Category Essay
Truth and Power: Fake News is the Consequence of Postmodernism.
Michel Foucault asserts that power and truth are intrinsically intertwined and virtually inseparable. He believes that power produces its own truth, which the powerful use to establish and reaffirm their power. This has Marxist underpinnings which I disagree with. Yet Foucault’s thinking has definite ramifications that are evident in contemporary political discourse. In the […]
ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY.
Please have a read of an essay I wrote about Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, for the Influx Press “Anti-Canon” series. http://www.influxpress.com/the-anti-canon-series-zen-and-the-art-of-archery-by-brendan-pickett/#.UfFJOI21GSp
THE CONVENTIONS AND IDEOLOGIES OF THE FILM NOIR GENRE IN ‘DOUBLE INDEMNITY’ & ‘SUNSET BOULEVARD.’
This study will analyse the concept of film genre; in general terms and within Film Noir. Firstly, it will define what film genre is. Secondly, it will assess primary Noir conventions, using examples from Double Indemnity1. After each, it will explain how these reflect contemporary ideologies. Thirdly, it will assess how Sunset Boulevard2 meets and […]
BRITISH NEW WAVE CINEMA. An Essay.
British New Wave films focus on the lives of the working class in England during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The key New Wave film-makers, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, were influenced by the political and social issues this class had to deal with in the post-WW2 ‘landscape’; by British literature of […]
WHICH PLAY IS MORE SHOCKING: BECKETT’S ENDGAME, OR RAVENHILL’S SHOPPING AND FUCKING?
Both Endgame and Shopping and Fucking are nihilistic plays. Both posit miserable characters in bleak and desolate, yet familial situations, leading desperately futile lives. Endgame is set in a barren post-apocalyptic, timeless, nowhere-world where people are reduced to living in bins, eating dog biscuits, whereas Shopping and Fucking is set mostly in a striped […]
THE FUNCTION OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN SARAH WATERS’ THE NIGHT WATCH.
“She didn’t mind. She almost liked it. Because the novel after all was only a novel; the people in it weren’t real.” Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch is a novel set in London during and after the second World War, with a plethora of characters who are all interrelated in some way, either by family, […]
A DISCUSSION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT AND EFFECT OF THE DIFFERENT NARRATIVE VOICES IN JACKIE KAY’S THE ADOPTION PAPERS.
The Adoption Papers [TAP] are a series of poems about identity, using three main voices, a daughter, her birth and adoptive mothers. The poems portray the daughter’s life, from conception, through her adoption, childhood and early adult years. She is the primary character seeking to define her identity, but the birth and adoptive mothers also […]
IS CITIZEN KANE AN ARISTOTELIAN TRAGEDY? An Analysis.
Citizen Kane [Kane] is a film about its protagonist, Charles Foster Kane [CFK], seen from numerous angles and viewpoints, both stylistically and narratively. Aristotle’s The Poetics is the definitive text on “questions about tragedy”,1 which posits the fundamental criteria for tragic form and content. This analysis examines whether Kane meets these criteria. Aristotle said “Tragedy […]
Brendan Pickett Writes... 