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Bureaucratic Sorceries In The Third Policeman: Anthropological Perspectives On Magic & Officialdom, Alexandra Irimia Dec 2022

Bureaucratic Sorceries In The Third Policeman: Anthropological Perspectives On Magic & Officialdom, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of …


The Magic Of Love: Love Magic In Medieval Romance, Dalicia Raymond Jul 2020

The Magic Of Love: Love Magic In Medieval Romance, Dalicia Raymond

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project examines authorial representations of the morality of three functions of love magic: to induce, to disrupt, and to facilitate love in twelfth- through fifteenth-century Middle High German, Old French, and Middle English romances. Using a cultural studies approach with close textual analysis and informed by gender studies, it investigates medieval romance authors’ discomfort with love inducing magic and asserts that this discomfort is a response to the magic’s violation of free will, a central tenet of medieval theology. I find that authors condemn love inducing magic but mark specific instances acceptable through explicit clarification of divine approval. Love …


"The Mirror Turn Lamp": Natural-Supernatural In Yeats, Cleston Lee Armstrong Iii May 2009

"The Mirror Turn Lamp": Natural-Supernatural In Yeats, Cleston Lee Armstrong Iii

Dissertations

The supernatural portrayed in Yeats represents a carefully constructed convergence of all major themes in his canon. Yeats's first exposure to myth, the supernatural, and magic occurs in the 1890s when he worked as an editor of William Blake and Irish fairy lore. This experience at once inspired Yeats to explore mysticism and to shroud his own collected works in mystery. With the onset of modernity and the age of criticism this period ushered in, however, he was unable to capitalize on the spiritual as first imagined. As mere aesthetic, peculiar illuminations of the immaterial world Yeats so intensely sought …


Hermetic Imagination: The Effect Of The Golden Dawn On Fantasy Literature, Charles A. Coulombe Oct 1996

Hermetic Imagination: The Effect Of The Golden Dawn On Fantasy Literature, Charles A. Coulombe

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was an English expression of the Nineteenth-Century occult revival in Europe. Dedicated to such practices as ceremonial magic and divination, it valued these more as gateways to true understanding of reality than for their intrinsic merit. The Golden Dawn’s essentially Neoplatonic world-view is reflected in the writings of such some-time members as W.B. Yeats, Arthur Machen and Charles Williams.