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Creative Writing Commons

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English Language and Literature

2014

Gene Washington

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Creative Writing

Shots In The Dark: The Presence Of Absence In Imaginative Literature (Iw), Gene Washington Jan 2014

Shots In The Dark: The Presence Of Absence In Imaginative Literature (Iw), Gene Washington

Gene Washington

Western metaphysics and IW can be described as a search for "first" presences, not absences. With the exception of philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Aristotle, writers like Lord Rochester (John Wilmot), Jonathan Swift and Philip Larkin, no one, to my knowledge, has taken absence as a "first" and consequently as also a "last." This essay is a modest attempt to open the door, if only a crack, for investigations into the metaphysics and meaning of absence as a means of creating, and understanding an interesting IW—from the perspective of the presence of absence as "first" and as "last."


On The Benefit Of Sleeping In: An Exercise In Epistemological Irony, Gene Washington Jan 2014

On The Benefit Of Sleeping In: An Exercise In Epistemological Irony, Gene Washington

Gene Washington

Irony, as an Archimedean Point, is perhaps the most efficient way to reveal human delusions and downright stupidities. Three factors go into the construction of such a Point: 1) a standpoint independent of the subject; 2) a view of the whole, not the part, of the subject and 3) an inside view of its agency—who and what brought the subject into being and how did it terminate. "ON THE BENEFIT OF SLEEPING IN: AN EXERCISE IN EPISTEMOLOGICAL IRONY" exemplifies the above.


When Death Intercepts Life In Imaginative Writing, Gene Washington Jan 2014

When Death Intercepts Life In Imaginative Writing, Gene Washington

Gene Washington

The representation of death in imaginative writing is a "virtual" (as opposed to) an actual death. It always occurs in the context of a "virtual" (represented) life. In this text the author examines some of the ways death "intercepts" life in such writing. The subject is a vast, perhaps inexhaustible, one. The richest source, one the author dos not mine, is Shakespeare's interceptions of life by death.