author & educator
Perhaps the best way to teach Freud today is as literature, with his standing in psychology departments oscillating between embarrassing footnote and outright pariah.
VARUN BEGLEY
"The Unbearable Freud"
Absurdism, I would argue, itself is a strategic domestication of modernism. The category subsumes a heterogeneous body of intensely specific works under a series of unequivocal generalizations. With its user-friendly philosophical precepts, absurdism allows a reassuring aura of meaningfulness to emerge from recalcitrant works.
VARUN BEGLEY
Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism
As the term wears on I sometimes feel undermined by a sub-textual doppelganger, a shadow Freud haunting the classroom.
VARUN BEGLEY
"The Unbearable Freud"
The problem of postmodernism and film thus smuggles in with it the problem of modernism in film, or, in other words, the dialectic of modernism and mass culture, in which cinematic entertainments are usually regarded as a low cultural form.
VARUN BEGLEY
"'Blade Runner' and the Postmodern: A Reconsideration", Scraps from the Loft, October 26, 2017
The odd conjuncture of psychoanalysis with literature dramatizes the perplexing deconstructions and inversions that can occur as Theory, capital T, meets "primary" texts in classrooms.
VARUN BEGLEY
"The Unbearable Freud"
Postmodernist accounts diametrically oppose reading strategies dependent on conventional aesthetic notions.
VARUN BEGLEY
"'Blade Runner' and the Postmodern: A Reconsideration", Scraps from the Loft, October 26, 2017
To read is to enter an intercourse with a text.
VARUN BEGLEY
"The Unbearable Freud"
The depthless postmodern surface incorporates fragments of once-meaningful codes and conventions that are now blankly cited without context or referent. The result is not a coherent aesthetic structure but an opaque and resistant pastiche.
VARUN BEGLEY
"'Blade Runner' and the Postmodern: A Reconsideration", Scraps from the Loft, October 26, 2017