JJMLL » JJMLL Issues
Regaining the Lost Momentum toward Authenticity: Heideggerian Being in Fowles's The Magus and Golding's Free Fall
Abstract
The post-war human, contrary to the Cartesian self, is so enmeshed in the inauthenticity of the modern time that he has lost sight of who he is and what he seeks in the banality of the present time. Martin Heidegger, in this regard, introduces the notion of an authentic being called ‘Dasein’ who has accepted his mortality as ‘being-in-the-world.’ In the same vein, an idea embraced by twentieth-century fiction writers was the modern human being and its idiosyncratic hallmarks extensively discussed in modern literature. The Magus by John Fowles and Free Fall by William Golding are two investigated fictions in this study in which the protagonists embark on a journey of self-discovery culminating in alterations in their outlook on life and discovering how to gain authenticity. The outcome of this study is that both sides have partially adapted to this world of being with all of its spatio-temporal limitations after having faced their mortality and temporality.
Keywords: Authenticity, Dasein, Heidegger, Literature, Temporality.
Authors: Hossein Sabouri
, Canan Şavkay
Doi: https://doi.org/10.47012/jjmll.15.4.9
Cited by: Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures (JJMLL) 2023, 15 (4): 1297-1309
Full text
References
Aarseth, Inger. 1975. Golding's Journey to Hell: An Examination of Prefigurations and Archetypal Pattern in Free Fall. English Studies 56 (4): 322-333. doi:10.1080/00138387508597706.
Acheson, James. 1998. John Fowles. New York: Macmillan.
Crane, John K. 1972. Golding and Bergson: The Free Fall of Free Will. Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 26 (4): 136-141.
Fowles, John. 1997. The Magus. London: Vintage.
Golding, William. 2013. Free Fall. London: Faber and Faber.
Hall, Harrison. 2008. Love, and Death: Kierkegaard and Heidegger on Authentic and Inauthentic Human Existence. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 27 (1-4): 179-197.
Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. New York: State University of New York Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1992. The Concept of Time. Translated by William McNeill. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, and Ian Gregor. 1967. William Golding: a Critical Study. London: Faber.
McDaniel, Ellen. 1985. Games and Godgames in The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Modern Fiction Studies 31 (1): 31-42.
O'Donnell, Patrick. 1980. Journeying to the Center: Time, Pattern, and Transcendence in William Golding's "Free Fall". Ariel-a Review of International English Literature 11 (3): 83-98.
Peters, Meindert E. 2019. Heidegger’s Embodied Others: On Critiques of the Body and ‘Intersubjectivity’ in Being and Time. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (2): 441-458.
Philips Buchberger, Michelle. 2012. John Fowles’s Novels of the 1950s and 1960s. The Yearbook of English Studies 42: 132-150.
Teske, Joanna. 1996. The Magus: A Polemic with Existentialism. Approaches to Fiction: 215-229.
Yılmaz, Victoria Bilge. 2018. Interactions Between Albert Camus’ The Fall and William Golding’s Free Fall. Current Academic Studies in Philology, Ankara: Gece Kitaplığı: 64-71.
Copyright © 2006-2022. All Rights Reserved, Yarmouk University
