Ecological Pathology in the Anthropocene: Climate Denial and Psychological Crisis in Ian McEwan’s Solar and The Wall (Published)
This paper explores connections between Anthropocene discourses and ecological fear, and psychological denial in Ian McEwan’s satirical climate novel Solar (2010). By applying psychoanalytic theory and concepts from the environmental humanities to the novel, this paper analyzes how Beard’s individual psychopathology mirrors and reproduces the socio-ecological denial of the systems which produce the climate crisis. The wall of silence and denial surrounding global warming caused by human activity is shown to consist of solipsism, Beard’s instant gratification and his recognition of and subsequent defense against his own cognitive dissonance. By correlating Beard’s moral and physical decay with the ever-accelerating climate crisis, Solar redefines the subgenre of the climate novel and presents the interior, on-going diseasibility of human psychological pathology as the greatest barrier to environmental responsibility in the Anthropocene. For while the Novels of Catastrophe focusing on post-apocalyptic Futures have for long portrayed the ecological crisis in terms of externality and Otherness, Solar focuses on the day-to-day specifics of current human psychopathology, highlighting how narcissism and self-delusion prevent human beings from coming together in a shared eco-accountability.
Keywords: Ecocriticism, Ian McEwan, Psychoanalytic criticism, Solar, anthropocene, climate denial, environmental humanities, human psychopathology
Arevenge Endeavor (And) Unconscious Desire: Psychoanalytic Study on Mustafa Saeed in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (Published)
Season of Migration to the North is first written in Arabic language by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih and later translated into more than fourteen languages. As postcolonial novel it reflected the conflict between the West and East. Despite Sudan is an Africa country, East stands for the Arab culture that dominates the Sudanese Muslim Majority nation. Many studies endeavored to explain the ambiguity that usually dominates this novel especially the main character Mustafa Saeed. This study aims at analyzing the main character by adopting psychoanalytic theory by Sigmund Freud and later theorist like Carl Jung to explore Mustafa Saeed’s interracial sexual relations with western women. It is also attempted to find out why did Mustafa behaved differently in Sudan and London? To test whether his childhood wormless upbringing impacted his sexual relations as defense mechanism as claimed by Freud that childhood experiences crucially contribute to adulthood personality or he deliberately seduced Western women sexually as a revenge for the Western exploitation for Africa. Through the critical analysis it’s apparent that Mustafa exploited English women sexually as a means of revengeful reaction to Western exploitation of Africa; but it’s also his loss of maternal care and love in state of sexual fixation towards all women especially his feeling of a vague sexual yearning when Mrs. Robinson embraced him for the first time despite he was only being a boy of twelve years old.
Keywords: Colonialism, Psychoanalytic criticism, interracial sexuality, oedipal complex