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Mohammad Ghaffary

Mohammad Ghaffary

Academic rank: Assistant Professor
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4012-0093
Education: PhD.
ScopusId: 55573741900
HIndex:
Faculty: Literature and Languages
Address: Arak University
Phone:

Research

Title
A Deleuzean Reading of Love and Art in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince
Type
Thesis
Keywords
becoming, line of flight, active / reactive, transcendence / immanence, minor literature, schizophrenizing love
Year
2022
Researchers Mohammad Ghaffary(PrimaryAdvisor)، Maryam Bayat(Student)

Abstract

Love, good art, and the relation between these two have been among the main themes in world literature. Whether one’s experience of love can affect one’s artistic creation or not has been dealt with as a philosophical issue in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince (1973). This research aimed at studying the main themes of love and art in this novel from the viewpoint of Gilles Deleuze’s Poststructuralist thought. The features of good art and the role of love in artistic creation were discussed in The Black Prince, which is about the life and inner struggles of a novelist named Bradley Pearson over the concept of love and art through which he becomes active. According to Deleuze, there are two kinds of love, namely Oedipal and schizophrenizing love. Love, as a manifestation of the free flow of desire, brings about moral dilemmas and major changes which cause Bradley disrupt his passivity being and involve in a process of becoming in the form of creating an artwork. This research offered a resistant reading of the novel with special reference to the impact of love on the main character’s worldview and artistic creation. Rejecting traditional studies based on Murdochian ethics and psychoanalytic viewpoints, this study discussed how the protagonist-narrator wins his freedom by eliminating the capitalism’s leash and accepting his schizophrenizing love for Julian through which he ultimately manages to deterritorialize his identity and undermine the transcendent forces controlling his ethics and artistic ambitions. The main theme of the novel, according to the present study, revolves around Bradley’s gradual personal transformation from a reactive figure to an active writer capable of creating lines of flight and transcending the prescribed norms of capitalism, which had been enslaving him in the form of Oedipalized institutions. In the end, this research revealed how Bradley uses art or minor literature as a way of revolting against the reactive forces of morals. This research