Thursday 25 March 2010

Baudrillard, Otherness and PhD


I have a new hero - Jean Baudrillard. He is making things very easy for me with my PhD, bless him!

The title of my novel is Others or I may change it to Otherness [that is a debate currently going on in my brain]. All the characters are 'others' and they are 'othered' and as such are seductive.

A mass of gobbledygook? No, a collection of teenagers all coming to terms with their lives and going through their individual rites of passage. the narrative asks questions of age, sex, foreignness, right, wrong, of the past and the future by living for the moment.

I have referred previously to Badudrillard's 'The Declination of Wills' which is part of a section entitled 'Radical Otherness'. This section has become my obsession it relates in so many ways to my PhD and the novel whilst explaining many of the connections. I never let my books get tatty but this one is beginning to as I read it, and then re-read it and re-read it again and again. Every spare moment I go back to it. Doing battle with the words until they submit and fall neatly into place in that jigsaw that is my PhD. It has given the critical aspect of my PhD a focus again and for that M.Jean Baudrillard I will be forever grateful (and to AM who suggested I looked at it again).

For the past, the present and the future...lest we forget

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