What follows in these writings is an account of my experiences, with the exception of some brief background focusing mainly from the time period of 1998 to present. It is not my intention to purport any sort of authoritative misguided stance of truth that beckons your adherence; rather it is that which is aptly titled, A Journey of Self Deception. Make of it what you will, for in all honesty it is still my greatest struggle to decipher what if any meaning there was and is in all if not any of it. Im not under any delusive pretense that this is of if any sort of import, as you will see for yourself I went that road. Rather I get the strange sense that this will be therapeutic and perhaps cautionary to those who seek higher or greater understanding from falling into the same mind traps I did. Insanity or Epiphany, I still dont know!

While the two modernist novels considered in this book, Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, were initially understood within the categories of stoic and tragic despair, more recent criticism has focused upon their carnivalesque dimension. The identification of these hermeneutic polarities presented the author with the challenging problem which underlies the present analysis, namely the question concerning the structural relationship between the contesting thematics. Drawing upon the paradigm of oscillation as established within the natural sciences, and adding a figurative dimension to the concept, the author has adapted this model as a key to unravelling the narrative buoyancy and structural coherence which sustain these novels of Modernism. The book elucidates how the carnivalesque challenge to despair contributes towards innovative narrative configurations, galvanizing the thematic antipodes into vertiginous microcosms of defiant selfhood.

Sam Collier laments about having lost his wife to cancer and his son to college. He dabbles with photography, keeping his mind occupied, until strange things begin to happen. Objects move and reconfigure. His photography changes in ways that can’t be explained. A young woman, Sara, comes into Sam’s life. Her peculiarities are both a turn-on and a dilemma. As he seeks outside advice, his and Sara’s relationship deepens to the point that she is the catalyst in his life. While enduring her mysterious ways, he can’t ignore the escalation of bizarre events that eventually snare both his friend and his son. Questioning his own sanity, Sam finally confronts the girl who has become his lover and confidant, then tries to hang on to what is left of his reality, as his vision of the universe must change. The desires of raging spirits are not easily satisfied.

In his play Bacchae, Euripides chooses as his central figure the god who crosses the boundaries among god, man, and beast, between reality and imagination, and between art and madness. In so doing, he explores what in tragedy is able to reach beyond the social, ritual, and historical context from which tragedy itself rises. Charles Segal's reading of Euripides' Bacchae builds gradually from concrete details of cult, setting, and imagery to the work's implications for the nature of myth, language, and theater. This volume presents the argument that the Dionysiac poetics of the play characterize a world view and an art form that can admit logical contradictions and hold them in suspension.

This month has been an experience, which began with ten uniforms, eight surrounding me with guns, a sick, dying chicken, and I ask myself the question, how do you soar like an eagle? I was then informed by police to “step away from the chicken!” I spent the next thirty-two days locked up, drugged many times, room was raided four times, was strangled once, and experienced an inland tsunami! During this experience, I was physically beaten, emotionally constipated, spiritually raped, and mentally flipped inside out. But I managed to write down everything on Facebook every few days to my family and friends at home, and that's how this story was written! Keep fighting the good fight, people!

Dramatic changes during the Reformation era in Northern Europe, such as witchcraft and new global discoveries, are examined through visual culture, both prints and paintings.

This volume continues the critical exploration of fundamental issues in the medieval and early modern world, here concerning mental health, spirituality, melancholy, mystical visions, medicine, and well-being. The contributors, who originally had presented their research at a symposium at The University of Arizona in May 2013, explore a wide range of approaches and materials pertinent to these issues, taking us from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, capping the volume with some reflections on the relevance of religion today. Lapidary sciences matter here as much as medical-psychological research, combined with literary and art-historical approaches. The premodern understanding of mental health is not taken as a miraculous panacea for modern problems, but the contributors suggest that medieval and early modern writers, scientists, and artists commanded a considerable amount of arcane, sometimes curious and speculative, knowledge that promises to be of value and relevance even for us today, once again. Modern palliative medicine finds, for instance, intriguing parallels in medieval word magic, and the mystical perspectives encapsulated highly productive alternative perceptions of the macrocosm and microcosm that promise to be insightful and important also for the post-modern world.