After romanticism

"Discussing two cinematic interpretations of Terence Rattigan's play The Browning Version, Eisenhauer traces the use/abuse of names in the rhetoric of academic and political vilification. Drawing on such diverse sources as Aeschylus, Browning, Golding, and Adorno, he finds the current state of discourse in need of "heavy teaching," so that the repressed subject of democracy/tyranny can surpass the psychopathology of the Same." "Analyzing Fellini's radical revision of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, the author suggests how inscrutability saves the audience from guilt because the viewer cannot arrive at apodictic certainty concerning the "subject screened." While Poe lampoons "the transcendentals" as a kind of disease, implying readerly guilt by association, and solidifying the letter T, Fellini, by valorizing theatrical illusion, fails to translate a text that teaches the reader more than he or she is prepared to know."