Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

Robert Delauney, Eiffel Tower (1911) (Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons) There are numerous ways in which the fourth wall can be transgressed. Then what is the role of the fourth wall as an inviolable boundary between fiction and reality? Secondly, is evidence of such infringements today a sign that society is becoming more self-reflexive in a quest to redefine the borders between fiction and the “real” world?                                                                                                             My new essay published in the July 2021 issue of Epoche Magazine

How do you convince someone to take the coronavirus vaccine? This essay argues that we can do so by presenting to them a reasoned argument from theology, namely, Pascal's wager. See essay at  https://bluelabyrinths.com/2021/04/25/can-pascals-rationality-rescue-the-pandemic-vaccine/ The Triumph of Death (1532) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 It is a commonplace to claim that art imitates life. If so, art, in performing this mimesis, should respond also to our obsession and concern with temporality (time as experienced, not as measured, or human time as opposed to what the metaphysicians claim). How does art participate in this alchemy of smelting clock time into felt time? Read essay at Blue Labyrinths .

  My research paper on “Time and the Observer in Jorge Luis Borges” has been published in the 2020 edition of the Literature & Aesthetics journal released a few days back. Abstract: Jorge Luis Borges is ambivalent in his views of time and is unwilling to completely accept a denial of the reality of time. I argue that this is because a view that refutes time denies the observer too along with it.  Borges tries therefore to identify a reconciliation between a refutation of time and its reality.  (Image: Edwaert Collier - Vanitas Still Life with a Statuette of an Antique Athlete and a Print of Michelangelo (1675) - Public Domain)

My essay Aesthetic ineffability and the rebirth of the reader  was published in May 2020 on  Aesthetics Research Lab ,  a "digital think tank and resource, revolving around theoretical and practical issues in aesthetics" conceived by Michael Spicher, PhD.  Here is the  link . This essay examine the idea that literature is as capable of giving rise to an experience of aesthetic ineffability as the other arts. Furthermore, the ineffable experience in literature may be a product of both the author and the reader, and that there is similarly a need for a confluence between the artist and viewer in other art forms too for ineffability to arise.

My essay  Vasily Grossman, Graham Greene and the nature of doubt  was published in  The Punch Magazine  in May 2020 - see  link. Claude Monet, Water Lily Pond (1899) (Wikimedia, Public Domain) What’s more important: having faith or being human? This essay examines this question by juxtaposing the work of the Russian writer Vasily Grossman against that of the English novelist Graham Greene.

My essay Vivaldi for Gorillas: Seeking Aesthetics in Adversity was published in March 2020 on  Aesthetics Research Lab ,  a "digital think tank and resource, revolving around theoretical and practical issues in aesthetics" conceived by Michael Spicher, PhD.  Here is the link . In this essay, I discuss this question: Why does someone reach for beauty in circumstances of adversity when it is usually presumed that staying alive presupposes all else? Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (1819) / Public domain (Wikimedia Commons)