Ian Tan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3593811 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian Tan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian |
| FAMILY NAME | Tan |
| SIGNATURE | TAN I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Nanyang Technological University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2268-2105 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Pedagogical prosthesis and vertical address
This paper will outline the contemporary philosophical appropriation and critique of Heidegger’s understanding of techne as the primary mode of being-in-the-world, and its implications for education, in the work of Bernard Stiegler and Peter Sloterdijk. I begin by engaging with a Heideggerian theory of education as turning away from inauthentic captivation towards the moment of truth. Heidegger’s ambiguous depiction of technological captivation m…
Authorial control, multiple worlds, and the situationality of truth
This essay reads Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and John Banville’s The Singularities with the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s logic of multiple worlds and the attendant creation of immanent Truth in a world raised to maximal intensity. Badiou’s eschewing representational fidelity towards the forging of authentic possibilities in worlds within a fictional universe provides us with a useful way to consider the transgression of ontological fra…
Speaking (from) out of tradition
This essay will argue for the pertinence of a hermeneutical approach to textuality, literary style, and the legacy of the contemporary novel in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Julian Barnes’s Elizabeth Finch. I will emphasize how Coetzee and Barnes’s ‘novels of ideas’ both explore the limitations and necessities of understanding character and the burden of textuality as ways through which the contemporary novel continues its self-conscious…
Prosthetic Memory and Textual Inheritance
The thought of contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler as applied to the question of literary inheritance and the historical burden of commemoration allows us to understand the significanc
The Limits of Language and the Fragmentation of the Western Mind in John Burnside’s the Dumb House
The Claim of Ethics
This essay performs a comparative reading of the themes of language, otherness and subjectivity in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan. Their focuses on the place and role of an ethical subjectivity who is profoundly affected and displaced by the (non)presence of the absolute Other provide apt philosophical material for comparison and contrast. Through a close analysis of the important philosophical and psychoanalytic themes in Levinas…
A Rending and a Raising
This essay considers the abstract aesthetics of J. M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy—The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus—as emphasizing the pertinence of the religious in terms of a rupturing of an ontotheological vision of the world. It analyzes Coetzee's employment of religious allegory in the trilogy as a commentary on the birth of religious consciousness that finds its ultimate meaning in an opening out of hermeti…
To give the literary event
This essay explores the poststructuralist concept of the ‘event’ as an unforeseen and incalculable surprise, reading its theoretical significance in two ways: as an occurrence that has already taken place (divided at its source) and an occurrence that opens up the impossible consideration of futurity. By linking the thought of the event with the phenomenological notion of the gift, I aim to explore how literary narratives perform the happening of…
Imaginative Capacity as Form-of-Life
This essay compares the poetic and political theories of contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben with the poetry of Wallace Stevens in order to outline a dynamic of 'inoperativity' that foregrounds the intimate relationship between language, form and an existential expression of possibility. Through a reading of Stevens's prose essays and poetry, I demonstrate how Agamben's reconceptualization of potentiality as a power kept in a non-relational …
Ereignis and the Grounding of Interpretation
In his lecture course on Hölderlin's hymn “The Ister,” Heidegger makes a striking claim about translation which implies that the paradigm of translation can never be encapsulated by a passive substitution of one linguistic signifier for another, for what is involved is no less than the stance the translator takes within his original language as unconcealment, and how he ex-sists toward the other language as the site of another revelation. If the …
Othered Temporalities and Possibilities
This article examines the synthetic function of narrative temporality as presented in Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative. By critically analyzing the applicability of Ricoeur’s conclusions about literary narratives as temporalizing worldhood to contemporary fiction, the author argues that an alternative conception of narrative time is needed to supplement Ricoeur’s homogenizing of the link between the literary treatment of time and historical inte…
Ian McEwan’s Aesthetic Stakes in Adaptation as Political Rewriting
This essay will examine two of Ian McEwan’s recent novellas as political rewritings of William Shakespeare and Franz Kafka. McEwan’s Nutshell (2016) repositions the avenger figure in Hamlet as an unborn child whose melancholic awareness of the condition of modern existence allows him a mode of ironic commentary about the possibilities of moral and political choices in a world soon to be destroyed by climate change and nuclear apocalypse. The Cock…
Spectrality as ethical gift and the chance for justice
This essay will explore the theoretical pertinence of the spectre in modern and contemporary Irish fiction as dislocating the sense of history as the modality of the present. I argue for the intertextuality residing between James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” and John Banville’s novel Snow not on the basis of a model of artistic derivativeness or disavowal, but as part of a dynamic of spectral inheritance that forces us to redefine notions of ep…
No Saving Fictions of Masculinity
This essay examines the ways Graham Swift’s novel Shuttlecock critically examines the dialectical construction of masculinity as the discourse of the patriarchal Other. Foregrounding a Lacanian reading of the text which locates the absence of signification at the level of the Symbolic which then paradoxically produces imaginary figurations and fictions of desire, I read the novel as using the paradigm of espionage (itself premised on possessing a…
The Sense of the Visible
This essay will read the poems in Wallace Stevens's Harmonium together with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in order to examine how Stevens imparts philosophical gravity to his use of language in the early poetry in a Heideggerian way, through grounding the self in a fundamental attitude of worldly openness
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Ian McEwan’s Aesthetic Stakes in Adaptation as Political Rewriting
This essay will examine two of Ian McEwan’s recent novellas as political rewritings of William Shakespeare and Franz Kafka. McEwan’s Nutshell (2016) repositions the avenger figure in Hamlet as an unborn child whose melancholic awareness of the condition of modern existence allows him a mode of ironic commentary about the possibilities of moral and political choices in a world soon to be destroyed by climate change and nuclear apocalypse. The Cock…
Spectrality as ethical gift and the chance for justice
This essay will explore the theoretical pertinence of the spectre in modern and contemporary Irish fiction as dislocating the sense of history as the modality of the present. I argue for the intertextuality residing between James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” and John Banville’s novel Snow not on the basis of a model of artistic derivativeness or disavowal, but as part of a dynamic of spectral inheritance that forces us to redefine notions of ep…
No Saving Fictions of Masculinity
This essay examines the ways Graham Swift’s novel Shuttlecock critically examines the dialectical construction of masculinity as the discourse of the patriarchal Other. Foregrounding a Lacanian reading of the text which locates the absence of signification at the level of the Symbolic which then paradoxically produces imaginary figurations and fictions of desire, I read the novel as using the paradigm of espionage (itself premised on possessing a…
The Sense of the Visible
This essay will read the poems in Wallace Stevens's Harmonium together with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in order to examine how Stevens imparts philosophical gravity to his use of language in the early poetry in a Heideggerian way, through grounding the self in a fundamental attitude of worldly openness
Ereignis and the Grounding of Interpretation
In his lecture course on Hölderlin's hymn “The Ister,” Heidegger makes a striking claim about translation which implies that the paradigm of translation can never be encapsulated by a passive substitution of one linguistic signifier for another, for what is involved is no less than the stance the translator takes within his original language as unconcealment, and how he ex-sists toward the other language as the site of another revelation. If the …
Othered Temporalities and Possibilities
This article examines the synthetic function of narrative temporality as presented in Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative. By critically analyzing the applicability of Ricoeur’s conclusions about literary narratives as temporalizing worldhood to contemporary fiction, the author argues that an alternative conception of narrative time is needed to supplement Ricoeur’s homogenizing of the link between the literary treatment of time and historical inte…
The Claim of Ethics
This essay performs a comparative reading of the themes of language, otherness and subjectivity in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan. Their focuses on the place and role of an ethical subjectivity who is profoundly affected and displaced by the (non)presence of the absolute Other provide apt philosophical material for comparison and contrast. Through a close analysis of the important philosophical and psychoanalytic themes in Levinas…
A Rending and a Raising
This essay considers the abstract aesthetics of J. M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy—The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus—as emphasizing the pertinence of the religious in terms of a rupturing of an ontotheological vision of the world. It analyzes Coetzee's employment of religious allegory in the trilogy as a commentary on the birth of religious consciousness that finds its ultimate meaning in an opening out of hermeti…
To give the literary event
This essay explores the poststructuralist concept of the ‘event’ as an unforeseen and incalculable surprise, reading its theoretical significance in two ways: as an occurrence that has already taken place (divided at its source) and an occurrence that opens up the impossible consideration of futurity. By linking the thought of the event with the phenomenological notion of the gift, I aim to explore how literary narratives perform the happening of…
Imaginative Capacity as Form-of-Life
This essay compares the poetic and political theories of contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben with the poetry of Wallace Stevens in order to outline a dynamic of 'inoperativity' that foregrounds the intimate relationship between language, form and an existential expression of possibility. Through a reading of Stevens's prose essays and poetry, I demonstrate how Agamben's reconceptualization of potentiality as a power kept in a non-relational …
The Limits of Language and the Fragmentation of the Western Mind in John Burnside’s the Dumb House
Speaking (from) out of tradition
This essay will argue for the pertinence of a hermeneutical approach to textuality, literary style, and the legacy of the contemporary novel in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Julian Barnes’s Elizabeth Finch. I will emphasize how Coetzee and Barnes’s ‘novels of ideas’ both explore the limitations and necessities of understanding character and the burden of textuality as ways through which the contemporary novel continues its self-conscious…
Prosthetic Memory and Textual Inheritance
The thought of contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler as applied to the question of literary inheritance and the historical burden of commemoration allows us to understand the significanc
Pedagogical prosthesis and vertical address
This paper will outline the contemporary philosophical appropriation and critique of Heidegger’s understanding of techne as the primary mode of being-in-the-world, and its implications for education, in the work of Bernard Stiegler and Peter Sloterdijk. I begin by engaging with a Heideggerian theory of education as turning away from inauthentic captivation towards the moment of truth. Heidegger’s ambiguous depiction of technological captivation m…
Authorial control, multiple worlds, and the situationality of truth
This essay reads Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and John Banville’s The Singularities with the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s logic of multiple worlds and the attendant creation of immanent Truth in a world raised to maximal intensity. Badiou’s eschewing representational fidelity towards the forging of authentic possibilities in worlds within a fictional universe provides us with a useful way to consider the transgression of ontological fra…
Philosophy (13 works) · Art (12 works) · Literature (11 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Contemporary Literature and Criticism (4 works)