In Sophocles’ stories, God is always an extremely important object. He always appears as an inviolable figure. In the story of Oedipus, no matter how hard Oedipus and his own parents try, the prophecies of the gods are always fulfilled. This great burden is present in the form of fate. Oedipus comes to Tiresias to explain who is the contamination, and because Tiresias points out that Oedipus is the contamination, the two begin to quarrel over who is the “blind” (370-410). This reminds me of Lacan’s reference in a seminar of The Purloined Letter to three different kinds of people: “blind, seer and robber”; blind does not see, seer knows that blind does not see and pretends not to see, and robber sees what lies beneath the surface. Blind can’t see, seer knows blind can’t see and pretends he can’t see, and robber sees what lies beneath the surface.

Shannon Li

Avital Ronell

GERM-UA 244

Oct. 12nd, 2023

Beneath the Curtain, Above the Stage

The video game Umineko When They Cry is a storytelling parody of Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None. The story is about an extremely complex family drama and an isolated island murder case, and contains quite a lot of hardcore logical reasoning. One extremely important concept in that game is magic. Magic is the key to reasoning in the game, i.e. the purpose of the reasoning is that the existence of magic needs to be disproved in order to find the truth about the secret murder case. The focus of this paper is not to market the video game, but to explore the limits of semiotics as well as hermeneutics in terms of its concept of magic and the narrative devices that contain it.

Curd, Patricia. A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia. Hackett Publishing, 2011.

Astrology had a very important place in the theoretical system of these ancient philosophers. Their philosophical ideas, however, were in a state of infantile speculation about natural phenomena during the period of human civilization’s exploration of the unknown. Although it is said that the three Milesians were wrong about the world because basic chemistry and physics were not developed at that time, and even mathematics was in an embryonic stage. But that does not mean that there is nothing to learn from their ideas.

A story like this can be understood in many ways. It can be a conflict between natural law and man-made law, or a conflict between a positivist position and a non-positivist position on the same legal case. Antigone, in jurisprudential terms, stands for natural law, and Creon stands for man-made law. It seems that the story simply discusses the importance of natural law (morality). It seems to be a confrontation between morality and law. But Antigone’s story has a certain sublime value in it. The characters in the story have a very unusual emphasis on the definition of womanhood.

This is a speech I made for the class Classical Literature & Philosophy with prof. Emanuela Bianchi.

In the first class, our professor wrote guidelines for our oral presentation and told us that we need to kick off the class discussion with a thought-provoking question at the end, but to avoid overly broad questions such as “So what do you all think? I then wondered if the question was really that broad. But I finally decided to use this question as the centerpiece of the discussion, and my presentation would inevitably end the class discussion with this question. Even if my motivation at the outset was resistance to the father’s injunctions - anti-Oedipus on a Freudian level.

Shannon Li

April. 24th, 2023

On the Color of the World

I think, in many cases, that color is always so confusing. If it is because of personal experiences and other reasons that I choose to accept certain ideas and reject certain things. Then me, I’m always in denial. From the time I started making choices, I refused to accept them, but I was never able to reject the act of choosing itself. I could see my refusal quite clearly, but I was also refusing to accept my own disgusting refusal.

Shannon Li

Cristina Vatulescu, Yana Makuwa

COLIT-UA 200, COLIT-UA 116

May. 5th, 2023

The Real Touch

Death Stranding is a game directed by Hideo Kojima, set in the United States. The dead are stranded on the “Beach” and become the living dead called BTs. When BTs consume the living, it will trigger a “voidout” similar to a nuclear explosion. In addition, a rainwater called timefall makes the infrastructure of the passage of time accelerated, so that they quickly collapse. The player takes on the role of Sam Porter Bridges, who is responsible for delivering supplies to the isolated colonies and reconnecting them with wireless networks. The “Seam” is a place between the living and the Beach, allowing him to travel between the world of the living and the Beach. I will start from this game to deconstruct what Death Stranding is trying to tell us.

Shannon Li

Normandy Sherwood

ASPP-UT 2

8 Mar. 2022

The Unfinished Dreams of Kon Satoshi

“With my heart full of gratitude for everything good in the world, I’ll put down my pen. Now excuse me, I have to go” (Kon). These were the last words Kon Satoshi wrote on his deathbed. In May 2010, he went to the hospital due to physical discomfort and was found to have pancreatic cancer. In August of the same year, Kon Satoshi passed away at the age of 46 (Loo). He is a famous Japanese animation director who only directed six works in his lifetime. The last work Dream Machine was never finished because of his death. As he said in his last words, he always respects his artistic process and appreciates the team that helped him. He regrets that he can no longer finish work that was halfway done. Although the number of works is not large, he has truly achieved that every film is a rich stroke in film history. Each of his works has won many international awards and has been studied and imitated by later directors of various countries.