The painting also serves as a vehicle for Ashbery's odyssey of self-exploration and self-knowledge. Ashbery's reflections come forth by way of his critical appreciation of Parmigianino's painting. Parmigianino's 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror' is the main source for the poem with the same title. The aim of this paper is to explore 'connection' and 'heterogeneity' in John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in the light of Rhizome Theory propounded by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (inspired by Jung) and clinical psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. ' Through the posthumanist merging of these two very different, albeit analogous philosophical ideas, I hope to shed new light on Banks' literary method and the radical anti-vitalist potential of his novel. The second key concept I seek to utilize is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the ' literary machine. The first is Ortega y Gasset's notion of ' dehumanization ', expounded in a little-cited 1925 essay, entitled ' The Dehumanization of Art ' (La deshumanización del arte). What meaning, if any, does this construct convey? More generally, what is the purpose of this bizarre, gloomy novel? And what implications does it have for literary theory in general? So as to diversify scholarly reception of Banks' extraordinary work, I seek to utilize two concepts of aesthetic theory that may be of help in this regard. Specifically, I attempt to grasp the aesthetic function of the Wasp Factory, a bizarre contraption utilized by the narrator to ritually murder wasps.

In this article I seek to explore the dark, twisted world of Iain Banks' masterpiece of speculative weird fiction, The Wasp Factory.

The wasp factory review