Combating an Alien Tyranny: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Evolution as a Feminist Poet

1987 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 23-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
The Self ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Sense Of Power

The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential – and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. (Simone de Beauvoir xxxiv)The name [of poet]Is royal, and to sign it like a queenIs what I dare not, – though some royal bloodWould seem to tingle in me now and then,With sense of power and ache.Aurora Leigh I. (934–38)'Tis Antidote to turn –To Tomes of solid Witchraft –(Emily Dickinson, #593)“Speed and energy, forthrightness and complete self-confidence – these are the qualities that hold us enthralled” as we read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1932 (1.212). As Woolf points out, these qualities emanate not so much from Aurora as from her creator, whose strong and lively presence so pervades the poem that “Again and again … Aurora the fictitious seems to be throwing light upon Elizabeth the actual. … [making it] impossible for the most austere of critics not sometimes to touch the flesh when his [sic] eyes should be fixed upon the page” (212). And as Woolf observes, the “flesh” the critic touches is that of a woman who knows that the royal blood of poets flows through her veins. “Elizabeth the actual” is a subject, speaking boldly of the world as she perceives and experiences it.

An Athenian Interlude

Prima Donna ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 89-118
Author(s):  
Paul Wink
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
York City ◽  
The Self ◽  
Significant Gain ◽  
World War ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
The World ◽  
National Opera ◽  
Major Turning Point

This chapter, “An Athenian Interlude,” analyzes a major turning point in Callas’s life associated with her move, at age thirteen, from New York City to Athens. In Athens, she experienced poverty, personal humiliation, and, during the World War II years, threats to her life. But her singing benefited from the strong mentorship she received from Elvira de Hidalgo, which helped launch her operatic career. Callas’s success as a singer with the Greek National Opera fueled resentment among her older and more established colleagues who envied her talent and resented being dethroned by a mere teenager who spoke Greek with an American accent. Poverty and conflicted relations at home with her mother and sister failed to compensate Callas for hostility at work. A significant gain in weight further undermined her self-confidence. Her experiences during the seven years spent in Athens exacerbated the split between Callas, the self-assured artist, and Maria, the vulnerable young woman.

The Age of Economics

Worldview ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 1 (7) ◽  
pp. 3-6
Author(s):  
Harlan Cleveland
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
The Self ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Underdeveloped Areas ◽  
Economic Expectations ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
The Revolution

The triple revolution in the “underdeveloped areas” -the revolution of rising economic expectations, of rising resentment at inequality, and of rising determination to be free and independent—is plain to see in the words and actions of leaders all through Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These deep desires are all, of course, the product of Western example and Western philosophy. The rationalism of Greece, the Christian idea of the dignity of man, the self-confidence of Europe after the Renaissance, the American demonstration that equality and independence can succeed, and the objective success of the scientific method in producing power and prosperity in industrial nations—these elements in our tradition have converted the world. After uncounted centuries of ignorance and apathy, the ancient societies of Asia and Africa want to participate in the good things that seem to result, from these alien ideas.

War, with Interludes (1991–1995)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leta E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Gulf War ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World

This chapter examines Kernis's music in the years 1991–1995, a period marked by a proliferation of dark, brooding works responding to world conflicts. These works include the Second Symphony (1991), a reaction to the first Gulf War; Still Movement with Hymn (1993), provoked by the war in Bosnia; Colored Field (1994), inspired by his 1989 visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau; and Lament and Prayer (1995), a memorial to the Holocaust. Was it the self-confidence brought on by increasing fame that in some sense empowered Kernis to take on these greater-than-life themes or to imagine that in some way he could, by his art, effect a change in the world around him? Such a viewpoint in no way indicates a misplaced self-importance. Rather, it is essential to the very art of composition, to the communicative goal that most composers pursue: the reaching out, through personal self-expression, to move and commune with listeners, and ultimately inspire a transformation in them.

Improving the Chinese Medicine Culture Self-Confidence of Students in Chinese Medicine Universities

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 156
Author(s):  
Yu Wang ◽  
Xue Yu ◽  
Afei Tang ◽  
Jin Zhu ◽  
Ce Cao
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
The Self ◽  
Quality Development ◽  
New Era ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
High Degree

As one of the most important creations of Chinese civilization, Chinese medicine culture is a treasure of our country and even the world, and it is also a precious treasure passed down from generation to generation of the Chinese nation. "Pharmaceutical business" reflects the importance of Chinese medicine culture in the new era. The self-confidence of Chinese medicine culture is the cornerstone of the revitalization of Chinese medicine culture. Facing the challenges and opportunities of the development of Chinese medicine culture in the future, college students of TCM schools can only advance the Chinese medicine industry to a higher level if they have a high degree of self-confidence in Chinese medicine culture. Higher quality development.

Nature without Self: Beauty, Death and Subjectivity in the Poetics of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens

2020 ◽  
pp. 141-165
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
Natural Process ◽  
The State ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
The Self ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come

Reflecting on the concerns of previous chapters, this section explores how post-Romantic poetics avow and disavow Romantic ideas about beauty, nature and the self in a bid to come to terms with life in all its ordinariness; with what Stevens plainly identifies as the state of things merely as they are. Ironically, those necessary fictions of the self and environment (the world of the human and nonhuman things) find themselves contradictorily embedded both in and beyond the fictive. Imaginative acts of self-dissolution signal an aesthetic critical distance between the self and nature to be illusory and the extent to which the self is inescapably mired in the fragility of natural process and perpetually aware of its own terminus in death. Accordingly, my coda evinces the British Romantic entanglements in the poetic thought of Emerson, Dickinson and Whitman, as well as Stevens’s complicated, and complicating, post-Romantic responses to those British and American Romantic models of self and nature that Stevens both imaginatively inherits and transforms.

scholarly journals Performativity analysis in Hyder’s the Sound of Falling Leaves

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-343
Author(s):  
Hira Ali ◽  
Zahir Jang Khattak ◽  
Abdul Ghaffar Ikram ◽  
Shehrzad Ameena Khattak
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The World ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Women Rights ◽  
Status Of Women

The present study delves into the concept of gender by applying the theory of performativity on Qurratulain Hyder’s story ‘The Sound of Falling leaves’. Awareness of the distinction between sex and gender started with the first wave of feminism. Many renowned critics like Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millet, and Judith Butler have explained this distinction. Writers portray society in text and many writers have tried their hands to depict the role, values, and status of women in a male-dominated patriarchal society. There are many reforms regarding the protection of women and to make women gender better, but we still find a lot of lacks. Gender is defined by society. One is born with sex and becomes a man or woman as he or she starts to identify with society. Gender is constructed on the base of performance of speech and actions which are repeated again and again until it becomes part of our consciousness (Butler, 1990). We have not found any research on this story regarding the application of the theory of performativity. So, this research is designed to examine to what extent the theory of performativity is true by discussing the portrayal of women in this story. This research also analyzes to what extent there is change in a Subcontinent society regarding therole and status of female. Discussion and analysis of text supports the theory of performativity. Instead of many reforms for women rights still woman of subcontinent like ‘Tanvir Fatima’ are suffering. She becomes victim of conservative society who is not ready to accept modern girls. She is beaten terribly by Khushwaqt and has no say. Her dreams are shattered by both cruel men and women. Further, this study also provides suggestions about how we can improve gender roles and provide healthy atmosphere for both men and women who can play the leading roles for the betterment of the world.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Individuation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Hengehold
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Other ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World

Most studies of Simone de Beauvoir situate her with respect to Hegel and the tradition of 20th-century phenomenology begun by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. This book analyzes The Second Sex in light of the concepts of becoming, problematization, and the Other found in Gilles Deleuze. Reading Beauvoir through a Deleuzian lens allows more emphasis to be placed on Beauvoir's early interest in Bergson and Leibniz, and on the individuation of consciousness, a puzzle of continuing interest to both phenomenologists and Deleuzians. By engaging with the philosophical issues in her novels and student diaries, this book rethinks Beauvoir’s focus on recognition in The Second Sex in terms of women’s struggle to individuate themselves despite sexist forms of representation. It shows how specific forms of women’s “lived experience” can be understood as the result of habits conforming to and resisting this sexist “sense.” Later feminists put forward important criticisms regarding Beauvoir’s claims not to be a philosopher, as well as the value of sexual difference and the supposedly Eurocentric universalism of her thought. Deleuzians, on the other hand, might well object to her ideas about recognition. This book attempts to address those criticisms, while challenging the historicist assumptions behind many efforts to establish Beauvoir’s significance as a philosopher and feminist thinker. As a result, readers can establish a productive relationship between Beauvoir’s “problems” and those of women around the world who read her work under very different circumstances.

Power of Darkness: Narrative and Biographical Reflexivity in A Series of Unfortunate Events

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-212
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH BULLEN
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Project Risk ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
High Earning ◽  
Textual Culture ◽  
Children’S Exposure ◽  
Central Claim

This paper investigates the high-earning children's series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, in relation to the skills young people require to survive and thrive in what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. Children's textual culture has been traditionally informed by assumptions about childhood happiness and the need to reassure young readers that the world is safe. The genre is consequently vexed by adult anxiety about children's exposure to certain kinds of knowledge. This paper discusses the implications of the representation of adversity in the Lemony Snicket series via its subversions of the conventions of children's fiction and metafictional strategies. Its central claim is that the self-consciousness or self-reflexivity of A Series of Unfortunate Events} models one of the forms of reflexivity children need to be resilient in the face of adversity and to empower them to undertake the biographical project risk society requires of them.

‘A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust’: The World and Self in Thomas Hardy's Poems

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
Body Subject

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.

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