Discrepant Affects

2020 ◽  
pp. 176-200
Author(s):  
Jonathan Gilmore

This chapter addresses a puzzling feature of one’s engagement with certain kinds of fictions. This is the problem of discrepant affects: one sometimes takes pleasure in fictional events that one would deplore in real life; one aligns oneself with or even admires fictional characters whom one would find despicable if encountered in the actual world; and one forms desires for events to occur in fictions that, in actual experience, one would want to prevent. Highlighting certain dimensions of simulative and empathetic processes, this chapter explains such normatively deviant responses as reflecting an appropriate fiction-motivated breakdown in the quarantine separating how one really values things from how one only imagines doing so.

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Robert J Petrella ◽  

It is widely recognised that hypertension is a major risk factor for the development of future cardiovascular (CV) events, which in turn are a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Blood pressure (BP) control with antihypertensive drugs has been shown to reduce the risk of CV events. Angiotensin-II receptor blockers (ARBs) are one such class of antihypertensive drugs and randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have shown ARB-based therapies to have effective BP-lowering properties. However, data obtained under these tightly controlled settings do not necessarily reflect actual experience in clinical practice. Real-life databases may offer alternative information that reflects an uncontrolled real-world setting and complements and expands on the findings of clinical trials. Recent analyses of practice-based real-life databases have shown ARB-based therapies to be associated with better persistence and adherence rates and with superior BP control than non-ARB-based therapies. Analyses of real-life databases also suggest that ARB-based therapies may be associated with a lower risk of CV events than other antihypertensive-drug-based therapies.


2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Trotter ◽  
Barbara Carey

WHILE I WAS GROWING UP, THERE WAS A PERIOD OF time when I was no longer interested in fictional characters, but in real life heros. Certainly one of the books that influenced me was Microbe Hunters by Paul De Kruif. I was spellbound as these scientific heros discovered the unseen universe of bacteria that was all around us. No less thrilling or useful was the discovery of a new force that allowed us to see within the human body, x-rays.


PMLA ◽  
1949 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 629-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Church

In two passages of his recent book on Thomas Wolfe (1947), Herbert J. Muller has briefly, but incisively, dealt with the time concepts of Wolfe and Proust. He points out that while both writers depended upon sensory impressions to recall the past, Wolfe lacked the keen subjective analysis of Proust and stayed closer to the actual experience that produced his memories. Wolfe's interest was in fixity and change as they are in real life, while Proust “aspired to the realm of Essence or Being, where change is mere appearance” (p. 75). It is important, I believe, that these distinctions be made, for Wolfe, unlike Proust, was no philosopher and would without question have been confused by an array of Bergsonian metaphysics. While outwardly the time concepts of Wolfe and of Proust seem somewhat alike, a closer examination reveals that these concepts are in many respects different. But no distinctions were made, for instance, by Mary M. Colum in her article on “Literature of Today and Tomorrow” (Scribner's, Dec. 1936, p. 102), which stated that Wolfe's work might well be described as “Remembrance of Things Past”—that “like Proust he tells us of his struggles with Time elements.” And Joseph Warren Beach, in American Fiction 1920–1940 (1941), while acknowledging that Wolfe could not have accepted fully the implications of Proust's theories, found that Wolfe and Proust had had a common psychological experience. “It is found in the recall by means of present sensations or impressions of closely similar impressions received in extreme youth” (p. 192).


2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-221
Author(s):  
Edward Timms

This paper examines certain discrepancies between the German originals and the English translations of three Holocaust-related works by W. G. Sebald: The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo. The process of Anglicization is shown to involve tonal transformations. Attention is also drawn to variations in the use of the textually embedded illustrations that form such a distinctive feature of Sebald's narrative strategy, for example the omission from The Emigrants of a chalk drawing by the refugee artist Frank Auerbach that was featured in the German original, Die Ausgewanderten. This raises further questions about an aesthetic of hybridity that not only combines words with images, but transforms real-life originals into quasi-fictional characters.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Zachary Michael Jack

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the portrayals of Middle America. How can such a beating-heart section of the country, the very cradle of regionalism, psychically ground and spiritually anchor a nation while simultaneously serving as its ultimate cautionary tale? Those who chose to leave Middle America sometimes hear in its portrayals a chilling message: Middle America is a place to avoid getting stuck in, a place whose fatalistic machinations the monied and mobile do well to escape. Many regionalists present Middle Americans as a Gothic people, from cradle to grave as mindful of death and dying as of living and thriving. Their stories and canvases illuminate an almost funereal-life-art practiced with fidelity in the heartland, where fictional characters and real-life citizens alike undertake the difficult task of living passionately and purposefully against a backdrop of finite and sometimes tragic limits. For true regionalists, however, the homegrown Gothic amounts to much more than mere pessimism or fatalism; it is an homage to Death, Life's less heralded twin, an animating force no less instructive and no less worthy of its own pages.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
André Leclerc

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2016v20n1p61In what follows, I present only part of a program that consists in developing a version of actualism as an adequate framework for the metaphysics of intentionality. I will try to accommodate in that framework suggestions found in Kripke’s works and some positions developed by Amie Thomasson. What should we change if we accept “fictional entities” in the domain of the actual world? Actualism is the thesis that everything that exists belongs to the domain of the actual world and that there are no possibilia. I shall defend that there are abstract artefacts, like fictional characters, and institutions. My argument could be seen as a version of Moore’s paradox: it is paradoxical to say: “I made (created) it, but I do not believe it exists”. Moreover, there are true sentences about them. I will examine what it means to include abstract artefacts in the domain of the actual world. I favour a use of “exist” that includes beings with no concrete occupation of tri-dimensional space; to exist, it is enough to have been introduced at some moment in history. Abstract artefacts, like fictional characters, exist in that sense. I argue that it is important to distinguish two perspectives (internal and external) in order to clarify the kind of knowledge we have of fictional characters. However, their existence presupposes a relation of dependence to a material basis and the mental activities of many people.


1999 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 284-285
Author(s):  
James R. Rogers

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement. Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.


Author(s):  
Cassie Jun Lin ◽  

With the heated debate on the utility of the humanities as a context, this paper reads Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” as an attempt to reconcile the emerging functional attitude towards the humanities and the susceptibility of the humanities to the neo-liberal condition. This paper traces connections between the “reparative” or the “post-critical” turn and fairy tales or fantasies in order to argue that Christina Rossetti’s much debated poem, “Goblin Market,” could be framed in a fantastic framework that substantiates a reparative orientation that is “additive and accretive” (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 149). A stubborn insistence on the hermeneutics of suspicion has informed much of the readings of the “Goblin Market,” especially the haunted market, as “kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic” (Sedgwick, Queer Performativity 15). I aim to provide a different approach given that recent scholarship on “Goblin Market” ignores the possibility of reparation. In this paper, I attempt to withhold suspicion in order to hone caring eyes to uncritical materials that are often deemed untenable to politicized life. I reparatively read the female participation in the market that resuscitates a full female identity and the “muted” ending that is often subjected to paranoid readings. Locating “Goblin Market” in a fantastic framework, I argue, helps us to see the actual world and it helps us visualize a fantastic world that brings out an ethical efflorescence that entertains human experience in its plenitude. This essay also argues that “Goblin Market,” partakes in “a new wave of innovative fairy tales” (Zipes 98) that gained ascendancy in the latter half of the nineteenth century and this serves as an affective archive to document long marginalized figures and feelings. I also argue that Rosetti’s poem invites thoughts on how aesthetic devices sustain and reproduce selves that ripple off from real-life experiences in a fantastic interruption of spatiality and temporality.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Gilligan ◽  
David A.J. Richards

Shakespeare has been dubbed the greatest psychologist of all time. This book seeks to prove that statement by comparing the playwright's fictional characters with real-life examples of violent individuals, from criminals to political actors. For Gilligan and Richards, the propensity to kill others, even (or especially) when it results in the killer's own death, is the most serious threat to the continued survival of humanity. In this volume, the authors show how humiliated men, with their desire for retribution and revenge, apocryphal violence and political religions, justify and commit violence, and how love and restorative justice can prevent violence. Although our destructive power is far greater than anything that existed in his day, Shakespeare has much to teach us about the psychological and cultural roots of all violence. In this book the authors tell what Shakespeare shows, through the stories of his characters: what causes violence and what prevents it.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhonda Nicole Balzarini ◽  
James McDonald ◽  
Taylor Kohut ◽  
Justin J Lehmiller ◽  
Bjarne Moon Holmes ◽  
...  

Emotional reactions to a partner’s extradyadic romantic interests are assumed to be negative and characterized by jealousy, an emotional state that arises over a perceived threat to one’s relationship. Yet, reactions may also be positive, and involve compersion, or taking joy in one's partner's pleasure in other sexual and relational encounters. Although some have argued that compersion is the opposite of jealousy, research has shown that compersion and jealousy are not opposing constructs, despite being treated this way in both theoretical and empirical research. Using a convenience sample of polyamorous (N = 3,530) and monogamous (N = 1,358) individuals we draw on theories of jealousy, emotional ambivalence, and emotional forecasting to examine people’s anticipated affective responses to hypothetical situations involving a partner’s extradyadic relations, and assess whether experience with having a partner engage in extradyadic relations was associated with anticipating less jealousy and more compersion. Results suggest that people in polyamorous relationships report less jealousy and more compersion with their partners, and that personal experience involving a partner’s extradyadic romantic interests predicted more compersion and less jealousy, with experience predicting greater increases in compersion among monogamous than polyamorous participants. Finally, while anticipated compersion was associated with greater relationship satisfaction, neither jealousy nor ambivalence were associated with relationship satisfaction. These results further demonstrate that individuals can experience both positive and negative reactions to a partner’s extradyadic relations, both based on actual experience and projection of responses to future events, and that real-life experiences are important in anticipating these emotions.


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