Organizing Things in Dickens

Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung

This chapter demonstrates how the organization of narrative information can shape a reader’s impression of what is represented. It focuses on two ways in which concrete objects are arranged in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: as specific members of general categories and as part of causally connected narrative structures. Dickens relies on these representational strategies to capture a scale of reality no longer suited to the individual human body. In doing so, he also reveals that the realist novel’s conventional commitment to individual experience at the scale of concrete particulars reflects constraints on the comprehension process.

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zsófia Demjén

This paper demonstrates how a range of linguistic methods can be harnessed in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the ‘lived experience’ of psychological disorders. It argues that such methods should be applied more in medical contexts, especially in medical humanities. Key extracts from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath are examined, as a case study of the experience of depression. Combinations of qualitative and quantitative linguistic methods, and inter- and intra-textual comparisons are used to consider distinctive patterns in the use of metaphor, personal pronouns and (the semantics of) verbs, as well as other relevant aspects of language. Qualitative techniques provide in-depth insights, while quantitative corpus methods make the analyses more robust and ensure the breadth necessary to gain insights into the individual experience. Depression emerges as a highly complex and sometimes potentially contradictory experience for Plath, involving both a sense of apathy and inner turmoil. It involves a sense of a split self, trapped in a state that one cannot overcome, and intense self-focus, a turning in on oneself and a view of the world that is both more negative and more polarized than the norm. It is argued that a linguistic approach is useful beyond this specific case.


Author(s):  
Scott Marek ◽  
Joshua S. Siegel ◽  
Evan M. Gordon ◽  
Ryan V. Raut ◽  
Caterina Gratton ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-114
Author(s):  
Karoline Gritzner

AbstractThis article discusses how in Howard Barker’s recent work the idea of the subject’s crisis hinges on the introduction of an impersonal or transpersonal life force that persists beyond human agency. The article considers Barker’s metaphorical treatment of the images of land and stone and their interrelationship with the human body, where the notion of subjective crisis results from an awareness of objective forces that transcend the self. In “Immense Kiss” (2018) and “Critique of Pure Feeling” (2018), the idea of crisis, whilst still dominant, seems to lose its intermittent character of singular rupture and reveals itself as a permanent force of dissolution and reification. In these plays, the evocation of nonhuman nature in the love relationships between young men and elderly women affirms the existence of something that goes beyond the individual, which Barker approaches with a late-style poetic sensibility.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1354067X2110040
Author(s):  
Josefine Dilling ◽  
Anders Petersen

In this article, we argue that certain behaviour connected to the attempt to attain contemporary female body ideals in Denmark can be understood as an act of achievement and, thus, as an embodiment of the culture of achievement, as it is characterised in Præstationssamfundet, written by the Danish sociologist Anders Petersen (2016) Hans Reitzels Forlag . Arguing from cultural psychological and sociological standpoints, this article examines how the human body functions as a mediational tool in different ways from which the individual communicates both moral and aesthetic sociocultural ideals and values. Complex processes of embodiment, we argue, can be described with different levels of internalisation, externalisation and materialisation, where the body functions as a central mediator. Analysing the findings from a qualitative experimental study on contemporary body ideals carried out by the Danish psychologists Josefine Dilling and Maja Trillingsgaard, this article seeks to anchor such theoretical claims in central empirical findings. The main conclusions from the study are used to structure the article and build arguments on how expectations and ideals expressed in an achievement society become embodied.


2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
SVEND ERIK LARSEN

Change in European cultural history has, for a long period, been discussed through two interrelated notions, that of science and that of history. This paper traces the various stages of this discussion from Antiquity to the present day from the point of view of history. Two reoccurring and paradigmatic characters of mythological descent, Odysseus and Prometheus, illustrate how history as a realm for human responsibility and future planning has established itself as a specific European construct, with the 18th century as its final breakthrough in practical and ideological terms. A close analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's drawing the Vitruvian Man, in statu nascendi, shows how the individual human being carrying the obligations and the promises of this history, is envisioned. The final remarks underline the importance of scientific knowledge in the concrete shaping of this responsibility and a plea for an increased cooperation across the disciplines.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 573-599
Author(s):  
Alex Batesmith ◽  
Jake Stevens

This article explores how ‘everyday’ lawyers undertaking routine criminal defence cases navigate an authoritarian legal system. Based on original fieldwork in the ‘disciplined democracy’ of Myanmar, the article examines how hegemonic state power and a functional absence of the rule of law have created a culture of passivity among ordinary practitioners. ‘Everyday’ lawyers are nevertheless able to uphold their clients’ dignity by practical and material support for the individual human experience – and in so doing, subtly resist, evade or disrupt state power. The article draws upon the literature on the sociology of lawyering and resistance, arguing for a multilayered understanding of dignity going beyond lawyers’ contributions to their clients’ legal autonomy. Focusing on dignity provides an alternative perspective to the otherwise often all-consuming rule of law discourse. In authoritarian legal systems, enhancing their clients’ dignity beyond legal autonomy may be the only meaningful contribution that ‘everyday’ lawyers can make.


Neuron ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 977-993.e7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Marek ◽  
Joshua S. Siegel ◽  
Evan M. Gordon ◽  
Ryan V. Raut ◽  
Caterina Gratton ◽  
...  

Discourse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
D. V. Andreenko

Introduction. Shaping modernity in the first third of the twentieth century is tied to the private worldview of the person of this era in which the main metaphor of the individual perception of “their time” is melancholy. The crisis of this historical period forms the prism of melancholic worldview. The goal of this article is to substantiate the reasons for the perception of melancholy as a phenomenon caused in part by the problem of individual experience of time. The relationship between melancholy and modernity has already been noted in the literature, but this text raises a new question – what is the temporal nature of this mutual influence?Methodology and sources. A key role in the understanding of melancholy is played by the texts of authors of the early 20th century: Walter Benjamin, devoted to Charles Baudelaire and the work of Sigmund Freud “Mourning and Melancholy”. The issue of temporality in the work is interpreted through the reference to the phenomenological tradition, namely in reference to the modern phenomenological analysis of depressive disorder in the work of Domonkos Sik.Results and discussion. The author comes to the conclusion that the feeling of the interrelation of melancholy and the epoch is extremely specific for a person of the first third of the 20th century, evidence of which could be found in the philosophical and cultural reflection of this period. Crisis worldview is reflected in literature, painting, cinema, philosophy, social theory, etc. Thus, it is possible to represent melancholy as a phenomenon, partly caused by the problem of individual experience of time. Melancholy occurs when a crisis worldview is supplemented by an experience of circular temporality, the disappearance of the future, preoccupation with the past, passivity, or isolation.Conclusion. If these elements come together, a total worldview is formed in which real world events intensify melancholy. In this sense, phenomenologically speaking, melancholy is not so much a state as a dynamic process.


LETRAS ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 147-161
Author(s):  
Fátima R. Nogueira

Se estudia la narrativa de Jaramillo Levi centrada en la relación entre el erotismo y la muerte, desde el intercambio de dos fuerzas que actúan en la producción del deseo: una, de naturaleza libidinosa e inconsciente, la otra de filiación social. Estos relatos exploran el vínculo entre las pulsiones sexuales y el instinto de la muerte revelando el exceso y la violencia ocultos en el erotismo; además, plasman la magnitud del deseo que al exceder los límites del cuerpo y del individuo deviene una experiencia de la sexualidad inhumana reafirmada sólo por un campo saturado de intensidades y vibraciones. Partiendo de la teoría lacaniana del deseo, y de conceptos de Deleuze y Guattari, en los relatos tal encuentro de fuerzas objetiviza el sujeto y cuestiona la noción antropomórfica de sexualidad. This study deals with Jaramillo Levi’s short stories centered on the relationship between eroticism and death, examining the exchange of two driving forces which create desire. The nature of one of these forces is unconscious and libidinous while the other is social. These stories explore the link between sexual drive and the death instinct, disclosing overindulgence and violence hidden behind eroticism. In addition, they depict the magnitude of desire, which upon exceeding the boundaries of the human body and the individual, becomes an experience of inhuman sexuality that can reaffirm itself only in a field permeated with intensity and vibrations. Considering Lacan’s theory of desire and other concepts from Deleuze and Guattari, the exchange of forces in these stories objectifies the subject and questions the anthropomorphic notion of sexuality.


Author(s):  
Régis Mollard ◽  
Pierre Yves Hennion ◽  
Alex Coblentz

The survey realized in 1992 on a military population allowed to collect anthropometric data on 688 males and 328 females. Among 73 measurements and 3 index, 26 of them have been retained for the comparison with previous surveys. Generally used for dimensioning human body models these data represent somatic measurements of reference, as weight and stature and segmentary measurements of trunk and limbs. A comparison with previous data, collected on a equivalent military population in 1973, confirms the modifications along the time are so significant that they can be considered as a phenomenon of morphological evolution. Likewise, the modification of the academic levels, average age and socio-cultural structures in the populations are combined to increase the anthropometric variability. It appears the military population presents a morphological modification with an overall increase in weight, stature and correlated dimensions. Otherwise, a light decrease of the cormic index indicates that the morphological transformation influences on the body proportions, with an increase more notable for the lower limbs compared to the trunk. The collected anthropometric information allow to update the Individual Database of ERGODATA from which ergonomie recommendations and statistical and morphological models of the human body can be proposed.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document