Attributability and the Self

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-59
Author(s):  
Susan Wolf
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Negative Attitudes

This chapter offers a close reading of Gary Watson’s important article “Two Faces of Responsibility.” It aims to disambiguate and revise the notions of attributability and accountability that Watson’s essay introduced and to clarify the relation between them. It distinguishes mere negative descriptions of an individual from negative attitudes toward that individual, and further distinguishes negative attitudes that constitute criticism from other attitudes that constitute blame. Accepting Watson’s idea that an act or trait is attributable to someone just in case it discloses a feature of an agent’s self, the essay argues that attributability (of a fault) is sufficient to justify criticism of an individual; blame and public sanctions, by contrast, require accountability.

scholarly journals Ruin philosophy, poetic discourse and the collapse of meta-narratives in Aleksandr Kushner's poetry of the 1970s

Nordlit ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Schönle
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
The Face ◽  
Creative Forces ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Way

This article offers an analysis of the trope of ruin in the poetry of Aleksandr Kushner (born 1936), in particular through a close reading of two of his poems: “In a slippery graveyard, alone” and “Ruins”. The analysis of these poems is preceded by an overview of ruin philosophy from Burke and Diderot to Simmel and Benjamin, with particular emphasis on the way the trope of ruin contemplation stages a confrontation between the self and what transcends it (death, history, nature, etc.). This philosophical background serves as a heuristic tool to shed light on the poetry of Kushner. Through the trope of ruin, Kushner explores the legitimacy of poetic speech after the collapse of all meta-narratives. Kushner has no truck with Diderot's solipsism, nor with Hegel's bold narrative of progress, nor with Simmel's peaceful reconciliation with the creative forces of nature. Nor, really, does he intend to bear witness to history, the way Benjamin does in the faint anticipation of some miracle. Instead, Kushner posits the endurance of a community united not around a grand project, but around the idea of carrying on in the face of everything, muddling through despite the lack of hopes for a transformational future and making the most of fleeting moments of positivity that emerge out of the fundamental serendipity of history.

Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Arti Minocha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Content

Abstract This paper looks at the formation of colonial print publics in Punjab, the gendered subjectivities that emerged in this new discursive space, and middle-class women’s deployment of print to articulate the self. This will be done through a close reading of one of the first novels in English, Cosmopolitan Hinduani, which was published in Lahore, Punjab, by a woman in 1902. The essay examines the narrator’s notion of a gendered cosmopolitanism and the subject position that it affords, her attempt at going beyond the fault lines of religion to articulate a liberal and modern political subject, while reworking the cosmopolitan/local binary. How does her insertion of herself as a gendered subject in the provincial, national, cosmopolitan imaginary reflect in the author’s choice of language and genre? My attempt will be to see the novel and its author as part of a literary culture in which she made certain choices about the form, language, content, and audience.

Writing to redundancy: approaches to spiritual journals and early modern spirituality

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Webster
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Cultural Resources

ABSTRACTThe ‘puritan diary’ has received attention from historians and literary critics with little exchange between the approaches. Placing the diary in the context of experimental Calvinist personal discipline reveals that the form emerged independently of the literature of practical divinity. Considering the practice as a ‘technology of the self’ draws attention to the meanings of writing in a protestant context and encourages us to consider the cultural resources available to early modern protestants. Close reading of these texts suggests a greater degree of complexity than is often admitted and allows for a tension between different views of the salvific process. This tension between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ forms is helpful in understanding the religiosity of early modern protestants.

scholarly journals The Madness of Jodh Singh: Patriotism and Paranoia in the Ghadar Archives

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Rohit Chopra
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Mental Condition ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
British Government ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Relationship

My paper focuses on Jodh Singh, a marginal figure in the archives of the Ghadar Party, who was arrested for High Treason against the United States for his role in the “Hindu Conspiracy” plots aimed at the British government of India. Incarcerated in a California prison, Singh was moved to a sanatarium on displaying symptoms of insanity. Through a close reading of a web of archival documents and scholarly reflections—at the center of which lies the report of a commission appointed to inquire into his mental condition—I examine the account of the madness of Jodh Singh as a statement about patriotism and paranoia. In engagement with the work of Foucault, Guha, and scholars of the Ghadar movement, I describe how the record of Singh’s experiences indicts the juridical-legal-medical framework of American society as operating on a distinction between legtimate and illegitimate madness. I also examine how Jodh Singh points to the glimmers of a critique of the self-image of the Ghadar Party as a revolutionary movement committed to egalitarian principles. I conclude with a reflection on what Jodh Singh might tell us about the relationship between madness, political aspiration, and the yearning for solidarity.

scholarly journals Fantasy, Mysticism, and Eroticism in Raja Alem’s Fatma

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-55
Author(s):  
Ghadir Zannoun K.
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabian ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Alternate Reality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Erotic

This paper is a close reading of Raja Alem’s 2005 novel, Fatma: A Novel of Arabia. I argue that Alem depicts the erotic in ways similar to Audre Lorde’s definition – as a doorway to self-fulfillment and in honor of the “fullness” of the erotic’s depth of feelings. The Saudi Arabian writer employs the fantastic, which has been used by writers to express feminist politics, to give textual embodiment to the relationship between the erotic, self-actualization, and women’s empowerment, central to which is self-knowledge and self-discovery. Alem suggests that a deeper knowledge of the self can open women to unlimited possibilities of being and perception, including a closer relationship to the natural and the supernatural worlds. Alem thus presents a female mythology that creates an alternate reality and undermines the binaries of patriarchal thinking, such as the corporeal/transcendent, the human/nonhuman, man/woman, and nature/culture.

scholarly journals Potret Self-system Remaja dengan Perilaku Tindakan Seksual Berisiko di Provinsi Jambi

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-64
Author(s):  
Kartika Setyaningsih Sunardi ◽  
Evi Martha ◽  
Essi Guspaneza
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Risky Behavior ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Population Group ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Cross Sectional Design ◽  
Influential Variable ◽  
Self System

Background: Indonesia's largest population group is adolescents. Adolescents have a critical period in the human life cycle and put adolescents vulnerable to the influence of sexual risky behavior. The purpose of this study was to describe the self-portrait system that causes the sexual risky behavior of adolescents in Jambi Province.Method: This was quantitative research using a cross-sectional design. As much as 661 unmarried male and female adolescents (15-24 years) in Jambi Province involved as the sample of the 2017 IDHS. Data were analyzed using univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analysis.Results: The result showed 68.1% of adolescents performed sexual risky behavior in Jambi Province. The Self-System Factors associated with sexual risky behavior of adolescents were age, knowledge, attitude, and alcohol consumption. The probability of adolescents in the age group of 20-24 years, who have low knowledge, negative attitudes, and consumed alcohol will perform sexual risky behavior of 95.78%. The result of the multivariate analysis found that the most influential variable with sexual risky behavior in adolescents was the attitude. It is suggested to the Department of Health and BKKBN to increase sexual knowledge about reproductive health and sexuality to adolescents.

SELF-ACCEPTANCE: FROM PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS TO THE CHARACTERISTICS OF A SUBJECT

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-59
Author(s):  
T. S. Pilipenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
The Self ◽  
Humanistic Psychology ◽  
Personal Agency ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Subject Characteristic ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Self Acceptance ◽  
High Level

In experimental psychology, the problem of non-acceptance of oneself, one’s environment, and the world around is one of the relevant issues. The author notes that the accepted in contemporary society popular opinions associated with self-acceptance often have manipulative or prescriptive nature and are the negative attitudes blocking the person activity and leading to its stagnation. The resolution of the stereotyped image of this phenomenon is possible from the perspective of historical-theoretical analysis of the study of self-acceptance. The paper presents various approaches to the understanding of self-acceptance by foreign and Russian psychologists within such psychology areas as neofreidism, gestalt-psychology, existential, and humanistic psychology. The author considers the changes in the study of self-acceptance, notes that despite different views of classical psychologists on the understanding of this phenomenon, they define self-acceptance as an active process promoting self-improvement and self-actualization of a person. This fact conflicts with the latent meaning of widespread life theses on self-acceptance. The paper emphasizes the possibility to study self-acceptance from the perspective of the subject approach as a phenomenon initiating the activity of a person in organization and regulation of own life activities, promoting further development of a person, its self-actualization. The author considers the controversial characteristics of self-acceptance as a subject characteristic: self-acceptance allows changing from self-understanding to self-improvement, at the same time, the high level of self-acceptance requires a particular level of development of the personal agency. The author notes the paradoxical understanding of the self-acceptance phenomenon largely within the frames of positive self-attitude, which can promote the “Self” image idealism and lead to intrapersonal regress.

scholarly journals Madeleine Blais-Dahlem et sa vision de l’autotraduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-60
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Czubińska
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Privileged Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Marco Micone ◽  
Patrice Desbiens

Nowadays self-translation remains a frequent practice in the literary field in Canada. A close reading of the self-translations done by Canadian writers such as Nancy Houston, Marco Micone or Patrice Desbiens allows to discover each author’s own vision of self-translation as a creative process. The aim of the paper is to determine, through a comparative analysis of excerpts from the two language versions of the play La Maculée/sTain (2012) and the latest bilingual novel La voix de mon père / My Father’s Voice (2015) by Fransaskois playwright Madeleine Blais-Dahlem, to what extent her self-translating practice guides the reading of the text. Examiningthe back and forth between the two versions of the same work will allow to delve deeper into the subject of the identity and privileged status of the translator (Tanqueiro 2009: 109, Saint 2018: 120), but also into the role and skills of the receiver of Madeleine Blais-Dahlem’s bilingual writings.

‘Lovely beyond Words’: Beckett, Value, Critique

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rónán McDonald
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Cultural Economy ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Linguistic Markers ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

In recent years there have been numerous pronouncements by diverse figures in the humanities, including Bruno Latour, Rita Felski and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that critique and ‘paranoid reading’ has run out of steam. There has been renewed attention to form, the ‘literary’, affect and the phenomenology of reading. What are the implications of this new turn for Beckett studies? Is it possible to articulate a positive value for a writer that undoes value, without simply recuperating him or her into the cultural economy? This essay is in two parts, counterpointed but complementary. The first takes a metacritical approach, elaborating synergies in Beckett and wider developments in academic literary studies. The second offers a close reading of Beckett's late prose text ‘All Strange Away’, from which I derive my titular quotation. This late work is both deeply engaged with and explicitly resistant to the Western aesthetic tradition, especially Romanticism. It deploys cultural and literary traces of aesthetic tradition, but only to parody and deface them, leaving for instance the imagination/fancy distinction blurred and suggestive, and the whole equipment for judgment uncomfortably residual and remaindered. Yet for all the play on auto-critique and self-cancellation, the text keeps the imagination flickering, precisely in the self-reflexive domain. The imagined death of the imagination, endures as the remainder, preventing the actual death and thereby keeping the possibility of valuation in process. We begin to find it in the percussive accompaniment enacted by the language: the unmistakable cadences and symmetries of Beckett's own prose. Ultimately a close reading of Beckett reveals the patterns and shapes of the prose and the drama, which as Adorno pointed out, gesture towards emancipatory possibilities without naming them. The pleasure of reading Beckett emerges from the dialectic of estrangement and recognition, mixing the uncanny and patterned linguistic markers. These signposts are found in the language, in the rhythms, patterns, repetitions and variations highlighted by a formalist criticism attentive to the phenomenology of reading.

“Accessories included”: Armed Christians and the mythos of heroic violence

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (3) ◽  
pp. 358-372
Author(s):  
Benjamin D. Utter
Keyword(s):  
Southern Baptist ◽  
Southern Baptist Convention ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Personal Power ◽  
Textual Tradition ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
National Power ◽  
The Individual

The myth of the “good guy with a gun” is a seductive one for Americans, who cite self-defense as the foremost reason for gun ownership, and Pew data show that white, self-identified evangelicals are more likely than members of other faith groups or the average citizen to own and carry a gun. This fantasy of the individual hero’s efficacy is enticing but, I argue, incoherent. Through comparison of past and present Southern Baptist Convention resolutions on gun violence and a close reading of gun rights advocacy rhetoric, I show how biblical language and heroic biblical exemplars are exploited to fuse fantasies of highly individualistic, personal power with a glorification of national power. The iconography of gun manufacturer merchandise perpetrates a misreading of history and Scripture, and, at least implicitly, of medieval romantic texts, as well. Careful attention to gun manufacturer advertising iconography, and to the medieval textual tradition that it appropriates, reveals a warning that the self-authorized hero, lethally “accessorized,” is as likely to threaten the safety of the community he serves as to guard it.

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