Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel

2019 ◽  
pp. 180-208
Author(s):  
Jeanne M. Britton
Keyword(s):  
Racial Difference ◽  
The Self ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
Epistolary Fiction ◽  
As If

This chapter argues that a novelistic version of sympathy negotiates transitions between oral, written, and printed texts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The mode of vicarious narration that earlier chapters locate in the decline of epistolary fiction culminates in a logic of epistolarity that justifies this novel’s narrative form. Brontë’s novel also transforms Enlightenment conceptions of sympathy through the shared identity between Heathcliff and Catherine, which returns to the extremes of familial proximity and racial difference that trouble Enlightenment notions of sympathy: Heathcliff could just as easily be Catherine’s brother or a racial “other.” After explaining that she has “watched and felt” Heathcliff’s sorrows, Catherine declares “I am Heathcliff.” This assertion suggests an assimilation of radical otherness or a complete mirroring of the self in the familial other, as if to annihilate, through the experience of shared suffering, the boundary that separates sibling from stranger.

From Container to Claustrum: Projective Identification in Couples

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Health ◽  
Projective Identification ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intimate Partners ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If

This paper is a contribution to the growing literature on the role of projective identification in understanding couples' dynamics. Projective identification as a defence is well suited to couples, as intimate partners provide an ideal location to deposit unwanted parts of the self. This paper illustrates how projective identification functions differently depending on the psychological health of the couple. It elucidates how healthier couples use projective identification more as a form of communication, whereas disturbed couples are inclined to employ it to invade and control the other, as captured by Meltzer's concept of "intrusive identification". These different uses of projective identification affect couples' capacities to provide what Bion called "containment". In disturbed couples, partners serve as what Meltzer termed "claustrums" whereby projections are not contained, but imprisoned or entombed in the other. Applying the concept of claustrum helps illuminate common feelings these couples express, such as feeling suffocated, stifled, trapped, held hostage, or feeling as if the relationship is killing them. Finally, this paper presents treatment challenges in working with more disturbed couples.

Vicarious gestures of participation

2018 ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Sruti Bala
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
Collective Processes ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Performance Projects ◽  
As If

Chapter IV follows two conceptually inspired performance projects by the Amsterdam-based Lebanese artist Lina Issa, Where We Are Not (2009) and If I Could Take Your Place? (2010 – ongoing). These works explore the question of what it means to take someone else’s place, to participate in someone’s life by doing something on their behalf, in the mode of ‘as if’. By analysing how this vicarious participation unfolds, the chapter foregrounds the spectatorial parameters of participation. The theorization of participation calls for an interweaving of the aesthetic with the social or political. Issa’s playful performances of standing in for others point to larger questions of what it means to participate in collective processes of imagining selfhood. The chapter suggests that the solidarity in the gesture of vicarious participation lies not so much in recognizing the so-called ‘other’ or in celebrating differences, but rather in being willing to dispossess oneself of the fixity of one’s ideas of the self, a potentially transformative gesture.

‘E Says it as if ‘E’s God - (How do Teachers Transmit their Attitudes and Expectations)

1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-111
Author(s):  
L.J. Dwyer
Keyword(s):  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The Self ◽  
Academic Goals ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
As If

As teachers, most of us would agree that our attitudes and expectations do somehow influence the academic goals of our pupils and of ourselves. Research findings indicate that the self-fulfiling prophecy operates in all realms of education and that it results in the kind of behaviour that is expected. The significance of this, especially for teachers in cross-cultural classes, is now well established and generally accepted. However, the ways in which we actually transmit our attitudes and expectations to our pupils are still not clear.

Letters to the Self: The Cloistered Writer in Nonretrospective Fiction

PMLA ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Porter Abbott
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
Epistolary Fiction ◽  
Letter Writer ◽  
Self Discovery

My field consists of those works of diary or epistolary fiction in which the author has limited the narrative voice to one diarist or letter writer. The strategy allows the author to focus on a drama of self-perception involving two main participants: the diarist and the text. The outcome of the drama basically depends on how the diarists write and how they read what they write. In the first part of my essay, I treat the drama of successful self-discovery through representative works by Tennyson, Mauriac, Bernanos, Sartre, and Gide. In the second part, I treat Werther, Lermontov’s Pechorin, and Mariane of the Lettres portugaises as writers who use their literary mode in essentially the opposite way: to maintain an existing idea of themselves.

scholarly journals A Theoretical Postscript: Time, Space, the Self and the You, and Digital Media as Narrative Constructions

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-224
Author(s):  
Christina Schachtner
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
The Self ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Narrative Constructions ◽  
The Media ◽  
Narrative Subject

Abstract This chapter explores how the concepts of time, space, the Self, the You, and the structural characteristics of the media concerned figure in the narratives. Time, for example, is fleshed out as biographical and sociocultural time whereas space takes on form in the narrative practices of managing boundaries and organizing virtual space. The analysis continues by confirming that the narrative subject is anything but isolated. The You sets foot on the narrative stage as a benchmark or a talking point. In the interplay between narrators and media, transmedia storytelling crystallizes as a new narrative form which interlinks media-based experiences from different phases of life and from different media, giving rise to a cosmos in which the narrators act as the designers of their own stories.

scholarly journals CARTESIAN SUBJECTS LOST IN THE ALPS REFLECTIONS ON RUBEN ÖSTLUND’S FORCE MAJEURE

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (55-56) ◽  
pp. 134-148
Author(s):  
Sven Anders Johansson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
The Self ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Force Majeure ◽  
The Alps ◽  
As If

The article analyses the constitution of subjectivity in Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure (2014). At the centre of attention stands the male protagonist who is uncapable of reconciling his inner nature with the external expectations. If the film may be un- derstood as a critique of existing middle-class conventions, it also reproduces a highly conventional ideal of the self-identical subject. The article argues that this confusion or irony is an expression of a Cartesian subject – still prevalent in the film – in crisis. A neglected aspect of Descartes’ theory is that the autonomy of the subjects presupposes the existence of God. The problem for Östlund’s char- acters is that there is no God. Still, they act as if he, or as if any au- thority might, legitimize their subjectivity. Thus, the whole existence becomes a series of performances. The idea of an inner nature cor- responds with the notion of an outer nature. The latter is certainly very present in Force Majeure, but at the same time this nature is constantly problematized. On an allegorical level, the film may thus be read as a comment on the Anthropocene, a state where we no longer know neither what “nature”, nor “culture” is.

‘The Fixed and the Fluid’

2019 ◽  
pp. 146-157
Author(s):  
Michael O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Great Awareness ◽  
Poetic Identity ◽  
Born Again ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Poetic Visions

This chapter addresses the question of poetic identity in the works of and literary relationship between Shelley and Byron. It identifies the mutual responsiveness of the two poets as well as their responsiveness to the self in poetry. For both poets, there is a great awareness of the possibility to re-imagine the self through poetry: to ‘multiply’ and be multiplied, to become ‘immortal’ through the continuance of one’s ideas and poetic visions, and to be born again in the minds and hearts of those readers who are receptive to the poet’s creations. Both poets, through their poetic works, explore the value of poetry through different forms. Byron’s narrative form provides means by which he can explore the self through opposing poles. As the chapter points out, for Byron, ‘Stories fix and identify; but they are also the doorways towards novelty and escape’. Shelley’s intense lyricism provides an opportunity to test the imagination’s capacity for movement between poles, to be at once fixed and fluid. Both poets present identity through the lens of poetic surrogates through whom they explore notions of isolation, the concept of heroism, a sense of suffering, and the very mortal wish for the timelessness of the soul. The two authors also deftly probe the relationship between author and reader. The chapter also explores the converging and diverging ways in which Byron and Shelley respond to Wordsworthian ideas of identity. It details how the poets’ friendship and intellectual exchange ‘changed who they were as poets’. Throughout, the chapter examines the skill with which each poet creates his works, and traces how poetic form corresponds to poetic idea.

The Moral Law: Derrida reading Kant

Derrida Today ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jacques de Ville
Keyword(s):  
Categorical Imperative ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
The Law ◽  
As If

This essay shows how Derrida, in a variety of texts, engages directly or indirectly with the Kantian moral law, which rests on the assumption of man's autonomy vis-à-vis his natural inclinations. In the background of this analysis is Derrida's engagement with Freud, the latter having argued that the Kantian moral law is located in, and can be equated with, the superego. Derrida challenges Freud's assignation of the moral law (solely) to the superego, and suggests that what appears to Kant as the moral law and to Freud as the demands of the superego, already involve a limitation of a much more radical demand on the self: that of absolute sacrifice, and which one can understand with reference to Freud's death drive. This demand can be referred to as the law of law, that is, the law which makes of the moral law a law. Within this broader framework, the essay explores in detail Derrida's reading of Kant's notion of respect that is owed to the moral law, the notion of duty, and the formulation of the categorical imperative by Kant in terms of an ‘as if’.

Schwache Nerven, starke Texte

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Mann ◽  
The Self ◽  
Case Vignette ◽  
Psychological Suffering ◽  
First Case ◽  
History Of ◽  
As If ◽  
New Look

By 1900, the medical phenomenon of neurasthenia had grown into an image of general disorder manifesting the malaise of modernity. Neurasthenia was always more than the psychological suffering of individuals – it was also the price society had to pay for progress. Thomas Mann, too, was influenced by his contemporaries‘ obsession with time. Especially in his early works, such as Buddenbrooks and Tonio Kröger, these subjects come together as if focussed in a burning glass: between degeneration and the psychology of the self, neurasthenia has become a symptom of a crisis of the bourgeois subject; from today's perspective, for example, the symptomatology of Thomas Buddenbrooks can be read as the first case vignette in the history of burnout. In this volume, however, the aim is not to apply the interpretation of neurasthenia as a contemporary illness around 1900 to the present, which application has by now turned into a simple template. Rather, it aims to interrogate the discourses surrounding neurasthenia and artistic potential as time-bound debates and to ask about the conditions of writing in the mirror of neurasthenia. This revisiting of a famous topos – illness and art in Thomas Mann – thus aims to take a new look at an old topic.

The Detection of Malingering

1999 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 386-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Wildman ◽  
Robert W. Wildman
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Symptom Checklist ◽  
Hit Rate ◽  
Independent Replication ◽  
Paper And Pencil ◽  
As If ◽  
Disability Compensation

A 60-item paper-and-pencil inventory showed a 98% “hit-rate” in distinguishing between honest and simulated malingering protocols produced by 29 nonclinical subjects who took the inventory in both the honest and faked conditions. When instructed to take the Wildman Symptom Checklist “as if applying for some kind of disability compensation,” subjects endorsed a significantly higher number of the self-statements which appear clinically unbelievable. Independent replication is now required

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