Realism, Truth, and Error in the Writing of B. S. Johnson

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
Julia Jordan
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Late Modernism ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Productive Potential ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Experimental Novel

Over the last decade or so in particular, B. S. Johnson has come to represent an exemplar of the 1960s and early 1970s experimental tendency for readers and scholars alike. His complex relation to realism is here examined, and the chapter shows the connections between this and his writing’s tonal and affective cast, proposing the centrality of anxiety, and preoccupation with the body. This recurs throughout his work as a corporeal proximity that scrambles the distance between subject and object. The errancy identified as so key to the experimental novel of the period is central: Johnson’s texts worry at themselves, both in what they depict and in their ability to depict it at all. This chapter shows how his novels register an emerging aesthetic of failure, whereby the productive potential of error allows the experimental novel to negotiate and to expand the contested categories of realism and late modernism.

scholarly journals The thymus and the science of self

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Geenen
Keyword(s):  
T Cells ◽  
Adaptive Immune System ◽  
Lymphoid Organ ◽  
The Body ◽  
Effector Cells ◽  
Major Organ ◽  
Organ Specific ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
Essential State ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThe conventional perception asserts that immunology is the science of ‘discrimination’ between self and non-self. This concept is however no longer tenable as effector cells of the adaptive immune system are first conditioned to be tolerant to the body’s own antigens, collectively known as self until now. Only then attain these effectors the responsiveness to non-self. The acquisition of this essential state of tolerance to self occurs for T cells in the thymus, the last major organ of our body that revealed its intricate function in health and disease. The ‘thymus’ as an anatomical notion was first notably documented in Ancient Greece although our present understanding of the organ’s functions was only deciphered commencing in the 1960s. In the late 1980s, the thymus was identified as the site where clones of cells reactive to self, termed ‘forbidden’ thymocytes, are physically depleted as the result of a process now known as negative selection. The recognition of this mechanism further contributed to the belief that the central rationale of immunology as a science lies in the distinction between self and non-self. This review will discuss the evidence that the thymus serves as a unique lymphoid organ able to instruct T cells to recognize and be tolerant to harmless self before adopting the capacity to defend the body against potentially injurious non-self-antigens presented in the context of different challenges from infections to exposure to malignant cells. The emerging insight into the thymus’ cardinal functions now also provides an opportunity to exploit this knowledge to develop novel strategies that specifically prevent or even treat organ-specific autoimmune diseases.

scholarly journals Why to build university spaces? How to discuss them? Appearance of a new lens

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aslı Alanlı
Keyword(s):  
Learning Process ◽  
Extreme Points ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
University Spaces ◽  
The University

Since the 1990s, the university space has been the subject of many discussions due to the introduction of communication technologies to the learning process,which has become significantly visible after the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic nowadays. These debates focus on the two extreme points ofwhether university space is necessary or not. In this regard, this research claims that the arguments on this topic are based on subject-object duality. It aims to develop a ground covering the discussions that oscillate between the two extremes by referring to sociomateriality, which advocates the interwovenness of subject and object. Adopting a retrospective perspective, itrediscovers the debates from the 1960s at the onto-epistemological levelthrough a sociomaterial lens. Finally, it situates the discussion on university space within the past-present-future dialogue.

Louise Bourgeois’s Melancholy Objects to be Used

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-164
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenal Experience ◽  
Mental Process ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Louise Bourgeois ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

Over a decade before the French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis in New York (1952–1985), her work mined territories of psyche, body, home, and exile. Bourgeois’s papers from 1940 onward reveal that she shared Freud’s description of neurotics, hysterics, and artists as suffering from reminiscences. Scottish psychoanalyst W. R. D. Fairbairn identified the last of these in 1943 as “war neuroses,” just six years before Bourgeois debuted her first mature sculptures. These abstract “personages” served as melancholy surrogates for lost objects, the friends and family Bourgeois left in 1938 in Occupied France. In the 1960s, she further reduced the body to ambivalent amalgams of part-objects made from plaster and latex, suggesting swollen nodes, skin, and sex organs. Of particular interest are two papers published by Fairbairn in 1938 that extend the inner world of the individual to the field of object relations via the transposition of the symbolically “restored object.” Fairbairn conceived the radical notion of restitution, the mental process of repairing damage in the artist’s inner object world. These principles resonate with Bourgeois’s métier and a postwar sculptural aesthetic that probed the phenomenal experience of anxiety, exile, and psychoanalysis on the Self and others.

Performance: Listening Bodies

2020 ◽  
pp. 134-158
Author(s):  
Zoë Skoulding
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sound Poetry ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The 1960S

Discussion of Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie and artist Christine Sun Kim draws attention to the embodiment of sound performance, which is considered in this chapter in relation to technology, race, gender, bilingualism and, though the parallel performances of humans and birds, ecology. The work of poets such as Bob Cobbing and Henri Chopin offers examples of how sound poetry of the 1960s explored a liberated listening through recording. Yet such a listening, enabled by machines, draws attention back to the capacities of the human body. Serres’ simultaneous emphasis on the centrality of the senses and the space of codes and messages in which the body moves frames a discussion of various boundaries between language, sound and noise in the work of Emma Bennett, Jonathan Skinner, Holly Pester, Tracie Morris, Hannah Silva and Rhys Trimble.

Retrospective on microbial transformations of halogenated organics

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 512-517
Author(s):  
P. L. McCarty ◽  
C. S. Criddle ◽  
T. M. Vogel
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Microbial Transformations ◽  
Aliphatic Compounds ◽  
The 1960S

Prior to the 1960s, knowledge of biological transformations of highly halogenated aliphatic compounds was limited, except in mammalian organisms where enzymatic transformations occurred to rid the body of ingested harmful chemicals.

scholarly journals A Generational Approach to Somatic Cultures: Modes of Attention to the Young Body in Contemporary Portuguese Society

Societies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Vitor Ferreira
Keyword(s):  
Research Data ◽  
The Body ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
Youth Cultures ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Body Design ◽  
History Of ◽  
Portuguese Society ◽  
The 1960S

The aims of this article are to identify, describe, and sociologically understand the different somatic cultures in contemporary Portuguese society—i.e., the distinct ways in which different generations have thought about, used and lived the body from the time of the Estado Novo (the New State, which was the regime that governed Portugal from 1933 to 1974) until the present day. Beginning with the hypothesis that there are different, historically institutionalized, somatic modes of attention to the “young body”, the author uses the most relevant institutions of the socialization of the body as analytical dimensions and investigates their main incorporation strategies and models of corporality. This hypothesis is informed by different generational conditions that change people’s uses of their body, their experiences of living in it, and their thoughts on the matter. Using these analytical dimensions, the article presents a typology that identifies, describes, and comprehends the three somatic cultures in the recent history of Portuguese society: the culture of physical invigoration that forms part of the legacy of the New State; the culture of physical rejuvenation inherited from youth cultures of the 1960s and 70s, along with the growth of body design industries in the 1980s; and the culture of physical perfection inherited from the biotech culture in the 1990s, accompanied by the radicalization of the body design industry. This approach entails the discussion and reinterpretation of a corpus of historical literature, presenting research data on the body in a defined time period (1930 to date) and space (Portugal), analyzed from an embodied perspective of generational change.

Becoming militant: embodying the Guinean revolution and Guinea–China relations

Africa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 721-745
Author(s):  
Nomi Dave
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
Republic Of Guinea ◽  
The Republic ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Revolutionary Ideology ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Moment

AbstractThis article considers the role of embodied experience in promoting revolutionary ideology in Guinea. The Republic of Guinea has long held close ties with China, and in the 1960s and 1970s the country pursued its own Cultural Revolution. While Chinese songs and aesthetics had little direct artistic influence, the Guinean state embraced Maoist ideals of social and self-transformation and discipline. Such ideals were translated into daily life through the regulation of bodies, including practices of dance, movement and physical gesture that sought to create revolutionary subjects. I show here how embodied practices, including the circulation of dancers and official delegations, cultivated Guinea's relationship with China; and how practices of movement and dance were inwardly experienced within Guinea during its own Cultural Revolution. In so doing, I address some of the contradictions of the Revolution and of Guinea–China relations. While the regime pursued its goals through violence and brutality, former revolutionary subjects today remember the moment for both its pain and its pleasures – for the hardships the body had to endure and for the nationalist pride that many still feel today.

The Anthropological Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu: Genesis, Concepts, Relevance

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Defrance
Keyword(s):  
Physical Education ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Sociology Of Sport ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sport Culture ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Social Uses ◽  
Social Coherence

The works of Pierre Bourdieu contribute to the establishment of a true sociology of culture and open prospects for the sociology of sport. A review of the genesis of this sociology shows that it has been constructed through breaks with French sociology’s way of approaching culture in the 1960s. The presentation of some of Bourdieu’s concepts is intended to show how they illuminate the social coherence of cultural behaviors and how the latter fit together. Finally, the paper emphasizes the relevance of such cultural analyses for those who study the social uses of the body, sport culture, or physical education.

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