Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics. By Erica Fox Brindley. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010. xxx + 207 Pp. Hardback, ISBN 978-0-8248-3386-2.)

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.

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Skepticism Concerning Human Agency: Sciences of the Self Versus “Voluntariness” in the Law

Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility ◽

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199925605.003.0005 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 113-134 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Paul Sheldon Davies

Keyword(s):

Human Agency ◽

The Self ◽

The Law

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The Eolian Harp: Coleridge’s Middle Voice?

Literature and Theology ◽

10.1093/litthe/frz041 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 101-119

Author(s):

Blake Allen

Keyword(s):

Significant Relationship ◽

Human Agency ◽

The Self ◽

Middle Voice ◽

Divine Inspiration ◽

The Senses

Abstract Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s conversation poem, The Eolian Harp, configures a complex and highly significant relationship between activity and passivity. A merely passive poet, under the influence of natural or divine inspiration, would in Coleridge’s view be reduced to a mere automaton. Yet the poem is often thought to represent just such a poet. Similarly, it is thought to represent Sara, the speaker’s interlocutor, as a surrogate self. I shall argue, instead, that the poem presents the self in a ‘middle voice’, at once active and passive, such that inspiration does not efface human agency. I shall also consider the senses in which Sara evinces a middle voice and thus a distinct and substantial subjectivity. The implications of this argument for Coleridge’s broader corpus, and for some recent critiques of his aesthetics, will be suggested.

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