“Outer” and “Inner” Body in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Literary Theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 14-15 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-154
Author(s):  
Géza S. Horváth

Bakhtin subordinates the experience of the body to the experience of the action, to the participation in the event of being. The world's thickening into body around the man is named as a new reality, an “aesthetic reality” by Bakhtin: “the artist and art as a whole create a completely new vision of the world, a new image of the world, a new reality of the world’s mortal flesh [реальность смертной плоти мира], unknown to any of the other clturally creative activities. [. . .] Aesthetic activity collects the world scattered in meaning and condenses it into a finished and self-contained image [образ]. This constitutes the analogy of the body and the artistic form for the creative view. The aesthetic activity gathers and thickens into a complete, sufficient- for-itself image the world dispersed from the perspective of the sense. The problem of the outer and inner body is treated in this paper in the light of Bakhtin’s philosophy of the act and being.

2014 ◽  
Vol 14-15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Géza S. Horváth

Bakhtin subordinates the experience of the body to the experience of the action, to the participation in the event of being. The world's thickening into body around the man is named as a new reality, an “aesthetic reality” by Bakhtin: “the artist and art as a whole create a completely new vision of the world, a new image of the world, a new reality of the world’s mortal flesh [реальность смертной плоти мира], unknown to any of the other clturally creative activities. [. . .] Aesthetic activity collects the world scattered in meaning and condenses it into a finished and self-contained image [образ]. This constitutes the analogy of the body and the artistic form for the creative view. The aesthetic activity gathers and thickens into a complete, sufficient- for-itself image the world dispersed from the perspective of the sense. The problem of the outer and inner body is treated in this paper in the light of Bakhtin’s philosophy of the act and being.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Lipsit

Forming. Shifting. Shaping. The envelope of one’s physiological body extends outwards in multiple shells, layer by layer. The versions of this envelope exist in the interstitial moment between clothing and architecture; ever forming and being formed, they shift and shape the circulation and happenings of the body on one side and the world on the other. The study of garments lends architecture recognition of various visible and invisible forces that create space and envelope. When space becomes dress, body specificity and movement is emphasized, and the geometries of the physiological body and what it means to experience space as an individual becomes primary, achieving a qualitative, sensory experience extending from the powers of kinaesthetic sense. Oscillating between scales and acts of making, model experimentation invents new ways to conceive and create architecture — a soft architecture finds itself operating here: on the liminal edge of body, envelope, and space


2008 ◽  
Vol 56 (2_suppl) ◽  
pp. 63-83
Author(s):  
Hugo Letiche

The theory of the body I want to explore here, assumes that researcher and researched are part of the same flesh of the world and can be understood in radical conjunction and not in duality. An interview is examined, first from the lifeworld (nursing) research paradigm and thereafter on the hand of Merleau-Ponty's concept of the reversibility of touching and being touched, wherein ‘subject’ (who touches) and ‘object’ (who is touched) are radically interrelated and coconstituted. Merleau-Ponty develops his reflections on this radical interaction as the ‘chiasm’. Although investigating the ‘chiasm’ can be seen as lifeworld research, the more common lifeworld approach only leads to rich description, which lacks the radical relational understanding of Merleau-Ponty's insights. I believe that acknowledgement of the chiasms of interrelationship reveals complex processes of enfoldment taking place between researcher and researched, writer and reader. All of them are enclosed in what Merleau-Ponty called the enfoldments or flesh of the world; which makes it very difficult to determine who touches whom and who is touched by whom. Research, when it tries to see, interpret and study the other, focuses on the visible of touching and being touched; but these inherently carry with them the invisible of the same actions. The consequences of these relationships for my study of a specific elderly woman are explored here.


2001 ◽  
Vol 204 (13) ◽  
pp. 2331-2338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen G. Gibbs ◽  
Luciano M. Matzkin

SUMMARYFruit flies of the genus Drosophila have independently invaded deserts around the world on numerous occasions. To understand the physiological mechanisms allowing these small organisms to survive and thrive in arid environments, we performed a phylogenetic analysis of water balance in Drosophila species from different habitats. Desert (cactophilic) species were more resistant to desiccation than mesic ones. This resistance could be accomplished in three ways: by increasing the amount of water in the body, by reducing rates of water loss or by tolerating the loss of a greater percentage of body water (dehydration tolerance). Cactophilic Drosophila lost water less rapidly and appeared to be more tolerant of low water content, although males actually contained less water than their mesic congeners. However, when the phylogenetic relationships between the species were taken into account, greater dehydration tolerance was not correlated with increased desiccation resistance. Therefore, only one of the three expected adaptive mechanisms, lower rates of water loss, has actually evolved in desert Drosophila, and the other apparently adaptive difference between arid and mesic species (increased dehydration tolerance) instead reflects phylogenetic history.


Slavic Review ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 600-625
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Blackwell

The author's actual creative act always proceeds along the boundaries of the aesthetic world, along the boundaries of the reality of the given, along the boundary of the body and the boundary of the spirit.—M. M. BakhtinThe spirit finds loopholes, transluscences in the world's finest texture.—V. V. Nabokov, "How I Love You"Are boundaries real? This, to a certain extent, is the central question posed by The Gift when Fyodor suggests that "definitions are always finite, but I keep straining for the faraway; I search beyond the barricades (of words, of senses, of the world) for infinity, where all, all the lines meet." Written in one of the most border-conscious eras of history (the Treaty of Versailles had just created nine new independent countries and changed the boundaries of many others), Vladimir Nabokov's last complete Russian novel addresses head-on the most pressing issues he and his fellow emigres faced. Cast beyond the edge of their homeland, the exiles were forced to accept unnaturally restricted movement within Europe as well, due to their lack of a valid nationality. So one might say that for Russian exiles of the 1920s and 1930s, boundaries constituted the single most unrelenting feature of reality.


Author(s):  
Tom Greggs

This chapter examines Bonhoeffer’s account of the church and advocates that throughout Bonhoeffer’s corpus there remains a desire to explicate the reality of the church in terms of its structural being with and for the other. This structure exists both internally in terms of its members’ relation to each other, and externally as the church relates as a corporate body to the world. The chapter considers Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiological method; the visibility of the church; vicarious representation; the church as the body of Christ; the agency of the Holy Spirit; preaching, the sacraments, and the offices of the church; and the question of the church in a religionless age.


Semiotica ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (204) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amarah Niazi Khan ◽  
Kathryn Staiano-Ross

AbstractWe all construct models of the world by which we make sense of the phenomena we encounter. But rarely is the model of the women who wear the burqa considered. We hold that the world must be perceived through the body of the other before meaning can be assessed. We argue that the burqa is not an object, but a set of human relationships. It has no singular interpretant by which it can be understood. It is a highly nuanced semiosic phenomenon that we believe can best be understood by placing the burqa within a specific human umwelt.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOTAN MARIA ◽  
Camelia Grigore ◽  
ELISABETA ANTONESCU ◽  
Felicia Gligor ◽  
Lavinia Duica ◽  
...  

Abstract IntroductionSARS-CoV-2 virus infection was first reported in China in late 2019 and has spread rapidly around the world. There is little information about the peculiarities of COVID-19 infection in children because the number of infected children was small, around 2% of all diseases.MethodsIn this retrospective study, we recruited 143 children infected with SARS-CoV-2 between March and October 2020, in Sibiu, Romania. RT-PCR tests, serum SARS-CoV-2 IgG/ IgM antibodies, lung radiography, biochemical and hematological tests were performed during the hospitalization.ResultsOf the 143 children selected in the study, 47.0% were male and 53% were female. At admission, all children tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, collecting nasopharyngeal exudate.Clinical manifestations included: cough in 75.52% of cases, fever in 55.94% of cases, nasal obstruction in 50.34% of cases, rhinorrhea in 38.46% of cases, muscle pain in 26.57% of cases, fatigue in 17.48% of cases, diarrhea and headache in 14.68% of cases. In 21 children (14,68%), the number of leukocytes was increased. In 38 cases (26,57%), the lung radiograph showed changes similar to bronchopneumonia, and the other cases did not have pulmonary changes. The persistence of the virus in the body of infected children is above the average reported in studies performed in adults, the virus being identified in the respiratory tract between 16 and 34 days. IgG class antibodies in patients' serum appeared between the 4th day of hospitalization and up to a maximum of 25 days, with a mean of 16.5 days.ConclusionThe persistence of the virus in the body of infected children is above the average reported in studies performed in adults, the virus being identified in the respiratory tract between 16 and 34 days. IgG class antibodies in patients' serum appeared within a mean of 16.5 days. All children were treated with symptomatic support without complications.


1998 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
Henning Eichberg

Contradictions of Modernity. Conflicting Configurations and Societal Thinking in Grundtvig's »The Human Being in the World«A Worm - a God. About the Human Being in the World. Ove Korsgaard (ed.). With contributions of Niels Buur Hansen, Hans Hauge, Bosse Bergstedt, Uffe Jonas and Knud Bjarne Gjesing. Odense Universitetsforlag 1997.By Henning EichbergIn 1817, Grundtvig wrote »Om Mennesket i Verden« which can be regarded as a key to the understanding of his philosophy and psychology, but which is difficult to place in relation to his later folkelig, societal engagement. A recent reedition of this text together with some actual comments by Grundtvig researchers is an occasion to quest deeper about this relation.However, it is not enough to ask - as Grundtvig research has done for a long time - what Grundtvig wanted to say, but his text can be regarded as a document of how modem orientation in the world is characterized by conflicting linguistic and metaphorical patterns, which sometimes may tell another story than intended.On the one hand, Grundtvig's text speaks of a lot of dualistic contradictions such as life vs. death, light vs. darkness, truth vs. lie, God vs. devil, human fall vs. resurrection, body vs. spirit, nature vs. history and time vs. eternity. In contrast to the author's intention to produce clarity and lucidity - whether in the spirit of Christianity or of modem rationality - the binary constructions give rather a confusing picture of systematical disorder where polarity and polemics are mixed, antagonism and gradual order, dichotomy and exclusive either-or, paradoxes and dialectical contradictions. On the other hand,Grundtvig tries again and again to build up three-pole imaginations as for instance the threefold human relation to time, space and truth and the three ages of spiritual seeing, feeling and conceptualization resp. of mythology (childhood), theology (youth) and history (adult age). The main history, Grundtvig wants to tell in his text, is built up around the trialectic relation of the human being to the body, to the spirit and to itself, to the living soul.The most difficult to understand in this relation seems to be what Grundtvig calls the spirit, Aanden. Grundtvig describes it as Aandigt Samfund mellem Menneske og Sandhed, »the spiritual community between the human being and the truth«, and this may direct our attention towards samfund, meaning at the same time association, togetherness and society. Aanden is described by threefold effects - will, conscience and faith, all of them describing social relations between human beings resp. their psychological correlate. The same social undertone is true when Grundtvig characterizes three Aande-Livets Spor (»traces of spiritual life«): the word, the history and love. If »the spirit« represents what is larger or »higher« than the single human being and what cannot be touched by his or her hand, then this definition fits exactly to society or the sociality of the human being. Social life - whether understood as culture, social identity or folk (people) - is not only a quantitative sum of human individuals, but represents another quality of natural order. Thus it has its logic that Grundtvig places the human being in between the realms of minerals, plant and animal life on the one hand and the »higher« order on the other, which can be understood as the social existence.In this respect, the societal dimension is not at all absent in his philosophy of 1817. However, it is not enough to state the implicite presence of sociality as such in the earlier Grundtvigian thinking before his folkelig break-through. What was the sociality, more concretely, which Grundtvig experienced during the early modernity? In general, highly dichotomous concepts are dominating the modem discourse as capitalism vs. feudalism, materialism vs. idealism, modernity vs. premodemity, democracy vs. absolutism or revolution vs. restoration; Grundtvig was always difficult to place into these patterns. Again, it might be helpful to try a trialectical approach, transcending the dualism of state and market by civil society as a third field of social action. Indeed, it was civil society with its farmers' anarchist undertones which became the contents of Grundtvig's later folk engagement.


Viatica ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilles LOUŸS ◽  

In The Japanese Chronicles, Nicolas Bouvier presents a full experience of being in the world, where all the senses are engaged, smell and taste in particular. Bouvier recalibrates the question of the body in travel narratives and shows how the senses can inform knowledge about the other, as organs of intercultural mediation. The sensorial notes of the text become tools for anthropological knowledge, calling on the body.


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