The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture by Susan Stewart

While infection has always haunted civilizations around the world, there are very few diseases that have had as much of an impact on Western culture as cancer has. The abundance of bereavement literature about characters with cancer begs the question; why cancer? This paper discusses ways in which cancer narratives reinforce Western obsession with control, through the lens of rhetoric and narrative structure. The author will specifically discuss how Patrick Ness’ 2011 novel, A Monster Calls, combats modern illness and cancer narratives and challenges themes of control threaded into Western culture

Download Full-text

‘I saw a knock-out’: Fatness, (In)visibility, and Desire in Shallow Hal

Somatechnics ◽

10.3366/soma.2012.0040 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

pp. 60-79 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jackie Wykes

Keyword(s):

Female Body ◽

Fat Body ◽

Western Culture ◽

Embodied Experience ◽

Knock Out ◽

Dominant Meaning ◽

Starting Point ◽

Female Bodies ◽

Fat Bodies ◽

Sexual Body

When the Farrelly brothers' movie Shallow Hal (2001) was released, one reviewer suggested that the film ‘might have been more honest if [it] had simply made Hal have a thing about fat women’ ( Kerr 2002 : 44). In this paper, I argue that Kerr hits the mark but misses the point. While the film's treatment of fat is undoubtedly problematic, I propose a ‘queer’ reading of the film, borrowing the idea of ‘double coding’ to show a text about desire for fat (female) bodies. I am not, however, seeking to position Shallow Hal as a fat-positive text; rather, I use it as a starting point to explore the legibility of the fat female body as a sexual body. In contemporary mainstream Western culture, fat is regarded as the antithesis of desire. This meaning is so deeply ingrained that representations of fat women as sexual are typically framed as a joke because desire for fat bodies is unimaginable; this is the logic by which Shallow Hal operates. The dominant meaning of fatness precludes recognition of the fat body as a sexual body. What is at issue is therefore not simply the lack of certain images, but a question of intelligibility: if the meaning of fat is antithetical to desire, how can the desire for – and of – fat bodies be intelligible as desire? This question goes beyond the realm of representation and into the embodied experience of fat sexuality.

Download Full-text

Malaria and kwashiorkor: Working with western culture scientists

10.1603/ice.2016.95489 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Florence Dunkel

Keyword(s):

Western Culture

Download Full-text

Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture, by Gail HawkesSex and Pleasure in Western Culture, by Gail Hawkes. Cambridge, Polity Press, 2004. viii, 208 pp. $59.95 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper).

Canadian Journal of History ◽

10.3138/cjh.40.2.401 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 40 (2) ◽

pp. 401-402 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Christopher Lawrence

Keyword(s):

Western Culture

Download Full-text

Time Goes on Crutches till Love Have All His Rites

10.1093/oso/9780190694098.003.0009 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Stefania Tutino

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Case Studies ◽

Daily Life ◽

East Asian ◽

Western Culture ◽

Men And Women ◽

Legal Contract

The last three chapters of this book present specific case studies showing concrete examples of the issues to which probabilism was applied. These chapters bring the theoretical and theological discussions on probabilism into the daily life of early modern men and women, and they demonstrate the fundamental role probabilism assumed in early modern Western culture. This chapter focuses on the question of the validity of East Asian marriages, which were institutionally, legally, and culturally very different from the European West. As Catholic missionaries and theologians confronted these differences, they found probabilism immensely useful for rethinking, updating, and adapting to this new context traditional notions concerning the nature of marriage both as a sacrament and as a legal contract.

Download Full-text

Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780190885120.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Michael C. Legaspi

Keyword(s):

Western Culture ◽

Profound Influence ◽

Wide Range ◽

The World ◽

Way Of Thinking

This is a book about wisdom. It is an inquiry into the beginnings of a particular way of thinking about life in the world. Seen in terms of wisdom, the world is not a meaningless array of disconnected things but something that is experienced as an ordered reality. This holistic way of understanding life in the world characterized pursuits of wisdom in a two-sided classical and biblical tradition that exercised a profound influence on Western culture. This book examines the development of that tradition in a wide range of texts from Homer to Plato and in the writings of early Jewish and Christian authors.

Download Full-text

Sleep in western culture

10.1093/oso/9780198778240.003.0018 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Roger Ekirch

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Sleep Deprivation ◽

Industrial Revolution ◽

Sleep Onset ◽

Western Culture ◽

The Past ◽

Predominant Form ◽

Artificial Illumination ◽

Illness Anxiety

Although a universal necessity, sleep, as the past powerfully indicates, is not a biological constant. Before the Industrial Revolution, sleep in western households differed in a variety of respects from that of today. Arising chiefly from a dearth of artificial illumination, the predominant form of sleep was segmented, consisting of two intervals of roughly 3 hours apiece bridged by up to an hour or so of wakefulness. Notwithstanding steps taken by families to preserve the tranquillity of their slumber, the quality of pre-industrial sleep was poor, owing to illness, anxiety, and environmental vexations. Large portions of the labouring population almost certainly suffered from sleep deprivation. Despite the prevalence of sleep-onset insomnia, awakening in the middle of the night was thought normal. Not until the turn of the nineteenth century and sleep’s consolidation did physicians view segmented sleep as a disorder requiring medication.

Download Full-text