scholarly journals Being there yet not there: why don’t embodied responses to literary texts jar with one another?

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elspeth Jajdelska
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Narrative Coherence ◽  
Perceptual Cues ◽  
Metaphor Comprehension ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Being There ◽  
Post Hoc

AbstractLanguage and literature can stimulate the embodied resources of perception. I argue that there is a puzzle about why we experience sequences of these embodied responses as integrated and coherent, even though they are not anchored in space and time by a perceiving body. Some successions of embodied representations would even be impossible in real world experience, yet they can still be experienced as coherent and flowing in response to verbal texts. One possibility is that embodied responses to language are fleeting; they need not be integrated because they do not depend on, or relate to, one another as they would in perception. Yet it is the potential for embodied representations to linger and connect with one another which underlies new and persuasive embodied literary theories of vividness, narrative coherence and metaphor comprehension. Another possibility is that readers anchor their embodied representations in a notional human body, one endowed with superhuman powers, such as omniscience. But this account relies on implausible, post hoc explanations. A third possibility is that integrating embodied representations produced by language need be no more problematic than integrating the deceptively patchy information harvested from the environment by perception, information which gives rise to an experience of the world in rich and continuous detail. Real world perceptual cues, however, sparse though they might be, are still integrated through grounding in specific points in time and space. To explain the integration of embodied effects, I draw on sensorimotor theories of perception, and on Clark’s suggestion (1997,

scholarly journals The Disease Narrative in Albert Camus’ The Plague

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ya Fen Huang
Keyword(s):  
Medical Science ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Port City ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
The World ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study

In many literary works, a character’s physical disease or illness also metaphorically references various universal characteristics of the human condition—death, religion, politics and relationships—as they are interworked amidst healthy and unhealthy bodies. In the case of Albert Camus’ The Plague, the epidemic of bubonic plague in the Algerian port city of Oran is considered an allegory for the German occupation of France from 1940 to 1944. The highly infectious disease disrupts citizens’ lives in real time, with consequences that further manifest throughout the world to varying degrees and in varying timeframes thereafter. This paper attempts to explore Camus’s metaphoric connotations of “the plague” within these social, cultural and historical narratives. This interdisciplinary study will also bring together analyses of literary and non-literary texts about the disease narrative, while also addressing literary theories related to medical science in order to better understand the allegorical definitions of illness, death, disability and exile in The Plague.

Heidegger II

Anxiety ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 361-396
Author(s):  
Bettina Bergo
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
The World ◽  
World Poverty ◽  
Being There ◽  
Jakob Von Uexküll ◽  
Von Uexküll

Following claims that Being and Time was essentially philosophical anthropology, and questions about the embodiment and mortality of Dasein, and Heidegger recurred to the distinction between humans who, as being-there, create a “world” for themselves and confront their death resolutely, versus animals who are caught up in their natural environments and do not die so much as “perish” biologically. In 1929 he studied the work of gestalt biologists like Jakob von Uexküll to support his arguments for the world-poverty of animals, unable hermeneutically to forge a real “world.” By 1936, nevertheless, his logic faltered when he argued that the age of technology and giganticism had reduced most humans to mere “technicized animals.” Even if this was a rhetorical flourish, it remained that only an anxious few remained among us who could dwell poetically and be free for their death, an idea with significant implications for the metaphysical politics Heidegger developed in response to Nazi politics. By 1949, the technicized animal—poor in world—appeared to perish with no greater resoluteness and dignity than its animal relatives.

World Authorship

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Element ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Places ◽  
Different Parts

Booksellers, authors, and academics have been talking about world literature since Goethe made the term fashionable in the early nineteenth century. Yet amidst all the talk of books that ‘circulate’ and literature as a kind of ‘universal property’ that can function as a ‘window on the world’, how do we account for the people who live in real places, and who write, translate, market, and read the texts that travel on these global journeys? This handbook breaks new ground by showing how to bring together the real-world contexts of authorship with the literary worlds of fiction through the concept of the world author. ‘World authorship’ is a practical update on Michel Foucault’s ‘author function’ that significantly expands the network of people and practices involved with literature and is at the same time more grounded in the study of actual literary texts. The concept is set out in detail in a rigorous introduction followed by twenty-five keyword chapters that cover all core aspects of world authorship, from ‘Beginnings’ to ‘Voice’, and have been written by professionals who work right across the sector. In its entirety, the handbook illuminates how literature is made and shared in different parts of the world and at different times of world history. At the heart of all contributions, however, is one key question: where is the human element in world literature? Established authors, translators, publishers, prize judges, and festival coordinators as well as academics from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds collectively give us the answer.

Does Literature Matter Today? Thoughts of the Outside

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Shaobo Xie
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
The World

The paper celebrates the publication of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents as a significant event in the age of neoliberalism. It argues that, in spite of the different premises and the resulting interpretative procedures respectively championed by the two co-authors, both of them anchor their readings of literary texts in a concept of literature that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal rationality, and both impassionedly safeguard human values and experiences that resist the technologisation and marketisation of the humanities and aesthetic education. While Ghosh's readings of literature offer lightning flashes of thought from the outside of the Western tradition, signalling a new culture of reading as well as a new manner of appreciation of the other, Miller dedicatedly speaks and thinks against the hegemony of neoliberal reason, opening our eyes to the kind of change our teaching or reading of literature can trigger in the world, and the role aesthetic education should and can play at a time when the humanities are considered ‘a lost cause’.

Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sawhney
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
National Literatures

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.

Being There: The Spatiality of ‘Other World’ Fantasy Fiction

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-251
Author(s):  
Anthony Pavlik
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Real World ◽  
The Real ◽  
Fantasy Fiction ◽  
Children And Young Adults ◽  
Being There ◽  
Other World

Fantasy other worlds are often seen as alternative, wholly ‘other’ locations that operate as critiques of the ‘real’ world, or provide spaces where child protagonists can take advantage of the otherness they encounter in their own process of growth. Rather than consider fantasy fiction's presentations of ‘other’ worlds in this way, this article proposes reading them as potential thirdspaces of performance and activity that are neutral rather than confrontational such that, in fantasy other world fiction for children and young adults, the putative ‘other’ world may not, in fact, be ‘other’ at all.

Text Prophetism

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Elvira Lumi ◽  
Lediona Lumi
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Divine Inspiration ◽  
Religious Doctrine ◽  
The World ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
Poetic Diction ◽  
Life On Earth

"Utterance universalism" as a phrase is unclear, but it is enough to include the term "prophetism". As a metaphysical concept, it refers to a text written with inspiration which confirms visions of a "divine inspiration", "poetic" - "legal", that contains trace, revelation or interpretation of the origin of the creation of the world and life on earth but it warns and prospects their future in the form of a projection, literary paradigm, religious doctrine and law. Prophetic texts reformulate "toll-telling" with messages, ideas, which put forth (lat. "Utters Forth" gr. "Forthteller") hidden facts from fiction and imagination. Prometheus, gr. Prometheus (/ prəmiθprə-mee-mo means "forethought") is a Titan in Greek mythology, best known as the deity in Greek mythology who was the creator of humanity and charity of its largest, who stole fire from the mount Olympus and gave it to the mankind. Prophetic texts derive from a range of artifacts and prophetic elements, as the creative magic or the miracle of literary texts, symbolism, musicality, rhythm, images, poetic rhetoric, valence of meaning of the text, code of poetic diction that refers to either a singer in a trance or a person inspired in delirium, who believes he is sent by his God with a message to tell about events and figures that have existed, or the imaginary ancient and modern world. Text Prophetism is a combination of artifacts and platonic idealism. Key words: text Prophetism, holy text, poetic text, law text, vision, image, figure

La imposible moral

2001 ◽  
pp. 73-77
Author(s):  
Alberto Constante
Keyword(s):  
Being And Time ◽  
Ethical Approach ◽  
Biological Matter ◽  
Ontological Question ◽  
The World ◽  
Being There

The impossible moral in Heidegger is based on two fundamental facts: firstly, that Heidegger devoted himself to the theme of being. All other issues, thesis or questions derive from that fundamental and unique “question about the meaning of Being”. Secondly, the ontological question in Heidegger wasn’t the question for the entity, but the question for the Being. On these bases, “The impossible moral” in Heidegger arises from his initial ontological argumentation from which all other structures derive and that Heidegger tries to separate from each anthropological, psychological or biological matter. In fact, we may suggest that an ethical approach in Heidegger could only arise from the exegesis of the structural whole of the “being-in-the-world”. This would happen by apprehending the original being of the “being-there” as “care” that isn’t anything else that the manifestation of the following features: “being-with” and “being one’s self”. All these without forgetting that Being and time has an ontological fundamental intention. Finally, “The impossible moral” in Heidegger is given by his radical antihumanism.

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