Under the Skin of John Updike: Self-Consciousness and the Racial Unconscious

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (3) ◽  
pp. 579-593
Author(s):  
Jay Prosser
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
White Skin ◽  
John Updike

Psoriasis is the structuring principle of John Updike's Self-Consciousness. The condition is also a metaphor for Updike's writings, in their concern with surface and their proliferation. Updike seeks to avoid self-revelation by making Self-Consciousness a memoir about the other. Displacing his psoriasis into a consideration of black and mixed-race skin. Updike reflects, in the mirror of the autobiography, his self with a letter to his half-black, half-white grandsons. In a series of pronominal substitutions, in which Updike's grandsons are transformed from addressees to narratees. Self-Consciousness discloses a racial unconscious. This racial unconscious is also that of American history. As slavery was founded on a Manichaeanism of black-white skin, desires for crossing the skin border were repressed. The unconscious dimension of racism survives in the stigmatization of differently marked skins. Reading the surface of Self-Consciousness as profound, this essay assigns Updike a novel place in a racially conscious American canon.

Under the Skin of John Updike: Self-Consciousness and the Racial Unconscious

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (3) ◽  
pp. 579-593
Author(s):  
Jay Prosser
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
White Skin ◽  
John Updike

Psoriasis is the structuring principle of John Updike's Self-Consciousness. The condition is also a metaphor for Updike's writings, in their concern with surface and their proliferation. Updike seeks to avoid self-revelation by making Self-Consciousness a memoir about the other. Displacing his psoriasis into a consideration of black and mixed-race skin. Updike reflects, in the mirror of the autobiography, his self with a letter to his half-black, half-white grandsons. In a series of pronominal substitutions, in which Updike's grandsons are transformed from addressees to narratees. Self-Consciousness discloses a racial unconscious. This racial unconscious is also that of American history. As slavery was founded on a Manichaeanism of black-white skin, desires for crossing the skin border were repressed. The unconscious dimension of racism survives in the stigmatization of differently marked skins. Reading the surface of Self-Consciousness as profound, this essay assigns Updike a novel place in a racially conscious American canon.

Ironic Reprise in Galdós' Novels

PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monroe Z. Hafter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
The Other ◽  
Separate Study ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Spanish Novel ◽  
Artistic Representation ◽  
The Rich

A recent article of Leon Livingstone rightly calls attention to the importance of Pérez Galdós' assimilation of Cervantine irony as a forerunner of the concern of modern Spanish novelists about the autonomy of their characters. The unreality of rationalism, which Livingstone holds to be the germ of El amigo Manso, the imagination's capacity to create reality at the heart of Misericordia, lead to the even bolder experiments in the artistic representation of reality undertaken by Unamuno, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Pérez de Ayala. Anomalous for his time yet so pervasive in his work is Galdós' employment of “interior duplication” that a separate study would contribute to our fuller understanding of his art as well as to our measure of the advances in the Spanish novel of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The present essay focuses on Galdós' developing skill with internal repetitions from La Fontana de Oro (publ. 1870), through the rich complexities of the novels written between 1886–89, to their almost stylized simplicity in El abuelo (1897). Always related to Cervantine irony, the variety of verbal echoes, the mirroring of one character in another, the unconscious illumination each may offer the other, underscore the increasingly intimate wedding of form and matter with which Galdós came to unfold his narratives.

scholarly journals Abraham Lincoln

1882 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 312-343
Author(s):  
Isaac N. Arnold
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
The Other ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Republic ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The One

The noblest inheritance we Americans derive from our British ancestors is the memory and example of the great and good men who adorn your history. They are as much appreciated and honoured on our side of the Atlantic as on this. In giving to the English-speaking world Washington and Lincoln we think we repay, in large part, our obligation. Their pre-eminence in American history is recognised, and the republic, which the one founded and the other preserved, has already crowned them as models for her children.

scholarly journals Challenges and limits of an education for all

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-349
Author(s):  
Ana Pires do Prado ◽  
Giselle Carino Lage
Keyword(s):  
School Management ◽  
The Other ◽  
Education For All ◽  
Public High Schools ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Selection Procedures ◽  
Management Culture ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Management Staff

Abstract This paper aims to demonstrate the existence of two different types of school management culture. Data was collected during fieldwork over the academic years 2008 and 2009 in two public high schools in Rio de Janeiro where we observed administrative and pedagogical meetings, classrooms and the everyday life of the schools. From an analysis of the practices and conceptions of management staff, we describe the unconscious grammatical principles that govern the running of the two schools. These becomes particularly clear in the different selection procedures in the two schools, one of them conducting severe criteria for entrance and the other allowing all to enter but few to reach the end of the course. These two recruitment selection practices reveal distinct expectations and beliefs on students' ability (or inability) to learn.

The Subversion of Plato's Quasi-Phenomenology and Mytho-Poetics in the Symposium

Janus Head ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Bert Olivier ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
The One

Is there a significant difference between Plato's texts and what is known as 'Platonism', that is, the philosophical tradition that claims Plato as its progenitor? Focusing on the Symposium, an attempt is made here to show that, far from merely fitting neatly into the categories of Platonism—with its neat distinction between the super-sensible and the sensible—Plato's own text is a complex, tension-filled terrain of countervailing forces. In the Symposium this tension obtains between the perceptive insights, on the one hand, into the nature of love and beauty, as well as the bond between them, and the metaphysical leap, on the other hand, from the experiential world to a supposedly accessible, but by definition super-sensible, experience-transcending realm. It is argued that, instead of being content with the philosophical illumination of the ambivalent human condition—something consummately achieved by mytho-poetic and quasi-phenomenohgical means—Plato turns to a putatively attainable, transcendent source of metaphysical reassurance which, moreover, displays all the trappings of an ideological construct. This is demonstrated by mapping Plato's lover's vision of 'absolute beauty' on to what Jacques Lacan has characterized as the unconscious structural quasi-condition of all religious and ideological illusion.

Symmetry vs. Duality in Logic

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 83-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Battilotti
Keyword(s):  
Sequent Calculus ◽  
Logical Consequence ◽  
Quantum States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Reasoning ◽  
Symmetric Mode ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Structural Rules ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Long Time

The author discusses the problem of symmetry, namely of the orientation of the logical consequence. The author shows that the problem is surprisingly entangled with the problem of “being infinite”. The author presents a model based on quantum states and shows that it features satisfy the requirements of the symmetric mode of Bi-logic, a logic introduced in the '70s by the psychoanalyst I. Matte Blanco to describe the logic of the unconscious. The author discusess symmetry, in the model, to include correlations, in order to obtain a possible approach to displacement. In this setting, the author finds a possible reading of the structural rules of sequent calculus, whose role in computation, on one side, and in the representation of human reasoning, on the other, has been debated for a long time.

POPULIST PERFECTIONISM: THE OTHER AMERICAN LIBERALISM

2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-163
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Spragens
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
American History ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent Argument ◽  
Normative Conception ◽  
American Liberalism

Recent debates over American liberalism have largely ignored one way of understanding democratic purposes that was widely influential for much of American history. This normative conception of democracy was inspired by philosophical ideas found in people such as John Stuart Mill and G. W. F. Hegel rather than by rights-based or civic republican theories. Walt Whitman and John Dewey were among its notable adherents. There is much that can be said on behalf of Richard Rorty's recent argument that American liberals would be well advised to recover and reclaim the heritage of Whitman and Dewey; but some additions and emendations to his construction of these champions of democracy would strengthen his case.

Interpreting the Uninterpretable: The Ethics of Opaqueness as an Approach to Moments of Inscrutability in Fieldwork

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xymena Kurowska
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Relational Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Construction Of Meaning ◽  
Narrative Practice

Abstract This paper develops what I call “the ethics of opaqueness” as a response to conceptual impasses concerning the uninterpretability of intersubjective knowledge production in narrative practice. The ethics of opaqueness sees the other as inscrutable and radically heterogenous, and confronts interpretations of the other by the self as suspicious projections. Thus, such an ethics addresses the self, not the other, as the object of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” In order to conceptualize the ethics of opaqueness, I look to relational psychoanalysis, which understands the unconscious as being inherently intersubjective. This results in a reformulation of the process of recognition, and deeper acknowledgment of countertransference—that is, the partly unconscious conflicts activated in the researcher through the research encounter, which may lead to imposing meaning on the other. The apparatus of relational psychoanalysis concretizes the limits of knowing either the other or the self and supplies a vocabulary to crystallize the double quality of “uninterpretable moments” in narrative practice. They may trigger an imposition of a frame and therefore an interpretive closure; however, they also supply a potentially transformative space for the contentious co-construction of meaning, often in the form of metaphors, which subverts any claim to interpretive mastery.

“Many persons say I am a ‘Mono Maniac’”: Three Letters from Dakota Conflict Captive Sarah F. Wakefield to Missionary Stephen R. Riggs

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
American History ◽  
The Other ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Unknown Number ◽  
States Government ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
The U.S

“The other Civil War” is how many Minnesotans think of the U.S.-Dakota Conflict of 1862, fought for six weeks in the recently established state as the Civil War raged elsewhere (Nichols). These hostilities between groups of Dakota Indians and the U.S. government were triggered by a containable incident near Acton, Minnesota, in which four hungry young Dakotas apparently challenged five white settlers over food and then killed them. But some Indians decided against containment, and the Conflict instead escalated into a contest for traditional Dakota cultural identity and cohesion. Of course, the Dakotas' sense of siege had been exacerbated for years by “the historically familiar rapacious traders, ethnocentric missionaries, white men's decimating diseases, inept Indian Bureau officials, equivocating United States government representatives, and deplorably conflicting military policies,” as well the growing number of “land-hungry settlers” (Russo, 99). When the war ended in late September 1862, about five hundred whites and a considerable, but unknown, number of Dakotas and crossbloods were dead (Anderson and Woolworth, 1). The U.S. government unilaterally abrogated treaties with the Dakotas – regardless of individuals' actual involvement in the Conflict – removed or imprisoned them, conducted hasty and illegal trials, and sent thirtyeight to the gallows in Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862. It is believed to be the largest mass execution in American history. Although little known outside the state, this short but intense war has been called “a microcosm of the tragedy of Indian–white relations in America,” and its repercussions still resonate over a century later (Nichols, 4).

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