scholarly journals Jaded selves and body distance: a case study of Cotard’s Syndrome in “Infinite Jest”

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 37-58
Author(s):  
Ana Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorders ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
External Stimuli

This article attempts to betoken the relevance of emotions and sensations arousing from the body for the reviving of the self in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The novel discerns a world where the oversaturation of choices and the external stimuli from entertainment has established a tradition of ennui and addiction as part of the hedonistic search for pleasure. This is particularly important for the understanding of the effects it may have on the mapping of the self and on agency which can consequently be framed among mental disorders. Taking a neuroscientific approach, Wallace’s characters is discussed as having a possible connection to Cotard’s syndrome. This delusion helps to reveal how a lack of emotions disables correct self-awareness giving way to the belief that one may be dead or non-existent.

scholarly journals OJEBETA “THE SELF AWAKENED” IN BUCHI EMECHETA’S THE SLAVE GIRL

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 95-99
Author(s):  
Mary Stella Ran B. ◽  
Poli Reddy R.
Keyword(s):  
Christian Education ◽  
Small Degree ◽  
The Self ◽  
African Women ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Buchi Emecheta ◽  
The People ◽  
In The Beginning

The novel “The Slave Girl” by Buchi Emecheta exposes the plights of African women and portrayal of their struggle as slaves and ultimately how they come up the problem and becomes a self-awakened.  In this paper, one can see Ojebeta starting her life as a slave and finally becomes an owner of a house by passing so many phases of life as a slave. In the beginning, she is sold into domestic slavery by her own brother.  She has become the victim to her brother’s traits.  She has become a scapegoat to the plans of African patriarchy.  The intention of Buchi Emecheta is to recreate the image of women through feminism.   Emecheta’s fiction is blended with reality representing socio historical elements of the prevailing society and its environment besides questioning the pathetic conditions of the people in general and women in particular. One can observe the narration of innocence of childhood grown into adulthood by attaining certain amount of freedom with the Christian education which she has received with which she has attained a small degree of self-awareness.

“The Continuity of Married Companionship”

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-530
Author(s):  
Cara Weber
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Conception ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ethical Action ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
A Site ◽  
Focus Questions

Victorian writers often focus questions of ethics through scenes of sympathetic encounters that have been conceptualized, both by Victorian thinkers and by their recent critics, as a theater of identification in which an onlooking spectator identifies with a sufferer. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) critiques this paradigm, revealing its negation of otherness and its corresponding fixation of the self as an identity, and offers an alternative conception of relationship that foregrounds the presence and distinctness of the other and the open-endedness of relationship. The novel develops its critique through an analysis of women's experience of courtship and marriage, insisting upon the appropriateness ofmarriage as a site for the investigation of contemporary ethical questions. In her depiction of Rosamond, Eliot explores the identity-based paradigm of the spectacle of others, and shows how its conception of selfhood leaves the other isolated, precluding relationship. Rosamond's trajectory in the novel enacts the identity paradigm's relation to skeptical anxieties about self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and reveals such anxieties to occur with particular insistence around images of femininity. By contrast, Dorothea's development in ethical self-awareness presents an alternative to Rosamond's participation in the identity paradigm. In Dorothea's experience the self emerges as a process, an ongoing practice of expression. The focus on expression in the sympathetic or conflictual encounter, rather than on identity, enables the overcoming of the identity paradigm's denial of otherness, and grounds a productive sympathy capable of informing ethical action.

scholarly journals Formasi Diskursus dan Subjektivitas dalam Novel The Water Knife Karya Paolo Bacigalupi : Kajian Arkeo-Genealogi Foucault

ATAVISME ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-154
Author(s):  
Budi Tri Santosa
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Strategy Formation ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
Intensive Control

This research is conducted to elaborate discursive formations, formation and surveillance of discursive subject, and the subject’s struggle towards the discourse in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. Data that is successfully collected are analyzed using Foucault’s archeo-genealogy method in two steps: archeology reading and genealogy reading. The result shows that there four formations forming a discourse, namely object, enunciative, conceptual, and strategy formation. Then, there are also four mechanisms of discursive formation, which are centering individual from society, training of control the activity of the body, testing individual’s body in the certain degree, and creating subject as body-machine of discourse. The mechanism of surveillance is done through three ways, they are hierarchial control, norm forming, and examination as intensive control. The effect of the dominant discourse is the rebellion against the discourse. There are two rebellion ways in the novel, namely parrhesia as the discourse discontinuity and the care of the self as means against the discourse.

scholarly journals IN THE INSIDE-OUT WORLD: MADNESS AS A THEME AND PLOT

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-75
Author(s):  
Vadym Vasylenko
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Conveyor Belt ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
The World ◽  
Functional Features ◽  
Split Personality ◽  
Inside Out

The paper focuses on the madness as a theme and plot in Ukrainian literature of the 1st half of the 20th century. The researcher analyzes ideological and aesthetic tendencies associated with the understanding of the madness phenomenon, clarifies its functional features, symbolic and ideological significance, and emphasizes the connection between the psychological atmosphere of the totalitarian reality and literary interpretations of madness. The analysis involves works of different genres, styles, and dates of writing in which the theme of madness acquires ideologically engaged and symbolically significant content. In “Sanatorium Zone” by M. Khvylovyi the madness phenomenon is associated with the problems of split personality and suicide. It may be explained in a modernist context, as a reflection of the internally conflicting nature of a man, incapable of changing the existing world or getting adjusted to it. In the tragicomedy “People’s Malakhiy”, M. Kulish introduced the idea of madness into the complex sociopolitical context of the soviet reality which he revealed in various forms (from mythological to social-political) using satirical and grotesque images, philosophical generalization, etc. An episode of madness in the novel “The Garden of Gethsemane” by I. Bahrianyi emphasizes the anomality of the soviet world which is symbolized by the punishment cell and characterized as a “conveyor belt for dismantling human souls”. The story of the romantic poet Hӧlderlin in the novel by V. Domontovych is socially and politically conditioned. It reveals the state of a man and the world in a difficult transitional era. In “The Enameled Bowl”, Domontovych elaborates the theme of illness through the idea of the lack of consistency between the internal and external and understands it as an artistic convention that marks the absurdity of the world. T. Osmachka in his prose was especially focused on the theme of madness. He was interested in mental disorders both as a form of the character’s self-awareness and as a clinical story. The mythological and ideological image of a mentally ill man, reflecting a creative person subjected to repression and persecution, is a symbol of his own biography. In general, the changes in the interpretation of mental disorders are associated with the renewal of the modernist poetics and caused by the writers’ attempts to clarify the connection between the external and internal.

Written on the Body: Ekphrasis, Perception and Deception in Heliodorus' Aethiopica

Ramus ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 111-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Whitmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Solid Material ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
The Novel ◽  
White Space ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
The Moment

Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the pages are forests of symbols, as though even in books of such magnitude the sentences needed compression to fit on to pages. How different to poetic volumes, beguilingly slender, their pages brilliant with blank, white space, across which the spindly words stretch like gossamer. In terms of content, however, novels are rarely as monolithic as their physical form suggests. From earliest times since, the genre has dealt, centrally, with themes of metamorphosis, transubstantiation, the fundamentally permeable nature of the self. The solid material aspect of the novel often masks a central preoccupation with the fluidity of identity.In the compass of this article, I want to explore the central role accorded by Heliodorus, arguably the greatest of ancient novelists, to questions of perceptual deception, to seeing and seeming; and in particular, I want to explore the role of artworks within Heliodorus' narrative economy. The narrative turns, as is well known, on the amazing paradox of an Ethiopian girl born white. Charicleia's skin colour is a visual trap, an illusion. Given that her freakish pigmentation is the result of her mother's glancing at an art-work at the moment of conception, Charicleia can almost be said to be a walking ekphrasis, an embodiment of the illusory traps of the unreal.

scholarly journals Bodies in the Novel Infinite Jest

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Chapman ◽  
Silvia Chapman ◽  
Stephanie Cosentino
Keyword(s):  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
External Stimulation ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Bodily Sensations ◽  
Body Self ◽  
Clinical Conditions ◽  
The Mind

This manuscript provides a literary analysis of the use of bodies in the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The novel describes a world where oversaturation of external stimulation leads to the perception of mind and body of self of an individual as prosthetic parts, malleable and deformed, wherein the mind fails to feel bodily sensations and characters experience a complete disconnectedness from the self and others. Indeed, the disembodiment of characters and sensations of disconnection leads them to a compulsive quest for connectedness through the use of masks, made-up feelings, mind–body hybrid pain, corporeal malleability, and prostheses. These portrayals of the disordered and disconnectedness between body and mind or self will be described and compared to clinical conditions characterized by a disconnection between mind and body and impaired body self-awareness. Through this exercise, we argue that the use of scientifically inspired pathologized bodies is a means of conveying the stance of Wallace on or criticism of the degradation of society through excessive entertainment.

scholarly journals A PROJECT OF CONSTRUCTING A CONTEMPORARY JEWISH IDENTITY IN RABINOVICI’S NOVEL SUCHE NACH M

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisda Liyanti
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Active Engagement ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
New Phase

Attitude to the Nazi past turns to its new phase in the 1980s, after the time of repressing, silent and mourning brings the new discourse in talking about the Holocaust. It was a tendency of "denying" the Holocaust and new anti-semitism movement. In the 90s, Jewish authors confirm their position as „self-determined agents' in the literary and political area. One of them is Doron Rabinovici, an Austrian Jewish author who wrote the novel Suche Nach M in engaging on the project of constructing a contemporary Jewish identity. In this article, the question of how Robinovici proposes the construction of contemporary Jewish identity will be answered through critical reading on Jewish myth and identity formation theory. The result shows two major strategies that he proposes in his novel: “deconstructs” the Jewish myth (by playing other possibilities to interpret them and unveil the truth) and suggests the self-referential concept (find oneself based on 'the self' instead of immersing self in 'the Other‟). These two strategies can be seen as an active engagement with one own traumatic past. It is a historical- and self-awareness approach to construct a problematic contemporary Jewish identity.

scholarly journals Az éntudat kialakulása

2000 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-134
Author(s):  
Gábor Stefanics
Keyword(s):  
Complex Model ◽  
Mirror Image ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Human Infants ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Sense Modalities

Jelen dolgozat az éntudattal rendelkező élőlények tudatának fejlődését vizsgálja. Az első rész főemlősök és csecsemők tükörképükre adott viselkedéses reakcióit elemzi, a hangsúlyt az éntudat jelenlétére utaló viselkedésformák fokozatosan fejlődő jellegére helyezve. Áttekintést nyújt a különböző modalitásokhoz tartozó testsémák eltérő reprezentációiról és magyarázatot kíván nyújtani az éntudat önszervező kialakulására. A második rész a testsémák és az éntudat önszervező folyamatait a matematikai csoportelmélet és az eltérő logikai szintek elméletével írja le, valamint a környezet és az éntudat közti információáramlás többszintű, komplex modelljét mutatja be.Present paper investigates the development of mind in living creatures showing the signs of having self-awareness. Behavioral phenomena of primates and human infants appearing to their mirror image are analised in the first part of the paper, laying the emphasis on the gradual quality of development of self-awareness. A survey of different representations belonging to variant sense modalities is provided in order to explain the self-organizing emergence of self-awareness. The second part describes the self-modifying process of body-schemes and self-awareness using mathematical group-theory and the theory of sets as metaphorical devices. A multi-level complex model of information-flow between the mind and environment is outlined. The main purpose of the paper is to provide a better understanding of the phenomenon of downward causation and to fill the gap of the ancient question of the body-mind (brain-mind) problem. This rather ambitious contribution to mind research also implies vague hints for the ones that are concerned about the research of artificial intelligence.

The Effects of Social Environment on Pronouns as a Measure of Self-Awareness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Persall
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Word Count ◽  
Group Setting ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Linguistic Inquiry

By analyzing the types of words used in people’s writing, we can make inferences about the different psychological states individuals may be in. According to previous research, the types of pronouns people express in their language can give information about their focus of attention. Greater use of first person singular pronouns is indicative of higher levels of self-awareness. People's focus of attention can be shifted towards the self by placing a mirror in front of them, or shifted to others by having other people present. This study manipulated levels of self-awareness in individuals, and then measured the pronoun usage in their writing using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2007). The results showed that the mirror condition displayed a significantly higher frequency of first person pronouns compared to the group condition. These results indicate that an individual setting with a mirror increases self-awareness, and that a group setting with no mirror reduces self-awareness. Researching self-awareness is important because it is a basic trait in humans, and a lack of, or excessive levels of self-awareness may indicate psychological problems, thus it can be applied to the study of mental disorders such as depression and mania.

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