scholarly journals Volume 13, 2021 Number 1: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number 2: Special Articles on Health Humanities and General Articles Volume 12, 2020 Number 1: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number 2: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number 3: Special Collection on “India and Travel Narratives”, guest-edited by Ms. Somdatta Mandal, PhD Number 4: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number 5: 1st RIOC Conference Issue Number 6: Special Articles on Health Humanities and General Articles Volume 11, 2019 Number 1: (Special Issue on Human Rights and Literature, guest-edited by Prof. Pramod K. Nayar) Number 2: General Issue Number 3: General Issue Volume 10, 2018 Number 1: (Special Issue on “Interrogating Cultural Translation: Literature and Fine Arts in Translation and Adaptation”, in collaboration with the Department of English, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham) Number 2: (On Frankenstein 200, 1818-2018 and the General Areas) Number 3: (General Issue) All Issues>> Of Crows and Humans: The Affective Economy of Mourning and Grieving

Author(s):  
Alexandra Margarita A. Orbeta ◽  

This paper aims to examine the representation of animals in Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), a multi-awarded novel about an academic’s struggles on coping with the grief of losing his wife. Previous scholarship on Grief is the Thing with Feathers focuses on an anthropocentric approach to grief and melancholia. However, I argue these emotions can be approached through an examination of the Crow, a fantastical talking bird who makes itself known during the funeral, against the human protagonists of the novel. My approach focuses on how the Crow manages to facilitate what Sara Ahmed calls an “affective economy” which aids the human characters to process their emotions. I critically analyze in this paper how the novel blurs the boundary that separates the human and beasts through its representation of animal emotion. I speculate on how the moments of encounter between the crow and humans emphasize the acts of touching and smelling as a mode to cope with melancholia and grief. Lastly, I look at how its hybridization of prose and poetry performatively imitates affective and emotional responses to personal loss.

Author(s):  
Tili Boon Cuillé

The Enlightenment remains widely associated with the rise of scientific progress and the loss of religious faith, a dual tendency that is thought to have contributed to the disenchantment of the world. In her wide-ranging and richly illustrated book, Tili Boon Cuillé questions the accuracy of this narrative by investigating the fate of the marvelous in the age of reason. Exploring the affinities between the natural sciences and the fine arts, Cuillé examines the representation of natural phenomena—whether harmonious or discordant—in natural history, painting, opera, and the novel from Buffon and Rameau to Ossian and Staël. She demonstrates that philosophical, artistic, and emotional responses to the "spectacle of nature" in eighteenth-century France included wonder, enthusiasm, melancholy, and the "sentiment of divinity." These "passions of the soul," traditionally associated with religion and considered antithetical to enlightenment, were linked to the faculties of reason, imagination, and memory that structured Diderot's Encyclopédie and to contemporary theorizations of the sublime. As Cuillé reveals, the marvelous was not eradicated but instead preserved through the establishment and reform of major French cultural institutions dedicated to science, art, religion, and folklore that were designed to inform, enchant, and persuade.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-231
Author(s):  
Ankhi Mukherjee

Examining the contestation of interpretations around this work, I argue that the proliferation of exegetical material on Sophocles’s Antigone is related to a noncomprehension of the human motives behind her transgressive action. Did she ever love, and is there any suffering in her piety? If she didn’t love (her brother), could she have suffered? I read the play alongside Kamila Shamsie’s postcolonial rewriting of it in Home Fire to elaborate on the relationship between personal loss and collective (and communal) suffering, particularly as it is focalized in the novel by the figure of a young woman who is both a bereaved twin and a vengeful fury.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 158
Author(s):  
Robert S.P. Jones

James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has fascinated readers for more than a century and there are layers of psychological meaning to be found throughout the novel. The novel is the perfect vehicle to discuss the relationship between form language and emotion as Joyce deliberately manipulated the emotional response of the reader through innovations in form and language, departing dramatically from previous literary traditions. This paper attempts to take a fresh look at the novel from a psychological perspective and seeks to examine underlying conditioning processes at work in the narrative – particularly the concept of associative learning. Understanding emotional responses to different stimuli is the bedrock of psychological investigation and 100 years after the date of its publication, Portrait of an Artist presents remarkably fresh insights into the human experience of emotion. Despite its age, Portrait of the Artist contains many contemporary psychological insights.


Author(s):  
Jan Gresil S. Kahambing ◽  

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (2018), his latest novel to-date, contains nostalgic elements of strangeness and cartography. In this paper, I short-circuit such themes with health under medical humanities, which heeds a Nietzschean counsel of close reading in literature. To do so, I explore the case of Rachel’s illness, namely her epileptic seizures, as an instance that drives her impetus for active forgetting and eventual convalescence. A close hermeneutical reading of the novel can reveal that both of Nietzsche’s ideas on active forgetting and convalescence provide traction in terms of what this paper constructs as Rachel’s pathography or narration of illness. Shifting the focus from the main narrator, Nathaniel, I argue that it is not the novel’s reliance on memory but the subplot events of Nathaniel’s sister and her epilepsy that form a substantial case of medical or health humanities.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gourd

As Septimus Smith prepares to commit suicide by throwing himself out of the window and ‘vigorously, violently down onto Mrs Filmer’s area railings,’ he comments on the narrative tradition of his own tragic demise. ‘It was their idea of tragedy,’ he reflects with bitter irony – ‘Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing.’ This paper addresses the wider implications of this sentiment in Mrs Dalloway, by positioning Septimus’ death as the tragic climax and dramatic focus of the novel. Previous scholarship has failed to recognise the significance of this allusion to Greek tragedy, though Woolf was an accomplished classical scholar and a voracious reader of ancient literature. This detail would repay attention, as the author’s self-conscious engagement with the literary and intellectual tradition of tragedy, demonstrated through the narrative and suicide of Septimus Smith, impacts upon our understanding of the novel as a whole. It raises several important questions which this paper seeks to address: to what extent does Woolf intend for us to sympathise with Septimus as the tragic protagonist? How does Woolf’s appropriation and manipulation of the tragic genre reflect her views on war, mental illness, and her relationship with her doctors? And finally, what does it tell us about Woolf’s idea of tragedy, and what she considers to be tragic?


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-268
Author(s):  
Xenia Zeiler ◽  
Kerstin Radde-Antweiler

Religious topics are increasingly addressed in journalism worldwide, including newspapers, television, radio and Internet news. The high visibility of religion in society and, inseparably connected to this, the increasing reappearance of religious themes in news media have come to the attention of recent academic research as well.This special issue offers new research material on the topic but also a new design and system of organizing the field. The novel approach of this special issue is threefold: (1) it focuses specifically and only on journalistic media; (2) it discusses a variety of religious and geographical contexts through case studies; and (3) it introduces a new structure of discussing journalism and religion by analyzing the three key concepts “sacred”, “secular” and “authority” through the lens of Laclau’s (1996, pp. 36) approach to terms as empty signifiers. The articles analyze how news media ascribe meanings to these terms.


Foods ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 1573
Author(s):  
Witoon Prinyawiwatkul

Food is more than just a source of nutrients—it also provides basic pleasure as well as aesthetic experiences. A number of studies have reported that acceptance, food choice, and consumption are affected by a large number of factors, including both intrinsic and extrinsic factors and cues, as well as consumer characteristics. Food-elicited emotions are becoming a critical component in designing products that meet consumers’ needs and expectations. Several studies have reported emotional responses to food and their relationships to product acceptability, preference, and choice. This Special Issue brings together a small range of studies with a diversity of approaches that provide good examples of the complex and multidisciplinary nature of the subject matter.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehmet Ufuk Caglayan

This paper introduces a special issue of this journal (Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences) that is devoted to G(elenbe)-Networks and their Applications. The special issue is based on revised versions of some of the papers that were presented at a workshop held in early January 2017 at the Séminaire Saint-Paul in Nice (France). It includes contributions in several research directions that followed from the introduction of the G-Network in the late 1980s. The papers present original theoretical developments, as well as applications of G-Networks to Machine Learning, to the performance optimization of energy systems via the novelEnergy Packet Networksformalism for systems that operate with renewable and intermittent energy sources, and to packet network routing and Cloud management over the Internet. We introduce these contributions from the perspective of an overview of recent work based on G-Networks.


PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 896-905 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothy J. Hale

In the introduction to a 2002 special issue of diacritics on ethics and interdisciplinarity, mark sanders asks us to consider, “What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy?” (3). Yet the question behind this question—the one that motivates his selection of essays for the issue—is why literary critics and theorists have drawn their ideas about ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou but have felt little or no need to consult past or present moral philosophers. As Sanders goes on to note, while “in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory,” there “has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy” (4).


Author(s):  
Tetiana Cherepovska ◽  
Olena Binkevych

The article reveals the phenomenon of psychologism in fiction and the ways of its actualization in modern English literature concerned with psychological aspects. The notion is analyzed on the basis of Cecilia Ahern’s novel “The Book of Tomorrow” that depicts the protagonist’s psychological crisis as a result of personal loss and the ways of coping with negative experience. Lexical-stylistic and compositional means are studied through the prism of the representation of the protagonist’s internal feelings caused by inner and outer factors. The role of symbols, fairy-tale allusions, personifications, artistic details and comparative tropes in depicting the young girl’s crisis state and her reactions to life changes is traced. The function of key words, implicit details, temporal fractures and the title in the compositional framing of the text is researched. The role of the mentioned-above linguistic means in the reflection of transformations taking place in the protagonist’s consciousness is studied. Some peculiarities of Cecilia Ahern’s individual author’s style, such as wide use of fairy-tale allusions and personifications, contrastive application of some lexical-stylistic means (artistic details) and the coherent function of the others (an implicit detail, extended metaphors), are outlined. The author’s favourite key words are listed; the stylistic role of their repetitions in different contexts is shown. The retrospective actualization of the lexeme tomorrow presented in the title is traced.


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