scholarly journals Fragmented Selves, Healing Visions

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 164-174
Author(s):  
Catrinel Popa ◽  
◽  

The purpose of this paper is to analyse two experimental “novels of the self”, written by two of the most innovative Jewish-Romanian writers of the ’30s: Max Blecher and H. Bonciu, stressing on those aspects they have in common with the mainstream of the twentieth-century Western literature. In both authors, inward disquietude is experienced as outward atmosphere, submerging the world in indefinable strangeness and mystery. In this context, the concept of “inner exile” and “fragmented self” may prove useful in defining the particular status of the narrators’perspective, as well as their relationship with the world (objects, settings, invisible traps, “sickly” or “healing” spaces).

Author(s):  
Finn Fordham

As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.


2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-113
Author(s):  
Kathryn Tanner

The contributions of this fine book are many but I will concentrate on three, before turning to several more critical remarks.First, and most obviously, the book does the invaluable service of surveying developments in kenotic christology in the nineteenth century while situating them nicely in their different contexts of origin and with reference to lines of mutual influence: continental, Scottish and British trends are all canvassed rather masterfully. Some attention, in lesser detail, is also given to the way these christological trends are extended in the twentieth century to accounts of the Trinity and God's relation to the world generally: kenosis, the self-emptying or self-limiting action of God, in the incarnation, is now viewed as a primary indication of who God is and how God works, from creation to salvation.


PMLA ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 89 (5) ◽  
pp. 980-992 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Miles

From Goethe's Wilhelm Meister through Keller's Grüner Heinrich to Rilke's Malte, the hero of the German Bildungsroman develops from unselfconscious adventurer in the outer world to compulsive explorer of the world within. This transformation in the hero—from “picaro” to “confessor”—implies a change in the concept of Bildung: the “self” no longer accumulates, but must be re-collected. Wilhelm Meister's unreflective nature aligns him directly with the picaresque hero; essentially, he does not develop. In Keller's novel the hero develops precisely by narrating his picaresque past. Through his confessional notebooks, Rilke's hero, Malte, attempts to overcome the “sickness” of his fragmented self by recollecting his childhood. This transformation of the literary hero in the nineteenth century mirrors in turn the historical rise of alienated, self-conscious man. Beyond Maire the Bildungsroman can only move on to parody, to the anti-Bildungsromane of Kafka, Mann, and Grass, in which both types of hero are parodied.


Author(s):  
Candy Gunther Brown

This chapter canvasses the various meanings of modernity and secularization, and develops a partial typology of Protestant reactions to these key themes of the twentieth century. Through the author’s expertise in global charismatic and divine healing movements, and shifting interpretations of sacred texts and religious practice, the chapter notes six categories of Protestant responses, which are to: (1) reinterpret the Bible in light of modern scholarship; (2) reaffirm the Bible’s authoritative status; (3) recontextualize the Bible in light of modern society and culture; (4) reinterpret medical materialism through the prism of biblical supernaturalism; (5) reassess the Bible’s compatibility with a plurality of spiritual healing resources; and (6) reappropriate modern technologies for traditional biblical ends. The chapter notes the challenges to the standard secularization theory, and to the self-definition of Protestant dissenting movements, as they move around the world. It illustrates these points with particular reference to the rise of African indigenous charismatic dissenting practice, starting with key figures such as William Wadé Harris.


Author(s):  
J. P. Telotte

Abstract: Film, Francesco Casetti argues, provided a common “field of convergence for different dimensions” of the popular imagination in the early twentieth century. We can see evidence of the extent of that “convergence” in the sort of discourse that unfolded in various other internal features of the pulps. Editorials, readers’ letters, and film reviews converge to demonstrate a sense of enthusiasm about the ability of films to supplement the work of SF by visualizing or realizing the genre’s ideas for reshaping the world and the self. That enthusiasm would bring repeated calls for the film industry to produce more SF-themed films, even to adapt favorite stories from the pulps. But as reviews of SF films began to proliferate in the pulps, particularly in the late 1930s, they would increasingly attest to a frustration or dissatisfaction with the sense of reality that was being achieved by the SF film and point to a rift beginning between the films and the world of SF literature.


KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eszter Rembeczki

The paper investigates the role of the other in the emergence and understanding of the self both in Descartes’ philosophy and in phenomenological theories based on Descartes. For Descartes, the thinking entity is almost closed into itself, but upon close inquiry it turns out that ideas of other entities filter into its thinking and eventually influence it. Therefore, the ego’s experience of itself depends of its experience of other ideas, while the ego active in practical life is constituted through its relation to things encountered in the world. In some twentieth-century approaches the ego can only understand itself through another ego. For Husserl, the self comprehends itself as the not-Other, while for Levinas the face of the Other constitutes the self of the Ego receiving it, through their radical difference.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-104
Author(s):  
Rudi Matthee

Abstract This essay identifies an historically-enduring Iranian insistence on self-sufficiency—which can be summed up, in a superordinate manner, as the idea that the world needs Iran more than Iran needs the world. Economically, this insistence is reflected in a (rhetorical) quest for self-reliance in production; politically, it tends to be articulated in an instinctive anti-(neo)colonial, often defiant stance vis-à-vis the world; and culturally, it is often expressed as a claim to civilizational grandeur, indeed uniqueness. The origins of this conceit have to be sought in antecedents combining economic perceptions with cultural assumptions that long precede Western imperialism and modern nationalism. These, in turn, are grounded in patterns of thought that reflect specific pre-modern physical and geopolitical conditions which go back to pre-Islamic notions of paradisiacal abundance as much as to economic realities encapsulated by Aristotle’s idea(l) of the self-sufficient household. I also argue that the notion evolved over time even as it retained its moral core. What was an instinctive dismissal of the outside world as dispensable, after 1800 became a self-conscious stance against foreign encroachment, real or imagined. In the course of the twentieth century, a quest for material autarky coupled with an insistence on cultural exceptionalism became an integral part of modern Iranian nationalism.


2001 ◽  
pp. 85-90
Author(s):  
O. V. Kozerod

The development of the Jewish religious movement "Khabad" and its organizations in the first quarter of the twentieth century - one of the important research problems, which is still practically not considered in the domestic Judaica. At the same time, this problem is relevant in connection with the fact that the religious movement "Khabad" during the twentieth century became the most widespread and influential area of Judaism in Ukraine and throughout the world.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-212
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH BULLEN

This paper investigates the high-earning children's series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, in relation to the skills young people require to survive and thrive in what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. Children's textual culture has been traditionally informed by assumptions about childhood happiness and the need to reassure young readers that the world is safe. The genre is consequently vexed by adult anxiety about children's exposure to certain kinds of knowledge. This paper discusses the implications of the representation of adversity in the Lemony Snicket series via its subversions of the conventions of children's fiction and metafictional strategies. Its central claim is that the self-consciousness or self-reflexivity of A Series of Unfortunate Events} models one of the forms of reflexivity children need to be resilient in the face of adversity and to empower them to undertake the biographical project risk society requires of them.


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