scholarly journals “In came the self-evident and luminous little mess”: Ethical Life Writing in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent i

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-67
Author(s):  
PETRONIA POPA-PETRAR
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Ethics ◽  
At Home

Abstract Starting from a brief examination of Muriel Spark’s position as a Scottish novelist within the framework of her anti-essentialist, anti-authoritative aesthetics, my essay will take a seemingly abrupt, but in fact consequential turn to investigate the complex antinomies involved in her fictional representation of the lives of others. Although at home and abroad she is hailed as Scotland’s most celebrated author of the twentieth century, Spark’s writerly practice consists of regularly dismantling grand narratives or fixed, stable identities, often clashing with more localized or prescriptive views on the social and national functions of narrative. My argument, however, is that it is the very unease of her “Scottishness” that acts as one of the foundations of her literary ethics, embodied in her acute awareness of the antinomies involved in textualizing the lives of others. Spark’s shrewdly metafictional Loitering with Intent (1981) openly thematizes both the obligation, and the risks of telling one’s own and other people’s stories, performing a radical ethics of narrative alterity through its staging of the enmeshments of writing, (auto)biography and experience.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

scholarly journals Recent Zones of Portraiture: The Selfie

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 87-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Bruś
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Force

In the “age of the selfie” (Jerry Saltz), we gauge the self as active. This paper proposes to engage the selfie as a dominant and enlarging practice of assertion and performance of lived existence.  I align the selfie with the snapshot, making a point about their extraordinary cultural force and productivity determined by their distinctive economies and technical bases as well as cultural statuses.  An expression of our desire to be visible in the social world, the selfie, I argue, is a sub-genre of portraiture which exposes and “proliferates” our face as an activity promising interaction. In the “post-face” phase of our culture this performative face is a surface of the visual present, always in the making.This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on May 24th 2016, and published on July 12th 2017.

scholarly journals "I have such sad news": Loss in Finnish North American Letters

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 53-71
Author(s):  
Samira Saramo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
North Americans ◽  
Death And Loss

Life writing has been an important tool for people to work through loss in their lives. In the context of twentieth-century migration, word of death and shared mourning occurred primarily through letters in the international post. Focusing on letters written by Finnish immigrants in the United States and Canada from the 1940s–1960s, this article analyzes some of the ways that letter writing has been used to address death and loss. Positioning personal letters within the broader field of life writing, this work examines how both loss and life writing often trigger a re/defining of the self, addressed in multiple and ambiguous ways by individual mourner/writers.  In its unsettling of life, feelings, and connections, loss is a rupture of the self. By narrating their life, writers create personal chronologies, position themselves in places and communities, and declare their values. The life writing of Finnish North Americans provides windows into the difficult work of trying to assign meaning to meaning-defying loss.

scholarly journals Local elites and social control: building council houses in Stirling between the wars

Urban History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES SMYTH ◽  
DOUGLAS ROBERTSON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
The Self ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Local Councillors ◽  
Significant Factors

ABSTRACT:This article examines the role played by local councillors in constructing new housing in Scotland during the inter-war period. Rather than view local authorities as simply the objective agency of central government's ambitions to construct council houses, we argue that the self-interest and motivations of councillors have to be recognized as significant factors in this process. It is argued also that the concerns of private landlords were neither ignored nor sacrificed in the rush to build new housing. Rather, given that councils remained dominated by local business men, many of whom were private landlords, councillors acted in ways to protect their own material and class interests. In so doing, they consciously, if implicitly, shaped the social geography of twentieth-century Scotland.

Citizen Subject

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Étienne Balibar ◽  
Emily Apter
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Social Relation ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject

What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience “the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship”? This title considers the necessary and necessarily antagonistic relation between the categories of citizen and subject. In this book, the question of modernity is framed anew with special attention to the self-enunciation of the subject (in Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, and Derrida), the constitution of the community as “we” (in Hegel, Marx, and Tolstoy), and the aporia of the judgment of self and others (in Foucault, Freud, Kelsen, and Blanchot). After the “humanist controversy” that preoccupied twentieth-century philosophy, the book proposes foundations for philosophical anthropology today, in terms of two contrary movements: the becoming-citizen of the subject and the becoming-subject of the citizen. The citizen-subject who is constituted in the claim to a “right to have rights” (Arendt) cannot exist without an underside that contests and defies it. He—or she, because the text is concerned throughout this volume with questions of sexual difference—figures not only the social relation but also the discontent or the uneasiness at the heart of this relation. The human can be instituted only if it betrays itself by upholding “anthropological differences” that impose normality and identity as conditions of belonging to the community. The violence of “civil” bourgeois universality, the text argues, is greater (and less legitimate, therefore less stable) than that of theological or cosmological universality. Right is thus founded on insubordination, and emancipation derives its force from otherness.

scholarly journals Alexander Robertson, Scottish Social Theology and Low-caste Hindu Reform in Early Twentieth-century Colonial India

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Western India ◽  
Material Development ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religion And Ethnicity ◽  
At Home

This article analyses the social theology and practice of Scottish presbyterian missionaries towards hinduism in early twentieth-century western India. It reveals a radical contrast in Scottish missionary practice and outlook with the earlier activities of Alexander Duff (1806–78) in India from 1829 to 1864 as well as with contemporaneous discourse on non-christian religion and ethnicity which was prevalent at home in Scotland. The article argues that Scottish presbyterian missionaries selectively adapted and elaborated radical social theology from late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Scotland to deal with the hindu socio-religious out-casting and economic exploitation that they experienced during their christian proselytisation in early twentieth-century western India. In particular, the article analyses the social theology of the United Free Church missionary Reverend Alexander Robertson, who lived and worked in western India from 1902 to 1937. Robertson sought to re-invent and apply radical Scottish social theology to the material development and religious conversion of Dalit or impoverished out-caste hindu populations in western India. The article also contrasts this Scottish missionary social theology and practice with the secular Edwardian Liberal ideas of Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (1871–1954), which Robertson's colleague and colonial administrator, Harold H. Mann (1872–1961) sought to implement towards Dalit people when he was Agricultural Chemist of Bombay Presidency after 1907 and Director of Agriculture for the Bombay Presidency in Pune from 1918 to 1927. In this context, the article argues more broadly that popular Orientalist discourse on non-christian religion and ethnicity at home in Scotland and perceptions of a subordinate Scottish relationship with the London metropole conceal the radical dimensions of Scottish identity within empire and the ways in which the interaction of radical practices between imperial peripheries like Scotland and India conditioned imperial development.

Not at Home: Servants, Scholars, and the Uncanny

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian McCuskey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Social Value ◽  
The Other ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Social ◽  
At Home

In “The Jolly Corner” (1908), Henry James locates the uncanny in the servants' quarters at the top of the house, where the genteel protagonist finally corners his ghostly double. James thus prompts us to reread Freud's “The Uncanny” (1919) with a pair of questions in mind. First, how does class identity bear on the uncanny; and, second, how in turn does the uncanny bear on class identity? Steering well clear of servants in his discussion, Freud apparently dodges the issue altogether; a closer look, however, reveals that he cannily represses the social value of the uncanny so as to hold it in reserve. James, on the other hand, documents how and why psychoanalysis converts bourgeois anxiety about servants into “the uncanny,” an abstraction that floats freely across the twentieth century from séance to academic circles, where it continues to function as a ghostlier demarcation of class. (BMcC)

Providing Freshmen with a Good “Starting-Block”

2019 ◽  
Vol 78 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 69-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikaël De Clercq ◽  
Charlotte Michel ◽  
Sophie Remy ◽  
Benoît Galand
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Student Adjustment ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Pivotal Phase ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Study Task ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Belonging ◽  
Intention To Persist

Abstract. Grounded in social-psychological literature, this experimental study assessed the effects of two so-called “wise” interventions implemented in a student study program. The interventions took place during the very first week at university, a presumed pivotal phase of transition. A group of 375 freshmen in psychology were randomly assigned to three conditions: control, social belonging, and self-affirmation. Following the intervention, students in the social-belonging condition expressed less social apprehension, a higher social integration, and a stronger intention to persist one month later than the other participants. They also relied more on peers as a source of support when confronted with a study task. Students in the self-affirmation condition felt more self-affirmed at the end of the intervention but didn’t benefit from other lasting effects. The results suggest that some well-timed and well-targeted “wise” interventions could provide lasting positive consequences for student adjustment. The respective merits of social-belonging and self-affirmation interventions are also discussed.

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