scholarly journals Paz’s A Draft of Shadows: Rewriting the Past, the Present and the Self

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Luis Solis
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Output

Pasado en Claro (A Draft of Shadows) was first published in 1975. This long poem is the mental journey Paz embarks upon in pursuit of his own personal paradise. This article focuses on three of important concepts Paz explores in this poem and in his literary output as a whole: the scope of language, memory and otherness. In the case of language, and its expression in poetry, Paz’s most eloquent pages can be found in The Bow and the Lyre (1956), but especially in The Monkey Grammarian (1970), the account of another journey, through language and the acts of writing and reading. As a personal attempt at regaining a mythical past, A Draft of Shadows affords a view of both the vast narrative of Mexican history and Paz’s personal retelling of his own past. A journey like this is only possible via the winding path of memory, its expression in language, and an identity created as it follows its own trail.

‘Auto-analyse’ and the Ethics of Memory in Assia Djebar's Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007)

2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 328-342
Author(s):  
Lucy Brisley
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Self ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
New Model ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Output

Recent transdisciplinary attempts to theorize an ethics of memory have centred on concepts such as melancholia, haunting and trauma. Despite being pathological states, they have paradoxically been posited as markers of ‘remembrance’ that signal the subject's ethical refusal to ‘move on’. If Algerian author Assia Djebar's literary output has, since 1995, been concerned with such tropes, I argue that her most recent narrative, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007), marks a shift away from such thinking. Rather than focusing on the spectralized others of Algerian history, Djebar's autofictional narrative enacts a return to the self. In doing so, it postulates a new model of relationality between self and other that moves beyond the limitations of melancholic possession, haunting and the traumatic acting out of the past. Drawing on the recent work of Judith Butler, this article demonstrates how Djebar's narrative seeks an ethical mode of remembrance that refuses to fetishize the traumatic condition.

Music and Memory: The Tlatelolco Refrain

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Kun
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Student Movements ◽  
Octavio Paz ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
To Come ◽  
Musical Memory ◽  
A Current

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.

scholarly journals Self-exciting multifractional processes

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-41
Author(s):  
Fabian A. Harang ◽  
Marc Lagunas-Merino ◽  
Salvador Ortiz-Latorre
Keyword(s):  
Stochastic Process ◽  
Brownian Motion ◽  
Rate Of Convergence ◽  
Existence And Uniqueness ◽  
Volterra Equation ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Past ◽  
Stochastic Volterra Equation ◽  
Multifractional Brownian Motion ◽  
Self Organizing

AbstractWe propose a new multifractional stochastic process which allows for self-exciting behavior, similar to what can be seen for example in earthquakes and other self-organizing phenomena. The process can be seen as an extension of a multifractional Brownian motion, where the Hurst function is dependent on the past of the process. We define this by means of a stochastic Volterra equation, and we prove existence and uniqueness of this equation, as well as giving bounds on the p-order moments, for all $p\geq1$. We show convergence of an Euler–Maruyama scheme for the process, and also give the rate of convergence, which is dependent on the self-exciting dynamics of the process. Moreover, we discuss various applications of this process, and give examples of different functions to model self-exciting behavior.

scholarly journals The Effects of Self-Compassion and Self-Esteem Writing Interventions on Women’s Valuation of Weight Management Goals, Body Appreciation, and Eating Behaviors

2021 ◽  
pp. 036168432110134
Author(s):  
Kheana Barbeau ◽  
Camille Guertin ◽  
Kayla Boileau ◽  
Luc Pelletier
Keyword(s):  
Weight Management ◽  
Expressive Writing ◽  
Eating Behaviors ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
The Self ◽  
Body Appreciation ◽  
Writing Interventions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Self Compassion ◽  
Bulimic Symptoms

In this study, we examined the effects of body-focused daily self-compassion and self-esteem expressive writing activities on women’s valuation of weight management goals, body appreciation, bulimic symptoms, and healthy and unhealthy eating behaviors. One-hundred twenty-six women, recruited from the community and a university participant pool ( Mage = 29.3, SD = 13.6), were randomly allocated to one of the three writing conditions: body-focused self-compassion, body-focused self-esteem, or control. Women reflected on a moment within the past 24 hours that made them feel self-conscious about their bodies, eating, or exercise habits (self-compassion and self-esteem conditions) or on a particular situation or feeling that occurred in the past 24 hours (control condition) for 4–7 days. At post-treatment (24 hours after the intervention), women in the self-compassion group demonstrated decreased bulimic symptoms, while women in the self-esteem and control conditions did not. Furthermore, clinically significant changes in bulimic symptoms were associated with being in the self-compassion condition but not in the self-esteem or control conditions. Results suggest that body-focused writing interventions may be more effective in temporarily reducing eating disorder symptoms in women if they focus on harnessing self-compassion. Additional online materials for this article are available on PWQ ’s website at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/03616843211013465

Drafted into a Foreign War?

Rhizomata ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-217
Author(s):  
Matthew Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Spiritual Practices ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Analytic Tradition ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rational Inquiry

Abstract This paper examines the central criticisms that come, broadly, from the modern, ‘analytic’ tradition, of Pierre Hadot’s idea of ancient philosophy as a way of life.: Firstly, ancient philosophy just did not or could not have involved anything like the ‘spiritual practices’ or ‘technologies of the self’, aiming at curing subjects’ unnecessary desires or bettering their lives, contra Hadot and Foucault et al. Secondly, any such metaphilosophical account of putative ‘philosophy’ must unacceptably downplay the role of ‘serious philosophical reasoning’ or ‘rigorous argument’ in philosophy. Thirdly, claims that ancient philosophy aimed at securing wisdom by a variety of means including but not restricted to rational inquiry are accordingly false also as historical claims about the ancient philosophers. Fourthly, to the extent that we must (despite (3)) admit that some ancient thinkers did engage in or recommend extra-cognitive forms of transformative practice, these thinkers were not true or ‘mainline’ philosophers. I contend that the historical claims (3) and (4) are highly contestable, risking erroneously projecting a later modern conception of philosophy back onto the past. Of the theoretical or metaphilosophical claims (1) and (2), I argue that the second claim, as framed here, points to real, hard questions that surround the conception(s) of philosophy as a way of life.

Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
The West ◽  
City Life ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Point Of Departure

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.

„We were a ghastly crew“: Gespenstige Schiffe und ruheloses Schreiben bei Samuel Taylor Coleridge und Arthur Rimbaud

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Zapf
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Arthur Rimbaud ◽  
Long Poem

AbstractEven though Coleridge’s fantastic romantic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) and Rimbaud’s hallucinatory symbolist poem “Le bateau ivre” (1871) use very different procedures, both of them show, each in their own way, a ghostly movement of the ship: a movement that seems to lead into the vastness of the globe but finds itself confined to the narrowness of one’s own self. Both of these sea poems draw a route that in the end is aimless in its bouncing and circular movement. The haunted ghost ship as a wooden skeleton without crew flies over water in Coleridge’s ballad, or falls into unattainable depths in Rimbaud’s long poem. Can these poetic travel narratives be described as forms of a “haunted globalization,” in which leaving the known for the unknown turns out to mean always moving around the same – the self, the known, the own writing process? Even if in the self, there will always be found the other, the foreign, too.

scholarly journals California and Irony in Mad Men

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Taveira
Keyword(s):  
Visual Rhetoric ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
The Self ◽  
Television Series ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mad Men ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
The Aesthetic

The combination of melodramatic and art cinematic techniques and influences in AMC’s television series Mad Men (2007¬–) reveals how a melodramatic televisuality can image novel modes of social and intimate relations and an alternative to the archetypal American narrative of the self-made man. Set in 1960s’ America, the series uses a contemporaneous and cosmopolitan California to triangulate the formal and narrative insistence of the past on the present. This triangulation is played out by Don Draper’s relations with his family, women, and his former identities and by the representation of homosexuality throughout the series. The application of Lee Edelman’s concept of “sinthomosexuality” and Richard Rorty’s “liberal ironist” reveal a queer, visual rhetoric to the show’s narrative and formal structures, forming a queer irony that allows the show to straddle the aesthetic extremes of “quality TV” (Jane Feuer) and soap opera, which, in turn, queers the exemplary American heterosexuality of Don Draper.

scholarly journals Politics, Responsibility and Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Woodiwiss
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Childhood Sexual Abuse ◽  
False Memory ◽  
The Self ◽  
Recovered Memory ◽  
False Memory Syndrome ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hidden Knowledge ◽  
Adult Lives ◽  
Material Conditions

This paper will explore ways in which self identified survivors of childhood sexual abuse and false memory syndrome appropriate therapeutic discourses which both encourage women to hold themselves responsible for their own unhappiness and provide a way to alleviate that responsibility. Although I look critically at women's engagement with abuse narratives the intention is not to enter the ‘recovered memory wars’ but rather to explore the consequences of locating adult victims of childhood sexual abuse within a therapeutic rather than a political framework. Within this therapeutic culture priority is given to self-actualisation and personal fulfilment and the self is increasingly seen as a project to be worked on. A pervasive theme within the therapeutic literature is a particular linkage between women's ‘inferiority’ and their oppression. Women are not only shown an array of problems from which they suffer together with self-improving solutions but are encouraged to seek the ‘hidden’ causes of these problems in the past and to probe further and further back rather than look to the material conditions of their adult lives for explanations. Drawing on interview material I will look at how women invest in discourses which provide an explanation for hidden knowledge of abuse and may offer a way to alleviate responsibility but which also encourage them to (re)construct themselves as sick, damaged and ultimately responsible for their own unhappiness.

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