scholarly journals Re-imagining Histories, Re-inventing the Self in Ian McEwan’s Atonement

2019 ◽  
pp. 165-176
Author(s):  
Vanja Vukićević Garić

Justifiably classified as an example of postmodern realism, or a “restorative metafiction” (O’Hara), Ian McEwan’s popular and critically acclaimed novel Atonement (2001) in its entirety reasserts its author’s frequently cited statement that “imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity.” Focusing mainly on the metafictional ending, which, as a kind of unusual post-scriptum, introduces a thematic, structural and an ontological twist re-directing the whole story, this paper explores the limits and the power of creative imagination to re-generate, amend and meaningfully extend personal histories, pointing to the fundamentally ethical dimension of the contemporary self-conscious fiction. The phenomenological connection between ars memoria, imagining, (re-)writing and the Self is seen through the main assumption of the existential psychology that the subject is capable of transcending oneself, recreating and re-inventing oneself in and by means of narrating the self as well as others. Analysing Briony Tallis as both a character and an author within the novel, in her narrative of her own as well as others’ histories, this paper will address ethical possibilities of the self-reflective fiction to connect subjectivity to the world questioning at the same time the boundaries of past, present and the idea of reality.

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-71
Author(s):  
Andrea Rossi

This article analyses the set of ethical questions underlying the emergence of the modern politics of security, as articulated, in particular, in the work of Thomas Hobbes. An ethic is here understood – in line with its ancient philosophical use and the interpretation advanced by authors such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot – as a domain of reflections and practices related to the cultivation and conversion of the self ( askēsis, metanoia). The article aims to demonstrate that, besides attending to the physical safety of the state and its citizens, modern apparatuses of security are also crucially implicated in the formation of their subjects as ethical and autonomous individuals. To substantiate this thesis, the article first illustrates how, since the first appearance of the term in the vocabulary of Western thought – and in Seneca’s work in particular – theories of security have been intimately tied to the cultivation of the self. It thus interprets Hobbes’s reflections on the subject as the upshot of a substantive, if implicit, re-articulation of Seneca’s ethic of security, by focusing on the two authors’ respective understandings of (a) autonomy, (b) the world, (c) ascesis, and (d) politics. Overall, it is suggested that the differences between the two authors testify to a wider political-historical shift: in modern regimes of governmentality, the ethical dimension of security no longer defines the rightful exercise of political power, but rather appears as an object of social and economic governance.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 741-759
Author(s):  
Meg Dobbins

“Young ladies don't understandpolitical economy, you know,” asserts the casually misogynistic uncle of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot'sMiddlemarch(1871) (17; bk. 1, ch 1). Although Eliot's heroine resents both her uncle's remark and “that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights,” her attempt to teach herself political economy in the novel only seems to confirm her uncle's assessment (18; bk. 1, ch. 1): Dorothea gathers a “little heap of books on political economy” and sets forth to learn “the best way of spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors, or – what comes to the same thing – so as to do them the most good” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48). Naively likening “spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors” to “do[ing] them the most good,” Dorothea fails to grasp the self-interest at the core of nineteenth-century political economic thought and so misunderstands the subject matter before her: “Unhappily her mind slipped off [the book] for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading sentences twice over with an intense consciousness of many things, but not of any one thing contained in the text. This was hopeless” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48).


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milana Phangadi

The nature of mental illness has been the subject of passionate discussion throughout history. In ancient Greece Plato invented the term “mental health,” which was conceived as reason aided by temper and ruling over passion. Griesinger almost 2 centuries ago was the first to state that “mental illness is brain illness,” an expression that has provided a strong impetus to the more recent medical conception of mental illness. Mental disorders affect the core of one’s being through varying severity that alter the way an individual thinks about the self, others, and the world. As to more severe disorders such as schizophrenia and psychosis, the degree is much more extreme, but it does not lower the significance of other disorders such as depression, anxiety, etc.In the current era of globalization, mental health is largely promoted through media. However, this does not guarantee improvement of health services and the overall condition of mental health globally. In this article, it is aimed to find the statistical increase in the numbers of the people who have mental illness in Indonesia, especially in Jakarta as how it is the capital city of Indonesia. This article contains statistical data collected from the ministry of health and from the collected data will be analysed further to provide a conclusion to this research.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Syarifudin Syarifudin

Each religious sect has its own characteristics, whether fundamental, radical, or religious. One of them is Insan Al-Kamil Congregation, which is in Cijati, South Cikareo Village, Wado District, Sumedang Regency. This congregation is Sufism with the concept of self-purification as the subject of its teachings. So, the purpose of this study is to reveal how the origin of Insan Al-Kamil Congregation, the concept of its purification, and the procedures of achieving its purification. This research uses a descriptive qualitative method with a normative theological approach as the blade of analysis. In addition, the data generated is the result of observation, interviews, and document studies. From the collected data, Jamaah Insan Al-Kamil adheres to the core teachings of Islam and is the tenth regeneration of Islam Teachings, which refers to the Prophet Muhammad SAW. According to this congregation, self-perfection becomes an obligation that must be achieved by human beings in order to remember Allah when life is done. The process of self-purification is done when human beings still live in the world by knowing His God. Therefore, the peak of self-purification is called Insan Kamil. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 135-150

The springboard for this essay is the author’s encounter with the feeling of horror and her attempts to understand what place horror has in philosophy. The inquiry relies upon Leonid Lipavsky’s “Investigation of Horror” and on various textual plunges into the fanged and clawed (and possibly noumenal) abyss of Nick Land’s work. Various experiences of horror are examined in order to build something of a typology, while also distilling the elements characteristic of the experience of horror in general. The essay’s overall hypothesis is that horror arises from a disruption of the usual ways of determining the boundaries between external things and the self, and this leads to a distinction between three subtypes of horror. In the first subtype, horror begins with the indeterminacy at the boundaries of things, a confrontation with something that defeats attempts to define it and thereby calls into question the definition of the self. In the second subtype, horror springs from the inability to determine one’s own boundaries, a process opposed by the crushing determinacy of the world. In the third subtype, horror unfolds by means of a substitution of one determinacy by another which is unexpected and ungrounded. In all three subtypes of horror, the disturbance of determinacy deprives the subject, the thinking entity, of its customary foundation for thought, and even of an explanation of how that foundation was lost; at times this can lead to impairment of the perception of time and space. Understood this way, horror comes within a hair’s breadth of madness - and may well cross over into it.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chase Pielak

In George Eliot'sDanielDeronda, animal vitality figures prominently in shaping the human shell, to use an opening animal metaphor. Approaching the significance of the animal leads to a reading of Gwendolen Grandcourt's character as a responsible creature. Gwendolen is Eliot's heroine, one half of the pair of protagonists around whom the novel revolves. Eliot's fantastic character takes shape in three movements, each punctuated by its own animal metaphor: Gwendolen morphs from Lamia to mastered-animal to white doe. Animal imagery appears at the edge of the human, the point at which humanity gains and loses subjectivity, and Gwendolen's novel is fundamentally one of finding her place in the world, her singularity, her responsibility. Images of animals stand in the linguistic gaps – in the places words fail – to figure the subject.1Animals appear at the end of the ability of language to mean. Nevertheless, this analysis is not intended to encompass the complex range of animal representations in George's Eliot's oeuvre, or even to catalog every example inDaniel Deronda. Instead, it suggests the possibility of using animal metaphor as a map for reading a Victorian heroine.


Molecules ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (9) ◽  
pp. 1772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria de los Angeles Cortes ◽  
Raquel de la Campa ◽  
Maria Luisa Valenzuela ◽  
Carlos Díaz ◽  
Gabino A. Carriedo ◽  
...  

During the last number of years a variety of crystallization-driven self-assembly (CDSA) processes based on semicrystalline block copolymers have been developed to prepare a number of different nanomorphologies in solution (micelles). We herein present a convenient synthetic methodology combining: (i) The anionic polymerization of 2-vinylpyridine initiated by organolithium functionalized phosphane initiators; (ii) the cationic polymerization of iminophosphoranes initiated by –PR2Cl2; and (iii) a macromolecular nucleophilic substitution step, to prepare the novel block copolymers poly(bistrifluoroethoxy phosphazene)-b-poly(2-vinylpyridine) (PTFEP-b-P2VP), having semicrystalline PTFEP core forming blocks. The self-assembly of these materials in mixtures of THF (tetrahydrofuran) and 2-propanol (selective solvent to P2VP), lead to a variety of cylindrical micelles of different lengths depending on the amount of 2-propanol added. We demonstrated that the crystallization of the PTFEP at the core of the micelles is the main factor controlling the self-assembly processes. The presence of pyridinyl moieties at the corona of the micelles was exploited to stabilize gold nanoparticles (AuNPs).


2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 491
Author(s):  
Ana Cláudia Munari ◽  
Taíssi Alessandra Cardoso da Silva

A partir da análise dos romances de Ricardo Lísias e da sua produção autocrítica, este trabalho busca entender algumas relações entre a literatura de autoficção e a publicização do sujeito autor imerso no universo midiático. Partindo de uma revisão bibliográfica que conceitua os objetos aqui circunscritos e de uma apreciação anterior sobre a produção literária de jovens escritores brasileiros selecionados pela revista Granta em 2012, estreitamos nossa focalização no movimento do romancista em direção à escrita de si e à autorreferência. Nesse sentido, analisamos e contextualizamos a modalidade de escritura denominada autoficção, especialmente no que tange às aproximações entre as instâncias do narrador e do autor e entre biografemas e ficção (FIGUEIREDO, 2013; KLINGER, 2012), e evocamos estudos da Sociologia e da Comunicação de modo a caracterizar a sociedade da qual emerge o corpus deste estudo (LIPOVESTKY, 2004; SANTAELLA, 2012). A partir desse contexto, investigamos as obras literárias – O céu dos suicidas (2012), Divórcio (2013) e Delegado Tobias (2014) – e as narrativas midiáticas de Ricardo Lísias e identificamos nelas estratégias da publicidade.********************************************************************The novel by Ricardo Lísias: wide open windows to the subject hypermodernAbstract: Through the analysis of the novels of Ricardo Lísias and its self-critical production, this work intends to understand some relationships between the self-fiction literature and the popularization of the subject author immersed in the media universe. Starting from a literature review that conceptualizes the objects herein bounded and an earlier assessment of the literary production of young Brazilian writers selected by Granta magazine in 2012, we strengthened  ur focus on the novelist's movement toward the writing itself  nd self-reference. Pursuing this aim, we analyzed and contextualized the form of writing named autofiction, especially with regard to the similarities between instances of the narrator and the author and between biographema and fiction (FIGUEIREDO, 2013; KLINGER, 2012). We also evoked Sociology and Media Studies to characterize the society of which emerges the corpus of this study (LIPOVESTKY, 2004; SANTAELLA, 2012). From these premises, we investigated the literary works – Céu dos suicidas (Heaven suicide, 2012), Divórcio (Divorce, 2013) and Delegado Tobias (Tobias, the police chief, 2014) – and the media narratives of Ricardo Lísias and finally we identified his advertising strategies.Keywords: Self-ficction; Contemporary literature; Hypermodernity; Ricardo Lísias


Author(s):  
Roman Szubin

The article is devoted to the search for a new space in the methodological studies on Russian literature. The author takes as its basis the method of hermeneutics  of words by Vardan Hayrapetyan. Especially the basic categories such as the world man (homo mundi), the Other and its variants: the self (rus. самость), otherness (rus. дру­гость), the alien (rus. чужесть) and two triads, which postulate two types of intellectual situations. In this regard, the author identifies the concept of the hybrid man of the hero of Russian literature in which a small person is a representative of an impersonal collective personality of the world man, home, family, ideas, etc. The author demonstrates the type of a hybrid man on the example of the protagonist of the novel by Vasily Shukshin Stepan Razin.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 1197-1202
Author(s):  
Mohammed Abdullah Abduldaim Hizabr Alhusami

The aim of this paper is to investigate the issue of intertextuality in the novel Alfirdaws Alyabab (The Waste Paradise) by the female Saudi novelist and short story writer Laila al-Juhani. Intertextuality is a rhetoric and literary technique defined as a textual reference deliberate or subtle to some other texts with a view of drawing more significance to the core text; and hence it is employed by an author to communicate and discuss ideas in a critical style. The narrative structure of Alfirdaws Alyabab (The Waste Paradise) showcases references of religious, literary, historical, and folkloric intertextuality. In analyzing these references, the study follows the intertextual approach. In her novel The Waste Paradise, Laila al-Juhani portrays the suffering of Saudi women who are less tormented by social marginalization than by an inner conflict between openness to Western culture and conformity to cultural heritage. Intertextuality relates to words, texts, or discourses among each other. Moreover, the intertextual relations are subject to reader’s response to the text. The relation of one text with other texts or contexts never reduces the prestige of writing. Therefore, this study, does not diminish the status of the writer or the text; rather, it is in itself a kind of literary creativity. Finally, this paper aims to introduce Saudi writers in general and the female writers in particular to the world literature.


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