Times in the Mind: Modernism in the 1920s

2018 ◽  
pp. 73-123
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Social World ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Counter Example ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Modernist Fiction

Confirmed at the same time as arrangements for the first Armistice Day were announced, Albert Einstein’s theories indicate that the 1920s were marked not only by stringent temporalities, but also by reactions against them and by alternative ways of conceptualising time. In the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust and others, this often took the form of a retreat from the social world into inner consciousness – into the minds of characters whose memories facilitated narrative structures evading everyday chronology in favour of freely following thoughts from the present into the past. Priorities involved can be compared with the work of recent and contemporary thinkers, including Henri Bergson as well as Einstein. Wyndham Lewis can be seen as an interesting if unreliable commentator on processes and possible influences involved, also providing an instructive counter-example in his own fiction. Modernist fiction itself, however, is far from comprehensively anachronic, but instead includes a strong element of conventional chronology as part of the complex interplay of contemporary temporalities its imagination seeks to contain.

Introduction: Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Sarah Pinto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Social World ◽  
New Method ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind

In the middle of World War II and at the end of colonial rule, a young woman in Punjab met with family friend Dev Satya Nand as a willing participant in his new method of dream analysis. This chapter introduces Mrs. A., Satya Nand, and the outlines of the case, which began with a discussion of bringing “Hindu Socialism” to Indian peasants and turned into an exploration of love, sexuality, ambition, and life after marriage. The case appeared early in the career of Satya Nand, a prolific but little remembered figure in twentieth-century Indian psychiatry, who theorized complex connections between the mind and the social world, casting the psyche as an organic vehicle for ethical imagination. This introduction also introduces Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahalya, central mythic figures who entered Mrs. A.’s musings and Satya Nand’s science. It asks what it means to begin a conversation about ethics from elsewhere than the usual sources in European myth and philosophy, and wonders at how we might consider this narrative in and beyond its place and time, Punjab on the eve of Partition, considering what it demands of us as readers of and alongside Mrs. A., an anonymous yet intimate voice.

The Social World as Will and Idea: Schopenhauer's Influence upon Durkheim's Thought

1988 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 674-705 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stjepan G. Mestrovic
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Nature Perception ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Unity Of Knowledge

The starting-point for this analysis is a remark made by André Lalande, that Durkheim was so enamoured with Schopenhauer's philosophy that his students nicknamed him ‘Schopen’. The intellectual context shared by Schopenhauer and Durkheim is explored, especially with regard to the opposition between the id-like ‘will’ and the mind. Schopenhauer's influence upon Durkheim's contemporaries is examined briefly. Then, this new context for apprehending Durkheim's thought is applied to selected problems in Durkheimian scholarship, problems that have to do with the dualism of human nature, perception, the unconscious and the unity of knowledge relative to the object-subject debate. The implications for sociological theory are also discussed.

scholarly journals Beyond Supervenience and Construction

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
David-Hillel Ruben
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Social World ◽  
John Searle ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Two Alternatives

AbstractI assume that identity theories and reductive strategies generally about the relationship between both the physical and the mental and the non-social and the social fail and I remind the reader why this is so. The mind cannot be reduced to body and the social (and this includes social action) cannot be reduced to what goes on in the minds of individuals and to their non-social actions, even when physical environment is added to the allegedly reducing base. I canvass two alternatives: supervenience and constructivism. My discussion of supervenience is by way of a survey of the work of others. Supervenience turns out to be too ‘brute’ a relation to account for the mind-body or the nonsocial-social relationships (I explain the idea of ‘brute’ in the paper). Supervenience is essentially a co-variance relation and even if the social were to supervene on the nonsocial, or the mental on the physical, supervenience leaves that co-variance inexplicable and mysterious. I ask whether constructivist solutions could explain the co-variance between levels any better (I look specifically at the work of John Searle) and I raise some issues with regard to the ability of constructivism to explain these relationships. Searle sees the institutional and social world through the perspective of various levels, in ways similar to the way in which the reductionist and the supervenience theorists did. My main argument is to offer an analogue problem for constructivism that was raised for supervenience. I conclude that constructivism could escape the problem of ‘brute’ co-variation between levels only by adopting a thoroughgoing irrealist perspective on the institutional and social.

scholarly journals Law as a Language, Law as an Art: Reflections on James Boyd White's Keep Law Alive

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Jefferson Powell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Language Law ◽  
Traditional Understanding

Abstract Keep Law Alive, the latest book by law and literature scholar James Boyd White, is an important apologia for the traditional understanding and practice of law in the United States. Law, White argues, has served as a language in a sense closely parallel to what we mean by referring to English or Spanish as a language: law provides those fluent in it with the tools to describe the social world and to imagine its transformation, but without scripting what the speaker must say. White also envisions law as an art that evokes imagination, emotion and personal judgment, as well as the mind, and that is fundamentally oriented toward the realization of justice. Intellectual, social and political changes, however, threaten to displace law as a language and art with a view of law as an essentially empty rhetoric that cloaks the use of abstract and impersonal reasoning often borrowed from other disciplines. The survival of law depends on the willingness of those who speak it to continue its practice as an art that serves a humane vision of political life.

Farming and Agriculture in Literary Modernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-113
Author(s):  
Jeremy Diaper
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Active Engagement ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Monetary Reform ◽  
Organic Movement ◽  
Social Credit ◽  
Political Criticism ◽  
The Social ◽  
John Middleton Murry

This article seeks to cultivate a better understanding of the influence of agriculture and farming on literary modernism. It begins with a brief analysis of agriculture in the work of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, before exploring the significance of farming in relation to Ford Madox Ford, John Middleton Murry and T. S. Eliot. Following on from this initial consideration of literary modernism and agriculture, it then proceeds to investigate Ezra Pound's position within environmental modernism, through exploring the influence of the organic husbandry movement on his social and political criticism. In particular, it examines Pound's active engagement with notable organic magazines of the period including the New English Weekly (to which Pound contributed over 200 pieces between 1932–1940 and authored its ‘American Notes’ in 1935) and the Townsman. Through an examination of Pound's affiliation with the organic movement, it will illustrate that their mutual agricultural concerns were invariably connected to the wider financial considerations of economic and monetary reform, including the social credit theories of Major C. H. Douglas.

The Contribution of Enrique Pichon-Rivière: Comparisons with His European Contemporaries and with Modern Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Scharff
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Family Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Original Family ◽  
Kurt Lewin ◽  
Social Applications

Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, worked and wrote in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, but his work has not so far been translated into English. From the beginning, Pichon-Rivière understood the social applications of analytic thinking, centring his ideas on "el vinculo", which is generally translated as "the link", but could equally be translated as "the bond". The concept that each individual is born into human social links, is shaped by them, and simultaneously contributes to them inextricably ties people's inner worlds to the social world of family and society in which they live. Pichon-Rivière believed, therefore, that family analysis and group and institutional applications of analysis were as important as individual psychoanalysis. Many of the original family and couple therapists from whom our field learned trained with him. Because his work was centred in the analytic writings of Fairbairn and Klein, as well as those of the anthropologist George Herbert Mead and the field theory of Kurt Lewin, his original ideas have important things to teach us today. This article summarises some of his central ideas such as the link, spiral process, the single determinate illness, and the process of therapy.

‘BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND’: The Manifesto in Britain and Ireland

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Italian Futurism ◽  
Free Zone ◽  
Hugh Macdiarmid ◽  
The Times

Aside from the familiar story of Vorticists and Imagists before the war, no detailed analysis of manifestos in Britain (or Ireland) exists. It is true that, by 1914, there had been such an upsurge in manifesto writing that a review of BLAST in The Times (1 July 1914) began: ‘The art of the present day seems to be exhausting its energies in “manifestoes.”’ But after the brief fire ignited by the arrival of Italian Futurism died out, Britain again became a manifesto-free zone. Or did it? While a mania for the militant genre did not take hold in Britain and Ireland the same way it did in France, Italy, Germany, or Russia, the manifesto did enjoy a small but dedicated following that included Whistler, Wilde, and Yeats; Patrick Geddes and Hugh MacDiarmid; Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound; Dora Marsden and Virginia Woolf; and Auden, MacNeice, and Spender. Through these and other figures it is possible to trace the development of a manifesto tradition specific to Britain and Ireland.

Our Most Troubling Madness

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Defeat ◽  
Social World ◽  
Epidemiological Evidence ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Brain Alteration ◽  
Benign Course ◽  
Cultural Features ◽  
The Way

This book examines the way schizophrenia is shaped by its social context: how life is lived with this madness in different settings, and what it is about those settings that alters the course of the illness, its outcome, and even the structure of its symptoms. Until recently, schizophrenia was perhaps our best example—our poster child—for the “bio-bio-bio” model of psychiatric illness: genetic cause, brain alteration, pharmacologic treatment. We now have direct epidemiological evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others. Something about the social world gets under the skin. This book presents twelve case studies written by psychiatric anthropologists that help to illustrate some of the variability in the social experience of schizophrenia and that illustrate the main hypotheses about the different experience of schizophrenia in the west and outside the west--and in particular, why schizophrenia seems to have a more benign course and outcome in India. We argue that above all it is the experience of “social defeat” that increases the risk and burden of schizophrenia, and that opportunities for social defeat are more abundant in the modern west. There is a new role for anthropology in the science of schizophrenia. Psychiatric science has learned—epidemiologically, empirically, quantitatively—that our social world makes a difference. But the highly structured, specific-variable analytic methods of standard psychiatric science cannot tell us what it is about culture that has that impact. The careful observation enabled by rich ethnography allows us to see in more detail what kinds of social and cultural features may make a difference to a life lived with schizophrenia. And if we understand culture’s impact more deeply, we believe that we may improve the way we reach out to help those who struggle with our most troubling madness.

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