Blindness, Empathy, and ‘Feeling Seeing’: Literary Accounts of Blind Experience

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Paterson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jorge Luis Borges ◽  
First Person ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
Ocular Cancer ◽  
Recent Account

Since Descartes, most discussions of blindness have been in terms of what Kleegecalls ‘the Hypothetical Blind Man’, a blank-blind figure, rendered mute. In contrast, the twentieth century offered a number of personal accounts of blindness and the process of going blind, at once furthering the fascination by the sighted reader of what the blind supposedly ‘see’ whilst also personalizing the testimony. We start with what Jorge Luis Borges terms the ‘pathetic moment’ of his own becoming blind (1973) along with other first-person accounts of going blind, including the so-called ‘Blind Traveller’ James Holman, RN, Helen Keller’s celebrated autobiographies, and Oliver Sacks’ recent account of progressive blindness through ocular cancer.

Colloquial features in Word Englishes

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Collins ◽  
Xinyue Yao
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American English ◽  
World Englishes ◽  
Evolutionary Status ◽  
First Person ◽  
Functional Interpretation ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
World English ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
Grammatical Change

A powerful discourse-pragmatic agent of grammatical change in English since the mid-twentieth century has been the increasing acceptance of colloquialism. Little is known, however, about its influence on grammatical developments in regional varieties of World English other than the two inner circle ‘supervarieties’, British and American English. This paper reports findings from a corpus-based study of three grammatical categories known to be undergoing a colloquialism-related rise in contemporary English, across a range of registers in ten World Englishes: quasi-modals (have to, have got to, be going to, want to), get-passives, and first person plural inclusive let’s. In each case comparisons are drawn with non-colloquial variants: modals (must, should, will, shall), be-passives, and let us. Subsequent functional interpretation of the data is used to explore the effect upon the quantitative patterns identified of the phenomenon of colloquialism and of further factors with which it interacts (including Americanism, prescriptivism, and evolutionary status).

Self and Self-Representation in the Long Twentieth Century

2021 ◽  
pp. 295-316
Author(s):  
Christopher Peacocke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Person Concept

Six issues are salient in discussions of the first person since 1900: immunity to error through misidentification; the possibility of survival without survival of one’s body; the elusiveness of the self; the role of the first person attitudes in the explanation of action; the first person component in mental concepts; and the role of the first person simulation in explaining the actions of others. Since 1900, there have been accounts both of the nature of the first person concept, and accounts of the nature of subjects of experience. This paper discusses the achievements and limitations of these accounts in addressing the preceding six issues. These issues are also assessed against a wider range of possibilities, both for the first person and for the subject to which it refers, than are considered in this literature.

The traitor and the hero

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-154
Author(s):  
Alison Garden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jorge Luis Borges ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Sexual Intimacy ◽  
World War ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Second World

In the years immediately prior to, and of, the Second World War textual glimmers of an unnamed Roger Casement can be detected in a preoccupation with the ghostly return of Irish history. As Ireland grappled with what role she could or should play in the (impending) war, a role complicated immeasurably by the precarious border and new Northern statelet, numerous authors grappled with an Irish history compromised by unclear allegiances and betrayal. This chapter uses a collection of mid-twentieth century texts – James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ (1944) and Elizabeth Bowe’s The Heat of the Day (1948) – to map how the interlinking preoccupations of espionage, betrayal and, frequently, sexual intimacy, are deeply connected, implicitly or explicitly, to the haunting spectre of Casement.

Ciało w stanie rozpadu. Doświadczenie bomby atomowej w relacjach hibakusha

2017 ◽  
pp. 43-52
Author(s):  
Artur Szarecki
Keyword(s):  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
First Person ◽  
The World ◽  
Personal Accounts

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 are a symbolic source of all later views on a nuclear holocaust. The specificity of the Japanese narratives, however, lies in the fact that they take the first-person form, and thus they give a direct testimony of the individuals’ experience. In the article I refer to the personal accounts of the victims of the atomic bomb (the so-called hibakusha) to prove that corporeality is employed in them as the primary category of description, and functions as the existential ground on which both the horror of the explosion is constructed, and the collapse of the “world of life” of the community is experienced.

Working the Qing Palace Machine

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Moll-Murata
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Work Incentives ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
Temporal Focus

This chapter asks about the personnel working at and for the Qing court. It explores their numbers, working conditions, labour relations, and social positions with a temporal focus on the mid and late Qing. Labour relations, in accordance with the definitions of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, include the non-working, reciprocal, tributary, and commodified types. All of these types were represented at the Qing courts in various constellations. The paper outlines work incentives and sanctions based on Palace Regulations and Precedents (Qinding gongzhong xianxing zeli) and personal accounts of a palace maid and a eunuch in the early twentieth century and gives insights into the interaction of humans with the institutional mechanisms of the palace machine.

The Admiralty’s gaze: disciplining indecency and sodomy in the Edwardian fleet

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-88
Author(s):  
Mary Conley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Potential Effect ◽  
The State ◽  
Sexual Activities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Perpetrators And Victims ◽  
Disciplinary Records ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
Statistical Survey

This article examines the ways that the British Admiralty treated both acts and allegations of indecency during the early twentieth century. Despite the trope of the gay sailor, remarkably little attention has been devoted to the history of homosexuality in the Victorian and Edwardian British navy. The article historicizes the role that the state has played in disciplining sexuality and the potential effect that such efforts had upon the maintenance of discipline and efficiency of the fleet. While few personal accounts have been left, courts-martial cases offer a lens to understand how sex was expressed afloat. The source base for this article includes select courts-martial cases of indecency that are contextualized with a broader statistical survey of Admiralty disciplinary records pertaining to indecency. Research from these courts-martial records suggests the limited effects of punitive disciplinary reforms in deterring acts of indecency and the difficulties that the Admiralty faced in policing men’s sexual activities aboard ship. In particular the article finds that a significant proportion of these cases involved boy ratings as both perpetrators and victims.

Lebanon

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elise Salem
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
First Person ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Lebanese Civil War ◽  
Current Period ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Colloquial Arabic

This chapter discusses the development of the novelistic tradition in Lebanon. It first provides an overview of the complex relationship between the Lebanese novel and nation-state before considering works published prior to the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. It then examines novels that appeared during the war years (1975–1990), along with novels written either during or immediately after the war but set in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. It also looks at contemporary postwar novels that vary from realistic to fantastical, from epistolary to first-person narrative, and from fuṣ ḥa to colloquial Arabic. The chapter describes the violence that characterizes the current period, citing as examples the slew of political assassinations and abductions, Israeli attacks, Hizballah takeovers, turmoil in the Palestinian camps, sectarian battles in Tripoli, and suicide car bombings, all reflected in the contemporary Lebanese novel.

From a spatial to a subjective framework

2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Misumi Sadler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Person ◽  
Original Function ◽  
Spatial Framework ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Explicit Mention ◽  
First Person Perspective

The current study examines pre-modern and modern Japanese texts from the seventh ~ twentieth century, and documents the semantic and pragmatic change of ni-marked NPs, which include “dative subjects” and NPs which appear to refer to human referents. The data demonstrates that what are called “dative subjects” in modern Japanese are diachronically and synchronically related to the most prototypical meaning/usage of ni-marked NPs as a spatial framework. The original function underwent changes from more propositional to more subjective usages — from its most basic usage, indicating stative locations, to its metonymic usage, marking locations where individuals worthy of respect reside so as to avoid their explicit mention, and finally to its extended usage, indicating human referents. This extended usage further developed into a subjective framework for propositions in contemporary Japanese novels written in the first person perspective. This shift from propositional to expressive/subjective usages is not binary, but rather continual, and the transition from one usage to another involves each new usage coexisting with the prior ones.

Phenomenon of the narrative from a limited third person in fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 136-145
Author(s):  
I. V. Ushchapovska ◽  
Ye. V. Nehaienko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Distinctive Feature ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Person ◽  
Inner Experiences ◽  
Outer World ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Points Of View

During the last centuries, modern English literature’s methodology developed many techniques. Due to the work of numerous translators, we can evaluate the effectiveness of this toolkit. However, despite the prevalence and availability of research materials, some aspects remain unexplored. There is a completely underestimated branch, which is narratology. Despite several similar features, studies prove that narrators can be different. The main characteristic to distinguish them is the point of view. It is worth noting that every narrative contains a combination of three points of view: narrator’s, character’s, and author’s. Considering the role of the parameter in fiction, it possible to compare it with the conductor because it determines the rules according to which the work will be organized. The purpose of the proposed research is to consider the phenomenon of narrative from a limited third person in English literature, in particular, to analyze the sources of its origin, a description of its characteristics, delineation of conceptual boundaries, and the analysis of its application. A narrative from a third person is recognizable in the text. Its distinctive feature is represented with third-person pronouns. An advantage of this point of view is the ability to give more information to the reader about the outer world. It lies far beyond the perspective of the first person. In the twentieth century, the narrative from a limited third person gained popularity. Its application implies that the narrator tells the story from the perspective of one character, unlike a narrative from an omniscient third person. This approach causes the effect of closeness, while not limited to the inner experiences

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document