Katherine Mansfield and Psychology

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
William James ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Post War ◽  
Masculinity Crisis ◽  
Critical Interest

Like many modernist writers, Katherine Mansfield was resistant to what she called the ‘“mushroom growth” of cheap psychoanalysis’, while at the same time she acknowledged the mutual imbrication of psychoanalysis and literature, describing her creative process in terms of the garnering of ‘subconscious wisdom’. This volume explores the multiple ways in which Mansfield’s fiction resonates with the landscapes opened up by psychology and psychoanalysis. In line with the recent surge of critical interest in early psychology, the contributors read Mansfield’s work alongside figures like William James, Théodule Ribot and Henri Bergson to open up new perspectives on the representation of effect and emotion in her fiction. While these essays trace strands within the intellectual milieu in which Mansfield came of age, others explore the intricate interplay between Mansfield’s fiction and Freudian theory, seeing her work as emblematic of the uncanny doubling of modernist literature and psychoanalysis. They reveal, inter alia, an unexpectedly close relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and M. B. Oxon’s Cosmic Anatomy (an occult book which fascinated Mansfield) and draw on Freud and Lacan to draw out the specificity of Mansfield’s engagement with post-war masculinity crisis. Together, the essays open up novel ways of thinking about fiction of unrivalled psychological complexity.

Katherine Mansfield and Translation

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Specific Interest ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Critical Interest

Our understanding of Anglophone modernism has been transformed by recent critical interest in translation. The central place of translation in the circulation of aesthetic and political ideas in the early twentieth century has been underlined, for example, as well as translation’s place in the creative and poetic dynamics of key modernist texts. This volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies offers a timely assessment of Mansfield’s place in such exchanges. As a reviewer, she developed a specific interest in literatures in translation, as well as showing a keen awareness of the translator’s presence in the text. Throughout her life, Mansfield engaged with new literary texts through translation, either translating proficiently herself, or working alongside a co-translator to explore the semantic and stylistic challenges of partially known languages. The metaphorical resonances of translating, transition and marginality also remain key features of her writing throughout her life. Meanwhile, her enduring popularity abroad is ensured by translations of her works, all of which reveal sociological and even ideological agendas of their own, an inevitable reflection of individual translators’ readings of her works, and the literary traditions of the new country and language of reception. The contributions to this volume refine and extend our appreciation of her specifically trans-linguistic and trans-literary lives. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of translation on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of translation on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism.

‘For the life of him he could not remember’: Post-war Memory, Mourning and Masculinity Crisis in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avishek Parui
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Post War ◽  
Masculinity Crisis ◽  
The Way

This article examines the entanglement between masculinity crisis and traumatic memory as described in Katherine Mansfield's short story ‘The Fly’. By exploring the way Mansfield depicts the figure of the ‘boss’ in the story as symbolic of the stubborn resistance against the natural organic order of time, the article investigates how such a memory project of preservation fails with all its masculinist hubris. Drawing on Pierre Janet’s notions of traumatic memory and narrative memory and on Freud’stheory of traumatic repetition and castration, the article attempts to locate the politics of memory in Mansfield’s story alongside the politics of masculinity that perversely equates male hysteria with performance and prestige.

The Practical Turn

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Michael Dummett ◽  
Simon Blackburn ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Popular View ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Charles Peirce

The pragmatist approach to philosophical problems focuses on the role of disputed notions—for example, truth, value, causation, probability, necessity—in our practices. The insight at the heart of pragmatism is that our analysis of such philosophical concepts must start with, and remain linked to, human experience and inquiry. As a self-conscious philosophical stance, pragmatism arose in America in the late nineteenth century, in the work of writers such as Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. While popular wisdom would have it that British philosophy thoroughly rejected that of its American cousins, that popular view is coming into dispute. Many distinguished British philosophers have also taken this practical turn, even if few have explicitly identified themselves as pragmatists. This book traces and assesses the influence of American pragmatism on British philosophy, with particular emphasis on Cambridge in the inter-war period (for instance, the work of Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein), on post-war Oxford (for instance, the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, P. F. Strawson and Michael Dummett), and on recent developments (for instance, the work of Simon Blackburn and Huw Price). There is a comprehensive introduction to the topic and the history of pragmatism, and Price and Blackburn, in their contributions, add their most recent thoughts to the debates.

scholarly journals Written Out of Life: The Death of Keith Vaughan and his Journal

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. LW&D223-LW&D241
Author(s):  
Alex Belsey
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Journal Writing ◽  
Conscientious Objector ◽  
Final Volume ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Post War

When the British painter Keith Vaughan (1912–77) ingested a lethal cocktail of barbiturates, having made the decision to end his life after a long struggle with cancer, there was only one thing left to do: write one final entry in his journal, the lifelong literary account he had commenced in 1939 and maintained ever since. Vaughan’s journal is an extraordinary document, its 61 volumes spanning 38 years of impassioned ideas and personal development from his difficult wartime years as a conscientious objector through his post-war life as a successful but troubled artist. This paper focuses on the final volume of Vaughan’s journal, commenced in August 1975 and ending on the morning of 4 November 1977. It considers how Vaughan used journal-writing at a time of great suffering to reflect upon his life and his reasons for leaving it. By revealing the crucial role that Vaughan’s final volume played in justifying that his life had ceased to have forward momentum or meaning, this paper argues for the close relationship between the practice of journal-writing and questions of futurity, positing Vaughan as an exemplary author-subject who uses diary or journal forms to postulate a potential future and their relationship to it.

scholarly journals "... from teat-jerk to quidnunc": A.R.D. Fairburn and the Formation of an Ideology of Architectural Nationalism in New Zealand

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 44-51
Author(s):  
Peter Wood
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Royal Institute ◽  
Social Responsibilities ◽  
Code Of Practice ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Post War

In 1934 ARD Fairburn published the essay "Some Aspects of N.Z. Art and Letters" in the journal Art in New Zealand. In it he criticized Alan Mulgan's book Home: A Colonial's Adventure, which had been first published in 1927, and was reprinted in 1934. It was, in Fairburn's view, an account unacceptably steeped in romantic melancholy for a distant motherland that was no longer as germane as it had once been. Instead he proposed looking to the American Transcendentalists Twain and Thoreau for direction. Also published in 1934 was a small book from the New Zealand Institute of Architects called Building in New Zealand. In it the NZIA made a case for the professional and social responsibilities of the architect in New Zealand and it is best described as conservative. However it is pertinent that this book was edited by Alan Mulgan. Here the role of the architect in cast in practical terms that bear direct comparison to the code of practice issue for the Royal Institute of British Architects. Mulgan's contribution to discussion on New Zealand architecture is limited to this publication, and it is likely his editorship of Building in New Zealand was motivated more by depression economics than architectural interest. However this book is still an important summary of the profession at that time, and it links architecture to Mulgan's romantic writings though the reiteration of a colonial fountainhead. By contrast Fairburn would go on to champion a national voice for New Zealand's writers, artists, and architects. Moreover he established a close relationship with Vernon Brown, and was to associate with Bill Wilson and the Architectural Group. Indeed, the limited writings available from these architectural associates often echo Fairburn's 1934 call for an antipodean "honesty" in "our" buildings. It is in the immediate post war period that the emergence of a national architectural expression in New Zealand is most celebrated, being lead in Auckland by Brown, Wilson, and the Architectural Group. However an examination of the writings by Fairburn and Mulgan shows that the elements of the debate were already in place well before then. I conclude that the antecedent for the emergence of debate on a national architectural character appears, however unintentionally, in the 1934 writings of Fairburn and Mulgan. Critical to this is discussion on we mean by "honest" architectural work.

ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981),

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sajjad Rizvi ◽  
Ahab Bdaiwi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Realist Theory ◽  
Mulla Sadra ◽  
Ontological Proof ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Post War

In modern Shiʿi intellectual history, Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981) stands out as the most important and influential philosopher and exegete in the twentieth century. The chapter is divided into parts: the first an account detailing his career and the intellectual milieu in which he lived; the second an exposition of his philosophical ideas, showing that Ṭabāṭabāʾī (1) formulated a realist theory of epistemology to combat skepticism; (2) rehearsed the traditional ontological proof for the existence of God for the new-theology of post-war Shiʿi intellectual history; (3) went to great lengths to demonstrate how philosophy could contribute to a more rigorous theological response to modernity; (4) provided the philosophy of being, championed by Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1635), with a new impetus by stressing above all else the rationalistic facet of the tradition; and (5) reoriented philosophy to augment theological positions articulated in response to the challenges of modernity.

Me or I? The Search for the Self in the Early Writings of Katherine Mansfield

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Edensor
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
William James ◽  
The Self ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
Human Psyche

Katherine Mansfield’s diaries and letters reveal a lifelong concern with notions of the self. In this paper, I examine two of Mansfield’s early stories, ‘Vignette: Summer in Winter’ and ‘The Education of Audrey’, to explore how her enquiry into the construction of the self in fiction demonstrates some affinity with the psychological theories of William James and Sigmund Freud. Mansfield’s approach is intuitive, and this gives rise to contradiction as she experiments with the lexicon of the self and with the form and structure of her stories. Whilst Mansfield posed no ‘theory’ of the self in an academic sense, her fiction does however, illustrate her continuing attempts to puzzle out, and to accurately represent, the complex and mutable nature of the human psyche.

Katherine Mansfield and Vitalist Psychology

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Hanson
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
The Self ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Changing Environments ◽  
Different Levels

This essay argues that the vitalist psychology of William James and particularly Henri Bergson shaped Mansfield’s understanding of the mutability and multiplicity of the self. It suggests that Bergson’s emphasis on the heterogeneity of consciousness finds an echo in the distinctiveness of Mansfield’s characterisation, as she tracks the fluid interplay between different levels and intensities of consciousness. Drawing on the vitalist understanding of personality, it argues that Mansfield tracks the expression and transmission of emotion between characters in terms of affect and involuntary action, disclosing the porosity of the self and its openness to the unpredictability of human interactions. Delving further into Bergson’s account of consciousness, it suggests that Mansfield shares his understanding of the self as caught between a virtual past and a virtual future, transformed moment by moment under the pressure of a past which breaks through into the present and a future which is constitutively unknowable. For Mansfield as for a number of modernist writers, character is framed in terms of a situational self which is responsive to the changing environments in which it finds itself, and consciousness is rendered as endlessly productive of novelty, of that which cannot be predicted from the familiar and already known.

scholarly journals "Id", "ego" i deficyt superego w obrazie psychologicznym bohaterów powieści "Zazdrość i medycyna" Michała Choromańskiego

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (10) ◽  
pp. 133-148
Author(s):  
Wiesław Setlak
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Psychological Realism ◽  
The World

Id, ego and superego deficit in a psychological image of the protagonists of ″Jealousy and Medicine″ by Michał Choromański Jealousy and Medicine – a novel by Michał Choromański, published in 1933, evidently breaks out of the convention of psychological realism thriving on the achievements of behavioural psychology, dominant in the interwar period. Choromański’s work is an innovatory experiment on composition and thought; the world shown in the novel resembles a psychotic maligna or oneiric vision. The whole novel prompts interdisciplinary research using psychoanalysis of Sigismund Freud, Charles Mauron’s psychocritical method, being a transformation of classical Freudian psychoanalysis (with Otto Rank’s modifications), contemporary psychology of a creative process and the methodologies of psychological research which are accepted and occasionally used by contemporary literary studies. Choromański’s novel is deemed the most discerning studium of jealousy in interwar literature.

Fashion

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Breward
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Jet Lag ◽  
Time Zone ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Consumer Expectations ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Post War

In 1947, the Parisian couturier Christian Dior launched his celebrated New Look, a collection that offered an aspirational alternative to the fabric restrictions and low consumer expectations of post-war austerity – seemingly re-routing fashionable trends in Europe and North America in the space of a season. The diarist had unwittingly become first a witness to, and then a participant in, the mysterious process of fashion change. Suffering from a version of sartorial jet-lag, she faced an oncoming tide of novelties, fresh versions of the fashion designer's diktat, while her own wardrobe remained in another, less contemporary, time zone. She knew that she must adapt or be overtaken. Though it would be difficult to re-enact this precise scenario today or in the more distant past, it does present some generic issues concerning fashion's close relationship with novelty, change, competition, guilt, and desire that will be familiar to historians of consumption in the early modern period and the contemporary. Fashion's relation to time and space has formed a fascinating context in which to consider the development of consumerism.

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