scholarly journals Apples and Pears: Symbolism and Influence in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Apple Tree’ and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’

Author(s):  
Setara Pracha

This essay offers a parallel reading of two stories, ‘Bliss’ by Katherine Mansfield and ‘The Apple Tree’ by Daphne du Maurier, revealing a hitherto unexamined yet fruitful area of research. Dramatic irony, organic unity and liminal spaces are identified and discussed in terms of how these are used to represent subconscious and conscious perceptions of reality. The plots incorporate symbols from well-known myths to suggest extreme mental states in narratives that invite the reader to occupy psychological spaces of delusion and fantasy. Material from previously unpublished letters reveals the extent to which Mansfield influenced du Maurier’s writing and this close analysis demonstrates how examining these writers in tandem provides a valuable mean of accessing their work in a new way. Du Maurier’s critical reputation is current undergoing a process of revision which echoes the way in which Mansfield has come to be increasingly regarded as one of the ‘high priestesses’ of modernism.

Author(s):  
Laura J. Shepherd

Chapter 5 outlines the ways in which civil society is largely associated with “women” and the “local,” as a spatial and conceptual domain, and how this has implications for how we understand political legitimacy and authority. The author argues that close analysis reveals a shift in the way in which the United Nations as a political entity conceives of civil society over time, from early engagement with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to the more contemporary articulation of civil society as consultant or even implementing partner. Contemporary UN peacebuilding discourse, however, constitutes civil society as a legitimating actor for UN peacebuilding practices, as civil society organizations are the bearers/owners of certain forms of (local) knowledge.


Film Studies ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-29
Author(s):  
Daniel Morgan

This paper is organised around an analysis of a short sequence from Godard‘s Pierrot le fou (1965). Although the sequence appears to be a series of repetitions, close analysis reveals it to be a single event presented in a carefully fragmented order. This unexpected fact generates questions about how to account for the relation between our initial beliefs about the organisation of the sequence and our knowledge of its actual structure. We come to see, in an intimate way, that reflection on the way we watch and understand film is one of the central themes of Godard‘s filmmaking.


2002 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Olin

IN CAMERA LUCIDA, ROLAND BARTHES'S subject is the significance of photography's defining characteristic: the photograph's inseparable relation to its subject, that which ''must have been'' in front of the camera's lens. Or so it would seem. The present reading of Camera Lucida argues that Barthes's essay actually shows photography's nature as dependent not only on the intimate relation to its object, commonly termed ''indexical,'' but in accord with its relation to its user, its beholder. An examination of Barthes's encounters with photographs in Camera Lucida reveals the way in which identification and misidentification figure into the viewing of images, and suggests that contact between the beholder and the photograph actually eclipses the relation between the photograph and its subject. Barthes's focus on the emotional response of the viewer disguises the fact that he misidentified key details in Camera Lucida's photographs, most significantly in a 1927 portrait by James Van Der Zee and in the ''Winter Garden Photograph.'' This latter photograph of Barthes's recently deceased mother as a small child is famously not illustrated in the book. This essay argues that it is fictional. These ''mistakes'' suggest that Camera Lucida undermines its ostensible basis in indexicality. The subject did not have to be in front of the camera after all. The present rereading of the text from this point of view articulates a notion of performativity according to which the nature of the contact that exists between the image and the viewer informs the way an image is understood. Barthes's desire to find his mother again through her photograph to a large extent acts out his desire to re(per)form and make permanent his relation to her, a desire that he elucidates in the process of describing his search for her picture and his reaction to it when he finds it. This performative element is charged with identification; the person the narrator (Barthes) seeks, in his mother, is himself. A close analysis of the ''Winter Garden Photograph,'' as described by Barthes, shows how performances of identification are inscribed with gender and familial configurations.


Author(s):  
Germán Vargas Guillén ◽  
Mary Julieth Guerrero Criollo

El artículo reconoce los aportes que la Dra. Julia V. Iribarne realizó en torno a la ética en perspectiva fenomenológica, especialmente en su obra De la ética a la metafísica. Con base en estas contribuciones se responden tres preguntas: ¿cómo la generatividad y la temporalidad se convierten en estructuras de la eticidad? ¿Cómo hay, fenomenológicamente, una metafísica en cuanto se conoce la mismidad y la alteridad trascendentalmente? ¿Es Dios para la ética un fictum o un factum? A modo de colofón se alude a la centralidad de la mente y el esclarecimiento de los estados mentales como avance en el fundamento y despliegue de la ética.This article identify the contributions that Dra. Julia V. Iribarne made around ethics in phenomenological perspective and especially her work Ethics in the way of metaphysics. According to her contributions we could answer these three questions: How generativity and temporality becomes structures of the ethics? How is possible, phenomenologically, a metaphysics if we know self-hood and otherness transcendentally? Is God a fictum or factum for the ethics? As a final reference, we will talk about the centrality of mind and we will try to clarify the rationale and mental states like a development of the ethics.


Author(s):  
Kenneth Chan

The past two decades have witnessed the resurgence of Chinese cinemas on the global stage. As Chinese directors confront the notion of remaking American films, they do so with the assurance that there is a potential global market for their product, which in turn might foster a more creative reimagining of a Chinese version that can stand on its own artistic merits as transnational Chinese cinema. This chapter undertakes a close analysis of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (Zhang Yimou 2009) as a transnational film remake to demonstrate how the film confidently reinvents the Coen Brothers’ original film, Blood Simple (1984) as an original in its own right. The analysis demonstrates the way in which the remake is infused with Zhang Yimou’s brand of cinematic pragmatism and the way in which the cooption of a transgressive politics of gender and postcoloniality becomes a route toward transnational appeal.


2019 ◽  
pp. 96-112
Author(s):  
Emma Short

This chapter compares Bowen to Katherine Mansfield. Neither English nor Irish, but a hybrid of both, Bowen, like Mansfield, does not belong to one country, existing instead in an unstable, liminal sphere between the two. Bowen’s admiration for Mansfield has been well-documented, and while she was undoubtedly influenced by Mansfield’s style, technique and talent, this chapter foregrounds a deeper connection between the two authors in their shared, fractured histories, and in the effect that this had on their writing. Charting the persistence of in-between spaces across the work of Bowen and Mansfield, the chapter considers the way in which the use of such spaces by the two writers not only signifies their shared histories of hybridity and dislocation, but also enables them to interrogate the shifting position of women in modernity. The chapter sketches out a taxonomy of such spaces in Bowen and Mansfield’s narratives, and in doing so reveals the dialogues operating across the writings of these authors through the spaces of the in between.


2019 ◽  
pp. 132-146
Author(s):  
Deryn Rees-Jones

This chapter raises important issues about Bishop’s aesthetic response to a double, but crucially different set of traumas during infancy (death of her father and ‘disappearance’ of her mother) and argues that repetition in Bishop’s writing signals specific anxieties about loss. The compulsion to repeat, Freud writes, takes ‘the place of the impulse to remember’. Christopher Bollas’ concept of the ‘unthought known’ is applied to consider Bishop’s negotiation with both what is known and yet cannot be spoken. Drawing closely on Bishop’s original drafts, this chapter offers a close analysis of the poem ‘Questions of Travel’ to think about its wider importance as the title of Bishop’s 1965 volume. In paying particular attention to the way in which the volume’s chronological development can be read in counterpoint to its final order on publication, I argue that in the volume Bishop finds an important aesthetic resolution to set against a biographical narrative.


Author(s):  
Frank Jackson

We believe that there is coffee over there; we believe the special theory of relativity; we believe the Vice-Chancellor; and some of us believe in God. But plausibly what is fundamental is believing that something is the case – believing a proposition, as it is usually put. To believe a theory is to believe the propositions that make up the theory, to believe a person is to believe some proposition advanced by them; and to believe in God is to believe the proposition that God exists. Thus belief is said to be a propositional attitude or intentional state: to believe is to take the attitude of belief to some proposition. It is about what its propositional object is about (God, coffee, or whatever). We can think of the propositional object of a belief as the way the belief represents things as being – its content, as it is often called. We state what we believe with indicative sentences in ‘that’-clauses, as in ‘Mary believes that the Democrats will win the next election’. But belief in the absence of language is possible. A dog may believe that there is food in the bowl in front of it. Accordingly philosophers have sought accounts of belief that allow a central role to sentences – it cannot be an accident that finding the right sentence is the way to capture what someone believes – while allowing that creatures without a language can have beliefs. One way of doing this is to construe beliefs as relations to inner sentences somehow inscribed in the brain. On this view although dogs do not have a public language, to the extent that they have beliefs they have something sentence-like in their heads. An alternative tradition focuses on the way belief when combined with desire leads to behaviour, and analyses belief in terms of behavioural dispositions or more recently as the internal state that is, in combination with other mental states, responsible for the appropriate behavioural dispositions. An earlier tradition associated with the British Empiricists views belief as a kind of pale imitation of perceptual experience. But recent work on belief largely takes for granted a sharp distinction between belief and the various mental images that may or may not accompany it.


Vivarium ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Lenz

AbstractThis paper reconstructs a controversy between a pupil of Alberic of Paris and Peter Abelard which illustrates two competing ways of reconciling different ancient traditions. I shall argue that their accounts of the relation between sentences and thoughts are incompatible with one another, although they rely on the same set of sources. The key to understanding their different views on assertive and non-assertive sentences lies in their disparate views about the structure of thoughts: whereas Abelard takes thoughts to be compositional, the opponent's arguments seem to rely on the premise that the mental states which correspond to sentences cannot be compositional in the way that Abelard suggested. Although, at a first glance, Abelard's position appears to be more coherent, it turns out that his opponent convincingly argues against weaknesses in Abelard's semantic theory by proposing a pragmatic approach.


Author(s):  
Berit Brogaard

We often communicate with each other about how the things we see visually appear to us when we want to achieve a goal like finding the perfect end table, deciding what to eat or issuing a warning. But what do we say when we talk about how things visually appear to us? Can our talk about appearances tell us anything about the nature of visual perception? In this book, the author delves into these questions, defending the view that in spite of all its imprecision, the language used to report on how things look provides important insight into the nature of visual perception. In chapters that explore the semantics of ‘appear’ words and the nature of the mental states they are used to express, she argues that considerations of how we talk and think about our experiences can help us establish that our visual experiences are akin to mental states, such as belief and desire, in being relations to contents, or propositions, that represent things and features in the perceiver’s environment. Along the way, she argues against alternative theories of what our talk about looks can tell us, including those of Chisholm, Jackson, Byrne, Johnston, Martin, Brewer, Travis, Siegel, Schellenberg, and Glüer. Finally, she examines how our talk about visual experience compares to our talk about how things sound, smell, taste and feel. This book is thus an extended defense of the view that experience in creatures like us is representational.


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