Costume and the Self-Extension: The Functions of Costume in Elmer Gantry from the Perspective of Material Culture

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 474-478
Author(s):  
J.W. Luo ◽  
K. Yu

As the other creation of material culture, clothes have concrete forms, and reflect the wearer’s taste and appreciation of beauty while provide certain social significance. This paper attempts to analyze the connection between the costume of the hero Elmer Gantry in the novel Elmer Gantry and his self-identity, then to discover how the novelist, Sinclair Lewis ,the first Nobel Prize winner in the USA, by describing the costume of the character, explores the different inner self-identities of one man.

Author(s):  
T.S. Rukmani

Hindu thought traces its different conceptions of the self to the earliest extant Vedic sources composed in the Sanskrit language. The words commonly used in Hindu thought and religion for the self are jīva (life), ātman (breath), jīvātman (life-breath), puruṣa (the essence that lies in the body), and kṣetrajña (one who knows the body). Each of these words was the culmination of a process of inquiry with the purpose of discovering the ultimate nature of the self. By the end of the ancient period, the personal self was regarded as something eternal which becomes connected to a body in order to exhaust the good and bad karma it has accumulated in its many lives. This self was supposed to be able to regain its purity by following different spiritual paths by means of which it can escape from the circle of births and deaths forever. There is one more important development in the ancient and classical period. The conception of Brahman as both immanent and transcendent led to Brahman being identified with the personal self. The habit of thought that tried to relate every aspect of the individual with its counterpart in the universe (Ṛg Veda X. 16) had already prepared the background for this identification process. When the ultimate principle in the subjective and objective spheres had arrived at their respective ends in the discovery of the ātman and Brahman, it was easy to equate the two as being the same spiritual ‘energy’ that informs both the outer world and the inner self. This equation had important implications for later philosophical growth. The above conceptions of the self-identity question find expression in the six systems of Hindu thought. These are known as āstikadarśanas or ways of seeing the self without rejecting the authority of the Vedas. Often, one system or the other may not explicitly state their allegiance to the Vedas, but unlike Buddhism or Jainism, they did not openly repudiate Vedic authority. Thus they were āstikadarśanas as opposed to the others who were nāstikadarśanas. The word darśana for philosophy is also significant if one realizes that philosophy does not end with only an intellectual knowing of one’s self-identity but also culminates in realizing it and truly becoming it.


Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
A. Yacob ◽  
S. Veeramani

In the novel, Sweet Tooth, McEwan has employed an ethical code of conduct called, Dysfunction of Relationship. The analysis shows that he tries to convey something extraordinary to the readers. If it is not even the reader to understand such a typical thing, He himself represents a new ethical code of conduct. The character of the novel, Serena is almost a person who is tuned to such a distinct one. It is clear that the character of this type is purely representational. Understanding reality based on situation and ethics has been a new field of study in terms of Post- Theory. Intervening to such aspect of Interpretation, this research article establishes a new study in the writings of Ian McEwan. In the novel, Dysfunction is not on the ‘Self’ but it is on the ‘Other’. The author tries to integrate the function of the Character Serena, instead of fragmenting the self. Hence, Fragmentation makes sense only in the dysfunction of relationship.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-177
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała

Abstract This paper analyses Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008) as a narrative informed by a revisionary and critical attitude to nineteenth-century ideologies, which is common to, and, indeed, stereotypical in much neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on the biographies of two eminent Victorians: Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan constructs their fictional counterparts as split between a respectable, public persona and a dark, inner self. While all the Victorian characters are represented as “other” than their public image, the focus in the novel, and in this paper, is on Dickens’s struggle to reconcile social propriety with his personal discontent. Flanagan represents this conflict through Dickens’s response to the allegations that starving survivors of Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition resorted to cannibalism. The zeal with which the Victorian writer refuted such reports reveals his own difficulty in living up to social and moral norms. The paper argues that the main link between the different narrative strands in the novel is the challenge they collectively pose to the distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.


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.


Author(s):  
Maher Ben Moussa

This article examines the issue of child agency and empowerment in Mildred’s D. Taylor’s novel Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry. This theme is addressed by some critics who come to the conclusion that Taylor’s protagonist, the young girl Cassie Logan, develops agency and subversive subjectivity in the course of the novel. This study challenges such readings to argue that the ending of Taylor’s novel does not reflect empowerment; and consequently does not support such conclusions. Through expanding self-in-relation theory to feminism as an interpretive tool, this paper suggests that Cassie Logan’s subversive agency remains partial and incomplete because she fails to engage in an inter-connected and constructive relationship with the ‘other’. Cassie’s empowerment is partial because she fails to exert it in the larger community of African Americans and whites, that otherwise could have stimulated a greater impetus for activism. This study concludes that agency and subjectivity are constructed and empowered within the community which is larger than the self and the family.  


Author(s):  
Rasmus Navntoft

The German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann (1875-1955) perceived World War I as a moral battle against the civilization project rooted in the European enlightenment. Like many other German intellectuals of that time, Mann stresses an opposition between the concept of culture and that of civilization – this conflict is seen as inherent in the European soul – and defends Germany’s right to remain a culture that does not evolve into a civilization. The concept of culture can contain irrational features such as mystical, bloody and terrifying teachings, whereas civilization is characterized by reason, enlightenment, skepticism and hostility towards passion and emotion. In his major work The Magic Mountain (1924) however, Mann tries to overcome this opposition and displays, through the metaphors of the text, that a new humanism is dependent upon a mystical and completely illogical balance between culture and civilization. The main character of the novel does not succeed in finding this balance. But, nonetheless, Mann continues to see the possibilities of a new humanism through this perspective in order to point out a humanistic hope in the shadesof two European world wars.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Wening Udasmoro

In literature, questions of the self and the other are frequently presented. The identity politics that gained prominence after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001 has occupied considerable space in this debate throughout the globe, including in France. One example of a novel dealing with the self and other is Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (2015). This article attempts to explore the processes of selfing and othering in this work. The politics of identity that seems to present Muslims and Islam as the other and French as the self is also extended to other identities and aspects involved in the novel. This article attempts to show, first, how the French author Houellebecq positions the self and other in Soumission; second, the type of self and other the novel focuses on; and third, how its selfing and othering processes reveal the gender hierarchy and social categorization of French society. It finds that the novel presents a hierarchy in its narrative through which characters are positioned based on their gender and sexual orientation, as well as their age and ethnic heritage.


2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-530
Author(s):  
Cara Weber

Victorian writers often focus questions of ethics through scenes of sympathetic encounters that have been conceptualized, both by Victorian thinkers and by their recent critics, as a theater of identification in which an onlooking spectator identifies with a sufferer. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) critiques this paradigm, revealing its negation of otherness and its corresponding fixation of the self as an identity, and offers an alternative conception of relationship that foregrounds the presence and distinctness of the other and the open-endedness of relationship. The novel develops its critique through an analysis of women's experience of courtship and marriage, insisting upon the appropriateness ofmarriage as a site for the investigation of contemporary ethical questions. In her depiction of Rosamond, Eliot explores the identity-based paradigm of the spectacle of others, and shows how its conception of selfhood leaves the other isolated, precluding relationship. Rosamond's trajectory in the novel enacts the identity paradigm's relation to skeptical anxieties about self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and reveals such anxieties to occur with particular insistence around images of femininity. By contrast, Dorothea's development in ethical self-awareness presents an alternative to Rosamond's participation in the identity paradigm. In Dorothea's experience the self emerges as a process, an ongoing practice of expression. The focus on expression in the sympathetic or conflictual encounter, rather than on identity, enables the overcoming of the identity paradigm's denial of otherness, and grounds a productive sympathy capable of informing ethical action.


Author(s):  
Pamela Anderson

A reading of Luce Irigaray suggests the possibility of tracing sexual difference in philosophical accounts of personal identity. In particular, I argue that Irigaray raises the possibility of moving beyond the aporia of the other which lies at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's account of self-identity. My contention is that the self conceived in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another is male insofar as it is dependent upon the patriarchal monotheism which has shaped Western culture both socially and economically. Nevertheless there remains the possibility of developing Ricoeur's reference to 'the trace of the Other' in order to give a non-essential meaning to sexual difference. Such meaning will emerge when (i) both men and women have identities as subjects, and (ii) the difference between them can be expressed. I aim to elucidate both conditions by appropriating Irigaray's 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love.'


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 23-35
Author(s):  
Marta Wojtyra

The author presents the reception of Wisława Szymborska’s work. She shows how the Nobel Prize received by the writer in 1996 caused a sudden increase in interest in her work. This interest has been shown from two perspectives: one is a fascination with poetry and an attempt to put the Nobel Prize winner on a monument, against which the poet herself strongly protested, and the other is the perspective of an open reluctance, not to say hate, resulting from indicating Szymborska’s youthful fascination with the ideals of socialism. The article shows how the Internet has become a platform that has helped to promote, above all, the knowledge about the author of the poems and, to a lesser extent, reflection on her work.


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