“What Can Literature Do?”

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
Simone de Beauvoir ◽  
Chris Fleming ◽  

In this article de Beauvoir defends a conception of literature as a kind of unveiling of something that exists outside itself, a mode of action which reveals certain truths about the world. What we call “literature” is eminently capable of grasping the world—a world which de Beauvoir, following Jean-Paul Sartre, conceives of as a “detotalized totality”; one that is real and independent of us, which exists for all, but is only graspable through our own projects and our perspectives. Yet far from keeping us stranded within our unique subjectivities, literature restores to subjective experience its generality; it allows other to “taste” the world as it exists for others. We can communicate through literature because in it our world, our languages, and our projects overlap. Ultimately, for de Beauvoir, literature is what allows us to see the world as others see it—all the while remaining, irreducibly, ourselves.

1982 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 546-549
Author(s):  
Dominick LaCapra
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
pp. 251660692199175
Author(s):  
Devansh Dubey ◽  
Payas Jain

The right to fair trial is inherent in the concept of due process of law, which now forms part of Article 21 of Indian Constitution after the Maneka Gandhi judgement. Pertinently attached with the same comes the responsibility of the criminal system to treat victims with increased awareness and sensitivity. However, the established convention shows that in planning and developing administration of criminal justice, proper attention is not given to the victims of crime in achieving goals of criminal justice; the major cause of it being that a victim is heard only as a witness not as a victim. A credible response to the said issue has emerged in the form of victim impact statement (VIS) in the modern legal system across the world. With that being said, the researchers through this article try to deduce the need for incorporating a VIS in India through the various jurisprudential understandings of what it means to be a victim, including the gap between the subjective experience of the sufferer and the interpretation of the same by others, and what restorative justice would mean to heal a victim. Establishing upon the same premise of victim status, the researchers try to suggest that the introduction of VIS, with the primary purpose of it being a therapeutic tool and not an instrument of changing the course of justice, will serve to make us reconsider our contours of a ‘victim’.


2018 ◽  
Vol 84 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Margy Alejandra Esparza Mora ◽  
Alzimiro Marcelo Conteiro Castilho ◽  
Marcelo Elias Fraga

ABSTRACT: Entomopathogenic fungi are important biological control agents throughout the world, have been the subject of intensive research for more than 100 years, and can occur at epizootic or enzootic levels in their host populations. Their mode of action against insects involves attaching a spore to the insect cuticle, followed by germination, penetration of the cuticle, and dissemination inside the insect. Strains of entomopathogenic fungi are concentrated in the following orders: Hypocreales (various genera), Onygenales (Ascosphaera genus), Entomophthorales, and Neozygitales (Entomophthoromycota).


Author(s):  
Anda Kuduma

The article is dedicated to the evaluation of creative work by poet and translator Jānis Hvoinskis, and it characterises the content and artistic qualities of Hvoinskis’s poetry process. The main focus is on the representation of the phenomenon of the city as an essential and characteristic poetic chronotope segment in Hvoinskis’s poetry. The study aims to identify and assess the characteristic kinds of city concept formation and their importance in building Hvoinskis’s artistic style. The article highlights and evaluates the techniques for designing the artistic structure of the indivisible chronotope in Hvoinskis’s poetry. This view is based on the fundamental principles of phenomenology, i.e., an individual phenomenon (phainómeno) is crucial in the reflection of consciousness, inner temporality, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and lifeworld. In turn, the highlight of poetry subject’s primary condition and existential motifs is logically linked to the main ideas of existentialism in their attitude towards the reason of an individual’s existence, relationships to life and death, freedom of will and choice, determinism. The study’s theoretical and methodological basis includes the ideas of phenomenology theoreticians (Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others) and the theories of existentialism philosophers (Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre). Hvoinskis’s poetry allows us to speak about a city as a concept, i.e., as a universal and capacious generalising notion (which includes images, notions, symbols) from which its associative components – poetry themes, motifs, images – derive. Thus, it is possible to speak about the depth dimension of the city phenomenon. The city phenomenon in Hvoinskis’s poetry is the landscape that has been adopted as the centre of the world of the lyric subject in both poetry collections that have come out to date: “Lietus pār kanālu e” (Rain over the Channel e, 2009) and “Mūza no pilsētas N” (Muse from City N, 2019). The depth dimension in Hvoinskis’s poetry appears in the natural synthesis of mythical and real chronotope, associatively impressive and plastic imagery, expressive style kindred to surrealism poetics. The city appears as a modernism project created by the logic of industrialisation, simultaneously revealing a metaphysical dimension where symbolic images as constituents of a myth preserve the memory of wholeness of the world. The emotional atmosphere of Hvoinskis’s poetry is defined by the highly existential atmosphere – despite the harsh indifference created by the city, the sadness of existential loneliness, social distance, and aversion towards life, the poet makes the tragic and ugly strangely appealing without losing the feeling of lightness and hope. The poet’s intense intuition and imagination exhibit the congeniality with the 20th-century French modernists. Hvoinskis’s poetry muse is death, which implies life.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Giersch ◽  
Thomas Huard ◽  
Sohee Park ◽  
Cherise Rosen

The experience of oneself in the world is based on sensory afferences, enabling us to reach a first-perspective perception of our environment and to differentiate oneself from the world. Visual hallucinations may arise from a difficulty in differentiating one's own mental imagery from externally-induced perceptions. To specify the relationship between hallucinations and the disorders of the self, we need to understand the mechanisms of hallucinations. However, visual hallucinations are often under reported in individuals with psychosis, who sometimes appear to experience difficulties describing them. We developed the “Strasbourg Visual Scale (SVS),” a novel computerized tool that allows us to explore and capture the subjective experience of visual hallucinations by circumventing the difficulties associated with verbal descriptions. This scale reconstructs the hallucinated image of the participants by presenting distinct physical properties of visual information, step-by-step to help them communicate their internal experience. The strategy that underlies the SVS is to present a sequence of images to the participants whose choice at each step provides a feedback toward re-creating the internal image held by them. The SVS displays simple images on a computer screen that provide choices for the participants. Each step focuses on one physical property of an image, and the successive choices made by the participants help them to progressively build an image close to his/her hallucination, similar to the tools commonly used to generate facial composites. The SVS was constructed based on our knowledge of the visual pathways leading to an integrated perception of our environment. We discuss the rationale for the successive steps of the scale, and to which extent it could complement existing scales.


Author(s):  
Gregory N. Siplivii ◽  

This article is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenology “Nothingness” by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Through research of existential phe­nomenology, the article also touches on the topic of “mood” as philosophical in­tentionality. Various kinds of “moods”, such as faintness (Verstimmung), ennui (Langeweile), burden (Geworden), inquisitiveness (Neugier), care (Sorge) and conscience (Gewissen), by Martin Heidegger’s and nausea (la nausée), anxiety (l’anxiété), dizziness (le vertige) by Jean-Paul Sartre, is considered in the context of what they may matter in an ontological sense. The phenomenologically under­stood “mood” as a general intentionality towards something is connected with the way in which the existing is able to ask about its own self. In addition, the ar­ticle forms the concept of the original ontological and phenomenological “in­completeness” of any existential experience. It is this incompleteness, this “al­ways-still-not” that provides an existential opportunity to realize oneself not only thrown into the world, but also different from the general flow of being. This “elusive emptiness” is interpreted in the article in accordance with the psychoan­alytic category of “real” (Jacques Lacan).


Author(s):  
Rakesh Bhatt ◽  
Sandeep Gupta

Nano particles are particles that exist on a nanometer scale. Nanoparticles exist in our surrounding either naturally or created by human activities. As per Commission of European Union (2011), a nano-object needs only one of its characteristic dimensions to be in the range of 1-100nm to be classed as a nanoparticle even if its other dimensions are outside that range. Nanoparticles have revolutionized the world through the introduction of a unique class of material and consumer products in many fields due to production of innovative materials and devices. Despite their unique benefits and utility in daily activities, this could result in undesirable changes in the environment and affect the workplace. Carbon-based nanoparticles, oxides of metals, and natural inorganic compounds can have biological effects on the environment and human health. This chapter deals with the nanoparticles and their mode of action in the environment.


Author(s):  
Brian Rogers

The word ‘perception’ can be used in two different ways. It can refer to our experience of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling objects and individuals around us. It can also refer to the processes that allow us to extract information from the patterns of energy that impinge on our sense organs. Thinking about perception as a set of processes has the advantage that it includes situations where there is no subjective experience. ‘What is perception?’ explains that sometimes our perceptual systems can be fooled and we experience illusions. Is this because of past experience and our knowledge of the world, or is it that we are not extracting the information in the patterns of energy reaching our senses?


Author(s):  
Christina Howells

Sartre was a philosopher of paradox: an existentialist who attempted a reconciliation with Marxism, a theorist of freedom who explored the notion of predestination. From the mid-1930s to the late-1940s, Sartre was in his ‘classical’ period. He explored the history of theories of imagination leading up to that of Husserl, and developed his own phenomenological account of imagination as the key to the freedom of consciousness. He analysed human emotions, arguing that emotion is a freely chosen mode of relationship to the outside world. In his major philosophical work, L’Être et le Néant(Being and Nothingness) (1943a), Sartre distinguished between consciousness and all other beings: consciousness is always at least tacitly conscious of itself, hence it is essentially ‘for itself’ (pour-soi) – free, mobile and spontaneous. Everything else, lacking this self-consciousness, is just what it is ‘in-itself’ (en-soi); it is ‘solid’ and lacks freedom. Consciousness is always engaged in the world of which it is conscious, and in relationships with other consciousnesses. These relationships are conflictual: they involve a battle to maintain the position of subject and to make the other into an object. This battle is inescapable. Although Sartre was indeed a philosopher of freedom, his conception of freedom is often misunderstood. Already in Being and Nothingness human freedom operates against a background of facticity and situation. My facticity is all the facts about myself which cannot be changed – my age, sex, class of origin, race and so on; my situation may be modified, but it still constitutes the starting point for change and roots consciousness firmly in the world. Freedom is not idealized by Sartre; it is always within a given set of circumstances, after a particular past, and against the expectations of both myself and others that I make my free choices. My personal history conditions the range of my options. From the 1950s onwards Sartre became increasingly politicized and was drawn to attempt a reconciliation between existentialism and Marxism. This was the aim of the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) (1960) which recognized more fully than before the effect of historical and material conditions on individual and collective choice. An attempt to explore this interplay in action underlies both his biography of Flaubert and his own autobiography.


Hypatia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-536
Author(s):  
Kimberly S. Love

This article investigates the role of shame in shaping the epistolary form and aesthetic structure of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I argue that the epistolary framing presents a crisis in the development of Celie's shamed self‐consciousness. To explain the connection between shame and Celie's self‐consciousness, I build on Jean Paul Sartre's theory of existentialism and explore three phases of Celie's evolution as it is represented in three phrases that I identify as significant transitions in the text: “I am,” “But I'm here,” and “It mine.” The first section examines how shame fractures Celie's self‐consciousness; the second focuses on how Celie positions and locates herself in the world; and the third explains how Celie mobilizes shame by connecting her self‐consciousness to a past that is shameful but also generative. I conclude by considering the novel's emergence in the Cosby/Reagan era in order to illuminate the mutual constitution of black familial pride and black racial shame.


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