scholarly journals Empowerment and Collaborative Agency in Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry

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.  

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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 479-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianpiero Petriglieri ◽  
Jennifer Louise Petriglieri ◽  
Jack Denfeld Wood

Through a longitudinal, qualitative study of 55 managers engaged in mobile careers across organizations, industries, and countries, and pursuing a one-year international master’s of business administration (MBA), we build a process model of the crafting of portable selves in temporary identity workspaces. Our findings reveal that contemporary careers in general, and temporary membership in an institution, fuel people’s efforts to craft portable selves: selves endowed with definitions, motives, and abilities that can be deployed across roles and organizations over time. Two pathways for crafting a portable self—one adaptive, the other exploratory—emerged from the interaction of individuals’ aims and concerns with institutional resources and demands. Each pathway involved developing a coherent understanding of the self in relation to others and to the institution that anchored participants to their current organization while preparing them for future ones. The study shows how institutions that host members temporarily can help them craft selves that afford a sense of agentic direction and enduring connection, tempering anxieties and bolstering hopes associated with mobile working lives. It also suggests that institutions serving as identity workspaces for portable selves may remain attractive and extend their cultural influence in an age of workforce mobility.


Author(s):  
Erel Shvil ◽  
Herbert Krauss ◽  
Elizabeth Midlarsky

The construct “self” appears in diverse forms in theories about what it is to be a person. As the sense of “self” is typically assessed through personal reports, differences in its description undoubtedly reflect significant differences in peoples’ apperception of self. This report describes the development, reliability, and factorial structure of the Experience of Sense of Self (E-SOS), an inventory designed to assess one’s perception of self in relation to the person’s perception of various potential “others.” It does so using Venn diagrams to depict and quantify the experienced overlap between the self and “others.” Participant responses to the instrument were studied through Exploratory Factor Analysis. This yielded a five-factor solution: 1) Experience of Positive Sensation; 2) Experience of Challenges; 3) Experience of Temptations; 4) Experience of Higher Power; and 5) Experience of Family. The items comprising each of these were found to produce reliable subscales. Further research with the E-SOS and suggestions for its use are offered.  DOI:10.2458/azu_jmmss_v4i2_shvil


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.


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.


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.


Oles Ulianenko, one of the most talented and controversial Ukrainian writers of these days, has been dead for ten years. His literary works did not receive any appropriate professional evaluation though because literary scholars and critics applied either the wrong or unproductive research methodology due to some objective and subjective reasons. The aim of the article is to suggest an alternative, in comparison to traditional variants, theoretical literary analysis which is grounded on the principles of the corporal-mimetic method to interpret fiction done on the extremely controversial novel “The Cross on Saturn” by O. Ulianenko. Having analyzed the idea and artistic content of the novel “The Cross on Saturn”, the conclusion is made that, first, the book characters seem to function as simulacra of their shallowness because they lack the depth of inner world. But despite this fact, despite parody, superficial dialogues and surrogate actions, the main characters of the novel and the peripeteia, they find themselves in, do not lose aesthetic appeal because these characters do not need deep inner world since their function is not determined by what these trivial characters reflect in the text mirror but by what the text mirror reflects in them. Second, the shallowness is filled with the content conditioned by the incest precedent which provides the basis of Oles Ulianenko’s novel to the degree to what the writer creates the tragedy in its exact, namely ancient Geek, meaning of the notion according to which tragedy is, on the one hand, a story determined by an utterly artificial form and content and, on the other hand, it is a story which does not simply end by death, it is a story which cannot end by anything else but death. It seems as if nothing but tragedy could make it impossible for a man to have their animal essence to supersede their human part.


Author(s):  
John L. Culliney ◽  
David Jones

We describe the foundations of the fractal self in relation to the Chinese notion of personal development and enhancement of adeptness in the world and mutualism with the other. This seeking, described in the codified system of Daoism, is a pathway that may progress to the highest level of achievement of such a self: that which defines a sage. The chapter introduces the view that a sage is a fractal self that achieves a peak of intimacy and constructive interaction with the world. We detail the development of human beings on this pathway, emerging beyond the core embodiments of empathy, sympathy, and rudimentary morality observed in apes. The self for the early Chinese was always a being that was embedded in the world and dynamic flow of forces. This self was defined in intimate terms as adaptable and adept, seeking to be a microcosmic contributor to some holistic macrocosm. In this chapter, Daoism leads our thinking on how the fractal self engages with the world. In turn, this way of understanding selfness and its potential to enrich its system from within resonates with discussions of the interactive self of Buddhism and was also in the minds of Pre-Socratic thinkers in the West.


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