Fragmented Selves, Healing Visions

The purpose of this paper is to analyse two experimental “novels of the self”, written by two of the most innovative Jewish-Romanian writers of the ’30s: Max Blecher and H. Bonciu, stressing on those aspects they have in common with the mainstream of the twentieth-century Western literature. In both authors, inward disquietude is experienced as outward atmosphere, submerging the world in indefinable strangeness and mystery. In this context, the concept of “inner exile” and “fragmented self” may prove useful in defining the particular status of the narrators’perspective, as well as their relationship with the world (objects, settings, invisible traps, “sickly” or “healing” spaces).

Translator and Translated Twice Removed: Multilingual Selfhood in Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman

This article analyses the novel An Unnecessary Woman (2013) by the American-Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine from the perspective of multilingual selfhood, echoing Borges's vision of ‘writing as translation’ as it expands to considerations of literary translingualism. The narrator/protagonist of the novel, Aaliya Saleh, is a translator whose main occupation is translation into Arabic from the existing English and French translations: from literary West into East. The significance of the author's creative choice of what is referred to as a twice-removed translator is explored with the following questions: How, while navigating between two languages, cultures, and identities, is the multilingual individual experiencing the balancing act between the ‘translation’ and the ‘original’? To what extent are characters, generated by writers' translingual imagination, indeed creative (re)incarnations of the author's fragmented self? Is there such a thing as the fidelity to an original' for an immigrant (the author)? What can we learn about this translingual polyphony of voices when it comes from the area of political conflict and deepening economic/humanitarian crisis?

Extracellular Fragmented Self-DNA Is Involved in Plant Responses to Biotic Stress

A growing body of evidence indicates that extracellular fragmented self-DNA (eDNA), by acting as a signaling molecule, triggers inhibitory effects on conspecific plants and functions as a damage-associated molecular pattern (DAMP). To evaluate early and late events in DAMP-dependent responses to eDNA, we extracted, fragmented, and applied the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) eDNA to tomato leaves. Non-sonicated, intact self-DNA (intact DNA) was used as control. Early event analyses included the evaluation of plasma transmembrane potentials (Vm), cytosolic calcium variations (Ca2+cyt), the activity and subcellular localization of both voltage-gated and ligand-gated rectified K+ channels, and the reactive oxygen species (ROS) subcellular localization and quantification. Late events included RNA-Seq transcriptomic analysis and qPCR validation of gene expression of tomato leaves exposed to tomato eDNA. Application of eDNA induced a concentration-dependent Vm depolarization which was correlated to an increase in (Ca2+)cyt; this event was associated to the opening of K+ channels, with particular action on ligand-gated rectified K+ channels. Both eDNA-dependent (Ca2+)cyt and K+ increases were correlated to ROS production. In contrast, application of intact DNA produced no effects. The plant response to eDNA was the modulation of the expression of genes involved in plant–biotic interactions including pathogenesis-related proteins (PRPs), calcium-dependent protein kinases (CPK1), heat shock transcription factors (Hsf), heat shock proteins (Hsp), receptor-like kinases (RLKs), and ethylene-responsive factors (ERFs). Several genes involved in calcium signaling, ROS scavenging and ion homeostasis were also modulated by application of eDNA. Shared elements among the transcriptional response to eDNA and to biotic stress indicate that eDNA might be a common DAMP that triggers plant responses to pathogens and herbivores, particularly to those that intensive plant cell disruption or cell death. Our results suggest the intriguing hypothesis that some of the plant reactions to pathogens and herbivores might be due to DNA degradation, especially when associated to the plant cell disruption. Fragmented DNA would then become an important and powerful elicitor able to trigger early and late responses to biotic stress.

Foucault’s Queer Virgins: An Unfinished History in Fragments

This essay attends to the place of virginity at the center of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh. Reading virginity through a rhetorical lens, the essay argues for an ethics and a politics of counter-conduct in Foucault characterized by chiasmus, a rhetorical structure of inverted parallelism. That chiastic structure frames Foucault’s Confessions, and all of his work, as a fragmented, self-hollowing speech haunted by death and the dissolution of the subject. The essay reads Foucault as apophatic speech that returns to us, no longer itself, made strange. In that deathly movement of eternal recurrence, Foucault’s Confessions speak after death from the x’d out place of the queer virgin: on a threshold that separates life from death, in a movement of metanoia or ethical conversion. As an unfinished history in fragments, the essay’s form brings attention to incompletion as a crucial aspect of Foucault’s work. The fragmentation that characterizes an unfinished history underscores poetic discontinuity as the hallmark of Foucault’s genealogical method and thought.

The Fragmented Self: Having Multiple Accounts in Instagram Usage Practice among Indonesian Youth

The usage of social media has become a part of youth’s life in this digital era. Particularly in Indonesia, Instagram is one of the most popular platforms among youth. In the practice of Instagram usage, apparently a person could manage more than just one account, creating phenomenon known as ‘real Instagram account’ and ‘fake Instagram account’. Hence this form of practice is raising question in regards to the identity presented by users in those accounts. This paper aims to analyze the practice of having multiple accounts in Instagram platform, focusing on how the self-presentation of users presented and why such presentation displayed, specifically in the contestation between the concept of ‘real’ and ‘fake’. Scope of the study in this research covers the media psychology of interconnection between self and social media platform. Research was conducted by mixed-method of new ethnography and virtual ethnography. Expected findings in this research include the analysis of fragmented self in Instagram multiple accounts, focusing in the issue of how the concept of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ are being defined by users, and the aspects behind such understandings. Apparently, in the social media platform as Instagram, youth is in search for a sense of freedom and authenticity, where they could be free in expressing themselves. Thus, the motivation of having multiple accounts. However, findings in this research also indicate that certain standards have been created in the Instagram, that at some point to some extent have conditioned users to present themselves in certain ways.

Discursive work in resisting stereotypic representations of the Chinese among Chinese students

The negative effects of stereotyping arising from a victim’s acceptance and internalisation of stereotype identities are well-known. As stereotypes are created and maintained in discourse, understanding how targets of stereotyping employ discursive resources to resist the constraining structures of stereotypic identities imposed upon them can provide insight into the process of stereotyping and contribute to efforts to reduce the threat of stereotyping. We examined the strategies used by targets of stereotyping in contesting stereotypic representations of their social group through the mobilisation of a range of discourse strategies when presented with stereotyping attacks on the group. The findings revealed that stereotypes are subtle in nature and may not be easily recognised and hence, difficult to resist. Participants employed a number of discourse strategies to repair their fragmented self and group identities. However, in their attempt to maintain identity coherence, they ended up using stereotyping discourses themselves to devalue the perceived outgroup as well as subgroups they created within their own social group. The study highlights the complexity of stereotyping and its self-perpetuating character, and sheds light on the difficulty faced by targets of stereotyping discourse in reconciling their identities through intense discursive and identity work.