Madness and Literature

Mental illness has been a favourite topic for authors throughout the history of literature, and, conversely, psychologists and psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud and Karl Jaspers have been interested in and influenced by literature. Pioneers within philosophy, psychiatry and literature share the endeavour to explore and explain the human mind and behaviour, including what a society deems as being outside perceived normality. This volume engages with literature’s multifarious ways of probing minds and bodies in a state of ill mental health. To encompass this diversity, the theoretical approach is eclectic and transdisciplinary. The cases and the theory are in dialogue with a clinical approach, addressing issues and diagnoses such as trauma, psychosis, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, self-harm, hoarding disorder, PTSD and Digital Sexual Assault. The volume has three parts. Chapters in Part I address literary representations of madness with a historical awareness, outlining the socio-political potentials of madness literature. Part II investigates how representations of mental illness can provide a different way of understanding what it is like to experience alternative states of mind, as well as how theoretical concepts from studies in literature can supplement the language of psychopathology. The chapters in Part III explore ways to apply literary cases in clinical practice. Throughout the book, the contributors explore and explain how the language and discourses of literature (stylistically and theoretically) can teach us something new about what it means to be in ill mental health.

Food and Love in Sanskrit Poetry: On the Margin of Desires

In Western representations, food and sex are frequently connected and compared in an erotic context. A survey of Sanskrit poetry shows that it was not so in the context of ancient India, despite the kāmaśāstras’ dictates. Parts of women’s bodies are occasionally likened to certain items of food (mostly fruit and nectar), and can sometimes be drunk, but are rarely said to be eatable. Lovers who are madly in love or suffer from the pangs of separation lose their appetite, and in consequence become thin. In contexts of love-in-union, wine, but not food, is frequently consumed and appreciated for its aphrodisiac qualities. Except in some cases when the pairs of lovers are animals, or at least animal-like, descriptions of food consumption do not lead to the erotic flavour (śṛṅgāra-rasa), but rather lead to the comic (hāsya), sometimes disgusting flavour (bībhatsa-rasa). Food descriptions were probably considered improper for poetry, because food had too many unerotic associations, being a favourite topic of Sanskrit ritual, legal and medical treatises.

Rosalind and "Śakuntalā" among the Ascetics: Reading Gender and Female Sexual Agency in a Bengali Adaptation of "As You Like It"

My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is negotiated in a Bengali adaptation, Ananga-Rangini (1897) by the little-known playwright Annadaprasad Basu. The Bengali adaptation does not assume the boy actor’s embodied performance as essential to its construction of the Rosalindequivalent, and thereby it misses several of the accents on gender and sexuality that characterize Shakespeare’s play. The Bengali adaptation, while accommodating much of Rosalind’s flamboyance, is more insistent upon the heteronormative closure and reconfigures the Rosalind-character as an acquiescent lover/wife. Further, Ananga-Rangini incorporates resonances of the classical Sanskrit play Abhijñānaśākuntalam by Kālidāsa, thus suggesting a thematic interaction between the two texts and giving a concrete shape to the comparison between Shakespeare and Kālidāsa that formed a favourite topic of literary debate in colonial Bengal. The article takes into account how the Bengali adaptation of As You Like It may be influenced by the gender politics informing Abhijñānaśākuntalam and by the reception of this Sanskrit play in colonial Bengal.

Łukasiewicz, Jan (1878–1956)

Before 1918, Łukasiewicz’s interests centred on logic (in the broad sense) and philosophy, and he worked on induction and probability. He also wrote an important historical book on the principle of contradiction in Aristotle. After 1918, Łukasiewicz concentrated almost entirely on mathematical logic and was the main organizer of the Warsaw School of Logic. The discovery of many-valued systems of logic is perhaps the most important result he achieved. He also invented an ingenious logical symbolism in which brackets (or other punctuation signs) are not necessary (bracket-free or Polish notation). Propositional calculi became a favourite topic of Łukasiewicz’s logical investigations. The history of logic was another subject in which Łukasiewicz achieved important results.

Experiential Marketing and Internet: Assessing the Role of Gender

Gender has always been a favourite topic of researchers to dig down. Considerable research works have focused the role of gender in the domain of consumer behaviour, but there is much more to explore in the area of experiential marketing as it is relatively a new concept in this field. The article discusses an examination of the differences in the ways men and women perceive sense, feel, think, act and relate experiences while using social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Purpose of the study is to examine the gender differences within the context of five experiences of experiential marketing. Through convenience sampling, 250 set of questionnaires were distributed to the university students, out of which 226 were found usable. T-test was applied for the analysis of data using SPSS software version 21. Shopping habits of women are considered to be highly influenced by social media. But results of the study indicate that men relate the experience provided by the sites with them more than the women do. Marketers can use the findings in tailoring their sites to enhance the customer experience.

Remembering colonial violence: Inter/textual strategies of Congolese authors

This article explores the Congolese remembering of the experienced colonial violence through the medium of literature. Although criticism of colonialism is not a favourite topic of Congolese writers, there exists an important corpus of texts, especially when the literary production of Congo Kinshasa and Congo Brazzaville with their politically distinct though sometimes similar experiences is taken into account. Three main strategies of writing about the topic can be distinguished: a documentary mode, an allegorical mode and a fragmented mode, which often appear in combination. Intertextuality with the colonial archive as well as oral African narrations is a recurrent feature of these texts. The short stories of Lomami Tchibamba, of the first generation of Congolese authors writing in French, are analysed as examples for a dominantly allegorical narration. Mythical creatures taken from the context of oral literature become symbols for the process of alterity and power relations during colonialism, while the construction of a heroic figure of African resistance provides a counter-narrative to colonial texts of conquest. Thomas Mpoyi-Buatu’s novel La reproduction (1986) provides an example of fragmented writing that reflects the traumatic experience of violence in both Congolese memory of colonialism and Congolese suffering of the present violent dictatorial regime. The body of the protagonist and narrator becomes the literal site of remembering.

Storytelling in multiple contexts

Since Sacks’ pioneering work in the 1970s, storytelling has become a favourite topic of research within conversation analysis. Scholars have examined storytelling from the point of view of sequential organization (Jefferson 1978), participation organization (Goodwin 1984), story co-telling (Duranti 1986, Mandelbaum 1987, Lerner 1992), displays of epistemic statuses (Schegloff 1988), and action formation (M. Goodwin 1982, 1990; Mandelbaum 1993; Beach 2000; Beach & Glenn 2011; Wu 2011, 2012). Work has also been done on the management of storytelling in the context of other, concurrent activities (Goodwin 1984, Goodwin & Goodwin 1992, Mandelbaum 2010, Haddington et al. 2014). The aim of this paper is to apply the many insights that researchers have accumulated since Sacks to the analysis and understanding of a single instance of storytelling in a Cantonese conversation. A detailed, step-by-step unpacking of this story will reveal how the contingencies of an interaction, including the interplay of multiple contexts, may leave fine-grained imprints on the shape and character of a story.

Global commerce in small boxes: parcel post, 1878–1913

Even if the high-tech and ‘revolutionary’ electric telegraph has become a favourite topic for communication historians dealing with global history, it cannot alone epitomize the first modern age of globalization. The postal network, and parcel post in particular, was also a key agent of globalization. In 1880, several Universal Postal Union member states signed a convention for the exchange of parcel post, opening a new channel in the world of commerce. By the end of the nineteenth century, millions of packets poured into post offices and railway stations, crossed countries, and created all sorts of transnational connections, from family to business to humanitarian relations. Behind the ordinary, seemingly low-tech small boxes lay a sophisticated service that emerged from transnational dynamics, challenged both national and international commercial circuits, and produced more complex control of economic borders.

The Buddhist Hell: An Early Instance of the Idea?

In spite of the modern idea that Buddhism is too rational a religion to have a conception of hell, the case is just the opposite. The Buddhists promoted this idea very early. This is not really surprising, since the idea of hell is closely connected with the concept of kamma , action, and its fruit or result. Every living being is what it is by the force of its actions in this or earlier lives: good actions entail rebirth in heaven or as a human, while bad actions have as their result rebirth as an animal, a ghost, or worst of all, in hell. In the Buddhist hell one is thus punished by the evil actions themselves, not by some sort of divine justice. Although life in hell is not eternal in Buddhism, it can still last for an enormous time span until the bad actions have been atoned for and one is reborn to a happier state of existence. Thus hell plays a great part in the Buddhist system of teachings, and it is a favourite topic in the monastic rules as well as in the narrative literature of the Jātakas , the subject of which is the Buddha's earlier lives. Hell is discussed as a topic already in the Kathāvatthu , the first scholarly treatise of Buddhism with a named author, datable between 250 and 100 BC. The discussion in the Kathāvatthu represents what may be seen as a fully developed conception of hell, and thus the Buddhist hell as described by its earliest canonical literature predates the appearance of the idea in most, if not all other religious traditions.

Views on cultic place-names in Denmark: a review of research

Although interest has long been shown in the meaning of place-names, place-name research as a methodical study has only a comparatively short history. A favourite topic for several authors has been to describe the history of an area on the basis of its place-names. From among all the names in the district, they would select now one and now another. Sometimes they would add a little non-onomastic source material and gradually they would reconstruct — on an exceptionally fragile foundation — a picture of the cultic past of the region. However, Danish place-names containing pre-Christian elements, in spite of their small number, may form an important source of information about the history of religion.