Faces of the Self

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-274
Author(s):  
Vanita Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Muslim Woman ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Face ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Individual

AbstractThis paper traces the centrality of the human face in the construction of modern individuality. It argues that the face of individuality no less than that of typology, is mired in and born of historical and political conditions that are subsequently disavowed in order that the individual (and the face she bears) is rendered a product of nature, an instantiation of the universal. Attempting to denaturalize and defamiliarize the authority invested in the face, this paper maps out three interrelated arguments: that the human face is historically produced; that its history is closely tethered to the production of modern subjectivity, and that its status as a purveyor of meaning relies upon the reiteration of preexisting norms through which it can be “read.” And yet, while this paper turns to the nineteenth century to trace the novel privileging of the face as an extension of selfhood, interwoven through this history is the figure of the “effaced” Muslim woman and the Muslim terrorist type.

Manageable Self in the Early Hellenistic Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-36
Author(s):  
Vaia Touna
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The Self ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Individual

This paper argues that the rise of what is commonly termed "personal religion" during the Classic-Hellenistic period is not the result of an inner need or even quality of the self, as often argued by those who see in ancient Greece foreshadowing of Christianity, but rather was the result of social, economic, and political conditions that made it possible for Hellenistic Greeks to redefine the perception of the individual and its relationship to others.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

Language, Religion, Nation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Abstract Entities ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
Collective Phenomenon ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

This chapter traces the popular usage of “genius” in the nineteenth century. If genius no longer has the self-evidence that was attributed to it in the eighteenth century, this is due in part to the profligacy with which the word had come to be used. While the term is widely invoked—in fact, ever more widely so—it is rarely the subject of sustained theoretical scrutiny of the type established by aesthetics and philosophy in the previous century. The genius celebrated in this popular usage was, more often than not, a collective phenomenon linking success or supremacy with the individual character of institutional or abstract entities in a way that combined genius as ingenium with genius as the form of superlative excellence.

Why British Society Had to ‘Get a Young Virgin Sacrificed’: Sacrificial Destiny in The Tree of Heaven

May Sinclair ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanna Melin Schyllert
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Tree Of Heaven ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Personal Sacrifice ◽  
Central Characters

In May Sinclair’s fiction, images of sacrifice abound. From the self-abnegating Katherine Haviland in Audrey Craven (1897) to the eponymous antiheroine of The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), Sinclair’s central characters seem to be eternally struggling with the issue of renunciation. The treatment of the theme is heterogeneous in many of Sinclair’s texts, not least in the novel The Tree of Heaven, which both condemns and praises personal sacrifice for a higher or communal purpose. This displays a fundamental insecurity about the nature, function and value of sacrifice. It is this ambivalence, which underlies so much of Sinclair’s fiction, in combination with the individual mixture of philosophies in her work, that will be explored here. This chapter investigates the concept of sacrifice in the war novel The Tree of Heaven and how it is connected to community and feminism. In order to find an understanding of sacrifice as proposed by Sinclair, and its meaning in the lives of both women and men in the context of early 20th century England, the chapter discusses the crossroads in the text between sacrifice, idealism, feminism, and the nation-wide feeling of community that appears to be required in wartime.

The Face of the Contemporary: Lost World Fantasies of Finding Lot’s Wife

Sodomscapes ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Intercultural Contact ◽  
The Face ◽  
Incarnational Theology

Chapter six examines a relatively unknown Victorian lost-world romance fantasy, Alfred Clark’s The Finding of Lot’s Wife (1896). The novel converts the legend of Lot’s wife, traditionally a cautionary tale of moral turpitude, into a stark lesson on the perilous consequences of intercultural contact in the Orientalizing theatre of colonial Palestine. Clark’s central contribution to the Sodom archive, however, resides in the novel’s prescient staging of a world in which insights associated with Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology of myth converge with the theological residue in Levinas’s writings – notably, the self-emptying action of kenosis, which Levinas takes from Pauline incarnational theology. Clark is no theologian, but his interest in the ethical provocations of kenosis is as keen as Levinas’s—and perhaps more viscerally arresting because of its narrative immediacy. This feature powerfully contributes to the innovation The Finding of Lot’s Wife brings to the Sodom archive. Clark’s ingenious intertwining of Blumenbergian and Levinasian treatments of myth effectively imagines the urgent contemporariness of the legacy of Lot’s wife. Clark shows how the lethal and reparative dimensions of that legacy asymmetrically impinge on each other, producing an arresting narrative image of dread commingled with hope and urgent consequence.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

scholarly journals “It’s All One Big Fantasy”: The Critique of Modernity in Dostoevsky’s Novel The Idiot

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Katya Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Final Word ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Russian Idea

The opposition between Europe and Russia runs through Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, culminating in Mme Epanchina’s declaration that both Europe and the Russians who travel to Europe are “one big fantasy” [Dostoevsky, 2002, p. 615]. In the novel, Dostoevsky uses the exile trope as a literary tool for expressing his Russian idea. Although the spiritual underpinnings of Dostoevsky’s nationalism have been well studied, the secular side of this concept bears further exploration. Peter Wagner argues that nationalism constitutes a response to the nostalgia that is developed in exile following one’s breaking away from tradition. Nineteenth-century nationalism specifically “was an attempt to recreate a sense of origins in the face of the disembedding effects of early modernity and capitalism” [Wagner, 2001, p. 103]. By applying Wagner’s theoretical framework to Dostoevsky’s narrative, the author demonstrates that in its secular essence, Dostoevsky’s nationalism is not a merely localized manifestation of a uniquely Russian sentiment, but a symptom of a larger phenomenon that was taking place in late nineteenth-century Europe. Because Mme Epanchina gets to say the final word in Dostoevsky’s novel, her role and the subtleties of her message will be the primary focus of the present analysis.

scholarly journals Fairies and Fairness:

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marissa Herzig
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
The Self ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Power Imbalance ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
White Femininity ◽  
Construction Of Whiteness ◽  
The Individual

The traditional association of whiteness with fairies warrants a closer examination, as this mythological yearning for a specific childlike realm reveals an idealization of a white past. Indeed, the likening of women to a pure, infantile domain reveals an elevation of whiteness, which, by default, degrades people of color as lesser. While there has been considerable scholarship on the racialization of Charlotte Brontë’s Haitian character Bertha Mason, the construction of whiteness in conjunction with Jane Eyre’s character has remained largely unexplored. I explore these themes of the construction of whiteness through fairies and the romanticization of a white past through a close analysis of humanity in Jane Eyre. I first investigate Victorian and Edwardian fairy visuals, moving on to demonstrate how Jane’s individuality and feminism gains autonomy with her religious spiritualism. I also show, however, how the faerie language in the novel serves to override and disregard Jane’s position as a human being with agency due to Mr. Rochester’s aesthetic of white femininity. Through close readings of the supernatural in Jane Eyre, I scrutinize how the use of fairy language creates a power imbalance where the dehumanization of women and minorities creates a male fantasy directly opposed to the theme of the individual. I discuss how the sexualization and racialization of women as supernatural beings bolsters the self-serving, problematic construct of the ‘human’ which continuously labels women and minorities as less than. Therefore, to restructure this racism and misogynistic thought, I propose a decentering of humanity from a white male perspective, seeing women and minorities not as a monolithic “Other,” almost supernatural beings, but as equally human and worth of respect and dignity.

Reconceiving the Divine in Eliette Abécassis’ La répudiée

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 376-393
Author(s):  
Raquelle K Bostow
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Spiritual Practice ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
The Face ◽  
French Author

Abstract Eliette Abécassis’ La répudiée (2000) narrates a rare story of female mystical practice in the face of her impending repudiation from a Hasidic community, which excludes women from intellectual engagement with religious texts. Set in the fictionalised neighbourhood of Meah Shearim in Jerusalem, the novel’s main character, Rachel, faces a divorce under the law of halakhah when she fails to become pregnant after ten years of marriage. Yet, throughout the novel, Rachel asserts her own individualised spiritual practice by locating the ‘divine’ within the love that she shares with her partner, placing her on the path of mysticism. To articulate Rachel’s intuition of the divine within human relationships, I rely on French author Hélène Cixous’ secularised notion of the juifemme: a woman who rewrites sacred texts, conceives of a God detached from dogmatic religion, and locates the divine within the other and the self.

scholarly journals Species Thinking Without Agency: The Afterlife of Slavery, Clones, and Blurring Subject and Object in the Anthropocene

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-45
Author(s):  
Joey Song
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Control ◽  
Afterlife Of Slavery

The overwhelming scale of climate change demands new ways of bridging national, cultural, and taxonomic differences. However, ecocritical frameworks that emphasise non-human agency in an attempt to make human individuals empathise with other people, other species, and the earth are haunted by the tenacious spectre of nineteenth-century classical liberalism’s characterization of personhood through specious, fragile dichotomies that can largely fall under the general rubric of agency versus determinism. The putatively opposed terms of these binaries are malleable, and control of their designation is a key element of control societies. Contemporary scholarship has identified several ways subjects bleed into objects, but, even though the ‘individual’ should theoretically collapse under its own ontological pressure in our current biopolitical age, neoliberalism largely holds onto classical liberalism’s central dogma of a person as an agential individual. I analyse the novel Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro and its critical analyses to show how the plight to recognise agency is a prison of analysis that upholds an ideal of the individual as the bastion of personhood. As seen through the afterlife of slavery post-emancipation, those in power can discursively recognise the humanity in people formerly designated 'things' while still perpetuating systematic exploitation and dehumanisation. The metric of ‘agency’ as a unit of hope is an epistemic barrier to effective political rhetoric regarding climate change and species thinking.

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