XL—Troilus and Criseyde, a Study in Chaucer's Method of Narrative Construction

PMLA ◽  
1896 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-322
Author(s):  
Thomas R. Price
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Troilus And Criseyde ◽  
Creative Genius ◽  
Classical Poetry ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Mind

It has been among the results of Dr. Lounsbury's noble work on Chaucer to make the mind of the poet for us, as never for any generation before us, discoverable in his poetry. Since that work appeared, each of Chaucer's poems, read now through the light of that illumination, seems to kindle into fresh meaning in its revealed association with the mind and purpose of the writer. And from the union of all the poems into one image, there seems to come a somewhat clear revelation of the poet's range of human vision and of his method of poetry. This revelation reaches, I think, its highest point of truth in that eighth chapter which forms the crown of Dr. Lounsbury's book, the chapter on Chaucer as Literary Artist. “About Chaucer's method of work,” he says, “there is nothing of that blind creative inspiration, which, acting without reflection, characterizes, or is supposed to characterize, the poets of the earliest periods. He has all the self-consciousness of the creative genius that has mastered his art” (Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, III, 324). “He knows precisely what he is aiming to accomplish.” Here is, I think, the true word spoken about Chaucer's mental character, about his poetical method, and, by inference, about his rank and special place among the classical poets. For the essence of classical poetry is self-knowledge and self-restraint, the artistic calculation of proportions, and the aesthetic calculation of effects. It is my purpose, therefore, to show in the Troilus and Criseyde, which I take to be Chaucer's most perfect poem, the evidence of Dr. Lounsbury's summary of Chaucer's poetical character, the evidence of deliberate and careful calculation, of cool, self-conscious, almost infallible skill.

Who Do You Think You Are?

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-57
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bommarito
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
What Works ◽  
Special Challenge ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Tools And Methods

This chapter explores self-knowledge, which is critical for solving the practical problems involved in getting through life. An awareness of your own quirks, character, and preferences is important for figuring out what works for you. However, self-knowledge is also tricky because it is especially elusive. People commonly learn about themselves only indirectly; often it is only by reading the reactions of others that people can see how harsh, kind, or annoying they are. It is also because when trying to know the self, the thing the individual is trying to see is the very thing that does the looking. Buddhism offers many evocative images to illustrate this special challenge: Just as a knife cannot cut itself, the mind cannot be directed toward itself. This makes knowing the self, especially in a deep way, an especially difficult task. Knowing the self thus requires special kinds of tools and methods. The chapter then considers the concept of Buddha Nature.

The Significance of Lamia

PMLA ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 550-561
Author(s):  
John Hawley Roberts
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
Creative Genius ◽  
The Aesthetic

In an article Poetry of Sensation or of Thought? I attempted to show how Endymion and Hyperion: A Fragment are related to the æsthetic problem that Keats first analyzed in Sleep and Poetry. At that time I suggested that the Odes and Lamia, following as they do the abandoning of Hyperion: A Fragment, are the outpourings of a mind released at last from the self-imposed duty of writing a poetry of humanitarian philosophy and allowed to indulge its creative genius for the poetry of sensation. It was my contention (and still is) that Keats had been trying to force himself, like his own Apollo, to accept “Knowledge enormous” as Beauty—knowledge “of the agony and strife of human hearts”; whereas at least one half of his being was affirming passionately that Feeling, particularly that which passes through the refinery of the creative imagination, is Beauty. It was his acceptance of this side of his nature that produced most of the poems written in the spring of 1819. But during the summer of 1819 Keats plunged once more into the old conflict. It will be the purpose of this paper to show how Lamia and The Fall of Hyperion are related to it.

‘Because I’m a wild animal’: Nature Versus Nurture in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox

2019 ◽  
pp. 121-143
Author(s):  
Michelle Devereaux
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Wild Animal ◽  
The Self ◽  
Creative Genius ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
Nature Versus Nurture ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter analyses the ideological framework of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book. This film addresses various Romantic conceptions of childhood, personal and cultural history, and the natural world in relation to the self and subjectivity. In his reimagining of Dahl’s story, Anderson exhibits a disdain for the mechanization of the societal landscape and the beings inhabiting it, similar to a course charted by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, while also optimistically suggesting that animal/human ‘nature’ can still survive through aesthetic and ideological compromise and creative genius. Anderson creates a brand of ideological pastoralism to match the aesthetic pastoralism/picturesque of many of his film worlds. While the anxiety portrayed in his earlier films remains, it is somewhat defused by an anarchic yet collaborative spirit.

There is No Searching for the Self: Self-Knowledge in Book Ten of Augustine’s De Trinitate

Phronesis ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 280-300
Author(s):  
Mateusz Stróżyński
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
De Trinitate ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Mind

Abstract This article explores the conception of self-knowledge in book 10 of Augustine’s De Trinitate. Augustine starts from the worry in Plato’s Meno that one cannot search for something entirely unknown and engages with Plotinus, Ennead 5.3 in developing his own understanding of the mind’s self-knowledge. He concludes that this knowledge is paradoxical in nature: it is necessary and, at the same time, futile; and it is separated from the knowledge of God. Augustine reaches this point by rejecting the Aristotelian identity of the knower with the known, as well as by grounding self-knowledge in the fact of the mind’s intimate presence to itself. Ultimately, self-knowledge appears to be an ‘objectless’ knowledge, a knowledge that the mind exists rather than knowledge of what the mind is.

Practical Authority and Self-Knowledge

2021 ◽  
pp. 32-57
Author(s):  
Michael Sevel
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Reason For Action

This paper develops an account of practical authority with a view to understanding why obeying authority is somehow problematic. While an authoritative directive may provide a reason for action, as is often thought, it also supplies the content of an intention to act. In this sense, an authority is the author of the content of a subject’s practical knowledge, the knowledge with which the subject acts when obeying. As a consequence, under modestly idealized conditions, a person in authority has knowledge of the mind of the obedient subject in a way that breaks down the self-other asymmetries the subject has to her own mind vis-à-vis others, the sort of asymmetries which philosophers have taken as central to the concept of a person. This consequence suggests a novel explanation of why practical authority is problematic and the obstacles to achieving its legitimacy.

scholarly journals Macbeth and the passions' "proper stuff"

Sederi ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 71-101
Author(s):  
Zenón Luis Martínez
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Self ◽  
Outward Appearance ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Bodily Sensations ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Shakespearean Tragedy

This essay examines early modern conceptions and representations of the passions in relation to issues of self-knowledge in texts ranging from Renaissance psychology to Shakespearean tragedy –with a particular focus on Macbeth. Considered in essence processes of the mind, the passions were believed to manifest themselves through material symptoms such as bodily effects, facial gestures and discourse. Accordingly, the early modern philosophy of man saw in the study of these material manifestations a vehicle to access the soul. By tracing the methodologies for translating the material side of human experience –words, gestures, bodily sensations and signals– into less material truths, early modern philosophy and theatre explored the certainties about inwardness as a necessary dimension of the self, as well as the uncertainties about the ultimate essence of such interiority. In this, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for its constant focus on outward appearance and rhetoric, stresses the need to focus on matter as a vehicle to explore interiority. And yet –and in keeping with the principles of earlier Renaissance humanists– the play acknowledges the utter impossibility to know the ultimate essence of the inward self.

Cartesian Fingerprints in Beckett's Imagination Dead Imagine

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-243
Author(s):  
Irit Degani-Raz
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Levels Of Abstraction ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Limiting Case

The idea that Beckett investigates in his works the limits of the media he uses has been widely discussed. In this article I examine the fiction Imagination Dead Imagine as a limiting case in Beckett's exploration of limits at large and the limits of the media he uses in particular. Imagination Dead Imagine is shown to be the self-reflexive act of an artist who imaginatively explores the limits of that ultimate medium – the artist's imagination itself. My central aim is to show that various types of structural homologies (at several levels of abstraction) can be discerned between this poetic exploration of the limits of imagination and Cartesian thought. The homologies indicated here transcend what might be termed as ‘Cartesian typical topics’ (such as the mind-body dualism, the cogito, rationalism versus empiricism, etc.). The most important homologies that are indicated here are those existing between the role of imagination in Descartes' thought - an issue that until only a few decades ago was quite neglected, even by Cartesian scholars - and Beckett's perception of imagination. I suggest the use of these homologies as a tool for tracing possible sources of inspiration for Beckett's Imagination Dead Imagine.

From Altered States to Altered Titles: A Close Analysis of the Title Sequence to Ken Russell's Altered States (1981)

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 556-571
Author(s):  
Jack Post
Keyword(s):  
Altered States ◽  
Thematic Structure ◽  
Personal Projects ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
Narrative Representations ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Film Images ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

Although most title sequences of Ken Russell's films consist of superimpositions of a static text on film images, the elaborate title sequence to Altered States (1981) was specially designed by Richard Greenberg, who had already acquired a reputation for his innovative typography thanks to his work on Superman (1978) and Alien (1979). Greenberg continued these typographic experiments in Altered States. Although both the film and its title sequence were not personal projects for Russell, a close analysis of the title sequence reveals that it functions as a small narrative unit in its own right, facilitating the transition of the spectator from the outside world of the cinema to the inside world of filmic fiction and functioning as a prospective mise-en-abyme and matrix of all the subsequent narrative representations and sequences of the film to come. By focusing on this aspect of the film, the article indicates how the title sequence to Altered States is tightly interwoven with the aesthetic and thematic structure of the film, even though Russell himself may have had less control over its design than other parts of the film.

Nihilistic Thinking as the Self-Will of the Mind and the Projects of Its Overcoming

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 74-87
Author(s):  
Irina N. Sidorenko
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
The Self ◽  
Spatial Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Radical Transformation

 The author analyzes the conceptions of ontological nihilism in the works of S. Kierkegaard, F. Nietzsche, M. Heidegger, E. Jünger. On the basis of this analysis, violence is defined as a manifestation of nihilism, of the “will to nothingness” and hypertrophy of the self-will of man. The article demonstrates the importance of the problem of nihilism. The nihilistic thinking of modern man is expressed in the attitude toward a radical transformation of the world from the position of his “absolute” righteousness. The paradox of the current situation is that there is the reverse side of this transformative activity, when there is only the appearance of action and the dilution of responsibility. Confidence in the rightness of own views and beliefs increases the risk of the violent imposition of own vision of reality. Historical and philosophical reconstruction of the conceptions of nihilism allowed to reveal the following projects of its comprehension and resolution: (1) the project of “positing of values,” which consists in the transformation of the evaluation, which is understood as another perspective of positing values, leading to the affirmation of being; (2) the project of overcoming nihilism from the space of temporality, carried out through the resoluteness to accept the historicity of own existence; (3) the project of overcoming nihilism as the oblivion of being from the spatial perspective of the “line,” allowing to realize the “glimpse” of being. The author concludes that it is impossible to solve the problem of violence and its various forms of its manifestation without overcoming “ontological nihilism.” Significant role in solving the problem of ontological violence is assigned to philosophy as a critical and responsible form of thinking, which is capable to help a person to bear the burden of the world, to provide meanings and affirm being, as well as to unite people and resist the fundamentalist claims of exclusivity and rightness.

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