‘travels of memory, imagination and fact’: Kate O'Brien's Archival Notes

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Jamison
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Late Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Teresa Of Avila ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Autobiographical Impulse

This essay explores Kate O'Brien's attitude towards autobiographical narrative and her quest for self-articulation. It argues that the repeated abstinence from the writing of her autobiography becomes a dominant trope in much of her late-life writing, much of which currently remains unpublished and/or uncollected. By analysing O'Brien's archival material alongside her published non-fiction prose, significant insights into O'Brien's thinking on the processes of memory, as well as her somewhat pained and contradictory relationship with the self and its expression, are brought to light. O'Brien's Farewell Spain (1937), Teresa of Avila (1951), My Ireland (1962), and Presentation Parlour (1963) all establish a mode of self-articulation through the relationship of the self with place (Spain), and person (her female relations and forebears). As such, this essay argues that these texts form a series of carefully averted auto/biographies and further utilises archive theory to offer a framework through which O'Brien's autobiographical impulse can be understood. Within this theoretical paradigm, O'Brien's quest for self-articulation finally becomes a desire to capture the anticipation of memory, opposed to direct recollection, and to seek out literary forms within which to express those memories.

The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The book’s epilogue explores the place of musical portraiture in the context of posthumous depictions of the deceased, and in relation to the so-called posthuman condition, which describes contemporary changes in the relationship of the individual with such aspects of life as technology and the body. It first examines Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to view how Bernard Herrmann’s score relates to issues of portraiture and the depiction of the identity of the deceased. It then considers the work of cyborg composer-artist Neil Harbisson, who has aimed, through the use of new capabilities of hybridity between the body and technology, to convey something akin to visual likeness in his series of Sound Portraits. The epilogue shows how an examination of contemporary views of posthumous and posthuman identities helps to illuminate the ways music represents the self throughout the genre of musical portraiture.

‘Quivering yet still’: Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and the Aesthetics of Attention

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-75
Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Still Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
The Relationship

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.

scholarly journals The Self and Its Prolonged Intrinsic Neural Timescale in Schizophrenia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Northoff ◽  
Karl Erik Sandsten ◽  
Julie Nordgaard ◽  
Troels Wesenberg Kjaer ◽  
Josef Parnas
Keyword(s):  
Negative Symptoms ◽  
Temporal Integration ◽  
The Self ◽  
Auditory Oddball ◽  
Power Law Exponent ◽  
Moderation Model ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Self Reference ◽  
Self Disorder

Abstract Schizophrenia (SCZ) can be characterized as a basic self-disorder that is featured by abnormal temporal integration on phenomenological (experience) and psychological (information processing) levels. Temporal integration on the neuronal level can be measured by the brain’s intrinsic neural timescale using the autocorrelation window (ACW) and power-law exponent (PLE). Our goal was to relate intrinsic neural timescales (ACW, PLE), as a proxy of temporal integration on the neuronal level, to temporal integration related to self-disorder on psychological (Enfacement illusion task in electroencephalography) and phenomenological (Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience [EASE]) levels. SCZ participants exhibited prolonged ACW and higher PLE during the self-referential task (Enfacement illusion), but not during the non-self-referential task (auditory oddball). The degree of ACW/PLE change during task relative to rest was significantly reduced in self-referential task in SCZ. A moderation model showed that low and high ACW/PLE exerted differential impact on the relationship of self-disorder (EASE) and negative symptoms (PANSS). In sum, we demonstrate abnormal prolongation in intrinsic neural timescale during self-reference in SCZ including its relation to basic self-disorder and negative symptoms. Our results point to abnormal relation of self and temporal integration at the core of SCZ constituting a “common currency” of neuronal, psychological, and phenomenological levels.

The relationship of frailty and disability with suicidal ideation in late life depression

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bickford ◽  
Ruth T. Morin ◽  
Cara Woodworth ◽  
Elizabeth Verduzco ◽  
Maryam Khan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Suicidal Ideation ◽  
Late Life ◽  
Late Life Depression ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin

PMLA ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caryl Emerson
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Good Reader ◽  
Death In Literature ◽  
Binary Model ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Good Starting Point ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Mikhail Bakhtin's work on Dostoevsky is well known. Less familiar, perhaps, is Bakhtin's attitude toward the other great Russian nineteenth-century novelist, Leo Tolstoy. This essay explores that “Tolstoy connection,” both as a means for interrogating Bakhtin's analytic categories and as a focus for evaluating the larger tradition of “Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky.” Bakhtin is not a particularly good reader of Tolstoy. But he does make provocative use of the familiar binary model to pursue his most insistent concerns: monologism versus dialogism, the relationship of authors to their characters, the role of death in literature and life, and the concept of the self. Bakhtin's comments on these two novelists serve as a good starting point for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the Bakhtinian model in general and suggest ways one might recast the dialogue between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on somewhat different, more productive ground.

Desire and distance in Kaija Saariaho's Lonh

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
The Self ◽  
Environmental Sounds ◽  
Feminine Subjectivity ◽  
Love Stories ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Narrative Convention ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the relationship of desire and distance in Kaija Saariaho's Lonh (1996) for soprano and electronics. The subject matter of Lonh is desire and romantic pleasures, anchored to feminine subjectivity, represented on stage by a soprano singer. Electronics provide the environmental sounds and amplify the singer's voice. Through Lonh looms a medieval song in the Occitan language, ‘Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai’ by Jaufré Rudel, a famous troubadour in twelfth-century Provence. Saariaho reverses the narrative convention of love stories by presenting the most intimate encounter at the very beginning. In their succeeding encounters, the lovers move further away from each other. Similarly, in the course of Lonh the distance to Jaufré's song also increases. Luce Irigaray's concepts of love are used for an analysis of the relationship of the loving pair. By the end of Lonh the borderlines of speaking, singing, electronics, language and music collapse in Barthesian jouissance (bliss). The electronic technology in Lonh enables the re-investiture of cultural values, and the construction of flexible identities, crossing boundaries between the self and the other.

scholarly journals Experiences of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (14) ◽  
pp. 2009-2023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia Knapton
Keyword(s):  
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Obsessive Compulsive ◽  
Compulsive Disorder ◽  
Qualitative Thematic Analysis ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental health problem characterized by persistent obsessions and compulsions. This article provides insights into experiences of OCD through a qualitative, thematic analysis performed on a set of interviews with people with OCD. Four themes were found as central in the participants’ descriptions of OCD episodes: (a) space, (b) the body, (c) objects, and (d) interactions. The findings also show that episodes of OCD can be grouped into three broad categories: (a) activity episodes, which revolve around everyday tasks; (b) state episodes, which are concerned with the self and identity; and (c) object episodes, which are concerned with the effects of objects on the self. The relationship of this three-way classification of OCD episodes to existing cognitive models of OCD is discussed. The study also demonstrates the value of categorizing episodes, rather than people, into subtypes of OCD so that intra-participant variation can be highlighted.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document