Hearing Voices: The Extended Mind in Evelyn Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-224
Author(s):  
Yuexi Liu
Keyword(s):  
Extended Mind ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Hearing Voices ◽  
Comic Novel ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
External Signals ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

Waugh's last comic novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) takes ‘exterior modernism’ to a new height, no longer avoiding interiority – as in his interwar fiction – but exteriorising the interior through dissociation. ‘The Box’, to which the writer-protagonist attributes the source of the tormenting voices, may well be his own mind, an extended – albeit unhealthy – mind that works as a radio: he transmits his thoughts and then receives them as external signals in order to communicate with them. Pinfold's auditory hallucinations are caused by the breakdown of communication. Interestingly, writing is also a dissociative activity. Concerned with the writer's block, the novel reflects on the creative process and illuminates the relationship between madness and creativity. If dissociation, or the splitting of the mind, is a defence against trauma, the traumatic experience Pinfold attempts to suppress is the Second World War. The unusual state of mind accentuates the contingency of Waugh's radio writing; his preferred medium is cinema.

scholarly journals Friends in war: Sweden between solidarity and self-help, 1939–1945

2020 ◽  
pp. 001083672090438
Author(s):  
Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou ◽  
Felix Berenskötter
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Winter War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

This article scrutinizes the assumption that friends support each other in times of war. Picking up the notion that solidarity, or ‘other-help’, is a key feature of friendship between states, the article explores how states behave when a friend is attacked by an overwhelming enemy. It directs attention to the trade-off between solidarity and self-help that governments face in such a situation and makes the novel argument that the decision about whether and how to support the friend is significantly influenced by assessments of the distribution of material capabilities and the relationship the state has with the aggressor. This proposition is supported empirically in an examination of Sweden’s response to its Nordic friends’ need for help during the Second World War – to Finland during the 1939–1940 ‘Winter War’ with the Soviet Union, and to Norway following the invasion of Germany from 1940 to 1945.

Trauma, complesso, dissociazione

2009 ◽  
pp. 13-31
Author(s):  
Fabrizio Alfani ◽  
Concetto Gullotta
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Psychology ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Psychic Trauma ◽  
Clinical Observations ◽  
Therapeutic Relation ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

- After a brief review of the main psychoanalytic approaches to psychic trauma, the Authors propose some remarks on the relationship that, according to analytical psychology, exists between trauma, the origin of the emotionally charged complexes and the genesis of the different forms of psychic disturbance. They underline how psychic dissociation is a process that in some measure constantly coexists in the mind with the tendency to integra tion, and how dissociation, in its manifold forms of expression, is one of the main way the mind uses to defend itself from the consequences of a traumatic experience. In the end, some clinical observations illustrate the characteristics that the therapeutic relation can assume with traumatized patients.

Surrealism, Chance and the Extended Mind

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-188
Author(s):  
Kerry Watson
Keyword(s):  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Objective Chance ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Exquisite Corpse ◽  
Automatic Drawing ◽  
Unconscious Mind ◽  
Artistic Skill ◽  
Unconscious State

This chapter discusses how the Surrealists engaged with techniques like automatic drawing, the exquisite corpse, collage, frottage and decalcomania, and how this might be interpreted in the context of theories of distributed cognition, enactivism, embodiment, and the extended mind. The Surrealists’ use of ‘objective chance’ was driven by a belief in the existence of an unconscious state of mind which could only be accessed obliquely, by using techniques which bypassed both artistic skill and conscious thought. ‘Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?’. This question is posed by Clark and Chalmers (1998) as an introduction to the concept of the extended mind, but it could just as well be the very question the Surrealists were trying to address in their search for a universal truth, the key to which they believed to be the unconscious mind as defined by Freud.

scholarly journals The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

This book offers an account on the last eight decades of British and Irish prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel, and the reader. The chapters look at the impact of global warfare on the novel from the Second World War to the Cold War to the twenty-first century; the reflexive continuities of late modernism; the influence of film and television on the novel form; mobile and fluid connections between sexuality, gender, and different periods of women’s writing; a broad range of migrant and ethnic fictions; and the continuities and discontinuities of prose fiction in different regional, national, class, and global contexts. Across the volume there is a blurring of the boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction, as the literary thinking of the period is traced in the spy novel, the children’s novel, the historical novel, the serial novel, shorter fiction, the science fiction novel, and the comic novel. The final chapters of the volume explore the relationship of twenty-first century fiction to post-war culture, and show how this new fiction both emerges from the history of the novel, and prefigures the novel to come.

Distributed Cognition and Women Writers’ Representation of Theatre in Eighteenth-Century England: ‘Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind’

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-186
Author(s):  
Ros Ballaster
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sarah Fielding ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cognitive Experience ◽  
The Mind

Readers in the mid-eighteenth century were increasingly invited to translate their knowledge about the social extension of mind learned in the experience of theatre to ‘new’ prose forms of the periodical and the novel. Women writers in these forms found opportunity to present women as cognitive agents rather than affective vehicles. Four works by women serve to illustrate this case: Eliza Haywood’s The Dramatic Historiographer (1735), Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: a new dramatic fable (1754), Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespeare Illustrated (1753-4), and Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid (1755-6). These printed prose works invoke memories of performance – the co-presence of the real bodies of audience and actors. But they often do so to claim the superior cognitive experience of the reader’s engagement through print with a fictional persona in the ‘mind’. The prose work is imagined as a repository of socially extended mind for its audience, an opportunity not only to recreate the experience of communal consumption of the artwork which theatre affords, but also to provide a more sophisticated form of narrative scaffolding. Distance and reflection are enabled by the absence of the performer’s body and the judicious authority of a framing narrator.

Arius and the Vampire

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 442-458
Author(s):  
Gregory Erickson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Unnatural Death ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Black Panther

This essay focuses on two figures in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the heretic Arius and the vampire, who when examined together address issues of anxiety over the body and artistic creation. Stephen’s early musings on Arius lead directly into his primary act of artistic creation, a poem he writes that begins, “He comes, pale vampire.” Like the heretic, the vampire will recede into the background, but will continue to haunt the novel, offering troubling and disruptive commentary on the narrative. Joyce’s less literal vampires have the ability to change forms—a rat in the cemetery, a bat flying over a church, ghosts of deceased characters, and a “black panther vampire”—and along with his paradigmatic heretic, Arius, they seem to float from the mind of character to character, forcing them to question received wisdom about creation, procreation, authority, succession, and the relationship of body to mind. Throughout the novel, heretics and vampires work as figures of disruption, as symbols of an alternative taxonomy, and as reminders of the threat or promise of undeserved births and unnatural death. Ultimately, we will see that vampire narratives, classical heresy, and Ulysses share a common central project: questioning and rethinking the act of creation itself.

The role and relationship of mindreading and social attunement in HRI – position statements of interdisciplinary researchers. Workshop HRI'20

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Wykowska ◽  
Jairo Pérez-Osorio ◽  
Stefan Kopp
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robot Interaction ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This booklet is a collection of the position statements accepted for the HRI’20 conference workshop “Social Cognition for HRI: Exploring the relationship between mindreading and social attunement in human-robot interaction” (Wykowska, Perez-Osorio & Kopp, 2020). Unfortunately, due to the rapid unfolding of the novel coronavirus at the beginning of the present year, the conference and consequently our workshop, were canceled. On the light of these events, we decided to put together the positions statements accepted for the workshop. The contributions collected in these pages highlight the role of attribution of mental states to artificial agents in human-robot interaction, and precisely the quality and presence of social attunement mechanisms that are known to make human interaction smooth, efficient, and robust. These papers also accentuate the importance of the multidisciplinary approach to advance the understanding of the factors and the consequences of social interactions with artificial agents.

Ч. АЙТМАТОВДУН «ТООЛОР КУЛАГАНДА» РОМАНЫНДАГЫ ПЕЙЗАЖДЫК СҮРӨТТӨӨЛӨР

2020 ◽  
pp. 92-94
Author(s):  
Н. Алтыкеева ◽  
Б. Ниясалиева
Keyword(s):  
Full Moon ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Additional Tool ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Aesthetic Values

Аннотация. Макалада романдын мазмунунан орун алган пейзаждык сүрөттөөлөр талкууланат. Пейзаждык сүрөттөөлөр чыгарманын көркөмдүүлүгүн, эстетикалык баалуулугун арттыруу менен катар эле каармандардын образын тереңден ачып берүүдө, окуялардын өнүгүп-өсүшү жана алдыда боло турган окуялар тууралуу окурманга маалымат берүүдө кошумча каражат катары колдонулат. Жазуучу романда пейзаждык сүрөттөөлөрдү өтө кылдат колдонгону байкалат. Алсак, тоо адамдагы улуулук жана бийиктикти айгинелейт, толукшуган ай жан- дүйнөнүн бөксөрбөй толуп турушун көрсөтөт, ачык асмандын алай-дүлөй түшкөн көрүнүшкө айланышы - каармандын ички сезими, уйгу-туйгу ойлонуусу, жан дүйнөсүнүн бурганак болушун ачып көрсөтүүдө маанилүү болсо, чабалекейлердин тынымсыз учуп чабалакташы, жан алакетке түшүп чыйпылдашы – алдыда боло турган кырсыктуу окуя тууралуу кабар берсе, согуштун апааты жашыл шибердин, бак-дарактардын күлгө айланышы, чымчык-куштардын күздү күтпөй кайдадыр учуп кетип жатышы менен түшүндүрүлөт. Tүйүндүү сөздөр: пейзаж. роман, идея, легенда, эпилог, каарман, негизги окуялар. Аннотация. В статье дается пейзажное описание. Пейзажное описание используется в произведении как дополнительное средство эстетических ценностей и помогает раскрыть образы героев, и действия произведения. Писатель в романе тонко использует пейзажное описание. Например горы возвышенное и самое ценное в человеке, а полная луна – счастливое душевное состояние человека, а превращение безоблачного неба в бущующий вид – указывает, как неспокойно в душе главного героя, его беспокойные мысли, как бушует его внутренний мир, а ласточки неспокойно летающие, предвещают несчастье, птицы улетающие раньше времени, превращение зелёной травы, деревьев в пепел предвещают ужасы войны. Ключевые слова: пейзаж. роман, идея, легенда, эпилог, герой, главное событие Annotation. The article discusses the landscape description. The landscape description is used in the work as an additional tool for aesthetic values and helps to reveal the images of heroes, and in the development of the action of the work/ The writer in the novel subtly uses the landscape description. The mountains are the sublime and the most valuable in a person, and the full moon is a happy state of mind of a person, and the transformation of a cloudless sky into a raging view indicates how restless the soul of the protagonist is, his restless thoughts. How his inner world is raging, and the swallows are restlessly flying, foreshadow the misfortune, the birds flying away ahead of time, the transformation of green grass, trees in the forehead the horrors of war. This article describes the idea of the story "Do not kill" which is given instead of the epilogue in the novel "When the mountains fall" which was written by Ch.Aitmatov. It considers the role of a story that calls to live in peace and to end wars that are occurring in the world. Keywords: Landscapе, novel, idea, legend, epilogue, hero, main event.

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