Genre originality of R. Riggs’ novel „Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”

The article carries out a systematic study of the genre of R. Riggs’ work „Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”, establishes its genre originality, states the features of different types of genre in the structure of one work, which is manifested in the multi-genre nature of the work. The article thoroughly and consistently proves that the work of R. Riggs „Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is a novel form, which is characterized by genre syncretism, as the genre structure combines features of fantasy, adventure, social novels and oral folklore, thoroughly decorated with philosophical motives. This „universality” is formed due to the relevant themes, issues, eidology, plot and compositional features. „Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is a multi-genre novel that combines several genres. The genre of the work can be called a fantastic-social novel-fairy tale, where the philosophical and psychological themes are constant. The author managed to reveal important social and psychological themes within the fantastic chronotope, which is presented by comparing real and unreal time-space. Constant in the novel is the image of the protagonist, who is the narrator, through the perspective of which the story achieves its subjectivity. The novel is characterized by a set of motives: social (war, genocide, inclusion, etc.), existential (meaning of life, existence of personality), psychological (loneliness, soul, loss), socio-historical (war, friendship, love, help), philosophical (good and evil, death, life), etc., which, combined, form a complex and unique artistic world of the novel form.

Donna Tartt’s Dostoevsky: Trauma and the Displaced Self

This essay explores Donna Tartt’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels The Adolescent, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov in The Goldfinch as a guide to understanding Dostoevsky’s unorthodox and theologically inflected theory of trauma. The essay argues that both authors approach traumatic memory through the ancient folkloric archetype of the “external soul” (the inner essence displaced into external objects for safekeeping) and conceive of the healing process as the attempt to bring the externalized soul—and its unwanted memories—back into the body. This motif allows both writers to reimagine the concept of the soul in modern secular terms: in Tartt’s conception of post-traumatic “soul loss” as a critical stage in the moral and aesthetic education of the self, and in Dostoevsky’s view of wounded memory as opening up the self to the more expansive, overwhelming trauma of religious experience. Tartt’s use of Dostoevsky in The Goldfinch underscores the Russian author’s value to contemporary trauma studies as an alternative to the prevailing canon.

WHY THE HEAD? CRANIAL MODIFICATION AS PROTECTION AND ENSOULMENT AMONG THE MAYA

Recent attempts to study cranial modification have suggested that the practice was a part of embodiment and socialization among the Maya. Comparison of colonial and modern Maya childbirth and socialization practices supports these arguments. We suggest that the next question to be asked is: “Why was the head specifically targeted for modification among the Maya?” This paper argues that one of the motivations behind cranial modification among the Maya was to protect newborns from injury. We present evidence from colonial documents and ethnographic studies on midwifery showing that animating essences resided in the head and that newborns were particularly at risk for soul loss and injury from evil winds. Further we present data on metaphoric polysemy between the human body and houses to argue that newborn humans were much like newly constructed houses in their susceptibility and that both required ritual ensoulment. The construction of the house roof parallels cranial modification. This likely has parallels in Classic Maya times, with some temple dedications and the construction of vaulted roofs with capstones, and suggests that the need to guard against soul loss has pre-Columbian roots.

Tibetan Medicine and Biomedicine: Epistemological Conflicts, Practical Solutions

The western adaptation of non-western medical systems and traditions is a complex process that takes place at a variety of different levels. In many practical medical contexts, epistemological issues receive little attention. Both patients and practitioners may switch frameworks relatively freely, without much concern about underlying theoretical assumptions. Epistemological issues may be more central elsewhere, for example in regard to the licensing and approval of practitioners and medicinal substances, or in terms of the rethinking of western models of knowledge to include new insights from these non-western sources. I suggest in this paper that the major learned medical traditions of Asia, such as āyurveda and traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Tibetan medicine, for all their differences from biomedicine and among each other, are in some respects relatively compatible with western biomedical understandings. They can be read in physiological terms, as referring to a vocabulary of bodily processes that underlie health and disease. Such approaches, however, marginalise or exclude elements that disrupt this compatibility (e.g. references to divinatory procedures, spirit attack or flows of subtle 'energies'). Other non-western healing practices, such as those in which spirit attack, 'soul loss' or 'shamanic' procedures are more central, are less easily assimilated to biomedical models, and may simply be dismissed as incompatible with modern scientific understandings. Rather than assenting to physiological reduction in the one case, and dismissal as pre-scientific in the other, we should look for a wider context of understanding within which both kinds of approach can be seen as part of a coherent view of human beings and human existence.