In this paper I propose to examine several poems by Elizabeth Bishop through the prism of the concept of letter delineated in “Lituraterre”, where Lacan explores the connection between the literal and the littoral in order to draw a key distinction between signifiers which are the semblances involved in ordinary communication, and the letter as a precipitate resulting from their breakdown. Insofar as the letter causes “writing effects that are structured around moments of vacillation of semblances” (M-H Roche), such effects may be traced in poems where Bishop focuses on how meaning is set adrift by eliding, displacing or transforming graphemes and phonemes. Her observation that “the names of seashore towns run out to sea” points to the littoral/liminal space of the poetic signifier that straddles enjoyment and meaning. I analyze Bishop’s painterly treatment of mist through the prism of Lacan’s discussion of Japanese calligraphy where the unary brush stroke, which “is the means to clear original Chaos” (E. Laurent), operates as the equivalent of the median void, often represented by fog in Chinese painting, i.e., as an avatar of the littoral that separates knowledge from enjoyment. I conclude with a reading of a poem where the semiosis of mortality hinges on the (dis-)appearance of certain phonemes, inviting us to question the literal/literary destiny of letters when they turn into Joycean litter, and prompting us to revisit Lacan’s familiar aphorism that “a letter always reaches its destination”.
{"title":"The Purloined Letters of Elizabeth Bishop","authors":"Axel Nesme","doi":"10.3390/h12050117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050117","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I propose to examine several poems by Elizabeth Bishop through the prism of the concept of letter delineated in “Lituraterre”, where Lacan explores the connection between the literal and the littoral in order to draw a key distinction between signifiers which are the semblances involved in ordinary communication, and the letter as a precipitate resulting from their breakdown. Insofar as the letter causes “writing effects that are structured around moments of vacillation of semblances” (M-H Roche), such effects may be traced in poems where Bishop focuses on how meaning is set adrift by eliding, displacing or transforming graphemes and phonemes. Her observation that “the names of seashore towns run out to sea” points to the littoral/liminal space of the poetic signifier that straddles enjoyment and meaning. I analyze Bishop’s painterly treatment of mist through the prism of Lacan’s discussion of Japanese calligraphy where the unary brush stroke, which “is the means to clear original Chaos” (E. Laurent), operates as the equivalent of the median void, often represented by fog in Chinese painting, i.e., as an avatar of the littoral that separates knowledge from enjoyment. I conclude with a reading of a poem where the semiosis of mortality hinges on the (dis-)appearance of certain phonemes, inviting us to question the literal/literary destiny of letters when they turn into Joycean litter, and prompting us to revisit Lacan’s familiar aphorism that “a letter always reaches its destination”.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135968657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper focuses on a peculiar aspect of film viewing, specifically the way in which—interacting with the viewer and their own story—visual images create identifications that can make the viewing a more or less disturbing affective experience. Psychoanalysis and cinema have an indissoluble connection. In particular, the language of cinema comes very close to that of psychoanalysis, given that movies are made according to our psychism. On the basis of this relationship, filmic narration often becomes part of patients’ session, especially teenagers, allowing us to explore areas of the mind hitherto silent.
{"title":"Role of Cinema and Psychoanalysis in Affective Experience","authors":"Elisabetta Bellagamba","doi":"10.3390/h12050115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050115","url":null,"abstract":"This paper focuses on a peculiar aspect of film viewing, specifically the way in which—interacting with the viewer and their own story—visual images create identifications that can make the viewing a more or less disturbing affective experience. Psychoanalysis and cinema have an indissoluble connection. In particular, the language of cinema comes very close to that of psychoanalysis, given that movies are made according to our psychism. On the basis of this relationship, filmic narration often becomes part of patients’ session, especially teenagers, allowing us to explore areas of the mind hitherto silent.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136294919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Jane Austen’s last novel Persuasion (1817), embodiment and disability function metonymically to show the emotional suffering of its characters. Austen gives temporary impairments to the novel’s protagonists, Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, and physical disabilities to minor characters who suffer actual and metaphorical falls, such as Louisa Musgrove and Mrs. Smith. In Persuasion, Austen evokes pain and suffering in both mental and physical ways, with men, like Wentworth, experiencing mental impairments and women, like Anne, Louisa, and Mrs. Smith, experiencing physical impairments. Austen uses impairments, illness, and disability as prostheses to highlight the importance of a marriage of respect, affection, and rationality.
{"title":"Jane Austen’s Persuasion: Finding Companionate Marriage through Sickness and Health","authors":"Maureen Johnson","doi":"10.3390/h12050114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050114","url":null,"abstract":"In Jane Austen’s last novel Persuasion (1817), embodiment and disability function metonymically to show the emotional suffering of its characters. Austen gives temporary impairments to the novel’s protagonists, Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, and physical disabilities to minor characters who suffer actual and metaphorical falls, such as Louisa Musgrove and Mrs. Smith. In Persuasion, Austen evokes pain and suffering in both mental and physical ways, with men, like Wentworth, experiencing mental impairments and women, like Anne, Louisa, and Mrs. Smith, experiencing physical impairments. Austen uses impairments, illness, and disability as prostheses to highlight the importance of a marriage of respect, affection, and rationality.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"93 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136295409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay sets out to explore the unexpected but amusing entanglement of three Jewish writers—Harry (“Heinrich”) Heine, Sigismund (“Sigmund”) Freud, and Jackie (“Jacques”) Derrida. You will not often find a reference to Heine in the work of Jacques Derrida, but you will find a Heine joke in Derrida’s discussion of forgiveness in Le parjure et le pardon (1998–1999), where the name Heine is invoked precisely in order to recall the scandalous automaticity, the machine-like quality of forgiveness. Beginning with Derrida’s surprising reference to the man George Eliot called a “unique German wit”, this essay will begin by arguing that there is something about Heine’s jokes, his Witze, his mots d’esprit, that not only plays up, but also paradoxically takes seriously, what Derrida, echoing Nietzsche in Of Grammatology, describes as the “play of the world.” The second part of this essay will engage Freud’s particular and quite special relation to Heine: Heine is the third most cited German writer in all of Freud’s work (after Goethe and Schiller). Neither Homer nor Sophocles is cited more often than Heine. Indeed, a bon mot from Heine is always ready-to-hand in the face of theoretical obstacles (e.g., “Observations on Transference Love”, “On Narcissism”, etc.). But perhaps nowhere is Freud’s affinity with Heine more apparent and more striking than in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where Heine’s witticisms offer the best and most canonical examples of jokes. In conclusion, this essay will argue that Heine’s wit can be read as a playbook—not only for psychoanalysis’s economic understanding of jokes, but also, more radically, for deconstruction’s thinking of play.
这篇文章旨在探索三位犹太作家——哈利(海因里希)海涅、西格蒙德(西格蒙德)弗洛伊德和杰基(雅克)德里达——意想不到但又有趣的纠葛。你不会经常在雅克·德里达的作品中发现海涅,但你会在德里达在《parjure et Le pardon》(1998-1999)中关于宽恕的讨论中发现一个海涅的笑话,在那里,海涅的名字被引用正是为了回忆起可耻的自动性,宽恕的机器般的品质。从德里达令人惊讶地提到乔治·艾略特称之为“独特的德国智慧”的人开始,这篇文章将首先论证海涅的笑话,他的智慧,他的mots d 'esprit,不仅发挥了作用,而且矛盾地认真对待,德里达在《论语法》中呼应尼采,称之为“世界的游戏”。本文的第二部分将探讨弗洛伊德与海涅的特殊关系:在弗洛伊德的所有作品中,海涅是被引用次数第三多的德国作家(仅次于歌德和席勒)。荷马和索福克勒斯被引用的次数都没有海涅多。事实上,面对理论障碍(如《移情之爱观察》、《论自恋》等),海涅的名言总是随手可得。但也许没有什么比《笑话及其与无意识的关系》(1905)一书中弗洛伊德与海涅的亲缘关系更明显、更惊人的了,在这本书中,海涅的俏皮话为笑话提供了最好、最典型的例子。总之,本文将论证,海涅的智慧可以被解读为剧本——不仅是精神分析学对笑话的经济理解,而且更激进地说,是解构主义对游戏的思考。
{"title":"Joking Around, Seriously: Freud, Derrida, and the Irrepressible Wit of Heinrich Heine","authors":"Elizabeth Rottenberg","doi":"10.3390/h12050113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050113","url":null,"abstract":"This essay sets out to explore the unexpected but amusing entanglement of three Jewish writers—Harry (“Heinrich”) Heine, Sigismund (“Sigmund”) Freud, and Jackie (“Jacques”) Derrida. You will not often find a reference to Heine in the work of Jacques Derrida, but you will find a Heine joke in Derrida’s discussion of forgiveness in Le parjure et le pardon (1998–1999), where the name Heine is invoked precisely in order to recall the scandalous automaticity, the machine-like quality of forgiveness. Beginning with Derrida’s surprising reference to the man George Eliot called a “unique German wit”, this essay will begin by arguing that there is something about Heine’s jokes, his Witze, his mots d’esprit, that not only plays up, but also paradoxically takes seriously, what Derrida, echoing Nietzsche in Of Grammatology, describes as the “play of the world.” The second part of this essay will engage Freud’s particular and quite special relation to Heine: Heine is the third most cited German writer in all of Freud’s work (after Goethe and Schiller). Neither Homer nor Sophocles is cited more often than Heine. Indeed, a bon mot from Heine is always ready-to-hand in the face of theoretical obstacles (e.g., “Observations on Transference Love”, “On Narcissism”, etc.). But perhaps nowhere is Freud’s affinity with Heine more apparent and more striking than in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where Heine’s witticisms offer the best and most canonical examples of jokes. In conclusion, this essay will argue that Heine’s wit can be read as a playbook—not only for psychoanalysis’s economic understanding of jokes, but also, more radically, for deconstruction’s thinking of play.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135197891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article proposes a Debordian reading of Michel Houellebecq’s first work Extension du domaine de la lutte that would thrust him into the spotlight as France’s most popular and controversial writer. Specifically, this investigation demonstrates that Debord’s theories are a useful lens from which to analyze Houellebecq’s harsh critique of late capitalism. Owing to a radical paradigm shift in the capitalist paradigm, Debord and Houellebecq posit that we live in a brave new world in which millions of individuals no longer have a frame of reference for distinguishing between commonplace reality and its simulation on a screen. On the informational battlefield where simulations of the good(s) life have proliferated themselves to the brink of replacing the real in the collective imagination of consumer citizens, they illustrate that the timeless search for happiness also seems to be even more fraught with peril in the 21st century.
这篇文章提出了对米歇尔·维勒贝克(Michel Houellebecq)的第一部作品《路的延伸》(Extension du domaine de la lutte)的Debordian式解读,这部作品将把他推到聚光灯下,成为法国最受欢迎和最具争议的作家。具体来说,这项调查表明,德波的理论是一个有用的镜头,从中分析维勒贝克对晚期资本主义的严厉批评。由于资本主义范式的根本性转变,Debord和Houellebecq假设我们生活在一个勇敢的新世界中,在这个新世界中,数百万人不再有一个参考框架来区分平凡的现实和屏幕上的模拟。在信息战场上,美好生活的模拟已经扩散到取代消费者集体想象中的真实生活的边缘,他们说明,在21世纪,对幸福的永恒追求似乎也更加充满了危险。
{"title":"The Submerged, Post-Truth “Island of Happiness” in Michel Houellebecq’s Extension du domaine de la lutte","authors":"Keith Moser","doi":"10.3390/h12050111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050111","url":null,"abstract":"This article proposes a Debordian reading of Michel Houellebecq’s first work Extension du domaine de la lutte that would thrust him into the spotlight as France’s most popular and controversial writer. Specifically, this investigation demonstrates that Debord’s theories are a useful lens from which to analyze Houellebecq’s harsh critique of late capitalism. Owing to a radical paradigm shift in the capitalist paradigm, Debord and Houellebecq posit that we live in a brave new world in which millions of individuals no longer have a frame of reference for distinguishing between commonplace reality and its simulation on a screen. On the informational battlefield where simulations of the good(s) life have proliferated themselves to the brink of replacing the real in the collective imagination of consumer citizens, they illustrate that the timeless search for happiness also seems to be even more fraught with peril in the 21st century.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135406624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the social and economic instability that followed, has given new life to conspirituality and far-right ideology in so-called Australia. This article discusses how politico-spiritual communities invested in both conspiracy theories and New Age spirituality have pieced together settler narratives about a New World Order and external threats to Western society from far-right and white supremacist Christian ideology circulated via new media. Using anti-colonial discourse analysis, we elucidate the undercurrent of white supremacist ideology in the Australian anti-vax movement, and highlight the misuse of Indigeneity in far-right and anti-vax narratives. We discuss how these narratives are settler-colonial and how conspiritualists co-opt and perform Indigeneity as a form of settler nativism. As a case study, we analyse the use of the term sovereignty by settlers attached to Muckadda Camp—a camp of ‘Original Sovereigns’ occupying the lawn outside Old Parliament house from December 2021 to February 2022. Using Indigenous critique from both new media and academia, we argue that although settlers may perform Indigeneity, they are exercising white supremacist settler narratives, and not Indigenous sovereignty.
{"title":"So-Called Sovereign Settlers: Settler Conspirituality and Nativism in the Australian Anti-Vax Movement","authors":"Madi Day, Bronwyn Carlson","doi":"10.3390/h12050112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050112","url":null,"abstract":"The COVID-19 pandemic, and the social and economic instability that followed, has given new life to conspirituality and far-right ideology in so-called Australia. This article discusses how politico-spiritual communities invested in both conspiracy theories and New Age spirituality have pieced together settler narratives about a New World Order and external threats to Western society from far-right and white supremacist Christian ideology circulated via new media. Using anti-colonial discourse analysis, we elucidate the undercurrent of white supremacist ideology in the Australian anti-vax movement, and highlight the misuse of Indigeneity in far-right and anti-vax narratives. We discuss how these narratives are settler-colonial and how conspiritualists co-opt and perform Indigeneity as a form of settler nativism. As a case study, we analyse the use of the term sovereignty by settlers attached to Muckadda Camp—a camp of ‘Original Sovereigns’ occupying the lawn outside Old Parliament house from December 2021 to February 2022. Using Indigenous critique from both new media and academia, we argue that although settlers may perform Indigeneity, they are exercising white supremacist settler narratives, and not Indigenous sovereignty.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135407867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) was founded in 1965 to manage education in London’s inner boroughs; by the early 1970s, it was held up as one of the most progressive education experiments in British history. One of the marks of this progressiveness was its attention to London’s Black child population and its attempts to connect with Black culture through multiculturalism. However, while the ILEA prided itself on its anti-racist, multicultural education methods, its publication arm often provided mixed messages about the value and place of Black students in the education system and society. Multiculturalism, which the ILEA used to guide the production of reading materials, often resulted in a lack of cultural specificity and an avoidance of issues facing Black students, such as racism. Partnering with Black educators allowed the ILEA to offer more culturally specific and anti-racist material, but doing so also brought the ILEA to the attention of critical governmental authorities, who would eventually disband the ILEA out of fear of Black radicalism.
{"title":"“Education Is a Cultural Weapon”: The Inner London Education Authority and the Politics of Literature for Young People","authors":"Karen Sands-O’Connor","doi":"10.3390/h12050109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050109","url":null,"abstract":"The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) was founded in 1965 to manage education in London’s inner boroughs; by the early 1970s, it was held up as one of the most progressive education experiments in British history. One of the marks of this progressiveness was its attention to London’s Black child population and its attempts to connect with Black culture through multiculturalism. However, while the ILEA prided itself on its anti-racist, multicultural education methods, its publication arm often provided mixed messages about the value and place of Black students in the education system and society. Multiculturalism, which the ILEA used to guide the production of reading materials, often resulted in a lack of cultural specificity and an avoidance of issues facing Black students, such as racism. Partnering with Black educators allowed the ILEA to offer more culturally specific and anti-racist material, but doing so also brought the ILEA to the attention of critical governmental authorities, who would eventually disband the ILEA out of fear of Black radicalism.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135386299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé (2001) is about six women who meet in an express train’s compartment in southern India. One of these women, Akhila, is the narrator of the novel, while we hear the voices of the other women only when they narrate their stories in first person to Akhila. The way the women tell these stories one by one is in the spirit of empowering Akhila, who is portrayed as a woman bound within heteronormative ideas of coupledom and gender-based expectations of care labor within patriarchal families. The women also encourage her, by example, to question the accepted ethical model of feminist practice within an already unethical patriarchal structure of society. This encouragement happens, I argue, as they recount instances of the self-acknowledged unethical care practices through which they have affectively resisted different forms of violence within the upper caste, patriarchal, heteronormative family structure. These forms of violence are intersectional as they are based on overlapping identities of caste, age, and gender.
{"title":"Malignant Care: Affects and Labor in Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé (2001)","authors":"Pujarinee Mitra","doi":"10.3390/h12050110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050110","url":null,"abstract":"Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé (2001) is about six women who meet in an express train’s compartment in southern India. One of these women, Akhila, is the narrator of the novel, while we hear the voices of the other women only when they narrate their stories in first person to Akhila. The way the women tell these stories one by one is in the spirit of empowering Akhila, who is portrayed as a woman bound within heteronormative ideas of coupledom and gender-based expectations of care labor within patriarchal families. The women also encourage her, by example, to question the accepted ethical model of feminist practice within an already unethical patriarchal structure of society. This encouragement happens, I argue, as they recount instances of the self-acknowledged unethical care practices through which they have affectively resisted different forms of violence within the upper caste, patriarchal, heteronormative family structure. These forms of violence are intersectional as they are based on overlapping identities of caste, age, and gender.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135425495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
With a psychoanalytic lens, this article will examine some forms of contemporary narration, which develop in the virtual world and appear as phenomena related to mythopoiesis in preadolescence. Such forms put the body at the heart of the identity transformation. The body becomes a staple of the metamorphosis of suffering and drives the elaboration of pain. While always on the edge of ambiguity, these stories nurture persecution, fear, a state of permanent and ruleless alert, and a flood of primordial affects questioning the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, which is a problem that the common sense of our time seems to feel with greater urgency.
{"title":"Narrations on Digital Unconsciousness: A Psychoanalytical Perspective on SCPs","authors":"Francesca De Marino","doi":"10.3390/h12050108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050108","url":null,"abstract":"With a psychoanalytic lens, this article will examine some forms of contemporary narration, which develop in the virtual world and appear as phenomena related to mythopoiesis in preadolescence. Such forms put the body at the heart of the identity transformation. The body becomes a staple of the metamorphosis of suffering and drives the elaboration of pain. While always on the edge of ambiguity, these stories nurture persecution, fear, a state of permanent and ruleless alert, and a flood of primordial affects questioning the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, which is a problem that the common sense of our time seems to feel with greater urgency.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135344286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article looks at a set of anglophone form poetry that I wrote for a course I took while pursuing my master’s degree in Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi (2019–2021), during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. The poems are a documentation of the life that I lived and experienced during this time. Using an auto-ethnographic method, this article simultaneously engages with poetic forms, such as the haiku, villanelle, sestina, and acrostic, and provides a self-reflexive analysis of the content and the South Asian context from which the poems emerged. Each poem, I argue, grapples with various gendered structures of interpersonal and state violence, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown that followed in its wake. In this article, I explore the ways in which the everydayness of violence can be documented through art and creative practices. My primary question is: What is the form of the poem doing for the content of the poem; that is, in what ways do certain poetic forms assist in the documentation of personal experiences of violence during a pandemic? This article explores the political possibilities offered by the method of writing form poetry as a documentation of violence, as well as providing a ‘witness’ to it. Thinking more about the role of producing art vis-à-vis my academic research, I further ask: How can we expand the scope of the feminist research methods we use, and what role might form poetry play in this? I situate this article at the intersection of South Asian Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Literary and Cultural Studies, particularly focusing on the South Asian anglophone poetics of the written word in a post-pandemic time.
{"title":"Form Poetry and the Pandemic","authors":"Tapaswinee Mitra","doi":"10.3390/h12050107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050107","url":null,"abstract":"This article looks at a set of anglophone form poetry that I wrote for a course I took while pursuing my master’s degree in Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi (2019–2021), during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. The poems are a documentation of the life that I lived and experienced during this time. Using an auto-ethnographic method, this article simultaneously engages with poetic forms, such as the haiku, villanelle, sestina, and acrostic, and provides a self-reflexive analysis of the content and the South Asian context from which the poems emerged. Each poem, I argue, grapples with various gendered structures of interpersonal and state violence, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown that followed in its wake. In this article, I explore the ways in which the everydayness of violence can be documented through art and creative practices. My primary question is: What is the form of the poem doing for the content of the poem; that is, in what ways do certain poetic forms assist in the documentation of personal experiences of violence during a pandemic? This article explores the political possibilities offered by the method of writing form poetry as a documentation of violence, as well as providing a ‘witness’ to it. Thinking more about the role of producing art vis-à-vis my academic research, I further ask: How can we expand the scope of the feminist research methods we use, and what role might form poetry play in this? I situate this article at the intersection of South Asian Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Literary and Cultural Studies, particularly focusing on the South Asian anglophone poetics of the written word in a post-pandemic time.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135718813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}