Alternative Self Research Articles

Philosophical and aesthetic meaning of the image / title of O. Dovzhenko’s film story “Enchanted Desna”

The Subject of the study is the philosophical and aesthetic aspect of the title of the film story “Enchanted Desna”. The purpose is to find out the author’s intention, clarify the problem and idea of the work based on deciphering its title. The established interpretations of “Enchanted Desna” in Dovzhenko studies need to be revised. The widespread understanding of this text in a populist way contradicts or at least does not include the interpretive possibilities provided by the author’s poetics. The need for its re-reading in the context of today makes the study relevant. Linguistic, aesthetic-typological, comparative, and phenomenological methods were used in the research. The novelty of the research lies in the original interpretation of the key image of the famous work. The Results. The starting point in the interpretation of Dovzhenko’s title is the semantics of the passive participle “enchanted” in connection with the image of the mirror and the motive of self-discovery. This story cannot be adequately understood outside the context of H. Skovoroda’s philosophical heritage. Indirectly through Skovoroda, Dovzhenko learns and develops Plato’s aesthetic ideas and the concept of calokagatia. He modernizes the ancient idea of beauty in the realm of creativity. Knowledge turns out to be identical to self-knowledge, the discovery of beauty is its creation. In accordance with the latest utopias, man is assigned the role of demiurge. If we take into account that beauty in this concept is identical to truth, then man (humanity) is also recognized as the creator of truth. Dovzhenko’s new humanism was nourished by the atmosphere of national Renaissance, Marxist and Nietzschean ideas. It is claimed that the central problem of the film story is the role of art in the formation of personality. “Enchanted Desna” is an image of art that immerses the soul in the processes of purification, personalization, self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, comprehension / creation of beauty-truth. The artist’s mission was to awaken in each person their alternative self, or, according to Skovoroda, the inner man with the help of art. In the future, it is necessary to find other versions of the image of the mirror of self-recognition in Ukrainian and foreign writers and to trace the influence of the magnum opus of the novelist Dovzhenko in the 60s.

Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age by Ayala Fader

Reviewed by: Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age by Ayala Fader Andrea Lieber Ayala Fader. Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age. Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 270 pp. In her compelling ethnography, Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, Ayala Fader shines light on the insular world of ultra-Orthodoxy as it navigates challenges sparked by the ubiquity of the Internet in twenty-first-century life. Fader's analysis unfolds on two fronts. Through deeply personal interviews she reveals the complex stories of individuals whose lives are upended by fervent religious doubt, leading them to find community and self-expression in a digitally mediated online world. In parallel, Fader also voices the perspective of the religious leaders and therapists charged with counseling those in doubt and who uphold the notion that the Internet is a moral threat that must be curtailed to preserve the sanctity of the Jewish soul. Unlike Jewish skeptics of any previous generation, the "double lifers" at the center of Fader's work have the Internet—a virtual platform that is at once private and uniquely public—to voice their doubt, externalize it, and pursue answers to their fundamental questions. By connecting anonymously with others, those struggling with doubt create an alternative, digital public that extends well beyond the confines of the ultra-Orthodox communities in which they live. This parallel world, where religious doubt is facilitated by and expanded through technology, [End Page 445] poses an existential challenge to ultra-Orthodoxy by subverting the mechanisms (such as the control of information) that it has used historically to maintain the authority of an increasingly strict interpretation of Jewish tradition. The human stories that animate Hidden Heretics are of individuals living with "life-changing doubt." Distinct from doubt that strengthens faith, "life-changing doubt" is deeply existential, urgently challenging a skeptic's world view with an intensity that compels action. Committing small transgressions in secret, searching blogs and online chat rooms for affirmation of and answers to their questions, and eventually making small, sometimes imperceptible changes to their personal practice, over time Fader's informants craft double lives—maintaining the outward appearance of piety while developing an interior, alternative space for expression of a different, alternative self. As an "anthropology of life-changing doubt," Hidden Heretics surfaces the complexities of what it means to live with these untenable contradictions by studying the semiotic forms (language, dress, and the body) that effectively embody doubt, turning it into a practice that can be seen, studied, and interpreted. Hidden Heretics builds on the approach employed in Fader's previous book, Mitzvah Girls, which analyzed the way Hasidic girls are socialized to become women and mothers in the closed community of Boro Park, Brooklyn. In this work, too, Fader emphasized the power of language, embodiment, and gender to communicate cultural meaning. While earlier generations of anthropologists saw religious categories like faith and belief as private and hidden from the public realm of practice, Fader suggests that belief and doubt are externalized practices, manifest in the things people do. "If belief and doubt are practices," she argues, "they can be ethnographically studied to account for the diversity of experiences afforded by age, gender, piety, or social class" (217). The power of Hidden Heretics lies in the way Fader takes her method in a new direction, exploring the way online spaces take shape as a "heretical counter-public." Showing how virtual space becomes externalized as discursive and public, yet simultaneously remains anonymous and private, her project is a useful model of how to do ethnographic research in hybrid spaces. In this regard, Fader's work will be of interest beyond Jewish studies, breaking important ground in anthropology, religion, and media studies. Another key strength Fader brings to this work is her astute ability to read for gender. A thread throughout the study notes the marked difference between the experiences of men and women living with doubt. While the men she studied could draw on the long history of apikorsim (heretics) and the legacy of the Jewish Enlightenment to frame their experience of doubt, the women she met had no such legacy and...

“mouth full & dripping with language”: The 2022 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

“mouth full & dripping with language”: The 2022 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry Amy Fish (bio), Krystal Howard (bio), and Carol-Ann Hoyte (bio) Winner: Elhillo, Safia. Home Is Not a Country. Make Me a World, 2021. Honor Books: Grimes, Nikki. Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2021. LaRocca, Rajani. Red, White, and Whole. Quill Tree Books, 2021. Luby, Brittany. Mii maanda ezhi-gkendmaanh/This Is How I Know. Illustrated by Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley, Translated by Alvin Ted Corbiere and Alan Corbiere, Groundwood Books, 2021. In her introduction to The Best American Poetry 2021, Tracy K. Smith writes, “poetry—the best poems of this rough year—courageously named so much of what I felt myself to be witnessing and enduring. . . . [and] reached me as offerings of desperately needed hope and endurance” (xxiii). As the judges this year explored the many works published for young readers, we were struck by the way these picture books, poetry collections, and verse narratives bore witness to the difficulties and beauties of the world. Each of the books the judges chose engages in a kind of witnessing of the past and its impact on the present. The winner and honor books for this year feature the experiences of young people of color coming to terms with their familial and cultural histories and engaging with their fore-mothers, [End Page 315] grandmothers, and mothers. “One of the many things I love about poetry,” U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón writes, “is that it’s slippery; it can move in between worlds, it doesn’t have to offer clarity or hope or vision, it only has to make us pay attention to the world.” While many of the works for young readers that we surveyed this year did provide hope in a traditional sense, many did not but instead brought to light painful memories and histories to be witnessed by readers. Limón goes on to say that, “Right now, when so much of the world is full of chaos and suffering, poetry can ground us again and remind us that beauty and wonder and imagination matter. We need to be reminded that awe is essential to our human lives.” Embodying not only endurance, these works invoke awe through their language, music, and imagination.1 Our winner this year is Safia Elhillo’s debut verse novel for young readers, Home Is Not a Country. A fresh take on the YA verse novel, Home Is Not a Country employs the fantastic to explore struggles with race, identity, and culture experienced by the young protagonist Nima. In a recent essay, “Searching for the Words to Describe Myself,” Elhillo, who self identifies as an Arabophone Black person, describes Nima as “a hyphenated American whose origins are a country not named in the book, but which I base on Sudan. The book’s cover art is a photograph of the Sudanese-Somali ceramicist Dina Nur Satti, a Black woman.” An early poem in the verse novel, “My Name,” weaves English and Arabic as Nima attempts to describe herself: nima well really it’s ni’mamispronounced at school to sound likethe middle of the word animal or stretchedinto a whining neema no letter in englishfor the snarling sound that centers my nameits little growl ع (15) Affectionately nicknamed “nostalgia monster” (14), Nima immerses herself in songs and photographs from her parents’ youth while feeling increasingly alienated from her own life and identity. By wishing herself away, Nima conjures the ghost of her alternative self, Yasmeen. While Nima wears her own skin with painful awkwardness—“muttering & burdened by the shadow of an accent/that i cannot manage to make charming” (9)—Yasmeen is a glamorous fantasy, “mouth full and dripping with language/. . . ./jewel of the neighborhood & somehow/a little taller than me/like there are extra bones in her spine” (12–13). This specter self whisks Nima into a city resembling Khartoum during the early days of her mother’s pregnancy—a pregnancy that could result in the birth of either Nima or Yasmeen. In Nima’s fantastical journey, confronting the past means reckoning with alternative futures...

Sidelining Bias: A Situationist Approach to Reduce the Consequences of Bias in Real-World Contexts

It has become common practice to conceptualize bias as an automatic response, cultivated through exposure to bias in society. From this perspective, combating bias requires reducing a proclivity for bias within individuals, as in many implicit-bias training efforts common in schools and corporations. We introduce an alternative approach that begins with the presumption that people are inherently complex, with multiple, often contradictory, selves and goals. When the person is conceptualized this way, it is possible to ask when biased selves are likely to emerge and whether this bias can be sidelined—that is, whether situations can be altered in potent ways that elevate alternative selves and goals that people will endorse and for which bias would be nonfunctional. Using both classic and contemporary examples, we show how sidelining bias has led to meaningful improvements in real-world outcomes, including higher academic achievement and reduced school suspensions, less recidivism to jail, and less stereotyping in mass advertisements.

The art of Jane Orleman: childhood trauma and the discourse of sexual violence

ABSTRACT Jane Orleman (American, born 1942) is an artist and a survivor of child sexual abuse. Through paintings she created during therapy, Orleman rejects the gendered and patriarchal binaries between therapeutic art and professional art, which pit the private, feminine, and intuitive against the public, masculine, and intellectual. By analysing selected artworks from Orleman that embody her child self, young woman self, and alternative self, I propose that Orleman reflects on and challenges the pathology of sexual trauma along with the discourse of sexual violence as a political statement. Therefore, I argue that her art deserves to be part of a larger, counternarrative, anti-rape and anti-incest cycle in contemporary American art.

Phantoms and Figments

Abstract This paper explores the parallels that can be observed between the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) and the English artist Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956). Although having quite different artistic backgrounds, they both arrived at complex spiritual theories and artistic production techniques associated with personality fragmentation and the emotional or intellectual exploration of alternative selves. While Pessoa and Spare are often regarded as exceptional artists and spiritual thinkers within their own environments, these similarities suggest a common familiarity with overarching themes and ideas expanding beyond their own restricted circles. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to question the exact nature of said esoteric and artistic exceptionality in light of the intellectual and artistic groups and movements surrounding them and propose a framework for the study of the overlap of occult and artistic circles in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries.

Cocomposing an Aesthetic Self Through Play: Toward a Transformative Framework for Dementia Care.

Aging and deterioration mark a new phase in many older adults' life, highlighting the importance of creativity and imagination. This article introduces the implementation of an innovative program, Play Intervention for Dementia, at a nursing home in Hong Kong, with emphasis on its contribution to the conceptual framework for understanding the selfhood of older adults with dementia. As a community-based participatory action research project, this study democratized knowledge production by integrating voices of practitioners with diverse backgrounds through video-based methods. Play, as an activity replete with free expressions and impulsive interactions, is an ideal realm for exploring and establishing selfhood with older adults with dementia. It has been found that "aesthetic self," an alternative self emerging from immediate aesthetic experience and carrying transformative power within the caring relationship, is a necessary element of self-construction in life with dementia. Integrating theories and practice, this framework provides a new lens for understanding and responding to selfhood, disease, and life.

Flaunting dissonance: The queering of narrative and gender boundaries in Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story

The Twyborn Affair (1979) is generally regarded as Patrick White’s covert “coming out” novel, followed by his frank “confession” in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). However, this article explores how even an earlier work such as The Aunt’s Story (1977/1948), from the Nobel laureate’s modernist phase, may be seen as a pre-text for the gay self, whereby the author stages incomplete representations of his own subaltern position in the characters he “becomes” in his writing. Through a series of textual feints, his persona is disseminated in the form of polyvalent alternative selves which belie any possibility for recuperation of a stable, authentic selfhood. White thereby refuses the univocal inscription of subjectivity upon which sexual hegemony is predicated. What I aim to do in this article is to extend the particularities of the novel’s writing strategies (found in the Jardin Exotique section, for example, which functions as a Foucauldian heterotopic space) into the province of gender. In doing so, I will show how the gay author, through the central character, Theodora Goodman’s protean identities and the deployment of competing narrative epistemologies, can fabricate alternative subject positions. These attest not only to the artificial technologies of gender constitution, but also function as remnants of White’s own divided status, brought about by his dissonant subaltern position in the borderlands of representation.

Bonding across Chinese social media

Abstract This paper explores social bonding in language play via the construction of ‘Chinese character (annotation)’ on two major social media platforms (Sina Weibo and WeChat) in China. The Chinese characters and their bracketed annotations under study, despite their one-to-one matching in sequence, never match each other either in meaning or in pronunciation. They convey a sense of playfulness among social media users who may be acquaintances or strangers to each other. While research on language play has uncovered systematic interpersonal meanings and social functions, our analysis of screen-based and user-based data shows that such linguistic behavior in a virtual community of practice contributes to social bonding among social media players. Within such structure and with different substitutes for both characters and annotations, social media users frame their expressions in evaluative or emotive ways to facilitate their presentation of an alternative self and of individual or community values.

Writing with Pencils in the Antebellum United States: Language, Instrument, Gesture

AbstractThis essay argues that the pencil, which became increasingly available in the United States during the antebellum decades, allowed writers to break from scriptural conventions and explore alternative selves because it afforded them the ability to write quickly, continuously, and on the move. Through readings of the manuscripts of John Washington, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman, this article demonstrates how the pencil facilitated such exploration by configuring language, instrument, and corporeal gesture in ways that suited the modernizing nation. The essay draws its method from a theoretical model known in Germany as the Schreibszene (writing scene), which demonstrates how archival scholars can explore the specific affordances of writing media and the scriptural experiments that may emerge from their use.

Sensitivity and Specificity of the Modified Epworth Sleepiness Scale in Children With Craniopharyngioma.

Children with craniopharyngioma are at risk for excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS). Multiple Sleep Latency Testing (MSLT) is the gold standard for objective evaluation of EDS; however, it is time and resource intensive. We compared the reliability, sensitivity, and specificity of the modified Epworth Sleepiness Scale (M-ESS) and MSLT in monitoring EDS in children with craniopharyngioma. Seventy patients (ages 6 to 20 years) with craniopharyngioma completed the M-ESS and were evaluated by polysomnography and MSLT. Evaluations were made after surgery, if performed, and before proton therapy. MSLT revealed that 66 participants (81.8%) had EDS, as defined by a mean sleep latency (MSL) < 10 minutes, with only 28.8% reporting EDS on the M-ESS by using a cutoff score of 10. The M-ESS demonstrated adequate internal consistency and specificity (91.7%) but poor sensitivity (33.3%) with the established cutoff score of 10. A cutoff score of 6 improved the sensitivity to 64.8% but decreased the specificity to 66.7%. Patients with craniopharyngioma are at high risk for EDS, as documented objectively on the MSLT, but they frequently do not recognize or accurately report their sleepiness. Future sleep studies should investigate whether specific items or alternative self- and parent-reported measures of sleepiness may have greater clinical utility in monitoring sleepiness in this population.

Staging the Shadow: Writing, Academic Subjectivities, and Hidden Selves

In this paper we explore our writing selves through the metaphors of concealment and display. We discovered the metaphoric possibilities opened up by Jung’s notions of persona and shadow and his emphasis on a rich psychic life that was animated by archetypes and symbolic meaning. This process helped us to glimpse alternative selves, that somehow live within us but are, like the shadow, neglected or pushed aside either due to institutional pressures to conceal or due to our own self-concept and our preferences for displaying certain identity types. Using poetic inquiry to access our unconscious feelings, we engaged in a process of writing that resulted in poetry and poetic vignettes. This type of arts-based practice helped us to disrupt the normative rationalist expectations surrounding academic work and intellectual production, and enabled us to create a space where agency and self-exploration were more accessible and transformative.

Liminality in nature-based tourism experiences as mediated through social media

The intersection between social media, liminality and nature-based tourism experiences hasn’t been the focus of previous tourism research. Such intersection, on the other hand, is illustrative of how social media relate to the constitution and performance of tourism spatialities, tourist identities, storytelling and place-making, and can lead to relevant theoretical contributes. We aim to investigate how liminality is expressed in relation to nature-based experiences by tourists on social media, and what role social media plays in mediating liminality during nature-based tourism experiences. The analysis is based on a participatory netnography of images and text posts, as well as online interviews with users of the popular social media Instagram. Findings show that the expression of tourism experiences in nature is closely related to specific notions of liminal otherness as opposed to the urban life and the everyday, where nature and wilderness are expressed as related to the genuine, the authentic and a true inner self. Creative combinations of pictures, captions and hashtags make it easier for tourists to express the contrast between the natural landscape and the everyday landscape once they returned home. These combinations also relate closely to performances of resistant and alternative selves and communities. At the same time, such performances are mediated and contested between freedom of self-expression, surveillance and social norms, an aspect that makes their liminal nature ambiguous.

Complex Worker: Self-Concept and Boundary-Work Among the Solo Self-Employed

This article proposes to examine the self-concept of members of an occupational category referred to as the “solo self-employed”—women and men who work alone and do not employ other workers. Our findings reveal that although the solo self-employed themselves do not make clear phenomenological use of the solo-self-employed category, they do speak similarly about their occupational independence, albeit without group awareness. The self-concept of the solo self-employed is mainly based on boundary work in relation to two well-known cultural-occupational categories: “employed workers” and “businesspeople.” Solo-employed workers prefer to distance themselves from these two categories and define themselves through negative comparisons between themselves and the two preceding categories. The Discussion section proposes perceiving solo self-employment as a social category that constructs an alternative self in relation to the selves associated with popular cultural-occupational scenarios.

The Concept of Empire in the Elizabethan Literature: Reading Persia in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays

The Elizabethan literature was fascinated by the representations of ancient and contemporary Persian Empire, as well as the figures like Cyrus the Great. The main historical sources about Persia that the English writers used, beside the Old Testament, were the writings of Xenophon and Herodotus. However, it was Xenophon that caught the attention of two prominent Elizabethan: Sir Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe. Their use of Persian images and figures in their texts was as an act of opposition to the Tudor foreign policy that supported Anglo-Ottoman ties in the 1570s and 1580s. The researchers, therefore, aim to analyse the anti-Ottoman discourse by using Persian Empire and identity in Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595) and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great plays (1590) by applying comparative analysis and close reading. The researchers, moreover, explore the way in which the Sidney’s and Marlowe’s aesthetic engagements aim at the initiation of the project of English empire-building based upon the Achaemenid and Safavid Persia along with representation of Persians as an imaginatively alternative self for the English people.

Faces of the Self in Modern Chinese Literature

A look at representations and explorations of the self in Chinese literature in the first half of the twentieth century shows not only those forces that shaped the formation of the modern Chinese self but also those tensions, anxieties, and aspirations that Chinese writers experienced in the construction of their new selves during the early days of the young republic. Examining representative literary works of this period reveals how the Chinese quest for a modern self, which is quite different from the traditional Confucian self, has been informed and enriched by the Chinese “contact” with foreign literatures and cultures since the late nineteenth century.... Using a number of representative literary works from early twentieth-century China as examples, this paper discusses the effectiveness of literature as a tool to explore the myriad facets of the self in modern Chinese literature, Chinese writers’ aspirations for an alternative self of their own, and the moral positions and writing strategies adopted by writers of the period in their conscious acts of exploring and/or shaping the self against the backdrop of Chinese modernity.

Normative economics and paternalism: the problem with the preference-satisfaction account of welfare

The normative turn of behavioral economics has led to a reconsideration of paternalism in normative economics. This article argues however that the preference-satisfaction account of welfare that still dominates welfare economics makes impossible to account for all the dimensions of the debate over paternalism. The laundered preferences approach and the alternative selves approach are two available frameworks to reconcile the consumer sovereignty principle that underlies the preference-satisfaction account with the fact that preferences are endogenous and context-dependent. I show however that neither of them is able to account for autonomy-related issues which are central in current debates over “soft” or “libertarian” paternalism. I suggest that a justification of paternalism compatible with liberal principles depends on the ability for reasonable persons to voluntarily consent to a collective choice rule with paternalistic tendencies. This argument relies on a distinction between preferences (which can be attached to other entities than persons) and values which is unknown to welfare economics.

Transportations of space, time and self: the role of reading groups in managing mental distress in the community

Background: The practice of reading and discussing literature in groups is long established, stretching back into classical antiquity. Although benefits of therapeutic reading groups have been highlighted, research into participants’ perceptions of these groups has been limited.Aims: To explore the experiences of those attending therapeutic reading groups, considering the role of both the group, and the literature itself, in participants’ ongoing experiences of distress.Method: Eleven participants were recruited from two reading groups in the South-East of England. One focus group was run, and eight individuals self-selected for individual interviews. The data were analysed together using a thematic analysis drawing on dialogical theories.Results: Participants described the group as an anchor, which enabled them to use fiction to facilitate the discussion of difficult emotional topics, without referring directly to personal experience. Two aspects of this process are explored in detail: the use of narratives as transportation, helping to mitigate the intensity of distress; and using fiction to explore possibilities, alternative selves and lives.Conclusions: For those who are interested and able, reading groups offer a relatively de-stigmatised route to exploring and mediating experiences of distress. Implications in the present UK funding environment are discussed.

The Alter Ego Workshop: A Cognitive Exercise

The Alter Ego Workshop:A Cognitive Exercise Josephine Anstey (bio) 1. Introduction Click for larger view View full resolution We all show and hide different aspects of ourselves to different groups and in different situations. Who pops out to have dinner with friends, to obey our grandmother, greet co-workers at the boss’s funeral, or when we are uncertain and lost in an unfamiliar place? Big, anonymous cities, the World Wide Web, travelling, all give people the opportunity to live parallel lives with completely alternate selves. But most of us squash and suppress whole personalities just so we can go about our daily routines. Physicists working on the Theory of Everything propose seven or eight extra dimensions coiled up within the three or four we know. Can we agree that we have alter egos coiled inside, us? Can we give them some room to come out and play? 2. Making Your Alter Ego Click for larger view View full resolution The first step, if you choose to take it, is to make an avatar of your alter ego(s): a material representation of your imprisoned self(ves). a). Gather Materials–a peg doll, cloth, pipe cleaners, wool, crayons. * b). Gather Tools–scissors, glue. c). Gather Yourself–rested, fed. d). Go to: http://www.creamcityreview.com/ io-main The audio file supports a meditative frame of mind allowing your alter ego to flow from your fingers into your avatar without self-censorship. * Other materials can be used, clay, balloons, straw, papier mache, a face drawn on your finger, etc. [End Page 46] 3. Getting to Know Your Alter Ego Click for larger view View full resolution When you have finished making your alter ego, spend some time getting to know yourself. Do you have a name? Are you shy, angry, greedy, flamboyant? Are you two years old? Are you omnipotent? Are you pregnant? Talk out loud. Walk about. What are you feeling? How would you act under pressure? How would you act if tempted? How would you act in love? 4. Playing with Your Alter Ego Click for larger view View full resolution Studies have shown that of all cognitive-breakout exercises, melodrama best supports the process of inhabiting, and unfolding diverse alter egos. Therefore the next step in this cognitive exercise is a guided exploration that takes the form of a melodrama in three acts. Your alter ego is invited to take part in three improvisations that trace the interrelationships of three characters. Love, compassion, repulsion, depression, and some of their attendant difficulties, are explored as your avatar serially steps into the mind of each character. Working through emotion, and the stories that emotion precipitate, helps us consolidate personality. However, the aim of the exercise is not to form a complete alternate self, but to understand that emotional response and judgment is tied more to context than personality; that self in this erea* is a language-based and very malleable construction. * Erea is a portmanteau word combining era (time) and area (space) [End Page 47] 5. Registering for the Melodrama Click for larger view View full resolution If you choose to take part in the melodrama you will need to register for a partner. Your partner is another Alter Ego Workshop participant, whose avatar will be acting opposite your own in real-time improvisations enabled by video-chat. To prepare for each act, read the short preamble that sets the scene. Online your avatars will be assigned roles and you will be given a short script to start the improvisation process. Then let your avatar unfold the scene. Register here for Alter Ego Workshop partner: http://impcon.org/?page_id=420 Warning: This is not a risk-free enterprise; self-image, identity and self-confidence are at stake, not only your own, but that of your partner. We consider that the avatars are necessary buffers for both of you. Although the complete loss of your normal narrative selves is extremely unlikely, it is a condition that may bring difficult consequences in this erea.* * See the case study The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart, William Morrow, 1971 [End Page 48] Josephine Anstey Josephine Anstey’s career has been concept and project...

Reading Readers: Living and Leaving Fictional Worlds

Traditional and recent claims that literature enables readers to develop more satisfying ways of being in the world overlook the phenomenon of readers—especially adolescent readers—feeling bereft when their engagement with a fictional world ends and dissatisfied with the ordinary life to which they must return. Looking at cases of actual readers’ experiences with such immersive fictions as the Harry Potter novels and The Hunger Games trilogy, this essay draws attention to the role that readers themselves play in negotiating the disparity between the alternative worlds and alternative selves they encounter or inhabit in fiction and the often disappointing strictures of external, shared reality. Bridging the gap between the fictional world and ordinary living, the essay contends, requires a double response from readers: (1) exploring ways to enact in their own lives elements of what they love in the imagined world, and (2) anticipating and evaluating the consequences of such enactments so that they can choose between healthy and unhealthy ones.