Reality Of Consciousness Research Articles

Dream or Delirium?: Revisiting the Ages in Eça and Machado

Dream or Delirium? Revisiting the Ages in Eça and Machado K. David Jackson Eça de Queirós’s recourse to the “diaphanous veil of fantasy” introduced in novels of the 1880s, O Mandarim (1880) and A Relíquia (1887), finds a counterpart in Machado de Assis’s first major novel of the same decade, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1880–81). The two authors were aware of each other’s work, documented by Machado’s sharp critique of characterization and motivation in O Primo Basílio (in O Cruzeiro, April 16, 1878). As if to suggest a further oceanic dialogue between the two great Luso-Brazilian novelists, A Relíquia was first published in the Rio de Janeiro journal Gazeta de Notícias in 1887, the same year of its publication as a book in Portugal. After 1880, according to Machado da Rosa, Eça explored the oneiric experiences of his characters and in the process enlarged the frame of conscious reality: “Talvez que a sua maior originalidade resida na integração do subconsciente com a consciência da personagem, feita sob um plano em que as fronteiras da realidade externa se enredam no mundo da fantasia, sem contudo perderem as suas linhas prosaicas . . .” (Rosa 199). Oneiric versatility is equally an innovative, even experimental feature in Machado’s Memórias Póstumas. The striking similarities of Brás Cubas’s “delirium” with the dream sequences of Teodorico Raposo in A Relíquia offer an illuminating counterpoint in the use and meaning of scenes of imagination and dreams and their role in the art of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Duílio da Gama, a Brazilian diplomat who frequented Eça’s house in Paris, confirmed the Portuguese writer’s special fascination with Machado’s oneiric episode: . . . uma das especialidades de Eça como ‘entertainer’ na sua casa de Neuilly, nos arredores de Paris, durante a década de 90, era a recitação memorizada do Capítulo VII, [End Page 47] ‘O Delírio,’ da obra de Machado, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas. Eça conhecia-o de cor. Nas palavras de uma testamunha de uma exibição do mestre actor/comediante que Eça seguramente era, ele ‘gostava de o declamar pausadamente, com inflexões estudadas, que sublinhava e esclarecia, com um comentário, as passagens de mais apurada análise psicológica ou da mais subtil ironia.’ (Lyra 199–200) What the fantasies in each novel most have in common is a universal re-visitation of the ages, placing the unsuspecting narrator in an abnormal reality with a privileged perspective on the theater of human history, described by Óscar Lopes as an “. . . amplo e imaginoso distanciamento histórico e geográfico” (83). Both create an aura of hallucination treated by the narrator with sarcastic and intense irony, contradicting the normal sense of reality in the attempt to reconstruct both personal and historical consciousness. Dreams are incorporated into Eça’s and Machado’s novels as a new counterpoint to descriptive realism, as Lopes comments: “Tanto em A Relíquia, escrita desde 1884, como mais tarde em A Ilustre Casa de Ramires (1900), o naturalismo das notações contemporâneas tem uma importante contrapartida de sonho, polarizada num subenredo que se insere na intriga principal” (85). Traveling back in time Brás Cubas’ “Delirium” (Chapter VII) consists of a hallucinatory trip back through the centuries, involving magical perspectives, moral critique, and metamorphosis. In an uncanny parallel to Eça’s novel of the same year, Brás first took the form of a Chinese barber shaving a mandarin, who mistreated him, before his body was transformed into a morocco-bound volume of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. Restored to human form, he was carried off by a hippopotamus on a furious ride to the origin of the centuries. The delirium is considered by Benedito Nunes to be one of three exemplary moments in Machado, all involving metaphor or fantasy, in which the author’s fiction becomes a form of thought, absorbing and restating philosophies aesthetically.1 The chapter mixes the skepticism of Montaigne with Pascal’s sense of the tragic...

Beyond Fundamentalism: Of Dancing Angels in Apocalyptic Times

What does it mean when an enormous freeway bridge collapses into the Mississippi River on a hot summer day? The author describes her experience of that shocking event in her community, putting it in the psychological context suggested by Edward Edinger's work on the archetype of the apocalypse, as well as mythology and astrology. Edinger argues that apocalyptic imagery in the dreams and visions of individuals describes a catastrophic (for the ego) intrusion of the Self into conscious realization, offering the individual an opportunity to enlarge the personality and develop a relationship to the transpersonal level of the psyche. But he seems not to envision such a possibility for the collective when world-changing apocalyptic events take place. The author urges the Jungian community to expand ideas of individuation to include collective individuation.

Shaping the ‘Public Sphere’ in Second Life: Architectures of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

The built environments of immersive worlds have generated a great many publications on construction technologies; much has also been written on the uses of virtual buildings for commercial and educational purposes. Remarkably little research has, however, been devoted to the appearance and effect of digital architectures, the traditional questions asked by architectural historians. This article offers a modest investigation of sites in Second Life that functioned as campaign venues during the 2008 United States presidential election. In the course of describing the symptomatic differences between the sites of the Republicans and Democrats, the author offers observations on buildings’ contribution to the creation of a “public sphere”—that discursive space broadly considered vital to a successful democracy. Though the architectures of the actual and virtual worlds are in some ways utterly divergent, they are, in others, remarkably similar. One of those ways, the author argues, is their agency. In virtual, as in actual settings, architecture manipulates the actions of its users. Buildings, it is posited, condition the movements of avatars and the thoughts of humans, often without their conscious realization.

Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom!

Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom! I n his 1987 study of the critical reception of Absalom, Absalom! Bernd En­ gler points out that “since the mid-Seventies the only interpretations to gain favour have been those which, at least partly, regard Absalom, Ab­ salom! as the conscious realization of an open work of art” (246). Some­ what testifying to how the text’s indeterminacy specifically concerns the inter­ connection of race and narrative, Engler’s survey also shows that noteworthy monographs from the decade include those concerning “Faulkner’s attitude towards racial questions” (252) as well as “the novel as a study in narratology and/or epistemology” (256). Indeed, even as Quentin and Shreve finalize their reconstruction of the endlessly uncertain past by reading Charles Bon’s white­ looking body as “passing white,” Faulkner does not supply any evidence for Bon’s racial mixture outside the white character-narrators’ invention. Engler is quick to note, however, that most race-related scholarship does not fully attend to the novel’s open-endedness, as exemplified by four studies from 1983: “Walter Taylor, Eric J. Sundquist, Thadious M. Davis, and Erskine Peters begin, as do most others, with the dubious assumption that Bon’s iden­ tity as Sutpen’s part-negro son has been clearly established in the text” (253). And it seems that this problem is still compromising the Absalom, Absalom! scholarship.1 For example, while critiquing the discursive domination of “‘le­ gitimate’ white caretakers of history,” Maritza Stanchich bases her postcolonial reading upon the same white “legitimacy” and uncritically follows Quentin and ‘One of a few exceptions to such a tendency, Barbara Ladd’s study delves into the subjectivity that interracializes Bon and elucidates why, “[although both [Quentin and his father] imagine Bon as a creole possessed of the expected creole decadence and capable of corrupting the innocence of Sutpens, it is only in Quentin’s narrative that Bon is constructed as black” (540). Ladd asserts that both Mr. Compson and Quentin, as historically conditioned subjects, invest in their narrative reconstruction their own anxiety over America’s constantly embattled providential design. Thus, Ladd argues, their fashioning of Bon varies due to the different historical forces that frustrated the American mission—i.e., Old World colonialism for Mr. Compson as the first postbellum generation, and racial “amalgamation” for his son. And, alienated from the lost cause, the narrators find their own identities in the respective Bons they construct: “it is really not very far, in terms of metaphorical development, from Jason’s creation of Bon (and by extension of himself) as cynical or fatalistic European charged with the seduction ofthe South through the unveiling of the white ne­ gro—the beautiful octoroon woman or ‘apotheosis of chattelry’ (AA 89)—to Quentin’s creation of Bon (and by extension himself) as the white negro, a man who has inherited both the violence and the illegitimacy, and whose blood demands vengeance. Both Jason’s and Quentin’s accounts are dramatizations of the white southerner’s sense of his own construction by postbellum history” (Ladd 542). 3 4 Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity Shreve’s re-creation of Bon as “a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white”: “When the narrators of different generations are faced with Bon, a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white and threatens to upset the South’s rigid race caste, their preCivil War and post-Civil War fears overlap and intermingle.... The strategy of the narrative seeks to uphold white domination by representing all characters of color through Rosa, Quentin, General Compson and Shreve, the ‘legitimate’ white caretakers of history” (608). Margo Crawford’s 2004 psychoanalytical study of racial mixture in Absa­ lom, Absalom! shows the same problem. For, while revealing how the novel’s white subjects cannot represent “interracialness” as a coherent Other but only as “abstract contradictions,” and thus exposing their own “meconnaissance, the recognition that is misrecognition, the‘me’ that is‘not me’” (76), Crawford fails to apply her critical paradigm to the white subjectivity that has made Bon—her most discussed example—“interracial” in the first place. Given that the narra­ tors do not...

Library Aware Power Conscious Realization of Complementary Boolean Functions

Library Aware Power Conscious Realization of Complementary Boolean Functions

Melville Essays the Romance: Comedy and Being in Frankenstein, "The Big Bear of Arkansas," and Moby-Dick

John Bryant, "Melville Essays the Romance: Comedy and Being in Frankenstein, "The Big Bear of Arkansas," and Moby-Dick (pp. 277-310)This essay argues that romance is not a fixed genre but a process of writing ("romancing")that Melville used at a particular moment in his career to engage in certain "ontological heroics," that is, confront the problem of Being (the mystery of the origins and reality of consciousness). The inadequacy of genre is asserted as the notion is observed to deconstruct in three ways, and it is replaced by six "Notes toward a Supreme Romance," which delineate elements in the process of romancing with examples from Michel de Montaigne's notion of essaying and Nathaniel Hawthorne's own definition of Romance as "careering on the verge." In applying these notes to Melville's romancing of structure and voice in Moby-Dick (1851), the essay first explores the structural framing technique in Mary Shelley's Gothic fiction, Frankenstein (1818, 1831), and its comic counterpart in Thomas Bangs Thorpe's classic tall tale, "The Big Bear of Arkansas"(1854). Both works conceal certain secrets of identity (or mysteries of selfhood and being)through nestings of voices (stories within stories) that culminate in a symbolic being(monster or bear). In Moby-Dick this model of "fictive essaying" is exhibited in "Cetology"(chapter 32), in which Ishmael cons the reader with a joke-within-a-joke structure that sexualizes the whale and thereby allows us unexpectedly to identify with the whale, which in the process also symbolizes the creative roots of Being. By essaying or "romancing" structure and symbol, Melville in effect tricks himself and his reader into a closer relation to the mystery of consciousness.

Narratives of the Night: The Use of Audio Diaries in Researching Sleep

This article draws on data from two major empirical studies of sleep to examine the use of audio diaries as an approach to researching sleep. Sleep has only recently emerged as a topic of interest to the sociologist, providing a valuable resource through which to examine the roles and relationships and gender inequalities which underpin everyday life. Yet accessing individual experiences of sleep is problematic. Considered a non-conscious activity, sleep takes place in most cases at night within the private domain of the home and is thus generally inaccessible to the social researcher and outside the conscious reality of the sleeper. In exploring the social aspects of sleep, we rely primarily on respondents’ interpretations of the sleep period given retrospectively in focus groups and in-depth interviews, distanced from the temporal, spatial and relational dimensions of the sleep event. This article also focuses on the use of audio diaries as a method designed to help bridge the gap between events in real time and retrospective accounts. We examine the narrative structure of audio diaries, discuss the principles and practice of using audio diaries in sleep research, illustrate the contribution of audio diary narratives to an understanding of the social context of sleep, and assess the use of audio diaries in social research. We conclude that, used in conjunction with other methods, audio diaries are an effective method of data collection, particularly for understanding experiences of intimate aspects of everyday life.

Consciousness and Science: an Advaita-Vedantic Perspective on the Theology – Science Dialogue

In modern science, the synthesis of “nature/mind” in observation, experiment, and explanation, especially in physics and biology increasingly reveal a “non-linear” totality in which subject, object, and situation have become inseparable. This raises the interesting ontological question of the true nature of reality. Western science as seen in its evolution from Socratic Greece has tried to understand the world by “objectifying” it, resulting in dualistic dilemmas. Indian “Science,” as seen in its evolution from the Vedic times (1500—500 BCE) has tried to understand the world by “subjectifying” our consciousness of reality. Within the Hindu tradition, the Advaita-Vedanta school of philosophy offers possibilities for resolving not only the Cartesian dilemma but also a solution to the nature of difference in a non-dualistic totality. We also present the Advaita-Vedanta principle of superimposition as a useful approach to modern physical and social science, which have been increasingly forced to reject the absolute reductionism and dualism of classical differences between subject and object.

The Renaissance in the Fields: Family Memoirs of a Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Peasant (review)

Reviews 125 Some readers might wish, in a work devoted to the construct of autobiography, for more discussion of the notion of feminine and masculine discourse. Abbott's Julian, however, works in a theological and psychological framework that is gender-neutral where 'the conscious realization of the soul is experienced indivisibly as a conscious realization of the indwelling Christ' (p. 160). In such a world personhood cannot be viewed only materialistically as validation of the human body by identity with the physical suffering of Christ. Abbott also eschews the simplistic division of male/raft'o and female!affectus as alternative approaches to understanding. Rather, for Julian the intellectus is the source of meaning, a faculty which requires both affectus and ratio (p. 83). The solid and scholarly book will be useful to those who study religious literature generally; the discussion of identity is a valuable case study for those interested in cultural and social aspects of the Middle Ages; and the subtle exploration ofthe continuity of a realist incarnational theology must be addressed by those who believe the late medieval church suffered disruption in a nominalistdominated world. There are some minor typographical errors, but this is a refreshing book which, as all good criticism should, urges a return to the sources. Rosemary Dunn School of Humanities James Cook University Balestracci, Duccio, The Renaissance in the Fields: Family Memoirs of a Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Peasant, trans. Paolo Squatrini and Betsy Meredith, University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999; paper; pp. xxvi, 146, 5 b/w illustrations, 1 map; R R P US$14.95; ISBN 0271018798. Many historians dream of finding unknown sources that illuminate a poorly documented aspect ofthe past. Imagine then the excitement ofDuccio Balestracci when in the early 1980s he discovered at archives in Siena two volumes of memoirs kept by a family offifteenth-centurypeasants, yes, peasants! The resulting book, La Zappa e la Retorica: Memorie Familiari di un Contadino Toscano del Quattrocentro, appeared in 1984. The book under review is an abridged and revised version of the original, with 'the hoe and the rhetoric' of the original title replaced by the more commercially promising The Renaissance in the Fields. Rather than family memoirs, these are account books with entries 126 Reviews dating from 1439 to 1502, kept primarily by one member ofthe family, Benedetto del Massarizia. The Massarizia family lived and farmed in the three villages of Marciano, Montalbuccio, and Carciano located in the 'Masse,' the area within four tofivemiles of the walls of Siena. Neither Benedetto nor any other members of the family could write, although Benedetto could probably read the entries, which were written by those with w h o m he had business. As a result, the books contain none of the intimate details that occur in the inquisition registers of Jacques Fournier, which Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie used to reconstruct peasant life at Montaillou, nor do they contain any of the information on family affairs that occur in the memoirs of Gregorio Dati and Buonaccorso Pitti. Balestracci edits one of the account books in the appendix, fourteen pages in length including Balestracci's lengthy introduction. Typical of the entries is one dated 1475: 'And I, Iachomo Pini, have received 4 lire from Benedetto de Masaritia for lady Giovanna degli Schotti, as he promised our Giovanni Pini. These are for a hayfield sold at Bascani.' A bit more revealing is the following, dated 1479: 'Giovanni Lapini and Paolo, his son and m y son-inlaw , who currently live on the edge of Uvile in their own house, are owed sixtytwo lire on November xxvi, which are for a hooded gown of French-style cloth, like new, one bed, one bedstead like new, assessed by Guido di Simone, jacketmaker , and Fruosino di Finuccio, as recorded by the contract drawn up by Bernardino Placiti, which is, by common agreement, a portion of the dowry of m y daughter Bernardina, as I promised.' Rather than using the account books to illuminate the lives of fifteenthcentury Italian peasants, Balestracci uses recent work on the social history of late medieval Italy to illuminate the account books. The best example of this is the short, seven-page chapter entitled...

Writing on the body: The poetic life-story of Philip Larkin

The physical worlds which individuals inhabit are extensions of what they consciously contrive, and in the narratives individuals write in and of their lives one often sees the means by which that consciousness pours itself out into the world, bringing a personal version of the world into effect. Narratives manifest the connection between individuals' outer worlds and their inner consciousnesses. This applies in complex ways also to individuals' own bodies; these are at once the ground of consciousness and a site upon which consciousness effects itself, pours itself out. The body might be described as a privileged site of conscious realization. In this paper, these themes are explored in relation to the writing, the life and the body of the English poet, Philip Larkin. Conceiving of writing not so much as a technique of communication than as a mode of cognition which makes experience meaningful, the paper explores the life-story Larkin wrote for himself and proceeded bodily to inhabit. By way of Larkin's own words and those of his biographer, Andrew Motion, through images of dithering, passivity, disparagement, depression and hypochondria, the paper offers a nuanced exemplification of an individual writing on his body a life-story of consciousness and control.

Eric Voegelin's Paradoxes of Consciousness and Participation

Eric Voegelin thought his “paradox of consciousness” was “the key to all his other works,” but no one has yet explored it as such a key. “participation” is the central term in Voegelin's philosophy, and the “paradox of consciousness” reveals the paradox of participation: a participant-partner is simultaneouslya partandthe whole(albeit in a perspective) of a reality of consciousness, like a marriage, a polity, or the cosmos.

Schrödinger's cat paradox and some other nice stories from science - what do they teach us?

SCHRÖDINGER's Cat paradox and the EINSTEIN-PODOLSKY-ROSEN paradox from quantum mechanics will revolutionize our world view. It will teach us that reality is not as real as we think it is. The consequences are startling: We live in a multidimensional world which is composed of a biological reality as we know it and of an energy - consciousness reality of a spaceless and time less quality.

A Numerical Metaphor in a Schoenberg Song, Op. 15, No. XI

Research Article| July 01 1993 A Numerical Metaphor in a Schoenberg Song, Op. 15, No. XI Anne Marie de Zeeuw Anne Marie de Zeeuw Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Musicology (1993) 11 (3): 396–410. https://doi.org/10.2307/763966 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Anne Marie de Zeeuw; A Numerical Metaphor in a Schoenberg Song, Op. 15, No. XI. Journal of Musicology 1 July 1993; 11 (3): 396–410. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/763966 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Musicology Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1993 Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Changing Consciousness of Reality: The Image of Berlin in Selected German Novels from Raabe to Doblin

The Changing Consciousness of Reality: The Image of Berlin in Selected German Novels from Raabe to Doblin

The Changing Consciousness of Reality. The Image of Berlin in Selected German Novels from Raabe to Doblin

The Changing Consciousness of Reality. The Image of Berlin in Selected German Novels from Raabe to Doblin

Criticism and Literature

Literary criticism in our country, which at its best is creative judgment on current writing and on its complex relationship to actual reality and the reader, is at the same time the equal of that literature, is an independent element in it, and deals with its concerns. Yet as such it does not turn into philosophizing that departs from the matter at hand, an abstract theory, or some overly urgent journalism "on the subject of… " This was noted long ago by Belinsky: "Criticism always corresponds to the phenomena on which it sits in judgment: that is why it is the consciousness of reality." This presumes that criticism is artistic perception, i.e., is itself literature. Just such a view of the nature and purpose of literary criticism was presented in Gogol's familiar definition: "Criticism based on profound taste and intelligence, criticism by a great talent, has the same merit as any original work: in it one sees the writer being analyzed, and even more one sees the analyzer. Criticism written by someone talented survives the ephemeral nature of journalism." The criticism written by the revolutionary democrats, and Marxist criticism as well, are precisely of that nature; [such criticism] is a stable, viable tradition for us.

Performance and Popular Culture

Performance and Popular Culture

The inability to transfer classroom learning to clinical nursing practice: a learning problem and its remedial plan

The inability to transfer classroom knowledge to clinical nursing practice is a common learning problem encountered by many nursing students. Manifestations of this problem may involve both the academic performance and personal development of the students: inability to solve problems in nursing situations; inflexibility and rigidity in the exercise of nursing care; fragmentation of nursing care; and apathy towards clinical practice. Because of the seriousness of this learning problem, a plan must be formulated to rectify it. This plan is developed with major emphasis on the teaching process, the student and the curriculum. One of the important roles of a teacher is to help students understand many widely useful relationships, principles or generalizations. In order to enhance transfer, nursing students must be given ample opportunities to apply the learned principles in a variety of nursing situations. Learning is a self-active process; an ideal transfer demands the students' conscious realization that transfer is possible. Students need to be committed to the belief that particular facts in the classroom study are pertinent in other situations. To promote transfer, the curriculum must be designed in such a way so that it has transfer value in terms of the students' goals and purposes. Furthermore, proper sequence of curricular activities is crucial if transfer of classroom knowledge to clinical practice is to occur.

Psychosynthesis: A psychotherapist's personal overview

Psychosynthesis, a therapeutic orientation based on personal experience, bridges psychological and theological conceptions of human nature. Psychotherapy is conducted in the here-and-now with emphasis on the relationship. Within that context, many techniques are employed. Imagination and intuition are cultivated. The client is helped to identify with his “personal self,” the center of consciousness and will, and to exercise willing control over the process of therapy and over his life. Basic principles include the existence of a higher unconscious, which is the locus of transpersonal needs, the interrelatedness of one to all, the reality of consciousness and will. Positive strivings and continuing growth are emphasized.

The nature of consciousness

In this paper the existence and nature of consciousness as a distinct phenomenon is considered in the framework of current scientific philosophy. It is contended that consciousness properly exists as a distinct entity; however, it apparently is an immeasurable quantity. As a consequence, we postulate that consciousness is a real, nonphysical entity, as these terms apply in modern physics. A consideration of the possible types of equations relating the variables of the physical world, P i , to the variables of the consciousness, C i , suggest that there should exist certain quantities common to both the physical equations and the equations of the conscious reality. It is therefore postulated that conscious reality is coupled to physical reality through a single fundamental physical variable. Since consciousness is apparently associated in some way with the electrochemical processes occuring in the brain and since the pertinent physical equations are very satisfactorily understood today, it should be possible to discover the nature of the interaction between the C i and P i variables. The connection should be such as to unify into a single conscious experience the data processing events taking place through-out the brain, yet excluding the many data reduction and chemical processes that do not form a part of our consciousness. A study of this problem indicates that the interaction is quantum mechanical. Thus there must exist a quantum mechanical process operating within the brain that is ultimately involved with the data processing functions of the brain. On the basis of this evidence, a theory of the operation of synapses of the brain is proposed that involves quantum mechanical tunneling at the synaptic cleft. A detailed mathematical consideration of this theory leads to five independent predictions concerning the structure of the synapses and functioning of the brain which are substantiated by observations. It is found that for consciousness to occur the minimum synaptic transmission frequency v́ min for the entire brain must satisfy the relation v′ min = N 2 3 t , where N is the total number of synapses in the brain and t is the synaptic transmission delay time. This equation represents a physical condition necessary for consciousness to exist in a brain.