Consciousness Of Self Research Articles

Predicting the Individual Values of the Social Change Model of Leadership Development: The Role of College Students’ Leadership and Involvement Experiences

This study explored the extent to which co-curricular involvement, holding formal leadership roles, and participating in leadership programs contributed to female and male college students’ capacity for socially responsible leadership. It focused specifically on the individual values of the Social Change Model of Leadership Development. An adapted version of Astin’s Input-Environment-Outcome Model was the conceptual framework and the Social Change Model individual values including consciousness of self, congruence, and commitment served as the theoretical framework. Data were collected from a random sample of 3,410 undergraduates at one institution through the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership. Participants completed a web-based survey including the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale-Revised2. Data were analyzed using hierarchical multiple regression to identify the extent to which the environmental variables contributed to outcomes. Involvement in student organizations was the most significant environmental variable and community involvement emerged as significant for women. A discussion of findings and implications is presented.

Emotionally Intelligent Leadership: A Guide for College Students (review)

Reviewed by: Emotionally Intelligent Leadership: A Guide for College Students Patrick Dilley Marcy Levy ShankmanScott J. Allen. Emotionally Intelligent Leadership: A Guide for College Students. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008. 131 pp. Paper: $25.00. ISBN: 978-0-4702-7713-3. The concept of what leadership entails has reached the Millennials. For centuries, a leader was thought to be born, to have inherent qualities that placed him (usually him) above other men. By the 20th century, leadership was conceived of being a strong [End Page 273] match between particular skills and positions/offices with responsibility for social or organizational outcomes or goals. But within the past decade or so, since the dawn of the new millennium, both of these concepts seem to have merged—and not flawlessly. To Millennials, everyone is equal and special. (See Jean M. Twenge’s Generation Me [2007] for a great analysis of how this change in undergraduate student identities and experiences developed.) Consequently, everyone has leadership potential and ability, no matter one’s inherent nature or one’s role within an organization. Marcy Levy Shankman and Scott J. Allen’s Emotionally Intelligent Leadership demonstrates the utility—and the futility—of this line of thinking as applied to college students. This book is written for an audience of undergraduate students, no doubt to be used in student leadership seminars and courses. According to the authors, “This book will help you begin or enhance the development of your leadership potential. This book will also help you think more critically about the topic of leadership” (p. 1). But more to the point, the authors then state, “If you hope to lead others, this book will help you think about the role of leader in a new way. If you’re interested in being a good team member, a good employee, or even a good friend, EIL will provide you with some of the tools needed to be successful in a formal (appointed) or informal (voluntary) leadership role” (p. 2). But, oddly, “This book will also help you become a better follower—a role or position often left out of discussions on leadership” (p.2). So although everyone can be a leader, not everyone can be a leader? That confusion of purpose or focus permeates the book. Shankman and Allen use the concept of “emotional intelligence,” which, they say, “was made popular by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence” (1998) (p. 5). Three “core facets” comprise this intelligence: consciousness of self, consciousness of others, and consciousness of context. Each consciousness—and one’s overall emotional intelligence—can be monitored. Each consciousness is operationalized in a number of areas, most having to do with communicating clearly and reflexively about one’s self, about others, and about the groups and environments in which one participates. The authors’ intended critical approach to understanding and becoming leaders and/or followers is framed within these areas; it is apparently to result from reading the “Student Voice” section and other inclusions of undergraduates’ comments about leadership. I searched the book in vain for any clue to the origin of the student comments. Unfortunately, these comments are short, containing little more than adages and aphorisms. Furthermore, I doubt whether the authors’ intended audience would be able to reflect much—let alone critically—since that audience would conceivably not have much experience in leading others. Augmenting the student comments in fostering critical reflection is another facet of each chapter, “Reflection Questions,” which are vague and which are seemingly designed to promote followership as often as leadership. For example, “What does it mean to be a good citizen in your organization? Would others agree with your definition?” (p. 84); “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being highest, at what level of optimism would you rate the organization with which you most closely associate? On what basis do you make this rating?” (p. 67); and one that is particularly suppositional and subjective, “How does losing control of emotions affect a leader?” I don’t think reading this slight book would harm any undergraduate; at the very least, as the authors write, “This book is intended to be a fast read” (p. 8). Indeed, improving skills...

How Today’s Undergraduate Students See Themselves as Tomorrow’s Socially Responsible Leaders

A new generation of leaders is needed not only to build local partnerships in today’s communities, but to assume all positions of leadership. Undergraduate students within a College of Agricultural Sciences at a large land grant university were given the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SLRS) to determine their self-perception of leadership according to the eight SLRS constructs: consciousness of self, congruence, commitment, collaboration, common purpose, controversy with civility, citizenship and courage through change. Results indicated a strong alignment with constructs such as congruence, consciousness of self and commitment, with slightly less agreement in the other constructs. Two important issues were illustrated. First, today’s undergraduates appear to be much more comfortable with diversity and conflict than once was the norm. Secondly, the citizenship construct brought to light a lack of awareness and desire to contribute to their civic responsibility. Implications include changes in leadership curriculum and implementation of service learning experiences.

George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country

In his study of Eliot as a psychological novelist, Michael Davis examines Eliot's writings in the context of a large volume of nineteenth-century scientific writing about the mind. Eliot, Davis argues, manipulated scientific language in often subversive ways to propose a vision of mind as both fundamentally connected to the external world and radically isolated from and independent of that world. In showing the alignments between Eliot's work and the formulations of such key thinkers as Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and G. H. Lewes, Davis reveals how Eliot responds both creatively and critically to contemporary theories of mind, as she explores such fundamental issues as the mind/body relationship, the mind in evolutionary theory, the significance of reason and emotion, and consciousness. Davis also points to important parallels between Eliot's work and new and future developments in psychology, particularly in the work of William James. In Middlemarch, for example, Eliot demonstrates more clearly than either Lewes or James the way the conscious self is shaped by language. Davis concludes by showing that the complexity of mind, which Eliot expresses through her imaginative use of scientific language, takes on a potentially theological significance. His book suggests a new trajectory for scholars exploring George Eliot's representations of the self in the context of science, society, and religious faith.

Agency, Consciousness, and Executive Control

On the Causal Theory of Action (CTA), internal proper parts of an agent such as desires and intentions are causally responsible for actions. CTA has increasingly come under attack for its alleged failure to account for agency. A recent version of this criticism due to Francois Schroeter proposes that CTA cannot provide an adequate account of either the executive control or the autonomous control involved in full-fledged agency. Schroeter offers as an alternative a revised understanding of the proper role of consciousness in agency. In this paper we criticize Schroeter’s analysis of the type of consciousness involved in executive control and examine the way in which the conscious self allegedly intervenes in action. We argue that Schroeter’s proposal should not be preferred over recent versions of CTA.

Urban Modernity on the Periphery

Research Article| June 01 2008 Urban Modernity on the Periphery: A New Middle Class Reinvents the Palestinian City Lisa Taraki Lisa Taraki Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2008) 26 (2 (95)): 61–81. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2007-029 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Lisa Taraki; Urban Modernity on the Periphery: A New Middle Class Reinvents the Palestinian City. Social Text 1 June 2008; 26 (2 (95)): 61–81. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2007-029 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsSocial Text Search Advanced Search The Palestinian town of Ramallah, possibly on the lowest rung of urban hierarchies in the region, is a peripheral town trying to become a city on the fringes of the Arab world. Its nascent new middle class partakes enthusiastically in the trans-Arab, urban, middle-class ethos elaborated in the centers of Arab modernity, the metropolitan cities. This new imagination, a hybrid construct crafted by the new urban middle classes in the age of globalization and the demise of the postindependence nationalist project, encompasses a new consciousness of self, family life, and family futures.It is a mark of the power of the trans-Arab, middle-class ethos that it has penetrated into the farthest reaches of the Arab world, and in a turbulent landscape shattered by wars, displacement, and dispossession. I argue that the coalescence of the momentous political events at the local level (the Oslo accords and the process of societal “normalization”) with the general collapse of the nationalist project of the Arab nation-state and the relentless currents of globalization sweeping the Arab world constituted the fertile ground in which the emerging urban middle class began to incubate its new life agendas and the sensibilities and practices that give it expression. City life is becoming a possibility in Palestine, more than half a century after its urban modernity was aborted by war and occupation. The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2008 Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness

Humans normally experience the conscious self as localized within their bodily borders. This spatial unity may break down in certain neurological conditions such as out-of-body experiences, leading to a striking disturbance of bodily self-consciousness. On the basis of these clinical data, we designed an experiment that uses conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality to disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body. We found that during multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders. Our results indicate that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and are based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information.

Understanding the brain. How can our intuition fail so fundamentally when it comes to studying the organ to which it owes its existence?

People find it difficult to get into their heads what goes on in their heads: how billions of nerve cells, working in parallel on individual tasks in separate areas of the brain with no coordinating supervision, are nevertheless able to assemble sensual input into coherent perceptions of the world, create decisions and come up with new ideas. How can our intuition fail so fundamentally when it comes to studying the organ to which it owes its existence—that is, when it comes to understanding how the brain works? We imagine that there is a central entity at work in our heads, which we equate with our conscious self and that has all the wonderful abilities that distinguish us as humans. This intuition imposes itself so persuasively—even overwhelmingly—that it is not surprising that, throughout our cultural history, scientists and philosophers have speculated as to where in the brain this all‐powerful and all‐controlling entity might be. ![][1] The plausible assumption was that there must be a single location where all information about our internal conditions and environment is made available, decisions are taken and actions are initiated. Even Descartes—who considered mental processes to be superior to, rather than connected to, material processes in the brain, and whose free‐floating res cogitans would therefore have needed no circumscribed location—did not believe that it was possible to get by without a singular localizable controlling entity. The contradiction between this assumption and the scientific evidence that has arisen since the time of Descartes could hardly be greater. Studies of the structural and functional organization of the brain have shown that this organ is, to a large extent, decentralized, and processes information in parallel in countless sensory and motor subsystems. In short, there is no single homunculus in our brains that controls and manages all these distributed processes. This … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

The Ethical Vision of Dante'sParadisoin Light of Levinas

Ethics is prima facie concerned with what one does or should do. Philosophically, it belongs to an area distinct from fundamental inquiries into what is (ontology) or how we know (epistemology). Yet at certain junctures in intellectual history ethics becomes more than that. It becomes essential to interpreting all realms of philosophy and of life. Ethics comes to be understood as fundamental to any disclosure of the world and to the very consciousness of self. From this perspective, what things are and how we know them cannot even be considered until an ethical relation has been taken up vis-a-vis others and perhaps even vis-avis an absolute or divine Other. Cosmology, or the representation of the universe, and the very foundation of knowing become irreducibly ethical matters and must necessarily be grasped in ethical terms. Ethics in this sense is more than one branch of knowledge among others; it enfolds in embryo a comprehensive vision of the world and its conditions of possibility. What does it mean to have an ethical vision of human existence and relatedness

The soul of the person: a contemporary philosophical psychology

Does the human being really have a soul? Is the idea of 'soul' a matter of religious faith? If science cannot detect the soul, how can reasonable people speak of it? Soul of the Person is a contemporary account of the metaphysical basis for the transcendence of the human person. In being directed toward truth, beauty, and goodness, the human person transcends the physical order and reveals himself as a spiritual, as well as a material, being. The metaphysical principle for this transcendence is what we call the soul. In this book, Adrian Reimers presents a rereading and interpretation of Thomas Aquinas's account of human nature. The book's argument is based principally on two modern thinkers: Charles Sanders Peirce and his theory of habit and sign, and Karol Wojtyla and his notion of the transcendence of the acting person. According to Reimers, the person is constantly in the process of self-realization, which occurs through the rational adoption and development of habits. Rationality is not a purely mental phenomenon; rather, it imbues our entire being. The human person forms his behavior - habits - rationally according to his ideals of what is truly good, even if that vision of the good is flawed, incomplete, or unacknowledged. This development of habits directed toward values is the root of the person's consciousness of self. Furthermore, the values by which one forms his life define the self that he more clearly becomes as a person. The rational principle by which he develops these habits is called the soul. The text concludes with an explanation of the immortality of the soul.

The society of selves

Human beings are not only the most sociable animals on Earth, but also the only animals that have to ponder the separateness that comes with having a conscious self. The philosophical problem of 'other minds' nags away at people's sense of who--and why--they are. But the privacy of consciousness has an evolutionary history--and maybe even an evolutionary function. While recognizing the importance to humans of mind-reading and psychic transparency, we should consider the consequences and possible benefits of being--ultimately--psychically opaque.

Introduction. Social intelligence: from brain to culture

Humans are perhaps the most social animals. Although some eusocial insects, herd mammals and seabirds live in colonies comprising millions of individuals, no other species lives in such a variety of social groups as Homo sapiens . We live in many different sized societies, from small, nomadic hunter

Philosophy Seminars for Five-year-olds

All of us, I believe, are extraordinarily active and creative intellectually when we are very young. Somehow, in the first few years of life, we acquire an identity, a consciousness of self; we discover, or create, a whole view of the world, a cosmology; and we learn to understand speech, and to speak ourselves. And we achieve all this without any formal education whatsoever. Compared with these mighty intellectual achievements of our childhood, the heights of adult artistic and scientific achievement all but pale into insignificance. It is reasonable to suppose that there is a biological, a neurological, basis for our extraordinary capacity to learn when we are very young. It probably has to do with the fact that our brains are still growing during the first few years of life. It is striking that there are things that can only be learnt during this time. If we have not had the opportunity to learn to speak by the age of twelve, we will never really learn to speak. Lightning calculators all begin to acquire their extraordinary arithmetical skills when very young. Some things, it seems, become too difficult for us to learn as we grow older. In our early childhood we are forced, by our situation, to be creative philosophers and metaphysicians, preoccupied by fundamental issues. One has only to think of the endless questioning of young children to appreciate something of their insatiable hunger to know, to understand.

Damaged Goods: Once Molested, Then a Predatorby Lillian Pegues Jennings; Bloomington, Indiana, Authorhouse, 2003, 222 pages, $17.50 softcover

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessDamaged Goods: Once Molested, Then a PredatorFabian M. Saleh M.D.Kate Erwin M.D.Fabian M. Saleh M.D.Search for more papers by this authorKate Erwin M.D.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Dec 2006https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2006.57.12.1815AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail This book comprises 18 chapters that address the life and upbringing of Mr. Dan Grayson, a young man with multiple personality disorder and traumatic stress disorder syndrome. Grayson was the victim of sexual abuse when he was a teenager. He later develops his other persona, Damaged Goods, reportedly unknown to Grayson's conscious self. As an adult he sexually abuses children. Dr. Jennings, author of this novel, seems to have more than a few agendas here.One important agenda appears to be to exculpate a perpetrator of his responsibility in offending against young children under the notion that "he who was abused becomes an abuser." This must be particularly true if he has multiple personality disorder, wherein the person is not responsible for the actions of his evil alter personality created in response to heinous abuse he suffered as a child.The book fails mightily in this regard. The offender, amidst tortured rhetoric and grammatically incorrect pseudo-philosophy, manages to undo his case by noting that he is "somewhat" conscious of his misdeeds and, driven by anger, chooses to abuse. He claims dissociation with amnesia, based on a need to deny painful memories of past abuse, as the rationale for his misdeeds. He irritatingly continues to write in the third person well after announcing his understanding of his drives and recognizing his responsibility.The impression Grayson makes is of a sociopath trying to appear empathic and appealing as he divests himself of responsibility for his behaviors. All the while he claims to have developed a deep appreciation of his actions and the consequences they have wrought. Like many sociopaths, this particular offender is awash in the consequences that his behavior has visited upon him, namely, incarceration in "the abyss." He has no remorse for the victims or the consequences of his actions on them. This is followed, at the end of the book, by a plea for help for people who are incarcerated. No plea has ever caused me to squeeze my eyes more tightly shut. Those of us not incarcerated are what is holding him down and so on. This is very unfortunate, as psychiatric services are desperately needed in prisons and jails.Furthermore, as studies indicate, dissociative identity disorder does not begin in adulthood. Grayson's abuse at the hands of teenage peers while attending boarding school does not translate into the development of an alter persona when Mr. Grayson becomes an adult. He doesn't claim that Damaged Goods existed before his multiple sex offenses.The pseudo-intellectualism oozing from every page, the poor grammar, the non sequiturs, and the blatantly self-serving tone—not to mention the focus on a disorder as exculpatory, a disorder that this individual is most unlikely to have—make for excruciating reading.Dr. Saleh and Dr. Erwin are assistant professors in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 57Issue 12 December, 2006Pages 1815-1815PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES December 2006 Volume 57 Number 12 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 December 2006 Published in print 1 December 2006

Damaged Goods: Once Molested, Then a Predator

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessDamaged Goods: Once Molested, Then a PredatorFabian M. Saleh M.D.Kate Erwin M.D.Fabian M. Saleh M.D.Search for more papers by this authorKate Erwin M.D.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Dec 2006https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2006.57.12.1815AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail This book comprises 18 chapters that address the life and upbringing of Mr. Dan Grayson, a young man with multiple personality disorder and traumatic stress disorder syndrome. Grayson was the victim of sexual abuse when he was a teenager. He later develops his other persona, Damaged Goods, reportedly unknown to Grayson's conscious self. As an adult he sexually abuses children. Dr. Jennings, author of this novel, seems to have more than a few agendas here.One important agenda appears to be to exculpate a perpetrator of his responsibility in offending against young children under the notion that "he who was abused becomes an abuser." This must be particularly true if he has multiple personality disorder, wherein the person is not responsible for the actions of his evil alter personality created in response to heinous abuse he suffered as a child.The book fails mightily in this regard. The offender, amidst tortured rhetoric and grammatically incorrect pseudo-philosophy, manages to undo his case by noting that he is "somewhat" conscious of his misdeeds and, driven by anger, chooses to abuse. He claims dissociation with amnesia, based on a need to deny painful memories of past abuse, as the rationale for his misdeeds. He irritatingly continues to write in the third person well after announcing his understanding of his drives and recognizing his responsibility.The impression Grayson makes is of a sociopath trying to appear empathic and appealing as he divests himself of responsibility for his behaviors. All the while he claims to have developed a deep appreciation of his actions and the consequences they have wrought. Like many sociopaths, this particular offender is awash in the consequences that his behavior has visited upon him, namely, incarceration in "the abyss." He has no remorse for the victims or the consequences of his actions on them. This is followed, at the end of the book, by a plea for help for people who are incarcerated. No plea has ever caused me to squeeze my eyes more tightly shut. Those of us not incarcerated are what is holding him down and so on. This is very unfortunate, as psychiatric services are desperately needed in prisons and jails.Furthermore, as studies indicate, dissociative identity disorder does not begin in adulthood. Grayson's abuse at the hands of teenage peers while attending boarding school does not translate into the development of an alter persona when Mr. Grayson becomes an adult. He doesn't claim that Damaged Goods existed before his multiple sex offenses.The pseudo-intellectualism oozing from every page, the poor grammar, the non sequiturs, and the blatantly self-serving tone—not to mention the focus on a disorder as exculpatory, a disorder that this individual is most unlikely to have—make for excruciating reading.Dr. Saleh and Dr. Erwin are assistant professors in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 57Issue 12 December, 2006Pages 1815-1815PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES December 2006 Volume 57 Number 12 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 December 2006 Published in print 1 December 2006

Seeing red: a study in consciousness

From sensations that probably began in bodily expression to the evolutionary advantages of a conscious self, 'Seeing Red' tracks the 'hard problem' of consciousness to its source and its solution, a solution in which, paradoxically, the very hardness of the problem may make all the difference.

The Staircase of teacher development: a perspective on the process and consequences of the unity and integration of self

The article is a theoretical conversation that addresses a new perspective on an often omitted or unrecognized process that is related to current issues in teacher education. Identified and explored is a sequence of forms in a teacher's professional, pedagogic life, and it is argued that these forms are synchronous with R. G. Collingwood's description of the journey traveled by individuals through the forms of consciousness in the quest for gaining knowledge of a phenomenon. An understanding of the rapprochement that exists between these two sequences offers a possible philosophical foundation for helping teachers understand, construct and generally make sense of experiences at various discrete moments of their career. Such theoretical understanding guides teachers to develop a personal way of knowing, a personal philosophy and to construct a unified and integrated consciousness of self as person and self as teacher. Covertly, the article identifies a number of issues inherent in teacher education programs.

Consciousness of the self (COS) and explicit knowledge

Starting with Dienes and Perner’s (1999) distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge and the traditional philosophical distinction between COS (the consciousness of self) as an object and COS as a subject, we suggest a triple classification of COS experience into three modes, each corresponding to a different state of consciousness. When one acts automatically COS is totally embedded within the representation of the environment. When one monitors or attends to one’s experience, the self is implied by an explicit representation of one’s attitudes, consistent with Descartes’ cogito insight ‘I think therefore I am’ (1641,1984). However, a reflexive thought, e.g., ‘I know fact x,’ requires an explicit representation of the self. This analysis highlights the existence of an intermediate mode of COS as a subject and suggests its possible connection to monitoring one’s behavior.

"Self-Displacing Vision": Snowdon and the Dialectic of the Senses

[I]nstead of apocalypse, there is only and self-displacing vision (65). Thus Geoffrey Hartman, early in Wordsworth's Poetry, comments on culminating scene in poet's account of origin and progress of his powers, (1) Ascent of Snowdon. implicit contrast, of course, is to Apostrophe to Imagination which supervenes on Wordsworth's account of crossing Alps in Prelude, Book VI, moment of recognition in which, rising up before and progress of [his] song (VI 527), (2) poet's reveals its distinctive structure: what Hart-man identifies, in an even more striking formulation, as consciousness of self raised to apocalyptic pitch (17). It is from these rival highpoints(63) of Prelude that argument of Wordsworth's Poetry, Hartman's account of poet's via naturaliter negative, is strung. formulation from which we set out--instead of apocalypse, there is only and self-displacing vision--is thus also an aphoristic condensation of that argument and its guiding claim: that adherence of Wordsworth's poetry to limits of experience must be read as systematically resisting or evading apocalyptic tendency of his imagination, with his most avoidance of apocalypse (61). dominant strategy of this avoidance would be literalization, although Hartman himself does not use that term: The main attributes that define figuratively in ecstatic Apostrophe of Book VI--mist, flash, abyss--appear in as literal part of landscape (64). I have impression, perhaps mistaken, that Hartman's reading in Wordsworth's Poetry of Apostrophe to Imagination has been more influential than his discussion of Snowdon. This is not surprising given absolute cognitive, if not poetic, privilege he claims for former passage: Wordsworth once, and only, face to face with his imagination (61), in language which (with its allusion to St. Paul) is itself notably apocalyptic in tendency. There is, however, a counterplot to Wordsworth's Poetry that emerges in latter half of book, and which Hartman's retrospective comments highlight. Consider, for example, following statement from Polemical Memoir introducing A Critic's Journey (1998): There is a dialectic of senses, initiated by dominance of eye, by scopic desire; and poet came to believe that Nature was an agency pitting other senses against and resolving-- developmentally and providentially--sensory fixations [...] Wordsworth's Poetry went beyond contending categories of 'Nature' and 'Imagination' to show this dialectic in detail. (xxvi) Here again and in particular, a later section of Wordsworth's Poetry entitled Eye and Ear on Snowdon, figures centrally, though in ways that significantly rework, as we will see, terms of its relation to Book VI. For displacements which organized relationship between two passages will now appear as internal to unfolding of episode itself and indeed to very play of perception. Hartman's earlier characterization of as developing and self-displacing vision thus itself harbors a literalism that refers us from visionary to visual. Read in context of this later development, Snowdon's astonishing avoidance of apocalypse will seem less like an evasion of self-knowledge, however breath-taking in performance, and more like an unprecedented form of poetic resolve. As quotation from A Critic's Journey indicates, Eye and Ear on Snowdon is part of a longer development devoted to showing how, beginning especially with Alfoxden period, Wordsworth's writing works to subdue the tyranny of eye without sacrificing its grounding in senses, and specifically how sight transcends [...] itself, and becomes hearing (176). …

James Merrill's Polyphonic Muse

James Merrill's Polyphonic Muse Timothy Materer University of Missouri-Columbia Early in his career, James Merrill considered the influence of the modernist poets "something to react against" (Collected Prose 51). Merrill thought that T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams revealed a "drift toward the more or less monumental" that obscured the human scale of their work. In Merrill's view, they began their careers writing "small, controllable" poems, but then each produced—in The Waste Land, The Cantos, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and Paterson—a "huge, unruly text that grapples ravenously with everything under the sun" (351). When he read Elizabeth Bishop, the intimate tone of her poetry seemed the "antidote to those ambitious and daunting 'giants' of modernism" (155, 163). When finishing his long poem The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), however, Merrill realized that his poetic development had come to resemble that of the modernists. He admitted in 1980 that, following the modernist tendency toward the monumental, he "felt a similar pressure at work in my own case" (351). The pressure that led Merrill to write the "huge, unruly text" of The Changing Light at Sandover included the desire to grapple with a variety of subjects. But more significant, as we will see in Merrill's own description of his development, was his desire to get beyond the limited sense of self and the constrained voice of his early [End Page 207] poetry. Like Eliot's Prufrock or Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, whom Pound described as "consciousness disjunct" (201), Merrill's poetic personae were limited by their alienated self-consciousness. Merrill's A Different Person (1993), a memoir that centers on the years 1950–52, describes his early career in the familiar terms of a young poet finding his own voice. 1 Dissatisfied with the voice of his early poems, he experimented by dramatizing aspects of the self as separate voices before he conceived of the poem as a medium for voices independent of the conscious self. In his one-act poetic play The Bait (1953) and long lyric poems such as "The Thousand and Second Night" and "From the Cupola" (Nights and Days, 1966), he experimented with a variety of speakers. In The Changing Light, he created a long poem that can be characterized in Mikhail Bakhtin's terms as a "polyphonic" work of layered voices. Merrill's ambition to speak in his own voice developed into the need to express the multiple selves or voices within him. Merrill's conception of himself as an "author" became more complex as he explored his poetic and sexual nature. A Different Person allows us to see why Merrill remarked on "how little choice I had in the matter" of his poetic development because of the complex psychological factors that went into it (Collected Prose 351). A Different Person links his growth as a poet to his growing understanding of his sexual nature. Finding his voice, his poetic muse, and a sense of his inner femininity were all linked. Merrill recalls making progress on The Bait only after he had made its narrator a woman, because "words came more easily to me in a woman's voice than in a man's" (Different Person 251). This statement seems surprising because, especially in the fifties, Merrill's poetry did not appear to speak in a feminine voice or create a feminine persona. Even though Merrill's love poems were written to other men, a reader of that time would be likely to assume that they were written by a man to a woman. As Merrill wrote in A Different Person, the [End Page 208] obscurity of his early poems had the effect of "masking . . . the gender of my loves" (183). Such masking and obscurity in his early poetry were limitations Merrill wanted to escape by finding a more authentic self and poetic voice. By leaving New York for Europe and eventually settling in Rome, he hoped to remake his poetry by remaking himself and becoming...