Crisis Of Self Research Articles

Comme des sentinelles by Jean-Philippe Martel

Reviewed by: Comme des sentinelles by Jean-Philippe Martel Walter S. Temple Martel, Jean-Philippe. Comme des sentinelles. Boréal, 2021. ISBN 978-2-764626764. Pp. 178. This poignant text unravels like a journal intime, providing a window into a curiously fascinating existence. Divided into 34 sections, the chapters are each prefaced with a title that speaks to the juxtaposition of emotions that qualify the ensemble of the work. From "Au réveil" to "Those were the good times," the literary voyage reveals the revelations of an unrestrained storyteller. In search of "something else," or perhaps a new perspective, the main character, Vincent Sylvestre, embodies a "crossroads" of past and present. Pointing to the fragility of a veritable existential crisis, the main character turns to alcohol and drugs, further underscoring the immediacy of his predicament. The narration is melancholic, evidenced early on through a discernable vulnerability: "J'ai ouvert les yeux en espérant me réveiller ailleurs, entouré de personnes saines et agréables, mais je me suis seulement senti étourdi" (9). Such sentiment prefaces what unfolds throughout as a sobering account of a multidimensional and highly complex crisis of self, finding root in the narrator's childhood. Readers will become immersed in the trials and tribulations of two unlikely yet parallel characters, Vincent (an intellectual) and Robert (a bandit). The former somehow finds solace in the darkest corners of the "out there" that he so desperately seeks to confront. As we trace the plight of the protagonist, we are perhaps propelled to confront the very question that haunts the writer's imaginary: How do we reconcile the unknown as we reflect on the past? What renders this text highly poetic is the simplicity of a narrative procedure that gives way to pensive observation: "À présent, les gens étaient toujours aussi désolants, mes perspectives d'avenir presque aussi sombres, mais quelque chose avait changé: moi, peut-être?" (30). Here we are reminded of the recurring theme of shifting perspectives. The writer thus manages to invite readers to participate in the lived experiences of characters who become increasingly dénudés. One of the overarching themes of the text is the implied double miroir that may suggest the reader's own fragility. Particularly striking is the main character's desire to escape the reality of a lackluster existence, temporarily veiled by mundane behaviors: "Pour penser à autre chose, j'ai allumé la télé—un geste machinal que je n'avais pas posé depuis longtemps" (37). Critical here is the reference to "autre chose" that resurfaces in surprising yet interconnected ways. Recalling the omnipresent theme of escape (which can be traced from beginning to end), the notion of forgetting one's self unravels as a temporary but prescriptive way of out the darkness that qualifies the protagonist's dilemma. The final chapter, "Un peu de paix," in a way resolves the tension associated with Vincent's unknown: "Une histoire où je ne suis peut-être pas un héros de légende, mais où je dis Je quand il est question de moi" (176). The emphasized Je draws attention to the empowerment of the sentinelle, who redefines his own ethos—on his own terms. [End Page 253] Walter S. Temple Utah Valley University Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

No justice, no progress: Contemporary African leadership and society in Plato’s crucible

Virtue and vice, courage and cowardice, wisdom and folly are tendencies common to all humans without historical, geographical, colour, or gender exceptions. Granting that the aforesaid statement is tenable, this article engages Plato’s idea of a just city and a just soul in the Republic and considers how these might speak to contemporary African leadership deficits and societal ills. This appraisal is predicated upon the notion that a just city and a just soul or their approximation are attainable and worth pursuing in contemporary Africa. Thus, as answers are sought for the colonial legacies still haunting Africa, self-examination is necessarily part of the process. In the Wretched of the Earth for example, it is easy and maybe legitimately so, to focus on Franz Fanon’s fiery critique of the colonialists and miss his self-critical appraisal of African intellectuals and leaders whom he calls “[s]poiled children of yesterday’s colonialism and today’s governing powers” that “oversee the looting of the few national resources”. More than fifty years after colonialism, this critique still remains valid. I therefore explore Plato’s answers (or questions) to this age-old human crisis of self- and public governance currently amplified in Africa and hampering common good and progress. In the search for a just city characterised by common good, this article spotlights Nigeria to buttress Plato’s emphasis on state of the soul rather than class, colour or creed as a precursor to leading a just and eudaemonic life and good self- and public governance.

Bourgeois, Buñuel, and Venus' Empty Shell: Hysteria and Crisis in Cet obscur objet du désir (1977)

Cet obscur objet du désir (Luis Buñuel, 1977) stands out for its representation of idealized femininity as an impossible desire. Here, this aspect of Buñuel's last film is re-examined from the perspective of two works by the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010)—Janus Fleuri (1968) and Fillette (1968)—and an icon of classical femininity, the Venus de Milo (c.100 BC). Using a psychoanalytical framework to question the relationship between the idealized female archetype and male hysteria, this article traces a pathway from the Venus de Milo to Bourgeois via Buñuel's film. The contrast between repetitive images of passive, mutilated femininity and Bourgeois' challenging pieces may shed new light on the difference between the excess represented by Buñuel (using two physically different actresses in a single role) and that represented by Bourgeois' sculptures. This contemporary perspective on the male hysteric allows us to look back at the two women in this film as the products of a metaphorical arc-en-cercle enacted by both male protagonist and director. Here, woman is more than simply Irigaray's ‘obliging prop’ of masculine fantasy; she is symptomatic of something more extreme, inherently tied to a crisis of self, brought about by the experience of desire.

Imagining a dialectical African modernity: Achebe's ontological hopes, Sembene's machines, Mda's epistemological redness

In Chinua Achebe's book of essays Hopes and Impediments, he asserts that Nigeria's failure to ‘develop’ and ‘modernise’ like Japan is because of a ‘failure of imagination’. Yet for many Africans, modernity is a tainted ‘gift’ because it was introduced into the African continent along with European colonial capitalism which simultaneously caused an ontological crisis of self. Although many Africans want to ‘catch up’ with the West, how is it possible when Western technological superiority was equated with white racial superiority? Achebe declares that, as Africans ‘begin their journey into the strange, revolutionary world of modernization’, literature should function as guide. Hence, I examine Ousmane Sembene's novel God's Bits of Wood which depicts Africans laying claim to ‘race-less’, ‘language-less’ ‘machines’. But does (Western) technology change culture? Can African culture appropriate technology to form a dialectical African modernity? If so, what role does ‘tradition’ play? In Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness, we witness the emergence of a traditional modernity made possible by a dialectical epistemology.

MLA 2014—Chicago: Melville and Matter

MLA 2014—ChicagoMelville and Matter Timothy Marr, Chair Click for larger view View full resolution Participants in “Melville and Matter” panel at MLA 2014, from left to right: Erik Larsen, Amy R. Nestor, Timothy Marr, Meredith Farmer. Photo Courtesy of Tony McGowan. Herman Melville’s many physical journeys revolutionized his perspectives on the planet, with enormous ontological implications. Melville’s odyssey through open oceans, expansive prairies, frozen extremes, verdant islands, and stony deserts exposed him to a “realizing sense” (Redburn ch. 27) of the immense power and terror of the material earth in space and time. Over the course of his career, Melville regularly engages the changing forms of earth’s material reality by centering on matter’s immanent capacity to generate continuing life in the midst of the fatal embrace of earthly destruction. The resilient instinct of flora to sprout shoots, tendrils, plumes, tufts, and [End Page 95] blooms embodies Melville’s own creative urge to continue writing in the face of eruptions of doubt. Melville often grounds his thinking in physical, chemical, organic, meteorological, and geological processes open to dynamic interpretation by both scientific studies of his own age and current theories of immanence, emergence, and assemblage in our own. Melville often materializes philosophy in vital substances such as blubber, oxygen, sap, and sperm and in refined essences such as attar, musk, and ambergris. Melville’s literary generativity is grafted with the physical forces of evolution and the “germinous seeds” of elemental energies. Melville also powerfully figures his fiction amidst such material formations as pebbles, stones, icebergs, volcanic eruptions, auroras, and stars. Extending the conference themes of vulnerability and resilience, “Melville and Matter” examined Melville’s investment in the spell of life and the myriad ways that the natural, the literary, and the human both animate and draw shape from the complex forms of inert things of matter, composing what Melville called “the mingled, mingling threads of life” (Moby-Dick ch. 114). Systems without Bodies: Moby-Dick’s “Ungraspable Phantom of Life” Erik Larsen, University of Notre Dame Within the first pages of Ishmael’s narration, Moby-Dick announces that “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life . . . is the key to it all.” By referencing and epistemically problematizing the concept of “life,” the novel indicates its participation in a general categorical crisis of the nineteenth century with respect to notions of vitality. This presentation explores how one philosophical formulation of this issue, namely Immanuel Kant’s conceptual bifurcation of organic life from dead or mechanical matter in his Critique of Judgment, can inform our understanding of Ahab’s crisis of self and body. More specifically, I investigate how Kant’s identification of organic life as the analogy for human subjectivity’s putative rational freedom and super-sensuous unity is reflected in Ahab’s attempts to analogize “his own proper and inaccessible being” with material objects that appear to evince a seamless unity of part and whole. The presentation explores how the failure of these attempts reveals the remarkable “accessibility” of Ahab’s being—his equitable ontological status in the world’s multitudinous forces and things—and thereby challenges the Kantian division of nature between living organisms and inorganic or dead materiality. The novel expresses a sense of nature that is neither identifiable in terms of organic bodily unity, nor merely the reflection, or antithesis, of human rationality. [End Page 96] Moby-Dick represents a formulation—highly important for current thinking in new materialism—of a ubiquitously vital nature characterized by systemic self-organization rather than one structured by the division between “living” and “dead” bodies. Melville and Meteorology: Three Ways of Looking at a Vortex Meredith Farmer, Wake Forest University For years critics have viewed Melville’s Captain Ahab as the paradigm of a strong, controlling agent. But Ahab’s body has a “leak” that lets a storm “burst in upon him.” And he is not even sure he could “‘find it . . . in this life’s howling gale.’” This description of “leaking” is, counterintuitively, about weather penetrating Ahab. And long before his leak is visible, we find that “subtle agencies” of the “weather” “wrought on Ahab’s texture.” In fact, Melville consistently represents humans as collections...

Search for Self in Arthur Miller's <i>The Death of a Salesman</i>

In spite of much research on Miller's The Death of a Salesman, no significant studies have been carried out on the aspect of ‘search for self’. This study re-justifies the need for a contingent model of the quest for identity, drawing ideas from the multiple manifestations of the threatening of self. It emphasizes the minimization of philosophical treatment and theorizing on self, on the grounds that the focus is on how Miller has dramatized the search for self among the different characters of the same family. The quest for self is expressed through a nostalgic yearning for the past, which has been lost due to various reasons. The process of search for self is spread over two generations, which enhances the effectiveness of Miller in depicting the struggle between the self of an individual and the public self the individual is compelled to put on as a mask. The dramatic strength of the play lies in the fact that it has interwoven the crisis of self in the life of the individuals and the broader changes taking place in the American society. Moreover, the study tries to display the intersection of psychological, social and emotional factors to which an individual self is subjected. Keywords: search, self, identity, literature, them-quest

Learning to Live with OCD: Labeling, the Self, and Stigma

Researchers have long questioned relationships among self-conceptions, “mental illness,” and stigma. This article looks at these issues through the lens of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), as minimal research has focused on the lived experience of OCD. We examine the impact of OCD on constructions of identity and the management/resistance of stigma. We do this through in-depth interviews with an untraditional Internet-based sample. We find respondents experience a crisis of self that leads them to a variety of strategies to deal with self-stigma, experienced stigma, and anticipated stigma.

Multiple Articulations of Exile in US Latina Literature: Confronting Exilic Absence and Trauma

sudden dispossession accompanying refugee flight is much more than loss of permanent home and traditional occupation or than parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also death of person one has become in particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at painful process of rebirth. Dervla Murphy frequent theme of exile in US Latina literature is framed within social and geopolitical reality of Latin America. Narratives of displacement and exile discussed in this article specifically focus on Central American and Caribbean experience determined by conditions of military regimes and authoritarianism in second half of twentieth century. Forced flee severe political repression and state violence in their homelands, Central American and Caribbean civilians came US mainly as political refugees, participating in massive population uprooting. In only three decades, from 1950-1983, almost two million people were forced relocate: approximately 900,000 Cubans; 300,000 Dominicans; 200,000 Nicaraguans; 300,000 Salvadorans; and 200,000 Guatemalans came US as documented and undocumented refugees (Pastor 300). effect of such massive relocations are typically experienced as psychological rupture that inevitably problematizes articulation of individual and collective subjectivity. As Edward Said notes, rift between human being and native often results in an alienation from self (173). This absence of strong grounding provokes feelings of uprootedness and nonbelonging, endangering one's personal sense of being and propelling one into perpetual solitude and nostalgia. inability find stable and complete meaning provokes crisis of self, fragmented subjectivity placed in continuous state of lack. Denied home and integrity in both homeland and immigrant location, exiles become confined space of absence and loss, or Said calls a perilous territory of not-belonging (177). In her analysis of Latin American women's writing in exile, Reading Body Politic (1993), Amy Kaminsky theorizes exile as particular form of presence-in-absence. She emphasizes its spatial configuration, pointing out that exile is primarily from, and not to, place (30). As physical topicality constituted by departure, exile is defined by what is missing, not by it contains, and its conditions of loss and emptiness foster a will return into (32). Desire reclaim presence is manifested, Kaminsky states, in perpetual longing, nostalgia, wish return, and fear of return where one can no longer be. Consequently, exile is experienced as dislocation, both physical and psychic. On other hand, exile may also offer liberating possibilities. Kaminsky notes that experience of physical and emotional rupture can lead personal growth and transformation. Through discovery of an inner capacity to survive and grow in new environment (37), one may find greater independence and confidence and thus gain more fulfilling self-affirmation and realization. Kaminsky compares this act of self-discovery rebirth, an emergence of new personhood and subjectivity. As epigraph this article states, exilic rebirth is inevitably connected death, the death of person one has become in particular context. Evidently, this individual liberation or, in Murphy's words, the painful process of rebirth--is attained in traumatic circumstances, but this is precisely why its meaning is so powerful and valuable. This article focuses on depiction of exile in three Latina texts--Helena Maria Viramontes' The Cariboo Cafe, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban, and Julia Alvarez's How Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents--in an attempt investigate different articulations of exilic condition. …

Crisis In The Gulf, by George Bush, Saddam Hussein, Et Alia. As Told to the New York Times

Crisis In The Gulf, by George Bush, Saddam Hussein, Et Alia. As Told to the New York Times Frederick M. Dolan . . . the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions. — Paul de Man In the life of a nation, we’re called upon to define who we are and what we believe. Sometimes the choices are not easy. As today’s President, I ask for your support in the decision I’ve made to stand up for what’s right and condemn what’s wrong all in the cause of peace. — George Bush The crisis in the Gulf, as today’s President acknowledges, is in large measure a crisis of self- definition: a matter of identity (as in defining America’s role in a post-cold war world, and indeed of writing the rules for such a world), of marking or highlighting the boundary between self and other (as in the ownership and control of “the world’s largest oil reserves,” or as between the civilized and the uncivil). Following a long Orientalist tradition, the West feels compelled to go elsewhere in search of its defining characteristics, even if this means, to use President Bush’s own metaphor, drawing lines in the sand. As his image forces one to reflect, sand—especially the shifting, wind-blown sand of the Arabian Empty Quarter—is a most unstable medium, and a line drawn in it is likely to be erased with the next change in weather. The contours of the boundary lines and identity President Bush hopes to define remain, it is true, somewhat murky. At the same time, for those who have followed literary theory over the past two decades, the battle over what meaning to assign Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait possesses an uncanny familiarity. The seemingly anarchic spin-doctoring of American officials charged with formulating war aims that seem at once defensible and feasible, and the way in which their efforts have been judged and interpreted in the press, have to do, in particular, with the much-discussed questions of allegory, symbol, and irony. At first glance, the debate in Congress and the media appears to be an argument over the appropriate allegorical reading of the Gulf crisis, with the Bush administration insisting on the pre-text of World War II and the lessons of Munich, and its critics favoring the script of Vietnam. To much of the public, the Bush administration’s deployment of nearly 400,000 troops, and billions of dollars of weaponry both high-tech and low, is allegorically intelligible in terms of the story of America’s tragic and ambiguous “involvement” in Vietnam. As in Vietnam, it is said, the United States is taking the lead in fighting somebody else’s war; as in Vietnam, the Middle East is figured as a “quagmire” in which American troops will become—what else?—“bogged down.” The Middle East will be transformed into a huge Lebanon, with the emergence of hopelessly ambiguous and complex factions intractable to the Manichaean American mind. American morale will gradually be destroyed, and America’s standing in the world will once again be diminished. Against this allegorical interpretation of the crisis, officials, media pundits, and a farrago of “experts” on matters from national security to Middle Eastern politics insist that the events taking place in the Gulf bear no relevant relationship to Vietnam. Our commitment in the Gulf is clear and forceful where it was ambiguous and shifting in Vietnam. As opposed to the gradual escalation that characterized Vietnam, plans for war in the Gulf, in so far as we can tell from press reports, suggest an all-out, all-or-nothing operation. More importantly—though for ideological reasons this point,qua allegory, must remain tacit—the campaign against Saddam Hussein involves “big principles” and “vital interests” (the tacit point being that Vietnam involved neither). The vital interests are variously described as oil or jobs; the big principles are those of territorial integrity, opposition to aggressive war, and respect for United Nations resolutions. The allegorical pre-text for the Persian Gulf crisis, in this optic, must be World...

Technology and the crisis of self

Communication between people occurs in a social context including role relationships eventually negotiated by participants. Developing and maintaining these relationships assists the society, and the entire communicative process is a necessary condition for a person's definition of a self identity. Contemporary technologies potentially limit the development of social relationships and broadening of self‐concepts. Computers cannot fulfill many social functions and could disrupt the social fabric, thereby losing vehicles for defining and constructing self. Planning training to improve communication skills may avoid negative consequences. Finding methods to augment new technologies with opportunities to develop relationship‐building skills must become a high priority.

Camus by Germaine Brée (review)

96 MODERN DRAMA May CAMUS, by Gennaine Bree, New Brunswick, N. J., Rutgers University Press, 1958, 275 pp. Price $5.00. The recent death of Albert Camus, in an automobile crash near Sens, gives an unforeseen and solemn relief to this warmly sympathetic book by Germaine Bree, whose foreword begins: "It is a perilous task to undertake to write a critical study of a living writer. . .." As compensation for the peril of her task, however, Miss Bree had the privilege of being aided in it by Camus himself, who put at her disposition a great deal of unpublished material, notably the personal notebooks he had kept since 1935 and the unfinished manuscript of his first attempted novel, La Mort Heureuse, which throws a curious new light on l'Etranger. She has further enriched her study by recalling certain neglected writings such as l'Envers et l'Endroit as well as numerous contributions to periodicals , and the works of other authors ranging from Aeschylus to William Faulkner that Camus adapted for the stage of his day. However since her approach to his work is above all "literary," the main part of her criticism deals with his major novels, stories and plays. The first six chapters constitute what is probably the most serious and comprehensive biography of Camus to have appeared so far. "We can reach," affirms Miss Bree, "no really penetrating understanding of the significance and value of his work if we take it out of the historical context of our time." This is obvious for the exceptional material circumstances out of which came, for example, LettJ'es Ii un ami allemand; less obvious but far more important for those intellectual circumstances that oriented Camus' reflections in the pre-war world of 1930-39, and which Miss Bn§e clarifies for us admirably. However the most interesting attempt of this biographical study is not the most historical: what it seeks particularly to expose are the essential images or intuitions, the forms of sensibility that underlie the problems Camus poses in his works and his way of posing them. Most often these are simple images drawn not from books but from his childhood and youth in North Africa: images of poverty and light, of pain and need and hopeless waiting, of the desert and the sea and the "invincible summer" of his native land. It is with these that one can begin speaking of what distinguishes him from his French-born contemporaries. Against the background of a society without religion, without ethics, without any consolation for what it must do and endure, man's task seemed perhaps to define itself more Simply for him than in the intensely historical and ideologically-tom civilization of the continent: to surmount the facile nihilism that is equally the lesson of life on a purely sensual and discontinuous plane, and of logical reflexion pushed to its extreme consequences; to affirm against the absurd and triumphant unity of nature and the superhuman purity of rational abstraction his own ambiguous being, and from it to draw the values that endow his life with coherence and meaning. "We must first save man," wrote Camus, "if we \",ish to save the idea of man." For, as Miss Bn§e takes care to point out, Camus is not, professionally speaking, a philosopher, nor is he interested above all in ideas or logical demonstrations; he is rather as she defines him, "a man who seeks to elucidate his experience through an effort of his intelligence." And it is not by chance that the experiences he most frequently presents in his works are "those moments of nakedness, when all rationalization and all protective ideas and beliefs disappear." A voyage, which throws one out of his carefully arranged pattern of living; a crime which suddenly reopens the whole question of life and death; a natural catastrophe on a personal or social level, which can not be eluded but must somehow be dealt with; an' accident , however trivial, which sets off such a prolonged and intense crisis of self- 1960 BOOK REvmws 97 knowledge as that which overtakes the narrator of La Chute-~>ne by one Miss Bree analyzes these "parables," as she likes to...