Divided Consciousness Research Articles

The Consciousness of Acting: The Effect of Divided and Unified Consciousness on Acting Performance

The art of acting, drama, or theatre has been largely excluded from the debate on the nature of consciousness in the scientific community. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether acting performance benefits from a divided or unified state of consciousness. Twenty-four acting students and professionals performed a monologue three times, twice with an interference task. Two different sets of instructions were provided for this task: one that asked participants to incorporate the interference into the world of their monologue (unified consciousness), and another that asked them to dissociate it from their theatrical performance (divided consciousness). The variables studied included an evaluation of performance on primary and secondary tasks, as well as responses on a creativity and dissociative experiences questionnaire and to open-ended questions. Two acting professors provided monologue ratings. There was a significant difference in interference task performance scores for the divided and unified conscious conditions, as well as for the primary rater's monologue scores. Participants performed better on both tasks when they were asked to incorporate the interference into the imagined world of their monologue. These results show that a unified conscious approach results in better performance on certain tasks, implying that unified consciousness may be more adaptive for certain daily functions such as multitasking.

The paradoxical self: duality and ambiguity in the works and lives of Oscar Wilde and Morrissey

Oscar Wilde’s and Morrissey’s lives seem to be full of contradictions. Their art constitutes a reaction against materialism, traditional lifestyle and social standards, as well as defence of individualism and freedom of thought. So far, their works have been analysed only from a very limited perspective of the tension between aesthetics and ethics. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that what prevails in their art is the state of ambivalence and ambiguity in relation to the issues connected with religion and morality, innocence and experience, life and death. This article aims at demonstrating multiplicity of personalities of the artists mentioned and ethical ambivalences of their works. Taken together, Wilde and Morrissey’s creative outputs present a clash between different spheres of life, the divided consciousness and the split between body and soul. Thus, the oscillation between opposite standpoints and values excluding each other is not only the result of the artists’ personal experience but it may symbolise the paradox and absurdity of the human existence as well.

The Queer Gift of Black Folk Double Consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois's Detective Story "The Case"

The Queer Gift of Black Folk Double Consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois's Detective Story "The Case" Erika Renée Williams (bio) W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of double consciousness, which he defines as "a problem" in the Euro-American imaginary, has long been understood to denote an alienated black subjectivity and an American body politic divided by racial caste. The white gaze, Du Bois instructs, has the potential to restrict the parameters of black subjectivity by barring black subjects from fully accessing their citizenship and expressing their humanity. In the opening chapter of his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," he recounts the childhood memory that perhaps occasioned his divided consciousness: that of a young white female classmate refusing the affection he offered with the gift of a "gorgeous" calling card.1 The incident leads him to realize that his blackness signals not approbation but abjection to many of his white compatriots and thus to see that they deem him a problem and not fully a person. Because he likens this experience of failed interpersonal, interracial affection to that of being cast out from his native land, Du Bois arguably suggests a parallel failed "romance," understood in its most capacious sense as any heightened exchange of intersubjective affect, between himself and the American nation writ large. In rendering the young white girl a symbol of an ungenerous and withholding white nation, Du Bois implicitly ties the development of individual states of black consciousness to the promise and pathos of black assimilation into a Euro-centrist American body politic, foregrounding the way interpersonal dynamics of intimacy shape collective processes of nation-building and implicitly rendering double consciousness a matter of misbegotten love. [End Page 27] Moreover, Du Bois's recounting of a childhood story of foreclosed "puppy love" to set up his theory of double consciousness in Souls marks his deployment of a literary trope that I term the "cross-caste romance." Drawing on Lisa L. Moore's work regarding the role of intercultural love in imagining and shaping the fabric of a nation, I define the cross-caste romance as an intimate relation between persons separated by differences (e.g., race, class, and gender) that are purportedly immutable but are in fact constructed, a relation that foregrounds the fragility of intersubjective exchange and the tenuousness of nation formation.2 Simultaneously a remainder of transatlantic slavery, a harbinger of antiracist and decolonial critique, and an object of metaphysical inquiry, double consciousness cannot be understood solely by way of history, politics, or philosophy. Rather, I argue that it must be approached through the framework of the story with which he introduces it and through its trope of failed interpersonal intimacy, which symbolizes not just the psycho-social alienation of black subjects but the broader material and sociopolitical divisions fracturing the United States. Indeed, Du Bois's various narrative projects, both fictional and nonfictional, describe the urgency of America's revaluation and acceptance of its ethnic others by using the language of intersubjective and intrasubjective intimacy—whether figured as romantic courtship or as other forms of love or eros. For Du Bois, the solution to the conundrum of the black subject's compulsory, divided consciousness is twofold: first, a robust process of black recovery and reclamation, premised partly on the recovery and reclamation of African ancestry and African folkways, and second, an attempt at some form of black assimilation, through which the black subject might "consent," with Motenian echoes, not to being reduced to a "single being" but rather to being incorporated into the American body politic while still maintaining some measure of cultural distinction.3 Du Bois suggests that black American subjects, once having taken sustenance from the legacy of "wasted, dispersed, or forgotten" African "genius," might then be freer to offer up the gifts—however conditional—of their affective labor.4 Like his anecdote in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois's forgotten 1907 detective story "The Case" frames double consciousness as a form of misbegotten love and in terms of the challenge of placing black self-love on a parallel track with black assimilation in the form of affective, intersubjective...

From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel, by Holly Blackford

Reviewed by: From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel by Holly Blackford Margaret R. Higonnet (bio) From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel, by Holly Blackford; pp. 296. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018, $50.00. Holly Blackford’s From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel grows out of the seed planted in her 2013 essay about “Child Study” as a legacy of Darwinian thought and the rise of child psychology. Charles Darwin, she argued, “drove forward the Child Study movement in the late Victorian period, framing questions about development in terms of evolution, adaptation to environment, and the relationship between atavistic instinct and human will” (“Raw Shok and Modern Method: Child Consciousness in Flowers for Algernon and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 38 [2003], 287). Blackford’s book sums up her thesis that Victorian child psychologists were “studying the ascent of man” in the aphorism that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (68). This phrase suggests that the individual child’s growing consciousness and mental control follow an arc drawn by Darwinians from so-called primitive peoples to a supposedly civilized modern race. Blackford traces a Victorian reconceptualization of the child as representation not of the future (the image projected in the age of revolution by many Romantic writers), but of the past. In an application of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, Victorians postulated that a child’s consciousness would develop from a so-called savage mentality, rooted in folklore and myth, to civilized adult self-control and a capacity for detached study. Darwin himself juxtaposed his study of evolution with an 1839 diary that he kept about his infant child and published in 1877; Hippolyte Taine likewise studied the language development of his daughter in order to access her actions by instinct or choice. The goal of the scientific community, Blackford argues, was to use the child to understand the adult, both by differentiating the two and by examining how reflective consciousness and creative imagination were integrated in child and adult. Blackford connects scholarship about the mental development of children to the dynamic of child consciousness depicted in novels that served as sources for thinkers from the fin-de-siècle to the mid-twentieth century. Her close readings, particularly of the first pages of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), sharpen our vision of the meandering path taken by Alice’s reflections: as she slips back and forth between two worlds, in her projective observation of her kitten, her imitation of others, and in her critique of adult authority as nonsense. The child’s playful imagination imitates the internal and external worlds at the same time as it reads them, while also recombining fragmentary observations. Blackford compares Alice to Henry James’s Maisie to consider James’s complex depictions of a child’s observation and performance as Maisie acquires a capacity to conceal herself. Although Blackford does not argue that these particular texts influenced scientific theories, she does draw a general causal connection. The key role of literature for the scientific community reflects the difficulty of gaining access to childhood mental processes by detached adult observation. Accordingly, in this book the broad panorama of theories about mental development by psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists is animated by detailed analyses of selected literary passages that evoke a young character’s mental operations from perception to growing consciousness. The Victorian British authors examined are Carroll, James, Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray [1890]), and J. M. Barrie (Peter [End Page 670] and Wendy [1911]), and they all offer openings onto themes of alienation and divided consciousness. Blackford’s title, From Alice to Algernon, she tells us, could be translated as “from Darwin to Freud,” continuing to thinkers such as Franz Boas, Jean Piaget, and B. F. Skinner, who grapple with cultural differences and social conditioning (2). In a rich web of references to different thinkers, Blackford underscores their interest in child study, but she does not apply her own analytic tools to close readings of their philosophic and scientific texts. Over...

Το ανοίκειο και το άφατο στοιχείο του λόγου στον Καζαντζάκη και τον Τερζάκη

This study investigates the theme of Uncanny in the Modern Greek roman of the 20th century and in particular in Terzakis’ Secret life and Kazantzakis’ Christ Recrucifi ed. The unspoken element of speech is a common component of the romans and a structural element of their poetics to the extent that it refl ects the divided consciousness of the characters. The encounter with the erotic Other becomes the occasion for the subjective division to emerge, to the point where the only escape is death drive. The cancellation of the love aff air brings the characters in confrontation with the diametrically opposed poles of their own subjectivity, the impulse of death on the one hand and life on the other. The depersonalisation of speech and the phenomena of xenopathy appear as a consequence of the extinction of the subject. Their doppelgängers emerge as a response to their desperate desire, up to the point where they eventually crush their living existence.

RITUAL PARTISIPATIVE FUNCTIONS OF THE INDUSTRIAL HOLIDAY OF LATE SOCIALISM (ON MATERIALS "ACHPOLIMETALL" COMBINE)

The article, based on archival materials of the Kentau Regional State Archive (KRSA) and documents of the South Kazakhstan regional committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan from the funds of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RSASPH), explores the organization and use of the industrial holiday in the identification processes of workers at the Achpolimetal combine in the early 1970s. The growing processes of alienation in Soviet society during the period of late socialism were reflected in labor productivity at the plant. The practice of preparing republican and all-union records and the subsequent honoring of production teams led to a "divided consciousness" among the working people, which influenced their attitude to work. The level of labor productivity and the cost of production have tended to decrease due to the unreliable quality of new self-propelled equipment and the actual lack of a proper repair base at the enterprise. Significant downtime and breakdown of equipment, violation of technological discipline, over-planned metal losses, and a decrease in the quality of products gradually increased. One of the ways to increase labor productivity was the holding of industrial holidays. The organization of industrial holidays, the analysis of the forms and methods of the holiday ritual for constructing a common social space that creates the conditions for a collective identity in the Soviet era were the object of study in this article, its subject is the actual ritual-participatory functions of the holiday and their influence on the construction of the professional identity of work teams of “Achpolimetal” combine.

Auden, Auden’s Milton, and Songs for Virgins

Abstract Deep though unexplored currents of W.H. Auden’s incipient Christian theology in ‘Song for St Cecilia’s Day’ become clearer when we read the poem with an eye on John Milton’s madrigal ‘At a Solemn Music’ and his musical tribute to virginity, ‘A Masque’. Auden closely identified Milton with the religious dualism that impeded his acceptance of Christianity, as well with the divided consciousness of the Protestantism whose disintegration was a primary source for contemporary global chaos; and his examination of art, religion, and sexuality consistently uses Milton’s poems as counter-texts off which to ‘bounce’ his own vision of Christian flesh and Christian spirit.

The Captivity Narrative and East-West Understanding in Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies

The American captivity narrative, like John Smith’s account of his rescue by Pocahontas, derives its plot from accounts of captivity in the conflicts with Morocco and the Ottoman Empire. This cross-cultural provenance is reflected in Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies which can be usefully compared with the greatest of the American texts, The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), in regard to characters, plot, setting and sympathy for the colonized. In The Kindness of Enemies the captivity narrative goes both ways, into the East and into the West, and there are different ways and degrees of being a captive. Reading Aboulela’s novel requires an analytic historical perspective on a Nineteenth Century Sufi rebellion during the Crimean War seen in counterpoint to the present besieged state of contemporary Britain. The novel broadens our common humanity as we share Natasha’s problem of having “morphed into something completely different” on her difficult journey into the West, into history and into her divided consciousness. Aboulela presents, in place of projection, an involving interchange and interpenetration of people, events, imagery and (opposing) cultures. My reading, organized around the motifs of dreams and sword, follows the struggles of protagonist and narrator Natasha with intercultural guilt during her research into the Chechen resistance to Russian colonization..

Суб’єктна організація сучасної монодрами як основний носій жанру

In this paper the main features of modern monodramа with the help of “system-subjective” method of research are overviewed. This method refers to the fore mono-subjective organization оf monodrama through the implementation of the external shared consciousness of a single entity action. It is noted that the loss of integrity monodrama for consciousness is linked to an internal confl ict I / I-Other, where I-Other object is to study the character. Subject of the action in this genre embodies and articulates one individual consciousness, consciousness corresponds to one subject, several characters can display images of their divided consciousness.. Lyric monodrama demonstrates the implementation of principles through the explicit manifestation of epic principles through the implicit expression of the author’s mind. The internal dialectical contradiction lies at the heart of the genre – the only divided consciousness character and attraction to epic / lyrical – cause the modification and transformation of modern monodrama.

Bridging the Gap: Toward a Reunification of Actor Consciousness

Bridging the Gap:Toward a Reunification of Actor Consciousness Marc Silberschatz (bio) A production of Hamlet. An actor enters. He begins to speak: “To be, or not to be – that is the question.”1 Now a doubling is occurring. The audience sees Hamlet contemplating oblivion. Simultaneously, they see an actor playing Hamlet and are more or less aware of their immersion in a fiction. Throughout history, this duality has prompted theorists both within and outside the theatre to consider the nature of actors’ minds when they perform. From the earliest discourses on performance, the notion of multiple potential levels of consciousness has been advanced and explored. The question has been resolved by incorporating the actor’s duality: divided consciousness is seen as desirable and arguably necessary in performance. Though couched in a panoply of terms, discourse on divided consciousness has tended to focus on theoretical constructs (actor versus character) or performed effects (emotional identification versus representation) rather than practical execution. Can divided consciousness be considered in a different way: as a result of the mechanics by which performances are made and executed? If this consideration is possible, what might it reveal about the nature and consequences of divided consciousness? This article considers the question from the perspective of flow (the psychological state associated with “being in the zone”). By using flow theory to analyze performance practice, a different picture of divided consciousness emerges. Specifically, in identification-oriented performance practice, divided consciousness may be seen as a schism between two flow dimensions: clear goals and immediate feedback. It emerges as a result of simultaneously seeking two conditions. First, actor-character merger, the assumption that a role in performance results from a joining of the actor and the character he is portraying. Second, the creation of and adherence to a “pre-agreed-upon” performance structure, which is here defined as any planned performance output, regardless of its form or content, whose purpose is to communicate a specific and preselected meaning to an audience. The implications of this understanding prompt several questions: is divided consciousness desirable for actors? If not, can it be successfully minimized through the deployment of alternate rehearsal and performance techniques? Starting from a contextual overview of flow theory, performance structure, and divided consciousness, these questions will be considered in turn. [End Page 147] Flow in Context Flow has been described as “a state of consciousness where one becomes totally absorbed in what one is doing to the exclusion of all other thoughts and emotions,” and “a harmonious experience where mind and body are working together effortlessly, leaving the person feeling that something special has just occurred.”2 Positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first identified the flow state and subsequently developed and refined flow theory. Flow consists of nine dimensions: (1) A balance of challenges and skills; (2) the establishment of clear goals; (3) the presence of immediate feedback; (4) the merging of action and awareness; (5) participants’ sense of control; (6) the exclusion of distractions from consciousness; (7) the elimination of self-consciousness; (8) a distortion of participants’ sense of time; (9) the experience being as “autotelic” or enjoyable in itself.3 Flow has been studied in numerous contexts including daily experience, athletics, professional dance, work and leisure environments, and family life.4 The application of flow theory in multiple contexts is possible because it is neither an artificial construct, nor the discovery of a new psychological state. Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges that “to call it a ‘discovery’ is perhaps misleading, for people have been aware of [flow] since the dawn of time.”5 Studies have also shown that flow experiences are not limited to specific cultural contexts, but are instead a universally recognized feature of human life.6 Flow’s universality facilitates the application of flow theory in theatrical contexts. Its incidence in training actors has been studied by Jeffery J. Martin and Keir Cutler, who concluded that flow experiences were neither common nor rare for their sample group: respondents experienced flow approximately four times per year on average.7 Similarly, John Gruzlier, Atsako Inoue, Roger Smart, Anthony Steed, and Tony Steffert conducted an experiment in which actors were provided neurofeedback training. In analyzing their results, Gruzlier et al. found a...

Religious Experiences and Mind-Brain Sciences in the 21st Century

Abstract The classical work by William James in context of current ideas in religion and modern psychology points to the difference between a “moralist” and a religious or mystical understanding. James described that specific psychological mechanisms related to religious experience (“re-unification”) are compensatory influences on divided consciousness or heterogeneous self, which is determined by a conflict between moral and immoral behavior symbolized by a personified evil as for example the ‘Satan’. According to recent findings there is not widely accepted evidence about specific neural mechanisms of these processes related to psychological integration and re-unification. Nevertheless recent findings indicate very specific and significant influences of these specific experiences related to meditation on brain functions and morphology.

“A deluge of shrieking unreason”: Supernaturalism and Settlement in New Zealand Gothic Fiction

“A deluge of shrieking unreason”: Supernaturalism and Settlement in New Zealand Gothic Fiction

Creative State / Flow State: Flow Theory in Stanislavsky's Practice

Nearly seventy-five years after his death, Konstantin Stanislavsky remains a toweringly influential figure, and many fundamental ideas about acting can be traced back to his practice. In this article, Marc Silberschatz examines the correspondences with, and divergences from, flow theory – the theory surrounding the psychological state associated with ‘being in the zone’ – in Stanislavsky's practice. Although separated by vast differences in social, cultural, and historical context, some significant and increasing correspondences between flow theory and Stanislavsky's practice are revealed and examined. Additionally, divergences from flow theory are identified and interrogated, suggesting that Stanislavsky's reliance on fixed, repeatable performance scores and divided consciousness are direct impediments to the achievement of flow. Marc Silberschatz is a PhD candidate at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He is also a professional theatre director whose work has been seen in both the United States and Scotland.

Hegel and the Third World: the making of Eurocentrism in world history

Hegel, more than any other modern Western philosopher, produced the most systematic case for the superiority of Western white Protestant bourgeois modernity. He established a racially structured ladder of gradation of the peoples of the world, putting Germanic people at the top of the racial pyramid, people of Asia in the middle, and Africans and Indigenous people of the Americas and Pacific Islands at the bottom. In Hegel and the Third World Tibebu guides the reader through Hegel's presentation on universalism to argue that such a classification flows in part from Hegel's philosophy of the development of human consciousness. Hegel classified Africans as people arrested at the lowest and most immediate stage of consciousness, that of the senses; Asians as people with divided consciousness, that of the understanding; and Europeans as people of reason. Tibebu demonstrates that Hegel's views were not his alone but reflected the fundamental beliefs of other major figures of Western thought at the time. With detailed analysis and thorough research Hegel and the Third World challenges the central idea of Hegel's philosophy of history: progress. In addition, Tibebu succeeds in providing a fascinating critique of the Western philosopher's rationalization of the gradual decline suffered by the people of the Third World in the context of modern world history.

The inoperative community of Romantic psychiatry

This paper reads Mary Shelley’s Matilda within the context of the rise of psychiatry, or what was termed “moral management,” in England in the Romantic period. The paper traces some of historical and social parameters of this Romantic psychiatry in terms of the desire for community and communal well‐being. On one hand, this desire reflects early psychiatry’s democratic and empathic spirit. On the other, it reflects a way of foisting well‐being upon populations in order better to manage their unwieldy psychological life. Romantic literature stages these two poles as a psychiatric consciousness whose two halves are at once in conflict with and uncannily related to one another. The paper briefly examines Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage as an early case history of how this divided consciousness plays itself out in the 1790s, commensurate with the first emergence of psychiatry. It then ends with a reading of Shelley’s novella as a response to the kind of social efficiencies psychiatry had come to represent by the time of the Regency. In the figure of Matilda Shelley writes a character who is aware of the demands for transparent happiness necessary to form well‐developed and self‐fulfilled citizens required to run the Empire. By remaining resistant to such cures, Matilda’s “depression” thus refuses to fit itself back into society, an alternate state of (not) belonging that the paper reads in terms of Jean‐Luc Nancy’s idea of “community.”

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage (review)

Reviewed by: Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage Michael M. Chemers Michelle Ephraim . Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. x + 180. $99.95. Anyone lucky enough to happen upon Michelle Ephraim's 15 June 2008 article in the Washington Post, "Father's Day with Shakespeare," a touching piece about using Shakespeare to cope with her own father's passing, will unavoidably think of her as a deeply engaged writer with a keen ability to cut straight to the heart of even the messiest matter. Ephraim's new book is characteristic. Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage is an absorbing and piercing examination into female Jewish characters of the period that is historically both broad and deep, framed by a thorough theorization. Grounded in the most recent scholarship on the topic of Jewish representation in Elizabethan plays, this book manages within the first three pages to significantly complicate commonly held notions of Elizabethan anti-Semitism as reflected in both the playwriting and theology of the period. The book is organized in a clear chronology depicting arcs of evolution of female characters from biblical sources (Esther, Deborah, Rebecca, Susanna, Bathsheba, and the daughter of Jephthah) to original characters like Marlowe's Abigail, daughter of Barrabas in The Jew of Malta, building to a coup de grâce with Shakespeare's Jessica, daughter of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. As a critical analysis focusing on depictions of both women and Jews, reading plays against broader social contexts of politics and ecclesial writings, the book is valuable enough. But Ephraim here has bigger (gefilte) fish to fry. What the book is really tussling with is the uneasy, fraught, and overdetermined relationship of anti-Semitic Christians to Jews as a people who, despite their supposed malignancy, intractability, infidelity, cannibalism, necromancy, blasphemy, and general inborn wickedness, are nevertheless the inheritors and custodians of the most central and sacred biblical truths. Jewish women are even more problematic; Judaism is, after all, the womb of Christianity. As a Jew who grew up in Salt Lake City, I am particularly interested at the intense and often (to my eye) ridiculous theological gymnastics necessary to liberate holy biblical Jews from diabolical living ones, and the divided consciousness that results. In this book, Ephraim deftly exposes this mechanism as it concerned the Elizabethan stage, contextualizes it, and renders it legible without diminishing its complexity. One passage that accomplishes this very well is Ephraim's examination of the play The Godly Queene Hester, a dramatic adaptation that was probably penned in the context of representations of Esther in civic pageantry. The play would gain publication and wide readership in 1561 thanks to associations with Elizabeth's 1558 ascendancy to the throne of England. Esther, Ephraim argues, is a complex figure who employs her female body to infiltrate (using both subterfuge and [End Page 406] racial cross-dressing) non-Jewish culture, at once protecting biblical truth from extermination and also finding fertile soil for it to germinate, ultimately emerging as a political powerhouse, revealing the secluded truth and then disseminating it. The temptation for comparison to Protestant Elizabeth, shut up by Catholic Mary only to emerge as queen, proved too great for Elizabeth's panegyrists. Naturally, however, it's not quite so simple. Ephraim writes: Esther's Jewish identity, which she wields as a commanding political weapon, also plays out contemporary concerns about scriptural interpretation.… In Hester, an Elizabethan audience could imagine their queen as a righteous monarch as well as a body that can "unclaspe" meaning. In one sense, Hester suggests a deceptive exterior that must be penetrated to discern a hidden Christian truth, but the interlude also inverts this traditional hermeneutic mode. In The Godly Queene Hester, Hester's hidden Jewishness offers the essence of scriptural clarity and yet ultimately delivers a Judaic and nationalistic meaning that excludes her Christian audience. (30) That meaning, involved as it is with a body that is both Jewish and female, becomes a site of tremendous anxiety, as reflected in the plays. The efficaciousness of Esther's subterfuge reminds the audience that the foreign threat remains present even in an England that can arguably...

''God's in This Apple'': Eating and Spirituality in Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

"God's in This Apple": Eating and Spirituality in Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire Stephanie Pocock (bio) For authors influenced by feminist studies of the divided consciousness and its manifestation in eating disorders, the ways in which characters choose to interact with food has assumed vital importance. Their writings are often haunted by the presence or tangible absence of food, with its undertones of mixed longing and loathing. The rhythms of eating and not eating, feasting and fasting, fulfilment and renunciation, have become for many critics symbols of the internalization of patriarchy by women. Few writers, however, have treated the symbolic act of eating with as much complexity as Caryl Churchill. Her characters, both male and female, often eat onstage, and when hungry, discuss eating and food at great length. While recognizing the particular importance of food to women, Churchill's plays resist treating feasting or fasting as specifically gendered activities. Instead, her characters' experiences of eating or starving are richly layered with social, political and spiritual significance. In her 1976 play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Churchill's careful portrayal of her characters' literal need for nourishment poignantly reveals the economic disparity that allows some to feast while others hunger. Yet the importance of eating and starving within the play transcends the political realm, deriving spiritual significance from the characters' attention to the Christian rituals of fasting and the Eucharist. Churchill's plays suggest that both hunger and gluttony are of political and social origin, that the growing, preparing, and consumption of food make far-reaching political statements. By considering the similarities between hunger caused by economic deprivation and that caused by female socialization, her plays emphasize the inseparability of capitalism and patriarchy. Those whom a hierarchical society values, it feeds well. Of necessity, such a system relies on maintaining a majority that consumes less without significant rebellion. Whether this majority is [End Page 60] forced into hunger through economic want or is socialized into self-starvation is of little consequence to those at the top. Thus feminism and capitalism, in Churchill's understanding, find themselves irreconcilably at odds. In an interview, the playwright said, "Of course, socialism and feminism aren't synonymous, but I feel strongly about both and wouldn't be interested in a form of one that didn't include the other" (qtd. in "Caryl Churchill" 78). Woven into Churchill's food symbolism along with her signature feminist and socialist statements are the language and traditions of Christian spirituality. In such diverse plays as Vinegar Tom (1976), Fen (1983), The Skriker (1994), and Blue Heart (1997), religious traditions clearly influence the characters' attitudes towards eating. It is in her treatment of the English Civil War, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, however, that Churchill most fully explores the act of eating as an insistent symbol of the paradoxical messages of the Christian tradition. For the play's characters, the act of eating in a religious context functions both as a form of self-realization and an extreme form of self-denial or even loss of self. Through experiences of poverty, starvation, and fasting, they cultivate a spirituality based on the acceptance of suffering as mortification of the flesh. Simultaneously, through the Eucharist and acts of charity, they realize a mystical union of body and soul, a feeding of the body that leads to fulfilment of the spirit. Food thus becomes a discordant symbol, serving as both a means of communion with God and the ecclesiastical body, and as a base necessity, a means to please the ever-lusting flesh. Although the rituals of Christian spirituality play a significant role in Churchill's canon, critics have tended to focus instead on the influences of Buddhism on her work. In an interview with Judith Thurman, Churchill mentions that, while studying at Oxford, she was "strongly influenced by Buddhism, and that sort of thing," and that, as a playwright, she finds herself "constantly coming back" to "Eastern" thought (54). Mark Thacker Brown has explored the ramifications of this rather nebulous statement, discussing Churchill's tendency to oppose western thought, focused on individuality and ownership, to "Eastern," centred on harmony and contentedness. These two modes of thought interact in a yin/yang...

‘‘God’s in This Apple’’: Eating and Spirituality in Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

For authors influenced by feminist studies of the divided consciousness and its manifestation in eating disorders, the ways in which characters choose to interact with food has assumed vital importance. Their writings are often haunted by the presence or tangible absence of food, with its undertones of mixed longing and loathing. The rhythms of eating and not eating, feasting and fasting, fulfilment and renunciation, have become for many critics symbols of the internalization of patriarchy by women. Few writers, however, have treated the symbolic act of eating with as much complexity as Caryl Churchill. Her characters, both male and female, often eat onstage, and when hungry, discuss eating and food at great length. While recognizing the particular importance of food to women, Churchill's plays resist treating feasting or fasting as specifically gendered activities. Instead, her characters’ experiences of eating or starving are richly layered with social, political and spiritual significance. In her 1976 play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Churchill's careful portrayal of her characters’ literal need for nourishment poignantly reveals the economic disparity that allows some to feast while others hunger. Yet the importance of eating and starving within the play transcends the political realm, deriving spiritual significance from the characters’ attention to the Christian rituals of fasting and the Eucharist.

Austrian Inner Colonialism and the Visibility of Difference in Stifter'sDie Narrenburg

This essay reads the novella Die Narrenburg (1844; “The Castle of Fools”), by the Austrian germanophone writer Adalbert Stifter (1805–68), in terms of colonial and postcolonial theory. I argue thatDie Narrenburgcaptures the moment when race becomes visible in a multinational Austrian Empire figured as inner colonial space. The novella also offers a challenge to the reality of race emerging into visibility and presents a strikingly modern picture of divided colonial consciousness, its desires suspended melancholically between the symptomatic maintenance of imperialist identifications and a sensitivity to the colonized that anticipates Frantz Fanon. The text thus exposes Hapsburg Austria as an unexpected symbolic locus for thinking about European racial and colonial discourse. It serves as a perceptive theorist of race and colonialism in a broad sense and suggests how we might read other seemingly peripheral works of central European literature for insights into intra- and extra-European colonial contexts. (JM)

Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity, MICHAEL TYE. Cambridge, MA, and London, UK.

In Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity, Michael Tye takes on the thorny issue of the unity of consciousness and answers these important questions: What exactly is the unity of consciousness? Can a single person have a divided consciousness? What is a single person? Tye argues that unity is a fundamental part of human consciousness -- something so basic to everyday experience that it is easy to overlook. For example, when we hear the sound of waves crashing on a beach and at the same time see a red warning flag, there is an overall unity to our experience; the sound and the red shape are presented together in our consciousness. Similarly, when we undergo a succession of thoughts as we think something through, there is an experience of succession that unifies the thoughts into a conscious whole. But, Tye shows, consciousness is not always unified. Split-brain subjects, whose corpus callosum has been severed, are usually taken to have a divided or disunified consciousness. Their behavior in certain situations implies that they have lost the unity normal human subjects take for granted; it is sometimes even supposed that a split-brain subject is really two persons.Tye begins his account by proposing an account of the unity of experience at a single time; this account is extended over the succeeding chapters to cover bodily sensations at a single time and perceptual experience, bodily sensations, conscious thoughts, and felt moods at a single time. Tye follows these chapters with a discussion of the unity of experience through time. Turning to the split-brain phenomenon, he proposes an account of the mental life of split-brain subjects and argues that certain facts about these subjects offer support for his theory of unity. Finally, addressing the topic of the nature of persons and personal identity, Tye finds the two great historical accounts -- the ego theory and the bundle theory -- lacking and he makes an alternative proposal. He includes an appendix on the general representational approach to consciousness and its many varieties, because of the relevance of representationalism to the theory of unity being adanced.