Exploration Of Self Research Articles

"I Will Gladly Share with Them My Richer Heritage": Schoolteachers in Frances E. W. Harper's "Iola Leroy" and Charles Chesnutt's "Mandy Oxendine"

Through the figure of the black schoolteacher, Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy, published in 1892, and Charles Chesnutt's novel Mandy Oxendine, unpublished during his life-time but believed to have been written between 1893 and 1896, (1) both reflect on the roles of black leaders in the age of self-uplift. What makes these texts' portrayal of teachers significant is that they reveal part of a conversation about the historical role of black teachers as agents of the self-uplift movement and about the direction of African American communities. The two books diverge in their views of the potential roles for black teachers. Harper's text promotes education as a means of moral and political improvement for black people and teachers as a part of the forefront of that movement. In contrast, Chesnutt's novel high-lights the cultural distance that education, class, and color can create between a teacher and the black community in which he teaches, challenging the notion of representative black leaders. Harper's and Chesnutt's portrayals of schoolteacher figures as nearly white complicates the implications of their texts. By combining the figure of a black schoolteacher with a mulatto character, both writers highlight the tension between communal duty and personal ambition, the very conflict that self-uplift ideology posed to middle-class African Americans. Because the mixed-race figure has the option to pass as white and abandon collective interests entirely, he or she functions as the ultimate symbol of this friction. The choice to become a schoolteacher, a symbol of black leadership, serves as the decisive moment in choosing between these paths. Thus, the merging of teacher and mulatto figure ignites a mediative exploration of self and communal desire. For Harper the pairing initiates a moral polemic to demonstrate that the purpose of self-improvement is to contribute to community advancement. Chesnutt, on the other hand, challenges this notion of an interdependent community in which individual and shared interests intersect in a uniformly negotiable terrain. Indeed, Chesnutt disputes the very idea of a knowable monolithic black community whose needs can be assessed and gratified by paradigmatic black leaders. Harper's and Chesnutt's depiction of mulatto figures as teachers reflects the legacy of education as an integral part of black resistance and self-help movements in the nineteenth century. In an essay entitled A Factor in Human Progress, (2) Harper characterized the role of education within community service movements: The education of the intellect and the training of the morals should go hand-in-hand. The devising brain and the feeling heart should never be divorced, and the question worth asking is not simply, What will education do for us? But, what will it help us to do for others? (Brighter 276) When Harper published this essay in the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review in 1885, many African Americans were increasingly looking to education to solve the problems of African American communities. With the failure of Reconstruction, the increasingly hostile atmosphere of exploitative work conditions, disenfranchisement, segregation, and growing violence led many blacks to look to internal development in the form of various mutual-aid societies, businessmen's organizations, fraternal societies, women's clubs, and church-sponsored social support groups to improve the condition of African American communities. (3) However, as John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., have put it, Negroes could be certain of an improved status only in the field of education ... (239). Harper's and Chesnutt's notion of education as a primary means of both self and communal advancement reflects this sentiment. In Iola Leroy, the advantages of a western education allow the title-character to transform from a white pro-slavery advocate to a black community leader. …

Text, Discourse, Deconstruction and an Exploration of Self: A Disruptive Model for Postmodern Art Education

Text, Discourse, Deconstruction and an Exploration of Self: A Disruptive Model for Postmodern Art Education

Ability to solve problems, professionalism, management, empathy, and working capacity in occupational therapy--the professional self description form.

The majority of occupational therapists in Sweden previously worked on large occupational therapy wards. Health care policy has changed over the years and the system has been reorganized accordingly. The employment situation for occupational therapists has also changed. This paper focuses on the perception of professional self among occupational therapists. The objective was to explore the professional self and to suggest components important to the occupational therapist profession. The Professional Self Description Form (PSDF) was used for the exploration of self. The 19 items in the PSDF cover areas relevant to professional functioning and activity. Sixty-eight employed occupational therapists participated. The results of the PSDF were subjected to factor analysis and five factors were obtained; Ability to solve problems, Professionalism, Management, Empathy, and Working capacity. We believe that these five factors can function as improving domains of the role of the professional occupational therapist in Sweden.

A Redefinition of Cognitive Therapy: Using Affect in the Exploration of Self

A Redefinition of Cognitive Therapy: Using Affect in the Exploration of Self

The "Undiscovered Continent": Emily Dickinson and the Space of the Mind

THE "UNDISCOVERED CONTINENT": EMILY DICKINSON AND THE SPACE OF THE MIND / Suzanne Juhasz Soto! Explore thyself! Therein thyself shalt find The "Undiscovered Continent"— No Settler had the mind. The "Undiscovered Continent" is one of Emily Dickinson's descriptions of the mind. Another from a letter to her friend Mrs. Holland, is "the Landscape of the Spirit."1 Poem and prose statement indicate both the centrality of her exploration of self and also how the place where it occurred, the mind, was conceived of as actual, substantial, there. "Continent," "Landscape"—these words grant spatial dimensions to the mind, the setting for Dickinson's most significant experience. The fact that Dickinson lived primarily in the mind is not a new observation. It has long been acknowledged as a factor central to her biography and art. Sometimes it is seen as a sign of her participation in European literary romanticism in general, in American transcendentalism , specifically. Sometimes, from another kind of critical perspective, it becomes a symptom of her peculiarity as a writer and woman, even of hermadness. Forfeministcritics, who view her solitude, her retreat to her house and to her room as strategy rather than debility, as an act occasionedby her social andpsychological situation as a womanwho also wanted to be a poet, the actuality of the mind as a place in which to live—in which to achieve control over one's experience, in which to experience thoroughly—is important for our understanding of this enterprise. In this paper I look at the place itself, the landscape of the spirit, as Dickinson's poems about the mindreveal it. Its characteristics as an environment shed light upon the nature of the activity that took place within its perimeters and also upon thewoman who created this situation for herself. As I have argued in my book on American women poets, Naked and Fiery Forms, to be a woman poet in our society is a "double-bind situation," one of conflict and strain.2 "Woman" and "poet" connote opposite and contradictory qualities and roles. In her article, "A Room of Her Own: Emily Dickinson as Woman Artist," Barbara Williams corroborates this point of view. "To be a woman—a vocation and an art, quite literally, in the nineteenth century—meant that one had to deny self; 86 ¦ The Missouri Review and to be a poet, as Emily Dickinson defined it, meant a lifetime of spiritual exploration to the end of self-discovery."3 Dickinson's solitude may well have been an escape, but it was also a solution. Given her temperament—her passionate intensity, her extreme sensitivity, her stubborn dedication to her sense of vocation; given the fate that awaited heras a normalwoman ofherclass and era—ahome, a husband, a family, a position in society; her decision to dwell, as Jean Mudge phrases it, "in her highly imaginative, eclectically informed, cosmos-encompassing, quick clever mind,"4 was in fact what enabled her to be the poet that she became. It gave her control over her own experience: she could select, apportion, focus, examine, explore, satiate herself exactly as she wished and needed to do, such that poetry could result. In the outer world, this manner of control would have been impossible. It gave her, as well, the possibility for complete and thorough experience, for risk, intensity, range and depth, that as a woman she could never have achieved in the world at large. She could notwander across the continent, like Whitman; but she could move freely in the "undiscovered continent," the mind. In describing themind as a settingforsignificantactivity, Dickinson's poetic language is characterized by an elaborate spatial vocabulary. Specifically, terms drawn from architecture, geography and space-travel define a location that is enclosed, private, yet changeable in dimension, that can alter suddenly and violently, that can become vast and limitless. Dickinson frequently refers to the caverns and corridors (777, 670), windows and doors (303, 657), even cellars (1182) of the mind. Because her external life was lived within one, then another, house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and, as the years progressed, within one room, her bedroom, itis appropriate thatshe employ this particular setoffigurative correspondences to describe the other place in which she lived. Yet...

Noticing Juan De La Cosa

The Maximus Poems chart a voyage of discovery into the self. Its (formal) pattern of perceptual acts signifies the form of a man perceiving and of the place perceived: a pattern not crystallized but fluid, extending as it does from local particulars which are plurisignative and vibratory. In the process of the form of Maximus, among the individual poems in the sequence, one can locate specific poems which mark the beginning of a new direction in the development of the sequence and hence in the development of the exploration of self. One such poem is On first Looking out through Juan de la Cosa's Eyes. The first twenty-two Maximus poems were written over a period of three and a half years, from the winter of 1949-1950 through May, 1953. After that, Olson went through a period of confusion during which he was forced to do a good deal of backing and filling before he was able to get the sequence moving again. Prior to this crisis of direction, Olson had had an unusual burst of creativity, evidenced by the fact that in the nineteen days between May 4 and May 23, 1953, he wrote all of eight poems from Letter 15 through Letter 22.1 In the context of the considerable influence of Pound and Williams evident in the earlier poems in the series, it might be said with only slight exaggeration that during