Interior Life Research Articles

The Struggle of the Male Self: A New Left Activist and His 1961 Diary

AbstractThis article examines the 1961 diary of a new left young activist to explore his fractured sense of personal and political self. At the height of the Cold War, John Hoyland was an undergraduate at London's University College, living with his Communist Party family and active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). His intensely political world notwithstanding, Hoyland's diary reveals that interior life troubled his every day and shaped much of his thinking. Hoyland's self-conscious narrative illuminates self-making, male heterosexuality, generation, and relationships and cultures in the early 1960s British Left. He experienced himself as fragmented and struggled to negotiate his conflicting identities. He felt torn between older models of socialist identity and morality, his hedonism associated with the beatnik metropolitan scene, and his project of personal self-improvement. His diary offers rare insight into the intimate thoughts and feelings of one New Left young man at a time when political, social, and sexual codes and cultures were in transition before the emergence of feminist sexual politics. The article examines the identities Hoyland held as a socialist, sexual, and domestic male subject; it considers how his emotional world and relationships were shaped by his metropolitan landscapes, consisting of CND marches, Communist Party meetings, urban youth spaces, and the parental home; and it discusses Hoyland as a writer and the sense of selfhood the diary helped to make possible.

Small Monuments

The notion of memory is key to understanding the practice of artist and film-maker Steve McQueen. McQueen's work has often been examined as either politically active or focused on body dynamics. Yet the manner in which he resorts to the theme of disappearance and addresses historical events that barely surface in popular Western narratives is comparable to the construction of monuments, wherein body and politics become inalienable from each other. Monuments are understood here as phenomena susceptible to eliciting memory and as material but mutable manifestations of past events. This article argues that certain works by McQueen constitute inquiries into possible ‘sites of memory’, as defined by Pierre Nora, but in this case concerning marginalised and minority histories. Articulated between documentary and fiction, from video installation to cinema, these works do not invent an interior life for the historical figures they depict. As such, they conform to what Saidiya Hartman has called ‘narrative restraint’, understood here as an ethics of both memorialising and film-making.

Haunting in the historical biopic: Lincoln

Lincoln features several key moments in which the conventional, realist coordinates of the historical biopic open to a deeper sense of time and place, evoked in the film's references to clairvoyance, haunting, and ‘bad dreams’ – aspects of Lincoln's interior life that are well known but seldom expressed in film. The theme of haunting in Lincoln is rendered directly, but it is also suggested in the film's multiple references to the medium of photography, and in scenes that recall the flicker effect of early film. The film's complex understanding of time underlines the uncanny nature of the historical biopic, and the strange, almost phantasmatic wish at its core – the wish to impersonate and revivify the dead – a wish that is especially visible in films that take Abraham Lincoln as their subject.

Premises of Visuality: Max Blecher and Marcel Proust

In this article we discuss the modern premises of visuality and the effects of the cultural transfer of optical and photographic techniques on the work of Max Blecher, a Romanian Jewish writer who was a keen explorer of Marcel Proust’s works. In his works Blecher pursued the same theme as Proust—the mechanisms of interior memory and life—and often used optical instruments as a metaphor of identity. The role of the photographic model in his depiction of social tableaux, characters, and dispositions, originated partly in the influence of Proust’s writing and partly in other techniques of the European literary avant-gardes.

Allsopp, M. Emotional Abuses and Other Psychic Harms: Invisible Wounds and Their Histories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2013. 280pp £66 ISBN 978–0‐23030302–7(hbk)

Allsopp, M. Emotional Abuses and Other Psychic Harms: Invisible Wounds and Their Histories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2013. 280pp £66 ISBN 978–0‐23030302–7(hbk)

“La Poesía Sorprendida”; or the Surrealist Poetic Imagination Against Neocolonial Dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, 1943–1947

La Poesía Sorprendida, a literary movement and journal that flourished in the Dominican Republic between 1943 and 1947, was an integral part of the broad European and Caribbean surrealist movement of the last century that viewed art as a form of resistance to fascism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. For the sorprendistas , interior life, a realm of imagination, constituted a kind of free zone in the otherwise totalitarian social space of the island of La Hispaniola during the dictatorship of Rafael Molina Trujillo. The surprise or shock generated from manifesting poetically an unfettered inner psychic life had, for them, the potential to dislodge the minds of the colonized from an adherence to an oppressive regulation of life under the neocolonial dictatorship. However, while La Poesía Sorprendida published a wealth of notable national and international poetry and critical essays, it was a movement subject to the philosophical idealism characteristic of much twentieth-century modernism. Their belief that poetry could strengthen the imagination and inner life as a way to transform outer life expressed their over-estimation of the power of ideas to transform social relations within a regime of capital. Nonetheless, La Poesía Sorprendida stands as an important chapter in the literary and political history of Surrealism in the twentieth-century.

Travelling with Imoinda: Art, Authorship, and Critique

Travelling with Imoinda:Art, Authorship, and Critique Joan Anim-Addo (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Joan Anim-Addo Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014 [End Page 570] This article raises questions concerning art, authorship, and to a lesser extent, critique, specifically in relation to my opera libretto Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name, written in 1997, given a first rehearsed reading in London in 1998 and first published in 2003 in Italy. Considering the scale of the art involved in this full-length work of music-theater, in terms of writing but also in relation to performance, I am interested to reflect upon what keeps those of us, black women especially, who find ourselves as artists woefully under-resourced in our diverse locations, nonetheless committed to developing that which seems at times to be an impossible practice. In the process of reflection, I borrow from the seminal Black British visual artists’ exhibition by black women curated by Lubaina Himid in 1985, the notion of “the thin black line.”1 For this purpose, the “thin black line” resonates ideas about resistance that retrospectively and disturbingly evoke 1980s Britain with its indifference or hostility to that which might yet be referred to as black arts practice. Addressing the question of commitment, I propose to consider desire in this context as perverse (in practical terms) and readily conjugated with commitment to highlight black arts practice as a perverse commitment. In this light, it is useful to be reminded that perverse commitment speaks also to the persistent, albeit largely dormant—and I contend still dominant—view of black arts practice in the diaspora. Notably, for example, Dame Janet Suzman, actor and ex-wife of Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the National Theatre, London, declared: “Theatre is a white invention, a European invention, and white people go to it. It’s in their DNA. It starts with Shakespeare” (Alberge and Brown). Readily discerned in this statement is a belief system that can be traced back to Enlightenment ideas of G. W. F. Hegel who posited that the “Negro” stands outside culture and “the history of intellectual, technological, moral, and cultural progress,” which in Michelle Wright’s words is “guided by the Absolute of reason.” She also reminds us of Hegel’s comments on the slave trade, “that slavery was most likely the only way Africans would learn to appreciate freedom and thus develop into subjects” (Wright 8). Later pseudo-scientific thought only aggravated that discursive reality which the “Enlightenment” had begun to produce. Following such enlightened tradition, Suzman adds further that “[theatre] is not in their [black] culture” and clinches her explanation with “Just as their stuff is not in white culture.” She states categorically: “Theatre is a totally European invention, as is tragedy. Other countries don’t do tragedy. It’s an invention by the Greeks.” Should it not be considered perverse on the part of black artists to persist in writing for the theater—especially theater considered high art—in the face of such clear-cut cultural battle lines drawn by (white) cultural gatekeepers in the diaspora? [End Page 571] Suzman is quoted at length because she articulates freely the substance of that which must be resisted by black artists. I underscore, too, the black artist’s propensity towards resistance or the “thin black line” (Himid) which in effect functions as intense engagement with a process of re(member)ing, as June D. Bobb refers to it with reference to the poets Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Thus, to write Beloved, Toni Morrison has also felt the need to access the interior life of slaves via her imagination to bear witness to, in her words, “the interior life of people who didn’t write [their history] (which doesn’t mean that they didn’t have it)” and to “fill in the blanks that the slave narrative left” (Morrison 183). In addition, perhaps especially within the diaspora, there are levels at which the compulsion to act upon what is known though not always acknowledged as “shared knowledge,” as Glissant writes of it, is overwhelming. About Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name My idea for Imoinda was...

“You must have been a solitary prisoner to understand these perplexed distinctions”: Imprisonment, Sensorial Isolation, and Altered Mental States in A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Oliver Twist

He is man alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but and horrible despair. --Charles Dickens, American Notes 113 This quotation, taken Charles Dickens's reflections on Philadelphia's Eastern Penitentiary, illustrates this article's intention to focus on Dickens's handling of solitary confinement imprisonment and on how the use of coercive sensorial isolation can create an altered state in the psychology of individuals. In exploring how the experience of being buried alive with its torturing anxieties may change an individual's mental state, this article explores Dickens's position as to whether such persons, been changed by the death they died during imprisonment, can ever be truly recalled to life, or whether they are left permanently scarred by the experience, trapped between two states, like a Spirit moving among mortals (A Tale 265, 17, 284). In the process, this article interrogates the impact enforced solitude has on the experience of characters' relationships to their spatial environments (how an individual's state of mind might become physically situated) and the way in which Dickens's representation of the effects of forced isolation specifically signposts ways in which the reader can or should interpret these states of mind. Doing so necessarily requires arguing against long-established critical tradition suggesting that Dickens lacked psychological insight: an absent psychology school of thought that has its roots among Dickens's contemporaries and whose on-going influence could still be seen echoed in the commentaries around the Dickens Bicentenary three years ago. (1) One of the best-known examples of this criticism would be George Eliot's comment: We have great novelist [Dickens] who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character ... with the same truth as their idiom and manner, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. (55, my emphasis). Though of the most quoted of such critiques, Eliot's comment is hardly unique, and when we note that such critics have included Mark Twain, Henry James, G. S. Fraser, and George Henry Lewes, it is easy to see why this perception gained such strong purchase. One key theme that runs through this school of thought is an Eliotian sense of Dickens's dwelling only on the external traits of his characters. Fellow novelist Mrs. Oliphant, writing in 1871, stated that [Dickens's] instinct leads him to keep on the surface, and comparing Eliot and Dickens in 1883, Nathan Sheppard suggested that [while] Dickens portrays the behaviour, George Eliot dissects the motive for the behaviour (678; 8). The influence of this external traits perception can still be felt in modern analysis, such as when Andrew Sanders describes Dickens's character-building as being from the outside inwards--although crucially Sanders does allow for movement toward an interior (77). In his essay Performing Character, Malcolm Andrews eloquently sums up this absent psychology school as holding the position that having squandered so much on externals [Dickens] either cannot or will supply much in the way of an interior life [for his characters] (72). This article argues against the absent psychology school of thought, demonstrating that significant psychological insight into representing and interpreting nineteenth-century states of minds is present in Dickens's works. In doing so, it refutes George Henry Lewes's (author of Problems of Life and Mind) critique that Dickens's unreal figures are wooden, and run on wheels and his assertion that one is reminded of the frogs whose brain have been taken out for physiological purposes, leaving not characters, but . …

Seán Dunne’s The Road to Silence: An Anomalous Spiritual Autobiography?

In many ways, The Road to Silence, the slim second volume of autobiography by the Cork-based poet Sean Dunne, conforms to the “circular” pattern of spiritual biography as theorized by David Leigh and other critics. This article argues that this is one of several ways that Dunne’s memoir can profitably be read as an intertext with Augustine’s Confessions. However, Dunne’s book differs markedly from many of the conventions of both classic and contemporary spiritual autobiographies. Prominent among these differences are its brevity; its dispassionate tone; and the manner in which it scrupulously maintains a distinction between the author’s interior life and his life in the world.

The spirituality of bishop Karol Wojtyla - John Paul II in his own notes

Private notes of Karol Wojtyła – John Paul II just on the moment of death of their author excited big interest between the people. The pope wrote in the testament, his secretary Msgr. Dziwisz has to fire all the documents, he left. Card. Stanisław Dziwisz didn’t accomplish the will of pope, because he was convinced, it is very important document, showing the interior life of John Paul II. Recently, the Publishing House Znak printed this Private notes (Krakow 2014) giving to the publicity to know the spiritual life of Karol Wojtyła – John Paul II. The Private notes are some kind of “diary of the soul” showing deeper life with God of Karol Wojtyła as bishop of Krakow, cardinal and pope. They are giving the possibility to enter in the mystery of the soul of John Paul II, to know his life of prayer, meditation and his relation to God and to Blessed Virgin Mary.

La poesía de Efrén Hernández: visión autoscópica de la vida y la experiencia espiritual

A series of ethical and religious themes, motives and concerns are shown,which are recurrent in the less studied poetic work of Efren Hernandez. Standingout are the themes of interior life and spiritual experience , manifested inthe search for God and transcendence, in the spiritual journey and autoscopicregard of man, as well as in human love and in the question regarding good andevil. These traditional issues of lyric poetry are treated here in an unorthodoxmanner. Efren Hernandez uses inversion and irony to subvert the religious motives:the search is a longing for mystical rapture, yet not accomplished, an unfructuousdesire of union with transcendence. Likewise, human contradictionsderived from the oppositions of flesh and spirit, as well as reason and passion,which lead to a poetic of rejection and renouncement.

Intimate Occupations: The Afterlife of the “Coolie”

AbstractThe “coolie” occupied the European colonial imaginary as a racialized, laboring Asian body ripe for economic experimentation. But what of the interior life and the afterlife of this laborer? This article considers how two contemporary novels, Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, occupy and queer the colonial archive by giving voice to “impossible subjects.” The Pagoda's protagonist Mr. Lowe escaped China as a young girl and is forced to work as a shopkeeper in post‐Emancipation Jamaica. The Book of Salt's protagonist Binh is a gay Vietnamese cook in Gertrude Stein's Paris home. Binh and Lowe represent the “coolie's” legacy and are thus rendered invisible despite the blood, sweat, and tears that go into their occupations. In these narratives, the protagonists form intimate sexual relationships with black characters who share a kindred sense of alienation becoming bodies that matter.

Trinity and Atheology: The Listening Self in Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe

Trinity and AtheologyThe Listening Self in Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe Ashok Collins The French novelist, playwright, biographer, essayist and musicologist Romain Rolland was born on 29 January 1866, in Clamecy, a small town in Burgundy. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915, and became infamous for his pacifist stance during the First World War. He developed an interest in the non-resistance of Mahatma Gandhi and the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism in the 1920s. Although he never became a member of the Communist Party, Rolland visited Russia in 1935 and became an advocate of the Soviet experiment despite his acknowledgement of its shortcomings. He died at the age of seventy-eight on 30 December 1944, in Vézelay, France. One of the aspects of Rolland’s work that has attracted perhaps the most sustained critical attention in past scholarship is his religious thought, which has usually been seen as an eclectic mixture of creeds based on an existential understanding of the divine (e.g., Cruickshank). The foundation of such a religious thinking was laid by what Rolland later described as three spiritual revelations, or éclairs, which provided a vivid, experiential counterpoint to the abstraction of the Catholic Mass that he attended during his childhood years.1 Rolland gives a detailed account of these flashes of intuition into the nature of existence in Le Voyage intérieur: a penetrating vision of the wide expanse of nature on a terrace in the town of Ferney; his reading of “les mots de feu de Spinoza,” which provided him with a direct taste of the divine life; and “l’éclair Tolstoyen,” which gave him the sensation of being one with the universe (28). In 1887, Rolland sketched out this new faith in a document he entitled “Credo quia verum,” which expressed a philosophy that would later become the “moteur de sa vie et de son œuvre” (Duchatelet, La Genèse 29). In the Credo, Rolland depicts a form of divinity that is not divorced in any way from the material realm but rather is encountered within human [End Page 113] experience. As Sipriot clarifies, for Rolland “[l]a vraie religion suit le rythme et les drames de la vie, de notre vie” (29). Such a unity between the divine and the human, and the importance placed on the natural world within his work, has led most scholars to define Rolland’s religiosity as a form of pantheism (Francis 253; Bonnerot 17), an interpretation that is certainly supported by Rolland’s own assertions on several occasions (Le Cloître 75; Chère Sofia 320). This understanding of the divine predominated for most of Rolland’s life, until a later re-engagement with the Catholic tradition through his friendship with Paul Claudel and various Catholic priests made a more personalized vision come to prominence within his interior life (see Paul Claudel, Romain Rolland; Au seuil). While most critics see a sharp divide between Rolland’s pantheism and his later rapprochement with the Christian tradition, other critics recognize that such discursive labeling can sometimes risk oversimplifying what was in fact a much more complex stance towards Catholicism from the very beginning of his literary career.2 Such critical disagreement becomes particularly intense when we turn to his most well-known novel, Jean-Christophe, an “œuvre de foi” (xiv) which has usually been read as an archetypal example of Rolland’s pantheistic vision at work in literary form (e.g., Bresky 1053). In this paper, however, we will follow the critical pathway laid out by Bernard Duchatelet, who hints at the possibility of undertaking a more thorough analysis of the numerous Biblical references that are scattered throughout the novel.3 The purpose of such a study is not to argue for a re-classification of the novel as a “Christian” text, nor to suggest that previous pantheistic definitions should be discarded entirely. Rather, by focusing on the textual representation of God in Jean-Christophe through a utilization of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity (Déconstruction du christianisme), I will seek to exploit the Biblical tradition in order to re-envisage the text as a literary example of the praxis of open...

American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America by Russell Shaw (review)

Reviewed by: American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America by Russell Shaw William D. Dinges American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America. By Russell Shaw. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013. 240 pp. $16.95. Russell Shaw is a prolific author, journalist, and right-of-center commentator on things Catholic. His recent outing in American Church is a jeremiad centering on the question: Has the narrative of assimilation for American Catholics yielded a positive dividend for the church in the contemporary cultural context? His subtitle phrases "Meteoric Fall" and "Uncertain Future" suggest his response. Shaw's story is historical in scope, conversational in tone, and anecdotal at points about his student years at Georgetown University. Scholars of Catholicism in America will find little new information here. What readers in general will find – especially mavens of the Catholic culture wars – is a hermeneutic that interprets the situation in the church over the last half century in a narrative of decline and ecclesial implosion, and one clearly guarded about constructive dialogue with the world. American Church has a foreword by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., and is divided into four chapters. The first addresses the "Gibbons Legacy," the historical drive led principally by Cardinal James Gibbons to transform the immigrant church and Americanize American Catholicism. Shaw highlights Gibbons's [End Page 67] assimilationist initiatives, the Brownson-Hecker debates over the issue, and how related tensions played out in the modernism/Americanism controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second chapter extols the virtues of Catholicism's triumphal era through mid-twentieth century, notably the strong community life, cultural identity, and organizational vitality earmarking the day. Chapter three focuses on what Shaw considers the "worst year ever" (144) in the church in America – 1976. This perfect storm included the Call to Action conference, an "explosion of dissent," a discarding of too much of what had previously been emphasized, and growing division among the American hierarchy. Shaw is especially adverse to the "historical consciousness" that captured the sensibility of many post-Vatican II Catholics. He chides Catholic educational institutions and the "problematic" aspects of the Land O'Lakes document regarding the compromise of Catholic identity. Shaw is equally blunt in his critique of John F. Kennedy's 1960 bend-over-backwards speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association – an address he deeply implicates in eviscerating Catholicism's public presence. The last chapter of American Church continues the "Down, down, down . . ." (182) trope, selectively drawing on contemporary sociological research (Davidson, D'Antonio, Carlin). Where Shaw entertains the possibilities of positive transformation, he believes that it will come with the emergence of a new Catholic subculture with a "strong, clear Catholic identity" – although one that wisely (in this reviewer's mind) resists cooptation by the political and cultural far right, that takes the Hispanic realities of the church into consideration, and that is purged of clericalism and secrecy. The role of the laity in the new evangelization is also key. How Shaw's vision of the "deepening" of the interior life and "stern ascesis" (209) plays out in this revitalization process remains obscure. While not a scholarly work, per se, American Church is a serious exposition on the challenges and opportunities facing the church in [End Page 68] the United States, especially the question of whether or not crisis has tipped into irreversible decline. Shaw's thinking resonates with right-side Catholic commentary on the question, but the tone is polite and devoid of self-righteous acrimony and name-calling. Shaw is certainly correct that the breakdown of the insular (predominantly ethnic) Catholic subculture combined with a more dystopian social landscape and a long-term cultural shift in which an aggressive secularism – rather than an antagonistic Protestantism – has changed the historical gestalt for the church today. This calls for a recalibration of Catholicism's church/sect drama and a re-tooling of the tradition's now all too porous boundaries. There is little in American Church, however, that suggests a different reading of the current situation; one, for example, that sees the tradition being creatively re-appropriated...

Cute-ifying Disability: Lil Bub, the Celebrity Cat

Cute-ifying Disability: Lil Bub, the Celebrity Cat

Wordsworth's City Retractions

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth's City RetractionsPeter LarkinPeter Larkin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 45, Number 1Winter 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044358 Views: 23Total views on this site © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Wertungsübertragung und Kontiguität. Mit zwei Beispielen zur Wertung des Frageversäumnisses im Parzival

of: Friedrich Michael Dimpel, Wertungsubertragung und Kontiguitat. Mit zwei Beispielen zur Wertung des Frageversaumnisses im Parzival. In: JLTonline (08.01.2015) Persistent Identifier: urn:nbn:de:0222-003042 Link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0222-003042

Construcción de un diccionario de comportamientos y competencias genéricas indispensables para el sacerdote diocesano en Perú

The present article is based on a previous study that provided a competencies-based profile of a Peruvian diocesan priest. It is of an exploratory and descriptive nature, and follows the qualitative research methodology. It seeks to establish the behaviors that are necessary for carrying out the pastoral work of a Peruvian diocesan priest. For that purpose, it carries out two studies. In the first one, it identifies five essential generic competencies: Interior Life, Obedience, Leading by Example, Priestly Fraternity and Continuous Education. In the second one, it creates and validates a behavioral dictionary for assessing levels of assimilation of each of the essential generic competencies. Moreover, it provides concrete and measurable indicators of the standard performance of a Peruvian diocesan priest.

The Flow of Narrative: Misleading Structures and Uncertain Faiths in Wieland

A lingering question in criticism of <em>Wieland</em> asks why the narrator, Clara, uncharacteristically withholds knowledge of events and perpetrators—a decision making for exciting reading but showing a baffling artifice. Why does this traumatized protagonist spend so much time imparting her past ignorance when the eventualities are known to her at the time of her writing? Some suggest that Clara withholds the <em>facts</em> in an attempt to impart a <em>feeling</em> to readers, enlisting their sympathy and casting Carwin as the villain. Others read Clara's narrative strategies as a product of mental instability, perhaps even insanity. But there exists another possibility: I suggest that Clara's narrative logic is part of a larger theory of causality, accepted with complete faith by Clara and her companions, and characterized most often by a conceptualization of “flow” in the text. This term flow, and related ones like “chain” and “train”, are used with almost neurotic constancy to describe the connections between precedents and antecedents, defining the actions of the present in terms of past inertia and predicting the future with prophetic surety. Likewise, these terms feature heavily in the long, pregnant passages regarding the drift of consciousness in the interior life of the narrator. Clara's retention of the eventual facts need not be read as an artificial device of story-telling, nor a manipulative tool in the prosecution of Carwin, but instead as emblematic of the novel's interrogation—and ultimate critique—of Enlightenment faith in perfect continuity, a faith which would justify Clara's dogged commitment to revealing events only in their original sequence. Ultimately, I argue that Brown's novel gestures toward the possibility of a more open Gothic model of events and thoughts, which could address the problematic ambiguities that remain despite Clara's attempt to impose a rigidly causal and chronological narrative.

Childhood and Eternity: On Unamuno's Tragic Pedagogy

SUMMARYThe present article seeks to describe the main lines of what Unamuno regarded as an adequate pedagogy for the child to enjoy a genuine and long childhood, which makes it easier for him to become a man of intense interior life and great historical value, provided that such childhood remains close to his heart. To show more clearly what a suitable pedagogy for Unamuno would consist of, it will also be explained why he considered an excessive submission to scientific pedagogy as pernicious for children's development.