Private Story Research Articles

Die Phänomenologie der Rheumatologie: Behinderung, Merleau-Ponty und der Irrtum des maximalen Griffs

Abstract This paper charts the concepts of grip and the bodily auxiliary in Maurice Merleau-Ponty to consider how they find expression in disability narratives. Arguing against the notion of “maximal grip” that some commentators have used to explicate intentionality in Merleau-Ponty, I argue that grip in his texts functions instead as a compensatory effort to stave off uncertainty, lack of mastery, and ambiguity. Nearly without exception in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, the mobilisation of “grip” is a signal of impending loss and is offered as a strategy for managing failure rather than as an example of sure-footed mastery. I read Merleau-Ponty alongside Mary Felstiner’s Out of Joint: A Public and Private Story of Arthritis to explore these other, attenuated dimensions of grip as an example of a way of thinking disabled embodiment otherwise.

The Symbiosis of Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Haydon: Focusing on an Argument about Blacks

This essay examines the symbiotic relationship between Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Haydon within the context of the aesthetic cultural phenomenon in the early nineteenth century. By paying special attention to the Examiner used as their debate table, this essay investigates how these Cockneys’ independent voices about blacks were against, but also nurtured and advanced, each other. First, this essay explores how Hunt and Haydon constructed a friendship based on their passion for the arts. Afterward, it examines how Hunt argued against Haydon’s anatomical sketch method based on the racial hierarchy in accordance with Hunt’s humanitarian interests in blacks. Subsequently, the essay goes on to look at how Haydon defended himself against Hunt’s attack by asserting his artistic point of view about blacks. Although re-examining the very private story of friendship between Hunt and Haydon can be viewed as narrow, this essay certainly shows us a picture of the most sociable and aesthetic cultural view of the period through their friendship.

Märta Tikkanen's gender and alcohol saga.

Märta Tikkanen’s poetry collection Århundradets kärlekssaga (The love story of the century, 1978) is a confessional book on life in a family where the husband and father is an alcohol abuser. It is also a love story about a married couple who love one another despite the terrible challenges posed to the relationship by alcoholism. The poetry collection became one of the most influential books in contemporary Nordic fiction, its themes on gender roles and alcohol abuse setting the trend in the Nordic discussion of women’s liberation. Märta Tikkanen’s courage to tell her own private story inspired other women to confess their gender equality problems to the public. The alcohol abuse of Märta Tikkanen’s husband Henrik Tikkanen was seen as an allegory for the more general problems in the relation between men and women. My essay introduces Märta Tikkanen’s poetry collection and discusses how the poems develop the theme of gender and alcohol. I will also compare her description of their marriage with Henrik Tikkanen’s self-portrait in his autobiographical novella Mariegatan 26, Kronohagen (1977). The analysis refers to contemporary research on gender and alcohol abuse and discusses how the poems contribute to a public recognition of the relationship between gender and alcohol abuse. The essay discusses the reception of Märta Tikkanen’s influential poems and explores her treatment of alcohol and gender in relation to other Nordic confessional or fictional books on alcohol abuse.

Melancholia and the search for the lost object in Farah’s Maps

Maps, given its intriguing narrative thrusts and multi-axial thematic concerns, is arguably the most studied or analysed of Nur- rudin Farah's nine prose fictions. The novel's title as well as its synopsis has naturally dictated the focus of critics on the Western Somalia Liberation Front's war efforts geared towards liberating the Ogaden from Ethiopian suzerainty and restoring it to Somalia. The nationalist fervour, the war it precipitates and its fallouts of a strife-ridden milieu have such a pervading presence in the novel that the personal experiences of the novel's two major characters, Askar and Misra, are quite often discussed as basic allegories of ethnic and nationalistic rivalries. This paper focuses on the personal experiences of Farah's two major characters. It contends that the private story of Askar and Misra is so compelling and central to the many issues broached in the novel that it deserves significant critical attention. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud's and Melanie Klein's concepts of melancholia, the paper explores how central the characters' haunting sense of melancholia is to the happenings in Farah's Maps.

鉄系高温超電導体発見のこぼれ話とその後の新材料

After obtaining my doctorate in engineering from Keio University, I spent five years as a researcher at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Suzukakedai Campus in Yokohama. During that time, I made the first report on a material system called iron-based high-temperature superconductors (Fe-SCs). Research on Fe-SCs is still hot topic in condensed matter physics. Now, I am continuing my research mainly on the fabrication of superconducting wire using Fe-SCs, while being distracted by some traditional affairs as a member of the faculty. Research on Fe-SCs has encouraged young researchers towards the further discovery of novel layered superconductors. This article was prepared by updating the content of “A Private Story, Discovery of Iron-based High Tc Superconductors” previously published in the membership journal of the Physical Society of Japan (Nihon Butsuri Gakkaishi).

Culture Crossing the Ocean: Food and Language in Imraan Coovadia’s The Wedding (2001)

For his trader-protagonists’ migration from India to South Africa, Coovadia uses a comic mode to represent the protagonists taking their home-grown linguistic habits across the Indian Ocean, habits which reflect the hierarchical divisions and suspicions of Indian life, and which are perpetuated through the strife in which the marriage of Ismet and Khateja Nassin begins in Durban. This article will trace the ways in which change comes about in the intensely private love story which Coovadia represents as unfolding against the larger history of Indian settlement in colonial Durban at the beginning of the twentieth century, and will show how the devices of comedy are used to resolve culinary and sexual conflict. It will also explore, through Coovadia’s use of a grandson-narrator, how and why the novel’s conclusion is shifted away from romantic comedy to accommodate future generations in the wider story of diasporic life trajectories. In focussing on the ambiguities of settlement and cultural continuity, the discussion will mostly be about language and language use.

“It Couldn’t Be Robbery To Steal That”: Artistic Appropriation and Twain’s “Jumping Frog”

In “The Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story” (1894), Mark Twain prefaces his account of the provenance of the famous story that launched his career with two anecdotes about artistic theft. Rereading the “Jumping Frog” in light of these anecdotes and the theory of originality Twain espouses in the “Private History,” this essay disputes the widespread interpretation that credits the internal, vernacular narrator, Simon Wheeler, with a subversive deadpan humor. On the contrary, this frame necessarily identifies the fictional Wheeler as a genuine simpleton. Twain similarly framed his historical source for the “Jumping Frog” story;ͱhis possession accrued not from exercising artistic originality but through publication and accreditation.

You Could Get Used to It: Susan Sontag, Ariella Azoulay, and Photography's Sensus Communis

war was long you get used to it --Zbigniew Herbert, Mr. Cogito Reads Newspaper On March 20, 2014, at 7:30 p.m., about sixty people gathered at Times Square in New York City. Standing across from a glimmering white Sephora sign and just a few feet from neon American flag glowing on New York City Police Department outpost, group raised pieces of pita bread toward a large digitally projected photograph on side of Thomson Reuters building. A broken tree protruding from a row of partially ruined buildings was anchoring horizon point in a photographic frame seemingly swelling with people, refugees lining up for food aid in Yarmouk camp in Damascus, Syria. 10 million people need our help in Syria, announced red lettering streaming across a digital banner running atop projected image. A few minutes later, projection repeated, then stopped; crowd thinned, but remained. It repeated hour later, at 8:30 p.m., and on same day and at precisely same times, projections of photograph also took place in Tokyo's Shibuya business district, one of busiest commercial areas in Japan. The projection, and campaign that led up to it, was both a classical pseudo-event, (1) staged for public and press, and a contemporary, transnational version of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century magic lantern show. (2) orchestrated not by missionaries but by a aid agency. The photograph had been circulating widely on media since United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in Near East (UNRWA) released it on February 24, timed to coincide with a UN Security Council resolution debate about opening besieged areas of for aid. A vigorous online campaign organized through media platform Thunderclap accompanied photograph's release. UNRWA set a target of twenty-three million social media impressions for their hashtag #LetUsThrough; number was a symbolic choice as it was also pre-war population of Syria. (3) According to UNRWA, number of likes, tweets, and shares of photograph using hashtag was in fact 38.5 million, far exceeding their original goal. UNRWA aid deliveries were ceased after photograph was taken on January 31, 2014, due to what agency described as security concerns. (4) About three weeks later, they resumed and then stopped again. On April 24, UNRWA was allowed to resume deliveries. As of this writing in December 2014, UNRWA is not able to distribute aid in Yarmouk. (5) UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness unsurprisingly lauded photograph, describing it as cinematic in its scope and grandeur, and yet ... deeply personal. Etched on each small face is a very personal private story. It was, he said, the combination of epic and miniature that explained photograph's rapid-fire iconic status. (6) Almost one thousand newspapers worldwide ran it. (7) The Guardian published a large-scale reproduction on its front page; paper's columnist Jonathan Jones, echoing Gunness, described it as an epic scene of human suffering. (8) The Independent ran photo with headline, Syria crisis: The picture that shows true extent of inside camp Yarmouk, and Time magazine and Huffington Post were even more extreme in their assertion that this singular image represented everything likely distant viewer needed to know, choosing headlines, Picture Sums Up Syria's Humanitarian and This One Photo Will Show You Just How Terrible The Refugee Crisis Is. (Is humanitarian crisis or refugee crisis more accurate description? Syrian crisis or Palestinian crisis? Or are multiple descriptors necessary and still insufficient?) None of these articles referenced December 16, 2012, bombing by Assad forces of a mosque, a hospital, and a school in Yarmouk camp or described camp's complex and precarious recent history. …

Book Review: Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities

Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities. By Emily Walker Heady. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013. ISBN 978-1-40945377-2. Pp. 150. 60.00 [pounds sterling]. Emily Walker Heady of Liberty University intersects literary criticism and conversion studies in her exploration of Victorian conversion narratives and their literary form. Heady asserts that the dual nature of conversion as both internal change and rhetorical performance (2) establishes an association between the private life of the convert and the public community to whom the convert tells her tale. In claiming this, Heady draws together two streams of thought in conversion studies. William James, in Varieties of Religious Experience (1901-1902), represents a stream that views conversion as a private experience, best studied through psychology. In contrast, Michael Ragussis in Figures of Conversion (1995) and Gauri Viswanathan in Outside the Fold (1998) represent a stream that highlights the public and political nature of conversion narratives, making sociology the proper field for its study. Heady's work integrates these two perspectives by focusing on the necessary communicative movement from private to public life through a convert s testimony. Since conversion narratives are commonplace in Victorian novels, they are a fitting resource for exploring her claim that the literary style of the convert's testimony is part of the conversion itself. In five chapters, Heady examines the conversion narratives of prominent Victorian authors: Dickens' Dombey and Son (1846), Brontes Villette (1853), Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), and Wilde's autobiographical works, De Profundis (published posthumously in 1905) and The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). In her first chapter on Dickens, Heady analyzes his narration of Paul Dombey's conversion from a money-absorbed capitalist to a man who cherishes his home life and finds spiritual value in the world of business. Unlike the sudden and supernatural conversion in A Christmas Carol (1843), Dickens uses a spiritually-integrated realism to tell the tale of Dombey's gradual and natural transformation (20). Heady claims that his use of realism betrays the Pelagian leanings of Dickens' later theology--conversion by human effort and spiritual education (21-23). Dickens also incorporates a New Testament parable into his account of Dombey's conversion: the Prodigal Son. Through his initially improper interpretation of the parable, Dombey betrays his problematic materialism (28-31). Dickens transitions from a private story about an individual to a public message for Victorian society, Heady claims, when he makes Dombey's amended interpretation of the parable both a means of and evidence for Dombey's conversion. She views Dombey and Son as Dickens' attempt to evangelize his reading community toward a proper integration of the sacred and the secular. Heady uses her second chapter to explore Bronte's struggle to narrate inner change without revealing too much or, conversely, introducing too sudden of a transformation into the story (46). In Villette, she sought to rectify the overly-inward narration of her heroine that had exposed Jane Eyre (1847) to criticism. Her protagonist, Lucy Snowe, undergoes a secular conversion that nonetheless gives room for the workings of providence. Throughout the novel, Lucy experiments with various narrative forms as lenses through which to interpret her own progress through life. She unsuccessfully narrates herself through realism's self-improvement genre (conversion through will and optimism, 48-55), romanticism's Gothic genre represented by Lucy's brief foray into Roman Catholic practice (dramatic and public confessions, 55-61), and the theological genre of spiritual journey, best characterized in Pilgrims Progress (65-66). Through her character's failed attempts at self-narration, Bronte critiques the typical conversion genres of Victorian literature and lands on typology as the most effective framework for Lucy's narrative. …

Cantieri tanatologici. Trauma vs scrittura nell’opera di Chloé Delaume

This article investigates the relationship between trauma and writing in Chloe Delaume’s oeuvre . Autofiction , the genre chosen by the French author, together with her personal idea of literature, creates a fictional universe whose aim is to change the real one. In this way, trauma is, at the same time, the subject of Delaume’s books and the result she wants to achieve. The mise en scene of her private story, through formal research and language experimentation, aspires to create a new identity for herself and to involve her readers in an individual search for awareness.

Disability Memoirs in the Academic World:

This article aims to examine how academic memoirs by disabled women exert a specific cultural mediation in contemporary society’s perception of disability. Mary Felstiner’s Out of Joint (2007) and Simi Linton’s My Body Politic (2006) are two examples of what G. Thomas Couser has called the “new disability memoir,” as they are so highly self-aware about the issues involved in representation and disability (2009, 164). Moreover, inasmuch these texts focus to a significant degree on the narrator’s professional life, I would like to analyze them also as academic memoirs; in both, we invariably find the academic background as the platform from which they are able to build up a renewed identity. As their academic careers unfold (Linton’s in psychology and Felstiner’s in history), these women try to understand the deep changes their lives and bodies undergo with a severe impairment. In this context, I will look at the identity strategies these authors consciously use in order to become affirmative models of disability, showing the “damaging effects not of disease or impairment but, rather, of the cultural mythologies that interpret those conditions in reductive or disparaging ways” (Mintz 2005, 1). Mary Felstiner and Simi Linton live quite parallel lives. Both have Jewish family backgrounds, both are happily married, both are feminists, and both will eventually become university professors. Before all that, they also share a generational time frame. They were born in the 1940s, and it is around 1970 (Felstiner in 1969 and Linton in 1971) when, still in their twenties, they meet

The Phenomenology of Rheumatology: Disability, Merleau‐Ponty, and the Fallacy of Maximal Grip

This paper charts the concepts of grip and the bodily auxiliary in Maurice Merleau‐Ponty to consider how they find expression in disability narratives. Arguing against the notion of “maximal grip” that some commentators have used to explicate intentionality in Merleau‐Ponty, I argue that grip in his texts functions instead as a compensatory effort to stave off uncertainty, lack of mastery, and ambiguity. Nearly without exception in Phenomenology of Perception, the mobilization of “grip” is a signal of impending loss, and is offered as a strategy for managing failure rather than as an example of sure‐footed mastery. I read Merleau‐Ponty alongside Mary Felstiner's Out of Joint: A Public and Private Story of Arthritis to explore these other, attenuated dimensions of grip. Finally, the paper turns to Harriet McBryde Johnson's memoir Too Late to Die Young as an example of a way of thinking disabled embodiment otherwise.

A Private Story, Discovery of Iron-Based High T_c Superconductors(Celebrating the Centenary of Superconductivity)

A Private Story, Discovery of Iron-Based High T_c Superconductors(Celebrating the Centenary of Superconductivity)

Out of joint – a private and public story of arthritis Mary Felstiner Out of joint – a private and public story of arthritis University of Nebraska Press 369pp £16.95 0 8032 2030 8 0803220308

Out of joint – a private and public story of arthritis Mary Felstiner Out of joint – a private and public story of arthritis University of Nebraska Press 369pp £16.95 0 8032 2030 8 0803220308

International Human Rights Lexicon (review)

Reviewed by: International Human Rights Lexicon Ignacio de la Rasilla del Mora (bio) International Human Rights Lexicon, by Susan Marks & Andrew Clapham (Oxford University Press2005) 461 pp. Co-authoring is a tricky business. Using one single voice presupposes a previous strong ideological feeling of fellowship and carries with it the careful forging of converging viewpoints. After lots of good will from both sides, the private story of the authors' accords and discords remains forever hidden in their deleted e-mail correspondence, presumed lengthy talks, and crossed out manuscripts. In the end there is one book, twenty-eight short essays on human rights issues in alphabetical order, one voice, and two international legal scholars. She, the pure academician from Cambridge University with a marked taste for political thought, whose post-modernist doctoral inquiry into democratic governance—The Riddle of All Constitutions1 —gained her wide doctrinal respect that her later work has not diminished. He, the Ph.D. from E.U.I. in Florence who accepted the call of Amnesty International to be their representative before the United Nations in New York prior to becoming a professor at the GIIS in Geneva in the late 1990s and who continues to produce a remarkable record of scholarly writings, including his latest, the monumental Human Rights Obligations of Non-State Actors.2 [End Page 1082] Now that the unknowable, the topic, and the characters have been identified, let us focus on the story the book wants to tell. This is a story of commitment for change intermingled with an acute awareness of the limitations that human rights law presently offers. It is by no means the first book that approaches human rights through dictionary lenses,3 Marks and Claphams' work distinguishes itself for having that contemporary air that few of their contemporaries can claim to possess. This is human rights law (and beyond) as seen by two young reputed cosmopolitan legal scholars in the early stages of the twenty-first century. Now, it would be way too easy to discuss the election of an alphabetical ordering for the display of the twenty-eight human rights-related terms—ranging from a minimum of ten pages (Democracy) to a maximum of twenty-six (Torture)—that compose the book. This acknowledged, the authors could, however, have easily provided the reader with a better-elaborated rationale for their methodological choice than the one offered in the preface: "We planned to organise our discussion thematically . . . but then we could not decide what should go where."4 This beginning displays surprising scholarly naiveté! Whatever their motives, once the alphabetical arrangement was decided, it would be inexcusable to classify those same terms thematically for review purposes. I shall, therefore, present a brief overview of the first fourteen chapters in keeping with the lexicon format the authors have adopted. Yet before doing so, a list of terms that they could have considered including should be put forward: poverty, peace, discrimination, gender, security, and war. Against this background, however, it should not go unnoticed that the Clapham and Marks' analysis of the different voices is a transversal and non-linear one that covers a wide range of issues including several of the aforementioned reprises. Eventually, the reader will also be able to identify some of the selected voices as having been already treated, from a different angle, in the authors' respective previous academic work: death penalty,5 torture,6 democracy,7 privacy,8 corporate responsibility,9 and terrorism.10 Arms: In a world where "60 per cent of guns are privately owned" and where the [End Page 1083] "five permanent members of the Security Council account for 88 per cent of all conventional arms exports" (45 per cent in the US alone), one must agree with Clapham and Marks' choice in using this voice to begin their lexicon.11 In analyzing how human rights law has contributed to "[allowing] small arms to become the real weapons of mass destruction" and what it can do now to reverse this tide, the authors present a general view of the "state of the art" by drawing on human rights instruments and related case law to put forward an array of legal interpretative frameworks for procuring...

Mountbatten goes to the movies: Promoting the heroic myth through cinema

Mountbatten goes to the movies: Promoting the heroic myth through cinema

Different from Himself: Hawthorne and the Masks of Masculinity

Different from Himself: Hawthorne and the Masks of Masculinity

From Private Story to Public History: Irene Rathbone Revises the War in the Thirties

This essay examines Irene Rathbone's wartime diary and her overlooked novel We That Were Young (1932) as key texts for our understanding of women's participation in World War I and of their contribution to that conflict's literary canon. Rathbone's novel is a feminist revision of war narratives foregrounding an ambivalent attitude toward the war and the changes it brought within English society. Rathbone both rewrites a typically male war history by featuring a marginal heroine in a liminal position between safety and danger at work near the front, and she also revises her personal wartime writings into a public work of testimony. My essay ultimately argues that Rathbone's formally traditional texts complicate and expand limited definitions of modernism as aesthetic experimentation and convey modern thematic concerns such as changing gender roles and the relativity of time during and after the war.

From Private Story to Public History: Irene Rathbone Revises the War in the Thirties

From Private Story to Public History: Irene Rathbone Revises the War in the Thirties

“My theory is intact; however”: Reflections on Teaching Spanish to Fifth Graders

ABSTRACT: In this article, an experienced foreign language methods instructor presents his “private story” about teaching Spanish to fifth‐graders as part of an elementary school's afternoon enrichment program. For the author, this one‐semester experience was transformative, causing him to reconsider the nature of what he now considers to be the rather sanitized foreign language methods courses in undergraduate teacher‐preparation programs. He discusses some ways he intends to alter his approach to the foreign language methods course, at the same time raising questions and making observations about classroom practices. For example, how can teachers acknowledge and explore the “messiness” of classroom life to their students' benefit? What does the odd and sometimes exasperating way that students “play” with language suggest in terms of classroom teaching approach? Professionally made foreign language training videos can lead to false expectations, even frustration. Visuals, hands‐on objects, and realia, although important, can lead to problematic classroom behaviors if teachers are not prepared to react to them. Student verbal and nonverbal reactions to what teachers do need to be understood (is it Simply that they don't want to learn?). Moreover, teachers need other teachers with whom they can express their frustrations and work collaboratively on language‐learning issues.