Quest For Self Research Articles

The Robarts Centre today and tomorrow: From the quest for self- knowledge to an ethics of care

The Robarts Centre today and tomorrow: From the quest for self- knowledge to an ethics of care

Self-Discovery in Small Remedies: A Reading of Shashi Deshpande’s

Women writers in Indian writing in English portray women as daughter, wife, mother and other stereotyped roles in their literary works of art. The cultural changes in India are contrasted through the lives of individuals, communities and the nation. The novelist interweaves many aspects of the personal life with the public matters. Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies (2006) is about the protagonist’s quest for self. It delineates the journey of women towards self-discovery in relation to society, and the relationships that are central to women. The women in her novels face upheavals in their marriage. The upheavals are generally inevitable when a woman refuses to conform to her ascribed traditional role. The article examines the self-discovery of the women characters in the novel Small Remedies.

The Quest of Self in Aura by Carlos Fuentes

The Quest of Self in Aura by Carlos Fuentes

India, Pakistan Dispute over the Kashmir Issue and the Current Situation after Articles 370 and 35A

The potential reason for South Asian instability and hostile action is the unresolved nature of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. In the past, it led to two major wars and several attempted events. Since the early 1990s, India and Pakistan have existed in an "Acting War" on Kashmir. Pakistan has been questioning India’s efforts to strengthen its control over Kashmir through force, and Pakistan supports the Kashmiri’s quest for self- determination in accordance with the UN Resolutions. Prime Minister Modi’s decision to abolish Articles 370 and 35A of the “Indian Constitution” that gave Kashmir a special status has caused controversy throughout the political arena. This paper analyzes the origin of the dispute and its impact on bilateral relations between India and Pakistan after the revocation of Articles 370 and 35A. This study is important because there will be greater realization in India and Pakistan that they need to settle the Kashmir dispute for their wellbeing and that of the region. This study proposes that India and Pakistan need to engage in composite bilateral talks on all important issues. Recurrent tension over Kashmir will undercut any initiative to bring stability to South Asia as well as perpetuate the risk of a nuclear war. Keywords: Kashmir; India-Pakistan Dispute; Articles 370; Current Situation

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

‘Quest for Self’: A Comparative Study on Maya Angelou's 'Phenomenal Woman' and Kamala Das's 'An Introduction'

At the very outset of the creation of humankind, it is foreordained that man is superior to woman as God created Adam first and Eve was created from the rib of Adam to be his companion. The thoughts, feelings and nature of God's two creations are different. The masculine body is represented stronger than the feminine. From the beginning woman is represented as the weaker sex who is marginalised in the patriarchal society. Woman was known by her husband's or father’s name, but all these myths about women are being challenged day by day by women who identify themselves by their own name. In this post-modern era a woman can fulfil her needs and wishes on her own. She is the writer of her own destiny. Back in the day, a woman was considered merely as a sexual object that has been created to satisfy the desires of men. She was muted and she could not voice her opinion. She had to go through every atrocity of men. The male poets interpreted women from their point of view which is far more different from the actual truth. The traditional notion of a woman's beauty and nature was a perennial topic in literature penned by male poets and the larger social discourse, nevertheless the female poets including Maya Angelou and Kamala Das have raised their voices in supporting women to grow up from the marginalised position in the patriarchal society. These female poets have tried their best to interpret the true definition of a woman. They are struggling for their rights to establish their identity. Maya Angelou and Kamala Das, two female poets coming from two different backgrounds and continents tried to break the system of male patriarchy and accepted woman as a human being who has an individual identity. Maya Angelou and Kamala Das, in their two poems An Introduction and Phenomenal Woman” establish a notion of creating an individual identity of their own by liberating themselves from the male dominance through their constant struggle for freedom.

Quest for Self as Reflected in Paulo Coelho’s Novel, “The Alchemist”

Paulo Coelho is a Brazilian writer and lyricist known for using rich symbolism in many of his works. He is honored with many international awards for his prolific contribution to the field of literature. In 1984, he wrote his first novel, “The Pilgrimage,” which is a collection of his spiritual inclination on his way to Santiago de Compostela, but he did not receive much acclamation for this. He achieved fame with his second novel, “The Alchemist,” which has sold at least 65millions of copies and holds a position in Guinness World Record for being one of the most widely translated books in the contemporary world. His mesmerizing novel ‘The Alchemist’ is regarded as one of the magnum opuses that deals with the self-recognition of the protagonist of the novel.

Engaging Tang Xianzu and Shakespeare in the Quest for Self

Engaging Tang Xianzu and Shakespeare in the Quest for Self

Motherhood in Wordsworth: A Psychoanalytic Study of his Poetics

By definition, the Romantic ego is a male; the creator of language which helps him to establish “rites of passage toward poetic creativity and toward masculine empowerment.”1 The outlet for a male quest of self – possession in Romantic poetry is women. For the Romantic poets , the “true woman was emotional, dependent and gentle –a born flower”2 and “the Ideal mother was expected to be strong , self- reliant , protective and efficient caretaker in relation to children and home.”4 With emphasis on the individual in Romantic literature and ideology, mothers are depicted as good when they are natural or unnaturally bad. In the Romantic period then, women’s maternal function equals the “foundation of her social identity and of her sexual desire.”5 Consequently, “convinced that within the individual and autonomous and forceful agent makes creation possible”, the Romantic poets “struggle to control that agent and manipulate its energy.”6
 In a number of William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) poems, this creative agent who possesses the powers of creation and imagination becomes a female character who is also often a mother. Nonetheless, when critics examine mothers in Wordsworth’s poetry, they also explore the child/poet’s relationship. Events in Wordsworth’s life surely influenced his attention to mothers. From a psycho-analytic perspective this interest might be an unconscious desire to resurrect the spirit of his dead mother Ann Wordsworth who died when the poet was almost eight. Thus in his poetry, the mother is the counterpart of the genuine faculty of the imagination of the poet and has a strong and felt presence within the poet’s poetic system.
 In The Prelude, Wordsworth acknowledges his mother’s deep influence on him. He associates her death with the break within his own poetic development; a sign that the poet relies upon in his creative power .It is through her that the young poet came first in contact with the genial current of the natural world. Nevertheless, without his mother, the male child’s connection to nature not only stands, it grows stronger:

Multiculturalism: A Critical Study of Chinua Achebe's Selected Novels

Reclaiming for one’s root doesn’t state that one has no root. As long as one has roots intact, one survives; and if one is uprooted or one’s roots are undiscovered, one dies. But they try their best to grow new roots amidst adverse circumstances to face reality. Cut off from cultural roots, they adopt a quest for self. In the contemporary literary criticism, roots and multiculturalism are the topics, dealt in by many novelists of repute in postcolonial literature. It can be observed that nowadays people are not only conscious of their own culture and tradition but claim superiority of their own over other’s culture. The present paper thus aims to present the cultural ambivalence that Chinua Achebe recorded in his novels Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease. When the Europeans came to colonize Africa, they bring with them their own culture. Achebe, in these two novels portrays the plight of the Nigerian people they face due to the mixing of the two different cultures. He draws both the pre colonial and colonial period with their both negative and positive sides. His No Longer at Ease is on corruption, which Achebe believes is brought by the Europeans to Africa. And his Things Fall Apart criticizes Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness where Conrad documented that civilization of Africa took place during the time of colonial period. Achebe’s protagonists were able to retain a sense of their pre-colonial glory, history considerably, however affected the culture and heritage in the ancient aroma. But in Africa, the ‘falcon could not hear the falconer and the center could not hold’ and eventually things did fall apart. Hence, the paper is also an attempt to examine the misrecognition of the Nigerian Culture by the dominating Europeans. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00004.3

Identity, alterity and language in postcolonial context: L'Amour, la Fantasia, Assia Djebar

Notions such as Other, difference and plurality are inevitable in contemporary philosophy as a logic that goes hand in hand with society and its functioning, so that the socio-political side of reality henceforth has not a single homogeneous field, but remains heterogeneous and fragmented. This is also the case with the subject and its identity, which is built up progressively in language, in discourse and in its immanent knowledge, so that the identity is revealed as a socio-discursively constructed fiction. In the novel L'Amour, la Fantasia of Assia Djebar published in 1985, this question of transfigured and required identity is omnipresent in the form of a quest for self through a linguistic quest and speleological writing. The writing of this writer becomes a space of interrogation and self-examination, so that her enunciating subject is not an I-am, but an I-become-in-writing. Moreover, the reflection on language in this novel, on the choice of language, has joined the notion of writing, thus forming two facets of the same problematic which is in turn much more complex, namely the question of identity ‒ the search for identity and its reconstitution. The aim of this article is therefore an examination of the notion of identity and its epistemology, while placing our centre of interest in the specific postcolonial context and observing the specific relation between France and Algeria in the socio-political and cultural fields.

A trickster as a quest for Self in B. Hrabal’sI Served the King of England

This article argues that social activism is inherent in the nature of the trickster figure, namely through the productive and therapeutic power of the imagination. Analysing the author’s style of writing, the novel’s composition in the broader context of Czech folklore studies, artistic and literary movements inside the socialist bloc in the 1960s and 1970s, the Jungian archetype, and the Lacanian mirror-stage theories, I explore how the trickster serves that social purpose in Bohumil Hrabal’s novel I Served the King of England. Enabling an externalization of the problems accompanying the process of individual and collective Self-development, the trickster provides for both the author and reader a shelter for reflection and a possible reconsideration of Self. The trickster character and narrative thus presents a soothing action and, through that, a warning and a suggestion for society. Of course, such externalization creates the possibility of neither overcoming the distance nor understanding the warning a trickster sends.

Salomon – człowiek Bożej mądrości? Kilka uwag na podstawie 1 KrL 1–11

The article aims to present some of the most significant concerns regarding ambiguous presentation of King Solomon in 1 Kgs 1–11. An emphasis is made here on a widely recognised image of Solomon’s as a person of great wisdom. This conception is primarily analysed on the basis of the abovementioned passage of the Bible. Study of Solomon’s character is an excellent example of how important it is to take into account God’s person and His will when using one’s wisdom. For this reason, the 1 Kgs 1–11 is still valid and can be viewed as an extensive didactic text on the significance of priorities in the human quest for self -fulfilment.

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Journey as the quest for self‑ identity. European peregrinations of the Russian romantics
 The Author of the article concentrates on the role and sense of a journey as functioning in the consciousness of the Russian in the first half of the 19th century. The Russian used to travel to Europe for the sake of education already in the 18th century – in the epoch of Peter I. Travelling became even more popular in the Romantic period. Russian Romantics considered the journey to Europe as “the travel of discovery”, being thus a form of the exploration of the world and other cultures, but also a form of experience aimed at the acquisition of self‑ knowledge and the recognition of self identity. The journey to the West of Europe could be perceived also in terms of a peculiar escape as well as an attempt at self‑ liberation from the gloomy reality of the Russian Empire at the time of tsar Nikolay I.Russian travelers – observing European order and comparing it to their own country – realized that there was a great distance between Russia and Europe in this respect. The juxtaposition of those two worlds – Europe and Russia – was frequently connected with the process of verification of national, religious and cultural identity.

All for One or One for All? Liberation Theology and the Quest for Self- Determination in Latin America, Israel, Palestine, and the United States

At the onset of the apartheid regime halfway into the twentieth century, many Afrikaners believed they engaged in a righteous God ordained struggle of liberation. After decades of British suppression they would now be free to fulfill their Christian mission and preside over South Africa. Later that century antiapartheid activists would similarly invoke the Scriptures, this time to urge the liberation of blacks from Afrikaner oppression. In both cases people claimed the right to self-determination partly on the basis of their faith. In the first case theological notions of liberation and election helped bolster a profoundly exclusivist ideology and systematic racism. Within the anti-apartheid movement theologians, on the contrary, sought to develop an inclusive theology that advocated freedom for all of humanity.1 Although the above illustration involves significant difficulties on its own accord, the two divergent attitudes towards theology and freedom bring us to an important broader question. How might theologies of liberation boost a community’s search for self-determination without resorting to exclusivism or nationalism and its potentially lethal excesses? Liberation theology may help release people from dominating forces, whether economic, political, cultural, or otherwise. But what to do when one community’s fight for freedom becomes another’s source of oppression? To explore these questions this paper will draw from four different traditions. Comparing major liberation theologies from Latin America, Israel, Palestine, and among American Indians in the United States,2 it aims to analyze how

On Not Being Found: A Winnicottian Reading of John Banville's Ghosts and Athena

On Not Being Found:A Winnicottian Reading of John Banville's Ghosts and Athena Mark O'Connell One of the more striking aspects of the work of the Irish novelist John Banville is its unflagging fascination with postures and impostures. Almost all of his protagonists are performers of roles, men who are constantly arranging themselves in some or other type of pose. Peopled as it is with frauds and masqueraders, his work might productively be viewed as a sustained exploration of the various ways people find of deceiving themselves and others, as a fiction about the fictions people make of themselves. Unsurprisingly, much of the critical response to the novels has focused on their engagement with problematic questions of selfhood and authenticity. The notion of the divided self has, in particular, proven an enduring point of interest. Hedwig Schwall, for instance, has described the oeuvre as "one big enterprise to deconstruct the illusion of (id)entity." "Each of the author's 'in-dividuals,'" she writes, "are utterly dividual, their split is their essence" (120). Brendan McNamee has linked the inauthenticity of Banville's protagonists with both their self-obsession and their self-division, arguing that the three are inseparable. At the heart of the question of authenticity, he argues, lies "the dilemma of self division." "Self-obsession goes hand-in-hand with self-division: a self looking, a self being looked at" (76). And John Kenny makes a similar point when he writes that Banville's narrators all suffer from an "excessive self-awareness" that "brings with it a sense of doubtful self-identity, suspect authenticity, and an agonized yearning for a sublimely idealized, preconscious, and therefore innocent, self" (170). Critics have tended to view the creation of narrative as offering a form of resolution to this problem of self-division, albeit an incomplete and problematic [End Page 328] one. Elke D'hoker sees Banville's narrators' first-person accounts as not just representative, but constitutive of selfhood. These "never fully reliable first-person narrators," she writes, "can be observed in the process of representing their traumatic past, their tormented thoughts and divided selves in a coherent narrative so as to achieve a sense of self that is unitary, solid and clear" (2). The mode of first-person narrative, she claims, "seems to offer the possibility of meaning and control not available in real life" (173). Likewise, Derek Hand refers to the narrators' "search for an appropriate language that will contain their experience, and render themselves and their lives knowable" (165). Schwall, too, agrees that all of these "cleft protagonists...perform their quest for self through writing" (116). If it is striking just how much of the critical work on Banville's fiction has focused on issues of selfhood, authenticity, and self-creation through narrative, what is perhaps equally notable is how infrequently (and, on the whole, fleetingly) the theories of psychoanalysis have been employed as a means of investigating these complexities. This, I would argue, constitutes a shortcoming in the criticism on a body of work that is so resolutely interior, so unswervingly concerned with the inscrutable forces and afflictions of personhood, with how the self is never at one with itself. If psychoanalysis could be said to have a single identifiable aim, it would be the scrutiny of peoples' narratives of selfhood, the exposure of their inventions and misconceptions about themselves. In its resolute interiority, in its repeated use of the confessional monologic form, and in its concern with the self and its troubled relationship to others, Banville's work is peculiarly suited to a psychoanalytic critical approach. In the present essay, I depart from the body of criticism sketched above in two fundamental respects: I present the self-division and fraudulence of Banville's narrators as resulting from an elemental fear of connection and communication, and I analyze the fictions they narrate from a psychoanalytic perspective. I argue that the theories of the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, in particular his notions of the True and False Self, are especially useful in illuminating Banville's complex—and, as we shall see, frequently paradoxical—view of the self and its interactions with the world. My focus here is primarily...

Aboriginal Women’s Movement; A Quest for Self- determination

Aboriginal Women’s Movement; A Quest for Self- determination

Je Me Souviens (Maintenant): Altérité, Indianité et Mémoire Collective

This article is about the will to remember as a political imperative in Quebec. Francis Leclerc’s Mémoires affectives (2004) explicitly anchors this will to remember in the multicultural and pluriethnic reality of modern Quebec. In the film, the quest for Self occurs principally through a dialogical relationship with “the Other,” the immigrant, who serves to participate in and reflect the stabilization of an identity and a memory from which he or she is nonetheless excluded, like an external witness. Beyond the immigrant, and more fundamentally, through the essentialist and archaistic posturing of the ahistorical, apolitical, and peripheral Indian body, the memory of the Self is woven, taking root in soil that is inhabited by and inhabits an identity of privilege. This critical analysis of the film serves to illustrate some of the discursive and representational strategies employed by recent Quebecois cinema in its attempt to respond to the increasingly complex and ambiguous colonial status of modern Quebec. It is also a response to the nation’s historical link to alterity — its own alterity and that of its “Others.”

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

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

Institutional design and conflict: an introduction

Among the prevalent objectives that we should set for our society, reduction of conflicts of all kinds is probably one of the easiest to agree upon. Any social contract that establishes peaceful ways to resolve disputes can Pareto-dominate, for some appropriate transfers or side payments, any social contract that instead lets individuals or groups resolve disputes through costly conflict. Given that the international order is a highly incomplete social contract and given that no authority has enforcement power over sovereign States, renegotiation is unavoidable when considering the international order. Moreover, such negotiations are more likely to become conflictual when the relevant players lack commitment power needed for side payments and/or lack precise information about the strength of the opponents. Since all these critical elements for peaceful negotiations to succeed, namely enforcement power, commitment power, and completeness of information, are most unlikely to exist in the international arena, international relations are the type of relations in which anarchy is most often the reality and conflict is the hardest to avoid. Yet, even in the most pessimistic world of anarchy, the quest for self enforcing institutions that may help conflict resolution or the reduction of negotiation and renegotiation costs is an important one, and a lot more work can be done by economists and political scientists to identify self-enforcing institutional mechanisms that work better than others and that therefore the relevant players could coordinate on. This issue contains some important contributions in this direction, and it can be viewed as divided in two parts: The first three papers deal with the difficult issues of alliance formation and alliance behavior in negotiations and contests, which is an important