Quest For Selfhood Research Articles

AFRICAN WOMEN’S QUEST FOR MOTHERHOOD IN FLORA NWAPA’S NOVELS EFURU AND IDU

The African classical tradition finds its development in African novel as African novels deals with variety of themes such as art, religion, apartheid, culture, tradition, ironies of life, colonial and post-colonial realities etc. African and Caribbean writing often celebrates black womanhood in a move towards a specifically African feminism. Mother is a person who nurtures and protects. African Literature in all ages celebrates motherhood and gives prime focus to motherhood in women’s’ life. Flora Nwapa, the Mother of female African Literature in English also treats motherhood as her main theme. Nwapa through her works portrays Igbo culture and Igbo Tradition. The lead characters in Efuru and Idu log for motherhood in their life and suffer in life because of it. Though successful in life in all other aspects they are considered incomplete because they are barren. Both the works deals with Motherhood and marriage as its prime focus and suffering of a woman and her quest for selfhood in the family and in society at large.

Nudity and Nakedness: The Gaze of Edna Pontellier

The description of Edna Pontellier’s unclothed body is a recurring metaphor in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. The correlation between nudity and nakedness implies a different status of how a person surveys himself, and is surveyed by others. Moreover, the tradition of men as the surveyor and women as the surveyed shapes the social expectation of women always striving to please the male gaze. Chopin’s Creole society is a sphere where women are surveyed and disciplined. This essay aims to demonstrate how Edna achieved an extraordinary awakening of how women are appraised by men and how they perfect their manners accordingly, under the inspiration of art and the ocean. This awakening is both liberating and detrimental for Edna, for she found only the incompatibility between her quest for selfhood and society. This discordance deepens Edna Pontellier’s solitude and leads to her final suicide. However, the physical destruction is not an act of surrender because, through her nudity, we witness powerful feminist awakening and rebellion.

History in the Attic: Search for Roots in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

In most of diaspora literature there is an attempt to retrieve the past. This makes one measure time in many ways, different calendars, change of seasons, past encounters narrated through wars, defeats, encounters and disasters. It is remembered through family history, ancestral heritage, nostalgia, memory and even through national disasters. This interaction portrays the immigrants caught in flight of memories, relationships and images. The relocation has its disgust for one thing or the other. The author has to live in the reminiscences, a collective memory representing a symbolic relationship between past and present. The Swinging Bridge by Ramabai Espinet chronicles the multiple exiles that are part of the Indian experience in the Caribbean and Canada through two figures one from the past- great grandmother Gainder and the other from the present - Mona, the protagonist. The novel commemorates the maternal roots and routes of Indo-Caribbean history by establishing the subjectivity of widows and young girls from India who crossed the Kala Pani (Black waters of the Atlantic) in search of new beginnings in Trinidad and the great-grand-daughter who engages in an existential quest for selfhood in Canada. Grief motivates a flood of personal memories as Mona begins to remember intimate details of family life that had been repressed under the cover of migration. Bits and pieces of the past, fragments scattered in various places, childhood memories, overheard conversations, prayer songs, all come together in the attic. She explores the secret songs, photographs and letters giving her a powerful voice for her culture, her family, her fellow women and for herself. Mona’s drive to document history enables her to reveal the family’s carefully guarded secrets- domestic violence, drunken rampages, sexual abuse, illegitimate children, and even AIDS. This paper seeks to analyse the novel’s diasporic contents and find out whether this attempt at retrieval of the past brings about a change in the perception of today’s generation. The author brings to light the problems of a plural society calling for need for relationships and need for mutual respect- all to avoid conflict situations through this effective tracing of history in the novel.

Kierkegaard: an introduction

1. Introduction: Kierkegaard's life and works 2. Pseudonymity and indirect communication 3. The human self: truth and subjectivity 4. The stages of existence: forms of the aesthetic life 5. The ethical life as the quest for selfhood 6. Religious existence: religiousness 7. Christian existence: faith and the paradox 8. Kierkegaard's dual challenge to the contemporary world.

"The Kiss of Memory": The Problem of Love in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

It is well known that there must be a body of waived matter, let us say, things accepted and taken for granted by all in a community before there can be that of The usual phrase is having things in common. Until this is thoroughly established in respect to Negroes in America, as well as of other minorities, it will remain impossible for the majority to conceive of a Negro experiencing a deep and abiding and not just the passion of sex.... [T]hey can and do experience discovery of the numerous subtle faces as a foundation for a and selfless love, and the nuances that go to that love....--Zora Neale Hurston, White Publishers Won't Print Zora Neale Hurston's 1950 essay on the lack of published representations of African American speaks to the concerns of her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, published thirteen years earlier. Hurston's piece suggests that despite her skepticism about protest fiction, she was deeply engaged with the political landscape of the early to mid-twentieth century in America as an author and intellectual. As Joel Pfister notes in an article designed to highlight Hurston's political efficacy, her racial politics were relational, not deterministic: depicted [African American] life and culture in relation to but not as decisively scripted by racially and economically motivated oppression. White Publishers Won't Print confirms Hurston's interest in the connection between racist assumptions about black people and fictional representations of African American love. She argues that publishing complex and subtle stories about heterosexual relationships between black people promotes interracial commonality of feeling. Crucially, Hurston specifies that such stories should also include how and why relationships are destroyed. This essay proposes to investigate Their Eyes Were Watching God on these terms. What diverse nuances ... go to destroy the great and selfless love between Janie Crawford and Tea Cake Woods (621)? It is difficult to talk about Their Eyes without talking about Janie and Tea Cake's relationship. Though Hurston's heroine, Janie Crawford, is fully realized, masterfully characterized, and deliciously complicated, the plot and the problem of the novel revolve around her finding, losing, and eulogizing this of her life. Critics who read the novel as a narrative about Janie's quest for selfhood or her progressive acquisition of voice tend to cast Tea Cake as a utopian alternative to the paradigm of masculinist domination identified by Janie's grandmother and typified by her second husband, Joe Starks. (1) Scholars responding to this characterization of Tea Cake tend to overcorrect these optimistic readings and attack the efficacy and authenticity of the relationship as a whole, arguing that Tea Cake is slightly more palatable, but largely of a piece with the other imperfect men in the novel. (2) What both of these readings often downplay, though, is the novel's deliberate and profound ambivalence towards Janie's chances, in her time and place, for finding a husband equipped to consistently encourage her self-actualization or listen to her voice. The novel contains both a profound idealization of Tea Cake's character and a skeptical critique of some of his behavior towards Janie. Whereas Janie's personal development can be read as a progressive journey or successful quest, her romantic relationships seem to echo each other in pervasive and disturbing ways. Pfister comments that For all its occasional romantic and pastoral cuteness and atmospheric hopefulness, Hurston chose not to insulate her story from destructive social forces and contradictions (622). Tea Cake's jealousy and violence is the novel's most intense and disturbing representation of the pervasiveness of domination because he is so unlike Logan and Joe, yet sporadically performs the same dominative masculinity that they do. …

Frida Kahlo, Mexicanidad and Máscaras: The Search for Identity in Postcolonial Mexico

Frida Kahlo has been called a surrealist, a communist, a feminist and a bad painter. But who was the real Kahlo, why was she so obsessed with her Mexican identity, and how should we assess her as an artist? This paper investigates Kahlo's quest for selfhood in the context of her Aztec heritage and Mexico's double experience of colonization by Spain and the US. The problem of mexicanidad is approached via Paz's analysis in El laberinto de la soledad (1952), while it is seen to resonate also with Bhaba's view of the stereotype in postcolonial discourse as elaborated in The Location of Culture (1994). Relevant, then, is Paz's view of la Chingada, or the prostituted state of Mexican heritage, his concepts of máscaras and murallas that both reveal and conceal identity, and which are especially indicative of Kahlo's pictorial treatment. Outwardly, Kahlo exhibits herself as a Mexican icon, yet her long dresses hide a maimed body, a masking process apparent too in her self-portraits. The stereotyped image of herself, projected with irony as well as pride in paintings like My Nurse and I (1937), The Mask (1945) and Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932), reveals the artist's quest to understand her mixed cultural identity, consistent with Bhabha's notion of the contradictory psyche of the colonized.

A slave's quest for selfhood in eighteenth-century Hindustan

A slave's quest for selfhood in eighteenth-century Hindustan

Be "Whole and Sole Yourself": The Quest for Selfhood in "Bishop Blougram's Apology"

Be "Whole and Sole Yourself": The Quest for Selfhood in "Bishop Blougram's Apology"

Reality and Fantasy: The Chinese-American Woman's Quest for Identity

Maxine Hong Kingston explores with uncanny frankness and sensitivity in her first autobiographical novel, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, the dilemma of the Chinese-American woman as she struggles for selfhood in a chaotic and hostile environment. Straddling two cultures, Maxine, the author/heroine, has to confront the reality or fiction of her Chinese heritage that reaches her mainly through her mother's mythical yet authoritative talk-stories, and the equally puzzling realities of her American birth, education, and experience. Both heritages impose external limitations and demand prescribed behaviors even though she is constantly aware of the remoteness of ancestral China and her essential separation from it, as well as her marginal status of exclusion and alienation in the American society. As a ChineseAmerican woman, Maxine must come to terms with her past and present, with China and America, with woman-as-slave and woman-aswarrior, and thus find her own identity and voice, one that is not externally imposed but self-expressive, born painfully out of the experience of alienation and suffering. This journey necessarily involves a rejection of all superficial authorities and restrictions, either Chinese or American, in order for her to open the way toward individual growth and self-expression that fuse the past with the present, the Chinese simultaneously with the American. This quest for selfhood must involve a deliberate act of self-assertion. She must deal with her Chinese-American-ness in the depth of her own being in order to know who she is and where she belongs. Values and behaviors deemed meaningful and valid to other women may turn out to be myths and falsehoods to her. She must examine established values and behaviors and then evaluate them in terms of her own perception and experience. As a Chinese girl growing up in America, Maxine has to test her strength to establish realities in the midst of conflicting alternatives: Those of us in the first American generation have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fit in solid America.' Growing up is a painful process for any youngster any

Gordon Allport and the quest for selfhood

Among the growing body of literature about selfhood and identity, writings of the late Gordon Allport provide a set of notable definitions that are es pecially relevant to the relationships of psychology and religion. While All port's perspective is distinctive in several ways, which we shall summarize at the end of this paper, probably his best-known and most important contribu tion is that of a methodological polarity. In terms of modern psychology, this was exemplified in his contrast between the Lockean and Leibnitzian tradi tions. The former is characterized by a view of the mind as essentially passive, while in the latter it is regarded as active or dynamic.1 This contrast is paral lelled by one in the study of religious behavior and experience?that of ex trinsic and intrinsic or immature and mature religion.