Split Self Research Articles

“The Split Self” by Klim Samgin: The Essence of Polyphonic and Monological Characters

“The Split Self” by Klim Samgin: The Essence of Polyphonic and Monological Characters

“Like Being in Purgatory”: Cultural Identity Mapping Centers Hmong American Experiences of Biculturalism

This study examines what it means to be bicultural to Hmong American emerging adults living in central California. Twenty-four participants ( Mage = 21.92 years) constructed a cultural identity map that portrayed what it means to them to be “Hmong American,” described both their cultural identity map content and their process of constructing it, and completed the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM). Grounded theory analysis of cultural identity maps and accompanying conversations reveals the pervasiveness of bifurcated biculturalism, or the experience of having split selves. For participants in this study, perceived cultural incompatibility between Hmong and American cultures rendered it necessary to possess two (and sometimes more) distinct cultural identities, and required—for some, almost constant—frame-switching to manage these identities. This article offers an in-depth portrait of three illustrative cases, which represent diversity in terms of gender, social class, and MEIM score. Altogether, findings contribute to scientific understanding of the complex and contradictory nature of biculturalism for Hmong American emerging adults, and speak to the link between ethnic stereotypes and bicultural identity development. Methodologically, this study highlights the utility of identity mapping to examine psychological experiences of biculturalism and other aspects of identity about which people may have hidden, complex, and potentially contradictory stances.

«Подпольный человек» как антропологический тип в творчестве Ф. М. Достоевского

Introduction. F.M. Dostoevsky called the under- ground type the most important thing that he brought out in his work. “The Underground Man,” in his opinion, is the main Russian person. In the “un - derground” type F.M. Dostoevsky revealed the idea of the duality of a person who cannot be pleased with any progress or reason, because he only needs, as the character of “Notes from Underground” noted, to declare his will. Thus we can talk about a person with a reverse perspective, i.e. about the one who is determined by internal causation, acts on himself, dreams and does not live among things. The purpose of the study is to demonstrate an un - derstanding of the dual nature of man in F.M. Dosto - evsky’s philosophy. Traditionally, starting with Plato, the duality of man in philosophy was understood as a division into soul and body. However, in our opinion, F.M. Dostoevsky’s “dual man”, who is called the underground type, thanks to the presence of consciousness, creates a second plane in the world, doubles reality to his dreams, belonging to subjec- tivity. Thus, we can say that the duality of human nature is a division within one human consciousness. What then can we say about consciousness? This is the presence of a person who exists in the world not according to the laws of the world, in relation to himself. Consciousness is what glues existence and the objects of our dreams together. Trying to keep his own dreams in reality, a person endows reality with meaning, overcoming the meaninglessness of the world. Methods. One of the main methods is literary analy - sis of the works of F. M. Dostoevsky and the interpre - tations of his ideas in the space of thought of L. I. Shestov and S. A. Nikolsky. The study also involves a targeted reference to the works of V.V. Zenkovsky, V.V. Rozanov, K.V. Mochulsky, L.P. Grossman and M.M. Bakhtin. These types of analysis are aimed at identifying connotations and discrepancies in the philosophical systems of the thinkers under study, both at the level of textual analysis of their works and at the level of studying their concepts. Textual analysis is used as an auxiliary method. Scientific novelty of the research. The article traces the development of the “underground man” type in the creative space of F. M. Dostoevsky. The first attempt to conceptualize it comes from the story “The Double.” The continuation of the type is found the work “Notes from Underground”. The sci - entific novelty of the study lies in the fact that, refut - ing the already existing interpretations of this type by Russian philosophers, the author proposes an alternative one, the essence of which is as follows: the “underground man” is a dual person, who is characterized not by the classical split in philosophy into soul and body, but by the split within one’s own consciousness. In addition, the article, for the first time in scientific literature, proves the idea that the main character of the novel “Teenager” also belongs to the type of “underground man.” Results. The author explores the anthropological configurations of the philosophy of F. M. Dostoevsky and identifies the “underground man” as a special anthropological type, conceptualized in F. M. Dostoevsky’s works. The latter it is under - stood as a person with a split self, who lives not in the world, but in a picture of the world, to which he doubles reality through imagination. Such a person is characterized by a priority of the internal level over the external one and a desire for a radical reduction of the present world. Conclusions. The philosophy of F. M. Dostoevsky, whose task was to try to comprehend, defend and justify man, is characterized by a special understand - ing of the latter as one who lives only by internal causation and refuses to obey the deterministic connections thanks to which everything exists in the world of the present.

The death of the self in posttraumatic experience

ABSTRACT Survivors of trauma commonly report feeling as though a part of themselves has died. This article provides a theoretical interpretation of this phenomenon, drawing on Waldenfels' notion of the split self. We argue that trauma gives rise to an explicit tension between the lived and corporeal body which is so profoundly distressing that it can be experienced by survivors as the death of part of oneself. We explore the ways in which this is manifest in the posttraumatic phenomena of dissociation; indescribability; and the fragmentation and repetition of time. Acknowledging that the traumatic loss of part of oneself involves significant grief, we then consider whether the bereavement literature might be helpfully applied. We focus specifically upon the continuing bonds model, which emphasizes an ongoing and meaningful relationship with the deceased through an active process of memorializing. In considering how this might be appropriated to the death of the self in trauma, we suggest that the development of an intrapersonal relationship between parts lost and living might, over time, offer a unique way in which to adapt to loss and approach the future.

‘I miss when my problems were about nothing’: Millennial angst, neoliberal feminism, and paratexts in Search Party (2016–2022)

This article investigates the articulation of complex demands of neoliberal feminism, such as individualism, entrepreneurialism and self-management on the millennial woman in recent streaming series. The portrayal of a fractured female self and its entanglement with millennial angst will shed light on serial depictions of neoliberal individualism and female subjectivity. Search Party, a satirical, genre-bending, half-hour comedy-drama serves as an example through which the contradictory demands of neoliberal feminism are negotiated and questioned. In addition to assessment of the narrative and character framing, paratextual materials and specifically the series’ promotional posters work to further situate the twenty-first century millennial female, underscoring her split self.

Fractured Landscape, Divided Society, Split Selves—the Blitzed London as ‘Third landscape’ in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness

Fractured Landscape, Divided Society, Split Selves—the Blitzed London as ‘Third landscape’ in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness

Dickensian Divisions: David Copperfield's "Hero[ine] of my own life"

This article explores how Charles Dickens's failed romance with Maria Beadnell–which drove him to burn his early autobiographical attempt–haunts his fictional life-writing novel David Copperfield. Maria's rejection intensified Dickens's previous traumas of the blacking warehouse and his father's imprisonment–subsequently producing a type of Freudian split self that I term the Dickensian hero/protagonist split. David is the novel's protagonist, but Agnes is its hero/ine. These divisions underscore Dickens's overarching preoccupations with legacy, and his notoriously fraught relationship with the life-writing genre. Agnes may not be a figure modern readers can admire; however, her position as hero/ine in David Copperfield's history nonetheless illuminates Dickens's own traumas, manifested in David's insecurities about heroism and narrative legacy.

Susto: The Metaphysics of Splitting the Self and Community

Curanderismo is an Indigenous healing tradition in Chicane communities and throughout Mexico. Using such a lens, this paper analyzes the metaphysical nature of trauma as a splitting (susto) of the self and community. First, this paper explores the Indigenous philosophical principles that form the metaphysics of curanderismo. Second, three reactions to susto will be explored including what Gloria Anzaldua calls the Coyolxauhqui imperative, a re-membering of a split self towards healing. Through the second aim, the third aim of this paper is to lay out a road map of the Coyolxauhqui imperative in hopes that it will save more communities from total annihilation. That road involves integrating traumatic memory and history into a sense of self/community, weaving new relationships, and orienting a new self with a decolonized spirit.

프루프록의 ‘위대한’ 고백: 단테 『신곡』과 엘리엇의 「J. 알프레드 프루프록의 연가」 같이 읽기

Critical readings of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” tend to conceive of Prufrock’s recurring evasion and frustration as deriving from his inability to confess his love, a symptom of the ills of modern civilization. However, this paper reconsiders this prevalent interpretation by intensively examining Dante’s lines from Inferno, which Eliot imports into the epigraph of this poem. Dante’s influence on Eliot have been widely explored already, but most studies investigate only the intertextuality between Canto 27 of Dante’s Inferno, especially Guido’s responses to Dante’s question, with the Prufrock poem. However, this paper pays special attention to Canto 27 of Dante’s Inferno and of Purgatory to show that Canto 27 is the site where Dante comments on human reason. Based on this observation, I argue that Eliot’s poem, by endorsing Dante’s lines, extends Eliot’s criticism of human reason as well. In particular, I understand Eliot’s “individual talent” to be his innovative shift in voice when Prufrock directly addresses the readers as he instantly combines his split self as “we”. This moment of integration overlaps with Dante’s double identification with Guido and with Virgil, transposing Prufrock’s ‘monologue’ within his divided self to an ‘aside’ revealed to the readers. Although the speaker fails his ‘love confession’ per se, we can reassess it to be a ‘great’ confession when Prufrock delivers his shameful story of hesitation directly to the readers in the voice of “we”—where the speaker momentarily oversteps the solid confinement of his excessive self-consciousness.

Der Andere in mir. Zur phantasmatischen Bildung des Selbst in der Trauerarbeit bei Derrida

The article focuses on the phantasmatic constitution of the self in Derrida’s deconstructive work of mourning. In contrast to Freud, Derrida does not merely analyse inner-psychic mourning processes that only occur after a concrete experience of loss which can be successfully processed. Rather, he explores the possibilities of an ‘impossible mourning’ that always-already begins before the actual loss of a desired object and never comes to a closure. Because the phantasmatic incorporation of the transcendent other both opens up and undermines the subject’s self-relation in the work of mourning, it is assigned a quasi-transcendental status: quasi-transcendental insofar as the conditions of the possibility of being oneself simultaneously mark the conditions of the impossibility of having recourse to a self-present and self-identical subject. The aim is to work out the key role of Derrida’s modification of transcendental imagination, whose syntheses are at work in the spectral images of the other that haunt us in a ghostly way. As an image of the other within me that gazes at or affects me in the imagination and thereby conditions my phantasmatic constitution as a split self, its internalised trace forms the inaccessible place of self-formation in the work of mourning.

The “Double Personalities” in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette, the protagonist Lucy Snowe is characteristic of double personalities explicitly exhibited in three pairs-sexual desire against self-repression, imagination against reason, and split self of Ginevra Fanshawe against the other-self Paulina Marry. The paper probes into how Brontë uses the contradictory metaphor of “flame” and “frost” to represent Lucy’s double personalities and analyzes how she eventually integrates dualities. Her experience manifests Brontë’s double bind as a female writer. A feminist perspective is adopted to discuss the writer’s inner conflicts between the will to write and female conformity based on her portrayal of Lucy’s double personalities and realistic experiences. It suggests that Charlotte Brontë strives to seek a moderate and compromising integration between social and private identities, male and female lines, as a possible solution to deal with the dilemma of “double bind”.

Crossing the Split in Nepantla: (Un)successful Attempts to Dismantle a TESOL Teacher Candidate in After-Queer Research

ABSTRACT This paper neither plans to use the restorative agenda nor provides a sample of representation or voices of a teacher candidate or researcher who identifies themselves as queer. Instead, this paper looks into the researcher’s desires and imagining in analyzing a split self to think about how to problematize their thinking and actions, which should go beyond the limits of gender and sexuality or a coded term “L-G-B-T-Q,” to disrupt the existing binary of doing queer research. First, the author reviews what queer and after-queer mean in educational research and how the researchers have queered their work in the education field. Then, the author describes the nepantla concept as a theoretical lens. The autohistoria-teoria, or a personal essay that theorizes, is used as a form of self-critique in this piece. The author concludes by reexamining this paper’s central question, How did a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teacher candidate queer their teaching in a high school in the United States? and shares critical thoughts of what could be next in after-queer research.

‘I feel like two different teachers’: the split self of teacher subjectivity

ABSTRACT In this paper, I use a debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson about the nature of time as a heuristic tool to understand the nature of teacher subjectivity. This debate outlines notions of time as measurable and time as duration or flow. These two interpretations of reality, one from a physicist and one from a philosopher, are used to examine the bi-Discoursal nature of the teacher identity An ethnographic participatory action research project in a preschool class in England finds that teachers operate as both physicist and philosopher, sometimes simultaneously. At times, the teacher is a physicist, measuring the geometry of child development and comparing it to a fixed point of normative expectations. At other times, the teacher is a philosopher, existing in the moment with children. The simultaneous existence of these two identities is a cause of anguish, forming a conflicted and contested self.

Seeing Things Within and Beyond The Mirror: An Analysis Of “The Lady In The Looking Glass: A Reflection”

Virginia Woolf a highly appreciated writer both for her literary-critical insight and innovative writing techniques explores the role and character of women in society to reveal the truth and reality of their nature. Woolf in her works surfaces forth the inner discomfort of apparently integrated and a whole individual. In “The Lady in The Looking Glass: A Reflection” (1929) Woolf employs the stream of consciousness technique to communicate the thoughts of a narrator who ponders an image of Isabella Tyson to unveil the nature of truth and reality of her person by opening the intricate layers of her appearance. This paper explores the concept of the split self with reference to the character of Isabella to see the impact of the other on/in the construction of self. Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage is used as a theoretical framework to see how Isabella’s character is put in the external symbolic order and is alienated from its own history to examine how the self can be conceptualized and affected by the interplay of various forces and the inside form in and through other. This study demonstrates that Isabella’s self-image is the distorted product of the ideal ego and ego ideal and is made and changed by acting towards others to make them believe what they see in her as true of her.

Андрогинные мотивы в романе Лены Элтанг «Побег куманики»

The novel “Pobeg Kumaniki” (“Bramble Sprout”) by Lena Eltang fits in with traditions of modernism, where the images of the androgyny are related to the problem of finding and obtaining “intelligible integrity.” The paper analyzes the methods of embodying androgynous motives (auto-associative intertextuality, temporal and gender variability of perception of re-ality, Moras’ representation of himself as a woman, the homosexual intention of the hero, the relationship of duality with different-sex characters, etc.). The novel reveals the androgyny semantics in the context of the split Self and the search for the fundamental basis that would unite the parts into a whole. Androgynous motives correlate with the themes of creativity and love. It is due to the desire to compensate for the brother’s dislike and parting with him that Moras creates the text. The absence of love is one of the novel’s central manifestations of the splinter motif (disintegration, separation) that is antonymous to androgyny. The storylines of the two characters (Forge and Moras) test different ways of achieving integrity. Two vectors of movement towards wholeness are revealed: one towards complexity, multidimensionality (combining the diversity of the world and the Self in consciousness and text) and one towards simplification (the disappearance of fragmentation in the state of the embryo, representing pure potency). However, all the methods only manifest the limitations of human capabilities. Androgyny is still an ideal not to be realized during earthly existence. Therefore, the Central character disappears in the finale.

Ф. НИЦШЕ: ТЕОЛОГИЯ, МЕТАФИЗИКА И ПСИХОЛОГИЯ В ПОИСКАХ ЖИЗНЕННОСТИ

The author believes that the current socio-cultural situation caused by the pandemic opens up the potential for intensified research in the field of history of philosophy. However, it is important to orient this research toward reconstruction of the integral world of a particular thinker based on the entire set of documents that record the circumstances of his life. The paper demonstrates this approach as applied to the Friedrich Nie-tzsche: his reflections and the process of work in the fields of literature, philosophy, psychology, music, and medicine are demonstrated in the context of the circumstances of his personal life and relations with his relatives. In parallel, the hermeneutic components of the modern biographical approach are clarified. The content of the psychological concept of «introvert» is compared with its philosophical and theological meaning. The author considers the interpretation of an introvert as a subject closed in itself and not useful for the society to be wrong. Based on texts written by Nietzsche, the author substantiates that the psycholog-ical type of an introvert implies a «super-social altruist» who splits his/her Self and places these elements in-to all things and all creatures of his/her inner world. At the same time, the «split Self» remains whole, main-taining the connection of everything to everything in the «inner world» and is therefore responsible for it. Thus, the worldview of an introvert (for example, a playwright, theologian, philosopher) is somewhat of a «meaning-making play» which he/she presents to the world so that the world could live according to it.

‘The truth is we’re watching each other’: Voiceover narration as ‘split self’ presentation in The Handmaid’s Tale TV series

Cognitive stylistics offers a renewed focus on readerly or audience interpretation, but while cognitive stylistic tools have been applied in the investigation of literary texts, their application to TV, film and screen has been more limited. This article examines the cognitive stylistic features of the voiceover narration in the first TV series adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale to explore the representation of June/Offred’s ‘split selves’ and how these are mediated through a prominent ‘filmic composition device’. Through analysis of voiceovers and corresponding production choices in series 1, this study explores, first, how the different modes of communication – both choices of visual production (such as shallow-focus shots) and linguistic features (such as ‘you’ address and container metaphors) – combine to show Offred’s split perspective; and second, how these stylistic elements work to foreground the key themes of the series, such as imprisonment, objectification and surveillance.

Wrapped Body and Masked Face

Taking Liu Manwen’s self-portraiture series, especially her Ordinary Life and Monologue, as examples, this article argues that the self-subject via self-portraiture comes to terms through social-cultural constitution and visual articulation. With face masked and body wrapped, Liu Manwen’s self-portraiture locates a troubled self against familial relations and social-cultural confinement and searches for self-expression through mirror reflection and spatial articulation. Issues specific to the discussion include spatial anxiety, where the self reconciles familial place and social space; psychological exploration, where the split self negotiates between the symbolic and the semiotic through mirror reflection; and bodily disguise, where the self conceals and reveals troubled identity through a masked face and bandage-wrapped body.

Recessive Action in Colm Tóibín’s "Brooklyn"

Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel Brooklyn accompanies Eilis Lacey, a native of Enniscorthy, Ireland of the 1950s on a reluctant voyage across the Atlantic. Her passage reconstructs a common experience of immigration and exile to New York for the Irish working class seeking to escape the lack of prospects in small-town Ireland after the Second World War. Caught as she is between two homes—the traditional Irish culture she emerges from and the new capitalist society of America to which she emigrates—Eilis is placed in a polemical relationship to the public sphere, staked on multiple grounds of in-betweenness: she is a woman, Irish, and an exile. Belonging, for her, is posited on a complex understanding of the tensions between national and transnational identities. Eilis’s parochialism, at first, and cosmopolitanism, later on, are both decisive characteristics that become driving forces behind her social integration and marriage prospects. She is initially barred from promising job and marriage opportunities due to her naivety and lack of sophistication. As an Irish female immigrant, Eilis becomes in the course of the novel a cosmopolitan from the margins, one of the newly uprooted, and ultimately a split self.

Philosophical and Speculative Economies of the Vanishing Body

The human is materially determined by that “irrational” hybrid of the physical and machine resulting in no more and no less sense than the “pure body” (if such thing is possible beyond mere postulation) is endowed with. The “rational” part of it or the “agency of making sense” remains outside the materiality of either the body or the machine – it is the automaton of signification or language. The automaton of capital and philosophy is individually substantiated as “subjectivity,” and more specifically that of the split capitalist self. The hybrid consisted of the physical (natural and machinic), on the one hand, and of the subject of signification, on the other hand, is the monstrosity that ultimately escapes sense: it is inhuman (Haraway) or non-human (Laruelle). It is that inhuman inanity that is neither subject nor merely body nor just a machine, the non-human. Similarly to Donna Haraway’s claim about the radical constructedness of the human as cyborg (Haraway, 1985), Marx argued that sociality, which includes both economic production and the so-called social reproduction (via the means of production), on the one hand and physicality on the other hand constitute the species-being of humanity. The human is radically constructed, yet, in the last instance, determined by the physical, argue both Haraway and Marx.