Sympathetic Feelings Research Articles

“A Royal Lady [Re]born”: Balladry, Transport, and Transgression in Michael Field’s The Tragic Mary

“A Royal Lady [Re]born”: Balladry, Transport, and Transgression in Michael Field’s The Tragic Mary Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) When “Michael Field”—the pseudonym of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper—visited Edinburgh in October 1889, they experienced a transportation into the city’s poetic past. Edinburgh, allegorized as a woman in the opening lines of the preface to their play The Tragic Mary (1890), fascinates the couple and draws them to her: “Beautiful for situation, happy in the way the light visits her, noble in natural outline, and favoured even in the rise and declivity of her streets, it is nevertheless as the repository of her Queen’s tragedy that Edinburgh fascinates us to herself.”1 Michael Field’s language of transport and suspension of volition as the city “fascinates” them and draws them toward its historically tragic queen are reminiscent of Walter Pater’s description of the collective contagion of dramatic form and has traces of eighteenth-century sentimental language and moral philosophy.2 The compulsory attraction that enables Michael Field’s impressions of Mary Stuart can best be described as an affective sympathetic bond. Adam Smith’s definition of sympathy as a “fellow-feeling” describes a process in which “passions upon some occasions, may seem to be transfused from one man to another, instantaneously, and antecedent to any knowledge of what excited them in the person principally concerned.”3 In tandem with this perspective, affect, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is understood as communal or circulating feeling. Sympathy was not just an emotional bond but a physiological force that came to mean something like feeling with, as well as for, another. And yet Smith also suggests elsewhere that certain sympathetic feeling “literally becomes” the feeling of the one who feels it, emphasizing the circulation of affects. This act of sympathy depends on the process of “transport”: Smith argues that readers “transport ourselves in fancy” to the scene of a particular book, in order to “sympathize . . . with the highest transports” of the characters’ feelings [End Page 495] (pp. 87–89). But, at the same time, “we feel ourselves naturally transported towards” other characters, scenes, and situations to move and feel with them, regardless of any will to do so (p. 88). By revisiting Mary Stuart’s relics, the couple becomes transported, using Smith’s terminology, to the past, fueled by their quest to write the Queen of Scot’s tragedy. Gesturing toward the historical reawakening Michael Field dramatizes in The Tragic Mary, an awakening only possible through the closeness they share with Mary Stuart, the fictional ballads that the queen sings re-create nostalgic reveries that allow a transference of expressive emotion. Michael Field uses poetic drama—and, I suggest, experiments with ballad form—to assert their perception of aesthetic modernity and renewal, as Andrew Eastham has posited in his discussion of the couple’s first verse drama, Callirrhoë (1884).4 Drama—as a mimetic form—relies on, as Eastham argues, “the translation and transference of expressive energies,” and it is “essential to both Pater and Field’s Hellenist visions that the contagious and excessive energy of Dionysus provided the first impulse towards theatre” (p. 494). Beginning with Callirrhoë, Michael Field experimented with various formal boundaries in their verse dramas to refashion a longer, and notably masculine, tradition of drama—fifth-century Greek and Shakespearian. If Aristotle believed drama to be an imitation of action, and mimesis to be a showing (or representation) versus a narrative retelling of that action, Michael Field continues the formal history of drama by playing with voice, rhythm, and structure. I speculate that the couple experiments with ballad meter in The Tragic Mary to incorporate a social mimesis founded on female community and contagious transference, or transport. The analysis that follows considers the play from the perspective both of nineteenth-century approaches to the ballad form and verse drama. I first provide a brief overview of the drama’s preface and plot before my initial close reading of the queen’s first ballad, “She was a royal lady born.” This song illustrates ballad meter as an affective communal experience that enables expressions of female desire. I then return to a consideration of...

Because She Has a Younger Husband: Critically Examining the Facebookers’ Comments Responding to Domestic Violence against a Famous Cambodian Actress

This paper is an attempt to explore and understand how SNS users responded to domestic violence against one Cambodian actress. Specially, I examined their comments whether they expressed sympathetic feelings toward her, or blaming her karma/fate, or suggesting divorce. To answer these questions, I used the semantic analysis by debunking socioeconomic backgrounds of the respondents, except gender identity that was identified. This study has found that the majority of men blamed the victim, Karma and the majority of women recommended the victim a divorce and legal assistance, indicating that men still have a strong patriarchal ideology, but women are now more likely to rely on the modern legal system.

Research of attitudes of the students studying in schools of physical education and sport toward disabled kids

This is a scientific study to analyze the attitudes of the students studying in schools of physical education and sports toward disabled children. In total 202 students (99 women, 103 men) who have attended to faculty of Physical Education and Sports of Gaziantep University participated in the research. Attitude Scale for kids with mental disabilities developed by Sungu was used in order to get the data of the research. Descriptive statistics for analysis of the data, Mann Whitney U test for pair group and Kruskall Wallis analysis for multiple groups were applied. The results of the research have indicated that students in schools of physical education and sports have sympathetic feelings for disabled children and favorable opinions for these kids to attend in icebreaker activities and education programs. No difference between the attitudes of different age, sex or grade groups were observed. It has also showed that the students who had had work experiences with disabled children before had more fear. Besides, it proved that the sport educations with disabled children provide students to have more positive attitudes. It has been concluded that the ones who claimed to be able to work with disabled children had higher marks.

Felicia Hemans and The Domestic Affections, and Other Poems; or Mrs Browne's Publishing Project

The Domestic Affections, and Other Poems (1812), Felicia Hemans's third and last volume of poetry under her maiden name, seems appropriately entitled for a poet whose nineteenth-century reputation rested on her being the poet of home and hearth. However, the title poem is, unusually for this period, neither the first poem in the volume nor the longest. In addition, the domestic affections themselves—the sorrows and joys of family life and nostalgic pull towards home—are not the pre-eminent theme of the volume, which juxtaposes patriotism and war. Rather, the title poem offers the attentive reader an equivocal account of the domestic joys it praises. These anomalies are interesting, and this article analyses letters written by the poet, her financially straitened mother and the elderly gentleman (and romantic admirer) who was effectively her patron, which show that the volume was published without the poet's knowledge and that its title was not her choice. Given the exploration of the sexual and financial politics at play behind the publication of this volume, the author suggests that “The Domestic Affections” is Hemans's carefully thought-out riposte to the gentleman who insisted that she concentrate on “sympathetic feelings” and “Affection and Piety”, and who held considerable power over the work she produced.

Examining Publics' Crisis Responses According to Different Shades of Anger and Sympathy

Integrating the discrete emotions and emotional dimensionality theories in crisis communication research, a 2 (emotional type: anger vs. sympathy) × 2 (emotional intensity: high vs. low) between-subjects experiment using a random general public sample was designed to examine the variance in publics' crisis coping strategies and their acceptance of different organizational crisis responses, as a function of crisis-induced anger and sympathy of different intensity. Differential influences of emotional type and intensity on coping and crisis response preferences were found. Interaction effects revealed: (a) more intense sympathetic feelings lead to higher likelihood of conative coping preference; (b) more sympathy at low intensity contributes to more preference of active cognitive coping and acceptance of accommodative organizational responses; and (c) more intense anger is related to acceptance of more defensive crisis response such as scapegoating.

Will get fooled again: Emotionally intelligent people are easily duped by high‐stakes deceivers

Purpose. There is major disagreement about the existence of individual differences in deception detection or naturally gifted detection ‘wizards’ (see O'Sullivan & Ekman, 2004 vs. Bond & Uysal, 2007). This study aimed to elucidate the role of a specific, and seemingly relevant individual difference – emotional intelligence (EI) and its subcomponents – in detecting high‐stakes, emotional deception.Methods. Participants (N= 116) viewed a sample of 20 international videos of individuals emotionally pleading for the safe return of their missing family member, half of whom were responsible for the missing person's disappearance/murder. Participants judged whether the pleas were honest or deceptive, provided confidence ratings, reported the cues they utilized, and rated their emotional response to each plea.Results. EI was associated with overconfidence in assessing the sincerity of the pleas and greater self‐reported sympathetic feelings to deceptive targets (enhanced gullibility). Although total EI was not associated with discrimination of truths and lies, the ability to perceive and express emotion (a component of EI), specifically, was negatively related to detecting deceptive targets (lower sensitivity [d′]). Combined, these patterns contributed negatively to the ability to spot emotional lies.Conclusions. These findings collectively suggest that features of EI, and subsequent decision‐making processes, paradoxically may impair one's ability to detect deceit.

Social capital and the distribution of household income in the United States: 1980, 1990, and 2000

Social capital is a person or group's sympathy or sense of obligation for another person or group. The objects of sympathetic feelings have social capital. Those holding sympathetic feelings for others provide social capital. Because social capital providers internalize the consequences of their choices on the objects of their social capital, they trade with each other on different terms and at different levels than would occur in arm's length transactions, all other things equal. Furthermore, changes in the distribution of social capital alter the terms and level of trade which in turn alter the distribution of income. This paper demonstrates mathematically the connection between changes in social capital and income distributions and then tests empirically the influence of social capital on household income distributions in the 50 U.S. states for the census years 1980, 1990, and 2000. The mathematical and empirical findings of this paper support the proposition that social capital measured by social capital indicator variables have important influences on the distribution of household incomes.

Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s by Felicity James

Felicity James. Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in 1790s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. 265. $75.00. In foreground of James Gillray's Anti-Jacobin cartoon New Morality, Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd, caricatured as Toad & Frog and surrounded by Liberty Caps and Sansculottes, croak out passages from their 1797 collection Blank Verse. Contemporaries were puzzled by Lamb's appearance in this mock-triumph of Jacobin tendency. Southey (who, like Coleridge, is depicted in cartoon as braying ass) commented: I know not what poor Lamb has done to be croaking there. Many readers since, with Lamb as poet of mournful sensibility, and, in guise of Elia, as familiar essayist of paradox and whimsicality, have echoed Southey's bewilderment. In her searching study of Lamb and his circle, however, Felicity James argues that Lamb's inclusion in revolutionary throng is not as odd as it might appear, indeed, that the suspicions of Anti-Jacobin might not have been misplaced. Gillray, she suggests, chose his target wisely. James's scholarly and accessible work situates Lamb's early in context of febrile revolutionary debates of 1790s. Building on recent work on romantic collaborative networks and ideas of sociability, it traces Lamb's politics to utopian ideas of community and sympathetic feeling fostered by meetings with Lloyd and Coleridge in little smoky room in Salutation & Cat. James argues that for Lamb and his circle, friendship itself is maintained by literary techniques of quotation, echo, and personal reference. Through art of allusion, Lamb's translates revolutionary debates of era into pragmatics of friendly conversation. The struggle to reposition politics of sentiment and affections in wake of Burke and Godwin, however, leave group's early utopian ideals of friendship and community based on home-born Feeling hovering uneasily between conservative retreat and radical engagement. By end of decade, it is apparent that Lamb and Coleridge have quite different ideas about friendship and community. James explores causes and consequences of this disagreement in way that combines detailed textual scrutiny with sharp awareness of personal and ideological tensions between parties. Among many delights of this book is its ability to suggest particular times and locations; James is an evocative scene-setter. The first chapter recreates atmosphere of Salutation & Cat, with friends engaging in conversation amid steaming egg-nog, in lug of Orinoco tobacco-smoke. James's carefully modulated reading of Lamb and Coleridge's work in 1790s rightly stresses inchoate nature of their political views, as well as influences such as electrical fluid theories of Thelwall and Godwin and, more importantly, Unitarianism. Unitarian notions of friendship form bedrock of Lamb and Coleridge's politics in 1790s, and James vividly situates Coleridge's ideal of Pantisocracy, his attempt to bridge Godwin and Burke with Unitarian idea of vast family of love, to economic transformation of family life during eighteenth century and to theorization of affect by Hume, Smith and Rousseau. Consequently, for James, smoky little room takes on role comparable to Thomas Poole's bower at Nether Stowey, representing Hartleyan small spot which lies at heart of larger benevolence. Seen this way, Salutation & Cat gatherings are both performative rebuttal of Godwin and an anxious revision of Burke--an attempt to protect fraternal affections, dismissed by Godwin, from anti-Jacobin appropriation. James's argument that allusion constitutes a key factor in Lamb's development of sympathetic mode of reading and writing is amply supported by her readings of individual poems. …

Specious Bedfellows: Ethnicity, Animality, and the Intimacy of Slaughter in Moby-Dick

Anxious to “make [his] Self an man,” Maine youth Joseph Loring swore off the lure of the California goldfields and shipped out on a New Bedford whaling vessel a month prior to Moby-Dick’s publication in the fall of 1851. A year and a half later, he proudly wrote to his mother that he had “struck 5 whales and ha[d] not gotten [his] head smashed yet.”1 In fact, he was now so much less “green” that he could as readily “go on to a whale as go over the hill of an evening or escort a school marm to her place of abode.” Assuring her that his labors on board were equally serene, he gladly reported that his ship “is scelibrated for the harmony in which here officers and aftergard live [and] there has not bin a hard word be twine the officers or the Stewers the 14 months that wee have bin to gather.” Yet such sentimental scenes of domestic bliss appear as a cover for his unavoidable worry that, “Still an unlucky blow may make Sauce Pans out of me.” Torn between portraying his struggle with whales as manly graciousness and non-hierarchical camaraderie or as brutally dangerous sport against a worthy adversary, Loring hastily states the inescapable fact of his utter dependence on sperm whales in an aphorism worthy of Ishmael: “Yet by them I live or by them I die.” In regaling his family with news of his voyage, Joseph Loring suggests that an apparatus of affect and domestic bliss mitigates his overwhelming dependence on creatures of the sea for his existence and earnings. His emphasis on the sympathetic feeling between crewmembers and his own vulnerability to sperm whales runs counter to dominant characterizations of the harvesting of whales and challenges accepted interpretations of the industry’s most famous literary tribute, Moby-Dick. Nineteenth-century whaling has been praised as the paradigmatic enterprise of masculine vigor, built of “exposure, privation, and danger, in comparison with which other field-sports are tame, safe, and

Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, and the Romantic Poetics of Feeling

Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, and the Romantic Poetics of Feeling Miranda Burgess (bio) Miranda Burgess University of British Columbia, Canada Miranda Burgess Miranda Burgess is Associate Professor of English at the Unviersity of British Columbia and the author of British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830. She is finishing Romantic Transport, 1790–1830, a book that examines the technologies and anxieties of mobility at the turn of the nineteenth century in relation to the history of feeling, the poetics of the figure, and experiments in narrative form. Her next project is a history of the idea that art moves those who encounter it. Footnotes I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support of the project to which this essay belongs. 1. Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 3, 10. 2. Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) 4. Subsequently cited in the text. 3. Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999) 10, 193; Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) 31–32, 658. 4. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 10. Subsequently cited in the text. 5. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978) 316. Subsequently cited in the text. 6. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 13. Subsequently cited in the text. 7. For Hume 576, sympathetic feeling proceeds from visible signs to a deduction of causes to “such a lively idea of the passion as is presently converted into the passion itself.” 8. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds., Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). 9. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 191, 197, 207. Subsequently cited in the text. 10. De Man, “Metaphor (Second Discourse),” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 151. Subsequently cited in the text. 11. See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002) 29–30. 12. Among the many rich and promising existing schemas for distinguishing between feelings and affects, this essay follows Brian Massumi’s development, in Parables 23–45, of a Spinozist model in which affects, as “intensities” existing as rich fields of potential, become feelings when they enter the related spheres of volition, cognition, experience, and language, which is also to say subjectivity. 13. “Transport” experienced a brief vogue in the late 1980s, perhaps in consequence of the psychologist Victor Nell’s Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), in which the term is repeatedly invoked to name the imaginative participation in scenes Nell theorizes as critical to readerly enjoyment. Karen Swann’s “Public Transport: Adventuring on Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain,” in ELH 55.4 (1988): 811, argues for the “creaks and jolts, shrills and iron clangs, [and]… insults… to one’s amour propre” that result from the experience of sympathy, or “transubjectivity,” Wordsworth depicts between Sailor and Female Vagrant, but these reminders of a material substrate for vagrant affect serve chiefly as a metonym for publicity (as in a public conveyance such as the stagecoach). David Marshall, in The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 5, ascribes to several writers of the long eighteenth century, including Mary Shelley, “an investment in the concept of sympathy as a transport that would transcend the distance and difference between people, allowing an exchange between parts, characters, and persons,” but does not elaborate on the material conditions of such an exchange. More recently, “The Transport of the Novel,” the title of Deidre Lynch...

Active Sympathetic Participation: Reconsidering Kant's Duty of Sympathy

In the Doctrine of Virtue Kant divides duties of love into three categories: beneficent activity (Wohltätigkeit), gratitude (Dankbarkeit) and Teilnehmung – commonly referred to as the duty of sympathy (MS 6: 452). In this paper I will argue that the content and scope of the third duty of love has been underestimated by both critics and defenders of Kant's ethical theory. The account which pervades the secondary literature maintains that the third duty of love includes only two components: an obligation to make use of our natural receptivity to sympathetic feelings as a means to fulfilling other duties of love, and an indirect duty to cultivate these feelings. As a result, Kant's duty of sympathy has been widely regarded as a duty whose value is derived from the way in which it serves other duties, in particular, the duty of beneficent activity, which obliges agents ‘to promote according to one's means the happiness of others in need’ (MS 6: 453). Teilnehmung has thus assumed something of a second-class status among the duties to others. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate that the prevailing account of Kant's third duty of love is incomplete.

Sentimental Visions of Empire in Eighteenth‐Century Studies

AbstractThis survey of recent critical work on the role played by the sentimental in eighteenth‐century representations of empire is organized around four central issues. The first addresses the double‐edged use of sentimental writing as a form of ideological mystification – the palliating representation of scenes of colonial violence and imperial exploitation as moments of benevolence or sentimental exchange – and as a form of critique – as a means of representing the causes and consequences of remote actions as an incitement to proper action. The second takes up the way sentimentality is entwined with questions of commerce as a means of thinking about relations across the vast distances of empire, focusing in particular on the way sentimental tropes enabled thinking about the emergence of the global. The third turns to the utility of sentimental language for forging bonds of sympathetic identification with broader communities of nation and of empire, with particular attention to the way the extension of sympathy to another imperils the sanctity of the feeling self, while the final section addresses the way sentimental tropes police the circulation of sympathetic feeling as the means of monitoring the very boundaries of the human in the context of eighteenth‐century empire. Throughout I stress the need for more comparative work on the role played by the sentimental not only within different domains of imperial activity but also across periods, disciplines, and national discourses. The essay includes an extensive bibliography of recent studies of eighteenth‐century sentimentality in relation to empire.

The Great American Opera: Klinghoffer, Streetcar, and the Exception

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? … Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale. A wild, mystical, sympathetic feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine… . [The] whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick.

The virtue of cold-heartedness

I defend a strong version of the Kantian claim that actions done solely from duty have moral worth by (1) considering pure cases of acting from duty, (2) showing that love and sympathy, unlike a sense of duty, can often lead us to do the wrong thing, (3) carefully distinguishing moral from non-moral virtues, and (4) by distinguishing pathological sympathy from practical sympathy. Not only is acting purely from a sense of duty superior to acting from love and sympathetic feelings, but the cold-heartedness found in Kant’s examples should be thought of as a virtue rather than a vice.

The Compassion of Zarathustra: Nietzsche on Sympathy and Strength

Contemporary theorists critical of the current vogue for compassion might like to turn to Friedrich Nietzsche as an obvious ally in their opposition to the sentiment. Yet this essay argues that Nietzsche's critique of compassion is not entirely critical, and that the endorsement of one's sympathetic feelings is actually a natural outgrowth of Nietzsche's immoralist ethics. Nietzsche understands the tendency to share in the suffering of their inferiors as a distinctive vulnerability of the spiritually strong and healthy. Their compassion, however, is an essential element of the imaginative creativity that Nietzsche holds to be the goal of human existence. Although shared suffering may prove debilitating for some, great individuals must come to affirm their compassion as necessary in achieving accurate knowledge of the human condition.

Sympathy and Spectacle: Lebende Bilder, Attitüden, and Visual Representation in Johanna Schopenhauer’s Travel Writing

This article explores the rhetorical strategies used in Johanna Schopenhauer's account of travel to England and Scotland to evince readerly sympathy through the observation of suffering. It focuses in particular on her inclusion of ‘Lebende Bilder’ and ‘Attitüden’ in this text to enhance the pathos of her description, thereby linking sympathetic feeling with visual perception and the imagination.

Public sentiments: structures of feeling in nineteenth-century American literature

Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. By Glenn Hendler. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. x, 275. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.95.) Public Sentiments examines sentimentalism in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. For author Glenn Hendler, process by which people are asked to feel both like and with another person, constituted the narrative and core of a structure of (11). Hendler views this structure of feeling as affective processes of everyday life (11) that shape and organize experience. Taking a page from Raymond Williams, he argues that structures of feeling often first become visible in art and literature. For Hendler's purposes, novel highlights centrality of in nineteenth-century American culture. In contrast to other scholars who have written on this topic, however, Hendler rejects notion that was a primarily privatizing emotional exchange between reader, text, and author, arguing that sympathy in nineteenth century was a paradigmatically public sentiment (12). Drawing on work of JUrgen Habermas, he contends that structures of sympathetic feeling in literature helped to constitute a public sphere. Sympathetic identification with characters in novels, Hendler insists, prepared readers psychologically for participation in political public as well as reading public. Thus novels, in his view, were not just opportunities for rational-critical discussion characteristic of Habermasian public sphere, but instruments of subject formation, producing, through acts of identification, a publicly oriented form of subjectivity. Hendler refers to this joining of psychic and public, emotional and political, as sentimental politics of affect (22). To illustrate his points, Hendler examines a number of topics in nineteenth-century literature: Washingtonian temperance narratives, work of Martin R. Delany, Horatio Alger's novels, women's fiction, figure of dandy in writings of Henry James and others, and bad boy novels, of which Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer is perhaps best known. Some of literary forms addressed early in book, like temperance narratives and Delany's novel, Blake; or, Huts of America, were allied to social movements whose advocates were, for reasons of class or race, excluded from bourgeois public sphere as defined by Habermas. Using a historicist approach to text and context, Public Sentiments displays an admirable sensitivity to difficulty of applying general models to specific historical circumstances. It posits that some literary forms deployed sympathetic identification to construct counterpublics that functioned alongside dominant bourgeois public sphere. Thus Delany's protagonist, Blake, is able to hatch a far-flung plan for a slave rebellion because of counterpublic communication based on identification and interchange of sentiments (79) among oppressed people of color. Later in book, Hendler shifts his analytical focus, deemphasizing historicist approach for close textual readings employing psychoanalytic terminology and concepts. He interprets bad boy novel, for example, as an instance of Althusserian interpolation of adult heterosexuality. The genre's contrast between boy-nature and self-- possessed male adulthood moves reader toward a masculinity that it assumes reader already possesses and yet represents as being constitutively in crisis (209) and constructs a heterosexuality that does not require women (210). …

Factors associated with carer strain in carers of people with multiple sclerosis

Purpose : To examine the factors associated with strain in carers of people with multiple sclerosis (MS). Method : People with MS were recruited from an MS management clinic. Demographic information, memory, executive function, attention/concentration, mood, disability and health of the person with MS, the carer's opinion of the care-recipient's memory and disability, and the carer's mood were recorded. A postal questionnaire to identify factors associated with carer strain was sent to carers. A further questionnaire was sent to carers to examine the association between memory problems in people with MS and carer strain. Results : Problems with everyday memory and activities of daily living were found to be associated with carer strain. Strained carers perceived strain to be a consequence of the memory problems (p<0.01). Aspects of the memory problems related to carer strain were the amount of time a carer could spend alone (p = 0.01), the carer's mood and less sympathetic feelings towards the person with MS (p<0.05). Strained carers had more desire for other people to help the person with MS deal with the memory problems by themselves than carers who were not under strain (p = 0.03). Conclusion : Carer strain was associated with memory problems experienced by people with MS.

Gift Giving and the Emotional Significance of Family and Friends

Gift exchange has been studied mainly by anthropologists. The work of Malinowski and Sahlins suggests a relationship between the closeness of social relationships and the purity of the gift (the extent to which it is given as an expression of sympathy and without concrete expectations of returns). This article examines gift giving in Western society. An emotional hierarchy of different social relationships was constructed on the basis of an analysis of feelings accompanying gift giving. The results suggest that friendships are emotionally more important than ties to extended kin. Key Words: family, friendship relationships, gift giving. Gift giving is the cement of social relationships. A range of feelings may be involved in gift giving. A gift, for instance, may be inspired by sympathetic feelings or feelings of being involved in someone else's life. In other cases, feelings of being morally obliged to another person may play a role. One feels indebted toward this person because he or she has done us a favor, rendered us a service, or given us a gift. Gift exchange has mainly been studied in the context of non-Western cultures. Anthropologists like Malinowski (1922), Levi-Strauss (1949/ 1969), and Sahlins (1972) emphasized that gift exchange fulfills important functions in the development and continuity of society and culture. They pointed to feelings of moral obligation involved in gift giving (do ut des or I give so that you give in return), and they demonstrated how obligations may lead to patterns of reciprocity in gift exchange. Sociologists have contributed to theories of gift exchange, too. Gouldner (1973a, 1973b), for example, made a distinction between two different norms of gift exchange-one oriented to reciprocity and another, more altruistic norm. Underlying these theoretical approaches is the relative share of gift giving, characterized by the absence or vagueness of expectations of return gifts, versus gift giving based on clear-cut expectations of reciprocity or feelings of mutual obligation. For example, Malinowski and Sahlins assume that the nearer the social relationship, the less a gift resembles an economic or quid pro quo transaction and the purer the feelings accompanying these gifts. Malinowski mentions as examples gifts that parents give to their offspring and gifts given by marriage partners to each other. The greater the emotional distance, the less pure the concomitant feelings of disinterestedness, sympathy, or involvement, and the stronger the feelings of reciprocal obligation and quid pro quo. In this article, we examine the extent to which the relation suggested by anthropologists between the purity of the gift and the degree of distance of the social relationships involved holds for a Dutch sample, who responded to a questionnaire about gift giving in the Netherlands in 1992 (Komter & Schuyt, 1993). Gift giving might be considered a good indicator of emotional involvement in family and friends because it is such a tangible and concrete and, therefore, measurable expression of feeling toward other people. Are different types of feelings involved in giving gifts to family and friends? Have friendship networks taken over some of the function and meaning of family ties? THE GIFT Theoretical and Empirical Backgrounds In Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski offers a detailed description of the pattern of ceremonial gift exchange among the population of the Trobriand archipelago. He proposes that a continuum of feelings are involved in gift giving. Pure gifts, altruistic gifts for which nothing is expected in return, and gifts that can be characterized as barter or forms of exchange where personal profit is the dominant motive are the exceptions. Most typical are motives that lie between these extremes. More or less equivalent reciprocity, characterized by clear expectations of returns, is the general rule underlying gift exchange. …

Rights Thinking

Judgments about right are normally circumscribed and balanced by other considerations but it is possible to imagine ‘rights thinking’ as occurring without any such admixture. This pure rights thinking is characterized by several distinctive features. First, resentment, respect, and other passions of rectitude overrule sympathetic feelings of concern and compassion, love and affection. One responds simply as justice demands, never allowing extraneous factors to interfere with satisfaction of this moral ideal. Second, when claims of rights collide with personal attachments or calculations of benefit, the right systematically prevails. For example, rights thinking resists assertions presented to justify breaking promises to friends for their supposed greater good. Third, although rights entail obligations to their holders, responsibilities to others extend no further than these entailments within pure rights thinking. No general obligation of benevolence is recognized, for example, since no one in particular has a right to one's benevolence. Hence, fourth, as well as entailing moral protections for their holders and defining centres of independent agency, the perception of rights also promotes one's fundamental separateness from others.