Wandering Soul Research Articles

The Black Wanderer: Reading the Black Diaspora, Resistance, and Becoming in The History of Mary Prince in the Classroom

This paper examines The History of Mary Prince as a pedagogical tool for exploring complexities within the Black Diaspora. As Paul Gilroy’s articulations of the Black Atlantic inform my approach, Prince’s circuitous journey through the West Indies and England situates her process of becoming as one mired in longing and loss. Encouraging students to consider Prince as a wandering soul in search of not only freedom, but also solid familiar connections lays the foundation for merging her narrative with other enslaved Black people traversing countries and regions on ships against their will. Ample research material available on the survivors of the 1858 illegal ship enslaving Africans “Wanderer'' offer an opportunity to consider the constructions of Black Atlantic identities in which formerly enslaved Black people forge connections with each other while longing for a return to Africa. Additionally, Tessa Mars’ and Yinka Shonibare’s art forms a bridge for conceptualizing Black diasporic identities. Because the Caribbean is often perceived as a perpetual space of fantasy and play, The History of Mary Prince also challenges misconceptions of slavery as an institution peculiar to the United States. Of her brutal slaveholder sending her to another island, Prince expresses competing emotions, “At length he put me on board the sloop, and to my great joy he sent me away to Turk’s Island. I was not permitted to see my mother or father, or poor sisters and brothers, to say goodbye, though going away to a strange land, and might never see them again.” Encouraging students to consider Prince as a wandering soul in search of not only freedom but also solid familiar connections lays the groundwork for merging Prince’s narrative with other enslaved Black people traversing countries and regions on ships against their will. Ample research material available on the survivors of the 1858 illegal ship enslaving Africans “Wanderer” serves as my teaching tool for considering the constructions of Black Atlantic identities in which formerly enslaved Black people forge connections with each other while longing for a return to Africa. One of these survivors, Cilucängy, expressed in a letter his desire to return to his homeland: “I am bound for my old home if God be with me.” My essay also draws on student reactions to Yinka Shonibare’s art piece entitled “Wanderer.” Shonibare’s artwork forms the bridge for conceptualizing the more complex definitions of the Black Atlantic, Black Diaspora, and transnational identities.

The movable portrait of a wandering soul: Clarice Lispector translator of Oscar Wilde

Resumo Amparados nos pressupostos da Literatura Comparada, dos Estudos Culturais e dos Estudos da Tradução, procuramos compreender as relações culturais que formaram (Bildung) Clarice Lispector em termos de sua identidade linguística, cultural e tradutória, a fim de estudar a tradução do romance O retrato de Dorian Gray (2016), assinada por Clarice em 1974 em diálogo com a sua novela de 1977, A hora da estrela (2020). Partindo da sua relativa proximidade com o imaginário judaico ao seu conhecimento do inglês, francês e espanhol, podemos entender Clarice como uma tradutora cultural. Dentre as várias conexões culturais que pudemos traçar no interior da novela de Clarice, as questões relativas às possibilidades e aos limites da representação literária e visual nos permitem lê-la em comparação com o romance de Wilde.

“Confucian Revival” From Both Chinese and Western, Ancient and Modern Perspectives: Observations and Reflections on Post-Millennium Research Into Confucianism

Abstract Confucianism in the new millennium has enjoyed a revival, a resurrection even, like a “wandering soul.” Due to this resurgence, whether it is regarded as an object of study, or as part of modern academic research, Confucianism can no longer be seen as an amalgamated entity, as it was in the last century. In contrast, since 2000, research into Confucian thought has changed not just from both Chinese and Western viewpoints, but from ancient and modern perspectives too. In the last century while China responded to the urgent need to modernize, Confucianism, as a system of ideas and concepts that had been part of classical Chinese society, tended to be examined against these historical changes. In so doing, its “resistance” to modernization was emphasized. Post-2000 however, more mainstream scholars have begun to highlight Confucianism as a reflection of the differences between China and the West. The fundamental reasons for the divisions in research today come from researchers in the West and China placing different degrees of importance on different aspects of the philosophy. Moreover, each group’s understanding and interpretation of China’s ancient and modern society differ.

Dry, Weary, Smiling Bones: Finding a ‘Yes’ through Hebrew Narrative and a Reduced Spirituality

Life can be a difficult phenomenon to acquiesce to, much less embrace. Tragedy is seemingly around every corner, and very many philosophies and faiths both ancient and modern have championed the exit from existence over its entrance. Existentialism and nihilism proclaim the seizure or suicide of one’s undesired birth, moksha and nirvana the blessed non-return of a wandering soul. Yet against these currents the Jewish ideational approach to being, with its ever-old and newness, has consistently given the world a ‘yes’, and this apparently despite having every reason not to; although perhaps “because” is more appropriate to that prior clause than “despite”. In what follows we therefore consider how we might uncover from within Judaism an abstracted “spirituality” for our times, a numinousness that is not necessarily a “belief”: a “faith” that is more in line with a hope. Our objective is to learn how to think differently rather than to convert, and thus towards this more modest goal we set out to explore some images from Hebrew poetry and narrative, attempting to bring forth core conceptualities which could then be applied to an affirming notional framework befitting anyone who would ponder—who would feel—a way through. How might we state this ‘yes’ for our lives?

Strindberg’s A Dream Play and Gumilyov’s Allah’s Child. A mystery plot

Тhe article explores the issue of implementation of a mystery plot in the dramaturgy of the turn of 19th–20th centuries. Within the aspect of the given topic, two plays are considered — A. Strindberg’s drama A Dream Play, and N. S. Gumilyov’s fairy tale Allah’s Child. It is an attempt to demonstrate that in these works one can find the same plotline, which can be traced back to the myth of Persephone. With various interpretations still around as to the content of the ancient Greek mystery, is can generally be acknowledged that the myth comprised the foundation of the sacred action at Eleusis; the debate only concerns its “stage” adaptation. At the turn of 19th–20th centuries, the story of Persephone is already creating its own, new myth about the trials of a wandering soul on the path of knowledge. In Strindberg’s and Gumilyov’s plays, the soul (Persephone) is played by a divine being: in A Dream Play it is the daughter of god Indra of ancient Indian mythology, and in Allah’s Child it is the daughter of a god from the mythology of peoples of Central and Minor Asia. Both heroines go through a hard path of earthly sorrows, and in the denouement return to the divine world. This plot structure, which mirrors the development of an ancient mystery, both playwrights — Swedish and Russian — introduce the Poet as a character. In both A Dream Play and Allah’s Child the Poet becomes an intermediary between the earthly and divine lives, bridging the gap between those worlds, and, in essence, acting as Dionysus. The general trend, whereby the dramaturgy of “the turn” looked back to ancient mythology, speaks to the ongoing process of myth structuring, as it acquires new meaningful layers.

Theodora Wilkin’s Wandering Soul

Abstract Sometime in the early eighteenth century, an Anglo-Dutch woman named Theodora Wilkin began translating into English an important Mennonite devotional work, Jan Philipsz Schabaelje’s Wandelende Ziele met Adam, Noach, en Simon Cleophas. Her translation (or, better, adaptation) survives in a manuscript of about one thousand pages. Wilkin’s text sheds considerable light on the state of intellectual history and literary adaptation in the early eighteenth century. Specifically, Theodora Wilkin’s Wandering Soul foregrounds three concerns. 1) It demonstrates the centrality of women to providential history. 2) It reconciles biblical wisdom and natural philosophical knowledge. 3) It closely considers the Ancients, both insofar as they reflected divine truth and promulgated idolatry.

Representation of women in the literary and medical discourse of the U.S. prose

The purpose of the study is to develop a typology of female images in American literary works on medical topics. Research methods: narratological, theory of receptive aesthetics, feminist literary criticism. The object of research is the prose works of American writers of the late XIX - early XXI centuries. Scientific novelty. The article analyzes for the first time the narrative configuration, the author’s artistic intentions and the role of the reader’s reception in the medical literary discourse through the prism of the historical role of women in American society. Conclusions. During the study, it was found that female images within the analyzed material are divided into several categories. We examined the role of a female doctor in the novels “Doctor Zey” (1882) by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “Under the Glass Dome” (1963) by Sylvia Plath, “Doctors” (1988) Eric Seagal, “Operation Wandering Soul” (1993) by Richard Powers , “Nothing Lasts Forever” (1994) Sidney Sheldon and “Harvest” (1996) Tess Gerritsen. In addition, we found features of the image of women as nurses in the works “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922) by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, “Arrowsmith” (1925) Sinclair Lewis, “Johnny Got a Rifle” (1938) Dalton Trumbo, “Snake Pit” (1946) Mary Jane Ward, “Flying Over the Cuckoo's Nest” (1962) Ken Kesey, “MASH: A Novel About Three Army Physicians” (1968) Richard Hooker, “House of God” (1978) Samuel Shem, “Critical Condition” (2002 ) Peter Clement. Finally, we examined the narrative role of patients in the novels “The Snake Pit” (1946) by Mary Jane Ward, “Under the Glass Dome” (1963) by Sylvia Plath, “Interrupted Life” (1993) by Susanne Keysen and “Prozac Nation” (1994) Elizabeth Würzel . The theoretical significance of the study is to reveal the features of the image of women in the American literary and medical discourse in the diachronic aspect

‘ANIMULA VAGULA BLANDULA’… CESARZ HADRIAN I JEGO DUSZYCZKA-WĘDROWNICZKA

Artykuł zawiera przegląd przekładów i komentarzy do znanego wiersza cesarza Hadriana Animula vagula blandula, jakie znajdują się w literaturze opublikowanej w języku polskim (A. Birley, A. Krawczuk, K. Morawski, J. German, Z. Kubiak, G. Morcinek). Są to jednocześnie literackie ścieżki omawianego wierszyka, wywołującego nadal wiele różnorodnych skojarzeń i ponadczasowych refleksji nad cesarzem – człowiekiem i jego duszyczką – wędrowniczką.

Dialectical Epimeleia: Platonic Care of the Soul and Philosophical Cognition

In this paper I argue that Plato’s notion of the care of the self is his remedy to the psychological malady he refers to as ‘wandering’. The wandering self requires care, and a close reading of the Platonic corpus indicates self-cultivation means stabilizing the soul in accordance with its intelligent nature. I then argue that Plato appropriates the ethical injunction to care for the soul and draws from it an important epistemological consequence. Specifically, his view is that a wandering soul’s instability renders it incapable of philosophical cognition. To engender a healthy soul, one must participate in dialectic.

The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period by David Cowart

COWRT, DAVID. The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2015. 258 pp. $80.00 hardcover, $32.95 paperback/e-book. As the next generation of postmodern authors emerges, several questions arise: Have these writers grown from an earlier literary cohort, or have they, at some point, entered a 'post-postmodern period? If contemporary writers do expand from their literary foremothers and forefathers, to what extent do they emulate, and to what extent challenge or subvert the craft? These are questions David Cowart addresses in his encyclopedic work The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period. While he says he will resist becoming thesis-bound (25), his thesis is fairly clearly stated in the book's final paragraph: From the vantage of the twenty-first-century's second decade...one can advance the argument that younger writers have continued to make it new without needing to dismantle the postmodern aesthetic crafted by a parental generation. As they engage, resist, perpetuate, and redefine that aesthetic, however, these second- and third-generation postmodernists compose a rainbow spectrum of literary possibility. Born in the 1940s, 1950s. 1960s, and later, they sustain and augment the powerful art of literati born in the 1920s and 1930s. (199) In other words, the central argument is that second- and third-generation postmodern writers negotiate with and build upon their predecessors while keeping the postmodern style fresh and original. Cowart explores several works of fiction, dissecting whether/how earlier postmodern authors (Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, for example) influence later postmodern writers. Some authors, such as Rachel Ingalls and Gloria Naylor, give only passing notice to literary predecessors (25), while others, including Steve Erickson, Richard Powers, and Alice Walker, grow from earlier writers (Thomas Pynchon for the former two; Flannery O'Connor for the latter). For instance, in chapter six, Cowart argues that Powers follows in Pynchon's footsteps by subversively weaving fairy tale into his Operation Wandering Soul, yet keeps the style innovative nonetheless (91). Chuck Palahniuk's Choke, as Cowart argues in chapter seven, maintains clear connections to forebears such as O'Connor, Ken Kesey, J. D. Salinger, and Joseph Heller (107). Palahniuk successfully deploys the style, yet he inherits a fully developed aesthetic that he shapes to ends that his main audience--Gen-Xers and Millennial--may mistake for the next thing (108). Other novels--Erickson's Arc d'X in particular--follow less successfully in the earlier postmoderns' footsteps (chapter five). In what is probably the book's strongest chapter, Cowart explores Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (chapter nine). This author differentiates himself from proximate literary fathers and mothers (the Pynchons. the DeLillos, the Toni Morrisons, the Joan Didions) without repudiating the aesthetic they crafted. [He] demonstrates the continuing viability of fiction that decenters the subject, doubts the transparency of language, and treats metanarratives with thoroughgoing skepticism (147). Cowart fluidly articulates how this novel builds not only on postmodern antecedents, but also on literary forefather Walt Whitman and his catalogue style, along with writers of antiquity (160). …

Abe Lincoln's Dream (review)

Reviewed by: Abe Lincoln's Dream Elizabeth Bush Smith, Lane . Abe Lincoln's Dream; written and illus. by Lane Smith. Roaring Brook, 2012. 32p. ISBN 978-1-59643-608-4 $16.99 Ad Gr. 2-5. Quincy, a young African-American girl, has wandered off from her school group while touring the White House. If that in itself isn't enough to signal a fantasy, then meeting up with the ghost of the sixteenth president surely is. Lincoln's penchant for corny wordplay and his soft spot for children are evident as he engages with Quincy in an exchange of goofy jokes, but the child readily senses the gloom and unease that trouble her otherwise gracious host, and the root of his depression is worry over the current state of the Union. Quincy is able to reassure Lincoln that the states have remained united, and equality for all is "getting better all the time." As to whether man continues to "fuss 'n' fight with his fellow man," Quincy has to admit, "We're still working on that," as a chair and broken glass erupt from the side of the U.S. Capitol. That's reassuring enough to put the wandering soul to rest, and to shift the president's persistent dream of a ship heading toward an unknown shore to that of a boat traveling toward the rising sun. A host of antique-style fonts and the dominant sepia, black, and red colors of the illustrations suggest printing of bygone days, but the lanky angularity and funky surrealism of the figures moving through the haunted White House and out into space are more akin to a Tim Burton creation. Two brief notes comment on Lincoln's recurring dream and the White House dogs that avoided the "haunted" Lincoln Bedroom, but children unequipped with prior knowledge of the causes of the president's depression won't find much enlightenment here. The picture-book set will be better served by Maira Kalman's equally imaginative approach in Looking at Lincoln BCCB 1/11), but this may be of passing interest to well-informed youngsters. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Few Remarks on the Poetics of Turbulence in Richard Powers’ Operation Wandering Soul

Dans le roman de Richard Powers Operation Wandering Soul, la linéarité conventionnelle du récit cède le pas à une forme de discontinuité et de circularité qui évoque le mouvement imprévisible d’une turbulence. On propose de montrer ici que cette turbulence met en œuvre une nouvelle manière d’écrire et de lire les récits. Dans le roman, la turbulence apparaît toujours sous l’aspect d’une force désorganisatrice qu’il faut maîtriser, un bruit qui doit être supprimé. Cet impératif, témoin des aspirations du récit au sens et à la clôture, peut se concevoir comme l’indice de la manière dont l’ordre narratif s’efforce de soumettre toute turbulence en dissimulant son chaos sous une linéarité de façade et des dénouements postiches. Cette activité transforme le récit (et le type de lecture qu’elle induit) en une sorte d’eschatologie dont Operation Wandering Soul dénonce le mensonge et la fuite en avant. Pour en combattre les effets néfastes, le roman s’emploie à perturber l’ordre narratif et à bousculer nos habitudes de lecture ; il se fait texte turbulent en conformant sa structure la plus intime à celle des systèmes non linéaires.

Lost Soul: "Confucianism" in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse (review)

Reviewed by: Lost Soul: "Confucianism" in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse Stephen C. Angle Lost Soul: "Confucianism" in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse BY John Makeham. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008. Pp. xii + 398. $49.95. There is little doubt that the wounds inflicted upon the body of traditional Confucianism by the end of China's civil service examinations in 1905, the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, and the New Culture Movement that began in 1915 collectively proved fatal. With the institutions that had given Confucianism its concrete reality dead or dying, Confucians since the early twentieth century have been struggling to find a new body of practice that can host its philosophical and spiritual essence-what the eminent historian Yu Ying-shih has referred to as Confucianism's wandering soul. John Makeham's Lost Soul: "Confucianism" in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse is an impressive investigation of these efforts over the last thirty years. It is a natural follow-up to the work Makeham has previously done on the twentieth-century "New Confucian" movement and follows the story of Confucianism all the way up to 2005. Makeham offers no final pronouncement on the prognosis for Confucianism, suggesting that readers can form their own opinions about how adequately the academic, discursive "body" he describes has succeeded in hosting the wandering soul's return. However, it is clear that Makeham is at least somewhat skeptical, since he argues that contemporary Confucian academic discourse is neither broadly connected to moral practice nor robustly creative in philosophical terms. His book thus not only offers a valuable perspective on what has been happening in recent years under the banner of "Confucianism" but also [End Page 173] presents a trenchant challenge that proponents of Confucianism would do well to take seriously. The subject of the book is "Confucian learning" (ruxue 儒學), which refers to Confucianism primarily as it is embodied in the activities and writing of academics in China and Taiwan, though Makeham also spends time on recent discussions of "Confucian teaching" (rujiao 儒教) and its relation to religion. Lost Soul is divided into four parts. Part 1, "Historical Background," covers events in the 1980s and early 1990s. Makeham stresses the role of Tu Wei-ming and the impact of efforts to promote Confucian education in Singapore. Even though the institution-building efforts in which Tu participated were ultimately abandoned, they provided a platform for the idea that a "creatively transformed" Confucianism could have renewed relevance in the contemporary world. Another theme is the important role played by mainland scholar Fang Keli. Fang, a Marxist, led important research projects on ruxue-and more specifically on New Confucianism-starting in 1986. Makeham covers the background, motivation, and some of the content of this research. It is in this context that he first introduces his argument that the revival of ruxue in China is not, to any significant degree, the result of a conscious government policy to promote Confucianism as an alternative ideology. Finally, Makeham also looks in some detail at activities in Taiwan, both because of their intrinsic importance and because he observes that rivalry and (more positively) cross-fertilization between scholars on both sides of the Taiwan Straits have played a crucial role in developing and sustaining academic interest in ruxue. Part 2 is organized around the theme of ruxue and Chinese culture. Makeham begins by exploring the degree to which ruxue has been understood as the core of Chinese culture, with special reference to the widespread view that it has "thoroughly penetrated every dimension and stratum of traditional society and its institutions" (p. 111). For such broad influence to be even conceivable, one suspects that "ruxue" would have to be referring to more than one thing, and indeed, part of Makeham's purpose is to show the various dimensions or aspects of ruxue that scholars have distinguished. He suggests that these dimensions are typically defined in dyadic terms: politicized versus popular, institutional versus social, official versus unofficial, and so on. In most cases, one dimension is seen as good and worth developing, [End Page 174] while the other is problematic and in need of critique or outright rejection. For many analysts, the multidimensional nature of ruxue...

Equity's Different Talks

This paper investigates the fundamental ambiguity that lays at the roots of Equity - both as a word and as a set of ideas - so to explain and justify its wandering soul, its hybrid nature and genealogy. Moving from a kind of foucaultian archeology, the Author comes to highlight the peculiarities of English Legal System, where the original complexities resulted in a real antagonism among different institutions, converting the ontological dispute in a matter of Politics. In this perspective, English Equity, developed from the intersection of Greek, Roman and Christian traditions, represented the perfect and powerful embodiment of the paradigm of 'political theology'. On this ground, the Author suggests her original interpretation of the political structure of the English Equity jurisdiction as a kind of not only institutionalized, but also naturalized power to decide the state of exception at the aim to reassert the sovereignty of the Crown against conflicting powers. In a theological perspective English Equity became a kind of desacralized shekinah deputed to unveil the Common Law's withdrawal. On a methodological level this paper focuses on the importance of the interdisciplinary approach (Law and Politics, Law and Literature, Law and Theology) for the subtle comprehension of the different languages, rhetoric, aesthetics that shape and legitimate the declaration of Law.

"Militant Expectations": Childhood's End and Millenarianism in Richard Powers' Operation Wandering Soul

I sent him my draft, to see if he might somehow be able to save it too from its inevitable end. My best intentions had failed to disperse the bleakness of the real. --Operation Wandering Soul Conclusion, then, is something Richard Powers would likely only come to in a beginning. But endings proceed inevitably from beginnings in Powers' estimation, making what has come before unavoidable and determinative. Best then to get the ending out the way first just in case we can outrun it. Against that backdrop, Powers doggedly tracks the exigent relationship among violence, the disappearance of childhood, and millenarianism in his novel Operation Wandering Soul, published in 1993. (1) With its mix of magical realist narrative devices (children who literally vanish or appear at different junctures of history) and social realist settings (the crumbling infrastructure of a dystopian Los Angeles), Powers' novel serves as a useful reference point for contemporary debates about violence, religion, and social welfare in America. In a sequence of moves, Powers also attempts to connect disparate cultures and eras by exploring the ways in which childhood is a social/historical construct. (2) But he also relentlessly situates the abuse of as a problem outside space and time; a foundational eschatology; the beginning and end of all narratives; and as a metanarrative that intertwines with the development, telling and effect of stories. Powers treats stories not only as inadequate to tell, but also as inextricable from their millenarian subject. cure is part of the disease; surgery would kill the patient. Set primarily in a children's hospital in a violent section of the city, the novel treats the status of children's wards as indices of the ultimate sickness and social trajectory of a society. Associating childhood story-telling with childhood illness and millennial decay, Powers reminds us that J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan bequest went to fund the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London (118). From his vantage in viewing sick and abandoned children, most of whom are orphaned, displaced or exiled, Powers' nearly pseudonymous narrator/protagonist, Doctor Richard Kraft, (3) situates history as a contest between abused children, or abused childhood, and the adults who have redefined childhood out of existence: Childhood is not that parade of vibrant kids teaching the world to sing. That's a new one: as far as [Linda] Espera has read, the product of the last fifty years. She knows the histories from school. Time was when domestic theory wrote the whole batch off as changeling babies, perversely truculent sub and semihumans. prescribed treatment was to beat the devils out of their tiny, ripe habitations. No wonder childhood is just waiting for her to turn around and leave the room so it can retaliate for the running lancet sores inflicted on it by ages of adulthood. (190) In this novel, childhood is under constant siege by adult violence: If the class [at the hospital] stayed amazingly sedate and violence-free throughout [the talk of the young Thai girl Joy], it is the stunned silence of islanders unable even to see the first-arrival masts on their horizon (33). These children of god are the latest generation to be colonized by a violent adult world: The traffic of juvenile misery drifting through his [emergency room] office begins to mirror the freeway's aimless lane changes.... disturbances out on the edge of the crumbling empire.... [Pediatrics] provides the quintessential, unexpurgated view of just where Western Civ's whole project is really headed in its third thousand years (347, 22). notation of Western civilization's third millenium encapsulates the apocalyptic time that governs the novel as a whole, and the waiting that Linda Espera--part physician/nurse/counselor, pretend believer in the story-cure, and as close to a love interest as Kraft comes to having--embodies in her name. …

John Makeham, Lost Soul, Confucianism in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse

In describing the transformation of modern Confucianism into discourses disassociated from the whole body of practices to which it was traditionally attached, the historian Yu Yingshi has compared it to a wandering soul (you hun) and wonders if Confucianism will ever be able to “borrow a corpse to enable the soul to return” (p.2). The peregrinations of this soul since China’s opening up, and the consequent multiplicity of contemporary academic discourses on Confucianism, provide the focus of ...

Powers's Operation Wandering Soul

Powers's Operation Wandering Soul

The Wandering Soul in Relation to Time

The unidirectional, linear-progressive view of time for psychology may need an overhaul. In this article, I comment upon Yamada and Kato’s (2006) findings and further discuss the underlying axiom that gives time its structure: We stand in relation to things. This relationship is key to understanding the world in which we are embedded. The trajectories of time reveal the course of a particular development, be it the psyche in the historical-cultural temporal context as illustrated through Wilhelm Wundt’s Elemente der Völkerpsychologie (1912), or how certain people conceive of their soul’s voyage through life and death cycles. However, the supposedly ‘observed’ developmental trajectories—of whatever nature they may be—emerge due to our situatedness towards a particular event. In the end, we must remember that time is nothing but an ‘infused’ component of the complex qualities of phenomena, whose Gestalt reveals itself once the researcher’s finite perspective has cut somewhere into the spatio-temporal totality of the objective world

Understanding Richard Powers

A television-era novelist concerned with humanistic themes; Understanding Richard Powers presents an introduction to one of the most important and admired writers to emerge in the post-Pynchon era of American literature. Joseph Dewey guides readers through Powers's dazzling combination of lexical virtuosity and structural daring - typical of the post-modernists - and the novelist's concern with the profound and humane dilemmas surrounding love and death - characteristic of late-century realists. Dewey contends that while Powers's novels investigate the most pressing issues of the new millennium, the novelist is most deeply interested in the same thematic argument that consumed Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson - the problem of the self, the deep and unshakable loneliness that has always been at the heart of the American literary imagination. Through an overview of Powers's career and close readings of his novels Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Prisoner's Dilemma, The Gold Bug Variations, Operation Wandering Soul, Galatea 2.2, Gain, and Plowing the Dark, Dewey explores each of the novelist's defining metaphors. Dewey places Powers in context as a major voice in the first generation born entirely within the era of television and the computer. Dewey shows us how Powers reminds his readers that we have never been so connected and yet never quite so alone.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

Lia Lee was born in the San Joaquin valley in California to Hmong refugees. At the age of three months, she first showed signs of having what the Hmong know as qaug dab peg (the spirit catches you and you fall down), the condition known in the West as epilepsy. While her highly competent doctors saw the best treatment in a dizzying array of pills, her parents preferred a combination of Western medicine and folk remedies designed to coax her wandering soul back to her body. Over the next four years, profound cultural differences and linguistic miscommunication would exacerbate the rift between Lia’s loving parents and her caring and well-intentioned doctors, eventually resulting in the loss of all Lia’s higher brain functions. Fadiman weaves this personal tragedy, a probing medical investigation, and a fascinating look at Hmong history and culture into a stunningly insightful, richly rewarding piece of modern reportage.