Feral Children Research Articles

Provocações para uma sociologia da sexualidade: Sistemas, linguagem, amor

O artigo busca pensar, a partir de uma sociologia da sexualidade, as provocações epistemológicas propostas por Judith Butler e Niklas Luhmann, sobretudo os pressupostos de que o sujeito é “inexistente”, vindo a existir por meio da linguagem, e de que a sociedade existe apartada do sujeito – sendo composta por comunicações. O texto discorre sobre os modos pelos quais a sociologia refletiu o corpo sexuado, passando pela polarização entre essencialistas/construcionistas, até as recentes tentativas de síntese entre esses polos, ilustrada com uma topologia baseada na faixa de Mobius lacaniana. O objetivo é ilustrar a importância dada à linguagem na constituição de corpos, sexualidade e valor de “humano”, a partir do exemplo de “crianças-feras” e do conceito butleriano de “abjeto”. Por fim, considera-se o Amor a partir de uma perspectiva sistêmica, com contribuições da Neurociência, concluindo que a Sociologia da Sexualidade se beneficia do sistema luhmanniano: o sujeito se configura mais autônomo em seu contexto social, psíquico e biológico e nos sistemas da sexualidade. Nesse cenário, não só o sujeito se torna central, porquanto seu próprio corpo físico seja a interseção de sistemas sociais, psíquicos e biológicos, mas também a sexualidade se torna cada vez mais autônoma, estetizada, atomizada a uma questão de escolha individual, com repercussões políticas, espaciais, corporais e sociais.

Of Feral Faculty and Magisterial Mowglis: The Domestication of Junior Faculty

This chapter presents an assistant professor's scholarly personal narrative at the precipice of promotion, and reveals how the feral child metaphor might aptly describe many junior professors’ experiences as they navigate a path toward tenure. This chronicling of mentorship in sometimes unexpected venues may aid new faculty and those invested in their success in both earning tenure and retaining them in the field.

Mentoring as Transformative Practice: Supporting Student and Faculty Diversity

Mentoring as Transformative Practice: Supporting Student and Faculty Diversity

How Children Learn Their Mother Tongue: They Don't.

A new solution is offered to the Infant Language Acquisition Problem, rejecting both of Chomsky's alternatives. It proposes that the infant does not acquire his mother tongue by mastering its grammar, whether by inference from personal experience or via an innate Language Acquisition Device such as the UG, but that the language he hears is all saved in his extremely plastic and capacious brain, where it is stored in such a way as to organize it while populating it. The brain is thus transformed into a mind by language. Support for this theory is drawn from such topics as feral children and linguistic experiments with bonobos.

Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit

Alison Hawthorne Deming's Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit is a collection of essays on the general theme of the relationship between humanity and other animals. A fine example of anthrozoology literature, Deming's “bestiary for the twenty-first century” gives a good, broad overview of ideas to be covered within this interdisciplinary field (8). Treating subjects as disparate as lobsters, feral children, and rabbits on Mars, the book discusses the mundane to the outlandish at the categorical junction of humans and animals. The book goes further than many current anthrozoological works by covering radical conceptual terrain such as extinct species, animals and technology, mythical creatures and cryptozoology, and the very boundary—if it in fact exists—between the beautiful and the beastly. While such a hodgepodge, which includes several previously published works, may seem a bit disjointed to those hoping for a smooth and predictable storyline, I found myself always eagerly anticipating the next pithy yet poetic chapter. Moreover, Deming brings the relevance of many vignettes into clearer focus by including accounts from her own lived experiences. The author of Zoologies has been thinking about animals for a long time and in many different and interesting contexts, as is evidenced in selections such as “Dog Tags,” “Field Notes on Hands,” and “Vervet.” Such variety gives the reader a sense that, far from being fanciful fabrications, these essays are about the real and often unpredictable encounters—sometimes only mental, sometimes also physical—that so often characterize human–animal interactions.

Imperial Transgressions

By reconsidering how race operates at the intersection of the human-animal divide, this essay looks back on the paths that have been opened by the special section “Nonhuman Empires.” Rather than interrogating the literary entanglement of animality and race, the argument considers the disciplinary and conceptual genealogies that stretch over these two alternative modes of differentiation. Starting with phrenology and comparative anatomy and moving toward anthropology and psychology, Sivasundaram argues that after ca. 1800, race and animality have had overlapping lives. This overlap was productive for Western empires, who were concerned with arbitrating the human in programs of war as much as settlement. The second part of the essay focuses on notions of descent from animals in South Asia with respect to how colonists studied alleged feral children, as much as the placement of accounts of animal descent in nationalist vocabularies. Transgressing and policing the human-nonhuman divide, Sivasundaram contends, was central to the project of empire; exposing empire’s power requires a widening of critical attention so that nonhumans are worthy of serious postcolonial critique.

“Negative” Anthropology in Texts about “Wolf Children”

“Negative” Anthropology in Texts about “Wolf Children”

The Feral Child by Che Golden (review)

Reviewed by: The Feral Child by Che Golden Kate Quealy-Gainer Golden, Che The Feral Child. Quercus, 2014 [272p] ISBN 978-1-62365-120-6 $15.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-6 The shadowy, dank ruins of Blarney Castle are the only thing thirteen-year-old Maddy finds appealing in her new environs, after the death of her parents forces her to move from the hustle and bustle of London to her grandparents’ rundown little Irish village. Despite Granda’s warnings, Maddy wanders one day among the castle’s stones and meets a strange, sharp-toothed child—a child whom she swears she sees again that night outside the window of her neighbor, the same night the boy next door goes missing. She’s relieved when Granda shares her suspicions that [End Page 23] the creature was a faerie, but she’s horrified when he suggests that she turn a blind eye and let the neighbor boy remain missing. Arming herself with iron and some spotty internet info, Maddy prepares to enter the faerie realm and get the boy back herself. Carved out by anger and grief, Maddy’s a hardened gem of a girl, clever as heck and as resourceful as she is feisty. Good thing too, because she needs all the guts and gumption she can muster as she faces down nasty kelpies, headless horsemen, and hungry wolves. Both the Tír na nÓg setting and the figures from Celtic mythology are vibrantly evoked, luminous and alluring in their danger. As an added bonus, a wicked wit permeates the third-person narration (the description of Maddy’s overbearing aunt is particularly amusing). Readers who like both their fairy tales and their humor dark will find plenty to love here. Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Homo ferus: the unification of the human and the environmental in David Malouf's An imaginary life

This essay presents a postcolonial, ecocritical reading of Australian author David Malouf's celebrated novel, An imaginary life (1978). By now an important name in contemporary postcolonial literature, Malouf has yet to be discussed as an author who attempts to explode both colonial and human-centred myths and tropes in a manner that promotes a linguistically sensitive, body- and nature-centred vision. As this essay will argue, Malouf's writing, in its critique of Enlightenment values that have led to the racial classification of humans and modernity's dismissal of the importance of the environment, advances a unique postcolonial and ecological aesthetic. One way in which An imaginary life interrogates Enlightenment values is through its interest in the figure of the “feral child”, a “discovery” or construction of the Enlightenment era itself. The term “feral child” derives from Linnaeus's category “Homo ferus”, appearing in the tenth edition of his Systema naturae (The system of nature). Classified alongside Linnaeus's racial human categories (like Homo Afer and Homo Europaeus), Homo ferus emerges concurrently with the colonial obsession with racial “otherness”. For Malouf, however, the feral human eludes the categorisation of taxonomy specifically and language in general: blurring the “human” and “nature”, it undermines the scientific classification of humankind, and without language, it embodies the possibility of human being-in-nature beyond the influence of symbolic enculturation. In An imaginary life, the wordless immersion of the feral child in the environment allegorises the novel's intention – to produce another form of language, a poetic, allusive language transcending classification and chronology, and enacting the unification of the “human” and the “natural”.

HYBRID COMMUNITIES

This article provides an extract from the second half of Lestel's book Animality (1996/2007). His book is divided into two parts. In the first part Lestel considers a number of ways in which humans and animals have been represented, particularly with respect to their supposed differences and borderline cases, over the course of Western history. To this end one reads of various depictions, construc- tions, and erasures of animals, including those of feral children, the animal-machines of Des- cartes and company, animals of ethological study, as well as artistic animals, suffering animals, speaking animals, cultural animals, and more. The first part is largely devoted, then, to past representations of animals as seen through Lestel's unique perspective. The second part, much of which is translated here, conveys Lestel's own observations, as developed most explicitly in his concept of “hybrid com- munities” between humans and animals. It is equal parts evolutionary and cultural anthropol- ogy, ethological ethnography, and philosophical creation of concepts, all in an attempt to situate “animality” at the interface of animals and humans. Rather than think animality, therefore, on the basis of animals, Lestel conceptualizes animality as a characteristic that develops between humans and animals in as much as they share, despite their curious alterity to one another, meaning and interests.

Wright, Alexa, Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture, I.B. Tauris, London, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-78076-336-1, 224 pp., US$29.00.

Alexa Wright’s Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture does precisely as its subtitle suggests and sets out to trace a history of human monsters through visual representations... Wright builds her study around a series of case studies, looking at how various ‘monsters’ have been represented and presented to the public gaze: wild people and feral children, the Monster of Ravenna, freaks, Joseph Merrick (the ‘Elephant Man’), Jack the Ripper and Myra Hindley and, lastly, Ted Bundy and Anders Breivik...

Memories of Erinna (After Erinna)

Memories of Erinna (After Erinna) MARGUERITE JOHNSON I live on in memories as the girl at the distaff. I died at the age of nineteen. Don’t feel sorry for me. I was old. I was past the age of marriage. A spinster, my mother said. Often. My mother mourned for the grandchildren never to be. But as I grew and aged and the lion-hearted, half-hearted suitors dropped off, she quietened with resignation and left me in peace, at the distaff. So I am not to be pitied or cried over, for my nineteen years were long and full. And as I dwell on a life remembered, I know that what we cherish most intensely are the memories locked inside our hearts. And inside my heart, locked away, like a coral necklace inside its case, she is enclosed. She who lives as a jewel inside my heart-casket, a casket into which I alone can peek, whose contents are touched by me alone. She came as a foundling. Left by a nymph in the night, my mother said. A bewitched child anonymously bequeathed to a widow. Some may say that must have been hard for my mother. It wasn’t. She was a shrewd woman. She knew how to provide for one child. She learnt how to provide for two. She came as a child around the age of three. She came swathed in a loose shift. Face, limbs, fingers and toes made of dust and dirt. When my mother bathed her she felt little nips, heard little protests, sensed little snarls. She came as a feral child and was bathed and bathed and bathed. Emerging from the cold arion 22.1 spring/summer 2014 water, cleaner than the time before, each time newer than the time before. Reborn for us. She came without speech and would play with the dolls without a word to them or me. She remained so for weeks until slowly words formed and sighs turned into syllables that turned into words that became clauses followed by sentences at first simple and finally complex and then we began to share our secrets and then when the witch’s spell was broken we began to speak for hours and to bicker and laugh and whisper. And we never stopped. For eleven years we never stopped. She came as a sister who was placed in my bed and who slept in my clothes and in my arms. Nestled thus we would remain until the long years stretched out and reached the last night of her girlhood (the night of the day when she gave her toys to the goddess . . . her offerings to the goddess to mark the end of one life and the beginning of another). As little girls we shared a private world together. Too young then for the distaff, we would play all day and all night. Deep into the waves she would leap from a white horse while I shouted “you’re mine!” Next would be Tortoise. She would be Tortoise first and in she would go, into her shell, as I ran around her, asking questions, to which she would yell “yes” or “no” until I was caught. Sometimes she would break the rules and run when she should have been quiet inside her shell. But when we grew into big girls, mother said it was time to work, that we had to be up at dawn, that we had to earn our keep. And so, no more than two years after her arrival, we would wake, called to the distaff by the sounds of mother’s singing. With our baby teeth pushed out by their older sisters, leaving temporary holes in our girlish smiles, we resembled miniatures of the gap-toothed wool carders. The old hags who spent their days upright, punishing sedentary bones with a staff tucked under one arm while the other siphoned wool MEMORIES OF ERINNA 176 to a spindle. “Run on, spindles drawing the thread, run on,” they chanted as if plucking the strings of an arcane instrument to draw both thread and song together. “Run on spindles , drawing the thread, run on,” and we would cry...

Where the Wild Child Is

Where the Wild Child Is Rebecca Tuvel Seshadri's book challenges us to consider the political potential of silence for race and animal studies. While acknowledging the many ways in which animals and inferiorized races have been (and continue to be) consigned to realms of speechlessness, their words rendered mute and ultimately irrelevant, Seshadri seeks the neutralizing power that resides in such exiled spaces. She asks: "When power uses a concept of language to silence the other, to render this other a wretched hybrid of human and animal…is there, however, a possibility that in turn silences or further neutralizes power?" (Seshadri 2012, 13). Counter to intuitions that the space of silence is powerless, Seshadri urges readers to consider what this space opens up (rather than closes down). Seshadri asks: What happens when "powerful silence functions as a mode of refusal" (21)? Might silence open a "space for opposition" (21)? An engagement with Derrida and Agamben, among others, suggests yes—that insofar as the space of silence exposes the very operation of sovereign power, it can resist that power. Here lies what Seshadri calls silence's "nonsovereign power" (13). Consider the following: traditionally, you become a subject under the law only if you have speech. Even if it is not your own speech, if the law applies to you, someone speaks on your behalf (someone has given a "voice" to your "voicelessness"). The case of animal rights is exemplary here. By giving animals a voice, we bring animals under the law. When the protection of the law is withheld from you, however, you are silenced; you are denied access to speech. In short, your voice does not matter. The screams of an animal, the protests of a slave—they are simultaneously consigned to a realm of silence (either meaningless babble or speechlessness entirely) and to a realm beyond access to the law. In short, language and law are co-implicated. [End Page 186] And yet, if silence is a part of language, and this part of language has been exiled or liberated from the law, does not this also open a space where power can be offset? Following Agamben, Seshadri's logic here runs as follows: the law, in attempting to consign speechlessness to a realm outside the law (a realm of exile or a space of nonsubjection to the law) is by this very attempt admitting there is a space outside the law. It does this in two ways. First, in order for the sovereign to say who does and does not speak, the sovereign itself must in a sense be outside language and the law, for he can only create the rules from a place beyond the rules. Second, in order for the sovereign to push anything to a realm "outside" the law, the sovereign is admitting there is a space outside his totalizing control, a space of silent yet potent resistance. In what follows, I explore some implications of Seshadri's thesis concerning silence's neutralizing power for race and animal studies. I do so by focusing on Seshadri's discussion of the "wild child." Seshadri claims that the wild child represents the space of silence par excellence. The wild child refers to those cases of feral children seen in the woods at the outskirts of villages, captured, and brought into cities where attempts are made to civilize them. Peter the Wild Boy is a famous example. This feral child without language, home, or society, who lives among the animals, sits on the fence between humanity and animality—she is what Seshadri calls a humAnimal—a figure that ultimately eludes the law. The wild child comes with neither an identity card nor a language that might enable us to identify her, locate her origins, or her race. In short, the wild child has no belonging. But by virtue of her exile from the law and shared language, she occupies a space of powerful silence. In the interest of exploring the potential of the wild child figure further, I here pose two questions for consideration. First, exactly how might Seshadri's reflections on the wild child figure be productively extended to race and animal studies? And, second...

The Feral Sublime: Caspar Hauser and Melville's Pierre

The Feral Sublime:Caspar Hauser and Melville's Pierre Len Gutkin Ferality and Madness in Pierre In Paul Auster's postmodern detective novel City of Glass (1985), the protagonist, Quinn, encounters a man named Peter Stillman, who we learn spent his childhood locked in a room, all human contact shut out.1 Having eventually been rescued and even taught to talk, Peter speaks a strange English marked by the trauma of his past, his weird, off-kilter idiom reflecting his late arrival to language and to the consciousness that language permits. In a stunning four-page monologue, Stillman provides Quinn with an account of himself and of his late emergence into sociality and subjectivity: I know that all is not right in my head. And it is true, yes, and I say this of my own free will, that sometimes I just scream and scream. For no good reason . . . I forget how to make the words come out of my mouth. [ . . . ] But I do love going to the park. There are the trees, and the air and the light. There is good in all that, is there not? Yes. (Auster 21). In Stillman's speech, Auster splits the difference between the distortions of pathology and the intensities of poetry, creating a linguistic texture I call the feral sublime. This strategy is by now a familiar one, and is in part descended from Faulkner's representation of Benjy's interiority in The Sound and the Fury. While Benjy is not, of course, feral, the otherness constituted by his cognitive limitations and the linguistic strategies deployed to represent his semi-verbal consciousness make him part of the history of the feral sublime.2 But the locus classicus of the feral sublime in American literature is Pierre's mysterious Isabel, for whom ferality is a form of Melvillean madness.3 The whole of Pierre might be thought of as a novel gone mad, dementedly refusing generic normativity, lurching from one overwrought genre-parody to the next, pushing its prose, on the one hand, to the limits of bad taste and, on the other, to the limits of an experimentalism that looks, today, uncannily modernistic. And not only is Pierre constructed madly, but it may also have been—so its initial reviewers thought—an actual document of insanity. The New York [End Page 20] Day Book accused it of containing "the ravings and reveries of a madman," while the Charleston Mercury reported that Melville "was really supposed to be deranged" and that his "friends were taking measures to place him under treatment." One reviewer claimed that Melville and his creations are a "collection of lunatics" (as qtd in Levander 424). As with Ahab and Bartleby, Isabel's madness involves a failure of socialization that requires an exploration of the failure of language. But unlike Bartleby, who rejects language altogether, reducing it to a single sentence of negation, Isabel never stops talking, at least once she gets started. For much of her early life, as recounted in her two-part monologue, she had hardly anyone to speak to at all. The house where she spent her early years was a zone of silence in which "[n]o name; no scrawled or written thing; no book, was in the house; no one memorial speaking of its former occupants. It was dumb as death." The couple in charge of her "were not entirely unkind to me; but, I repeat, they seldom or never spoke to me" (NN Pierre 115). Her eventual asylum home dilates the primal scene of language-deprivation: most of the inmates "were dumb, and could not, or would not speak, or had forgotten how to speak" (120). Representations of Isabel's madness depend on the specter of the feral child, in which Melville had a pronounced interest, as evidenced by his repeated allusions, throughout his oeuvre, to the story of the German wild-child Casper Hauser. A network of verbal and thematic echoes connecting Pierre and an important early account of Caspar Hauser strongly suggest Melville's debt to the Hauser story. Hauser and Melville The tale of Casper Hauser, an unsocialized teenager who seemed to emerge out of nowhere in Nuremberg in 1828...

The Mute’s Voice: The Dramatic Transformations of the Mute and Deaf-Mute in Early-Nineteenth-Century France

What does the mute have to tell us? In France at the end of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries, this question propelled some important early melodramas, including Guilbert de Pixerecourt's Coelina ou l'Enfant du mystere (Coelina, or the child of mystery) (1800) and Jean-Nicolas Bouilly's LIAbbe de l'Epee (1799), with the secrets harbored by the mute character being central to the play's resolution. Outside the theater, in classrooms, hospitals, and institutions, this question also challenged pedagogues and philosophers who sought to determine just what kind of consciousness lay within the so-called deaf and dumb. The deaf-mute's social identity also performed important symbolic work in late-eighteenth-century France, as representative of those exiled from power and citizenship who were being welcomed into the new national community. This blend of the theatrical, pedagogical, and sociocultural significance of the deaf-mute is nowhere more apparent than in Bouilly's play L!Abbe de l'Epee, a dramatization of an episode from twenty-five years earlier in which the Abbe Charles-Michel de l'Epee, renowned his work in teaching the deaf and dumb to communicate through manual sign language, embarked a quest to have an abandoned deaf-mute adolescent recognized as the deposed Comte de Solar and returned to his rightful social position. Just as this play was drawing Parisian audiences, the capture of a feral in the woods of Aveyron, followed by his transfer to Paris to be examined by the leading intellects of the day, posed a similar set of questions: Who is this mute, and what can he tell us? The quickly became a subject speculation and appropriation in journals and stage, and the language and imagery of the theater, in return, exerted its influence scientific and philosophical observations, weaving with them to shape the way in which he was to be perceived by his contemporaries.This essay develops a perspective informed by studies to track the literary and social significance of the mute and muteness in Bouilly's play and in the world outside the theater in France at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Bouilly's UAbbe de i'Epee offers a unique site of tension between modes of representing the mute, thanks to its ostensibly realistic portrayal of a thinly veiled historical deaf-mute individual, the Comte de Solar, and his teacher and patron, the Abbe de l'Epee.1 The narratives around the mute wild boy captured in Aveyron and brought to Paris early in 1800 express the immediate impact of literary and theatrical discourses in shaping a popular understanding of the kind of difference embodied by the feral child, who was to become the subject of an extended and influential philosophical and educational experiment conducted by Jean Itard. Juxtaposed, Bouilly's play and Itard's reports his pedagogical progress with the can be seen to share significant features, including a concern with the place of the mute in society and the presentation of the teacher as heroic advocate of the disadvantaged. But we can also catch glimpses of literary, especially theatrical, in Itard's portrayal of his boy.My primary interest is in the relationship between the theatrical representations of muteness and that muteness-often combined with deafness-that existed outside of the theater, in the towns and villages of France. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue that disability pervades literary narrative, first, as a stock feature of characterization, and second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device.2 Coining the term narrative prosthesis to point to how literary narratives lean on imagery for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight,3 they argue that disability characterization can be understood as a prosthetic contrivance upon which so many of our cultural and literary narratives rely. …

Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820. Diane Long Hoeveler.

Previous articleNext article No AccessGothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820. Diane Long Hoeveler.Frederick BurwickFrederick Burwick Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 43, Number 4Autumn 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24065363 Views: 7Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

From “We: A Passivity”

159 TIM ROBERTS FROM “WE: A PASSIVITY” — I am the By-Thyme. I am seen here, making it. Or it is me. The presences are repeated. I think it is writing. I think it is out and up and beside. Whatever is growing is near, my own eardrums, my very eardrums, my ability to resort to assurances. My ability to look through the colored glass, talking and talking over the real talking. How do you manage to kiss that figurine every day? Do you travel and kiss or do you leave your kissing for later, when you’re travelling, the best idea is the best idea is the best you can think of. MotionX is calculating your route. If you stop, mitigate plain speaking, harness ocular pump, you didn’t need a pair of new shoes,youdidn’tneedwords.Dickinsonturnstofiction.Wemake that comprehensible for everyone else. You’re reprehensible. All this crazy talk. Escape so that the intersection is everywhere, trains breaking down, trains breaking up, backpacks so heavy, she recalculates the route as a Coroner. I think it’s funny but no doubt hear the humming. What is it about the live feed you don’t want to hear? If the taxing ability is looking at you, what do you run in? The sound? No, the preposition. No, no, no, the way forward. The speaking way forward. The extrapolated interest in syllable after syllable, falling on your face fabricating. Fabricating when the mobility appears. The Coroner hums like a bee. 160 — I know I have only begun to be somewhere. Only begun to release my own words. It is this work that has put me here. It is this going back to the margins, going back, reversing. What can you mean in that referentiality? Because it is reference. Structure should not be falling and falling, but it is. This is where it lifts its heavy heft and points back to what’s crumbling. You are the way we have been rolling in. You claim the smoke is complete. Didn’t we fit it together, how much was ahead of us? This energy prevented the two sides of itself, it wanted for instance (a) school, entitled Standard Living School, entitled “lift me up” when you renovate, and then (b) nothing else, because it’s too complicated, because it’s using the word “light.” This energy will have to be trained. It’s repeatedly outfoxed. It’s going to reach the whole handle because of its repeated why. What am I saying? What I wanted in fiction? What’s going to settle this? A form, of art, wishy-washy is the right word. Morning and it feels like the only word. I take my project and I put it away. The dictionary is all colors of red, finally we know how to use it. Why do you say that book was only a pointing into? I have been heartened by the rotation effect. Now I’m sure I don’t want to proceed. I’m taking the sublime and gallivanting it around. That’s not fair. That’s not turning anyone on. It’s a constant, that feral child, that complexity, emerging from the woods bespattered. 161 — Believe these words. Not from day to day but in another way. The great mother. First at the vat. I want to be clear where my interest is. I’d give anything to talk about concretions, to go into the day with a goal. But the sound makes its slide. But it’s many a lay, when you think about it. When you’re the first person in nature to have a hint. This could be where you come in, what you are meant to do. This is what you’re here for. What you’ve been following. The burden rolls its pall over the concluding sections. We could have been here all day. I keep pushing but it’s relatively over. There’s a critique in the quotient. Did the book fail? Did it unfold a zero point? The instructions were to characterize the “Bee” and the “I.” Nobody much did it. Mouths made voices then they went in. Mouths went under where they...

To tame this feral man: Dissociation as an antidote for terror.

The author presents a dream in which she was asked to de-escalate violence by means of working with Osama bin laden and President George Bush. In the process of discussing this dream she considers the repetition of retaliatory cycles, splitting, conflicting views, and the role on fantasy in dealing with trauma. Next there is a discussion about the author's situation during the 9/11 atrocity, with a focus on the experience of teaching trauma to her graduate-level trauma class at New York University. Questions are raised about the long-term effects of the atrocity as well as the transmission of this trauma. Language: en

To Teach and to Treat: Meditations on The Miracle Worker

To Teach and to TreatMeditations on The Miracle Worker Ellen Handler Spitz "It's less trouble to feel sorry for her than it is to teach her anything better." William Gibson, The Miracle Worker When Dr. Gerard Fromm asked me to speak on The Miracle Worker at the Austen Riggs annual Creativity Conference in honor of playwright William Gibson, who passed away in November 2008, at the age of ninety-four, and who was a great friend to psychoanalysis, I demurred at first because I am not an expert on the life of Helen Keller, nor indeed on blindness, nor on disability; yet I have thought deeply about the film, and I hope that what follows may prove meaningful. It is, of course, a brilliant work, and all I can do is to offer a few of my own perceptions. I must emphasize at the outset that, in what follows, I shall be speaking about the 1962 movie with William Gibson's script, just as it is, and not its relation to historical fact. I shall be treating it sui generis, as a work of art, tout compris. Last term, my colleague Professor Jay Freyman, a classicist, and I taught a seminar on "The Nature of Learning and the Art of Teaching" at our campus of the University of Maryland. In it, we screened this film, as it seemed to us that The Miracle Worker had to be an indispensable part of our inquiry. But why? What makes it such an important and timeless classic on the nature of learning and the art of teaching? Ninety minutes long, black and white, deceptively simple, the film held our students rapt (the class, twenty Humanities Scholars, watched it together, as a group). Although they had already been captivated by a plethora of engaging material, [End Page 101] including films such as Goodbye, Mr. Chips, To Sir with Love, Farewell, My Concubine, Stand and Deliver, Dead Poets Society, The Paper Chase, and many readings ranging from Aristophanes, Plato, and Montaigne to Jacques Barzun, Gilbert Highet, and Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), I doubt that, for most of them, anything trumped The Miracle Worker. Our special focus was as stated, and, along with this particular film, we asked our students to read Montaigne's classic, justly famous essay of 1575, "Of the Education of Children," a supremely relevant text. Now, at Austen Riggs, the manifest focus is not on teaching and learning per se but rather on therapy and treatment. Which are different. Or are they? If they are different, how are they different and in what ways different? Bennett Simon, for example, has noted in Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (1978) that Plato treats madness and ignorance as maladies of the same kind. Simon writes: "Plato's unique contribution is the ideal that man can achieve control over the irrational by a special kind of training and education." He adds that, "analogously, Freud's unique contribution was the development of [a method] leading to permanent, internal reorganization … a method of understanding, leading to self understanding" (207). This juxtaposition frames my essay. In pondering the film and what it portrays and in considering how different and similar these realms of endeavor are and in what ways they overlap—education and treatment, the teacher and the therapist—we might note that the Greek stem therap- carries the basic meaning "to serve." Hence, its English derivative "therapist" likewise carries the connotation of service, i. e., the therapist renders service to the body or mind of the patient. Indeed, the ancient Greeks so used the stem to mean "render medical service."1 Annie Sullivan, young and inexperienced (Helen Keller was her first pupil), is brought to Tuscumbia, Alabama by a set of desperate parents because their little girl, Helen, blind and deaf, needs to learn. The stakes are high. If she cannot learn, the alternative under consideration by her family is to send her to an institution that may destroy her spirit and possibly spell her demise altogether. Creating mayhem in her parents' gracious southern mansion, Helen appears to us on screen as a feral child—dirty, [End Page 102] unkempt, uttering...

Poetic wolves and environmental imagination: representations of wolf in recent Chinese literature

During the last decade or so, the literary writings that portray the lives of the wolves and their relationship with the humans sprouted and prospered in China. These wolf writings all give very vivid and appealing portraits of wolves, their wild existence, their character, their relationship with men, and their role in the ecosystem. They have shaped our understanding of and attitudes towards animals and nature, which is of great value to the ongoing building of ecological civilization in China as well as in the world. In general, the Chinese wolf literature has inevitably been influenced and inspired by the long and rich traditions of the wolf myths and literature in the West, particularly those works of Jack London, Rudyard Kipling and other Western writers since the end of the 19th century. With due attention paid to the influence of the Western wolf literature, this essay will mainly analyze the three most important Chinese wolf novels—The Wolf Child, Remembering Wolves and The Wolf Totem, both separately and with reference to one another. It argues that the representations of wolves in them subvert the stereotypical hostile images of wolf in traditional Chinese culture, bring about fresh reflections on the cultural and spiritual symptoms of (post)modernity and globalization, and finally lead to a growing ecological consciousness and the call for balance between humans and nonhumans.