Studies in the Literary Imagination最新文献

{"title":"Subterranean Histories: Constantine Cavafy and the Poetics of Memory","authors":"Louis A. Ruprecht","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0010","url":null,"abstract":"In the late spring of 2013, in those rare heydays when the city of Atlanta seems uniquely alive with colors and scents, I had the opportunity to speak with the Honorable Vassilios Gouloussis, who was then Greek Consul in Atlanta, in his Buckhead office. Gouloussis and I have enjoyed a long and meaningful collaborative friendship, and our wide-ranging conversation that day offered a welcome respite from the pressures of an academic semester just coming to an end. As our conversation about possible fall programming was nearing its conclusion, he leapt excitedly to his feet and began sifting through the papers on his desk. A cable had come from Athens earlier in the week, and it offered an enthusiastic reminder. UNESCO had declared 2013 as the Year of Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), in recognition of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of that marvelous poet's birth. \"We might consider doing something about this,\" Vassilios suggested wryly. Indeed we might. It all happened very quickly, and I was deeply moved by the enthusiastic responses I received from everyone with whom I discussed the possibility of celebrating the legacy of this coy, uncommon, and most lyrical of modern Greek poets. Three noteworthy scholars--Anne McClanan in art history (Portland State University), Mike Lippman in classics (University of Nebraska), and Gonda Van Steen in modern Greek literature (University of Florida)--all leapt at the chance to share their thoughts about this poet, who has obviously been an object of great admiration and a source of deep inspiration for all of us. Cavafy has a way of looking at everything that catches his poetic attention with an intriguing blend of historical whimsy, soft irony, luscious sensuality, and humane touch. These scholars expressed an immediate interest in examining how he used Homeric myth, Byzantine visual culture, and more nearly contemporary dramatic forms to advance a view of the past that brought it to life in an, at times, eerily necromantic manner. Closer to home, friends and colleagues were similarly responsive. My good friend, Nickitas Demos, offered to organize a musical celebration of Cavafy's poetry, an event which gave him the opportunity to re-visit and to re-fashion an original musical composition inspired by Cavafy's longest published poem (\"Myris: Alexandria AD 340\") based on Gregory Jusdanis's superb English translation. Pearl McHaney, then Director of Georgia State University's far-reaching Center for Collaborative and International Arts (CENCIA) offered us considerable financial and administrative support, despite the fact that she did not know Cavafy. Yet. Other members of the Executive Committee of GSU's Center for Hellenic Studies (Margo Alexander, Christos Galileias, Kathryn Kozaitis, Faidra Papavasiliou, Gerard Pendrick, and Lela Urquhart) all pitched in with their enthusiastic support and involved their students as well. It all came together with remarkable speed and elegance. The two-day event, \"Cel","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129263386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“I don’t know where to go for a quiet mind”: A Case Study of Samuel Richardson’s Clementina","authors":"Hélène Dachez","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0001","url":null,"abstract":"His malady settled upon his brain. --Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle 382 Because Samuel Richardson printed--among other medical texts--The English Malady by George Cheyne, and Robert James's Medical Dictionary, there is no doubt that he knew what the medical symptoms of mind troubles were and what treatments were offered by the physicians of the period. Besides, especially at the end of his life, the English novelist himself exchanged many letters with Cheyne about his \"nervous malady.\" He regularly asked for Cheyne's medical advice about ways to put an end to his physical and nervous disorders. In his diagnosis, Cheyne wrote to Richardson: \"all your complaints are vapourish and nervous, of no manner of Danger, but extremely frightful and lowering\" (Letters 54). For Cheyne, the disorders that afflict Richardson are the common symptoms of \"nervous Hyp,\" one of whose main symptoms is a depressive mind (Letters 50). Emphasizing the part bodily and mental disorders play in the plots of his novels, critics sometimes draw the parallel between Richardson's own impaired state of health and the way he deals with his characters. Raymond Stephanson, for instance, analyses Clarissa as \"a projection of Richardson's own nervous problems as well as a testament to their reality and value,\" and he adds that \"the destructive pressure of the Protean Lovelace on the harmonious Clarissa is an externalization of that nervous dissonance from which Richardson suffered for so long\" (283). In the 1754 The History of Sir Charles Grandison, it is mainly on the character of the Italian Catholic Clementina della Porretta that Richardson concentrates the representation and expression of mental troubles, dealt with in a manner redolent of a case study, a \"narrative matrix\" whose characteristics he exploits and rewrites into his novel (Wenger 21). (1) He uses various perspectives, which this article aims at analyzing through the notion of case studies, defined as \"individual pieces of narrative that provide the foundation for a larger structure of medical knowledge ... [that] relate both to the private and public spheres ..., [that] are used to elaborate a scientific reasoning based on the interpretation of symptoms ... [and that add] a new element to the corpus of medical knowledge\" (Vasset 5-7). (2) Exploiting the interplay between inner and outer perspectives adopted and opinions voiced on Clementina's case, the novelist anchors the representation and expression of the heroine's mental troubles in the religious and medical discourses of his time, weaves them together, and shows both their influence and their limits in the representation of mental troubles and their treatment. Clementina's predicament, further analyzed in narrative, stylistic, and linguistic terms, draws attention to the links between mental derangement, language (or languages), and the various geographical and metaphorical spaces derangement comes to occupy in Richardson's last novel. The ","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126153687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Ne’er-do-well: Representing the Dysfunctional Migrant Mind, New Zealand 1850–1910","authors":"Jenny Kain","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0005","url":null,"abstract":"In 1886 two committee members from the newly established British Emigrants' Information Office (EIO) visited Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand. Walter Hazell's and Howard Hodgkin's four-month tour had a particular purpose. As representatives of an office created to promote opportunities in the British colonies, they visited Australasia to report on the region's suitability as an emigration field. Part of their remit was identifying the characteristics which denoted fit and unfit migrants. This task, Hazell and Hodgkin conceded, was challenging. And yet, while they reported it was difficult to detail all the qualities that made a colonist successful, they were adamant that one type would fail (Australasian Colonies 51-52). They described this group as the so-called ne'er-do-wells, typically young men lacking in character and sent out by their parents or clergymen to reform their ways. Conversely, the representatives of the EIO explained, the peculiar conditions of colonial life, combined with the absence of home restraints, would only \"serve to hasten the ne'er-do-well's downward path\" (56). Sympathetic to the existing immigration restrictions through which the colonies declined to receive lunatics and the infectiously diseased, Hazell and Hodgkin suggested that the rejection of the ne'er-do-well was equally justified. They had found this type particularly resented in New Zealand where the recruitment drives of the 1870s had imported many of the now unemployed. Across the colonies these \"ingrained bad characters\" were feared for their \"moral contamination,\" therefore, \"no matter what station in life the scapegrace may be,\" they were not wanted (52-53). This article seeks to investigate how and why the ne'er-do-well came to represent this so-called moral contamination. This approach situates the term as a label used to denote the borderline between those perceived as mad and sane. Hazell and Hodgkin were not unique in advocating the exclusion of the ne'er-do-well. Through investigating the provenance, ubiquity, and longevity of this label, it is possible to show how the ne'er-do-well became so maligned in colonial discourse about immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And yet, in a modern day context, the term has lost its connotation of a dysfunctional state of mind. The Oxford Dictionary of English offers the following non-gender specific definitions: A ne'er-do-well is a lazy and irresponsible person, and a scapegrace is mischievous or wayward (\"Ne'er-do-well\"; \"Scapegrace\"). Nineteenth-century British usage similarly reflected the behavioral or character connotations of the term ne'er-do-well,-weel, or-weal. In 1832 the Chambers Edinburgh Journal described how the Scottish term ne'er-do-weel was applied to those who never did well in life due to their unfavorable qualities (\"The Ne-er Do Weel\"). This variant was likewise used in northern England to describe men of rather doubtful respectability (\"Wants, Wishes and Whims\").","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128691373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“You must have been a solitary prisoner to understand these perplexed distinctions”: Imprisonment, Sensorial Isolation, and Altered Mental States in A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Oliver Twist","authors":"Kris Siefken","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0004","url":null,"abstract":"He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair. --Charles Dickens, American Notes 113 This quotation, taken from Charles Dickens's reflections on Philadelphia's Eastern Penitentiary, illustrates this article's intention to focus on Dickens's handling of solitary confinement imprisonment and on how the use of coercive sensorial isolation can create an altered state in the psychology of individuals. In exploring how the experience of being \"buried alive\" with its \"torturing anxieties\" may change an individual's mental state, this article explores Dickens's position as to whether such persons, having been \"changed by the death they died\" during imprisonment, can ever be truly \"recalled to life,\" or whether they are left permanently scarred by the experience, trapped between two states, like \"a Spirit moving among mortals\" (A Tale 265, 17, 284). In the process, this article interrogates the impact enforced solitude has on the experience of characters' relationships to their spatial environments (how an individual's state of mind might become physically situated) and the way in which Dickens's representation of the effects of forced isolation specifically signposts ways in which the reader can or should interpret these states of mind. Doing so necessarily requires arguing against a long-established critical tradition suggesting that Dickens lacked psychological insight: an absent psychology school of thought that has its roots among Dickens's contemporaries and whose on-going influence could still be seen echoed in the commentaries around the Dickens Bicentenary three years ago. (1) One of the best-known examples of this criticism would be George Eliot's comment: We have one great novelist [Dickens] who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character ... with the same truth as their idiom and manner, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. (55, my emphasis). Though one of the most quoted of such critiques, Eliot's comment is hardly unique, and when we note that such critics have included Mark Twain, Henry James, G. S. Fraser, and George Henry Lewes, it is easy to see why this perception gained such strong purchase. One key theme that runs through this school of thought is an Eliotian sense of Dickens's dwelling only on the \"external traits\" of his characters. Fellow novelist Mrs. Oliphant, writing in 1871, stated that \"[Dickens's] instinct leads him to keep on the surface,\" and comparing Eliot and Dickens in 1883, Nathan Sheppard suggested that \"[while] Dickens portrays the behaviour, George Eliot dissects the motive for the behaviour\" (678; 8). The influence of this \"external traits\" perception can still be felt in modern analysis, such as when Andrew Sanders describes Dickens's character-bui","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"107 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133035576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Seeing Things … Differently, or, Hallucinating the Postmodern","authors":"Will Slocombe, C. Baker","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0008","url":null,"abstract":"From thermodynamics and rocket technology to the deep web, Thomas Pynchon's novels and stories have often juxtaposed science and technology with unusual, not to say downright implausible happenings. This is perhaps the result of a fascination with contorting scientific knowledge into strange applications, whether as metaphors for social mores or to see how far its logics can be pushed toward the breaking point, but it is assuredly grounded in the relationship between the human and the technological and how American society deals with its contemporary technological environment. For example, Bleeding Edge explores the growth of the internet and the dot-com boom, Vineland focuses on television and film, and Gravity's Rainbow deals with the V2 rocket program. Obviously, such reductive statements omit the complexities of Pynchon's inclusions of and allusions to competing paradigms and conspiracy theories, but in each case what is foregrounded is how individuals understand and relate to the world. As such, it is possible to assert that Pynchon's fictions have always been involved in representing and articulating \"states of mind.\" Such states might differ across his fictions in terms of their setting and context, but whether concerned with the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (Against the Day), the 9/11 attacks (Bleeding Edge), California at various points (The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, Inherent Vice), World War Two and its aftermath (V, Gravity's Rainbow), or even colonial America (Mason & Dixon), Pynchon's works are invariably concerned with seeing things \"differently\" than established histories might otherwise imply and, moreover, foregrounding the relativism and partiality of any individual perspective or overly simplified way of perceiving the world. His protagonists search for answers to make sense of their experiences as they are cast adrift from meaning; in the case of Slothrop from Gravity's Rainbow, he is literally lost as he disappears from the narrative part way through. Within this framework, a recurrent trope of Pynchon's fictions is negative psychological responses to the environment (paranoia, uncertainty, emotional and epistemological insecurity) as a result of a failure to reconcile individual experiences with something defined as normal or normative. Pynchon's characters neither grow nor find answers, but this is precisely the point: they accumulate data, clues, and/or experiences, but no single answer suffices to define everything, and no individual's answer corresponds to any other's. As a result of this, one of the disciplines/discourses most often referenced in his fictions is psychiatry, for even when not directly connected to the narrative arc, psychological and psychiatric terminology and characters are nonetheless present and serve to lead the reader to the perception that reality is contested, not a given, and that perception is not straightforwardly schematic. More specifically, this article examines the ways in which perceptions","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131307820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visions in Verse: Writing the Visual in Romantic Dream Visions","authors":"A. O'connell","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0003","url":null,"abstract":"In Immanuel Kant's Anthropology the criterion for distinguishing dreams from reality is rational communication (Schlutz 113). Quoting Heraclitus's dictum, \"when we are awake we have a world in common, but when we are asleep each has his own world,\" Kant argues that the faculty of fantasy blurs this distinction (Kant, Anthropology 63; see Schlutz 113). Inspiration and original genius are the \"involuntary and hence dream-like products of fantasy\" (Schlutz 115, see Kant 50-51). Inspired poetry and art sit uneasily, for Kant, between sleep and waking as they rise up out of the world of dreams to communicate their visions within the waking world. For Romantic poets, it follows that art and poetry could also act as an essential bridge between the two worlds, as a means of communicating the dreams and visions of the creative mind with the outside world. They were a representation for the outside world of what lies inside that otherwise exclusive state of the dreaming mind. Some of the best-known Romantic dream visions, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge's \"Kubla Khan,\" John Keats's The Fall of Hyperion, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Triumph of Life, as discussed here, attempt to take up this challenge and seek to communicate the inspired visions that lie at the heart of the original creative idea. In The Fall of Hyperion, Keats embraces this role for the poet, claiming \"poesy alone can tell her dreams\" (8). However, like many Romantic dream visions that reflect on their own creation, the poem is keenly aware of one crucial problem inherent in this process: language. Before the twentieth century, ideas, thoughts, and inspired moments were all thought to be visual, not linguistic. To take creative ideas from the imaginative mind and communicate them with the world through poetry involved a transformation from the visual to the linguistic, from visions into verse. In the Romantic period the creative vision in the mind could refer to the inner experience of any of a range of imaginative states, from thoughts and ideas to the vision that is imagined when reading, composing poetry, daydreaming, in reverie, madness, or sleeping dreams. This is what Alan Richardson refers to in \"Reimagining the Romantic Imagination,\" borrowing neuroscience's current terminology, as \"the default mode.\" For Richardson, memory, prospective \"future thinking,\" daydreaming, nocturnal dreaming, and theory of mind or mind reading are linked in Romantic brain science as what scientists might now call defaulting, but which was understood in the Romantic period as various ways of imagining (389). When Romantic poets explore these states of mind, they understand them as a spectrum of liminal imaginative states. Shelley and Coleridge both argue that the imaginative states in this spectrum differ only in degree, not in kind. (1) In Speculations on Metaphysics, Shelley claims that: Thoughts, or ideas, or notions ... differ from each other, not in kind, but in force. It has commonly been supp","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130180164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Representing and Expressing States of Mind: “The Labyrinth of Another’s Being”","authors":"A. Ingram, A. O'connell, Leigh Wetherall-Dickson","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0000","url":null,"abstract":"It is W. B. Yeats, in his poem \"The Tower,\" who speaks of the \"Plunge ... Into the labyrinth of another's being\" (111, 113). In his case, Yeats attempts to call up from the grave the fictitious figure he had himself created as a mouthpiece for some of his earlier work, Owen \"Red\" Hanrahan, the bardic, womanizing schoolteacher. He summons him, in the incantatory mode of \"The Tower\": Old lecher with a love on every wind, Bring up out of that deep considering mind All that you have discovered in the grave, For it is certain that you have Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing Plunge, lured by a softening eye, Or by a touch or a sigh, Into the labyrinth of another's being. (106-13) The point, in Yeats's poem, is to ask: \"Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or woman lost,\" which comes down to a more trivial enterprise than the build-up of promises (114-15). But that build-up is nevertheless substantial, involving a call to beyond the grave, requesting the assumed spiritual insights available to the dead, and resorting to a character who never in fact lived at all, as though only a being derived from pure imagination--imagination fortified, as with Hanrahan, by received traditions, spiritual and cultural, formal and folk--will be capable of revealing the kind of wisdom sought by Yeats: the secrets of another's being. As this example implies, though, there are many modes of mind--from the fictional to the autobiographical, the spiritual, the extreme, from the conscious to the unconscious, the deluded, and the self-satisfied--and equally many modes of attempting to represent or to express them. The present volume alone includes examples from diaries, dream visions, and the hallucinatory, from psychiatric case studies, even from attempts to control the wrong sort of immigrant mentality from entering into Australia and New Zealand, as well as the many kinds of fictional states of mind, from first person narratives to different attempts with differently nuanced third person accounts. When Samuel Johnson advised James Boswell about keeping a diary, he declared that the important point was to record the state of one's mind (Boswell, Boswell for the Defence 182). Johnson's comment, though, very much begs the question of how that can be done. Johnson himself was too intelligent and too suffering a writer not to have given the issue substantial thought, though his own diaries were apparently destroyed either by his own hand shortly before his death or by his executors. For his part, Boswell, who experienced his own share of suffering from depression--or melancholy, or hypochondria--speculated: \"Could I extract the hypochondria from my mind and deposit it in my journal, writing down would be very valuable\" (Boswell: The Ominous Years 240). We clearly need to add self-therapy, or its possibility, as yet one more reason for attempting to express a state of mind. The subject to be represented might turn out to be just as much of a fiction as a cr","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121155967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Half-Mangled Narrator: The Violence of Psychic Dissection in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams","authors":"E. Parisot","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0002","url":null,"abstract":"The trope of psychic dissection, used to describe the delineation of mental processes and their formative contribution to character and identity, was largely made available to readers and writers of the late eighteenth century by developments in the emerging field of psychology. \"All that we know of the body,\" proposes Thomas Reid in his Inquiry into the Human Mind, \"is owing to anatomical dissection and observation, and it must be by an anatomy of the mind that we can discover its powers and principles\" (5). (1) By the time William Godwin's Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams was published and receiving critical response, the trope was being employed aptly to describe Godwin's method of characterization. Godwin is lauded for the way \"he rivets our attention to a minute dissection of the characters, feelings, and emotions,\" and for his \"chief skill ... in delineating in the wanderings of the intellect ... which strangely delights in the most afflicting and humiliating of human miseries\" (Rev. of Caleb Williams 564; Croker 218). Godwin himself--in his preface to the 1832 edition of Fleetwood--confirms the centrality of metaphorical dissection to his preference for first-person narration in Caleb Williams. As a penetrating form of enquiry, it was \"infinitely the best adapted\" to: the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses, which led the personages I had to describe primarily to adopt the particular way of proceeding in which they afterwards embarked, (qtd. in Caleb Williams 351) While Godwin's conceit of a \"metaphysical dissecting knife\" echoes Reid's Inquiry, his commitment to detailing the \"gradually accumulating impulses\" that give rise to an individual's character and behavior is palpably indebted to the associationist principles of John Locke and David Hartley (a debt also reflected in Godwin's own doctrine of necessity and its extension to the faculty of the mind). (2) Enlightenment philosophies of the mind evidently bore considerable influence upon Godwin, not only facilitating the adoption of dissection as a literary trope, but also the transformation of the literary sphere into a theatre fit for clinical experimentation and enquiry. This intellectual debt has not gone unnoticed in recent scholarship. Most notably, William D. Brewer's study of the mental anatomies of Godwin and Mary Shelley explores precisely this influence on Godwin, and how Enlightenment-and Romantic-era theories of the mind shaped his view of literary works as \"thought-experiments\" and \"imaginary laboratories\" in the \"'science' of mental anatomy\" (19). With particular regard to Caleb Williams, Brewer not only asserts that Caleb undertakes the role of an \"amateur mental anatomist\" preoccupied with both Falkland's and his own state of mind, but that Godwin \"also envisioned the 'ideal re","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"431 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116523991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“A written monologue by that most interesting being, myself”: Sickness, Suicide, and Self-Reflection in the Diary of Alice James","authors":"Leigh Wetherall-Dickson","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0006","url":null,"abstract":"In May 1895, William James delivered a talk to the Young Men's Christian Association of Harvard University entitled Is Life Worth Living? The lecture was subsequently published, first in the International Journal of Ethics in October of the same year and again as a stand-alone essay in 1896. The essay addresses the dangerous doubt that necessarily accompanies an \"over-studious career\": My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my words are to deal only with that metaphysical tedium vitae which is peculiar to reflecting men. Most of you are devoted for good or ill to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy, and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unreality that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed. This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career. Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. (16) William is describing the predicament of Hamlet, the archetypal reflective man, but he is possibly drawing upon sources much closer to home. (1) As George Cotkin notes, \"fin de siecle suicides and potential suicides suffered from a doubting mania akin to the type that had cast a shadow over [William]'s own life\" (89). Elsewhere William describes himself as a \"victim of neurasthenia and of the sense of hollowness and unreality that goes with it\" (qtd. in Cotkin 77). William may also have in mind his sister's enquiry to her father about the ethics of committing suicide. In September 1878, the year of Alice's \"hideous summer\" during which she suffered her second serious breakdown, Henry James senior wrote to the youngest of the James siblings, Robertson, recounting the discussion: One day a long time ago [she] asked me whether I thought that suicide, to which at times she felt very strongly tempted, was a sin. I told her that I thought it was not a sin except when it was wanton, as when a person from a mere love of pleasurable excitement indulged in drink or opium to the utter degradation of his faculties and to the ruin of the human form in him; but that it was absurd to think it sinful when one was driven to it in order to escape bitter suffering, from spiritual flux, as in her case, or from some loathsome form of disease, as in others. I told her that so far as I was concerned she had my full permission to end her life whenever she pleased.... She then remarked that she was very thankful to me, but she felt that now she could perceive it to be her right to dispose of her own body when it became intolerable ... she was more than content to stay by my side, and battle in concert against the evil that is in the world. I don't fear suicide much since this conversation, though she often tells me that she is strongly tempted still, (qtd. in James, Death 15-16) William may have seen the letter, been","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134484909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Adventures in Psychiatry: Narrating and Enacting Reform in Post-War Mental Healthcare","authors":"Vicky Long","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The development of psychiatry owed much to the establishment of pauper lunatic asylums throughout Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, the low status of these institutions, combined with psychiatrists' failure to devise effective treatment methods, meant that psychiatry did not enjoy a prestigious reputation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The post-war era, however, is commonly viewed as a period of rapid change in British mental healthcare. Mental hospitals were brought within the provisions of the new National Health Service in 1948, and this development provided psychiatrists and other mental health care workers with an opportunity to raise the status of psychiatry by reframing the profession as just another branch of medicine. Yet there was little consensus as to how progress was to be achieved, for psychiatrists were developing seemingly antithetical therapeutic models, premised on divergent understandings of the etiology of mental disorders. Some psychiatrists were convinced that mental illnesses had biological causes, just like other illnesses. They developed and applied new physical therapies such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and leucotomy, which they hoped would target the physical origins of mental disorders while also aligning psychiatry to developments in general medicine (Shorter ch. 6). Other psychiatrists were interested in their patients' psychological symptoms, and the ways in which patients' psychosocial environments influenced their mental wellbeing. These psychiatrists developed a model of social psychiatry and sought to establish therapeutic communities within their hospitals, building on wartime experiments in the use of group treatment methods for soldiers displaying psychological symptoms (Harrison and Clarke 698-708; Mills and Harrison 22-43; Whiteley 233-48). In so doing, they hoped to counter institutionalization by transforming mental hospitals into actively therapeutic environments. This article examines how psychiatrists who subscribed to different therapeutic approaches narrated their efforts to transform psychiatric practice within their memoirs. It focuses on accounts authored by William Sargant, an advocate of the physical therapies, and Denis Martin and David Clark, both associated with social psychiatry and the therapeutic community approach. Temporally located views of the space and place of mental healthcare underpinned all three narratives, for the authors premised the need for reform on the legacy of therapeutic pessimism and authoritarianism, physically embodied within Britain's antiquated psychiatric hospitals. However, while Martin and Clark sought to transform the lives of chronic patients within the old psychiatric hospitals, Sargant attempted to relocate psychiatric care within general medicine, discarding chronic patients and psychiatric hospitals as unsalvageable relics from the past. Undeniably, the authors' divergent views on the nature and treatmen","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129550579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}