SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1353/sub.2022.0027
R. Savarese
{"title":"The Neuroscientist’s Memoir: Dramatic Irony and Disorders of Consciousness","authors":"R. Savarese","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores new technologies of communication, mischievously suggesting that an ordinary memoir, on some fundamental level, is no different from what occurred with a young woman in a persistent vegetative state who “willfully modulated [her] brain activity.” If, as Elaine Scarry famously suggested, readers produce mental imagery “under the instruction of a writer,” then thinking about the role of alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) in providing such instruction might help us to think through the relationship between cognition and generic innovation while, importantly, making room for neurodivergent writers. When George Perec wrote The Void without using the letter “e,” he imposed a restriction that could be said to work a bit like a “tennis-yes, navigation-no” protocol. In Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, the blind writer Stephen Kuusisto reinvents travel writing by having hearing and touch take the lead. Narrative itself ends up being transformed. This essay explores how disability puts pressure on the procedures of conventional narrative.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"54 - 70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41995041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1353/sub.2022.0031
Casey Schoenberger
{"title":"The Smell of Inner Beauty in Ancient China","authors":"Casey Schoenberger","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Qu Yuan (c. 340–278 BC) is often called “the first Chinese poet,” because the primary work attributed to him, Li sao (“Sublimating Sorrow”), is the first in the tradition to evoke a distinctive persona engaged in self-reflection and personal narrative. To explain why this story of frustrated political ambition became arguably the first instance of Chinese autobiography or life writing, this paper uses the notion of “biological handicap,” proposed by Amotz Zahavi. As a peacock’s cumbersome tail feathers reduce its individual chances of survival but communicate valuable information to potential mates, the Li Sao’s poetic persona uses images its audience understood as external marks of invisible, spiritual potency, like long eyebrows and fragrant adornments, to evoke unfulfilled political potential, resulting in an early model of literary interiority.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"132 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47243384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1353/sub.2022.0021
Diana Mistreanu
{"title":"La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François Vernay (review)","authors":"Diana Mistreanu","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"151 - 155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45028021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1353/sub.2022.0026
Andrew Elfenbein
{"title":"Life Writing, Identity, and the Classroom: Perspectives from Social and Educational Psychology","authors":"Andrew Elfenbein","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The attractiveness of life writings stems from its promise of exceptional intimacy with a writer. Yet that intimacy can come at a cost, especially in relation to writers from marginalized backgrounds. As many of them have noted, they can feel expected to produce vulnerable versions of themselves on the page for the vicarious satisfaction of white audiences. Such satisfactions can become especially problematic in the classroom when life writing by one author is allowed to stand for the experience of an entire social group. This article details strategies for de-essentializing the use of life writing in the classroom by underscoring the complexities both of race and of the classroom reading experience.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"35 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42632903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1353/sub.2022.0029
Lisa Zunshine
{"title":"How Memories Become Literature","authors":"Lisa Zunshine","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes, as its starting point, embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several manuscripts of Christa Wolf’s autobiographical novel, Patterns of Childhood (Kindheitsmuster, 1976), available at the Berlin Academy of Arts. The author shows that later versions of Patterns of Childhood have more complex embedments in the chapter describing the adolescent protagonist’s relationship with her schoolteacher. This textual development is integral to the process whereby the presumably authentic memories of the past are constructed to fit the present needs of the person who is doing the remembering. Accompanying the three case studies of the manuscript revision is a discussion of theoretical and practical implications of this “cognitive-archival” approach to literature.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"114 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41602527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1353/sub.2022.0030
Laura Otis
{"title":"The Role of Multimodal Imagery in Life Writing","authors":"Laura Otis","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0030","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Life writers describe extraordinary experiences that often extend far beyond the everyday lives of the readers they are trying to reach. How memoirists try to bring their pasts alive in readers’ minds goes to the heart of why they write. Moving readers emotionally requires close engagement that can often be achieved through sensory simulation. As psychologists such as Lawrence Barsalou and literary scholars such as G. Gabrielle Starr have shown, fiction-writers and poets involve their readers by encouraging them to recreate their own past bodily sensations, especially multi-modal sensations (such as vision and touch) that blend as in lived experience. In this study of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive, I will examine how two gifted memoirists encourage readers to imagine in several sensory modalities at once. Through expert use of language, Bauby and Trethewey open their experiences to a wide range of readers to share the most acute human joys and sufferings.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"115 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44533008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1353/sub.2022.0025
R. Charon
{"title":"Writing our Lives to Live Them: The Cognitive Forms of a Narrative Medicine","authors":"R. Charon","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Life-writing combines, collates, or colludes many lives into one text. No work of fiction, biography, poetry, drama, memoir, journaling, blogging, or autobiography—all of them life-writing—does not do this, either blatantly or surreptitiously. I am interested in forms in which authors do not own up to writing about themselves under the cover of writing about another. This essay will focus on the implications of this generic collusion in writing in health care. Health care professionals are given space within their professional journals to write personal essays about their work. Typically, these essays include a patient portrait or vignette as a means to probe some aspect of clinical practice. Some, not all, of these journals provide guidelines for protecting the privacy/confidentiality of patients described in the essay, including instructions for how to “fictionalize” patients or families to render them non-identifiable, even to themselves. A clinician-author may adopt this genre to illuminate a moment in practice that bears reflection and provides insight into the world of care. Often, however, the essay’s tenor is the author, and the patient is pressed into service as but the vehicle for that examination. The genre may be adopted to confess an error, to lament a woe (generalizable to all readers), to critique the actions of colleagues or patients, or to boast of a successful clinical intervention. Perhaps these essays are all, or should all, be co-authored “duets” by patient and clinician.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"15 - 34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46429792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2022-08-20DOI: 10.1353/sub.2022.0018
Jun-xia Feng
{"title":"Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity ed. by Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns, and Mark Sprevak (review)","authors":"Jun-xia Feng","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"109 - 114"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48675117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}