Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1985"

Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis

Abstract: This volume is the first clear and comprehensive critical analysis of Jacques Lacan's thought for the English-speaking world. With Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of Psychoanalysis Ellie Ragland-Sullivan not only fills that gap but also provides the foundation upon which all future studies of Lacan must build. Working principally from the legendary but seldom-analyzed Seminars, Ragland-Sullivan clarifies and synthesizes Lacan's major concepts. Using empirical data as well as Lacan's texts, she demonstrates how Lacan's teachings constitute a new epistemology that goes far beyond conventional thinking in psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics.

“Imaginary gardens with real toads”: Reading and drama in education

Abstract: (1985). “Imaginary gardens with real toads”: Reading and drama in education. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 24, Educating Through Drama, pp. 193-198.

Lacan et la philosophie

Abstract: This review article examines certain of the assumptions that inform Juranville's philosophical reading of Lacan and demonstrates that, whilst his foregrounding of phenomenology is an important contribution to Lacanian studies in that it suggests that Lacan's reference to linguistics may have been overstated and that it is more productive to read his work as a more general reflection on language and signification, it depends ultimately upon the unfounded assumption that Lacan's discourse is a system to be read purely in terms of its self-development or synchrony. It is further argued that Lacan's relationship with philosophy is more ambiguous than the author suggests and that Juranville's vision of the philosophical field requires a certain problematization

L'empire des Bacwezi. La construction d'un imaginaire géopolitique

Abstract: The Empire of the Bacwezi : the Construction of an Imaginary Geopolitics ; ; According to contemporary historiography the kingdoms of the great lakes of East Africa are to be derived from the former empire of the Kitara governed by the Bacwezi dynasty. A careful rereading of the written oral and archeological sources enables this interpretation to be called into question. The legendary cycle of the Bacwezi, kept up notably by the initiation cult of the Kunbandwa which was common to all the cultures of the region, gave rise to the ethnic and racial hypotheses of the first European explorers and was utilized by local ruling groups who felt themselves victims of the political transformations of the 19th century (particularly in the former State of the Bunyoro). The archeological proofs equally appear as questionable extrapolations. The history of this "empire" is that of the construction of an imaginary political space within an African culture.

A child's imaginary companion: A transitional self

Abstract: The article explores the use of the imaginary companion by normal children, two to five years of age. Some existing literature on the imaginary companion is reviewed. Three case presentations demonstrate the use of the imaginary companion and its effect on ego development.

Brecht and Rhetoric

Abstract: IN A notorious comment, J. L. Austin once wrote that "a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on stage."' Perhaps Austin only ever attended amateur theatricals. Bertolt Brecht approved of amateur acting, since the occasional flatness and hollowness of its utterances seemed to him an unwitting form of alienation effect. For Brecht, the whole point of acting was that it should be in a peculiar sense hollow or void. Alienated acting hollows out the imaginary plenitude of everyday actions, deconstructing them into their social determinants and inscribing within them the conditions of their making. The "void" of alienated acting is a kind of Derridean "spacing," rendering a piece of stage business exterior to itself, sliding a hiatus between actor and action and thus, it is hoped, dismantling the ideological self-identity of our routine social behavior. In "What Is Epic Theatre?" Walter Benjamin remarked that the actor "must be able to space his gestures as the compositor produces spaced type."2 The dramatic gesture, by miming routine behavior in contrivedly hollow ways, represents it in all its lack, in its suppression of material conditions and historical possibilities, and thus represents an absence which it at the same time produces. What the stage action represents is the routine action as differenced through the former's nonself-identity, which nevertheless remains self-identical-recognizable-enough to do all this representing rather than merely to "reflect" a "given" nonidentity in the world. A certain structure of presence must, in other words, be preserved: "verisimilitude" between stage and society can be disrupted only if it is posited. Brecht was particularly keen on encouraging his actors to observe and reproduce actions precisely, for without such an element of presence and recognition the absencing of the alienation effect would be nonproductively rather than productively empty. The internal structure of the effect is one of presence and absence together, or rather a problematic contention of the two in which the distinction between "representation" and "nonrepresentation" is itself thrown into question. The stage action must be self-identical enough to represent as nonself-identical an apparently self-identical world, but in that very act puts its own self-identity into question.

12 Edmondstone Street

Abstract: First published in 1985, this book combines autobiography with a sense of the ways in which the objects with which we surround ourselves, and the places in which we live, build our private maps of reality and shape our personal mythologies. By the author of "An Imaginary Life" and "Antipodes".

History, the Feminist Discourse, and Alice Walker's The Third Life Of Grange Copeland

Abstract: Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland was published in 1970 during the midst of the Seventies feminist movement in America. As a feminist text, The Third Life reproduces and reinforces many feminist values, codes, conventions, and myths. It produces a feminist narrative which invents what Frederic Jameson calls imaginary "formal resolutions" to "unsolvable social contradictions" in the social real.'

Illusion et désillusion dans l'Émigré de Sénac de Meilhan

Abstract: Francois Laforge : Illusion and disillusion in Senac de Meilhan's «L'Emigre ». ; L'Emigre, which dates from the same period as Bonald's and J. de Maistre's theoretical texts, is part of a general critical reflexion on the Enlightenment and the Revolution. The choice of a fictional form reflects Senac's two-fold ideological aim. He wished, first, to show the Enlightenment's true character, which was illusion and the imaginary, and which made the novel the perfect instrument for a rigorous critique of the ' enlightened ' aristocracy's different myths. Secondly, he wanted to exorcise contemporary history, by denying the Revolution any reality. Here again, as the Revolution is no longer part of reality but of fiction, the only appropriate form is that of the novel.

Cynthia Ozick's Book of Creation: "Puttermesser and Xanthippe"

Abstract: We live in times that valorize experimental ingenuity over traditional vision. Because the experimental repudiates convention and employs alternative forms, it is proclaimed unprecedented and, therefore, innovative. In her recent collection of essays, Art and Ardor, Cynthia Ozick argues powerfully against the formlessness of experimental fiction, its absence of seriousness, its want of interest, its dearth of intelligence, its failure of mastery; and she maintains that the two lines of experimentation and innovation are asymptotes, and can never meet. Her essay, "Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means," redefines the innovative: "The innovative imagines something we have never experienced before . .. sets out to educate its readers in its views about what it means to be a human being ... [and] has as its motivation the extension of humanity."' All that Ozick avers in her essay is transmuted into Puttermesser and Xanthippe, where the reader enters a world never experienced before and emerges aware of what it means to be a human being; Puttermesser and Xanthippe is a complex, witty, and moving depiction of consuming intellectual passion, burgeoning self-discovery, and the veneration of artistic perfection. Puttermesser and Xanthippe evolves from "Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife," a short story that introduces Ruth Puttermesser, lays the groundwork for her further development, and glimpses the direction of Puttermesser and Xanthippe. In "Puttermesser: Her Work History," we discover that Puttermesser, who is "something of a feminist," has created an imaginary relative, an Uncle Zindel, in an effort to "claim an ancestor" and because, as

The linguistic unconscious of Jacques Lacan.

Abstract: In a style notorious for its hermetic obscurity, Jacques Lacan has articulated a radical discourse based upon his reading of the primary Freudian texts. What appears more radical than his own polemics is Lacan's observation that what was most original and most important in Freud has remained ignored and denied ever since its discovery. Lacan's appeal to psychoanalysts is to return to Freud, reread his works, and rediscover what has been left out in current interpretations of psychoanalytic theory. In so doing, Lacan tenders, one cannot help but be struck with the singular importance and significance that Freud accorded his discovery of the unconscious. Given the current climate of psychoanalytic theorizing characterized by discussions of pre-Oedipal object relations and self-object transferences, Lacan's return to the unconscious may seem to be a step backward. After all, Freud himself supplanted the topographical theory with the structural theory, relegating the unconscious to a secondary characteristic of id-egosuperego functioning. Yet, it is known that even at the end of his life, Freud regarded the unconscious as his most important discovery, one that is critical to psychoanalytic theory and practice. Lacan contends that the significance of this discovery has become denatured and disavowed because of the distressing implications inherent in a full acceptance of its truth. Instead, analysts have focused on the ego as an agent of mastery and have emphasized adaptation as its goal. Such a conception of the ego is imaginary, according to Lacan, and serves only to foster the illusion of individual autonomy (2). Lacan's approach to the Freudian unconscious emphasizes its linguistic dimensions. Although Freud never explicitly described the unconscious as

Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis

Abstract: Thank you for downloading boxen the imaginary world of the young cs lewis. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have look hundreds times for their chosen novels like this boxen the imaginary world of the young cs lewis, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they cope with some infectious virus inside their desktop computer.

Oral History and the Boundaries of Fiction

Abstract: I FLINCHED when I saw it. Never before had the contents of The Public Historian prompted such a visceral reaction. But there it was, undeniably, on pages 38 and 39 of the Winter 1984 issue of this quarterly journal.1 The right-hand page boldly heralded an essay by John E. Wills, Jr., entitled "Taking Historical Novels Seriously." Facing from the left-hand page was a photograph illustrating three books all bedecked with dust-jacket costumes, all propped atop a horizontal copy of An Explanation of World History, the massive tome by William L. Langer, Jr. The visual message was unmistakable: these historical novels can elucidate aspects of mankind's diverse adventures through time. I had no quarrel with two of these books, Ole E. Rolvaag's saga of Norwegian-American pioneers in the austere Dakota Territory, Giants in the Earth, and James Clavell's epic of Japan, Sh6gun. But the third was Alex Haley's Roots. For this oral historian the juxtaposition was unnerving. Roots is historical fiction? Others classify it as oral history. Is oral history fiction? The implications were hardly comforting. Actually, Wills has little to say about Roots beyond acknowledging it "owed its appeal both to its link to an actual family story and to Haley's skill in developing imaginary situations and dialogue that went well beyond his family traditions." Wills is harsher with the televised version of Roots: "It would be easy to carp at the latter, with its idyllic West Africa, its Hollywood-style romanticization of relations among slaves, and its omission of so much of the information that enriches the book." Nonetheless, he concedes that "in the extraordinary performances of its black actors and in the reaching and moving of huge numbers of people who don't read books at all, it went far beyond the book as a national political and moral event."2

Aspects of the Intellectual Context of Pater's 'Imaginary Portraits'

Abstract: There is no denying the importance of the 'imaginary portrait' as a technique, or preoccupation, in appreciating Pater's intention and achievement. The term covers somewhat disparate material drawn from Pater's career after 1878: the clearly semi-autobiographical 'The Child in the House', Marius the Epicurean, the evocations or short stories of Imaginary Portraits, the part historical reconstruction, part fiction of 'Hippolytus Veiled'. Critics have, perhaps a little too readily, found enough coherence and common purpose in these works to warrant a general classification. The resulting 'imaginary portraits' have been, broadly, subject to two kinds of attention. Scholars have seen them as in varying ways autobiographical or, alternatively, have explored themes, images, and dramatic patterns within them. Gerald Monsman's Freudian and structuralist account, identifying the portraits' inspiration in Pater's 'dreaded yet desired separation from parental dominance' and U. C. Knoepflmacher's study of Marius the Epicurean are recent examples of the two approaches.' Both the psychological and the thematic frames of reference are valuable means of rescuing Pater from the charge of intellectual and emotional confusion brought, for example, in Eliot's well-known essay.2 However, both methods have their dangers. The critic who explores the metamorphosis of the unconscious materials of literary art into conscious image and symbol may fall into unwarranted speculations and assertions, as Monsman seems to do (even if one wholly accepts Freudianism, there are insuperable difficulties in the 'diagnosis' of a long-dead subject). The problem with discovering themes and patterns is that they may become formulaic and restrictive, offering emblems rather than aeteologies. It might be useful to approach Imaginary Portraits, not by psychological speculation or the arrangement of mythic patterns but by investigating the traces in them of submerged controversial intention (I will omit 'Denys l'Auxerrois', where Pater's treatment of his source material is less interesting than in the other three portraits). The early notion of Pater, based largely on

Yarim-Lim's War Declaration

Abstract: Professor Sasson offers his attentions to Tablet A.1314 from Room 115 of the palace at Mari. Is it a declaration of war or an imaginary political drama?

Advertising in France: mirror of society or distorted image?

Abstract: Advertising doesn't simply reflect the real world as we experience it: the world portrayed in advertisements moves on a day-dream level, which implies a dissatisfaction with the real world expressed through imaginary representations of the future as it might be: a Utopia (1).