Browsing by Subject "Identity (Psychology) in literature"
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Item Deceit, disguise, and identity in Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares(2009-05) Schmitz, Ryan Thomas, 1975-; Reed, Cory A.One of the most salient characteristics of Cervantes's literary production is his fascination, one might even say his obsession, with the human capacity for transformation. Nearly all of his plays, novellas, and novels feature characters that adopt alternative identities and disguise or dissimulate their true, original selves. The Novelas ejemplares (1613) encompass a veritable cornucopia of characters that pass themselves off as another. There are women who pass as men, Christians as Turks, Catholics as Protestants, and noblemen as gypsies, among many others. Identity, or at least its appearance, is represented as fluid and malleable. By creatively controlling the signs that they project in public, the characters of the novellas demonstrate a remarkable ability to adapt to innumerable contingencies. Similarly, subjects of the Spanish empire, driven particularly by ethno-religious and socio-economic motives, utilized craft and guile to conceal their identity or simulate another. On a theoretical level, both in Spain and throughout Europe, intellectuals explored the human capacity for transformation, and there emerged a new sense of interiority. As Stephen Greenblatt observes, in the Renaissance, "there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process" (2). In this study I examine the abundance of deceit and disguise in Cervantes's collection of twelve novellas within the work's sociohistorical context. Specifically, I analyze how the novellas are embedded in two particular threads of cultural discourse on human identity: Spanish social history and early modern European intellectual history.Item Fluidities of gender in Ezra Pound(Texas Tech University, 1999-05) Jang, Geun YoungThis study of Ezra Pound explores the locus of the fluidities in his poetic writings through the lenses of gender and sexuality Rather than fixed categories of the feminine or the masculine, I attempt to find the locus of the blurring of gender in Pound's poetry and poetics, and this blurring appears to be an ambivalence or ambiguity Chapter I introduces the fluidities into a critical tradition of Pound that considers him contradictory. I argue that his gender representation is fluid, somewhat ambiguous or ambivalent, in that he appropriates and deploys the feminine fluidities. In Chapter II, I argue that Pound's transition from soft to hard, rather than a real transition or eventual evolution, is an oscillation between the binaries of soft/hard, fluid/solid, feminine/masculine, 3.nd yin/yang. In the first section of Chapter III, psychoanalysis is presented as about the unconscious, sexuality, and, above all, the body which has been repressed, and the second section mainly discusses Pound's fluid experiments with gender (his use of personae) in terms of English and French feminist approaches In the first section of Chapter VI, I broadly explore androgyny in the modernist period, in order to discern and confirm the fluidities of gender in Pound, and these fluidities are examined in Pound's poetics, economics, and politics in the second section Chapter V is about his connection of the feminine with the Orient, seeing Pound's objectification of the feminine and Oriental Other as a paradoxical combination of absence and excess Pound's anti-Semitism is also explained as a mother sacrifice in terms of Kristeva's notion of the abject and Freud's totem Yet, as several critics note, this nothing and excess belong, rather than to the feminine or the Orient, to Pound, because he presents his own ambivalence and ambiguity through these mirrors of the Other. Chapter VI is about gender issues in Pound's scientism, the interrelated mechanisms of science and poetics in the vortex, the ideogram, and Pound's mysticism In Chapter VQ, citing Irigaray's notion of fluids, I conclude that Pound's appropriation of the fluidities results in his own nothing/excess, because these fluidities blur the boundaries of fixed categories such as poetics, economics, and politics. This blurring and transgression ultimately create his own marginalization and victimage.Item Metamorphosis and the emergence of the feminine: a motif of "Difference" in recent feminist quest fiction(Texas Tech University, 1997-05) Allen, Paula J. SmithThe feminine quest has lately been identified and defined to some extent by feminist scholars who have attempted to differentiate its elements from those of the quest of the masculine hero. This differentiation suggests that there is a tme archetype of the questing hero(ine) that lurks behind the mythological figures previously identified in literature by stmcturalist scholars. The tme archetype would be one that would be equally relevant to both the male and female quest, neither a hero nor a heroine, but a figure in which the two are indistinguishable. It is tme that such a figure cannot exist as long as culture so strongly identifies the nature of a human being with his sexual identification. Because roles are assigned by gender, the imagery of the male and female quests differ from one another. The part of each individual, a self, that is neither male nor female is, therefore, not acknowledged. The implication of the differentiafion in roles in the images that represent archetypes is that the casting of the "type" is informed by a culture that fails to define a part of itself The stories examined in this volume are attempts by their authors to create an image of this part of themselves that culture has suppressed. Because language is the clay that culture uses to create its forms, these stories are invariably reflexive. These authors borrow images and patterns familiar to westem culture and re-invest them with meaning pertinent to the feminine consciousness. Their stories, then, are a re-creation of the human experience. The quest heroine's return is determined by her ability to remake her world to sustain herself and those like her. It is this retum that is questioned most by feminist writers and critics of this century, and that deliberation is the organizing principle of this study.Item "Something more than fantasy": fathering postcolonial identities through Shakespeare(2005) Waddington, George Roland; Friedman, Alan Warren; Mallin, Eric Scott