Olamina's Hyperempathy Syndrome: Gender, Sexuality, Religion, Politics and Afrofuturism in Octavia Butler's Parables (original) (raw)
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"A More Realistic View:" Reimagining Sympoietic Practice in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series
Extrapolation, 2020
In this essay, I contend hyperempathy syndrome constitutes a kind of new materialism avant la lettre, prefiguring problems we are perhaps only now in a position to address academically. In other words, if both current scientific and philosophical conceptions of life attest that beings are always already co-constituted by their surroundings, we can no longer rely on a model of subjectivity and personhood that presupposes clear, bounded individuation. Before the popularization of affect theory and new materialism, Octavia E. Butler’s hyperempathy—a condition causing possessors to have an embodied response to visual perception of others’ emotions—provides a speculation on the consequences of the felt, interconnectivity of beings that “sympoiesis” characterizes. Against assumptions that interconnectivity necessarily precipitates more ethical modes of being in the world, Butler challenges static claims about shared substance and experience by providing a more complex depiction of what it means to feel as others do. I argue that Butler’s presentation of hyperempathy demonstrates that sharing experience is not a panacea for human and non-human relations but a restaging of the politics of identification and institutional power on another dimension.
(VULNER)ABILITY: AN ANALYSIS OF WOMEN IN PAULA HAWKINS'S NOVELS
Clepsydra, 2019
The notion of vulnerability has been applied to diverse areas of knowledge, particularly in the last years. However, its denotation has been traditionally attached to negative ideas, such as weakness, passivity or susceptibility to abuse, which results in the victimisation of vulnerable subjects. In this article I aim to reorient the notion of vulnerability, understanding it as a permeable and dynamic term that facilitates the ethical encounter among individuals and that helps vulnerable subjects to regain agency. With this approach, two very popular novels are analysed: Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train (2015), and Into the Water (2017). Drawing from Judith Butler's notion of the epistemological frames and Emmanuel Levinas's ethical encounter, the female leading characters of the novels are analysed. In this way, a reflection on the current ways of exploiting women's vulnerability in contemporary west societies is provided. This leads to conclude that vulnerability can be used as a tool of resistance against patriarchal customs. Resumen El término de vulnerabilidad se ha aplicado a diversas áreas de conocimiento, especialmente en los últimos años. Sin embargo, su definición se ha relacionado tradicionalmente con ideas negativas como la debilidad, la pasividad o la susceptibilidad al abuso, que dan como resultado la victimización de los sujetos vulnerables. En este artículo se pretende reorientar la noción de vulnerabilidad, entendiéndola como un término permeable y dinámico, que facilita la aproximación ética entre individuos y ayuda a los grupos vulnerables a recuperar y aplicar su voluntad. Con esta aproximación, en este artículo se analizan dos obras muy populares de Paula Hawkins: La chica del tren (2015) y Escrito en el agua (2017). Partiendo del concepto de los marcos epistemológicos de Judith Butler y de la aproximación ética de Emmanuel Lévinas, se analizan los personajes principales femeninos de las obras. Así se reflexiona sobre la forma en la que se explota la vulnerabilidad de la mujer en sociedades occidentales actuales y se concluye que la vulnerabilidad puede usarse como herramienta de resistencia ante prácticas patriarcales.
Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus
Women: A Cultural Review, 2017
Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.
Društvene i humanističke studije, 2023
This paper explores the portrayal of violence and gender in its relation to different historical periods, countries, cultures, and religions. The aim is to determine the role these different aspects have in forming of characters' identities and more specifically how it is all related to gender. The research will focus on Toni Morrison's A Mercy, Elena Ferrante's Tetralogy My Brilliant Friend, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus. All three novels, regardless of the different periods they fictionalize and discuss, and the literature they belong to, are connected by the captivating darkness that runs deeply through their fictional fiber and portrays the horrible conditions and struggles women have to go through because of the violence they were succumbed to, but also the violence they have to resort to to survive and even thrive in the everchanging, but always firmly men's world. Morrison's novel is set in the early stages of the slave trade in America when racial, religious, and class tensions were just beginning to form, Ferrante's tetralogy focuses on the post-WWII Italy, poverty-stricken and violent neighborhoods of the outskirts of Naples, and Purple Hibiscus is set in postcolonial Nigeria, a country struggling with political instability and economic difficulties. All three authors with their respective novels render vibrant pictures of the lives of young girls and grown women, mothers, daughters, and friends, across times, countries, but also classes, that offer plenty of space for comparative research focusing on the presence and role of violence in their lives.
Zadie Smith’s NW : Unsettling the Promise of Empathy
Contemporary Literature, 2017
A t the end of her essay "Middlemarch and Everybody," Zadie Smith praises George Eliot as a novelist who "was on the border of the New," pointing to her aesthetic legacy: "What twenty-first-century novelists inherit from Eliot," Smith argues, "is the radical freedom to push the novel's form to its limits" (41). Smith's novel NW (2012) takes up this inheritance, pushing form to create "a highly experimental, revisionary late modernist novel" (Knepper 112), while still adhering to the realist commitment to reflect-accurately and convincinglythe reality of "ordinary human life" (to use Eliot's terms). 1 This formal challenge, I argue, is also an ethical one. NW confronts and reexplores the prominent value associated with the realist novel as a genre, and with George Eliot's novels in particular-empathy. NW's formal experimentation serves to question the promise of empathy, both as a social mechanism that can create solidarity and help vulnerable underclasses, and as an aesthetic mechanism that makes novel reading an ethical practice. Empathy, or what Victorian novelists like Eliot refer to as fellow-feeling or sympathy, is the human faculty of feeling with others through imaginative transference: it is a process whereby a person emotionally places him-or herself into a situation experienced by a fellow human being, thus mentally sharing an aspect of the other 5. The socioeconomic critique embedded in NW is widely recognized. Both David Marcus and Alexander Beaumont read NW as a critique of capitalist freedom. Beaumont claims that in NW "freedom takes the form of an ideological delusion" (202-3). I argue that the novel undermines not only the neoliberal promise of freedom, but also its promise of empathy-both as a social and as an aesthetic mechanism. 6. On this debate in relation to narrative empathy see my co-authored article, Amiel Houser and Mendelson-Maoz.
Psychopathic Character-Types in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
IBADAN JOURNAL OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES (Volume 30) , 2020
Several existing studies on Chimamanda Adichie's writings have privileged colonialism and religious indoctrination as the bane of the life of characters in Purple Hibiscus. This study recognises these as defining elements of being African. It examines the dominant portraits of psychopathic character-types prevalent in Purple Hibiscus owing to the types of characters portrayed in the novel, by taking its bearing from Sigmund Freud's work on psychopathic characters and character-types in literature. This aspect of Freudian psychoanalysis establishes the link between psychology, psychotherapy and literature. It engages Adichie's character-types using aspects of Freud's literature-derived psychoanalytic models: the exceptions, the success wrecked and the haunted to provide the basis for the psychoanalytical interpretation of Eugene's misconstrued neurosis. Eugene's undiagnosed state traumatises members of his family who seek alternative therapeutic measures: from the washing of figurines to silences and poisoning. This conscious reading of these psychopathic characters portray suppressed mental health issues that bedevils highly placed individuals whose psychological states remain undiagnosed on account of their utopian identity and status. Keywords: Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis, Psychopathic CharacterTypes, Chimamanda Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
Religious and Secular powers have for centuries been contentious issues that affect the lives of human beings either positively or negatively depending on human responses to them. Literature abounds with characters who have responded in various ways to the dictates of religious and secular institutions. While some characters have learnt from and achieved a better understanding of human existence in their religious and secular interactions, others have been destroyed by such adherence. Of particular interest are fanatics, religious or traditional, and what happens to them and the societies to which they belong. The interest in the consequences of fanaticism or wrong emphasis have spurred this writer into an analysis of Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Mariama Ba's So long a Letter, from the perspective of the impact that religious and traditional values have on the individual psyche. One discovers that the two writers proffer a warning that excessive adherence, rather than enhance progress can bring about chaos and the destruction of individual psyche and societal harmony. INTRODUCTION In our layman's understanding, a hero is a man of exceptional qualities who wins our admiration through noble and selfless deeds, especially of courage. In Literature, a hero or heroine is conceived of as the male or female character of a play or a novel around whom the action revolves and in whose fate we the audience or reader's get sympathetically involved and/or identify with.