Araştırma Makalesi • Research Article (original) (raw)

An Eriksonian Reading of The Body by Hanif Kureishi: Integrity Versus Despair

Anemon Muş Alparslan Üniversitesi sosyal bilimler dergisi, 2023

The ageing body and old age issues are among the prominent concerns of Western civilization throughout 21st century. The body, as the new raw material of consumer society, is perceived as something that can be changed as a result of medical developments and even bought and sold like other commodities. Furthering the cause of this transformations Erik Erikson’s psychosocial theory which evokes the quintessence of social pressure on elder people may help to receive the complexity of the issue. In his theory, Erikson posits eight stages of development with specific tasks and crisis peculiar to each stage throughout the life span. This paper represents an attempt to examine Hanif Kureishi’s The Body novella within the framework of Eriksonian psychosocial theory of human development. Admittedly, Kureishi’s short fiction appears to be in the main dealt with ethnicity and identity matters that render the postcolonial approach. Yet, this study is significant in that it deals with the pressures of society, becoming increasingly severe against old people, on ageing, which points out the last stage of Erikson, integrity vs. despair. It also reveals that past experiences and personal desires affect someone’s psyche. Through The Body, the tie between society and individual, desires and realities, appearance and internal existence have been affirmed. It may be concluded when Hanif Kureishi’s The Body is evaluated within the framework of Erikson’s psychosocial development theory, the accuracy of the effects of socio-cultural factors on personality development has been determined.

The Body as a Private and Social Space. The Margins of Research Regarding Old Age and Gender

Qualitative Sociology Review

In the conditions of late modernity, the body is a project realized in both the public and private spheres. The aim of this article is to review theories and empirical studies concerning socio-cultural issues and the subjective determinants of perceptions of physicality. The body has become the main instrument of experiencing the world and oneself, a significant area, a key element of an individual’s identification strategy. The modern human speaks with and through the body, the person’s identity is reduced to self-presentation, by projecting their physicality, they project themselves. The presentation and reception of body is dominated by an aesthetic perspective, organically bound with the tendency to aestheticize daily life in general.The text is based on empirical data, analysis of 403 qualitative interviews conducted between 2012-2014 in Polish cities: Warsaw, Kielce, Chelmno, and Przemysl. The research shows that the emotional aspect of experiencing body, as well as the cognit...

Becoming Old. The Gendered Body and the Experience of Aging

Aging and Human Nature. Perspectives from Philosophical, Theological, and Historical Anthropology (Springer), 2020

It seems rather obvious that the experience of ageing is not indifferent to gender, and that studies of gender ought to account for ageing and old age. Yet, the two subject matters have been rarely investigated together. This is due to the tendency to reduce ageing (as well as its gendered aspects) either to supposedly biological necessities or to their social construction and restrictions. Notwithstanding, both ageing and gender are first and foremost bodily phenomena. Aging, as well as gender are dimensions we experience, incorporate and express through our bodies. The aim of the proposed paper is to bridge the gap between the biological and social approaches to ageing and gender with a phenomenological-anthropological approach. In this respect, I want to argue that the biological and the social are intertwined in human embodiment. The paper thus addresses ageing and gender neither as purely biological nor as merely discursive phenomena, but as phenomena of an embodied experience. Experience in this sense is necessarily situated, constituted by biological, material, historical and socio-cultural circumstances. As situated bodily beings, we not only have a first, but also a second nature: social norms are incorporated in the ways we habitually relate to the world, ourselves and others. While the process of ageing always confronts us with the finitude and materiality of our bodily being in general, with respect to gender and ageing, this means, as situated, specific circumstances and norms influence not only the way we think about ageing, but also the processes of becoming older and the experience of our aged bodies.

Old age – „how beautiful to be yourself”, Journal of Education Culture and Society No. 2_2011

In every given period one can observe different attitudes towards old age, death and the elderly, which are shown through varied stances and ideas about this specific period of human life. The reality of the XXI century often regarded as “vision-centric” is dominated by the cult of beauty and youth which creates increasingly demanding requirements, related mainly to the attractiveness of appearance, of the body – especially the one belonging to the elderly. The increase in the number of senior citizens compared to the rest of the society that can be witnessed nowadays leads to the elderly being a more carefully examined social group. Mediated by the media discourse the images of the elderly are becoming more common and therefore the author’s attempt at reconstructing the postmodern strategy of the rendering of late adulthood seems to be an interesting and important topic to consider. Key words: old age, elderly, body, advertisement, appearance, aestheticization. The renaissance of old age, up until now only a speculation, slowly yet surely becomes a fact. It can be argued that in some sense a “trend for old age” is arising. The concept of old age is the topic of many contemporary discussions focusing on its economic, social, cultural and demographic aspects. It is a field of study for both the scientists and the general public, in short, as Jean Pierre Bois stated – old age is a hot topic now – it is omnipresent (Bois 1996, p. 11). This phenomenon of the popularity of old age is not augmented by the qualitative change in the ageing discourse, on the contrary – it becomes a shameful and in a way problematic subject. It is treated as a disease or a punishment for lack of care of one’s body, it is pushed to the margin. The older years are a period of human life that is characterized by a lot of variety. Therefore in order to capture its meaning one needs to consider that it eludes any attempt at generalization while also keeping a keen eye on specificity of participation, description and presentation of it. Old age, despite being always present

Topical Issues of Object and Subject of Age-Related Psychology in Modern Ukrainian Reality

MODERN SCIENTIFIC INNOVATIONS IN PSYCHOLOGY, 2019

Successful development of scientific knowledge is stipulated by a clearly delineated area of research which is different from related fields and sciences. This statement is mainly related to those sciences that originated from one source and further on focused on similar issues, for example, psychic genesis. There are different aspects of this issue: anthropogenetic, orthogenetic, epigenetic, phylogenetic, ontogenetic and sociogenetic, while this study focuses on ontogenesis. Considering origin and establishment of human mental functions in ontogenesis, in Ukraine these issues are studied by experts in developmental psychology. In our country this field of science is also called genetic psychology though it has nothing to do with identification of the role of genotype and environment in formation of individual psychic peculiarities. Impairments of mental and physical development (disontogenesis), especially in childhood, are studied by special psychology. Age as a unit of analysis appeared in the focus of attention after the publication of L. Vygotsky's work "The Problem of Age", which was written in the 1930s, though it was published 50 years later, to be exact, in 1984 1. After reading this work one can differentiate between the fields of interest of two closely related areas: developmental psychology and age-related psychology. The former studies the genesis of psychic in the whole diversity of this process in ontogenesis, while the latter focuses on peculiarities and regularities of age-related dynamics of psychic in ontogenesis. What will such differentiation of fields mean from the scientific point of view? First of all, it will enable us to come closer to the crucial solution of the issue about age-related norm of mental development. What is meant is the correct approach to this issue taking into account the fact that the age of a person is the function of both biological and historical time. Thus, there are different dimensions of age: passport, biological, social, cultural

'Humans Unhumans'. Ageing, Dying and the Body Nostalgic in Kazuo Ishiguro and Hanif Kureishi

In one of his Treatises on Government, John Locke stated that «every Man has a Property in his own Person» 1 . The complex articulation of this apparently matterof-fact argument has haunted the Western cultural imaginary, and has been transformed into numerous literary texts and figures. Ever since Mary Shelley started investigating an ante-litteram Foucauldian «unfolding» 2 of life, the issues related to the «immortalization of the flesh and the amortization of the body» 3 have become growingly relevant. In this paper, I shall aim at investigating the literary versions of the biopolitics of owning and disowning bodies, of ageing and dying offered by Kazuo Ishiguro, namely in his celebrated Never Let Me Go, and by Hanif Kureishi, who dedicated his novella "The Body" to an interrogation of the marketable value of human bodies and body parts. … death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process. Friedrich Engels, Socialism:

‘Human Unhumans’. Ageing, Dying and the Body Nostalgic in Kazuo Ishiguro and Hanif Kureishi

2014

In one of his Treatises on Government , John Locke stated that «every Man has a Property in his own Person». The complex articulation of this apparently matter-of-fact argument has haunted the Western cultural imaginary, and has been transformed into numerous literary texts and figures. Ever since Mary Shelley started investigating an ante-litteram Foucauldian «unfolding» of life, the issues related to the «immortalization of the flesh and the amortization of the body» have become growingly relevant. In this paper, I shall aim at investigating the literary versions of the biopolitics of owning and disowning bodies, of ageing and dying offered by Kazuo Ishiguro, namely in his celebrated Never Let Me Go , and by Hanif Kureishi, who dedicated his novella “The Body” to an interrogation of the marketable value of human bodies and body parts.

Contributions of Vygotsky's cultural historical theory to thinking about aging (Atena Editora)

Contributions of Vygotsky's cultural historical theory to thinking about aging (Atena Editora), 2023

This paper is part of a doctoral study whose context of observation was a group of elderly women participating in an Open University for the Third Age (UATI). Immersed in this experience we found contradictions between our perceptions, which revealed the dynamism and complexity of those elderly women and the scientific/academic discourse based on the perspective of a naturalized aging, with a certain predestination to sameness and to losses resulting from organic deterioration. It was in Vygotski's historical and cultural perspective that we found support to substantiate the perception that the aging process is part of the uninterrupted flow of humanization, because it is given over to what is lived, to relationships and affections, which are not a privilege of a specific age, but unfold throughout life. This way, the objective of this work was to establish approximations between the Vygotskian theory and aging. To this end, we separated the text into four units of meaning from which we made our considerations, namely: the issue of age; the social situation of development; the phenomenon of perezhivanie and the group context. We conclude that, when the look is for the construction of creative and potent forms of existence in old age, the cultural historical approach provides valuable contributions, for it makes it possible to think of aging in the uninterrupted course of human development and helps the understanding of groups of elderly people as privileged spaces for transformation.