A. C. Spearing
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780198187240
- eISBN:
- 9780191719035
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187240.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This chapter examines the subjectivization of narrative in two Middle English romances. King Horn is largely narratorless; subjectivizing material includes statements of characters’ thought and ...
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This chapter examines the subjectivization of narrative in two Middle English romances. King Horn is largely narratorless; subjectivizing material includes statements of characters’ thought and feeling, explanations of motive, and emotional evaluation, but no individualization of a textual narrator. Synecdoche, equivalent to cinematic close-up, is a predominant figure. Like cinematic narrative, that of Horn is subjectivized yet impersonal. Havelok has an intermittent narratorial ‘I’ occupying space outside the story, enacting various roles, and intervening especially at transitional moments to convey partisan responses. Havelok claims historicity, yet often using free indirect style imagines its characters’ inner lives empathetically, and at one point even defines empathy.Less
This chapter examines the subjectivization of narrative in two Middle English romances. King Horn is largely narratorless; subjectivizing material includes statements of characters’ thought and feeling, explanations of motive, and emotional evaluation, but no individualization of a textual narrator. Synecdoche, equivalent to cinematic close-up, is a predominant figure. Like cinematic narrative, that of Horn is subjectivized yet impersonal. Havelok has an intermittent narratorial ‘I’ occupying space outside the story, enacting various roles, and intervening especially at transitional moments to convey partisan responses. Havelok claims historicity, yet often using free indirect style imagines its characters’ inner lives empathetically, and at one point even defines empathy.
A. C. Spearing
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780198187240
- eISBN:
- 9780191719035
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187240.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This chapter begins from Kittredge’s exposition of the ‘dramatic principle’ in the Canterbury Tales, a work which apparently provides justification for understanding narrative as spoken in a ...
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This chapter begins from Kittredge’s exposition of the ‘dramatic principle’ in the Canterbury Tales, a work which apparently provides justification for understanding narrative as spoken in a fictional narrator’s ‘voice’. Analysis of its critical history shows that dislike of the Man of Law’s Tale has encouraged readings that displace blame for supposed deficiencies on to its teller. Recent interpretation, while subtler, continues the arbitrary separation of this major poem from its author and anachronistically attributes modern critics’ prejudices to Chaucer. It is argued that Chaucer, just beginning to explore narrative voicing, did not anticipate the dramatic monologue. Detailed stylistic analysis of the tale reveals the impossibility of distinguishing subjectivization from narrative substance, and of referring it to the consciousness of an individual teller. The chapter ends by noting in the tale a disturbed questioning that is obscured by unhistorical ‘dramatic’ interpretations.Less
This chapter begins from Kittredge’s exposition of the ‘dramatic principle’ in the Canterbury Tales, a work which apparently provides justification for understanding narrative as spoken in a fictional narrator’s ‘voice’. Analysis of its critical history shows that dislike of the Man of Law’s Tale has encouraged readings that displace blame for supposed deficiencies on to its teller. Recent interpretation, while subtler, continues the arbitrary separation of this major poem from its author and anachronistically attributes modern critics’ prejudices to Chaucer. It is argued that Chaucer, just beginning to explore narrative voicing, did not anticipate the dramatic monologue. Detailed stylistic analysis of the tale reveals the impossibility of distinguishing subjectivization from narrative substance, and of referring it to the consciousness of an individual teller. The chapter ends by noting in the tale a disturbed questioning that is obscured by unhistorical ‘dramatic’ interpretations.
Moshe Sluhovsky
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226472850
- eISBN:
- 9780226473048
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226473048.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
Early Christian monastic spiritual practices of self-formation became increasingly popular in late medieval and early modern Catholicism. Now, for the first time in the history of Christian ...
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Early Christian monastic spiritual practices of self-formation became increasingly popular in late medieval and early modern Catholicism. Now, for the first time in the history of Christian spirituality, religious orders, first and foremost among them Franciscans and Jesuits, trained devout people, men and women, lay and religious, in practices of meditation, introspection, and subjectivization. Thousands, if not ten of thousands of lay people now acquired techniques of self examination that enabled them to pursue life goals and transform themselves. The book examines four of the major spiritual practices of the period, traces their history, diffusion, and the challenges they presented to clerical authority. Spiritual direction and general confession, two of the practices of self-formation discussed in the book, served as safety belts to guarantee that practitioners remained subjected to the teachings of the church. But spiritual exercises, general examination of conscience, and general confession supplied practitioners with techniques of self-construction and self -affirmation. Using insights from Michel Foucault's later work on practices of truth-telling and subjectivization, the book proposes the first systematic investigation of the complexity of subjectivization in early modern Catholicism as both a mechanism of self-formation and of subjugationLess
Early Christian monastic spiritual practices of self-formation became increasingly popular in late medieval and early modern Catholicism. Now, for the first time in the history of Christian spirituality, religious orders, first and foremost among them Franciscans and Jesuits, trained devout people, men and women, lay and religious, in practices of meditation, introspection, and subjectivization. Thousands, if not ten of thousands of lay people now acquired techniques of self examination that enabled them to pursue life goals and transform themselves. The book examines four of the major spiritual practices of the period, traces their history, diffusion, and the challenges they presented to clerical authority. Spiritual direction and general confession, two of the practices of self-formation discussed in the book, served as safety belts to guarantee that practitioners remained subjected to the teachings of the church. But spiritual exercises, general examination of conscience, and general confession supplied practitioners with techniques of self-construction and self -affirmation. Using insights from Michel Foucault's later work on practices of truth-telling and subjectivization, the book proposes the first systematic investigation of the complexity of subjectivization in early modern Catholicism as both a mechanism of self-formation and of subjugation
Erin C. Tarver
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226469935
- eISBN:
- 9780226470276
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226470276.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Why does sports fandom matter so much to fans, who often don’t play the games they watch at all? This book philosophically investigates sports fandom, spanning the fields of feminist philosophy, ...
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Why does sports fandom matter so much to fans, who often don’t play the games they watch at all? This book philosophically investigates sports fandom, spanning the fields of feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and philosophy of sport, and in dialogue with the work of sociologists, anthropologists, and historians of sport and popular culture. Sports fandom, this book concludes, is a primary means of creating and reinforcing individual and community identities for Americans today, contributing both to communities’ persistence over time, and to the racial and gender hierarchies that characterize those communities. Sports fandom is a practice of subjectivization: a means by which individuals are both regulated and, at the same time, achieve a sense of their own identities. By analyzing fan practice, history, and discourse (especially in the American south), and by responding to contemporary philosophical and social scientific work on sports fans, this book argues that racial whiteness is reproduced in and through many white fans’ imaginative relation to and ritualized display of men of color, and that normative heterosexual masculinity is reproduced through the practices of sports fandom that more or less explicitly disparage femininity and homosexual desire. Yet, it also concludes that sports fandom is not uniformly oppressive; sports fans are not univocal, and there are marginal forms of sports fandom that constitute genuine glimmers of social resistance.Less
Why does sports fandom matter so much to fans, who often don’t play the games they watch at all? This book philosophically investigates sports fandom, spanning the fields of feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and philosophy of sport, and in dialogue with the work of sociologists, anthropologists, and historians of sport and popular culture. Sports fandom, this book concludes, is a primary means of creating and reinforcing individual and community identities for Americans today, contributing both to communities’ persistence over time, and to the racial and gender hierarchies that characterize those communities. Sports fandom is a practice of subjectivization: a means by which individuals are both regulated and, at the same time, achieve a sense of their own identities. By analyzing fan practice, history, and discourse (especially in the American south), and by responding to contemporary philosophical and social scientific work on sports fans, this book argues that racial whiteness is reproduced in and through many white fans’ imaginative relation to and ritualized display of men of color, and that normative heterosexual masculinity is reproduced through the practices of sports fandom that more or less explicitly disparage femininity and homosexual desire. Yet, it also concludes that sports fandom is not uniformly oppressive; sports fans are not univocal, and there are marginal forms of sports fandom that constitute genuine glimmers of social resistance.
Moshe Sluhovsky
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226472850
- eISBN:
- 9780226473048
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226473048.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
The practices discussed in the book served not merely to diffuse spiritual practices among believers. They contributed to creating a new sense of self, a self that is constantly under its own ...
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The practices discussed in the book served not merely to diffuse spiritual practices among believers. They contributed to creating a new sense of self, a self that is constantly under its own surveillance, constantly examining itself and producing itself as a subject. As such, they document and affirm Michel Foucault's discussion, following other philosophers of modern subjecthood, of the uniqueness of modern subjectivization as a process that creates selves while submitting them to authority.Less
The practices discussed in the book served not merely to diffuse spiritual practices among believers. They contributed to creating a new sense of self, a self that is constantly under its own surveillance, constantly examining itself and producing itself as a subject. As such, they document and affirm Michel Foucault's discussion, following other philosophers of modern subjecthood, of the uniqueness of modern subjectivization as a process that creates selves while submitting them to authority.
Erin C. Tarver
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226469935
- eISBN:
- 9780226470276
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226470276.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Although social science literature on sports fandom reduces its appeal to “basking in reflected glory” (BIRGing) and the euphoria of the stadium, this chapter focuses on the everyday practices of ...
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Although social science literature on sports fandom reduces its appeal to “basking in reflected glory” (BIRGing) and the euphoria of the stadium, this chapter focuses on the everyday practices of sports fans, arguing that sports fandom facilitates the cultivation and reproduction of individual and community identities. In Foucaultian terms, sports fandom is a practice of subjectivization—a means by which individuals both subordinate themselves to a discipline and achieve a sense of their own identities. Just as a religious practitioner obtains new self-knowledge by participating in confession, prayer, and the observance of Lent, the sports fan comes to understand him or herself as a particular sort of person through participation in the daily practices of sports fandom, which include knowledge acquisition, ritual performances, and participation in fan discourse. Through participation in these practices, sports fandom is instrumental in the production of masculine subjects, and of subjects who understand themselves as belonging to a specific (often racialized) community or region—as an “I” who is part of a particular “we.” Examples analyzed include Markovits and Albertson's (2012) study of women sports fans, Ole Miss fans' performance of white southernness, and the use of "we" pronouns in fan discourse.Less
Although social science literature on sports fandom reduces its appeal to “basking in reflected glory” (BIRGing) and the euphoria of the stadium, this chapter focuses on the everyday practices of sports fans, arguing that sports fandom facilitates the cultivation and reproduction of individual and community identities. In Foucaultian terms, sports fandom is a practice of subjectivization—a means by which individuals both subordinate themselves to a discipline and achieve a sense of their own identities. Just as a religious practitioner obtains new self-knowledge by participating in confession, prayer, and the observance of Lent, the sports fan comes to understand him or herself as a particular sort of person through participation in the daily practices of sports fandom, which include knowledge acquisition, ritual performances, and participation in fan discourse. Through participation in these practices, sports fandom is instrumental in the production of masculine subjects, and of subjects who understand themselves as belonging to a specific (often racialized) community or region—as an “I” who is part of a particular “we.” Examples analyzed include Markovits and Albertson's (2012) study of women sports fans, Ole Miss fans' performance of white southernness, and the use of "we" pronouns in fan discourse.
Leo Shtutin
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- April 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198821854
- eISBN:
- 9780191860980
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198821854.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
The separate discussions of page and stage in Chapters 2 and 3 are followed in Chapters 4 and 5 by a more abstract investigation of parallel inverse processes—the subjectivization of space and the ...
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The separate discussions of page and stage in Chapters 2 and 3 are followed in Chapters 4 and 5 by a more abstract investigation of parallel inverse processes—the subjectivization of space and the spatialization of the subject—manifest in both the poetry and drama of the period. As already made clear, space is presented in the works to be discussed not as objective outside but as emanation of character; by the same token, the subject does not remain fully demarcated from its surroundings, and exhibits varying degrees of spatial dispersion. Exploring various types of subjectivization and associated formal techniques such as collage, montage, and temporal telescoping, Chapter 4 focuses on Maeterlinck’s one-acts, Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ and ‘Lundi Rue Christine’, and Jarry’s Ubu roi.Less
The separate discussions of page and stage in Chapters 2 and 3 are followed in Chapters 4 and 5 by a more abstract investigation of parallel inverse processes—the subjectivization of space and the spatialization of the subject—manifest in both the poetry and drama of the period. As already made clear, space is presented in the works to be discussed not as objective outside but as emanation of character; by the same token, the subject does not remain fully demarcated from its surroundings, and exhibits varying degrees of spatial dispersion. Exploring various types of subjectivization and associated formal techniques such as collage, montage, and temporal telescoping, Chapter 4 focuses on Maeterlinck’s one-acts, Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ and ‘Lundi Rue Christine’, and Jarry’s Ubu roi.
