Fault Tree by Kathryn L. Pringle (review)

Configurations

Part of the panel "Subjects of Human Knowledge: Anthropology in Contemporary Fiction" at the British Society for Literature and Science annual Conference, 7 – 9 April 2021. Over the past decade or so, a substantial number of novels featuring anthropologist protagonists have been published to wide-spread acclaim. Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees (2013), Lily King’s Euphoria (2014), both set in the south Pacific, and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), set in an alternative-history London, all draw on phases in the twentieth century history of anthropology (from the 1920s to the 1980s). In addition, they share further characteristics. The novels all feature fictional – or fictionalised – anthropologists that are engaged in complex constellations of anthropological observation and situate anthropological inquiry in relation to other scientific disciplines as well as evolving cultural concerns. In all three novels, too, the production of anthropological knowledge coincides with the death or destruction of the beings investigated. Each novel revisits a moment in the history of anthropology, laying bare the internal fault lines of the discipline, as well as anthropology's distinctive position in the knowledge discourses of modern societies. In a discipline precariously poised between the claim of scientific practice and cultural reflexivity, the problematization of the role of the observer has historically been a disciplinary hallmark. The novels engage with this problematization through several characteristic structural elements, which recur with variations in all three novels (such as triangular character constellations or shifting subject-object relations). In addition, all three novels interrogate the entanglement of observation and destruction that became foundational for the modern understanding of the human, as it emerged in the processes of colonial encounters that form the framework of anthropological field work. In the novels, this is manifested in characteristic plot patterns which are based on an encounter of several individuals each with a problematic history of their own, who join in situations of 'field work' which in turn lead them into encounters with the objects of anthropological observation. In these situations, the objects of anthropological observation are never truly allowed to achieve a reciprocity of perspective. The novels aim to highlight the destructive consequences of the anthropological encounter for the 'objects observed' by showing how the relationship with the anthropological observer leads to the death of the observed. Paradoxically, however, by keeping the anthropological observers squarely in the focus of the narrative, they also repeat the epistemological erasure of the perspectives of the individuals and communities they observe. In this way, all three novels also demonstrate the limits of a metropolitan critique of anthropology's colonial entanglements.

Psychiatric Services, 2006

sjesr, 2021

This research paper seeks to study the juxtaposition of antithetical forces in the text The Fault in Our Stars penned down by John Green. The research centers on the characters' quest for finding an answer to the meaninglessness, attempts for filling the void, facticity, existential angst, and ultimate despair in the framework of the philosophy of 'Existentialism' posited by Jean-Paul Sartre. All the major characters in the novel are cancer patients, living a dismal and distressing life under the looming shadow of death. In an existential vein, the protagonists set out on a journey of self-exploration and choose to eke out a momentary optimism from their pessimistic situations. While battling with the terminal disease, Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters engage in an emotional liaison that becomes a redeeming force in their traumatized existence. This research will study how love becomes a life force, an antithetical force juxtaposed with death and devastation. The...

This paper aims to have a deconstructionist reading of William Blake's "A Poison Tree." Highly associated with the well-known poststructuralist Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s, deconstruction's primary concern is "the otherness" and "indeterminacy" or "instability" of the ultimate meaning of the text. A deconstructionist reader tries to bring out elements of marginality, supplementarity, and "undecidability" in the reading of texts. Involved in reading the text very closely and critically, a typical deconstructionist tries to recognize how the text differs from what it (its writer) tends to express. Accordingly, the present study sets out to read and analyse William Blake's "A Poison Tree" to discover if the poem, as deconstructionists assert, might include inconsistencies and contradictory points making the meaning of the text "undecidable" and beyond reach. Methodologically, the present study makes an attempt to show how the text is undermining its own philosophy and logic – that is – to demonstrate how the text subverts and differs from what it appears to communicate. At the end it might be concluded that language can be used as an effective means by its user(s) (speakers/writers) to get power, and suppress or marginalize others. It is also demonstrated how texts seem to include contradictory elements- that is – they differ from what they intend to express. All these argumentations can bring us to "indeterminacy" and "instability" of meaning within the text.

Words Against the Void: Poems by an Existential Psychologist (Revised & Expanded Edition)

Ecocene: Cappadocia journal of environmental humanities, 2022

This essay investigates ecological epiphany in short stories by Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, moments in which characters confront the link between their own consumption habits and planetary damage. These moments build on a longer literary history of epiphany in modern fiction, a history that foregrounds suddenness, physicality, and the mundane, but these short stories also adapt epiphany to address prominent concerns about anthropogenic climate change in the twenty-first century. Through close readings of Smith’s “The Dialectic” (2019), Smith’s “The Lazy River” (2017), and Oates’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (2019), I show how these stories’ ecological epiphanies invite the reader to emotionally confront the urgency of the climate crisis and to take action. While important arguments by Amitav Ghosh and Rob Nixon argue that literature must make planetary crisis visible, Smith’s and Oates’s short stories suggest that some contemporary writers now face a different issue, not a need to heighten the visibility of the damage, but rather a need to psychologically confront its terrible obviousness.

English Studies in Canada, 2018

This paper is a comprehensive analysis of Dylan Thomas's outstanding 'process' poem: "The force that through the green fuse." – one of Thomas’s most acclaimed poetic efforts. This impressive 1933 verse was composed and published when the poet was just nineteen years of age. As the principal work within the seven verses grouped as 'process' poems, “The force …” explores and brilliantly contrasts the birth, growth and death' connections between the natural world and himself, the poet, as an eloquent, self-examining representative of mankind. Section 2 of the paper opens by responding to the question:- ‘what is this poem about?’ It is an undeniable fact that every entity deemed to possess what humanity might call ‘life’ in the natural world, will pass through a five-fold sequence of:- (1) birth or origination; (2) growth or juvenile development; (3) increase or procreation; (4) withering or declining; and (5) eventual death. This arrangement is obviously not a revelation – merely a simplistic way of describing anything connected with the various chronological episodes associated with the word ‘living.’ Within the animal world, mankind as a genus is blatantly evident - together with categories of creatures of all sizes from the ‘enormous’ to the ‘minute’ and similarly within the plant world from giant redwoods to the tiniest of fungal spores. As we shall see, Dylan Thomas was fascinated by this cohesion of process so that the poem endeavours to equate, or at least to parallel, the inevitable stages in his own life with the various ‘forces’ and influences that affect diverse worldly entities. Section 3 then examines the overall structure of the poem followed by an in-depth examination of the meaning of each of the first three straightforward stanzas, together with their accompanying “And I am dumb …” couplets. Stanza four, the enigmatic, perhaps perplexing, summary of the work, merits particularly thorough attention. Alternative published critical interpretations of the stanza’s meaning are discussed and this writer’s clarification and understanding of the stanza is advocated. Section 4 identifies and explains the poetics of this simply-structured poem. It explores Thomas’s choices of vocabulary within each stanza, followed by his use of phonemic patterns (i.e. alliteration, assonance, consonance) and reviews the poem’s rhythm and metre (i.e. syllables and stresses), grammatical structure (i.e. punctuation and enjambment) and Thomas’s use of repetition and its effects. Section 5 reviews and evaluates the observations made by a variety of published Thomas critics – some supportive, some less so in respect of this truly unique poem.