Avatars, Egregores and the Writing of the Self

2015

In the Flesh: Fiction as an "Incarnational Art" I arrived in Chicago in January of 2014, fresh from the warm Southern embrace of an imaginative English department at a small Christian liberal arts university. Chicago, as I saw it, was rich in artistic appreciation and participation, but equally abounding in rugged industrial pragmatism. Throughout that spring 2014 semester, I commuted from Pilsen, my beloved neighborhood known for its artists (some of whom also worked in a more "practical" job to earn money) to the business center of the city (which was not devoid of artists either). Although the world of ideas and intuition can overlap the world of business and materialism, the two often conflict. I am by no account a professional artist, but I do consider literary art an essential part of my self-expression and identity. My struggle to find the time and energy to write as much as I felt I needed to while in Chicago enabled me to empathize with the artists in my community. As I attempted to balance practical necessities like cooking, cleaning, and working at my internship, with the need to regularly and creatively express myself, it became clear to me that sustaining the creative mind and soul does not always coincide perfectly with sustaining the body. When time, energy, and resources are limited, one realm of human need must take precedence over the other. This dichotomy led me toward an interest in the intersection between art-especially literary art-and our physical human lives. Thornberry Thesis 2 When Amy Sonheim, one of my professors in that precious English department mentioned above, came to town in February, she suggested over lunch that I read Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners. Valuing her recommendation, I immediately ordered the book and soon found that O'Connor, too, takes note of the split between the realms of body and of soul, of form and of content, or-in her words-of mystery and of manners. In "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," one of several essays that make up the book, O'Connor briefly addresses the conflict that arises when artists, particularly writers, seek to "write well and live well at the same time" (66). She implies that good writers rarely live in financial comfort unless the writer already has copious amounts of money available by some other means. That is, good writing is a full-time job that doesn't pay well. However, writers who work for the quality of what they write don't write primarily because they want financial rewards.

The Cultural Sociology of Reading: , 2022

This essay gathers from diverse individuals personal accounts of their engagements with a wide range of fictional narratives. All of them encounter works of fiction having experienced loss, lack, or other hardship, whether personal or societal, that has induced a diminished sense of self. Their accounts show that fictional worlds have the capacity to meet an individual’s need, whatever its origin, providing models of a more robust agency in choosing a response to hardship and loss, the relief of resonant tangible expressions of inner emotional pain, or more capacious worlds making it possible to imagine a more empowered self. And thus these aesthetic engagements prove powerfully and invaluably self-focused, fiction reading that enlarges one’s self.

The Aesthetic of Self-Becoming: How Art Forms Empower, 2020

This an extract from my book 'The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming - How Art Forms Empower'. (Routledge 2020) It might seem that any attempt to define storytelling will be undone by the sheer variety of its formats across different cultures. However, in order for one person to communicate with another (and to do so across language divides) there must be distinct but shared features of experience that are conceptually required in order for communication to take place. In what follows, I will define the scope of storytelling by reference to such features

Bruhn, Mark J.; Wehrs, Donald R., eds. Cognition, Literature, and History. Routledge, 2014

College Composition and Communication, 2018

This article addresses an impasse between rhetoric and composition practice and theory. On one hand, from the poststructural through the posthuman, our most vigorous theories challenge classical notions of selfhood and agency. On the other hand, from institutional assessment through writing about writing, composition's most vigorous practices entail fairly traditional ideas about selfhood and agency. This piece crosses over the impasse by suggesting that "self " and "agency" are vital fantasies for composition, and that negotiating these fantasies is an ethical process. At its heart, I argue, composition is any ethical, collective working out of these fantastical concepts that helps adaptive individuals more freely emerge.

Cornell University Library eBooks, 2014

Love on Trial: Adjusting and Assigning Relationships, 2011

In his exploration of bold or frank speech as significant to “the care of the self,” Foucault made plain his disquiet with psychoanalysis – a disquiet shared by many Post-structuralist theorists; these same theorist, however, also doubt Foucault’s claim that care of the self is possible – which is problematic to anyone wishing to further Foucault’s incomplete project. By taking Derrida’s “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event” as a single text for attentive reading alongside “Fearless Speech” this short paper seeks to investigate how care of the self can take place within an awareness and function of post-structuralist deconstruction of language – particularly the written word. It is the conclusion of this author that Sarah Kofman’s “Nietzsche and Metaphor” demonstrates that critically informed frank (or confessional) parrhesiastic writing nurtures “the ever dancing self” by what might be called “writing and reading the self with a thousand eyes.”

NYSVA Annual Conference Proceedings, 2005, 2005

The "old school" and the "new school" of narratology seem to share a referential bias in their view of fictional minds. (1) Classical studies assume that via a meticulous differentiation of voices and viewpoints, we are able to extract a "reliable" representation of the fictional world. (2) Recent cognitive approaches tend to regard fictional and actual minds as being based on precisely the same cognitive schemata; we should ask ourselves, however, whether the natural parameters of thought and those of fiction actually converge. In this paper, I wish to demonstrate the challenge that fictional characters representing each other's perceptions, thoughts and feelings issue to both classical and cognitive approaches to fictional minds. I suggest that fictional agents -not only narrators but focalizers as well -may take advantage of precisely the same techniques of constructing the minds of others as are used in omniscient narration. Furthermore, I try to demonstrate how this feature of literary representation inherently problematizes the "naturalizing" of (fictional) mental functioning. I will start with examples from homodiegetic narration (Ford Madox Ford, Richard Ford) and then widen the scope to more problematic instances in the heterodiegetic mode (Emmanuèle Bernheim, Fay Weldon). I argue that the "narrative tendency" of a character constructing other characters' minds potentially mitigates the binarity of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration. Finally, such speculating and narrativizing -and perhaps fantasizing, hallucinating -fictional minds provide a parallel, not 232