Identification In Life And Literature

Sigmund Freud viewed the coping strategy of identification as both an expansion of the verb to identify, as well as a validation of the concept to identify with. This book shows how the Aztec emperor Montezuma and the noted Argentine writer Julio Cortzar each, respectively, used the process of identification in a Freudian manner. In the case of Montezuma, it is argued that he identified the Spanish conquistador Hernn Corts as the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror), while for Cortzar, it is demonstrated that he identified with a Moteca Indian from the Aztec world, who was about to be sacrificed.

Today, globalization, migration and political polarization complicate the individual’s search for a cohesive identity, making identity formation and transformation key issues in everyday life. This collection of essays highlights a number of the dimensions of identity, including cultural hybridity, religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, sexuality, and childhood, and explores how they are thematized in different narratives. The stories discussed are set in Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, France, Germany, Great Britain, Haiti, India, Israel, Japan, Polynesia, Norway, Romania, Spain and South Africa, emphasizing today’s international focus on identity. The majority of the contributions here focus on literary texts, while others investigate identity formations in interviews, language corpora, student reading logs, film, theatre and pathographies.

This study explores the social functions of literature from the perspective of policymakers, writers, readers and residents in contemporary Cuba. It provides a new perspective on post-59 Cuban literature that underlines how cultural policy has made literature a hybrid activity between elite and mass culture, with inherent social, rather than aesthetic or political, value. Whilst many traditional studies of Cuban literature assume either its subjugation to politics and ideology or, conversely, its role in resisting political discourse via a rather naïve notion of artistic freedom, this project explores the varied, dynamic and multiple ways in which literature works in Cuban society: as a catalyst for identity construction aimed at consensus and belonging, but also as an instrument of self-differentiation and self-definition, even in the more recent context of a more market-oriented system. The study reviews policy from 1959 to the present, and presents contemporary case studies exploring the social functions of literature for writers, readers and ordinary Havana residents.

"Autobiography is a long-established literary modality of self-exposure with commanding works such as Augustine's Confessions, Rousseau's book of the same title, and Salvador Dalâi's paradoxical reformulation of that title in his Unspeakable Confessions. Like all genres with a distinguished career, autobiography has elicited a fair amount of critical and theoretical reflection. Classic works by Kèate Hamburger and Philippe Lejeune in the 1960s and 70s articulated distinctions and similarities between fiction and the genre of personal declaration. Especially since Foucault's seminal essay on "Self Writing," self-production through writing has become more versatile, gaining a broader range of expression, diversifying its social function, and colonizing new media of representation. For this reason, it seems appropriate to speak of life-writing as a concept that includes but is not limited to classic autobiography. Awareness of language's performativity permits us to read life-writing texts not as a record but as the space where the self is realized, or in some instances de-realized. Such texts can build identity, but they can also contest ascribed identity by producing alternative or disjointed scenarios of identification. And they not only relate to the present, but may also act upon the past by virtue of their retrospective effects in the confluence of narrator and witness"--

Erik H. Erikson's remarkable insights into the relationship of life history and history began with observations on a central stage of life: identity development in adolescence. This book collects three early papers that—along with Childhood and Society—many consider the best introduction to Erikson's theories. "Ego Development and Historical Change" is a selection of extensive notes in which Erikson first undertook to relate to each other observations on groups studied on field trips and on children studied longitudinally and clinically. These notes are representative of the source material used for Childhood and Society. "Growth and Crises of the Health Personality" takes Erikson beyond adolescence, into the critical stages of the whole life cycle. In the third and last essay, Erikson deals with "The Problem of Ego Identity" successively from biographical, clinical, and social points of view—all dimensions later pursued separately in his work.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery in Life Science Literature, KDLL 2006, held in conjunction with the 10th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2006). The 12 revised full papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers cover all topics of knowledge discovery in life science data.

This guide book is a bibliography of books about the American West by various authors, compiled by the literary critic J. Franck Dobie. The list is subdivided along themes associated with the different aspects of life in the West such as Native American culture, Spanish influences, French influences, Texas Rangers, Missionaries, Women pioneers and Mountain men culture, among others. Each aspect is preceded by a brief discussion of the topic before the list of books themed on the subject.

In 1963, French-Spanish writer Jorge Semprun published Le Grand Voyage (The Long Voyage), a fictional account of his deportation to Buchenwald. Later, Semprun became an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and served as Spain's minister of culture. This volume of the Yale French Studies series constitutes an overall assessment of his work, spanning his broad range of genres and traditions. Including both new perspectives and pieces by authors who have written widely on Semprun, this volume is a refreshing and dynamic look at one of the twentieth-century's most interesting literary voices.