Self Realization For Fictional Characters

A fictional character in a play steps off the stage and begins a journey of self-realization.

“This debut novel about an Irish expat millennial teaching English and finding romance in Hong Kong is half Sally Rooney love triangle, half glitzy Crazy Rich Asians high living—and guaranteed to please.” —Vogue A RECOMMENDED BOOK FROM: The New York Times Book Review * Vogue * TIME * Marie Claire * Elle * O, the Oprah Magazine * The Washington Post * Esquire * Harper's Bazaar * Bustle * PopSugar * Refinery 29 * LitHub * Debutiful An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer Ava, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children. Julian is a banker. A banker who likes to spend money on Ava, to have sex and discuss fluctuating currencies with her. But when she asks whether he loves her, he cannot say more than "I like you a great deal." Enter Edith. A Hong Kong–born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Edith takes Ava to the theater and leaves her tulips in the hallway. Ava wants to be her—and wants her. And then Julian writes to tell Ava he is coming back to Hong Kong... Should Ava return to the easy compatibility of her life with Julian or take a leap into the unknown with Edith? Politically alert, heartbreakingly raw, and dryly funny, Exciting Times is thrillingly attuned to the great freedoms and greater uncertainties of modern love. In stylish, uncluttered prose, Naoise Dolan dissects the personal and financial transactions that make up a life—and announces herself as a singular new voice.

This collection of chapters, written by prominent scholars in their respective fields, re-examines the nature of self-awareness in both Western and Eastern philosophy, inquires into its diverse and variable modes, and significantly broadens the framework of its analysis. The chapters collected focus on reflective and pre-reflective forms of self-awareness, as well as the relation between self-awareness and the awareness of things and the world. Included are examinations of the affective and embodied dimensions of self-awareness, the distinct forms of self-awareness in memory, phantasy, and dreams, as well as the temporal and spatial nature of self-awareness. This edited volume appeals to students and researchers working in phenomenology and on the philosophy of self-awareness.

This exciting new edited collection bridges the gap between narrative and self-understanding. The problem of self-knowledge is of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition for millennia. Likewise the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual parts of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by definition fictional, by definition not a matter of ascertained fact, as this applies to the understanding of our lives? When we see ourselves in the mimetic mirror of literature, what we see may not just be a matter of identifying with a single protagonist, but also a matter of recognizing long-form structures, long-arc narrative shapes that give a place to – and thus make sense of – the individual bits of experience that we place into those structures. But of course at precisely this juncture a question arises: do we make that sense, or do we discover it? The twelve chapters brought together here lucidly and steadily reveal how the matters at hand are far more intricate and interesting than any such dichotomy could accommodate. This is a book that investigates the ways in which life and literature speak to each other.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a Christian convert and a social philosophy scholar, had an intense conversation with the Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig in 1913. This “Leipzig Conversation” shattered Rosenzweig’s understanding of the meaning of religion, but it also propelled him to embrace his innate Jewish faith. Three years later, they engaged in a correspondence that has emerged as an historic, stunning dialogue on Jewish-Christian thinking. Rosenzweig went on to write The Star of Redemption, a classic work of modern Jewish philosophical theology and to become one of the most important and influential figures of twentieth-century German Jewry. Rosenstock-Huessy took a different path—writing his Sociology, which pointed the social sciences in a new direction based on speech-thinking, and an enormous, rich body of work covering grammar and society, revolutions, Church history, and industrial law; teaching generations of European and American university students; and putting his faith into action. This is the first major collection of essays on these two close friends’ “new thinking.” Their dialogue mirrored Nietzsche’s anti-transcendent reading of Judaism and Christianity, as well as his attack on idealism. But their dialogue also resurrected the redemptive cores of these faiths as sources for the rejuvenation of human society. This book brings to publication three essays by Rosenstock-Huessy on Nietzsche, and a translation of a chapter from his Sociology, clarifying the post-Nietzschean approach of the “new thinking.” The Cross and the Star, a 50-year span of significant scholarship, vivifies the reasons for Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock-Huessy’s influence on faith and society, and why their respective thought speaks directly and enduringly to the global human challenges of our time.

Personal development is integral to much counselling and psychotherapy training. Self-awareness and critical reflection are also vital for developing effective therapeutic relationships. This uniquely focused sourcebook offers a fascinating range of approaches to the challenging and sometimes elusive task of self-development and self understanding. This textbook begins by introducing four core ways of seeing the 'self': as multiple, contextual, open to change, and always in relation to the 'other', and finishes by bringing together a range of specialist practitioners to explore different pathways to self understanding. Self Awareness and Personal Development provides hands-on resources for the ongoing project of exploring the self. It is an invaluable text for students, trainees and practitioners in counselling and psychotherapy.

Interpretation, Relativism, and Identity: Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Krausz addresses three major philosophical themes: interpretation, relativism, and identity. It does so by focusing on Krausz’s distinctive exploration of the relationship between interpretation and ontology, the varieties of relativism, and the interpretive dimension of identity construction. Throughout the years, Krausz has participated in exchanges between people who embrace opposing views about reality, human selves, and the attachments or detachments between them. In these exchanges, life orientations are at stake as much as conceptual distinctions. These exchanges are reflected in a discussion among renowned scholars in philosophy and literary studies not only on Krausz’s work but also on the significant philosophical implications of key issues for how we understand the human condition, our commitments and values, the meaning of religious and artistic texts, and the way we make sense of our lives and ourselves. The contributors to this volume engage with all of these concerns in their dialogue with Krausz and with one another. The range and versatility of Krausz’s conceptual apparatus can benefit students and scholars with interests in interpretative endeavors, different ontological commitments, and various conceptual priorities and preferences.

Borges Beyond the Visible presents radically new readings of some of Jorge Luis Borges’s most celebrated stories. Max Ubelaker Andrade shows how Borges employed intertextual puzzles to transform his personal experiences with blindness, sexuality, and suicide while allowing readers to sense the transformative power of their own literary imaginations. In readings of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “El Aleph,” and “El Zahir,” Ubelaker Andrade argues that Borges, considering his own impending blindness, borrowed from Islam’s prohibitions on visual representation to create a “literary theology”—a religion focused on the contradictions of literary existence and the unstable complexities of a visual world perceived without everyday sight. Embracing these contradictions allowed Borges to transform his relationships with sex, sexuality, and family in multilayered stories such as “Emma Zunz,” “La intrusa,” and “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.” Yet these liberating transformations, sometimes offered to the reader as a paradoxical “gift of death,” are complicated by “La salvación por las obras,” a story built around Borges’s relationship with a suicidal reader and the woman to whom they were both connected. The epilogue presents “Místicos del Islam,” an unpublished essay draft by Borges, as a key source of insight into an irreverent, iconoclastic writing practice based on a profound faith in fiction. Compelling and clear, Borges Beyond the Visible is a revelatory examination of the work of one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. It opens up exciting areas of inquiry for scholars, students, and readers of Borges.