Tag: Self
We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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March 7, 2025
Thanks to Ibrahim Nureni, a 2025 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
There is a widespread conception or misconception of autobiography as a retrospective prose narrative focusing on personal life and existence of a real person, who is believed to stand behind the narrative under the mask of a proper name. Autobiography is viewed as a chronological representation of authorial desired subjectivity. However, the radical interventions of poststructuralists within the premise of autobiographical discourse (as represented in the critical essay of Paul de Man “Autobiography as De-facement”) have undermined the commonsensical study of autobiography as “real-life-in-writing,” the unproblematic connections between writing and author and the conception of language as representational.
March 9, 2018
Thanks to Sam Risak, a 2018 Harrison Middleton University Fellow in Ideas recipient, for today’s post.
An unnamed narrator sheds weight but not her past in Carmen Maria Machado’s “Eight Bites.” After a gastric bypass surgery, old flesh is personified into a “body with nothing it needs: no stomach or bones or mouth” that lingers in the protagonist’s house (165). Machado’s surrealist blurring of realities rejects the possibility for any universal ideals,
November 10, 2017
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s blog.
In an attempt to better understand how we orient ourselves in life, I turn to Dante.
In The Divine Comedy, Dante begins nearly every canto by determining his location. This works twofold as it locates the reader as well as the narrator. The reader first meets Dante in a dark wood where he is surprised by a scary and threatening creature.
September 22, 2017
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Last week, I attended a lecture at St. John’s College titled, “The Intermittencies of the Self: Philosophic and Poetic Inquiries into the Nature of Selfhood (Or: Is Literature the Most Important Activity a Human Being Can Engage in, and Should You Dedicate Your Life to It?)”. The speaker, David Carl, used a number of texts to trace an argument about the way that a self may be constructed.
September 15, 2017
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
“The mind’s dignity is to acknowledge that it is limited and that reality is outside it.”
Fernando Pessoa’s The Education of the Stoic is a thought-project based on the construct of a fully rational self through the fictional persona of The Baron of Teive. From the beginning, the text unsettles the reader. In a book that attempts to define a self,