ellauri078.html on line 145: Behind her school botanical studies lay a popular text in common use at female seminaries. Written by Almira H. Lincoln, Familiar Lectures on Botany (1829) featured a particular kind of natural history, emphasizing the religious nature of scientific study. Lincoln was one of many early 19th-century writers who forwarded the “argument from design.” She assured her students that study of the natural world invariably revealed God. Its impeccably ordered systems showed the Creator’s hand at work.
ellauri106.html on line 526: Instead of emphasizing the moral and political consequences of modern capitalism, as had the radical social movements before it, postmodernization offers “privacy, diminished expectations, subjectivism, individuality, particularity, and localism” as alternatives to the modern’s stability and universalism.
ellauri119.html on line 460: Now a fast forward to French fries and scepticism. Alongside the passion for merging that marked Romantic love, a more sceptical French tradition can be traced from Stendhal onwards. Stendhal's theory of crystallization implied an imaginative readiness for love, which only needed a single trigger for the object to be imbued with every fantasised perfection. Proust went further, singling out absence, inaccessibility or jealousy as the necessary precipitants of love. Lacan would almost parody the tradition with his saying that "love is giving something you haven't got to someone who doesn't exist". A post-Lacanian like Luce Irigaray would then struggle to find room for love in a world that will "reduce the other to the same...emphasizing eroticism to the detriment of love, under the cover of sexual liberation".
ellauri142.html on line 1045: Smail wrote several books on the subject of psychotherapy, emphasizing the extent to which society is often responsible for personal distress. Critical of the claims made by psychotherapy, he suggests that it only works to the extent that the therapist becomes a friend of the patient, providing encouragement and support. Much distress, he says, results from current conflicts, not past ones, and in any case, damage done probably cannot be undone, though we may learn to live with it. He doubts whether 'catharsis', the process whereby it is supposed that understanding past events makes them less painful, really works. The assumption that depression, or any other form of mental distress, is caused by something within the person that can be fixed, is he argued, without foundation. He could thus be regarded as part of the 'anti-psychiatry' movement, along with R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, but where Laing emphasised family nexus as making psychosis understandable, Smail emphasises 'Interest' and power in relation to more everyday distress. These are integral to Western society, and, he suggests, considered out of bounds by most psychotherapists, who are themselves both constrained and complicit in protecting their own interests.
ellauri270.html on line 389: Even a dystopian society like this one doesn’t exclude other aspects of human nature like youth, popularity, friendship, and selfishness. Nancy’s behavior resembles that of many popular teen girls—again emphasizing the universal nature of Jackson’s story. We get the sense that Old Man Warner is perpetually displeased with any kind of change to tradition—even though the omniscient narrator tells us that the “tradition” Warner is used to is very different from the original lottery.
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