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victimhood. Witchcraft trials, perhaps paradoxically, have proven to be fruitful sites for finding evidence of women’s resistance and agency. Women accused of witchcraft resisted in various ways, including the recantation of confessions made under torture. This very resistance, particularly recantation, has led to some highly questionable interpretations of witchcraft cases. On one hand, it is necessary to recognise the possibility
196 11 Foucault, confession, and Donne Joel M. Dodson This chapter reconsiders Michel Foucault’s critique of confession in order to examine, in slightly broader yet more methodological terms, what exactly we mean by negotiating ‘confessional’ conflict in late Reformation English literature. My aim is to use Foucault to re-think Foucault: to read Foucault’s later lectures on the ‘care of the self ’ as an alternate model for historicizing doctrinal affiliation in late Tudor and early Stuart literature rather than the penal or penitential vocabulary elaborated
The depiction of torture in Costa-Gavras's The Confession (1970) reveals the brutal methods employed by the government during the 1951 Slánský trial, one of several show trials in Communist Czechoslovakia. The film straightforwardly argues that the government tortured the defendants in order to extract the confessions that they wanted, and it exposes the incredible violence of the interrogation methods. Revisiting this film uncovers a significant historical difference with our contemporary debate about torture, which revolves around whether torture
This paper explores the occult relationship between modern psychoanalysis and the pre-Freudian psychoanalysis of James Hogg‘s 1824 Gothic novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Haunted by the ghosts of Mesmerism and of Calvinisms rabidly contagious religious fervour, Hogg‘s novel explodes post-Lockean paradigms of the subject for a post-Romantic British culture on the eve of the Empire. Turning back to Scotland‘s turbulent political and religious history, the novel looks forward to the problems of Empire by turning Locke‘s sense-making and sensible subject into the subject of an unconscious ripe for ideological exploitation, a subject mesmerized by the process of making sense of himself.
This article analyses the representation of several colonial structures in the Caribbean reconfiguration of the Gothic genre, specifically in two works of contemporary Puerto Ricanfiction: Miss Florences Trunk: Fragments for a Romantic Trash Novel (1991) by Ana Lydia Vega and Over My Dead Body (2012) by Marta Aponte Alsina. In these novellas, specifically through the main characters reading of diaries and confessions, we are presented with a description of the physical structures. At the same time, the colonial structure also emerges, a context in which slavery, sexual abuse and mulataje are described as ubiquitous sources of terror.
This essay draws on Julia Kristeva‘s concept of ‘borderline’ experience, a feature of psychotic discourse, to examine the representation of madness, split personality and sociopathic behaviour in James Hogg‘s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the contemporary, muted Gothic of John Burnside‘s The Locust Room (2001). The main characteristics of borderline experience - a concern with authenticity and the proper name, with uncertain boundaries between inside and outside, truth and delusion - are central concerns in Hogg and Burnside, and the essay assesses the value of borderline discourse for a critical reading of madness in Gothic.
Introduction The peculiar course of the gacaca process introduced in Rwandan society to deal with the legacy of the 1994 genocide against Tutsi has been thoroughly examined in book-length scholarly studies ( Clark, 2010 ; Ingelaere, 2016 ; Chakravarty, 2015 ; Doughty, 2016 ; Longman, 2017 ). 1 Not only observations of trial proceedings but also survey results and popular narratives collected during fieldwork indicate that testimonial activity – both confessions but especially accusations – was the cornerstone of the gacaca system ( Penal Reform
Brabant (2011 : 92–3). 20 Cf. above-mentioned interview (note 12): ‘Les lacunes du journalisme font le bonheur des ONG’. 21 See, for example, the collection of articles entitled ‘Secret Aid Worker’ (formerly ‘Confessions of a Humanitarian’), where professionals speak anonymously about subjects like poor management
Given the widespread belief in witchcraft and the existence of laws against such practices, why did witch-trials fail to gain momentum and escalate into ‘witch-crazes’ in certain parts of early modern Europe? This book answers this question by examining the rich legal records of the German city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a city that experienced a very restrained pattern of witch-trials and just one execution for witchcraft between 1561 and 1652. The book explores the factors that explain the absence of a ‘witch-craze’ in Rothenburg, placing particular emphasis on the interaction of elite and popular priorities in the pursuit (and non-pursuit) of alleged witches at law. By making the witchcraft narratives told by the peasants and townspeople of Rothenburg central to its analysis, the book also explores the social and psychological conflicts that lay behind the making of accusations and confessions of witchcraft. Furthermore, it challenges the existing explanations for the gender-bias of witch-trials, and also offers insights into other areas of early modern life, such as experiences of and beliefs about communal conflict, magic, motherhood, childhood and illness. Written in a narrative style, the study invites a wide readership to share in the drama of early modern witch trials.
then some of its successors, with regard to the appearance in fiction of duels, monks and confession. Zosima is, no doubt, as has been remarked, ‘a composite literary image’ (Grigorieff, 1967, 34). Sergei Hackel (1983, 162–4) has proposed Bishop Bienvenu, from Hugo’s Les Misérables , as one ingredient. Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Karamazov Brothers (Brat’ia Karamazovy , 1879–80), not counting of course the intended succeeding volumes never written, spans getting on for a thousand pages, comprising four parts, in twelve books and an