{"id":164,"date":"2018-11-11T16:55:29","date_gmt":"2018-11-11T21:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/?p=164"},"modified":"2018-11-11T16:57:07","modified_gmt":"2018-11-11T21:57:07","slug":"i-am-a-sick-man-i-am-a-wicked-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/the-blind-owl-and-notes-from-underground\/i-am-a-sick-man-i-am-a-wicked-man\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;I am a sick man&#8230;I am a wicked man&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What is modern about our readings this week?\u00a0 What is particularly &#8220;western&#8221; or &#8220;eastern&#8221; about the narratives?\u00a0 Is <em>The Blind Owl<\/em> a\u00a0&#8220;Persian&#8221; story,\u00a0<em>Notes from Underground,\u00a0<\/em>Russian?\u00a0 How might we read these books as literature, outside of their contexts?\u00a0 Is it possible to do so, as art or as literature?<\/p>\n<p>Do either of the narrators gain perspective, perhaps a moment of change?<\/p>\n<p>It seems obvious that Dostoyevsky and Hedayat would agree that thinking too much, having the ability to see <em>all<\/em> sides of an issue or problem, leads to paralysis, what Tocqueville describes as the falling into the self.\u00a0 How might\u00a0solipsism be prevented or ameliorated?<\/p>\n<p>Take a look at pg. 62 of\u00a0<em>The Blind Owl<\/em>.\u00a0 Hedayat speaks of a &#8220;real face&#8221; that emerges at the end of life.\u00a0 What does he mean by this?<\/p>\n<p>What do the two stories tell us about the relationship between the mind and the body?\u00a0 Are the grotesqueries in\u00a0<em>The Blind Owl<\/em> limited to the psychological, or does it extend to the physical (for example, the scenes from the butcher shop&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>Related to the above:\u00a0 What are we to make of the closing comment by Richard Pevear in the\u00a0<em>Foreward<\/em> to\u00a0<em>Notes from Underground<\/em>, specifically his assertion that what &#8220;bedevils our century&#8221; is &#8220;that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of behavior?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-219\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci257\/files\/2017\/10\/6a0120a8545b6a970b01a511f28e05970c.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2030\" height=\"1498\" \/><strong>Sadegh Hedayat&#8217;s grave,\u00a0P\u00e8re Lachaise\u00a0Cemetery, Paris, France<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is modern about our readings this week?\u00a0 What is particularly &#8220;western&#8221; or &#8220;eastern&#8221; about the narratives?\u00a0 Is The Blind Owl a\u00a0&#8220;Persian&#8221; story,\u00a0Notes from Underground,\u00a0Russian?\u00a0 How might we read these books as literature, outside of their contexts?\u00a0 Is it possible &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/the-blind-owl-and-notes-from-underground\/i-am-a-sick-man-i-am-a-wicked-man\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1690,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-blind-owl-and-notes-from-underground"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1690"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions\/167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/psci257-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}