Spaces of death in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

In this article I explore the idea expressed by philosophers and social geographers such as Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and Henk van Houtum that “space” is a social construct; that the space in which a society exists and of which it consists is shaped by that society itself, and that specific locations are assigned to each of the members of the community. I discuss how the dominant spaces in society are shaped by those in positions of authority according to their own ideologies so as to ensure social order and their continued empowerment within the social structure. Additionally, I suggest that it is possible for those who do not conform to social norms, and who are consequently cast into dominated spaces, to undermine the authority of those in positions of power by embracing their marginalised state, and thereby to generate new spaces they can inhabit. I explore these ideas in relation to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and its depiction and examination of central nineteenth-century ideas and anxieties about death and the different areas allocated to the dead.In hierdie artikel ondersoek ek die idee, verwoord deur filosowe en sosiale geograwe soos Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja en Henk van Houtum, dat “ruimte” ’n sosiale skepping is; dat die ruimte waarin ’n gemeenskap geleë is en waaruit dit bestaan deur die samelewing self gevorm word en dat spesifieke ruimtes aan elk van die lede van die gemeenskap toegeken word. Ek bespreek hoe die dominante spasies in die samelewing deur dié in posisies van outoriteit in ooreenstemming met hul eie ideologieë geskep word om sosiale orde en die voortbestaan van hul eie mag binne die sosiale struktuur te verseker. Ek voer ook aan dat dit moontlik is vir dié wat nie by sosiale norme hou nie en wat gevolglik in ruimtes van onderdrukking gewerp word om die outoriteit van dié in magsposisies te ondermyn en sodoende nuwe ruimtes vir hulself te skep. Ek ondersoek hierdie idees ten opsigte van Emily Brontë se Wuthering Heights en dié teks se uitbeelding en ondersoeking van kern negentiende-eeuse idees en vrese met betrekking tot die dood en die verskeie areas wat aan die dooies toegeken word.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjls20hb201

‘Not a country at all’: landscape and Wuthering Heights

This article explores the issue of women’s representational genealogies through an analysis of Andrea Arnold’s 2011 Wuthering Heights. Beginning with 1970s feminist arguments for a specifically female literary tradition, it argues that running through both these early attempts to construct an alternative female literary tradition and later work in feminist philosophy, cultural geography and film history is a concern with questions of ‘alternative landscapes’: of how to represent, and how to encounter, space differently. Adopting Mary Jacobus’ notion of intertextual ‘correspondence’ between women’s texts, and taking Arnold’s film as its case study, it seeks to trace some of the intertextual movements – the reframings, deframings and spatial reorderings – that link Andrea Arnold’s film to Emily Brontë’s original novel. Focusing on two elements of her treatment of landscape – her use of ‘unframed’ landscape and her focus on visceral textural detail – it points to correspondences in other women’s writing, photography and film-making. It argues that these intensely tactile close-up sequences which puncture an apparently realist narrative constitute an insistent presence beneath, or within, the ordered framing which is our more usual mode of viewing landscape. As the novel Wuthering Heights is unmade in Arnold’s adaptation and its framings ruptured, it is through this disturbance of hierarchies of time, space and landscape that we can trace the correspondences of an alternative genealogy

Voice hearing in borderline personality disorder across perceptual, subjective, and neural dimensions

BACKGROUND: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) commonly occur in the context of borderline personality disorder (BPD) yet remain poorly understood. AVH are often perceived by patients with BPD as originating from inside the head and hence viewed clinically as "pseudohallucinations," but they nevertheless have a detrimental impact on well-being. METHODS: The current study characterized perceptual, subjective, and neural expressions of AVH by using an auditory detection task, experience sampling and questionnaires, and functional neuroimaging, respectively. RESULTS: Perceptually, reported AVH correlated with a bias for reporting the presence of a voice in white noise. Subjectively, questionnaire measures indicated that AVH were significantly distressing and persecutory. In addition, AVH intensity, but not perceived origin (i.e., inside vs outside the head), was associated with greater concurrent anxiety. Neurally, fMRI of BPD participants demonstrated that, relative to imagining or listening to voices, periods of reported AVH induced greater blood oxygenation level-dependent activity in anterior cingulate and bilateral temporal cortices (regional substrates for language processing). AVH symptom severity was associated with weaker functional connectivity between anterior cingulate and bilateral insular cortices. CONCLUSION: In summary, our results indicate that AVH in participants with BPD are (1) underpinned by aberrant perceptual-cognitive mechanisms for signal detection, (2) experienced subjectively as persecutory and distressing, and (3) associated with distinct patterns of neural activity that inform proximal mechanistic understanding. Our findings are like analogous observations in patients with schizophrenia and validate the clinical significance of the AVH experience in BPD, often dismissed as "pseudohallucinations." These highlight a need to reconsider this experience as a treatment priority

Morris dancers, matriarchs and paperbacks:Doing the village in contemporary Britain

To call a place rural is to categorize it as a particular kind of place and, often, to presume that particular kinds of being innately occur there. Over the past 20 years, however, trends in British rural studies have problematized easy ascription; this article is an ethnographic contribution within those trends. If it is no longer adequate to read the rural as a container for being, then, as I contend here, rurality can be explored anew through doing. I draw upon David Matless’s (1994) frame of ‘doing the village’ representationally, and amplify it to include concepts of place as representational and relational. I thus use ‘doing’ to read the multiple ways in which diverse residents in a Northern England village engage with both their real locality and with nationally shared rural imaginings