Cavell and the Endless Mourning of Skepticism

The article discusses Stanley Cavell and his concept of skepticism. Stanley Cavell describes one of the fundamental lessons of skepticism, as the familiar challenge to the possibility of certainty or knowledge that emerges as a methodological tendency in modern thought. In elucidating the historical and continuing impulse to doubt in a range of examples drawn from philosophy, literature, and cinema, Cavell argues that skepticism reveals the loss of transcendental necessity, the kind of metaphysical guarantee that traditionally grounded linguistic meaning in a one-to-one correspondence between words and the objects. For Cavell, modernity appears as an epoch where transcendental securities have irretrievably disappeared.</p

Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy: Advancing Social Justice by Improving Social Cognition through Literary Study

Previous studies suggest that narrative fiction promotes social justice by increasing empathy, but critics have argued that the partiality of empathy severely limits its effectiveness as an engine of social justice, and that what needs to be developed is universal compassion rather than empathy. We created Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy (CCP) to target the development of two social-cognition capabilities that entail compassion: (1) recognition of self-other overlap and (2) cognizance of the situational, uncontrollable causes of bad character, bad behavior, and bad life-outcomes. Employing a pre/post within- and between-subjects design, we found that students in the CCP classes, but not students in conventionally taught classes, improved in these two areas of social cognition and also exhibited increased preference for compassionate social policies for stigmatized groups. This finding suggests that pedagogy can play a significant role in literature’s contribution to social justice, and that further efforts to develop and test pedagogies for improving social cognition are warranted

Writing Prozāk Diaries in Tehran: Generational Anomie and Psychiatric Subjectivities

I explore the historical and cultural shifts that underlie the normalization of the term de´pre´shen and the emergence of public psychiatric discourses in 1990s Iran. I do this by investigating the cultural sensibilities of a particular generation, the self-identified 1980s generation, and the ways they situate what is perceived as de´pre´shen in social anomie and the memories of the Iran–Iraq war. I argue that psychiatrization of psychological distress in Iran was not simply a de-politicizing hegemonic biomedical discourse, but that the contemporary Iranian discourses of psychological pathology and social loss evolved in public, hand-in-hand, through the medicalization of post-war loss. Psychiatric subjectivity describes conditions where individuals internalize psychiatry as a mode of thinking, and performatively articulate not only their desires, hopes, and anxieties, but also historical losses as embodied in individual and collective brains. I underscore my interlocutors’ simultaneous historicization and medicalization of their de´pre´shen, arguing that psychiatrically medicalized individuals are performative actors in the discursive formation of both biomedical and social truth. De´pre´shen, in the larger sense of the word, has become one way to navigate ruptured pasts, slippery presents, and uncertain futures