Category:Humanities

This category is for articles dealing with the various subjects referred to as Humanities (e.g., Sociology)


 * Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study* Edited by John V. Knapp and Kenneth Womack Univ. Of Delaware Press, 2003.

The development in recent years of the intersections between the family and literary study continues to emerge as one of the most productive and illuminating arenas of contemporary critique. As an interpretative mechanism, family systems therapy (fst) provides scholars and readers alike with a revelatory social psychology for evaluating the nature of the familial structures that often mark our textual experiences. In addition to addressing the family dynamic through which a given literary character develops a fully realized sense of self, family systems therapy allows readers to examine the patterns by which characters function in their larger intimate systems, whether those systems be social, institutional, or even global.


 * Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study* offers a collection of original essays that reflects both the substantial critical interest in this important contemporary field of inquiry, as well as its wide range of forays into such disciplines as feminism, gender studies, ethnicity, race, and cultural studies. Divided into three descriptive sections, Reading the Family Dance includes interdisciplinary essays that address various literary works in terms of family systems therapies respective approaches to our understandings of the self, the family, and the world. The essays in this volume range through much of the imaginative literature in English, including British works, ethnic and canonized American texts, and even the translation of a Brazilian novel; although many of the works analyzed in this collection were published in the twentieth century, Reading the Family Dance features essays devoted to Shakespeare and to various works of nineteenth-century fiction as well.

The volume begins with John V. Knapp's comprehensive and wide-ranging introduction to family systems therapy and literary study. In addition to providing readers with an intellectual history of the discipline, Knapp establishes a contemporary scholarly foundation for the ensuing collection. The essays by Kenneth Womack, Rosemary Babcock, Gary Storhoff, and Lee Ann De Reus included in the volume's first section, "The Self: Family Systems Therapy and the Quest for Identity," examine a host of issues related to the development of the self, including the onset of personal identity, sibling differentiation, and interpersonal communication.

In the volume's second section, "The Family: Family Systems Therapy and the Discourse of Community," the essays by Joan I. Schwarz, Steven Snyder, Jerome Bump, Sara Cooper, and John V. Knapp discuss the vocabularies of community that assist families as they develop into functional units or, conversely, into dysfunctional factions. In Reading the Family Dance's final section, "The World: Reading Family Systems Therapy in Extremis," the essays by Todd F. Davis, James M. Decker, Marco Malaspina, and Denis Jonnes explore the ways in which our culture often manifests itself in larger family systems. The essays in this section examine the ethics of these larger communities through their analyzes of Hollywood's entertainment culture, Renaissance-era family dynamics, and America's postwar family system.

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