WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 30 minutes (+ 10 minutes for discussion).
Elżbieta Wąsik
Department of Older Germanic Languages
On abstracting and generalizing within the framework of General Semantics
This paper will depart from four conceptual and methodological assumptions: firstly, that the foundation of all psychophysiological knowing constitutes structural differences between the subjective worlds of cognizing organisms, secondly, that the objectivity of real world is the matter of a subjective definition, thirdly, that perception implies abstraction, and, finally, that concrete is only that feature (aspect and constituent of reality) which has not been abstracted yet. In order to elucidate the role of abstract thinking in cognition — the complement of which is generalizing — the paper will refer to the philosophical sources of the abstraction-related conception of language and thought. The primary focus of attention will be put on General Semantics, a philosophical-sociological theory of meaning, proposed by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950), an American scholar of Polish origin, who enjoyed the greatest popularity from the period of the 1950s through the 1970s. It will be demonstrated that, in Korzybski’s approach to meaning being communicated by humans linguistically, the ability of abstracting is a prerequisite of thinking and reasoning processes at all. As such, it constitutes a crucial factor in the evolution of human societies and in the personal growth of human individuals, as biological, psychological and social beings, as well as language speakers aware of self and others in time-and-space relations. Accordingly, it will be shown that general semanticists have emphasized the need of practical training in abstracting, which is, in their view, indispensable to change for the better the habits of evaluation and to improve the effectiveness of communication. In conclusion, the importance of the concepts of abstracting and generalizing for the logic of philosophy will be stressed.
Małgorzata Bobowska
Center for Canadian Literature
Japanese folklore and mythology permeating Canadian reality in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms, The Water of Possibility and The Kappa Child
As a writer who did not experience the internment and who was born in Japan, Hiromi Goto moves beyond addressing the war-time trauma, and experiments with Japanese mythology. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to show how Goto employs Japanese culture in the form of myths and mythical creatures, such as kappa, tanuki, and yamanba in her novels, specifically in Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) The Kappa Child (2001), and The Water of Possibility (2001). In particular, the paper will focus on the way in which the writer goes beyond autoethnography and moves from "minority writing" and an Orientalist portrayal of Japanese Canadian women. My research has shown that not only does she change the stories of yamanba, kappa and tanuki in order to adjust them to the Canadian landscape, but the writer also brings together the elements of absurd, grotesque, and science fiction. What is more, Goto also raises the issue of one’s sexual identity / orientation, and questions the binary associated thinking with sex and gender. For instance, in The Kappa Child, the Japanese creature of kappa serves as a marker of diasporic consciousness, but at the same time, the protagonist seems to be gender-ambiguous. All in all, I believe that a synthesis of the selected Goto’s novels would shed more light on the way in which the author discusses diasporic consciousness, and how the employment of the Japanese mythology contributes to a new way of perceiving the transnational Japanese Canadian identity.