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17 pages, 1063 KB

Open AccessArticle

Sylvia Plath and the Biopolitical Self: Narrating Aging, Decay, and Disease in Literary Imagination

by Yun Xing

Philosophies 2025, 10(5), 100; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies10050100 - 12 Sep 2025

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This study examines Sylvia Plath’s literary corpus through a biopolitical lens, analyzing how her representations of embodiment—particularly aging, decay, disease, and institutionalization—function as sites of contestation against institutional power. Moving beyond traditional biographical and psychoanalytic interpretations, this research study applies theoretical frameworks from Foucault, Agamben, and Esposito to illuminate how Plath’s work engages with and resists biopolitical structures. Through close readings of “The Bell Jar”, “The Colossus”, and “Ariel”, this study demonstrates how Plath’s aesthetic strategies transform embodied vulnerability into forms of resistance. The analysis explores four key dimensions: the institutionalized body and medical authority; aesthetic politics and the anxiety of aging; the biopolitics of reproduction and maternity; and death as both boundary and transcendence. This study reveals Plath’s corporeal poetics as a sophisticated engagement with the political dimensions of embodiment in the mid-twentieth century, establishing a literary tradition that influences contemporary understandings of bodies as sites of political contestation. Comparative analysis with other confessional poets highlights Plath’s distinctive and systematic approach to biopolitical themes, positioning her work as particularly significant for subsequent feminist theorizations of embodied resistance. Full article

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15 pages, 239 KB

Open AccessArticle

“Cured, I Am Frizzled, Stale, and Small”: Jungian Individuation Realized in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies

by Todd Gannon

Humanities 2024, 13(5), 126; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13050126 - 30 Sep 2024

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Abstract

Robert Lowell’s Life Studies won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960 and is credited with initiating the confessional poetry movement, which included followers and students of Lowell such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In Life Studies, Lowell channeled his 1950s experiences with bipolar disorder and mental health hospitalizations into poems such as “Man and Wife”, “Waking in the Blue”, and “Home After Three Months Away”. Lowell’s hard-won Life Studies triumph, though most recently analyzed through socioeconomic and “divine madness” lenses, can also be understood through Carl Jung’s individuation concept which posits that self-realization can be attained through the reconciliation of one’s own conscious and unconscious mental processes. This article argues that Lowell’s Life Studies poems, when examined through Jungian individuation, enabled Lowell to achieve self-realization, and paved the way for mentally ill individuals to learn how to achieve psychological wholeness through art. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Discourses of Madness)

13 pages, 1581 KB

Open AccessArticle

Pop/Poetry: Dickinson as Remix

by Julia Leyda and Maria Sulimma

Arts 2023, 12(2), 62; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12020062 - 22 Mar 2023

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 14477 | Correction

Abstract

In its meticulous, freewheeling adaptation of the life and work of celebrated poet Emily Dickinson, the television series Dickinson (Apple TV+, 2019–2021) manifests a twenty-first-century disruption of high and low culture afforded by digital media, including streaming video and music platforms. This article argues that the fanciful series models a mixed-media, multimodal aesthetic form that invites a diverse range of viewers to find pleasure in Dickinson’s poetry itself and in the foibles of its author, regardless of their familiarity with the literary or cultural histories of the US American 19th century. Dickinson showcases creator Alena Smith’s well-researched knowledge of the poet and her work, while simultaneously mocking popular (mis)conceptions about her life and that of other literary figures such as Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath, all set to a contemporary soundtrack. This analysis of Dickinson proposes to bring into conversation shifting boundaries of high and low culture across generations and engage with critical debates about the utility of the popular (and of studies of the popular) in literary and cultural studies in particular. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Perspectives on Pop Culture)

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9 pages, 1654 KB

Open AccessArticle

MELIF, a Fully Automated Liver Function Score Calculated from Gd-EOB-DTPA-Enhanced MR Images: Diagnostic Performance vs. the MELD Score

by Carolina Río Bártulos, Karin Senk, Ragnar Bade, Mona Schumacher, Jan Plath, Nico Kaiser, Isabel Wiesinger, Sylvia Thurn, Christian Stroszczynski, Abdelouahed El Mountassir, Mathis Planert, Jan Woetzel and Philipp Wiggermann

Diagnostics 2022, 12(7), 1750; https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics12071750 - 20 Jul 2022

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2483

Abstract

In the management of patients with chronic liver disease, the assessment of liver function is essential for treatment planning. Gd-EOB-DTPA-enhanced MRI allows for both the acquisition of anatomical information and regional liver function quantification. The objective of this study was to demonstrate and evaluate the diagnostic performance of two fully automatically generated imaging-based liver function scores that take the whole liver into account. T1 images from the native and hepatobiliary phases and the corresponding T1 maps from 195 patients were analyzed. A novel artificial-intelligence-based software prototype performed image segmentation and registration, calculated the reduction rate of the T1 relaxation time for the whole liver (rrT1_liver) and used it to calculate a personalized liver function score, then generated a unified score—the MELIF score—by combining the liver function score with a patient-specific factor that included weight, height and liver volume. Both scores correlated strongly with the MELD score, which is used as a reference for global liver function. However, MELIF showed a stronger correlation than the rrT1_liver score. This study demonstrated that the fully automated determination of total liver function, regionally resolved, using MR liver imaging is feasible, providing the opportunity to use the MELIF score as a diagnostic marker in future prospective studies. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Imaging of Hepatitis)

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16 pages, 288 KB

Open AccessEssay

Of Mirrors and Bell Jars. Heterotopia and Liminal Spaces as Reconfigurations of Female Identity in Sylvia Plath

by Carmen Bonasera

Humanities 2019, 8(1), 20; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010020 - 24 Jan 2019

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 13036

Abstract

The poetry of Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has received a considerable number of critical responses, among which spatial analysis occupies a minor position, although her texts explore complex relationships between subject and context. Drawing from a threefold theoretical apparatus (Bachelard’s theory of the poetic space, the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia, and the trope of liminality), this article focuses on the analysis of Plath’s increasing use of in-between spaces and objects of transition and transformations (mirrors, thresholds, windows), as well as on her predilection for heterotopic and alienating sceneries (hospital rooms, cemeteries), in both her poetry and prose. The study first acknowledges Plath’s choice of spatial imagery as a progressive orientation towards transitional states and places of otherness and ambivalence. Then, it highlights the specific role of heterotopic and liminal spaces in the process of reconfiguration of female identity. Given the impossibility for the female subject to rely on imprisoning domestic spheres to suture the edges of her fragmented self, reconceptualization of her own consciousness only becomes possible in the movement across a threshold. The analysis finally determines that the poetic evocation of spaces of conflict and difference paradoxically contributes to the shaping of female identity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Negotiating Spaces in Women’s Writing)

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