Blogs

      Does birth order really affect a person’s personality? This question has been looming over the psychology world for a long time, beginning with the research of Alfred Adler in the early 20th century. While the views on Adler’s theories are currently almost as skeptical as Freud’s radical theories, Adler sparked the controversy that scientists still debate today. (1) The majority of psychologists think birth order does not have an effect on personality, but the topic is still a widely debated disagreement that remains unanswered. (3) Despite numerous research projects, scientists are still concluding answers that do not align, leaving the public mystified.

Careful Meditations: A Poetry Exercise in Word Replacement

a collaboration of intellect by Gertrude Stein, William James, Mark Strand, and Isabel Holmes

Introduction:

David Shields' Reality Hunger: A Manifesto radically adopts the notion of art as appropriation. Among many of his noteworthy provocations, he states: "the citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can't be copyrighted" (29). The core of Shields' argument is embedded in the form of his work: a collection of 618 aphorisms, most of which quote (but do not cite) other writers, artists, musicians, and critics. Shields intended to publish the work without attributing credit to these other voices, but "Random House lawyers determined that it was necessary for [him] to provide a complete list of citations," (209) which are contained in the appendix.

          Frames can symbolize things (conclusions, formalities, endings, etc.)—boundaries that are hard to see. Frames can also be more like windows, allowing viewers to reach through them into worlds beyond. And frames can be less like frames and more curtains or webs, airy with their in-betweens, but still providing a gauzy boundary through which to view those worlds beyond. My framing web is this: a few strands of our class discussions got tangled, and here I am, looking at international comics.

Sophie Balis-Harris
Web Book Commentary: Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer

Sophie Balis-Harris
Web Book Commentary: Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer

 What follows is a fictional commencement speech given to a graduating class of Bryn Mawr women by the most notable members of the James family. Though Alice never stepped foot on this campus, I have put myself in her frame of mind and have come with what I feel she would have bestowed upon the women who were able to do what she had not been allowed. As for Henry, he did give a commencement speech here at Bryn Mawr, but I must say it was not what I had in mind after reading The Portrait of a Lady, so I have written him a new speech which I think speaks more to the women he was addressing than his own speech. William also spoke to the student body in his lifetime.

What has most captured my interest in House of Wits has been the question of representation and re-presentation as I have learned about the James family. Each of my papers has dealt with this topic of representation. A few months ago I mapped Alice’s diary with charts to see if the diary was a thorough and accurate representation of her life, and I learned that she wrote less than 15% of the time she kept the diary. This surprised me, for as a genre the reader assumes a diary gives a complete and moment-by-moment description of its author’s life, that a diary is as close to actually knowing what happened as the reader could ever get. Alice’s diary proved this assumption false.  A diary is not a life.&

    Oliver Sacks’ novel, An Anthropologist on Mars, contains seven fascinating and strange neurobiological stories that explore unique perceptions and experiences of both the world and oneself in the world. The first tale, “The Colorblind Painter”, is about Jonathan I., a painter who, after an accident, lost his ability to perceive color in the world, his memories, and even his dreams. He could not remember what color ever looked like (the entire concept was obliterated from his brain), yet, intriguingly, it was determined that he could discriminate wavelengths of light.