Date of Award
2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Wallace, Miriam
Area of Concentration
English
Abstract
My thesis asks how we as humans relate to the world through the “body” and “mind or “bodymind.” The “bodymind” can be explored through good and bad education, as one way we relate to the world is through knowledge. But, there is also the knowledge of our body through the senses which is our first form of knowing. As we gain knowledge, we make sense of our initial sensations of being and from these processes we form our-Self. Using Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and Hard Times, through the lens of Paulo Freire’s educational existentialist theory of knowledge; I consider the difference between mechanical knowledge and mystical knowledge. Secondly, I relate ideas of embodiment in Anne McCaffery’s The Ship Who Sang using Rene Descartes’ “body-mind problem” and Margaret Price’s term the “bodymind.” Disability studies show us that not everybody can know the world in the same way. Therefore, we must educate everyone according to the function of their own “bodymind.” Education is not simply for one “body” or one kind of “body,” and the same goes for the “mind” in which there are also many different kinds. So, ultimately this thesis is about educating the “bodymind.”
Recommended Citation
O'Rourke, Maggie, "EDUCATING THE BODYMIND IN DICKENS’S OUR MUTUAL FRIEND AND MCCAFFREY’S THE SHIP WHO SANG" (2022). Theses & ETDs. 6280.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/6280