Socionics, in psychology and sociology, is a pseudoscientific theory of information processing and personality types. It incorporates Carl Jung's work on Psychological Types with Antoni Kępiński's theory of information metabolism. Socionics is modification of Jung's personality type theory that uses eight psychic functions instead of four. These cognitive functions are supposed to process information at varying levels of competency and interact with the corresponding function in other individuals, giving rise to predictable reactions and impressions—a theory of intertype relations. In contrast to the generally accepted views in personality psychology on age-related variability of the human psyche, socionics distinguishes 16 рsychophysiological types or types of informational metabolism unchanged throughout life. The issue of the existence of personality types is considered by modern personality psychology to be extremely controversial. However, the immutability of socionic рsychophysiological types is determined by the stability of their neural structures in the brain. At the same time, psychological personality traits can evolve and change throughout life. The special commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences has placed socionics among such well-known pseudosciences as astrology and homeopathy.
In personality typology, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. It enjoys popularity despite being widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community. The test attempts to assign a binary value to each of four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is taken to produce a four-letter test result representing one of sixteen possible personalities, such as "ISTJ" or "ENFP".
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael's opinions often ran contrary to those of her contemporaries.
Lionel Mordecai Trilling was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. With his wife Diana Trilling, whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review.
Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor, who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.
The Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS) is a self-assessed personality questionnaire designed to help people better understand themselves and others. It was first introduced in the book Please Understand Me. It is one of the most widely used personality assessments in the world. The KTS is closely associated with the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI); however, there are significant practical and theoretical differences between the two personality questionnaires and their associated different descriptions. It has been criticized as pseudoscience.
Joan Acocella is an American journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She has written books on dance, literature, and psychology.
Isabel Briggs Myers was an American writer who co-created the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. The MBTI is one of the most-often used personality tests worldwide; over two million people complete the questionnaire each year.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 is a 2005 non-fiction book written by British historian Tony Judt examining the six decades of European history from the end of World War II in Europe in 1945 to 2005. Postwar is widely considered one of the foremost accounts of contemporary European history, particularly with regards to the history of Eastern Europe. It has been translated into French and German.
Katharine Cook Briggs was an American writer who was the co-creator, with her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, of an inventory of a widely popular personality type system known as the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
Penelope Gilliatt was an English novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film critic. As one of the main film critics for The New Yorker magazine in the 1960s and 1970s, Gilliatt was known for her detailed descriptions and evocative reviews. A writer of short stories, novels, non-fiction books, and screenplays, Gilliatt was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971).
Elizabeth Wagele (1939–2017) was an American artist, musician, and writer of books on the Enneagram of Personality and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
Diane Williams is an American author, primarily of short stories. She lives in New York City and is the founder and editor of the literary annual NOON. She is the author of eleven books, including How High? — That High, for which she was interviewed by Merve Emre in The New Yorker. Her book The Collected Stories of Diane Williams was published by Soho Press in 2018.
Laurie Anne Helgoe is an American psychologist with an interest in the relationship between personality development and culture. In 2008, her writing revealed that scholarly and popular accounts regarding humans who display the personality traits of introversion and extraversion were flawed, and that instead of representing 25-30% of the population, introverts make up 57% of the population. The identified flaw was a dated reliance on the early work of Isabel Briggs Myers, and the failure to note results of the latest nationally representative surveys using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a questionnaire used by psychologists to classify human personality traits. Helgoe discussed these findings in the book Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life is Your Hidden Strength.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works.
Susan Taubes was a Hungarian-American writer and intellectual.
The Neapolitan Novels, also known as the Neapolitan Quartet, are a four-part series of fiction by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, published originally by Edizioni e/o, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, and published by Europa Editions. The English-language titles of the novels are My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). In the original Italian edition, the whole series bears the title of the first novel L'amica geniale. The series has been characterized as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. In an interview in Harper's Magazine, Elena Ferrante has stated that she considers the four books to be "a single novel" published serially for reasons of length and duration. The series has sold over 10 million copies in 40 countries.
Ravenna Mathews Helson was an American psychologist known for her research on the psychology of women and creativity. Dacher Keltner has described her as "a pioneer in the study of women's lives".
In literary criticism and cultural studies, postcritique is the attempt to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critique, critical theory, and ideological criticism. Such methods have been characterized as a "hermeneutics of suspicion" by Paul Ricœur and as a "paranoid" or suspicious style of reading by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Proponents of postcritique argue that the interpretive practices associated with these ways of reading are now unlikely to yield useful or even interesting results. As Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker put it in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique, "the intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so self-evident." A postcritical reading of a literary text might instead emphasize emotion or affect, or describe various other phenomenological or aesthetic dimensions of the reader's experience. At other times, it might focus on issues of reception, explore philosophical insights gleaned via the process of reading, pose formalist questions of the text, or seek to resolve a "sense of confusion."
Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study is a widely-reviewed 2022 nonfiction book written by literary scholar John Guillory.
