Download or read book A History of Ambiguity written by Anthony Ossa-Richardson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since it was first published in 1930, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity has been perceived as a milestone in literary criticism—far from being an impediment to communication, ambiguity now seemed an index of poetic richness and expressive power. Little, however, has been written on the broader trajectory of Western thought about ambiguity before Empson; as a result, the nature of his innovation has been poorly understood. A History of Ambiguity remedies this omission. Starting with classical grammar and rhetoric, and moving on to moral theology, law, biblical exegesis, German philosophy, and literary criticism, Anthony Ossa-Richardson explores the many ways in which readers and theorists posited, denied, conceptualised, and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts between antiquity and the twentieth century. This process took on a variety of interconnected forms, from the Renaissance delight in the ‘elegance’ of ambiguities in Horace, through the extraordinary Catholic claim that Scripture could contain multiple literal—and not just allegorical—senses, to the theory of dramatic irony developed in the nineteenth century, a theory intertwined with discoveries of the double meanings in Greek tragedy. Such narratives are not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, they provide an insight into the foundations of modern criticism, revealing deep resonances between acts of interpretation in disparate eras and contexts. A History of Ambiguity lays bare the long tradition of efforts to liberate language, and even a poet’s intention, from the strictures of a single meaning.
Download or read book Seven Types of Ambiguity written by William Empson and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1966 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines seven types of ambiguity, providing examples of it in the writings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot.
Download or read book A Culture of Ambiguity written by Thomas Bauer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy? In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture, which stands in striking contrast to both present-day fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how Islam’s encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies that in their own ways rejected ambiguity—and therefore also their own cultural traditions. Awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize, A Culture of Ambiguity not only reframes a vast range of Islamic history but also offers an interdisciplinary model for investigating the tolerance of ambiguity across cultures and eras.
Download or read book A Certain Ambiguity written by Gaurav Suri and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While taking a class on infinity at Stanford in the late 1980s, Ravi Kapoor discovers that he is confronting the same mathematical and philosophical dilemmas that his mathematician grandfather had faced many decades earlier--and that had landed him in jail. Charged under an obscure blasphemy law in a small New Jersey town in 1919, Vijay Sahni is challenged by a skeptical judge to defend his belief that the certainty of mathematics can be extended to all human knowledge--including religion. Together, the two men discover the power--and the fallibility--of what has long been considered the pinnacle of human certainty, Euclidean geometry. As grandfather and grandson struggle with the question of whether there can ever be absolute certainty in mathematics or life, they are forced to reconsider their fundamental beliefs and choices. Their stories hinge on their explorations of parallel developments in the study of geometry and infinity--and the mathematics throughout is as rigorous and fascinating as the narrative and characters are compelling and complex. Moving and enlightening, A Certain Ambiguity is a story about what it means to face the extent--and the limits--of human knowledge.
Download or read book Strategies of Ambiguity in Ancient Literature written by Martin Vöhler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-02-22 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ambiguity in the sense of two or more possible meanings is considered to be a distinctive feature of modern art and literature. It characterizes the "open artwork" (Eco) and is generated by "disruptive tactics" (Wellershoff) and strategies to engender uncertainty. While ambiguity is seen as a "paradigm of modernity" (Bode), there is skepticism regarding its use in the pre-modern era. Older studies were dominated by the conviction that there was a lack of ambiguity in pre-modernity because, according to the rules of the "old rhetoric", ambiguity was seen as an avoidable error (vitium) and a violation of the dictate of clarity (perspicuitas). The aim of the volume is to re-examine the putative "absence of ambiguity" in the pre-modern era. Is it not possible to find clear examples of deliberately employed (intended) ambiguity in antiquity? Are the oracles and riddles, the Palinode of Stesichoros and Socrates (Phaedrus), the dissoi logoi of rhetoric, the ambiguities of the tragedies all exceptions or do they not indicate a distinct interest in the artistic use of ambiguity? The presentations of the conference, which will include scholars from various philologies, will combine a recourse to theoretical concepts of intended ambiguity with exemplary analyses from the field of pre-modern art and literature.
Download or read book Navigating Ambiguity written by Andrea Small and published by Ten Speed Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking guide to help you lean in to the discomfort of the unknown to turn creative opportunities into intentional design, from Stanford University's world-renowned d.school. “Navigating Ambiguity reminds us not to run from uncertainty but rather see it as a defining moment of opportunity.”—Yves Béhar, Founder and CEO, fuseproject A design process presents a series of steps, but in real life, it rarely plays out this neatly. Navigating Ambiguity underscores how the creative process isn’t formulaic. This book shows you how to surrender control by being adaptable, curious, and unbiased as well as resourceful, tenacious, and courageous. Designers and educators Andrea Small and Kelly Schmutte use humor and clear steps to help you embrace uncertainty as you approach a creative project. First, they explain how the brain works and why it defaults to certainty. Then they show you how to let go of the need for control and instead employ a flexible strategy that relies on the balance between acting and adapting, and the give-and-take between opposing approaches to make your way to your goal. Beautiful cut-paper artwork illustrations offer ways to rethink creative work without hitting the usual roadblocks. The result is a more open and satisfying journey from assignment or idea to finished product.
Download or read book Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past written by Francois G Richard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collective inquiries in this volume address ethnicity in ancient Africa as social fact and political artifact along numerous dimensions. Is ethnicity a useful analytic? What can archaeology say about the kinds of deeper time questions which scholars have asked of identities in Africa? Eleven authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in Africa were made and unmade. They examine how these intersect with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. The various chapters cover broad geographic and temporal ground, following an arc across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and East Africa, spanning from prehistory to the colonial period.
Download or read book Structural Ambiguity in English written by Dallin D. Oaks and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-05-27 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structural Ambiguity in English is a major new scholarly work that provides an innovative and accessible linguistic description of those features of the language that can be exploited to generate structural ambiguities. Most ambiguity scholarship is concerned with disambiguation-the process of making what is ambiguous clear. This book takes the opposite approach as it focuses on describing the features in the English language that may contribute towards the creation of structural ambiguities, which form the core of some of the best word-plays found in advertising, comedy and marketing. Oaks utilizes a systematic and comprehensive inventory approach that identifies individual elements in the language and their distinctive behaviors that can be manipulated in the deliberate creation of structural ambiguities. In doing so he also provides authentic examples to illustrate the concepts he presents. This book will appeal to researchers and academics interested in the structure of the English language, usage, pragmatics, communication, natural language processing, editing, and humor studies as well as those in marketing, advertising, or humor writing.
Download or read book Alexander written by Guy Maclean Rogers and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2005-10-11 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly two and a half millennia, Alexander the Great has loomed over history as a legend–and an enigma. Wounded repeatedly but always triumphant in battle, he conquered most of the known world, only to die mysteriously at the age of thirty-two. In his day he was revered as a god; in our day he has been reviled as a mass murderer, a tyrant as brutal as Stalin or Hitler. Who was the man behind the mask of power? Why did Alexander embark on an unprecedented program of global domination? What accounted for his astonishing success on the battlefield? In this luminous new biography, the esteemed classical scholar and historian Guy MacLean Rogers sifts through thousands of years of history and myth to uncover the truth about this complex, ambiguous genius. Ascending to the throne of Macedonia after the assassination of his father, King Philip II, Alexander discovered while barely out of his teens that he had an extraordinary talent and a boundless appetite for military conquest. A virtuoso of violence, he was gifted with an uncanny ability to visualize how a battle would unfold, coupled with devastating decisiveness in the field. Granicus, Issos, Gaugamela, Hydaspes–as the victories mounted, Alexander’s passion for conquest expanded from cities to countries to continents. When Persia, the greatest empire of his day, fell before him, he marched at once on India, intending to add it to his holdings. As Rogers shows, Alexander’s military prowess only heightened his exuberant sexuality. Though his taste for multiple partners, both male and female, was tolerated, Alexander’s relatively enlightened treatment of women was nothing short of revolutionary. He outlawed rape, he placed intelligent women in positions of authority, and he chose his wives from among the peoples he conquered. Indeed, as Rogers argues, Alexander’s fascination with Persian culture, customs, and sexual practices may have led to his downfall, perhaps even to his death. Alexander emerges as a charismatic and surprisingly modern figure–neither a messiah nor a genocidal butcher but one of the most imaginative and daring military tacticians of all time. Balanced and authoritative, this brilliant portrait brings Alexander to life as a man, without diminishing the power of the legend.
Download or read book The Ambiguity of Play written by Brian Sutton-Smith and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sutton-Smith focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct "rhetorics"--The ancient discourses of fate, power, communal identity, and frivolity and the modern discourses of progress, the imaginary, and the self. In a sweeping analysis that moves from the question of play in child development to the implications of play for the Western work ethic, he explores the values, historical sources, and interests that have dictated the terms and forms of play put forth in each discourse's "objective" theory
Download or read book Plurality and Ambiguity written by David Tracy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-06-10 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Plurality and Ambiguity, David Tracy lays the philosophical groundwork for a practical application of hermeneutics, while constructing an innovative model of theological interpretation developed out of the notions of conversation and argument. He concludes with an appraisal of the religious significance of hope in an age of radically different voices and constantly shifting meanings.
Download or read book Ambiguity written by Susanne Winkler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-30 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume investigates the concept of ambiguity and how it manifests itself in language and communication from a new perspective. The main goal is to uncover a great mystery: why can we communicate effectively despite the fact that ambiguity is pervasive in the language that we use? And conversely, how do speakers and hearers use ambiguity and vagueness to achieve a specific goal? Comprehensive answers to these questions are provided from different fields which focus on the study of language, in particular, linguistics, literary criticism, rhetoric, psycholinguistics, theology, media studies and law. By bringing together these different disciplines, the book documents a radical change in the research on ambiguity. The innovation is brought about by the transdisciplinary perspective of the individual and co-authored papers that bridge the gaps between disciplines. The research program that underlies this volume establishes theoretical connections between the areas of (psycho)linguistics that concentrate on the question of how the system of language works with the areas of rhetoric, literary studies, theology and law that focus on the question of how communication works in discourse and text from the perspective of both production and perception. A three-dimensional Ambiguity Model is presented that serves as a theoretical anchor point for the analyses of the different types of ambiguities by the contributors of this volume. The Ambiguity Model is a hybrid model which brings together the different perspectives on how language and the language system work with respect to ambiguity as well as the question of how ambiguity is employed in communication and in different communicational settings. A set of specific features that are relevant for the description of ambiguity, such as whether the ambiguity arises in the production or perception process, and whether it occurs in strategic or nonstrategic communication, are defined. The research program rests on the assumption that both the production and the perception of ambiguity, as well as its strategic and nonstrategic occurrence, can only be understood by exploring how these factors interact with each other and a reference system when ambiguity is generated and resolved. The collection Ambiguity: Language and Communication constitutes a superb introduction to the workings of ambiguity in language and communication along with extensive analyses of many different examples from different fields. As such it is relevant for students of linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, law and theology and at the same time there is sufficient quality analysis and new research questions to benefit advanced readers who are interested in ambiguity.
Download or read book Managing Ambiguity written by Čarna Brković and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare. Managing Ambiguity follows how neoliberal insistence on local community, flexibility, and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back, and how this fostered a specific mode of power.
Download or read book Risk Ambiguity and Decision written by Daniel Ellsberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ellsberg elaborates on "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms" and mounts a powerful challenge to the dominant theory of rational decision in this book.
Download or read book The Ethics of Ambiguity written by Simone de Beauvoir and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the groundbreaking author of The Second Sex comes a radical argument for ethical responsibility and freedom. In this classic introduction to existentialist thought, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity simultaneously pays homage to and grapples with her French contemporaries, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by arguing that the freedoms in existentialism carry with them certain ethical responsibilities. De Beauvoir outlines a series of “ways of being” (the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist, and the intellectual), each of which overcomes the former’s deficiencies, and therefore can live up to the responsibilities of freedom. Ultimately, de Beauvoir argues that in order to achieve true freedom, one must battle against the choices and activities of those who suppress it. The Ethics of Ambiguity is the book that launched Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist and existential philosophy. It remains a concise yet thorough examination of existence and what it means to be human.
Download or read book Giorgione s Ambiguity written by Tom Nichols and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-12-25 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Venetian painter known as Giorgione or “big George” died at a young age in the dreadful plague of 1510, possibly having painted fewer than twenty-five works. But many of these are among the most mysterious and alluring in the history of art. Paintings such as The Three Philosophers and The Tempest remain compellingly elusive, seeming to deny the viewer the possibility of interpreting their meaning. Tom Nichols argues that this visual elusiveness was essential to Giorgione’s sensual approach and that ambiguity is the defining quality of his art. Through detailed discussions of all Giorgione’s works, Nichols shows that by abandoning the more intellectual tendencies of much Renaissance art, Giorgione made the world and its meanings appear always more inscrutable.
Download or read book Sources of Law Legal Change and Ambiguity written by Alan Watson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is the law notoriously unclear, arcane, slow to change in the face of changing circumstances? In this sweeping comparative analysis of the lawmaking process from ancient Rome to the present day, Alan Watson argues that the answer has largely to do with the mixed ancestry of modern law, the confusion of sources—custom, legislation, scholarly writing, and judicial precedent—from which it derives.
