Download or read book An Archaeology of Sympathy written by James Chandler and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people’s very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being. In what is sure to become a critical classic, An Archaeology of Sympathy challenges Sergei Eisenstein’s influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. James Chandler begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, he reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra’s It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Chandler then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work. Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, An Archaeology of Sympathy casts new light on the long eighteenth century and the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.
Download or read book A Future for Archaeology written by Robert Layton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last thirty years issues of culture, identity and meaning have moved out of the academic sphere to become central to politics and society at all levels from the local to the global. Archaeology has been at the forefront of these moves towards a greater engagement with the non-academic world, often in an extremely practical and direct way, for example in the disputes about the repatriation of human burials. Such disputes have been central to the recognition that previously marginalized groups have rights in their own past that are important for their future. The essays in this book look back at some of the most important events where a role for an archaeology concerned with the past in the present first emerged and look forward to the practical and theoretical issues now central to a socially engaged discipline and shaping its future. This book is published in honor of Professor Peter Ucko, who has played an unparalleled role in promoting awareness of the core issues in this volume among archaeologists.
Download or read book Words Made Flesh written by Sean Dempsey and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2022-08-26 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion is not merely a different way of thinking but is rather an alternative manner of being—it is both a way of attending to the world and a form of embodiment. Literature provides another key to legislating new ways of being in the world. Some of the best Romantic literature can be understood as experimental attempts to access and harness infrasensible energy—affects and dispositions operating beneath the threshold of consciousness—in the hope that by so doing it may become possible to project elusive affects into the practical world of conscious thinking and judgment. Words Made Flesh demonstrates how the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and the novelist Jane Austen affect, mediate, and ultimately alter our very sense of embodiment in ways that have lasting effects on readers’ affective, political, and spiritual lives. Such works, which unsettle habitual ways of seeing, are perennially valuable because they not only call attention to the dispositions we normally inhabit, but they also suggest ways of forging new patterns and forms of life through the medium of embodiment. Drawing on the work of these writers, Dempsey argues that Romanticism’s contribution to our understanding of the postsecular becomes clearer when considered in relation to three timely scholarly conversations not previously synthesized: secular and postsecular studies, affect theory, and media studies. By weaving together these three strands, Words Made Flesh clarifies how Romanticism provides a useful field guide to the new geography of the self ushered in by secular modernity, while also pointing toward potential postsecular futures. Ultimately, Dempsey argues for a view of literature that recognizes it as an essential component to ethical practice.
Download or read book The Science of Sympathy written by Rob Boddice and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his Descent of Man , Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in a civilized human society. His idea buttressed the belief that white, upper-class, educated men deserved their sense of superiority by virtue of good breeding. It also implied that societal progress could be steered by envisioning a new blueprint for sympathy that redefined moral actions carried out in sympathy's name. Rob Boddice joins a daring intellectual history of sympathy to a portrait of how the first Darwinists defined and employed it. As Boddice shows, their interpretations of Darwin's ideas sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy. Scientific and medical progress demanded that "cruel" practices like vivisection and compulsory vaccination be seen as moral for their ultimate goal of alleviating suffering. Some even saw the so-called unfit--natural targets of sympathy--as a danger to society and encouraged procreation by the "fit" alone. Right or wrong, these early Darwinists formed a moral economy that acted on a new system of ethics, reconceptualized obligations, and executed new duties. Boddice persuasively argues that the bizarre, even dangerous formulations of sympathy they invented influence society and civilization in the present day.
Download or read book The Virtue of Sympathy written by Seth Lobis and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with an analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and building to a new reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, author Seth Lobis charts a profound change in the cultural meaning of sympathy during the seventeenth century. Having long referred to magical affinities in the universe, sympathy was increasingly understood to be a force of connection between people. By examining sympathy in literary and philosophical writing of the period, Lobis illuminates an extraordinary shift in human understanding.
Download or read book Passions Sympathy and Print Culture written by Heather Kerr and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores ways in which passions came to be conceived, performed and authenticated in the eighteenth-century marketplace of print. It considers satire and sympathy in various environments, ranging from popular novels and journalism, through philosophical studies of the Scottish Enlightenment, to last words, aesthetics, and plastic surgery.
Download or read book Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth Century US Literary History written by Maria A. Windell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sentimentalism is usually studied through US-British relations after the American Revolution or in connection to national reforms like the abolitionist movement. Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History instead argues that African American, Native American, Latinx, and Anglo American women writers also used sentimentalism to construct narratives that reframed or countered the violence dominating the nineteenth-century Americas, including the Haitian Revolution, Indian Removal, the US-Mexican War, and Cuba's independence wars. By tracking the transformation of sentimentalism as the US reacted to, enacted, and intervened in conflict Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History demonstrates how marginalized writers negotiated hemispheric encounters amidst the gendered, racialized, and cultural violence of the nineteenth-century Americas. It remaps sentiment's familiar transatlantic and national scholarly frameworks through authors such as Leonora Sansay and Mary Peabody Mann, and considers how authors including John Rollin Ridge, John S. and Harriet Jacobs, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Victor Séjour, and Martin R. Delany adapted the mode. Transamerican sentimentalism cannot unseat the violence of the nineteenth-century Americas, but it does produce other potential outcomes-including new paradigms for understanding the coquette, a locally successful informal diplomacy, and motivations for violent slave revolt. Such transformations mark not sentiment's failures or distortions, but its adaptive attempts to survive and thrive.
Download or read book Compassion s Edge written by Katherine Ibbett and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compassion's Edge traces the relation between compassion and toleration after France's Wars of Religion. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division. It provides a robust corrective to today's hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.
Download or read book The Hypothetical Mandarin Sympathy Modernity and Chinese Pain written by Eric Hayot Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Asian Studies Pennsylvania State University and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009-03-27 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has the West for so long and in so many different ways expressed the idea that the Chinese have a special relationship to cruelty and to physical pain? What can the history of that idea and its expressions teach us about the politics of the West's contemporary relation to China? And what does it tell us about the philosophy of modernity? The Hypothetical Mandarin is, in some sense, a history of the Western imagination. It is also a history of the interactions between Enlightenment philosophy, of globalization, of human rights, and of the idea of the modern. Beginning with Bianchon and Rastignac's discussion of whether the former would, if he could, obtain a European fortune by killing a Chinese mandarin in Balzac's Le Pere Goriot (1835), the book traces a series of literary and historical examples in which Chinese life and European sympathy seem to hang in one another's balance. Hayots wide-ranging discussion draws on accounts of torture, on medical case studies, travelers tales, photographs, plasticized corpses, polemical broadsides, watercolors, and on oil paintings. His analyses show that the historical connection between sympathy and humanity, and indeed between sympathy and reality, has tended to refract with a remarkable frequency through the lens called "China," and why the story of the West's Chinese pain goes to the heart of the relation between language and the body and the social experience of the modern human being. Written in an ebullient prose, The Hypothetical Mandarin demonstrates how the network that intertwines China, sympathy, and modernity continues to shape the economic and human experience.
Download or read book Researching the Archaeological Past through Imagined Narratives written by Daniël van Helden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeological interpretation is an imaginative act. Stratigraphy and artefacts do not tell us what the past was like; that is the task of the archaeologist. The diverse group of contributors to this volume address the relationship between archaeology and imagination through the medium of historical fiction and fictive techniques, both as consumers and as producers. The fictionalisation of archaeological research is often used to disseminate the results of scholarly or commercial archaeology projects for wider public outreach. Here, instead, the authors focus on the question of what benefits fiction and fictive techniques, as inspiration and method, can bring to the practice of archaeology itself. The contributors, a mix of archaeologists, novelists and other artists, advance a variety of theoretical arguments and examples to advance the case for the value of a reflexive engagement between archaeology and fiction. Themes include the similarities and differences in the motives and methods of archaeologists and novelists, translation, empathy, and the need to humanise the past and diversify archaeological narratives. The authors are sensitive to the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding the influence of fiction on researchers and the incorporation of fictive techniques in their work. Sometimes dismissed as distracting just-so stories, or even as dangerously relativistic narratives, the use of fictive techniques has a long history in archaeological research and examples from the scholarly literature on many varied periods and regions are considered. The volume sets out to bring together examples of these disparate applications and to focus attention on the need for explicit recognition of the problems and possibilities of such approaches, and on the value of further research about them.
Download or read book The Sympathy of Things written by Lars Spuybroek and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-04-21 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'If there is one thing we can learn from John Ruskin, it is that each age must find its own way to beauty' writes Lars Spuybroek in The Sympathy of Things, his ground-breaking work which proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital era. Spuybroek argues that we must 'undo' the twentieth century and learn to understand the aesthetic insights of the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for the contemporary age. Linking philosophy, design, and the digital, with art history, architecture, and craft, Spuybroek explores the romantic notion of 'sympathy', a core concept in Ruskin's aesthetics, re-evaluating it as the driving force of the twenty-first century aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century, but which Spuybroek argues to be central to contemporary aesthetics and design. Revised throughout, and a new foreword by philosopher Brian Massumi, this is a new edition of a seminal work which has drawn praise from fields as diverse as digital architecture and speculative realism, and will continue to be influential as it wrests Ruskin's ideas out of the Victorian era and reconstructs them for the modern age.
Download or read book Politics and Affect in Black Women s Fiction written by Kathy Glass and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring literary possibilities, Politics and Affect reads black women’s text—in particular Frances Harper’s “The Two Offers” (1859), Julia Collins’s The Curse of Caste (1865), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998)—as richly creative documents saturated with sociopolitical value. Interested in how African American women writers from the nineteenth century to the present have mined the politics of affect and emotion to document love, shame, and suffering in environments shaped by race, Kathy Glass gives sustained attention to the impact of racist affect on the black body, and examines how black women writers deploy emotional states to engender sociopolitical change.
Download or read book Intermedialities written by Davide Panagia and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-15 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding democracy through film philosophy and political theory Shining new light on our understanding of cinema’s ways of political thinking, Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience puts modern political theory in conversation with the philosophy of film. Davide Panagia argues that there are no natural laws of association that can guarantee a template for democratic participation, as democracy is predicated not on stabilizing foundations but rather on the formation of expansive collectivities and institutions that are responsive to alterability. Instead, democracy requires a relational ontology, one that he elucidates by turning to philosophers of film like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard—all of whom have articulated a political aesthetic of cinematic experience that is at once aspectual and compositional. Panagia reads these thinkers alongside a countertradition of modern political thought, represented by David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. His articulation of cinematic experience thus allows for a political aesthetic that is rooted in the migratory realities of undetermined relations.
Download or read book Shelley s Broken World written by Bysshe Inigo Coffey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shelley's Broken World is a provocative and profound reassessment of Shelley's poetic art and thought. Bysshe Inigo Coffey returns to a peculiarity of Shelley's expressive repertoire first noticed by his Victorian readers and editors: his innovatory use of pauses, which registered as irregularities in ears untuned to his innovations. But his pauses are more than a quirk; various intermittences are at the centre of Shelley's artistry and his thought. This book aims to transform the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts in which Shelley is positioned. It offers a ground-breaking analysis of his reading, and is the first study to refer to and include images of the unpublished 'Marlow List', a record of the books Shelley left behind him on his departure for Italy in 1818. Shelley's prosody grew to articulate his sense that actuality is experienced as ruptured and fractured with gaps and limit-points. He shows us the weakness of the actual. As we approach the bicentenary of the poet's death, Shelley's Broken World provides an exciting new beginning for the study of a major Romantic poet, the history of materialism, and prosody.
Download or read book Political Economy and the Novel written by Sarah Comyn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of ‘Homo Economicus’ provides a transhistorical account of homo economicus (economic man), demonstrating this figure’s significance to economic theory and the Anglo-American novel over a 250-year period. Beginning with Adam Smith’s seminal texts – Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations – and Henry Fielding’s A History of Tom Jones, this book combines the methodologies of new historicism and new economic criticism to investigate the evolution of the homo economicus model as it traverses through Ricardian economics and Jane Austen’s Sanditon; J. S. Mill and Charles Dickens’ engagement with mid-Victorian dualities; Keynesianism and Mrs Dalloway’s exploration of post-war consumer impulses; the a/moralistic discourses of Friedrich von Hayek, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged; and finally the virtual crises of the twenty-first century financial market and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Through its sustained comparative analysis of literary and economic discourses, this book transforms our understanding of the genre of the novel and offers critical new understandings of literary value, cultural capital and the moral foundations of political economy.
Download or read book Atmospheres of Projection written by Giuliana Bruno and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together cultural history, visual studies, and media archaeology, Bruno considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment. Projection has long been transforming space, from shadow plays to camera obscuras and magic lantern shows. Our fascination with projection is alive on the walls of museums and galleries and woven into our daily lives. Giuliana Bruno explores the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture and their continued importance to contemporary artists who are reinventing the projective imagination with atmospheric thinking and the use of elemental media. To explain our fascination with projection and atmosphere, Bruno traverses psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy, architecture, the history of science, visual art, and moving image culture to see how projective mechanisms and their environments have developed over time. She reveals how atmosphere is formed and mediated, how it can change, and what projection can do to modify a site. In so doing, she gives new life to the alchemic possibilities of transformative projective atmospheres. Showing how their “environmentality” produces sites of exchange and relationality, this book binds art to the ecology of atmosphere.
Download or read book Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy written by Kirsty Martin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume looks at ideas of sympathy in the early 20th-century novel. It offers a new reading of literary modernism challenging notions of modernism as hostile to emotion and empathy. It also offers a new intervention into the growing field of literature and emotion studies.
