Download or read book The Seat of Consciousness in Ancient Literature written by Richard E. Lind and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-01-09 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For early civilizations, consciousness and the sense of self were experienced as located in the center of the body, most often near to or within the physical heart. Enlightenment was understood as the illumination of a transformed "spiritual heart." Thus the mind of the body as a whole was represented by the heart-soul. In contrast, modern culture places consciousness within the brain, resulting in a mind/body dualism. This separation of mind and body has recently been emphasized as characteristic of the psychopathologies of the modern self. This volume explores the understanding and experience of consciousness in the earliest civilizations before about 500 BCE. Beginning with a description of ancient Western and Eastern heart-consciousness, the psychological and spiritual manifestations of the ancient mature heart-soul are summarized. Ancestor worship, lineage identity, primitive consciousness and the ways in which the external world was mirrored by the inner world provide additional clues about the experience of heart-consciousness. Finally, the work addresses the fundamental changes in the experience of consciousness that led to the mind/body dualism of today.
Download or read book Mrs Dalloway written by Virginia Woolf and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-12-16 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.
Download or read book Consciousness the Novel written by David Lodge and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing with characteristic wit and brio, and employing the insight and acumen of a skilled novelist and critic, Lodge explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction (mainly English and American) in light of recent investigations in the sciences.
Download or read book Paper Minds written by Jonathan Kramnick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-09-07 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do poems and novels create a sense of mind? What does literary criticism say in conversation with other disciplines that addresses problems of consciousness? In Paper Minds, Jonathan Kramnick takes up these vital questions, exploring the relations between mind and environment, the literary forms that uncover such associations, and the various fields of study that work to illuminate them. Opening with a discussion of how literary scholarship’s particular methods can both complement and remain in tension with corresponding methods particular to the sciences, Paper Minds then turns to a series of sharply defined case studies. Ranging from eighteenth-century poetry and haptic theories of vision, to fiction and contemporary problems of consciousness, to landscapes in which all matter is sentient, to cognitive science and the rise of the novel, Kramnick’s essays are united by a central thematic authority. This unified approach of these essays shows us what distinctive knowledge that literary texts and literary criticism can contribute to discussions of perceptual consciousness, created and natural environments, and skilled engagements with the world.
Download or read book Narrative and Consciousness written by Gary D. Fireman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-06-12 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We define our conscious experience by constructing narratives about ourselves and the people with whom we interact. Narrative pervades our lives--conscious experience is not merely linked to the number and variety of personal stories we construct with each other within a cultural frame, but is subsumed by them. The claim, however, that narrative constructions are essential to conscious experience is not useful or informative unless we can also begin to provide a distinct, organized, and empirically consistent explanation for narrative in relation to consciousness. Understanding the role of narrative in determining individual and collective consciousness has been elusive from within traditional academic frameworks. This volume argues that addressing so broad and complex a problem requires an examination from outside our insular disciplinary framework. Such an open examination would be informed by the inquiries and approaches of multiple disciplines. Recognition of the different approaches to examining personal stories will allow for the coordination of how narrative seems (its phenomenology), with what mental labor it does (its psychology), and how it is realized (its neurobiology). Only by overcoming the boundaries erected by multiple theoretical and discursive traditions can we begin to comprehend the nature and function of narrative in consciousness. Narrative and Consciousness brings together essays by exceptional scholars and scientists in the disciplines of literary theory, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how stories are constructed, how stories structure lived experience, and how stories are rooted in material reality (the human body). The specific topics addressed include narrative in the development of conscious awareness; autobiographical narrative, fiction and the construction of self; trauma and narrative disruptions; narrative, memory and identity; and the physiological and neural substrate of narrative. It is the editors' hope that the multidisciplinary nature of this collection will challenge the reader to move beyond disciplinary confines and toward a coherent interdisciplinary dialogue.
Download or read book The Consciousness Industry written by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1974 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Emergence of Mind written by David Herman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology that traces the representation of consciousness and mind creation in English literature from 700 to the present.
Download or read book The Epistolary Novel written by Joe Bray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-08-29 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epistolary novel is a form which has been neglected in most accounts of the development of the novel. This book argues that the way that the eighteenth-century epistolary novel represented consciousness had a significant influence on the later novel. Critics have drawn a distinction between the self at the time of writing and the self at the time at which events or emotions were experienced. This book demonstrates that the tensions within consciousness are the result of a continual interaction between the two selves of the letter-writer and charts the oscillation between these two selves in the epistolary novels of, amongst others, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith.
Download or read book Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel written by Robert Humphrey and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1962 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Recovering Your Story written by Arnold Weinstein and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Great art discovers for us who we are,” writes eminent literature professor and critic Arnold Weinstein in this magisterial new book about how we can better uncover and understand our own stories by reading five major modern writers. Professor Weinstein, author of the highly acclaimed A Scream Goes Through the House, has spent a lifetime guiding students through the work of great writers, and in a volume that crowns his career, Weinstein invites us to discover ourselves–our perceptions, our dreams, our own elusive, deepest stories–in the masterpieces of modernist fiction. Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner: the very names sound intimidating. Yet as Weinstein argues with wit and passion, the works of these authors, and of their contemporary heir Toni Morrison, are in fact shimmering mirrors of our own inner world and most intimate thoughts. Novels such as Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Beloved allow us to explore the inner worlds of human feeling and bring us face-to-face with our own deepest selves and desires. Weinstein decodes these great novels, and he shows how to read them to understand human beings–the way our minds and hearts actually work. This is what Weinstein means by “recovering your story.” Weinstein illuminates the complex pleasures woven into these peerless narratives. Beneath the slow, sensual cadences of Proust he finds an edgy erotic tension as well as a remarkably crisp depiction of the timeless world inside the self. Joyce’s Ulysses, in Weinstein’s brilliantly original reading, is a protean linguistic experiment that forces us to view both our bodies and our minds in a radically new–and hilariously funny–light. His analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse circles back again and again on Woolf’s depiction of the importance of relationships in knowing the self. Faulkner, argues Weinstein, is at once our greatest tragedian and our darkest comedian, a novelist who captures both the agony and absurdity of consciousness in a time of social and moral disintegration. Finally, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Weinstein explores the legacy of modernism in a contemporary novel, as Morrison brings the body into the literary picture, confronting how the body affects not only our fundamental concept of self, but also consciousness itself. In this magnificent work of literary appreciation and exploration, Weinstein makes the astonishing discovery of the self as a part of the joy of reading great modernist fiction, even as he makes these powerful works understandable, accessible, indeed imperative for all adventurous readers.
Download or read book Behaviorism Consciousness and the Literary Mind written by Joshua Gang and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature? If inanimate objects such as novels or poems have no mental properties of their own, then why do we talk about them as if they do? Why do we perceive the minds of characters, narrators, and speakers as if they were comparable to our own? In Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind, Joshua Gang offers a radical new approach to these questions, which are among the most challenging philosophical problems faced by literary study today. Recent cognitive criticism has tried to answer these questions by looking for similarities and analogies between literary form and the processes of the brain. In contrast, Gang turns to one of the twentieth century's most infamous psychological doctrines: behaviorism. Beginning in 1913, a range of psychologists and philosophers—including John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Gilbert Ryle—argued that many of the things we talk about as mental phenomena aren't at all interior but rather misunderstood behaviors and physiological processes. Today, behaviorism has relatively little scientific value, but Gang argues for its enormous critical value for thinking about why language is so good at creating illusions of mental life. Turning to behaviorism's own literary history, Gang offers the first sustained examination of the outmoded science's place in twentieth-century literature and criticism. Through innovative readings of figures such as I. A. Richards, the American New Critics, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and J. M. Coetzee, Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind reveals important convergences between modernist writers, experimental psychology, and analytic philosophy of mind—while also giving readers a new framework for thinking about some of literature's most fundamental and exciting questions.
Download or read book Consciousness Performing Arts and Literature written by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-30 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the background of personal, institutional and cultural trajectories, this book considers dance, opera, theatre and practice as research from a consciousness studies perspective. Highlights include a conversation with Barbara Sellers-Young on the nature of dance; an assessment of the work of International Opera Theater; a new perspective on liveness and livecasts; a reassessment, with Anita S. Hammer, of the concept of a universal language of the theatre; a discussion of two productions of new plays; the development of a new concept of theatre of the heart; a comparison of Western and Thai positions on the concept of beauty; and an examination of the role of conflict for theatre. The final chapter of the book is taken up by the author’s first novel, which launches the new genre of spiritual romance.
Download or read book Consciousness Theatre Literature and the Arts 2009 written by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-12-14 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays collected in this volume were initially presented at the Third International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, held at the University of Lincoln, May 16-18, 2009. The conference was organised on the basis of the success of its predecessors in 2005 and 2007, and on the basis of the success of the Rodopi book series Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, which has to date seen twenty-one volumes in print, with another twelve in press or in the process of being written. The 2009 conference and the book series highlight the continuing growth of interest within the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies, and in the distinct disciplines of theatre studies, literary studies, film studies, fine arts and music in the relationship between the object of these disciplines and human consciousness. Fifty-six delegates from twenty-one countries across the world attended the May 2009 conference in Lincoln; their range of disciplines and approaches is reflected well in this book.
Download or read book The Figure of Consciousness written by Jill M. Kress and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through analysis of metaphors of consciousness in the philosophy and fiction of William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton, this work traces the significance of representations of knowledge, gender and social class, revealing how writers conceived of the self in modern literature.
Download or read book Culture and Consciousness written by William S. Haney and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haney demonstrates that the debates in theory surrounding the questions of identity, truth, and language, which have so far eluded the mind or reason, cannot be resolved without recourse to the structure of consciousness and intersubjectivity - an interaction mediated by language and resulting in mutual agreement. Chapters four to eight apply the notion of intersubjectivity to the reading of specific works."--Jacket.
Download or read book Framing Consciousness in Art written by Gregory Minissale and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Framing Consciousness in Art examines how the conscious mind enacts and processes the frame that both surrounds the work of art yet is also shown as an element inside its space. These `frames-in-frames¿ may be seen in works by Teniers, Velázquez, Vermeer, Degas, Rodin, and Cartier-Bresson and in the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Buñuel. The book also deals with framing in a variety of cultural contexts: Indian, Chinese and African, going beyond Euro-American formalist and aesthetic concerns which dominate critical theories of the frame.
Download or read book Forming Sleep written by Nancy L. Simpson-Younger and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-04-22 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forming Sleep asks how biocultural and literary dynamics act together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Engaging with poetry, drama, and prose largely written in English between 1580 and 1670, the essays in this collection highlight period discussions about how seemingly insentient states might actually enable self-formation. Looking at literary representations of sleep through formalism, biopolitics, Marxist theory, trauma theory, and affect theory, this volume envisions sleep states as a means of defining the human condition, both literally and metaphorically. The contributors examine a range of archival sources—including texts in early modern faculty psychology, printed and manuscript medical treatises and physicians’ notes, and printed ephemera on pathological sleep—through the lenses of both classical and contemporary philosophy. Essays apply these frameworks to genres such as drama, secular lyric, prose treatise, epic, and religious verse. Taken together, these essays demonstrate how early modern depictions of sleep shape, and are shaped by, the philosophical, medical, political, and, above all, formal discourses through which they are articulated. With this in mind, the question of form merges considerations of the physical and the poetic with the spiritual and the secular, highlighting the pervasiveness of sleep states as a means by which to reflect on the human condition. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Brian Chalk, Jennifer Lewin, Cassie Miura, Benjamin Parris, Giulio Pertile, N. Amos Rothschild, Garret A. Sullivan Jr., and Timothy A. Turner.
