Download or read book Encountering the Impossible written by Alexander Sergeant and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Shortlisted for the 2022 Best First Monograph Award presented by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Hollywood fantasy cinema is responsible for some of the most lucrative franchises produced over the past two decades, yet it remains difficult to find popular or critical consensus on what the experience of watching fantasy cinema actually entails. What makes something a fantasy film, and what unique pleasures does the genre offer? In Encountering the Impossible, Alexander Sergeant solves the riddle of the fantasy film by theorizing the underlying experience of imagination alluded to in scholarly discussions of the genre. Drawing principally on the psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, Sergeant considers the way in which fantasy cinema rejects Hollywood's typically naturalistic mode of address to generate an alternative experience that Sergeant refers to as the fantastic, a way of approaching cinema that embraces the illusory nature of the medium as part of the pleasure of the experience. Analyzing such canonical Hollywood fantasy films as The Wizard of Oz, It's a Wonderful Life, Mary Poppins, Conan the Barbarian, and The Lord of the Rings movies, Sergeant theorizes how fantasy cinema provides a unique film experience throughout its ubiquitous presence in the history of Hollywood film production.

Download or read book The Impossible Will Take a Little While written by Paul Rogat Loeb and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More relevant than ever, this seminal collection of essays encourages us to believe in the power of ordinary citizens to change the world In today's turbulent world it's hard not to feel like we're going backwards; after decades of striving, justice and equality still seem like far off goals. What keeps us going when times get tough? How have the leaders and unsung heroes of world-changing political movements persevered in the face of cynicism, fear, and seemingly overwhelming odds? In The Impossible Will Take a Little While, they answer these questions in their own words, creating a conversation among some of the most visionary and eloquent voices of our times. Today, more than ever, we need their words and their wisdom. In this revised edition, Paul Rogat Loeb has comprehensively updated this classic work on what it's like to go up against Goliath -- whether South African apartheid, Mississippi segregation, Middle East dictatorships, or the corporations driving global climate change. Without sugarcoating the obstacles, these stories inspire hope to keep moving forward. Think of this book as a conversation among some of the most visionary and eloquent voices of our times -- or any time: Contributors include Maya Angelou, Diane Ackerman, Marian Wright Edelman, Wael Ghonim, Váav Havel, Paul Hawken, Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Kozol, Tony Kushner, Audre Lorde, Nelson Mandela, Bill McKibben, Bill Moyers, Pablo Neruda, Mary Pipher, Arundhati Roy, Dan Savage, Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker, Cornel West, Terry Tempest Williams, and Howard Zinn.

Download or read book The Second Kind of Impossible written by Paul Steinhardt and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Shortlisted for the 2019 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize* One of the most fascinating scientific detective stories of the last fifty years, an exciting quest for a new form of matter. “A riveting tale of derring-do” (Nature), this book reads like James Gleick’s Chaos combined with an Indiana Jones adventure. When leading Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt began working in the 1980s, scientists thought they knew all the conceivable forms of matter. The Second Kind of Impossible is the story of Steinhardt’s thirty-five-year-long quest to challenge conventional wisdom. It begins with a curious geometric pattern that inspires two theoretical physicists to propose a radically new type of matter—one that raises the possibility of new materials with never before seen properties, but that violates laws set in stone for centuries. Steinhardt dubs this new form of matter “quasicrystal.” The rest of the scientific community calls it simply impossible. The Second Kind of Impossible captures Steinhardt’s scientific odyssey as it unfolds over decades, first to prove viability, and then to pursue his wildest conjecture—that nature made quasicrystals long before humans discovered them. Along the way, his team encounters clandestine collectors, corrupt scientists, secret diaries, international smugglers, and KGB agents. Their quest culminates in a daring expedition to a distant corner of the Earth, in pursuit of tiny fragments of a meteorite forged at the birth of the solar system. Steinhardt’s discoveries chart a new direction in science. They not only change our ideas about patterns and matter, but also reveal new truths about the processes that shaped our solar system. The underlying science is important, simple, and beautiful—and Steinhardt’s firsthand account is “packed with discovery, disappointment, exhilaration, and persistence...This book is a front-row seat to history as it is made” (Nature).

Download or read book Hope in 60 Seconds written by Cristina Baker and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now more than ever, we all face trying situations. The hope we need and hunger for is not a strategy or state of mind, but faith in Jesus. He stands secure for us in the face of every trial, from loss to sickness to injustice. Through 20 short prayers, 10 personal stories of miraculous transformations, and Biblical teachings, Hope in 60 Seconds will help you take the first steps towards a journey of security in the hope of Jesus. “At twenty-one I was as far from hopeful as anyone could get. Maybe as far as you are now.” These are the words of Cristina Baker as she considered her traumatic life: from childhood abuse to troubled teen years, to a descent into substance abuse, she resonates with a lost world who understands first-hand how easy it is to lose hope. Then, just as she was about to go to jail for drug possession, the Hero of Hope, Jesus Christ, came into her life and set her on a completely new path. If you are weary and doubting, Cristina understands. Hope in 60 Seconds will help you to: Be encouraged and empowered by someone who has been in a similar place of discouragement and discovered Christ’s authority and love, Learn how Jesus establishes hope and begin to experience it first-hand in the darkest of circumstances, Grow in your ability to connect with Jesus and find the hope you have longed for all of your life, and Prove that a connection with Jesus is the ultimate source of hope. The message of Cristina’s life is Jesus, the hope we need and hunger for—a hope that will stand secure in the face of brokenness, loss, sickness, abuse, a brain tumor diagnosis, injustice, and death. In Hope in 60 Seconds, she shares the steps of her journey to encounter, receive, and walk in the hope of Jesus, and offers readers powerful wisdom for how they can take the same journey for themselves.

Download or read book Yearning for the Impossible written by John Stillwell and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2006-05-23 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the history of mathematics from the perspective of the creative tension between common sense and the "impossible" as the author follows the discovery or invention of new concepts that have marked mathematical progress: - Irrational and Imaginary Numbers - The Fourth Dimension - Curved Space - Infinity and others The author puts t

Download or read book Encountering Althusser written by Katja Diefenbach and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-01-10 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French philosopher Louis Pierre Althusser (1918 -1990) helped define the politico-theoretical conjuncture of pre- and post-1968. Today, there is a recrudescence of interest in his thought, especially in light of his later work, published in English as Philosophy of the Encounter (Verso, 2006). This has led to renewed debates on the reformulation of conflicting notions of materialism, on the event as both philosophical concept and political construction, and on the nature of politics and the political. These original essays by leading scholars aim to provide a new assessment of Althusser's thought, especially in relation to contemporary debates. Organized in four sections that represent the main currents in Althusser's scholarship, the book discusses materialism and the different formulations of the relationship between politics and philosophy, Althusser's interpretations of political thinkers (including Machiavelli, Deleuze and Gramsci), the resources he provides to critique political economy and politics in post-Marxist thought, and the theorization of ideology and politics. Encountering Althusser is a groundbreaking resource that highlights Althusser's continuing relevance to contemporary radical thought.

Download or read book When the Impossible Happens written by Stanislav Grof and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2009-12 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feelings of oneness with others, nature, and the universe. Encounters with extraterrestrials, deities, and demons. Out-of-body experiences and past-life memories. Science casts a skeptical eye. But Dr. Stanislav Grof - the psychiatric researcher who co-founded transpersonal psychology - believes otherwise. When the Impossible Happens presents Dr. Grof's mesmerizing firsthand account of his fifty-year inquiry into waters uncharted by conventional psychology, an odyssey that will leave you questioning the very fabric of your existence. From the first LSD session that gave Dr. Grof a glimpse of cosmic consciousness to his latest work with Holotropic Breathwork, When the Impossible Happens explores fascinating experiments in astral projection; remarkable tales of synchronicity; memories of birth and prenatal life; the survival of consciousness after death, and much more. Here is an incredible opportunity to journey beyond ordinary consciousness - guaranteed to shake the foundations of what we assume to be reality - and sure to offer a new vision of our human potential, as we contemplate When the Impossible Happens. STANISLAV GROF, M.D., PH.D. One of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology, Dr. Grof is the president of the International Transpersonal Association, and a professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies and the Pacifica Graduate Institute. His numerous books include Beyond the Brain and Psychology of the Future.

Download or read book Cloud of the Impossible written by Catherine Keller and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experience of the impossible churns up in our epoch whenever a collective dream turns to trauma: politically, sexually, economically, and with a certain ultimacy, ecologically. Out of an ancient theological lineage, the figure of the cloud comes to convey possibility in the face of the impossible. An old mystical nonknowing of God now hosts a current knowledge of uncertainty, of indeterminate and interdependent outcomes, possibly catastrophic. Yet the connectivity and collectivity of social movements, of the fragile, unlikely webs of an alternative notion of existence, keep materializing--a haunting hope, densely entangled, suggesting a more convivial, relational world. Catherine Keller brings process, feminist, and ecopolitical theologies into transdisciplinary conversation with continental philosophy, the quantum entanglements of a "participatory universe," and the writings of Nicholas of Cusa, Walt Whitman, A. N. Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler, to develop a "theopoetics of nonseparable difference." Global movements, personal embroilments, religious diversity, the inextricable relations of humans and nonhumans--these phenomena, in their unsettling togetherness, are exceeding our capacity to know and manage. By staging a series of encounters between the nonseparable and the nonknowable, Keller shows what can be born from our cloudiest entanglement.

Download or read book An Impossible Love written by Christine Angot and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An agonizing turbulence lies just beneath the surface of this skillfully wrought novel by the French phenom who caused a sensation with the publication of her novel Incest. Reaching back into a world before she was born, Christine Angot describes the inevitable encounter of two young people at a dance in the early 1950s: Rachel and Pierre, her mother and father. Their love is acute. It twists around Pierre's decisive judgments about class, nationalism, and beauty, and winds its way towards dissolution and Christine's own birth. Though it's Pierre whose ideas are most often voiced, it's Rachel who slowly comes into view, her determination and patience forming a radiant, enigmatic disposition. Equal parts subtle and suspenseful, An Impossible Love is an unwavering advance toward a brutal sequence of events that mars both Christine's and Rachel's lives. Angot the author carves Angot the narrator out of this corrosive element, exposing an unmendable rupture, and at the same time offering a portrait of a striking, ineradicable bond between mother and daughter.

Download or read book Encountering Earth written by Trevor George Hunsberger Bechtel and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-05-14 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One day, Matthew Eaton was walking through an impromptu animal shelter display at his local pet store when suddenly an eight-month-old kitten dug his claws into Eaton’s flesh. Eaton recognized that the “eyes of this cat and the curve of his claw” compelled a response analogous to those found in the writings of Buber, Levinas, and Derrida. And not just Eaton but a whole community of theologians have found themselves in an encounter with particular places and animals that demands rich theological reflection. Eaton enlisted fellow editors Harvie and Bechtel to collect the essays in this volume, in which theologians listen to horses, rats, snakes, cats, dogs, and the earth itself, who become new theological voices demanding a response. In this volume, the voice of the more-than-human world is heard as making theology possible. These essays suggest that what we say theologically represents not simply ideas of our own making subsequently superimposed onto the natural world through our own discovery, but rather flow from an expressive Earth. With additional contributions from: Kimberly Carfore Lisa E. Dahill Celia Deane-Drummond Heather Eaton Nathan Kowalsky Abigail Lofte Jame Schaefer Cristina D. Vanin Mark Wallace Grace Y. Kao Chris Carter John Berkman Laura Hobgood

Download or read book Talking to Crazy written by Mark Goulston and published by AMACOM. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No matter how hard you try to reason with irrational people, it never works. So how do you talk to someone who just won't listen? You can't win by ignoring the insanity, and you can't argue it away. However, you can stop it cold. Top-ranked psychiatrist and communication expert Mark Goulston shows you just how to do so in this life-changing book for everyone trapped in maddening personal or professional relationships. Goulston unlocks the mysteries of the irrational mind, and explains how faulty thinking patterns develop. His keen insights are matched by a set of counterintuitive strategies proven to defuse crazy behavior, along with scripts, examples, and exercises that teach you how to use them. In Talking to “Crazy”, you will learn: Why people act the way they do How instinctive responses can exacerbate the situation, and what to do instead When to confront a problem and when to walk away How to activate the Sanity Cycle, which quickly transforms you from threat to ally How to use 14 simple yet effective communication techniques, including assertive submission flattery, the kiss-off, and more You can't reason with unreasonable people, but you can reach them. Talking to “Crazy” shows you just how easy it is to do it.

Download or read book Authors of the Impossible written by Jeffrey J. Kripal and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Outstanding and almost certainly controversial. . . . [Kripal] has promise to revitalize and extend the reach of religious studies.” —Choice Most scholars dismiss research into the paranormal as pseudoscience, a frivolous pursuit for the paranoid or gullible. Even historians of religion, whose work naturally attends to events beyond the realm of empirical science, have shown scant interest in the subject. But the history of psychical phenomena, Jeffrey J. Kripal contends, is an untapped source of insight into the sacred and by tracing that history through the last two centuries of Western thought we can see its potential centrality to the critical study of religion. Kripal grounds his study in the work of four major figures in the history of paranormal research: psychical researcher Frederic Myers; writer and humorist Charles Fort; astronomer, computer scientist, and ufologist Jacques Vallee; and philosopher and sociologist Bertrand Méheust. Through incisive analyses of these thinkers, Kripal ushers the reader into a beguiling world somewhere between fact, fiction, and fraud. The cultural history of telepathy, teleportation, and UFOs; a ghostly love story; the occult dimensions of science fiction; cold war psychic espionage; galactic colonialism; and the intimate relationship between consciousness and culture all come together in Authors of the Impossible, a dazzling and profound look at how the paranormal bridges the sacred and the scientific. “An excellent book. . . . engaging, witty, and thoughtful.” -- Christopher Partridge, Lancaster University “[Kripal] demands nothing short of a paradigm shift in order to make sense of the odd, the anomalous, and the inexplicable.” —Catherine L. Albanese, University of California, Santa Barbara “Quietly earth-shattering.” — Victoria Nelson, author of The Secret Life of Puppets

Download or read book Encountering Truth written by Pope Francis and published by Image. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experience the morning homilies of Pope Francis and witness how he continues to change the life of the Catholic Church. Shortly after seven in the morning, Pope Francis gives a brief homily in the little Vatican chapel of Saint Martha, in front of an audience that is always different: gardeners, office workers, nuns and priests, as well as a growing group of journalists. It is a set appointment, and in some ways a revolutionary innovation, where a pope speaks to everyone, off the cuff, without any written text, as he would have done as a parish priest. Encountering Truth is a collection of highlights from these homilies from March 2013 to May 2014. Along with summaries by Radio Vaticana (who recorded and transcribed the homilies) and commentary by Father Antonio Spadaro, SJ, these reflections provide moments of inspiration, simplicity, and a glimpse into the papal world very few ever get to experience.

Download or read book Textual Friendship written by Kuisma Korhonen and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This in-depth study of the essay as a form of literary and philosophical expression examines the links between essay writing and the concept of friendship over a long textual tradition running from Plato's Phaedrus through Montaigne's Essais to Derrida's Politiques de l'amitié. Literary critic and philosopher Kuisma Korhonen suggests that the search for textual friendship motivates essayists as diverse as Bacon, Saint-Évremond, Mme de Lambert, Emerson, and Derrida. All of these writers have written at least one essay about friendship, and in each case, Korhonen interprets the notion of friendship as a figure for the textual encounter, both between the writer and reader and between each text and its many referenced predecessors.Korhonen points out that despite the boundary of text separating writer and reader, the essay invites friendship. Through its references to other writers it links readers and writers across boundaries of time and space. Korhonen discusses at length these impossible encounters, drawing on the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, especially his emphasis on the ethical implications of the Other.Korhonen goes on to construct an ethical genealogy of the essay, focusing mainly on Montaigne. He notes three textual strategies in Montaigne's essay: the use of rhetoric in producing a friendly ethos, the philosophical dialogue going back to Plato as a subtext for the essay form, and a Pyrrhonian skepticism that questions the status of propositional language.Finally Korhonen examines specific texts on friendship, including Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Bacon, Emerson, Saint-Évremont, Mme de Lambert, and Derrida.This is a work of great erudition that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the expressive possibilities and philosophical implications of the essay.Kuisma Korhonen, Ph.D. (Helsinki, Finland) is a Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced studies, a Docent in Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki, and the author of numerous articles and book chapters on literary theory, philosophy, and comparative literature.

Download or read book Encountering Affect written by Dr Ben Anderson and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Encountering Affect, Ben Anderson explores why understanding affect matters and offers one account of affective life that hones in the different ways in which affects are ordered. Intervening in debates around non-representational theories, he argues that affective life is always-already ‘mediated’ - the never finished product of apparatuses, encounters and conditions. Through a wide range of examples including dread-debility-dependency in torture, ordinary hopes, and precariousness, Anderson shows the significance of affect for understanding life today.

Download or read book Encountering the Goddess written by Thomas B. Coburn and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coburn provides a fresh and careful translation from the Sanskrit of this fifteen-hundred-year-old text. Drawing on field work and literary evidence, he illuminates the process by which the Devī-Māhātmya has attracted a vast number of commentaries and has become the best known Goddess-text in modern India, deeply embedded in the ritual of Goddess worship (especially in Tantra). Coburn answers the following questions among others: Is this document "scripture?" How is it that this text mediates the presence of the Goddess? What can we make of contemporary emphasis on oral recitation of the text rather than study of its written form? One comes away from Coburn's work with a sense of the historical integrity or wholeness of an extremely important religious development centered on a "text." The interaction between the text and later philosophical and religious developments such as those found in Advaita Vedanta and Tantra is quite illuminating. Relevant here are the issues of the writtenness and orality/aurality of 'scripture,' and the various ways by which a deposit of holy words such as the Devī-Māhātmya becomes effective, powerful, and inspirational in the lives of those who hold it sacred.

Download or read book Impossible written by Nancy Werlin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-08-11 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully wrought modern fairy tale from master storyteller and award-winning author Nancy Werlin Inspired by the classic folk ballad “Scarborough Fair,” this is a wonderfully riveting novel of suspense, romance, and fantasy. Lucy is seventeen when she discovers that she is the latest recipient of a generations-old family curse that requires her to complete three seemingly impossible tasks or risk falling into madness and passing the curse on to the next generation. Unlike her ancestors, though, Lucy has family, friends, and other modern resources to help her out. But will it be enough to conquer this age-old evil?