Download or read book Equivocation and the Paradox of Fiction written by Benjamin Patrick Brooks and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature written by Noël Carroll and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature is an in-depth examination of literature through a philosophical lens, written by distinguished figures across the major divisions of philosophy. Its 40 newly-commissioned essays are divided into six sections: historical foundations what is literature? aesthetics & appreciation meaning & interpretation metaphysics & epistemology ethics & political theory The Companion opens with a comprehensive historical overview of the philosophy of literature, including chapters on the study’s ancient origins up to the 18th-20th centuries. The second part defines literature and its different categories. The third part covers the aesthetics of literature. The fourth and fifth sections discuss the meaning and consequences of philosophical interpretation of literature, as well as epistemological and metaphysical issues such as literary cognitivism and imaginative resistance. The sixth section contextualizes the place of philosophy of literature in the "real world" with essays on topics such as morality, politics, race and gender. Fully indexed, with helpful further reading sections at the end of each chapter, this Companion is an ideal starting point for those coming to philosophy of literature for the first time as well as a valuable reference for readers more familiar with the subject.
Download or read book Sympathy for the Devil written by Gemma del Carmen Argüello Manresa and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last thirty years there has been a fruitful debate around the so-called Paradox of fiction or the Paradox of emotional response to fiction. That is, how can fictional situations move us even if we know they do not exist? When we read a novel, assist to the theater or when we watch a film at home we normally react emotionally if the stories these mediums present engage us in such a way that move us to tears, horror, indignation, annoyance, etc. However, we know that these stories and the characters within them are not real. Then, there is a problem, at least in philosophical terms. The problem arises when we look carefully at the notion of belief. We neither believe that the characters of the fictions are real, nor the stages were they act on, nor the circumstances we watch depicted. We know they are unreal, and although this evidence they move us, sometimes softly and occasionally so strongly that they have such an impact in our lives.The Paradox of fiction lies upon these facts; the argumentation of this paradox centersaround the contradiction between the unreality of the fictional situations and the reality of our beliefs within our emotional lives (according to cognitive approach to emotions). And in consequence contains four premises: 1. We believe in statements that are true and that support that something exists. 2. In order to have an emotion we do have to believe in certain state of affairs. 3. We do not believe in the existence of the content of fictions (that is, the states of affairs purported by fictions). 4. Fictions move us. These premises show us that there is a paradox when we are engaged emotionally with fictional situations that means, on the emotions we feel in the aesthetics field. Many philosophers have tried to find out a solution in order to understand why and how this paradox happens. In this work I will explore many of the most important solutions offered to this paradox. However I will divide the paradox according to the central premises (the second and the third). According to the third premise we do not believe in the existence of the content of fictions, so in order to have an emotion we have to believe that something exists. I think one of the main problems regarding the Paradox of fiction is that there is not a clear definition on what is a fiction and how we get engaged with them. So it is necessary to find a satisfactory definition of fictions in order to know what kind of mental relation we have towards them. Another problem, and the most important one, is related to the notion of belief concerning the definition of emotions (the second premise) and the impossibility of conceiving getting emotionally engaged with fictional or imaginary entities we do not believe in. In this work I will argue that for getting a satisfactory solution of The paradox of Fiction it is important to demonstrate that we can feel an emotion for fictional objects we acentral imagine, and also, because I am concerned with narrative fictional works, that we have to understand the character's emotions in order to be capable to feel something towards them. I will try to show that understanding other's emotions is a process like a Hermeneutic Circle. But on the other hand I will try to argue the only way we can feel any emotion towards the other, in this case the fictional character, is via sympathizing with him and since we can feel sympathy for him then we can feel any emotion for him. I will try to test my model in an analysis of a film. I will analyze how a film possibly can elicit the emotion of pity giving us prior information about the character we can acentral imagine and since we can imagine his situation with caring we can feel sympathy for him and in consequence pity. However I will not argue on the moral dimension of the emotion of pity. I am only concerned on pity as an emotion we can feel towards anyone.Nevertheless because of the theme of the film that will be analyzed I will have to discuss briefly if we can feel pity for someone in imagination that might not act accordingly to our moral commitments.
Download or read book Narrative Gravity written by Rukmini Bhaya Nair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores the anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist idea that our stories make us up, rather than we make up our stories. This is a foundational text for students of linguistics, philosophy and literary theory.
Download or read book Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett s Fiction written by David Watson and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Postmodern Artistry in Medievalist Fiction written by Earl R. Anderson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-06-09 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on modern-day fiction set in the Middle Ages or that incorporates medieval elements, this study examines storytelling components and rhetorical tropes in more than 60 works in five languages by more than 40 authors. Medievalist fiction got its “postmodern” start with such authors as Calvino, Fuentes, Carpentier and Eco. Its momentum increased since the 1990s with writers whose work has received less critical attention, like Laura Esquivel, Tariq Ali, Matthew Pearl, Matilde Asensi, Ildefonso Falcones, Andrew Davison, Bernard Cornwell, Donnal Woolfolk Cross, Ariana Franklin, Nicole Griffith, Levi Grossman, Conn Iggulden, Edward Rutherfurd, Javier Sierra, Alan Moore and Brenda Vantrease. The author explores a wide range of “medievalizing” tropes, discusses the negative responses of postmodernism and posits four “hard problems” in medievalist fiction.
Download or read book Resnick on the Loose written by Mike Resnick and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2012-08-10 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: RESNICK ON THE LOOSE collects Mike Resnick's essays, editorials, interviews, introduction, and articles -- more than 75 of them -- covering everything from Hugo Awards to classic authors to the art of writing. An essential volume for anyone interested in looking beyond Resnick's award-winning novels and stories to the heart and soul of the creative genius behind them! Introduction by Eric Flint.
Download or read book The Paradox of Subjectivity written by David Carr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-06-03 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much effort in recent philosophy has been devoted to attacking the metaphysics of the subject. Identified largely with French post-structuralist thought, yet stemming primarily from the influential work of the later Heidegger, this attack has taken the form of a sweeping denunciation of the whole tradition of modern philosophy from Descartes through Nietzsche, Husserl, and Existentialism. In this timely study, David Carr contends that this discussion has overlooked and eventually lost sight of the distinction between modern metaphysics and the tradition of transcendental philosophy inaugurated by Kant and continued by Husserl into the twentieth century. Carr maintains that the transcendental tradition, often misinterpreted as a mere alternative version of the metaphysics of the subject, is in fact itself directed against such a metaphysics. Challenging prevailing views of the development of modern philosophy, Carr proposes a reinterpretation of the transcendental tradition and counters Heidegger's influential readings of Kant and Husserl. He defends their subtle and complex transcendental investigations of the self and the life of subjectivity. In Carr's interpretation, far from joining the project of metaphysical foundationalism, transcendental philosophy offers epistemological critique and phenomenological description. Its aim is not metaphysical conclusions but rather an appreciation for the rich and sometimes contradictory character of experience. The transcendental approach to the self is skillfully summed up by Husserl as "the paradox of human subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world." Proposing striking new readings of Kant and Husserl and reviving a sound awareness of the transcendental tradition, Carr's distinctive historical and systematic position will interest a wide range of readers and provoke discussion among philosophers of metaphysics, epistemology, and the history of philosophy.
Download or read book Rewriting Reprising in Literature written by Claude Maisonnat and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volumes includes a series of 17 selected essays, preceded by a methodological introduction, whose purpose is to offer a fresh outlook on the question of rewriting-reprising. The argument, taking for granted the phenomenon of intertextuality, develops along three main axes: the first one reconsiders the already debated issue of authority on post-structuralist premises, arguing that the origin of a text is untraceable. The second looks at a phenomenon often associated with reprising, especially in a post-colonial context: trauma, whether individual or historical, in relation to creative repetition. The third axis offers a re-reading of the question of voice, introducing the notion of the textual voice, understood as that part of the enunciative act over which the author has no control. When writers make of reprising a deliberate practise, we are tempted to believe that their position, between homage and pillage, presupposes the existence of a traceable source of the literary Word. We must however face the problematic nature of enunciation, the void on which is is founded. Which leads us to the proposition that the act of reprising is a creation ex nihilo: a certain mode of organisation around that void. Besides, in a century of major man-made traumas, whose effect was the tearing up of social fabrics, reprising will assume a more complex significance: the symptomatic, repetitive stitching of what is being constantly ripped up.
Download or read book Engaging Characters written by Murray Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Characters - those fictional agents populating the fictional worlds we spend so much time absorbed in - are ubiquitous in our lives. We track their fortunes, judge their actions, and respond to them with anger, amusement, and affection - indeed the whole palette of human emotions. Powerfully drawn characters transcend their stories, entering into our imaginations and deliberations about the actual world, acting as analogies and points of reference. And yet there has been remarkably little sustained and systematic reflection on these creatures that absorb so much of our attention and emotional lives. In Engaging Characters, Murray Smith sets out a comprehensive analysis of character, exploring the role of characters in our experience of narrative and fiction. Smith's analysis focuses on film, and also illuminates character in literature, opera, song, cartoons, new and social media. At the heart of this account is an explanation of the capacity of characters to move us. Teasing out the various dimensions of character, Smith explores the means by which films draw us close to characters, or hold us at a distance from them, and how our beliefs and attitudes are formed and sometimes reformed by these encounters. Integrating these arguments with research on emotion in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology, Engaging Characters advances an account of the nature of fictional characters and their functions in fiction, imagination, and human experience. In this revised, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Engaging Characters, Smith refines and extends the arguments of the first edition, with a substantial new introduction reviewing the debates on emotion, empathy, and film spectatorship that the book has inspired.
Download or read book The Ethics of Intensity in American Fiction written by Tony Hilfer and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon the philosophical theories of William James, Dewey, and Mead and focusing upon major works by Whitman, Stein, Howells, Dreiser, and Henry James, Anthony Hilfer explores how these authors have structured their characters' consciousness, their purpose in doing so, and how this presentation controls the reader's moral response. Hilfer contends that there was a significant change in the mode of character presentation in American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The self defined in terms of a Victorian ethic and judged adversely for its departures from that code shifted to the self defined in terms of emotional intensity and judged adversely for its failures of nerve. In the first mode, characters are almost always wrong to yield to desire; in the second, characters are frequently wrong not to and, in fact, are seen less as the sum of their ethical choices than as the process of their longings. His conclusion: modern fiction is as overbalanced toward pathos as Victorian fiction was toward ethos. but the continued dialectic between the two is a tension that ought not be resolved.
Download or read book Habermas and Literature written by Geoff Boucher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Habermas has written about the cultural role of literature and about literary works, he has not systematically articulated a literary-critical method as a component of either communicative reason or post-metaphysical thinking. Habermas and Literature brings Habermasian concepts and categories into contact with aesthetic and cultural theories in and around the Frankfurt School, and beyond. Its central claim is that Habermas' contribution to literary and cultural criticism is the concept of literary rationality and the notion that literature performs a key role in the formation of the modern social imaginary. Habermas and Literature maintains that literary works have “two faces” – discursive intervention in the public sphere and personal integration of imaginative disclosures – that depend upon two modalities of literary reception: critique and identification. It develops the resulting literary theory through detailed discussion of the theories advanced by Habermas, followed in each case by synthetic and reconstructive argumentation that brings the framework of communicative reason into dialogue with literary methods, aesthetic theories and psychoanalytic categories. It does so through close engagement with debates around aesthetic rationality, world disclosure, social imaginaries, post-secular society and the utopian demand for happiness articulated by artworks. In the process, the Habermasian position is critically reconstructed when necessary, with reference to psychoanalytic and literary theories, and tested, in relation to demanding fiction and popular works.
Download or read book Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment written by Paul Maltby and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the familiar clash of religious conservatism and secular liberalism Paul Maltby finds a deeper discord: an antipathy between Christian fundamentalism and the postmodern culture of disenchantment. Arguing that each camp represents the poles of America's virulent culture wars, he shows how the cultural identity, lifestyle, and political commitments of many Americans match either the fundamentalist profile of one who cleaves to metaphysical and authoritarian beliefs or the postmodern profile of one who is disposed to critical inquiry and radical-democratic values. Maltby offers a critique that operates in both directions. His use of the resources of postmodern theory to contest fundamentalism's doctrinal claims, ultra-right politics, anti-environmentalism, and conservative aesthetics informs his engagement with contemporary fundamentalist painting, spiritual warfare fiction, dominionist attitudes to nature, and a profoundly undemocratic interpretation of Christianity. At the same time, Maltby identifies some of fundamentalism’s legitimate spiritual concerns, assesses the cost of perpetual critique, and exposes the deficit of spiritual meaning that haunts the culture of disenchantment.
Download or read book Plato s Ghost written by Nilofer Kaul and published by Phoenix Publishing House. This book was released on 2021-11-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychoanalytic encounters are filled with the unknowability of two unconscious minds meeting. Here one may forge a link that enables the process of meaning-making, or else it can become the space for destruction, perversion, evacuation, regression, and stasis. The area that lies between the mind of the analyst and that of the analysand is thus the liminal area of psychoanalysis - of growth, change, turbulence, as well as that of impasse, bastion, and failure. This latter could be what Bion meant by minus links. It seems that the primitive part of the mind is always looking for ways to evade psychic pain and emotional truth is always in peril. Analytic links are always fraught with danger. Minus links share with each other the quality of evading truth and therefore inhibiting emotional growth and the capacity to give meaning to experiences. Blind spots may be enabled by analytic allegiance to our particular schools, our inability to forge a technique in the face of the protomental apparatus which can breed arrogance, the complacencies of language, gaps between our theoretical allegiance and our technique, and, finally, all too often, our unwillingness and inability to get in touch with our true experience. Would it help to chronicle our quotidian failures? In these liminal moments, the links between analyst and analysand slide away from the emotional truth, rather than towards it. Nilofer Kaul presents these moments and explores the complex reasons behind them in a stunning debut work that questions the heart of analytic practice.
Download or read book The American Journal of Sociology written by Albion W. Small and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 924 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Established in 1895 as the first U.S. scholarly journal in its field, AJS remains a leading voice for analysis and research in the social sciences, presenting work on the theory, methods, practice, and history of sociology. AJS also seeks the application of perspectives from other social sciences and publishes papers by psychologists, anthropologists, statisticians, economists, educators, historians, and political scientists.
Download or read book Swastika Night written by Katharine Burdekin and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 1985 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a "feudal Europe seven centuries into post-Hitlerian society, Burdekin's novel explores the connection between gender and political power and anticipates modern feminist science fiction."--Cover.
Download or read book Metaphysics and Transcendence written by Arthur Gibson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-05-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This author presents new metaphysics with a genealogy based on counter-intuition and locates counter-intuition and complexity at the foundations of truth. This book stimulates future philosophical and religious discussion.
