Download or read book Our Stories written by John Martin Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-06 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays on the metaphysical issues pertaining to death, the meaning of life, and freedom of the will, John Martin Fischer argues (against the Epicureans) that death can be a bad thing for the individual who dies. He defends the claim that something can be a bad thing--a misfortune--for an individual, even if he never experiences it as bad (and even if he does not any longer exist). Fischer also defends the commonsense asymmetry in our attitudes toward death and prenatal nonexistence: we are indifferent to the time before we are born, but we regret that we do not live longer. Further, Fischer argues (against the immortality curmudgeons, such as Heidegger and Bernard Williams), that immortal life could be desirable, and shows how the defense of the (possible) badness of death and the (possible) goodness of immortality exhibit a similar structure; on Fischer's view, the badness of death and the goodness of life can be represented on spectra that display certain continuities. Building on Fischer's previous book, My Way a major aim of this volume is to show important connections between issues relating to life and death and issues relating to free will. More specifically, Fischer argues that we endow our lives with a certain distinctive kind of meaning--an irreducible narrative dimension of value--by exhibiting free will. Thus, in acting freely, we transform our lives so that our stories matter.
Download or read book Essays on the Pleasures of Death written by Ellie Ragland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Essays on the Pleasure of Death, Ellie Ragland discusses the interconnection of Freud and Lacan's theories, while maintaining that crucial differences between them still exist. Ragland argues, however, that Lacan's "return to Freud" gave coherence to concepts which Freud could never explain: psychosis, narcissism, the body and the death drive. Drawing upon Lacan's untranslated seminars through 1981, Ragland analyzes his theories of the death drive and the concept of jouissance, the driving force behind language and libido. Along with her examination of Lacanian theories about the body, meaning systems, and how they shape reality, Ragland also discusses the ethical problems of psychoanalysis and the ways in which Lacan's work points to the inadequacies of terms like "sexuality" and "gender."
Download or read book An Intimate Affair written by Jill Fields and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the history of twentieth-century lingerie. This book examines the ways cultural meanings are orchestrated by the 'fashion-industrial complex, ' and the ways in which individuals and groups embrace, reject, or derive meaning from these everyday, yet significant, intimate articles of clothing.
Download or read book Out of Nowhere Into Nothing written by Caryl Pagel and published by Fiction Collective 2. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on the apparitional, the incomprehensible, and the paranormal in conversation with art, travel, and storytelling The ghosts—literal and figurative—that drive our deepest impulses, disturb our most precious memories, and haunt the passages of our daily lives are present in this collection of sublime meditations on the unbelievable, the coincidental, and the apparitional. Often containing reflections on the art of storytelling, Caryl Pagel’s essays blend memoir, research, and reflection, and are driven by a desire to observe connections between the visual and the invisible. The narrator of Pagel’s essays explores each enigma or encounter (a football coach’s faked death, the faces of women walking, historical accounts of hallucinations, a city’s public celebration gone wrong) as an intellectual detective ascending a labyrinthine tower of clues in pursuit of a solution to an unreachable problem: always curious, and with a sense of profound wonder. Out of Nowhere Into Nothing is a sprawling, highly associative consideration of the ways in which the observed material world recalls us to larger narrative and aesthetic truths. Interspersed with documentary-style photographs, Pagel’s first collection of prose is a radiant, obsessive investigation into the mysteries at the center of our seemingly mundane lives.
Download or read book On the Pleasure of Hating written by William Hazlitt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-09-06 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Hazlitt's tough, combative writings on subjects ranging from slavery to the imagination, boxing matches to the monarchy, established him as one of the greatest radicals of his age and have inspired journalists and political satirists ever since.
Download or read book Exploring Site specific Art written by Judith Rugg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-02-28 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over recent years, a greater diversity of spaces has opened up worldwide for the making and display of art beyond the gallery. A new 'space consciousness' has developed, with an emphasis on the significance of the spatial. Judith Rugg takes up a range of site-specific artworks internationally located in countries ranging from China to France, Italy and the UK, Argentina and Canada to Australia, Poland and the Netherlands to explore the relationships between site-specific art and space set within its globalising contexts. Through close inspection of works such artists as Doris Salcedo, Langlands and Bell, Phyllida Barlow and Vong Phaophanit, Rugg considers how an interdisciplinary spatial theory can inform many elements of contemporary art. In clear, illustrated chapters, she engages with very contemporary spatial issues, including those of the environment, cultural identity and belonging, as well as experiences of displacement, migration and marginalisation and the effects of urbanization and tourism. For students and practitioners of fine arts, art theory and history, as well as those who are fascinated by site-specific art, this is an original and challenging exploration.
Download or read book Essays on Taste and the Pleasures of the Imagination From the Spectator written by Joseph Addison and published by . This book was released on 1834 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Erotikon written by Shadi Bartsch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-11-15 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Erotikon' brings together leading contemporary intellectuals from a variety of fields for an expansive debate on the full meaning of eros. Restricted neither by historical period nor by genre, these contributions explore manifestations or eros throughout Western culture.
Download or read book Why I Write written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times
Download or read book Essays on the Sources of the Pleasures Received from Literary Compositions written by William Greenfield and published by . This book was released on 1809 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Understanding Blanchot Understanding Modernism written by Christopher Langlois and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Blanchot occupies a central though still-overlooked position in the Anglo-American reception of 20th-century continental philosophy and literary criticism. On the one hand, his rigorous yet always-playful exchanges with the most challenging figures of the philosophical and literary canons of modernity have led thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault to acknowledge Blanchot as a major influence on the development of literary and philosophical culture after World War II. On the other hand, Blanchot's reputation for frustrating readers with his difficult style of thought and writing has resulted in a missed opportunity for leveraging Blanchot in advancing the most essential discussions and debates going on today in the comparative study of literature, philosophy, politics, history, ethics, and art. Blanchot's voice is simply too profound, too erudite, and too illuminating of what is at stake at the intersections of these disciplines not to be exercising more of an influence than it has in only a minority of intellectual circles. Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism brings together an international cast of leading and emergent scholars in making the case for precisely what contemporary modernist studies stands to gain from close inspection of Blanchot's provocative post-war writings.
Download or read book Modern Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle written by Sigmund Freud and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-07-29 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: in Freud's view we are driven by the desire for pleasure as well as by the desire to avoid pain. But the pursuit of pleasure has never been a simple thing. Pleasure can be a form of fear, a form of memory and a way of avoiding reality. Above all, as these essays show with remarkable eloquence, pleasure is a way in which we repeat ourselves. The essays collected in this volume explore, in Freud's uniquely subtle and accessible style, the puzzles of pleasure and morality - the enigmas of human development.
Download or read book Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure written by Ellie Ragland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lacan postulated that the psyche can be understood by means of certain structures, which control our lives and our desires, and which operate differently at different logical moments or stages of formation. Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure offers us a reading of the major concepts of Lacan in terms of his later topological theory and aims to show how this was always a concern for Lacan and not only an issue in the last seminars. Ellie Ragland discusses how various stages of formation can be uncovered topologically within language itself, and operate to place certain properties – fantasy, the drive, jouissance, discourse and ethics in language itself. In this way she explores not only how language actually works in tandem with the properties, but also gives a different idea of what knowledge actually is and what implications that may have for reimagining and reworking differential/diagnostic structures. Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure is a compelling exponent of the innovative approaches Lacan takes to rethinking what psychoanalysis is and what it can do to enlighten psychoanalysts and treat patients. It will be essential reading to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists training graduate students in the fields of film, literary, gender and cultural studies.
Download or read book Essays and Miscellaneous Writings written by Walter Nichols and published by . This book was released on 1826 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fun Home written by Alison Bechdel and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2007 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.
Download or read book Selected Essays written by David Hume and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-12 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his writings, David Hume set out to bridge the gap between the learned world of the academy and the marketplace of polite society. This collection, drawing largely on his Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1776 edition), which was even more popular than his famous Treatise of Human Nature, comprehensively shows how far he succeeded. From `Of Essay Writing' to `Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences' Hume embraces a staggering range of social, cultural, political, demographic, and historical concerns. With the scope typical of the Scottish Enlightenment, he charts the state of civil society, manners, morals, and taste, and the development of political economy in the mid-eighteenth century. These essays represent not only those areas where Hume's arguments are revealingly typical of his day, but also where he is strikingly innovative in a period already famous for its great thinkers. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Download or read book Stephen Wall Trollope and Character and Other Essays on Victorian Literature written by Seamus Perry and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2018-07-14 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Wall, ‘Trollope and Character’ and Other Essays on Victorian Literature gathers together the principal publications of the distinguished scholar-critic Stephen Wall. Widely regarded for his writings on the Victorian novel, Wall’s major writings about Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, including the full text of his book-length study Trollope and Character (1988) and a history of Dickens’s reception, are contained in this volume. Also included are Wall’s reflections on Jane Austen and George Eliot and on other aspects of nineteenthcentury fiction, as well as his influential essay on the ways in which English novels should be edited. Together, the essays communicate the mixture of learning, human sympathy, critical intelligence and dry wit that made Wall’s voice so distinctive and trusted.
