Download or read book Existential America written by George Cotkin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-01-24 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As Cotkin shows, not only did Americans readily take to existentialism, but they were already heirs to a rich tradition of thinkers - from Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville to Emily Dickinson and William James - who had wrestled with the problems of existence and the contingency of the world long before Sartre and his colleagues. After introducing the concept of an American existential tradition, Cotkin examines how formal existentialism first arrived in America in the 1930s through discussion of Kierkegaard and the early vogue among New York intellectuals for the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus.
Download or read book Heideggerian Theologies written by Hue Woodson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In light of Martin Heidegger’s contextualized influence upon them, John Macquarrie, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner engage in theologies that, in their respective tasks and scopes, venture into existential theology, following Heideggerian pathmarks toward the primordiality of being on the way to unconcealment, or “aletheia.” By way of each pathmark, each existential theologian assumes a specific theological stance that utilizes a decidedly existential lens. While the former certainly grounds them fundamentally in a kind of theology, the latter, by way of Heideggerian influences, allows them to venture beyond any traditional theological framework with the use of philosophical suppositions and propositions. In an effort at explaining the relationship between humanity’s “being” and God’s “Being,” each existential theologian examines what it means to be human, not strictly in terms of theology, but as it is tied inextricably to an understanding of the philosophy of existence: the concept of what being is.
Download or read book Existential Theology written by Hue Woodson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Existential Theology: An Introduction offers a formalized and comprehensive examination of the field of existential theology, in order to distinguish it as a unique field of study and view it as a measured synthesis of the concerns of Christian existentialism, Christian humanism, and Christian philosophy with the preoccupations of proper existentialism and a series of unfolding themes from Augustine to Kierkegaard. To do this, Existential Theology attends to the field through the exploration of genres: the European traditions in French, Russian, and German schools of thought, counter-traditions in liberation, feminist, and womanist approaches, and postmodern traditions located in anthropological, political, and ethical approaches. While the cultural contexts inform how each of the selected philosopher-theologians present genres of “existential theology,” other unique genres are examined in theoretical and philosophical contexts, particularly through a selected set of theologians, philosophers, thinkers, and theorists that are not generally categorized theologically. By assessing existential theology through how it manifests itself in “genres,” this book brings together lesser-known figures, well-known thinkers, and figures that are not generally viewed as “existential theologians” to form a focused understanding of the question of the meaning of “existential theology” and what “existential theology” looks like in its varying forms.
Download or read book Situating Existentialism written by Jonathan Judaken and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology provides a history of the systemization and canonization of existentialism, a quintessentially antisystemic mode of thought. Situating existentialism within the history of ideas, it features new readings on the most influential works in the existential canon, exploring their formative contexts and the cultural dialogues of which they were a part. Emphasizing the multidisciplinary and global nature of existential arguments, the chosen texts relate to philosophy, religion, literature, theater, and culture and reflect European, Russian, Latin American, African, and American strains of thought. Readings are grouped into three thematic categories: national contexts, existentialism and religion, and transcultural migrations that explore the reception of existentialism. The volume explains how literary giants such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were incorporated into the existentialist fold and how inclusion into the canon recast the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and it describes the roles played by Jaspers and Heidegger in Germany and the Paris School of existentialism in France. Essays address not only frequently assigned works but also underappreciated discoveries, underscoring their vital relevance to contemporary critical debate. Designed to speak to a new generation's concerns, the collection deploys a diverse range of voices to interrogate the fundamental questions of the human condition.
Download or read book Dig written by Phil Ford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hipness has been an indelible part of America's intellectual and cultural landscape since the 1940s. But the question What is hip? remains a kind of cultural koan, equally intriguing and elusive. In Dig, Phil Ford argues that while hipsters have always used clothing, hairstyle, gesture, and slang to mark their distance from consensus culture, music has consistently been the primary means of resistance, the royal road to hip. Hipness suggests a particular kind of alienation from society--alienation due not to any specific political wrong but to something more radical, a clash of perception and consciousness. From the vantage of hipness, the dominant culture constitutes a system bent on excluding creativity, self-awareness, and self-expression. The hipster's project is thus to define himself against this system, to resist being stamped in its uniform, squarish mold. Ford explores radio shows, films, novels, poems, essays, jokes, and political manifestos, but argues that music more than any other form of expression has shaped the alienated hipster's identity. Indeed, for many avant-garde subcultures music is their raison d'être. Hip intellectuals conceived of sound itself as a way of challenging meaning--that which is cognitive and abstract, timeless and placeless--with experience--that which is embodied, concrete and anchored in place and time. Through Charlie Parker's "Ornithology," Ken Nordine's "Sound Museum," Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," and a range of other illuminating examples, Ford shows why and how music came to be at the center of hipness. Shedding new light on an enigmatic concept, Dig is essential reading for students and scholars of popular music and culture, as well as anyone fascinated by the counterculture movement of the mid-twentieth-century. Publication of this book was supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Download or read book Mailer written by Mary V. Dearborn and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1999 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As the biographer of both Henry Miller (one of Mailer's heroes) and the radical journalist Louise Bryant, Dearborn is uniquely sensitive to Mailer's best and worst sides."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Mike Nichols and the Cinema of Transformation written by J.W. Whitehead and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mike Nichols burst onto the American cultural scene in the late 1950s as one half of the comic cabaret team of Nichols and May. He became a Broadway directing sensation, then moved on to Hollywood, where his first two films--Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and The Graduate (1967)--earned a total of 20 Academy Award nominations. Nichols won the 1968 Oscar for Best Director and later joined the rarefied EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) club. He made many other American cinematic classics, including Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Silkwood (1983), Working Girl (1988), Postcards from the Edge (1990), and his late masterpieces for HBO, Wit (2001) and Angels in America (2003). Filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderbergh regard him with reverence. This first full-career retrospective study of this protean force in the American arts begins with the roots of his filmmaking in satirical comedy and Broadway theatre and devotes separate chapters to each of his 20 feature films. Nichols' permanent achievements are his critique of the ways in which culture constructs conformity and his tempered optimism about individuals' liberation by transformative awakening.
Download or read book Existential Errands written by Norman Mailer and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer written by Barry H. Leeds and published by PBS Publications. This book was released on 2018-02-21 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural Writing. THE ENDURING VISION OF NORMAN MAILER is Professor Barry H. Leeds' second book about one of America's most respected, most controversial, and most prolific authors. It looks at Mailer from where Leeds' first volume left off and takes him on through his most recent works. "Leeds' ideas are engaging, his enthusiasm infectious, and his prose mercifully free of critical jargon.Recommended for contemporary literature collections"--William Gargan in Library Journal. This is literary criticism with a heart and soul, and with an appreciation of subject which is so often missed in contemporary analysis.
Download or read book Norman Mailer written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and film director, Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. Along with Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer was a practitioner of New Journalism, a genre which encompassed the essay and other nonfiction writing.
Download or read book The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People written by Robert Inchausti and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1991-08-13 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how the spiritual longings of ordinary people have shaped the most progressive political and cultural movements of the twentieth century and given birth to a new postmodern perspective on existence that recoups the traditional religious verities on the far side of both literary modernism and neo-Marxism. Inchausti focuses on figures who have been instrumental in defending the sacred traditions of indigenous cultures and oppressed minorities. He demonstrates that Mahatma Gandhi, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Elie Wiesel, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and Lech Walesa share an ethic that is, at once, plebeian in origin and yet sublime in aspiration.
Download or read book The Art of Being written by Yi-Ping Ong and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-10 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Art of Being is a powerful account of how the literary form of the novel reorients philosophy toward the meaning of existence. Yi-Ping Ong shows that for Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir, the form of the novel in its classic phase yields the conditions for reconceptualizing the nature of self-knowledge, freedom, and the world. Their discovery gives rise to a radically new poetics of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novel. For the existentialists, a paradox lies at the heart of the novel. As a work of art, the novel exists as a given totality. At the same time, the capacity of the novel to compel belief in the free and independent existence of its characters depends on the absence of any perspective from which their lives may be viewed as a consummated whole. At stake in the poetics of the novel are the conditions under which knowledge of existence is possible. Ong’s reframing of foundational debates in novel theory takes us beyond old dichotomies of mind and world, interiority and totality, and form and mimesis. It illuminates existential dimensions of novelistic realism overlooked by empirical and sociological approaches. Bringing together philosophy, novel theory, and intellectual history with groundbreaking readings of Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, James, Flaubert, and Zola, The Art of Being reveals how the novel engages in its very form with philosophically rich notions of self-knowledge, freedom, authority, world, and the unfinished character of human life.
Download or read book Romantic Postmodernism in American Fiction written by Alsen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-21 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended for teachers and students of American Literature, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of romantic tendencies in postmodernist American fiction. The book challenges the opinion expressed in the Columbia History of the American Novel (1991) and propagated by many influential scholars that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction is represented by the disjunctive and nihilistic work of such writers as Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover. Professor Alsen disagrees. He contends that this kind of fiction is not read and taught much outside an isolated but powerful circle in the academic community. It is the two-part thesis of Professor Alsen's book that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction consists of the widely read work of the Nobel Prize laureates Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison and other similar writers and that this mainstream fiction is essentially romantic. To support his argument, Professor Alsen analyzes representative novels by Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, the later John Barth, Alice Walker, William Kennedy, and Paul Auster. Professor Alsen demonstrates that the traits which distinguish the fiction of the romantic postmodernists from the fiction of their disunctive and nihilist colleagues include a vision of life that is a form of philosophical idealism, an organic view of art, modes of storytelling that are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century romance, and such themes as the nature of sin or evil, the negative effects of technology on the soul, and the quest for transcendence.
Download or read book Norman Mailer in Context written by Maggie McKinley and published by Literature in Context. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers new insight into the contextual background and literary-historical impact of Norman Mailer's body of work.
Download or read book Feast of Excess written by George Cotkin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feast of Excess is an engaging and accessible portrait of "The New Sensibility," as it was named by Susan Sontag in 1965. The New Sensibility sought to push culture in extreme directions: either towards stark minimalism or gaudy maximalism. Through vignette profiles of prominent figures-John Cage, Patricia Highsmith, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Anne Sexton, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Erica Jong, and Thomas Pynchon, to name a few-George Cotkin presents their bold, headline-grabbing performances and places them within the historical moment.
Download or read book The Complete Idiot s Guide to American Literature written by Laurie E. Rozakis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1999 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at American authors from Washington Irving to John Updike and provides brief biographical sketches, excerpts and summaries of major works, and explanations of major literary movements
Download or read book Lipton s A Marijuana Journal written by Norman Mailer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final previously unpublished work from two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the National Book Award, Norman Mailer. Norman Mailer is one of America's most consequential public intellectuals of the postwar period. He cofounded the Village Voice, and he was the author of twelve novels, among them The Naked and the Dead and Harlot’s Ghost, as well as numerous works of nonfiction. He is truly one of the giants of American literature. Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal is the only work by Norman Mailer that has not been published previously. Written between 1954-55, from December to March, it contains many ideas he would develop in his later work. The journal includes daily musings, as well as thoughts profound. It is a must-read for Norman Mailer scholars, as well as literature professors. Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal also includes never before published letters between Robert Lindner (author of Rebel Without a Cause, Prescription for a Reberllion, and The 50 Minute Hour) and Norman Mailer. They introduce the reader to Mailer’s state of mind during the time he was writing the journal and to the unique relationship he had with Dr. Lindner.
