Download or read book Fiction Agonistes written by Gregory Jusdanis and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this path-breaking new work, Gregory Jusdanis asks why literature matters. Why are we afraid to admit our pleasures of reading, to defend the arts to the school board, to discuss the importance of literature in life? Drawing on a wealth of references from Aristophanes to Eudora Welty, from Fernando Pessoa to Orhan Pamuk, from Cavafy to hypertext stories, Jusdanis reminds us that the arts have always been under attack. Instead of despair, however, he offers a pragmatic defense of literature, arguing that it performs a social function in dramatizing the break between illusion and reality, life and the life-like, permanence and metamorphosis. The ability to distinguish between the actual and the imaginary is essential to human beings. Our capacity to imagine something new, to project ourselves into the mind of another person, and to fight for a new world is based on this distinction. Literature allows us to imagine alternate possibilities of human relationships and political institutions, even in the watery world of the Internet. At once daring and lucid, Fiction Agonistes considers the place of art today with passion and optimism.

Download or read book Casey Agonistes written by Richard M. Mckenna and published by Gateway. This book was released on 2012-12-07 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating collection from the Nebula Award-wining author contains the stories: Casey Agonistes, Hunter Come Home, The Secret Place, Mine Own Ways, Fiddler's Green

Download or read book Casey Agonistes and Other Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories written by Richard McKenna and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1973 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Political Fictions written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2002-08-27 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In these coolly observant essays, the iconic bestselling writer looks at the American political process and at "that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.

Download or read book Lewis Agonistes written by Louis Markos and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2003-09-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The written legacy of C.S. Lewis continues to be a rich mine of Christian thought and perspective. And each work continues to be as relevant today as it was at its original publishing.And now, Lewis scholar Louis Markos has done the community of faith a great service by organizing Lewis’s thoughts on a wide scope of subjects pertaining to modernity and postmodernity—on science and the natural world, the new age movement, philosophy, evil and suffering, the arts, and heaven and hell. Lewis Agonistes will make readers work in the same way that Lewis’s writings made them work, forcing them to rethink and examine ideas—to become participants in the agon (or wrestling match) of the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Why Literature written by Cristina Vischer Bruns and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-05-05 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: >

Download or read book Nixon Agonistes written by Garry Wills and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new preface: A “stunning” analysis of the troubled Republican president by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg (The New York Times Book Review). In this acclaimed biography that earned him a spot on Nixon’s infamous “enemies list,” Garry Wills takes a thoughtful, in-depth, and often “very amusing” look at the thirty-seventh US president, and draws some surprising conclusions about a man whose name has become synonymous with scandal and the abuse of power (Kirkus Reviews). Arguing that Nixon was a reflection of the country that elected him, Wills examines not only the psychology of the man himself and his relationships with others—from his wife, Pat, to his vice-president, Spiro Agnew—but also the state of the nation at the time, mired in the Vietnam War and experiencing a cultural rift that pitted the young against the old. Putting his findings into moral, economic, intellectual, and political contexts, he ultimately “paints a broad and provocative landscape of the nation’s—and Nixon’s—travails” (The New York Times). Simultaneously compassionate and critical, and raising interesting perspectives on the shifting definitions of terms like “conservative” and “liberal” over recent decades, Nixon Agonistes is a brilliant and indispensable book from one of America’s most acclaimed historians.

Download or read book An Ecology of World Literature written by Alexander Beecroft and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a literature? How do literatures of different countries interact with each other? In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Beecroft develops a new way of thinking about world literature. Drawing on a series of examples and case studies, the book ranges from ancient epic to the contemporary fiction of Roberto Bolao and Amitav Ghosh. Beecroft identifies a series of literary ecologies, from small-scale societies to the planet as a whole, within which literary texts are produced and circulated. An Ecology of World Literature places in dialogue scholarship on ancient and modern, western and non-western texts, producing new and unexpected demands for literary study.

Download or read book Modern Classics of Science Fiction written by Gardner Dozois and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 695 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Aldiss William Gibson R.A. Lafferty Ursula K. Le Guin Lucius Shepard Bruce Sterling Theodore Sturgeon Howard Waldrop Connie Willis Gene Wolfe Roger Zelazny "The best stories are timeless. Long years from now the stories here may still touch someone, cause that person to blink, and put the book down for a second, and stare off through the hallow air, and shirver in wonder."

Download or read book Literature Autonomy and Commitment written by Aukje van Rooden and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often argued that a new form of committed literature is needed. Embracing the 18th-century Romantic idea of aesthetic autonomy, literature is believed to have turned its back to everyday social and political reality. One of the central questions occupying contemporary literary debates is therefore whether literary autonomy is essential to modern literature ('autonomism') or should be abandoned ('anti-autonomism'). Aukje van Rooden argues that the debate between autonomists and anti-autonomists cannot be anything but a fruitless tug-of-war, because it is based on a distorted historical picture. In order to make sense of the social relevance of contemporary literature, a new theoretical paradigm has to be formulated. Literature, Autonomy and Commitment not only offers an historical-conceptual reconstruction of the Romantic paradigm and the theoretical impasse it has created, but also sketches the outline of a new paradigm, called 'the relational paradigm', based on the relational ontologies developed in 20th- and 21st-century philosophy.

Download or read book A Tremendous Thing written by Gregory Jusdanis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Why did you do all this for me?" Wilbur asked. "I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.""You have been my friend," replied Charlotte. "That in itself is a tremendous thing."—from Charlotte's Web by E. B. WhiteFriendship encompasses a wide range of social bonds, from playground companionship and wartime camaraderie to modern marriages and Facebook links. For many, friendship is more meaningful than familial ties. And yet it is our least codified relationship, with no legal standing or bureaucratic definition. In A Tremendous Thing, Gregory Jusdanis explores the complex, sometimes contradictory nature of friendship, reclaiming its importance in both society and the humanities today. Ranging widely in his discussion, he looks at the art of friendship and friendship in art, finding a compelling link between our need for friends and our engagement with fiction. Both, he contends, necessitate the possibility of entering invented worlds, of reading the minds of others, and of learning to live with people.Investigating the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of friendship, Jusdanis draws from the earliest writings to the present, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad to Charlotte's Web and "Brokeback Mountain," as well as from philosophy, sociology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and political theory. He asks: What makes friends stay together? Why do we associate friendship with mourning? Does friendship contribute to the formation of political communities? Can friends desire each other? The history of friendship demonstrates that human beings are a mutually supportive species with an innate aptitude to envision and create ties with others. At a time when we are confronted by war, economic inequality, and climate change, Jusdanis suggests that we reclaim friendship to harness our capacity for cooperation and empathy.

Download or read book Gazza Agonistes written by Ian Hamilton and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-07-21 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This is a fan's eye-view of Paul Gascoigne - and fans, as we know, are expert at reassembling dashed hopes...' In 1987 Ian Hamilton - acclaimed poet, biographer and Tottenham fan - was smitten from afar by the impish skills of Newcastle United's Paul Gascoigne. When 'Gazza' duly signed for Spurs, Hamilton was sure that he and English football had found their new hero. But Gascoigne was destined to be brought low by tragic flaws, and Hamilton was ideally positioned to tell the tale in this, a peerless piece of football literature. 'By the final whistle Hamilton has sketched a compelling figure: reckless, cocky, twitchy, hyperactive and half bonkers... but with flashes of implausible grace that connect with the dreams of his audience.' Independent

Download or read book Futile Pleasures written by Corey McEleney and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First Book Against the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own. During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature’s potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

Download or read book Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy written by Gül Bilge Han and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy presents a rethinking of modernist claims to autonomy by focusing on the work of Wallace Stevens, one of the most renowned poets of the twentieth century. By showing how multiple socio-political currents underlie and motivate Stevens' version of autonomy, the book challenges the commonly received accounts of the term as art and literature's escape from the world. It provides new and close readings of Stevens' work including poems from different stages of the poet's career. It re-energizes a tradition of historicist readings of Stevens from the 1980s and 1990s. The study of Stevens' work in this book is developed in constant dialogue with current studies in modernism and aesthetic theory, particularly those offered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. The book explores the question of autonomy in Stevens' exploration of the aesthetic and social domains, and the vexed issue of his poetry's relation to philosophical thinking.

Download or read book Writer and Occasion in Twelfth Century Byzantium written by Ingela Nilsson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In twelfth-century Constantinople, writers worked on commission for the imperial family or aristocratic patrons. Texts were occasioned by specific events, representing both a link between writer and patron and between literary imagination and empirical reality. This is a study of how one such writer, Constantine Manasses, achieved that aim. Manasses depicted and praised the present by drawing from the rich sources of the Graeco-Roman and Biblical tradition, thus earning commissions from wealthy 'friends' during a career that spanned more than three decades. While the occasional literature of writers like Manasses has sometimes been seen as 'empty rhetoric', devoid of literary ambition, this study assumes that writing on command privileges originality and encourages the challenging of conventions. A society like twelfth-century Byzantium, in which occasional writing was central, called for a strong and individual authorial presence, since voice was the primary instrument for a successful career.

Download or read book The Trouble with Literature written by Victoria Kahn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, based on the Clarendon Lectures in English for 2017, argues that the literature of the English Reformation marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness. But instead of arguing that the Reformation fostered English literature, as scholars have often done, Victoria Kahn claims that literature helped undo the Reformation, with implications for both poetry and belief. Ultimately, literature in the Reformation is one vehicle by which religious belief was itself transformed into a human artifact, whether we understand this as a poetic artifact or a mental fiction. This transformation in turn helped produce the eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics, with its emphasis on our experience of non-cognitive pleasure in the work of art, and the modern formalist definition of literature, according to which—in the words of one critic—'literature solves no problems and saves no souls.' This modern definition of literature, in short, has a history, this history is intertwined with the problem of belief, and by returning to the fraught years of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century in England, we can come to a new understanding of how the trouble with literature has shaped our discipline. The first lecture contrasts modern and early modern understandings of literature and literariness. The second and third lectures focus on Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. The fourth lecture treats the work of Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and J.M. Coetzee.

Download or read book The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton written by John Milton and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2009-10-28 with total page 1410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Milton is, next to William Shakespeare, the most influential English poet, a writer whose work spans an incredible breadth of forms and subject matter. The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton celebrates this author’s genius in a thoughtfully assembled book that provides new modern-spelling versions of Milton’s texts, expert commentary, and a wealth of other features that will please even the most dedicated students of Milton’s canon. Edited by a trio of esteemed scholars, this volume is the definitive Milton for our time. In these pages you will find all of Milton’s verse, from masterpieces such as Paradise Lost–widely viewed as the finest epic poem in the English language–to shorter works such as the Nativity Ode, Lycidas,, A Masque and Samson Agonistes. Milton’s non-English language sonnets, verses, and elegies are accompanied by fresh translations by Gordon Braden. Among the newly edited and authoritatively annotated prose selections are letters, pamphlets, political tracts, essays such as Of Education and Areopagitica, and a generous portion of his heretical Christian Doctrine. These works reveal Milton’s passionate advocacy of controversial positions during the English Civil War and the Commonwealth and Restoration periods. With his deep learning and the sensual immediacy of his language, Milton creates for us a unique bridge to the cultures of classical antiquity and medieval and Renaissance Christianity. With this in mind, the editors give careful attention to preserving the vibrant energy of Milton’s verse and prose, while making the relatively unfamiliar aspects of his writing accessible to modern readers. Notes identify the old meanings and roots of English words, illuminate historical contexts–including classical and biblical allusions–and offer concise accounts of the author’s philosophical and political assumptions. This edition is a consummate work of modern literary scholarship.