Download or read book From Polypragmon to Curiosus written by Matthew Leigh and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Polypragmon to Curiosus is a study of how Greek and Latin writers describe curious, meddlesome, and exaggerated behaviour. Founded on a detailed investigation of a family of Greek terms, often treated as synonymous with each other, and of the Latin words used to describe them, opening chapters survey how they were used in Greek literature from the 5th and 4th centuries BC, moving onto their Latin usage and relationship to that of Hellenistic and imperial Greek. Other chapters adopt a more thematic approach and consider how words, such as polypramon, periergos, philopragmon, and curiosus, are employed in descriptions of the world of knowledge opened up by empire - in discourses of pious and impious curiosity, in reflections on what constitutes useful and useless learning, and in descriptions of style. The themes which the volume addresses remain alive throughout the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, most obviously through emblematic figures of human curiosity, such as Dante's Ulisse and Marlowe's Dr Faustus.
Download or read book The Miscellany of the Spanish Golden Age written by Jonathan David Bradbury and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking up the invitation extended by tentative attempts over the past three decades to construct a functioning definition of the genre, Jonathan Bradbury traces the development of the vernacular miscellany in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish-America. In the first full-length study of this commercially successful and intellectually significant genre, Bradbury underlines the service performed by the miscellanists as disseminators of knowledge and information to a popular readership. His comprehensive analysis of the miscelánea corrects long-standing misconceptions, starting from its poorly-understood terminology, and erects divisions between it and other related genres. His work illuminates the relationship between the Golden Age Spanish miscellany and those of the classical world and humanist milieu, and illustrates how the vernacular tradition moved away from these forebears. Bradbury examines in particular the later inclusion of explicitly fictional components, such as poetic compositions and short prose fiction, alongside the vulgarisation of erudite or inaccessible prose material, which was the primary function of the earlier Spanish miscellanies. He tackles the flexibility of the miscelánea as a genre by assessing the conceptual, thematic and formal aspects of such works, and exploring the interaction of these features. As a result, a genre model emerges, through which Golden Age works with fragmentary and non-continuous contents can better be interpreted and classified.
Download or read book Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Epistemic Desire to Know written by Marianna Papastephanou and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores curiosity from many philosophical perspectives of relevance to various fields and disciplines such as educational studies, epistemology, political philosophy and history of thought. It advances and enriches scholarly research on curiosity while critiquing current approaches to the epistemic desire to know. Its interest in contemporary accounts of curiosity does not entail neglect of the conceptual history of this notion from antiquity to the present. Its focus on cultural and scientific appreciations of curiosity is global rather than local and inclusive of standpoints beyond established divisions such as the “modern versus postmodern” or the “analytic versus continental”. The book offers fresh and unique engagements with what motivates us to ask questions and how this motivation operates from an ethical, cultural and political point of view.
Download or read book Curiosity Studies written by Perry Zurn and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language collection to establish curiosity studies as a unique field From science and technology to business and education, curiosity is often taken for granted as an unquestioned good. And yet, few people can define curiosity. Curiosity Studies marshals scholars from more than a dozen fields not only to define curiosity but also to grapple with its ethics as well as its role in technological advancement and global citizenship. While intriguing research on curiosity has occurred in numerous disciplines for decades, no rigorously cross-disciplinary study has existed—until now. Curiosity Studies stages an interdisciplinary conversation about what curiosity is and what resources it holds for human and ecological flourishing. These engaging essays are integrated into four clusters: scientific inquiry, educational practice, social relations, and transformative power. By exploring curiosity through the practice of scientific inquiry, the contours of human learning, the stakes of social difference, and the potential of radical imagination, these clusters focus and reinvigorate the study of this universal but slippery phenomenon: the desire to know. Against the assumption that curiosity is neutral, this volume insists that curiosity has a history and a political import and requires precision to define and operationalize. As various fields deepen its analysis, a new ecosystem for knowledge production can flourish, driven by real-world problems and a commitment to solve them in collaboration. By paying particular attention to pedagogy throughout, Curiosity Studies equips us to live critically and creatively in what might be called our new Age of Curiosity. Contributors: Danielle S. Bassett, U of Pennsylvania; Barbara M. Benedict, Trinity College; Susan Engel, Williams College; Ellen K. Feder, American U; Kristina T. Johnson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Narendra Keval; Christina León, Princeton U; Tyson Lewis, U of North Texas; Amy Marvin, U of Oregon; Hilary M. Schor, U of Southern California; Seeta Sistla, Hampshire College; Heather Anne Swanson, Aarhus U.
Download or read book Making Mathematical Culture written by Richard J. Oosterhoff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-25 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1503, for the first time, a student in Paris was able to spend his entire university career studying only the printed textbooks of his teacher, thanks to the works of the humanist and university reformer Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (c. 1455-1536). As printed books became central to the intellectual habits of following generations, Lefèvre turned especially to mathematics as a way to renovate the medieval university. Making Mathematical Culture argues this was a pivatol moment in the cultural history of Europe and explores how the rise of the printed book contributed to the growing profile of mathematics in the region. Using student manuscripts and annotated books, Making Mathematical Culture offers a new account of printed textbooks, as jointly made by masters and students, and how such collaborative practices informed approaches to mathematics.
Download or read book Curiosity and Power written by Perry Zurn and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A trailblazing exploration of the political stakes of curiosity Curiosity is political. Who is curious, when, and how reflects the social values and power structures of a given society. In Curiosity and Power, Perry Zurn explores the political philosophy of curiosity, staking the groundbreaking claim that it is a social force—the heartbeat of political resistance and a critical factor in social justice. He argues that the very scaffolding of curiosity is the product of political architectures, and exploring these values and architectures is crucial if we are to better understand, and more ethically navigate, the struggle over inquiry in an unequal world. Curiosity and Power explores curiosity through the lens of political philosophy—weaving in Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida in doing so—and the experience of political marginalization, demonstrating that curiosity is implicated equally in the maintenance of societies and in their transformation. Curiosity plays as central a role in establishing social institutions and fields of inquiry as it does in their deconstruction and in building new forms of political community. Understanding curiosity is critical to understanding politics, and understanding politics is critical to understanding curiosity. Drawing not only on philosophy and political theory but also on feminist theory, race theory, disability studies, and trans studies, Curiosity and Power tracks curiosity in the structures of political marginalization and resistance—from the Civil Rights Movement to building better social relationships. Curiosity and Power insists that the power of curiosity be recognized and engaged responsibly.
Download or read book Curiosity as an Epistemic Virtue written by Nenad Miščević and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-08 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores curiosity from a normative epistemological viewpoint. Taking into account recent developments in the psychology of curiosity, as well as research on the nature and motivation of scientific inquiry, Miščević identifies curiosity as a positive and vital character trait. Key topics covered include: · Curiosity as a subject in the history of philosophy · Curiosity as a possible ethical virtue · The importance of curiosity about oneself · Whether curiosity is good in itself or only as a means to an end (e.g. in the pursuit of truth). The book begins with a brief historical overview, before turning to the nature of curiosity from both a psychological and philosophical viewpoint. Curiosity is revealed as a crucial instrument in the advancement of science and wisdom, as well as within the wider picture of meaningful human life. Miščević skilfully defends the idea that curiosity motivates and organises our cognitive abilities, playing the central role in our cognitive lives.
Download or read book The Anecdotal Narration and Encyclopedic Thought of Pliny the Elder s Naturalis Historia written by Ágnes Darab and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, with its varied content, enables and expects the reader to employ a complex interpretative technique. One aspect of Pliny’s diction is that he often interrupts the discussions of topics with digressions and begins to address something that seemingly has nothing to do with the subject. The hypothesis suggested by this book is that these digressions that occur in different places and in great number throughout the text of Naturalis Historia should not be regarded as mistakes fragmenting the encyclopedia’s structure. Most of these digressions are anecdotes. Researching the aetiological anecdotes, and those about the life of animals, famous persons from political or intellectual life, and the most important Greek painters and sculptors requires the application of different perspectives. When we approach anecdotes from the perspective of narrative techniques, the role of the stories as exempla becomes clearer, and its further aspects can be spotted. This book also draws attention to Pliny the writer, an aspect of the text that has been contested until very recently.
Download or read book New Perspectives on Educational Resources written by Karl Christian Alvestad and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing new perspectives on educational resources together, this book considers how a range of learning materials can be used to effectively highlight creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking in learning. Covering a broad scope of educational resources, the book examines the use of resources in Scandinavian education within language studies, literature, history, and social studies at all levels of education through empirically grounded research, including ethnographies and textual analysis. Written by practising experts in the field of education studies, chapters present examples of both cutting-edge digital media and more traditional artefacts and books, providing critical discussion and inspiration for how a range of resources can be used creatively within the classroom. This interdisciplinary book is a valuable addition to scholarly discussions around educational development and learning, and will be relevant for academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of teacher education, didactics, curriculum, and educational technology.
Download or read book Cultural Crossroads in the Ancient Novel written by Marília P. Futre Pinheiro and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-12-04 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The protagonists of the ancient novels wandered or were carried off to distant lands, from Italy in the west to Persia in the east and Ethiopia in the south; the authors themselves came, or pretended to come, from remote places such as Aphrodisia and Phoenicia; and the novelistic form had antecedents in a host of classical genres. These intersections are explored in this volume. Papers in the first section discuss “mapping the world in the novels.” The second part looks at the dialogical imagination, and the conversation between fiction and history in the novels. Section 3 looks at the way ancient fiction has been transmitted and received. Space, as the locus of cultural interaction and exchange, is the topic of the fourth part. The fifth and final section is devoted to character and emotion, and how these are perceived or constructed in ancient fiction. Overall, a rich picture is offered of the many spatial and cultural dimensions in a variety of ancient fictional genres.
Download or read book The Ass of the Gods Apuleius Golden Ass the Onos Attributed to Lucian and Graeco Roman Metamorphosis Literature written by Kristopher F.B. Fletcher and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-03-20 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apuleius’ Golden Ass and the Lucianic Loukios, or the Ass depend on and play with readers’ familiarity with the clear patterns of Greek and Roman stories of metamorphosis. The formulaic nature of these stories suggests that the appearance of a god at the end of the Golden Ass is unsurprising and that the end of the Loukios is more innovative. This context also sheds new light on the function of the Cupid and Psyche story, the meaning of these works’ titles, and the lost Metamorphoseis on which they are both based and of which the Golden Ass is a translation.
Download or read book Cupid and Psyche written by Regine May and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apuleius’ tale of Cupid and Psyche has been popular since it was first written in the second century CE as part of his Latin novel Metamorphoses. Often treated as a standalone text, Cupid and Psyche has given rise to treatments in the last 400 years as diverse as plays, masques, operas, poems, paintings and novels, with a range of diverse approaches to the text. Apuleius’ story of the love between the mortal princess Psyche (or “Soul”) and the god of Love has fascinated recipients as varied as Romantic poets, psychoanalysts, children’s books authors, neo-Platonist philosophers and Disney film producers. These readers themselves produced their own responses to and versions of the story. This volume is the first broad consideration of the reception of C&P in Europe since 1600 and an adventurous interdisciplinary undertaking. It is the first study to focus primarily on material in English, though it also ranges widely across literary genres in Italian, French and German, encompassing poetry, drama and opera as well as prose fiction and art history, studied by an international team of established and young scholars. Detailed studies of single works and of whole genres make this book relevant for students of Classics, English, Art History, opera and modern film.
Download or read book Discourse Knowledge and Power in Apuleius Metamorphoses written by Evelyn Adkins and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2022-05-23 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ancient Rome, where literacy was limited and speech was the main medium used to communicate status and identity face-to-face in daily life, an education in rhetoric was a valuable form of cultural capital and a key signifier of elite male identity. To lose the ability to speak would have caused one to be viewed as no longer elite, no longer a man, and perhaps even no longer human. We see such a fantasy horror story played out in the Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, written by Roman North African author, orator, and philosopher Apuleius of Madauros—the only novel in Latin to survive in its entirety from antiquity. In the novel’s first-person narrative as well as its famous inset tales such as the Tale of Cupid and Psyche, the Metamorphoses is invested in questions of power and powerlessness, truth and knowledge, and communication and interpretation within the pluralistic but hierarchical world of the High Roman Empire (ca. 100–200 CE). Discourse, Knowledge, and Power presents a new approach to the Metamorphoses: it is the first in-depth investigation of the use of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius’ novel. It argues that discourse, broadly defined to include speech, silence, written text, and nonverbal communication, is the primary tool for negotiating identity, status, and power in the Metamorphoses. Although it takes as its starting point the role of discourse in the characterization of literary figures, it contends that the process we see in the Metamorphoses reflects the real world of the second century CE Roman Empire. Previous scholarship on Apuleius’ novel has read it as either a literary puzzle or a source-text for social, philosophical, or religious history. In contrast, this book uses a framework of discourse analysis, an umbrella term for various methods of studying the social political functions of discourse, to bring Latin literary studies into dialogue with Roman rhetoric, social and cultural history, religion, and philosophy as well as approaches to language and power from the fields of sociology, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Discourse, Knowledge, and Power argues that a fictional account of a man who becomes an animal has much to tell us not only about ancient Roman society and culture, but also about the dynamics of human and gendered communication, the anxieties of the privileged, and their implications for swiftly shifting configurations of status and power whether in the second or twenty-first centuries.
Download or read book Word of Mouth written by Gianni Guastella and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Word of Mouth offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the evolving personifications of the ancient concept of fama in ancient and medieval literature and in European figurative art between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries.
Download or read book Flattery in Seneca the Younger written by Martina Russo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-22 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flattery in Seneca the Younger explores the discourse of flattery in Seneca's philosophical texts, and analyses the extent to which Seneca developed a theory of adulation. Martina Russo maps a phenomenology of flattery, tracing its external manifestations in Senecan philosophy. The personal practice of flattery displayed in the Ad Polybium and in De clementia along with the 'distant' exempla of flattery represented by Seneca, and with the theorization of adulation, indicates the range and the complexity of strategic flattery during the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Furthermore, it is argued that Seneca emerges not only as a practitioner of flattery but also as a theorist of it. While many writers tarnished their reputation by giving in to flattery, Seneca was among the few who not only accepted flattery but also advocated it as an essential tool in his own times. Nevertheless, in Seneca's philosophical prose, a constant tension emerges: whereas flattery is 'politically' acceptable as an instrument to cope with the absolute power embraced by the princeps, the sapiens (wise) and the proficiens (would-be wise) should be careful because flattery can seriously compromise their path to wisdom. By analysing the theory and practice of flattery, Russo discusses how passages permeated with the most blatant flattery can be read on a new level, by viewing Seneca's philosophical prose as an extended exercise in symbolic projection and figured speech. It becomes possible to disclose traces of political criticism behind the fa?ade of the most flagrant flattery.
Download or read book Tacitus Wonders written by James McNamara and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume approaches the broad topic of wonder in the works of Tacitus, encompassing paradox, the marvellous and the admirable. Recent scholarship on these themes in Roman literature has tended to focus on poetic genres, with comparatively little attention paid to historiography: Tacitus, whose own judgments on what is worthy of note have often differed in interesting ways from the preoccupations of his readers, is a fascinating focal point for this complementary perspective. Scholarship on Tacitus has to date remained largely marked by a divide between the search for veracity – as validated by modern historiographical standards – and literary approaches, and as a result wonders have either been ignored as unfit for an account of history or have been deprived of their force by being interpreted as valid only within the text. While the modern ideal of historiographical objectivity tends to result in striving for consistent heuristic and methodological frameworks, works as varied as Tacitus' Histories, Annals and opera minora can hardly be prefaced with a statement of methodology broad enough to escape misrepresenting their diversity. In our age of specialization a streamlined methodological framework is a virtue, but it should not be assumed that Tacitus had similar priorities, and indeed the Histories and Annals deserve to be approached with openness towards the variety of perspectives that a tradition as rich as Latin historiographical prose can include within its scope. This collection proposes ways to reconcile the divide between history and historiography by exploring contestable moments in the text that challenge readers to judge and interpret for themselves, with individual chapters drawing on a range of interpretive approaches that mirror the wealth of authorial and reader-specific responses in play.
Download or read book Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture written by Joseph A. Howley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long a source for quotations, fragments, and factoids, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius offers hundreds of brief but vivid glimpses of Roman intellectual life. In this book Joseph Howley demonstrates how the work may be read as a literary text in its own right, and discusses the rich evidence it provides for the ancient history of reading, thought, and intellectual culture. He argues that Gellius is in close conversation with predecessors both Greek and Latin, such as Plutarch and Pliny the Elder, and also offers new ways of making sense of the text's 'miscellaneous' qualities, like its disorder and its table of contents. Dealing with topics ranging from the framing of literary quotations to the treatment of contemporary celebrities who appear in its pages, this book offers a new way to learn from the Noctes about the world of Roman reading and thought.
