Download or read book Illness and Irony written by Michael Lambek and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2003-11-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theories of illness and therapy since Freud have included the possibility that sufferers are complicit in their conditions. The studies in this volume explore the ways in which illness and therapy may be characterized as sites at which ironies of the human condition are produced, encountered, acknowledged – or discounted in favor of more literal readings. They ask what these sites can teach us about questions of human agency and about the broader importance of irony for theory. Encompassing a variety of perspectives, the contributors included in Illness and Irony apply theories of irony to a myriad of cultural contexts, ranging from Freud’s consulting room and the Lacanian clinics of Buenos Aires to fright illness in a Yemeni village and spirit possession on the island of Mayotte. An introductory chapter by Michael Lambek establishes a contextual viewpoint on irony, arising from the writings of Thomas Mann, Alexander Nehamas and others. Vincent Crapanzano concludes the volume by linking the contributions to current debates about irony in rhetoric, linguistics and comparative literature.
Download or read book Illness and Irony written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Illness and Irony written by Michael Lambek and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theories of illness and therapy since Freud have included the possibility that sufferers are complicit in their conditions. The studies in this volume explore the ways in which illness and therapy may be characterized as sites at which ironies of the human condition are produced, encountered, acknowledged – or discounted in favor of more literal readings. They ask what these sites can teach us about questions of human agency and about the broader importance of irony for theory. Encompassing a variety of perspectives, the contributors included in Illness and Irony apply theories of irony to a myriad of cultural contexts, ranging from Freud’s consulting room and the Lacanian clinics of Buenos Aires to fright illness in a Yemeni village and spirit possession on the island of Mayotte. An introductory chapter by Michael Lambek establishes a contextual viewpoint on irony, arising from the writings of Thomas Mann, Alexander Nehamas and others. Vincent Crapanzano concludes the volume by linking the contributions to current debates about irony in rhetoric, linguistics and comparative literature.
Download or read book Wisdom Won from Illness written by Jonathan Lear and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wisdom Won from Illness brings into conversation two fields of humane inquiry—psychoanalysis and moral philosophy—that seem to have little to say to each other but which, taken together, form a basis for engaged ethical thought about how to live. Jonathan Lear begins by looking to the ancient Greek philosophers for insight into what constitutes the life well lived. Socrates said the human psyche should be ruled by reason, and much philosophy as well as psychology hangs on what he meant. For Aristotle, reason organized and presided over the harmonious soul; a wise person is someone capable of a full, happy, and healthy existence. Freud, plumbing the depths of unconscious desires and pre-linguistic thoughts, revealed just how unharmonious the psyche could be. Attuned to the stresses of modern existence, he investigated the myriad ways people fall ill and fail to thrive. Yet he inherited from Plato and Aristotle a key insight: that the irrational part of the soul is not simply opposed to reason. It is a different manner of thinking: a creative intelligence that distorts what it seeks to understand. Can reason absorb the psyche’s nonrational elements into a whole conception of the flourishing, fully realized human being? Without a good answer to that question, Lear says, philosophy is cut from its moorings in human life. Wisdom Won from Illness illuminates the role of literature in shaping ethical thought about nonrational aspects of the mind, offering rich readings of Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, and others.
Download or read book A Case for Irony written by Jonathan Lear and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2001, Vanity Fair declared that the Age of Irony was over. Joan Didion has lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama has become an "irony-free zone." Jonathan Lear in his 2006 book Radical Hope looked into America’s heart to ask how might we dispose ourselves if we came to feel our way of life was coming to an end. Here, he mobilizes a squad of philosophers and a psychoanalyst to once again forge a radical way forward, by arguing that no genuinely human life is possible without irony. Becoming human should not be taken for granted, Lear writes. It is something we accomplish, something we get the hang of, and like Kierkegaard and Plato, Lear claims that irony is one of the essential tools we use to do this. For Lear and the participants in his Socratic dialogue, irony is not about being cool and detached like a player in a Woody Allen film. That, as Johannes Climacus, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors, puts it, “is something only assistant professors assume.” Instead, it is a renewed commitment to living seriously, to experiencing every disruption that shakes us out of our habitual ways of tuning out of life, with all its vicissitudes. While many over the centuries have argued differently, Lear claims that our feelings and desires tend toward order, a structure that irony shakes us into seeing. Lear’s exchanges with his interlocutors strengthen his claims, while his experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst bring an emotionally gripping dimension to what is at stake—the psychic costs and benefits of living with irony.
Download or read book Illness as Metaphor written by Susan Sontag and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this penetrating analysis of the social attitudes toward various major illnesses - chiefly tuberculosis, the scourge of the 19th century, and cancer, the terror of our own - Susan Sontag demonstrates that "illness is not a metaphor" and shows why "the healthiest way of being ill is one purified of metaphoric thinking." Once tuberculosis was identified as a bacterial infection, it ceased to be a symbol of a romantic fading away or of a sensitive or artistic temperament, and it could be treated and cured. Similarly, we must today cease to think of cancer as a mark of doom, a punishment or a sign of a repressed personality, and recognize it for what it is: one disease among many and often receptive to treatment." -- from back cover.
Download or read book Intoxicated by My Illness written by Anatole Broyard and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 1993-06-01 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anatole Broyard, long-time book critic, book review editor, and essayist for the New York Times, wants to be remembered. He will be, with this collection of irreverent, humorous essays he wrote concerning the ordeals of life and death—many of which were written during the battle with cancer that led to his death in 1990. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year “A heartbreakingly eloquent and unsentimental meditation on mortality . . . Some writing is so rich and well-spoken that commentary is superfluous, even presumptuous. . . . Read this book, and celebrate a cultured spirit made fine, it seems, by the coldest of touches.”—Los Angeles Times “Succeeds brilliantly . . . Anatole Broyard has joined his father but not before leaving behind a legacy rich in wisdom about the written word and the human condition. He has died. But he lives as a writer and we are the wealthier for it.”—The Washington Post Book World “A virtuoso performance . . . The central essays of Intoxicated By My Illness were written during the last fourteen months of Broyard’s life. They are held in a gracious setting of his previous writings on death in life and literature, including a fictionalized account of his own father’s dying of cancer. The title refers to his reaction to the knowledge that he had a life-threatening illness. His literary sensibility was ignited, his mind flooded with image and metaphor, and he decided to employ these intuitive gifts to light his way into the darkness of his disease and its treatment. . . . Many other people have chronicled their last months . . . Few are as vivid as Broyard, who brilliantly surveys a variety of books on illness and death along the way as he draws us into his writer’s imagination, set free now by what he describes as the deadline of life. . . . [A] remarkable book, a lively man of dense intelligence and flashing wit who lets go and yet at the same time comtains himself in the style through which he remains alive.”—The New York Times Book Review “Despite much pain, Anatole Broyard continued to write until the final days of his life. He used his writing to rage, in the words of Dylan Thomas, against the dying of the light. . . . Shocking, no-holds-barred and utterly exquisite.”—The Baltimore Sun
Download or read book Therapeutic Action written by Jonathan Lear and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses how to write about the process of psychic change without betraying either love or science. It investigates the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity that are appropriate for psychoanalysts, the concepts of internalization and of transference.
Download or read book Paul Klee written by Angela Lampe and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a fresh look at one of the major artists of the 20th century, this book illustrates how Paul Klee’s critical and ironic take on life was evident in every stage of his oeuvre. Known for its whimsy and levity, Paul Klee’s art is often considered gleefully childlike. This groundbreaking volume argues that Klee’s style emerged from a philosophical school that originated with early German Romanticism and consisted of perpetual shifts between satire and affirmation of the absolute, finite and infinite, and real and ideal. Featuring approximately 250 works, this careful appreciation of Klee connects each stage of his career to the larger philosophical context. Exploring the satires and caricatures of Klee’s youth, his experimentations in Cubism and "mechanical theater," and the constructivist approach of the Bauhaus school, this book follows the trajectory of Klee’s oeuvre as a reflection of prevailing styles. It closes with the artist’s final years, in which he was labeled a "degenerate artist" by the Nazi regime and struggled with illness. Viewed through the many facets of irony as a complex theme, and against the backdrop of Europe’s seismic political and artistic movements, Klee’s body of work takes on a renewed significance as one of the most critical of its generation.
Download or read book Nobody s Normal How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness written by Roy Richard Grinker and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity. Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.
Download or read book The Antidote for Everything written by Kimmery Martin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this whip-smart and timely novel from acclaimed author Kimmery Martin, two doctors travel a surprising path when they must choose between treating their patients and keeping their jobs. Georgia Brown’s profession as a urologist requires her to interact with plenty of naked men, but her romantic prospects have fizzled. The most important person in her life is her friend Jonah Tsukada, a funny, empathetic family medicine doctor who works at the same hospital in Charleston, South Carolina and who has become as close as family to her. Just after Georgia leaves the country for a medical conference, Jonah shares startling news. The hospital is instructing doctors to stop providing medical care for transgender patients. Jonah, a gay man, is the first to be fired when he refuses to abandon his patients. Stunned by the predicament of her closest friend, Georgia’s natural instinct is to fight alongside him. But when her attempts to address the situation result in incalculable harm, both Georgia and Jonah find themselves facing the loss of much more than their careers.
Download or read book The End of Illness written by David B. Agus and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world's foremost physicians and researchers comes a monumental work that radically redefines conventional conceptions of health and illness to offer new methods for living a long, healthy life.
Download or read book The Illness Narratives written by Arthur Kleinman and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of America's most celebrated psychiatrists, the book that has taught generations of healers why healing the sick is about more than just diagnosing their illness. Modern medicine treats sick patients like broken machines -- figure out what is physically wrong, fix it, and send the patient on their way. But humans are not machines. When we are ill, we experience our illness: we become scared, distressed, tired, weary. Our illnesses are not just biological conditions, but human ones. It was Arthur Kleinman, a Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist, who saw this truth when most of his fellow doctors did not. Based on decades of clinical experience studying and treating chronic illness, The Illness Narratives makes a case for interpreting the illness experience of patients as a core feature of doctoring. Before Being Mortal, there was The Illness Narratives. It remains today a prescient and passionate case for bridging the gap between patient and practitioner.
Download or read book Superactually written by Chuk Moran and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2013-02-08 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To speak ironically is to speak just for the effect. To speak superactually is to do something with words and take responsibility for that action. This is a book of short, provocative essays. Some are on fun topics in pop culture (hackers, dubstep, cat memes, thinking green, parkour, and the girl next door). Others are takes on technical topics in social theory (sensation, hype, discrimination, imagination, and the typical). This is a book to help smart people feel hip and hip people feel smart. ,
Download or read book The Art of Living written by Alexander Nehamas and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-03 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault.
Download or read book The Irony of the Well written by Owen Staples and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American society is wedged right in the middle of the cross and the crown like days of old. The reader will understand the automatic conflict of the "dream of most Americans". The Irony of The Well describes the unexplored territory of recovery from mental illness. It concludes and summarizes the part of the journey. The book also relates to the mainstream that which we all do- the racing, getting, buying, and spending of all this energy and yet, slowly getting nowhere while depleting the earth's resources in so doing. This book provides clues, a map and an interesting recipe to begin setting things in motion for a better and sustainable world. Owen was trapped between two systems. The Irony of The Well is a journey through the life of an American Mormon from Utah and is a classic example of the inevitable outcome of when capitalism and Mormonism collide.
Download or read book Bittersweet written by Chris Feudtner and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004-01-21 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of medicine's most remarkable therapeutic triumphs was the discovery of insulin in 1921. The drug produced astonishing results, rescuing children and adults from the deadly grip of diabetes. But as Chris Feudtner demonstrates, the subsequent transformation of the disease from a fatal condition into a chronic illness is a story of success tinged with irony, a revealing saga that illuminates the complex human consequences of medical intervention. Bittersweet chronicles this history of diabetes through the compelling perspectives of people who lived with this disease. Drawing on a remarkable body of letters exchanged between patients or their parents and Dr. Elliot P. Joslin and the staff of physicians at his famed Boston clinic, Feudtner examines the experience of living with diabetes across the twentieth century, highlighting changes in treatment and their profound effects on patients' lives. Although focused on juvenile-onset, or Type 1, diabetes, the themes explored in Bittersweet have implications for our understanding of adult-onset, or Type 2, diabetes, as well as a host of other diseases that, thanks to drugs or medical advances, are being transformed from acute to chronic conditions. Indeed, the tale of diabetes in the post-insulin era provides an ideal opportunity for exploring the larger questions of how medicine changes our lives.
