Download or read book Liberty of the Imagination written by Edward Cahill and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Liberty of the Imagination, Edward Cahill uncovers the surprisingly powerful impact of eighteenth-century theories of the imagination—philosophical ideas about aesthetic pleasure, taste, genius, the beautiful, and the sublime—on American writing from the Revolutionary era to the early nineteenth century. Far from being too busy with politics and commerce or too anxious about the morality of pleasure, American writers consistently turned to ideas of the imagination in order to comprehend natural and artistic objects, social formations, and political institutions. Cahill argues that conceptual tensions within aesthetic theory rendered it an evocative language for describing the challenges of American political liberty and confronting the many contradictions of nation formation. His analyses reveal the centrality of aesthetics to key political debates during the colonial crisis, the Revolution, Constitutional ratification, and the advent of Jeffersonian democracy. Exploring the relevance of aesthetic ideas to a range of literary genres—poetry, novels, political writing, natural history writing, and literary criticism—Cahill makes illuminating connections between intellectual and political history and the idiosyncratic formal tendencies of early national texts. In doing so, Liberty of the Imagination manifests the linguistic and intellectual richness of an underappreciated literary tradition and offers an original account of the continuity between Revolutionary writing and nineteenth-century literary romanticism.
Download or read book Liberty of the Imagination written by Edward Cahill and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Liberty of the Imagination, Edward Cahill uncovers the surprisingly powerful impact of eighteenth-century theories of the imagination—philosophical ideas about aesthetic pleasure, taste, genius, the beautiful, and the sublime—on American writing from the Revolutionary era to the early nineteenth century. Far from being too busy with politics and commerce or too anxious about the morality of pleasure, American writers consistently turned to ideas of the imagination in order to comprehend natural and artistic objects, social formations, and political institutions. Cahill argues that conceptual tensions within aesthetic theory rendered it an evocative language for describing the challenges of American political liberty and confronting the many contradictions of nation formation. His analyses reveal the centrality of aesthetics to key political debates during the colonial crisis, the Revolution, Constitutional ratification, and the advent of Jeffersonian democracy. Exploring the relevance of aesthetic ideas to a range of literary genres—poetry, novels, political writing, natural history writing, and literary criticism—Cahill makes illuminating connections between intellectual and political history and the idiosyncratic formal tendencies of early national texts. In doing so, Liberty of the Imagination manifests the linguistic and intellectual richness of an underappreciated literary tradition and offers an original account of the continuity between Revolutionary writing and nineteenth-century literary romanticism.
Download or read book The Liberal Imagination written by Lionel Trilling and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-07-18 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.
Download or read book The Christian Imagination written by Willie James Jennings and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies. A probing study of the cultural fragmentation-social, spatial, and racial-that took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals. Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities. Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race. Using his bold, creative, and courageous critique to imagine a truly cosmopolitan citizenship that transcends geopolitical, nationalist, ethnic, and racial boundaries, Jennings charts, with great vision, new ways of imagining ourselves, our communities, and the landscapes we inhabit.
Download or read book The Republic of Imagination written by Azar Nafisi and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller The author of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with the next chapter of her life in books—a passionate and deeply moving hymn to America Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics of English and American literature to her eager students in Iran. In this electrifying follow-up, she argues that fiction is just as threatened—and just as invaluable—in America today. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination. Nafisi invites committed readers everywhere to join her as citizens of what she calls the Republic of Imagination, a country with no borders and few restrictions, where the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.
Download or read book The Environmental Imagination written by Lawrence Buell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-01 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination, a need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity's relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in The Environmental Imagination, the most ambitious study to date of how literature represents the natural environment. With Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone, Buell gives us a far-reaching account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more "ecocentric" way of being. In doing so, he provides a major new understanding of Thoreau's achievement and, at the same time, a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature. The green tradition in American writing commands Buell's special attention, particularly environmental nonfiction from colonial times to the present. In works by writers from Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry, John Muir to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson to Leslie Silko, Mary Austin to Edward Abbey, he examines enduring environmental themes such as the dream of relinquishment, the personification of the nonhuman, an attentiveness to environmental cycles, a devotion to place, and a prophetic awareness of possible ecocatastrophe. At the center of this study we find an image of Walden as a quest for greater environmental awareness, an impetus and guide for Buell as he develops a new vision of environmental writing and seeks a new way of conceiving the relation between human imagination and environmental actuality in the age of industrialization. Intricate and challenging in its arguments, yet engagingly and elegantly written, The Environmental Imagination is a major work of scholarship, one that establishes a new basis for reading American nature writing.
Download or read book The Modernist Imagination written by Martin Jay and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the most exciting and innovative work in the humanities is occurring at the intersection of intellectual history and critical theory. This volume includes work from some of the most prominent contemporary scholars in the humanities.
Download or read book Politics of the Imagination written by Colin Bennett and published by Cosimo, Inc.. This book was released on 2008-06-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great American crank, in the best sense of the word, Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932) spent his life hunting down reports of "anomalous phenomena"-"damned" events such rains of frogs, cattle mutilations, and UFO sightings-and studying them from a true outsider's perspective, one that characterized even objective science as wearing blinders in its approach to them. In this modern classic of analytical biography, Colin Bennett examines not only the life of this one-man investigator of real-life X-Files but his work as well, likening him to such diverse figures that loom in the cultural imagination as Lee Harvey Oswald and Shakespeare's Hamlet. A must-read for fans of the strange, this riveting book explores why the 20th century, which gave rise to conspiracy-theory philosophies and widespread distrust of social authority, embraced Fort so wholly that his name has been immortalized in the adjective "Fortean." In the course of a delightfully misspent youth, COLIN BENNETT was employed as both a musician and as a mercenary soldier. He was far better at the second than at the first. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, he is the author of the novels Infantryman and The Entertainment Bomb, and paranormal nonfiction including Looking for Orthon, a biography of George Adamski; Politics of the Imagination, a biography of Charles Fort; and An American Demonology, about the head of the 1950s UFO-hunting agency Project Blue Book.
Download or read book The American Village written by Philip Morin Freneau and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hume s Imagination written by Tito Magri and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-22 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes a new and systematic interpretation of the mental nature, function and structure, and importance of the imagination in Book 1, 'Of the Understanding', of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. The proposed interpretation has deeply revisionary implications for Hume's philosophy of mind and for his naturalism, epistemology, and stance to scepticism. The book remedies a surprising blindspot in Hume scholarship and contributes to the current, lively philosophical debate on imagination. Hume's philosophy, if rightly understood, gives suggestions about how to treat imagination as a mental natural kind, its cognitive complexity and variety of functions notwithstanding. Hume's imagination is a faculty of inference and the source of a distinctive kind of idea, which complements our sensible representations of objects. Our cognitive nature, if restricted to the representation of objects and of their relations, would leave ordinary and philosophical cognition seriously underdetermined and expose us to scepticism. Only the non-representational, inferential faculty of the imagination can put in place and vindicate ideas like causation, body, and self, which support our cognitive practices. The book reconstructs how Hume's naturalist inferentialism about the imagination develops this fundamental insight. Its five parts deal with the dualism of representation and inference; the explanation of generality and modality; the production of causal ideas; the production of spatial and temporal content, and the distinction of an external world of bodies and an internal one of selves; and the replacement of the understanding with imagination in the analysis of cognition and in epistemology.
Download or read book Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination written by Joyce Appleby and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author claims that liberal assumptions color everything American, from ideas about human nature to fears about big government. Not the dreaded "L" word of the 1988 presidential campaign; liberalism in its historical context emerged from the modern faith in free inquiry, natural rights, economic liberty, and democratic government. The author contrasts this view with classical republicanism--ornate, aristocratic, prescriptive, and concerned with the common good. The two concepts, as the author shows, posed choices in their day and in ours, specifically in addressing the complex relations between individual and community, personal liberty and the common good, aspiration and practical wisdom.
Download or read book Free Imagination written by Peter Tse and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Free Imagination argues that the brain's capacity to imagine is the fundamental basis of human Free Will. Laws of physics need not apply in our internal simulations, so virtually anything is possible there. And since some of our actions can follow from that which we imagine, especially from processes of deliberation that involve imagining possible scenarios and outcomes, our actions inherit the freedom of our imaginings. The creative power of the human imagination may have evolved as a consequence of the demodularization of neural circuitry associated with volitional attentional operations over operands downloadable into a mental workspace where, virtually, anything could be combined with anything else. This new cognitive architecture gave rise to the danger of psychosis. Our schizotypal form of imagination, arising from the promiscuous, generative and iterative combination of disencapsulated operators and operands in a mental workspace, may have evolved only in humans by exapting from existing motoric and other operations involved in volitional hand dexterity to a domain of premotoric simulation. What we imagine into existence can be used for good or evil. Imagination is therefore our greatest tool and weapon. When applied to ourselves, it allows us the possibility of reimagining and then transforming ourselves in light of second-order desires. This gives us the ability to choose to become a new kind of chooser in the future. Other animals lack this second-order Free Will; although they can do otherwise, they cannot want to become otherwise than they are, making them amoral. This book explores the idea that because humans, in contrast, have second-order Free Will, they can be moral or immoral.
Download or read book Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth Century British Imagination written by Srividhya Swaminathan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the eighteenth century, audiences in Great Britain understood the term ’slavery’ to refer to a range of physical and metaphysical conditions beyond the transatlantic slave trade. Literary representations of slavery encompassed tales of Barbary captivity, the ’exotic’ slaving practices of the Ottoman Empire, the political enslavement practiced by government or church, and even the harsh life of servants under a cruel master. Arguing that literary and cultural studies have focused too narrowly on slavery as a term that refers almost exclusively to the race-based chattel enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans transported to the New World, the contributors suggest that these analyses foreclose deeper discussion of other associations of the term. They suggest that the term slavery became a powerful rhetorical device for helping British audiences gain a new perspective on their own position with respect to their government and the global sphere. Far from eliding the real and important differences between slave systems operating in the Atlantic world, this collection is a starting point for understanding how slavery as a concept came to encompass many forms of unfree labor and metaphorical bondage precisely because of the power of association.
Download or read book Empires of the Imagination written by Peter J. Kastor and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2009-09-14 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empires of the Imagination takes the Louisiana Purchase as a point of departure for a compelling new discussion of the interaction between France and the United States. In addition to offering the first substantive synthesis of this transatlantic relationship, the essays collected here offer new interpretations on themes vital to the subject, ranging from political culture to intercultural contact to ethnic identity. They capture the cultural breadth of the territories encompassed by the Louisiana Purchase, exploring not only French and Anglo-American experiences, but also those of Native Americans and African Americans. Despite differences in concerns and methods, the pieces collected share crucial ground in how they suggest new ways for thinking about empire, identity, and memory. The authors show how France and the United States set about their competing imperial projects even as residents of the North American West effectively resisted those imperial aims, creating instead their own notions of community and connection. At the same time, these essays show how the contact among peoples created new social configurations and distinct cultural identities. Moving beyond the particulars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these essays reveal how the Louisiana Purchase subsequently entered into the public consciousness on both sides of the Atlantic in ways that continue to define imperial projects, racial identities, and ethnic communities. Delineating a unique moment in transatlantic historical conversation, Empires of the Imagination also provides important lessons in cross-disciplinary approaches to North American and Atlantic history. In addition to the multinational perspectives of the authors, individual essays deploy social science history, political culture, and ideological history, as well as social and cultural history, to create a cohesive understanding of diverse experiences. Contributors: Emily Clark, Tulane University * Laurent Dubois, Duke University * Mark Fernandez, Loyola University, New Orleans * Peter J. Kastor, Washington University in St. Louis * Paul Lachance, University of Ottawa * Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, Dalhousie University * James E. Lewis Jr., Kalamazoo College * Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia * Jacques Portes, Université de Paris VIII * Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, Université de Paris VII-Denis Diderot * Cécile Vidal, L' École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales * François Weil, L' École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales * Richard White, Stanford University
Download or read book Most Blessed of the Patriarchs Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination written by Annette Gordon-Reed and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-04-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle Finalist for the George Washington Prize Finalist for the Library of Virginia Literary Award A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection "An important book…[R]ichly rewarding. It is full of fascinating insights about Jefferson." —Gordon S. Wood, New York Review of Books Hailed by critics and embraced by readers, "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs" is one of the richest and most insightful accounts of Thomas Jefferson in a generation. Following her Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hemingses of Monticello¸ Annette Gordon-Reed has teamed with Peter S. Onuf to present a provocative and absorbing character study, "a fresh and layered analysis" (New York Times Book Review) that reveals our third president as "a dynamic, complex and oftentimes contradictory human being" (Chicago Tribune). Gordon-Reed and Onuf fundamentally challenge much of what we thought we knew, and through their painstaking research and vivid prose create a portrait of Jefferson, as he might have painted himself, one "comprised of equal parts sun and shadow" (Jane Kamensky).
Download or read book The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature written by Deanna Smid and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature, Deanna Smid presents a literary, historical account of imagination in early modern English literature, paying special attention to its effects on the body, to its influence on women, to its restraint by reason, and to its ability to create novelty. An early modern definition of imagination emerges in the work of Robert Burton, Francis Bacon, Edward Reynolds, and Margaret Cavendish. Smid explores a variety of literary texts, from Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler to Francis Quarles’s Emblems, to demonstrate the literary consequences of the early modern imagination. The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature insists that, if we are to call an early modern text “imaginative,” we must recognize the unique characteristics of early modern English imagination, in all its complexity.
Download or read book Kant Anthropology Imagination Freedom written by John Rundell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a new reading of Immanuel Kant’s work, this book interrogates his notions of the imagination and anthropology, identifying these – rather than the problem of reason – as the two central pivoting orientations of his work. Such an approach allows a more complex understanding of his critical-philosophical program to emerge, which includes his accounts of reason, politics and freedom as well as subjectivity and intersubjectivity, or sociabilities. Examining Kant’s theorisation of the complexity of our phenomenological existence, the author explores his transcendental move that includes reason and understanding whilst emphasising the importance of the faculty of the imagination to undergird both, before moving to consider Kant’s pluralised, transcendental notion of freedom. This outstanding book will appeal to scholars with interests in philosophy, politics, anthropology and sociology, working on questions of imagination, reason, subjectivities and human freedom.
