Download or read book Mirages of the Selfe written by Timothy J. Reiss and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes. It offers quite new interpretations of what it was to be a personto experience who-nessin other times and places, involving new understandings of knowing, willing, and acting, as well as of political and material life, the play of public and private, passions and emotions. The trajectory the author reveals reaches from the ancient sense of personhood as set in a totality of surroundings inseparable from the person, to an increasing sense of impermeability to the world, in which anger has replaced love in affirming a sense of self. The author develops his analysis through an impressive range of authors, languages, and texts: from Cicero, Seneca, and Galen; through Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise and Abelard; to Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic written by Patrick Gray and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores Shakespeare's representation of the failure of democracy in ancient Rome This book introduces Shakespeare as a historian of ancient Rome alongside figures such as Sallust, Cicero, St Augustine, Machiavelli, Gibbon, Hegel and Nietzsche. It considers Shakespeare's place in the history of concepts of selfhood and reflects on his sympathy for Christianity, in light of his reception of medieval Biblical drama, as well as his allusions to the New Testament. Shakespeare's critique of Romanitas anticipates concerns about secularisation, individualism and liberalism shared by philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel and Patrick Deneen.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self written by Raymond Martin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Foucault, Raymond Martin and John Barresi explore the works of a wide range of thinkers and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. The authors open with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain both the theoretical relevance of feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists. Martin and Barresi cover a number of issues broached by philosophers and psychologists, such as the existence of a fixed and unchanging self and whether the concept of the soul has a use outside of religious contexts. They address the question of whether notions of the soul and the self are still viable in today's world. Together, they reveal the fascinating ways in which great thinkers have grappled with these and other questions and the astounding impact their ideas have had on the development of self-understanding in the west.
Download or read book Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy written by Stephanie Shirilan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few English books are as widely known, underread, and underappreciated as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Stephanie Shirilan laments that modern scholars often treat the Anatomy as an unmediated repository of early modern views on melancholy, overlooking the fact that Burton is writing a cento - an ancient form of satire that quotes and misquotes authoritative texts in often subversive ways - and that his express intent in so doing is to offer his readers literary therapy for melancholy. This book explores the ways in which the Anatomy dispenses both direct physic and more systemic medicine by encouraging readers to think of melancholy as a privileged mental and spiritual acuity that requires cultivation and management rather than cure. Refuting the prevailing historiography of anxious early modern embodiment that cites Burton as a key witness, Shirilan submits that the Anatomy rejects contemporary Neostoic and Puritan approaches to melancholy. She reads Burton’s erraticism, opacity, and theatricality as modes of resistance against demands for constancy, transparency, and plainness in the popular literature of spiritual and moral hygiene of his day. She shows how Burton draws on rhetorical, theological, and philosophical traditions that privilege the transformative powers of the imagination in order to celebrate melancholic impressionability for its capacity to inspire and engender empathy, charity, and faith.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne written by Philippe Desan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1580, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) published a book unique by its title and its content: Essays"R. A literary genre was born. At first sight, the Essays resemble a patchwork of personal reflections, but they engage with questions that animate the human mind, and tend toward a single goal: to live better in the present and to prepare for death. For this reason, Montaigne's thought and writings have been a subject of enduring interest across disciplines. This Handbook brings together essays by prominent scholars that examine Montaigne's literary, philosophical, and political contributions, and assess his legacy and relevance today in a global perspective. The chapters of this Handbook offer a sweeping study of Montaigne across different disciplines and in a global perspective. One section covers the historical Montaigne, situating his thought in his own time and space, notably the Wars of Religion in France. The political, historical and religious context of Montaigne's Essays requires a rigorous presentation to inform the modern reader of the issues and problems that confronted Montaigne and his contemporaries in his own time. In addition to this contextual approach to Montaigne, the Handbook also establishes a connection between Montaigne's writings and issues and problems directly relevant to our modern times, that is to say, our age of global ideology. Montaigne's considerations, or essays, offer a point of departure for the modern reader's own assessments. The Essays analyze what can be broadly defined as human nature, the endless process by which the individual tries to impose opinions upon others through the production of laws, policies or philosophies. Montaigne's motto -- "What do I know?" -- is a simple question yet one of perennial significance. One could argue that reading Montaigne today teaches us that the angle defines the world we see, or, as Montaigne wrote: "What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it."
Download or read book Women the Novel and Natural Philosophy 1660 1727 written by K. Gevirtz and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how early women novelists from Aphra Behn to Mary Davys drew on debates about the self generated by the 'scientific' revolution to establish the novel as a genre. Fascinated by the problematic idea of a unified self underpinning modes of thinking, female novelists innovated narrative structures to interrogate this idea.
Download or read book Politics and the Passions 1500 1850 written by Victoria Kahn and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the new theories of human motivation that emerged during the transition from feudalism to the modern period, this is the first book of new essays on the relationship between politics and the passions from Machiavelli to Bentham. Contributors address the crisis of moral and philosophical discourse in the early modern period; the necessity of inventing a new way of describing the relation between reflection and action, and private and public selves; the disciplinary regulation of the body; and the ideological constitution of identity. The collection as a whole asks whether a discourse of the passions might provide a critical perspective on the politics of subjectivity. Whatever their specific approach to the question of ideology, all the essays reconsider the legacy of the passions in modern political theory and the importance of the history of politics and the passions for modern political debates. Contributors, in addition to the editors, are Nancy Armstrong, Judith Butler, Riccardo Caporali, Howard Caygill, Patrick Coleman, Frances Ferguson, John Guillory, Timothy Hampton, John P. McCormick, and Leonard Tennenhouse.
Download or read book Petrarch s Humanism and the Care of the Self written by Gur Zak and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Gur Zak examines two central issues in Petrarch's works - his humanist philosophy and his concept of the self.
Download or read book The New Science and Women s Literary Discourse written by J. Hayden and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at literary discourse, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction, diaries, and drama, this collection offers remarkable and fascinating examples of women writers who integrated scientific material in their literary narratives.
Download or read book Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England written by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-06-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleven essays invite us to rethink not only what constitutes an environment but also where the environment ends and selfhood begins. The essays examine the dynamic and varied mediations early modern writers posited between microcosm and macrocosm, ranging from discourses on the ecology of passions to striking examples of distributed cognition.
Download or read book The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature written by V. Greene and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-08-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty-five years ago Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the Author. For medievalists no death has been more timely. The essays in this volume create a prism through which to understand medieval authorship as a process and the medieval author as an agency in the making.
Download or read book Rethinking Tragedy written by Rita Felski and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-02-11 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking collection provokes a major reassessment of the significance of tragedy and the tragic in late modernity. A distinguished group of scholars and theorists extends the discussion of tragedy beyond its usual parameters to include film, popular culture, and contemporary politics. Seven new essays—as well as eight essays originally published in a New Literary History special issue on tragedy—address important, previously neglected areas of tragedy and postcolonial criticism. The new material explores the tragic dimensions of popular culture, the relationship between tragedy and pity, and feminism's avoidance of the tragic, and includes an incisive history of tragic theory. Classic and cutting-edge, this collection offers a provocative, accessible, and comprehensive treatment of tragedy and tragic theory. Contributors: Elisabeth Bronfen, University of Zurich; Stanley Corngold, Princeton University; Simon Critchley, University of Essex; Joshua Foa Dienstag, University of California, Los Angeles; Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University; Page duBois, University of California, San Diego; Terry Eagleton, University of Manchester; Rita Felski, University of Virginia; Simon Goldhill, Cambridge University; Heather K. Love, University of Pennsylvania; Michel Maffesoli, University of Paris (V); Martha C. Nussbaum, University of Chicago; Timothy J. Reiss, New York University; Kathleen M. Sands, University of Massachusetts, Boston; David Scott, Columbia University; George Steiner, University of Geneva; Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh
Download or read book The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England written by Hassan Melehy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining both familiar and underappreciated texts, Hassan Melehy foregrounds the relationships that early modern French and English writers conceived with both their classical predecessors and authors from flourishing literary traditions in neighboring countries. In order to present their own avowedly national literatures as successfully surpassing others, they engaged in a paradoxical strategy of presenting other traditions as both inspiring and dead. Each of the book's four sections focuses on one early modern author: Joachim Du Bellay, Edmund Spenser, Michel de Montaigne, and William Shakespeare. Melehy details the elaborate strategies that each author uses to rewrite and overcome the work of predecessors. His book touches on issues highly pertinent to current early modern studies: among these are translation, the relationship between classicism and writing in the vernacular, the role of literature in the consolidation of the state, attitudes toward colonial expansion and the "New World," and definitions of modernity and the past.
Download or read book Open Subjects written by James Kuzner and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections, and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, the study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be.
Download or read book The Shadow of Dante in French Renaissance Lyric written by Alison Baird Lovell and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an interpretation of Maurice Scève’s lyric sequence Délie, object de plus haulte vertu (Lyon, 1544) in literary relation to the Vita nuova, Commedia, and other works of Dante Alighieri. Dante’s subtle influence on Scève is elucidated in depth for the first time, augmenting the allusions in Délie to the Canzoniere of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca). Scève’s sequence of dense, epigrammatic dizains is considered to be an early example, prior to the Pléiade poets, of French Renaissance imitation of Petrarch’s vernacular poetry, in a time when imitatio was an established literary practice, signifying the poet’s participation in a tradition. While the Canzoniere is an important source for Scève’s Délie, both works are part of a poetic lineage that includes Occitan troubadours, Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, and Dante. The book situates Dante as a relevant predecessor and source for Scève, and examines anew the Petrarchan label for Délie. Compelling poetic affinities emerge between Dante and Scève that do not correlate with Petrarch.
Download or read book The Experimental Self written by Jan Golinski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-05-11 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did someone become a scientist before the profession itself existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of Humphry Davy (1778-1829), one of the foremost British men of science of the nineteenth century. Originally a country boy from a modest background, Davy s remarkable accomplishments propelled him to a knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Society. He was a brilliant and celebrated lecturer, and his chemical investigations led to the discoveries of sodium, potassium, and other elements and to the invention of the miners safety lamp. He was also a poet, a friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who wrote philosophical dialogues, a book on salmon-fishing, and narratives of his travels. An enigmatic figure to his contemporaries, Davy has continued to elude the attempts of biographers to classify him. Golinski argues that Davy s life is best viewed as a prolonged process of self-experimentation. Readers will follow Davy s course from his youthful enthusiasm for physiological experimentation to his late-life manifestation as a melancholic traveler on the European continent. Along the way, they will gain an appreciation for the creativity Davy invested in his self-fashioning as a man of science, and the obstacles he overcame, in a period when the path to a scientific career was not as well-trodden as it is today. The Experimental Self is an inventive treatment of a major figure in science history."
Download or read book Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare s England written by David B. Goldstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goldstein presents a lively analysis of Shakespeare, Milton, religious writers and recipe book authors from the perspective of communal eating.
