Download or read book Walter Pater and Persons written by Stephen Cheeke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Pater and Persons investigates the vital concept of the Person in the work of Walter Pater, a major influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Stephen Cheeke explores the intersections of the person, persona, and personality in Pater's work; re-examines arguments about his famously personal prose style; traces Pater's ambivalent fascination with impersonality and asceticism; considers the poetics of personification in his writings about Greek myth and religion, in the divine logos of early Christianity, and in the theory of Platonic Universals; and explores his fascination with metempsychosis (the many persons through whom the individual soul transmigrates). Cheeke also explores the networks in which Pater was interpreted and misinterpreted by different persons and personalities, such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and W.B Yeats. Their (mis)readings of Pater, and rebellions against his work from Decadent, antinomian, and 'mystical' perspectives, reveal the ways in which Pater's writing had always been in a critical dialogue with its own thinking, as well as a prescient one in relation to his reception. The philosophical question of 'what is a person?'--a crucial one for the nineteenth century, and with an increasing urgency in our own times--is illuminated throughout this work.

Download or read book Beyond Our Lights and Shadows written by Judith A. Merkle and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given to you through prophecy with the laying of hands by the council of elders" (1Tim. 4:14). Members of the church today can comprehend Paul's sentiment to Timothy. While not all ordained, all baptized Christians have experienced the laying on of hands in baptism. They have been touched by that mysterious mix of charism, initiated into the Body of Christ through the Holy Spirit, as well as launched into life with Christ through the institution of the Church with all its concreteness, ambiguity, sinfulness and goodness. Through the lens of Christian theology, along with the sociology of Max Weber in his study of charism and institution in modern society, Judith A. Merkle analyzes the interaction and tautness between the concept of powerful grace through baptism and the institution in the life of the modern church. Weber asserts that freedom and creativity in modern society only become manifest within social relations. Since these highly valued modern experiences do not exist outside the institutional framework, they exist in tension with the constrictive and creative aspects of the institution. Judith A. Merkle offers the reader perspective on this contemporary experience in the church.

Download or read book The Ecstatic and the Archaic written by Paul Bishop and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word ‘archaic’ derives from the Greek arkhaios, which in turn is related to the word archē, meaning ‘principle’, ‘origin’, or ‘cause’; the notion of ecstasy, or ekstasis, implies standing outside or beyond oneself, a self-transcendence. How these two concepts are articulated and co-implicated constitutes the core question underlying this edited collection, which examines both the present day and antiquity in order to trace the insistent presence of the ecstatic amid the archaic. Presented in three parts, the contributors to this diverse book take the concept of the archaic in an entirely new direction. Part I, 'Ecstasy and the psychological', covers topics including Jung, Freud, ancient psychotherapy, desire, and theatre. Part II, 'Ecstatic-archaic history', considers Ludwig Klages, Orestes and Dionysus. Finally, Part III, 'Ancient ecstatic in other worlds', examines Luo Guanzhong’s Three Kingdoms and Enki at Eridu. The collection offers a distinctive contextualisation of the dimension of the archaic in relation to the ecstatic experience. The Ecstatic and the Archaic will appeal to readers interested in the relationship between ancient and postmodern worlds, and in how the past manifests itself in the present. It will be of great interest to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian ideas, classical religions and the history of ideas, as well as practitioners of analytical psychology and psychoanalysis.

Download or read book Nostalgia Anxiety Politics Media and Performing Arts in Egypt Central Eastern Europe and Russia written by Tetyana Dzyadevych and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2025-01-07 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume shows that the cultural production of nostalgia is a major tool for structuring feelings of resentment and anxiety. The current volume is concerned with collective nostalgia as it has been elicited, channeled, and weaponized by media production agents. The book aims to analyze how the performing arts and media (music, cinema, TV, etc.) generate and shape the feeling of collective nostalgia. It shows how the cultural production of nostalgia reflects distinct social-political contexts and serves particular political purposes. The collective monograph prioritizes cases from the post-Soviet context. However, the authors do not argue that the collapse of the socialist bloc in general, and the USSR in particular, has established some unique nostalgic precedent. The book claims that mechanisms of producing nostalgia and marshaling it for political purposes are broadly similar in most (modern or postmodern) settings. It is not our intent to demonize Russia, nor do we want Russia to be our dominant frame of reference, even if, in most of our cases here, 'nolens volens' appeared first in Russia-centric post-Soviet discourse. The “Russian bloc” has been placed in the second part of the book in order to give primacy to non-Russian subjects.

Download or read book The Photographic Uncanny written by Claire Raymond and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-23 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for a renewed understanding of the fundamentally uncanny quality of the medium of photography. It especially makes the case for the capacity of certain photographs—precisely through their uncanniness—to contest structures of political and social dominance. The uncanny as a quality that unsettles the perception of home emerges as a symptom of modern and contemporary society and also as an aesthetic apparatus by which some key photographs critique the hegemony of capitalist and industrialist domains. The book’s historical scope is large, beginning with William Henry Fox Talbot and closing with contemporary indigenous photographer Bear Allison and contemporary African American photographer Devin Allen. Through close readings, exegesis, of individual photographs and careful deployment of contemporary political and aesthetic theory, The Photographic Uncanny argues for a re-envisioning of the political capacity of photography to expose the haunted, homeless, condition of modernity.

Download or read book Spinning Wyrd written by Ryan Smith and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2023-08-08 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Delve Deeper into Norse Paganism with this Radically Inclusive Approach Expanding on the progressive ideas and practices in The Way of Fire and Ice, this next-step book teaches you how to tap into the forces of the Nordic cosmos. The greatest of these forces is wyrd, the symphony of life cocreated by all beings, from the humblest plants to the mightiest gods. Bestselling author Ryan Smith guides you deep into the mysteries, where you'll discover the role of fate, the importance of the Nine Worlds, the Norse concept of the self, and more. Ryan helps you develop direct relationships with animistic powers, commune with the dead, and cultivate your skills in ecstatic trance journeywork. Spinning Wyrd is for practitioners who are looking for more than the basics, who want to master the mysticism of Heathenry and build a better world.

Download or read book Abolishing Boundaries written by Peter Zarrow and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, 2022 Sharon Harris Book Award presented by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute Focusing on four key Chinese intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, Abolishing Boundaries offers new perspectives on modern Chinese political thought. These four intellectuals—Kang Youwei, Cai Yuanpei, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi—were deeply familiar with the Confucian and Buddhist classical texts, while also interested in the West's utopian literature of the late nineteenth century as well as Kant and the neo-Kantians, Marxists, and John Dewey and new liberalism, respectively. Although none of these four intellectuals can simply be labeled utopian thinkers, this book highlights how their thinking was intertwined with utopian ideals to produce theories of secular transcendence, liberalism, and communism, and how, in explicit and implicit ways, their ideas required some utopian impulse in order to escape the boundaries they identified as imprisoning the Chinese people and all humanity. To abolish these boundaries was to imagine alternatives to the unbearable present. This was not a matter of armchair philosophizing but of thinking through new ways to commit to action. These men did not hold a totalistic picture of some perfect society, but in distinctly different ways they all displayed a utopian impulse that fueled radical visions of change. Their work reveals much about the underlying forces shaping modern thought in China—and the world. Reacting to China's problems, they sought a better future for all humanity.

Download or read book The Philosophy of Reenchantment written by Michiel Meijer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a philosophical study of the idea of reenchantment and its merits in the interrelated fields of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and ontology. It features chapters from leading contributors to the debate about reenchantment, including Charles Taylor, John Cottingham, Akeel Bilgrami, and Jane Bennett. The chapters examine neglected and contested notions such as enchantment, transcendence, interpretation, attention, resonance, and the sacred or reverence-worthy—notions that are crucial to human self-understanding but have no place in a scientific worldview. They also explore the significance of adopting a reenchanting perspective for debates on major concepts such as nature, naturalism, God, ontology, and disenchantment. Taken together, they demonstrate that there is much to be gained from working with a more substantial and affirmative concept of reenchantment, understood as a fundamental existential orientation towards what is seen as meaningful and of value. The Philosophy of Reenchantment will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in philosophy—especially those working in moral philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, theology, religious studies, and sociology.

Download or read book Catholic Modernism and the Irish avant garde written by James Matthew Wilson and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study constitutes the first-ever definitive account of the life and work of Irish modernist poets Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, and Denis Devlin. Apprenticed to the likes of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, all three writers worked at the center of modernist letters in England, France, and the United States, but did so from a distinctive perspective. All three writers wrote with a deep commitment to the intellectual life of Catholicism and saw the new movement in the arts as making possible for the first time a rich sacramental expression of the divine beauty in aesthetic form. MacGreevy spent his life trying to voice the Augustinian vision he found in The City of God. Coffey, a student of neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, married scholastic thought and a densely wrought poetics to give form and solution to the alienation of modern life. Devlin contemplated the world with the eyes of Montaigne and the heart of Pascal as he searched for a poetry that could realize the divine presence in the experience of the modern person. Taken together, MacGreevy, Coffey, and Devlin exemplify the modern Catholic intellectual seeking to engage the modern world on its own terms while drawing the age toward fulfillment within the mystery and splendor of the Church. They stand apart from their Irish contemporaries for their religious seriousness and cosmopolitan openness to European modernism. They lay bare the theological potencies of modern art and do so with a sophistication and insight distinctive to themselves. Although MacGreevy, Coffey, and Devlin have received considerable critical attention in the past, this is the first book to study their work comprehensively, from MacGreevy's early poems and essays on Joyce and Eliot to Coffey's essays in the neo-scholastic philosophy of science, and on to Devlin's late poetic attempts to realize Dante's divine vision in a Europe shattered by war and modern doubt.

Download or read book The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology written by Mark A. McIntosh and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study brings to life the striking role of the divine ideas tradition in the teaching of its central exponents, and suggests how the divine ideas might constructively inform Christian theology and spirituality today.

Download or read book Henry Crabb Robinson written by Philipp Hunnekuhl and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '[The text] significantly expands upon the [existing] body of scholarship to argue persuasively that Crabb Robinson was the most important pioneering comparatist during the Romantic period. [...] Hunnekuhl‟s tightly-woven monograph opens the door for further inquiry into other areas of Robinson‟s early reading, writing and social interactions. [...] Future scholarship in these and other areas in the early life of one of the most important diarists and commentators on British life and thought in the nineteenth century will now be able to build upon the solid foundation laid by Philipp Hunnekuhl.' Timothy Whelan, The Coleridge Bulletin

Download or read book The Divine Bureaucracy and Disenchantment of Social Life written by Maznah Mohamad and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the expansion of Islamisation within a modern and plural state such as Malaysia. It elaborates on how elements of theology, sacred space, resources, and their interactivity with secular instruments such as legislative, electoral, and new social technological platforms are all instrumentally employed to consolidate a divine bureaucracy. The book makes the point that religious social movements and political parties are only few of the important agents of Islamisation in society. The other is the modern and secular state structure itself. Weber’s legal rational bureaucracy or Hegel’s ethical bureaucracy predominantly characterises a modern feature of governmentality. In this instance an Islamic bureaucracy is advantageously situated not only within an ambit of modernity and therefore legality, but divinity and therefore sacrality as well. This positioning gives religious state agents more salience than any other form of bureaucracy leading to their unquestioned authority in the current contexts of societies with Muslim majority rule. One of the requisites of this condition is the homogenisation of Islam followed by ring-fencing of its constituents. The latter can involve contestations with women, other genders, ‘secular’ Muslims, non-Muslims as well as dissenting Muslims with their differing truthful ‘Islams’.

Download or read book Lydia Ginzburg s Prose written by Emily Van Buskirk and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian writer Lydia Ginzburg (1902–90) is best known for her Notes from the Leningrad Blockade and for influential critical studies, such as On Psychological Prose, investigating the problem of literary character in French and Russian novels and memoirs. Yet she viewed her most vital work to be the extensive prose fragments, composed for the desk drawer, in which she analyzed herself and other members of the Russian intelligentsia through seven traumatic decades of Soviet history. In this book, the first full-length English-language study of the writer, Emily Van Buskirk presents Ginzburg as a figure of previously unrecognized innovation and importance in the literary landscape of the twentieth century. Based on a decade's work in Ginzburg’s archives, the book discusses previously unknown manuscripts and uncovers a wealth of new information about the author’s life, focusing on Ginzburg’s quest for a new kind of writing adequate to her times. She writes of universal experiences—frustrated love, professional failures, remorse, aging—and explores the modern fragmentation of identity in the context of war, terror, and an oppressive state. Searching for a new concept of the self, and deeming the psychological novel (a beloved academic specialty) inadequate to express this concept, Ginzburg turned to fragmentary narratives that blur the lines between history, autobiography, and fiction. This full account of Ginzburg’s writing career in many genres and emotional registers enables us not only to rethink the experience of Soviet intellectuals, but to arrive at a new understanding of writing and witnessing during a horrific century.

Download or read book Samson Occom written by Ryan Carr and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mohegan-Brothertown minister Samson Occom (1723–1792) was a prominent political and religious leader of the Indigenous peoples of present-day New York and New England, among whom he is still revered today. An international celebrity in his day, Occom rose to fame as the first Native person to be ordained a minister in the New England colonies. In the 1770s, he helped found the nation of Brothertown, where Coastal Algonquian families seeking respite from colonialism built a new life on land given to them by the Oneida Nation. Occom was a highly productive author, probably the most prolific Native American writer prior to the late nineteenth century. Most of Occom’s writings, however, have been overlooked, partly because many of them are about Christian themes that seem unrelated to Native life. In this groundbreaking book, Ryan Carr argues that Occom’s writings were deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions of hospitality, diplomacy, and openness to strangers. From Occom’s point of view, evangelical Christianity was not a foreign culture; it was a new opportunity to practice his people’s ancestral customs. Carr demonstrates Occom’s originality as a religious thinker, showing how his commitment to Native sovereignty shaped his reading of the Bible. By emphasizing the Native sources of Occom’s evangelicalism, this book offers new ways to understand the relations of Northeast Native traditions to Christianity, colonialism, and Indigenous self-determination.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation written by Dennis Taylor and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation: Literary Negotiation of Religious Difference explores how Shakespeare’s plays dramatize key issues of the Elizabethan Reformation, the conflict between the sacred, the critical, and the disenchanted; alternatively, the Catholic, the Protestant, and the secular. Each play imagines their reconciliation or the failure of reconcilation. The Catholic sacred is shadowed by its degeneration into superstition, Protestant critique by its unintended (fissaparous) consequences, the secular ordinary by stark disenchantment. Shakespeare shows how all three perspectives are needed if society is to face its intractable problems, thus providing a powerful model for our own ecumenical dialogues. Shakespeare begins with history plays contrasting the saintly but impractical King Henry VI, whose assassination is the ”primal crime,” with the pragmatic and secular Henry IV, until imagining in the later 1590’s how Hal can reconnect with sacred sources. At the same time in his comedies, Shakespeare imagines cooperative ways of resolving the national ”comedy of errors,” of sorting out erotic and marital and contemplative confusions by applying his triple lens. His late Elizabethan comedies achieve a polished balance of wit and devotion, ordinary and the sacred, old and new orders. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s ultimate Elizabethan consideration of these issues, its so-called lack of objective correlation a response to the unsorted trauma of the Reformation.

Download or read book The Trial of Gustav Graef written by Barnet Hartston and published by Northern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although largely forgotten now, the 1885 trial of German artist Gustav Graef was a seminal event for those who observed it. Graef, a celebrated sixty-four-year-old portraitist, was accused of perjury and sexual impropriety with underage models. On trial alongside him was one of his former models, the twenty-one-year-old Bertha Rother, who quickly became a central figure in the affair. As the case was being heard, images of Rother, including photographic reproductions of Graef's nude paintings of her, began to flood the art shops and bookstores of Berlin and spread across Europe. Spurred by this trade in images and by sensational coverage in the press, this former prostitute was transformed into an international sex symbol and a target of both public lust and scorn. Passionate discussions of the case echoed in the press for months, and the episode lasted in public memory for far longer. The Graef trial, however, was much more than a salacious story that served as public entertainment. The case inspired fierce political debates long after a verdict was delivered, including disputes about obscenity laws, the moral degeneracy of modern art and artists, the alleged pernicious effects of Jewish influence, legal restrictions on prostitution, the causes of urban criminality, the impact of sensationalized press coverage, and the requirements of bourgeois masculine honor. Above all, the case unleashed withering public criticism of a criminal justice system that many Germans agreed had become entirely dysfunctional. The story of the Graef trial offers a unique perspective on a German Empire that was at the height of its power, yet riven with deep political, social, and cultural divisions. This compelling study will appeal to historians and students of modern German and European history, as well as those interested in obscenity law and class and gender relations in nineteenth-century Europe.

Download or read book Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet written by Ted Striphas and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, algorithms exercise outsize influence on cultural decision-making, shaping and even reshaping the concept of culture. How were automated, computational processes empowered to perform this work? What forces prompted the emergence of algorithmic culture? Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet is a history of how culture and computation came to be entangled. From Cambridge, England, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, by way of medieval Baghdad, this book pinpoints the critical junctures at which algorithmic culture began to coalesce in language long before it materialized in the technological wizardry of Silicon Valley. Revising and extending the methodology of “keywords,” Ted Striphas examines changing concepts and definitions of culture, including the development of the field of cultural studies, and stresses the importance of language in the history of technology. Offering historical and interdisciplinary perspective on the relationship of culture and computation, this book provides urgently needed context for the algorithmic injustices that beset the world today.