Download or read book Patterned Aimlessness written by Barbara Stevens Heusel and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novels of Iris Murdoch are lively journeys across landscapes teeming with ideas. Such texts as An Accidental Man, The Philosopher's Pupil, The Black Prince, and The Sea, The Sea blend art and philosophy in tales that have intrigued and puzzled readers like few other contemporary novels. In Patterned Aimlessness Barbara Stevens Heusel brings an order and a clarity to the mystery of Murdoch's narrative form. She shows how this writer of many genres came to integrate philosophy, morality, psychology, language, and aesthetics in order to call into question the conventions of the English novel. Following Wittgenstein's lead Murdoch makes palpable the complexities of human experience, the "accidental, idiosyncratic happenings of life." Her fiction and her individual voice, Heusel says, reflect the chaos of existence with all of its contradictions, its paradoxes, its jarring rhythms. Heusel turns to literary theory to point out Murdoch's compatibility with Mikhail Bakhtin's views on the narrative voice in the novel. For both, morality is an utmost concern, and language is inherently a social, historical, and ideological creation: words resonate with centuries of meanings and uses. Answering some common criticisms of Murdoch's novels, Heusel also points out that Murdoch's presentation of female characters critiques societal expectations of women. The study culminates with thoughtful analyses of Murdoch's characters in A Word Child, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea, Nuns and Soldiers, and The Message to the Planet in light of the patterns she has introduced.
Download or read book Iris Murdoch Philosopher written by Justin Broackes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iris Murdoch was a notable philosopher before she was a notable novelist and her work was brave, brilliant, and independent. This volume presents essays by critics and admirers of her work, together with a long Introduction on her career, reception, and achievement, an unpublished piece by Murdoch herself, and a memoir by her husband John Bayley.
Download or read book Iris Murdoch Connected written by Mark Luprecht and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2014-11-26 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Iris Murdoch was one of the most interesting and wide-ranging philosophers in recent British history. In addition to her five works on moral philosophy and existentalism, including Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she was the author of twenty-five works of fiction, including The Sea, the Sea, winner of the Booker Prize, and The Black Prince, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. This collection reassesses her literary and philosophical output, focusing on her key literary works and the influence she had among contemporary philosophers" --
Download or read book Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life written by Peter Cheyne and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents interdisciplinary research on the aesthetics of perfection and imperfection. Broadening this growing field, it connects the aesthetics of imperfection with issues in areas including philosophy, music, literature, urban environment, architecture, art theory, and cultural studies. The contributors to this volume argue that imperfection has value in being open and inclusive. The aesthetics of imperfection is typified by organic, unpolished production and the avoidance of perfect finish, instead representing living and natural change, and opposing the consumerist concern with the flawless and pristine. The chapters are divided into seven thematic sections. After the first section, on imperfection across the arts and culture, the next three parts are on imperfection in the arts of music, visual and theatrical arts, and literature. The second half of this book then moves to categories in everyday life and branches this further into body, self, and the person, and urban environments. Together, the chapters promote a positive ethos of imperfection that furthers individual and social engagement and supports creativity over mere passivity. Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life will appeal to a broad range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophical aesthetics, literature, music, urban environment, architecture, art theory, and cultural studies.
Download or read book Iris Murdoch and the Ancient Quarrel written by Lyra Ekström Lindbäck and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-18 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lyra Ekström Lindbäck revisits the crucial distinction between literature and philosophy in Iris Murdoch's work to make a convincing case for understanding the particularity of literature and her insistence on the separation between the two. Iris Murdoch and the Ancient Quarrel makes a break with existing scholarship on Murdoch's philosophy and literature that ultimately re-states the philosophical value of literature, alongside literary aspects of philosophy. This book differs by deepening Murdoch's insistence on the differences between the disciplines, providing a consistent and polemical argument for the distinction between literature and philosophy more generally. Engaging thinkers such as Plato, Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Weil, and Cavell, Iris Murdoch and the Ancient Quarrel delves into the aesthetic characteristics that distinguish philosophy and literature. Through a discussion of the illusion of sense, the role of conceptual thinking in literature, the clash between epistemology and fiction, the artifice of tragedy, and the ambiguous morality of artistic inspiration and experience, this study reveals literature as essentially other to philosophy.
Download or read book Iris Murdoch and Remorse written by Frances White and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Literary Imagination Ancient and Modern written by Todd Breyfogle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-11 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps best known for his widely acclaimed translations of the Greek tragedies and Herodotus's History, as well as his edition of Hobbes's Thucydides, David Grene has also had a major impact as a teacher and interpreter of texts both ancient and modern. In this book, distinguished colleagues and former students explore the imaginative force of literature and history in articulating and illuminating the human condition. Ranging as widely as Grene's own interests in Greek and Roman antiquity, in drama, poetry, and the novel, in the art of translation, and in English history, these essays include discussions of the Odyssey and Ulysses, the Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius, Mallarmé's English and T. S. Eliot's religion, and the mutually antipathetic minds of Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson. The introduction by Todd Breyfogle sketches for the first time the contours of Grene's own thought. Classicists, political theorists, intellectual historians, philosophers, and students of literature will all find much of value in the individual essays here and in the juxtaposition of their themes. Contributors: Saul Bellow, Seth Benardete, Todd Breyfogle, Amirthanayagam P. David, Wendy Doniger, Mary Douglas, Joseph N. Frank, Victor Gourevitch, Nicholas Grene, W. R. Johnson, Brendan Kennelly, Edwin McClellan, Françoise Meltzer, Stephanie Nelson, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Ostwald, Robert B. Pippin, James Redfield, Sandra F. Siegel, Norma Thompson, and David Tracy
Download or read book Iris Murdoch Philosophical Novelist written by Miles Leeson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a concise and highly readable reassessment of Iris Murdoch's engagement with philosophy throughout her life and proposes that she was, most importantly, a philosophical novelist. By investigating her use of philosophical argument in her fictional writing, it becomes clear that her narratives always depend upon a strong metaphysical underpinning. Leeson proceeds thematically through the philosophical phases of Murdoch's life and develops a clear argument that Murdoch reacts against the philosophies of Sartre, Plato, Nietzsche and Heidegger not only in her philosophical writings but also in her fiction. Indeed, it is in her fiction that her philosophical argument is most persuasive and accessible. This timely study provides new information regarding Murdoch's engagement with Martin Heidegger and also provides a detailed critique of critics who have overlooked Murdoch's engagement with philosophy within her fiction.
Download or read book Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger written by Rebecca Moden and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-03 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger engaged in over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching and morality of art. This book presents a reappraisal of Murdoch’s novels – chiefly, three mature novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980) and The Good Apprentice (1985), and two enigmatic late novels, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) – which are perceived through the prism of her discourse with Weinberger. It draws on a run of almost 400 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger, and on Murdoch’s philosophical writings, Weinberger’s private writings, the remarks of both artists in interviews, and other material relating to their views on art and art history, much of which is unpublished and has received no previous critical attention. Scrutiny of their shared values, methods and the imagistic dialogue that takes place in their art provides original perspectives on Murdoch’s creativity, and new ways of understanding her experimentation with the visual arts. This book offers a new line of enquiry into Murdoch's novels, and into the relationship between literature and the visual arts.
Download or read book A Philosophy to Live By written by Maria Antonaccio and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Philosophy to Live By highlights Murdoch's distinctive conception of philosophy as a spiritual or existential practice and enlists the resources of her thought to explore a wide range of thinkers and debates at the intersections of moral philosophy, religion, art, and politics.
Download or read book Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch written by Julia Theresa Meszaros and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age of self-affirmation and self-assertion, "selfless love" can appear as a threat to the lover's personal well-being. This perception jars with the Biblical promise that we gain our life through losing it and therefore calls for a theological response. In conversation with the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and the atheistic moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch enquires into the anthropological grounds on which selfless love can be said to build up, rather than undermine, the lover's self. It proposes that while the implausibility of selfless love was furthered by the modern deconstruction of the self, both Tillich and Murdoch utilize this very deconstruction towards explicating and restoring the link between selfless love and human flourishing. Julia T. Meszaros shows that they use the modern diagnosis of the human being's lack of a stable and independent self as manifest in Sartre's existentialism in support of an understanding of the self as relational and fallen. This leads them to view a loving orientation away from self and a surrender to the other as critical to the full flourishing of human selfhood. In arguing that Tillich and Murdoch defend the link between selfless love and human flourishing through reference to the human being's ontological selflessness, Meszaros closely engages Soren Kierkegaard's earlier attempt to keep selfless love and human flourishing in a productive, dialectical tension. She also examines the breakdown of this tension in the later figures of Anders Nygren, Simone Weil, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and addresses the pitfalls of this breakdown. Her examination concludes by arguing that the link between selfless love and human flourishing would be strengthened by a more resolute endorsement of a personal God, and of the reciprocal nature of selfless love.
Download or read book Iris Murdoch and Her Work written by Mustafa and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores different aspects of Murdoch's work including her philosophy and fiction, focusing on a wide variety of issues ranging from reading "Murdoch as a fabulator" to the central role Murdoch plays in the "ethical turn." Approaching Murdoch's work from multiple perspectives, this book is of interest for Murdoch scholars, literature and philosophy students, as well as for general readers.
Download or read book Post War British Women Novelists and the Canon written by Nick Turner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-11-03 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the increasing number of books on contemporary fiction, there is a need for a work that examines whom we value, and why. These questions lie at the heart of this book which, by focusing on four novelists, literary and popular, interrogates the canon over the last fifty years. The argument unfolds to demonstrate that academic trends increasingly control canonicity, as do the demands of genre, the increasing commercialisation of literature, and the power of the literary prize. Turner argues that literary excellence, demonstrated by style and imaginative power, is often missing in many works that have become modern classics and makes a case for the value of the 'universal' in literature. Written in a jargon-free style, with reference to many supporting writers, the book raises a number of significant cultural questions about the arts, fashions and literary reputations, of interest to readers in contemporary literary studies.
Download or read book Why Iris Murdoch Matters written by Gary Browning and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Why Iris Murdoch Matters Gary Browning draws on as yet unpublished archival material to present an unrivalled overview of Murdoch's work and thought. Browning argues for Murdoch's position amongst the key theorists of modern life, and discusses in detail her engagement with the notion of late modernity. Her multiple perspectives on art, philosophy, religion, politics and the self all relate to how she understands the nature of late modernity. Browning lucidly illustrates that through both her thought and fiction we can grasp the significance of issues that remain of paramount importance today: the possibilities of a moral life without foundations, the meaning of philosophy in a post-metaphysical age, the prospects of politics without ideological certainties and the significance of art after realism. A totally original work arguing persuasively that Iris Murdoch not only matters but is absolutely central to how we think through the contemporary age.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of the British Novel written by Virginia Brackett and published by Infobase Learning. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 2708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the print edition:" ... comprehensive ... Recommended."
Download or read book Iris Murdoch written by A. Rowe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-10-13 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an eclectic mix of essays that reposition Murdoch's work in relation to current debates in philosophy, theology, literature, gender and sexuality, and authorship. The essays refine, develop or contest previous readings, and blur the distinction between liberal humanist and theoretical positions, suggesting negotiations between them.
Download or read book Murdoch on Truth and Love written by Gary Browning and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reviews Iris Murdoch’s thought as a whole. It surveys the breadth of her thinking, taking account of her philosophical works, her novels and her letters. It shows how she explored many aspects of experience and brought together apparently contradictory concepts such as truth and love. The volume deals with her notions of truth, love, language, morality, politics and her life. It shows how she offers a challenging provocative way of seeing things which is related to but distinct from standard forms of analytical philosophy and Continental thought. Unlike so many philosophers she does offer a philosophy to live by and unlike many novelists she has reflected deeply on the kind of novels she aimed to write. The upshot is that her novels and her philosophy can be read together productively as contributions to how we can see others and the world.
