Download or read book Promise the Infinite Drawing Out Babel written by Rachel Smith and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Library of Babel written by Jorge Luis Borges and published by Pocket Paragon. This book was released on 2000 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Not many living artists would be sufficiently brave or inspired to attempt reflecting in art what Borges constructs in words. But the detailed, evocative etchings by Erik Desmazieres provide a perfect counterpoint to the visionary prose. Like Borges, Desmazieres has created his own universe, his own definition of the meaning, topography and geography of the Library of Babel. Printed together, with the etchings reproduced in fine-line duotone, text and art unite to present an artist's book that belongs in the circle of Borges's sacrosanct Crimson Hexagon - "books smaller than natural books, books omnipotent, illustrated, and magical.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Tar for Mortar written by Jonathan Basile and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2018 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TAR FOR MORTAR offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature's greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story "The Library of Babel" is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges's narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator's claims of the library's universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing. Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library - is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion? While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges's imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.
Download or read book Fairy Tale Architecture written by Andrew Bernheimer and published by Oro Editions. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fairy Tale Architecture is a ground-breaking book, the first study to bring architects in conversation with fairy tales in breathtaking designs. Little Red Riding Hood, Baba Yaga, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Snow Queen: these and more than fifteen other stories designed by Bernheimer Architecture, Snøhetta, Rural Studio, LEVENBETTS, and LTL Architects and many other international vanguards have created stunning works for this groundbreaking collection of architectural fairy tales. Story by story, Andrew Bernheimer and Kate Bernheimer--a brother and sister team as in an old fairy tale--have built the ultimate home for lovers of fiction and design. Snow girls and spinning houses. Paper capes and engineered hair braids. Resin bee hives and infinite libraries. Here are futuristic structures made from traditional stories, inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen and The Little Match Girl to the Brothers Grimm's Rapunzel and The Juniper Tree to fairy tales by Jorge Luis Borges and Joy Williams and from China, Japan, Russia, Nigeria, and Mexico. A desire for story and shelter counts as among our most ancient instincts, and this dual desire continues to inspire our most imaginative architects and authors today. Fairy Tale Architecture invites the reader into a space of wonder, into a new form that will endure ever after.
Download or read book Scientific Babel written by Michael D. Gordin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-04-13 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English is the language of science today. No matter which languages you know, if you want your work seen, studied, and cited, you need to publish in English. But that hasn’t always been the case. Though there was a time when Latin dominated the field, for centuries science has been a polyglot enterprise, conducted in a number of languages whose importance waxed and waned over time—until the rise of English in the twentieth century. So how did we get from there to here? How did French, German, Latin, Russian, and even Esperanto give way to English? And what can we reconstruct of the experience of doing science in the polyglot past? With Scientific Babel, Michael D. Gordin resurrects that lost world, in part through an ingenious mechanism: the pages of his highly readable narrative account teem with footnotes—not offering background information, but presenting quoted material in its original language. The result is stunning: as we read about the rise and fall of languages, driven by politics, war, economics, and institutions, we actually see it happen in the ever-changing web of multilingual examples. The history of science, and of English as its dominant language, comes to life, and brings with it a new understanding not only of the frictions generated by a scientific community that spoke in many often mutually unintelligible voices, but also of the possibilities of the polyglot, and the losses that the dominance of English entails. Few historians of science write as well as Gordin, and Scientific Babel reveals his incredible command of the literature, language, and intellectual essence of science past and present. No reader who takes this linguistic journey with him will be disappointed.
Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Download or read book Archaeology of Babel written by Siraj Ahmed and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India. Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.
Download or read book Utopia of Understanding written by Donatella Ester Di Cesare and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speaking and understanding can both be thought of as forms of translation, and in this way every speaker is an exile in language—even in one's mother tongue. Drawing from the philosophical hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the testimonies of the German Jews and their relation with the German language, Jacques Derrida's confrontation with Hannah Arendt, and the poetry of Paul Celan, Donatella Ester Di Cesare proclaims Auschwitz the Babel of the twentieth century. She argues that the globalized world is one in which there no longer remains any intimate place or stable dwelling. Understanding becomes a kind of shibboleth that grounds nothing, but opens messianically to a utopia yet to come.
Download or read book Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell written by Susanna Clarke and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-06-05 with total page 1162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Hugo-award winning, epic New York Times Bestseller and basis for the BBC miniseries, two men change England's history when they bring magic back into the world. In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, most people believe magic to have long since disappeared from England - until the reclusive Mr. Norrell reveals his powers and becomes an overnight celebrity. Another practicing magician then emerges: the young and daring Jonathan Strange. He becomes Norrell's pupil, and the two join forces in the war against France. But Strange is increasingly drawn to the wild, most perilous forms of magic, and he soon risks sacrificing his partnership with Norrell and everything else he holds dear. Susanna Clarke's brilliant first novel is an utterly compelling epic tale of nineteenth-century England and the two magicians who, first as teacher and pupil and then as rivals, emerge to change its history.
Download or read book After Babel written by George Steiner and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A brilliant work . . . A dazzling meditation on the very nature of language itself” from the world-renowned scholar and author of The Poetry of Thought (Kirkus Reviews). In his classic work, literary critic and scholar George Steiner tackles what he considers the Babel “problem”: Why, over the course of history, have humans developed thousands of different languages when the social, material, and economic advantages of a single tongue are obvious? Steiner argues that different cultures’ desires for privacy and exclusivity led to each developing its own language. Translation, he believes, is at the very heart of human communication, and thus at the heart of human nature. From our everyday perception of the world around us, to creativity and the uninhibited imagination, to the often inexplicable poignancy of poetry, we are constantly translating—even from our native language.
Download or read book Labyrinths written by Jorge Luis Borges and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1964 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forty short stories and essays have been selected as representative of the Argentine writer's metaphysical narratives.
Download or read book Stray Arts and Other Inventions written by Anthony Etherin and published by . This book was released on 2019-10-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Taking as his subject a series of historically significant inventions--from ancient mythologies to modern scientific wonders--Anthony Etherin explores the structure of language, combining various forms of verse with the most severe literary restrictions. Many of Anthony's poems experiment with palindromes and anagrams: Palindromic sonnets; triolets and sonnets composed of anagrammed lines; and, at the extremes of combinatorial constraint, palindromic poems that are perfect anagrams of each other. This book also introduces Anthony's "aelindromes"--an anagram-palindrome hybrid, in which letters are parsed and reordered according to premeditated numerical sequences. Complemented throughout with experiments in visual poetry, STRAY ARTS (AND OTHER INVENTIONS) presents a complex poetic formalism of previously untested intricacy. "I've seen people able to do perfect bottom deals at casino poker tables for 100 thousand dollar stakes, under heat. I've seen people able to do bottom deals at illegal mob games where everyone was carrying. This poetry is only a bit safer but way, way harder. And impresses me more. I love it."--Penn Jillette "Anthony Etherin renders all my own virtuoso ventures obsolete. I truly covet this book."--Christian B�k "Anthony Etherin is a hard taskmaster with language, making it jump through hoops, run long distances backwards, and then turn in on itself, in a strenuous series of contortions that leave it gleaming with word-sweat--but all this exercise is more than worth it, because the poems Anthony produces are dictionaries of possibilities, maps of linguistic futures that are well worth exploring if you want to find joy and delight and jaw-dropping skill."--Ian McMillan
Download or read book Hyperboreal written by Joan Naviyuk Kane and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2013-10-21 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hyperboreal originates from diasporas. It attempts to make sense of change and to prepare for cultural, climate, and political turns that are sure to continue. The poems originate from the hope that our lives may be enriched by the expression of and reflection on the cultural strengths inherent to indigenous culture. It concerns King Island, the ancestral home of the author's family until the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs forcibly and permanently relocated its residents. The poems work towards the assembly of an identity, both collective and singular, that is capable of looking forward from the recollection and impact of an entire community's relocation to distant and arbitrary urban centers. Through language, Hyperboreal grants forum to issues of displacement, lack of access to traditional lands and resources and loss of family that King Island people—and all Inuit—are contending with.
Download or read book Infinity and the Mind written by Rudy Rucker and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dynamic exploration of infinity In Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker leads an excursion to that stretch of the universe he calls the “Mindscape,” where he explores infinity in all its forms: potential and actual, mathematical and physical, theological and mundane. Using cartoons, puzzles, and quotations to enliven his text, Rucker acquaints us with staggeringly advanced levels of infinity, delves into the depths beneath daily awareness, and explains Kurt Gödel’s belief in the possibility of robot consciousness. In the realm of infinity, mathematics, science, and logic merge with the fantastic. By closely examining the paradoxes that arise, we gain profound insights into the human mind, its powers, and its limitations. This Princeton Science Library edition includes a new preface by the author.
Download or read book My Wife Jodie written by V. A. Rudys and published by Blinkenlight. This book was released on 2021-07-16 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethan Page had it all: a respectable job, loving friends, and a beautiful apartment - the envy of all his friends. He was madly in love with his wife, Jodie - until he discovered the price she demanded for engineering his perfect life.
Download or read book Baxter s Explore the Book written by J. Sidlow Baxter and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2010-09-21 with total page 1846 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore the Book is not a commentary with verse-by-verse annotations. Neither is it just a series of analyses and outlines. Rather, it is a complete Bible survey course. No one can finish this series of studies and remain unchanged. The reader will receive lifelong benefit and be enriched by these practical and understandable studies. Exposition, commentary, and practical application of the meaning and message of the Bible will be found throughout this giant volume. Bible students without any background in Bible study will find this book of immense help as will those who have spent much time studying the Scriptures, including pastors and teachers. Explore the Book is the result and culmination of a lifetime of dedicated Bible study and exposition on the part of Dr. Baxter. It shows throughout a deep awareness and appreciation of the grand themes of the gospel, as found from the opening book of the Bible through Revelation.
Download or read book Out Of Control written by Kevin Kelly and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.
