Download or read book Paradise Lost a Divine Comedy or Profane Bathos written by Donald C. Bartley and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2020-05-04 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paradise Lost: a Divine Comedy or Profane Bathos? (, Ai-ichigen) breaks the spell, awakening the dreamer. For living in our dreams, we struggle to live in Paradise. Darwin said the origin of species was by means of natural selection, the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life; & history has borne him out. Proceeding from a faulty & partial memory, it needs repeating & constant amending; yet it renders no progress: history affirms the blind & random nature of human events! Schooled that by the labors of our native intelligence, we alone could subdue Darwin, we have made nature pay for our great industry. Our mighty institutions embrace Darwinian principles making us highly competitive through fear & separation. Love & unification we spurn to maintain our competitive edge, believing that by keeping our independence, our freedom we secure; for space & time were limited. These beliefs, being empirical, we never question. But what if Darwin was wrong? if things don’t evolve? if life were vouchsafed? For science avers that nature is lawless. It follows no rules in having no point or purpose. Positing a cosmic intelligence steering nature offends science. All the laws & meanings we find in nature are what science gives it. Yet were point & purpose never any part of this world, then how could we know them or even possess them in ourselves? & that includes our native wits. So, science concedes that life is deterministic &, promptly, reality dissolves; for life, we know to be uncertain & rife with choices. What we dare not question, this book answers. Strangers here we have become, thinking life in Paradise could ever be a struggle. Having turned fantasy into reality, Paradise is lost on us!

Download or read book The Spirituality of Comedy written by Conrad Hyers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand comedy is to understand humanity, for the comic sense is central to what it means to be human. Nearly all the major issues with which human beings have exercised themselves are touched upon in some manner by the comic spirit. Yet education in the art of comedy and in comic appreciation is given little attention in most societies. The Spirituality of Comedy explores the wisdom of comedy and the comic answer to tragedy (in both popular and classical senses of the term). Tragedy is seen as a fundamental problem of human existence, while comedy is its counterweight and resolution.Conrad Hyers has taken a fresh look at comedy from the standpoint of comparative mythology and religion, and thus comedy's spiritual significance. In his unique study of the comic tradition, Hyers explains the difficulty in pinning down themes, structures, plots, or characters that are common to all comedy. Instead he argues that there is an essence of comedy in the area of pattern. He draws upon the rich historical ensemble of types of comic figures: the humorist, comedian, comic hero, rogue, trickster, clown, fool, underdog, and simpleton. He shows how each type incarnates a comic heroism in its own unique manner, offering a profound wisdom and philosophy of life.The approach of this book is broadly interdisciplinary, with materials and interpretations introduced from the various fields of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences as they illuminate both the tragic and comic sensibilities. The methodological thread that draws this all together is an analysis of the major types of comic figures in terms of the myths and legends associated with them, the rituals they produce and enact, and the symbolism of the comic figures themselves. Written in a very readable literary style, The Spirituality of Comedy will appeal to psychologists, social scientists, clergy, philosophers, and students of literature.

Download or read book The Comedy of Survival written by Joseph W. Meeker and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With imagination and flair, the author also introduces the idea of a play ethic, as opposed to a work ethic, and demonstrates the importance of play as a necessary and desirable component of the comic spirit. The Comedy of Survival is a book for literary critics, environmentalists, human ecologists, philosophers, and anthropologists. General readers, too, will find much to ponder in the author's clear explication of how all of us might become better stewards of this, our home planet Earth.

Download or read book Mark Twain s Comedy Classics 190 Stories Sketches Illustrated Edition written by Mark Twain and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2017-07-21 with total page 2932 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This grand collection of Mark Twain's short stories contains his famous humorous tales, children's stories, satires, and other sketches written in his recognizable witty style: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County Aurelia's Unfortunate Young Man A Complaint about Correspondents, Dated in San Francisco Answers to Correspondents Among the Fenians The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn't Come to Grief Curing a Cold An Inquiry about Insurances Literature in the Dry Diggings 'After' Jenkins Lucretia Smith's Soldier The Killing of Julius Caesar 'Localized' An Item which the Editor Himself could not Understand Among the Spirits Brief Biographical Sketch of George Washington A Touching Story of George Washington's Boyhood A Page from a Californian Almanac Information for the Million The Launch of the Steamer Capital Origin of Illustrious Men Advice for Good Little Girls Concerning Chambermaids Remarkable Instances of Presence of Mind Honored as a Curiosity in Honolulu The Steed 'Oahu' A Strange Dream Short and Singular Rations Mark Twain's Burlesque Autobiography and First Romance Burlesque Autobiography Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance Merry Tales The Private History of a Campaign That Failed The Invalid's Story Luck The Captain's Story A Curious Experience Mrs. Mc Williams and the Lightning Meisterschaft The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories The Million Pound Bank Note Mental Telegraphy The Enemy Conquered About all Kinds of Ships Playing Courier The German Chicago A Petition to the Queen of England A Majestic Literary Fossil Sketches New and Old The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories The Curious Republic of Gondour and Other Whimsical Sketches Alonzo Fitz, and Other Stories Mark Twain's Library of Humor Other Stories Biography Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer.

Download or read book Moving Picture World and View Photographer written by and published by . This book was released on 1915 with total page 1630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Radical Comedy in Early Modern England written by Professor Rick Bowers and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-28 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the generic and mythic strength of comedy and the theories of Bakhtin, Bergson, and Hobbes, this book identifies the radical nature of early modern English comedy. The satirical comedic actions that shape the "Shepherds' Play," Thomas Dekker's pamphlets, and the comic dramas of Marston, Middleton, and Jonson are all driven, Bowers points out, by an ability to criticize authority, assert plebeian culture, and insist on the complexity and innovation of human discourse. The texts examined (including The Jew of Malta, Metamorphosis of Ajax, Antonio and Mellida, Bartholomew Fair, The Alchemist, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside) simultaneously create and employ standard comedic elements. Farce, absurdity, excess, over-the-top characters, unremitting irony, black humor, toilet humor, and tricksters of all types - such features and more combine to satirize medical, religious, and political authority and to implement necessary social change. Written with a narrative ease, Radical Comedy in Early Modern England shows how comic interventions both describe and reconfigure prevalent authority in its own time while arguing that, through early modern comedy, one can observe the changes in social behavior and understandings characteristic of the Renaissance.

Download or read book Serious Comedy written by Patrick Downey and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of how seriously to take literature has vexed philosophers throughout the centuries. Are the stories we write merely noble lies told to hold society together? A means of comic detachment from a tragic world? Mimicry of transcendent truths? Potent acts of self-realization? From the Socratics to the Romantics, all of these opinions and more have been offered. In a pop-culture age in which we live out of the stories we tell, our culture needs a clear answer. In this masterful overview of the Western literary tradition, Patrick Downey traces how seriously philosophers and writers across the centuries, from Plato to Kierkegaard, have taken humanity’s attempts at self-authorship in tragedy and comedy. These attempts, Downey argues, only find resolution in history’s most significant work of literature: the Bible. Setting all other literature in its right place, the Bible and the gospel it proclaims take us beyond literature to the true story of reality, providing what the philosophers and poets have sought for all along: a serious comedy.

Download or read book Comic Relief written by Kathleen Marie Higgins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-13 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a lively and unorthodox analysis of Nietzsche by examining a neglected aspect of his scholarly personality--his sense of humor. While often thought of as ponderous and melancholy, the Nietzsche of Higgins's study is a surprisingly subtle and light-hearted writer. She presents a close reading of The Gay Science to show how the numerous literary risks that Nietzsche takes reveal humor to be central to his project. Higgins argues that his use of humor is intended to dislodge readers from their usual, somber detachment and to incite imaginative thinking.

Download or read book Character Consciousness in Eighteenth century Comic Fiction written by Elizabeth Kraft and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth-century novel developed amid an emerging emphasis on individualism that clashed with long-cherished beliefs in hierarchy and stability. Though the comic novelists, unlike Defoe and Richardson, avoided total involvement in the mind of any one character, they were nonetheless fundamentally concerned with the nature of consciousness. In Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, Elizabeth Kraft examines the kind of consciousness central to comic novels of the period. It is, she asserts, individual identity conceived in social terms--a character's search for his or her place in a precarious secular order. Understanding this concept of character is vitally important to a full appreciation of eighteenth-century comic fiction. To respond validly to these fictional characters, Kraft claims, the twentieth-century reader must recapture, or recreate, the eighteenth-century self. In readings of five novels--Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Tobias Smollett's Peregrine Pickle, and Fanny Burney's Cecilia--Kraft explores the relationships among consciousness, character, and comic narrative. Fielding, Lennox, and Sterne, she argues, question the validity of narratives of consciousness. Each seeks to define the limitations as well as the virtues of the form in representing the individual and communal lives. Smollett and Burney, on the other hand, address a readership that expects the novel to offer meaningful renderings of person experience. These novelists accept the validity of the narrative of consciousness but place this narrative within the context of the larger community. As a thorough analysis of relations between narrative and the construction of character and consciousness, Kraft's study is an important addition to our understanding of the theoretical formulations of eighteenth-century fiction.

Download or read book The Moving Picture World written by and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 830 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Psychotherapy of Character The Play of Consciousness in the Theater of the Brain written by Robert A. Berezin and published by Wheatmark, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eddie's mother was up on a ladder cleaning the kitchen ceiling when her water broke. She was annoyed at the interruption, and the mess. Contemporary psychiatry has fallen under the sway of biological reductionism, where our patients do not receive proper care. They are treated primarily or exclusively with psychoactive drugs. The result has been a pharmaceutical epidemic, with psychiatric drug sales topping $70 billion a year. Pharmaceutical psychiatry ignores the complexities of the human condition as if the agency of human suffering can be cured by a pill. Eddie never really enjoyed swimming…. he couldn't stop water from pouring into his nose and sinuses. It didn't occur to him to tell his counselors, never mind his parents, where he could have gotten nose clips. It didn't occur to him that anyone would be responsive to his needs. In Psychotherapy of Character, Dr. Berezin presents a much-needed alternative to the prevailing doctrine, one that is grounded in an understanding of human nature. Suffering is not a brain problem, it is a human problem. He illuminates the practice and effectiveness of psychotherapy through the story of his patient, Eddie. Eddie's complicated inner life, varied experiences, and ultimate breakthrough, stand in contrast to the destructive and false promises of a magical cure. He introduces a new and inclusive paradigm of consciousness for the twenty-first century. On the surface, he lived a successful college life. Eddie was due to graduate with honors, and was accepted into a prestigious PhD program in biology. All the while, he felt alone and dead inside. No one really knew him.

Download or read book The Wagnerian Romances written by Gertrude Hall Brownell and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Wagnerian Romances" by Gertrude Hall Brownell. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Download or read book Dark Pool of Light The crisis and future of consciousness written by Richard Grossinger and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores and compares neuroscientific and philosophical views of reality and human consciousness"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth Century Comedy written by Brian Corman and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2013-01-21 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten plays in this new collection show both the continuity and the changes in comedy over the course of the Restoration and eighteenth century. Each play includes its original prologue and epilogue, as well as an historical introduction and full annotation. The editor’s Introduction provides a rich historical and literary context for the plays’ composition and production. A glossary of frequently used words likely to be unfamiliar to general readers is also included.

Download or read book Film and Female Consciousness written by L. Bolton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-07-28 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film and Female Consciousness analyses three contemporary films that offer complex and original representations of women's thoughtfulness and individuality: In the Cut (2003), Lost in Translation (2003) and Morvern Callar (2002). Lucy Bolton compares these recent works with well-known and influential films that offer more familiar treatments of female subjectivity: Klute (1971), The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Marnie (1964). Considering each of the older, celebrated films alongside the recent, unconventional works illustrates how contemporary filmmaking techniques and critical practices can work together to create provocative depictions of on-screen female consciousness. Bolton's approach demonstrates how the encounter between the philosophy of Luce Irigaray and cinema can yield a fuller understanding of the fundamental relationship between film and philosophy. Furthermore, the book explores the implications of this approach for filmmakers and spectators, and suggests Irigarayan models of authorship and spectatorship that reinvigorate the notion of women's cinema.

Download or read book The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays written by John Montague and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Feast of the Sorcerer written by Bruce Kapferer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-10-15 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sorcery has long been associated with the "dark side" of human development, along with magic and witchcraft. This text argues, however, that sorcery practices reveal critical insights into how consciousness is formed, and how human beings constitute their social