Download or read book The Decline of Pleasure written by Walter Kerr and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction written by Alan Jacobs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.
Download or read book The Autonomy of Pleasure written by James A. Steintrager and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous—and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law unto itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also analyzes the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond.
Download or read book Thrilled to Death written by Archibald D. Hart and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2007-09-30 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating exploration of the profound loss of pleasure in our daily lives and the seven steps for restoring it. Pleasure. We know what it feels like and many of us spend our days trying to experience it. But can too much pleasure actually be bad for us? Yes, says Dr. Archibald Hart, clinical psychologist and expert in behavorial psychology. Backed by recent brain-imaging research, Dr. Hart shares that to some extent, our pursuit of extreme and overstimulating thrills hijacks our pleasure system and robs us of our ability to experience pleasure in simple things. We are literally being thrilled to death. In this insightful book, Dr. Hart explores the stark rise in a phenomenon known as anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure or happiness. Previously linked only to serious emotional disorders, anhedonia is now seen as a contributing factor in depression (specifically nonsadness depression) and in the growing number of people who complain of profound boredom. This emotional numbness and loss of joy are results of the overuse of our brain's pleasure circuits. In Thrilled to Death, Dr. Hart explains the processes of the brain's pleasure center, the damaging trends of overindulgence and overstimulation, the signs and problems of anhedonia, and the seven important steps we must take to recover our wonderful joy in living.
Download or read book The Trouble with Pleasure written by Aaron Schuster and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into the strange and troublesome relationship to pleasure that defines the human being, drawing on the disparate perspectives of Deleuze and Lacan. Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two of the most formidable figures of postwar French thought. Though the encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze's work, we are yet to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his career. In The Trouble with Pleasure, Aaron Schuster tackles this tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster focuses on drive and desire—the strange, convoluted relationship of human beings to the forces that move them from within—“the trouble with pleasure." Along the way, Schuster offers his own engaging and surprising conceptual analyses and inventive examples. In the “Critique of Pure Complaint” he provides a philosophy of complaining, ranging from Freud's theory of neurosis to Spinoza's intellectual complaint of God and the Deleuzian great complaint. Schuster goes on to elaborate, among other things, a theory of love as “mutually compatible symptoms”; an original philosophical history of pleasure, including a hypothetical Heideggerian treatise and a Platonic theory of true pleasure; and an exploration of the 1920s “literature of the death drive,” including Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, and Blaise Cendrars.
Download or read book CivilWarLand in Bad Decline written by George Saunders and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to discover or revisit a virtuosic, disturbingly prescient voice. Praise for George Saunders and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline “It’s no exaggeration to say that short story master George Saunders helped change the trajectory of American fiction.”—The Wall Street Journal “Saunders’s satiric vision of America is dark and demented; it’s also ferocious and very funny.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “George Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality, with a sure sense of his material and apparently inexhaustible resources of voice. [CivilWarLand in Bad Decline] is scary, hilarious, and unforgettable.”—Tobias Wolff “Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless.”—Jonathan Franzen “Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.”—Zadie Smith “An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.”—Thomas Pynchon
Download or read book The Man of the Renaissance written by Ralph Roeder and published by . This book was released on 1935 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hope and the Longing for Utopia written by Daniel Boscaljon and published by James Clarke & Company. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At present the battle over who defines our future is being waged most publicly by secular and religious fundamentalists. 'Hope and the Longing for Utopia' offers an alternative position, disclosing a conceptual path toward potential worlds that resist a limited view of human potential and the gift of religion. In addition to outlining the value of embracing unknown potentialities, these twelve interdisciplinary essays explore why it has become crucial that we commit to hoping for values that resist traditional ideological commitments. Contextualized by contemporary writing on utopia, and drawing from a wealth of times and cultures ranging from Calvin's Geneva to early twentieth-century Japanese children's stories to Hollywood cinema, theseessays cumulatively disclose the fundamental importance of resisting tantalizing certainties while considering the importance of the unknown and unknowable. Beginning with a set of four essays outlining the importance of hope and utopia as diagnostic concepts, and following with four concrete examples, the collection ends with a set of essays that provide theological speculations on the need to embrace finitude and limitations in a world increasingly enframed by secularizing impulses. Overall, this book discloses how hope and utopia illuminate ways to think past simplified wishes for the future.
Download or read book The Decline of Pleasure written by Walter Kerr and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire By Edward Gibbon A New Edition written by Edward Gibbon and published by . This book was released on 1789 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire By Edward Gibbon written by and published by . This book was released on 1789 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire written by Edward Gibbon and published by . This book was released on 1787 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire With a Portrait and Maps written by Edward Gibbon and published by . This book was released on 1825 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book U S Industrial Outlook written by and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents industry reviews including a section of "trends and forecasts," complete with tables and graphs for industry analysis.
Download or read book U S Industrial Outlook for Industries with Projections for written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire written by and published by . This book was released on 1840 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Etc written by Edward Gibbon and published by . This book was released on 1781 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
