Download or read book The Demon of Noontide written by Reinhard Clifford Kuhn and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kierkegaard claimed that the gods created man because they were bored, and Baudelaire predicted that the "delicate monster" of boredom would one day swallow up the whole world in an immense yawn. Between these two statements lies the undefined expanse of ennui, whose manifestations in European literature form the fascinating subject of this book. Reinhard Kuhn's aim is to define the demon of noontide, to learn how writers through the ages have treated it, and to discover what it indicates about the nature of the creative act. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Demon of Noontide written by Reinhard C. Kuhn and published by . This book was released on with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Idle Pursuits written by Virginia Krause and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Throughout this study, idleness is shown to be a key element of self-presentation beginning with the figure of the idle aristocrat. The extravagant display of a life of leisure made Gilles de Rais the icon of aristocratic idleness. But even the hardworking humanist was anxious to assume a studied posture of idleness. If both figures were eager to display idleness, it was because oisivete was an important source of what modern theorists have termed symbolic capital. Finally, the Renaissance also saw the birth of a new figure of the "idler": the consumer of leisure. For it was leisure itself along with chivalric and amorous adventure that was consumed by the readers of the popular Amadis series. At once a commodity and form of capital, idleness (otium) clearly belonged to the realm of social exchanges ostensibly reserved for affairs (negotium)."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Noonday Demon written by Andrew Solomon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author offers a look at depression in which he draws on his own battle with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, researchers, doctors, and others to assess the complexities of the disease, its causes and symptoms, and available therapies. This book examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations, around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness. He takes readers on a journey into the most pervasive of family secrets and contributes to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition.
Download or read book Melville and the Theme of Boredom written by Daniel Paliwoda and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2010-01-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boredom is a prevalent theme in Herman Melville's works. Rather than a passing fancy or a device for drawing attention to the action that also permeates his work, boredom is central to the writings, the author argues. He contends that in Melville's mature work, especially Moby Dick, boredom presents itself as an insidious presence in the lives of Melville's characters, until it matures from being a mere killer of time into a killer of souls.
Download or read book Essays on Boredom and Modernity written by Barbara Dalle Pezze and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past thirty years saw a growing academic interest in the phenomenon of boredom. If initially the analyses were mostly a-historical, now the historicity of boredom is widely recognised, though often it is taken as evidence of its permanence as a constant "quality" of the human condition, expression of a metaphysical malady inherent to the fact of being human. New trends in the literature focus on the peculiar relationship between boredom and modernity and attempt to embrace the new social, cultural and political factors which provoked the epochal change of modernity and relate them to a change in the parameters of human experience and the crisis of subjectivity. The very changes that characterise modernity are the same that led to the "democratisation" of boredom: modernity and boredom are shown to be inextricably connected and inseparable. This volume aims at contributing to the growing body of literature on boredom with a number of essays which reflect on the connection of boredom and modernity and focus on particular texts, authors, or aspects of the phenomenon. The approach is multidisciplinary, in keeping with the pervasiveness of the phenomenon in our culture and societies, with essays reflecting on philosophy, literature, film, media and psychology.
Download or read book Henri Lefebvre Boredom and Everyday Life written by Patrick Gamsby and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-09-23 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henri Lefebvre, Boredom, and Everyday Life culls together the scattered fragments of Henri Lefebvre’s (1901–1991) unrealized sociology of boredom. In assembling these fragments, sprinkled through Lefebvre’s vast oeuvre, Patrick Gamsby constructs the core elements of Lefebvre’s latent theory of boredom. Themes of time (modernity, everyday), space (urban, suburban), and mass culture (culture industry, industry culture) are explored throughout the book, unveiling a concealed dialectical movement at work with the experience of boredom. In analyzing the dialectic of boredom, Gamsby argues that Lefebvre’s project of a critique of everyday life is key for making sense of the linkages between boredom and everyday life in the modern world.
Download or read book Prosaic Desires written by Sara Crangle and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studying the work of Joyce, Woolf, Stein and Beckett, Sara Crangle explores the everyday human longings found in Modernist writing. This discussion is set within a framework of continental philosophy, particularly the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas.
Download or read book The Seven Deadly Sins written by Stanford M. Lyman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1989 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of sloth, lust, anger, pride, envy, gluttony, and greed.
Download or read book migr s written by Richard Scholar and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating history of French words that have entered the English language and the fertile but fraught relationship between English- and French-speaking cultures across the world English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases—such as à la mode, ennui, naïveté and caprice—lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world. Émigrés demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, “turned” English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelyn’s complaint that English lacks “words that do so fully express” the French ennui and naïveté, to George W. Bush’s purported claim that “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste. They have established themselves as “creolizing keywords” that both connect English speakers to—and separate them from—French. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete. At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Émigrés invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst.
Download or read book Exiled Royalties written by Robert Milder and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exiled Royalties is a literary/biographical study of the course of Melville's career from his experience in Polynesia through his retirement from the New York Custom House and his composition of three late volumes of poetry and Billy Budd, Sailor. Conceived separately but narratively and thematically intertwined, the ten essays in the book are rooted in a belief that "Melville's work," as Charles Olson said, "must be left in his own 'life,'" which for Milder means primarily his spiritual, psychological, and vocational life. Four of the ten essays deal with Melville's life and work after his novelistic career ended with the The Confidence-Man in 1857. The range of issues addressed in the essays includes Melville's attitudes toward society, history, and politics, from broad ideas about democracy and the course of Western civilization to responses to particular events like the Astor Place Riots and the Civil War; his feeling about sexuality and, throughout the book, about religion; his relationship to past and present writers, especially to the phases of Euro-American Romanticism, post-Romanticism, and nascent Modernism; his relationship to his wife, Lizzie, to Hawthorne, and to his father, all of whom figured in the crisis that made for Pierre. The title essay, "Exiled Royalties," takes its origin from Ishmael's account of "the larger, darker, deeper part of Ahab"--Melville's mythic projection of a "larger, darker, deeper part" of himself. How to live nobly in spiritual exile--to be godlike in the perceptible absence of God--was a lifelong preoccupation for Melville, who, in lieu of positive belief, transposed the drama of his spiritual life to literature. The ways in which this impulse expressed itself through Melville's forty-five year career, interweaving itself with his personal life and the life of the nation and shaping both the matter and manner of his work, is the unifying subject of Exiled Royalties.
Download or read book Sublime Historical Experience written by F. R. Ankersmit and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? This book investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge.
Download or read book Figures of Identity written by Clark S. Muenzer and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1990-10-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of coherence in Goethe's novels, which, like Faust, compelled his attention throughout his creative life, has only recently occupied a few critics. Professor Muenzer's study offers the most comprehensive effort of this kind by examining the problematic nature of self-definition through the four novels and its emergence as a discursive process of the imagination. The self of these texts, Muenzer suggests, evolves as a symbolic construct that records a patter of pursuit for each of their protagonists and orients the reader toward three basic goals of human aspiration. Thus, Werther aspires to purposefulness as a center of teleological fulfillment, while the hero of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship refers to an ideological center of participation in his social desire. Eduard, in The Elective Affinities, presumes to occupy a center of archaeological power through his typically self-assertive strategies. In the last of his novels, Wilhelm Meister's Journeymanship, Goethe articulates the need to balance all such self-involved behavior with an attitude of self-denial. Apparently, the mind can orient itself through centers of purpose, order, and power, but it must also recognize the illusion of their attainment. Identity does not involve a substantive presence, and the result of self-definition for Goethe is interpretive work. Each of Professor Muenzer's interpretations has been guided by this premise. The interests of all of Goethe's novelistic protagonists, he concludes, "serve as orienting postures toward goals that cannot be literally achieved." Consequently, symbolic resolutions are proposed. These then introduce new problems as points of departure in subsequent works. The hidden agenda of Goethe's work as a novelist is a self that exists as a textual problem, a series of interpretive moves that endlessly defer the attainment of self presence by supplementing each other in narrative fictions.
Download or read book Pandexicon written by Wayne Grady and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you keep a list of the words coined by Covid? Wayne Grady did! They're deftly woven into a journal/timeline, taking us through two years of surrealism and limbo.—Margaret Atwood This exploration of the many new terms of the Covid-19 pandemic provides insight into the ways an ever-evolving vocabulary helped us cope with our anxiety and adapt to a new reality. When the pandemic struck in early 2020, Wayne Grady started collecting the words and phrases that arose from our shared global experience. Some, such as “uptick” and “pivot,” had existed before but now took on new meaning, and others, such as “covidivorce,” “quarantini,” “covexit,” and “shecession,” appeared for the first time, their meaning instantly clear. Through this new vocabulary, we became more able to adapt to change, to domesticate it in a sense, and to reduce our fears. Moving from the very beginning of the pandemic (the “Before Times”) and our early response to it through the peaks and troughs of the various waves in countries throughout the world, and ending with a contemplation of what the “After Times” might look like, this book takes us on a journey through the pandemic and illuminates both how this new language has unfolded and how it has changed the way we think about ourselves and each other.
Download or read book Journal of the American Oriental Society written by American Oriental Society and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: List of members in each volume.
Download or read book The Human Condition written by John Kekes and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Human Condition is a response to the growing disenchantment in the Western world with contemporary life. John Kekes provides rationally justified answers to questions about the meaning of life, the basis of morality, the contingencies of human lives, the prevalence of evil, the nature and extent of human responsibility, and the sources of values we prize. He offers a realistic view of the human condition that rejects both facile optimism and gloomy pessimism; acknowledges that we are vulnerable to contingencies we cannot fully control; defends a humanistic understanding of our condition; recognizes that the values worth pursuing are plural, often conflicting, and that there are many reasonable conceptions of well-being. Kekes emphasizes the importance of facing the fact that man's inhumanity to man is widespread. He rejects as simple-minded both the view that human nature is basically good and that it is basically bad, and argues that our well-being depends on coping with the complex truth that human nature is basically complicated. Finally, Kekes argues that the scheme of things is indifferent to our fortunes and that we can rely only on our own resources to make what we can of our lives.
Download or read book Russian Literature and Its Demons written by Pamela Davidson and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Merezhkovsky's bold claim that "all Russian literature is, to a certain degree, a struggle with the temptation of demonism" is undoubtedly justified. And yet, despite its evident centrality to Russian culture, the unique and fascinating phenomenon of Russian literary demonism has so far received little critical attention. This substantial collection fills the gap. A comprehensive analytical introduction by the editor is follwed by a series of fourteen essays, written by eminent scholars in their fields. The first part explores the main shaping contexts of literary demonism: the Russian Orthodox and folk tradition, the demonization of historical figures, and views of art as intrinsically demonic. The second part traces the development of a literary tradition of demonism in the works of authors ranging from Pushkin and Lermontov, Gogol and Dostoevsky, through to the poets and prose writers of modernism (including Blok, Akhmatova, Bely, Sologub, Rozanov, Zamiatin), and through to the end of the 20th century.
