Download or read book Egalitarian Sublime written by James Williams and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We call sublime those things and experiences supposed to be the very best. But what if the best actually leads to inequality and exploitation? Williams critiques the sublime over its long history and in recent returns to sublime nature and technologies. Deploying a new critical method that draws on process philosophy, he shows how the sublime has always led to inequality. This holds true even where it underpins ideas of cosmopolitan enlightenment, and even when refined by Burke, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Zizek. Against the unjust legacies of the traditional sublime, James Williams defends a new, anarchist sublime: multiple, self-destructive and temporary; opposed to any idea of highest value to be shared by all but always imposed on the powerless.
Download or read book The Egalitarian Sublime written by James Williams and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the unjust legacies of the traditional sublime, James Williams defends an anarchist sublime: multiple, self-destructive and temporary; opposed to any idea of highest value to be shared by all, but always imposed on the powerless.
Download or read book Egalitarian Sublime written by Williams James Williams and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We call sublime those things and experiences supposed to be the very best. But what if the best actually leads to inequality and exploitation? Williams critiques the sublime over its long history and in recent returns to sublime nature and technologies. Deploying a new critical method that draws on process philosophy, he shows how the sublime has always led to inequality. This holds true even where it underpins ideas of cosmopolitan enlightenment, and even when refined by Burke, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Zizek. Against the unjust legacies of the traditional sublime, James Williams defends a new, anarchist sublime: multiple, self-destructive and temporary; opposed to any idea of highest value to be shared by all but always imposed on the powerless.
Download or read book The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy written by Georg Guillemin and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The study shows that more than any of the other landscapes evoked by McCarthy, the Southwestern desert becomes the stage for his dramatizations of a wild sense of the pastoral. McCarthy's fourth novel, Suttree, which is the only one set in an urban environment, is used in the introductory chapter to discuss the relevant compositional aspects of his fiction and the methodology of the chapters to come." "The main part of the study devotes chapters to McCarthy's Southern novels, his keystone work Blood Meridian, and the Western novels known as the Border Trilogy. The concluding chapter discusses the broader context of American pastoralism and suggests that McCarthy's ecopastoralism is animistic rather than environmentalist in character."--Jacket
Download or read book Posthumanist Research and Writing as Agentic Acts of Inclusion written by Anne B. Reinertsen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Posthumanist Research and Writing as Agentic Acts of Inclusion: Knowledge Forced Open looks at the true value and possibilities of 'learning' and knowledge within the emerging field of New Public Governance by examining, through a posthumanist lens and other perspectives, the paradoxical knowledge situation we are in today. This book addresses the constitution of knowledge as an uncertain process, understanding text as spaces for entanglements of knowledge – knowledge not as certainty but as uncertainty – and writing as the act and art of engaging with these entanglements. Through examining research from multiple perspectives, text, stories as narrative are constructed as data – showing ethnographic engagements between writers, readers and texts. The authors show how to construct messy entanglements of continual, always already constant thinking and becomings, through the art and science of research and writing as knowledging processes. Suitable for scholars of posthumanist thinking in Education and the social sciences, this book challenges the academy to look at new ways of thinking with and through knowledge and showing the importance of such processes.
Download or read book Romantic Sustainability written by Ben P. Robertson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romantic Sustainability is a collection of sixteen essays that examine the British Romantic era in ecocritical terms. Written by scholars from five continents, this international collection addresses the works of traditional Romantic writers such as John Keats, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Samuel Coleridge but also delves into ecocritical topics related to authors added to the canon more recently, such as Elizabeth Inchbald and John Clare. The essays examine geological formations, clouds, and landscapes as well as the posthuman and the monstrous. The essays are grouped into rough categories that start with inspiration and the imagination before moving to the varied types of consumption associated with human interaction with the natural world. Subsequent essays in the volume focus on environmental destruction, monstrous creations, and apocalypse. The common theme is sustainability, as each contributor examines Romantic ideas that intersect with ecocriticism and relates literary works to questions about race, gender, religion, and identity.
Download or read book Tempest in the Caribbean written by Jonathan Goldberg and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's The Tempest has long been claimed by colonials and postcolonial thinkers alike as the dramatic work that most enables them to confront their entangled history, recognized as early modernity's most extensive engagement with the vexing issues of colonialism--race, dispossession, language, European displacement and occupation, disregard for native culture. Tempest in the Caribbean reads some of the "classic" anticolonial texts--by Aime Cesaire, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, George Lamming, and Frantz Fanon, for instance--through the lens of feminist and queer analysis exemplified by the theoretical essays of Sylvia Wynter and the work of Michelle Cliff. Extending the Tempest plot, Goldberg considers recent works by Caribbean authors and social theorists, among them Patricia Powell, Jamaica Kincaid, and Hilton Als. These rewritings, he suggests, and the lived conditions to which they testify, present alternatives to the masculinist and heterosexual bias of the legacy that has been derived from The Tempest. By placing gender and sexuality at the center of the debate about the uses of Shakespeare for anticolonial purposes, Goldberg's work points to new possibilities that might be articulated through the nexus of race and sexuality. Place sexuality at the center of Caribbean responses to Shakespeare's play.
Download or read book The Political Right and Equality written by Matthew McManus and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-21 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McManus presents an intellectual history of the conservative and reactionary tradition, stretching from Aristotle and Filmer to Alexander Dugin and Patrick Deneen. Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of the intellectual political right, McManus traces its core to a nostalgia for the hierarchical cosmos of antiquarian and scholastic thinking. The yearning for a shared vision of the universe where each part of reality has its place maps onto the conservative admiration for orderly political and social stratification. It stamps even the more moderate forms of liberal conservatism which emerged in the aftermath of the revolutionary 18th century, as the political right struggled to accept and later master first the politics of liberal capitalism and later universal suffrage. In its most radical forms this nostalgia for an orderly and hierarchical existence can harden into a resentment at the perceived shallowness of liberal modernity. McManus argues for those who support the project of modernity to commit themselves to better understanding the depth of the political right’s critiques, many of which expose uncomfortable but solvable problems with the quest for equality and freedom. A critical guide to the history of conservative and reactionary thought for students and scholars of political science and political history. While there are a lot of competing explanations for the contemporary rise of right-wing forces, Matt McManus’ new book suggests that it is hostility to equality that actually unites the right. Zeroing in on key intellectuals and writers, McManus, in a sharply written text, offers a compelling explanation for the disproportionate intensity of right-wing grievance politics.
Download or read book Thinking through Thomas Merton written by Robert Inchausti and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the legacy of Thomas Merton and his relevance for contemporary times. With the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948, Thomas Merton became a bestselling author, writing about spiritual contemplation in a modern context. Although Merton (19151968) lived as a Trappist monk, he advocated a spiritual life that was not a retreat from the world, but an alternative to it, particularly to the deadening materialism and spiritual vacuity of the postwar West. Over the next twenty years, Merton wrote for a wide audience, bringing the wisdom of Christianity, Buddhism, and Sufism into dialogue with the periods contemporary thought. In Thinking through Thomas Merton, Robert Inchausti introduces readers to Merton and evaluates his continuing relevance for our time. Inchausti shows how Merton broke the high modernist trance so that we might become the change we wish to see in the world by refiguring the lost virtues of silence, contemplation, and community in a world enamored by the will to power, virtuoso performance, radical skepticism, and materialist metaphysics. Mertons defense of contemplative culture is considered in light of the postmodern thought of recent years and emerges as a compelling alternative. Inchausti explores Mertons understanding of Western Christian monasticism and provides new insights into his critique of modernity. Curt Cadorette, author of Catholicism in Social and Historical Contexts: An Introduction
Download or read book Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy written by Henry Somers-Hall and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume brings together a team of international specialists on Deleuze and Guattari to provide in-depth critical studies of each plateau of their major work, A Thousand Plateaus. It combines an overview of the text with deep scholarship and brings a renewed focus on the philosophical significance of their project.'A Thousand Plateaus' represents a whole new way of doing philosophy. This collection supports the critical reception of Deleuze and Guattari's text as one of the most important and influential works of modern theory. Key Features : emphasises the philosophical nature of A Thousand Plateaus, provides detailed coverage of the text as a whole, brings together cutting edge research from some of the leading lights in scholarship on Deleuze and Guattari, an ideal companion to a plateau-by-plateau reading of Deleuze and Guattari's work."--Back cover
Download or read book Thinking Revolution Through Film written by Hanno Berger and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-09-19 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to redefine the relationship between film and revolution. Starting with Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on the American and French Revolution, it argues that, from a theoretical perspective, revolutions can be understood as describing a relationship between time and movement and that ultimately the spectators and not the actors in a revolution decide its outcome. Focusing on the concepts of ‘time,’ ‘movement,’ and ‘spectators,’ this study develops an understanding of film not as a medium of agitation but as a way of thinking that relates to the idea of historicity that opened up with the American and French Revolution, a way of thinking that can expand our very notion of revolution. The book explores this expansion through an analysis of three audiovisual stagings of revolution: Abel Gance’s epic on the French Revolution Napoléon, Warren Beatty’s essay on the Russian Revolution Reds, and the miniseries John Adams about the American Revolution. The author thereby offers a fresh take on the questions of revolution and historicity from the perspective of film studies.
Download or read book American Literary Studies written by Michael A. Elliott and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars discuss strategies and methodology in American literary studies.
Download or read book Partita for Glenn Gould written by Georges Leroux and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2010 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A privileged look into the life of a solitary artist with an extraordinary gift for communicating art to everyone.
Download or read book Romanticism and Gender written by Anne K. Mellor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking twenty women writers of the Romantic period, Romanticism and Gender explores a neglected period of the female literary tradition, and for the first time gives a broad overview of Romantic literature from a feminist perspective.
Download or read book Adventures of the Symbolic written by Warren Breckman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marxism's collapse in the twentieth century profoundly altered the style and substance of Western European radical thought. To build a more robust form of democratic theory and action, prominent theorists moved to reject revolution, abandon class for more fragmented models of social action, and elevate the political over the social. Acknowledging the constructedness of society and politics, they chose the "symbolic" as a concept powerful enough to reinvent leftist thought outside a Marxist framework. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic, which reassessed philosophical Marxism at mid century, Warren Breckman critically revisits these thrilling experiments in the aftermath of Marxism. The post-Marxist idea of the symbolic is dynamic and complex, uncannily echoing the early German Romantics, who first advanced a modern conception of symbolism and the symbolic. Hegel and Marx denounced the Romantics for their otherworldly and nebulous posture, yet post-Marxist thinkers appreciated the rich potential of the ambiguities and paradoxes the Romantics first recognized. Mapping different ideas of the symbolic among contemporary thinkers, Breckman traces a fascinating reflection of Romantic themes and resonances, and he explores in depth the effort to reconcile a radical and democratic political agenda with a politics that does not privilege materialist understandings of the social. Engaging with the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj i ek, Breckman uniquely situates these important theorists within two hundred years of European thought and extends their profound relevance to today's political activism.
Download or read book Equality Renewed written by Christine Sypnowich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should we approach the daunting task of renewing the ideal of equality? In this book, Christine Sypnowich proposes a theory of equality centred on human flourishing or wellbeing. She argues that egalitarianism should be understood as seeking to make people more equal in the constituents of a good life. Inequality is a social ill because of the damage it does to human flourishing: unequal distribution of wealth can have the effect that some people are poorly housed, badly nourished, ill-educated, unhappy or uncultured, among other things. When we seek to make people more equal our concern is not just resources or property, but how people fare under one distribution or another. Ultimately, the best answer to the question, ‘equality of what?,’ is some conception of flourishing, since whatever policies or principles we adopt, it is flourishing that we hope will be more equal as a result of our endeavours. Sypnowich calls for both retrieval and innovation. What is to be retrieved is the ideal of equality itself, which is often assumed as a background condition of theories of justice, yet at the same time, dismissed as too homogenising, abstract and rigid a criterion for political argument. We must retrieve the ideal of equality as a central political principle. In doing so, she casts doubt on the value of focussing on cultural difference, and rejects the idea of neutrality that dominates contemporary political philosophy in favour of a view of the state as enabling the betterment of its citizens.
Download or read book The Ethics of Theory written by Robert Doran and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Ethics of Theory, Robert Doran offers the first broad assessment of the ethical challenges of Critical Theory across the humanities and social sciences, calling into question the sharp dichotomy typically drawn between the theoretical and the ethical, the analytical and the prescriptive. In a series of discrete but interrelated interventions, Doran exposes the ethical underpinnings of theoretical discourses that are often perceived as either oblivious to or highly skeptical of any attempt to define ethics or politics. Doran thus discusses a variety of themes related to the problematic status of ethics or the ethico-political in Theory: the persistence of existentialist ethics in structuralist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial writing; the ethical imperative of the return of the subject (self-creation versus social conformism); the intimate relation between the ethico-political and the aesthetic (including the role of literary history in Erich Auerbach and Edward Said); the political implications of a “philosophy of the present” for Continental thought (including Heidegger's Nazism); the ethical dimension of the debate between history and theory (including Hayden White's idea of the “practical past” and the question of Holocaust representation); the “ethical turn” in Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty; the post-1987 “political turn” in literary and cultural studies (especially as influenced by Said). Drawing from a broad range of Continental philosophers and cultural theorists, including many texts that have only recently become available, Doran charts a new path that recognizes the often complex motivations that underlie the critical impulse, motivations that are not always apparent or avowed.
