Download or read book The Mechanic Muse written by Hugh Kenner and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugh Kenner, one of America's most distinguished critics, brings his customary wit and erudition to bear on a particularly provocative theme: the response of literary Modernism to a changing environment wrought by technology. In fascinating examinations of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Beckett, Kenner looks at how inventions like the linotype, the typewriter, the subway, and the computer altered the way the world was viewed and depicted. Kenner sheds new light on the works of these authors, while providing, almost incidentally, a wealth of anecdotes and asides that will delight the general reader and literary specialist alike.
Download or read book The Companion to The Mechanical Muse The Piano Pianism and Piano Music c 1760 1850 written by Derek Carew and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended as a supplement to The Mechanical Muse: The Piano, Pianism and Piano Music, c.1760-1850, this Companion provides additional information which, largely for reasons of space but also of continuity, it was not possible or desirable to include in that volume. The book is laid out alphabetically and full biographical entries are provided for all musical figures mentioned, including composers, performers, theoreticians and teachers, as well as piano makers and publishers of music, within the period covered by The Mechanical Muse. There are also entries on figures of importance from outside the period but whose influence is palpably important within it, such as J.S. Bach. As well as biographical information, all these entries contain lists of principal works and a section on further reading so that readers can follow up people and matters of particular interest. Also included in The Companion are entries devoted to particular works and other information of relevance, such as descriptions of musical forms, characteristics of dances and so on, as well as some technical information on music and explanations of technical terms pertaining to keyboard instruments themselves and to ways of playing them. This Companion is not intended to replace existing reference books such as Grove or Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, but will be useful for those who desire to know more about a particular topic and do not necessarily have access to more specialist reference works, or time to visit large or specialist libraries. As such it is indispensable to users of The Mechanical Muse.
Download or read book The Mechanical Muse The Piano Pianism and Piano Music c 1760 1850 written by Derek Carew and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the piano's accession from musical curiosity to cultural icon, examining the instrument itself in its various guises as well as the music written for it. Both the piano and piano music were very much the product of the intellectual, cultural and social environments of the period and both were subject to many influences, directly and indirectly. These included character (individualism), the vernacular ('folk/popular') and creativity (improvisation), all of which are discussed generally and with respect to the music itself. Derek Carew surveys the most important pianistic genres of the period (variations, rondos, and so on), showing how these changed from their received forms into vehicles of Romantic expressiveness. The piano is also looked at in its role as an accompanying instrument. The Mechanical Muse will be of interest to anyone who loves the piano or the period, from the non-specialist to the music postgraduate.
Download or read book The Mechanical Muse The Piano Pianism and Piano Music c 1760 850 written by Derek Carew and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the piano's accession from musical curiosity to cultural icon, examining the instrument itself in its various guises as well as the music written for it. Both the piano and piano music were very much the product of the intellectual, cultural and social environments of the period and both were subject to many influences, directly and indirectly. These included character (individualism), the vernacular ('folk/popular') and creativity (improvisation), all of which are discussed generally and with respect to the music itself. Derek Carew surveys the most important pianistic genres of the period (variations, rondos, and so on), showing how these changed from their received forms into vehicles of Romantic expressiveness. The piano is also looked at in its role as an accompanying instrument. The Mechanical Muse will be of interest to anyone who loves the piano or the period, from the non-specialist to the music postgraduate.
Download or read book The Muse in the Machine written by T. R. Hummer and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music, race, politics, and conscience. In these eight essays written over the span of a decade and a half, T. R. Hummer explains how, for him, such abiding concerns revolve around the practice of poetry and the evolution of a culturally responsible personal poetics. Hummer writes about the suicide of poet Vachel Lindsay, the culture wars at the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the divided soul of his native American South, and the salving, transcendent practice of musicianship. Inevitably entwined with a personal or cultural component, Hummer's criticism is thus grounded in experience that is always familiar and often straight to the heart in its rightness. In one of those statements of "poetic purpose" that goes hand in hand with a residency, guest editorship, or lecture tour, Hummer once wrote that "poetry inhabits and enunciates an incommensurable zone between individual and collective, between body and body politic, an area very ill-negotiated by most of us most of the time. Our culture, with its emphasis on the individual mind and body, teaches us very little about how even to think about the nature of this problem. . . . E pluribus unum is a smokescreen: what pluribus; what unum? And yet this phrase is an American mantra, as if it explained something." This is a quintessential Hummer moment: a writer has just given himself a good reason to quit. What Hummer knows must happen next is what The Muse in the Machine is all about.
Download or read book The mechanical muse written by Ivanka Kovacevich and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book World of Aetaltis Gamemaster s Guide written by Marc Tassin and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the World of Aetaltis fantasy campaign setting for 5E.
Download or read book A Muse and a Maze written by Peter Turchi and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his characteristic talent for finding the connections between writing and the stuff of our lives (most notably in his earlier hit Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer), Peter Turchi ventures into new, and even more surprising, territory. In A Muse and a Maze, Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and puzzle-making and its flip side, puzzle-solving. He teases out how mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling. And he uncovers the magic—the creation of credible illusion—that writers share with the likes of Houdini and master magicians. In Turchi’s associative narrative, we learn about the history of puzzles, their obsessive quality, and that Benjamin Franklin was a devotee of an ancient precursor of sudoku called Magic Squares. Applying this rich backdrop to the requirements of writing, Turchi reveals as much about the human psyche as he does about the literary imagination and the creative process. With the goal of giving writers new ways to think about their work and readers new ways to consider the books they encounter, A Muse and a Maze suggests ways in which every piece of writing is a kind of puzzle. The work argues that literary writing is defined, at least in part, by its embrace of mystery; offers tangrams as a model for the presentation of complex characters; compares a writer’s relationship to his or her narrator to magicians and wizards; offers the maze and the labyrinth as alternatives to the more common notion of the narrative line; and concludes with a discussion of how readers and writers, like puzzle solvers, not only tolerate but find pleasure in difficulty. While always balancing erudition with accessibility, Turchi examines the work of writers as various as A. A. Milne, Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, Anton Chekhov, Alison Bechdel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Antonya Nelson, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles D’Ambrosio, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Thomas Bernhard, and Mark Twain, elaborating and illuminating ways in which their works expand and deliver on the title’s double entendre, A Muse and a Maze. With 100 images that range from movie stills from Citizen Kane and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to examples of sudokus, crosswords, and other puzzles; from Norman Rockwell’s famous triple self-portrait to artwork by Charles Richie; and from historical arcana to today’s latest magic, A Muse and a Maze offers prose exposition, images, text quotations, and every available form of wisdom, leading the reader step-by-step through passages from stories and novels to demonstrate, with remarkable clarity, how writers evolve their eventual creations.
Download or read book Champions of Aetaltis written by Erin M. Evans and published by . This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of adventure stories set in the fantasy world of Aetaltis.
Download or read book Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age written by Ross Thomson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-05-08 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States registered phenomenal economic growth between the establishment of the new republic and the end of the Civil War. This study argues that the transition of the United States from an agrarian economy in 1790 to an industrial leader in 1865 relied fundamentally on the spread of technological knowledge within and across industries.
Download or read book Manufacturing the Muse written by Dennis G. Waring and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-29 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a 19th century instrument helped to shape New World culture.
Download or read book Thinking with Objects written by Domenico Bertoloni Meli and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-11-17 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Bertoloni Meli reexamines such major texts as Galileo's Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Descartes' Principles of Philosophy, and Newton's Principia, and in them finds a reliance on objects that has escaped proper understanding. From Pappus of Alexandria to Guidobaldo dal Monte, Bertoloni Meli sees significant developments in the history of mechanical experimentation, all of them crucial for understanding Galileo. Bertoloni Meli uses similarities and tensions between dal Monte and Galileo as a springboard for exploring the revolutionary nature of seventeenth-century mechanics.' (Back cover)
Download or read book Smith Blue written by Camille T. Dungy and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2011-05-18 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Smith Blue, Camille T. Dungy offers a survival guide for the modern heart as she takes on twenty-first-century questions of love, loss, and nature. From a myriad of lenses, these poems examine the human capability for perseverance in the wake of heartbreak; the loss of beloved heroes and landscapes; and our determination in the face of everyday struggles. Dungy explores the dual nature of our presence on the planet, juxtaposing the devastation caused by human habitation with our own vulnerability to the capricious whims of our environment. In doing so, she reveals with fury and tenderness the countless ways in which we both create and are victims of catastrophe. This searing collection delves into the most intimate transformations wrought by our ever-shifting personal, cultural, and physical terrains, each fraught with both disillusionment and hope. In the end, Dungy demonstrates how we are all intertwined, regardless of race or species, living and loving as best we are able in the shadows of both man-made and natural follies. Flight It is the day after the leaves, when buckeyes, like a thousand thousand pendulums, clock trees, and squirrels, fat in their winter fur, chuckle hours, chortle days. It is the time for the parting of our ways. You slid into the summer of my sleeping, crept into my lonely hours, ate the music of my dreams. You filled yourself with the treated sweet I offered, then shut your rolling eyes and stole my sleep. Came morning and me awake. Came morning. Awake, I walked twelve miles to the six-gun shop. On the way there I saw a bird-of-prayer all furled up by the river. I called to it. It would not unfold. On the way home I killed it. It is the time of the waking cold, when buckeyes, like a thousand thousand metronomes, tock time, and you, fat on my summer sleep, titter toward me, walk away. It is the time for the parting of our days.
Download or read book Absolute Music Mechanical Reproduction written by Arved Mark Ashby and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Arved Ashby writes with a keen sense of the historical processes, ironies, and reversals that seem to characterize the ways that musicologists think about, and contemporary listeners experience, works and performance. This book is a major contribution to the burgeoning body of critical musicological literature on recordings; anybody interested in that field, or in the question of the 'artwork' in the contemporary world, needs to read this book--which fortunately, is a great pleasure to do."--Adam Krims, author of Music and Urban Geography "The relationship between classical music and recording is strangely conflicted: on the one hand recorded music is the perfect realization of aesthetic autonomy, on the other hand it commodifies music and transforms its role within society. Ashby's book offers a penetrating analysis of these cultural conflicts, showing how technological developments from the phonogram to the mp3 have changed our basic sense of what music is as well as the ways in which we consume it. What emerges from this sustained study of the relationship between technology and values is a view of classical musical culture that is both richer and truer to life."--Nicholas Cook, author of A Guide to Musical Analysis "Lively and persuasive. Ashby has the enviable, rare ability to lead the reader comfortably through highly complex material without oversimplifying. This is a must-read for composers, music theorists, performers, musicologists, critics, and anyone with an interest in classical music beyond the elementary level."--Jonathan Dunsby, author of Performing Music
Download or read book The Intelligence of a Machine written by Jean Epstein and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advent of the cinema radically altered our comprehension of time, space, and reality. With his experience as a pioneering avant-garde filmmaker, Jean Epstein uses the universes created by the cinematograph to deconstruct our understanding of how time and space, reality and unreality, continuity and discontinuity, determinism and randomness function both inside and outside the cinema. Time, he says, should be regarded as the first, not the fourth, dimension—and the cinematograph allows us, for the first time, to manipulate it in directions and speeds of our choosing. The theoretical work of Jean Epstein greatly influenced later generations of cinema philosophers, notably Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, but the bulk of his work remains unpublished. The Intelligence of a Machine, his first major title published in English, is one of the earliest philosophies of cinema.
Download or read book The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical written by Mauro F. Guillén and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-26 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not a traditional architectural history but rather a sociological study of the profession of architecture during its early modernist period, this text provides an understanding of the degree to which modernist architecture emerged from a tradition of engineering and industrial management.
Download or read book The Monster in the Machine written by Zakiya Hanafi and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Monster in the Machine tracks the ways in which human beings were defined in contrast to supernatural and demonic creatures during the time of the Scientific Revolution. Zakiya Hanafi recreates scenes of Italian life and culture from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries to show how monsters were conceptualized at this particular locale and historical juncture—a period when the sacred was being supplanted by a secular, decidedly nonmagical way of looking at the world. Noting that the word “monster” is derived from the Latin for “omen” or “warning,” Hanafi explores the monster’s early identity as a portent or messenger from God. Although monsters have always been considered “whatever we are not,” they gradually were tranformed into mechanical devices when new discoveries in science and medicine revealed the mechanical nature of the human body. In analyzing the historical literature of monstrosity, magic, and museum collections, Hanafi uses contemporary theory and the philosophy of technology to illuminate the timeless significance of the monster theme. She elaborates the association between women and the monstrous in medical literature and sheds new light on the work of Vico—particularly his notion of the conatus—by relating it to Vico’s own health. By explicating obscure and fascinating texts from such disciplines as medicine and poetics, she invites the reader to the piazzas and pulpits of seventeenth-century Naples, where poets, courtiers, and Jesuit preachers used grotesque figures of speech to captivate audiences with their monstrous wit. Drawing from a variety of texts from medicine, moral philosophy, and poetics, Hanafi’s guided tour through this baroque museum of ideas will interest readers in comparative literature, Italian literature, history of ideas, history of science, art history, poetics, women’s studies, and philosophy.
