Download or read book The Place of Imagination written by Joseph R. Wiebe and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wendell Berry teaches us to love our places--to pay careful attention to where we are, to look beyond and within, and to live in ways that are not captive to the mastery of cultural, social, or economic assumptions about our life in these places. Creation has its own integrity and demands that we confront it. In The Place of Imagination, Joseph R. Wiebe argues that this confrontation is precisely what shapes our moral capacity to respond to people and to places. Wiebe contends that Berry manifests this moral imagination most acutely in his fiction. Berry's fiction, however, does not portray an average community or even an ideal one. Instead, he depicts broken communities in broken places--sites and relations scarred by the routines of racial wounds and ecological harm. Yet, in the tracing of Berry's characters with place-based identities, Wiebe demonstrates the way in which Berry's fiction comes to embody Berry's own moral imagination. By joining these ambassadors of Berry's moral imagination in their fictive journeys, readers, too, can allow imagination to transform their affection, thereby restoring place as a facilitator of identity as well as hope for healed and whole communities. Loving place translates into loving people, which in turn transforms broken human narratives into restored lives rooted and ordered by their places.
Download or read book Imagination in Place written by Wendell Berry and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2010-01-10 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Berry's latest collection of essays is the reminiscence of a literary life. It is a book that acknowledges a lifetime of intellectual influences, and in doing so, positions Berry more squarely as a cornerstone of American literature . . . A necessary book. Here, Berry's place as the 'grandfather of slow food' or the 'prophet of rural living' is not questioned. This book ensures we understand the depth and breadth of Berry's art.” —San Francisco Chronicle “[A] stellar collection . . . Foodies, architects, transportation engineers, and other writers are adopting and adapting [Berry’s] concepts, perhaps leading to what he envisions will one day be 'an authentic settlement of our country.'“ —The Oregonian A writer who can imagine the “community belonging to its place” is one who has applied his knowledge and citizenship to achieve the goal to which Wendell Berry has always aspired—to be a native to his own local culture. And for Berry, what is “local, fully imagined, becomes universal,” and the “local” is to know one's place and allow the imagination to inspire and instill “a practical respect for what is there besides ourselves." In Imagination in Place, we travel to the local cultures of several writers important to Berry's life and work, from Wallace Stegner's great West and Ernest Gaines' Louisiana plantation life to Donald Hall's New England, and on to the Western frontier as seen through the Far East lens of Gary Snyder. Berry laments today's dispossessed and displaced, those writers and people with no home and no citizenship, but he argues that there is hope for the establishment of new local cultures in both the practical and literary sense. Rich with Berry's personal experience of life as a Kentucky agrarian, the collection includes portraits of a few of America's most imaginative writers, including James Still, Hayden Carruth, Jane Kenyon, John Haines, and several others.
Download or read book The Republic of Imagination written by Azar Nafisi and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller The author of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with the next chapter of her life in books—a passionate and deeply moving hymn to America Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics of English and American literature to her eager students in Iran. In this electrifying follow-up, she argues that fiction is just as threatened—and just as invaluable—in America today. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination. Nafisi invites committed readers everywhere to join her as citizens of what she calls the Republic of Imagination, a country with no borders and few restrictions, where the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.
Download or read book Locating Imagination in Popular Culture written by Nicky van Es and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people’s favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology.
Download or read book The Field of Imagination written by Scott M. Cleary and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-09-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America’s Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine is best remembered as the pamphleteer who inspired the American Revolution. Yet few also know him as an eighteenth-century poet of considerable repute. In The Field of Imagination, Scott Cleary offers the first book on Paine’s poetry, exploring how poetry written both by and about Paine is central to understanding his development as a political theorist. Despite his claim in The Age of Reason that he was abandoning poetry because it led too much into the "field of imagination," Paine never completely left poetry behind. He took advantage of his position as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine to situate his poetry in relation to the magazine’s tacit support of American independence. He drew on two British poets, James Thomson and Charles Churchill, to provide revealing epigraphs for his major early works in support of that independence, and in turn he himself became an influence on early American poets such as Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau. Paine’s poetry has until now been largely relegated to the status of scholarly curiosity. But whether through his own poetry, his thoughts on the place and function of poetry in the Age of Reason, or his deep influence on the poetry of the early American republic, Paine’s involvement in poetical craft provides a lens onto the unique and tempestuous literary culture of the eighteenth century.
Download or read book The Bioregional Imagination written by Tom Lynch and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bioregionalism is an innovative way of thinking about place and planet from an ecological perspective. Although bioregional ideas occur regularly in ecocritical writing, until now no systematic effort has been made to outline the principles of bioregional literary criticism and to use it as a way to read, write, understand, and teach literature. The twenty-four original essays here are written by an outstanding selection of international scholars. The range of bioregions covered is global and includes such diverse places as British Columbia's Meldrum Creek and Italy's Po River Valley, the Arctic and the Outback. There are even forays into cyberspace and outer space. In their comprehensive introduction, the editors map the terrain of the bioregional movement, including its history and potential to inspire and invigorate place-based and environmental literary criticism. Responding to bioregional tenets, this volume is divided into four sections. The essays in the “Reinhabiting” section narrate experiments in living-in-place and restoring damaged environments. The “Rereading” essays practice bioregional literary criticism, both by examining texts with strong ties to bioregional paradigms and by opening other, less-obvious texts to bioregional analysis. In “Reimagining,” the essays push bioregionalism to evolve—by expanding its corpus of texts, coupling its perspectives with other approaches, or challenging its core constructs. Essays in the “Renewal” section address bioregional pedagogy, beginning with local habitat studies and concluding with musings about the Internet. In response to the environmental crisis, we must reimagine our relationship to the places we inhabit. This volume shows how literature and literary studies are fundamental tools to such a reimagining.
Download or read book Food in Memory and Imagination written by Beth Forrest and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we engage with food through memory and imagination? This expansive volume spans time and space to illustrate how, through food, people have engaged with the past, the future, and their alternative presents. Beth M. Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice have brought together first-class contributions, from both established and up-and-coming scholars, to consider how imagination and memory intertwine and sometimes diverge. Chapters draw on cases around the world-including Iran, Italy, Japan, Kenya, and the US-and include topics such as national identity, food insecurity, and the phenomenon of knowledge. Contributions represent a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. This volume is a veritable feast for the contemporary food studies scholar.
Download or read book Places of the Imagination written by Dr Stijn Reijnders and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-01-28 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the phenomenon of people visiting locations from popular novels, films or television series. Places of the Imagination presents a timely and insightful analysis of this form of media tourism, exploring the question of how best to explain the increasing popularity of media tourism within contemporary culture. Drawing on extensive empirical and interview material, this book examines the representation of landscapes in popular narratives that have inspired media tourism, whilst also investigating the effects over time of such tourism on local landscapes, and the processes by which tourists appropriate the landscape, experiencing and accommodating them into their imagination. Oriented around three central case studies of popular television detective shows, famous films and classic literature, Places of the Imagination develops a new theoretical understanding of media tourism. As such, it will appeal to sociologists and cultural geographers, as well as those working in the fields of media and cultural studies, popular and fan culture, tourism and the sociology of leisure.
Download or read book Place Identity and National Imagination in Post war Taiwan written by Bi-yu Chang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the struggles for political and cultural hegemony that Taiwan has witnessed since the 1980s, the focal point in contesting narratives and the key battlefield in the political debates are primarily spatial and place-based. The major fault line appears to be a split between an imposed identity emphasizing cultural origin (China) and an emphasis on the recovery of place identity of ‘the local’ (Taiwan). Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan explores the ever-present issue of identity in Taiwan from a spatial perspective, and focuses on the importance of, and the relationship between, state spatiality and identity formation. Taking postwar Taiwan as a case study, the book examines the ways in which the Kuomintang regime naturalized its political control, territorialized the island and created a nationalist geography. In so doing, it examines how, why and to what extent power is exercised through the place-making process and considers the relationship between official versions of ‘ROC geography’ and the islanders’ shifting perceptions of the ‘nation’. In turn, by addressing the relationship between the state and the imagined community, Bi-yu Chang establishes a dialogue between place and cultural identity to analyse the constant changing and shaping of Chinese and Taiwanese identity. With a diverse selection of case studies including cartographical development, geography education, territorial declaration and urban planning, this interdisciplinary book will have a broad appeal across Taiwan studies, geography, cultural studies, history and politics.
Download or read book The Moral Imagination written by John Paul Lederach and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in hardcover in 2005.
Download or read book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet written by Ursula K. Heise and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-29 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sense of Place and Sense of Planet analyzes the relationship between the imagination of the global and the ethical commitment to the local in environmentalist thought and writing from the 1960s to the present. Part One critically examines the emphasis on local identities and communities in North American environmentalism by establishing conceptual connections between environmentalism and ecocriticism, on one hand, and theories of globalization, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, on the other. It proposes the concept of "eco-cosmopolitanism" as a shorthand for envisioning these connections and the cultural and aesthetic forms into which they translate. Part Two focuses on conceptualizations of environmental danger and connects environmentalist and ecocritical thought with the interdisciplinary field of risk theory in the social sciences, arguing that environmental justice theory and ecocriticism stand to benefit from closer consideration of the theories of cosmopolitanism that have arisen in this field from the analysis of transnational communities at risk. Both parts of the book combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed analyses of novels, poems, films, computer software and installation artworks from the US and abroad that translate new connections between global, national and local forms of awareness into innovative aesthetic forms combining allegory, epic, and views of the planet as a whole with modernist and postmodernist strategies of fragmentation, montage, collage, and zooming.
Download or read book The Way of Imagination written by Scott Russell Sanders and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prize–winning essayist turns to the imagination as a spiritual guide and material method of living through climate disruption, as climate change and broad extinction forever alter our place on the planet and our lives together. Scott Russell Sanders shows how imagination, linked to compassion, can help us solve the urgent ecological and social challenges we face. While reflecting on the conditions needed for human flourishing, he tells the story of his own intellectual and moral journey from childhood religion to an adult philosophy of life. That philosophy is tested when his first wife and then their son fall ill. Compelled to leave their beloved old house, they design a new one, and then transform their vision into a home and their raw city lot into a garden.
Download or read book Harry Potter Imagination written by Travis Prinzi and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-28 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality." Those words, written by Plutarch and quoted by J.K. Rowling in her 2008 Harvard commencement speech, sum up both the Harry Potter series and Travis Prinzi's analysis of the best-selling books in Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds. Great imaginative literature places the readers between two worlds - the story world and the world of daily life - and challenges readers to imagine and to act for a better world. Starting with Harry Potter's great themes, Harry Potter & Imagination takes readers on a journey through the transformative power of those themes for both the individual and for culture by placing Rowling's series in its literary, historical, and cultural contexts. Prinzi explores how fairy stories in general, and Harry Potter in specific, are not merely tales that are read to "escape from the real world," but stories with the power to transform by teaching us to imagine better. "Harry Potter & Imagination offers a challenging and rewarding tour of the inspirations for and meanings behind J.K. Rowling's lauded series. Travis Prinzi ably explores how the Harry Potter books satisfy fundamental human yearnings, utilize mythological archetypes, and embody their author's social vision. From Arthurian romance and Lovecraftian horror to postmodernism and political theory, Prinzi provides new insights into the Harry Potter phenomenon. Harry Potter & Imagination will not only fascinate and entertain readers, but will also convince them that fairy tales matter." [Dr. Amy H. Sturgis, editor of Past Watchful Dragons] "There is no more insightful commenter on the Harry Potter novels than Travis Prinzi - and Harry Potter & Imagination is an ideal showcase for his original thinking and lucid writing. This trail-blazing guidebook into the world of Harry Potter - showing the imaginative way between two worlds - is a must read." [John Granger, author of The Deathly Hallows Lectures and other books]
Download or read book The Environmental Imagination written by Lawrence Buell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-01 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination, a need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity's relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in The Environmental Imagination, the most ambitious study to date of how literature represents the natural environment. With Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone, Buell gives us a far-reaching account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more "ecocentric" way of being. In doing so, he provides a major new understanding of Thoreau's achievement and, at the same time, a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature. The green tradition in American writing commands Buell's special attention, particularly environmental nonfiction from colonial times to the present. In works by writers from Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry, John Muir to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson to Leslie Silko, Mary Austin to Edward Abbey, he examines enduring environmental themes such as the dream of relinquishment, the personification of the nonhuman, an attentiveness to environmental cycles, a devotion to place, and a prophetic awareness of possible ecocatastrophe. At the center of this study we find an image of Walden as a quest for greater environmental awareness, an impetus and guide for Buell as he develops a new vision of environmental writing and seeks a new way of conceiving the relation between human imagination and environmental actuality in the age of industrialization. Intricate and challenging in its arguments, yet engagingly and elegantly written, The Environmental Imagination is a major work of scholarship, one that establishes a new basis for reading American nature writing.
Download or read book Escape to the Hiding Place written by Marianne Hering and published by Imagination Station Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When the cousins hide at a farm with Dutch Resistance workers, they are given a secret mission: smuggling a Jewish baby to her mother" --P. [4] of cover.
Download or read book Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination written by Frederick Burwick and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Space Place and Hybridity in the National Imagination written by Christine Vandamme and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores space, place and hybridity in today’s multicultural societies with a strong emphasis on the role of art and spatial representations, in order to map out the complexity of modern nations and celebrate the creative powers of their highly dynamic communities and cultures. It considers how the very idea of the nation has evolved since the emergence and development of the idea of the nation-state at the end of the eighteenth century, and how art can reinvigorate representations of nation-states worldwide without relegating their minorities to the margin. Instead of merely focusing on the role of place and land in national representations, the book adopts a wider and more critical approach to space in the arts by investigating the notions of both hybridity and Bhabha’s “Third Space” in the fields of aesthetics, film studies and literature, with a particular emphasis on postcolonial literature.
