Download or read book The Virtues of Disillusionment written by Steven Heighton and published by Athabasca University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people go through life chasing illusions of success, fame, wealth, happiness, and few things are more painful than the reality-revealing loss of an illusion. But if illusions are negative, why is the opposite, being disillusioned, also negative? In this essay based on his inaugural writer-in-residence lecture at Athabasca University, internationally acclaimed writer Steven Heighton mathematically evaluates the paradox of disillusionment and the negative aspects of hope. Drawing on writers such as Herman Melville, Leonard Cohen, Kate Chopin, and Thich Nhat Hanh, Heighton considers the influence of illusions on creativity, art, and society. This meditation on language and philosophy reveals the virtues of being disillusioned and, perhaps, the path to freedom.
Download or read book The Virtues of Disillusionment written by Steven Heighton and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reaching Mithymna written by Steven Heighton and published by Biblioasis. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE 2020 HILARY WESTON WRITERS’ TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • A New York Times New & Noteworthy Book • A CBC Best Nonfiction Book of 2020 • A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book for 2020 “Combining his poetic sensibilities and storytelling skills with a documentarian’s eye, [Heighton] has created a wrenching narrative.”—2020 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury In the fall of 2015, Steven Heighton made an overnight decision to travel to the frontlines of the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and enlist as a volunteer. He arrived on the isle of Lesvos with a duffel bag and a dubious grasp of Greek, his mother's native tongue, and worked on the landing beaches and in OXY-—a jerrybuilt, ad hoc transit camp providing simple meals, dry clothes, and a brief rest to refugees after their crossing from Turkey. In a town deserted by the tourists that had been its lifeblood, Heighton-—alongside the exhausted locals and under-equipped international aid workers—-found himself thrown into emergency roles for which he was woefully unqualified. From the brief reprieves of volunteer-refugee soccer matches to the riots of Camp Moria, Reaching Mithymna is a firsthand account of the crisis and an engaged exploration of the borders that divide us and the ties that bind.
Download or read book Fears of a Setting Sun written by Dennis C. Rasmussen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surprising story of how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson came to despair for the future of the nation they had created Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them—including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—came to deem America’s constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation. Fears of a Setting Sun is the first book to tell the fascinating and too-little-known story of the founders’ disillusionment. As Dennis Rasmussen shows, the founders’ pessimism had a variety of sources: Washington lost his faith in America’s political system above all because of the rise of partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was too weak, Adams because he believed that the people lacked civic virtue, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions laid bare by the spread of slavery. The one major founder who retained his faith in America’s constitutional order to the end was James Madison, and the book also explores why he remained relatively optimistic when so many of his compatriots did not. As much as Americans today may worry about their country’s future, Rasmussen reveals, the founders faced even graver problems and harbored even deeper misgivings. A vividly written account of a chapter of American history that has received too little attention, Fears of a Setting Sun will change the way that you look at the American founding, the Constitution, and indeed the United States itself.
Download or read book Illusion Disillusion and Irony in Psychoanalysis written by John Steiner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-22 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illusion, Disillusion, and Irony in Psychoanalysis explores and develops the role of illusion and daydream in everyday life, and in psychoanalysis. Using both clinical examples and literary works, idealised illusions and the inevitable disillusion that is met when reality makes an impact, are carefully explored. Idealised phantasies which involve a timeless universe inevitably lead to disillusion in the face of reality which introduces an awareness of time, ageing, and eventually death. If the illusions are recognised as phantasy rather than treated as fact, the ideal can be internalised as a symbol and serve as a measure of excellence. Steiner shows that the cruelty of truth needs to be recognised, as well as the deceptive nature of illusion, and that relinquishing omnipotence is a critical and difficult developmental task that is relived in analysis. Illusion, Disillusion, and Irony in Psychoanalysis will be of great use to the psychoanalyst or psychotherapist seeking to understand the patient’s withdrawal into a phantasy world, and the struggle to allow the impact of reality.
Download or read book Gustav Mahler Volume 3 Vienna Triumph and Disillusion 1904 1907 written by Henry-Louis de La Grange and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 1056 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the second volume of de La Grange's monumental study of Mahler appeared, it was hailed in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications as an indispensable portrait of the great composer. Here at last is the third volume of this magisterial work. Ranging from 1904 to 1907, it explores Mahler's final years as administrator, producer, and conductor of the Vienna Opera. It was a time of intense inner struggle, with Mahler's energy and creative powers drained by the competing demands of running the Hofoper and struggling for recognition as a composer. And they were tragic years as well, especially 1907, Mahler's last year in Vienna, when the death of his daughter and the diagnosis of heart disease forced him to leave the Opera. Throughout the book, de La Grange offers true-to-life portraits of Mahler the human being, the family man, and the composer, and he weaves in innumerable testimonies and anecdotes that throw new light on the great composer's complex personality. The product of forty years of research, here is the definitive study of a musical giant. It is, as The Wall Street Journal said of volume two, "a work of the first importance, one that nobody seriously interested in Mahler can possibly afford to skip."
Download or read book The Radical Pursuit of Rest written by John Koessler and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether in our careers, churches, schools or families, busyness is the norm, and anything less makes us feel unproductive and anxious. John Koessler understands that rest is not automatic or easy to attain. With honest, biblical reflections on trends in our culture and churches, he presents a unique perspective on how pursuing rest leads us to the heart of God.
Download or read book Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion written by María de Zayas y Sotomayor and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of María de Zayas’s popularity in the mid-eighteenth century, the number of editions in print of her work was exceeded only by the novels of Cervantes. But by the end of the nineteenth century, Zayas had been excluded from the Spanish literary canon because of her gender and the sociopolitical changes that swept Spain and Europe. Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion gathers a representative sample of seven stories, which features Zayas’s signature topics—gender equality and domestic violence—written in an impassioned tone overlaid with conservative Counter-Reformation ideology. This edition updates the scholarship since the most recent English translations, with a new introduction to Zayas’s entire body of stories, and restores Zayas’s author’s note and prologue, omitted from previous English-language editions. Tracing her slow but steady progress from notions of ideal love to love’s treachery, Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion will restore Zayas to her rightful place in modern letters.
Download or read book History and Utopian Disillusion written by Jun Young Lee and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canonical but controversial works of radical modernism, John Dos Passos' novels continue to intrigue readers and challenge literary critics with their unique styles and provocative messages. This book offers an insightful and refreshing perspective on his fictional world, exploring the historical vision and utopian aspirations of his early novels in light of their dialectical politics in narrating modern American society. History and Utopian Disillusion convincingly shows that Dos Passos' epic-scale project is a radical hymn of faith dialectically inspiring the utopian resolution of American history by presenting entropic despair and disillusionment.
Download or read book Six Masters in Disillusion written by Algar Thorold and published by . This book was released on 1909 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bitter Knowledge written by Thomas D. Eisele and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bitter Knowledge examines the Socratic method in three fundamental Platonic dialogues, Protagoras, Meno, and Theaetetus, contending that the method is really a cyclical one of disillusionment and renewal.
Download or read book Decade of Disillusion written by David McKie and published by Springer. This book was released on 1972-06-18 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hope and Christian Ethics written by David Elliot and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theological virtue of hope has long been neglected in Christian ethics. However, as social, civic and global anxieties mount, the need to overcome despair has become urgent. This book proposes the theological virtue of hope as a promising source of rejuvenation. Theological hope sustains us from the sloth, presumption and despair that threaten amid injustice, tragedy and dying; it provides an ultimate meaning and transcendent purpose to our lives; and it rejoices and refreshes us 'on the way' with the prospect of eternal beatitude. Rather than degrading this life and world, hope ordains earthly goods to our eschatological end, forming us to pursue social justice with a resilience and vitality that transcend the cynicism and disillusionment so widespread at present. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas and virtue ethics, the book shows how the virtue of hope contributes to human happiness in this life and not just the next.
Download or read book The Virtues of Vulnerability written by Sara Rushing and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the liberal tradition, the physical body has been treated as a focus of rights discussion and a source of economic and democratic value; it needs protection but it is also one's dominion, tool, and property, and thus something over which we should be able to exercise free will. However, the day-to-day reality of how we live in our bodies and how we make choices about them is not something over which we can exercise full control. In this way, embodiment mirrors life in a pluralist body politic: we are interdependent and vulnerable, exposed with and to others while desiring agency. As disability, feminist, and critical race scholars have all suggested, barriers to bodily control are often a problem of public and political will and social and economic structures that render relationality and caring responsibilities private, invisible, and low value. These scholarly traditions firmly maintain the importance of bodily integrity and self-determination, but make clear that autonomy is not a matter of mere non-interference but rather requires extensive material and social support. Autonomy is thus totally intertwined with, not opposed to, vulnerability. Put another way, the pursuit of autonomy requires practices of humility. Given this, what do we learn about agency and self-determination, as well as trust, self-knowledge, dependence, and resistance under such conditions of acute vulnerability? The Virtues of Vulnerability looks at the question of how we navigate "choice" and control over our bodies when it comes to conditions like birth, illness, and death, particularly as they are experienced within mainstream medical institutions operating under the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. There is often a deep disconnect between what people say they want in navigating birth, illness, and death, and what they actually experience through all of these life events. Practices such as informed consent, the birth plan, advanced directives, and the patient satisfaction survey typically offer a thin and unreliable version of self-determination. In reality, "choice" in these instances is encumbered and often determined by our vulnerability at the most critical moments. This book looks at the ways in which we navigate birth, illness, and death in order to think about how vulnerability and humility can inform political will. Overall, the book asks under what conditions vulnerability and interdependence enhance or diminish our sense of ourselves as agents. In exploring this question it aims to produce a new vocabulary for democratic politics, highlighting traits that have profound political implications in terms of how citizens aspire, struggle, relate to, and persevere with each other.
Download or read book The Arts of Rule written by Sharon R. Krause and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2009-01-16 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two generations of students inspired by Harvey Mansfield come together here to demonstrate how their diverse approaches illuminate the topic of the arts of rule and speak to the wide scope of Mansfield's contributions. The essays collected here cover both ancient and modern ground. The first section covers topics such as Xenophon's question of what it is to be a gentleman, Aristotle's view of friendship, Montaigne's account of the highest good, and Montesquieu's elevation of modesty. The second section engages Machiavelli's political theory and its influence on subsequent thinkers, such as Bacon, Hobbes, and Hume. Authors in the third section examine the sources, conditions, and practices of freedom in the context of modern politics, drawing on writers from Shakespeare to Tocqueville to shed light on contemporary debates. The arts of rule cover the exercise of power by princes and popular sovereigns, but they range beyond the domain of government itself, extending to civil associations, political parties, and religious institutions. Artful rule both directs the use of authority toward a specific end and posits a more comprehensive vision of the best way of life for human beings. Making full use of political philosophy and benefiting from a range of backgrounds, this collection recognizes that although the arts of rule are comprehensive, the best government is a limited one.
Download or read book Doctored The Disillusionment of an American Physician written by Sandeep Jauhar and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his acclaimed memoir Intern, Sandeep Jauhar chronicled the formative years of his residency at a prestigious New York City hospital. Doctored, his harrowing follow-up, observes the crisis of American medicine through the eyes of an attending cardiologist. Hoping for the stability he needs to start a family, Jauhar accepts a position at a massive teaching hospital on the outskirts of Queens. With a decade's worth of elite medical training behind him, he is eager to settle down and reap the rewards of countless sleepless nights. Instead, he is confronted with sobering truths. Doctors' morale is low and getting lower. Blatant cronyism determines patient referrals, corporate ties distort medical decisions, and unnecessary tests are routinely performed in order to generate income. Meanwhile, a single patient in Jauhar's hospital might see fifteen specialists in one stay and still fail to receive a full picture of his actual condition. Provoked by his unsettling experiences, Jauhar has written an introspective memoir that is also an impassioned plea for reform. With American medicine at a crossroads, Doctored is the important work of a writer unafraid to challenge the establishment and incite controversy.
Download or read book Double Disillusion written by Anika Gauja and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2018-04-11 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the 2016 Australian federal election. Won by the Liberal–National Coalition by the slimmest of margins, the result created a climate of political uncertainty that threatened the government’s lower house majority. While the campaign might have lacked the theatre of previous elections, it provides significant insights into the contemporary political and policy challenges facing Australian democracy and society today. In this, the 16th edited collection of Australian election studies, 41 contributors from a range of disciplines bring an unprecedented depth of expertise to the 2016 contest. The book covers the context, key battles and issues in the campaign, and reports and analyses the results in detail. It provides an evaluation of the role of political actors such as the parties, independents, the media, interest groups and GetUp!, and examines election debate in the online space. Experts from a range of policy fields provide an analysis of election issues ranging from the economy and industrial relations to social policy, the environment, and gender and sexuality. Each of the chapters is written on the basis of in‑depth and original research, providing new insights into this important political event.
