Download or read book The Learned Women written by Moliere Moliere (Poquelin) and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-07-20 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies) is a comedy by Molière in five acts, written in verse. A satire on academic pretention, female education, and préciosité (French for preciousness), it was one of his most popular comedies. It premiered at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal on 11 March 1672.Two young people, Henriette and Clitandre, are in love, but in order to marry, they must overcome an obstacle: the attitude of Henriette's family. Her sensible father and uncle are in favour of the marriage; but unfortunately her father is under the thumb of his wife, Philaminte. And Philaminte, supported by Henriette's aunt and sister, wishes her to marry Trissotin, a "scholar" and mediocre poet with lofty aspirations, who has these three women completely in his thrall. For these three ladies are "learned"; their obsession in life is learning and culture of the most pretentious kind, and Trissotin is their special protégé and the fixture of their literary salon.The Learned Ladies" was the last-but-one of Molière's plays and the last of his great rhyming-couplet comedies. Its predecessors had used the artificiality of the style to add point and irony to some of Molière's most trenchant examinations of aspects of the human condition. For lighter-hearted satire, sending up specific behaviour rather than the general human condition, Molière tended to use prose. "The Learned Ladies" has the best of both worlds: it satirises a specific fad (intellectual pretension) but - perhaps because its subject requires an appropriately "high style" - is written in rhyming verse. Targeting cultural snobbery, "The Learned Ladies" mocks the fashion, current among upper-class ladies, for holding "salons" to discuss such "learned" matters as the arts, philosophy and science. The joke, to Molière's audience, was not merely intellectual snobbery, but that the snobs were women. This was an age when matters of the mind were, in theory, still the province of men; upper-class women were expected to be charming, witty, interested in the world and its doings, but not scholars. The majority of the aristocratic ladies in Molière's own audience probably took this view and shared the opinion of the men, that "learned ladies" and their gatherings were fools, fit targets for the pedants, charlatans and other confidence-tricksters who preyed on them. "The Learned Ladies" played for a couple of dozen performances (a successful "run" for court plays at the time) and attracted none of the hostility and scandal of Molière's more contentious works. This French-to-English translation is by A. R. Waller and is scrupulously accurate to Molière's meaning.
Download or read book Contending for the Chinese Modern written by Xiaoping Wang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Contending for the "Chinese Modern", Xiaoping Wang studies the writing of fiction in 1940s China. It makes critical reappraisements of some famed Chinese writers, and sheds fresh lights on the theoretical issues pertaining to the problematic of plural modernities.
Download or read book Minima Moralia written by Theodor Adorno and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-century America and finds a life deformed by capitalism. This is Adorno's theoretical and literary masterpiece and a classic of twentieth-century thought.
Download or read book Slaughterhouse Five written by Kurt Vonnegut and published by Dial Press Trade Paperback. This book was released on 1999-01-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.
Download or read book Hacker Hoaxer Whistleblower Spy written by Gabriella Coleman and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ultimate book on the worldwide movement of hackers, pranksters, and activists collectively known as Anonymous—by the writer the Huffington Post says “knows all of Anonymous’ deepest, darkest secrets” “A work of anthropology that sometimes echoes a John le Carré novel.” —Wired Half a dozen years ago, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman set out to study the rise of this global phenomenon just as some of its members were turning to political protest and dangerous disruption (before Anonymous shot to fame as a key player in the battles over WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street). She ended up becoming so closely connected to Anonymous that the tricky story of her inside–outside status as Anon confidante, interpreter, and erstwhile mouthpiece forms one of the themes of this witty and entirely engrossing book. The narrative brims with details unearthed from within a notoriously mysterious subculture, whose semi-legendary tricksters—such as Topiary, tflow, Anachaos, and Sabu—emerge as complex, diverse, politically and culturally sophisticated people. Propelled by years of chats and encounters with a multitude of hackers, including imprisoned activist Jeremy Hammond and the double agent who helped put him away, Hector Monsegur, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy is filled with insights into the meaning of digital activism and little understood facets of culture in the Internet age, including the history of “trolling,” the ethics and metaphysics of hacking, and the origins and manifold meanings of “the lulz.”
Download or read book The Simpsons and Philosophy written by William Irwin and published by Open Court. This book was released on 2001-02-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unconventional and lighthearted introduction to the ideas of the major Western philosophers examines The Simpsons — TV’s favorite animated family. The authors look beyond the jokes, the crudeness, the attacks on society — and see a clever display of irony, social criticism, and philosophical thought. The writers begin with an examination of the characters. Does Homer actually display Aristotle’s virtues of character? In what way does Bart exemplify American pragmatism? The book also examines the ethics and themes of the show, and concludes with discussions of how the series reflects the work of Aristotle, Marx, Camus, Sartre, and other thinkers.
Download or read book Moli re written by Michael Hawcroft and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-09-27 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Molière wrote, directed, and starred in comedies for public and court audiences in seventeenth-century France. He is perennially successful, but perennially subject to critical controversy: do his plays aim to do more than make audiences laugh? This book focuses on a group of characters in the plays, the interpretation of whose role lies at the heart of any answer to this question. For over a century critics have baptised them 'raisonneurs'. They are characters who engage with some of Molière's most foolish protagonists, but they have been variously interpreted as exponents of wisdom or as ridiculous bores. This book argues that new light can be shed on the words and actions of these characters, and so on the tenor of the plays as a whole, by detailed contextual analysis of the dramaturgical and comic structures in which they operate. They have never before been treated so exhaustively. They emerge neither as the mouthpieces of common sense nor as pompous fools, but as thoughtful, witty, and resourceful friends of the foolish protagonists whom Molière himself played. The book takes into account what is known of the performance styles of Molière's troupe of actors as well as engaging closely with the text of the plays and the critical debate to date. Some of Molière's most teasingly problematic plays are held up to fresh scrutiny, including L'Ecole des femmes, Le Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, and Le Malade imaginaire. The book is written with scholars, students, and interested theatre-goers in mind. This is the first book-length treatment of the topic.
Download or read book The Role of the Reader written by Umberto Eco and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the differences between "open" and "closed" texts, or, texts that actively involve the reader and texts that evoke a limited, predetermined response from the reader. -- Back cover.
Download or read book Discourse on the State of the Jews written by Simone Luzzatto and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1638, a small book of no more than 92 pages in octavo was published “appresso Gioanne Calleoni” under the title “Discourse on the State of the Jews and in particular those dwelling in the illustrious city of Venice.” It was dedicated to the Doge of Venice and his counsellors, who are labelled “lovers of Truth.” The author of the book was a certain Simone (Simḥa) Luzzatto, a native of Venice, where he lived and died, serving as rabbi for over fifty years during the course of the seventeenth century. Luzzatto’s political thesis is simple and, at the same time, temerarious, if not revolutionary: Venice can put an end to its political decline, he argues, by offering the Jews a monopoly on overseas commercial activity. This plan is highly recommendable because the Jews are “wellsuited for trade,” much more so than others (such as “foreigners,” for example). The rabbi opens his argument by recalling that trade and usury are the only occupations permitted to Jews. Within the confines of their historical situation, the Venetian Jews became particularly skilled at trade with partners from the Eastern Mediterranean countries. Luzzatto’s argument is that this talent could be put at the service of the Venetian government in order to maintain – or, more accurately, recover – its political importance as an intermediary between East and West. He was the first to define the role of the Jews on the basis of their economic and social functions, disregarding the classic categorisation of Judaism’s alleged privileged religious status in world history. Nonetheless, going beyond the socio-economic arguments of the book, it is essential to point out Luzzatto’s resort to sceptical strategies in order to plead in defence of the Venetian Jews. It is precisely his philosophical and political scepticism that makes Luzzatto’s texts so unique. This edition aims to grant access to his works and thought to English-speaking readers and scholars. By approaching his texts from this point of view, the editors hope to open a new path in research into Jewish culture and philosophy that will enable other scholars to develop new directions and new perspectives, stressing the interpenetration between Jews and the surrounding Christian and secular cultures.
Download or read book The History of Philosophy written by A. C. Grayling and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AUTHORITATIVE AND ACCESSIBLE, THIS LANDMARK WORK IS THE FIRST SINGLE-VOLUME HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY SHARED FOR DECADES 'A cerebrally enjoyable survey, written with great clarity and touches of wit' Sunday Times The story of philosophy is an epic tale: an exploration of the ideas, views and teachings of some of the most creative minds known to humanity. But there has been no comprehensive history of this great intellectual journey since 1945. Intelligible for students and eye-opening for philosophy readers, A. C. Grayling covers with characteristic clarity and elegance subjects like epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, logic, and the philosophy of mind, as well as the history of debates in these areas, through the ideas of celebrated philosophers as well as less well-known influential thinkers. The History of Philosophy takes the reader on a journey from the age of the Buddha, Confucius and Socrates. Through Christianity's dominance of the European mind to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. On to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre, then the philosophical traditions of India, China and the Persian-Arabic world. And finally, into philosophy today.
Download or read book Reading Roman Comedy written by Alison Sharrock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-24 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years the domain of specialists in early Latin, in complex metres, and in the reconstruction of texts, Roman comedy is now established in the mainstream of Classical literary criticism. Where most books stress the original performance as the primary location for the encountering of the plays, this book finds the locus of meaning and appreciation in the activity of a reader, albeit one whose manner of reading necessarily involves the imaginative reconstruction of performance. The texts are treated, and celebrated, as literary devices, with programmatic beginnings, middles, ends, and intertexts. All the extant plays of Plautus and Terence have at least a bit part in this book, which seeks to expose the authors' fabulous artificiality and artifice, while playing along with their differing but interrelated poses of generic humility.
Download or read book Man and Superman written by George Bernard Shaw and published by . This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mr. Whitefield has recently died, and his will indicates that his daughter Ann should be left in the care of two men, Roebuck Ramsden and Jack Tanner. Ramsden, a venerable old man, distrusts John Tanner, an eloquent youth with revolutionary ideas, saying "He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark the snorting nostril and the restless blue eye, just the thirty-secondth of an inch too wide open), possibly a little mad". In spite of what Ramsden says, Ann accepts Tanner as her guardian, though Tanner doesn't want the position at all. She also challenges Tanner's revolutionary beliefs with her own ideas. Despite Tanner's professed dedication to anarchy, he is unable to disarm Ann's charm, and she ultimately persuades him to marry her, choosing him over her more persistent suitor, a young man named Octavius Robinson.
Download or read book Adventures among Ants written by Mark W. Moffett and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intrepid international explorer, biologist, and photographer Mark W. Moffett, "the Indiana Jones of entomology," takes us around the globe on a strange and colorful journey in search of the hidden world of ants. In tales from Nigeria, Indonesia, the Amazon, Australia, California, and elsewhere, Moffett recounts his entomological exploits and provides fascinating details on how ants live and how they dominate their ecosystems through strikingly human behaviors, yet at a different scale and a faster tempo. Moffett’s spectacular close-up photographs shrink us down to size, so that we can observe ants in familiar roles; warriors, builders, big-game hunters, and slave owners. We find them creating marketplaces and assembly lines and dealing with issues we think of as uniquely human—including hygiene, recycling, and warfare. Adventures among Ants introduces some of the world’s most awe-inspiring species and offers a startling new perspective on the limits of our own perception. • Ants are world-class road builders, handling traffic problems on thoroughfares that dwarf our highway systems in their complexity • Ants with the largest societies often deploy complicated military tactics • Some ants have evolved from hunter-gatherers into farmers, domesticating other insects and growing crops for food
Download or read book The Sinner s Guide written by Luis (de Granada) and published by . This book was released on 1890 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age written by Melveena McKendrick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1974-07-04 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An identification and analysis of Spanish Golden-Age drama's preoccupation with the woman who will not accept marriage as her natural role.
Download or read book The Messages of Tourist Art written by Bennetta Jules-Rosette and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tourist art may be a billion dollar business. Nevertheless, such art is despised. What is worse, the "bad" culture is seen as driving out the "good. " Commer cialization is assumed to destroy traditional arts and crafts, replacing them with junk. The process is seen as demeaning to artists in the traditional societies, who are seduced into a type of whoredom: unfeeling production of false beauty for money. The arts remain problematic for the social sciences. Sociology textbooks treat the arts as subordinate reflections of social forces, norms, or groups. An thropology textbooks conventionally isolate the arts in a separate chapter, failing to integrate them with analyses of kinship, economics, politics, language, or biology. Textbooks reflect the guiding theories, which emphasize such factors as modes of production, patterns of thought, or biological and normative con straints, but their authors have not adequately formulated the aesthetic dimen sion. One may compare the theoretical status of the arts to that of religion. After the contributions by Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, the sociology of religion is well established, but where is a Durkheim or Weber for the sociology of art? What is true of the social sciences in general holds for understanding of modernization in the Third World. These processes and those places are analyzed economically, politically, and socially, but the aesthetic dimension is treated in isolation, if at all, and is poorly grasped in relation to the other forces.
Download or read book The Characters of Jean de La Bruy re written by Jean de La Bruyère and published by . This book was released on 1885 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These writings provide a unique view of the height of 17th-century French culture.
