Download or read book Digressions and the Human Imagination written by Morten Nielsen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digressions and the Human Imagination makes a significant contribution to our anthropological knowledge about human creativity. The creative force of the human imagination is widely considered as a key ingredient in understanding how social and cultural transformations occur. And yet, what we know about the nature of creative processes is surprisingly limited. Taking their cue from literary studies, the contributors to this volume explore digression as human creativity’s main impulse. They offer a series of experimental explorations of digression in different arenas of social life – literature, conversations, myths, humour, art, and wayfinding. In their examination of the relationship between creativity and digressive processes, the contributions challenge and eventually collapse conventional distinctions between ‘artistic’ and ‘scientific’ imaginaries. This book articulates with clarity the freedom and joy of wandering off in new directions, but also the potentially transgressive and even revolutionary character that digression has when it is put to work through the creativity of the human imagination. It will be relevant for anthropologists and other scholars from across the humanities and social sciences with an interest in creativity.
Download or read book Digressions and the Human Imagination written by Morten Nielsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2024-07-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digressions and the Human Imagination makes a significant contribution to our anthropological knowledge about human creativity. The creative force of the human imagination is widely considered as a key ingredient in understanding how social and cultural transformations occur. And yet, what we know about the nature of creative processes is surprisingly limited. Taking their cue from literary studies, the contributors to this volume explore digression as human creativity's main impulse. They offer a series of experimental explorations of digression in different arenas of social life - literature, conversations, myths, humor, art, wayfinding. In their examination of the relationship between creativity and digressive processes, the contributions challenge and eventually collapse conventional distinctions between 'artistic' and 'scientific' imaginaries. The book articulates with clarity the freedom and joy of wandering off in new directions, but also the potentially transgressive and even revolutionary character that digression has when it is put to work through the creativity of the human imagination. It will be relevant for anthropologists and other scholars from across the humanities and social sciences with an interest in creativity.
Download or read book Digressions in Deep Time written by Declan Lloyd and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Deep time” is a term which attempts to capture temporal scales far beyond human comprehension. These are stretches of time epitomised by geological and cosmic scale processes, vast enough to make the entirety of human existence appear as little more than a footnote. The past few years have seen a boom in texts dedicated to the study of deep time, extending across a broad range of disciplines which fall markedly outside of its geological roots. These studies are unified by two ideas in particular: that deep time thinking and ecocriticism should be considered in conjunction, and that literature and the arts play a vital role in fostering a deep time awareness. Digressions in Deep Time is the first collection of essays which considers the multifarious representations of deep time across literature and the arts, assembling the work of a wide range of prominent scholars whose research frequently engages with temporality and ecocriticism. Featured contributions include work by the Pulitzer-prize winning author John McPhee, who popularised the term deep time in the late seventies, as well as chapters by Richard Irvine (author of An Anthropology of Deep Time), Benjamin Morgan (author of The Outward Mind) and Andrew Tate (author of Apocalyptic Fiction).
Download or read book The First Four Notes written by Matthew Guerrieri and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2012 A New Yorker Best Book of the Year Los Angeles Magazine's #1 Music Book of the Year This revelatory book of music history examines what is perhaps the best known and most-popular symphony ever written—and its famous four-note opening. Reaching back before Beethoven’s time, Matthew Guerrieri uncovers premonitions of the opening notes in the rhythms of ancient Greek poetry and the music of the French Revolution. He discusses the Fifth’s impact when it premiered, tracing the artistic, philosophical, and political reverberations across Europe to China, Russia, and the United States, from Romanticism to ring tones, from propaganda to pop. This fascinating piece of musical detective work is a treat for music lovers of every stripe.
Download or read book Employing Nietzsche s Sociological Imagination written by Jack Fong and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harnessing the empowering ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche to read the human condition of modern existence through a sociological lens, Employing Nietzsche’s Sociological Imagination: How to Understand Totalitarian Democracy confronts the realities of how modernity and its utopianisms affect one’s ability to purpose existence with self-authored meaning. By critically assessing the ideals of modern institutions, the motives of their pundits, and their political ideologies as expressions born from the social decay of exhausted dreams and projects of modernity, Jack Fong assembles Nietzsche’s existential sociological imagination to empower actors to emancipate the self from such duress. Illuminating the merits of creating new meaning for life affirmation by overcoming struggle with one’s will to power, Fong reveals Nietzsche’s horizons for actualized and empowered selves, selves to be liberated from convention, groupthink, and cultural scripts that exact deference from society’s captive audiences.
Download or read book Plant Thinkers of Twentieth Century Bengal written by Sumana Roy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-02 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book delves into the unconventional perspectives of writers and artists from Twentieth Century Bengal, exploring their roles as 'plant thinkers.' By examining the works of figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others, the narrative delves into how their stories, songs, art, and films, deeply influenced Bengali life and thought. Embracing themes of forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants, these thinkers, including Jagadish Chandra Bose with his scientific experiments, derived their worldviews, poetics, and politics from the intricate world of plants. The work not only explores Bose's scientific research and philosophy but also delves into religious rituals that fostered a profound connection with the natural world. Through a nuanced examination of the affective relationship between individuals and the plant world, the narrative uncovers a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in both actions and words. Moreover, it highlights the political possibilities beyond the confines of the nation state that emanated from such profound thinking. As the book unfolds, it weaves a rich tapestry of living practices and artistic expressions rooted in plant philosophy. By contemplating the sap and flow of these influences, it prompts readers to reflect on what contemporary consciousness can glean from these thinkers.
Download or read book Physics Imagination And Reality written by P R Wallace and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 1991-07-05 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physics: Imagination and Reality introduces the reader to major ideas and the conceptual structure of modern physics, by tracing its development from the introduction of fields into physics by Faraday and Maxwell in the last century. Because the approach is historical, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the subjects. It should appeal to anyone interested in a basic understanding of the contemporary physicists view of the physical world. It avoids all but the simplest mathematics and presents ideas and concepts in everyday language.Physics: Imagination and Reality attempts to provide educated citizens with an understanding of contemporary physics and, at the same time, shows that its ideas have a grandeur, a challenge to the imagination and an aesthetic appeal which merit its recognition as an integral part of our culture.
Download or read book Imagination and Politics in Seventeenth century England written by Todd Wayne Butler and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded in the language of early moderns themselves, this study proposes a new epistemology of early modern politics, which sees human thought as a precursor to political action. In analyzing a wide variety of seventeenth-century English texts, including the writings of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, Caroline Court masques, and the poetry and prose of John Milton, Todd Butler reveals an early modern English society deeply concerned with the fundamentally imaginative nature of politics.
Download or read book H C Artmann s Structuralist Imagination written by Marc-Oliver Schuster and published by Königshausen & Neumann. This book was released on 2010 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Politics of Joking written by Jana Kopelent Rehak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-25 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages anthropologically with humor as political expression. It reveals how humor is in many instances central to human efforts to cope with political struggle and significant to understanding power dynamics in socio-political life. The chapters examine humor and joking activities across a diverse range of geographic areas and cultural contexts. The contributors consider humor as it is constituted in political anxiety, aggression and power, and when it becomes a tool to resist, repair, reconcile or make a moral claim. Collectively they demonstrate that humor can provide a powerful critique, a non-violent form of political protest and the space for restoration of human dignity.
Download or read book Classical Islamic Philosophy written by Luis Xavier López-Farjeat and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thematic introduction to classical Islamic philosophy focuses on the most prevalent philosophical debates of the medieval Islamic world and their importance within the history of philosophy. Approaching the topics in a comprehensive and accessible way in this new volume, Luis Xavier Lopez-Farjeat, one of the co-editors of The Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy, makes classical Islamic philosophy approachable for both the new and returning student of the history of philosophy, medieval philosophy, the history of ideas, classical Islamic intellectual history, and the history of religion. Providing readers with a complete view of the most hotly contested debates in the Islamic philosophical tradition, Lopez-Farjeat discusses the development of theology (kalām) and philosophy ( falsafa) during the ʿAbbāsid period, including the translation of Aristotle into Arabic, the philosophy and theology of Islamic revelation, logic and philosophy of language, philosophy of natural science, metaphysics, psychology and cognition, and ethics and political philosophy. This volume serves as an indispensable tool for teachers, students, and independent learners aiming to discover the philosophical problems and ideas that defined the classical Islamic world. Key Features • Offers readers a broad, thorough view of the history of Islamic philosophy by using a thematic approach. • Traces the dialogues between philosophers and theologians about important and controversial topics. • Offers both historical descriptions of the key debates in classical Islamic philosophy and current interpretations by contemporary scholars. • Includes extensive lists for further reading at the end of each chapter, directing curious students to the best avenues for further research.
Download or read book Digressions in European Literature written by A. Grohmann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With studies of, amongst others, Miguel de Cervantes, Anton Chekhov, Charles Baudelaire and Henry James, this landmark collection of essays is a unique and wide-ranging exploration and celebration of the many forms of digression in major works by fifteen of the finest European writers from the early modern period to the present day.
Download or read book Telling the Truth written by Barbara C. Foley and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara Foley here focuses on the relatively neglected genre of documentary fiction: novels that are continually near the borderline between factual and fictive discourse. She links the development of the genre over three centuries to the evolution of capitalism, but her analyses of literary texts depart significantly from those of most current Marxist critics. Foley maintains that Marxist theory has yet to produce a satisfactory theory of mimesis or of the development of genres, and she addresses such key issues as the problem of reference and the nature of generic distinctions. Among the authors whom Foley treats are Defoe, Scott, George Eliot, Joyce, Isherwood, Dos Passos, William Wells Brown, Ishmael Reed, and Ernest Gaines.
Download or read book The Distortion of Nature s Image written by Damian Gerber and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global ecological crisis is upon us. From global warming to the long-term implications of ocean acidification, air and water pollution, deforestation, and the omnipresent dangers of nuclear technology the future of our planetary home is threatened. Yet in the midst of the unfolding crisis, the conventional ideologies of the twentieth century and their representations of nature remain unchallenged by both the defenders of capitalism and capitalism's most radical critics. The Distortion of Nature's Image illustrates how the anti-naturalism of late capitalist society, in which nature is reified into the emptiness of mere matter, simply a thing to be dominated, is subtly complemented by the failure of the Left to go both beyond the historic limitations of Marx's ninteenth-century viewpoint and beyond anarchism's blind faith in "natural law." However, an alternative for comprehending nature and the ecological crisis as historical and social phenomena remains open in the dialectical naturalism of Western Marxism and Murray Bookchin's social ecology. By examining in closer detail how Bookchin's social ecology politicizes the concept of nature, as well as how precursory models in Western Marxist thought provide a foundation for this, Damian Gerber illustrates how the notion of an ecological society remains a decisively political question.
Download or read book Science and the Human Imagination written by Mary B. Hesse and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity written by Harvie Ferguson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-10 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The connections between the emergence of modern society and the experience of melancholy are explored through a comprehensive re-examination of Soren Kierkegaard's rich and insightful writings.
Download or read book Betwixt Jest and Earnest written by Raymond A. Anselment and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1979-12-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, and Swift are among the best prose satirists in a remarkably rich literary era. Focusing on these key figures, ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’ examines the theory and practice of religious prose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Recognizing the difficulties inherent in attempting to transform unimaginative animadversion into effective satire, it analyses the ways in which Marprelate’s tracts, Milton’s anti-prelatical satires, Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d, and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub variously resolve the decorum of religious satire. Although the study is not specifically an intellectual history or a rigid definition of religious attitudes towards jest, it does bring together basic symptoms of altering sensibilities in the period. Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, and Swift represent diverse religious dispositions, but they share a similar satiric vision. Each recognizes the central importance of manner, and all develop dramatic satire heavily dependent on character, an emphasis which often displaces the immediate issues contested, but never obscures the larger concerns the satirists pursue. Their preoccupations with the nature of tradition, their emphasis on the self, and their sensitivity to language reflect similar involvements in questions of certainty and absolutism. The virtues and abuses they find in such central questions are not unique to them or their time, but their emphases are, for they wrote in an age in which sensitive men could confront revolution and reaction with an assurance not easily attainable once that era had passed.
