Download or read book The Philosophy of Literature written by Peter Lamarque and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-08-11 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By exploring central issues in the philosophy of literature, illustrated by a wide range of novels, poems, and plays, Philosophy of Literature gets to the heart of why literature matters to us and sheds new light on the nature and interpretation of literary works. Provides a comprehensive study, along with original insights, into the philosophy of literature Develops a unique point of view - from one of the field's leading exponents Offers examples of key issues using excerpts from well-known novels, poems, and plays from different historical periods

Download or read book Painting Borges written by Jorge J. E. Gracia and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative examination of the artistic interpretation of twelve of Borges’s most famous stories.

Download or read book The Philosophy of Interpretation written by Joseph Margolis and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2001-06-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a lively, freshly invited collection of papers by a number of well-known philosophers and other specialists who have focused very pointedly on certain central conceptual puzzles posed by the general practice of interpretation in the arts, literature, history, and the natural and human sciences. The collection gives very nearly the impression of a sustained debate.

Download or read book PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATIONS IN LITERATURE written by Dr. Sankhang Basumatary and published by Ashok Yakkaldevi. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main purpose of this book is to analyse the philosophical ideas employed by Jean-Paul Sartre in his philosophical fiction titled Nausea (1938). Sartre tries to convey some of his philosophical concerns through this novel. Although the philosophical ideas are conveyed in the novel these are not as vivid as could be in a philosophical texts (The Transcendence of the Ego 1936, Being and Nothingness 1943). The significance of this work, however, lies not on understanding the philosophical concerns in isolation, but in employing the same in the form of a literary work and certain literary technique in pseudonymous plays or names. Sartre engages with pseudonymous play of protagonist and many other characters in his semi-autobiographical novel Nausea as he also says by himself in his later publication of autobiographical work The Words (1946) and first undated sheets of the novel Nausea where he laments his constant confrontation with difficult situations of lived experience.

Download or read book Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Literature written by David Davies and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2008-03-06 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What, if anything, distinguishes works of fiction such as Hamlet and Madame Bovary from biographies, news reports, or office bulletins? Is there a “right” way to interpret fiction? Should we link interpretation to the author’s intention? Ought our moral unease with works that betray sadistic, sexist, or racist elements lower our judgments of their aesthetic worth? And what, when it comes down to it, is literature? The readings in this collection bring together some of the most important recent work in the philosophy of literature by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, John Searle, and David Lewis. The readings explore philosophical issues such as the nature of fiction, the status of the author, the act of interpretation, the role of the emotions in the act of reading, the aesthetic and moral value of literary works, and other topics central to the philosophy of literature.

Download or read book Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture written by William Irwin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing thirteen articles, this book makes the case to philosophers that popular culture is worthy of their attention. It considers popular art forms such as movies, television shows, comic books, children's stories, photographs, and rock songs.

Download or read book Philosophy and the Novel written by Alan H. Goldman and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-04-05 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan H. Goldman presents an original and lucid account of the relationship between philosophy and the novel. In the first part, on philosophy of novels, he defends theories of literary value and interpretation. Literary value, the value of literary works as such, is a species of aesthetic value. Goldman argues that works have aesthetic value when they simultaneously engage all our mental capacities: perceptual, cognitive, imaginative, and emotional. This view contrasts with now prevalent narrower formalist views of literary value. According to it, cognitive engagement with novels includes appreciation of their broad themes and the theses these imply, often moral and hence philosophical theses, which are therefore part of the novels' literary value. Interpretation explains elements of works so as to allow readers maximum appreciation, so as to maximize the literary value of the texts as written. Once more, Goldman's view contrasts with narrower views of literary interpretation, especially those which limit it to uncovering what authors intended. One implication of Goldman's broader view is the possibility of incompatible but equally acceptable interpretations, which he explores through a discussion of rival interpretations of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Goldman goes on to test the theory of value by explaining the immense appeal of good mystery novels in its terms. The second part of the book, on philosophy in novels, explores themes relating to moral agency—moral development, motivation, and disintegration—in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, John Irving's The Cider House Rules, and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo. By narrating the course of characters' lives, including their inner lives, over extended periods, these novels allow us to vicariously experience the characters' moral progressions, positive and negative, to learn in a more focused way moral truths, as we do from real life experiences.

Download or read book Finding a Replacement for the Soul written by Brett Bourbon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaching the study of literature as a unique form of the philosophy of language and mind--as a study of how we produce nonsense and imagine it as sense--this is a book about our human ways of making and losing meaning. Brett Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being that is misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. Accordingly, his book seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship. The book itself is framed by the literary and philosophical challenges presented by Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. With reference to these books and the problems of interpretation and meaning that they pose, Bourbon makes a case for the fundamental philosophical character of the study of literature, and for its dependence on theories of meaning disguised as theories of mind. Within this context, he provides original accounts of what sentences, fictions, non-fictions, and poems are; produces a new account of the logical form of fiction and of the limits of interpretation that follow from it; and delineates a new and fruitful domain of inquiry in which literature, philosophy, and science intersect. Table of Contents: Preface Note on Abbreviations Introduction: What Are We When We Are Not? Part I The Surface of Language and the Absence of Meaning 1. From Soul-Making to Person-Making 2. The Logical Form of Fiction 3. The Emptiness of Literary Interpretation 4. To Be But Not To Mean 5. How Do Oracles Mean? Part II Senses and Nonsenses: Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations 6. A Twitterlitter of Nonsense: Askesis at Finnegans Wake 7. The Analogy between Persons and Words 8. "The Human Body Is the Best Picture of the Human Soul" 9. The Senses of Time 10. Being Something and Meaning Something Bibliography Acknowledgments Index This is an adventurous and unusual book. Bourbon moves back and forth between literary and philosophical contexts with ease, showing in multifarious ways how the one can, often in unexpected ways, illuminate the other. Throughout these wide-ranging explorations Bourbon uncovers a good deal about both the nature of literary meaning and our distinctive -- if tellingly irreducible -- relations to literary texts. --Garry L. Hagberg, author of Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory and Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge

Download or read book Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue written by Hans-Georg Gadamer and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1993-11-18 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hans-Georg Gadamer, the major proponent of philosophical hermeneutics, reveals himself here as a highly sensitive reader and critic of the German literary tradition. This is not the work of a specialist as narrowly defined in the typical literary study. Although he is a master of the techniques of criticism, Gadamer always sees the study of literature as a fundamentally human activity where human beings, generation after generation, pose their questions to an encroaching darkness that threatens to rob them of their confidence in the meaning of life and death. Never pedantic or antiquarian, these studies show such literary giants of the German past as Goethe and Hölderlin as our contemporaries. Gadamer demonstrates his ability to achieve the creative interplay of literature and philosophy which, in isolation, easily degenerate into sterile academic games. Typical of this dialogue are essays on Rainer Maria Rilke, including an examination of a problem of punctuation in one of his poems. What would be, in less capable hands, one more solution to a literary problem, turns out to be one of Gadamer's creative approaches to the mystery of man's relation to time and death.

Download or read book Interpretation and Its Objects written by Andreea Deciu Ritivoi and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2003 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects twenty-one original essays that discuss Michael Krausz’s distinctive and provocative contribution to the theory of interpretation. At the beginning of the book Krausz offers a synoptic review of his central claims, and he concludes with a substantive essay that replies to scholars from the United States, England, Germany, India, Japan, and Australia. Krausz’s philosophical work centers around a distinction that divides interpreters of cultural achievements into two groups. Singularists assume that for any object of interpretation only one single admissible interpretation can exist. Multiplists assume that for some objects of interpretation more than one interpretation is admissible. A central question concerns the ontological entanglements involved in interpretive activity. Domains of application include works of art and music, as well as literary, historical, legal and religious texts. Further topics include truth commissions, ethnocentrism and interpretations across cultures.

Download or read book Aesthetics and Literature written by David Davies and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2007-08-19 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading is an essential life skill; it can raise intelligence and develop confidence in learning. Susan Elkin's handy, introductory guide outlines teaching concepts and practical strategies to encourage reading both in and out of the classroom. Topics covered include: - Creative suggestions to encourage reading in all age groups - Ideas to support reading for pleasure as well as for information gathering - Making the most of schemes offering incentives for children to read - This is essential reading for all teachers.

Download or read book Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory written by Joel Weinsheimer and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lucid and elegantly written book, Joel Weinsheimer discusses how the insights of Hans-Georg Gadamer alter our understanding of literary theory and interpretation. Weinsheimer begins by surveying modern hermeneutics from Schleiermacher to Ricoeur, showing that Gadamer's work is situated in the middle of an onging dialogue. Gadamer's hermenutics says, Weinsheimer, is specifically philosophical, for it explores how understanding occurs at all, not how it should be regulated in order to function more rigorously or effectively. According to Weinsheimer, Gadamer views understanding as an effect of history, not an action but a passion, something that happens on metaphor: it fuses the different into the same but, like metaphor, does not repress difference. Similarly, Gadamer's critique of the semiotic conception of language redresses the balance between difference and sameness in the relation of word and world. The common thread in the contributions of philosophical hermeneutics to literary theory is the multifaceted tension between the one and the many, between sameness and difference. This appears in metaphor and application, in the complex dialogue between the past and present, and between the interpretation and the interpreted generally. In the final chapter of the book, "The Question of the Classic," Weinsheimer explores the implications of this analysis of Gadamer's hermeneutics for the current debate concerning the study of the canon and the classic.

Download or read book Reading Philosophy Writing Poetry written by Wendy Swartz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a formative period of Chinese culture, early medieval writers made extensive use of a diverse set of resources, in which such major philosophical classics as Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Classic of Changes featured prominently. Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry examines how these writers understood and manipulated a shared intellectual lexicon to produce meaning. Focusing on works by some of the most important and innovative poets of the period, this book explores intertextuality—the transference, adaptation, or rewriting of signs—as a mode of reading and a condition of writing. It illuminates how a text can be seen in its full range of signifying potential within the early medieval constellation of textual connections and cultural signs.If culture is that which connects its members past, present, and future, then the past becomes an inherited and continually replenished repository of cultural patterns and signs with which the literati maintains an organic and constantly negotiated relationship of give and take. Wendy Swartz explores how early medieval writers in China developed a distinctive mosaic of ways to participate in their cultural heritage by weaving textual strands from a shared and expanding store of literary resources into new patterns and configurations."

Download or read book The Dawn of Analysis written by Scott Soames and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-30 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures. The first volume takes the story from 1900 to mid-century. The second brings the history up to date. As Scott Soames tells it, the story of analytic philosophy is one of great but uneven progress, with leading thinkers making important advances toward solving the tradition's core problems. Though no broad philosophical position ever achieved lasting dominance, Soames argues that two methodological developments have, over time, remade the philosophical landscape. These are (1) analytic philosophers' hard-won success in understanding, and distinguishing the notions of logical truth, a priori truth, and necessary truth, and (2) gradual acceptance of the idea that philosophical speculation must be grounded in sound prephilosophical thought. Though Soames views this history in a positive light, he also illustrates the difficulties, false starts, and disappointments endured along the way. As he engages with the work of his predecessors and contemporaries--from Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Donald Davidson and Saul Kripke--he seeks to highlight their accomplishments while also pinpointing their shortcomings, especially where their perspectives were limited by an incomplete grasp of matters that have now become clear. Soames himself has been at the center of some of the tradition's most important debates, and throughout writes with exceptional ease about its often complex ideas. His gift for clear exposition makes the history as accessible to advanced undergraduates as it will be important to scholars. Despite its centrality to philosophy in the English-speaking world, the analytic tradition in philosophy has had very few synthetic histories. This will be the benchmark against which all future accounts will be measured.

Download or read book Philosophy Literature and the Human Good written by Michael Weston and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative new examination of the philosophical, moral and religious significance of literature, Michael Weston explores the role of literature in both analytic and continental traditions. He initiates a dialogue between them and investigates the growing importance of these issues for major contemporary thinkers. Each chapter explores a philosopher or literary figure who has written on the relation between literature and the good life, such as Derrida, Kierkegaard, Murdoch and Blanchot. Challenging and insightful, Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good is ideal for all students of philosophy and literature.

Download or read book Interpretation and Meaning in Philosophy and Religion written by Dirk-Martin Grube and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-06-10 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpretation and Meaning in Philosophy and Religion synthesizes cutting-edge philosophical reflections on interpretation with their application to religion. For this, new theoretical insights on interpretation by Krausz, Lamarque, Leddy, Hagberg, and Gibson are examined. Topics cover multiplism (i.e. interpretative pluralism), the goal of interpretation and its starting point. These concepts are then studied in relation to the practice of interpreting religious texts. For example, Grube proposes that the action-relevance of religious interpretations limits the possibility of tolerating divergent interpretations, Karrer-Grube challenges Lamarque’s insistence on a firm starting point, and Gokhale challenges Krausz by arguing that Vedantic practices of interpretation are non-multiplist.

Download or read book Turning Toward Philosophy written by Jill Gordon and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acknowledging the powerful impact that Plato's dialogues have had on readers, Jill Gordon shows how the literary techniques Plato used function philosophically to engage readers in doing philosophy and attracting them toward the philosophical life. The picture of philosophical activity emerging from the dialogues, as thus interpreted, is a complex process involving vision, insight, and emotion basic to the human condition rather than a resort to pure reason as an escape from it. Since the literary features of Plato's writing are what draw the reader into philosophy, the book becomes an argument for the union of philosophy and literature--and against their disciplinary bifurcation--in the dialogues. Gordon construes the relationship of Plato's text to its audience as an analogue of Socrates' relationship with his interlocutors in the dialogues, seeing both as fundamentally dialectic. On this insight she builds her detailed analysis of specific literary devices in chapters on dramatic form, character development, irony, and image-making (which includes myth, metaphor, and analogy). In this way Gordon views Plato as not at all the enemy of the poets and image-makers that previous interpreters have depicted. Rather, Gordon concludes that Plato understands the power of words and images quite well. Since they, and not logico-deductive argumentation, are the appropriate means for engaging human beings, he uses them to great effect and with a sensitive understanding of human psychology, wary of their possible corrupting influences but ultimately willing to harness their power for philosophical ends.