Title search results
Showing 41 - 60 of 28992 items
Pindar’s Poetics of Immortality
By Asya C. Sigelman. 2016
Modern scholarship tends to focus on the social, political and economic information that can be gleaned from Pindar's treatment of…
the subject of his victory odes - the athlete who brings immortality to his family and polis. In this book, Asya C. Sigelman offers a new approach to the odes, exploring the fact that Pindar's language and imagery suggest that the athlete's victory is only a weaker version of the poet's immortalizing feat. Examining several central Pindaric images, Sigelman shows that they are fundamentally reflexive, structured as expressions of poetic creativity engaged in a perpetual synthesis of intra-poetic time - of the unity of the past, present and future of the world of Pindar's song. As the book's case studies of several of the odes demonstrate, this synthesis is key to Pindar's notion of immortalization and constitutes the central poetic subject of Pindar's song which underlies and informs its praise of the victorious athlete.Anything That Burns You
By Tereese Svoboda. 2002
This is the first full-length biography of this fascinating woman of arts and letters who was a major force both…
within the literary salons of New York City in the early 20th Century, but also on the streets as a protester of inequality and injustice which was rampant at the time. Author Terese Svoboda, award-winning poet, non-fiction writer, novelist, and videographer, provides a rich and detailed account of the life and world of Lola Ridge, poet, artist, editor, and activist for the cause of women’s rights, workers rights, racial equality and social reform. From her childhood as a newly arrived Irish immigrant in the grim mining towns of New Zealand with her mother who had fled with her infant daughter to Down Under in order to escape one bad marriage only to find herself in another; to her years as a budding poet and artist in Sydney, Australia, which, even in its early days was a socially progressive and influential artistic hub; to her migration to America and the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, where she joined forces with the literary and artistic world in the years leading up to WWI, and helped start and edit two major journals of the time, Others and Broom, as well as go on to publish several books of poetry. At one time considered one of the most popular poets of her day (in an era when poetry was a top-selling genre and even available for sale at newsstands), she later fell out of critical favor due to her realistic and impassioned verse that looked head on at the major social woes of society--poverty, racism, labor inequality, unequal wealth distribution, and the appalling conditions in which the immigrant population was forced to live in the tenements of New York and elsewhere--subjects deemed ill-suited for a femaie poet. Moreover,her work and appearances alongside the likes of Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Will Durant and other socialists and radicals, and her public outcry in the wake of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Fire and the executions of Sacco & Vanzetti put her in the line of fire not only of the police and government, but also the literary pundits who criticized her activism as being excessive and melodramatic. With this lively portrait of the artistic and socially active world (100 years before “occupy Wall Street) Svoboda gives us a veritable who’s who of all the key players in the arts, literature and radical politics of the time, in which Lola Ridge stood front and center, a traialblazer for women, poetry and human rights far ahead of her time. But as Svoboda argues, she was sadly marginalized in later years along with many pioneering and primarily female poets of her day such as Marianne Moore, H.D., and Amy Lowell, who have only recently been recognized for their major contribution to our literature. With spirited prose, impeccable research, insight and wit, Svoboda has restored this vastly undervalued and overlooked author to her rightful place in this country’s literary and social history.Advice to a Young Scientist
By P. B. Medawar. 1979
To those interested in a life in science, Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel laureate, deflates the myths of invincibility, superiority, and…
genius; instead, he demonstrates it is common sense and an inquiring mind that are essential to the scientist’s calling. He deflates the myths surrounding scientists--invincibility, superiority, and genius; instead, he argues that it is common sense and an inquiring mind that are essential to the makeup of a scientist. He delivers many wry observations on how to choose a research topic, how to get along wih collaborators and older scientists and administrators, how (and how not) to present a scientific paper, and how to cope with culturally ”superior” specialists in the arts and humanities.Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman
By Richard P. Feynman. 1939
A Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a loving husband and father, an enthusiastic teacher, a surprisingly accomplished bongo player, and a genius…
of the highest caliber---Richard P. Feynman was all these and more. Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track--collecting over forty years' worth of Feynman's letters--offers an unprecedented look at the writer and thinker whose scientific mind and lust for life made him a legend in his own time. Containing missives to and from such scientific luminaries as Victor Weisskopf, Stephen Wolfram, James Watson, and Edward Teller, as well as a remarkable selection of letters to and from fans, students, family, and people from around the world eager for Feynman's advice and counsel, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track not only illuminates the personal relationships that underwrote the key developments in modern science, but also forms the most intimate look at Feynman yet available. Feynman was a man many felt close to but few really knew, and this collection reveals the full wisdom and private passion of a personality that captivated everyone it touched. Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track is an eloquent testimony to the virtue of approaching the world with an inquiring eye; it demonstrates the full extent of the Feynman legacy like never before. Edited and with additional commentary by his daughter Michelle, it's a must-read for Feynman fans everywhere, and for anyone seeking to better understand one of the towering figures--and defining personalities--of the twentieth century.Staging Science
By Martin Willis. 2016
This book considers scientific performances across two centuries, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Performances include demonstrations…
of technologies, experiments that look like theatre, theatre that looks like science, tourist representations and natural history film-making. Its key aim is to open debate on how scientific activity, both historical and contemporary, might be understood in the context of performance studies and the imaginative acts required to stage engaging performances. Scientific performances have become increasingly of interest to historians of science, literature and science scholars, and in the field of science studies. As yet, however, no work has sought to examine a range of scientific performances with the aim of interrogating and illuminating the kinds of critical and theoretical practices that might be employed to engage with them. With scientific performance likely to become ever more central to scholarly study in the next few years this volume offer a timely, and early, intervention in the existing debates, and aims, too, to be a touchstone for future work.Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean
By Douglas Wolk. 2007
Suddenly, comics are everywhere: a newly matured art form, filling bookshelves with brilliant, innovative work and shaping the ideas and…
images of the rest of contemporary culture. In Reading Comics, critic Douglas Wolk shows us why and how. Wolk illuminates the most dazzling creators of modern comics-from Alan Moore to Alison Bechdel to Chris Ware-and explains their roots, influences, and where they fit into the pantheon of art. As accessible to the hardcore fan as to the curious newcomer, Reading Comics is the first book for people who want to know not just which comics are worth reading, but ways to think and talk and argue about them.Political Writings
By Theodore Dreiser. 1940
Theodore Dreiser staked his reputation on fearless expression in his fiction, but he never was more outspoken than when writing…
about American politics. Spanning a period in American history from the Progressive Era to the advent of the Cold War, this generous volume collects Dreiser's most important political writings from his journalism, broadsides, speeches, private papers, and long out-of-print nonfiction books. Touching on the Great Depression, the New Deal, and both World Wars as well as Soviet Russia and the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, these writings exemplify Dreiser's candor and his penchant for championing the defenseless and railing against corruption. The works also navigate historical terrain with prescient observations on topics such as religion, civil rights, national responsibility, individual ethics, global relations, and censorship that remain relevant to a contemporary audience.Silence in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Beckett, Barthes, Nancy, Stevens
By Thomas Gould. 2018
This book discusses the elusive centrality of silence in modern literature and philosophy, focusing on the writing and theory of…
Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, the prose of Samuel Beckett, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It suggests that silence is best understood according to two categories: apophasis and reticence. Apophasis is associated with theology, and relates to a silence of ineffability and transcendence; reticence is associated with phenomenology, and relates to a silence of listenership and speechlessness. In a series of diverse though interrelated readings, the study examines figures of broken silence and silent voice in the prose of Samuel Beckett, the notion of shared silence in Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, and ways in which the poetry of Wallace Stevens mounts lyrical negotiations with forms of unsayability and speechlessness.The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
By Rachel Teubner. 2017
The essay for which The Sacred Wood is primarily remembered is one of the most famous pieces of criticism in…
English: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” helped to re-orientate arguments about the study of literature and its production by redefining the nature of tradition and the artist's relation to it.At a time when the word “traditional” had become a way of damning with faint praise by reference to the past, Eliot reinterpreted the term to mean something entirely different. It is not, he argues, something just “handed down,” but, instead, a prize to be obtained “by great labour,” not least in the making of a huge effort of understanding how the past fits together. Seen thus, Eliot suggests, a literary and artistic tradition “has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” – and it is not just past, but present as well. For Eliot, “art never improves,” but only changes, and each part of the tradition is constantly being reinterpreted in light of what is added to the whole. The role of the poet, in Eliot's view, is to subjugate their own personality, and become “a receptacle,” in which “numberless feelings, phrases, images… can unite to form a new compound.” Redefining the issue of poets' relations to the past in this new way is a fine example of creative thinking, and Eliot’s ability to connect existing concepts in new ways was what gave weight to the argument that he advanced: that poets cannot succeed without understanding that they are taking their place on a continuum that stretches back to all their predecessors, and incorporate the ideas, strengths and failings of the entire body of work that those poets represented.The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry
By Koen Vermeir, Michael Funk Deckard. 2011
Attracting philosophers, politicians, artists as well as the educated reader, Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, first published in 1757, was a…
milestone in western thinking. This edited volume will take the 250th anniversary of the Philosophical Enquiry as an occasion to reassess Burke's prominence in the history of ideas. Situated on the threshold between early modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, Burke's oeuvre combines reflections on aesthetics, politics and the sciences. This collection is the first book length work devoted primarily to Burke's Philosophical Enquiry in both its historical context and for its contemporary relevance. It will establish the fact that the Enquiry is an important philosophical and literary work in its own right.The Story of Thomas Alva Edison, Inventor: The Wizard of Menlo Park
By Margaret Davidson. 1964
Mrs. Sigourney of Hartford: Poems and Prose on the Early American Deaf Community
By Edna Edith Sayers, Diana Moore. 2013
Lydia Huntley was born in 1791 in Norwich, CT, the only child of a poor Revolutionary war veteran. But her…
father's employer, a wealthy widow, gave young Lydia the run of her library and later sent her for visits to Hartford, CT. After teaching at her own school for several years in Norwich, Lydia returned to Hartford to head a class of 15 girls from the best families. Among her students was Alice Cogswell, a deaf girl soon to be famous as a student of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc. Lydia's inspiration came from a deep commitment to the education of girls and also for African American, Indian, and deaf children. She left teaching to marry Charles Sigourney, then turned to writing to support her family, publishing 56 books, 2,000 magazine articles, and popular poetry. Lydia Sigourney never abandoned her passion for deaf education, remaining a supporter of Gallaudet's school for the deaf until her death. Yet, her contributions to deaf education and her writing have been forgotten until now. All of Lydia Sigourney's of Lydia Sigourney's work on the nascent Deaf community is presented in this new volume. Her writing intertwines her mastery of the sentimentalism form popular in her day with her sharp insights on the best ways to educate deaf children. In the process, Mrs. Sigourney of Hartford reestablishes her rightful place in history.Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination
By Adam Perchard, Karina Jakubowicz. 2017
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a seminal piece of literary criticism, and a…
masterclass in the critical thinking skill of interpretation. Interpretation plays a vital role in critical thinking: it focuses on interrogating accepted meanings and laying down clear definitions on which a strong argument can be built. Both history and literary history in the US have frequently revolved around understanding how Americans define themselves and each other, and Morrison’s work seeks to investigate, question, and redefine one of the central concepts in American history and American literary history: color.. Morrison turned to the classics of American literature to ask how authors had chosen to define the terms ‘black’ and ‘white.’ Instead of accepting traditional interpretations of these works, Morrison examined the way in which ‘whiteness’ defines itself through ‘blackness,’ and vice versa. Black bondage and the myths of black inferiority and savagery, she showed, allowed white America to indulge its own defining myths – viewing itself as free, civilized, and innocent. A classic of subtle and incisive interpretation, Playing in the Dark shows just how crucial and how complex simple-looking definitions can be.The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult
By Alice Walker. 1996
In the early eighties, three extraordinary events interrupted Alice Walker's peaceful, reclusive life--the publication of the bestselling novel The Color…
Purple, the Pulitzer Prize, and an offer from Spielberg to make her novel into a film. This book chronicles that period of transition from recluse to public figure, and invites us to contemplate, along with her, the true significance of unanticipated gifts.Mythologies
By John Gomez. 2017
Mythologies is a masterpiece of analysis and interpretation. At its heart, Barthes’s collection of essays about the “mythologies” of modern…
life treats everyday objects and ideas – from professional wrestling, to the Tour de France, to Greta Garbo’s face – as though they are silently putting forward arguments. Those arguments are for modernity itself, the way the world is, from its class structures, to its ideologies, to its customs. In Barthes’s view, the mythologies of the modern world all tend towards one aim: making us think that the way things are, the status quo, is how they should naturally be. For Barthes, this should not be taken for granted; instead, he suggests, it is a kind of mystification, preventing us from seeing things differently or believing they might be otherwise. His analyses do what all good analytical thinking does: he unpicks the features of the arguments silently presented by his subjects, reveals their (and our) implicit assumptions, and shows how they point us towards certain ideas and conclusions. Indeed, understanding Barthes’ methods of analysis means you might never see the world in the same way again. Six skills combine to make up our ability to think critically. Mythologies is an especially fine example of a work that uses the skills of analysis and creative thinking.Orientalism
By Riley Quinn. 2017
Edward Said’s Orientalism is a masterclass in the art of interpretation wedded to close analysis. Interpretation is characterized by close…
attention to the meanings of terms, by clarifying, questioning definitions, and positing clear definitions. Combined with one of the main sub-skills of analysis, drawing inferences and finding implicit reasons and assumptions in arguments, interpretation becomes a powerful tool for critical thought. In Orientalism, the theorist, critic and cultural historian Edward Said uses interpretation and analysis to closely examine Western representations of the “Orient” and ask what they are really doing, and why. One of his central arguments is that Western representations of the East and Middle East persistently define it as “other”, setting it up in opposition to the West. Through careful analysis of a range of texts and other materials, Said shows that implicit assumptions about the “Orient’s” otherness underlie much Western thought and writing about it. Clarifying consistently the differences between the real-world East and the constructed ideas of the “Orient”, Said’s interpretative skills power his analysis, and provide the basis for an argument that has proven hugely influential in literary criticism, philosophy, and even politics.Gender Trouble
By Tim Smith-Laing. 2017
Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is a perfect example of creative thinking. The book redefines feminism's struggle against patriarchy as part…
of a much broader issue: the damaging effects of all our assumptions about gender and identity. Looking at the factionalism of contemporary (1980s) feminism, Butler saw a movement split by identity politics. Riven by arguments over what it meant to be a women, over sexuality, and over class and race, feminism was falling prey to internal problems of identity, and was failing to move towards broader solidarity with other liberation movements such as LGBT. Butler turned these issues on their head by questioning the basis that supposedly fundamental and fixed identities such as 'masculine/feminine' or 'straight/gay' actually have. Tracing these binary definitions back to the binary nature of human anatomy ('male/female'), she argues that there is no necessary link between our anatomies and our identities. Subjecting a wide range of evidence from philosophy, cultural theory, anthropology, psychology and anthropology to a renewed search for meaning, Butler shows both that sex (biology) and gender (identity) are separate, and that even biological sex is not simplistically either/or male/female. Separating our biology from identity then allows her to argue that, while categories such as 'masculine/feminine/straight/gay' are real, they are not necessary; rather, they are the product of society's assumptions, and the constant reproduction of those assumptions by everyone around us. That opens up some small hope for change: a hope that – 25 years after Gender Trouble's publication – is having a huge impact on societies and politics across the world.Characteristics of Negro Expression
By Benjamin Lempert, Mercedes Aguirre. 2017
The racial prejudices of 1930s America were many, and included a common presumption that African American art was unoriginal –…
merely poorly copying white culture. African-American novelist, anthropologist and essayist Zora Neale Hurston crushingly evaluated such assumptions in her 1934 essay ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression.’ While Hurston’s approach and premises seem in many ways dated to modern readers, the essay still shows an incisive mind carefully evaluating arguments and cutting them down to size. African-American art of the time did not – Hurston influentially argued – play by the same rules as white art, so it could not meaningfully be discussed by ‘white’ notions of aesthetic value. Where white European tradition views art as something fixed, Hurston saw African-American art works as a distinctive form of mimicry, reshaping and altering the original object until it became something new and novel. In this way, she contended, African-American creative expression is a process that generates its own form of originality – turning borrowed material into something original and unique. By carefully evaluating the relevance of previous arguments, Hurston showed African American artistic expression in an entirely new light.The Story of Clara Barton (Cornerstones of Freedom)
By Zachary Kent. 1987
Kevin Guest House (Images of Modern America)
By Gerald L. Halligan, Denis Garvey. 2016
While unknown to many living in western New York, the Kevin Guest House has served thousands of critically ill individuals…
and their families for over 40 years. Quietly nestled within the expanding Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus of Buffalo, New York, the demand for the facility continues to increase. The opening chapter is a testimony to the Speyser-Beer family, who originally owned the property. The second and third chapters memorialize the founders of the Kevin Guest House, the Garvey family of Sharon, Pennsylvania. The remaining chapters provide a virtual tour of the grounds and building expansions of 2016.