The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction

The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction
Author: S. Halldorson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2007-12-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230609783

This book sets out to write nothing short of a new theory of the heroic for today's world. It delves into the "why" of the hero as a natural companion piece to the "how" of the hero as written by Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell over half a century ago. The novels of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo serve as an anchor to the theory as it challenges our notions of what is heroic about nymphomaniacs, Holocaust survivors, spurious academics, cult followers, terrorists, celebrities, photographers and writers of novels who all attempt to claim the right to be "hero."

The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand

The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand
Author: Douglas J. Den Uyl
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1987-01-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780252014079

"An Illini book." Includes bibliographical references and index.

Two Orientations Toward Human Nature

Two Orientations Toward Human Nature
Author: Rony Guldmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351877151

Our culture entertains a schizophrenic attitude towards human nature. On the one hand, egoism is held to be our most powerful motive, playing a crucial cultural role by explaining the appeal of capitalism and providing a foundation for individualism. By contrast much of the continental intellectual tradition speaks of wholeness and alienation, seeing human nature not as self-interested but as herd-like. Guldmann argues that this schism reflects two diverging conceptions of human agency, and that the attempt to locate human nature somewhere along a continuum between egoism and altruism presupposes a misleading picture of what it is to be a human being. The second, ’continental’ tradition is more illuminating because it recognizes that human beings are necessarily committed to some conception of the ultimately significant.

The Masterless

The Masterless
Author: Wilfred M. McClay
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 1994
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780807821176

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Conceiving Evil

Conceiving Evil
Author: Wendy C. Hamblet
Publisher: Algora Publishing
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2014-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 162894093X

What is it that permits us to see others as 'evil'? This book argues that it's our epistemological framework, which also resituates our own moral compass and reframes our moral world such that we can justify performing violent deeds, which we would readily demonize in others, as the heroics of eradicating evil. When conflict is understood positively as the confrontation of differences, an unavoidable and indeed desirable consequence of the rich tapestry of earthly life, then a discussion can open as to how to navigate the countless confrontations of difference in the most skillful way. Through this lens, violence comes into view as the least skillful means of responding to, and working with, difference, since violence tends to 'rebound' and leaves both victims and perpetrators worse off—shameful and vengeful. Philosopher Wendy C. Hamblet argues that the radically polarized and oversimplified worldview that sorts the phenomena of the world into 'good guys' and 'evil others' is a framework as old as human community itself, and one that undermines people's own moral infrastructure, permitting them to take up the very acts that they would readily demonize as 'evil' in others. One's own violent responses to the human condition come to be reframed from unskillful and undesirable actions to valiant heroic reactions. In short, those who see 'evil' in others are far more likely to do 'evil,' resorting to the least skillful means for navigating difference—violence. In theory, violence is demonized as 'evil' in popular and criminological discourse and calls forth 'rebounding' like responses in the form of acts of vengeance in individuals and punitive responses in state institutions. However, punishment is itself defined as an 'evil' inflicted by a legitimate authority upon a wrongdoer in compensation for a wrong done. This leads to the conundrum that the state, as much as the vigilante, must necessarily undermine its own legitimacy by taking up the very acts that it deems as evil in its enemies and punishes in its deviant citizens. By reframing conflict positively, Hamblet introduces a new way of thinking about difference that allows the reader to appreciate (rather than tolerate) difference as a desirable feature of a multicultural, multi-religioned, multi-gendered world. This resituates the discussion of conflict such that conflict response styles can be viewed as more and less skillful means of navigating impasses in a world of differences.

Hamlet and Arjuna: Heroes of a Feather

Hamlet and Arjuna: Heroes of a Feather
Author: Dr. Salia Rex
Publisher: Partridge Publishing
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2017-11-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1543701442

The enigmatic psyche of Hamlet, the prince of Denmark has raised myriad critical opinions, which see him as an indecisive hero, a lunatic, misogynist and a philosopher who failed as a son, lover and prince, leading a life of incest shadowed by inferiority complex and paranoia. The result is the son becoming the bane of his family. The book takes a fresh look at Hamlet, the hero, from a novel angle in the light of the philosophy of the Bhagavadgita, and projects him as a hero who fights many a battle in his mind against his own gunas until he gets refined as a Trigunatita. A glance at Hamlet criticism provides a kaleidoscopic view of the extensive critical readings on Hamlet ever since the text was published. This work captivates converging and diverging elements of the two masterpieces. In Hamlet and Arjuna: Birds of a Feather, Dr. Salia Rex analyses the psyche and actions of Hamlet, the tragic hero of William Shakespeare, and Arjuna, the mythological hero of Veda Vyasa, to unearth their converging elements and quintessential uniqueness as heroes.

The Fra

The Fra
Author: Elbert Hubbard
Publisher:
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1909
Genre:
ISBN:

A Mirror to Nature

A Mirror to Nature
Author: Rose A. Zimbardo
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2021-10-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813186730

In this provocative study Rose Zimbardo examines a crucial revolution in aesthetics that took place in the late seventeenth century and that to this day dominates our response to literature. Although artists of that time continued to follow the precept "imitate nature," that nature no longer corresponds to the earlier understanding of the term. What had been in essence an allegorical mode came to be a literal one. Focusing on the drama of the period as an exemplary form, Zimbardo shows how it moved from depicting a metaphysical reality of idea to portraying an inner reality of individual experience. But drama is constrained in expressing the inner experience since its medium is limited to human action. The novel arose to replace drama as the popular literary form, Zimbardo argues, because it could better and more freely convey man's inner world and thereby imitate the "new" nature. The study concluded that the changes which took place in drama during this period and which led to the invention of the novel resulted not from any "change of heart" or sensibility but from a fundamental change in the understanding of the nature which art was thought to imitate. Neither the drama of the 1690s nor the early novel, Zimbardo finds, was in the least "sentimental." A Mirror to Nature brings a new critical perspective to bear on literary developments at the end of the seventeenth century—one that must be considered by critics and historians of the period.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx
Author: Francis Wheen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780393321579

Looks at the life of the father of Communism focusing primarily on the human side of the man rather than his works.

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation
Author: Sarah Wootton
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2017-01-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113757934X

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation charts a new chapter in the changing fortunes of a unique cultural phenomenon. This book examines the afterlives of the Byronic hero through the work of nineteenth-century women writers and screen adaptations of their fiction. It is a timely reassessment of Byron's enduring legacy during the nineteenth century and beyond, focusing on the charged and unstable literary dialogues between Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and a Romantic icon whose presence takes centre stage in recent screen adaptations of their most celebrated novels. The broad interdisciplinary lens employed in this book concentrates on the conflicted rewritings of Byron's poetry, his 'heroic' protagonists, and the cult of Byronism in nineteenth-century novels from Pride and Prejudice to Middlemarch, and extends outwards to the reappearance of Byronic heroes on film and in television series over the last two decades.