Nietzsche, Life as Literature

Nietzsche, Life as Literature
Author: Alexander Nehamas
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1985
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674624269

More than eighty years after his death, Nietzsche's writings and his career remain disquieting, disturbing, obscure. His most famous views-the will to power, the eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, the master morality-often seem incomprehensible or, worse, repugnant. Yet he remains a thinker of singular importance, a great opponent of Hegel and Kant, and the source of much that is powerful in figures as diverse as Wittgenstein, Derrida, Heidegger, and many recent American philosophers. Alexander Nehamas provides the best possible guide for the perplexed. He reveals the single thread running through Nietzsche's views: his thinking of the world on the model of a literary text, of people as if they were literary characters, and of knowledge and science as if they were literary interpretation. Beyond this, he advances the clarity of the concept of textuality, making explicit some of the forces that hold texts together and so hold us together. Nehamas finally allows us to see that Nietzsche is creating a literary character out of himself, that he is, in effect, playing the role of Plato to his own Socrates. Nehamas discusses a number of opposing views, both American and European, of Nietzsche's texts and general project, and reaches a climactic solving of the main problems of Nietzsche interpretation in a step-by-step argument. In the process he takes up a set of very interesting questions in contemporary philosophy, such as moral relativism and scientific realism. This is a book of considerable breadth and elegance that will appeal to all curious readers of philosophy and literature.

Philosophy and Literary Modernism

Philosophy and Literary Modernism
Author: Robert P. McParland
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1527517845

Philosophy and Literary Modernism probes the relationship of authors with the thought of their time. The authors studied here include Conrad, Eliot, Faulkner, Forster, Hemingway, Hesse, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence, Williams, and Woolf, among others. Literary modernism engaged with explorations of literary form, language, ways of knowing the world, identity, commitment, chance, truth, and beauty. The book considers how writers participated in the intellectual spirit of their time and with the thought of philosophers like Henri Bergson, G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Perspectival Realism

Perspectival Realism
Author: Michela Massimi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2022
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0197555624

"What does it mean to be a realist about science if one takes seriously the view that scientific knowledge is always perspectival, namely historically and culturally situated? In this book, Michela Massimi articulates an original answer to this question. The book begins with an exploration of how scientific communities often resort to several models and a plurality of practices in some areas of inquiry, drawing on examples from nuclear physics, climate science, and developmental psychology. Taking this plurality in science as a starting point, Massimi explains the perspectival nature of scientific representation, the role of scientific models as inferential blueprints, and the variety of scientific realism that naturally accompanies such a view. Perspectival realism is realism about phenomena (rather than about theories or unobservable entities). The book defends this novel realist view, which places epistemic communities and their situated knowledge center stage. The result is a portrait of scientific knowledge as a collaborative inquiry, where the reliability of science is made possible by a plurality of historically and culturally situated scientific perspectives. Along the way, Massimi offers insights into the nature of scientific modelling, scientific knowledge qua modal knowledge, data-to-phenomena inferences, and natural kinds as sortal concepts. Perspectival realism is ultimately realism that takes the multicultural nature of science seriously and couples it with cosmopolitan duties about how one ought to think about scientific knowledge and the distribution of the benefits resulting from scientific advancements"--

Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature

Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature
Author: Jen E. Boyle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351958518

Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature explores the prevalence of anamorphic perspective in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. Jen Boyle investigates how anamorphic media flourished in early modern England as an interactive technology and mode of affect in public interactive art, city and garden design, and as a theory and figure in literature, political theory and natural and experimental philosophy. Anamorphic mediation, Boyle brings to light, provided Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Daniel Defoe, among others, with a powerful techno-imaginary for traversing through projective, virtual experience. Drawing on extensive archival research related to the genre of "practical perspective" in early modern Europe, Boyle offers a scholarly consideration of anamorphic perspective (its technical means, performances, and embodied practices) as an interactive aesthetics and cultural imaginary. Ultimately, Boyle demonstrates how perspective media inflected a diverse set of knowledges and performances related to embodiment, affect, and collective consciousness.

D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence
Author: Thomas Jackson Rice
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2018-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351046330

Originally published in 1983, D.H. Lawrence is an annotated bibliographic collection of works by and about D.H. Lawrence. Consisting of three parts, the primary bibliography contains separate bibliographies of Lawrence’s major publications, of collection editions of his works, of his letters, and of concordances to his writings. The secondary bibliography contains bibliographies of biographical and critical publications concerning Lawrence, generally or his individual works. Appendixes and Indexes include an extensive checklist of major foreign-language publications concerning Lawrence and a useful topical and thematic subject index for the guide.

Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent

Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent
Author: Wayne C. Booth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 1974-10-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0226065723

When should I change my mind? What can I believe and what must I doubt? In this new "philosophy of good reasons" Wayne C. Booth exposes five dogmas of modernism that have too often inhibited efforts to answer these questions. Modern dogmas teach that "you cannot reason about values" and that "the job of thought is to doubt whatever can be doubted," and they leave those who accept them crippled in their efforts to think and talk together about whatever concerns them most. They have willed upon us a "befouled rhetorical climate" in which people are driven to two self-destructive extremes—defenders of reason becoming confined to ever narrower notions of logical or experimental proof and defenders of "values" becoming more and more irresponsible in trying to defend the heart, the gut, or the gonads. Booth traces the consequences of modernist assumptions through a wide range of inquiry and action: in politics, art, music, literature, and in personal efforts to find "identity" or a "self." In casting doubt on systematic doubt, the author finds that the dogmas are being questioned in almost every modern discipline. Suggesting that they be replaced with a rhetoric of "systematic assent," Booth discovers a vast, neglected reservoir of "good reasons"—many of them known to classical students of rhetoric, some still to be explored. These "good reasons" are here restored to intellectual respectability, suggesting the possibility of widespread new inquiry, in all fields, into the question, "When should I change my mind?"

Theory of Literature

Theory of Literature
Author: Rene Wellek
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-04-02
Genre: Criticism
ISBN: 9781628972832

Theory of Literature was born from the collaboration of Ren Wellek, a Vienna-born student of Prague School linguistics, and Austin Warren, an independently minded "old New Critic." Unlike many other textbooks of its era, however, this classic kowtows to no dogma and toes no party line. Wellek and Warren looked at literature as both a social product--influenced by politics, economics, etc.--as well as a self-contained system of formal structures. Incorporating examples from Aristotle to Coleridge, written in clear, uncondescending prose, Theory of Literature is a work which, especially in its suspicion of simplistic explanations and its distrust of received wisdom, remains extremely relevant to the study of literature today.

Don Quixote

Don Quixote
Author: Slav N. Gratchev
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2017-11-06
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1611488583

This book is a unique scholarly attempt to examine Don Quixote from multiple angles to see how the re-accentuation of the world’s greatest literary hero takes place in film, theatre, and literature. To accomplish this task, eighteen scholars from the USA, Canada, Spain, and Great Britain have come together, and each of them has brought his/her unique perspective to the subject. For the first time, Don Quixote is discussed from the point of re-accentuation, i.e. having in mind one of the key Bakhtinian concepts that will serve as a theoretical framework. A primary objective was therefore to articulate, relying on the concept of re-accentuation, that the history of the novel has benefited enormously from the re-accentuation of Don Quixote helping us to shape countless iconic novels from the eighteenth century, and to see how Cervantes’s title character has been reinterpreted to suit the needs of a variety of cultures across time and space.

Infernal Paradise

Infernal Paradise
Author: Ronald G. Walker
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2023-11-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520319249

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.