Blessings in Disguise, Or, The Morality of Evil PDF Download

Author: Jean Starobinski
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674076471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
It is the task of art, he contends, to make the most of these conventions, to use the very disguises of civilization to counter the barbarism they mask. Tracing this idea through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, Starobinski charts the historical and intellectual limits of criticism itself.".

Author: Thomas Nys
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317394402
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 928

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Book Description
Why ought we concern ourselves with understanding a concept of evil? It is an elusive and politically charged concept which critics argue has no explanatory power and is a relic of a superstitious and primitive religious past. Yet its widespread use persists today: we find it invoked by politicians, judges, journalists, and many others to express the view that certain actions, persons, institutions, or ideologies are not just morally problematic but require a special signifier to mark them out from the ordinary and commonplace. Therefore, the question of what a concept of evil could mean and how it fits into our moral vocabulary remains an important and pressing concern. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil provides an outstanding overview and exploration of these issues and more, bringing together an international team of scholars working on the concept of evil. Its 27 chapters cover the crucial discussions and arguments, both historical and contemporary, that are needed to properly understand the historical development and complexity of the concept of evil. The Handbook is divided into three parts: Historical explorations of evil Recent secular explorations of evil Evil and other issues. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil is essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of ethics and philosophy of psychology. It also provides important insights and background for anyone exploring the concept of evil in related subjects such as literature, politics, and religion.

Author: Svetlana Boym
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501337513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 557

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Book Description
Svetlana Boym was a prolific writer, a charismatic professor, a novelist, and a public intellectual. She was also a fiercely resourceful and reflective immigrant; her most resonant book, The Future of Nostalgia, was deeply rooted in that experience. Even after The Future of Nostalgia carried her fame beyond academic circles, few readers were aware of all of her creative personas. She was simply too prolific, and her work migrated across most people's disciplinary boundaries-from literary and cultural studies through film, visual, and material culture studies, performance, intermedia, and new media. The Svetlana Boym Reader presents a comprehensive view of Boym's singularly creative work in all its aspects. It includes Boym's classic essays, carefully chosen excerpts from her five books, and journalistic gems. Showcasing her roles both as curator and curated, the reader includes interviews and excerpts from exhibition catalogues as well as samples of intermedial works like Hydrant Immigrants. It also features autobiographical pieces that shed light on the genealogy of her scholarly work and rarities like an excerpt from Boym's first graduate school essay on Russian literature, complete with marginalia by her mentor Donald Fanger. Last but not least, the reader includes late pieces that Boym did not live to see through publication, as well as transcripts of her memorable last lectures and performances.

Author: Kenneth C. Calhoon
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442664169
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Affecting Grace examines the importance of Shakespeare’s poetry and plays within German literature and thought after 1750 – including its relationship to German classicism, which favoured unreflected ease over theatricality. Kenneth S. Calhoon examines this tension against an extensive backdrop that includes a number of canonical German authors – Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, von Kleist, and Nietzsche – as well as the advent of Meissen porcelain, the painting of Bernardo Bellotto and Francesco Guardi, and aspects of German styles of architecture. Extending from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (c. 1597) to Kleist’s The Broken Jug (1806), this study turns on the paradox that the German literary world had begun to embrace Shakespeare just as it was firming up the broad but pronounced anti-Baroque sensibility found pivotally in Lessing’s critical and dramatic works. Through these investigations, Calhoon illuminates the deep cultural changes that fundamentally affected Germany’s literary and artistic traditions.

Author: Jean Starobinski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description

Author: Kenneth Scott Calhoon
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442645997
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Affecting Grace examines the importance of Shakespeare's poetry and plays within German literature and thought after 1750 – including its relationship to German classicism, which favoured unreflected ease over theatricality. Kenneth S. Calhoon examines this tension against an extensive backdrop that includes a number of canonical German authors – Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, von Kleist, and Nietzsche – as well as the advent of Meissen porcelain, the painting of Bernardo Bellotto and Francesco Guardi, and aspects of German styles of architecture. Extending from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (c. 1597) to Kleist's The Broken Jug (1806), this study turns on the paradox that the German literary world had begun to embrace Shakespeare just as it was firming up the broad but pronounced anti-Baroque sensibility found pivotally in Lessing's critical and dramatic works. Through these investigations, Calhoon illuminates the deep cultural changes that fundamentally affected Germany's literary and artistic traditions.

Author: Constantine Christos Vassiliou
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666913286
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This book’s primary purpose is to commemore the 300th anniversary of a seminal book in classical liberal thought. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters is a delightfully rich, sympathetic sattire of commercial society’s promise and discontents, covering a wide range of issues and themes that shaped the direction of liberal modernity. It consists of a series of letters largely writted by two Persian travelers to Paris, who allow modern readers to view Parisian life from the perspective of an outsider. The volume includes contributions from prominent scholars of Montesquieu’s whose classic commentaries have stood the test of time, and early career scholars who have recently unearthed new and exciting avenues for understanding this important hinge-figure in modern political thought.

Author: Peter Gray
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526185768
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Investigates the dynamic relationship between experiences of profound social and cultural disruption, and human memory. Critical comparisons are made across a wide variety of catastrophic experiences and memories; not just of war, but also of massacre, genocide, rebellion, famine, partition, shipwreck and fire. The book is an accessible showcase for a wide range of methodological approaches to the study of memory, including literary studies, cultural studies, participant-observation and historical studies, and uses a variety of oral, visual and written sources. Offers a diverse chronological and geographical range of catastrophic cases, from seventeenth-century England to the recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, from Ireland to the Indian sub-continent, from Mexico to wartime Leningrad. Well-written and accessible – a fascinating read.

Author: Chiara Bottici
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136951199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
While globalization unifies the world, divisions re-emerge within it in the form of a spectacular separation between Islam and the West. How can it be that Huntington’s contested idea of a clash of civilizations became such a powerful political myth through which so many people look at the world? Bottici and Challand disentangle such a process of myth-making both in the West and in Muslim majority countries, and call for a renewed critical attitude towards it. By analysing a process of elaboration of this myth that took place in academic books, arts and media, comics and Hollywood films, they show that the clash of civilizations has become a cognitive scheme through which people look at the world, a practical image on the basis of which they act on it, as well as a drama which mobilizes passions and emotions. Written in a concise and accessible way, this book is a timely and valuable contribution to the academic literature, and more generally, to the public debate. As such, it will be an important reference for scholars and students of political science, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, Middle Eastern politics and Islam.

Author: Marco Menin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192679333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A crucial period for the birth of the modern subject, France's 'long eighteenth century' (approximately 1650-1820) was an era marked by the formulation of a new aesthetic and ethical code revolving around the intensification of emotions and the hyperbolic use of weeping. Precisely because tears are not a simple biological fact but rather hang suspended between natural immediacy, on one side, and cultural artifice, on the other, the analysis of crying came to represent an exemplary testing ground for investigations into the enigmatic relations binding the realm of physiology to that of psychology. Thinking About Tears explores how the link between tears and sensibility in France's long eighteenth century helps shed light on the process through which the European emotional lexicon has been built: from viewing tears as governed by the sphere of 'passions' and 'feelings', thinkers began to view crying as first a matter of sensibility and then of sensiblerie (a pathological excess of sensibility), thereby presupposing an intimate connection with the category of 'sentiments'. For this reason, this volume examines not only or even primarily the actual emotion of crying, but also the attempt to think about and explain this feeling. Drawing on a wide range of early modern philosophical, medical, religious, and literary texts-including moral treatises on the passions, medical textbooks, letters, life-writings, novels, and stage-plays-Thinking About Tears reveals another side to a period that has too often been saddled with the cursory label of 'the age of reason'.