Elegy for Theory

Elegy for Theory PDF Author: D. N. Rodowick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674727010
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
Rhetorically charged debates over theory have divided scholars of the humanities for decades. In Elegy for Theory, D. N. Rodowick steps back from well-rehearsed arguments pro and con to assess why theory has become such a deeply contested concept. Far from lobbying for a return to the "high theory" of the 1970s and 1980s, he calls for a vigorous dialogue on what should constitute a new, ethically inflected philosophy of the humanities. Rodowick develops an ambitiously cross-disciplinary critique of theory as an academic discourse, tracing its historical displacements from ancient concepts of theoria through late modern concepts of the aesthetic and into the twentieth century. The genealogy of theory, he argues, is constituted by two main lines of descent—one that goes back to philosophy and the other rooted instead in the history of positivism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Giving literature, philosophy, and aesthetics their due, Rodowick asserts that the mid-twentieth-century rise of theory within the academy cannot be understood apart from the emergence of cinema and visual studies. To ask the question, "What is cinema?" is to also open up in new ways the broader question of what is art. At a moment when university curriculums are everywhere being driven by scientism and market forces, Elegy for Theory advances a rigorous argument for the importance of the arts and humanities as transformative, self-renewing cultural legacies.

Elegy for Theory

Elegy for Theory PDF Author: D. N. Rodowick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674726081
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
Rhetorically charged debates over theory have divided scholars of the humanities for decades. In Elegy for Theory, D. N. Rodowick steps back from well-rehearsed arguments pro and con to assess why theory has become such a deeply contested concept. Far from lobbying for a return to the "high theory" of the 1970s and 1980s, he calls for a vigorous dialogue on what should constitute a new, ethically inflected philosophy of the humanities. Rodowick develops an ambitiously cross-disciplinary critique of theory as an academic discourse, tracing its historical displacements from ancient concepts of theoria through late modern concepts of the aesthetic and into the twentieth century. The genealogy of theory, he argues, is constituted by two main lines of descent--one that goes back to philosophy and the other rooted instead in the history of positivism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Giving literature, philosophy, and aesthetics their due, Rodowick asserts that the mid-twentieth-century rise of theory within the academy cannot be understood apart from the emergence of cinema and visual studies. To ask the question, "What is cinema?" is to also open up in new ways the broader question of what is art.

Philosophy’s Artful Conversation

Philosophy’s Artful Conversation PDF Author: D. N. Rodowick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674967380
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding. Philosophy’s Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory’s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a “philosophy of the humanities.” In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like. Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.

The Virtual Life of Film

The Virtual Life of Film PDF Author: D. N. RODOWICK
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674042832
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
As almost every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of "watching a film" is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media, what will happen to cinema--and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of the twenty-first century.

In the Flesh

In the Flesh PDF Author: Erika Zimmerman Damer
Publisher: Wisconsin Studies in Classics
ISBN: 0299318702
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
This original look at the Roman love elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid engages postmodern and new materialist feminist theory to assert the significance in the poems of human bodies in all their vulnerability, sexiness, and materiality. This analysis underscores the impact marginalized characters such as mistresses and enslaved individuals have on the genre.

The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy

The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy PDF Author: Karen Weisman
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0199228132
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 736

Book Description
The single most comprehensive study of elegy, this Handbook offers groundbreaking scholarship, historical breadth, and responds to recent exciting developments in elegy studies: the explosion in interest in elegies about AIDS, cancer, and war; the reconsideration of the role of women; and elegy's relation to ethics, philosophy, and theory.

Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy PDF Author: J. D. Vance
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062872257
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS NOW A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD AND STARRING AMY ADAMS, GLENN CLOSE, AND GABRIEL BASSO "You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

The Crisis of Political Modernism

The Crisis of Political Modernism PDF Author: D. N. Rodowick
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520087712
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
"Gives a superb critical and polemical overview of the '70s film theory. Rodowick is particularly good at showing both the political stakes of these influential theories and their blind spots."—Constance Penley, University of California, Santa Barbara

Alamo Theory

Alamo Theory PDF Author: Josh Bell
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619321580
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
"Bell's work is a concoction of the surreal and the hyper-real, the hilarious and the devastating."—The New Yorker "One of the most tonally versatile young poets working today."—Boston Review "A contemporary knockout, Bell's poems run the gamut of good: they're seriously funny, bizarre, wry, ambitious, acrobatic, gorgeous. Sometimes they have zombies."—Flavorwire Joshua Bell's unnerving and darkly funny second collection of poems inhabits various personae—including a prominent series starring the garrulous and aging rock star Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe—through which he examines paranoid, misogynist, and murderous elements within contemporary American culture. Throughout are prose "movie poems" that feature zombies, a summer camp slasher, exorcism, and courtroom drama. From "The Creature": Like many humans, I enjoy lifting small, living things. Your wife qualifies, but doesn't like to be lifted. I guess it's probably because, as is true with many humans, your wife doesn't want to be eaten, and often we are lifted, by the bigger thing, right before it drops us on a rock and eats us. I understand, I say to your wife, lowering her body to the kitchen floor, her legs bending slowly as she takes back the weight I've returned to her, like an astronaut moving back into the gravity of the capsule… Josh Bell earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. He was a member of the creative writing faculty at Columbia University and is currently Briggs Copeland Lecturer at Harvard.

Poetry of Mourning

Poetry of Mourning PDF Author: Jahan Ramazani
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226703401
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Book Description
Through readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems and the blues, this book covers a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. It is grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning.