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Literature and Skepticism

Literature and Skepticism PDF Author: Pablo Oyarzun
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438486812
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
Literature and Skepticism links the skeptic attitude to the conditions of possibility in (modern) literature—in particular, the narrative form and the essay. Pablo Oyarzun proposes that narrative and the essay document the relationship between literature and skepticism in different but complementary and, at the same time, complicit ways. As the narrative performance reaches the structural limit of the literary—understood as the domain of fiction—a sort of para-discursive reflection critically accompanies this performance, discussing it, ironizing it, feigning to disbelieve it, or overtly belying it. Yet the narrative doubtfully takes distance from itself, surrendering all right to a final truth at the very moment at which truth emerges, essayistic, to the surface. The authors considered—Montaigne, Swift, Lichtenberg, Kleist, Kafka, and Borges—are eminent representatives of one and the other form, and all of the works analyzed are cases of a complex interplay between narrative and essay.

Literature and Skepticism

Literature and Skepticism PDF Author: Pablo Oyarzun
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438486812
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
Literature and Skepticism links the skeptic attitude to the conditions of possibility in (modern) literature—in particular, the narrative form and the essay. Pablo Oyarzun proposes that narrative and the essay document the relationship between literature and skepticism in different but complementary and, at the same time, complicit ways. As the narrative performance reaches the structural limit of the literary—understood as the domain of fiction—a sort of para-discursive reflection critically accompanies this performance, discussing it, ironizing it, feigning to disbelieve it, or overtly belying it. Yet the narrative doubtfully takes distance from itself, surrendering all right to a final truth at the very moment at which truth emerges, essayistic, to the surface. The authors considered—Montaigne, Swift, Lichtenberg, Kleist, Kafka, and Borges—are eminent representatives of one and the other form, and all of the works analyzed are cases of a complex interplay between narrative and essay.

Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism

Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism PDF Author: Michael Fischer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226251411
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Cavell is read avidly by students of film, television, painting, and music, but especially by students of literature, for whom he offers major readings of Thoreau. Fischer (English, U. of New Mexico) shows why Cavell's work is also of particular relevance to the controversies surrounding poststructuralist literary theory. Paper edition (0-226-25141-1) is available for $10.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature

Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Anita Gilman Sherman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108905358
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
This ambitious account of skepticism's effects on major authors of England's Golden Age shows how key philosophical problems inspired literary innovations in poetry and prose. When figures like Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert of Cherbury, Cavendish, Marvell and Milton question theories of language, degrees of knowledge and belief, and dwell on the uncertainties of perception, they forever change English literature, ushering it into a secular mode. While tracing a narrative arc from medieval nominalism to late seventeenth-century taste, the book explores the aesthetic pleasures and political quandaries induced by skeptical doubt. It also incorporates modern philosophical views of skepticism: those of Stanley Cavell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, and Hans Blumenberg, among others. The book thus contributes to interdisciplinary studies of philosophy and literature as well as to current debates about skepticism as a secularizing force, fostering civil liberties and religious freedoms.

Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism

Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism PDF Author: Mark Wollaeger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804766819
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
"You want more scepticism at the very foundation of your work. Scepticism, the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth - the way of art and salvation." Joseph Conrad wrote these words to John Galsworthy in 1901, and this study argues that Conrad's skepticism forms the basis of his most important works, participating in a tradition of philosophical skepticism that extends from Descartes to the present. Conrad's epistemological and moral skepticism - expressed, forestalled, mitigated, and suppressed - provides the terms for the author's rethinking of the peculiar relation between philosophy and literary form in Conrad's writing and, more broadly, for reconsidering what it means to call any novel 'philosophical'. Among the issues freshly argued are Conrad's thematics of coercion, isolation, and betrayal; the complicated relations among author, narrator, and character; and the logic of Conradian romance, comedy, and tragedy. The author also offers a new way of conceptualizing the shape of Conrad's career, especially the 'decline' evidenced in the later fiction. The uniqueness of Conrad's multifarious literary and cultural inheritance makes it difficult to locate him securely in the dominant tradition of the British novel. A philosophical approach to Conrad, however, reveals links to other novelists - notably Hardy, Forster, and Woolf - all of whom share in the increasing philosophical burden of the modern novel by enacting the very philosophical issues that are discussed within their pages. Conrad's interest as a skeptic is heightened by the degree to which he resists the insights proffered by his own skepticism. The first chapter introduces the idea of the Conradian 'shelter', and the next two use Schopenhauer to show how the language of metaphysical speculation in Tales of Unrest and 'Heart of Darkness' spills over into a religious impulse that resists the disintegrating effect of Conrad's skepticism. The author then turns to Hume to model the authorial skepticism that in Lord Jim contests the continuing visionary strain of the earlier fiction and Descartes to analyze the ways in which Romantic vision is more stringently chastened by irony in Nostromo and The Secret Agent. The concluding chapter touches on several late novels before examining how competing models of political agency in Conrad's last great fiction of skepticism, Under Western Eyes, situate it somewhere between ideology critique and a mystified account of the exigencies of individual consciousness.

Doubt and Skepticism in Antiquity and the Renaissance

Doubt and Skepticism in Antiquity and the Renaissance PDF Author: Michelle Zerba
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702465X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
An interdisciplinary study of the forms and uses of uncertainty in important works of literature and philosophy in antiquity and the Renaissance.

Scepticism and Hope in Twentieth Century Fantasy Literature

Scepticism and Hope in Twentieth Century Fantasy Literature PDF Author: Kath Filmer-Davies
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879725549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Filmer argues that, in secular society, the psychological need to hope is met in the literature of fantasy. She illustrates her thesis using the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Peter Beagle, Susan Cooper, Madeleine L'Engle, George Orwell, Russell Hoban, James Thurber, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Alan Garner, Ursula LeGuin, and Patricia Wrightson. Paper edition (unseen), $13.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Species intelligibilis. 1. Classical roots and medieval discussions

Species intelligibilis. 1. Classical roots and medieval discussions PDF Author: Leen Spruit
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004098831
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Book Description
The main purpose of this book is to offer a comprehensive historical analysis of the discussions on a crucial problem for the Medieval theory of knowledge: the formal mediation of sensible reality in intellectual knowledge.

Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism

Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism PDF Author: Millicent Bell
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300127200
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
Readers of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies have long noted the absence of readily explainable motivations for some of Shakespeare’s greatest characters: why does Hamlet delay his revenge for so long? Why does King Lear choose to renounce his power? Why is Othello so vulnerable to Iago’s malice? But while many critics have chosen to overlook these omissions or explain them away, Millicent Bell demonstrates that they are essential elements of Shakespeare’s philosophy of doubt. Examining the major tragedies, Millicent Bell reveals the persistent strain of philosophical skepticism. Like his contemporary, Montaigne, Shakespeare repeatedly calls attention to the essential unknowability of our world. In a period of social, political, and religious upheaval, uncertainty hovered over matters great and small—the succession of the crown, the death of loved ones from plague, the failure of a harvest. Tumultuous social conditions raised ultimate questions for Shakespeare, Bell argues, and ultimately provoked in him a skepticism which casts shadows of existential doubt over his greatest masterpieces.

Uncertain Chances

Uncertain Chances PDF Author: Maurice S. Lee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199985812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
Maurice Lee's study illustrates how writers such as Poe, Melville, Douglass, Thoreau, Dickinson, and others participated in a broad intellectual and cultural shift in which Americans increasingly learned to live with the threatening and wonderful possibilities of chance.

The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe

The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe PDF Author: Dr. Steven Novella
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1538760517
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 505

Book Description
An all-encompassing guide to skeptical thinking from podcast host and academic neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine Steven Novella and his SGU co-hosts, which Richard Wiseman calls "the perfect primer for anyone who wants to separate fact from fiction." It is intimidating to realize that we live in a world overflowing with misinformation, bias, myths, deception, and flawed knowledge. There really are no ultimate authority figures-no one has the secret, and there is no place to look up the definitive answers to our questions (not even Google). Luckily, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is your map through this maze of modern life. Here Dr. Steven Novella-along with Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein-will explain the tenets of skeptical thinking and debunk some of the biggest scientific myths, fallacies, and conspiracy theories-from anti-vaccines to homeopathy, UFO sightings to N- rays. You'll learn the difference between science and pseudoscience, essential critical thinking skills, ways to discuss conspiracy theories with that crazy co- worker of yours, and how to combat sloppy reasoning, bad arguments, and superstitious thinking. So are you ready to join them on an epic scientific quest, one that has taken us from huddling in dark caves to setting foot on the moon? (Yes, we really did that.) DON'T PANIC! With The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, we can do this together. "Thorough, informative, and enlightening, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe inoculates you against the frailties and shortcomings of human cognition. If this book does not become required reading for us all, we may well see modern civilization unravel before our eyes." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson "In this age of real and fake information, your ability to reason, to think in scientifically skeptical fashion, is the most important skill you can have. Read The Skeptics' Guide Universe; get better at reasoning. And if this claim about the importance of reason is wrong, The Skeptics' Guide will help you figure that out, too." -- Bill Nye