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Author: C. Namwali Serpell Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674729099 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 404
Book Description
Literature is uncertain. Literature is good for us. These two ideas are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature’s capacity to perplex and its ethical value? Seven Modes of Uncertainty contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our experience.
Author: C. Namwali Serpell Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674729099 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 404
Book Description
Literature is uncertain. Literature is good for us. These two ideas are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature’s capacity to perplex and its ethical value? Seven Modes of Uncertainty contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our experience.
Author: C. Namwali Serpell Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674419685 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 404
Book Description
Literature is rife with uncertainty. Literature is good for us. These two ideas about reading literature are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature’s capacity to unsettle, perplex, and bewilder us, and literature’s ethical value? To revive this question, C. Namwali Serpell proposes a return to William Empson’s groundbreaking work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our own experience. Taking as case studies experimental novels by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Elliot Perlman, Tom McCarthy, and Jonathan Safran Foer, Serpell suggests that literary uncertainty emerges from the reader’s shifting responses to structures of conflicting information. A number of these novels employ a structure of mutual exclusion, which presents opposed explanations for the same events. Some use a structure of multiplicity, which presents different perspectives regarding events or characters. The structure of repetition in other texts destabilizes the continuity of events and frustrates our ability to follow the story. To explain how these structures produce uncertainty, Serpell borrows from cognitive psychology the concept of affordance, which describes an object’s or environment’s potential uses. Moving through these narrative structures affords various ongoing modes of uncertainty, which in turn afford ethical experiences both positive and negative. At the crossroads of recent critical turns to literary form, reading practices, and ethics, Seven Modes of Uncertainty offers a new phenomenology of how we read uncertainty now.
Author: Marta Figlerowicz Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501714236 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 178
Book Description
Can other people notice our affects more easily than we do? In Spaces of Feeling, Marta Figlerowicz examines modernist novels and poems that treat this possibility as electrifying, but also deeply disturbing. Their characters and lyric speakers are undone, Figlerowicz posits, by the realization that they depend on others to solve their inward affective conundrums—and that, to these other people, their feelings often do not seem mysterious at all. Spaces of Feeling features close readings of works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, Ralph Ellison, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens. Figlerowicz points out that these poets and novelists often place their protagonists in domestic spaces—such as bedrooms, living rooms, and basements—in which their cognitive dependence on other characters inhabiting these spaces becomes clear. Figlerowicz highlights the diversity of aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts in which these affective dependencies become central to these authors' representations of selfhood. By setting these novels and poems in conversation with the work of contemporary theorists, she illuminates pressing and unanswered questions about subjectivity.
Author: John Plotz Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231553684 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
There are the acknowledged classics of world literature: the canonical works assigned in schools, topping every must-read list . . . and then there are the B-Sides. These are the books that slipped through the cracks, went unread, missed their rightful appointment with posterity. They were ahead of their times or behind their times or on a whole different schedule than the rest of the universe. What do you do when a book that you love has been neglected or dismissed by everyone else? In B-Side Books, leading writers, critics, and scholars show why their favorite forgotten books deserve a new audience. From dusty westerns and far-out science fiction to obscure Czech novelists and romance-novel precursors, the contributors advocate for the unsung virtues of overlooked books. They write about unheralded novels, poetry collections, memoirs, and more with understanding, respect, passion, and love. In these thoughtful, often personal essays, contributors—including Stephanie Burt, Caleb Crain, Merve Emre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Carlo Rotella, and Namwali Serpell—read books by writers such as Helen DeWitt, Shirley Jackson, Stanislaw Lem, Dambudzo Marechera, Paule Marshall, and Charles Portis.
Author: Samantha Pinto Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 1478009284 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 164
Book Description
The countless retellings and reimaginings of the private and public lives of Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, Mary Seacole, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta have transformed them into difficult cultural and black feminist icons. In Infamous Bodies, Samantha Pinto explores how histories of these black women and their ongoing fame generate new ways of imagining black feminist futures. Drawing on a variety of media, cultural, legal, and critical sources, Pinto shows how the narratives surrounding these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century celebrities shape key political concepts such as freedom, consent, contract, citizenship, and sovereignty. Whether analyzing Wheatley's fame in relation to conceptions of race and freedom, notions of consent in Hemings's relationship with Thomas Jefferson, or Baartman's ability to enter into legal contracts, Pinto reveals the centrality of race, gender, and sexuality in the formation of political rights. In so doing, she contends that feminist theories of black women's vulnerable embodiment can be the starting point for future progressive political projects.
Author: Ben Masters Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198766149 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 213
Book Description
Marrying lyrical close reading with critical awareness, Novel Style argues for the ethical value of elaborate styles of writing and demonstrates that artistic excessiveness can provide dynamic responses to the moral complexities of our times.
Author: Chad Walber Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3030126765 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 405
Book Description
Sensors and Instrumentation, Aircraft/Aerospace and Energy Harvesting, Volume 7: Proceedings of the 37th IMAC, A Conference and Exposition on Structural Dynamics, 2019, the seventh volume of eight from the Conference brings together contributions to this important area of research and engineering. The collection presents early findings and case studies on fundamental and applied aspects of Shock & Vibration, Aircraft/Aerospace, Energy Harvesting & Dynamic Environments Testing including papers on: Alternative Sensing & Acquisition Active Controls Instrumentation Aircraft/Aerospace & Aerospace Testing Techniques Energy Harvesting
Author: Timothy Aubry Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674988965 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 143
Book Description
In the wake of radical social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies’ embrace of politics entailed a widespread rejection of aesthetic considerations. For scholars invested in literature’s role in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, appreciating literature’s formal beauty seemed frivolous and irresponsible, even complicit with the iniquities of the social order. This suspicion of aesthetics became the default posture within literary scholarship, a means of establishing the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s political commitments. Yet as Timothy Aubry explains, aesthetic pleasure never fully disappeared from the academy. It simply went underground. From New Criticism to the digital humanities, Aubry recasts aesthetics as the complicated, morally ambiguous, embattled yet resilient protagonist in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first–century literary studies. He argues that academic critics never stopped asserting preferences for certain texts, rhetorical strategies, or intellectual responses. Rather than serving as the enemy of formalism and aesthetics, political criticism enabled scholars to promote heightened experiences of perceptual acuity and complexity while adjudicating which formal strategies are best designed to bolster these experiences. Political criticism, in other words, did not eradicate but served covertly to nurture reading practices aimed at achieving aesthetic satisfaction. Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures shows that literary studies’ break with midcentury formalism was not as clean as it once appeared. Today, when so many scholars are advocating renewed attention to textual surfaces and aesthetic experiences, Aubry’s work illuminates the surprisingly vast common ground between the formalists and the schools of criticism that succeeded them.
Author: Andy Clark Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0190217014 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 425
Book Description
Exciting new theories in neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence are revealing minds like ours as predictive minds, forever trying to guess the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. In this up-to-the-minute treatment, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores new ways of thinking about perception, action, and the embodied mind.
Author: C. Namwali Serpell
Author: C. Namwali Serpell
Author: C. Namwali Serpell
Author: Marta Figlerowicz
Author: John Plotz
Author: Samantha Pinto
Author: Ben Masters
Author: Chad Walber
Author: Timothy Aubry
Author: Andy Clark
Author: Namwali Serpell