The Paradox of Omniscience. Short Stories PDF Download

Author: Arunas Bartusevicius
Publisher: Arunas Bartusevicius
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 95

View

Book Description
Melancholic and introspective look into the life and the complexities of human interaction.

Author: Clifford A. Pickover
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250083095
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 369

View

Book Description
In his most ambitious book yet, Clifford Pickover bridges the gulf between logic, spirit, science, and religion. While exploring the concept of omniscience, Pickover explains the kinds of relationships limited beings can have with an all-knowing God. Pickover's thought exercises, controversial experiments, and practical analogies help us transcend our ordinary lives while challenging us to better understand our place in the cosmos and our dreams of a supernatural God. Through an inventive blend of science, history, philosophy, science fiction, and mind-stretching brainteasers, Pickover unfolds the paradoxes of God like no other writer. He provides glimpses into the infinite, allowing us to think big, and to have daring, limitless dreams.

Author: David Grylls
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317232801
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

View

Book Description
First published 1986. In this book the author refutes the notion that Gissing’s weaknesses as a novelist are associated with defects in his personality and argues that the power of his writing stemmed from his divided character. Gissing’s permanently divided emotions on poverty, reformism, women and art were, at his best, the reason he could write so convincingly about them. This analysis of Gissing’s imagination and the fictional development in his major works shows that the effectiveness of his novels depends largely on these dichotomies and opposites. This work covers the whole range of Gissing’s writing and relates it to its social and intellectual milieu.

Author: Charles D. Presberg
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271072237
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

View

Book Description
Cervantes’s Don Quixote confronts us with a series of enigmas that, over the centuries, have divided even its most expert readers: Does the text pursue a serious or comic purpose? Does it promote the truth of history and the untruth of fiction, or the truth of poetry and the fictiveness of truth itself? In a book that will revise the way we read and debate Don Quixote, Charles D. Presberg discusses the trope of paradox as a governing rhetorical strategy in this most canonical of Spanish literary texts. To situate Cervantes’s masterpiece within the centuries-long praxis of paradoxical discourse in the West, Presberg surveys its tradition in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the European Renaissance. He outlines the development of paradoxy in the Spanish Renaissance, centering on works by Fernando de Rojas, Pero Mexía, and Antonio de Guevara. In his detailed reading of portions of Don Quixote, Presberg shows how Cervantes’s work enlarges the tradition of paradoxical discourse by imitating as well as transforming fictional and nonfictional models. He concludes that Cervantes’s seriocomic "system" of paradoxy jointly parodies, celebrates, and urges us to ponder the agency of discourse in the continued refashioning of knowledge, history, culture, and personal identity. This engaging book will be welcomed by literary scholars, Hispanisists, historians, and students of the history of rhetoric and poetics.

Author: Andrea Macrae
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429638485
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 327

View

Book Description
This volume advances scholarly understanding of the ways in which discourse deixis underpins the workings of metafictional novels. Building on existing scholarship in the field, the book begins by mapping out key themes and techniques in metafiction and puts forward a focused and theoretically coherent account of discourse deixis—language which points to a section or aspect of the discourse context in which that language is used—in written literary discourse, highlighting its inherent significance in metafiction specifically. Macrae takes readers through an exploration of discourse deixis as used within the techniques of metanarration, metalepsis, and disnarration, drawing on a mix of both well-established and lesser-known metafictional novels from the late 1960s and early 1970s by such authors as John Barth, Brigid Brophy, Robert Coover, John Fowles, Steve Katz, and B.S. Johnson. This comprehensive account integrates and develops a new approach to understanding discourse deixis and innovative insights into metafictionality more broadly and will be of particular interest to scholars in literary studies, postmodern literature, narratology, and stylistics.

Author: S. Land
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349072745
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311

View

Book Description

Author: Allard den Dulk
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526163535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189

View

Book Description
This book breaks new ground by showing that the work of David Foster Wallace originates from and functions in the space between philosophy and literature. Philosophy is not a mere supplement to or decoration of his writing, nor does he use literature to illustrate pre-established philosophical truths. Rather, for Wallace, philosophy and literature are intertwined ways of experiencing and expressing the world that emerge from and amplify each other. The book does not advance a fixed or homogenous interpretation of Wallace’s oeuvre but instead offers an investigative approach that allows for a variety of readings. The volume features fourteen new essays by prominent and promising Wallace scholars, divided into three parts: one on general aspects of Wallace’s oeuvre – such as his aesthetics, form, and engagement with performance – and two parts with thematic focuses, namely ‘Consciousness, Self, and Others’ and ‘Embodiment, Gender, and Sexuality’.

Author: Laurie Kruk
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
ISBN: 0776623249
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 407

View

Book Description
Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story is the first comparative study of eight internationally and nationally acclaimed writers of short fiction: Sandra Birdsell, Timothy Findley, Jack Hodgins, Thomas King, Alistair MacLeod, Olive Senior, Carol Shields and Guy Vanderhaeghe. With the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature going to Alice Munro, the “master of the contemporary short story,” this art form is receiving the recognition that has been its due and—as this book demonstrates—Canadian writers have long excelled in it. From theme to choice of narrative perspective, from emphasis on irony, satire and parody to uncovering the multiple layers that make up contemporary Canadian English, the short story provides a powerful vehicle for a distinctively Canadian “double-voicing”. The stories discussed here are compelling reflections on our most intimate roles and relationships and Kruk offers a thoughtful juxtaposition of themes of gender, mothers and sons, family storytelling, otherness in Canada and the politics of identity to name but a few. As a multi-author study, Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story is broad in scope and its readings are valuable to Canadian literature as a whole, making the book of interest to students of Canadian literature or the short story, and to readers of both.

Author: Marc Chenetier
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812230598
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

View

Book Description
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996

Author: Victor J. Stenger
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 161592003X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

View

Book Description
Throughout history, arguments for and against the existence of God have been largely confined to philosophy and theology, while science has sat on the sidelines. Despite the fact that science has revolutionized every aspect of human life and greatly clarified our understanding of the world, somehow the notion has arisen that it has nothing to say about the possibility of a supreme being, which much of humanity worships as the source of all reality. This book contends that, if God exists, some evidence for this existence should be detectable by scientific means, especially considering the central role that God is alleged to play in the operation of the universe and the lives of humans. Treating the traditional God concept, as conventionally presented in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, like any other scientific hypothesis, physicist Stenger examines all of the claims made for God's existence. He considers the latest Intelligent Design arguments as evidence of God's influence in biology. He looks at human behavior for evidence of immaterial souls and the possible effects of prayer. He discusses the findings of physics and astronomy in weighing the suggestions that the universe is the work of a creator and that humans are God's special creation. After evaluating all the scientific evidence, Stenger concludes that beyond a reasonable doubt the universe and life appear exactly as we might expect if there were no God. This paperback edition of the New York Times bestselling hardcover edition contains a new foreword by Christopher Hitchens and a postscript by the author in which he responds to reviewers' criticisms of the original edition.