The Tragic Vision

Originally published in 1973. Literary critics who have studied tragedy and the tragic vision failed, in Murray Krieger's estimation, to define exactly what they saw as the tragic vision in general terms. An aim of his book is to create a tentative definition of tragic and to flesh out what the author sees as the definition most illuminating of modern literature and the modern mind. In order to do this, Krieger distinguishes between what he sees as the "tragic vision" and "tragedy"—tragedy, from his perspective, is an object's literary form, whereas tragic vision refers to a subject's psychology, the subject's view and version of reality. In light of the shriveling of the tragic concept in the modern world and the reduction of a total view to the psychology of the protagonist, Krieger contends that the protagonist in a tragedy is now more appropriately designated a "tragic visionary" than a "tragic hero.

The Play and Place of Criticism

Originally published in 1967. In The Play and Place of Criticism, Professor Krieger addresses basic questions related to criticism in the title essay that forms the introduction to this collection and that constitutes a considered statement of his "contextualist" position. In agreement with Spitzer, Krieger believes that the critic has a valuable part to play in relating the "new words" of the individual poem to the "old words" of the language. He goes further in identifying the role of the critic as essentially rhapsodic, a sharing-in and an expression of the poet's "fine frenzy," which, when it succeeds, transports the critic beyond words and dooms his analytical efforts to failure. Thus, while defending the critic's right to exercise "the free play of the mind" in approaching his subject, the author insists that the critic recognize his subordinate "place" in performing his act of mediation. Elsewhere in the volume Krieger uses other terms and metaphors to explore similar problems revolving around the mediate and the immediate in poetry and criticism. In calling for a poetry of "still movement," for example, he examines both the opposition and the union of temporal with spatial or plastically formal elements, of the dynamically empirical with the statically archetypal. Having defined his critical position in these ways, Krieger relates it to other schools of criticism and applies its methods to the analysis of works by Shakespeare, Pope, Arnold, Hawthorne, and others

Poetic Presence and Illusion

Orignally published in 1979. Poetic Presence and Illusion brings together Krieger's speculation on literature and its effect on the reader. The poem, Krieger argues, is an illusionary presence and an ever-present illusion. It exists for the reader, like a drama before an audience, only within an illusionary context. But the illusion should not be taken lightly as a false substitute for reality. It is itself a real and positive force: it is what we see and, as such, is constitutive of our reality, even if our critical faculty de-constitutes that reality by viewing it as no more than an illusion. The coupling of poetic presence and poetic illusion serves to describe the relationship between poetry as metaphor and the reader's sense of personal and poetic reality. Krieger examines the workings of selected Renaissance and contemporary poems with regard to this dual nature and evaluates the work of literary critics (himself included) who have been concerned with this doubleness. Poetic Presence and Illusion allows readers who have read Krieger's earlier work to understand the development of his critical position

Patriarchal Negotiations: Women, Writing and Religion 1640-1660

PhDWomen were prominent in the Lollard movement in the fifteenth century, but it is only in the mid-seventeenth century that women begin to produce theological texts which contribute to the controversy over popular religious expression and women's part in religious culture. After 1640 women began to publish on a number of theological issues and in a wide range of genres: prose polemic, prophecy, autobiography and spiritual meditation. Subject to widespread criticism, they quickly had to fashion a rhetoric of justification with which to defend their intervention in print and pacify male critics. This thesis shows that they achieved this in two ways: by producing a literature which complied with the expectations of masculine theological culture and by manipulating these assumptions so as to create space for a female symbolic language of piety. They developed a literary self-consciousness which depends on the idea of subjectivity as a gendered experience and they often resisted their detractors by valorising denigrated forms of female subjectivity and pursuing theological conclusions irrespective of normative ideas of gender. Women did not engage in theological debate in isolation, however. They often intervened as committed members of religious sects and thus deserve to be read as representatives of corporate and communal theologies. In contrast to earlier studies which have sought to recover neglected women writers as early feminists, without reading their work historically, this thesis seeks to uncover the social and the theological rather than the authorial origin of much early modem women's writing and to measure its engagement with early modem debates on women and religious culture. It seeks to challenge the increasingly dominant view of early modem women writers which invests them with too modem an authorial presence, by reconstituting the seventeenth-century debates which gave rise to their work and by bringing modem French feminist perspectives to bear on a period largely untouched by theoretical approaches to literature. To this end it proceeds by way of several close readings of women who wrote as women and as Baptists, Independents, Levellers, Presbyterians and Quakers

Computational Transformation of the Public Sphere : Theories and Case Studies

This book is an edited collection of MA research paper on the digital revolution of the public and governance. It covers cyber governance in Finland, and the securitization of cyber security in Finland. It investigates the cases of Brexit, the 2016 US presidental election of Donald Trump, the 2017 presidential election of Volodymyr Zelensky, and Brexit. It examines the environmental concerns of climate change and greenwashing, and the impact of digital communication giving rise to the #MeToo and Incel movements. It considers how digitilization can serve to emancipate women through ride-sharing, and how it leads to the question of robot rights. It considers fake news and algorithmic governance with respect to case studies of the Chinese social credit system, the US FICO credit score, along with Facebook, Twitter, Cambridge Analytica and the European effort to regulate and protect data usage.Non peer reviewe

Ekphrasis

Originally published in 1992. What, in apparently pictorial poetry, do words represent? Conversely, how can words in a poem be picturable? Murray Krieger develops a systematic theoretical statement out of answers to such questions. Ekphrasis is his account of the continuing debates over meaning in language from Plato to the present. Krieger sees the modernist position as the logical outcome of these debates but argues that more recent theories radically question the political and aesthetic assumptions of the modernists and the two-thousand-year tradition they claim to culminate. Krieger focuses on ekphrasis—the literary representation of visual art, real or imaginary—a form at least as old as its most famous example, the shield of Achilles verbally invented in the Iliad. He argues that the "ekphrastic principle" has remained enduringly problematic in that it reflects the resistant paradoxes of representation in words. As he examines the conflict between the spatial and temporal, between vision-centered and word-centered metaphors, Krieger reveals how literary theory has been shaped by the attempts and the deceptive failures of language to do the job of the "natural sign.

Computational transformation of the public sphere : theories and case studies

Computational Transformation of the Public Sphere is the organic product of what turned out to be an effective collaboration between MA students and their professor in the Global Politics and Communication program in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki, in the Fall of 2019. The course, Philosophy of Politics and Communication, is a gateway course into this MA program. As I had been eager to conduct research on the impact of new digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) on democratic governance, I saw this course as an opportunity to not only share, but also further develop my knowledge of this topic

Computational Transformation of the Public Sphere: Theories and Cases

This book is an edited collection of original research papers on the digital revolution of the public and governance. It covers cyber governance in Finland, and the securitization of cyber security in Finland. It investigates the cases of Brexit, the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump, the 2017 presidential election of Volodymyr Zelensky, and Brexit. It examines the environmental concerns of climate change and greenwashing, and the impact of digital communication giving rise to the #MeToo and Incel movements. It considers how digitilization can serve to emancipate women through ride-sharing, and how it leads to the question of robot rights. It considers fake news and algorithmic governance with respect to case studies of the Chinese social credit system, the US FICO credit score, along with Facebook, Twitter, Cambridge Analytica and the European effort to regulate and protect data usage

Power relations in the Christian ministry: theology, order, politics and the Holy Spirit

This thesis for the first time demonstrates that power relations, which are as disparate as juridical frameworks, political engagement, spiritual experience, theology and God, can be fully accounted for in a single theory approach that is descriptive analytical, post-structuralist and rhizome ontological. This is achieved through an exploration of Christian ministry practice and theological approaches, the politics of the Confessing Struggle, Barthian dogmatics and Pentecostal power accounts. It is argued that a conventional normative-theological reflection of the Christian ministry obstructs both practical-theological accountability and having an empowering pastoral approach. Thereby, the conceptual creation, counter-modern capacities and limitations––as well as the ministry-internal effects––of different forms of Christian agency formation are explored, using Foucauldian terms. These include: Barth’s ‘theological existence,’ Pentecostal empowerment through Spirit baptism, and the distributed-charismatic and prayerful pursuit of divine power and presence. It should be possible to engage and reconcile all forms of Christian empowerment to one another on the basis of a rhizomic ministry practice; one which, when established upon a charismatic-revivalist ethos, is able to facilitate the occasional formation and coming to life of a distributed divine presence and power