76 research outputs found

    The evolution of language: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE)

    Get PDF

    On the Way to the (Un)Known?

    Get PDF
    Twenty-two authors from various countries analyze travelogues on the Ottoman Empire between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The volume discusses questions of perceptions of "otherness", the circulation of knowledge, intermedial relations, gender roles, and explores possibilities and limits of digital analysis

    The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973): Volume II, Aesthetics and Ontology

    Get PDF
    The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. With a Marxist orientation inspired by the thinking of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, the "red years" of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was formative for the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s, and is still of vital relevance for the contemporary audiovisual landscape. It was also the seminal experience for a generation of critics who have dedicated the following half-century to the task of critically responding to the cinema. The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) gives a historical overview of this period in the journal's history, combining biographical accounts of the critics who were involved with Cahiers in the post-1968 and theoretical explorations of the text they wrote

    Civil War Congress and the Creation of Modern America

    Get PDF
    Most literature on the Civil War focuses on soldiers, battles, and politics. But for every soldier in the United States Army, there were nine civilians at home. The war affected those left on the home front in many ways. Westward expansion and land ownership increased. The draft disrupted families while a shortage of male workers created opportunities for women that were previously unknown. The war also enlarged the national government in ways unimagined before 1861. The Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, civil rights legislation, the use of paper currency, and creation of the Internal Revenue Service to collect taxes to pay for the war all illustrate how the war fundamentally, and permanently, changed the nation. The essays in this book, drawn from a wide range of historical expertise and approaching the topic from a variety of angles, explore the changes in life at home that led to a revolution in American society and set the stage for the making of modern America. Contributors: Jean H. Baker, Jenny Bourne, Paul Finkelman, Guy Gugliotta, Daniel W. Stowell, Peter Wallenstein, Jennifer L. Weber

    Obiter Dicta

    Get PDF
    "Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

    Dostoevsky beyond Dostoevsky

    Get PDF
    Dostoevsky beyond Dostoevsky is a collection of essays with a broad interdisciplinary focus. It includes contributions by leading Dostoevsky scholars, social scientists, scholars of religion and philosophy. The volume considers aesthetics, philosophy, theology, and science of the 19th century Russia and the West that might have informed Dostoevsky’s thought and art. Issues such as evolutionary theory and literature, science and society, scientific and theological components of comparative intellectual history, and aesthetic debates of the nineteenth century Russia form the core of the intellectual framework of this book. Dostoevsky’s oeuvre with its wide-ranging interests and engagement with philosophical, religious, political, economic, and scientific discourses of his time emerges as a particularly important case for the study of cross-fertilization among disciplines

    A Miéville Bestiary: Monsters as Commentary on the Hybridity of Real and Conceptual Landscapes in the Work of China Miéville.

    Get PDF
    To date, China Miéville has written: 12 novels; two short story collections; four volumes of non-fiction; graphic novels; roleplaying games and numerous essays and articles in a writing career spanning since the late 1990s. Miéville’s novels are celebrated for being distinctly different from each other yet there are three concepts of landscapes which Miéville keeps revisiting: genre landscapes, urban landscapes and socio-political landscapes. This thesis will explore the theoretical approaches Miéville utilises to explore these conceptual landscapes before using the form of the bestiary to highlight how these concepts are manifested in his novels. The most important of those fantastical elements at his disposal is the monster which naturally encourages an examination of hybridity and liminality. The Bestiary has existed in the form that is familiar to us for many centuries. The interweaving of morality and mysterious depictions of the natural world imbued historical bestiaries with a sense of the mythological. Their power as a device for world creation is particularly recognised by writers of fantasy fiction. This thesis will demonstrate that by using monsters as manifestations of these conceptual landscapes Miéville successfully utilises the hybridity and liminality of both monsters and fantastic fiction as a methodology to critique our own contemporary late-capitalist social landscape. Key Words: Miéville, monsters, bestiary, hybridity, genre, Weird, psychogeography, Marxism

    Ghosts - or the (Nearly) Invisible

    Get PDF
    In this volume, ghost stories are studied in the context of their media, their place in history and geography. From prehistory to this day, we have been haunted by our memories, the past itself, by inklings of the future, by events playing outside our lives, and by ourselves. Hence the lure of ghost stories throughout history and presumably prehistory. Science has been a great destroyer of myth and superstition, but at the same time it has created new black boxes which we are filling with our ghostly imagination. In this book, literature from the Middle Ages to Oscar Wilde and Neil Gaiman, children’s stories, folklore and films, ranging from the Antarctic and Russia to Haiti, are covered and show the continuing presence of spectral phenomena

    British Literature of the 18th-20th Cenutry

    Get PDF
    Openly licensed anthology focused on the theme of British Literature from the 18th-20th centuries. Includes: Persuasion by Jane Austen, Lady Audley’s Secret by M.E. Braddon, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Middlemarch by George Eliot, A Passage to India by E.M. Forrester, Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave by Mary Prince, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson

    18th-20th Century British Literature

    Get PDF
    Openly licensed anthology focused on the theme of 18th-20th Century British Literature. Contains Persuasion by Jane Austen; Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë; Lady Audley’s Secret by M.E. Braddon; Middlemarch by George Eliot; A Passage to India by E.M. Forster; Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy; Pamela by Samuel Richardson; Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
    • …
    corecore