4,087 research outputs found

    Hereditary Tradition: Analyzing Connections among Detective Depictions in Texts by Poe, Doyle, and King using Harold Bloom’s Revisionary Ratios Theory

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    There has been a longstanding debate about the origin of detective fiction, with most recognizing Poe as its pioneer. However, there remains a need to comprehensively analyze the literary influence that spans across generations in detective fiction. This research introduces a comprehensive analysis of the literary influence that spans across generations in detective fiction, shedding light on the intricate web of connections between Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Laurie R. King. Central to this investigation is the application of Harold Bloom’s theory of revisionary ratios, which serves as an invaluable analytical framework. Through the application of Harold Bloom’s theory of revisionary ratios, this research provides a comprehensive exploration of the enduring significance of intertextuality in shaping the detective fiction landscape. It underscores the intricate web of influences that connect Poe’s pioneering works with subsequent narratives by Conan Doyle and King. Having the enduring significance of intertextuality that shapes the detective fiction landscape, this study still offers a novel perspective on the genre’s dynamic evolution. The method involves a detailed review of revisionary ratio concepts and their implications for understanding complex literary works more thoroughly. The result reveals the enduring significance of revisionary ratios in understanding the complexities of literary works, with Edgar Allan Poe’s influence resonating in subsequent detective stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Laurie R. King

    Forever is a Long Time: Reconsidering Universities' Perpetual Endowment Policies in the Twenty - First Century

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    College and university officials in the United States have long invoked a combination of Anglo-Saxon legal precedents, plus the obligations of responsible philanthropic stewardship, to justify policies of perpetual endowments. Closely related to this general principle has been the practice of not spending more than the annual earnings (in other words, interest and dividends) from an endowment. Our historical analysis provides a counter to this contemporary conventional wisdom that has been accepted with little critical consideration in American higher education. Rediscovery of philosophical arguments, and actual cases of foundations and philanthropists who placed limits on the life span of gifts, demonstrates how historical research can provide an informed base for reconsideration of government and institutional policies and practices that shape giving and spending at colleges and universities in the twenty-first century.The grounding in economics for our study is Howard Bowen's 1980 "revenue theory" of college costs. The historical precedent for our policy analysis comes from eighteenth-century France, as advanced by A.J. Turgot, to shape national economic development. Its implications for higher education in the United States is illustrated by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller's reservations about a perpetual endowment for an educational project: "Forever is a long time . . ." Our historical research addresses the consequences -- pro and con -- of government policies requiring colleges to spend endowments at more than a marginal annual rate and in a fixed period of time; and, secondly, are there good reasons for donors to colleges to voluntarily opt to increase spending and place time limits on gifts

    Detection, Desire and Contamination: The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes

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    Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, is often viewed as a fictional embodiment of justice and order in nineteenth-century Britain, a fantasy of epistemological mastery precisely calibrated against the social flux and uncertainty of the fin-de-siècle. Holmes solves perplexing crimes through logic and reason, and affirms a positivist conservative ideology that upholds the status quo. This thesis will challenge this comforting reading of Holmes by arguing, firstly, that he is in fact a highly ambivalent figure - morally problematic, culturally marginalised and sexually ambiguous. Secondly, it will demonstrate how Holmes should be situated within the context of various historical and contemporary discourses, including inquisitorial modes of punishment and surveillance, the discourse of atavism, contemporary anxieties about degeneracy in the upper classes and the cultural problematics of bachelorhood and bohemia in Victorian society. Finally, it will trace a continuum in which Holmes, as an archetype in a discourse of detection extending back to the work of earlier writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, sets the pattern for the legion of brilliant, eccentric and ambiguous detectives who have followed in his wake. Understood in terms of this genealogy, the detective’s characteristic flaws, traits, eccentricities and methodologies can be seen to have a specific relation to their historical moment: indeed, part of the lingering appeal of the eccentric detective lies in the fit between their eccentricities, the nature of the crimes they solve, and their ability to restore order. This thesis will demonstrate the fit in the case of Sherlock Holmes, but will also demonstrate that he is more ambiguous, ambivalent and even subversive than his consoling conservative appeal might suggest

    A Missing Step In Kant’s Refutation of Idealism

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    This paper contends that Kant’s argument in the Refutation of Idealism section of the Critique of Pure Reason misses a step which allows Kant to move illicitly from inner experience to outer objects. The argument for persistent outer objects does not comprehensively address the skeptic’s doubts as it leaves room for the question about the necessary connection between representations and outer objects. A second fundamental issue is the ability of transcendental idealism to deliver the account of outer objects, as required by the Refutation of Idealism itself

    Another Scandal of Philosophy

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    Kant’s work, taken as a whole manifests a diversity of styles of writing, of which the disparity between his critical and popular style is salient. In this paper, this diversity is connected with, what Lyotard calls ‘the absence of a homogeneous language’ in Kant’s system. Taking this connection as a point of departure it is argued that the stylistic diversity in Kant reflects the burden of coordinating the realist and idealist aspects of his philosophical outlook. That Kant labels the scepticism about the deducibility of practical validity from theoretical rightness as a scandal of philosophy is taken as an indication that he is concerned about this problem. In view of this it is asked, with reference to the occurrence of moral and juridical terms (δίκη [justice], τίσις [reparation], αδικία [injustice], διδόναι δίκην [do justice]) in de text in which Anaximander’s key metaphysical ideas about nature and world order are cast what lessons can be learned from the origins of the European philosophical tradition to come to terms with Kant’s problem, which is considered as a problem for metaphysics in general, given its cosmopolitical tendency

    Introduction to \u3cem\u3eSystem of Transcendental Idealism (1800)\u3c/em\u3e

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    The Winonan

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    https://openriver.winona.edu/thewinonan1990s/1192/thumbnail.jp
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