Apropos of Something

Apropos of Something PDF Author: Elisa Tamarkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645326X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
A history of the idea of “relevance” since the nineteenth century in art, criticism, philosophy, logic, and social thought. Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin’s sweeping meditation on a key shift in consciousness: the arrival of relevance as the means to grasp how something that was once disregarded, unvalued, or lost to us becomes interesting and important. When so much makes claims to our attention every day, how do we decide what is most valuable right now? Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was an Anglo-American concept, derived from a word meaning “to raise or to lift up again,” and also “to give relief.” It engaged major intellectual figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatists and philosophers—William James, Alain Locke, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead—as well as a range of critics, phenomenologists, linguists, and sociologists. Relevance is a struggle for recognition, especially in the worlds of literature, art, and criticism. Poems and paintings in the nineteenth century could now be seen as pragmatic works that make relevance and make interest—that reveal versions of events that feel apropos of our lives the moment we turn to them. Vividly illustrated with paintings by Winslow Homer, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and others, Apropos of Something is a searching philosophical and poetic study of relevance—a concept calling for shifts in both attention and perceptions of importance with enormous social stakes. It remains an invitation for the humanities and for all of us who feel tasked every day with finding the point.

Apropos of Something

Apropos of Something PDF Author: Elisa Tamarkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645326X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445

Get Book Here

Book Description
A history of the idea of “relevance” since the nineteenth century in art, criticism, philosophy, logic, and social thought. Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin’s sweeping meditation on a key shift in consciousness: the arrival of relevance as the means to grasp how something that was once disregarded, unvalued, or lost to us becomes interesting and important. When so much makes claims to our attention every day, how do we decide what is most valuable right now? Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was an Anglo-American concept, derived from a word meaning “to raise or to lift up again,” and also “to give relief.” It engaged major intellectual figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatists and philosophers—William James, Alain Locke, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead—as well as a range of critics, phenomenologists, linguists, and sociologists. Relevance is a struggle for recognition, especially in the worlds of literature, art, and criticism. Poems and paintings in the nineteenth century could now be seen as pragmatic works that make relevance and make interest—that reveal versions of events that feel apropos of our lives the moment we turn to them. Vividly illustrated with paintings by Winslow Homer, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and others, Apropos of Something is a searching philosophical and poetic study of relevance—a concept calling for shifts in both attention and perceptions of importance with enormous social stakes. It remains an invitation for the humanities and for all of us who feel tasked every day with finding the point.

Apropos of Nothing

Apropos of Nothing PDF Author: Woody Allen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1951627377
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
The Long-Awaited, Enormously Entertaining Memoir by One of the Great Artists of Our Time—Now a New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller. In this candid and often hilarious memoir, the celebrated director, comedian, writer, and actor offers a comprehensive, personal look at his tumultuous life. Beginning with his Brooklyn childhood and his stint as a writer for the Sid Caesar variety show in the early days of television, working alongside comedy greats, Allen tells of his difficult early days doing standup before he achieved recognition and success. With his unique storytelling pizzazz, he recounts his departure into moviemaking, with such slapstick comedies as Take the Money and Run, and revisits his entire, sixty-year-long, and enormously productive career as a writer and director, from his classics Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Annie and Her Sisters to his most recent films, including Midnight in Paris. Along the way, he discusses his marriages, his romances and famous friendships, his jazz playing, and his books and plays. We learn about his demons, his mistakes, his successes, and those he loved, worked with, and learned from in equal measure. This is a hugely entertaining, deeply honest, rich and brilliant self-portrait of a celebrated artist who is ranked among the greatest filmmakers of our time.

Sir Apropos of Nothing

Sir Apropos of Nothing PDF Author: Peter David
Publisher: Gallery Books
ISBN: 9781451623284
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
They were dark and stormy knights...and when they had their way with a helpless tavern wench one terrible evening, they had no idea that the result of that twilight brutality was going to come after them years later looking to settle the score... The "result's" unlikely name is Apropos: A rogue, a rascal, a scoundrel, a cheat...and those are his good points. Lame of leg but fast of wit, the only reason Apropos doesn't consider chivalry dead is because he's not yet through with it. Herewith, Sir Apropos of Nothing -- his story in the words of the knave himself. Apropos, all too aware of his violent and unseemly beginnings, travels to the court of the good King Runcible, with three goals in mind: to find his father, seek retribution, and line his own pockets. However, Apropos carries the most troublesome burden a would-be harbinger of chaos can bear: He may well be a hero foretold, a young man of destiny. It is not a notion that Apropos finds palatable, having very low regard for such notions as honor, selflessness, or risking one's neck. Yet when Apropos finds himself assigned as squire to the most senile knight in the court -- Sir Umbrage of the Flaming Nether Regions, whose squires tend to have a rather short life span -- Apropos is forced to rise to the occasion lest he be dragged under -- permanently. His difficulties are compounded when a routine mission to escort the King's daughter home after a long absence goes horribly awry. Suddenly Apropos finds himself saddled with trying to survive while dealing with a berserk phoenix, murderous unicorns, mutated harpies, homicidal warrior kings, and -- most problematic of all -- a princess who may or may not be a psychotic arsonist. Featuring a hero cut from cloth similar to that of such entertaining blackguards as Blackadder and Flashman, Sir Apropos of Nothing is a skewed version of classic, mythic adventure that is by turns hilarious and frightening, slapstick and serious, and filled with drop-dead laughs and drop-dead people.

Anglophilia

Anglophilia PDF Author: Elisa Tamarkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226789438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
Anglophilia charts the phenomenon of the love of Britain that emerged after the Revolution and remains in the character of U.S. society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of American intellectualism. But as Tamarkin shows, this Anglophilia was more than just an elite nostalgia; it was popular devotion that made reverence for British tradition instrumental to the psychological innovations of democracy. Anglophilia spoke to fantasies of cultural belonging, polite sociability, and, finally, deference itself as an affective practice within egalitarian politics. Tamarkin traces the wide-ranging effects of anglophilia on American literature, art and intellectual life in the early nineteenth century, as well as its influence in arguments against slavery, in the politics of Union, and in the dialectics of liberty and loyalty before the civil war. By working beyond narratives of British influence, Tamarkin highlights a more intricate culture of American response, one that included Whig elites, college students, radical democrats, urban immigrants, and African Americans. Ultimately, Anglophila argues that that the love of Britain was not simply a fetish or form of shame-a release from the burdens of American culture-but an anachronistic structure of attachement in which U.S. Identity was lived in other languages of national expression.

Marion Milner

Marion Milner PDF Author: David Russell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019267529X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This is a book about reading, drawing, and getting better--and what they have to do with one another. The British essayist, artist, and psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1900-1996) thought deeply about how reading, drawing, and getting better related to each other. The guiding question of Milner's life was of how people come to feel alive in, and feel creatively responsive to, their own lives. In pursuit of this, Milner explored fields as diverse as anthropology, folklore, education, literature, art, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology. She became one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary thinkers about creativity. David Russell shows that there is no writer quite like Milner and the rewards of reading her are immense. Key to all her writing is her search for creative practices of attention--of how we pay attention in the life we have. She helped to develop a kind of psychoanalysis in Britain that focussed on the ways people relate to their own lives and the lives of others. Milner was literary and artistic; she took herself as her subject. Her writing performs ways of responding associatively to the words and images she encountered. In the process, she found she was a quite different person than she had first thought. In the 1930s Milner invented a form for writing about reading: an original kind of diary book, which is structured by the experience of going back to, and rereading, past diaries. In her interplay of past and present selves, she finds new ways of looking at, and experiencing, the world.

Normality

Normality PDF Author: Peter Cryle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022648405X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
Most of us think we know what is meant when we hear the term "normal," but Cryle and Stephens upend taken-for-granted attitudes about the term. They offer a history of the intellectual and cultural issues that have been at stake in the use of the term since it appeared around 1820. What is taken at one time or any one culture to be "aberrant" or "deviant" clearly depends on assumed meanings for norm and normality. The authors of this book explore this history--peppered with a fascinating series of case studies--to make sense of variations on the theme of identity (disability, gender, race, sexuality) in fields organized around identity. They locate the concept in the scientific spheres where it originated in its modern sense and they chart its transformations and developments from the 1820s in France (medicine) to the mid-20th century (Alfred Kinsey). They start with comparative anatomy and other branches of medicine before moving on to consider developments in fields as remote as craniometry, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. It is not enough to say, with David Halperin, that "queer" is "whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant." Cryle and Stephens move beyond a simple binary opposition between "normal" and "abnormality" to give us the whole picture, from the Continent to the U.S., and in all the contexts that distinguish the normal from other available terms (such as typical, average, respectable, conventional, white and heterosexual, and uniform). "Normality" has had a long struggle to secure its cultural dominance and authority, a story which is told here for the first time.

Chamber Concise Dictionary

Chamber Concise Dictionary PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788186062364
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 1476

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Book Description


How they did; or, Those four, by the author of 'The aggravating school girl'.

How they did; or, Those four, by the author of 'The aggravating school girl'. PDF Author: Grace Stebbing
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description


The Mirror of the Self

The Mirror of the Self PDF Author: Shadi Bartsch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226038351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
People in the ancient world thought of vision as both an ethical tool and a tactile sense, akin to touch. Gazing upon someone—or oneself—was treated as a path to philosophical self-knowledge, but the question of tactility introduced an erotic element as well. In The Mirror of the Self, Shadi Bartsch asserts that these links among vision, sexuality, and self-knowledge are key to the classical understanding of the self. Weaving together literary theory, philosophy, and social history, Bartsch traces this complex notion of self from Plato’s Greece to Seneca’s Rome. She starts by showing how ancient authors envisioned the mirror as both a tool for ethical self-improvement and, paradoxically, a sign of erotic self-indulgence. Her reading of the Phaedrus, for example, demonstrates that the mirroring gaze in Plato, because of its sexual possibilities, could not be adopted by Roman philosophers and their students. Bartsch goes on to examine the Roman treatment of the ethical and sexual gaze, and she traces how self-knowledge, the philosopher’s body, and the performance of virtue all played a role in shaping the Roman understanding of the nature of selfhood. Culminating in a profoundly original reading of Medea, The Mirror of the Self illustrates how Seneca, in his Stoic quest for self-knowledge, embodies the Roman view, marking a new point in human thought about self-perception. Bartsch leads readers on a journey that unveils divided selves, moral hypocrisy, and lustful Stoics—and offers fresh insights about seminal works. At once sexy and philosophical, The Mirror of the Self will be required reading for classicists, philosophers, and anthropologists alike.

The Idiot (Vintage Classics)

The Idiot (Vintage Classics) PDF Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0553901893
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of The Idiot is destined to stand with their versions of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons as the definitive Dostoevsky in English. After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set out in The Idiot to portray a man of pure innocence. The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people.” Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this “positively beautiful man” on the people around him, leading to a final scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world literature.