Futile Pleasures

Futile Pleasures PDF Author: Corey McEleney
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823272672
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First Book Against the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own. During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature’s potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

Futile Pleasures

Futile Pleasures PDF Author: Corey McEleney
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823272672
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First Book Against the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own. During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature’s potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

Disreputable Pleasures

Disreputable Pleasures PDF Author: Mike Huggins
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780714653631
Category : Leisure
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Challenging the respectable image of Victorian society, this irreverent, revisionist collection explores the sinful side of middle-class Victorian leisure, highlighting the problematic relationship between public respectability and private pleasure.

Aristotle's Theory of Conduct

Aristotle's Theory of Conduct PDF Author: Thomas Marshall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description


The Problem of Pleasure

The Problem of Pleasure PDF Author: Carol Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136598693
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The tourism and leisure industries are big business. Opportunities for leisure and tourism have escalated as disposable income, technology, travel and education have become increasingly available in recent times. However, this trend has been juxtaposed with an increase in crime, particularly since the early the 1950s. Acquisitive crimes have been facilitated with the development of more portable and valuable commodities; some activities, such as drink driving and disorder, have now been socially defined as crimes and are more readily identified through new technology such as the increasing use of CCTV. The Problem of Pleasure covers them all. The purpose of this book is to inform and enlighten a range of readers, whose interests may be academic or commercial on possible crime events and modus operandi of criminals. The book has a global perspective, bringing together leading academics from the UK, the US, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand who examine several aspects of leisure that are vulnerable to crime, from illegal hunting to street racing, as well as the impact of crime upon tourists and the tourism industry. This book will be a key text for students of tourism and leisure as well as criminology and sociology; people working in the tourism and recreation industry; policy makers and the police.

Social Deviance

Social Deviance PDF Author: Stuart Henry
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745643043
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Resource added for the Psychology (includes Sociology) 108091 courses.

Understanding Virtue Ethics

Understanding Virtue Ethics PDF Author: Stan van Hooft
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317494024
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
More and more philosophers have advocated varieties of virtue-based ethics that challenge moral theory traditionally founded on moral obligation and the delineation of what is right or wrong in given situations. Virtue ethics, which focuses upon the character of moral agents more than on the moral status of their actions or the consequences of those actions, has become one of the most important and stimulating areas of contemporary ethical theory. "Understanding Virtue Ethics" is an accessible and lively introduction to the subject. It provides a broad overview of the history of virtue ethics from Aristotle to Nietzsche as well as examining the ideas of such contemporary writers as Ricoeur and Levinas. Major themes dealt with by moral theory are examined and how a virtue ethics approach to them differs from those of other traditions is explored. Practical problems of moral complexity such as abortion, euthanasia, and integrity in politics, and how they might be approached from a virtue perspective are considered. The charges of relativism and egoism that are often mounted against virtue ethics are rebutted and virtues that are especially relevant to contemporary life, namely, courage, taking responsibility, and reverence are examined in depth. Finally, the author argues that virtue ethics is highly relevant to our understanding of the moral dimensions of professional roles.

Living Intersections: Transnational Migrant Identifications in Asia

Living Intersections: Transnational Migrant Identifications in Asia PDF Author: Caroline Plüss
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400729669
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book presents ground-breaking theoretical, and empirical knowledge to produce a fine-grained and encompassing understanding of the costs and benefits that different groups of Asian migrants, moving between different countries in Asia and in the West, experience. The contributors—all specialist scholars in anthropology, geography, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology—present new approaches to intersectionality analysis, focusing on the migrants’ performance of their identities as the core indicator to unravel the mutual constituitivity of cultural, social, political, and economic characteristics rooted in different places, which characterizes transnational lifestyles. The book answers one key question: What happens to people, communities, and societies under globalization, which is, among others, characterized by increasing cultural disidentification?

Middlebrow Modernism

Middlebrow Modernism PDF Author: Christopher Chowrimootoo
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520298659
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.

The Workers' Festival

The Workers' Festival PDF Author: Craig Heron
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442658509
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
For most Canadians today, Labour Day is the last gasp of summer fun: the final long weekend before returning to the everyday routine of work or school. But over its century-long history, there was much more to the September holiday than just having a day off. In The Workers' Festival, Craig Heron and Steve Penfold examine the complicated history of Labour Day from its origins as a spectacle of skilled workers in the 1880s through its declaration as a national statutory holiday in 1894 to its reinvention through the twentieth century. The holiday's inventors hoped to blend labour solidarity, community celebration, and increased leisure time by organizing parades, picnics, speeches, and other forms of respectable leisure. As the holiday has evolved, so too have the rituals, with trade unionists embracing new forms of parading, negotiating, and bargaining, and other social groups re-shaping it and making it their own. Heron and Penfold also examine how Labour Day's monopoly as the workers' holiday has been challenged since its founding, with alternative festivals arising such as May Day and International Women's Day. The Workers' Festival ranges widely into many key themes of labour history – union politics and rivalries, radical movements, religion (Catholic and Protestant), race and gender, and consumerism/leisure – as well as cultural history – public celebration/urban procession, urban space and communication, and popular culture. From St. John's to Victoria, the authors follow the century-long development of the holiday in all its varied forms.

Latin Erotic Elegy and the Shaping of Sixteenth-Century English Love Poetry

Latin Erotic Elegy and the Shaping of Sixteenth-Century English Love Poetry PDF Author: Linda Grant
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108493866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Interdisciplinary in approach and methodologically sophisticated, this book explores the dynamic reception of Latin erotic elegy in Renaissance love poetry.