Error, Misuse, Failure

Error, Misuse, Failure PDF Author: Julian Yates
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639625
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
If certain objects work well, no one notices them. As with "black boxes, " their success may be gauged by their relative invisibility -- and this was the indirect goal of the objects that Julian Yates considers here: the portrait miniature, the relic, the privy (flush toilet), the printed text, and the priest-hole (a secret hiding place for Catholic priests in Protestant England). Because each of these contrivances was prone to error, misuse, and sometimes catastrophic failure, they become in Yates's analysis an occasion for recasting the history of the English Renaissance as object lessons -- "knowing from the point of view of the known." It is through such lapses -- the texts and stories generated to explain away a relic that is too easily faked, a miniature that is too curiously real, the stench of a failing privy, a book that persistently sheds its pages, or the presence of so much "papist trash" in an ostensibly reformed England -- that Yates recovers the silent work of "things" in cultural production. Drawing object lessons from failing technological devices, Error, Misuse, Failure plumbs the foundations of Renaissance culture in England, recovering a curious language of mistakes, dirt, and parasitism that associates the failures of these "things" with the figures of Rome, Catholicism, and Sodom. Yates offers a mode of historical inquiry rooted in material culture, sensitive to the way humans induct nonhumans (animals, plants, and manufactured things) into their communities. Historically, the book offers a new set of stories about the rise of printing, the development of domestic architecture, and England's Catholic community -- stories that remind readers of the ways in whichattending to the history of nonhumans requires a radical rethinking of historical landmarks and boundaries.

Error, Misuse, Failure

Error, Misuse, Failure PDF Author: Julian Yates
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639625
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
If certain objects work well, no one notices them. As with "black boxes, " their success may be gauged by their relative invisibility -- and this was the indirect goal of the objects that Julian Yates considers here: the portrait miniature, the relic, the privy (flush toilet), the printed text, and the priest-hole (a secret hiding place for Catholic priests in Protestant England). Because each of these contrivances was prone to error, misuse, and sometimes catastrophic failure, they become in Yates's analysis an occasion for recasting the history of the English Renaissance as object lessons -- "knowing from the point of view of the known." It is through such lapses -- the texts and stories generated to explain away a relic that is too easily faked, a miniature that is too curiously real, the stench of a failing privy, a book that persistently sheds its pages, or the presence of so much "papist trash" in an ostensibly reformed England -- that Yates recovers the silent work of "things" in cultural production. Drawing object lessons from failing technological devices, Error, Misuse, Failure plumbs the foundations of Renaissance culture in England, recovering a curious language of mistakes, dirt, and parasitism that associates the failures of these "things" with the figures of Rome, Catholicism, and Sodom. Yates offers a mode of historical inquiry rooted in material culture, sensitive to the way humans induct nonhumans (animals, plants, and manufactured things) into their communities. Historically, the book offers a new set of stories about the rise of printing, the development of domestic architecture, and England's Catholic community -- stories that remind readers of the ways in whichattending to the history of nonhumans requires a radical rethinking of historical landmarks and boundaries.

Error in Shakespeare

Error in Shakespeare PDF Author: Alice Leonard
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030351807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book

Book Description
The traditional view of Shakespeare’s mastery of the English language is alive and well today. This is an effect of the eighteenth-century canonisation of his works, and subsequently Shakespeare has come to be perceived as the owner of the vernacular. These entrenched attitudes prevent us from seeing the actual substance of the text, and the various types of error that it contains and even constitute it. This book argues that we need to attend to error to interpret Shakespeare’s disputed material text, political-dramatic interventions and famous literariness. The consequences of ignoring error are especially significant in the study of Shakespeare, as he mobilises the rebellious, marginal, and digressive potential of error in the creation of literary drama.

Bad Form

Bad Form PDF Author: Kent Puckett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199948534
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Get Book

Book Description
Bad Form argues that the social mistake - the blunder, the gaffe, the faux pas - is crucial to the structure of the nineteenth-century novel.

The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist

The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist PDF Author: Zachary Sng
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804775095
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
Eighteenth-century Europe, preoccupied with both the origins and the defense of reason, was naturally concerned with what might be the root of all error. A topic any systematic account of knowledge must grapple with, error became a frequent point of debate in new scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical investigations. Taking John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding as his point of departure, Sng examines a number of such debates, focusing on literary and philosophical accounts of the relationship between language and thought. Rather than approaching its topic conceptually or historically, he takes on canonical texts of the Enlightenment and Romanticism and engages with their rhetorical strategies. In so doing, Sng elucidates how people wrote about error and how texts claimed to produce reliable and error-free modes of knowledge. The range of authors addressed—Leibniz, Adam Smith, Coleridge, Kant, and Goethe—demonstrates the diversity and heterogeneity underlying the textual production of the age.

Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature

Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature PDF Author: S. Lightsey
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230605648
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book

Book Description
This book examines marvels as tangible objects in the literary, courtly, and artisanal cultures of medieval England, but these clever devices, neither wholly semiotic nor purely positivist objects, are imbued with diverse cultural significance that illuminates in new ways the familiar literature of the Ricardian period.

Management of Medical Technology

Management of Medical Technology PDF Author: Joseph D. Bronzino
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
ISBN: 148319390X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book

Book Description
Management of Medical Technology: A Primer for Clinical Engineers introduces and examines the functions and activities of clinical engineering within the medical environment of the modern hospital. The book provides insight into the role that clinical engineers play in the management of medical technology. Topics covered include the history, job functions, and the professionalization of clinical engineering; safety in the clinical environment; management of hospital equipment; assessment and acquisition of medical technologies; preparation of a business plan for the clinical engineering department; and the moral and ethical issues that surround the delivery of health-care. Clinical engineers and biomedical engineers will find the book as a great reference material.

The Face of Mammon

The Face of Mammon PDF Author: David Landreth
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199773297
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book

Book Description
'The Face of Mammon' studies the coins of 16th-century England as they are articulated in literary writing. It argues that the coinage of the 16th century is a very different object from the money that we know in that modern money is the object of a discourse, economics, that had not yet taken shape.

The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England

The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England PDF Author: Roze Hentschell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317036697
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book

Book Description
Through its exploration of the intersections between the culture of the wool broadcloth industry and the literature of the early modern period, this study contributes to the expanding field of material studies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The author argues that it is impossible to comprehend the development of emerging English nationalism during that time period, without considering the culture of the cloth industry. She shows that, reaching far beyond its status as a commodity of production and exchange, that industry was also a locus for organizing sentiments of national solidarity across social and economic divisions. Hentschell looks to textual productions-both imaginative and non-fiction works that often treat the cloth industry with mythic importance-to help explain how cloth came to be a catalyst for nationalism. Each chapter ties a particular mode, such as pastoral, prose romance, travel propaganda, satire, and drama, with a specific issue of the cloth industry, demonstrating the distinct work different literary genres contributed to what the author terms the 'culture of cloth'.

Elemental Ecocriticism

Elemental Ecocriticism PDF Author: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452945675
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book

Book Description
For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world. The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation). Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England PDF Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317042069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586

Get Book

Book Description
The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.