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Author: Michael Wainwright
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137601337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
If game theory, the mathematical simulation of rational decision-making first axiomatically established by the Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann, is to prove worthy of literary hermeneutics, then critics must be able to apply its models to texts written without a working knowledge of von Neumann's discipline in mind. Reading such iconic novels as Fahrenheit 451, In Cold Blood, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye from the perspective of the four most frequently encountered coordination problems - the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock, Game Theory and Postwar American Literature illustrates the significant contribution of mathematical models to literary interpretation. The interdisciplinary approach of this book contributes to an understanding of the historical, political, and social contexts that surround the texts produced in the post-Cold War years, as well as providing a comprehensive model of joining game theory and literary criticism.
Author: Michael Wainwright
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137601337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Get Book Here
Book Description
If game theory, the mathematical simulation of rational decision-making first axiomatically established by the Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann, is to prove worthy of literary hermeneutics, then critics must be able to apply its models to texts written without a working knowledge of von Neumann's discipline in mind. Reading such iconic novels as Fahrenheit 451, In Cold Blood, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye from the perspective of the four most frequently encountered coordination problems - the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock, Game Theory and Postwar American Literature illustrates the significant contribution of mathematical models to literary interpretation. The interdisciplinary approach of this book contributes to an understanding of the historical, political, and social contexts that surround the texts produced in the post-Cold War years, as well as providing a comprehensive model of joining game theory and literary criticism.
Author: Michael Wainwright
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137588225
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
This interdisciplinary monograph applies the theory of games of strategy (or game theory) to an important subset of American literature: minoritarian texts. Fittingly, John von Neumann's game theory, as a mathematical subdiscipline practically abandoned by its founder after the publication of 'Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele' (1928), but purposefully reengaged with on his permanent relocation to America in 1938, carries the minoritarian credentials of a Hungarian-born national of Jewish descent. The state of international politics in the late 1930s certainly contributed to von Neumann's renewed interest in his theory, but a socioeconomic environment built on the legacy of slavery focused a reengagement with coordination problems that would last until his death. In these strategic situations, people must make choices in the knowledge that other people face the same options and that the outcome for each person will result from everybody's decisions. The four most frequently encountered coordination problems are the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock Minoritarians find majoritarian attempts to control these social dilemmas particularly challenging. Hence, a game-theoretically inflected hermeneutic that identifies the logical, rational, and strategic state of human interrelations not only helps to categorize, but also to analyze minoritarian texts. The authors under detailed consideration are Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet A. Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Mohsin Hamid.
Author: Michael Wainwright
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319952587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
The Rational Shakespeare: Peter Ramus, Edward de Vere, and the Question of Authorship examines William Shakespeare’s rationality from a Ramist perspective, linking that examination to the leading intellectuals of late humanism, and extending those links to the life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. The application to Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets of a game-theoretic hermeneutic, an interpretive approach that Ramism suggests but ultimately evades, strengthens these connections in further supporting the Oxfordian answer to the question of Shakespearean authorship.
Author: Tara Fickle
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479884367
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Winner, 2020 American Book Award, given by the Before Columbus Foundation How games have been used to establish and combat Asian American racial stereotypes As Pokémon Go reshaped our neighborhood geographies and the human flows of our cities, mapping the virtual onto lived realities, so too has gaming and game theory played a role in our contemporary understanding of race and racial formation in the United States. From the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment to the model minority myth and the globalization of Asian labor, Tara Fickle shows how games and game theory shaped fictions of race upon which the nation relies. Drawing from a wide range of literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, Fickle illuminates the ways Asian Americans have had to fit the roles, play the game, and follow the rules to be seen as valuable in the US. Exploring key moments in the formation of modern US race relations, The Race Card charts a new course in gaming scholarship by reorienting our focus away from games as vehicles for empowerment that allow people to inhabit new identities, and toward the ways that games are used as instruments of soft power to advance top-down political agendas. Bridging the intellectual divide between the embedded mechanics of video games and more theoretical approaches to gaming rhetoric, Tara Fickle reveals how this intersection allows us to overlook the predominance of game tropes in national culture. The Race Card reveals this relationship as one of deep ideological and historical intimacy: how the games we play have seeped into every aspect of our lives in both monotonous and malevolent ways.
Author: Jay Watson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496822552
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Gloria J. Burgess, David A. Davis, Sarah E. Gardner, Richard Godden, Ryan Heryford, Robert Jackson, Gavin Jones, Mary A. Knighton, Peter Lurie, John T. Matthews, Myka Tucker-Abramson, Michael Wainwright, Jay Watson, and Michael Zeitlin The matter of money touches a writer's life at every point—in the need to make ends meet; in dealings with agents, editors, publishers, and bookstores; and in the choice of subject matter and the minutiae of imagined worlds. William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha was no exception. The people and communities he wrote about stayed deeply entangled in personal, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as did the author himself. Faulkner's economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century. The Faulkner met within these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason. Faulkner and Money brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel Laureate and new questions about his art. Essays in this collection address economies of debt and gift giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.
Author: Kevin Brazil
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198824459
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which twenty-century novelists responded to visual art and how writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period.
Author: Paul Erickson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604677X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.
Author: Josephine Hendin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470756381
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
This Concise Companion is a guide to the creative output of the United States in the postwar period, in its diverse energies, shapes and forms. Embraces diversity, covering Vietnam literature, gay and lesbian literature, American Jewish fiction, Italian American literature, Irish American writing, emergent ethnic literatures, African American writing, jazz, film, drama and more. Shows how different genres and approaches opened up creative possibilities and interacted in the postwar period. Portrays the postwar United States split by differences of wealth and position, by ethnicity and race, and by agendas of left and right, but united in the intensity of its creative drive.
Author: Evan Brier
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201442
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
As television transformed American culture in the 1950s, critics feared the influence of this newly pervasive mass medium on the nation's literature. While many studies have addressed the rhetorical response of artists and intellectuals to mid-twentieth-century mass culture, the relationship between the emergence of this culture and the production of novels has gone largely unexamined. In A Novel Marketplace, Evan Brier illuminates the complex ties between postwar mass culture and the making, marketing, and reception of American fiction. Between 1948, when television began its ascendancy, and 1959, when Random House became a publicly owned corporation, the way American novels were produced and distributed changed considerably. Analyzing a range of mid-century novels—including Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place—Brier reveals the specific strategies used to carve out cultural and economic space for the American novel just as it seemed most under threat. During this anxious historical moment, the book business underwent an improbable expansion, by capitalizing on an economic boom and a rising population of educated consumers and by forming institutional alliances with educators and cold warriors to promote reading as both a cultural and political good. A Novel Marketplace tells how the book trade and the novelists themselves successfully positioned their works as embattled holdouts against an oppressive mass culture, even as publishers formed partnerships with mass-culture institutions that foreshadowed the multimedia mergers to come in the 1960s. As a foil for and a partner to literary institutions, mass media corporations assisted in fostering the novel's development as both culture and commodity.
Author: Paul Erickson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022609720X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397
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Book Description
In recent decades game theory—the mathematics of rational decision-making by interacting individuals—has assumed a central place in our understanding of capitalist markets, the evolution of social behavior in animals, and even the ethics of altruism and fairness in human beings. With game theory’s ubiquity, however, has come a great deal of misunderstanding. Critics of the contemporary social sciences view it as part of an unwelcome trend toward the marginalization of historicist and interpretive styles of inquiry, and many accuse its proponents of presenting a thin and empirically dubious view of human choice. The World the Game Theorists Made seeks to explain the ascendency of game theory, focusing on the poorly understood period between the publication of John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern’s seminal Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 and the theory’s revival in economics in the 1980s. Drawing on a diverse collection of institutional archives, personal correspondence and papers, and interviews, Paul Erickson shows how game theory offered social scientists, biologists, military strategists, and others a common, flexible language that could facilitate wide-ranging thought and debate on some of the most critical issues of the day.
