Author: Alexander Nehamas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691148651
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and desire, and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life. Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated. Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to understand, and not suppress.
Author: Sara Ahmed
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082239278X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.
Author: Betty Neels
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 1459205219
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 167
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Book Description
“I’M NOT ATTRACTED TO THIN MICE.” So stated the urbane Baron Tiele Raukema van den Eck—and as Rebecca Saunders was both thin and mouse-like, she knew exactly where she stood with him! But he had been very kind, rescuing her when she was virtually destitute. He had even found her a job—nursing his mother. The job was enjoyable and well paid, and it took her to Norway and Holland. The result was inevitable—Rebecca fell in love with the baron, and not even the presence of his girlfriend, Nina, could stop her from dreaming.
Author: Justin Cartwright
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312348809
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
A powerful elegy to the intimacies and idiocies of family, this is a stunning novel that transcends British and American cultures as it dissects them. Told in five voices, it's the story of an apparently ordinary family reunited by the return of its prodigal daughter.
Author: Randy Alcorn
Publisher: NavPress
ISBN: 149641151X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 65
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Book Description
Think God doesn’t want you to be happy? Think again. We know that we will experience unimaginable joy and happiness in Heaven, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also experience joy and happiness here on earth. In God’s Promise of Happiness, bestselling author and noted theologian Randy Alcorn shares select passages and scripture from his latest hardcover release, Happiness, that provide insight, wisdom, and proof positive that God not only wants us to be happy, he commands it!
Author: Darrin M. McMahon
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802142894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 572
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Book Description
An intellectual history of man's most elusive yet coveted goal. Today, we think of happiness as a natural right, but people haven't always felt this way. Historian McMahon argues that our modern belief in happiness is a recent development, the product of a revolution in human expectations carried out since the eighteenth century. He investigates that fundamental transformation by synthesizing two thousand years of politics, culture, and thought. In ancient Greek tragedy, happiness was considered a gift of the gods. During the Enlightenment men and women were first introduced to the novel prospect that they could--in fact should--be happy in this life as opposed to the hereafter. This recognition of happiness as a motivating ideal led to its consecration in the Declaration of Independence. McMahon then shows how our modern search continues to generate new forms of pleasure, but also, paradoxically, new forms of pain.--From publisher description.
Author: Adam Braun
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476730636
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This the story of how a young man turned $25 into more than 200 schools around the world and the guiding steps anyone can take to lead a successful and significant life. The author began working summers at hedge funds when he was just sixteen years old, sprinting down the path to a successful Wall Street career. But while traveling he met a young boy begging on the streets of India, who after being asked what he wanted most in the world, simply answered, "A pencil." This small request led to a staggering series of events that took the author backpacking through dozens of countries before eventually leaving one of the world's most prestigious jobs at Bain & Company to found Pencils of Promise, the organization he started with just $25 that has since built more than 200 schools around the world. This book chronicles the author's journey to find his calling, as each chapter explains one clear step that every person can take to turn your biggest ambitions into reality, even if you start with as little as $25. His story takes readers behind the scenes with business moguls and village chiefs, world-famous celebrities and hometown heroes. It is filled with compelling stories and shareable insights. All proceeds from this book support Pencils of Promise.
Author: Randy Alcorn
Publisher: NavPress
ISBN: 1496420039
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Would you like to experience true happiness? When it comes to happiness, most of us have the same questions. Why can’t I be consistently happy? Is it wrong to be happy when there’s so much pain and suffering in the world? And perhaps the biggest one: How can I be happier? Some Christians make an artificial contrast between joy and happiness, while others claim God wants us to be holy, but not happy. In fact, he wants us to be both, and the two go hand in hand! In 60 Days of Happiness, noted theologian and New York Times bestselling author Randy Alcorn shares sixty timeless devotions demonstrating that God not only wants us to be happy in him and enjoy his gifts, he commands and empowers us to do so.
Author: Brad Leithauser
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525564128
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
A comic novel about a Midwestern professor who tries to prop up his failing prospects for happiness by setting out on the Journey of a Lifetime. Louie Hake is forty-three and teaches architectural history at a third-rate college in Michigan. His second marriage is collapsing, and he's facing a potentially disastrous medical diagnosis. In an attempt to fend off what has become a soul-crushing existential crisis, he decides to treat himself to a tour of the world's most breathtaking architectural sites. Perhaps not surprisingly, Louie gets waylaid on his very first stop in Rome--ludicrously, spectacularly so--and fails to reach most of his other destinations. He embarks on a doomed romance with a jilted bride celebrating her ruined marriage plans alone in London. And in the Arctic he finds that turf houses and aluminum sheds don't amount to much of an architectural tradition. But it turns out that there's another sort of architecture there: icebergs the size of cathedrals, bobbing beside a strange and wondrous landscape. It soon becomes clear that Louie's grand journey is less about where his wanderings have taken him and more about where his past encounters with romance have not. Whether pursuing his first wife, or his estranged current wife, or the older woman he kissed just once a quarter-century ago, Louie reveals himself to be endearing, deeply touching, wonderfully ridiculous . . . and destined to find love in all the wrong places.
Author: Jesse Lee Kercheval
Publisher: Terrace Books
ISBN: 9780299187347
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
"After her husband's sudden death, Ginny Gillespie travels with his ashes to Paris, where she meets and falls in love with Roland Keppi, a strange, visionary man without a country. Their dreamlike affair is disrupted when Roland vanishes, deported to a German camp for people without identity papers. But coincidences, dreams, and visions eventually reunite them with the promise of a bright future. Set primarily in France between the world wars, the narrative moves easily between the present and the past and among Ginny, Roland, and the important people in their lives. These intertwining stories raise questions of fate and the meaning of family, identity, and happiness."--Library Journal
