Prometheus's Brother

Prometheus's Brother PDF Author: Thomas Pornin
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781533126177
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The gods fashioned the living beings out of clay, and delegated to two titans, Prometheus and Epimetheus, the task of equipping them with all their proper legs and teeth and wings and fur. This is what Plato relates in the Protagoras. 2,400 years later, we invented science, refined biology, theorised evolution; and yet, we still think of animal species as small clay sculptures with well-defined, divinely allotted attributes. We see the world with our grandparents' eyes: our minds recognise and analyse objects and concepts by sifting them through mental categories that we inherited from our ancestors. Ideas have history. This book thus tries to put the notion of animal species in its historical context, and that context spans more than two millennia of religion, philosophy, science, and camel husbandry.

Prometheus's Brother

Prometheus's Brother PDF Author: Thomas Pornin
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781533126177
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The gods fashioned the living beings out of clay, and delegated to two titans, Prometheus and Epimetheus, the task of equipping them with all their proper legs and teeth and wings and fur. This is what Plato relates in the Protagoras. 2,400 years later, we invented science, refined biology, theorised evolution; and yet, we still think of animal species as small clay sculptures with well-defined, divinely allotted attributes. We see the world with our grandparents' eyes: our minds recognise and analyse objects and concepts by sifting them through mental categories that we inherited from our ancestors. Ideas have history. This book thus tries to put the notion of animal species in its historical context, and that context spans more than two millennia of religion, philosophy, science, and camel husbandry.

Meat Planet

Meat Planet PDF Author: Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520379004
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world’s first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein. Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab—a substance sometimes called “cultured meat”—and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food. Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political, and it demands that we examine questions of justice and desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world. Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem’s capacity to sustain life. He argues that even if cultured meat does not “succeed,” it functions—much like science fiction—as a crucial mirror that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions.

Calderón

Calderón PDF Author: Robert ter Horst
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813187710
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
Although Pedro Calderón de la Barca was one of the greatest and most prolific playwrights of Spain's Golden Age, most of his nonallegorical comedias—118 in all—have remained unknown. Robert ter Horst presents here the first full-length study of these works, a sustained, meditative analysis dealing with more than 80 plays, conveying a sense of the whole of Calderón's secular theater. To approach so vast a body of literature, Mr. ter Horst examines the meaning and function in Calderón of three broad subjects—myth, honor, and history—the warp threads across which the playwright weaves a subtle tapestry of contrasts, dualities, and conflicts: the private person versus the public person, the inner realm versus the outer, masculine against feminine, poet against prince. The Calderón who emerges is a consciously consummate artist whose lifelong study was the passions of the human mind and body. In addition, he is seen as a synthesizer of his Spanish literary heritage and especially as a brilliant adapter of Cervantes' insights to the stage. Robert ter Horst's profound and far-ranging analysis sheds light on many fine works previously neglected and finds new depths in such supreme achievements as No hay cosa como callar, El segundo Escipión, and La vida es suefio.

Old Greek Stories

Old Greek Stories PDF Author: James Baldwin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mythology, Greek
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description


Frankenstein and Its Classics

Frankenstein and Its Classics PDF Author: Jesse Weiner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350054895
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Frankenstein and Its Classics is the first collection of scholarship dedicated to how Frankenstein and works inspired by it draw on ancient Greek and Roman literature, history, philosophy, and myth. Presenting twelve new essays intended for students, scholars, and other readers of Mary Shelley's novel, the volume explores classical receptions in some of Frankenstein's most important scenes, sources, and adaptations. Not limited to literature, the chapters discuss a wide range of modern materials-including recent films like Alex Garland's Ex Machina and comics like Matt Fraction's and Christian Ward's Ody-C-in relation to ancient works including Hesiod's Theogony, Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Apuleius's The Golden Ass. All together, these studies show how Frankenstein, a foundational work of science fiction, brings ancient thought to bear on some of today's most pressing issues, from bioengineering and the creation of artificial intelligence to the struggles of marginalized communities and political revolution. This addition to the comparative study of classics and science fiction reveals deep similarities between ancient and modern ways of imagining the world-and emphasizes the prescience and ongoing importance of Mary Shelley's immortal novel. As Frankenstein turns 200, its complex engagement with classical traditions is more significant than ever.

Nothing As We Need It

Nothing As We Need It PDF Author: Daniela Cascella
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1685710603
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Nothing As We Need It: A Chimera imagines and writes a composite and impure form of criticism that embodies the writing of research as recursive, entangled, and many-voiced. Shaped by encounters with literature not translated in English, by the polyphonies, artifices, and concealments of a bilingual self, and by the sense of speechlessness and haunting when writing of works that cannot be instantly quoted, this book's subtitle derives from the mythological Chimera: a monstrous creature made of three different parts, impossible in theory but real in the imagination and in the reading of the myth. Similarly the book is written in different styles, some of which may seem impossible, monstrous, and disturbing. It manifests critical writing as enmeshment and conversation with its subject matters; favours impurity rather than detachment; embraces exaggeration, repetition, laughter, and self-parody as legitimate forms of knowledge. Yet a chimera also designates the object of a yearning deemed unattainable: this book exists in the space of such yearning, in the tension between words and what exceeds them, their overtones. The critic is exhausted by yearning, rather than the owner of exhaustive knowledge. A Menippean satire for critical writing, Nothing As We Need It sustains its argument for composite and impure writing in its form. It demands ways of reading equally varied, and wildly imaginative. Listening to literature beyond the limits of textual analysis, it dismisses the visual implications of reflection, which assumes detachment and polished surfaces, in favour of an aural method of resonance, allowing enmeshment and interference. This book unsettles language, welcomes uninhibited exaggeration and wordplay, and manifests possibilities for working with citation beyond the boundaries of inverted commas. Daniela Cascella is an Italian-British writer, working with forms and transformations of critical writing that inhabit, echo, and are haunted by their subjects: literature, voices, concealments of the self. Writing in English as a second language, writing as a stranger in a language, she is drawn toward unstable and uncomfortable forms of writing-as-sounding, and toward the transmissions and interferences of knowledge across cultures. Her books include: Chimeras: A Deranged Essay, An Imaginary Conversation, A Transcelation (Sublunary Editions, 2022), Singed. Muted Voice-Transmissions, After The Fire (Equus Press, 2017), F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Zer0 Books, 2015), and En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction (Zer0 Books, 2012). Cascella is Programme Tutor in the Art Writing MLitt at the Glasgow School of Art, Associate Lecturer in the Sound Arts MA at London College of Communication, and Commissioning Editor at MAP Magazine. She publishes and lectures internationally, and often works with artists, writers, and musicians on collaborative projects and performative readings.

Another Freedom

Another Freedom PDF Author: Svetlana Boym
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226069753
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The word “freedom” is so overly used—and frequently abused—that it is always in danger of becoming nothing but a cliché. In Another Freedom, Svetlana Boym offers us a refreshing new portrait of the age-old concept. Exploring the rich cross-cultural history of the idea of freedom, from its origins in ancient Greece to the present day, she argues that our attempts to imagine freedom should occupy the space of not only “what is” but also “what if.” Beginning with notions of sacrifice and the emergence of a public sphere for politics and art, Boym expands her account to include the relationships between freedom and liberation, modernity and terror, and political dissent and creative estrangement. While depicting a world of differences, she affirms lasting solidarities based on the commitment to the passionate thinking that reflections on freedom require. To do so, Boym assembles a remarkable cast of characters: Aeschylus and Euripides, Kafka and Mandelstam, Arendt and Heidegger, and a virtual encounter between Dostoevsky and Marx on the streets of Paris. By offering a fresh look at the strange history of this idea, Another Freedom delivers a nuanced portrait of freedom, one whose repercussions will be felt well into the future.

Inscrutable Malice

Inscrutable Malice PDF Author: Jonathan A. Cook
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 1501757164
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
In Inscrutable Malice, Jonathan A. Cook expertly illuminates Melville's abiding preoccupation with the problem of evil and the dominant role of the Bible in shaping his best-known novel. Drawing on recent research in the fields of biblical studies, the history of religion, and comparative mythology, Cook provides a new interpretation of Moby-Dick that places Melville's creative adaptation of the Bible at the center of the work. Cook identifies two ongoing concerns in the narrative in relation to their key biblical sources: the attempt to reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of evil, as dramatized in the book of Job; and the discourse of the Christian end-times involving the final destruction of evil, as found in the apocalyptic books and eschatological passages of the Old and New Testaments. With his detailed reading of Moby-Dick in relation to its most important source text, Cook greatly expands the reader's understanding of the moral, religious, and mythical dimensions of the novel. Both accessible and erudite, Inscrutable Malice will appeal to scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Melville's classic whaling narrative.

The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric

The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric PDF Author: Michael Giordano
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802099467
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 697

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Book Description
The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric examines the poetics of meditation in the French love lyric at the height of the Lyonnais Renaissance as illustrated by one of the country's most prominent writers. Maurice Scève's Délie is the first French sequence of poems devoted to a single woman in the manner of Petrarch's Rime. It is also the first Renaissance work to use emblems in a sustained work on love. At their core, most amatory lyrics involve a triple relation among lover, beloved, and the meaning of love. Whether the poet-lover is a man or woman, poetic discourse generally takes the form of an interior monologue frequently intermingled with direct and indirect address to the beloved. Though the dominant quality of this lyric is personal introspection, Michael Giordano finds Délie to be consistent with traditions of Christian meditation. He argues that the amatory lyric served as a vehicle for contests of value and paradigm change not only because it was conditioned both by sacred and profane sources, but also because it occurred at a time of religious upheaval and scientific revolution.

Black Prometheus

Black Prometheus PDF Author: Jared Hickman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190272589
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
An innovative transnational literary study, Black Prometheus tracks the mythical figure's surprising resonance in Anglo-American antislavery discourse from 1800 until the end of the U.S. Civil War.