Promise the Infinite: Drawing Out Babel

Promise the Infinite: Drawing Out Babel PDF Author: Rachel Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781913421243
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Promise the Infinite: Drawing Out Babel

Promise the Infinite: Drawing Out Babel PDF Author: Rachel Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781913421243
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Library of Babel

The Library of Babel PDF Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789333185875
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Tar for Mortar

Tar for Mortar PDF Author: Jonathan Basile
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447505
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
TAR FOR MORTAR offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature's greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story "The Library of Babel" is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges's narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator's claims of the library's universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing. Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library - is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion? While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges's imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.

Fairy Tale Architecture

Fairy Tale Architecture PDF Author: Andrew Bernheimer
Publisher: Oro Editions
ISBN: 9781951541286
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Fairy Tale Architecture is a ground-breaking book, the first study to bring architects in conversation with fairy tales in breathtaking designs. Little Red Riding Hood, Baba Yaga, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Snow Queen: these and more than fifteen other stories designed by Bernheimer Architecture, Snøhetta, Rural Studio, LEVENBETTS, and LTL Architects and many other international vanguards have created stunning works for this groundbreaking collection of architectural fairy tales. Story by story, Andrew Bernheimer and Kate Bernheimer--a brother and sister team as in an old fairy tale--have built the ultimate home for lovers of fiction and design. Snow girls and spinning houses. Paper capes and engineered hair braids. Resin bee hives and infinite libraries. Here are futuristic structures made from traditional stories, inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen and The Little Match Girl to the Brothers Grimm's Rapunzel and The Juniper Tree to fairy tales by Jorge Luis Borges and Joy Williams and from China, Japan, Russia, Nigeria, and Mexico. A desire for story and shelter counts as among our most ancient instincts, and this dual desire continues to inspire our most imaginative architects and authors today. Fairy Tale Architecture invites the reader into a space of wonder, into a new form that will endure ever after.

Scientific Babel

Scientific Babel PDF Author: Michael D. Gordin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022600032X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
English is the language of science today. No matter which languages you know, if you want your work seen, studied, and cited, you need to publish in English. But that hasn’t always been the case. Though there was a time when Latin dominated the field, for centuries science has been a polyglot enterprise, conducted in a number of languages whose importance waxed and waned over time—until the rise of English in the twentieth century. So how did we get from there to here? How did French, German, Latin, Russian, and even Esperanto give way to English? And what can we reconstruct of the experience of doing science in the polyglot past? With Scientific Babel, Michael D. Gordin resurrects that lost world, in part through an ingenious mechanism: the pages of his highly readable narrative account teem with footnotes—not offering background information, but presenting quoted material in its original language. The result is stunning: as we read about the rise and fall of languages, driven by politics, war, economics, and institutions, we actually see it happen in the ever-changing web of multilingual examples. The history of science, and of English as its dominant language, comes to life, and brings with it a new understanding not only of the frictions generated by a scientific community that spoke in many often mutually unintelligible voices, but also of the possibilities of the polyglot, and the losses that the dominance of English entails. Few historians of science write as well as Gordin, and Scientific Babel reveals his incredible command of the literature, language, and intellectual essence of science past and present. No reader who takes this linguistic journey with him will be disappointed.

Archaeology of Babel

Archaeology of Babel PDF Author: Siraj Ahmed
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503604047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India. Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.

Sophie's World

Sophie's World PDF Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 735

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Book Description
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell PDF Author: Susanna Clarke
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 160819535X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1162

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Book Description
In the Hugo-award winning, epic New York Times Bestseller and basis for the BBC miniseries, two men change England's history when they bring magic back into the world. In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, most people believe magic to have long since disappeared from England - until the reclusive Mr. Norrell reveals his powers and becomes an overnight celebrity. Another practicing magician then emerges: the young and daring Jonathan Strange. He becomes Norrell's pupil, and the two join forces in the war against France. But Strange is increasingly drawn to the wild, most perilous forms of magic, and he soon risks sacrificing his partnership with Norrell and everything else he holds dear. Susanna Clarke's brilliant first novel is an utterly compelling epic tale of nineteenth-century England and the two magicians who, first as teacher and pupil and then as rivals, emerge to change its history.

Labyrinths

Labyrinths PDF Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811200127
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Forty short stories and essays have been selected as representative of the Argentine writer's metaphysical narratives.

Baxter's Explore the Book

Baxter's Explore the Book PDF Author: J. Sidlow Baxter
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310871395
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1846

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Book Description
Explore the Book is not a commentary with verse-by-verse annotations. Neither is it just a series of analyses and outlines. Rather, it is a complete Bible survey course. No one can finish this series of studies and remain unchanged. The reader will receive lifelong benefit and be enriched by these practical and understandable studies. Exposition, commentary, and practical application of the meaning and message of the Bible will be found throughout this giant volume. Bible students without any background in Bible study will find this book of immense help as will those who have spent much time studying the Scriptures, including pastors and teachers. Explore the Book is the result and culmination of a lifetime of dedicated Bible study and exposition on the part of Dr. Baxter. It shows throughout a deep awareness and appreciation of the grand themes of the gospel, as found from the opening book of the Bible through Revelation.