Bodies and Books

Bodies and Books PDF Author: Gillian Silverman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206185
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
In nineteenth-century America, Gillian Silverman contends, reading—and particularly book reading—precipitated intense fantasies of communion. In handling a book, the reader imagined touching and being touched by the people affiliated with that book's narrative world—an author, a character, a fellow reader. This experience often led to a sense of consubstantiality, a fantasy that the reader, the material book, and the imagined other were momentarily merged. Such a fantasy challenges psychological conceptions of discrete subjectivity along with the very notion of corporeal integrity—the idea that we are detached, skin-bound, and autonomously functioning entities. It forces us to envision readers not as liberal subjects, pursuing reading as a means toward privacy, interiority, and individuation, but rather as communal beings inseparable from objects in our psychic and phenomenal world. While theorists have long emphasized the way reading can promote a sense of abstract belonging, Bodies and Books emphasizes the intense somatic bonds that nineteenth-century subjects experienced while reading. Silverman bridges the gap between the cognitive and material effects of reading, arguing that the two worked in tandem, enabling readers to feel deep communion with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world. Drawing on the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century readers along with literary works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Susan Warner, and others, Silverman explores the book as a technology of intimacy and ponders what nineteenth-century readers might be able to teach us two centuries later.

Bodies and Books

Bodies and Books PDF Author: Gillian Silverman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206185
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book

Book Description
In nineteenth-century America, Gillian Silverman contends, reading—and particularly book reading—precipitated intense fantasies of communion. In handling a book, the reader imagined touching and being touched by the people affiliated with that book's narrative world—an author, a character, a fellow reader. This experience often led to a sense of consubstantiality, a fantasy that the reader, the material book, and the imagined other were momentarily merged. Such a fantasy challenges psychological conceptions of discrete subjectivity along with the very notion of corporeal integrity—the idea that we are detached, skin-bound, and autonomously functioning entities. It forces us to envision readers not as liberal subjects, pursuing reading as a means toward privacy, interiority, and individuation, but rather as communal beings inseparable from objects in our psychic and phenomenal world. While theorists have long emphasized the way reading can promote a sense of abstract belonging, Bodies and Books emphasizes the intense somatic bonds that nineteenth-century subjects experienced while reading. Silverman bridges the gap between the cognitive and material effects of reading, arguing that the two worked in tandem, enabling readers to feel deep communion with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world. Drawing on the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century readers along with literary works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Susan Warner, and others, Silverman explores the book as a technology of intimacy and ponders what nineteenth-century readers might be able to teach us two centuries later.

Reading Bodies

Reading Bodies PDF Author: Callie Callon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567684423
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Callie Callon investigates how some early Christian authors utilized physiognomic thought as rhetorical strategy, particularly with respect to persuasion. Callon shows how this encompassed denigrating theological opponents and forging group boundaries (invective against heretics or defence of Christians), self-representation to demonstrate the moral superiority of early Christians to Greco-Roman outsiders, and the cultivation of collective self-identity. The work begins with an overview of how physiognomy was used in broader antiquity as a component of persuasion. Callon then examines how physiognomic thought was employed by early Christians and how physiognomic tropes were employed to “prove” their orthodoxy and moral superiority. Building on the conclusions of the earlier chapters, Callon then focuses on the representation of the physiognomies of early Christian martyrs, before addressing the problem of the acceptance or even promotion of the idea of a physically lacklustre Jesus by the same authors who otherwise utilize traditional physiognomic thought.

Reading and the Body

Reading and the Body PDF Author: Thomas Mc Laughlin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137522895
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Literary theory has been dominated by a mind/body dualism that often eschews the role of the body in reading. Focusing on reading as a physical practice, McLaughlin analyzes the role of the eyes, the hands, postures and gestures, bodily habits and other physical spaces, with discussions ranging from James Joyce to the digital future of reading.

Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies

Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies PDF Author: Timothy K. Beal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134799780
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The Bible is often said to be one of the foundation texts of Western culture. The present volume shows that it goes far beyond being a religious text. The essays explore how religious, political and cultural identities, including ethnicity and gender, are embodied in biblical discourse. Following the authors, we read the Bible with new eyes: as a critic of gender, ideology, politics and culture. We ask ourselves new questions: about God's body, about women's role, about racial prejudices and about the politics of the written word. Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies crosses boundaries. It questions our most fundamental assumptions about the Bible. It shows how biblical studies can benefit from the mainstream of Western intellectual discourse, throwing up entirely new questions and offering surprising answers. Accessible, engaging and moving easily between theory and the reading of specific texts, this volume is an exciting contribution to contemporary biblical and cultural studies.

Bodies Are Cool

Bodies Are Cool PDF Author: Tyler Feder
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593112636
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
This cheerful love-your-body picture book for preschoolers is an exuberant read-aloud with bright and friendly illustrations to pore over. From the acclaimed creator of Dancing at the Pity Party and Roaring Softly, this picture book is a pure celebration of all the different human bodies that exist in the world. Highlighting the various skin tones, body shapes, and hair types is just the beginning in this truly inclusive book. With its joyful illustrations and encouraging refrain, it will instill body acceptance and confidence in the youngest of readers. “My body, your body, every different kind of body! All of them are good bodies! BODIES ARE COOL!”

Reading Dancing

Reading Dancing PDF Author: Susan Leigh Foster
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520063334
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Winner of the Dance Perspectives Foundation de la Torre Bueno Prize Recent approaches to dance composition, seen in the works of Merce Cunningham and the Judson Church performances of the early 1960s, suggest the possibility for a new theory of choreographic meaning. Borrowing from contemporary semiotics and post-structuralist criticism, Reading Dancing outlines four distinct models for representation in dance which are illustrated, first, through an analysis of the works of contemporary choreographers Deborah Hay, George Balanchine, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham, and then through reference to historical examples beginning with court ballets of the Renaissance. The comparison of these four approaches to representation affirms the unparalleled diversity of choreographic methods in American dance, and also suggests a critical perspective from which to reflect on dance making and viewing.

Theories of Reading

Theories of Reading PDF Author: Karin Littau
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745616593
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Why do literary theorists see reading as an act of dispassionate textual analysis and meaning production, when historical evidence shows that readers have often read excessively, obsessively, and for sensory stimulation? Posing these and other questions, this is the first major work to bring insights from book history to bear on literary history and theory. In so doing, the book charts a compelling and innovative history of theories of reading. While literary theorists have greatly contributed to our understanding of the text-reader relation, they have rarely taken into account that the relation between a book and a reader is also a relation between two bodies: one made of paper and ink, the other flesh and blood. This is why, Karin Littau argues, we need to look beyond the words on the page, and pay attention to the technical innovations in the physical format of the book. Only then is it possible to understand more fully how media technology has changed our experience of reading, and why media history presents a challenge to our conceptions of what reading is. Each chapter places the reader in specific disciplinary and historical contexts: literature, criticism, philosophy, cultural history, bibliography, film, new media. Overall, the history recounted in this book points to a split between modern literary study which regards reading as a reducibly mental activity, and a tradition reaching back to antiquity which assumed that reading was not only about sense-making but also about sensation. Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania will be essential reading for all students and scholars of literary theory and history as well as of great interest to students of the history of the book and new media.

All Bodies Are Good Bodies

All Bodies Are Good Bodies PDF Author: Charlotte Barkla
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781761212611
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Bold and beautiful, loud and proud, All Bodies are Good Bodies is an uplifting board book about different body features and types. Through playful rhyme, it promotes the development of body acceptance and celebrates inclusivity and individuality. I love hands! Hands that are white and hands that are brown, Freckles mean sunshine has sent kisses down. Short fingers, long fingers, bendy or straight, Hands to clap, or high-five your mate.

Bodies Unbound

Bodies Unbound PDF Author: Cynthia Waring
Publisher: Readersmagnet LLC
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This is a memoir. In it, Cynthia vulnerably reveals her search for reasons as to why she left her family. For a time, Waring lives homeless, broken, and unable to deal with her life. Almost by accident, she becomes a Massage Therapist, and through her client's appreciation of her, her self-esteem blossoms. After giving over 30,000 massages, she is given insight into how people carry trauma and how it affects the body. We read and are moved as we follow Cynthia's journey from homelessness to receiving a standing ovation for her play and sells 20,000 copies of her book. As Ron Liggett describes her journey, "Waring peals away the layers of a wounded heart to reveal a resilient and tenacious soul on a long but rewarding healing mission."

Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: J. McMaster
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023051202X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
McMaster's lively study looks at the various codes by which Eighteenth-century novelists made the minds of their characters legible through their bodies. She tellingly explores the discourses of medicine, physiognomy, gesture and facial expression, completely familiar to contemporary readers but not to us, in ways that enrich our reading of such classics as Clarissa and Tristram Shandy , as well as of novels by Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.