Loopholes

Loopholes PDF Author: John Bruns
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351508261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Much writing about comedy in the last twenty years has only trivialized comedy as cheap or as temporary distraction from things that "really matter." It has either presented exhaustive taxonomies of kinds of humor--like wit, puns, jokes, humor, satire, irony--or engaged in pointless political endgames, moral dialogues, or philosophical perceptions. Comedy is rarely presented as a mode of thought in its own right, as a way of understanding, not something to be understood. Bruns' guiding assumption is that comedy is not simply a literary or theatrical genre, to be diff erentiated from tragedy or from romance, but a certain way of disclosing, perhaps undoing, the way the world is organized. When we view the world in terms of what is incompatible, we are reading comically. In this sense, comedy exists outside the alternatives of tragic and comic. Loopholes argues that trivialization of comedy comes from fear that it will address our anxieties with honesty-- and it is this truth that scares us. John Bruns discusses comedy as a mode of thought with a cognitive function. It is a domain of human understanding, a domain far more troubling and accessible than we care to acknowledge. To "read comically" we must accept our fears. If we do so, we will realize what Bruns refers to as the most neglected premise of comedy, that the world itself is a loophole--both incomplete and limitless.

Loopholes

Loopholes PDF Author: John Bruns
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351508261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Much writing about comedy in the last twenty years has only trivialized comedy as cheap or as temporary distraction from things that "really matter." It has either presented exhaustive taxonomies of kinds of humor--like wit, puns, jokes, humor, satire, irony--or engaged in pointless political endgames, moral dialogues, or philosophical perceptions. Comedy is rarely presented as a mode of thought in its own right, as a way of understanding, not something to be understood. Bruns' guiding assumption is that comedy is not simply a literary or theatrical genre, to be diff erentiated from tragedy or from romance, but a certain way of disclosing, perhaps undoing, the way the world is organized. When we view the world in terms of what is incompatible, we are reading comically. In this sense, comedy exists outside the alternatives of tragic and comic. Loopholes argues that trivialization of comedy comes from fear that it will address our anxieties with honesty-- and it is this truth that scares us. John Bruns discusses comedy as a mode of thought with a cognitive function. It is a domain of human understanding, a domain far more troubling and accessible than we care to acknowledge. To "read comically" we must accept our fears. If we do so, we will realize what Bruns refers to as the most neglected premise of comedy, that the world itself is a loophole--both incomplete and limitless.

Freedom to Fail

Freedom to Fail PDF Author: Peter Trawny
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745695264
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
Martin Heidegger is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and his seminal text Being and Time is considered one of the most significant texts in contemporary philosophy. Yet his name has also been mired in controversy because of his affiliations with the Nazi regime, his failure to criticize its genocidal politics and his subsequent silence about the holocaust. Now, according to Heidegger's wishes, and to complete the publication of his multi-volume Complete Works, his highly controversial and secret 'Black Notebooks' have been released to the public. These notebooks reveal the extent to which Heidegger's 'personal Nazism' was neither incidental nor opportunistic, but part of his philosophical ethos. So, why would Heidegger, far from destroying them, allow these notebooks, which contain examples of this extreme thinking, to be published? In this revealing new book, Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's complete works in German, confronts these questions and, by way of a compelling study of his theoretical work, shows that Heidegger was committed to a conception of freedom that is only beholden to the judgement of the history of being; that is, that to be free means to be free from the prejudices, norms, or mores of one's time. Whoever thinks the truth of being freely exposes themselves to the danger of epochal errancy. For this reason, Heidegger's decision to publish his notebooks, including their anti-Jewish passages, was an exercise of this anarchical freedom. In the course of a wide-ranging discussion of Heidegger's views on truth, ethics, the truth of being, tragedy and his relationship to other figures such as Nietzsche and Schmitt, Trawny provides a compelling argument for why Heidegger wanted the explosive material in his Black Notebooks to be published, whilst also offering an original and provocative interpretation of Heidegger's work.

The Poetics of Aristotle

The Poetics of Aristotle PDF Author: Aristotle
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781544217574
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama - comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play - as well as lyric poetry and epic poetry). They are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes: 1. Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody. 2. Difference of goodness in the characters. 3. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out. In examining its "first principles," Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."

Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas's Ethics

Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas's Ethics PDF Author: John Bowlin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521620192
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
In this study John Bowlin argues that Aquinas's moral theology receives much of its character and content from an assumption about our common lot: the good we desire is difficult to know and to will, in particular because of contingencies of various kinds - within ourselves, in the ends and objects we pursue, and in the circumstances of choice. Since contingencies are fortune's effects, Aquinas insists that it is fortune that makes good choice difficult. Bowlin then explicates Aquinas's treatment of a number of topics in light of this difficulty: the moral and theological virtues, the first precepts of the natural law, the voluntariness of virtuous action, and the happiness available to us in this life. By noting that Aquinas proceeds with an eye on fortune's threats to virtue, agency, and happiness, Bowlin places him more precisely in the history of ethics, among Aristotle, Augustine, and the Stoics.

Critical Excess

Critical Excess PDF Author: Colin Davis
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804774307
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
The "ancient quarrel" between philosophy and literature seems to have been resolved once and for all with the recognition that philosophy and the arts may be allies instead of enemies. Critical Excess examines in detail the work of five thinkers who have had a huge, ongoing impact on the study of literature and film: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Slavoj Žižek, and Stanley Cavell. Their approaches are very different from one another, but they each make unexpected interpretive leaps that render their readings exhilarating and unnerving. But do they go too far? Does a scribbled note left behind by Nietzsche really tell us about the nature of textuality? Can Hitchcock truly tell you "everything you always wanted to know about Lacan"? Does the blanket hung up in a motel room invoke the Kantian divide between the knowable phenomenal world and the unknowable things in themselves? Contextualizing the work of the five thinkers in the intellectual debates to which they contribute, this book analyzes the stakes and advantages of "overreading."

Experimentalism as Reciprocal Communication in Contemporary American Poetry

Experimentalism as Reciprocal Communication in Contemporary American Poetry PDF Author: Elina Siltanen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027266395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
The poems of John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman may seem to offer endless small details of expression, observation, thought and narrative which fail to hang together even from one line to the next. But as Elina Siltanen shows here, this extraordinary flow of uncoordinated detail can stimulate readers to join the poets in a delightful exploration of ordinary language. When readers take a poem in this spirit, they actually begin to read as members of a community: the community not only of themselves and other readers, but also including the poet and other poets, plus all the speakers of the language in which the poem is written. For all these different parties, that language is indeed a shared resource, and the way for readers to get started is simply by recalling or imagining some of the numerous kinds of context in which the given poem’s words-phrases-sentences could, or could not, be successfully used. The rewards for such proactive readers are on the one hand a heightened sense of the subtle interweavings of language and life, and on the other hand a freshly empowered self-confidence. The point being that, within the community of contemporary experimental poetry, poets have no more authority than readers. Rejecting older cultural hierarchies, they present themselves as teasing out the idiomatic serendipities of their own poems together with their readers.

Rhetorical Investigations

Rhetorical Investigations PDF Author: Walter Jost
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813922492
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Jost juxtaposes problems and questions in philosophy and literature, using rhetoric as the middle term and common ground between them.

Philosophical Conceptualization and Literary Art

Philosophical Conceptualization and Literary Art PDF Author: Phillip Stambovsky
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838640265
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"In sum, this original inquiry uniquely respects the cognitional diversity that distinguishes the revelatory poetic spirit from the discursively speculative spirit, even as it demonstrates their deep affinities and mutual implications in the life of the imaginative intelligence."--BOOK JACKET.

The Force of Tradition

The Force of Tradition PDF Author: Donald G. Marshall
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742541627
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
"The essays in this volume offer analyses of religious, literary, and cultural traditions and both responses and resistance to them including works by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Josiah Rayes, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jacques Derrida, Charlotte Bronte, Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edith Wharton, Chinua Achebe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, antebellum, African-American women preachers, and Christian and Jewish thinkers in the wake of the Holocaust, among others."--BOOK JACKET.

Hawthorne's Shyness

Hawthorne's Shyness PDF Author: Clark Davis
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801880988
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This important new reading of a central figure in American literary history, significant in its own right, powerfully demonstrates the potential of Davis's critical approach.