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Author: Harold Kaplan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780203793527
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Harold Kaplan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780203793527
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Harold Kaplan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351522817
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 501
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Book Description
Democratic Humanism and American Literature illustrates the interplay between democratic assumptions and literary performance in the America's classic nineteenth-century writers--Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Cooper, Poe, Whitman, Twain, and James. Harold Kaplan suggests that these major figures' works are linked by the myths of genesis of a new political culture. Challenged by the democratic ideal, and committed to it, they wrote prophetic books in the American liberal tradition and endowed its ethical intelligence. The task of stating a new and undefined freedom was always implicit and often in the foreground of the writing of these nineteenth-century giants. As the author describes the situation, "the free man had to decide in what sense he was bound by nature or could master it; in what sense he was committed to his society and could reconcile his freedom with it." These classic writers devoted their work to examining this dialectic of values; Kaplan sees their complex and polarized democratic consciousness as seminal in the imaginative tradition they generated. What is unique in that tradition of values is the rivalry of criticism with affirmations of faith. "The highly original ethical trait involved here is based on the capacity of a political society to use its negations against itself and survive." The author suggests that in our own time moral judgments are more likely to be the province of activist politics than literature. His new introduction relates the theme of the book to cultural and political developments in the American experience of modernity and adds a discussion of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams to the figures treated in the original edition. Since tendencies to develop ideological and idiosyncratic responses to extrinsic events have grown stronger over time, it is more important than ever for scholars and students alike to recover a "moral imagination"--the force that gave rise to the great literary works of the nineteenth century. To describe that force is Harold Kaplan's goal in Democratic Humanism and American Literature.
Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231122641
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
brought on by advances in technological communication, intellectual specialization, and cultural sensitivity -- has eroded the former primacy of the humanities, Edward Said argues that a more democratic form of humanism -- one that aims to incorporate, emancipate, and enlighten --
Author: Anthony B. Pinn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190921536
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 825
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Book Description
As a system of thought that values human needs and experiences over supernatural concerns, humanism has gained greater attention amid the rapidly shifting demographics of religious communities. This outlook has taken on global dimensions, with activists, artists, and thinkers forming a humanistic response not only to religion, but to the pressing social and political issues of the 21st century. The Oxford Handbook of Humanism aims to explore the subject by analyzing its history, its philosophical development, and its influence on culture. It will also discuss humanism as a global phenomenon-an approach that has often been neglected in more Western-focused works.
Author: Stephen P. Weldon
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421438585
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
The story of how prominent liberal intellectuals reshaped American religious and secular institutions to promote a more democratic, science-centered society. Winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Award for Best Book by the Center for Inquiry Recent polls show that a quarter of Americans claim to have no religious affiliation, identifying instead as atheists, agnostics, or "nothing in particular." A century ago, a small group of American intellectuals who dubbed themselves humanists tread this same path, turning to science as a major source of spiritual sustenance. In The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism, Stephen P. Weldon tells the fascinating story of this group as it developed over the twentieth century, following the fortunes of a few generations of radical ministers, academic philosophers, and prominent scientists who sought to replace traditional religion with a modern, liberal, scientific outlook. Weldon explores humanism through the networks of friendships and institutional relationships that underlay it, from philosophers preaching in synagogues and ministers editing articles of Nobel laureates to magicians invoking the scientific method. Examining the development of an increasingly antagonistic engagement between religious conservatives and the secular culture of the academy, Weldon explains how this conflict has shaped the discussion of science and religion in American culture. He also uncovers a less known—but equally influential—story about the conflict within humanism itself between two very different visions of science: an aspirational, democratic outlook held by the followers of John Dewey on the one hand, and a skeptical, combative view influenced by logical positivism on the other. Putting America's distinctive science talk into historical perspective, Weldon shows how events such as the Pugwash movement for nuclear disarmament, the ongoing evolution controversies, the debunking of pseudo-science, and the selection of scientists and popularizers like Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov as humanist figureheads all fit a distinctly American ethos. Weldon maintains that this secular ethos gained much of its influence by tapping into the idealism found in the American radical religious tradition that includes the deism of Thomas Paine, nineteenth-century rationalism and free thought, Protestant modernism, and most important, Unitarianism. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and a thorough study of the main humanist publications, The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism reveals a new level of detail about the personal and institutional forces that have shaped major trends in American secular culture. Significantly, the book shows why special attention to American liberal religiosity remains critical to a clear understanding of the scientific spirit in American culture.
Author: Steven Rockefeller
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231073496
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 702
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Book Description
Combining ?biography and intellectual history, Steven Rockefeller offers an illuminating introduction to the philosophy of John Dewey, with special emphasis on the evolution of the religious faith and moral vision at the heart of his thought. This study pays particular attention to Dewey's radical democratic reconstruction of Christianity and his many contributions to the American tradition of spiritual democracy. Rockefeller presents the first full exploration of Dewey's religious thought, including its mystical dimension. Covering Dewey's entire intellectual life, the author provides a clear introduction to Dewey's early neo-Hegelian idealism as well as to his later naturalistic metaphysics, epistemology, theory of education, theory of evaluation, and philosophy of religion. The author tells the story of the evolution of this faith and philosophical vision, offering fresh insight into the enduring value of the thought of America's foremost philosopher.
Author: Jack Salzman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521307031
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
The Cambridge Handbook of American Literature offers a compact and accessible guide to the major landmarks of American literature.
Author: Nicole Brittingham Furlonge
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609385616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
Forging new ideas about the relationship between race and sound, Furlonge explores how black artists--including well-known figures such as writers Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, and singers Bettye LaVette and Aretha Franklin, among others--imagine listening. Drawing from a multimedia archive, Furlonge examines how many of the texts call on readers to "listen in print." In the process, she gives us a new way to read and interpret these canonical, aurally inflected texts, and demonstrates how listening allows us to engage with the sonic lives of difference as readers, thinkers, and citizens.
Author: Alan Marshall
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Alan Marshall takes Alexis de Tocqueville's discussion of 'Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies' in the second volume of his Democracy in America as the starting point for a wide-ranging examination of the nature of democratic thought and expression in American experimental poetry, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the mid-nineteenth century, to George Oppen, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Creeley a century later. The book begins by considering the political significance of what Marshall describes as 'the invisible physiognomy' of Whitman's poetry, which is followed by a re-evaluation of the flawed republican humanism of Ezra Pound in the light of the thought of Hannah Arendt. Other chapters deal with Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser. The book argues against the narrowly ideological interpretation of politics that dominates contemporary literary studies. To that extent it recalls Tocquevilles concern to underline the differences between his own methods and perspectives and the historical determinism of his contemporaries. Marshall brings together an exceptional variety of theoretical writing, including works by Theodor Adorno, Seyla Benhabib, Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, James Madison, Karl Marx, David Riesman, and Donald Winnicott, as he seeks to expand and develop Tocqueville's circumspect humanist critical trajectory. The chapters are conceived as a series of innovative dialogical constellations, to which the close reading of poetry is central. The aim throughout is to measure the thought of the poets or their poems against the thoughts of those who are more often called thinkers.
Author: Scott M Reznick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198891954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
This volume traces how American literature evolved in response to widespread conflicts over the very nature of US democracy in the early republic and antebellum eras. It examines how American writers reacted to three moments of profound divisiveness in the 1790s, 1830s, and 1850s.
