Play and the Politics of Reading

Play and the Politics of Reading PDF Author: Paul B. Armstrong
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501720651
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
"Classrooms and curricula should be structured to foster the playful interaction that can teach students how to negotiate social and political differences in an emancipatory, noncoercive manner.... Teaching reading as a playful exercise of reciprocity with otherness can help prepare students for a democracy understood as a community of communities."—from the "Pedagogical Postscript" Reading is socially useful, in Paul B. Armstrong's view, and can model democratic interaction by a community unconstrained by the need to build consensus but aware of the dangers of violence, irrationality, and anarchy. Reading requires mutual recognition but need not culminate in agreement, Armstrong says; instead, the social potential of reading arises from the active exchange of attitudes, ideas, and values between author and reader and among readers. Play and the Politics of Reading, which has important implications for education, draws on Wolfgang Iser's notion of free play to offer a valuable response to social problems. Armstrong finds that Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Henry James, and James Joyce provide apt examples of the politics of reading, for reasons both literary and political. In making the transition from realism to modernism, these authors experimented with narrative strategies that seek simultaneously to represent the world and to question the means of representation itself. The formal ambiguities and complexities of such texts as Howards End and Ulysses are ways of staging for the reader the difficulties and opportunities of a world of differences. Innovative formal structures challenge readers to reconsider their assumptions and beliefs about social issues.

Play and the Politics of Reading

Play and the Politics of Reading PDF Author: Paul B. Armstrong
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501720651
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
"Classrooms and curricula should be structured to foster the playful interaction that can teach students how to negotiate social and political differences in an emancipatory, noncoercive manner.... Teaching reading as a playful exercise of reciprocity with otherness can help prepare students for a democracy understood as a community of communities."—from the "Pedagogical Postscript" Reading is socially useful, in Paul B. Armstrong's view, and can model democratic interaction by a community unconstrained by the need to build consensus but aware of the dangers of violence, irrationality, and anarchy. Reading requires mutual recognition but need not culminate in agreement, Armstrong says; instead, the social potential of reading arises from the active exchange of attitudes, ideas, and values between author and reader and among readers. Play and the Politics of Reading, which has important implications for education, draws on Wolfgang Iser's notion of free play to offer a valuable response to social problems. Armstrong finds that Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Henry James, and James Joyce provide apt examples of the politics of reading, for reasons both literary and political. In making the transition from realism to modernism, these authors experimented with narrative strategies that seek simultaneously to represent the world and to question the means of representation itself. The formal ambiguities and complexities of such texts as Howards End and Ulysses are ways of staging for the reader the difficulties and opportunities of a world of differences. Innovative formal structures challenge readers to reconsider their assumptions and beliefs about social issues.

Play and the Politics of Reading

Play and the Politics of Reading PDF Author: Paul B. Armstrong
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801443251
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
"Reading is socially useful, in Paul B. Armstrong's view, and can model democratic interaction by a community unconstrained by the need to build consensus but aware of the dangers of violence, irrationality, and anarchy. Reading requires mutual recognition but need not culminate in agreement, Armstrong says; instead, the social potential of reading arises from the active exchange of attitudes, ideas, and values between author and reader and among readers. Play and the Politics of Reading, which has important implications for education, draws on Wolfgang Iser's notion of free play to offer a valuable response to social problems."--Besedilo z zavihka.

Power Plays: Politics, Football, and Other Blood Sports

Power Plays: Politics, Football, and Other Blood Sports PDF Author:
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604736540
Category : Athletes
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Barry, award-winning author of "

Playing Pillow Politics at MGK

Playing Pillow Politics at MGK PDF Author: Lal Medawattegedera
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789550393039
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description


Uncomputable

Uncomputable PDF Author: Alexander Galloway
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839764007
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A journey through the uncomputable remains of computer history Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought these machines to life. With an eye to both the computable and the uncomputable, Galloway shows how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fray and fall apart. By re-building obsolete technology using today's software, the past comes to light in new ways, from intricate algebraic patterns woven on a hand loom, to striking artificial-life simulations, to war games and back boxes. A description of the past, this book is also an assessment of all that remains uncomputable as we continue to live in the aftermath of the long digital age.

How Literature Plays with the Brain

How Literature Plays with the Brain PDF Author: Paul B. Armstrong
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421410036
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
An original interdisciplinary study positioned at the intersection of literary theory and neuroscience. "Literature matters," says Paul B. Armstrong, "for what it reveals about human experience, and the very different perspective of neuroscience on how the brain works is part of that story." In How Literature Plays with the Brain, Armstrong examines the parallels between certain features of literary experience and functions of the brain. His central argument is that literature plays with the brain through experiences of harmony and dissonance which set in motion oppositions that are fundamental to the neurobiology of mental functioning. These oppositions negotiate basic tensions in the operation of the brain between the drive for pattern, synthesis, and constancy and the need for flexibility, adaptability, and openness to change. The challenge, Armstrong argues, is to account for the ability of readers to find incommensurable meanings in the same text, for example, or to take pleasure in art that is harmonious or dissonant, symmetrical or distorted, unified or discontinuous and disruptive. How Literature Plays with the Brain is the first book to use the resources of neuroscience and phenomenology to analyze aesthetic experience. For the neuroscientific community, the study suggests that different areas of research—the neurobiology of vision and reading, the brain-body interactions underlying emotions—may be connected to a variety of aesthetic and literary phenomena. For critics and students of literature, the study engages fundamental questions within the humanities: What is aesthetic experience? What happens when we read a literary work? How does the interpretation of literature relate to other ways of knowing?

Reading Machiavelli

Reading Machiavelli PDF Author: John P. McCormick
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069121154X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A new reading of Machiavelli’s major works that demonstrates how he has been previously misread To what extent was Niccolò Machiavelli a “Machiavellian”? Was he an amoral adviser of tyranny or a stalwart partisan of liberty? A neutral technician of power politics or a devout Italian patriot? A reviver of pagan virtue or initiator of modern nihilism? Reading Machiavelli answers these questions through original interpretations of Machiavelli’s three major political works—The Prince, Discourses, and Florentine Histories—and demonstrates that a radically democratic populism seeded the Florentine’s scandalous writings. John McCormick challenges the misguided understandings of Machiavelli set forth by prominent thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and representatives of the Straussian and Cambridge schools, and he emphasizes the fundamental, often unacknowledged elements of a vibrant Machiavellian politics. Advancing fresh readings of Machiavelli’s work, this book presents a new outlook on how politics should be conceptualized and practiced.

Power Play

Power Play PDF Author: Jenny Adams
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The game of chess reached western Europe by the year 1000, and within several generations it had become one of the most popular pastimes ever. Both men and women, and even priests played the game despite the Catholic Church's repeated prohibitions. Characters in countless romances, chansons de geste, and moral tales of the eleventh through twelfth centuries also played chess, which often symbolized romantic attraction or sexual consummation. In Power Play, Jenny Adams looks to medieval literary representations to ask what they can tell us both about the ways the game changed as it was naturalized in the West and about the society these changes reflected. In its Western form, chess featured a queen rather than a counselor, a judge or bishop rather than an elephant, a knight rather than a horse; in some manifestations, even the pawns were differentiated into artisans, farmers, and tradespeople with discrete identities. Power Play is the first book to ask why chess became so popular so quickly, why its pieces were altered, and what the consequences of these changes were. More than pleasure was at stake, Adams contends. As allegorists and political theorists connected the moves of the pieces to their real-life counterparts, chess took on important symbolic power. For these writers and others, the game provided a means to figure both human interactions and institutions, to envision a civic order not necessarily dominated by a king, and to imagine a society whose members acted in concert, bound together by contractual and economic ties. The pieces on the chessboard were more than subjects; they were individuals, playing by the rules.

Mexican Americans and the Politics of Diversity

Mexican Americans and the Politics of Diversity PDF Author: Lisa Magaña
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816549796
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
With Mexican Americans now the nation’s fastest growing minority, major political parties are targeting these voters like never before. During the 2004 presidential campaign, both the Republicans and Democrats ran commercials on Spanish-language television networks, and in states across the nation the Mexican-American vote can now mean the difference between winning or losing an election. This book examines the various ways politics plays out in the Mexican-origin community, from grassroots action and voter turnout to elected representation, public policy creation, and the influence of lobbying organizations. Lisa Magaña illustrates the essential roles that Mexican Americans play in the political process and shows how, in just the last decade, there has been significant political mobilization around issues such as environmental racism, immigration, and affirmative action. Mexican Americans and the Politics of Diversity is directed to readers who are examining this aspect of political action for the first time. It introduces the demographic characteristics of Mexican Americans, reviewing demographic research regarding this population’s participation in both traditional and nontraditional politics, and reviews the major historical events that led to the community’s political participation and activism today. The text then examines Mexican American participation in electoral political outlets, including attitudes toward policy issues and political parties; considers the reasons for increasing political participation by Mexican American women; and explores the issues and public policies that are most important to Mexican Americans, such as education, community issues, housing, health care, and employment. Finally, it presents general recommendations and predictions regarding Mexican American political participation based on the demographic, cultural, and historical determinants of this population, looking at how political issues will affect this growing and dynamic population. Undoubtedly, Mexican Americans are a diverse political group whose interests cannot be easily pigeonholed, and, after reading this book, students will understand that their political participation and the community’s public policy needs are often unique. Mexican Americans and the Politics of Diversity depicts an important political force that will continue to grow in the coming decades.

Stories and the Brain

Stories and the Brain PDF Author: Paul B. Armstrong
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421437759
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book explains how the brain interacts with the social world—and why stories matter. How do our brains enable us to tell and follow stories? And how do stories affect our minds? In Stories and the Brain, Paul B. Armstrong analyzes the cognitive processes involved in constructing and exchanging stories, exploring their role in the neurobiology of mental functioning. Armstrong argues that the ways in which stories order events in time, imitate actions, and relate our experiences to others' lives are correlated to cortical processes of temporal binding, the circuit between action and perception, and the mirroring operations underlying embodied intersubjectivity. He reveals how recent neuroscientific findings about how the brain works—how it assembles neuronal syntheses without a central controller—illuminate cognitive processes involving time, action, and self-other relations that are central to narrative. An extension of his previous book, How Literature Plays with the Brain, this new study applies Armstrong's analysis of the cognitive value of aesthetic harmony and dissonance to narrative. Armstrong explains how narratives help the brain negotiate the neverending conflict between its need for pattern, synthesis, and constancy and its need for flexibility, adaptability, and openness to change. The neuroscience of these interactions is part of the reason stories give shape to our lives even as our lives give rise to stories. Taking up the age-old question of what our ability to tell stories reveals about language and the mind, this truly interdisciplinary project should be of interest to humanists and cognitive scientists alike.