Poetics of Conduct

Poetics of Conduct PDF Author: Leela Prasad
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231139217
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Leela Prasad's riveting book presents everyday stories on subjects such as deities, ascetics, cats, and cooking along with stylized, publicly delivered ethical discourse, and shows that the study of oral narrative and performance is essential to ethical inquiry. Prasad builds on more than a decade of her ethnographic research in the famous Hindu pilgrimage town of Sringeri, Karnataka, in southwestern India, where for centuries a vibrant local culture has flourished alongside a tradition of monastic authority. Oral narratives and the seeing-and-doing orientations that are part of everyday life compel the question: How do individuals imagine the normative, and negotiate and express it, when normative sources are many and diverging? Moral persuasiveness, Prasad suggests, is intimately tied to the aesthetics of narration, and imagination plays a vital role in shaping how people create, refute, or relate to "text," "moral authority," and "community." Lived understandings of ethics keep notions of text and practice in flux and raise questions about the constitution of "theory" itself. Prasad's innovative use of ethnography, poetics, philosophy of language, and narrative and performance studies demonstrates how the moral self, with a capacity for artistic expression, is dynamic and gendered, with a historical presence and a political agency.

Poetics of Conduct

Poetics of Conduct PDF Author: Leela Prasad
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231139217
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Leela Prasad's riveting book presents everyday stories on subjects such as deities, ascetics, cats, and cooking along with stylized, publicly delivered ethical discourse, and shows that the study of oral narrative and performance is essential to ethical inquiry. Prasad builds on more than a decade of her ethnographic research in the famous Hindu pilgrimage town of Sringeri, Karnataka, in southwestern India, where for centuries a vibrant local culture has flourished alongside a tradition of monastic authority. Oral narratives and the seeing-and-doing orientations that are part of everyday life compel the question: How do individuals imagine the normative, and negotiate and express it, when normative sources are many and diverging? Moral persuasiveness, Prasad suggests, is intimately tied to the aesthetics of narration, and imagination plays a vital role in shaping how people create, refute, or relate to "text," "moral authority," and "community." Lived understandings of ethics keep notions of text and practice in flux and raise questions about the constitution of "theory" itself. Prasad's innovative use of ethnography, poetics, philosophy of language, and narrative and performance studies demonstrates how the moral self, with a capacity for artistic expression, is dynamic and gendered, with a historical presence and a political agency.

The Poetics of the Everyday

The Poetics of the Everyday PDF Author: Siobhan Phillips
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231149301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"--recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way." In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits. Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

Poetics of Liveliness

Poetics of Liveliness PDF Author: Ada Smailbegović
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552564
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Can poetry act as an aesthetic amplification device, akin to a microscope, through which we can sense minute or nearly imperceptible phenomena such as the folding of molecules into their three-dimensional shapes, the transformations that make up the life cycle of a silkworm, or the vaporous movements that constitute the ever-shifting edges of clouds? We tend to think of these subjects as reserved for science, but, as Ada Smailbegović argues, twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Their works can be envisioned as laboratories within which the methodologies of experimentation, natural historical description, and taxonomic classification allow poetic language to register the rhythms and durations of material transformation. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds. It investigates works such as Christian Bök’s insertion of a poetic text into the DNA code of living bacteria in order to generate a new poem in the shape of a protein molecule, Jen Bervin’s considerations of silk fibers and their use in biomedicine, Gertrude Stein’s examination of brain tissues in medical school and its subsequent influence on her literary taxonomies of character, and Lisa Robertson’s studies of nineteenth-century meteorology and the soft architecture of clouds. In their attempt to understand physical processes unfolding within lively material worlds, Smailbegović contends, these poets have developed a distinctive materialist poetics. Structured as a poetic cosmology akin to Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” which begins at the atomic level and expands out to the vastness of the universe, Poetics of Liveliness provides an innovative and surprising vision of the relationship between science and poetry.

Sound and Sentiment

Sound and Sentiment PDF Author: Steven Feld
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822353652
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A new, thirtieth-anniversary edition of the landmark ethnography that introduced the anthropology, or the cultural study, of sound.

The Poetics of Gender

The Poetics of Gender PDF Author: Nancy K. Miller
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231063111
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Does gender have a poetics: What difference does gender make? How does it affect writing, reading, and the functions of text in society? The Poetics of Gender is a brilliant assembly of leading feminist critics whose collective effort presents the most up-to-date research on these important issues. The range of techniques and theories represented here are applied across a broad spectrum of texts and cultural forms, extending from women's writing of the Renaissance and the fiction of George Sand to the relation between quiltmaking and nineteenth-century literary forms, the pornography of Georges Bataille, and the theories of Julia Kristeva.

Creaturely Poetics

Creaturely Poetics PDF Author: Anat Pick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231147872
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Simone Weil once wrote that "the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence." With these words, she established a relationship among vulnerability, beauty, and existence that transcends the boundaries separating the species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new "poetics of species," that forces us to rethink the significance of the body, both human and animal. Exploring the "logic of flesh," or how art and culture use the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Offering a powerful alternative to more personalist visions of morality, Pick proposes a "creaturely" approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts that prioritize the inhuman and challenge the familiar inventory of the human (consciousness, language, morality, and dignity). She reintroduces Weil's crucially important work and its elaboration of themes such as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, and she moves away from assumptions about animal "otherness" and nonhuman subjectivities. Pick identifies the "animal" within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her creaturely view, powerlessness is the point at which both aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.

The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism

The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism PDF Author: Hermann Kappelhoff
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231539312
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Hermann Kappelhoff casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment. Appreciating cinema's unique ability to bind concrete living conditions to individual experience (which existing political institutions cannot), he reads films by Sergei Eisenstein and Pedro Almodóvar, by the New Objectivity and the New Hollywood, to demonstrate how cinema situates spectators within society. Kappelhoff applies the Deleuzean practice of "thinking in images" to his analysis of films and incorporates the approaches of Jacques Rancière and Richard Rorty, who see politics in the permanent reconfiguration of poetic forms. This enables him to conceptualize film as a medium that continually renews the audiovisual spaces and temporalities through which audiences confront reality. Revitalizing the reading of films by Visconti, Fassbinder, Kubrick, Friedkin, and others, Kappelhoff affirms cinema's historical significance while discovering its engagement with politics as a realm of experience.

Forms of Poetic Attention

Forms of Poetic Attention PDF Author: Lucy Alford
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
A poem is often read as a set of formal, technical, and conventional devices that generate meaning or affect. However, Lucy Alford suggests that poetic language might be better understood as an instrument for tuning and refining the attention. Identifying a crucial link between poetic form and the forming of attention, Alford offers a new terminology for how poetic attention works and how attention becomes a subject and object of poetry. Forms of Poetic Attention combines close readings of a wide variety of poems with research in the philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology of attention. Drawing on the work of a wide variety of poets such as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, Al-Khansā’, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, and Claudia Rankine, Alford defines and locates the particular forms of attention poems both require and produce. She theorizes the process of attention-making—its objects, its coordinates, its variables—while introducing a broad set of interpretive tools into the field of literary studies. Forms of Poetic Attention makes the original claim that attention is poetry’s primary medium, and that the forms of attention demanded by a poem can train, hone, and refine our capacities for perception and judgment, on and off the page.

Hindu Mission, Christian Mission

Hindu Mission, Christian Mission PDF Author: Reid B. Locklin
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438497423
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
For some four hundred years, Hindus and Christians have been engaged in a public controversy about conversion and missionary proselytization, especially in India and the Hindu diaspora. Hindu Mission, Christian Mission reframes this controversy by shifting attention from "conversion" to a wider, interreligious study of "mission" as a category of thought and practice. Comparative theologian Reid B. Locklin traces the emergence of the nondualist Hindu teaching of Advaita Vedānta as a missionary tradition, from the eighth century to the present day, and draws this tradition into dialogue with contemporary proposals in Christian missiology. As a descriptive study of the Chinmaya Mission, the Ramakrishna Mission, and other leading Advaita mission movements, Hindu Mission, Christian Mission contributes to a growing body of scholarship on transnational Hinduism. As a speculative work of Christian comparative theology, it develops key themes from this engagement for a new, interreligious theology of mission and conversion for the twenty-first century and beyond.

Photo Poetics

Photo Poetics PDF Author: Shengqing Wu
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549717
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 650

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Book Description
Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world? Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.