Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393099546
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
'Romanticism and Consciousness' is a comprehensive collection of essays on Romanticism-its intellectual and political backgrounds, its place in literary history, its continued relevance to the present age, its relation to psychoanalysis and other modern trends of thought-and on the major English Romantic poets. The topics covered include the relations between nature and consciousness, nature and revolution, and nature and literary form; the principal poets studied are Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
Author: J. Beer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403919313
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
In this sequel to his Romantic Consciousness, John Beer discusses further questionings of human consciousness; both the degree to which Dickens's conscious dramatizing differs from the subconscious workings of his psyche and the exploration of subliminal consciousness by nineteenth-century psychical researchers.
Author: Christof Koch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262301032
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
A fascinating exploration of the human brain that combines “the leading edge of consciousness science with surprisingly personal and philosophical reflection . . . shedding light on how scientists really think”—this is “science writing at its best” (Times Higher Education). In which a scientist searches for an empirical explanation for phenomenal experience, spurred by his instinctual belief that life is meaningful. What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. This engaging book—part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation—describes Koch’s search for an empirical explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest—his instinctual (if “romantic”) belief that life is meaningful. Koch describes his own groundbreaking work with Francis Crick in the 1990s and 2000s and the gradual emergence of consciousness (once considered a “fringy” subject) as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation. Present at this paradigm shift were Koch and a handful of colleagues, including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Stanislas Dehaene, Giulio Tononi, Wolf Singer, and others. Aiding and abetting it were new techniques to listen in on the activity of individual nerve cells, clinical studies, and brain-imaging technologies that allowed safe and noninvasive study of the human brain in action. Koch gives us stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness as well as his own reflections on a variety of topics, including the distinction between attention and awareness, the unconscious, how neurons respond to Homer Simpson, the physics and biology of free will, dogs, Der Ring des Nibelungen, sentient machines, the loss of his belief in a personal God, and sadness. All of them are signposts in the pursuit of his life's work—to uncover the roots of consciousness.
Author: Bobby Azarian
Publisher: BenBella Books
ISBN: 1637740441
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Why do we exist? For centuries, this question was the sole province of religion and philosophy. But now science is ready to take a seat at the table. According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning. But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by cutting-edge findings at the intersection of physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory—generally referred to as “complexity science.” Thanks to a new understanding of evolution, as well as recent advances in our understanding of the phenomenon known as emergence, a new cosmic narrative is taking shape: Nature’s simplest “parts” come together to form ever-greater “wholes” in a process that has no end in sight. In The Romance of Reality, cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian explains the science behind this new view of reality and explores what it means for all of us. In engaging, accessible prose, Azarian outlines the fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics at the heart of the old assumptions about the universe’s evolution, and shows us the evidence that suggests that the universe is a “self-organizing” system, one that is moving toward increasing complexity and awareness. Cosmologist and science communicator Carl Sagan once said of humanity that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The Romance of Reality shows that this poetic statement in fact rests on a scientific foundation and gives us a new way to know the cosmos, along with a riveting vision of life that imbues existence with meaning—nothing supernatural required.
Author: Alan Richardson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271039035
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Certain works of Romantic drama&—Prometheus Unbound, Cain, The Cenci&—have received a good deal of critical attention, by as a whole the genre has been misunderstood and only slightly considered. Alan Richardson redresses a tradition of critical neglect by considering the works of Romantic drama not as failed stage-plays (&"closet drama&") but as constituting a new, distinctively Romantic genre. In turning from the contemporary stage&—which was marked by spectacle, rant, and melodrama&—the Romantic poets developed an altogether new kind of drama, one which they hoped could recapture the intensity of Shakespearean tragedy that Neoclassical writers had scarcely approached. Richardson calls this genre (after Byron) &"mental theater,&" both because its works are concerned with portraying the development of self-consciousness and because it fuses the subjectivity of lyric with the interaction of dramatic poetry. Moreover, these works are addressed directly to the mind of the reader, bypassing the medium of stage representation. This study places Romantic self-consciousness in a fundamentally new light. Far from uncritically pursuing an egoistic stance, the Romantics criticize through their poetic drama the attempt to attain psychic autonomy. The protagonists of Romantic drama are seduced by their antagonists into entering such a condition only to find in it a hollow, deathly isolation. They find in self-consciousness not their promised liberation, but a tormented fate modeled after that of their betrayers. Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley delineate the limitations of &"Romantic&" self-consciousness in their works of mental theater; Shelley alone envisions their transcendence through his radical transformation of consciousness in the conclusion to Prometheus Unbound. This interpretation of mental theater will lead to a new evaluation of the Romantics as dramatic poets. It brings back to critical attention neglected but challenging works such as Byron's Heaven and Earth and Beddoes's Death's Jest-Book, and provides vital new perspectives on undervalued texts like Wordsworth's The Borderers and Byron's Manfred and Cain. It qualifies decades of critical speculation on &"Romantic individualism&" and &"Romantic consciousness,&" and helps return the ideal of imaginative sympathy to the central position held in the critical writings of the Romantics themselves. Finally, in emphasizing the dramatic quality of mental theater, it challenges the still-prevalent view that Romantic poetry in inherently lyrical in character. Scholars concerned with English Romantic drama, Romantic literature, and the Romantic period as well as English drama will find this work to be an important contribution to their understanding.
Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580
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Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Author: J. Beer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403997217
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Revolutionary thinking at the end of the Eighteenth century prompted major English writers to probe the riddle of human consciousness and the ways in which it might differ from 'Being' in a divine or universal sense. In the first of two studies, John Beer traces this question in writings by Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the impact of their ideas on successors such as Keats, De Quincey, Byron and the Shelleys. Relevance to later figures such as the Cambridge Apostles and Tennyson is also discussed.
Author: Christof Koch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262042819
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
A thought-provoking argument that consciousness—more widespread than previously assumed—is the feeling of being alive, not a type of computation or a clever hack In The Feeling of Life Itself, Christof Koch offers a straightforward definition of consciousness as any subjective experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted—the feeling of being alive. Psychologists study which cognitive operations underpin a given conscious perception. Neuroscientists track the neural correlates of consciousness in the brain, the organ of the mind. But why the brain and not, say, the liver? How can the brain—three pounds of highly excitable matter, a piece of furniture in the universe, subject to the same laws of physics as any other piece—give rise to subjective experience? Koch argues that what is needed to answer these questions is a quantitative theory that starts with experience and proceeds to the brain. In The Feeling of Life Itself, Koch outlines such a theory, based on integrated information. Koch describes how the theory explains many facts about the neurology of consciousness and how it has been used to build a clinically useful consciousness meter. The theory predicts that many, and perhaps all, animals experience the sights and sounds of life; consciousness is much more widespread than conventionally assumed. Contrary to received wisdom, however, Koch argues that programmable computers will not have consciousness. Even a perfect software model of the brain is not conscious. Its simulation is fake consciousness. Consciousness is not a special type of computation—it is not a clever hack. Consciousness is about being.
Author: David Herman
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803234988
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
An anthology that traces the representation of consciousness and mind creation in English literature from 700 to the present.
Author: Manfred Frank
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791485803
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Often portrayed as a movement of poets lost in swells of passion, early German Romanticism has been generally overlooked by scholars in favor of the great system-builders of the post-Kantian period, Schelling and Hegel. In the twelve lectures collected here, Manfred Frank redresses this oversight, offering an in-depth exploration of the philosophical contributions and contemporary relevance of early German Romanticism. Arguing that the early German Romantics initiated an original movement away from idealism, Frank brings the leading figures of the movement, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), into concert with contemporary philosophical developments, and explores the role that Friedrich Hölderlin and other members of the Homburg Circle had upon the development of early German Romantic philosophy.
