The Self-Deceiving Muse

The Self-Deceiving Muse PDF Author: Alan Singer
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271048468
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Current philosophical discussions of self-deception remain steeped in disagreement and controversy. In The Self-Deceiving Muse, Alan Singer proposes a radical revision of our commonplace understanding of self-deception. Singer asserts that self-deception, far from being irrational, is critical to our capacity to be acute &"noticers&" of our experience. The book demonstrates how self-deception can be both a resource for rational activity generally and, more specifically, a prompt to aesthetic innovation. It thereby provides new insights into the ways in which our imaginative powers bear on art and life. The implications&—philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical&—of such a proposition indicate the broadly interdisciplinary thrust of this work, which incorporates &"readings&" of novels, paintings, films, and video art.

The Self-Deceiving Muse

The Self-Deceiving Muse PDF Author: Alan Singer
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271048468
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Current philosophical discussions of self-deception remain steeped in disagreement and controversy. In The Self-Deceiving Muse, Alan Singer proposes a radical revision of our commonplace understanding of self-deception. Singer asserts that self-deception, far from being irrational, is critical to our capacity to be acute &"noticers&" of our experience. The book demonstrates how self-deception can be both a resource for rational activity generally and, more specifically, a prompt to aesthetic innovation. It thereby provides new insights into the ways in which our imaginative powers bear on art and life. The implications&—philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical&—of such a proposition indicate the broadly interdisciplinary thrust of this work, which incorporates &"readings&" of novels, paintings, films, and video art.

The Self-deceiving Muse

The Self-deceiving Muse PDF Author: Alan Singer
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271037210
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
"Focuses on the phenomenon of self-deception, and proposes a radical revision of our commonplace understanding of it as a token of irrationality. Argues that self-deception can illuminate the rationalistic functions of character"--Provided by publisher.

Fiction's Present

Fiction's Present PDF Author: R. M. Berry
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 079147920X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Combining creative and critical responses from some of today's most progressive and innovative novelists, critics, and theorists, Fiction's Present adventurously engages the aesthetic, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of contemporary fiction. By juxtaposing scholarly articles with essays by practicing novelists, the book takes up not only the current state of literature and its criticism but also connections between contemporary philosophy and contemporary fiction. In doing so, the contributors aim to provoke further discussion of the present inflection of fiction—a present that can be seen as Janus-faced, looking both forward to the novel's radically changed, political, economic, and technological circumstances, and back to its history of achievements and problems. Editors R. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo contend that examinations of fiction's present are most informative not when they defend philosophical distinctions or develop literary classifications, but when they grapple with elusive topics such as the meaning of a narrative present or the relation of fiction's medium to its representations of context. As the essays reveal, this process, when pursued diligently, breaks down traditional divisions of academic and intellectual labor, compelling the fiction writer to become more philosophical and the theorist to become more imaginative. The value of this book is not in the exhaustiveness of its treatment, but rather in the seriousness of the criticism it incites. The present materializes in quarrel, and it is toward such a beginning that the writings in Fiction's Present work.

Fatal Self-Deception

Fatal Self-Deception PDF Author: Eugene D. Genovese
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139501631
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Slaveholders were preoccupied with presenting slavery as a benign, paternalistic institution in which the planter took care of his family and slaves were content with their fate. In this book, Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese discuss how slaveholders perpetuated and rationalized this romanticized version of life on the plantation. Slaveholders' paternalism had little to do with ostensible benevolence, kindness and good cheer. It grew out of the necessity to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation. At the same time, this book also advocates the examination of masters' relations with white plantation laborers and servants - a largely unstudied subject. Southerners drew on the work of British and European socialists to conclude that all labor, white and black, suffered de facto slavery, and they championed the South's 'Christian slavery' as the most humane and compassionate of social systems, ancient and modern.

Binding the Absent Body in Medieval and Modern Art

Binding the Absent Body in Medieval and Modern Art PDF Author: Emily Kelley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351573764
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This collection of essays considers artistic works that deal with the body without a visual representation. It explores a range of ways to represent this absence of the figure: from abject elements such as bodily fluids and waste to surrogate forms including reliquaries, manuscripts, and cloth. The collection focuses on two eras, medieval and modern, when images referencing the absent body have been far more prolific in the history of art. In medieval times, works of art became direct references to the absent corporal essence of a divine being, like Christ, or were used as devotional aids. By contrast, in the modern era artists often reject depictions of the physical body in order to distance themselves from the history of the idealized human form. Through these essays, it becomes apparent, even when the body is not visible in a work of art, it is often still present tangentially. Though the essays in this volume bridge two historical periods, they have coherent thematic links dealing with abjection, embodiment, and phenomenology. Whether figurative or abstract, sacred or secular, medieval or modern, the body maintains a presence in these works even when it is not at first apparent.

Attending to the Literary

Attending to the Literary PDF Author: Alan Singer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000920496
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
• Considers a fascinating mix of thinkers and writers to present an intriguing and timely argument about ’literarity’ (a term coined by Derrida) • Emphasises the value of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic education • Accessible to undergraduates and others who are unfamiliar with literary theory and philosophical aesthetics

The Narrative Shape of Truth

The Narrative Shape of Truth PDF Author: Ilya Kliger
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271078162
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Its champions—and its detractors—have often understood the novel as the genre par excellence of truthlessness. The Narrative Shape of Truth counters this widely accepted view. It argues instead that the novel has found new, historically specific configurations of truth and narrative. The nineteenth-century novel, in particular, can be understood as responding to the emerging tendency to view truth as inseparable from, rather than opposed to, time. Ilya Kliger offers a nonreductive way of reading the histories of philosophy and the novel side by side. He identifies the crucial moment in the epistemological history of narrative when, at the end of the eighteenth century, a new structural affiliation between truth and time emerged. This book examines novels by four authors—Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy—as well as the writings of leading European intellectuals and philosophers. Kliger argues that the “realist” novel can be conceived as prompting us (and giving us the means) to think of truth differently, as immanent in a temporal shape rather than transcendent in a principle, a fact, or a higher order.

The Smile of Tragedy

The Smile of Tragedy PDF Author: Daniel R. Ahern
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271058900
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
In The Smile of Tragedy, Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsche’s attitude toward what he called “the tragic age of the Greeks,” showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of “Dionysian pessimism,” Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical separation is at the root of Western nihilism. Ahern explains why Nietzsche, in creating this precursor to a new aesthetics, rejects Aristotle’s medicinal interpretation of tragic art and concentrates on Apollinian cruelty as a form of intoxication without which there can be no art. Ahern shows that Nietzsche saw the human body as the vessel through which virtue and art are possible, as the path to an interpretation of “selflessness,” as the means to determining an order of rank among human beings, and as the site where ethics and aesthetics coincide.

The Smile of Tragedy: Nietzsche and the Art of Virtue

The Smile of Tragedy: Nietzsche and the Art of Virtue PDF Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271059516
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description


Becoming Human

Becoming Human PDF Author: Chad Wellmon
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271048522
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
"Examines the crisis of a late eighteenth-century anthropology as it relates to the emergence of a modern consciousness that sees itself as condemned to draw its norms and very self-understanding from itself"--Provided by publisher.