The Use and Abuse of Literature

The Use and Abuse of Literature PDF Author: Marjorie Garber
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307277127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In this deep and engaging meditation on the usefulness and uselessness of reading in the digital age, Harvard English professor Marjorie Garber aims to reclaim “literature” from the periphery of our personal, educational, and professional lives and restore it to the center, as a radical way of thinking. But what is literature anyway, how has it been understood over time, and what is its relevance for us today? Who gets to decide what the word means? Why has literature been on the defensive since Plato? Does it have any use at all, other than serving as bourgeois or aristocratic accoutrements attesting to one’s worldly sophistication and refinement of spirit? What are the boundaries that separate it from its “commercial” instance and from other more mundane kinds of writing? Is it, as most of us assume, good to read, much less study—and what would that mean?

The Use and Abuse of Literature

The Use and Abuse of Literature PDF Author: Marjorie Garber
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307277127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book

Book Description
In this deep and engaging meditation on the usefulness and uselessness of reading in the digital age, Harvard English professor Marjorie Garber aims to reclaim “literature” from the periphery of our personal, educational, and professional lives and restore it to the center, as a radical way of thinking. But what is literature anyway, how has it been understood over time, and what is its relevance for us today? Who gets to decide what the word means? Why has literature been on the defensive since Plato? Does it have any use at all, other than serving as bourgeois or aristocratic accoutrements attesting to one’s worldly sophistication and refinement of spirit? What are the boundaries that separate it from its “commercial” instance and from other more mundane kinds of writing? Is it, as most of us assume, good to read, much less study—and what would that mean?

The Use and Abuse of History

The Use and Abuse of History PDF Author: Marc Ferro
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134449658
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Use and Abuse of History has become a key text of current historiography; this is a book that poses fundamental and disturbing questions about the use and abuse of history. Engaging and challenging, this book confronts the reader with the many 'histories' that exist and have existed around the world, from the Zulu kingdoms to Communist China. This title has now been extensively revised by Marc Ferro, a well respected historian, and presents the different narratives that constitute the histories of countries as diverse as India, Iran, Trinidad and the United States makes for fascinating reading in their own right. What makes this book so valuable, though, is what these narratives tell us about the societies which create them – how much is history distorted in order to condition the minds of those who are taught it? Use and Abuse of History appeals to anyone with a general interested in history.

Use and Abuse of Statistics. --

Use and Abuse of Statistics. -- PDF Author: William John Reichmann
Publisher: Hassell Street Press
ISBN: 9781013361272
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Substance Use and Abuse

Substance Use and Abuse PDF Author: Victor N. Shaw
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313012075
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
While the issues of substance use and abuse have been addressed from a variety of perspectives and approaches, the fundamental social issues have not been covered in any systematic way. This book represents the first academic effort to apply major sociological theories to the field of substance use and abuse in order to provide readers with a solid knowledge base from which they may develop more informed ideas about prevention, intervention, treatment, law enforcement, and social reactions to this ubiquitous social problem. Using a systematic framework, Shaw reviews the existing literature, explains key concepts, addresses fundamental issues, and discusses the policy implications for public health, social control, community, and work. This comprehensive sociological treatment of substance use and abuse is essential reading for educators in public policy, sociology, criminology, and deviance. Applying the major sociological theories of anomie, career, conflict, functionalist, rational choice, social control, social disorganization, social learning, social reaction, and subculture perspectives, Shaw provides an important overview of the issues involved with substance use and abuse. By utilizing such an approach, he demonstrates that public views, governmental policies, intervention strategies, and prevention programming can be informed by the different sociological theories. This unique consideration and analysis illustrates that no single view on substance use and abuse is absolute or sacred. Therefore, considering the issues from a variety of sociological perspectives will bring greater understanding to a pervasive social problem that continues to plague American society.

The Making of Addiction

The Making of Addiction PDF Author: Louise Foxcroft
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317024826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
What does drug addiction mean to us? What did it mean to others in the past? And how are these meanings connected? In modern society the idea of drug addiction is a given and commonly understood concept, yet this was not always the case in the past. This book uncovers the original influences that shaped the creation and the various interpretations of addiction as a disease, and of addiction to opiates in particular. It delves into the treatments, regimes, and prejudices that surrounded the condition, a newly emerging pathological entity and a form of 'moral insanity' during the nineteenth century. The source material for this book is rich and surprising. Letters and diaries provide the most moving material, detailing personal struggles with addiction and the trials of those who cared and despaired. Confessions of shame, deceit, misery and terror sit alongside those of deep sensual pleasure, visionary manifestations and blissful freedom from care. The reader can follow the lifelong opium careers of literary figures, artists and politicians, glimpse a raw underworld of hidden drug use, or see the bleakness of urban and rural poverty alleviated by daily doses of opium. Delving into diaries, letters and confessions this book exposes the medical case histories and the physician's mad, lazy, commercial, contemptuous, desperate, altruistic and frustrated attempts to deal with drug addiction. It demonstrates that many of the stigmatising prejudices arose from false 'facts' and semi-mythical beliefs and thus has significant implications, not only for the history of addiction, but also for how we view the condition today.

Art History

Art History PDF Author: W. McAllister Johnson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802068415
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
These essays discuss major questions that should arise in courses in bibliography, methodology, and historiography, once the survey courses are left behind.

Anticipating Total War

Anticipating Total War PDF Author: Manfred F. Boemeke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521622943
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
The essays in Anticipating Total War explore the discourse on war in Germany and the United States between 1871 and 1914. The concept of "total war" provides the analytical focus. The essays reveal vigorous discussions of warfare in several forums among soldiers, statesmen, women's groups, and educators on both sides of the Atlantic. Predictions of long, cataclysmic wars were not uncommon in these discussions, while the involvement of German and American soldiers in colonial warfare suggested that future combat would not spare civilians. Despite these "anticipations of total war," virtually no one realized the practical implications in planning for war in the early twentieth century.

Lives of the Mind

Lives of the Mind PDF Author: Roger Kimball
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This book provides a sharply observed tour of Western intellectual and artistic aspiration.

On the Use and Abuse of Literary and Ecclesiastical Endowments

On the Use and Abuse of Literary and Ecclesiastical Endowments PDF Author: Thomas Chalmers
Publisher: Rarebooksclub.com
ISBN: 9781230046716
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1827 edition. Excerpt: ...insisted, we conceive that, in an endowed, there is a better mechanism than in an unendowed college, for working off the products of science and sound literature. But if there be a virtue in the worse mechanism to stimulate the better mechanism, and set it more actively agoing; then to the former really, though indirectly, we may have to attribute the high service of raising and sustaining the character of philosophy in our land. It is not difficult to reconcile our preference for endowed universities to the pleasure wherewith we contemplate the rise of a great popular university in the midst of them. The one sentiment is truly the effect of the other. The recent institution will never, we think, outstrip the older ones; but it will urge them onward, so that they shall be perpetually ahead of itself. It will be the impellent cause for advancing and elevating the tone of science, even though a high toned science may never be dispensed from its own lecture-rooms. It will work its greatest good through the medium of Oxford and Cambridge; and, in their ostensible triumph, and its own apparent defeat and inferiority, will an intelligent observer recognize the most substantial proof of the great service it shall have achieved for the nation. 36. There is a bigotry on the side of endowed seminaries which leads those whom it actuates to be jealous of popular institutions. And, on the other hand, there is a generous feeling towards these institutions, which is often accompanied with a certain despite towards the endowed and established seminaries. We think that a more comprehensive consideration of the actings and reactings which take place in society, should serve to abate the heats of this partizanship; and, that what in one view is regarded as...

Seduced by Story

Seduced by Story PDF Author: Peter Brooks
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681376636
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
In this spiritual sequel to his influential Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks examines the dangerously alluring power of storytelling. “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story. Forty years after publishing his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn” in contemporary criticism and philosophy, Brooks returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from The Girl on the Train to legal argument, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive.