The Value of Literature

The Value of Literature PDF Author: Rafe McGregor
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783489251
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
In The Value of Literature, Rafe McGregor employs a unique approach – the combination of philosophical work on value theory and critical work on the relationship between form and content – to present a new argument for, and defence of, literary humanism. He argues that literature has value for art, for culture, and for humanity – in short, that it matters. Unlike most contemporary defenders of literary value, the author's strategy does not involve arguing that literature is good as a means to one of the various ends that matter to human beings. It is not that literature necessarily makes us cleverer, more sensitive, more virtuous, more creative, or just generally better people. Nor is it true that there is a necessary relation between literature and edification, clarification, cultural critique, catharsis, or therapy. Rather than offer an argument that forges a tenuous link between literature and truth, or literature and virtue, or literature and the sacred, this book analyses the non-derivative, sui generic value characteristic of literature and demonstrates why that matters as an end in itself.

The Value of Literature

The Value of Literature PDF Author: Rafe McGregor
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783489251
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The Value of Literature, Rafe McGregor employs a unique approach – the combination of philosophical work on value theory and critical work on the relationship between form and content – to present a new argument for, and defence of, literary humanism. He argues that literature has value for art, for culture, and for humanity – in short, that it matters. Unlike most contemporary defenders of literary value, the author's strategy does not involve arguing that literature is good as a means to one of the various ends that matter to human beings. It is not that literature necessarily makes us cleverer, more sensitive, more virtuous, more creative, or just generally better people. Nor is it true that there is a necessary relation between literature and edification, clarification, cultural critique, catharsis, or therapy. Rather than offer an argument that forges a tenuous link between literature and truth, or literature and virtue, or literature and the sacred, this book analyses the non-derivative, sui generic value characteristic of literature and demonstrates why that matters as an end in itself.

Values of Literature

Values of Literature PDF Author: Hanna Meretoja
Publisher: Brill Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042039230
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Why we read literature and why we should read literature are age-old questions that have, in recent years, gained unprecedented scope and intensity, against the backdrop of what has been perceived as a world-wide crisis in the humanities. While scholars frequently discuss different types of value separately, in this volume values of literature are approached in the plural: we argue that the ethical, aesthetic, cognitive, affective, social, historical, and existential values of literature should be explored in connection with each other. The three parts of the book explore the relationship between ethics and aesthetics; the cognitive, affective, and social values of literature; and the construction and questioning of literary values in society. Throughout the book, we discuss the different things literature can do - ranging from affirmation of social dogmas to its capacities for self-questioning and challenging of moral certainties - through the dynamic interplay of its ethical and aesthetic, cognitive and affective aspects. Literature not only reflects and draws on the values of the historical world from which it stems; it also actively addresses, challenges, and transforms those values and explores new ways to understand value. Through these complementary processes, literature engages in its own distinctively literary forms of value inquiry.

Locating Values in Literature

Locating Values in Literature PDF Author: Corina-Mihaela Beleaua
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793609411
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Locating Values in Literature: Goodness, Beauty, and Truth discusses the relevance of literature in the current educational process, stating that regardless of the level of study, literature provides students with the necessary skills to address real-world situations. Corina-Mihaela Beleaua posits that a curriculum that includes literature has a multitude of benefits for the mental and ethical development of students, defending the relevance of the three ancient values of goodness, beauty, and truth. Beleaua argues that literature is a significant tool for endorsing these transcendentals and actualizing their positive potentials as humanistic and moral values, acting as a symbolic manifestation of moral values that will impact readers outside of the scope of the literature itself. Scholars of literature, philosophy, and education will find this book particularly useful.

The Values in Numbers

The Values in Numbers PDF Author: Hoyt Long
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231193504
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application together with reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate.

The Practice of Value

The Practice of Value PDF Author: John Frow
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 9781742583464
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
"The essays collected here ... are centrally concerned with conflicts of value: the aesthetic value that is ascribed to texts; the economic value that accrues to intellectual property; the processes of social valuation that turn waste into worth and back again; the structures of valued knowledge that shape both the disciplines of knowledge and everyday life; and the political struggles over social and cultural difference that give rise, at their most intense, to the desolation of communities and the destruction of cultures."--Publishers website

Why Reading Books Still Matters

Why Reading Books Still Matters PDF Author: Martha C. Pennington
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351809067
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Bringing together strands of public discourse about valuing personal achievement at the expense of social values and the impacts of global capitalism, mass media, and digital culture on the lives of children, this book challenges the potential of science and business to solve the world’s problems without a complementary emphasis on social values. The selection of literary works discussed illustrates the power of literature and human arts to instill such values and foster change. The book offers a valuable foundation for the field of literacy education by providing knowledge about the importance of language and literature that educators can use in their own teaching and advocacy work.

Literature-based Moral Education

Literature-based Moral Education PDF Author: Linda Leonard Lamme
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
All forms of children's literature contain moral and ethical views and values. For educators, librarians, counsellors and parents, Literature-based Moral Education: Children's Books and Activities for Teaching Values, Responsibility, and Good Judgment in the Elementary School discusses nine values important in a child's moral development, and integrates learning ideas and activities for classroom, library, or home use within reviews of children's books that deal with each of the issues covered.

The Meaning of Literature

The Meaning of Literature PDF Author: Timothy J. Reiss
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150173301X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
In this searching and wide-ranging book, Timothy J. Reiss seeks to explain how the concept of literature that we accept today first took shape between the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, a time of cultural transformation. Drawing on literary, political, and philosophical texts from Central and Western Europe, Reiss maintains that by the early eighteenth century divergent views concerning gender, politics, science, taste, and the role of the writer had consolidated, and literature came to be regarded as an embodiment of universal values. During the second half of the sixteenth century, Reiss asserts, conceptual consensus was breaking down, and many Western Europeans found themselves overwhelmed by a sense of social decay. A key element of this feeling of catastrophe, Reiss points out, was the assumption that thought and letters could not affect worldly reality. Demonstrating that a political discourse replaced the no-longer-viable discourse of theology, he looks closely at the functions that letters served in the reestablishment of order. He traces the development of the idea of literature in texts by Montaigne, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes, among others; through seventeenth-century writings by such authors as Davenant, Boileau, Dryden, Rymer, Anne Dacier, Astell, and Leibniz; to eighteenth-century works including those of Addison, Pope, Batteux and Hutcheson, Burke, Lessing, Kant, and Wollstonecraft. Reiss follows key strands of the tradition, particularly the concept of the sublime, into the nineteenth century through a reading of Hegel's Aesthetics. The Meaning of Literature will contribute to current debates concerning cultural dominance and multiculturalism. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in literature and in cultural studies, including literary theorists and historians, comparatists, intellectual historians, historical sociologists, and philosophers.

Recoding World Literature

Recoding World Literature PDF Author: B. Venkat Mani
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823273423
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
Winner, 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association Winner, 2018 German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize in Germanistik and Cultural Studies. From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, B. Venkat Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of “bibliomigrancy”—the physical and virtual movement of books—Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves. Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation’s relationship with print culture—a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification. Shifting current scholarship’s focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.

Literature and Character Education in Universities

Literature and Character Education in Universities PDF Author: Edward Brooks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000452107
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Literature and Character Education in Universities presents the potential of literary and philosophical texts for character education in modern universities. The book engages with theoretical and practical aspects of character development in higher education, combining conceptual discussion of the role of literature in character education with applied case studies from university classrooms. Character education within the academic context of the university presents unique challenges and opportunities. Literature and Character Education in Universities presents perspectives from academics in Europe, the USA and Asia, offering unique insights into the ways that engaged reading and discussion of core texts can promote the development of intellectual and moral virtues. Chapters draw on a wide range of texts from Confucius’ Analects to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, focusing on themes such as truthfulness, self-knowledge, prudence, tolerance, friendship, and humility. Literature and Character Education in Universities will be of real use to researchers, academics and postgraduates in the fields of higher education, philosophy, and literature. It should be essential reading for university educators interested in character development and advocates of literary education in modern universities.