Author: John Bruns
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351508261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
Much writing about comedy in the last twenty years has only trivialized comedy as cheap or as temporary distraction from things that "really matter." It has either presented exhaustive taxonomies of kinds of humor--like wit, puns, jokes, humor, satire, irony--or engaged in pointless political endgames, moral dialogues, or philosophical perceptions. Comedy is rarely presented as a mode of thought in its own right, as a way of understanding, not something to be understood. Bruns' guiding assumption is that comedy is not simply a literary or theatrical genre, to be diff erentiated from tragedy or from romance, but a certain way of disclosing, perhaps undoing, the way the world is organized. When we view the world in terms of what is incompatible, we are reading comically. In this sense, comedy exists outside the alternatives of tragic and comic. Loopholes argues that trivialization of comedy comes from fear that it will address our anxieties with honesty-- and it is this truth that scares us. John Bruns discusses comedy as a mode of thought with a cognitive function. It is a domain of human understanding, a domain far more troubling and accessible than we care to acknowledge. To "read comically" we must accept our fears. If we do so, we will realize what Bruns refers to as the most neglected premise of comedy, that the world itself is a loophole--both incomplete and limitless.
Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy
Author: Gerald L. Bruns
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810116758
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
In this text Bruns investigates the recent phenomenon of philosophers taking an interest in literature and literary theory.
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810116758
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
In this text Bruns investigates the recent phenomenon of philosophers taking an interest in literature and literary theory.
Loopholes
Author: John Bruns
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351508261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
Much writing about comedy in the last twenty years has only trivialized comedy as cheap or as temporary distraction from things that "really matter." It has either presented exhaustive taxonomies of kinds of humor--like wit, puns, jokes, humor, satire, irony--or engaged in pointless political endgames, moral dialogues, or philosophical perceptions. Comedy is rarely presented as a mode of thought in its own right, as a way of understanding, not something to be understood. Bruns' guiding assumption is that comedy is not simply a literary or theatrical genre, to be diff erentiated from tragedy or from romance, but a certain way of disclosing, perhaps undoing, the way the world is organized. When we view the world in terms of what is incompatible, we are reading comically. In this sense, comedy exists outside the alternatives of tragic and comic. Loopholes argues that trivialization of comedy comes from fear that it will address our anxieties with honesty-- and it is this truth that scares us. John Bruns discusses comedy as a mode of thought with a cognitive function. It is a domain of human understanding, a domain far more troubling and accessible than we care to acknowledge. To "read comically" we must accept our fears. If we do so, we will realize what Bruns refers to as the most neglected premise of comedy, that the world itself is a loophole--both incomplete and limitless.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351508261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
Much writing about comedy in the last twenty years has only trivialized comedy as cheap or as temporary distraction from things that "really matter." It has either presented exhaustive taxonomies of kinds of humor--like wit, puns, jokes, humor, satire, irony--or engaged in pointless political endgames, moral dialogues, or philosophical perceptions. Comedy is rarely presented as a mode of thought in its own right, as a way of understanding, not something to be understood. Bruns' guiding assumption is that comedy is not simply a literary or theatrical genre, to be diff erentiated from tragedy or from romance, but a certain way of disclosing, perhaps undoing, the way the world is organized. When we view the world in terms of what is incompatible, we are reading comically. In this sense, comedy exists outside the alternatives of tragic and comic. Loopholes argues that trivialization of comedy comes from fear that it will address our anxieties with honesty-- and it is this truth that scares us. John Bruns discusses comedy as a mode of thought with a cognitive function. It is a domain of human understanding, a domain far more troubling and accessible than we care to acknowledge. To "read comically" we must accept our fears. If we do so, we will realize what Bruns refers to as the most neglected premise of comedy, that the world itself is a loophole--both incomplete and limitless.
The Poetics of Aristotle
Author: Aristotle
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781544217574
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 82
Book Description
In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama - comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play - as well as lyric poetry and epic poetry). They are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes: 1. Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody. 2. Difference of goodness in the characters. 3. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out. In examining its "first principles," Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781544217574
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 82
Book Description
In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama - comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play - as well as lyric poetry and epic poetry). They are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes: 1. Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody. 2. Difference of goodness in the characters. 3. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out. In examining its "first principles," Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."
Freedom to Fail
Author: Peter Trawny
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745695264
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 66
Book Description
Martin Heidegger is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and his seminal text Being and Time is considered one of the most significant texts in contemporary philosophy. Yet his name has also been mired in controversy because of his affiliations with the Nazi regime, his failure to criticize its genocidal politics and his subsequent silence about the holocaust. Now, according to Heidegger's wishes, and to complete the publication of his multi-volume Complete Works, his highly controversial and secret 'Black Notebooks' have been released to the public. These notebooks reveal the extent to which Heidegger's 'personal Nazism' was neither incidental nor opportunistic, but part of his philosophical ethos. So, why would Heidegger, far from destroying them, allow these notebooks, which contain examples of this extreme thinking, to be published? In this revealing new book, Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's complete works in German, confronts these questions and, by way of a compelling study of his theoretical work, shows that Heidegger was committed to a conception of freedom that is only beholden to the judgement of the history of being; that is, that to be free means to be free from the prejudices, norms, or mores of one's time. Whoever thinks the truth of being freely exposes themselves to the danger of epochal errancy. For this reason, Heidegger's decision to publish his notebooks, including their anti-Jewish passages, was an exercise of this anarchical freedom. In the course of a wide-ranging discussion of Heidegger's views on truth, ethics, the truth of being, tragedy and his relationship to other figures such as Nietzsche and Schmitt, Trawny provides a compelling argument for why Heidegger wanted the explosive material in his Black Notebooks to be published, whilst also offering an original and provocative interpretation of Heidegger's work.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745695264
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 66
Book Description
Martin Heidegger is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and his seminal text Being and Time is considered one of the most significant texts in contemporary philosophy. Yet his name has also been mired in controversy because of his affiliations with the Nazi regime, his failure to criticize its genocidal politics and his subsequent silence about the holocaust. Now, according to Heidegger's wishes, and to complete the publication of his multi-volume Complete Works, his highly controversial and secret 'Black Notebooks' have been released to the public. These notebooks reveal the extent to which Heidegger's 'personal Nazism' was neither incidental nor opportunistic, but part of his philosophical ethos. So, why would Heidegger, far from destroying them, allow these notebooks, which contain examples of this extreme thinking, to be published? In this revealing new book, Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's complete works in German, confronts these questions and, by way of a compelling study of his theoretical work, shows that Heidegger was committed to a conception of freedom that is only beholden to the judgement of the history of being; that is, that to be free means to be free from the prejudices, norms, or mores of one's time. Whoever thinks the truth of being freely exposes themselves to the danger of epochal errancy. For this reason, Heidegger's decision to publish his notebooks, including their anti-Jewish passages, was an exercise of this anarchical freedom. In the course of a wide-ranging discussion of Heidegger's views on truth, ethics, the truth of being, tragedy and his relationship to other figures such as Nietzsche and Schmitt, Trawny provides a compelling argument for why Heidegger wanted the explosive material in his Black Notebooks to be published, whilst also offering an original and provocative interpretation of Heidegger's work.
Old Testament Story and Christian Ethics
Author: Robin A. Parry
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1597522295
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 387
Book Description
Christian use of the Old Testament has tended to focus on law and wisdom literature and to marginalize narrative materials. This book restores story to its rightful place in Old Testament ethics and aims to set out parameters within which Christian ethical reappropriations of Old Testament narratives can take place. The argument begins by examining recent philosophical studies of the role of story in the ethical life. Special attention is paid to the work of Paul Ricoer, Martha Nussbaum and Robert C. Roberts. Then the theological foundations are laid by demonstrating the importance of narrative for Old Testament ethics and of the biblical metanarrative for Christian interpretation. Genesis 34 is examined as a detailed case study to exemplify the fruits of the method for Christian readers. The study considers reception history, feminist interpretation, discourse analysis and canonical context to shed new light on the terrible story of the rape of Dinah.
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1597522295
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 387
Book Description
Christian use of the Old Testament has tended to focus on law and wisdom literature and to marginalize narrative materials. This book restores story to its rightful place in Old Testament ethics and aims to set out parameters within which Christian ethical reappropriations of Old Testament narratives can take place. The argument begins by examining recent philosophical studies of the role of story in the ethical life. Special attention is paid to the work of Paul Ricoer, Martha Nussbaum and Robert C. Roberts. Then the theological foundations are laid by demonstrating the importance of narrative for Old Testament ethics and of the biblical metanarrative for Christian interpretation. Genesis 34 is examined as a detailed case study to exemplify the fruits of the method for Christian readers. The study considers reception history, feminist interpretation, discourse analysis and canonical context to shed new light on the terrible story of the rape of Dinah.
What Are Poets For?
Author: Gerald L Bruns
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609380800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
Conceptions and practices of poetry change not only from time to time and from place to place but also from poet to poet. This has never been more the case than in recent years. Gerald Bruns’s magisterial What Are Poets For? explores typographical experiments that distribute letters randomly across a printed page, sound tracks made of vocal and buccal noises, and holographic poems that recompose themselves as one travels through their digital space. Bruns surveys one-word poems, found texts, and book-length assemblies of disconnected phrases; he even includes descriptions of poems that no one could possibly write, but which are no less interesting (or no less poetic) for all of that. The purpose of the book is to illuminate this strange poetic landscape, spotlighting and describing such oddities as they appear, anomalies that most contemporary poetry criticism ignores. Naturally this breadth raises numerous philosophical questions that Bruns also addresses—for example, whether poetry should be responsible (semantically, ethically, politically) to anything outside itself, whether it can be reduced to categories, distinctions, and the rule of identity, and whether a particular poem can seem odd or strange when everything is an anomaly. Perhaps our task is simply to learn, like anthropologists, how to inhabit such an anarchic world. The poets taken up for study are among the most important and innovative in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Paul Celan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, John Matthias, J. H. Prynne, and Tom Raworth.What Are Poets For? is nothing less than a lucid, detailed study of some of the most intractable writings in contemporary poetry.
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609380800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
Conceptions and practices of poetry change not only from time to time and from place to place but also from poet to poet. This has never been more the case than in recent years. Gerald Bruns’s magisterial What Are Poets For? explores typographical experiments that distribute letters randomly across a printed page, sound tracks made of vocal and buccal noises, and holographic poems that recompose themselves as one travels through their digital space. Bruns surveys one-word poems, found texts, and book-length assemblies of disconnected phrases; he even includes descriptions of poems that no one could possibly write, but which are no less interesting (or no less poetic) for all of that. The purpose of the book is to illuminate this strange poetic landscape, spotlighting and describing such oddities as they appear, anomalies that most contemporary poetry criticism ignores. Naturally this breadth raises numerous philosophical questions that Bruns also addresses—for example, whether poetry should be responsible (semantically, ethically, politically) to anything outside itself, whether it can be reduced to categories, distinctions, and the rule of identity, and whether a particular poem can seem odd or strange when everything is an anomaly. Perhaps our task is simply to learn, like anthropologists, how to inhabit such an anarchic world. The poets taken up for study are among the most important and innovative in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Paul Celan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, John Matthias, J. H. Prynne, and Tom Raworth.What Are Poets For? is nothing less than a lucid, detailed study of some of the most intractable writings in contemporary poetry.
Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas's Ethics
Author: John Bowlin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521620192
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
In this study John Bowlin argues that Aquinas's moral theology receives much of its character and content from an assumption about our common lot: the good we desire is difficult to know and to will, in particular because of contingencies of various kinds - within ourselves, in the ends and objects we pursue, and in the circumstances of choice. Since contingencies are fortune's effects, Aquinas insists that it is fortune that makes good choice difficult. Bowlin then explicates Aquinas's treatment of a number of topics in light of this difficulty: the moral and theological virtues, the first precepts of the natural law, the voluntariness of virtuous action, and the happiness available to us in this life. By noting that Aquinas proceeds with an eye on fortune's threats to virtue, agency, and happiness, Bowlin places him more precisely in the history of ethics, among Aristotle, Augustine, and the Stoics.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521620192
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
In this study John Bowlin argues that Aquinas's moral theology receives much of its character and content from an assumption about our common lot: the good we desire is difficult to know and to will, in particular because of contingencies of various kinds - within ourselves, in the ends and objects we pursue, and in the circumstances of choice. Since contingencies are fortune's effects, Aquinas insists that it is fortune that makes good choice difficult. Bowlin then explicates Aquinas's treatment of a number of topics in light of this difficulty: the moral and theological virtues, the first precepts of the natural law, the voluntariness of virtuous action, and the happiness available to us in this life. By noting that Aquinas proceeds with an eye on fortune's threats to virtue, agency, and happiness, Bowlin places him more precisely in the history of ethics, among Aristotle, Augustine, and the Stoics.
Critical Excess
Author: Colin Davis
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804774307
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
The "ancient quarrel" between philosophy and literature seems to have been resolved once and for all with the recognition that philosophy and the arts may be allies instead of enemies. Critical Excess examines in detail the work of five thinkers who have had a huge, ongoing impact on the study of literature and film: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Slavoj Žižek, and Stanley Cavell. Their approaches are very different from one another, but they each make unexpected interpretive leaps that render their readings exhilarating and unnerving. But do they go too far? Does a scribbled note left behind by Nietzsche really tell us about the nature of textuality? Can Hitchcock truly tell you "everything you always wanted to know about Lacan"? Does the blanket hung up in a motel room invoke the Kantian divide between the knowable phenomenal world and the unknowable things in themselves? Contextualizing the work of the five thinkers in the intellectual debates to which they contribute, this book analyzes the stakes and advantages of "overreading."
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804774307
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
The "ancient quarrel" between philosophy and literature seems to have been resolved once and for all with the recognition that philosophy and the arts may be allies instead of enemies. Critical Excess examines in detail the work of five thinkers who have had a huge, ongoing impact on the study of literature and film: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Slavoj Žižek, and Stanley Cavell. Their approaches are very different from one another, but they each make unexpected interpretive leaps that render their readings exhilarating and unnerving. But do they go too far? Does a scribbled note left behind by Nietzsche really tell us about the nature of textuality? Can Hitchcock truly tell you "everything you always wanted to know about Lacan"? Does the blanket hung up in a motel room invoke the Kantian divide between the knowable phenomenal world and the unknowable things in themselves? Contextualizing the work of the five thinkers in the intellectual debates to which they contribute, this book analyzes the stakes and advantages of "overreading."
Experimentalism as Reciprocal Communication in Contemporary American Poetry
Author: Elina Siltanen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027266395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
The poems of John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman may seem to offer endless small details of expression, observation, thought and narrative which fail to hang together even from one line to the next. But as Elina Siltanen shows here, this extraordinary flow of uncoordinated detail can stimulate readers to join the poets in a delightful exploration of ordinary language. When readers take a poem in this spirit, they actually begin to read as members of a community: the community not only of themselves and other readers, but also including the poet and other poets, plus all the speakers of the language in which the poem is written. For all these different parties, that language is indeed a shared resource, and the way for readers to get started is simply by recalling or imagining some of the numerous kinds of context in which the given poem’s words-phrases-sentences could, or could not, be successfully used. The rewards for such proactive readers are on the one hand a heightened sense of the subtle interweavings of language and life, and on the other hand a freshly empowered self-confidence. The point being that, within the community of contemporary experimental poetry, poets have no more authority than readers. Rejecting older cultural hierarchies, they present themselves as teasing out the idiomatic serendipities of their own poems together with their readers.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027266395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
The poems of John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman may seem to offer endless small details of expression, observation, thought and narrative which fail to hang together even from one line to the next. But as Elina Siltanen shows here, this extraordinary flow of uncoordinated detail can stimulate readers to join the poets in a delightful exploration of ordinary language. When readers take a poem in this spirit, they actually begin to read as members of a community: the community not only of themselves and other readers, but also including the poet and other poets, plus all the speakers of the language in which the poem is written. For all these different parties, that language is indeed a shared resource, and the way for readers to get started is simply by recalling or imagining some of the numerous kinds of context in which the given poem’s words-phrases-sentences could, or could not, be successfully used. The rewards for such proactive readers are on the one hand a heightened sense of the subtle interweavings of language and life, and on the other hand a freshly empowered self-confidence. The point being that, within the community of contemporary experimental poetry, poets have no more authority than readers. Rejecting older cultural hierarchies, they present themselves as teasing out the idiomatic serendipities of their own poems together with their readers.
Rhetorical Investigations
Author: Walter Jost
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813922492
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Jost juxtaposes problems and questions in philosophy and literature, using rhetoric as the middle term and common ground between them.
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813922492
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Jost juxtaposes problems and questions in philosophy and literature, using rhetoric as the middle term and common ground between them.