[PDF] Seeing Into The Life Of Things eBook

Author : John L. Mahoney
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 31,98 MB
Release : 1998
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780823217335

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As the discourse of contemporary cultural studies brings questions of race, nationality, and gender to the center of critical attention nowadays, there is a strong sense that religious, or perhaps religious experience, should command the attention of the academic and wider reading community. Seeing into the Life of Things is a response to that need. By combining the theoretical and the practical, this book serves as both a pioneering scholarly contribution to a devleoping field and a valuable guide for those who read, reflect on, and discuss points of intersection of religion and literature. The contributors to this pioneering study represent a range of voices and viewpoints, some of them established leaders in their fields, others in the process of becoming new leaders. E. Dennis Taylor, Joseph Appleyard, Philip Rule, John Boyd, and Jane and Charles Rzepka work toward the development of a discourse that can take its place with discourses that have developed around a New Historicism and Feminism. Robert Kiely, Stephen Fix, Keven Van Anglen, J. Robert Barth, Richard Kearney, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Judith Wilt, John L. Mahoney, David Leigh, Melinda Ponder, John Anderson, and Michael Raiger offer more focused approaches to writers as varied as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Katherine Lee Bates, Flannery O'Connor, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Seamus Heaney and to special genres like spritual autobiography and film.

Author : Fernando Santos-Granero
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 40,57 MB
Release : 2009-10-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0816545065

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Native peoples of the Amazon view objects, especially human artifacts, as the first cosmic creations and the building blocks from which the natural world has been shaped. In these constructional cosmologies, spears became the stings of wasps, hammocks became spiderwebs, stools became the buttocks of human beings. A view so antithetical to Western thought offers a refreshing perspective on the place and role of objects in human social life—one that has remained under-studied in Amazonian anthropology. In this book, ten scholars re-introduce objects to contemporary studies of animism in order to explore how various peoples envision the lives of material objects: the occult, or extraordinary, lives of “things,” whose personas are normally not visible to lay people. Combining linguistic, ethnological, and historical perspectives, the contributors draw on a wealth of information gathered from ten Amerindian peoples belonging to seven different linguistic families to identify the basic tenets of what might be called a native Amazonian theory of materiality and personhood. They consider which objects have subjective dimensions and how they are manifested, focusing on three domains regarding Amazonian conceptions of things: the subjective life of objects, considering which things have a subjective dimension; the social life of things, seeing the diverse ways in which human beings and things relate as subjectivities; and the historical life of things, recognizing the fact that some things have value as ritual objects or heirlooms. These chapters demonstrate how native Amazonian peoples view animals, plants, and things as “subjectivities” possessing agency, intentionality, and consciousness, as well as a composite anatomy. They also show how materiality is intimately linked to notions of personhood, with artifacts classified as natural or divine creations and living beings viewed as cultural or constructed. The Occult Life of Things offers original insights into these elaborate native ontologies as it breaks new ground in Amazonian studies.

Author : Lawrence Weschler
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 47,22 MB
Release : 1982-01-01
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780520045958

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Traces the life and career of the California artist, who currently works with pure light and the subtle modulation of empty space

Author : Mary Oliver
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 96 pages
File Size : 43,63 MB
Release : 2014-10-14
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 0698170040

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In this stunning collection of new poems, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life’s work, describing with wonder both the everyday and the unaffected beauty of nature. Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird’s nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments. At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.

Author : Simon Goldhill
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 36,28 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1107087481

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Simon Goldhill offers a fascinating new perspective on the material culture of nineteenth-century Britain.

Author : Andrew Bennett
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 27,6 MB
Release : 2013-07-19
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 1847796729

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Andrew Bennett argues in this fascinating book that ignorance is part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic focus: ignorance is what literary texts are about. He sees that the dominant conception of literature since the Romantic period involves an often unacknowledged engagement with the experience of not knowing. From Wordsworth and Keats to George Eliot and Charles Dickens, from Henry James to Joseph Conrad, from Elizabeth Bowen to Philip Roth and Seamus Heaney, writers have been fascinated and compelled by the question of ignorance, including their own. Bennett argues that there is a politics and ethics as well as a poetics of ignorance: literature’s agnoiology, its acknowledgement of the limits of what we know both of ourselves and of others, engages with the possibility of democracy and the ethical, and allows us to begin to conceive of what it might mean to be human. This exciting approach to literary theory will be of interest to lecturers and students of literary theory and criticism.

Author : Thomas Hurka
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 49,89 MB
Release : 2010-12-03
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0199752613

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For centuries, philosophers, theologians, moralists, and ordinary people have asked: How should we live? What makes for a good life? In The Best Things in Life, distinguished philosopher Thomas Hurka takes a fresh look at these perennial questions as they arise for us now in the 21st century. Should we value family over career? How do we balance self-interest and serving others? What activities bring us the most joy? While religion, literature, popular psychology, and everyday wisdom all grapple with these questions, philosophy more than anything else uses the tools of reason to make important distinctions, cut away irrelevancies, and distill these issues down to their essentials. Hurka argues that if we are to live a good life, one thing we need to know is which activities and experiences will most likely lead us to happiness and which will keep us from it, while also reminding us that happiness isn't the only thing that makes life good. Hurka explores many topics: four types of good feeling (and the limits of good feeling); how we can improve our baseline level of happiness (making more money, it turns out, isn't the answer); which kinds of knowledge are most worth having; the importance of achieving worthwhile goals; the value of love and friendship; and much more. Unlike many philosophers, he stresses that there isn't just one good in life but many: pleasure, as Epicurus argued, is indeed one, but knowledge, as Socrates contended, is another, as is achievement. And while the great philosophers can help us understand what matters most in life, Hurka shows that we must ultimately decide for ourselves. This delightfully accessible book offers timely guidance on answering the most important question any of us will ever ask: How do we live a good life?

Author : Peter Kreeft
Publisher : InterVarsity Press
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 39,63 MB
Release : 2009-08-20
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0830874526

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Peter Kreeft's Socrates probes the contemporary values of success, power and pleasure.