Critical Distance: Ethical and Literary Engagements with Detachment, Isolation, and Otherness

Critical Distance: Ethical and Literary Engagements with Detachment, Isolation, and Otherness PDF Author: Sami Pihlström
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303135561X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
This book argues that no ethically appropriate relation to other human beings is possible unless we treat them as genuinely other. The authors provide reasons to be critical of various attempts, many of them popular in our contemporary (Western) culture, to encourage deeper attachment to and immersion into others’ lives and experiences. They defend the significance of the distance between human beings, criticizing exaggerated uses of, e.g., the concept of empathy and related concepts in academic as well as more popular ethical contexts, across a range of issues from the nature of ethical duty to the philosophy of love. The chapters offer non-technical philosophical and cultural criticism through selected perspectives on the continuum between closeness and distance, exploring various aspects of ethically significant relations between human beings. This book thus appeals to a wide audience, especially researchers and students in different fields of the humanities, including philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies, by combining philosophical and literary methodologies in a humanistic examination of the value of distance. The book also argues that we have to be able to abstract from the concrete other in ethical relations, living in the normative and rational sphere of duty instead of emotional immersion.

Critical Distance: Ethical and Literary Engagements with Detachment, Isolation, and Otherness

Critical Distance: Ethical and Literary Engagements with Detachment, Isolation, and Otherness PDF Author: Sami Pihlström
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303135561X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
This book argues that no ethically appropriate relation to other human beings is possible unless we treat them as genuinely other. The authors provide reasons to be critical of various attempts, many of them popular in our contemporary (Western) culture, to encourage deeper attachment to and immersion into others’ lives and experiences. They defend the significance of the distance between human beings, criticizing exaggerated uses of, e.g., the concept of empathy and related concepts in academic as well as more popular ethical contexts, across a range of issues from the nature of ethical duty to the philosophy of love. The chapters offer non-technical philosophical and cultural criticism through selected perspectives on the continuum between closeness and distance, exploring various aspects of ethically significant relations between human beings. This book thus appeals to a wide audience, especially researchers and students in different fields of the humanities, including philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies, by combining philosophical and literary methodologies in a humanistic examination of the value of distance. The book also argues that we have to be able to abstract from the concrete other in ethical relations, living in the normative and rational sphere of duty instead of emotional immersion.

Pragmatist Truth in the Post-Truth Age

Pragmatist Truth in the Post-Truth Age PDF Author: Sami Pihlström
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316517705
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Engages in a self-critical examination of the pragmatist conception of truth integrating ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion.

Diversity and Otherness

Diversity and Otherness PDF Author: Lisa Gaupp
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788366675315
Category : Cultural pluralism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book critically examines multiple ways in which cultural diversity is, and has been represented and handled. It questions the construction of differences in doing culture while emphasizing the fluidity of cultural entanglements. It is an invitation to re-think norms, practices and negotiations of diversity and otherness, to distinguish emancipatory from standardizing approaches and to “transculturalize” the study and the politics of culture.

Literary Theory

Literary Theory PDF Author: Terry Eagleton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118306295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A quarter of a century on from its original publication,Literary Theory: An Introduction still conjures thesubversion, excitement and exoticism that characterized theorythrough the 1960s and 70s, when it posed an unprecedented challengeto the literary establishment. Eagleton has added a new preface tothis anniversary edition to address more recent developments inliterary studies, including what he describes as “the growthof a kind of anti-theory”, and the idea that literary theoryhas been institutionalized. Insightful and enlightening,Literary Theory: An Introduction remains the essential guideto the field. 25th Anniversary Edition of Terry Eagleton’s classicintroduction to literary theory First published in 1983, and revised in 1996 to includematerial on developments in feminist and cultural theory Has served as an inspiration to generations of students andteachers Continues to function as arguably the definitive undergraduatetextbook on literary theory Reissue includes a new foreword by Eagleton himself, reflectingon the impact and enduring success of the book, and on developmentsin literary theory since it was first published

The Conservationist

The Conservationist PDF Author: Nadine Gordimer
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101571063
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
"This is a novel of enormous power' New Statesman 'Gordimer is a great writer ... It is Turgenev that she most brings to mind' -- New York Review of Books The Booker Prize winning political novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.

Literacy of the Other

Literacy of the Other PDF Author: Aparna Mishra Tarc
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438457499
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Explores the existential significance of literacy. Winner of the 2017 American Educational Research Association’s Division B Outstanding Book Award Literary of the Other stages a bold psychoanalytic investigation into the existential significance of literacy. Featuring a dazzling array of novel artifacts and events, the book situates literacy in the internal fictive worlds of the self and other. This approach is designed to encourage teachers of language and literature to sustain reflexive thought in their practices of reading and writing as a means to gain insight into the psychical processes of literacy. With lucid and compelling prose, Aparna Mishra Tarc reminds us of the importance of fostering a meaningful practice of literacy in the construction of real and fictive stories by which to live well throughout our lives. Renarrating many versions of a shared humanity might develop in us all a sympathetic regard for the storied lives of others. Aparna Mishra Tarc is Associate Professor of Education at York University.

Ethics and Literary Practice

Ethics and Literary Practice PDF Author: Adam Zachary Newton
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3039285041
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This volume draws together a diverse array of scholars from across the humanities to formulate and address the question of “ethics and literary practice” for a new decade. In taking up a conjunction whose terms remain productively open to question, fifteen essays survey a range of approaches and topics including genre and disciplinary rhetoric, emergence theory and literary signification, the ethics of alterity, of attention, and of aesthetics, the decolonial and the paracritical, neorealism and contingency, analogy and affect, scripture and national literature. From Seamus Heaney to Hannah Arendt, Teresa Brennan to Stanley Cavell, Ronit Matalon to Édouard Glissant, Uwe Timm to Katherena Vermette, Notes for Echo Lake to the Gospel of St. Matthew, these contributions demonstrate how broadly and fruitfully ramifying its organizing inquiry can be. Bringing such multifarious perspectives to the topic feels only more urgent as language, meaning, and expression enter the crucible of a “post-truth” era.

American Protest Literature

American Protest Literature PDF Author: Zoe Trodd
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674027639
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
ÒI like a little rebellion now and thenÓÑso wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has led writers to rage and reason, prophesy and provoke. This is the first anthology to collect and examine an American literature that holds the nation to its highest ideals, castigating it when it falls short and pointing the way to a better collective future. American Protest Literature presents sources from eleven protest movementsÑpolitical, social, and culturalÑfrom the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. Each section reprints documents from the original phase of the movement as well as evidence of its legacy in later times. Informative headnotes place the selections in historical context and draw connections with other writings within the anthology and beyond. Sources include a wide variety of genresÑpamphlets, letters, speeches, sermons, legal documents, poems, short stories, photographs, postersÑand a range of voices from prophetic to outraged to sorrowful, from U.S. Presidents to the disenfranchised. Together they provide an enlightening and inspiring survey of this most American form of literature.

Matters of Care

Matters of Care PDF Author: María Puig de la Bellacasa
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452953473
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.

The Novel and the New Ethics

The Novel and the New Ethics PDF Author: Dorothy J. Hale
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503614077
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This "new" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the "new" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word.