by
Jay, Martin, 1944-
Call Number
194 20
Publication Date
1993
Summary
Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged vision's allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this antiocularcentric discourse and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers vision's role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From French Impressionism to Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded analyses of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.
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242.
by
Murphy, Margueritte S., 1955-
Call Number
811.509 20
Publication Date
1992
Summary
From its inception in nineteenth-century France, the prose poem has embraced an aesthetic of shock and innovation rather than tradition and convention. In this suggestive study, Margueritte S. Murphy both explores the history of this genre in Anglo-American literature and provides a model for reading the prose poem, irrespective of language or national literature. Murphy argues that the prose poem is an inherently subversive genre, one that must perpetually undermine prosaic conventions in order to validate itself as authentically "other." At the same time, each prose poem must to some degree suggest a traditional prose genre in order to subvert it successfully. The prose poem is thus of special interest as a genre in which the traditional and the new are brought inevitably and continually into conflict. Beginning with a discussion of the French prose poem and its adoption in England by the Decadents, Murphy examines the effects of this association on later poets such as T.S. Eliot. She also explores the perception of the prose poem as an androgynous genre. Then, with a sensitivity to the sociopolitical nature of language, she draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to illuminate the ideology of the genre and explore its subversive nature. The bulk of the book is devoted to insightful readings of William Carlos Williams's Kora in Hell, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, and John Ashbery's Three Poems. As notable examples of the American prose poem, these works demonstrate the range of this genre's radical and experimental possibilities.
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by
Rogers, David J. (David James), 1918-
Call Number
715.0976 20
Publication Date
1991
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0.0478
by
Rogers, David J. (David James), 1918-
Call Number
715.0976 20
Publication Date
1991
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0.0478
by
Foster, Frances Smith.
Call Number
810.99287 20
Publication Date
1993
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0.0466
by
Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar, active 16th century.
Call Number
970.016092 20
Publication Date
1993
Summary
Castaways (or Naufragios) is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-1536). It is also an enthralling story of adventure and survival against unimaginable odds. Its author, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a fortune-seeking sixteenth-century Spanish nobleman, was the treasurer of an expedition to claim for the Spanish Crown a vast area that includes today's Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful of men to make the long journey to the West coast, where they would meet up with Hernan Cortes, on foot. They endured unspeakable hardships, some of them surviving only by eating the dead. Others, including Cabeza de Vaca joined native peoples he met along the way, learning their languages and practices, and serving them as a slave and later as a physician. When after eight years he finally reached the West, he was not recognized by his compatriots. Cabeza de Vaca displays great interest in the cultures - so alien to his own - of the native peoples he encountered on his odyssey, observing their customs and belief systems with a degree of sophistication and sensitivity unusual in the conquistador. As he forged intimate bonds with some of them, sharing their brutal living conditions and curing their sick, he found himself on a voyage of self-discovery that was to make his reunion with his fellow Spaniards less joyful than expected. Cabeza de Vaca's narrative is a marvelously gripping story, but it is also much more. It is a first-hand account of sixteenth-century Spanish colonization, of the encounter between the conquistador and the Native American, of the aspirations and fears of exploration. It is a trove of ethnographic information, its descriptions and interpretations of native peoples' cultures making it a powerful precursor to modern anthropology. And it is a masterpiece of exploration writing, its author keenly aware of the fictive thrust that often energizes the writing of history.
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0.0444
by
Fukuoka, Masanobu
Call Number
631.584 FUK
Publication Date
2009 1978
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0.0425
by
Moore, Edward C. (Edward Carter), 1917-
Call Number
501 20
Publication Date
1993
Summary
Interest in Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is today worldwide. Ernest Nagel of Columbia University wrote in 1959 that "there is a fair consensus among historians of ideas that Charles Sanders Peirce remains the most original, versatile, and comprehensive philosophical mind this country has yet produced." The breadth of topics discussed in the present volume suggests that this is as true today as it was in 1959. Papers concerning Peirce's philosophy of science were given at the Harvard Congress by representatives from Italy, France, Sweden, Finland, Korea, India, Denmark, Greece, Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and the United States. The Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress opened at Harvard University on September 5, 1989, and concluded on the 10th - Peirce's birthday. The Congress was host to approximately 450 scholars from 26 different nations. The present volume is a compilation of selected papers presented at that Congress. The philosophy of science and its logic are themes in the work of Charles Peirce that have been of greatest interest to scholars. Peirce was himself a physical scientist. He worked as an assistant at the Harvard Astronomical Observatory from 1869 to 1872 and made a series of astronomical observations there from 1872 to 1875. Solon I. Bailey says of these observations, "The first attempt at the Harvard Observatory to determine the form of the Milky Way, or the galactic system, was made by Charles S. Peirce ... The investigation was of a pioneer nature, founded on scant data." Peirce also made major contributions in fields as diverse as mathematical logic and psychology. C.I. Lewis has remarked that "the head and font of mathematical logic are found in the calculus of propositional functions as developed by Peirce and Schroeder." Peirce subsequently invented, almost from whole cloth, semiotics - the science of the meaning of signs. Ogden and Richards, the British critics, say that "by far the most elaborate and determined attempt to give an account of signs and their meanings is that of the American logician C.S. Peirce, from whom William James took the idea and the term Pragmatism, and whose Algebra of Dyadic Relations was developed by Schroeder."
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by
Moore, Edward C. (Edward Carter), 1917-
Call Number
501 20
Publication Date
1993
Summary
Interest in Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is today worldwide. Ernest Nagel of Columbia University wrote in 1959 that "there is a fair consensus among historians of ideas that Charles Sanders Peirce remains the most original, versatile, and comprehensive philosophical mind this country has yet produced." The breadth of topics discussed in the present volume suggests that this is as true today as it was in 1959. Papers concerning Peirce's philosophy of science were given at the Harvard Congress by representatives from Italy, France, Sweden, Finland, Korea, India, Denmark, Greece, Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and the United States. The Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress opened at Harvard University on September 5, 1989, and concluded on the 10th - Peirce's birthday. The Congress was host to approximately 450 scholars from 26 different nations. The present volume is a compilation of selected papers presented at that Congress. The philosophy of science and its logic are themes in the work of Charles Peirce that have been of greatest interest to scholars. Peirce was himself a physical scientist. He worked as an assistant at the Harvard Astronomical Observatory from 1869 to 1872 and made a series of astronomical observations there from 1872 to 1875. Solon I. Bailey says of these observations, "The first attempt at the Harvard Observatory to determine the form of the Milky Way, or the galactic system, was made by Charles S. Peirce ... The investigation was of a pioneer nature, founded on scant data." Peirce also made major contributions in fields as diverse as mathematical logic and psychology. C.I. Lewis has remarked that "the head and font of mathematical logic are found in the calculus of propositional functions as developed by Peirce and Schroeder." Peirce subsequently invented, almost from whole cloth, semiotics - the science of the meaning of signs. Ogden and Richards, the British critics, say that "by far the most elaborate and determined attempt to give an account of signs and their meanings is that of the American logician C.S. Peirce, from whom William James took the idea and the term Pragmatism, and whose Algebra of Dyadic Relations was developed by Schroeder."
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0.0355
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