Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics PDF Download

Author: Ulf Schulenberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Presenting pragmatist humanism as a form of anti-authoritarianism, this book sheds light on the contemporary significance of pragmatist aesthetics and the revival of humanism. This interdisciplinary study shows that a mediation between pragmatist aesthetics – which emphasizes the significance of creating, making, and inventing – and Marxist materialist aesthetics – which values form – promises interesting results and that the former can learn from the latter. In doing so, Ulf Schulenberg discusses 3 layers of the multi-layered phenomenon that is the revival of humanism: He first explains the potential of a pragmatist humanism, clarifying the contemporary significance of humanism. He then argues that pragmatist humanism is a form of anti-authoritarianism. Finally, he shows the possibility of bringing together the resurgence of humanism and a renewed interest in the work of aesthetic form by arguing that pragmatist aesthetics needs a more complex conception of form. Establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics brings together literary and aesthetic theory, philosophy, and intellectual history. It discusses a broad range of authors – from Emerson, Whitman, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Dewey to Wittgenstein, Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Latour, and Rorty – to illuminate how humanism, pragmatism, and anti-authoritarianism are interlinked.

Author: Ulf Schulenberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000469107
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Pragmatism is a humanist philosophy. In spite of the much-debated renaissance of pragmatism, however, a detailed discussion of the relationship between pragmatism and humanism is still a desideratum. It is difficult to understand the complexity of pragmatism without considering the significance of humanism. At least since the 1970s, humanism, mostly in its liberal version, has been vehemently attacked and criticized. In pragmatism, however, a particular understanding of humanism has persisted. Bringing literary studies, philosophy, and intellectual history together and establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, Pragmatism and Poetic Agency endeavors to elucidate this persistence of humanism. Schulenberg continues the thought-provoking argument he developed in his previous two monographs by advancing the idea that one can only grasp the unique contemporary significance of pragmatism when one realizes how pragmatism, humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and postmetaphysics are interlinked. If one appreciates the implications and consequences of this link, then one is in a position to see pragmatism’s antifoundationalist and antirepresentationalist story of progress and emancipation as continuing the project of the Enlightenment.

Author: Guy Stevenson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030477606
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book offers a radical new reading of the 1950s and 60s American literary counterculture. Associated nostalgically with freedom of expression, romanticism, humanist ideals and progressive politics, the period was steeped too in opposite ideas – ideas that doubted human perfectibility, spurned the majority for a spiritually elect few, and had their roots in earlier politically reactionary avant-gardes. Through case studies of icons in the counterculture – the controversial sexual revolutionary Henry Miller, Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and self-proclaimed ‘philosopher of hip’, Norman Mailer – Guy Stevenson explores a set of paradoxes at its centre: between romantic optimism and modernist pessimism; between brutal rhetoric and emancipatory desires; and between social egalitarianism and spiritual elitism. Such paradoxes, Stevenson argues, help explain the cultural and political worlds these writers shaped – in their time and beyond.

Author: Tony Davies
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134104332
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
Definitions of humanism have evolved throughout the centuries as the term has been adopted for a variety of purposes – literary, cultural and political – and reactions against humanism have contributed to movements such as postmodernism and anti-humanism. Tony Davies offers a clear introduction to the many uses of this influential yet complex concept and this second edition extends his discussion to include: a comprehensive history of the development of the term and its influences theories of post-humanism, cybernetics and artificial intelligence implications of concepts of humanism and post-humanism on political and religious activism discussion of the key figures in humanist debate from Erasmus and Milton to Chomsky, Heidegger and Foucault a new glossary and further reading section. With clear explanations and poignant discussions, this volume is essential reading for anyone approaching the study of humanism, post-humanism or critical theory.

Author: Richard Gaskin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780198776895
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
According to the literary humanist, works of imaginative literature have an objective meaning which is fixed at the time of their production and which is the same for all readers, then and thereafter, not subject to the vagaries of individual readers' responses. Such works refer to the real world and make statements about that world which are of cognitive as well as aesthetic value; the two kinds of value are indeed intimately connected. Richard Gaskin offers a defence of literary humanism, so understood, against assault from two directions. On the one hand, some analytic aestheticians have argued that works of literature do not bear referentially on the world and do not make true statements about it; others hold that such works do not make a contribution to knowledge; others again allow that works of literature may have cognitive value, but deny that this depends on their having truth or reference. On the other hand, reception-theorists and deconstructionists have rejected the humanist's objectivist conception of literary meaning, and typically take a pragmatist and anti-realist approach to truth and meaning. This latter, poststructuralist treatment of literature has often been accompanied by a radical politicization of its study. In defending literary humanism against these various forms of attack, Gaskin shows that the reading and appreciation of literature is a cognitive activity fully on a par with scientific investigation, and that we can and should engage in it disinterestedly for the sake of what can be learnt about the world and our place in it.

Author: Nina Witoszek
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351674471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This book discusses the ongoing revolution of dignity in human history as the work of ‘humanist outliers’: small groups and individuals dedicated to compassionate social emancipation. It argues that anti-authoritarian revolutions like 1989’s ‘Autumn of the Nations’ succeeded in large part due to cultural and political innovations springing from such small groups. The author explores the often ingenious ways in which these maladapted and liminal ‘outliers’ forged a cooperative and dialogic mindset among previously resentful and divided communities. Their strategies warrant closer scrutiny in the context of the ongoing 21st century revolution of dignity and efforts to (re)unite an ever more troubled and divided world.

Author: Graham Good
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773569235
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
The intellectual trends Good discusses include what he calls the New Sectarianism, which rejects individuality in favour of collective identities based on race, gender, and sexual preference; Presentism, which rejects the notion of history as a continuous narrative in favour of seeing the past as interpretable in any way that suits the political interests of the present; and a "hermeneutic of suspicion," in which literary texts are seen as masks for discreditable political motives. Good demonstrates that these trends culminate in the prison-like "carceral" vision of Michel Foucault and his followers: the view that culture is ideology and that culture does not free humans but incarcerates them. Good contrasts this view with the liberal vision of culture and society represented by Northrop Frye, concluding with an analysis of the relationship between anti-humanist theory among academics and the managerial practices of university administrations, which, he argues, neglect or reject basic humanistic values such as free individuality, aesthetic greatness, and autonomous inquiry.

Author: Lee Oser
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826217753
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
"Oser examines the twentieth-century literary clash between a dogmatically relativist modernism and a robust revival of Christian humanism. Reviewing English literature from Chaucer to Beckett, and the thoughts of philosophers, theologians, and modern literary critics, Oser challenges the assumption that Christian orthodoxy is incompatible with humanism, freedom, and democracy"--Provided by publisher.

Author: Bernard Harrison
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253014123
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 495

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Book Description
“Harrison’s marriage of philosophy and literary criticism does genuine and novel work.” —Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism How can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the human condition? Can mere words illuminate something that we call “reality”? Bernard Harrison answers these questions in this profoundly original work that seeks to re-enfranchise reality in the realms of art and discourse. In an ambitious account of the relationship between literature and cognition, he seeks to show how literary fiction, by deploying words against a background of imagined circumstances, allows us to focus on the roots, in social practice, of the meanings by which we represent our world and ourselves. Engaging with philosophers and theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, and Stanley Fish, and illustrating his ideas through readings of works by Swift, Woolf, Appelfeld, and Dickens, among others, this book presents a systematic defense of humanism in literary studies, and of the study of the humanities more generally, by a distinguished scholar.

Author: Jean-François Lyotard
Publisher: Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804720069
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
"In a wide-ranging discussion the author examines the philosophy of Kant, Heidegger, Adorno and Derrida and looks at the works of modernist and postmodernist artists such as Cezanne, Debussy and Boulez. Lyotard addresses issues such as time and memory, the sublime and the avant-garde, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Throughout his discussion he considers the close but problematic links between modernity, progress and humanity, and the transition to postmodernity. Lyotard claims that it is the task of literature, philosophy and the arts to bear witness to and explain this difficult transition." "This important contribution to aesthetic and philosophical debates will be of great interest to students in philosophy, literary and cultural theory and politics."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved