Thinking with Literature

Thinking with Literature PDF

Author: Terence Cave

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0198749414

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To speak of 'thinking with literature' is to make the assumption that literature (in the broadest sense) is neither a side-show nor a side-issue in human cultures: it belongs to the spectrum of imaginative modes that includes both philosophical and scientific thought. Whether one regards it as a practice or as an archive, literature is highly pervasive, robust, enduring, and pregnant with values. Thinking with Literature argues that what it affords above all is a way of thinking, whether for writer, reader, or critic. Literature constitutes one of the prime instruments of cultural improvisation; it is the embodiment of a powerful, inventive, and ever-changing cognitive agency. As such, it invites a cognitive mode of criticism, one which asserts the priority of the individual literary work as a unique product of human cognition. In this book, discussions of topics, arguments, and hypotheses from the cognitive sciences, philosophy, and the theory of communication are woven into the fabric of a critical analysis which insists on the value of close reading: a poem by Yeats, a scene from Shakespeare, novels by Mme de Lafayette, Conrad, Frantzen, stories from Winnie-the-Pooh, and many others appear here on their own terms, with their own cognitive energies. Written in an accessible style, Thinking with Literature speaks both to mainstream readers of literature and to specialists in cognitive studies.

Thinking about Literature

Thinking about Literature PDF

Author: Robert McMahon

Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13:

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Details a different system for teaching classic and contemporary literature in high school that is designed to keep students interested in what they are learning and understand the material.

Thinking Design Through Literature

Thinking Design Through Literature PDF

Author: Susan Yelavich

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-28

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1351777963

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This book deploys literature to explore the social lives of objects and places. The first book of its kind, it embraces things as diverse as escalators, coins, skyscrapers, pottery, radios, and robots, and encompasses places as various as home, country, cities, streets, and parks. Here, fiction, poetry, and literary non-fiction are mined for stories of design, which are paired with images of contemporary architecture and design. Through the work of authors such as César Aires, Nicholson Baker, Lydia Davis, Orhan Pamuk, and Virginia Woolf, this book shows the enormous influence that places and things exert in the world.

This Thing Called Literature

This Thing Called Literature PDF

Author: Andrew Bennett

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-02-11

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 1317698282

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What is this thing called literature? Why should we study it? And how? Relating literature to topics such as dreams, politics, life, death, the ordinary and the uncanny, this beautifully written book establishes a sense of why and how literature is an exciting and rewarding subject to study. Bennett and Royle delicately weave an essential love of literature into an account of what literary texts do, how they work and what sort of questions and ideas they provoke. The book’s three parts reflect the fundamental components of studying literature: reading, thinking and writing. The authors use helpful, familiar examples throughout, offering rich reflections on the question ‘What is literature?’ and on what they term ‘creative reading’. Bennett and Royle’s lucid and friendly style encourages a deep engagement with literary texts. This book is not only an essential guide to the study of literature, but an eloquent defence of the discipline.

Thinking Literature across Continents

Thinking Literature across Continents PDF

Author: Ranjan Ghosh

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0822373696

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Thinking Literature across Continents finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of literature; rather, they allow their different backgrounds and lively disagreements to stimulate generative dialogue on poetry, world literature, pedagogy, and the ethics of literature. Addressing a varied literary context ranging from Victorian literature, Chinese literary criticism and philosophy, and continental philosophy to Sanskrit poetics and modern European literature, Ghosh offers a transnational theory of literature while Miller emphasizes the need to account for what a text says and how it says it. Thinking Literature across Continents highlights two minds continually discovering new paths of communication and two literary and cultural traditions intersecting in productive and compelling ways.

The Science of Character

The Science of Character PDF

Author: S. Pearl Brilmyer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0226815781

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"In 1843, the Victorian political theorist John Stuart Mill outlined a new science, "the science of the formation of character." Although Mill's proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer shows that it survived in the work of Victorian novelists, who cultivated a narrative science of human nature. Brilmyer explores this characterological project in the work of such novelists as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner. Bringing to life Mill's unrealized dream of a science of character, Victorian realists used fiction to investigate the nature of embodied experience, how traits and behaviors in human and nonhuman organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features-shapes, colors, and gestures-come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. In the hands of these authors, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the universal laws governing human life. The Science of Character offers brilliant insights into important novels of the period, including Eliot's Middlemarch, and a fuller picture of English realism during the crucial span between 1870 and 1920"--

Thinking and Learning through Children's Literature

Thinking and Learning through Children's Literature PDF

Author: Miriam G. Martinez

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1475821522

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Much of teachers’ attention these days is focused on having students read closely to ferret out the author’s intended meaning and the devices used to convey that meaning. But we cannot forget to guide students to have moving engagements with literature, because they need to make strong personal connections to books of merit if they are to become the next generation of readers: literate people with awareness of and concern for the diversity of human beings around them and in different times and places. Fortunately, guiding both students’ personal engagement with literature and their close reading to appreciate the author’s message and craft are not incompatible goals. This book enthusiastically and intelligently addresses both imperatives, first surveying what is gained when students are immersed in literature; then celebrating and explicating the main features of literature students need to understand to broaden their tastes and deepen their engagement, at the same time they meet external standards; then presenting a host of active methods for exploring all major genres of children’s books; and finally presenting suggestions for interdisciplinary teaching units grounded in literature. Created by noted leaders in the fields of children’s literature and literacy, the book is enlivened by recurring features such as suggested reading lists, issues for discussion, links to technology, and annotations of exemplary books.

Does Literature Think?

Does Literature Think? PDF

Author: Stathis Gourgouris

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780804732147

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What is the process by which literature might provide us with access to knowledge, and what sort of knowledge might this be? The question is not simply whether literature thinks, but whether literature thinks theoretically—whether it has a capacity, without the external aid of analytical methods that have determined Western philosophy and science since the Enlightenment, to theorize the conditions of the world from which it emerges and to which it addresses itself. Suspicion about literature's access to knowledge is ancient, at least as old as Plato's notorious expulsion of the poets from the city in the Republic. With full awareness of this classical background and in dialogue with a broad range of twentieth-century thinkers, Gourgouris examines a range of literary texts, from Sophocles' Antigone to Don DeLillo's The Names, as he traces out his argument that literature possesses an intrinsic theoretical capacity to make sense of the nonpropositional.

Writing and Literature

Writing and Literature PDF

Author: Tanya Long Bennett

Publisher: University of North Georgia

Published: 2018-01-10

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9781940771236

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In the age of Buzzfeeds, hashtags, and Tweets, students are increasingly favoring conversational writing and regarding academic writing as less pertinent in their personal lives, education, and future careers. Writing and Literature: Composition as Inquiry, Learning, Thinking and Communication connects students with works and exercises and promotes student learning that is kairotic and constructive. Dr. Tanya Long Bennett, professor of English at the University of North Georgia, poses questions that encourage active rather than passive learning. Furthering ideas presented in Contribute a Verse: A Guide to First-Year Composition as a complimentary companion, Writing and Literature builds a new conversation covering various genres of literature and writing. Students learn the various writing styles appropriate for analyzing, addressing, and critiquing these genres including poetry, novels, dramas, and research writing. The text and its pairing of helpful visual aids throughout emphasizes the importance of critical reading and analysis in producing a successful composition. Writing and Literature is a refreshing textbook that links learning, literature, and life.