Twentieth-Century Multiplicity

Twentieth-Century Multiplicity PDF

Author: Daniel H. Borus

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2011-12

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0742515079

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The book describes the ways in which American thinkers and artists in the first two decades of the twentieth century challenged notions that a single principle explained all relevant phenomena, opting instead for a pluralistic world in which many truths, goods, and beauties coexisted. It argues that the bracketing of the idea that all knowledge was integrated allowed for a new appreciation of the importance of context and contingency.

August Wilson

August Wilson PDF

Author: Alan Nadel

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2010-05-16

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1587299356

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Contributors to this collection of 15 essays are academics in English, theater, and African American studies. They focus on the second half of Wilson's century cycle of plays, examining each play within the larger context of the cycle and highlighting themes within and across particular plays. Some topics discussed include business in the street in Jitney and Gem of the Ocean, contesting black male responsibilities in Jitney, the holyistic blues of Seven Guitars, violence as history lesson in Seven Guitars and King Hedley II, and ritual death and Wilson's female Christ. The book offers an index of plays, critics, and theorists, but not a subject index. Nadel is chair of American literature and culture at the University of Kentucky.

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze PDF

Author: John Marks

Publisher: Pluto Press

Published: 1998-05-20

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9780745308746

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A guide to the work of Gilles Deleuze

Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy

Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy PDF

Author: Leonard Lawlor

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2011-12-01

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0253005167

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“[A]n outstanding book that will serve as a fine supplement (and guide) to important primary texts in early twentieth-century continental philosophy” (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews). Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy offers a lucid and engaging introduction to the major works of French and German philosophy in the first half of the century. Leonard Lawlor takes as his starting point the original publication of Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics in 1903, and his endpoint as the original publication Foucault’s The Thought of the Outside in 1966. Lawlor interprets key texts by major figures in the continental tradition, such as Bergson and Foucault, as well as Freud, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. Taken together, his assessment of these figures illustrates the major theoretical trends of the time―immanence, difference, multiplicity, and the overcoming of metaphysics.

Henry Adams

Henry Adams PDF

Author: James P. Young

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2021-10-08

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0700631828

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Henry Adams has been a neglected figure in recent years. The Education of Henry Adams is widely accepted as a classic of American letters, but his other work is little read except by specialists. His brilliant journalism is out of print, while Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and the novels Democracy and Esther receive little attention. Even the monumental History of the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, considered by some to be the greatest history written by any American, seems noticed only by scholars of that period. James P. Young, author of the highly regarded Reconsidering American Liberalism, seeks to revive interest in the thought of Adams by extracting core ideas from his writings concerning both American political development and the course of world history and then showing their relevance to the contemporary longing for a democratic revival. In this revisionist study, Young denies that Adams was a reactionary critic of democracy and instead contends that he was an idealistic, though often disappointed, advocate of representative government. Young focuses on Adams's belief that capitalist industrial development during the Gilded Age had debased American ideals and then turns to a careful study of Adams's famous contrast of the unity of medieval society with the fragmentation of modern technological society. Though fully aware of Adams's concerns about technology, Young rejects the idea that Adams was bitterly opposed to twentieth century developments in that field. He shows that though a liberal democrat with inclinations toward reform, Adams is much too sophisticated to be captured by any simple label.

Time and History in Deleuze and Serres

Time and History in Deleuze and Serres PDF

Author: Bernd Herzogenrath

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2011-12-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1441142746

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For Gilles Deleuze, time is 'out of joint'. For Michel Serres, it is 'a crumpled handkerchief'. In both of these concepts, explicit references are made to the non-linear dynamics of Chaos and Complexity theory, as well as the New Sciences. The groundbreaking work of these key thinkers has the potential to instigate a radical break from traditional existentialist theories of time and history, affording us the opportunity to view history and historical events as a complex, non-linear system of feedback-loops, couplings and interfaces. In this collection, the first to address the comparative historiographies of Deleuze and Serres, twelve leading experts - including William Connolly, Eugene Holland, Claire Colebrook and Elizabeth Grosz - examine these alternative concepts of time and history, exposing critical arguments in this important and emerging field of research.

Information Multiplicity

Information Multiplicity PDF

Author: John Johnston

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 1998-05-08

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1421403927

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"With the birth of information theory and cybernetics in the late 1940s and early 1950s," writes John Johnston, "a decisive step was taken toward the immense techno-scientific transformation of the world into coded bits of 'information' and machinic assemblages." Beginning with Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, the novels that have reflected this transformation have similarly assembled disparate bits of information and narrative into fictions saturated with data and transcribed "clips" from media such as motion pictures, television, recordings, and computer files. Realism having thus fractilized into high-speed collage, thought itself is redefined from the High Modernist "stream of consciousness" into what the machine psychologist Daniel Dennett refers to as "multiple drafts" or "circuits" operating concurrently in the human brain. In a series of close readings, Johnston traces how this viral influx of information into human consciousness has been replicated in works by Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland), Joseph McElroy (Lookout Cartridge), William Gaddis (J.R.), Don DeLillo (Libra), and William Gibson (Necromancer). From John Johnston's Introduction: "Information multiplicities are profoundly corrosive of older cultural forms and identities, dissolving both subjects and objects alike into systems, processes and nodes in the circuits and flow of information exchange. But they also bring about new kinds of energy and even strange new forms of 'artificial life.' . . . Contemporary culture—or more specifically what is called postmordern techno- or cyberculture—is a restructuring process that can similarly be described: as an artifactual space created when information re-structures modern or traditional culture in order to make it a better habitat for information."

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