“ In this beautifully and intelligently written book, Ferguson not only reports on some of the intellectual tremors jolting the world of thinking women and men, but also considers the basic questions with penetrating analysis, yet at a very readable level. . . . An excellent book.” —Choice
Heralded for its readability and scholarship, The Fire in the Equations offers a fascinating discussion of scientific discoveries and their impact on our beliefs. The book’s title is derived from Dr. Stephen Hawking’s pondering, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”
Originally published in the U.S. in 1995, it provides an excursion through new theories of quantum physics and cosmology, ranging from the nature of time, the big bang, the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics, laws of nature, and their possible relation to God, chaos theory, black holes, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, particle physics, Darwin's theory of evolution, and the role of God in all these equations. It even raises such questions as “how God might answer prayers” from the point of view of physics.
While she gives no absolute answers, Kitty Ferguson takes the reader through a world of paradoxes and improbabilities, explaining how believing in a pre-determined universe and free will as a theory of human behavior is possible. She concludes that what we know about science doesn't necessarily make God inevitable, but does not rule God out either.
Contributors. Jonathan Culler, Joan DeJean, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Carla Freccero, Angela Leighton, Laura Mandell, Jeffrey Masten, Robyn Wiegman
Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
For the last century and a half, Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) has enjoyed a reputation for being the critical grey eminence behind the coming to power of the Romantic Movement. It was Schlegel, in his three series of aphoristic fragments (Lyceum, Athenaeum, and Ideas), who actually first defined and employed the word "romantic" in the present sense; and it was he who in a chaotic, fragmentary, and often mysterious but forceful manner first proclaimed the doctrine that was to usher in the modern age in literature. He too was among the first to put his new program into practice in the shape of his unfinished Lucinde,a work variously denounced as pornography and heralded as a forerunner of modern novelistic experimentation, and probably the most famous novel to come out of German Romanticism.
Both the Fragments and Lucinde,along with a brilliant tour de force, the "Essay on Incomprehensibility," are available now for the first time in a complete English translation in this volume, together with a brief scholarly introduction. This translation will enable non-German readers to examine at first hand the work of a man whom Rene Wellck has called "one of the greatest critics of history." At a time when the function of criticism is coming once again under close skeptical scrutiny, Friedrich Schlegel's unorthodox, unsystematic but seminal critical mind—all of literature, philosophy, art, and history were grist to his mill—should find many sympathetic readers. The book will be of particular interest to theorists of literature and fiction, comparative literature scholars, and historians of the intellectual history of Germany, and it is appropriate for course use in German and comparative literature classes.
Firefighter and Paramedic Burnout was the first comprehensive book dealing with the recognition and treatment of burnout among firefighter and paramedic personnel. Today, this standard still serves to provide readers with a system of identification of early warning signs of excessive stress, its personal and social consequences, and interventions that have been proven to assist firefighters and their family members to return to a state of health and productivity.
In this highly individual study, Avrom Fleishman explores a wide range of literary references to human culture—the culture of ideas, facts, and images. Each critical essay in Fiction and the Ways of Knowing takes up for sustained analysis a major British novel of the nineteenth or the twentieth century. The novels are analyzed in the light of social, historical, philosophical, and other perspectives that can be grouped under the human sciences.
The diversity of critical contexts in these thirteen essays is organized by Avrom Fleishman's governing belief in the interrelations of literature and other ways of interpreting the world. The underlying assumptions of this approach—as explained in his introductory essay—are that fiction is capable of encompassing even the most recondite facts and recalcitrant ideas; that fiction, though never a mirror of reality, is linked to realities and takes part in the real; and that a critical reading may be informed by scientific knowledge without reducing the literary work to a schematic formula.
Fleishman investigates the matters of fact and belief that make up the designated meanings, the intellectual contexts, and the speculative parallels in three types of novel. Some of the novels discussed make it clear that their authors are informed on matters beyond the nonspecialist's range; these essays help bridge this information gap. Other fictional works are only to be grasped in an awareness of the cultural lore tacitly distributed in their own time; a modern reader must make the effort to fathom their anachronisms. And other novels can be found to open passageways that their authors can only have glimpsed intuitively; these must be pursued with great caution but equal diligence.
The novels discussed include Little Dorrit, The Way We Live Now, Daniel Deronda, he Return of the Native, and The Magus. Also examined are Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Northanger Abbey, To the Lighthouse, Under Western Eyes, Ulysses, and A Passage to India.
In ten essays spanning more than three decades of scholarship, Charles R. Forker, the author of Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster, explores the dramatic and poetic styles of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in relation to Elizabethan ideas of space and time, image patterns and aesthetic form in drama, cultural contexts (the family, the state, the individual), and political and religious values.
Forker has divided his essays into three sections. The essays in the first section, "The Stage," explore theatrical self-consciousness; those in "The Green World" examine the use of pastoral and natural settings as significant factors in dramatization; the essays in the final section, "The Family," discuss ideas of dramatic engagement and disengagement in major Elizabethan playwrights other than Shakespeare.
Film is in a state of rapid change: the transition from analog to digital is profoundly affecting not just filmmaking and film distribution but a number of other facets of the industry, including the ways in which films are archived. In From Grain to Pixel—the first volume in the new Framing Filmseries from Amsterdam University Press—Giovanna Fossati brings together scholars and archivists to discuss their theories on digitization and to propose new possibilities for future archives.
Frank Norris - American Writers 68 was first published in 1968. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Perhaps the most amazing thing of all about Garcilaso de la Vega's epic account of the De Soto expedition is the fact that, although it is easily the first great classic of American history, it had never before received a complete or otherwise adequate English translation in the 346 years which have elapsed since its publication in Spanish. Now the Inca's thrilling narrative comes into its own in the English speaking world.
Hernando de Soto's expedition for the conquest of North America was the most ambitious ever to brave the perils of the New World. Garcilaso tells in remarkably rich detail of the conquistadors' wanderings over half a continent, of the unbelievable vicissitudes which beset them, of the Indians whom they sought to win for King and Church and by whose hands most of them died, of De Soto's death, and of the final pitiful failure of the expedition.
Hugely successful in her own time for adult novels and plays, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) would be astounded to find out she is remembered for a handful of books for children, but most of all for the enormously popular Secret Garden. This fascinating biography-the first to have the full cooperation of Burnett's descendants and relatives-examines her life with lively intelligence, sensitivity, and fascinating new, never-before-published material.
Burnett's life was full of those reversals of fortune that mark her work. Following modest beginnings in mid-Victorian Manchester, she arrived in post-Civil War Tennessee at the age of fifteen with her widowed mother and two sisters. Burnett was the breadwinner of the family from the age of seventeen, eventually publishing a total of fifty-two books and writing and producing thirteen plays. She made and spent a fortune in her lifetime, was generous and profligate, yet anxious about money and obsessively hardworking.
Constantly restless and inventive, Burnett's personal life was as complex as her professional one. Her first marriage to a southern doctor disintegrated as a result of her notorious flirtations and a scandalous affair, and her subsequent marriage to an English doctor turned actor suffered a similar fate. She understood the intensity and loneliness of the thoughtful child, but was herself a largely absent mother of two sons-overwhelmed by guilt when tragedy struck one of them; the other one never got over being the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy.
A woman of contrasts and paradoxes, this quintessentially British writer was equally at home in the United States, which honored her with a memorial in Central Park. Frances Hodgson Burnett reinvented for herself and for generations to come in both countries the magic and the mystery of the childhood she never had.
Three prominent folklorists wrote these essays in the 1970s about Dorrance Weir of upstate New York and his song "Take that Night Train to Selma," Joe Scott of Maine and his song "The Plain Golden Band," and Paul Hall of Newfoundland and "The Bachelor's Song."
When poet/critic Lars Gustafsson was the editor of Bonniers Litterära Magasin, he was bombarded with the question, “What makes a good poem?” Forays into Swedish Poetry is his answer.
The fifteen poems in this volume range across the history of Swedish poetry from the 1640s, at the beginning of the Period of Great Power, to the late twentieth century. Poets as diverse as Skogekär Bergbo, Erik Johan Stagnelius, August Strindberg, and Vilhelm Ekelund are discussed from historical, psychological, and sociopolitical viewpoints. However, Gustafsson includes only those poems he considers excellent.
Each essay begins with a presentation of the poem both in Swedish and in English translation. Gustafsson’s analyses are built upon his subjective experiences with poems and poets and upon a more objective structural approach that investigates the actual machinery of the poems. Thus, Gustafsson enlightens us with his always imaginative, sometimes daring analyses, and we learn a great deal about the critic himself in the process. One of his main concerns is what he calls, in his discussion of Edith Södergran, the very mysteriousness of human existence. Time and again, Gustafsson emphasizes the enigmatic, arcane aspects of life in his analyses. In contrast, his vocabulary and approach also bespeak a constant interest in science and technology.
In his introduction, Robert T. Rovinsky, the volume’s translator, presents examples of Gustafsson’s various thematic interests as voiced in his poems, several of which are translated here for the first time. While “The Machines” explores his theory of people as automatons and “Conversation between Philosophers” his linguistic pessimism, Gustafsson’s work as a whole shows his enchantment with its major theme: the intrinsic mystery of life.
A classroom resource for instructors that includes full syllabi and teaching modules, Feminist Practices will be of interest to anyone who teaches in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Feminist Practices is intended for use in classrooms and to spark creative ideas for teaching a diverse array of topics.
What makes a practice feminist? What is at stake in claiming the feminist label? Whether within a university context or in larger national and global ones, feminist projects involve challenging established relations of power (critique), envisioning alternative possibilities (theory), and employing activism to change social relations. By taking diverse forms of feminist practice as its focal point, this course reader investigates how to study the complexity of women’s and men’s lives in ways that take race, gender-power, ethnicity, class, and nationality seriously. Feminist Practices also shows how the production of such feminist knowledge challenges long-established beliefs about the world.
Topics covered include
• Gendered labor,
• Commercialization of sexuality and reproduction,
• Love and marriage in the twenty-first century,
• Violence against women,
• Varieties of feminist activism, and
• Women’s leadership and governance.
Feminist Practices draws upon articles published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society to explore the nature of feminist practices in the twenty-first century and the range of issues these practices address. Organized thematically the collection captures the complexity of a global movement that emerges in the context of local struggles over diverse modes of injustice.
When political and civil unrest threatened France’s social order in the 1950s, French cinema provided audiences a unique form of escapism from such troubled times: a nostalgic look back to the France of the nineteenth century, with costume dramas set in the age of Napoleon and the Belle Époque. Film critics, however, have routinely dismissed this period of French cinema, overlooking a very important period of political cultural history. French Costume Drama of the 1950s redresses this balance, exploring a diverse range of films including Guitry’s Napoléon (1955), Vernay’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1943), and Becker’s Casque d’Or (1952) to expose the political cultural paradox between nostalgia for a lost past and the drive for modernization.
Federalism and Regional Development is the resuit of the first German-American geography seminar, held at the University of Texas in September 1979. The chapters deal with the impact of geographic policy planning by various governmental agencies in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States, two countries with federal systems of government. Although various bureaucratic offices at the federal, state, county, and city levels became involved in spatial planning in both countries, no overall coordination of development planning existed. The contributors to this volume offer many theoretical and empirical perspectives on the evolution of federal policies and programs and their impact on geographic planning activities at all levels of government. The topics covered range from actual regional case studies in both countries to the framework of the agencies concerned with spatial planning. Numerous maps and tables document the data resources of the contributors and yield useful insights on the workings of the federal system.
We turn to Richard Hooker to understand the intellectual background of the Renaissance. He sets forth in his writing the ethical, political, and religious assumptions of his age. This magnificent old-spelling edition of Hooker’s works has long been needed, and is being greeted with universal admiration.
Volume Four presents the text of the first and only major attack on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity—namely, A Christian Letter, 1599—with Hooker’s marginal notes made on his own copy of the Letter; and the more extensive essays which he left in manuscript, written in preparation for a published reply. The importance of these notes and essays lies in their expansion of some of the more controversial points made in the Laws, and in the light they shed on Hooker, his personality, method, and sources.
John Booty’s Introduction and substantial commentary place Hooker’s arguments firmly in their historical and theological contexts.
From the text:
“Too often, it is overlooked or its meaning blurred. It comes between the brightness of the 1300’s—Chaucer’s time—and the time of Elizabeth I. Looking into it, we may be so dazzled by the two bright centuries which bound it that it is a dim space of time with no exact shape or clear colors in it. Yet the whole century was active, practical, strong, unique, humane, searching and changing, mystical.”
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