BiblioVault - Books about Critical

Berkeley

Critical and Interpretive Essays

Colin Turbayne, Editor

University of Minnesota Press, 1982

Berkeley was first published in 1982. 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.

In contemporary philosophy the works of George Berkeley are considered models of argumentative discourse; his paradoxes have a further value to teachers because, like Zeno's, they challenge a beginning student to find the submerged fallacy. And as a final, triumphant perversion of Berkeley's intent, his central contribution is still commonly viewed as an argument for skepticism - the very position he tried to refute. This limited approach to Berkeley has obscured his accomplishments in other areas of thought - his account of language, his theories of meaning and reference, his philosophy of science. These subjects and others are taken up in a collection of twenty essays, most of them given at a conference in Newport, Rhode Island, commemorating the 250th anniversary of Berkeley's American sojourn of 1728–31. The essays constitute a broad survey of problems tackled by Berkeley and still of interest to philosophers, as well as topics of historical interest less familiar to modern readers. Its comprehensive scope will make this book appropriate for text use.

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Forms of Discovery

Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English

Winters

Ohio University Press, 1967

With Forms of Discover, Yvor Winters completes his critical canon. The distinguished poet-critic defines by analysis and example the development of the method that he has called “post-Symbolist.”

Starting with the styles of the English Renaissance, Winters discusses at length the felicities and shortcomings of these traditions, the main defect being that sensory imagery was little more than ornament. This sets the problem: to discover a style wherein both the conceptual and the perceptual are given their fullest expression

In the work of Charles Churchill, Winters explores the development of a complexly controlled associational procedure. Here is a richly varied conceptual method, though the sensory is still almost totally absent.

Churchill’s methods and those of the Renaissance masters are then contrasted with the work of the Romantics, who wrote a great deal about nature without bothering to look at it, and whose most lasting contribution would appear to be pathetically sentimental fallacies.

The turn of the century, in France, Britain, and America, sees the beginning of the post-Symbolist methods, while Yeats continues the retrograde movement of the Romantics. It is in the work of poets like Tuckerman, Hardy, Bridges, Stevens, T. Sturge Moore, and Paul Valéry that rational discourse combines richly with the perceptual universe in which we live: the particular perception is enhance by reference to general concepts, the general given substance by the particular exemplifying it.

The post-Symbolist methods result in a poetry that unifies the diverse fields of human experience and employs all aspects of language.

Style in Winters’ sense is not simply a way of gracefully combining words. It is the way a man lives, the method or art wherein he discovers to the best of his ability the real nature of the world in which he lives. It is in this sense that Forms of Discovery is a philosophical work, not a miscellaneous collection of essays; this book is, as Winters remarks, “an act of piety, not an act of destruction.”

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Going North Thinking West

The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction

Irvin Peckham

Utah State University Press, 2010

A long-time writing program administrator and well-respected iconoclast, Irvin Peckham is strongly identified with progressive ideologies in education. However, in Going North Thinking West, Peckham mounts a serious critique of what is called critical pedagogy—primarily a project of the academic left—in spite of his own sympathies there.

College composition is fundamentally a middle-class enterprise, and is conducted by middle-class professionals, while student demographics show increasing presence of the working class. In spite of best intentions to ameliorate inequitable social class relationships, says Peckham, critical pedagogies can actually contribute to reproducing those relationships in traditional forms—not only perpetuating social inequities, but pushing working class students toward self-alienation, as well.

Peckham argues for more clarity on the history of critical thinking, social class structures and teacher identity (especially as these are theorized by Pierre Bourdieu), while he undertakes a critical inquiry of the teaching practices with which even he identifies.

Going North Thinking West focuses especially on writing teachers who claim a necessary linkage between critical thinking and writing skills; these would include both teachers who promote the fairly a-political position that argumentation is the obvious and necessary form of academic discourse, and more controversial teachers who advocate turning a classroom into a productive site of social transformation.

Ultimately, Peckham argues for a rereading of Freire (an icon of transformational pedagogy), and for a collaborative investigation of students’ worlds as the first step in a successful writing pedagogy. It is an argument for a pedagogy based on service to students rather than on transforming them.

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Leibniz

Critical and Interpretive Essays

Michael Hooker, Editor

University of Minnesota Press, 1982

Leibniz was first published in 1982. 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.

The past fifteen years have witnessed a renaissance in the study of the history of philosophy, with special attention devoted to the seventeenth century and the work of Descartes and Leibniz. The essays in this collection open new pathways to the study of Leibniz, and will be welcomed not only by historians of philosophy but also by those contemporary philosophers who use logic and the philosophy of language to address metaphysical questions — since Leibniz was the first philosopher to do just that.

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The NFL

Critical and Cultural Perspectives

Thomas Oates

Temple University Press, 2015

The National Football League is one of the most significant cultural engines in contemporary American life. Yet despite intense and near ubiquitous media coverage, commentators rarely turn a critical lens on the league to ask what material and social forces have contributed to its success, and how the NFL has influenced public life in the United States.

The editors of and contributors to The NFL examine the league as a culturally, economically, and politically powerful presence in American life. The essays, by established and up-and-coming scholars, explore how the NFL is packaged for commercial consumption, the league's influence on American identity, and its relationship to state and cultural militarism.

The NFL is the first collection of critical essays to focus attention on the NFL as a cultural force. It boldly moves beyond popular celebrations of the sport and toward a fuller understanding of football's role in shaping contemporary sport, media, and everyday life.

Contributors include: David L. Andrews, Aaron Baker, Michael Butterworth, Jacob Dittmer, Dan Grano, Samantha King, Kyle Kusz, Toby Miller, Ronald L. Mower, Dylan Mulvin, Oliver J.C. Rick, Katie Rodgers, and the editors.

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Notes on Social Measurement

Historical and Critical

Otis Dudley Duncan

Russell Sage Foundation, 1984

"A richly erudite history of measurement and an account of its current state in the social sciences—fascinating, informative, provocative." —James S. Coleman, Unversity of Chicago "Wise and powerful." — American Journal of Sociology "Personal and provocative—an excellent set of historical and critical ruminations from one of social measurement's greatest contributors." —Choice

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(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Edited by Duncan Wheeler and Fernando Canet

Intellect Books, 2014

Formulated around a number of key thematic concerns—new creative trends; the politics and practices of memory; auteurship, genre, and stardom in a transnational age—this reassessment of contemporary Spanish cinema from 1992 to 2012 brings leading academics from a broad range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds into dialogue with critically and commercially successful practitioners to suggest the need to redefine the parameters of one of the world’s most creative national cinemas. This volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of Spanish film, but also to anyone with an interest in contemporary world cinema.

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Twining

Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives

Anastasia Salter

Amherst College Press, 2021

Hypertext is now commonplace: links and linking structure nearly all of our experiences online. Yet the literary, as opposed to commercial, potential of hypertext has receded. One of the few tools still focused on hypertext as a means for digital storytelling is Twine, a platform for building choice-driven stories without relying heavily on code. In Twining, Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop lead readers on a journey at once technical, critical, contextual, and personal. The book’s chapters alternate careful, stepwise discussion of adaptable Twine projects, offer commentary on exemplary Twine works, and discuss Twine’s technological and cultural background. Beyond telling the story of Twine and how to make Twine stories, Twining reflects on the ongoing process of making.

"While there have certainly been attempts to study Twine historically and theoretically... no single publication has provided such a detailed account of it. And no publication has even attempted to situate Twine amongst its many different conversations and traditions, something this book does masterfully." —James Brown, Rutgers University, Camden

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Yeats

An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, Volume XII, 1994

Richard J. Finneran, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1996

This latest volume of Yeats continues the tradition of excellence with nine new critical essays and a host of book reviews. Highlights include "Yeats at Fifty," a recent essay by A. Walton Litz; a consideration of the art in the Cuala Press Broadsides by Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux; and a discussion of the textual and interpretive history of The Green Helmet and Other Poems by David Holdeman. Other contributors include Brian Arkins on style in Yeats's poetry, David Clark on "Her Vision in a Wood," Peter Denman on Ferguson and Yeats, Shelley Sharp on Yeats's theater, and Janis E. Tedesco on the sexual dynamic of A Vision. Rounding out the volume are the annual bibliography of Yeats's scholarship by K. P. S. Jochum and a compilation of dissertation abstracts.

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