301 books match the query 'Knowledge' and 16 start with d

cover of D H LAWRENCE: SELF AND SEXUALITY

D H LAWRENCE

SELF AND SEXUALITY

James C. Cowan

The Ohio State University Press, 2003

D. H. Lawrence: Self and Sexuality is a psychoanalytic study of D. H. Lawrence’s life and writings. James Cowan relies most notably the methods of Heinz Kohut, psychoanalytic “self psychology,” and employs as well the object relation theories of D. W. Winnicott and others. This work also examines sexual issues in Lawrence’s work from a literary and critical perspective, employing authoritative medical and psychoanalytic sources in human sexuality. Lawrence’s work, which was early read in traditional Freudian terms, has only recently been considered from other psychoanalytic perspectives. In this self psychological study, Cowan provides a new and path-breaking analysis of Lawrence.

Turning to several problematic issues of sexuality in Lawrence, the author first discusses a number of Lawrence’s sexual fallacies, and personal and cultural issues. Cowan also considers contrasting idealized and negative presentations of Mellors and Sir Clifford Chatterley in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the theme of the “loss of desire” sequence of poems in Pansies.

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cover of Dante and the Limits of the Law

Dante and the Limits of the Law

Justin Steinberg

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In Dante and the Limits of the Law, Justin Steinberg offers the first comprehensive study of the legal structure essential to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Steinberg reveals how Dante imagines an afterlife dominated by sophisticated laws, hierarchical jurisdictions, and rationalized punishments and rewards. He makes the compelling case that Dante deliberately exploits this highly structured legal system to explore the phenomenon of exceptions to it, crucially introducing Dante to current debates about literature’s relation to law, exceptionality, and sovereignty.

Examining how Dante probes the limits of the law in this juridical otherworld, Steinberg argues that exceptions were vital to the medieval legal order and that Dante’s otherworld represents an ideal “system of exception.” In the real world, Dante saw this system as increasingly threatened by the dual crises of church and empire: the abuses and overreaching of the popes and the absence of an effective Holy Roman Emperor. Steinberg shows that Dante’s imagination of the afterlife seeks to address this gap between the universal validity of Roman law and the lack of a sovereign power to enforce it. Exploring the institutional role of disgrace, the entwined phenomena of judicial discretion and artistic freedom, medieval ideas about privilege and immunity, and the place of judgment in the poem, this cogently argued book brings to life Dante’s sense of justice.
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cover of Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America

Dark Twins

Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America

Susan Gillman

University of Chicago Press, 1989

"Many persons have such a horror of being taken in," wrote P. T. Barnum, "that they believe themselves to be a sham and are continually humbugging themselves." Mark Twain enjoyed trading on that horror, as the many confidence men, assumed identities, and disguised characters in his fiction attest. In Dark Twins, Susan Gillman challenges the widely held assumption that Twain's concern with identity is purely biographical and argues that what has been regarded as a problem of individual psychology must be located instead within American society around the turn of the century. Drawing on Twain's whole writing career, but focusing on the controversial late period of social "pessimism" and literary "incoherence," Gillman situates Twain and his work in historical context, demonstrating the complex interplay between his most intimate personal and authorial identity and the public attitudes toward race, gender, and science.

Gillman shows that laws regulating race classification, paternity, and rape cases underwrite Twain's critical exploration of racial and sexual difference in the writings of the 1890s and after, most strikingly in the little-known manuscripts that Gillman calls the "tales of transvestism." The "pseudoscience" of spiritualism and the "science" of psychology provide the cultural vocabularies essential to Twain's fantasy and science fiction writings of his last two decades. Twain stands forth finally as a representative man, not only a child of his culture, but also as one implicated in a continuing American anxiety about freedom, race, and identity.
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cover of Darwin's Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation

Darwin's Evolving Identity

Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation

Alistair Sponsel

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Why—against his mentor’s exhortations to publish—did Charles Darwin take twenty years to reveal his theory of evolution by natural selection? In Darwin’s Evolving Identity, Alistair Sponsel argues that Darwin adopted this cautious approach to atone for his provocative theorizing as a young author spurred by that mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell.  While we might expect him to have been tormented by guilt about his private study of evolution, Darwin was most distressed by harsh reactions to his published work on coral reefs, volcanoes, and earthquakes, judging himself guilty of an authorial “sin of speculation.” It was the battle to defend himself against charges of overzealous theorizing as a geologist, rather than the prospect of broader public outcry over evolution, which made Darwin such a cautious author of Origin of Species. 


Drawing on his own ambitious research in Darwin’s manuscripts and at the Beagle’s remotest ports of call, Sponsel takes us from the ocean to the Origin and beyond. He provides a vivid new picture of Darwin’s career as a voyaging naturalist and metropolitan author, and in doing so makes a bold argument about how we should understand the history of scientific theories.
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cover of Deaf Epistemologies: Multiple Perspectives on the Acquisition of Knowledge

Deaf Epistemologies

Multiple Perspectives on the Acquisition of Knowledge

Peter V. Paul

Gallaudet University Press, 2012

Epistemology is the study of how “knowledge” is formed. Standard epistemology isolates the “known” from the “knowers,” thereby defining “knowledge” as objectively constant. Multiple epistemologies suggest that individuals learn in different ways shaped by life factors such as education, family, ethnicity, history, and regional beliefs. In this groundbreaking volume, editors Peter V. Paul and Donald F. Moores call on ten other noted scholars and researchers to join them in examining the many ways that deaf people see and acquire deaf knowledge.

       This collection considers three major groups of deaf knowledge perspectives: sociological and anthropological, historical/psychological and literary, and educational and philosophical. The first explores the adoption of a naturalized, critical epistemological stance in evaluating research; the epistemology of a positive deaf identity; how personal epistemologies can help form deaf education policies; and valuing deaf indigenous knowledge in research. The next part considers dueling epistemologies in educating deaf learners; reforms in deaf education; the role of deaf children of hearing parents in creating Deaf epistemologies; and the benefit of reading literature with deaf characters for all students. The final part explores the application of the Qualitative-Similarity Hypothesis to deaf students’ acquisition of knowledge; a metaparadigm for literacy instruction in bilingual-bicultural education; collaborative knowledge-building to access academia; and examination of the benefits and disadvantages of being deaf.

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cover of Decolonizing Native Histories: Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas

Decolonizing Native Histories

Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas

Florencia E. Mallon, ed.

Duke University Press, 2012

Decolonizing Native Histories is an interdisciplinary collection that grapples with the racial and ethnic politics of knowledge production and indigenous activism in the Americas. It analyzes the relationship of language to power and empowerment, and advocates for collaborations between community members, scholars, and activists that prioritize the rights of Native peoples to decide how their knowledge is used. The contributors—academics and activists, indigenous and nonindigenous, from disciplines including history, anthropology, linguistics, and political science—explore the challenges of decolonization.

These wide-ranging case studies consider how language, the law, and the archive have historically served as instruments of colonialism and how they can be creatively transformed in constructing autonomy. The collection highlights points of commonality and solidarity across geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and also reflects deep distinctions between North and South. Decolonizing Native Histories looks at Native histories and narratives in an internationally comparative context, with the hope that international collaboration and understanding of local histories will foster new possibilities for indigenous mobilization and an increasingly decolonized future.

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cover of Descartes' Metaphysical Physics

Descartes' Metaphysical Physics

Daniel Garber

University of Chicago Press, 1992

In this first book-length treatment of Descartes' important and influential natural philosophy, Daniel Garber is principally concerned with Descartes' accounts of matter and motion—the joint between Descartes' philosophical and scientific interests. These accounts constitute the point at which the metaphysical doctrines on God, the soul, and body, developed in writings like the Meditations, give rise to physical conclusions regarding atoms, vacua, and the laws that matter in motion must obey.

Garber achieves a philosophically rigorous reading of Descartes that is sensitive to the historical and intellectual context in which he wrote. What emerges is a novel view of this familiar figure, at once unexpected and truer to the historical Descartes.

The book begins with a discussion of Descartes' intellectual development and the larger project that frames his natural philosophy, the complete reform of all the sciences. After this introduction Garber thoroughly examines various aspects of Descartes' physics: the notion of body and its identification with extension; Descartes' rejection of the substantial forms of the scholastics; his relation to the atomistic tradition of atoms and the void; the concept of motion and the laws of motion, including Descartes' conservation principle, his laws of the persistence of motion, and his collision law; and the grounding of his laws in God.
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cover of Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality

Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality

John R. Shook

Vanderbilt University Press, 2000

The ongoing revival of interest in the work of American philosopher and pragmatist John Dewey has given rise to a burgeoning flow of commentaries, critical editions, and reevaluations of Dewey's writings. While previous studies of Dewey's work have taken either a historical or a topical focus, Shook offers an innovative, organic approach to understanding Dewey and eloquently shows that Dewey's instrumentalism grew seamlessly out of his idealism. He argues that most current scholarship operates under a mistaken impression of Dewey's early philosophical positions and convincingly demonstrates a number of key points:

that Dewey's metaphysical empiricism remained more indebted to Kant and Hegel than is commonly supposed;
that Dewey owed more to the influence of Wundt than is commonly believed;
that the influence of Peirce and James was not as significant for the development of Dewey's theories of mind and truth as has been argued in the past;
and that Dewey's pragmatic theory of knowledge never really abandoned idealism.

Shook's exposition of the unity of Dewey's thought challenges a large scholarly industry devoted to suppressing or explaining away the consistency between Dewey's early thought and his later work. In every respect, Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality is a provocative and engaging study that will occupy a unique niche in this field. It is certain to stimulate discussion and controversy, forcing Dewey traditionalists out of habitual modes of thought and transforming our conventional understanding of the development of classical American philosophy.

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cover of Diary of a Poem

Diary of a Poem

Andrew Hudgins

University of Michigan Press, 2011

Praise for Andrew Hudgins

"Hudgins . . . [is] one of the few poets of the American South who can be both solemn and sidesplitting in a single poem."
---Publishers Weekly

"Andrew Hudgins is a natural storyteller . . . The surface[s]  of Hudgins's poems---their quirky economy, the sheer music of his prosody---are so right because he goes so deep."
---Washington Post

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

Andrew Hudgins's Diary of a Poem is an engaging collection of essays that offers pleasure and profit to its readers. The title essay discusses the author's amusing travails as he attempts to write an ode about intestines, while other pieces explore the poetry of James Agee, Donald Justice, Allen Tate, and other poets, as well as the musician Johnny Winter, who is the subject of a rollicking segment about rock 'n' roll. More seriously, Hudgins writes with lively good humor about his tomato garden, the unread books piled up precipitously around his bed, and the emotional problems that led to an embarrassingly intimate, yet funny encounter with his father-in-law.

Diary of a Poem is lively, charming, often humorous, and a pleasurable read for the general reader and the poetry specialist alike.


Author photo by Jo McCulty

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cover of Dickens and Massachusetts: The Lasting Legacy of the Commonwealth Visits

Dickens and Massachusetts

The Lasting Legacy of the Commonwealth Visits

Diana C. Archibald

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

Charles Dickens traveled to North America twice, in 1842 and twenty-five years later in 1867–68, and on both trips Massachusetts was part of his itinerary. Although many aspects of his U.S. travels disappointed him, Massachusetts was the one state that met and even exceeded Dickens's expectations for “the republic of [his] imagination.” From the mills of Lowell to the Perkins School for the Blind, it offered an alternate vision of America that influenced his future writings, while the deep and lasting friendships he formed with Bostonians gave him enduring ties to the commonwealth. 

This volume provides insight from leading scholars who have begun to reassess the significance of Massachusetts in the author's life and work. The collection begins with a broad biographical and historical overview taken from the full-length narrative of the award-winning exhibition Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation, which attracted thousands of visitors while on display in Lowell. Abundant images from the exhibition, many of them difficult to find elsewhere, enhance the story of Dickens's relationship with the vibrant cultural and intellectual life of Massachusetts. The second section includes essays that consider the importance of Dickens's many connections to the commonwealth.

In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Chelsea Bray, Iain Crawford, Andre DeCuir, Natalie McKnight, Lillian Nayder, and Kit Polga.

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cover of Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E.M. Forster

Difficult Rhythm

Music and the Word in E.M. Forster

Michelle Fillion

University of Illinois Press, 2013

Difficult Rhythm examines E. M. Forster's irrepressible interest in music, providing plentiful examples of how the eminent British author's fiction resonates with music. Musicologist Michelle Fillion analyzes his critical writings, short stories, and novels, including A Room with a View, which alludes to Beethoven, Wagner, and Schumann, and Howards End, which explicitly alerts readers how fiction can adopt musical forms and ideas. This volume also includes, for the first time in print, Forster's notes on Beethoven's piano sonatas. Documenting his knowledge of music, his musical favorites and friends, and his attitudes toward various composers, performances, and competing musical theories, this engaging book traces the musical influences of luminaries such as Wagner, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Britten on Forster's life and work.
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cover of Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century

Disappearing Tricks

Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century

Matthew Solomon

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Disappearing Tricks revisits the golden age of theatrical magic and silent film to reveal how professional magicians shaped the early history of cinema. Where others have called upon magic as merely an evocative metaphor for the wonders of cinema, Matthew Solomon focuses on the work of the professional illusionists who actually made magic with moving pictures between 1895 and 1929.

The first to reveal fully how powerfully magic impacted the development of cinema, the book combines film and theater history to uncover new evidence of the exchanges between magic and filmmaking in the United States and France during the silent period. Chapters detailing the stage and screen work of Harry Houdini and Georges Méliès show how each transformed theatrical magic to create innovative cinematic effects and thrilling new exploits for twentieth-century mass audiences. The book also considers the previously overlooked roles of anti-spiritualism and presentational performance in silent film.

Highlighting early cinema's relationship to the performing body, visual deception, storytelling, and the occult, Solomon treats cinema and stage magic as overlapping practices that together revise our understanding of the origins of motion pictures and cinematic spectacle.

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cover of Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

Evelyn Adkins

University of Michigan Press, 2022

In ancient Rome, where literacy was limited and speech was the main medium used to communicate status and identity face-to-face in daily life, an education in rhetoric was a valuable form of cultural capital and a key signifier of elite male identity. To lose the ability to speak would have caused one to be viewed as no longer elite, no longer a man, and perhaps even no longer human. We see such a fantasy horror story played out in the Metamorphoses  or The Golden Ass, written by Roman North African author, orator, and philosopher Apuleius of Madauros—the only novel in Latin to survive in its entirety from antiquity. In the novel’s first-person narrative as well as its famous inset tales such as the Tale of Cupid and Psyche, the Metamorphoses is invested in questions of power and powerlessness, truth and knowledge, and communication and interpretation within the pluralistic but hierarchical world of the High Roman Empire (ca. 100–200 CE).

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power presents a new approach to the Metamorphoses: it is the first in-depth investigation of the use of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius’ novel. It argues that discourse, broadly defined to include speech, silence, written text, and nonverbal communication, is the primary tool for negotiating identity, status, and power in the Metamorphoses. Although it takes as its starting point the role of discourse in the characterization of literary figures, it contends that the process we see in the Metamorphoses reflects the real world of the second century CE Roman Empire. Previous scholarship on Apuleius’ novel has read it as either a literary puzzle or a source-text for social, philosophical, or religious history. In contrast, this book uses a framework of discourse analysis, an umbrella term for various methods of studying the social political functions of discourse, to bring Latin literary studies into dialogue with Roman rhetoric, social and cultural history, religion, and philosophy as well as approaches to language and power from the fields of sociology, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Discourse, Knowledge, and Power argues that a fictional account of a man who becomes an animal has much to tell us not only about ancient Roman society and culture, but also about the dynamics of human and gendered communication, the anxieties of the privileged, and their implications for swiftly shifting configurations of status and power whether in the second or twenty-first centuries.

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cover of Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol

Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism

A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol

Donald Fanger

Northwestern University Press, 1998

Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism is Donald Fanger's groundbreaking study of the art of Dostoevsky and the literary and historical context in which it was created. Through detailed analyses of the work of Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, Fanger identifies romantic realism, the transformative fusion of two generic categories, as a powerful imaginary response to the great modern city. This fusion reaches its aesthetic and metaphysical climax in Dostoevsky, whose vision culminating in Crime and Punishment is seen by Fanger as the final synthesis of romantic realism.
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cover of Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood

Dracula's Crypt

Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood

Joseph Valente

University of Illinois Press, 2001

Dracula's Crypt unearths the Irish roots of Bram Stoker's gothic masterpiece, offering a fresh interpretation of the author's relationship to his novel and to the politics of blood that consumes its characters.
 
An ingenious reappraisal of a classic text, Dracula's Crypt presents Stoker's novel as a subtly ironic commentary on England's preoccupation with racial purity. Probing psychobiographical, political, and cultural elements of Stoker's background and milieu, Joseph Valente distinguishes Stoker's viewpoint from that of his virulently racist, hypermasculine vampire hunters, showing how the author's dual Anglo-Celtic heritage and uncertain status as an Irish parvenu among London's theatrical elite led him to espouse a progressive racial ideology at odds with the dominant Anglo-Saxon supremacism. In the light of Stoker's experience, the shabby-genteel Count Dracula can be seen as a doppelgänger, an ambiguous figure who is at once the blood-conscious landed aristocrat and the bloodthirsty foreign invader.
 
Stoker also confronts gender ideals and their implications, exposing the "inner vampire" in men like Jonathan Harker who dominate and absorb the women who become their wives. Ultimately, Valente argues, the novel celebrates a feminine heroism, personified by Mina Harker, that upholds an ethos of social connectivity against the prevailing obsession with blood as a vehicle of identity.
 
Revealing a profound and heretofore unrecognized ethical and political message, Dracula's Crypt maintains that the real threat delineated in Dracula is not racial degeneration but the destructive force of racialized anxiety itself. Stoker's novel emerges as a powerful critique of the very anxieties it has previously been taken to express: anxieties concerning the decline of the British empire, the deterioration of Anglo-Saxon culture, and the contamination of the Anglo-Saxon race.
 
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cover of Dramatizing Dementia: Madness In The Plays Of Tennessee Williams

Dramatizing Dementia

Madness In The Plays Of Tennessee Williams

Jacqueline O'Connor

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

Jacqueline O’Connor examines how Tennessee Williams portrayed society’s treatment of the mentally ill. The critical approach is eclectic and the author draws on a variety of psychological, literary, and biographical sources.
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