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6 books match the query 'Riddle'

cover of "Tell Me a Riddle": Tillie Olsen

"Tell Me a Riddle"

Tillie Olsen

Rosenfelt, Deborah S

Rutgers University Press, 1995

“Tell Me a Riddle” renders an unforgettable portrait of a working class couple when the gender determined differences in their experiences of poverty and familial life give rise to bitter conflict after almost four decades of marriage.  As she dies from cancer, Eva, the protagonist, recollects a revolutionary past that both critiques and offers hope for the present.  Deborah Rosenfelt’s introduction and the essays in this volume survey the critical reception of this highly acclaimed story, analyze its biographical and historical contexts, examine the text’s language, structure, spiritual and moral significance, and illuminate Olsen’s relationship to the American midwest, the American left, and the Jewish enlightenment tradition.

This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of Olsen’s life, an authoritative text of “Tell Me a Riddle,” relevant essays by Olsen, seven critical essays, and a bibliography.

The contributors are: Joanne Trautmann Banks, Constance Coiner, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Mara Faulkner, Elaine Orr, Linda Ray Pratt, and Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt.

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cover of Aquinas, Wittgenstein, and the Riddle of Spiritual Pedagogy

Aquinas, Wittgenstein, and the Riddle of Spiritual Pedagogy

Matthew Dunch

Catholic University of America Press, 2027

How can Paul, or you and I for that matter, speak with authority about mystery? Using the language of sacred riddles, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, and the Riddle of Spiritual Pedagogy argues that spiritual authority arises within the creative tension between the mystery of God’s will and our concrete human circumstances. Since at least the Enlightenment and increasingly in times of scandal, spiritual authority is suspect. Speaking authoritatively about mystery seems like a contradiction. Critics accuse such authorities of being at best vapid or at worst manipulative. Using a philosophical approach, Matt Dunch, SJ, defends the tradition of Christian spiritual teaching from St. Paul, through St. John Cassian and St. Ignatius Loyola, to contemporaries such as Dorothy Day. He supplements St. Thomas Aquinas’s account of prudence and counsel with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sensitivity to the context and limits of sensible speech. Taken together, they all give us their accounts of how spiritual teaching can emerge from sacred riddles. Spiritual authority is unlike other forms of authority because the mystery or riddle of God is outside human understanding. At the same time, spiritual authority must address our concrete needs. Dunch considers how such riddles might be lived with and through, though not solved. This book will be of interest to readers who love the nature and practice of religious language, including philosophers of religion, systematic theologians, and spiritual directors. It will speak to anyone contemplating sacred mysteries.
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cover of Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self

Yuri Corrigan

Northwestern University Press, 2017

Dostoevsky was hostile to the notion of individual autonomy, and yet, throughout his life and work, he vigorously advocated the freedom and inviolability of the self. This ambivalence has animated his diverse and often self-contradictory legacy: as precursor of psychoanalysis, forefather of existentialism, postmodernist avant la lettre, religious traditionalist, and Romantic mystic. 

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self charts a unifying path through Dostoevsky's artistic journey to solve the “mystery” of the human being. Starting from the unusual forms of intimacy shown by characters seeking to lose themselves within larger collective selves, Yuri Corrigan approaches the fictional works as a continuous experimental canvas on which Dostoevsky explored the problem of selfhood through recurring symbolic and narrative paradigms. Presenting new readings of such works as The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Corrigan tells the story of Dostoevsky’s career-long journey to overcome the pathology of collectivism by discovering a passage into the wounded, embattled, forbidding, revelatory landscape of the psyche.

Corrigan’s argument offers a fundamental shift in theories about Dostoevsky's work and will be of great interest to scholars of Russian literature, as well as to readers interested in the prehistory of psychoanalysis and trauma studies and in theories of selfhood and their cultural sources.

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cover of Riddle, Mystery, and Enigma: Two Hundred Years of British–Russian Relations

Riddle, Mystery, and Enigma

Two Hundred Years of British–Russian Relations

David Owen

Haus Publishing, 2022

A history of relations between Britain and Russia from the nineteenth century to the present.
 
With Riddle, Mystery, and Enigma, statesman and author David Owen tells the story of Britain’s relationship with Russia, which has been surprisingly underexplored. Through his characteristic insight and expertise, he depicts a relationship governed by principle as often as by suspicion, expediency, and necessity.
 
When the two nations formed a pragmatic alliance and fought together at the Battle of Navarino in Greece in 1827, it was overwhelmingly the work of the British prime minister, George Canning. His death brought about a drastic shift that would see the countries fighting on opposite sides in the Crimean War and jostling for power during the Great Game. It was not until the Russian Revolution of 1917 that another statesman had a defining impact on relations between Britain and Russia: Winston Churchill, who opposed Bolshevism yet never stopped advocating for diplomatic and military engagement with Russia. In the Second World War, he recognized early on the necessity of allying with the Soviets against the menace of Nazi Germany. Bringing us into the twenty-first century, Owen chronicles how both countries have responded to their geopolitical decline. Drawing on both imperial and Soviet history, he explains the unique nature of Putin’s autocracy and addresses Britain’s return to “blue water” diplomacy.  Newly revised, this paperback edition features extended chapters on Putin’s Russia and the future of British–Russian relations after the Russo-Ukrainian War.
 
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cover of The Riddle of Literary Quality: A Computational Approach

The Riddle of Literary Quality

A Computational Approach

Karina van Dalen-Oskam

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

What is literature? Can we measure ‘literariness’ in texts themselves? The innovative Computational Humanities project The Riddle of Literary Quality asked thousands of Dutch readers for their opinion about contemporary Dutch and translated novels. The public shared which novels they had read, what they really thought of them, and how they judged their quality. Their judgments of the same novels were compared with the results of computational analysis of the books.

Using evidence from almost 14,000 readers and building on more textual data than ever before, Van Dalen-Oskam and her team uncovered unconscious biases that shed new light on prejudices many people assumed no longer existed. This monograph explains in an accessible way how the project unfolded, which methods were used, and how the results may change the future of Literary Studies.
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cover of The Riddle of Malnutrition: The Long Arc of Biomedical and Public Health Interventions in Uganda

The Riddle of Malnutrition

The Long Arc of Biomedical and Public Health Interventions in Uganda

Jennifer Tappan

Ohio University Press, 2017

More than ten million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition globally each year. In Uganda, longstanding efforts to understand, treat, and then prevent the condition initially served to medicalize it, in the eyes of both biomedical personnel and Ugandans who brought their children to the hospital for treatment and care. Medicalization meant malnutrition came to be seen as a disease—as a medical emergency—not a preventable condition, further compromising nutritional health in Uganda.

Rather than rely on a foreign-led model, physicians in Uganda responded to this failure by developing a novel public health program known as Mwanamugimu. The new approach prioritized local expertise and empowering Ugandan women, blending biomedical knowledge with African sensibilities and cultural competencies.

In The Riddle of Malnutrition, Jennifer Tappan examines how over the course of half a century Mwanamugimu tackled the most fatal form of childhood malnutrition—kwashiorkor—and promoted nutritional health in the midst of postcolonial violence, political upheaval, and neoliberal resource constraints. She draws on a diverse array of sources to illuminate the interplay between colonialism, the production of scientific knowledge, and the delivery of health services in contemporary Africa.

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