The Critical Imagination

Download or read book The Critical Imagination written by James Eric Grant and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Critical Imagination explores metaphor, imaginativeness, and criticism of the arts. James Grant critically examines the idea that art is rewarding because it involves responding imaginatively to a work. He explains the role imaginativeness plays in criticism, and goes on to examine why imaginative metaphors are so common in art criticism.

Download or read book The Mathematical Imagination written by Matthew Handelman and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present. The Mathematical Imagination is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Download or read book Kafka's Castle and the Critical Imagination written by Stephen D. Dowden and published by Camden House. This book was released on 1995 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kafka's final, unfinished novel The Castle remains one of the most celebrated yet most stubbornly uninterpretable masterpieces of modernist fiction. Consequently it has been a lightning rod for theories and methods of literary criticism. In this chronological study of its fate at the hands of academic and non-academic critics, S. D. Dowden lays emphasis on the acts of critical imagination that have shaped our image and understanding of Kafka and his novel. He explores the historical and cultural contingencies of criticism: from the Weimar Era of Max Brod and Walter Benjamin to Lionel Trilling's Cold War to the postmodern moment of multiculturalism and its turn to "cultural studies." Dowden shows how and why The Castle became a contested site in the imaginative life of each succeeding generation of criticism. In addition, he accounts for those moments at which Kafka's novel escapes, or at least attempts to escape, the gravitational pull of historically anchored understanding. Forthright in its prose, Dowden's is a book essential for anyone, casual reader or professional critic, who hopes to grasp the peculiar difficulties and challenges of Kafka's prose in general and of The Castle in particular.

Download or read book Psalms and the Use of the Critical Imagination written by Katherine E. Southwood and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors provide fresh insight into the context surrounding the composition and reception of the Psalms, the relationships between the Psalms, and of early audiences who engaged with the material. Close attention is also paid to specific interpretative problems which emerge in the Psalms, both linguistic and theological. Consequently, there is the creation of a more sophisticated historical reconstruction of how the Psalms were used originally and in subsequent periods, opening up challenges and possibilities for scholars through emphasizing the need in critical Psalms scholarship for vitality and imagination.

Download or read book The Critical Imagination in African Literature written by Maik Nwosu and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In African studies, the “Echeruoan ideal” is understood as an intervention or intellectual engagement characterized by a broadness of vision as well as a depth of analysis. The essays gathered in this volume celebrate that ideal and honor Echeruo’s contribution to the African intellectual tradition. Editors Nwosu and Obiwu explore the driving forces in the literature of Africa and the African diaspora. Contributors examine such themes as migration and exile, trauma and repression, violence and rebellion, and gender and human rights. Showcasing a rich diversity of cultural and academic backgrounds, this volume inaugurates a new paradigm for further examination of African literature as world literature and for analysis of African literature through the lens of psychoanalytic semiotics. While varied in modes of inquiry, the essays are unified in their ambition to explore new theoretical directions, reinvigorating the conversation around how African literature is read and studied.

Download or read book Language Narratives and Shifting Multilingual Pedagogies written by Belinda Mendelowitz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the UKLA Academic Book Award 2024 This book challenges monoglossic ideologies, traditional language pedagogies and dominant forms of knowledge construction by foregrounding multilingual and multicultural students' language narratives, repertoires, and identities. The research is based on a sixteen-year longitudinal study of a sociolinguistics course at an English language university and the language narratives produced by the first-year education students. The study was borne out of a need to create a critically inclusive course that would engage a cohort of students from socially and linguistically diverse backgrounds in contemporary South Africa. Drawing on data from over 5,000 students who have journeyed through this course, this book shows how a narrative heteroglossic pedagogy harnesses students' multilingual strengths. A close analysis reveals complex identity work by students located in the Global South. The authors argue that decolonising language education is about reconceptualising language, reconfiguring what knowledges are valued in the classroom, and reshaping pedagogy.

Download or read book The Critical Opinions of Samuel Johnson written by Samuel Johnson and published by Princeton : Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1926 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: