stanford university press jun 1999 (13 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - How can science be brought to connect with experience This book addresses two of the most challenging problems facing contemporary neurobiology and cognitive science: first, understanding how we unconsciously execute habitual actions as a result of neurological and cognitive processes that are not formal actions of conscious judgment but part of a habitual nexus of systematic self-organization; second, creating an ethics adequate to our present awareness that there is no such thing as a transcendental self, a stable subject, or a soul.In earlier modes of cognitive science, cognition was conceptualized according to a model of representation and abstract reasoning. In the realm of ethics, this corresponded to the philosophical tenet that to do what is ethical is to do what corresponds to an abstract set of rules. By contrast to this computationalism, the author places central emphasis on what he terms 'enaction'--cognition as the ability to negotiate embodied, everyday living in a world that is inseparable from our sensory-motor capacities.Apart from his researches in cognitive science, the bodies of thought that enable Varela to make this link are phenomenology and two representatives of what he calls the 'wisdom traditions' Confucian ethics and Buddhist epistemology. From the Confucian tradition, he draws upon the Mencius to propose an ethics of praxis, one in which ethical action is conceived as a project of being rather than as a system of judgment, less a matter of rules that are universally applicable than a goal of expertise, sagehood.The Buddhist contribution to his project encompasses 'the embodiment of the void' and the 'pragmatics of a virtual self.' How does a belief system that does not posit a unitary self or subject conceive the living of an 'I' In summation, the author proposes an ethics founded on 'savoir faire' that is a practice of transformation based on a constant recognition of the 'virtual' nature of ourselves in the actual operations of our mental lives.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - In this book, one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He takes seriously Hegel's claim that art has exhausted its spiritual vocation, that it is no longer through art that Spirit principally comes to knowledge of itself. He argues, however, that Hegel by no means proclaimed the 'death of art' (as many still imagine) but proclaimed rather the indefinite continuation of art in what Hegel called a 'self-annulling' mode.With astonishing breadth and originality, the author probes the meaning, aesthetics, and historical consequences of that self-annulment. In essence, he argues that the birth of modern aesthetics is the result of a series of schisms--between artist and spectator, genius and taste, and form and matter, for example--that are manifestations of the deeper, self-negating yet self-perpetuating movement of irony. Through this concept of self-annulment, the author offers an imaginative reinterpretation of the history of aesthetic theory from Kant to Heidegger, and he opens up original perspectives on such phenomena as the rise of the modern museum, the link between art and terror, the natural affinity between 'good taste' and its perversion, and kitsch as the inevitable destiny of art in the modern era. The final chapter offers a dazzling interpretation of Dürer's Melancholia in the terms that the book has articulated as its own.The Man Without Content will naturally interest those who already prize Agamben's work, but it will also make his name relevant to a whole new audience--those involved with art, art history, the history of aesthetics, and popular culture.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante.The author presents 'literature' as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia Virgil is Dante's guide.The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a 'comedy,' and it concludes with a discussion of the 'ends of poetry' in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry 'end' does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise.Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'This is one of a handful of books of criticism that has and wil continue to profoundly affect how I think about reading. Fantasm and Fiction makes a timely contribution to a trend in literarty criticism just coming into its own, takes a deserved place in the challenging and presitigious Cultural Memory in the Present series form Stanford, and provides stimulating and exemplary critical thought for all readers of literature.'--Henry Street.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This book examines how one aspect of the social and technological situation of literature--namely, the postal system--determined how literature was produced and what was produced within literature. Language itself has the structure of a relay, where what is transmitted depends on a prior withholding. The social arrangements and technologies for achieving this transmission thus have had a particularly powerful impact on the imagination of literature as a medium.The book has three parts. The first part reconstructs the postal conditions of classic and Romantic literature: the invention of postage in the seventeenth century, which transformed the postal system into a service meant to be used by the population (instead of by the prince alone); the sexualization of letter writing, which was introduced in the middle of the eighteenth century and changed the reading of a letter into an interpretation of intimate confessions of the soul; and Goethe's turning of this new ontology of the letter into a logistics of literature whereby literary authorship was constructed by means of postal logistics, with the precision of engineering.The second part analyzes nineteenth-century postal innovations that facilitated communication through letters and examines how literary works were able to live off such communication. These innovations included the reform of the post office; the invention of the postage stamp; the Universal Postal Union, which subjected letter writing to an economy of materials and uniform standards; and the telegraph and the telephone, which surpassed literature in terms of speed, economy, and analog-signal processing.In the third part, on the basis of a close reading of Franz Kafka's letters to his typist-fiancée, the author demonstrates how postal logistics of love and authorship have worked in the era of modern postal systems and technical media. Kafka's correspondence is deciphered as a 'war of nerves' waged by means of all available techniques and conditions of transmission.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - '[Marin's] mandarin prose, as foreign to our age of mass culture as Poussin's paintings, seems as self-sufficient as the strangely in accessible art it so beautifully describes.'--Common Knowledge.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This innovative work sets two texts by two different authors on facing pages, designed so that they read in tandem--Miller's text on the right, Asensi's on the left. It makes a long trajectory, moving back and forth as an ox plows a field, boustrophedonically, to borrow the figure in Manuel Asensi's title.Black Holes, by J. Hillis Miller, analyzes changes in the contemporary research university in the West. The mission of the research university has been profoundly influenced by the end of the Cold War and by globalization, advances in communication technologies, and shifts in funding from the federal government to transnational corporations. Miller aims to discover what the function of the humanities might be in this new kind of university. Echoing Bill Readings, he calls for a university of dissensus that would be made up of adjacent or overlapping communities, each fundamentally other to the others, each inhabited by its own otherness. Each of those opacities is a kind of black hole in the luminosity or enlightenment to which the university has traditionally been dedicated. Miller concludes with sections on Trollope and Proust that attempt to show how otherness is exemplified in the work of two fundamentally dissimilar authors.Manuel Asensi's J. Hillis Miller: or, Boustrophedonic Reading is the first comprehensive interpretation of Miller's work, one that foregrounds its difference not only from the work of his associates--such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Georges Poulet--but from European literary methodologies such as semiotics, Slavic formalism, Glosematics, narratology, structuralism, and reception theory. Bypassing or challenging conventional accounts of Miller's work, Asensi brings a fresh view to his readings of Miller's criticism. He finds there a complex and partially contradictory 'matrix' that persists, throughout the apparent methodological changes, from Miller's earliest work to the most recent. According to Asensi, that matrix organizes itself around a fascination with the strangeness or otherness of literary works.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Highly recommended for all libraries.'--Library Journal'In describing the political culture that produced Lin Biao, Jin Qiu accomplishes what very few Westerners could ever hope to: the construction of a nuanced and reasonably full-orbed cultural discussion of the texture and tenor of extra-institutional machinations, interpersonal relationships, family and inter-family dynamics, and even jealousies and superstitions that figured into decision-making and policy formulation.'--Canadian Journal of History.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This book argues that a combination of property rights reform, administrative fragmentation, and technological advance has caused the post-Mao Chinese state to lose a significant degree of control over 'thought work,' or the management of propagandistic communications flowing into and through Chinese society.The East Asian economic meltdown of the late 1990's has reinforced the conviction, derived from Communism's nearly worldwide collapse a decade earlier, that the only path to sustained prosperity combines an openness to trade and investment with market economies that are minimally impinged upon by state intervention. But, the author argues, the situations in China demonstrates that the political, social, and cultural costs of 'reform and opening' are high. Notably, the construction of culture in China has fallen into the hands of lower-level government administrators, semiautonomous individuals and groups in society, and foreign-based public and private organizations. Contrary to the prevailing neo-liberal wisdom, however, this transformation has not generated a Habermasian public sphere and an autonomous civil society that will lead China inevitably toward democracy. Instead, the immediate result has been 'public sphere praetorianism,' a condition in which the construction of culture becomes excessively market-oriented without being directed toward the achievement of public political goals.The case of China shows that under such conditions, a society is set adrift and rudderless, with its members unable or unwilling to channel their energies toward the resolution of pressing public concerns, and communication flows dissolve into a patternless mosaic. True, the flows are much less constrained by government than ever before--an important precondition for democratization. But the short-term effect is actually an enervating depoliticization--even narcotization--of society, while the state itself paradoxically continues to lose control.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante.The author presents 'literature' as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia Virgil is Dante's guide.The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a 'comedy,' and it concludes with a discussion of the 'ends of poetry' in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry 'end' does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise.Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Soares writes a lively narrative full of interesting sketches of individuals and events. He navigates the arcane relationships between the Oxford colleges and the University with great clarity. And he deftly handles the ironies of the 'Oxford Myth' and its obfuscation of the realities of modern Oxford.'--History of Education Quarterly'Once there was an ancient foundation, a seat of privilege and powerful connections. Then, quickly, quietly, working from within, it modernized itself. But old myths clung like ivy, failing to reflect the meritocratic make-over, and exposing it in due course to attacks from the Left and Right--attacks to which it was all the more vulnerable for the loss of its old Establishment friends and new dependence on the public purse. This is the tale told by Joseph Soares in The Decline of Privilege: The Modernization of Oxford University, and he tells it enormously well, with a wealth of carefully researched detail, a sharp sense of paradox, and a nice balance between intellectual framework and the living zest of incident and personality.'--Oxford Today.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Mental image, dream, fantasy, hallucination--all these are comprised in the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasm. Perhaps only such a multifarious concept is adequate to the range of visual elements involved in the experience of reading fiction, or of writing it. Soon after the birth of the novel, doctors expressed concern that readers might be possessed by what they were reading, haunted by textual fantasms. Contemporary writers like John Gardner, Maurice Blanchot, and John Banville figure this possession as a kind of textual dreaming: fiction, like dream, draws from a fantasmal unconscious.For the reader's images to become conscious, however, they must be cued by a material text through framing strategies and evocative gaps. This book analyzes the complex relationship between the fantasmal experience and the material text, reading a wide range of works--such as Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan,' Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, and Rimbaud's 'The Vowels'--that treat explicitly what is implicit in reading.Although the specific images of individual readers cannot be predicted, one can speculate on the modes of these images: are they focused or fogged, schematic or emotive, fleeting or enduring These are questions not only for theorists but for artists who make textual visualization visible. Drawing on artists' books, marginal drawings by authors, and films such as Prospero's Books, Fantasm and Fiction illuminates the process of textual visualization.The author develops, in addition, 'A Politics of Visualization' through analyses of the photographs of David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman's film Blue, and Nicole Brossard's novel Picture Theory. In this richly suggestive study, the fantasm emerges as a crucial aspect not only of reading but of any kind of envisioning.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This innovative work sets two texts by two different authors on facing pages, designed so that they read in tandem--Miller's text on the right, Asensi's on the left. It makes a long trajectory, moving back and forth as an ox plows a field, boustrophedonically, to borrow the figure in Manuel Asensi's title.Black Holes, by J. Hillis Miller, analyzes changes in the contemporary research university in the West. The mission of the research university has been profoundly influenced by the end of the Cold War and by globalization, advances in communication technologies, and shifts in funding from the federal government to transnational corporations. Miller aims to discover what the function of the humanities might be in this new kind of university. Echoing Bill Readings, he calls for a university of dissensus that would be made up of adjacent or overlapping communities, each fundamentally other to the others, each inhabited by its own otherness. Each of those opacities is a kind of black hole in the luminosity or enlightenment to which the university has traditionally been dedicated. Miller concludes with sections on Trollope and Proust that attempt to show how otherness is exemplified in the work of two fundamentally dissimilar authors.Manuel Asensi's J. Hillis Miller: or, Boustrophedonic Reading is the first comprehensive interpretation of Miller's work, one that foregrounds its difference not only from the work of his associates--such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Georges Poulet--but from European literary methodologies such as semiotics, Slavic formalism, Glosematics, narratology, structuralism, and reception theory. Bypassing or challenging conventional accounts of Miller's work, Asensi brings a fresh view to his readings of Miller's criticism. He finds there a complex and partially contradictory 'matrix' that persists, throughout the apparent methodological changes, from Miller's earliest work to the most recent. According to Asensi, that matrix organizes itself around a fascination with the strangeness or otherness of literary works.