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The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory
by Matthew HandelmanThis 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 Theory of Communication
by Warren Weaver Claude E ShannonScientific knowledge grows at a phenomenal pace--but few books have had as lasting an impact or played as important a role in our modern world as The Mathematical Theory of Communication, published originally as a paper on communication theory more than fifty years ago. Republished in book form shortly thereafter, it has since gone through four hardcover and sixteen paperback printings. It is a revolutionary work, astounding in its foresight and contemporaneity. The University of Illinois Press is pleased and honored to issue this commemorative reprinting of a classic.
The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature)
by Azelina FlintIn an unprecedented comparison of two of the most important female authors of the nineteenth century, Azelina Flint foregrounds the influence of the religious communities that shaped Louisa May Alcott’s and Christina Rossetti’s visions of female creativity. In the early stages of the authors’ careers, their artistic developments were associated with their patrilineal connections to two artistic movements that shaped the course of American and British history: the Transcendentalists and Pre-Raphaelites. Flint uncovers the authors’ rejections of the individualistic outlooks of these movements, demonstrating that Alcott and Rossetti affiliated themselves with their mothers and sisters’ religious faith. Applying the methodological framework of women’s mysticism, Flint reveals that Alcott’s and Rossetti’s religious beliefs were shaped by the devotional practices and life-writing texts of their matrilineal communities. Here, the authors’ iconic portrayals of female artists are examined in light of the examples of their mothers and sisters for the first time. Flint recovers a number of unpublished life-writings, including commonplace albums and juvenile newspapers, introducing readers to early versions of the authors’ iconic works. These recovered texts indicate that Alcott and Rossetti portrayed the female artist as a mouthpiece for a wider community of women committed to social justice and divine communion. By drawing attention to the parallels in the authors’ familial affiliations and religious beliefs, Flint recuperates a tradition of nineteenth-century women’s mysticism that departs from the individualistic models of male literary traditions to locate female empowerment in gynocentric relationships dedicated to achieving a shared revelation of God.
The Matrix Trilogy (SparkNotes Film Guide)
by SparkNotesThe Matrix Trilogy (SparkNotes Film Guide) Making the reading experience fun! SparkNotes Film Guides are one-stop guides to great works of film–masterpieces that are the foundations of filmmaking and film studies. Inside each guide you&’ll find thorough, insightful overviews of films from a variety of genres, styles, and time periods. Each film guide contains:Information about the director and the context in which the film was made Thoughtful analysis of major characters Details about themes, motifs, and symbols Explanations of the most important lines of dialogue In-depth discussions about what makes a film so remarkable SparkNotes Film Guides are an invaluable resource for students or anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the great films they know and love.
The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century
by Christopher S. NealonChristopher Nealon's reexamination of North America's poetry in English, from Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden to younger poets of the present day, argues persuasively that the central literary project of the past century was to explore the relationship between poetry and capitalism--its impact on individuals, communities, and cultures.
The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect (Corporealities: Discourses Of Disability)
by David T. Mitchell Sharon L. Snyder Susan AntebiThe Matter of Disability returns disability to its proper place as an ongoing historical process of corporeal, cognitive, and sensory mutation operating in a world of dynamic, even cataclysmic, change. The book’s contributors offer new theorizations of human and nonhuman embodiments and their complex evolutions in our global present, in essays that explore how disability might be imagined as participant in the “complex elaboration of difference,” rather than something gone awry in an otherwise stable process. This alternative approach to materiality sheds new light on the capacities that exist within the depictions of disability that the book examines, including Spider-Man, Of Mice and Men, and Bloodchild.
The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes
by Christopher BraiderWhat influence did Ren#65533; Descartes' concept of mind-body dualism have on early modern conceptions of the self? In The Matter of Mind, Christopher Braider challenges the presumed centrality of Descartes' groundbreaking theory to seventeenth-century French culture. He details the broad opposition to rational self-government among Descartes' contemporaries, and attributes conventional links between Descartes and the myth of the 'modern subject' to post-structuralist assessments. The Matter of Mind presents studies drawn from a range of disciplines and examines the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, the drama of Pierre Corneille, and the theology of Blaise Pascal. Braider argues that if early modern thought converged on a single model, then it was the experimental picture based on everyday experience proposed by Descartes' sceptical adversary, Michel de Montaigne. Forceful and provocative, The Matter of Mind will encourage lively debate on the norms and discourses of seventeenth-century philosophy.
The Matter of My Book: Montaigne's Essais as the Book of the Self
by Richard L. RegosinThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.
The Matter of Virtue: Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare
by Holly A. CrockerIf material bodies have inherent, animating powers—or virtues, in the premodern sense—then those bodies typically and most insistently associated in the premodern period with matter—namely, women—cannot be inert and therefore incapable of ethical action, Holly Crocker contends. In The Matter of Virtue, Crocker argues that one idea of what it means to be human—a conception of humanity that includes vulnerability, endurance, and openness to others—emerges when we consider virtue in relation to modes of ethical action available to premodern women. While a misogynistic tradition of virtue ethics, from antiquity to the early modern period, largely cast a skeptical or dismissive eye on women, Crocker seeks to explore what happened when poets thought about the material body not as a tool of an empowered agent whose cultural supremacy was guaranteed by prevailing social structures but rather as something fragile and open, subject but also connected to others.After an introduction that analyzes Hamlet to establish a premodern tradition of material virtue, Part I investigates how retellings of the demise of the title female character in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida among other texts structure a poetic debate over the potential for women's ethical action in a world dominated by masculine violence. Part II turns to narratives of female sanctity and feminine perfection, including ones by Chaucer, Bokenham, and Capgrave, to investigate grace, beauty, and intelligence as sources of women's ethical action. In Part III, Crocker examines a tension between women's virtues and household structures, paying particular attention to English Griselda- and shrew-literatures, including Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. She concludes by looking at Chaucer's Legend of Good Women to consider alternative forms of virtuous behavior for women as well as men.
The Matter of Voice: Sensual Soundings
by Karmen MacKendrickPhilosophers for millennia have tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. Nevertheless, voices resonate among bodies, among texts, and across denotation and sound; they are singular, as unique as fingerprints, but irreducibly collective too. They are material, somatic, and musical. But voices are also meaningful—they give body to concepts that cannot exist in abstractions, essential to sense yet in excess of it. They can be neither reduced to neurology nor silenced in abstraction. They complicate the logos of the beginning and emphasize the enfleshing of all words. Through explorations of theology and philosophy, pedagogy, translation, and semiotics, all interwoven with song, The Matter of Voice works toward reintegrating our thinking about both speaking and authorial voice as fleshy combinings of meaning and music.
The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing
by Thomas HardingBorn into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1919, George Weidenfeld fled to England in 1938 to escape the Nazi regime. There he began a career in publishing that would make him one of the most influential figures in the industry. Over the course of his long and illustrious career he championed some of the most important voices of the twentieth century, from Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow to Harold Wilson, Isaiah Berlin and Henry Kissinger.But what do we know about the man himself? Was he, as described by some, the 'greatest salesperson', 'the world's best networker', 'the publisher's publisher' and 'a great intellectual'? Was his lifelong effort to be the world's most famous host a cover for his desperate loneliness? Who, in fact, was the real George Weidenfeld and how did he rise so successfully within the ranks of London and New York society? Providing a full, unvarnished and at times difficult history of this complex man, this first biography of a titan of culture is also a story of resilience, determination and the power of ideas to shape history.
The Mayan Languages
by Nora C. England Judith Aissen Roberto Zavala MaldonadoThe Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken. The Mayan Languages: provides detailed grammatical sketches of approximately a third of the Mayan languages, representing most of the branches of the family; includes a section on the historical development of the family, as well as an entirely new sketch of the grammar of "Classic Maya" as represented in the hieroglyphic script; provides detailed state-of-the-art discussions of the principal advances in grammatical analysis of Mayan languages; includes ample discussion of the use of the languages in social, conversational, and poetic contexts. Consisting of topical chapters on the history, sociolinguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, and acquisition of the Mayan languages, this book will be a resource for researchers and other readers with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language acquisition, and linguistic typology.
The McGraw-Hill Guide: Writing for College, Writing for Life
by Duane Roen Gregory Glau Barry MaidWith The McGraw-Hill Guide, students will take a goals-oriented approach to their writing assignments using proven techniques related to student success. They’ll set goals for their writing, use effective composing strategies to achieve those goals, and assess their progress towards achieving them. Students will learn the underlying principles on which the effectiveness of any writing is assessed―by assessing it themselves―and develop the strategies they’ll need to support their writing long after they have completed college. <p><p> Connect Composition supports instruction across multiple semesters and courses with interactive exercises, online learning videos, enriched ebook materials, annotation and writing tools, and much more! <p><p> • LearnSmartAchieve – a continuously adaptive learning system that pinpoints students’ individual strengths and weaknesses and provides personalized support to help them master key topics and material. LearnSmart Achieve provides foundational support on key course areas such as the writing process, critical reading, the research process, reasoning and argument, grammar and common sentence problems, punctuation and mechanics, style and word choice, and multilingual writer support. <p><p>• Power of Process – a critical reading and writing tool that guides students through instructor-chosen strategies and helps them engage directly with a text through highlighting, annotation, and short answer questions. <p><p>• Analytics - Progress dashboards that quickly show how you are performing on your assignments and tips for improvement.
The McGraw-Hill Handbook (Second Edition)
by Elaine Maimon Janice Peritz Kathleen YanceySpecific, student- and instructor-tested features of The McGraw-Hill Handbook equip today's students with tools for learning, writing, researching, and editing. The book also provides students and teachers with access to powerful online resources.
The McGraw-Hill Reader: Issues Across the Disciplines
by Gilbert H. MullerThe McGraw-Hill Reader addresses the liberal arts tradition, cross-curricular ideas, and diverse viewpoints through more than one hundred quality prose works from prominent writers and thinkers. A range of readings from both classic and contemporary sources and from across the disciplines―from education, the social sciences, business and economics, the humanities, and the sciences―provoke critical thought and effective writing.
The McGraw-Hill Reader: Issues Across the Disciplines Eighth Edition
by Gilbert H. MullerAddressing the continuing interest in liberal arts issues, interdisciplinary themes, multicultural perspectives, and critical thinking, The McGraw-Hill Reader provides students with a full range of quality prose works spanning various ages, cultures, and subjects.
The Mcgraw-Hill Reader: Issues Across the Disciplines (11th edition)
by Gilbert H. MullerThe McGraw-Hill Reader addresses the liberal arts tradition, cross-curricular ideas, and diverse viewpoints through more than one hundred quality prose works from prominent writers and thinkers. A range of readings from both classic and contemporary sources and from across the disciplines provoke critical thought and effective writing.
The Meaning of Constructions (Elements in Construction Grammar)
by Benoît Leclercq Cameron MorinThis Element offers a primer for the study of meaning in a Construction Grammar approach. It reviews the main principles of meaning shared across constructionist frameworks, including its ubiquity in grammatical structure, its usage-based formation, and its nature as the output of cognitive representations. It also reviews the importance given to meaning in construction-based explanations of sentence composition, innovative language use, and language change. Paradoxically, the Element shows that there is no systematic framework delineating the rich structure of constructional meaning, which has led to theoretical disagreements and inconsistencies. It therefore proposes an operational model of meaning for practitioners of Construction Grammar. It details the characteristics of a complex interface of semantic, pragmatic, and social meaning, and shows how this framework sheds light on recent theoretical issues. The Element concludes by considering ways in which this framework can be used for future descriptive and theoretical research questions.
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary
by Simon WinchesterIt was on New Year's morning, 1928, that an eruption of mad lexical glee from a battered old typewriter on a desk in Baltimore from the hands of Henry Louis Mencken sent news all across the USA of the long-awaited publication of the book that was to crown the English language undisputed monarch of the linguistic kingdom. From the Oxford-based project a total of 414,825 words, ten times as many as had hitherto been suspected of existing, had now been recognized and catalogued, the results of seventy years of Herculean effort by scholars, linguists, and thousands of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people. "The Meaning of Everything" is a readily accessible historical account of the making of the remarkable Oxford English Dictionary, leading up to the appointment of the first editor, James Murray, in 1879 through to its triumphant publication in 1928 and beyond.
The Meaning of Focus Particles: A Comparative Perspective
by Ekkehard KönigFocus particles (words such as even, only, also) play an important role in English, in various syntactic and semantic domains, but their characteristics pose numerous problems for current syntactic frameworks and semantic theories. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the syntax, meaning and use of focus particles and related function words in English and many other languages. It also provides a historical perspective on their development.
The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry
by Robert SheppardThis study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets. The critical approach derives from Robert Sheppard's axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form. Analyzing the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Caroline Bergval, Sean Bonney, Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Kenneth Goldsmith, Allen Fisher, and Geraldine Monk, Sheppard argues that their forms are a matter of authorial design and readerly engagement.
The Meaning of History
by Daniel PipesIn her brilliant new opening essay, Banerjee says of Berdyaev "he was never more than a curious but unwelcome guest in history. He fearlessly engaged it on the level of ideas while remaining alien to its means and ends, gifted with an incurable longing for transcendence." Witness to two world wars, Berdyaev observed the destruction of established cultures in the traumatic birth of new systems. Arrested on political suspicion-by Czarist and then by Bolshevik police—he died in exile in France in 1948, carrying forth his intellectual work until the end.Berdyaev considered the philosophy of history as a field that laid the foundations of the Russian national consciousness. Its disputes were centered on distinctions between Slavophiles and Westerners, East and West. The Meaning of History was an early effort, following World War I, that attempted to revive this perspective. With the removal of Communism as a ruling system in Russia, that nation returned to an elaboration of a religious philosophy of history as the specific mission of Russian thought. This volume thus has contemporary significance. Its sense of the apocalypse, which distinguishes Russian from Western thought, gives the book its specifically religious character.In order to grasp and oppose the complex phenomenon of social and cultural disintegration, Berdyaev shows that human beings must rely upon some internal dialectic. After the debacle of the war, the moment arrived to integrate Russian historical experiences into those of a Europe, which, although torn by schism, still claimed to be the descendant of Christendom. The book is remarkable for its powerful stylistic grace, and astonishingly contemporary feeling.
The Meaning of Life in Romantic Poetry and Poetics (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)
by Ross WilsonThis volume brings together an impressive range of established and emerging scholars to investigate the meaning of ‘life’ in Romantic poetry and poetics. This investigation involves sustained attention to a set of challenging questions at the heart of British Romantic poetic practice and theory. Is poetry alive for the Romantic poets? If so, how? Does ‘life’ always mean ‘life’? In a range of essays from a variety of complementary perspectives, a number of major Romantic poets are examined in detail. The fate of Romantic conceptions of ‘life’ in later poetry also receives attention. Through, for examples, a revision of Blake’s relationship to so-called rationalism, a renewed examination of Wordsworth’s fascination with country graveyards, an exploration of Shelley’s concept of survival, and a discussion of the notions of ‘life’ in Byron, Kierkegaard, and Mozart, this volume opens up new and exciting terrain in Romantic poetry’s relation to literary theory, the history of philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics.
The Meaning of Literature
by Timothy J. ReissIn this searching and wide-ranging book, Timothy J. Reiss seeks to explain how the concept of literature that we accept today first took shape between the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, a time of cultural transformation. Drawing on literary, political, and philosophical texts from Central and Western Europe, Reiss maintains that by the early eighteenth century divergent views concerning gender, politics, science, taste, and the role of the writer had consolidated, and literature came to be regarded as an embodiment of universal values.During the second half of the sixteenth century, Reiss asserts, conceptual consensus was breaking down, and many Western Europeans found themselves overwhelmed by a sense of social decay. A key element of this feeling of catastrophe, Reiss points out, was the assumption that thought and letters could not affect worldly reality. Demonstrating that a political discourse replaced the no-longer-viable discourse of theology, he looks closely at the functions that letters served in the reestablishment of order. He traces the development of the idea of literature in texts by Montaigne, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes, among others; through seventeenth-century writings by such authors as Davenant, Boileau, Dryden, Rymer, Anne Dacier, Astell, and Leibniz; to eighteenth-century works including those of Addison, Pope, Batteux and Hutcheson, Burke, Lessing, Kant, and Wollstonecraft. Reiss follows key strands of the tradition, particularly the concept of the sublime, into the nineteenth century through a reading of Hegel's Aesthetics.The Meaning of Literature will contribute to current debates concerning cultural dominance and multiculturalism. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in literature and in cultural studies, includingliterary theorists and historians, comparatists, intellectual historians, historical sociologists, and philosophers.
The Meaning of Meat and the Structure of the Odyssey
by Egbert J. BakkerThis comprehensive study of the Odyssey sees in meat and meat consumption a centre of gravitation for the interpretation of the poem. It aims to place the cultural practices represented in the poem against the background of the (agricultural) lived reality of the poem's audiences in the archaic age, and to align the themes of the adventures in Odysseus' wanderings with the events that transpire at Ithaca in the hero's absence. The criminal meat consumption of the suitors of Penelope in the civilised space of Ithaca is shown to resonate with the adventures of Odysseus and his companions in the pre-cultural worlds they are forced to visit. The book draws on folklore studies, the anthropology of hunting cultures, the comparative study of oral traditions, and the agricultural history of archaic and classical Greece. It will also be of interest to narratologists and students of folklore and Homeric poetics.