The Ideology of Imagination
The Ideology of Imagination

Author: Forest Pyle

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0804728623

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To demonstrate his thesis, the author undertakes critical re-readings of four major Romantic authors - Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats - and shows how the legacy of ideology and imagination is reflected in the novels of George Eliot. He shows that for each of these writers, the imagination is neither a faculty that can be presumed nor one idea among others; it is something that must be theorized and, in Coleridge's words, "instituted." Once instituted, Coleridge asserts, the imagination can address England's fundamental social antagonisms and help restore national unity. More pointedly, the institution of the imagination is the cornerstone of a "revolution in philosophy" that would prevent the importation of a more radical - and more French - political revolution.

Geopolitical Imagination
Geopolitical Imagination

Author: Mikhail Suslov

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2020-11-02

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 3838213610

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In his timely book, Mikhail Suslov discusses contemporary Russian geopolitical culture and argues that a better knowledge of geopolitical concepts and fantasies is instrumental for understanding Russia’s policies. Specifically, he analyzes such concepts as “Eurasianism,” “Holy Russia,” “Russian civilization,” “Russia as a continent,” “Novorossia,” and others. He demonstrates that these concepts reached unprecedented ascendance in the Russian public debates, tending to overshadow other political and domestic discussions. Suslov argues that the geopolitical imagination, structured by these concepts, defines the identity of post-Soviet Russia, while this complex of geopolitical representations engages, at the same time, with the broader, international criticism of the Western liberal world order and aligns itself with the conservative defense of cultural authenticity across the globe. Geopolitical ideologies and utopias discussed in the book give the post-Soviet political mainstream the intellectual instruments to think about Russia’s exclusion—imaginary or otherwise—from the processes of a global world which is re-shaping itself after the end of the Cold War; they provide tools to construct the self-perception of Russia as a sovereign great-power, a self-sufficient civilization, and as one of the poles in a multipolar world; and they help to establish the Messianic vision of Russia as the beacon of order, tradition, and morality in a sea of chaos and corruption.

The Mathematical Imagination
The Mathematical Imagination

Author: Matthew Handelman

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2019-03-05

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0823283852

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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.

Age and the Reach of Sociological Imagination
Age and the Reach of Sociological Imagination

Author: DALE. DANNEFER

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-10

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780367190880

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Combining foundational principles of critical social science with recent breakthroughs in research across disciplines ranging from biology to economics, this book offers a scientifically and humanly expanded landscape for apprehending the life course.

Imaginal Politics
Imaginal Politics

Author: Chiara Bottici

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-05-13

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0231527810

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Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins by defining the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language.

Redefining the Role of Language in a Globalized World
Redefining the Role of Language in a Globalized World

Author: Wang, Ai-Ling

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2021-01-22

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1799828336

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Language, while seemingly static, is dynamic and ever-changing, necessitating adaptability in various fields of language studies. It is especially true in a globalized world and an information age. In the field of language and its applications, it is essential to reconsider and redefine existing issues and envision how the changes may have impacts on human beings and on the entire globe. Redefining the Role of Language in a Globalized World is an essential scholarly publication that explores the role language will play in a globalized world and how language changes over time through its interdependent relationship with technology. Featuring a wide range of topics such as bilingualism, native speaker prejudice, and social inequality, this book is essential for educators, linguists, researchers, curriculum designers, academicians, policymakers, librarians, and students.

The Liberal Imagination
The Liberal Imagination

Author: Lionel Trilling

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2012-07-18

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1590175514

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The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.