Imagining Ourselves gathers together selections from Canadian non-fiction books that in some way have had a major impact on how we view ourselves as Canadians, revealing how the national identity has been shaped and informed by the written word. Included are selections from such well-known Canadian books as Wild Animals I Have Known (Ernest Thomas Seton), Pilgrims of the Wild (Grey Owl), Klee Wyck (Emily Carr), The Game (Ken Dryden), Renegade in Power (Peter C. Newman), Survival (Margaret Atwood), and The Last Spike (Pierre Berton).
Anyone reading comments in online spaces is often confronted with a collective cultural loss of empathy. This profound loss is directly related to the inability to imagine the life and circumstances of the other. Our malnourished capacity for empathy is connected to an equally malnourished imagination. In order to truly love and welcome others, we need to exercise our imaginations, to see our neighbors more as God sees them than as confined by our own inadequate and ungracious labels. We need stories that can convict us about our own sins of omission or commission, enabling us to see the beautiful, complex world of our neighbors as we look beyond ourselves. In this book, Mary McCampbell looks at how narrative art--whether literature, film, television, or popular music--expands our imaginations and, in so doing, emboldens our ability to love our neighbors as ourselves. The prophetic artists in these pages--Graham Greene, Toni Morrison, and Flannery O'Connor among them--show through the form and content of their narrative craft that in order to love, we must be able to effectively imagine the lives of others. But even though we have these rich opportunities to grow emotionally and spiritually, we have been culturally trained as consumers to treat our practice of reading, watching, and listening as mere acts of consumption. McCampbell instead insists that truly engaging with artists who have the prophetic capacity to create art that wakes us up can jolt us from our typically self-concerned spiritual stupors. She focuses on narrative art as a means of embodiment and an invitation to participation, hospitality, and empathy. Reading, seeing, or listening to the story of someone seemingly different from us can awaken us to the very real spiritual similarities between human beings. The intentionality that it takes to surrender a bit of our own default self-centeredness is an act of spiritual formation. Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves presents a journey through initial self-reflection to a richer, more compassionate look outward, as narrative empowers us to exercise our imaginations for the sake of expanding our capacity for empathy.
Digital self-tracking devices and data have become normal elements of everyday life. Imagining Personal Data examines the implications of the rise of body monitoring and digital self-tracking for how we inhabit, experience and imagine our everyday worlds and futures. Through a focus on how it feels to live in environments where data is emergent, present and characterized by a sense of uncertainty, the authors argue for a new interdisciplinary approach to understanding the implications of self-tracking, which attends to its past, present and possible future. Building on social science approaches, the book accounts for the concerns of scholars working in design, philosophy and human-computer interaction. It problematizes the body and senses in relation to data and tracking devices, presents an accessible analytical account of the sensory and affective experiences of self-tracking, and questions the status of big data. In doing so it proposes an agenda for future research and design that puts people at its centre.
Imagining the Self, Constructing the Past celebrates the various ways in which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are adapted, recollected, and represented in our own day and age. Most of the chapters fit broadly into one of three categories: namely, the representation of the self in medieval and early modern history and literature; the recollection and utilization of the past in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; and the role of the medieval and the early modern in our own society. Overall, the contributions to this volume bear witness to the importance of representation to our understanding of ourselves, each other, and our shared past.
Climate crisis disrupts the beliefs, values and behaviors of contemporary societies, sparking potential for radical changes in culture and consciousness. Drawing upon her experience as a Jungian psychotherapist and a researcher in the field of climate psychology, Sally Gillespie writes about the challenges, dilemmas, opportunities and transformations of engaging with climate and ecological crises. Many factors shape how we understand and respond to the existential threats of climate crisis. This accessible book with its discussions about worldviews, cultural myths, emotional resilience, social connectedness, nature relatedness and collective action explores consciousness change in those most engaged with climate issues. Calling upon the words and stories of many people, including Indigenous leaders, ecologists, campaigners, writers and philosophers, Gillespie encourages us to enter into climate conversations to forge emotional resilience, ecological consciousness and inspired action. With its unique focus on the psychological experience of facing into the climate crisis, this warm and supportive book offers companionship and sustenance for anyone who wants to be alive to our natural world and to the existential challenges of today. It is an essential resource for counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers and other helping professionals, as well as climate campaigners, policy makers, educators, scientists and researchers.
Now in paperback, a bewitching collection of stories and novellas that are “suspenseful, thought-provoking, mystical, and haunting” (Publishers Weekly) Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives draws upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, and interrogation transcripts to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. “An Outtake” chronicles an escaped slave’s take on liberty and the American Revolution; “The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in Haiti and a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent; “The Aeronauts” soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theater of the U. S. Civil War; “Rivers” portrays a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; and in “Acrobatique,” the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back.
Representations in visual arts and fiction play an important part in our lives and culture. Walton presents a theory of the nature of representation, which shows its many varieties and explains its importance. His analysis is illustrated with examples from film, art, literature and theatre.
In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions. Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts—some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering—engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period—its so-called classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.
