The Science of Character

The Science of Character

Author: S. Pearl Brilmyer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0226815781

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"In 1843, the Victorian political theorist John Stuart Mill outlined a new science, "the science of the formation of character." Although Mill's proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer shows that it survived in the work of Victorian novelists, who cultivated a narrative science of human nature. Brilmyer explores this characterological project in the work of such novelists as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner. Bringing to life Mill's unrealized dream of a science of character, Victorian realists used fiction to investigate the nature of embodied experience, how traits and behaviors in human and nonhuman organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features-shapes, colors, and gestures-come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. In the hands of these authors, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the universal laws governing human life. The Science of Character offers brilliant insights into important novels of the period, including Eliot's Middlemarch, and a fuller picture of English realism during the crucial span between 1870 and 1920"--


Character

Character

Author: Amanda Anderson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-10-23

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 022665866X

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Over the last few decades, character-based criticism has been seen as either naive or obsolete. But now questions of character are attracting renewed interest. Making the case for a broad-based revision of our understanding of character, Character rethinks these questions from the ground up. Is it really necessary to remind literary critics that characters are made up of words? Must we forbid identification with characters? Does character-discussion force critics to embrace humanism and outmoded theories of the subject? Across three chapters, leading scholars Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi reimagine and renew literary studies by engaging in a conversation about character. Moi returns to the fundamental theoretical assumptions that convinced literary scholars to stop doing character-criticism, and shows that they cannot hold. Felski turns to the question of identification and draws out its diverse strands, as well as its persistence in academic criticism. Anderson shows that character-criticism illuminates both the moral life of characters, and our understanding of literary form. In offering new perspectives on the question of fictional character, this thought-provoking book makes an important intervention in literary studies.


The Character Gap

The Character Gap

Author: Christian B. Miller

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0190264225

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We like to think of ourselves and our friends and families as pretty good people. The more we put our characters to the test, however, the more we see that we are decidedly a mixed bag. Fortunately there are some promising strategies - both secular and religious - for developing better characters.


Literature and Character Education in Universities

Literature and Character Education in Universities

Author: Edward Brooks

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1000452107

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Literature and Character Education in Universities presents the potential of literary and philosophical texts for character education in modern universities. The book engages with theoretical and practical aspects of character development in higher education, combining conceptual discussion of the role of literature in character education with applied case studies from university classrooms. Character education within the academic context of the university presents unique challenges and opportunities. Literature and Character Education in Universities presents perspectives from academics in Europe, the USA and Asia, offering unique insights into the ways that engaged reading and discussion of core texts can promote the development of intellectual and moral virtues. Chapters draw on a wide range of texts from Confucius’ Analects to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, focusing on themes such as truthfulness, self-knowledge, prudence, tolerance, friendship, and humility. Literature and Character Education in Universities will be of real use to researchers, academics and postgraduates in the fields of higher education, philosophy, and literature. It should be essential reading for university educators interested in character development and advocates of literary education in modern universities.


Character Studies in the Fourth Gospel

Character Studies in the Fourth Gospel

Author: Hunt, et al

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 746

ISBN-13: 0802873928

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Using various narrative approaches and methodologies, an international team of forty-four Johannine scholars here offers probing essays related to individual characters and group characters in the Gospel of John. These essays present fresh perspectives on characters who play a major role in the Gospel (Peter, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, Thomas, and many others), but they also examine characters who have never before been the focus of narrative analysis (the men of the Samaritan woman, the boy with the loaves and fishes, Barabbas, and more). Taken together, the essays shed new light on how complex and nuanced many of these characters are, even as they stand in the shadow of Jesus. Readers of this volume will be challenged to consider the Gospel of John anew.


Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot

Author: Paul Lawley

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-08-05

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 1441156348

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This book provides an introductory study of Beckett's most famous play, dealing not just with the four main characters but with the pairings that they form, and the implications of these pairings for the very idea of character in the play. After locating Godot within the context of Beckett's work, Lawley discusses some of the play's puzzles and difficulties-including the absent "fifth character", Godot himself.


Teaching Character Education Through Literature

Teaching Character Education Through Literature

Author: Karen E. Bohlin

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780415322027

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Offering guidance to teachers on including character education within their lessons, this book shows how teachers can provide an encounter with literature that enables students to be more responsive to ethical themes and questions.


Family Portraits

Family Portraits

Author: Randy McCracken

Publisher: WestBow Press

Published: 2013-12

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 1490811745

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Pastor and Bible teacher Randy McCracken offers an intimate look at lesser-known members of 1 and 2 Samuel's four main families--those of Samuel, Eli, Saul, and David. Examining characters unfamiliar to many Bible readers, he reveals important lessons for today.


Character and the Christian Life

Character and the Christian Life

Author: Stanley Hauerwas

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 1989-01-15

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 0268088136

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Some fourteen years after its initial publication, this important and influential book, with a new, substantial, and candid introduction by the author, is available in a reasonably priced paperback edition. In this volume Hauerwas assesses recent interest in the “ethics of character” and suggests areas in his own work that now call for some corrective and/or further work.