Seven Modes of Uncertainty

Seven Modes of Uncertainty

Author: C. Namwali Serpell

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-04-30

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 0674729099

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Literature is uncertain. Literature is good for us. These two ideas are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature’s capacity to perplex and its ethical value? Seven Modes of Uncertainty contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our experience.


Seven Modes of Uncertainty

Seven Modes of Uncertainty

Author: C. Namwali Serpell

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-04-30

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 0674419685

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Literature is rife with uncertainty. Literature is good for us. These two ideas about reading literature are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature’s capacity to unsettle, perplex, and bewilder us, and literature’s ethical value? To revive this question, C. Namwali Serpell proposes a return to William Empson’s groundbreaking work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our own experience. Taking as case studies experimental novels by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Elliot Perlman, Tom McCarthy, and Jonathan Safran Foer, Serpell suggests that literary uncertainty emerges from the reader’s shifting responses to structures of conflicting information. A number of these novels employ a structure of mutual exclusion, which presents opposed explanations for the same events. Some use a structure of multiplicity, which presents different perspectives regarding events or characters. The structure of repetition in other texts destabilizes the continuity of events and frustrates our ability to follow the story. To explain how these structures produce uncertainty, Serpell borrows from cognitive psychology the concept of affordance, which describes an object’s or environment’s potential uses. Moving through these narrative structures affords various ongoing modes of uncertainty, which in turn afford ethical experiences both positive and negative. At the crossroads of recent critical turns to literary form, reading practices, and ethics, Seven Modes of Uncertainty offers a new phenomenology of how we read uncertainty now.


Spaces of Feeling

Spaces of Feeling

Author: Marta Figlerowicz

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-12-15

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1501714236

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Can other people notice our affects more easily than we do? In Spaces of Feeling, Marta Figlerowicz examines modernist novels and poems that treat this possibility as electrifying, but also deeply disturbing. Their characters and lyric speakers are undone, Figlerowicz posits, by the realization that they depend on others to solve their inward affective conundrums—and that, to these other people, their feelings often do not seem mysterious at all. Spaces of Feeling features close readings of works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, Ralph Ellison, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens. Figlerowicz points out that these poets and novelists often place their protagonists in domestic spaces—such as bedrooms, living rooms, and basements—in which their cognitive dependence on other characters inhabiting these spaces becomes clear. Figlerowicz highlights the diversity of aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts in which these affective dependencies become central to these authors' representations of selfhood. By setting these novels and poems in conversation with the work of contemporary theorists, she illuminates pressing and unanswered questions about subjectivity.


B-Side Books

B-Side Books

Author: John Plotz

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0231553684

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There are the acknowledged classics of world literature: the canonical works assigned in schools, topping every must-read list . . . and then there are the B-Sides. These are the books that slipped through the cracks, went unread, missed their rightful appointment with posterity. They were ahead of their times or behind their times or on a whole different schedule than the rest of the universe. What do you do when a book that you love has been neglected or dismissed by everyone else? In B-Side Books, leading writers, critics, and scholars show why their favorite forgotten books deserve a new audience. From dusty westerns and far-out science fiction to obscure Czech novelists and romance-novel precursors, the contributors advocate for the unsung virtues of overlooked books. They write about unheralded novels, poetry collections, memoirs, and more with understanding, respect, passion, and love. In these thoughtful, often personal essays, contributors—including Stephanie Burt, Caleb Crain, Merve Emre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Carlo Rotella, and Namwali Serpell—read books by writers such as Helen DeWitt, Shirley Jackson, Stanislaw Lem, Dambudzo Marechera, Paule Marshall, and Charles Portis.


Novel Style

Novel Style

Author: Ben Masters

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0198766149

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Marrying lyrical close reading with critical awareness, Novel Style argues for the ethical value of elaborate styles of writing and demonstrates that artistic excessiveness can provide dynamic responses to the moral complexities of our times.


Sensors and Instrumentation, Aircraft/Aerospace, Energy Harvesting & Dynamic Environments Testing, Volume 7

Sensors and Instrumentation, Aircraft/Aerospace, Energy Harvesting & Dynamic Environments Testing, Volume 7

Author: Chad Walber

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-05-03

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 3030126765

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Sensors and Instrumentation, Aircraft/Aerospace and Energy Harvesting, Volume 7: Proceedings of the 37th IMAC, A Conference and Exposition on Structural Dynamics, 2019, the seventh volume of eight from the Conference brings together contributions to this important area of research and engineering. The collection presents early findings and case studies on fundamental and applied aspects of Shock & Vibration, Aircraft/Aerospace, Energy Harvesting & Dynamic Environments Testing including papers on: Alternative Sensing & Acquisition Active Controls Instrumentation Aircraft/Aerospace & Aerospace Testing Techniques Energy Harvesting


Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures

Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures

Author: Timothy Aubry

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-09-03

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 0674988965

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In the wake of radical social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies’ embrace of politics entailed a widespread rejection of aesthetic considerations. For scholars invested in literature’s role in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, appreciating literature’s formal beauty seemed frivolous and irresponsible, even complicit with the iniquities of the social order. This suspicion of aesthetics became the default posture within literary scholarship, a means of establishing the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s political commitments. Yet as Timothy Aubry explains, aesthetic pleasure never fully disappeared from the academy. It simply went underground. From New Criticism to the digital humanities, Aubry recasts aesthetics as the complicated, morally ambiguous, embattled yet resilient protagonist in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first–century literary studies. He argues that academic critics never stopped asserting preferences for certain texts, rhetorical strategies, or intellectual responses. Rather than serving as the enemy of formalism and aesthetics, political criticism enabled scholars to promote heightened experiences of perceptual acuity and complexity while adjudicating which formal strategies are best designed to bolster these experiences. Political criticism, in other words, did not eradicate but served covertly to nurture reading practices aimed at achieving aesthetic satisfaction. Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures shows that literary studies’ break with midcentury formalism was not as clean as it once appeared. Today, when so many scholars are advocating renewed attention to textual surfaces and aesthetic experiences, Aubry’s work illuminates the surprisingly vast common ground between the formalists and the schools of criticism that succeeded them.


Surfing Uncertainty

Surfing Uncertainty

Author: Andy Clark

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0190217014

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Exciting new theories in neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence are revealing minds like ours as predictive minds, forever trying to guess the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. In this up-to-the-minute treatment, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores new ways of thinking about perception, action, and the embodied mind.


Structural Health Monitoring 2000

Structural Health Monitoring 2000

Author: Fu-Kuo Chang

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 1999-09-07

Total Pages: 1104

ISBN-13: 9781566768818

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Comprising 102 papers presented by researchers from all over the world, the proceedings of this workshop contain current information about a variety of structural health monitoring technologies, as well as their current and potential applications in various fields. Emphasis is placed on those technologies that are promising for future applications in industry and government and the infrastructures that are needed to support such technological development. The content of the workshop is divided into keynote presentations (ten altogether), aerospace applications, general applications, civil applications, integration and systems, sensors, and signal processing and diagnostic methods. Includes the editor's summary report on the results of the panel discussions and presentations from the First International Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring held at Stanford U. in September 1997. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)


Musical Acoustics, Neurocognition and Psychology of Music

Musical Acoustics, Neurocognition and Psychology of Music

Author: Bader Rolf (ed./Hrsg.)

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9783631599914

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The volume presents current research in the field of Systematic Musicology at the Institute of Musicology, University of Hamburg. Internationally leading research like the unique 'Acoustic Camera' developed at the Institute or a real-time hardware implementation of Physical Modeling as well as important contributions to the field of Musical Neurocognition and Psychology, like Forensic Music Psychology, or the development of a Syllogistic Music Theory addresses hot topics in Systematic Musicology today. Der Band präsentiert die aktuelle Forschung der Systematischen Musikwissenschaft am Institut für Musikwissenschaft, Universität Hamburg. Bei der international führenden Forschung, wie etwa der weltweit größten 'Akustischen Kamera', welche am Institut entwickelt wurde, oder der Echtzeit-Hardware-Implementierung von physikalischer Modellierung wie auch bei wichtigen Beiträgen auf den Gebieten der Musikalischen Neurokognition und Musikalischen Psychologie, z.B. der Forensischen Musikpsychologie oder der Entwicklung einer Syllogistischen Musiktheorie, handelt es sich um Schlüsselthemen heutiger Musikwissenschaft.