The Uses of Obscurity

The Uses of Obscurity

Author: Allon White

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-09

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1003821839

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Originally published in 1981, this book examines why and how textual difficulty became a norm of modernist literature and questions how we can begin to account for the forms of obscurity and difficulty which developed in the late 19th Century and which became so important to modernism. The author argues that the decline of realism entailed the growth of ‘symptomatic’ or ‘subtextual’ reading which tended to treat fiction as compromised autobiography. This kind of reading left the author dangerously isolated and exposed in the midst of a newly sophisticated public. Within this general cultural perspective, the book traces the private anxieties that led George Meredith, Joseph Conrad and Henry James to conceal themselves within their complex and resistant fictions. It discusses opacity in the texts themselves – embarrassment and shame in Meredith; ‘engimas’ in Conrad; and the fear of vulgarity and knowledge in Henry James.


Embracing Obscurity

Embracing Obscurity

Author: Anonymous

Publisher: B&H Publishing Group

Published: 2012-10

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1433677814

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Argues for a life based on humility, service, and sacrifice instead of the accepted worldview of a life valuing fame and recognition.


Jade Fall

Jade Fall

Author: Kevin E Carlson

Publisher:

Published: 2020-10-18

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13:

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Lauren and her friends visit an amusement park, Hydro World, located in the Mojave Desert on its opening day. The park is advanced beyond anything Lauren could have imagined-state of the art in a technology that allowed its builders to create whole enclosed ecosystems, mimicking a natural world lost to environmental decay. Then the Jade Fall happens, an enormous green meteor makes landfall, exploding into blinding emerald light. When the light fades, Lauren has survived, and so has Hydro World, but as she looks around, only two of her friends, Bobby and Lisa, are there-everyone else has vanished. Lauren and her friends meet more survivors, and it seems only a fraction of parkgoers survived the Jade Fall. Lauren attempts to lead the survivors out of Hydro World, assisted by the park's central computer, which goes by the name Leviathan. Soon they find the world around them has been altered-often in seemingly impossible ways. Hydro World has become a place where water can burn, gravity can change, and more. In the gloom of the desolate park, new life begins to assert itself. Some are benignly beautiful, but others are unspeakable abominations with too many eyes and too many mouths. Worse for Lauren, she slowly becomes aware of her own impossible changes to her body, developing frightening powers which she tries to keep hidden from her fellow survivors-at first. With extreme power the others lack, she balances on the edge of survival and becoming yet another of Hydro World's monsters. "I'm afraid of the things I can hear, the things I can do. And most of all, I'm afraid that when I'm in the moment doing those things, I'm not afraid at all. I'm afraid that I love it."


Intellectual Impostures

Intellectual Impostures

Author: Jean Bricmont

Publisher: Profile Books

Published: 2011-05-26

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1847657826

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When Intellectual Impostures was published in France, it sent shock waves through the Left Bank establishment. When it was published in Britain, it provoked impassioned debate. Sokal and Bricmont examine the canon of French postmodernists - Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Latour, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari - and systematically expose their abuse of science. This edition contains a new preface analysing the reactions to the book and answering some of the attacks.


The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Author: John Koenig

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1501153668

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “It’s undeniably thrilling to find words for our strangest feelings…Koenig casts light into lonely corners of human experience…An enchanting book. “ —The Washington Post A truly original book in every sense of the word, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows poetically defines emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express—until now. Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a life as vivid and complex as your own? That feeling has a name: “sonder.” Or maybe you’ve watched a thunderstorm roll in and felt a primal hunger for disaster, hoping it would shake up your life. That’s called “lachesism.” Or you were looking through old photos and felt a pang of nostalgia for a time you’ve never actually experienced. That’s “anemoia.” If you’ve never heard of these terms before, that’s because they didn’t exist until John Koenig set out to fill the gaps in our language of emotion. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows “creates beautiful new words that we need but do not yet have,” says John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars. By turns poignant, relatable, and mind-bending, the definitions include whimsical etymologies drawn from languages around the world, interspersed with otherworldly collages and lyrical essays that explore forgotten corners of the human condition—from “astrophe,” the longing to explore beyond the planet Earth, to “zenosyne,” the sense that time keeps getting faster. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is for anyone who enjoys a shift in perspective, pondering the ineffable feelings that make up our lives. With a gorgeous package and beautiful illustrations throughout, this is the perfect gift for creatives, word nerds, and human beings everywhere.


The challenge of the sublime

The challenge of the sublime

Author: Hélène Ibata

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-02-05

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1526117428

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This book examines the links between the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain and eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in particular, is shown to have directly or indirectly challenged visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and visual media such as panoramas and book illustrations, by arguing that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork.


Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma

Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma

Author: Curtis A. Gruenler

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2017-04-30

Total Pages: 636

ISBN-13: 0268101655

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In this book, Curtis Gruenler proposes that the concept of the enigmatic, latent in a wide range of medieval thinking about literature, can help us better understand in medieval terms much of the era’s most enduring literature, from the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm to the great vernacular works of Dante, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and, above all, Langland’s Piers Plowman. Riddles, rhetoric, and theology—the three fields of meaning of aenigma in medieval Latin—map a way of thinking about reading and writing obscure literature that was widely shared across the Middle Ages. The poetics of enigma links inquiry about language by theologians with theologically ambitious literature. Each sense of enigma brings out an aspect of this poetics. The playfulness of riddling, both oral and literate, was joined to a Christian vision of literature by Aldhelm and the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book. Defined in rhetoric as an obscure allegory, enigma was condemned by classical authorities but resurrected under the influence of Augustine as an aid to contemplation. Its theological significance follows from a favorite biblical verse among medieval theologians, “We see now through a mirror in an enigma, then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). Along with other examples of the poetics of enigma, Piers Plowman can be seen as a culmination of centuries of reflection on the importance of obscure language for knowing and participating in endless mysteries of divinity and humanity and a bridge to the importance of the enigmatic in modern literature. This book will be especially useful for scholars and undergraduate students interested in medieval European literature, literary theory, and contemplative theology.


Security Strategies in Linux Platforms and Applications

Security Strategies in Linux Platforms and Applications

Author: Michael Jang

Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Learning

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 538

ISBN-13: 1284110273

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The Second Edition of Security Strategies in Linux Platforms and Applications covers every major aspect of security on a Linux system. Written by an industry expert, this book is divided into three natural parts to illustrate key concepts in the field. It opens with a discussion of the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities associated with Linux as an operating system using current examples and cases. Part 2 discusses how to take advantage of the layers of security available to Linux--user and group options, filesystems, and security options for important services, as well as the security modules associated with AppArmor and SELinux. The book closes with a look at the use of both open source and proprietary tools when building a layered security strategy for Linux operating system environments. Using real-world examples and exercises, this useful resource incorporates hands-on activities to walk readers through the fundamentals of security strategies related to the Linux system.


Contemporary Issues of the Semiotics of Law

Contemporary Issues of the Semiotics of Law

Author: Anne Wagner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2005-09-20

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1847312063

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The law is a symbolic construction and therefore rests on a variety of undertakings. What gives law its meaning is,for some, ideology, for others, the welfare of the majority. However, what is manifest is a conception of the law as a material structure that carries symbols of everyday life. The analyses that are made in the law and semiotics movements show that the laws symbolism cannot be understood by reference only to itself, a strictly legal meaning. It is a symbol that conveys life, a symbol that in itself is contaminated with life, politics, morality and so on. Law and Semiotics is an obvious meeting point between traditions, because it is the place where all the discussions about the law can find a common language. This is a collection of different papers where the institution of the law is investigated, in combination with, and as part of, a multiplicity of sign systems. Firstly, law can be understood as part of a global system of meaning (Part I) ; and, secondly, that despite the homogenising threat of globalisation, the play of legal meaning retains a socio-historical specificity (Part II). The global issues of human migration, human rights, colonisation and transnational power are played out in local spaces, in the public discourses through which they are given localised representation, in moments of activism, and as a tool of subversion. The law is a rhetorical device which at once constitutes these global and local truths but which is also constituted by them.


Between Friends

Between Friends

Author: John M. Najemy

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0691656649

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Between Friends offers the first extended close reading of the most famous epistolary dialogue of the Renaissance, the letters exchanged from 1513 to 1515 by Niccolo Machiavelli and Francesco Vettori. John Najemy reveals the literary richness and theoretical tensions of the correspondence, the crucial importance of the dialogue with Vettori in Machiavelli's emergence as a writer and political theorist, and the close but complex relationship between the letters and Machiavelli's major works on politics. Unlike previous and mostly fragmentary treatments of the correspondence, this book reads the letters as a continuously developing, collaborative text in which problems of language and interpretation gradually emerge as the critical issues. Najemy argues that Vettori's skeptical reaction to Machiavelli's first letters on politics and provoked Machiavelli into a defense of language's power to represent the world, a notion that soon become the underlying assumption of The Prince. Later, and largely through an apparently whimsical exchange of letters on love and the foibles of eros, Vettori led Machiavelli to confront the power of desire in language, which opened the way for a different, essentially poetic, approach to writing about politics that surfaces for the first time in the pages of the Discourses on Livy. John M. Najemy is Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400 (North Carolina). Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.