The Promise and Premise of Creativity considers literature in the larger context of globalization and "the clash of cultures." Refuting the view that the study of literature is "useless," Eoyang argues that it expands three distinct intellectual skills: creative imagination, vicarious sympathy, and capacious intuition. With the advent of the personal computer and the blurring of cultural and economic boundaries, it is the ability to imagine, to intuit, and to invent that will mark the educated student, and allow her to survive the rapid pace of change. As never before, the ability to empathize with other peoples, to understand cultures very different from one's own, is vital to success in a globalized world. In this, the very "uselessness" of literature may inure the mind to think creatively. Engaging with both the theory and practice of literature, its past and its potential future, Eoyang claims that our sense of the world at large, of the salient similarities and differences between cultures, would be critically diminished without comparative literature.
Creativity is a hot topic in education. As such, there is no shortage of insights or suggestions for how teachers might incorporate creativity into their curriculum. Wading through these suggestions can, however, be quite daunting. This is because many of these suggestions imply that teachers need to somehow radically change their approach to teaching, adopt a new curriculum, or add-on to their existing curriculum. Consequently, many teachers feel that such changes are not feasible and may even come at the cost of supporting students’ academic learning. This book provides an alternative. Teachers need not adopt a new curriculum, radically change what they are already doing, or attempt to add more to their already overflowing plate of curricular responsibilities. Rather, teaching for and with creativity is often more about doing what one is already doing, only slightly better. The aim of this book is to help teachers understand how they can make slight changes to their own teaching, which can substantially support the development of students’ creative potential and result in a more creative approach to teaching. The insights and practical suggestions presented in this book represent some of the newest and most promising work being done in the field of creativity studies. This book is unique in that it presents teachers with concrete ideas for how to simultaneously support creativity and learning. A particularly novel feature of this book is that it offers a blend of theoretical insights and vivid classroom examples to illustrate the kinds of opportunities and challenges that teachers face when they attempt to teach for and with creativity. As such, this book will provide teachers, scholars, researchers, and anyone interested in classroom creativity with new directions for future research and educational practice.
“This tale is a sturdy one that is made even more emphatic by Davies’s terse writing style. The text is heightened in every way by Carlin’s outstanding mixed-media artwork.” — Booklist (starred review) On a mean street in a mean, broken city, a young girl tries to snatch an old woman’s bag. But the frail old woman says the thief can’t have it without giving something in return: the promise. It is the beginning of a journey that will change the girl’s life — and a chance to change the world, for good.
For fans of Harper Lee and Rita Mae Brown, Roy Hoffman's new novel is steeped in a sense of place--coastal Alabama--with its rich tapestry of characters caught in a web of justice not for all. Early Praise for The Promise of the Pelican: "Roy Hoffman has written a fast-paced, mesmerizing and incredibly moving contemporary novel about human and civil rights,"-- bestselling author Lee Smith "A thrilling novel, with characters as memorable as those of Shakespearean tragedy...I could not put it down." --Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife At once a literary crime novel and an intergenerational family drama, The Promise of the Pelican is set in the multicultural South, where justice might depend on the color of your skin and your immigration status. Hank Weinberg is a modern day Atticus Finch, recently retired as a defense attorney in Mobile, Alabama, and a Holocaust survivor, who fled the Nazis as a young child. With his daughter in rehab, he's now taking care of his special needs grandson. Mourning his dead wife, spending mornings fishing on the pier with other octogenarians, he passes the rest of his days watching over his sweet grandson with the help of Lupita, a young Honduran babysitter. When her brother Julio, an undocumented immigrant, is accused of murder, Hank must return to the courtroom to defend him while also trying to save his daughter and grandson's life from spinning out of control. The Promise of the Pelican takes its title from the legend that a pelican will pierce its own breast for blood to feed its starving chicks, a metaphor for one old man who risks all to save the vulnerable. In a crisp prose style Harper Lee called "lean and clean," Hoffman writes from an enormous well of compassion. He fills his new novel with a cast of finely drawn characters of all ages and abilities facing life's harshest challenges and rising to meet them with dignity.
The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.
Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation—and promise to help businesses reap them. A trendy industry, this type of consulting generates courses, workshops, books, and conferences that all claim to hold the secrets of success. But what promises does the notion of innovation entail? What is it about the ideology and practice of business innovation that has made these firms so successful at selling their services to everyone from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies? And most important, what does business innovation actually mean for work and our economy today? In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change. A masterful look at the contradictions of our capitalist age, Creativity on Demand is a model for the anthropological study of our cultures of work.
As the sweltering heat of the southern summer gives way to the sweetness of autumn, the promise of good things, from harvest to the holidays, inspires us all.We begin to imagine filling our homes with chrysanthemums, pumpkins, and floral designs in the burnished colors of fall. Deep crimson, gold, and gingery-orange flowers fill flower shop windows. Nurseries and plant farms offer bronze mums and pansies and kale in jewel tones of royal purple, rose, and gold. To help you turn your imaginings into beautiful reality, Jim DelPrince, Mississippi State University Extension's floriculture expert extraordinaire, has worked with his colleagues to create this enticing and inspiring book full of ideas, designs, and examples you can use to bring the promise of good things into your home and landscape.
Kirkus Reviews calls The Promise one of the Best Books of Fiction, and of Literature in Translation, of the year! * Voted one of the Big Fall Books from Indies by Publishers Weekly & LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 "The world is ready for her blend of insane Angela Carter with the originality of Clarice Lispector."—Mariana Enriquez, LitHub "Both her debut story collection, Forgotten Journey, and her only novel, The Promise, are strikingly 20th-century texts, written in a high-modernist mode rarely found in contemporary fiction."—Lily Meyer, NPR A dying woman's attempt to recount the story of her life reveals the fragility of memory and the illusion of identity. "Of all the words that could define her, the most accurate is, I think, ingenious."—Jorge Luis Borges "I don't know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us."—Italo Calvino "Few writers have an eye for the small horrors of everyday life; fewer still see the everyday marvelous. Other than Silvina Ocampo, I cannot think of a single writer who, at any time in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humor."—Alberto Manguel "Art is the cure for death. A seminal work by an underread master. Required for all students of the human condition."—Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews "This haunting and vital final work from Ocampo, her only novel, is about a woman's life flashing before her eyes when she's stranded in the ocean. . . . the book’s true power is its depiction of the strength of the mind and the necessity of storytelling, which for the narrator is literally staving off death. Ocampo’s portrait of one woman’s interior life is forceful and full of hope."—Gabe Habash, Starred Review, Publishers Weekly "Ocampo is beyond great—she is necessary."—Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance "I don't know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us."—Italo Calvino "These two newly translated books could make her a rediscovery on par with Clarice Lispector. . . . there has never been another voice like hers."—John Freeman, Executive Editor, LitHub "Like William Blake, Ocampo's first voice was that of a visual artist; in her writing she retains the will to unveil immaterial so that we might at least look at it if not touch it."—Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread A woman traveling on a transatlantic ship has fallen overboard. Adrift at sea, she makes a promise to Saint Rita, "arbiter of the impossible," that if she survives, she will write her life story. As she drifts, she wonders what she might include in the story of her life—a repertoire of miracles, threats, and people parade tumultuously through her mind. Little by little, her imagination begins to commandeer her memories, escaping the strictures of realism. Translated into English for the very first time, The Promise showcases Silvina Ocampo at her most feminist, idiosyncratic and subversive. Ocampo worked quietly to perfect this novella over the course of twenty-five years, nearly up until the time of her death in 1993.
