Download Free A Sense Of Things Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online A Sense Of Things and write the review.

In May 1906, the Atlantic Monthly commented that Americans live not merely in an age of things, but under the tyranny of them, and that in our relentless effort to sell, purchase, and accumulate things, we do not possess them as much as they possess us. For Bill Brown, the tale of that possession is something stranger than the history of a culture of consumption. It is the story of Americans using things to think about themselves. Brown's captivating new study explores the roots of modern America's fascination with things and the problem that objects posed for American literature at the turn of the century. This was an era when the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of things suddenly came to define a national culture. Brown shows how crucial novels of the time made things not a solution to problems, but problems in their own right. Writers such as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James ask why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears, and to shape our wildest dreams. Offering a remarkably new way to think about materialism, A Sense of Things will be essential reading for anyone interested in American literature and culture.
Wallace Stevens the poet and Wallace Stevens the insurance executive: for more than one critical generation it has seemed as if these two men were unacquainted--that Stevens was a poet who existed only in the rarefied world of language. However, the idea that Stevens lived a double life, the author maintains, is misleading. This compelling book uncovers what Stevens liked to think of as his "ordinary" life, a life in which the demands of politics, economics, poetry, and everyday distractions coexisted, sometimes peacefully and sometimes not. Examining the full scope of Stevens's career (from the student-poet of the nineteenth century to the award-winning poet of the Cold War years), Longenbach reveals that Stevens was not only aware of events taking place around him, but often inspired by those events. The major achievements of Stevens's career are shown to coalesce around the major historical events of his lifetime (the Great Depression and two World Wars); but Longenbach also dwells on Stevens's two extended periods of poetic silence, exploring the crucial aspects of Steven's life that were not exclusively poetic. Longenbach demonstrates that through Stevens's work in surety law he was far more intimately acquainted with legal and economic concerns than most poets, and he consequently thought deeply about the strengths--and, equally important, the limitations--of poetry as a social product and force.
This book charts the evolution of metaphysics since Descartes and provides a compelling case for why metaphysics matters.
From one of our preeminent neuroscientists: a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling, and culture. The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition of that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular life and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life. In The Strange Order of Things, Damasio gives us a new way of comprehending the world and our place in it. www.antoniodamasio.com
Edwards (philosophy, Furman U.) describes a religious way of living that relies on neither religion's traditional power nor the current enthusiasm for values. He first provides an historical introduction, paying special attention to Kierkegaard and the early work of Heidegger. He then analyzes Heidegger's notion of "poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal," and shows how this notion is exemplified in Thoreau's Walden, Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, and Wallace Stevens' poem "The Plain Sense of Things." Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
From the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, a timely and passionate case for the role of the well-designed object in the digital age. Curator and scholar Glenn Adamson opens Fewer, Better Things by contrasting his beloved childhood teddy bear to the smartphones and digital tablets children have today. He laments that many children and adults are losing touch with the material objects that have nurtured human development for thousands of years. The objects are still here, but we seem to care less and know less about them. In his presentations to groups, he often asks an audience member what he or she knows about the chair the person is sitting in. Few people know much more than whether it's made of wood, plastic, or metal. If we know little about how things are made, it's hard to remain connected to the world around us. Fewer, Better Things explores the history of craft in its many forms, explaining how raw materials, tools, design, and technique come together to produce beauty and utility in handmade or manufactured items. Whether describing the implements used in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the use of woodworking tools, or the use of new fabrication technologies, Adamson writes expertly and lovingly about the aesthetics of objects, and the care and attention that goes into producing them. Reading this wise and elegant book is a truly transformative experience.
We live in an age when the growth of the Internet has made it easier than ever to gain access to information and accumulate knowledge. But information is not the same as meaning, nor is knowledge identical with wisdom. Many people feel engulfed by a tsunami of facts in which they can find no meaning. In thirteen short, accessible chapters McGrath, author of the bestselling The Dawkins Delusion, leads the reader through a nontechnical discussion of science and faith. How do we make sense of the world around us? Are belief in science and the Christian faith compatible? Does the structure of the universe point toward the existence of God? McGrath's goal is to help readers see that science is neither anathema to faith, nor does it supersede faith. Both science and faith help with the overriding human desire to make sense of things. Faith is a complex idea. It is not a blind leap into the dark but a joyful discovery of a bigger picture of wondrous things of which we are all a part.
A Deleuzian guide to reading the world, Reading the Way of Things is an exploration of the ideas of McLuhan, Deleuze, Guattari, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Burroughs, and more. It is a book that aims at getting the reader past teleological interpretations and questions, letting the reader in on new ways of doing criticism as well as new ways of going, being, and thinking.
We are guilty of actions that make no sense. We perform acts of beauty and acts of ugliness. We give in to hidden ambitions, latent hungers, and clumsy grasps at insight. At the heart of these stories are the rituals—grand and small—in which we humans partake; the peculiar gestures we hope will forge meaning or help us glean some sort of understanding. They may be formally ceremonial and spiritual, like the imposition of ashes in a darkened church. But often they are secular, private, and bizarre. A woman slips her son's old baby tooth into her mouth as he's led away to prison. A girl in a tunnel plays an invisible piano while bombs ravage the city above. A man with a laser machine creates a private galaxy to rekindle lost love. A daughter frantically searches a wax museum for her mother's second self. Set mostly in Michigan, the stories in The Things We Do That Make No Sense are woven through with the power of ritual and glimmer with lush descriptions and poignant dialogue. From both the everyday and the sacred, these characters piece together the strange mosaic of life.
Presents an analysis of nineteenth-century English fiction, focusing on objects found in three Victorian novels, arguing that these items have meanings the modern reader does not understand, but were clear to the Victorian reader.