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This text seeks to offer a new theory of narrative in its uncovering of how conversations and comic interchanges between lovers in stories create an intimacy and happiness of the everyday. Drawing on a diverse body of theory (from sociolinguistics to philosophy to literary criticism) and reading an unexpectedly eclectic group of texts (works by Shakespeare and Tolstoy appear beside Casablanca and I Love Lucy) Kay Young explores how narrative couples play together, struggle together, and return to one another to experience what it means to be in a relationship over time.
What does it mean to be happy? Americans have had an obsession with "the pursuit of happiness" ever since the Founding Fathers enshrined it—along with life and liberty—as our national birthright. Whether it means the accumulation of wealth or a more vaguely understood notion of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, happiness has been an inevitable, though elusive, goal. But it is hard to separate "real" happiness from the banal self-help version that embraces mindless positive thinking. And though we have two booming "happiness industries"—religion, with its promise of salvation, and psychopharmacology, with its promise of better living through chemistry—each comes with its own problems and complications. In Seven Pleasures, Willard Spiegelman takes a look at the possibilities for achieving ordinary secular happiness without recourse to either religion or drugs. In this erudite and frequently hilarious book of essays, he discusses seven activities that lead naturally and easily to a sense of well-being. One of these—dancing—requires a partner, and therefore provides a lesson in civility, or good citizenship, as one of its benefits. The other six—reading, walking, looking, listening, swimming, and writing—are things one performs alone. Seven Pleasures is a marvelously engaging guide to the pursuit of happiness, and all its accompanying delights.
**From the Sunday Times Bestselling Author** Life-affirming - THE TELEGRAPH Wonderful - INDEPENDENT She made it her mission to learn how to be default happy rather than default disgruntled - RADIO 4 - WOMAN'S HOUR Take a leaf out of Gray's book and be kinder to yourself by appreciating life just as it is - IRISH TIMES This book came to me in an hour of need - during lockdown when I had to focus on the positive, appreciate simple things, not lose my shit, and value each day. It was a pure joy for me and held my hand - SADIE FROST Interesting and joyful. Lights a path that could help us to build resilience against society's urging to compare life milestones with peers - LANCET PSYCHIATRY Underwhelmed by your ordinary existence? Disillusioned with your middlin' wage, average body, 'bijou' living situation and imperfect loved ones? Welcome to the club. There are billions of us. The 'default disenchanted'. But, it's not us being brats. Two deeply inconvenient psychological phenomenons conspire against our satisfaction. We have negatively-biased brains, which zoom like doom-drones in on what's wrong with our day, rather than what's right. (Back in the mists of time, this negative bias saved our skins, but now it just makes us anxious). Also, something called the 'hedonic treadmill' means we eternally quest for better, faster, more, like someone stuck on a dystopian, never-ending treadmill. Thankfully, there are scientifically-proven ways in which we can train our brains to be more positive-seeking. And to take a rest from this tireless pursuit. Whew. Catherine Gray knits together illuminating science and hilarious storytelling, unveiling captivating research showing that big bucks don't mean big happiness, extraordinary experiences have a 'comedown' and budget weddings predict a lower chance of divorce. She reminds us what an average body actually is, reveals that exercising for weight loss means we do less exercise, and explores the modern tendency to not just try to keep up with the Murphys, but keep up with the Mega-Murphies (see: the social media elite). Come on in to this soulful and life-affirming read, to discover why an ordinary life may well be the most satisfying one of all.
As a young man growing up near Basel, Jung was fascinated and disturbed by tales of Nietzsche's brilliance, eccentricity, and eventual decline into permanent psychosis. These volumes, the transcript of a previously unpublished private seminar, reveal the fruits of his initial curiosity: Nietzsche's works, which he read as a student at the University of Basel, had moved him profoundly and had a life-long influence on his thought. During the sessions the mature Jung spoke informally to members of his inner circle about a thinker whose works had not only overwhelmed him with the depth of their understanding of human nature but also provided the philosophical sources of many of his own psychological and metapsychological ideas. Above all, he demonstrated how the remarkable book Thus Spake Zarathustra illustrates both Nietzsche's genius and his neurotic and prepsychotic tendencies. Since there was at that time no thought of the seminar notes being published, Jung felt free to joke, to lash out at people and events that irritated or angered him, and to comment unreservedly on political, economic, and other public concerns of the time. This seminar and others, including the one recorded in Dream Analysis, were given in English in Zurich during the 1920s and 1930s.
Ancient questions about the causes and nature of pleasure were revived in the eighteenth century with a new consideration of its ethical and political significance. Rowan Boyson reminds us that philosophers of the Enlightenment, unlike modern thinkers, often represented pleasure as shared rather than selfish, and she focuses particularly on this approach to the philosophy and theory of pleasure. Through close reading of Enlightenment and Romantic texts, in particular the poetry and prose of William Wordsworth, Boyson elaborates on this central theme. Covering a wide range of texts by philosophers, theorists and creative writers from over the centuries, she presents a strong defence of the Enlightenment ideal of pleasure, drawing out its rich political, as well as intellectual and aesthetic, implications.
This book argues for the importance of disability to authors of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle. By examining texts in a variety of genres — ranging from self-experimental medical texts to lyric poetry to metaphysical essays — Stanback demonstrates the extent to which non-normative embodiment was central to Romantic-era thought and Romantic-era aesthetics. The book reassesses well-known literary and medical works by such authors as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Humphry Davy, argues for the importance of lesser-studied work by authors including Charles Lamb and Thomas Beddoes, and introduces significant unpublished work by Tom Wedgwood.
Originally published in 1977, The Hindu Religious Tradition provides a detailed exploration into the different doctrines regarding the nature of Religious Reality and the many paths of search for this Reality within the Hindu religion. The book discusses these differing doctrines from the point of view of their philosophical significance and their use in man’s search for the divine in consideration of the traditional teaching that the divine is already in man and can be realised in direct experience. It provides a comprehensive account of this tradition through considering all aspects that are integral to it, and highlights that the profundity of this tradition lies in that it cannot be limited to the requirements of any one form of conceiving the divine. The Hindu Religious Tradition will appeal to those with an interest in Hinduism, religious philosophy, and theology.
Exposing a fundamental but forgotten capacity to sense with others, this fresh approach to ethics centers on expressive, moving bodies in everyday affective encounters. Common sense has yet to yield its golden promise: robust selves, a stable sense of reality, and bonds of solidarity. The Affection in Between argues that reimagining common sense involves tackling two intractable philosophical puzzles together: the problems of sensory integration and of “other minds.” Construing common sense as either an individual cognitive capacity or a communal body of beliefs and practices, as our tradition of philosophical and political thought has done for too long, constricts possibilities of self and other, ethics and politics. Neither register alone can evade political manipulation and deliver common ground between confident yet unavoidably porous selves. April Flakne begins with a novel interpretation of the neglected Aristotelian concept of sunaisthesis, an embodied, interactive capacity to create overlapping meaning through the cultivation of a sensibility that is neither individual nor communal but unfolds between bodies in movement. Bolstering Aristotle’s concept with classical and contemporary phenomenology, including critical phenomenology, empirical theories of social cognition, and affect theory, Flakne offers fresh answers to a pressing and legitimate skepticism about selfhood and the role that ethics might play in countering disorientation and manufactured division. Through an exploration of the intimate experiences of birth, death, caregiving, and mourning, Flakne brings the ethical and political aspects of interembodied interaction home and into lived experience.