Converse in the Spirit is a comparative study of the writings of William Blake and the German visionary philosopher Jacob Boehme. It argues that the relationship between Blake and Boehme was a meeting of like minds that transcended place and time, that each regarded himself as part of a community of vision, and aspiration, and believed that any predominant form ofthought and understanding was only partial.

If we look at Isis as an archive of research articles representing ways in which historians have written about science over the past century, then one changing practice can be found in discussions of the usefulness of metaphors in the history of the sciences. During the first half of Isis’s history, metaphors were represented in stable categories: image studies, scientific analogies, diffusion, and individual scientists associated with metaphor. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, tools drawn from sociology, feminism, and the (...) history of literature, among others, created new discussions about how metaphors might be used. More recently, useful hybrids have further diversified the ways in which metaphors are discussed. Throughout the history of Isis, the usefulness of metaphors has been renegotiated in ways that suggest a periodization of metaphoric use and access to alternative histories of the sciences. (shrink)

For the philosopher Ivan Illich, society became a set of systems rather than a group of people. As such, society depersonalizes life and brings the need for open non-systematized spaces where people can act and interact outside their typical roles. On the other hand, an absence of formal structures may simply open spaces for the informal reproduction of society’s already well-established structures. Given this conjuncture, can systems be designed to foster personal expression? The answer I found in cybernetics is self-organization, (...) a process of adaptation to a context that can grow different organizations depending on what this context provides. This implies that personal expression is a concern in society’s emergent organizations, calling for meta planning to design the context of some of society’s self-organization processes. The cybernetician Gordon Pask argued that depersonalization follows from non-conversational communications, like the ones that develop in large committees. In response, Pask’s fellow cybernetician Stafford Beer proposed a meeting protocol called Team Syntegrity allowing large groups to subdivide into small integrated discussion groups. While Beer’s work has been extensively discussed in existent literature, this article presents the results of four experiments conducted by using variations of Beer’s protocol to understand both the ease with which it can be adapted to different situations, and the implications of its conversational structure on personal expression. The experiment’s realization demonstrates that the protocol’s preparation is laborious and hard to adapt in a timely manner in situations where participant numbers fluctuate. Automation of these processes, however, offers possibilities to use the approach in loosely organized groups. Automation can also help choosing the most appropriate protocol for particular situations through the manipulation of its configuration. Despite difficulties, the protocol offers promise for different purposes, encouraging personal expression in a way that reverberates with others’ personal perspectives. (shrink)

This is a philosophical review of the exhibition dedicated to Literature – Art titled Mukhaputa (Cover page) held on occasion of the Manipal International Literature and Arts Platform 2017 in Manipal, India. The curatorial strategy of the exhibition explores the intersectional relationships between literature and visual arts at large. The context of this critical review is the recent past of modern literature journals in print that encouraged artists and illustrators to converse with literature and in (...) turn poets and authors to be artists in their own right. Through a reflection on the nature of new forms of art works submitted by various artists to the exhibition, the review situates new methods of interdisciplinary curating which is highly contingent and speculative. Curation, thus, demands a new reading in terms of its role in interdisciplinary creative practice. (shrink)

Kant’s account of moral feeling is continually disputed in the secondary literature. My goal is to focus on the Religion and make sense of moral feeling as it appears in this context. I argue that we can best understand moral feeling if we note its place in Kant’s concerns about the possibility of moral conversion. As Kant notes, if the new, morally upright man is of a different character than the man he used to be, then it remains (...) unclear how the new man can properly bear the debts of his old self. To address this issue, we need the presupposition that a person is both continually conscious of her empirical, bodily identity and capable of experiencing a felt recognition of the moral law; without this presupposition, I argue that fair punishment and the just payment of evil debts is impossible. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this study to shed light on the importance of social media hosted content related to socially-motivated discussions. Moving from the field of communication for development, the research leverages social media as a powerful tool for collecting and analyse peer-to-peer communication towards the conceptualization of eVoices of Unheard. The deep understanding of these conversation can generate recommendations for organizations and governments designing and providing interventions fostering local socio-economic development.Design/methodology/approachThe study presents a large-scale analysis of social media interactions on (...) the topic “#favela” to generate insights into a social network structure, narrative contents and meaning generated.FindingsStructurally, the analysed networks are comparable with those presented in current academic literature; automatic text analysis confirmed the promise of the inner value of communication for development opening the floor to conceptualization of the “eVoices of unheard”, which is the collective and conscious use of social media to mediate community discussions about tangible and intangible issues related to socio-economic development.Originality/valueFramed within the rise of interactive communication for development this research show that social media an support the notion of voice proposed by Couldry moving from process towards value thereby understanding intangible issues related with socio-economic development. (shrink)

In the concluding pages of his first major book, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, René Girard asserts that “Toutes les conclusions romanesques sont des conversions. Personne ne peut en douter” (All novelistic conclusions are conversions; it is impossible to doubt this).1 By this he means simply that there comes a moment when both the great novelists whom he studies and their characters recognize a fundamental truth that dramatically changes them: a life founded on human desire alone can end only in (...) misery and failure. Although not necessarily religious in nature, this novelistic conversion, as Robert Doran puts it in his recent edition of Girard’s uncollected writings on literature and literary theory .. (shrink)

Tom Andersen’s reflecting team process, which allowed families to witness and respond to the talk of professionals during therapy sessions, has been described as revolutionary in the field of family therapy. Reflecting teams are prominent in a number of family therapy approaches, more recently in narrative and dialogical therapies. This way of working is considered more a philosophy than a technique, and has been received positively by both therapists and service users. This paper describes how dialogical therapists conceptualise the reflective (...) process, how they work to engage families in reflective dialogues and how this supports change. We conducted semi-structured, reflective interviews with 12 dialogical therapists with between 2 and 20 years of experience. Interpretative Phenomenological analysis of transcribed interviews identified varying conceptualisations of the reflecting process and descriptions of therapist actions that support reflective talk among network members. We adopted a dialogical approach to interpretation of this data. In this sense, we did not aim to condense accounts into consensus but instead to describe variations and new ways of understanding dialogical reflecting team practices. Four themes were identified: Lived experience as expertise; Listening to the self and hearing others; Relational responsiveness and fostering connection; and Opening space for something new. We applied these themes to psychotherapy process literature both within family therapy literature and more broadly to understand more about how reflecting teams promote helpful and healing conversations in practice. (shrink)

Inspired and in honor of the work of noted political theorist Mary P. Nichols, the essays in this volume explore political ideas and implications in a range of works of philosophy, literature, and film from classical antiquity to the present day, creating an interdisciplinary conversation across genres.

In recent years, few areas of research have advanced as rapidly as cognitive science, the study of the human mind and brain. A fundamentally interdisciplinary field, cognitive science has both inspired and been advanced by work in the arts and humanities. In _Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics,_ Frederick Luis Aldama and Patrick Colm Hogan, two of the most prominent experts on the intersection of mind, brain, and culture, engage each other in a lively dialog that (...) sets out the foundations of a cognitive neuroscientific approach to literature. Despite their shared premises, Aldama and Hogan differ—sometimes sharply—on key issues; their discussion therefore presents the reader not with a single doctrine, but with options for consideration—an appropriate result in this dynamic field. With clarity and learning, Aldama and Hogan consider five central topics at the intersection of literature and cognitive science. They begin with the fundamental question of the nature of the self. From here, they turn to language, communication, and thought before moving on to the central issue of the structure and operation of narrative. The book concludes with thought-provoking explorations of aesthetics and politics. Illustrating their arguments with work that ranges from graphic fiction and popular cinema to William Faulkner and Bertolt Brecht, Aldama and Hogan leave the reader with a clear sense of what cognitive cultural studies have already achieved and the significant promise the discipline holds for the future. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay shows how certain limit-points of Lacan's psychoanalytic discourse in his 1955–56 seminar on The Psychoses tangentially brush up against Maurice Blanchot's writing on the neuter, as presented in The Space of Literature from 1955. The effort is to strike up a conversation between Lacan's “clinical discourse” and Blanchot's “critical writing” on the topics of language, writing, authority, and madness. In this regard, the essay approaches an infinite point of approximation between the procedure of psychosis and the (...) procedure of literary writing by questioning whether, at some point in these different ways of proceeding, they may share a certain experience of language. Namely, this is an experience of a language that, as stated by both Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, “speaks all by itself” and does so incessantly and with a certain furious neutrality. (shrink)

Spirituality has long been considered a dimension of holistic palliative care. However, conceptualizations of spirituality are in transition in the nursing literature. No longer rooted within religion, spirituality is increasingly being defined by the universal search for meaning, connectedness, energy, and transcendence. To be human is to be spiritual. Some have argued that the concept of spirituality in the nursing literature has become so generic that it is no longer meaningful. A conceptualization that attempts to be all‐encompassing of (...) what it means to live a human life has a tendency to render invisible the differences that make life meaningful. For palliative patients in particular, a generic approach may obscure and relativize the important values and beliefs that inform the critical questions that many patients grapple with at end of life. A different approach to conceptualizing spirituality can be achieved through the use of typologies. Rather than obscuring difference, categories are constructed to illuminate how spirituality is understood within a diverse society and how those understandings might influence patient–provider relationships. What follows in this article is a dialogue illustrating one typology of spirituality constructed from a review of selected nursing literature. The hypothetical narrator and three participants, representing the positions of theism, monism, and humanism, discuss their understandings of spirituality and religion, and how those understandings influence the intersections between nursing ontology, epistemology, and spiritual care. (shrink)

A path-breaking intervention in current debates on reading and literature, the two complementary essays—one on literature and the other on reading—focus largely on texts in English and French, but also refer to other literatures. The authors propose a way of reading literature that not only synthesizes some earlier tendencies and puts them in context, but also propounds a revolutionary understanding of the nature of literature and reading. The writers taken up for discussion include William Shakespeare, Joseph (...) Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, William Burroughs, Dylan Thomas, Attia Hosain, Albert Wendt, Zadie Smith, Philip Hensher, Mohsin Hamid and many others. (shrink)

Examines the connections between American philosophy and literature. This title includes discussion of subjects ranging from Stephen Crane's metaphysics to business ethics in William Dean Howells, pragmatic religion in Willa Cather and Harold Frederic, John Steinbeck's philosophy of work, and Norman Maclean's philosophy of community.

This book is a philosophical reflection on the experience of time from within exile. Its focus on temporality is unique, as most literature on exile focuses on the experience of space, as exile involves dislocation, and moods of nostalgia and utopia. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback proposes that in exile, time is experienced neither as longing back to the lost past nor as wanting a future to come but rather as a present without anchors or supports. She articulates this present (...) as a "gerundive" mode, in which the one who is in exile discovers herself simply being, exposed to the uncanny experience of having lost the past and not having a future. To investigate this, the book establishes a conversation among three authors whose work has exemplified this sense of gerundive time: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot, and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. The book does not aim to discuss how these authors understand the relation between time and exile but enters in conversation with them in relation to this question. Attempting to think and express this difficult sense of time from within exile, the book engages with the relation between thought and language, and between philosophy and literature. Departing from concrete existential questions, it opens new philosophical and theoretical modes through which to understand what it means to be present in times of exile. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Communicating Conversion:Penitential Turn Transmission in the Early Franciscan FraternityKrijn PanstersIntroductionThe literature on religious conversion shows that there is no comprehensive inventory of individual conversion stories that may provide the basic materials for a genealogy of Christian conversion, or of a further examination of its tradition.1 The scholarly interpretations that we have almost exclusively concern conversion narratives about anonymous masses, such as the Saxons (...) under Charlemagne, or the conversions of a limited number of famous people.2 These include the "usual suspects" such as St. Paul, whose conversion led him to become a follower of Jesus,3 St. Augustine, who also converted to Christianity,4 John Wesley, whose conversion led him to begin his own ministry,5 and Thomas Merton, who converted to Catholicism and became a priest.6 To this exclusive crowd of icons of Christian conversion certainly belongs St. Francis of Assisi (†1226), [End Page 171] whose exemplary conversion experience centers on penance (recognition of himself as a sinner, conversion of the heart, rejection of worldly life, imitation of Christ) and whose case is special and exceptional in that the event of the commencement of his penitential life remains the essence of the core of his spiritual preaching and teaching.In this article, I will therefore deal with Francis's penitential turn transmission—his communication of a spiritual propositum based on conversion from sin to virtue—and thus with his main spiritual message.7 I will start with a short description of how Francis turned his conversion experience, an episode that has been studied extensively as an important part of his biography, into the cornerstone of his spiritual transmission, viz., his promotion of a new religious program. I will continue with a contextualization of Francis's communication of conversion from a broader historical-theological perspective. I will then analyze the deeper dimensions of his call to conversion, viz., his instruction of "doing penance" in terms of turning from sin to virtue. I will conclude with a reflection on the continuation of his spiritual transmission within the Franciscan order and, furthermore, on the comparison with other "conversional communications" in the Christian tradition.Francis's Communication of ConversionFrancis described his conversion to a life of "doing penance" as the outcome of an encounter with outcasts, after which "what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body" and he "delayed a little and left the world."8 In this confession, he conceptualized his religious [End Page 172] turnabout as the start of the penitential life and, with this, as an invitation to his readers to also change the orientation and direction of their lives and to switch from worldliness to otherworldliness—to the realization, from now on, not of worldly but of heavenly goods. It is very likely that Francis had already heard the call to conversion and penitential life in the encounter with certain Gospel texts.9 As is evident from his conversional account, however, he truly "first recognized himself as a sinner"10 in an encounter with lepers. It was this spiritual event, causing a moral shift from selfishness to social concern,11 that brought about a radical reorientation toward a life of faith, a remarkable religious renewal, and a rapid replacement of sin with salvation. It was also this existential experience, this self-perceived transition "from damnation to redemption," that came to represent the essence of the evangelical program that Francis developed in the following years. In the words of André Vauchez:The text of the Gospel to which Francis and his companions never ceased referring in their preaching included this dimension: "Do penance! The kingdom of heaven is at hand!" (or "is coming," according to the other version of Matthew 4:17 then in circulation). But the conversion to which they were inviting [End Page 173] their listeners was not presented as a simple preparation or preliminary step that was necessary to pass through in order to attain perfection. It already included entry into this "kingdom of heaven," which it was helping to create here and now (hinc et nunc). Far from any millenarian speculation or complex divisions of the history of salvation which certain ecclesiastical authors... (shrink)

In response to the phenomenon of women converting to Islam, a body of research has emerged, engaging with the question, ‘Why are Western women, raised in liberal contexts, converting to Islam?’ This line of enquiry is not limited to academic literature. In recent years, converts to Islam have faced intense scrutiny in mainstream media across Europe. This article contributes an analysis of documentaries to the study of representations of female converts to Islam, focusing particularly on the British documentary Make (...) Me a Muslim and the Swiss documentary Les Converties d’Allah. We suggest that comparing these two documentaries illuminates certain common narrative threads in media representations of female converts to Islam across different European contexts. In this article, we firstly situate this research within existing literature on gender and conversion to Islam and outline our approach to the study of documentaries on women’s conversion to Islam. Secondly, we analyse the two documentaries, focusing on their shared concerns, namely gender equality and women’s oppression, and the familial environment of the female convert. We argue that paying attention to how female converts are represented illuminates some of the ways in which European framings of the ‘in-betweenness’ of female converts to Islam create notions of female converts as ‘vulnerable-fanatics’ prone to ‘radicalisation’, and threatened by ‘oppressive’ Islam. We demonstrate how female converts participating in documentaries at times complicate and talk back to apprehensions regarding equality, oppression and radicalisation. Finally, we focus in a similar way on understandings of female converts as ‘troublemakers’ within their family environments. Throughout the analysis, we show how the figure of the female convert as vulnerable-fanatic and as family troublemaker is gendered and interlaced with concerns about essentialised cultural difference and radicalisation. (shrink)

What does a famed literary theorist have to say about the interaction between ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’? Well, if he's Garrett Stewart, the celebrated agent of pyrotechnic style in the service of durable insights across disparate disciplines and media, then we have much reason to lean in and listen. Stewart is the author of 20 books that range with uncanny competency across Victorian narrative, contemporary American fiction, written auralities, poetics and prose stylistics, cinematic evolution from silver oxide to screen pixel, (...) book art, scenes of reading in painting, and most recently, the vocal drama of Barbra Streisand. The distances between his disciplinary terrains are as vast as his close readings of them are coordinated and trenchant. Here, sitting down before a shared conversational canvas, Stewart fields questions from David LaRocca, who asks how he, if he, thinks about the program of literature and philosophy. LaRocca, editor of the recent Attention Spans: Garrett Stewart, a Reader (Bloomsbury, 2024) and the forthcoming Bandwidths: Reading Across Media with Garrett Stewart (Bloomsbury), tracks the urgency of our moment—in which literature and philosophy are independently besieged and yet may concede little rapprochement. Where does philosophy happen in literature (a philosopher's question) is turned around by Stewart such that we see literature conjuring philosophy at the level of the sentence. We are not peering ‘in’ so much as looking ‘at’ the art of literature teaching philosophy through refined reading and the analytical inquest of the syllable and the sayable. Anyone who works at the fraught fissure of these realms will benefit from the ways Stewart makes literature and philosophy sensible to one another—even as he productively unsettles the terms and conditions of their affiliation. (shrink)

Religious conversion revolutions the boundaries which delimit personal identity. Therefore, the main semiotic problem of mental and cultural representations of this religious phenomenon is to convey simultaneously a feeling of sameness and otherness, identity and change. In the present paper, mirrors are analysed as cultural mechanisms which enable representations to accomplish this paradoxical task. After a brief survey concerning literature on mirrors, some early-modern religious texts using these optical instruments as representative devices are analysed in-depth: a painting of (...) the Magdalene’s conversion by Artemisia Gentileschi, an engraving representing conversion from a 17th-century French book, a fragment from Sainte Theresa’s spiritual autobiography, a passage from John Calvin’s Institution de la religion chrétienne. In its conclusion, the paper underlines the importance of Saint Paul’s metaphoric conception of mirrors for the cultural history of these objects, and tries to define the role which cultural semiotics should play concerning this kind of representative mechanisms. (shrink)

The book evaluates on-going ethical conversations to learn how emotional communication is received, teachings internalized, and a religious world-view brought to life. Exploring how religious values saturate people's consciousness to induce subtle shifts in moral and ethical sensibilities, this book is about people's practices that illuminate how Islam is lived. Based on fieldwork conducted in Ankara between 2010-2016, the study enquires into people's ethical, religious, and moral motivations, through the use of the ethnographic method and "thick description". Conversations and interviews (...) with officials, community leaders, students, entrepreneurs, professionals, and blue-collar workers, were subjected to close scrutiny to foreground societal change and churning. To capture perspectives absent or deliberately overlooked in mainstream public discourse and scholarship, fieldwork was conducted in locations ranging from homes, offices, university dorms, and the shrines of saints. In listening closely to how people talk about their religious practices, the book addresses the question of how Islamic subjectivities are being forged in Turkey. The study unveils how people are pushed to re-think old practices and attitudes in the process of reinterpreting Islam in the light of contemporary concerns. Filling a gap in the literature where micro-level, grounded analyses of culture and society are relatively rare, the book is a key resource for readers interested in anthropology of religion and gender, ethnography, Turkey and the Middle East. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on conversational thinking to demonstrate the value of public reasoning in building a decent world and true democracies. We shall take into account the views of selected scholars, especially John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, on law and democratic practice, to explain why post-colonial Africa is weighed down by sociopolitical hegemonies that have aversion to their opposition and eliminate room for strong institutions, rule of law and human rights. In light of conversational thinking, this eliminates any (...) chance for “creative struggle,” i.e. a philosophers struggle against the post-colonial imaginary/social agents to dethrone strong individuals and create strong institutions. In the absence of these indices which a conversational orientation may engender, it is difficult to transform bogus democracy into true democracy and thus to create a decent society. Post-colonial Africa mired in social regression, political crisis and economic stagnation urgently needs conversational tonics to overcome the ineffectiveness of bogus democracy. We postulate a thesis about three structural transformations forming what we call Democratic Transformational Programme. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:666 Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Lana Dee Povitz To See and Be Seen: In Conversation with JEB August 12, 2017; a hot, bright morning. Ariel and I disembark at the train station in Takoma, DC, and head toward the waiting car. In the driver’s seat is one of the most important photographers of lesbian lives in the United States, Joan E. Biren, (...) popularly known as JEB. Decades before social media made images of nearly anything accessible to nearly anyone with a web connection, JEB published Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians in 1979—in her words, “The first lesbian [photography] book that was going to say LESBIAN on the cover and have real people with real faces and first names on the inside.”1 A videographer later in her career, JEB made her mark traveling around the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s with her Dyke Show.2 Formally titled Lesbian Images in Photograph : 1850–the present, this constantly evolving visual and audio performance featured between three hundred and four hundred slides of lesbians or lesbian-like women from 1850 to the present.3 At the crest 1. Joan E. Biren, phone interview with Ariel Goldberg, October 10, 2017. Transcript in author’s possession. 2. JEB toured with the Dyke Show in the United States and Canada from 1979 to 1985. See Sophie Hackett, “Queer Looking,” Aperture 218 (Spring 2015): 40–45. 3. Ibid. On “lesbian-like” women and finding lesbians throughout history before the consolidation of the identity category, see Judith M. Bennett, “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, nos. 1–2 (January–April 2000): 1–24; David M. Halperin, “The First Homosexuality?” in his How to Do the History of Homosexuality Lana Dee Povitz 667 of the women’s liberation movement, audiences crowded together wherever they could to see the show—in living rooms, garages, church basements, community centers, and feminist bookstores—sitting rapt on the ground or on folding chairs. For many in these all-women spaces, JEB’s slides were the first images of women like them they’d ever seen. It’s Ariel who has arranged today’s interview, doing research for the book they’re writing about the influence of the twentieth century’s LGBTQ photographers on contemporary mainstream image culture. Ariel Goldberg is a photographer and poet who crisscrosses New York City working as an adjunct on different college campuses. The more they tell me about JEB in the weeks leading up to this meeting, the more I sense something genealogical afoot. Each representing the white, Jewish, middle -class,antiracist-lesbian-grassroots activism of their respective eras, both JEB and Ariel are self-taught, collaborative, and accountable to their circles of activist/artist friends. They pursue projects with or without (usually without) institutional support and brim with interests that hover between marginal and hot. As for me, I’m a historian, tagging along for the ride. I know little about photography, its practitioners, or its technologies, but I’m dipping into a new research project about the impact of social-movement participation on activist lives. And, aware of JEB’s role as a documentarian of (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002): 48–80; Leila Rupp, Sapphistries : A Global History of Love Between Women (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). See also Cait McKinney, “‘Finding the Lines to My People’: Media History of Queer Bibliographic Encounter,” GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 24, no. 1 (January 2018): 55–83. For a discussion of queer desire for belonging based in literature, see Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).  Ariel Goldberg, by Lana Dee Povitz. 668 Lana Dee Povitz social justice movements, including women’s and gay liberation, as well as her theoretical contributions to the early lesbian-separatist collective known as the Furies Collective, I am curious what this veteran activist life looks like now. Ariel and I speculated about JEB on the ride down from New York. We know she... (shrink)

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wide variety of American writers proposed the existence of energies connecting human beings to cosmic processes. From varying points of view--scientific, philosophical, religious, and literary--they suggested that such energies would eventually result in the perfection of individual and collective bodies, assuming that assimilation into larger networks of being meant the expansion of humanity's powers and potentialities--a belief that continues to inform much posthumanist theory today. Universes without Us explores a lesser-known countertradition in (...) American literature. As Matthew A. Taylor's incisive readings reveal, the heterodox cosmologies of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston reject the anthropocentric fantasy that sees the universe as a kind of reservoir of self-realization. For these authors, the world can be made neither "other" nor "mirror." Instead, humans are enmeshed with "alien" processes that are both constitutive and destructive of "us." By envisioning universes no longer our own, these cosmologies picture a form of interconnectedness that denies any human ability to master it. Universes without Us demonstrates how the questions, possibilities, and dangers raised by the posthuman appeared nearly two centuries ago. Taylor finds in these works an untimely engagement with posthumanism, particularly in their imagining of universes in which humans are only one category of heterogeneous thing in a vast array of species, objects, and forces. He shows how posthumanist theory can illuminate American literary texts and how those texts might, in turn, prompt a reassessment of posthumanist theory. By understanding the posthuman as a materialist cosmology rather than a technological innovation, Taylor extends the range of thinkers who can be included in contemporary conversations about the posthuman. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Teaching Ethics in the Health Care Setting Part I:Survey of the LiteratureMary Carrington Coutts (bio)The last twenty years have brought important changes to health care and health care education. Educators and students alike face an enormous number of new fields of study and new medical technologies. Health care professionals and institutions are also facing new challenges in the form of shrinking economic resources, and the AIDS epidemic. They must (...) also respond to increased patient participation in health care decisions, and public concern about abortion and euthanasia. These challenges to the health care professional have compelled educators to accommodate ethics within their already overcrowded curriculum. Those same dilemmas have influenced health care institutions to become active in health care ethics education.Medical ethics education gained a foothold in the United States during the late 1960s, when the medical schools of Pennsylvania State University, the University of Florida, and the State University of New York at Stonybrook established programs in the humanities (Pellegrino 1982). In 1978 Robert Veatch noted that formal teaching in medical ethics was rare; most institutions that taught medical ethics used "informal instruction in the apprenticeship mode" (Veatch 1978). However, by 1982 a survey by the American Medical Association (AMA) revealed that all but one of the 127 medical schools had courses that included medical ethics. Thirty eight of these had medical ethics as a required course (Pellegrino 1985). And by 1989, 43 of the 127 medical schools had separate courses in medical ethics, while 100 covered medical ethics within required courses. Medical ethics is now an accepted part of medical curriculum, though it is not fully mature, and its future remains somewhat unclear (Miles 1989).The evolution of ethics in the nursing curriculum has essentially mirrored that of the medical curriculum. A 1977 survey of baccalaureate nursing programs revealed that only 7 percent of nursing programs required courses in ethics [End Page 171] (Aroskar 1977). A decade later a second survey of undergraduate programs identified 85 percent of responding nursing schools as teaching nursing ethics either in separate ethics courses or within other required courses (Cassells and Redman 1989).Though the precise future of health care ethics may be unpredictable, there is little thought that the role of ethics will diminish in importance as the 21st century approaches. Ethics is seen as part of a larger plan to develop and enhance the health professional's human values, social conscience, and interpersonal skills. "This broader effort derives from concerns about the personal attributes and humanistic sensitivity of physicians, the recent overly 'scientized' trend in premedical education, the selection of medical students, and the socialization and cynicism engendered by medical education" (Miles 1989, p. 705).While nearly every medical and nursing school in the United States now teaches ethics in one form or another, the degree to which ethics is integrated into the curriculum varies from school to school. Some ethics courses are required elements of the students' education; some institutions require attendance at seminars and ethics grand rounds. Other schools offer an array of elective courses in topics that relate to ethics in medicine and nursing (including medical humanities, medicine and the law, literature and medicine, history of medicine, patient advocacy, and human values in nursing.) "Brown bag" seminars and journal clubs are also common.There is much debate over how health care ethics should be taught. Some argue that medical professionals should be conversant with theories of ethics and principles of biomedical ethics. Others think that a theoretical approach will alienate already over-worked medical or nursing students, and that instruction in ethical theory should be kept to a minimum. Case studies are frequently cited as a way to involve students in medical decision making, forcing them to analyze problems that they can relate to their own experiences.Additional concerns center around who should teach health care ethics. Frequently, physicians and nurses interested in ethics teach courses. Some commentators see this as the most desirable arrangement, asserting that practicing health care professionals best understand the conflicts faced by physicians and nurses-in-training. However, there is a growing pool of professionals who are undergoing training as medical ethicists. These individuals study ethical theory and bioethical... (shrink)

In this interview, poet practitioners and scholars Akhil Katyal and Aditi Angiras, traverse the intersections of queer identities, poetry/literature, digital spaces, and activism. Katyal and Angiras revisit/rethink the complexities of queer progress, emphasising a ‘capacious hermeneutics’ and deconstructing monolithic narratives that centres on same-sex marriage or assimilation into heteronormative structures. They reflect on the fluidity of queer identities, highlighting the evolving relationship individuals have with the names/labels they choose for themselves. The interview further explores the disparity in queer representation (...) within academic versus popular culture, with a focus on the underrepresentation of queer women and trans men in media/television/popular culture, in contrast to their prominence in academia. Katyal and Angiras accentuate the transformative potential of digital platforms, examining how they both amplify queer voices and expose individuals to heightened vulnerability, ‘accelerated versions of reality’, and trolling. The poets emphasise the need to embrace heterotopias, diverse, coexisting spaces of queer expressions and activism, while acknowledging the ongoing struggles for trans/queer safety, homelessness, and marginalised communities within the larger queer movement. As well, the conversation informs the ongoing evolution of queer narratives both in literature, poetry, and broader cultural spaces, advocating for inclusivity, intersectionality, and a departure from monolithic understandings of queer progress. (shrink)

Despite its elusiveness as a concept, ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) is becoming part of everyday life, and a range of empirical and methodological approaches to social studies of AI now span many disciplines. This article reviews the scope of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EM/CA) approaches that treat AI as a phenomenon emerging in and through the situated organization of social interaction. Although this approach has been very influential in the field of computational technology since the 1980s, AI has only recently emerged (...) as such a pervasive part of daily life to warrant a sustained empirical focus in EM/CA. Reviewing over 50 peer-reviewed publications, we find that the studies focus on various social and group activities such as task-oriented situations, semi-experimental setups, play, and everyday interactions. They also involve a range of participant categories including children, older participants, and people with disabilities. Most of the reviewed studies apply CA’s conceptual apparatus, its approach to data analysis, and core topics such as turn-taking and repair. We find that across this corpus, studies center on three key themes: openings and closing the interaction, miscommunication, and non-verbal aspects of interaction. In the discussion, we reflect on EM studies that differ from those in our corpus by focusing on praxeological respecifications of AI-related phenomena. Concurrently, we offer a critical reflection on the work of literature reviewing, and explore the tortuous relationship between EM and CA in the area of research on AI. (shrink)

The Islamization of Syria, a multi-faceted social and cultural process not limited to demography, was slow and highly variable across different locales. This article analyzes geographical works—ten in Arabic, one in Persian, and one in Hebrew— as well as the earliest Ottoman defters of the province to outline the process of Islamization in Syria from the Islamic conquest in the seventh century to the Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth. Geographical texts cannot be mined as databases, but when interpreted as (...) class='Hi'>literature they provide often detailed information regarding the foundation of mosques, the slow conversion of multi-religious shrines, and areas within Syria known for particular religious affiliations. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular internationally, and contributed (...) to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. Volume 1 covers the years 1822 to 1827. (shrink)

The paper exposes the relevance of permuting conversions (in natural-deduction systems) to the role of such systems in the theory of meaning known as proof-theoretic semantics, by relating permuting conversion to harmony, hitherto related to normalisation only. This is achieved by showing the connection of permuting conversion to the general notion of canonicity, once applied to arbitrary derivations from open assumption. In the course of exposing the relationship of permuting conversions to harmony, a general definition of the former (...) is proposed, generalising the specific cases of disjunction and existential quantifiers considered in the literature. (shrink)

This article adds to the conversation analytic literature on repair and on preference structure by examining a previously-undescribed otherinitiated repair practice, using the form of an alternative question, and the various actions that this practice is used to accomplish. Alternative question repair initiations can present alternate hearings or understandings of a prior utterance for clarification. They can also be used to initiate error correction by targeting a trouble source in a prior utterance with the first alternative and providing a (...) candidate correction with the second. In the latter case, rejection of the candidate preference can be done as a dispreferred response. Recipients can make use of both turn design and context to interpret the actions being done through this form of repair. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular internationally, and (...) contributed to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford (1812–77) was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. Volume 1 covers the years 1822 to 1827. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular internationally, and (...) contributed to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford (1812–77) was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. Volume 2 runs from September 1827 to 1832. (shrink)

This volume brings together 13 interviews with some of the brightest names in contemporary philosophy, including W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, as well as John Rawls. Covering a wide range of topics from the philosophy of law and logic to metaphysics to literature, the interviews in this text provide an introduction to some of the most influential thinkers of the day.

In this paper I investigate how philosophy can speak for children and how children can have a voice in philosophy and speak for philosophy. I argue that we should understand children as responsible rational individuals who are involved in their own philosophical inquiries and who can be involved in our own philosophical investigations—not because of their rational abilities, but because we acknowledge them as conversational partners, acknowledge their reasons as reasons, and speak for them as well as let them speak (...) for us and our rational community. In order to argue this I turn, first, to Gareth Matthews' philosophy of childhood and suggest a reconstruction of some of his concepts in line with the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. Second, in order to examine more closely our conceptions of rationality and our pictures of children, I consider the children's books, The Lorax and Where is My Sister? and Henrik Ibsen's play, The Wild Duck. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann, in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular internationally, and contributed (...) to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular internationally, and contributed (...) to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. Volume 2 runs from September 1827 to 1832. (shrink)

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equippedwith a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of (...) law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government,along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. Athird connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in thistroubled domain.The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. Thecumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quitesane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin aconversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854), in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular internationally, and (...) contributed to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford (1812–77) was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. (shrink)

Cover -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter One: Writing against Theodicy: Secularization in Baudelaire's Poetry and Critical Essays -- Chapter Two: The Mourning of God and the Ironies of Secularization in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris -- Chapter Three: Sublimation and Conversion in Zola and Huysmans -- Chapter Four: The Staging of Doubt: Zola and Huysmans on Lourdes -- Chapter Five: Religious and Secular Conversions: Transformations in Céline's Medical Perspective on Evil -- Conclusion (...) -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Book. (shrink)

In recent years, multidisciplinary study has become all the rage in academic circles. Scholars have been going all out for interdisciplinarity, not only in research programs, but pedagogically in the classroom, and structurally in higher education curricula. Fewer and fewer cautionary voices are being heeded or even heard in this conversation. In this essay, I advocate a mediating position on this issue that has emerged from reflecting on my own professional work with interdisciplinary scholarship. That work includes research, scholarship, and (...) teaching in the fields of theology, religion and science, and religion and literature, as well as ten years of editorial experience with the American Journal of Theology and .. (shrink)

These eighty-seven memoirs, anecdotes, and informal recollections by a broad range of reporters reflect both the reality and the myths surrounding this legendary figure. Together, they cover the entire span of Nietzsche's life and yield new insights into Nietzsche as a thinker and as a commentator on his times, recounting his views on religion, philosophy, women, literature, arts, and some of the great thinkers and historical figures.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:230 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nneka D. Dennie The State and Future of Black Women’s Studies: The Black Women’s Studies Association and the National Women’s Studies Association in Conversation On February 25, 2021, the Black Women’s Studies Association (BWSA) and National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) partnered for one of NWSA’s Kitchen Table Talks—a new initiative spearheaded by NWSA President Kaye Wise Whitehead (...) to foster dialogue between NWSA and other organizations. The event, titled “Space Making: State/Future of Black Women’s Studies,” featured three panelists and was moderated by Whitehead. The featured speakers were Stephanie Andrea Allen (BWSA conference chair), Jacinta R. Saffold (BWSA co-founder and treasurer), and Erica L. Williams (member of the NWSA Governing Council). Allen is a Black lesbian writer and publisher whose scholarship examines how lesbian literature and film responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that invisibilize Black lesbians; she is a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor of gender studies at Indiana University. Saffold is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Orleans who researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, hip hop studies, and digital humanities. Williams is an associate professor of anthropology at Spelman College, whose work has examined sex tourism and Black feminist activism in Brazil. Together, Whitehead, Allen, Saffold, and Williams explored their hopes for Black Women’s Studies and illuminated the challenges and joys of advancing the field. News and Views 231 The collaboration between BWSA and NWSA is a testament to how far Black Women’s Studies has come over the past fifty years and a promise of where it may continue to go in the future. NWSA was founded in 1977 and has since served as a hub for researchers, educators, and practitioners who interrogate questions of women and gender in their work. For decades, NWSA has been central to the nationwide US institutionalization of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. By contrast, BWSA is a young organization that is continuing to grow. In 2018, Saffold and I co-founded BWSA in order to provide a community for scholars working in the field of Black Women’s Studies. BWSA is the only professional association specifically designed to bring scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation about research that centers Black women. We launched BWSA with the goal of ensuring that future generations of scholars can readily access networks and mentorship from researchers who encounter a common question: when your work is simultaneously “too Black” and “too woman” for your field, department, or institution, what do you do? Drawing inspiration from well-established organizations in which we frequently participated, such as NWSA, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), and the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), Saffold and I sought to build a space that cultivated a Black feminist ethic of care for both the research and the researchers. In that spirit, BWSA provides resources to help scholars do their best work, including a mentorship program, a virtual writing community, a calls-for-papers list for publications, and article as well as graduate student paper prizes. It was an honor to join an organization as trusted and respected as NWSA for a dialogue about our shared visions for Black Women’s Studies. Three key themes emerged from the panelists’ conversation with each other. They repeatedly returned to the importance of making financial commitments to Black Women’s Studies, creating conditions to support Black women’s intellectual labor, and practicing self-care. Speakers explored the interplay between the responsibilities that institutions, communities, and individuals have to Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist scholars. They observed that in order for departments and universities to foster interdisciplinary work on Black women, they need to move beyond paying lip service to the idea that diversity, equity, and inclusion matter; there needs to be permanent funding for work on race, 232 News and Views gender, class, and sexuality. Panelists also emphasized that Black women being in community with each other and supporting one another have always been central to... (shrink)

Woman and Authority in Ian McEwan's "Conversation with a Cupboard Man" and Its Film Adaptation The paper analyzes Ian McEwan's short story "Conversation with a Cup-board Man" and its film adaptation made in Poland by director Mariusz Grzegorzek in 1993. In many works McEwan shows women in more positive light than men. This short story, however, deals with a mother's total domination of her son's life. The text is in the form of first-person narration of the son but it is (...) the figure of the mother that is of utmost importance.The protagonist describes his life from his childhood. His mother wanted him to remain a baby as long as possible, depriving him of free will and leaving him totally dependent on her. Her attitude changed when she found a partner. The protagonist, now seventeen, had rapidly to grow up from a baby into an adult. Childhood and total passivity remain for him ideals to be pursued, and a cramped cupboard becomes his favourite environment. The influence of his upbringing remains with him for ever. After analyzing the short story the paper explores parallels to other works by McEwan and other writers. The importance of the use of the indeterminate article in the title is discussed. Attention is given to the issue of defamiliarization. And the ambivalent attitude of the protagonist towards his mother is examined.The second part of the paper deals with the film adaptation. Grzegorzek has imaginatively developed the short story into a full-blown feature film. It preserves most of the important elements of the short story, at the same time providing new material largely in keeping with the original's tone. The director not only extrapolates, inventing new scenes to fill in the short story's unspoken gaps but also skilfully changes the narrator's comments into scenes, and this is not purely a change from telling into showing. The paper discusses the imagery of the movie, especially Oedipal motifs, references to Christ, and the impression of blood-red lips. It stresses the stronger role of the teacher from the home and his influence on the only independent action of the protagonist—the revenge on Pus-face. It is also important that the film omits any verbal expression of the protagonist's hatred towards his mother. (shrink)

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Frédéric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular internationally, and contributed (...) to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. Volume 1 covers the years 1822 to 1827. (shrink)