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Early in July 1997, scholars from around the world met in Volos, Greece, to discuss the work of American writer and international traveler Herman Melville. Offering insights into Melville the man and Melville the artist, the papers presented at this conference reflected a variety of interdisciplinary, international, and intergenerational perspectives. With the participation of esteemed Melville critics and many young scholars gaining recognition for their innovative and incisive work in the area of Melville studies, this unique conference afforded all who attended an overview of current approaches to Melville and detailed thermatic examinations of his specific works and themes.
A cultural history of one of the most important centres of the Hellenistic and Byzantine world.
Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and automata. In an engaging, sophisticated, and accessible presentation, Despina Kakoudaki argues that, in their narrative and cultural deployment, artificial people demarcate what it means to be human. They perform this function by offering us a non-human version of ourselves as a site of investigation. Artificial people teach us that being human, being a person or a self, is a constant process and often a matter of legal, philosophical,...
Herman Melville in Context provides the fullest introduction in one volume to the multifaceted life and times of Herman Melville, a towering figure in nineteenth-century American and world literature. The book grounds the study of Herman Melville's writings to the world that influenced their composition, publication and recognition, making it a valuable resource to scholars, teachers, students and general readers. Bringing together contributions covering a wide range of topics, the collection of essays covers the geographical, social, cultural and literary contexts of Melville's life and works, as well as its literary reception. Herman Melville in Context will enable readers to approach Melville's writings with fuller insight, and to read and understand them in a way that approximates the way they were read and understood in his time.
Melville's Philosophies departs from a long tradition of critical assessments of Melville that dismissed his philosophical capacities as ingenious but muddled. Its contributors do not apply philosophy to Melville in order to detect just how much of it he knew or understood. To the contrary, they try to hear the philosophical arguments themselves-often very strange and quite radical-that Melville never stopped articulating and reformulating. What emerges is a Melville who is materialistically oriented in a radical way, a Melville who thinks about life forms not just in the context of contemporary sciences but also ontologically. Melville's Philosophies recovers a Melville who is a thinker of great caliber, which means obliquely but dramatically reversing the way the critical tradition has characterized his ideas. Finally, as a result of the readings collected here, Melville emerges as a very relevant thinker for contemporary philosophical concerns, such as the materialist turn, climate change, and post-humanism.
Der Band schlägt für die literarische Moderne eine Verflechtungs- und Praxisgeschichte vor, die keinem autonomieästhetischen Großnarrativ mehr folgt, denn viele Entwürfe der Avantgarden haben sich vor dem Hintergrund einer als überlegen gedachten heteronomen Instanz entfaltet – als Primitivismus, als religiöse Mystik, als Wissenschaftskritik und Wissenschaftsgläubigkeit, als politische Parteiarbeit oder als geschichtsphilosophische Mission.
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With the rise of modernity, law faces an irreducible contradiction. It must stem the State's available strength, while at the same time use this strength to make its decisions binding. The author, starting from this paradox, analyses the legal, philosophical and literary discourses of modernity to find the right tools to properly differentiate law and "vis", overcoming two philosophical and juridical traditions: the one depicting law as a Leviathan, and the one wanting to make it immune to all forms of violence. In particular, through an unedited reading of Kafka and Melville's narratives, she demonstrates how the modern legal systems, rather than just being instruments of control, are dreams and fantasies of non-violence.