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The Lever as Instrument of Reason
The lever appears to be a very simple object, a tool used since ancient times for the most primitive of tasks: to lift and to balance. Why, then, were prominent intellectuals active around 1800 in areas as diverse as science, philosophy, and literature inspired to think and write about levers? In The Lever as Instrument of Reason, readers will discover the remarkable ways in which the lever is used to model the construction of knowledge and to mobilize new ideas among diverse disciplines. These acts of construction are shown to model key aspects of the human, from the more abstract processes of moral decision-making to a quite literal equation of the powerful human ego with the supposed stability and power of the fulcrum point.
German Romanticism and Science
Situated at the intersection of literature and science, Holland's study draws upon a diverse corpus of literary and scientific texts which testify to a cultural fascination with procreation around 1800. Through readings which range from Goethe’s writing on metamorphosis to Novalis’s aphorisms and novels and Ritter’s Fragments from the Estate of a Young Physicist, Holland proposes that each author contributes to a scientifically-informed poetics of procreation. Rather than subscribing to a single biological theory (such as epigenesis or preformation), these authors take their inspiration from a wide inventory of procreative motifs and imagery.
Spark from the Deep
How encounters with strongly electric fish informed our grasp of electricity. Spark from the Deep tells the story of how human beings came to understand and use electricity by studying the evolved mechanisms of strongly electric fish. These animals have the ability to shock potential prey or would-be predators with high-powered electrical discharges. William J. Turkel asks completely fresh questions about the evolutionary, environmental, and historical aspects of people’s interest in electric fish. Stimulated by painful encounters with electric catfish, torpedos, and electric eels, people learned to harness the power of electric shock for medical therapies and eventually developed technologies to store, transmit, and control electricity. Now we look to these fish as an inspiration for engineering new sensors, computer interfaces, autonomous undersea robots, and energy-efficient batteries.
Fact and Fiction
Fact and Fiction explores the intersection between literature and the sciences, focusing on German and British culture between the eighteenth century and today. Observing that it was in the eighteenth century that the divide between science and literature as disciplines first began to be defined, the contributors to this collection probe how authors from that time onwards have assessed and affected the relationship between literary and scientific cultures. Fact and Fiction's twelve essays cover a wide range of scientific disciplines, from physics and chemistry to medicine and anthropology, and a variety of literary texts, such as Erasmus Darwin's poem The Botanic Garden, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Goethe's Elective Affinities. The collection will appeal to scholars of literature and of the history of science, and to those interested in the connections between the two.
Goethe Yearbook 24
Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and his age, featuring in this volume a special section on the poetics of space in the Goethezeit. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 24 features a special section titled "The Poetics of Space in the Goethezeit," co-edited by John Lyon and Elliott Schreiber, with contributions on blind spots in Goethe's Elective Affinities; on the topography and topoi of...
The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy
This Handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the philosophical dimensions of German Romanticism, a movement that challenged traditional borders between philosophy, poetry, and science. With contributions from leading international scholars, the collection places the movement in its historical context by both exploring its links to German Idealism and by examining contemporary, related developments in aesthetics and scientific research. A substantial concluding section of the Handbook examines the enduring legacy of German romantic philosophy. Key Features: • Highlights the contributions of German romantic philosophy to literary criticism, irony, cinema, religion, an...
Portable Moving Images
This media history explores a series of portable small cameras, playback devices, and storage units that have made the production of film and video available to everyone. Covering several storage formats from 8mm films of the 1900s, through the analogue videotapes of the 1970s, to the compression algorithms of the 2000s, this work examines the effects that the shrinkage of complex machines, media formats, and processing operations has had on the dissemination of moving images. Using an archaeological approach to technical standards of media, the author provides a genealogy of portable storage formats for film, analog video, and digitally encoded video. This book is a step forward in decoding the storage media formats, which up to now have been the domain of highly specialised technicians.
Forces of Nature
Um 1800 diskutierte man über Naturkräfte in verschiedenen wissenschaftlichen und künstlerischen Zusammenhängen: Anziehung und Abstoßung, Lebenskräfte und elektrische Ströme, der "Bildungstrieb" und biologische Organismen wurden als Kräfte untersucht, die sich auf „natürliche" Prozesse zurückführen lassen. Literatur, Wissenschaft und Philosophie der deutschsprachigen Romantik von Schelling bis zu Günderrode und Hölderlin arbeiteten sich an Konzepten von Kräften ab, die als dynamisch und in beständiger Tätigkeit begriffen wurden – Kräfte, die auch menschliche Handlungen, soziale Strukturen und kulturelle Entwicklungen einzuschließen schienen. Der Band erkundet Vor- und Darstellungen von Naturkräften in der Romantik an der Schnittstelle von Naturwissenschaft und kulturellen Vorstellungswelten.
Mapping the Moving Image
In Mapping the Moving Image, Pasi Valiaho offers a compelling study of how the medium of film came to shape our experience and thinking of the world and ourselves. By locating the moving image in new ways of seeing and saying as manifest in the arts, science and philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century, the book redefines the cinema as one of the most important anthropological processes of modernity. Moving beyond the typical understanding of cinema based on optical and linguistic models, Mapping the Moving Image takes the notion of rhythm as its cue in conceptualizing the medium's morphogenetic potentialities to generate affectivity, behaviour, and logics of sense. It provides a clear picture of how the forms of early film, while mobilizing bodily gestures and demanding intimate, affective engagement from the viewer, emerged in relation to bio-political investments in the body. The book also charts from a fresh perspective how the new gestural dynamics and visuality of the moving image fed into our thinking of time, memory and the unconscious.
The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry
This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood confers on 19th-century poetry and culture, this book draws on new formalist and psychoanalytic perspectives to rethink familiar concepts such as immortality, the sublime, and the death drive as well as forms and genres such as the pastoral, the ode, and the ballad. Ruderman establishes that infancy emer...
