Author: Guy de Maupassant File Type: pdf

Author: Pericles Lewis File Type: pdf The modernist period witnessed attempts to explain religious experience in non-religious terms. Such novelists as Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka found methods to describe through fiction the sorts of experiences that had traditionally been the domain of religious mystics and believers. In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion. Through comparisons of major novelists with sociologists and psychologists from the same period, Lewis identifies the unique ways that literature addressed the changing spiritual situation of the early twentieth century. He challenges accounts that assume secularisation as the main narrative for understanding twentieth-century literature. Lewis explores the experiments that modernists undertook in order to invoke the sacred without directly naming it, resulting in a compelling study for readers of twentieth-century modernist literature.ReviewIn this book, as in his two earlier ones, Pericles Lewis finds a new perspective on twentieth-century literature and demonstrates in surprising and convincing ways the depth and complexity of religious vision in the greatest modernist novels. With an impressive breadth of learning and an exact command of language and structure, this book finds in the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce a contradictory, self-doubting approach to religious meanings unlike those of most religious writing in the past three millennia, but profoundly religious meanings none the less. What makes the book so decisively convincing is that its approach illuminates patterns of structure and meaning that were unnoticed until now even in these deeply studied authors, but which, thanks to Lewis alert, sympathetic readings, now seem unmistakably central. Edward Mendelson, Columbia UniversityLewiss book is a masterly analysis of the transmutation of religious experience in the modernist novel ... The richness of [the] book lies in its vivid and persuasive detail, and the careful cross-referencing between chapters. Times Literary Supplement Book DescriptionThe modernist period witnessed attempts to explain religious experience in non-religious terms. In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion, through comparisons of major novelists with sociologists and psychologists from the same period.

Author: Sabine Roeser File Type: pdf Risks arising from technologies raise important ethical issues. Although technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, ICT, and nuclear energy can improve human well-being, they may also convey risks for our well-being due to, for example, abuse, unintended side-effects, accidents, and pollution. As a consequence, technologies can trigger emotions, including fear and indignation, which often leads to conflicts between stakeholders. How should we deal with such emotions in decision making about risky technologies? This book offers a new philosophical theory of risk emotions, arguing why and how moral emotions should play an important role in decisions surrounding risky technologies. Emotions are usually met with suspicion in debates about risky technologies because they are seen as contrary to rational decision making. However, Roeser argues that moral emotions can play an important role in judging ethical aspects of technological risks, such as justice, fairness, and autonomy. This book provides a novel theoretical approach while at the same time offering concrete recommendations for decision making about risky technologies. It will be of interest to those working in different areas of philosophysuch as ethics, decision theory, philosophy of science, and philosophy of technologyas well as scholars in the fields of psychology, public policy, science and technology studies, environmental ethics, and bioethics. **

Author: Vladimir Nabokov File Type: epub The letters of the great writer to his wifegathered here for the first timechronicle a decades-long love story and document anew the creative energies of an artist who was always at work. No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer is quite as beguiling as that of Vladimir Nabokovs to Vera Slonim. She shared his delight in lifes trifles and literatures treasures, and he rated her as having the best and quickest sense of humor of any woman he had met. From their first encounter in 1923, Vladimirs letters to Vera form a narrative arc that tells a half-century-long love story, one that is playful, romantic, pithy and memorable. At the same time, the letters tell us much about the man and the writer. We see the infectious fascination with which Vladimir observed everythinganimals, people, speech, the landscapes and cityscapes he encounteredand learn of the poems, plays, stories, novels, memoirs, screenplays and translations on which he worked ceaselessly. This delicious volume contains twenty-one photographs, as well as facsimiles of the letters themselves and the puzzles and doodles Vladimir often sent to Vera.**