The Molecular Biology of Gaia

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The Molecular Biology of Gaia
G. R. Williams
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Monte-Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods 1998: Proceedings of a Conference held at the Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, USA, June 22-26, 1998

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Monte-Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods 1998: Proceedings of a Conference held at the Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, USA, June 22-26, 1998

Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 354066176X

When it was first published, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge proved to be a seminal work in the psychoanalytic study of Faulkner's fiction, especially of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! This softcover reissue of John Irwin's masterful exposition unwinds the mystery of unconscious desire and doubling that inform the novels.

The blood's been done sucked from me after I read this book . . . .......2006-04-26

The thesis of this book is that repetition is central to Tolstoy’s art. The author argues that Tolstoy uses this device—or rather, complex of devices—to represent and examine the processes by which people structure and give meaning to their experience. Repetition is shown to be essential to his style, to his understanding of characters’ psychology, to the structure of his work, and to his interaction with readers. In short, it defines much of what is “Tolstoyan” about Tolstoy.

Following a discussion of the epistemological and psychological beliefs that shape Tolstoy’s use of repetition, the author explores the effects and implications of repeated verbal elements as they function in the discourse of characters and narrators. She develops a concept of “novels of length,” which are distinguished from ordinary “long novels” in that length is essential to their themes and purposes. A complex dynamic of memory, forgetting, and reminders (repetition) structures both the characters’ evolving identities and the readers’ changing apprehension of the text.

The author next discusses Tolstoy’s use of repetition to shape relationships among characters, and considers the connection between these relationships and thematic development in his novels. She concludes by exploring the intertextual repetitions in Tolstoy’s oeuvre, which are seen as part of a process by which allusions among works create a revealing sense of the author’s developing career.

In examining the link between Tolstoy’s repeated verbal elements and his broader concepts of structure and meaning, the book combines close readings of key passages in the novels with an exploration of larger theoretical issues: the dynamics of reading and sense-making, the ethics and aesthetics of memory, and the function of language as a system of cognition and communication. As a result, the book contributes not only to studies of Tolstoy and the genre of the novel but to our understanding of the relations among rhetorical, cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical aspects of great art generally.

Double Exposures aims not only to focus attention on competing meanings of realism and mimesis in nineteenth-century German narrative fiction, but also to supply a quite different account of how realism’s typically submerged structures allow readers to explore some of the basic phenomena and contradictions of their extra-literary, social existence. It challenges the currently dominant critical perspective on German poetic realism (and on literary realism in general), which considers this seemingly transparent mode of representation a deeply ideological and self-deceiving form of cultural discourse that reiterates, and so reinforces, powerful social constraints already at work in the extra-literary sphere.

By rethinking the landmark theories of Jacobson and Barthes, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Freud and Lacan—especially their attention to repetition—to point out that any instance of formal repetition produces effects that cannot be contained, the author articulates how the supposedly marginal moments of faltering to both its own and its other cultural discourses are, in fact, intrinsic effects of poetic realism’s double, conflictual nature.

Through a series of close readings of several realist novellas by Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Storm, C. F. Meyer, and Wilhelm Raabe, the book explores a number of realism’s array of “redundant” motifs having to do with nature, gender, family, class, and aesthetics. It demonstrates that the realist project was always about more than simply reinforcing bourgeois ideology, and always fostered a form of self-awareness and reflection inseparable from what we value as literature.