Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism This is a volume of papers from a conference held at Harvard University in 2010 to honor the American philosopher Stanley Cavell (b. 1926), and particularly to celebrate the publication of his autobiographical fragments, Little Did I Know (Stanford University Press, 2010). The theme of the conference, "Cavell and Literary Studies," is perhaps testimony to the fact that, apart from philosophers who were among his devoted students at Harvard (James Conant, Richard Eldridge, Richard Fleming, Timothy Gould, Stephen Mulhall, among many others), Cavell's most enthusiastic readers have been literary critics.[1] Still, the theme may seem a bit thin. During the last thirty years literary study has become less literary than social and political in its topics and debates. A short list of current critical approaches would include, under the rubric of "Cultural Studies," gender studies, ethnic studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and, more recently, cybernetics. Now they are resting
www.psych.rochester.edu/people/reis_harry/assets/pdf/CarothersReis_2012.pdf The story of the self Memory is our past and future. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. "Our memory is our coherence," wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, "our reason, our feeling, even our action." Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are. It's no surprise, then, that there is fascination with this quintessentially human ability. This is quite a trick, psychologically speaking, and it has made cognitive scientists determined to find out how it is done. When you ask people about their memories, they often talk as though they were material possessions, enduring representations of the past to be carefully guarded and deeply cherished. We know this from many different sources of evidence. Even highly emotional memories are susceptible to distortion. What accounts for this unreliability?
A Reader's War “Thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires…civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables.” This defense, made by Mario Vargas Llosa when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature two years ago, could have come from any other writer. It is, in fact, allowing for some variety of expression, a cliché. But clichés, so the cliché goes, originate in truth. Vargas Llosa reiterated the point: “Without fictions, we would be less aware of the importance of freedom for life to be livable, the hell it turns into when it is trampled underfoot by a tyrant, an ideology, or a religion.” It would be hard to find writers who disagree with Vargas Llosa’s general sense of literature’s civilizing function. There was a feeling during the years of George W. His successor couldn’t have been more different. Any President’s gravest responsibilities are defending the Constitution and keeping the country safe. Mrs.
Obama Demands That Congress Do 'the Work of Self-Government' Share President Obama's 2013 State of the Union address. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak) For those who doubted that Barack Obama would maintain his commitment to a gun-safety agenda that challenges the supposed political power of the National Rifle Association, and the political caution of Democrats who more than a decade ago decided for the most cynical of reasons to abandon the struggle to address gun violence, the president’s fourth State of the Union address provided the answer. Obama’s speech delivered a bold economic message—a rejection of the austerity threat posed by Paul Ryan and the Republican right in favor of a job-creation agenda—and it renewed the liberal promises of his recent inaugural address: fair pay for women, fair treatment for lesbians and gays, immigration reform, a return to seriousness with regard to climate change. That would have been enough in most years. And the president recognized that demand. “It has been two months since Newtown. Then the president went deeper.
How to Stimulate Curiosity and Promote Learning Curiosity is the engine of intellectual achievement — it’s what drives us to keep learning, keep trying, keep pushing forward. But how does one generate curiosity, in oneself or others? George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, proposed an answer in the classic 1994 paper, “The Psychology of Curiosity.” Curiosity arises, Loewenstein wrote, “when attention becomes focused on a gap in one’s knowledge. (MORE: Secrets of the Most Successful College Students) Here, three practical ways to use information gaps to stimulate curiosity: 1. (MORE: How to Raise a Group’s IQ) 2. 3. This technique can be adapted to all kinds of settings: for example, colleagues from different departments could be asked to complete a task together, one that requires the identification of information gaps that the coworkers, with their different areas of expertise, must fill in for each other.
Christopher Ricks · In theory · LRB 16 April 1981 Is there an honourable, thoughtful alternative to literary theory? Literary theory at present dishonourably pretends that there is not. So the case against literary theory begins with its overbearing insistence that there is no genuine case for anything else. The advocates of theory often declare that we are all theorists whether we realise it and acknowledge it or not. This stratagem is an easy extension of the announcement that we all have an ideology whether we realise it or not – an announcement which has had too easy a ride, since the choice of the word ‘ideology’ is itself the reflection of an ideology. The theory-missionaries who find it convenient to practise baptism with a hose are clearly running a risk, since in theory they are running another argument: that these days we urgently need more literary theorists. Geoffrey Hartman of Yale, whose advocacy of literary theory (rather, of one rampancy of it) is impassioned and learned, is not personally an arrogant man.
When John Boehner just sat there President Obama’s State of the Union speech showed that the progressive energy of his second inaugural address wasn’t just a man getting carried away by the moment. On Tuesday night, he outlined an ambitious second-term agenda: a commitment to universal preschool, raising the federal minimum wage, executive action on climate change, a strong jobs agenda, easing barriers to voting, tough new gun laws. The president won’t get everything he’s asking for, not even most of it, and some of the details of what he wants and how he’ll achieve it were sketchy, but it was rewarding to see him ask. And while Obama talked deficit reduction early in the speech, it was much less detailed and central than in most of his other big national speeches. “Deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan,” he said, stating what should be obvious, but often isn’t inside the Beltway. But the heart of the speech came during his remarks on gun violence. “They deserve a vote,” he said three times, and went on:
The London Psychology Collective No More Indiana Jones Warehouses - Do Your Job Better By William Pannapacker In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones—perhaps the last heroic professor to appear in a major Hollywood film—survives a series of adventures involving spiders, snakes, treacherous colleagues, and countless Nazis who are determined to recover the ark of the covenant for their Führer. Apparently the ark has mystical powers: If you open it with the wrong intentions, it will melt your face or explode your head. Ultimately, Jones recovers the ark: He really delivers on his grant. That's what happens to the majority of undergraduate projects in the humanities. Fortunately, we are living at a moment when our students can undertake a far wider range of learning experiences than was possible when the traditional research paper was the gold standard of scholarly production. The digital humanities, or "DH," encourages scholars and students to use the Internet to present their work to a global audience. The situation was worse for undergraduate researchers.
Lies, Damned Lies and Big Data This is a guest post by David Hales, a fellow associate of the new complexity think-tank, Synthesis. David specialises in computational social science and here he provides a thought-provoking response to the rise in big data, and some of the more outlandish claims made about it. For a good example of the latter, see Chris Anderson’s piece ‘The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete‘. In this piece, David makes some very relevant points for development big data initiatives. Almost everything we do these days leaves some kind of data trace in some computer system somewhere. When such data is aggregated into huge databases it is called “Big Data”. What’s wrong with this? Firstly what is this “data” we are talking about? Given this level of generality, if someone tells you they are working on “big data” it tells you almost nothing. If no coherent answer can be produced to this question then any such project is at best directionless and at worst not conscious of its aims. Like this:
All About Psychology Many thanks for taking the time to check out my psychology website. My name is David Webb and I've had a passionate interest in studying and teaching psychology for over 20 years. I have a first class honors degree in psychology and a Masters in Occupational psychology from the University of Sheffield (UK). For a number of years, I was a lecturer in psychology at the University of Huddersfield (UK). In 2003 I moved to sunny Spain with my family, where in addition to writing and hosting the All About Psychology Website, I also work as an online tutor and research dissertation supervisor. The All About Psychology website ( was launched in March 2008 and is designed to help anybody looking for detailed information and resources. The Psychology Journal Articles Collection: Get completely free access to classic full text journal articles, including material from the most eminent and influential psychologists of the 20th century.