1,720,973 research outputs found
Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World
Full text linkA blind spot suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of understanding. Just as the brain reads the blind spot of the visual field by a curious process of readjustment, Shakespearean drama disorients us with moments of unmastered and unmasterable knowledge, recasting the way we see, know and think about knowing. Focusing on such moments of apparent obscurity, this volume puts methods and motives of knowing under the spotlight, and responds both to inscribed acts of blind-sighting, and to the text or action blind-sighting the reader or spectator. While tracing the hermeneutic yield of such occlusion is its main conceptual aim, it also embodies a methodological innovation: structured as an internal dialogue, it aims to capture, and stake out a place for, a processive intellectual energy that enables a distinctive way of knowing in academic life; and to translate a sense of intellectual community into print.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_smemc/1004/thumbnail.jp
In lieu of democracy, or how not to lose your head: theatre and authority in Renaissance England
No full textA discussion of the role of tragicomedy as a political tool in sixteenth and early seventeenth century England
The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England
No full textThis book explores interconnections between the modes of knowing that we now associate with the rubrics ‘literature’ and ‘science’ at a formative point in their early development. Rather than simply tracing lines of influence, it focuses on how both literary texts and natural philosophy engage with materiality, language, affect, and form. Some essays are invested in how early modern science adopts and actively experiments with rhetorical and poetic modes and expression, while others emphasize a shared investment in natural philosophical topics—alchemy, chance, or astrology for example—that move among the period’s observational texts and its literature, highlighting the participation of literary texts in the production of experimental knowledge. Organised around the broad themes of creation and transformation, mediation and communication, and interpretation and imaginative speculation, the essays collectively probe the presumed dichotomy between science’s schematizing and taxonomic ambitions, and the fertile and volatile creative energies of literary texts
From Philosopher's Stone to Phosphorus: Robert Boyle's Illuminating Experiments
No full textThis essay explores Robert Boyle’s efforts to create, and his experimental interactions with, a range of luminous substances—notably phosphorus, which he associated with the philosopher’s stone. For Boyle, phosphorus was alight with spiritual significance, and his investigations into this enigmatic and spectacular substance included elements of pious self-reflection. At the same time, Boyle also acknowledged the possibility that ‘luciferous’ phosphorus had darker, more diabolical origins and uses. The final part of the essay discusses the dynamic relation of secrecy and openness in Boyle’s writings. For Boyle, lucidity is not a just a stylistic but an epistemic quality: it indicates the veracity of a knowledge claim, rather than just being a way of communicating such knowledge. Nonetheless, Boyle also made strategic use of alchemical tropes of secrecy even as he transgressed those conventions in practice, replicating textually the faltering and recursive movement from ignorance to partial understanding that characterised his own experimental practices
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Crossings
Full text linkCrossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms brings together activists, artists, scholars, and migrants with diverse histories to explore what the experience of migration does with, and to, knowledge, and how its own ways of knowing find expressive form. As the volume’s authors think about physical and imaginative crossings, and the traversals and transactions of knowledge they entail, the book itself crosses and complicates disciplinary and formal boundaries and the barriers between critical and creative intervention. Crucially, it brings together voices and forms emerging out of the experience of dislocation with responses to the encounters it generates.
The volume’s discussions begin in the early modern world, and move freely across periods to dwell on the urgent experience of migrancy in our own times, while also responding to an urgent need to connect the local with the global experience of migrant knowledge and migrant aesthetics. Crossings stakes the claim that creative art, backed by humanities-based thinking, can meet the imaginative and ethical demands that the unknowable reality of mass displacement places on us, in a way that governments, institutions, and public discourse have calamitously failed to do. But aesthetic practice itself needs to be re-positioned if it is to rise to these political and human challenges, negotiating the points of friction between its own predilections and the matter of migration.
Crossings offers “migrant forms” – art about migration, objects from migrant life shaped into artifacts, and migrant self-expressions – as the means of this imaginative re-orientation, and a tool for activating a radical alternative to economic models of social benefit. Crossings takes its place in an emergent ecology of migrant forms, both speaking to and participating in that ecology.</jats:p
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