1,720,972 research outputs found
Books, Theology, and Hens: the Correspondence and Friendship of C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers
Full text linkThat Lewis and Sayers had much in common and that their lives intersected in a number of interesting ways throughout their careers is common knowledge for even the casual follower of either author. What does not seem to have been appreciated or explained sufficiently in the scholarship to date is the nature of the friendship between these two influential Christian authors. Therefore, it is this friendship we wish to shed light on, using as our primary source the correspondence between Lewis and Sayers from 1942-1957. In addition, we look at what the biographers of each author have to say about their relationship
The Stance of a Last Survivor : C. S. Lewis and the Modern World (Chapter One of The Rhetoric of Certitude)
Full text linkExcerpt: As professor and scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature, C. S. Lewis wrote and published well-respected and influential literary criticism. At the same time, following his conversion to Christianity around 1930, he felt a duty to apply his argumentative and philosophical skills to the writing of Christian apologetics-defenses of traditional Christian principles against the attacks of skeptics and religious liberals. More important, Lewis lived in an age largely hostile to his attitudes and thought, both in literature and Christianity. In a period that s.aw such startling literary productions as The Waste Land and Ulysses, Lewis chose to defend traditional literary forms such as epic poetry and allegory. And in a century enamored with the theories of Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, and Jung, Lewis offered a standard of mere Christianity, accepting, without apology, the sinfulness of man and God\u27s supernatural involvement in human affairs. Thus, Lewis was faced with an extremely difficult rhetorical problem: how does a writer communicate his ideas to his audience when every social, cultural, and intellectual force is at work to undermine the very concepts he presents? A study of Lewis\u27s nonfiction prose reveals clearly the rhetorical interplay of author, subject, and audience and the ways in which these elements manifest themselves in the style of the prose works
The Matter and (mostly) Manner of Mere Christianity
No full textPresented to a meeting of the Inkling Folk Fellowship (IFF), July 23rd, 2021.
Zoom Session Link: https://youtu.be/F2ZKEPD0YFg
Research Question•Why does Lewis’s work of popular apologetics continue to find a wide readership while other excellent books in the same genre—e.g., Sayers’s Creed or Chaos—do not?
Christianity Today Survey (2000): Most influential Christian books
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1942-44; 1952) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937) Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (1932-67) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (1968) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908) Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline (1978) Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (1927) Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
Hypothesis
•While Lewis’s understanding of Christian doctrine and his mastery of logical argument are important, the success of Mere Christianity has more to do with the style through which the author communicated its content. •Lewis’s apologetic theory led him to focus on the core truths of Christianity and to describe them in an appropriate style, given the nature of his audience (including that of the original BBC broadcast talks). •Lewis was successful in creating a knowledgeable, familiar, and trustworthy persona through his use of multiple tones, and he blended rational argument with imagination to create memorable metaphors and analogies that captivated both his audience’s imagination and intellect
A Difference of Degree: Sayers and Lewis on the Creative Imagination (Chapter in The Faithful Imagination)
Full text linkExcerpt: Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis were writers who thought deeply about the creative imagination, the creative process, and the relation of these to their Christian faith. Both were practitioners, as well as theorists, producing multiple works of fiction, drama, apologetics, and poetry. Both wrote for a variety of audiences including scholarly and popular and believed that literary works could be entertaining as well as edifying, could both delight and teach, as the classical and renaissance writers put it. Finally, both authors addressed the creative imagination in their essays, books, and letters. While a comprehensive treatment of their respective theories of the creative imagination would require a book-length study, my aim is to describe each writer\u27s theoretical view and to explore one particular disagreement that arose between the two in response to Sayers\u27s book, The Mind of the Make1: 1 Finally, I hope to provide some explanation for the different views by looking at two addresses, one by Lewis and one by Sayers, in which each author attempts to formulate a Christian aesthetic
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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