Imagined Truths

Imagined Truths
Author: Mary L. Coffey
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2019-05-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487531699

Imagined Truths provides a twenty-first-century analysis of stylistic and philosophical manifestations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literary realism. Bringing together the work of the foremost specialists in the field of contemporary Spanish letters, this collection offers new approaches to literary and cultural criticism and reveals how Spanish realism, far from imitative of other European movements, engaged in complex and modern concepts of representation and mimesis. Imagined Truths acknowledges the critical importance of women writers and contemporary approaches to questions of gender. The essays address the impact of economics on our perceptions of reality and our constructions of everyday life, and they argue for the importance of emotions in the social construction of individual identity. Most importantly, the essays acknowledge the post-imperial turn in literary studies. Addressing a broad range of authors, works, and topics, including the continued relevance of Cervantes’s Don Quijote and the way Spanish realism moved beyond narrative to inhabit the spaces of both theatre and film, Imagined Truths comprises a series of meditations on new ways of understanding the unique place of realism in Spanish cultural history. Offering insights for specialists in a wide range of disciplines – literature, cultural studies, gender studies, history, philosophy – this collection is equally important for readers just becoming acquainted with realist narrative as a central component of Spanish literary history.

Imagined Truths

Imagined Truths
Author: Bryant Griffith
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 100
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9460916635

Education is often envisioned as a linear, one-way, cause-and-effect process, with teaching as the cause, learning as the effect. But the relationships are less tidy, less passive, and more cyclical than that. There is a continuous cycle of inquiry, discovery, and integration, leading to further inquiry. Technology facilitates the exchange of information, not just teacher to student, but student to teacher, and student to student. The result is that the nature of the development of learning, knowledge, and even wisdom becomes more transparent. This presents challenges of method and identity for the teacher, but more importantly, it enforces a sense among students of their critical investment in their own education. Teachers and learners need to contemplate why and how they construct knowledge. An essential part of this reflection is questioning the premises that govern our views of the world, as well as the premises of what is presented as knowledge. This demands a new epistemology, and requires that teachers change their conceptual structures and recognize that all theories of knowledge are not founded solely on formal logic using uninterpreted experience as data. Moreover, it demands that new models be considered as ways of making sense and of understanding. As teachers, we realize that learning how to cope with changes of this magnitude requires leadership where relationships are crucial. The rapidly emerging significance of social networks is reshaping our world, a world that isn’t flat but where spiky concentrations of people work together to make things happen creatively. It is more the case that the education we need to provide is to solve problems we can’t conceive. Our cultural narratives, when freed of the bounds of instrumental learning, become powerful tools for an emerging world where questions and answers are not simple, cause and effect equations. Yes, the teacher is a facilitator, but one with the mastery of sufficient material to be able to paint numerous contexts for the learner. We need to be open, attentive, and anticipatory to that which may surprise us, to that which we will not expect. The shape of past knowledge can be discovered by reflecting on the ways in which we make decisions and by asking why questions. These questions frame intentions and focus on the specific process of knowing why and how ideas have changed from the past to the present. By placing the self in the middle, this process becomes a trialectic of relational thought which in turns becomes the dialectic of learning.

Imagined Truths

Imagined Truths
Author: Richard Lemm
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1901
Genre: Americans
ISBN: 9781990160073

Richard Lemm grew up in 1950s Seattle, raised by alcoholic grandparents, with an absent mother and a fabled father who died shortly after he was born. To avoid the draft, he left the land of opportunity and moved to Canada in 1967. Now, more than fifty years later, he uses his poet's sensibility to examine his cultural heritage. Familiar myths--the wild west, the ""greatest country on earth,"" the ""true north strong and free,"" the red-blooded male and others--strongly influenced Lemm's generation on both sides of the border. Lemm explores the ways in which we use imagined truths to justify o.

Truth Imagined

Truth Imagined
Author: Eric Hoffer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781933435015

Blind as a child, Eric Hoffer--one of America's most important thinkers--regained his sight at the age of fifteen and became a voracious reader. At eighteen, fate would take his remaining family, sending him on the road with three hundred dollars and into the life of a Depression Era migrant worker, but his appetite for knowledge--history, science, mankind--remained and became the basis for his insights on human nature. Filled with timeless aphorisms and entertaining stories, Truth Imagined tracks Hoffer's years on the road, which served as the breeding ground for his most fertile thoughts. (Restored to print by noted author Christopher Klim.)

Only Imagine

Only Imagine
Author: Kathleen Stock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198798342

Only Imagine offers a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known, 'fictional truth'. The theory of fictional content Kathleen Stock argues for is known as 'extreme intentionalism'; the idea that the fictional content of a particular work is equivalent to exactly what the author of the work intended the reader to imagine. Historically, this sort of view has been highly unpopular. Literary theorists and philosophers alike have poured scorn upon it. The first half of this book attempts to argue that it should in fact be taken very seriously as an adequate account of fictional truth: better, in fact, than many of its more popular rivals. The second half explores various explanatory benefits of extreme intentionalism for other issues in the philosophy of fiction and imagination. Namely, can fiction give us reliable knowledge? Why do we 'resist' imagining certain fictions? What, in fact, is a fiction? And, how should the imagination be characterised?

Imagined Democracies

Imagined Democracies
Author: Yaron Ezrahi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2012-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139577069

This book proposes a revisionist approach to democratic politics. Yaron Ezrahi focuses on the creative unconscious collective imagination that generates ever-changing visions of legitimate power and authority, which compete for enactment and institutionalization in the political arena. If, in the past, political authority was grounded in fictions such as the divine right of kings, the laws of nature, historical determinism and scientism, today the space of democratic politics is filled with multiple alternative social imaginaries of the desirable political order. Exposure to electronic mass media has made contemporary democratic publics more aware that credible popular fictions have greater impact on shaping our political realities than do rational social choices or moral arguments. The pressing political question in contemporary democracy is, therefore, how to select and enact political fictions that promote peace and how to found the political order on checks and balances between alternative political imaginaries of freedom and justice.

Imagined Sovereignties

Imagined Sovereignties
Author: Kevin Olson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 131659209X

Movements like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party embody some of our deepest intuitions about popular politics and 'the power of the people'. They also expose tensions and shortcomings in our understanding of these ideals. We typically see 'the people' as having a special, sovereign power. Despite the centrality of this idea in our thinking, we have little understanding of why it has such importance. Imagined Sovereignties probes the considerable force that 'the people' exercises on our thought and practice. Like the imagined communities described by Benedict Anderson, popular politics is formed around shared, imaginary constructs rooted in our collective imagination. This book investigates these 'imagined sovereignties' in a genealogy traversing the French Enlightenment, the Haitian Revolution, and nineteenth-century Haitian constitutionalism. It problematizes taken-for-granted ideas about popular politics and provokes new ways of imagining the power of the people.

The Imagined Civil War

The Imagined Civil War
Author: Alice Fahs
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807899291

In this groundbreaking work of cultural history, Alice Fahs explores a little-known and fascinating side of the Civil War--the outpouring of popular literature inspired by the conflict. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a remarkable variety of war-related compositions, including poems, songs, children's stories, romances, novels, histories, and even humorous pieces. Fahs mines these rich but long-neglected resources to recover the diversity of the war's political and social meanings. Instead of narrowly portraying the Civil War as a clash between two great, white armies, popular literature offered a wide range of representations of the conflict and helped shape new modes of imagining the relationships of diverse individuals to the nation. Works that explored the war's devastating impact on white women's lives, for example, proclaimed the importance of their experiences on the home front, while popular writings that celebrated black manhood and heroism in the wake of emancipation helped readers begin to envision new roles for blacks in American life. Recovering a lost world of popular literature, The Imagined Civil War adds immeasurably to our understanding of American life and letters at a pivotal point in our history.

Imagined Civilizations

Imagined Civilizations
Author: Roger Hart
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2013-08-15
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1421407124

Roger Hart debunks the long-held belief that linear algebra developed independently in the West. Accounts of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Mission to China have often celebrated it as the great encounter of two civilizations. The Jesuits portrayed themselves as wise men from the West who used mathematics and science in service of their mission. Chinese literati-official Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), who collaborated with the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) to translate Euclid’s Elements into Chinese, reportedly recognized the superiority of Western mathematics and science and converted to Christianity. Most narratives relegate Xu and the Chinese to subsidiary roles as the Jesuits' translators, followers, and converts. Imagined Civilizations tells the story from the Chinese point of view. Using Chinese primary sources, Roger Hart focuses in particular on Xu, who was in a position of considerable power over Ricci. The result is a perspective startlingly different from that found in previous studies. Hart analyzes Chinese mathematical treatises of the period, revealing that Xu and his collaborators could not have believed their declaration of the superiority of Western mathematics. Imagined Civilizations explains how Xu’s West served as a crucial resource. While the Jesuits claimed Xu as a convert, he presented the Jesuits as men from afar who had traveled from the West to China to serve the emperor.