Ambiguous Realities

Examining specific literary, historical, and theological texts, the essays in Ambiguous realities illuminate a number of important issues about women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: the changes in attitude toward women, the role and status of women, the dichotomy between public and private spheres, the prescriptions for women's behavior and the image of the ideal woman, and the difference between the perceived and the actual audience of medieval and Renaissance writers.--Back cover.

In Ambiguous Antidotes, Hilaire Kallendorf explores the receptions of Virtues in the realm of moral philosophy and the artistic production it influenced during the Spanish Gold Age.

"This book examines shadow imagery in postwar literature, television, film, photography, and popular culture"--

Perturbatory narration is a heuristic concept, applicable both quantitatively and qualitatively to a specific type of complex narratives for which narratology has not yet found an appropriate classification. This new term refers to complex narrative strategies that produce intentionally disturbing effects such as surprise, confusion, doubt or disappointment ‒ effects that interrupt or suspend immersion in the aesthetic reception process. The initial task, however, is to indicate what narrative conventions are, in fact, questioned, transgressed, or given new life by perturbatory narration. The key to our modeling lies in its combination of individual procedures of narrative strategies hitherto regarded as unrelated. Their interplay has not yet attracted scholarly attention. The essays in this volume present a wide range of contemporary films from Canada, the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, France and Germany. The perturbatory narration concept enables to typify and systematize moments of disruption in fictional texts, combining narrative processes of deception, paradox and/or empuzzlement and to analyse these perturbing narrative strategies in very different filmic texts.

Contemporary analytic philosophy can generally be characterized by the following tendencies: commitment to first-order predicate logic as the only viable formal logic; rejection of correspondence theories of truth; a view of existence as something expressed by the existential quantifier; a metaphysics that doesn’t give the world as a whole its due. This book seeks to offer an alternative analytic theory, one that provides a unified account of what there is, how we speak about it, the underlying logic of our language, how the truth of what we say is determined, and the central role of the real world in all of this. The result is a robust account of reality. The inspiration for many of the ideas that constitute this overall theory comes from such sources as Aristotle, Leibniz, Ryle, and Sommers.

In an age of diversity and pluralism, asks Hiedlebaugh (communication studies, Oswego State U. of New York), how can people talk productively about those issues that most divide them. Two main sub- questions generated by her investigation are how people can reason together to make good decisions when standards for what counts as reasonable vary profoundly, and how can they know how to produce good rhetoric when standards for what counts as good are shifting. c. Book News Inc.

This collection of essays on selected texts in literature, film and the media is driven by a shared theme of contesting the binary thinking in respect of gender and sexuality. The three parts of this book – “contesting norms”, “performing selves” and “blurring the lines” – delineate the queer celebration of difference and deviance. They pinpoint the limitation of assumed norms and subverting them, revel in the fluid and ambiguous self that springs from the contestation of those norms, and then repeatedly transgress and, as a result, obscure the limits that separate the normal from the abnormal. The variety of texts included in the collection ranges from a discussion of queer subjects represented in film, television and literature to that of the representations of other non-normative figures (including a madwoman, a freak or a prostitute) and to gender-role contestation and gender-bending practicing evidenced in the press, theatre, film, literature and popular culture.

Often called ‘Mini-India’, the Andaman Islands have been a crucial site of encounter between different regimes, subjects, castes, creeds, languages, and ethnicities. Since 1858, subaltern convicts, refugees, repatriates, and labourers from South and Southeast Asia have moved to the islands, condemned to, or in search of a new life. While some migrants have achieved social mobility, others have remained disenfranchised and marginalized. This ethnographic study of the Andaman settler society analyses various shades of inequality that arise from migrant communities’ material and representational access to the state. The author employs the concept of subalternity to investigate political negotiations of island history, collective identity, ecological sustainability, and resource access. Interpreting characteristic views, practices, and voices of subaltern interlocutors, the author untangles their collective agency and consciousness in migration, settlement, and place-making processes. Further, the book highlights particular subaltern strategies in order to achieve autonomy and peaceful cohabitation through movement, cultural and social appropriation, and multi-layered methods of resistance.