Forms Of Astonishment

This is an illustrated study of a number of Greek myths about the transformations of humans and gods. Richard Buxton poses the question of how seriously the Greeks took these tales, and in doing so also illuminates issues explored by anthropologists and students of religion.

An illustrated study of a number of Greek myths about the transformations of humans and gods. Richard Buxton poses the question of how seriously the Greeks took these tales, and in doing so also illuminates issues explored by anthropologists and students of religion.

Charts the history of a Spiritual Baptist community from the passing of the Prohibition Ordinance in 1917 until the lifting of the ban in 1951.

All societies are shaped by arts, media, and other persuasive practices that can awe, captivate, enchant or otherwise seem to cast a spell on the audience. Likewise, scholarship itself often is driven by a sense of wonder and a willingness to be open to what lies beyond the obvious. This book broadens and deepens this perspective. Inspired by Stephen Tyler’s view of ethnography as an art of evocation, international scholars from the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, and rhetoric explore the spellbinding power of elusive meanings as people experience them in daily life and while gazing at works of art, watching films or studying other cultures. The book is divided into three parts covering the evocative power of visual art, the immersion in ritual and performance, and the reading, writing, and interpretation of texts. Taken as a whole, the contributions to the book demonstrate how astonishment and evocation deserve an important place in the conceptual repertoire of the human sciences.

This book brings together the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Lacan around their treatments of ‘astonishment,’ an experience of being struck by something that appears to be extraordinarily significant. Both thinkers have a central interest in the dissatisfaction with meaning that these experiences generate when we attempt to articulate them, to bring language to bear on them. Maria Balaska argues that this frustration and difficulty with meaning reveals a more fundamental characteristic of our sense-making capacities –namely, their groundlessness. Instead of disappointment with language’s sense-making capacities, Balaska argues that Wittgenstein and Lacan can help us find in this revelation of meaning’s groundlessness an opportunity to acknowledge our own involvement in meaning, to creatively participate in it and thereby to enrich our forms of life with language.

The first in-depth treatment of the major theories of the sublime from Longinus to Kant.

An illustrated quarterly.