It Figures

Two figs meet on a ship traveling from the Mediterranean to the USA. (Hey, it happens!) Naturally they discuss the portholes and the fact that they're all round. They begin to wonder, if a square has four sides and a pentagon five, and so on, how many sides does a circle have? Is it too many to count? Is it infinity? After talking about shapes, including the spectacular megagon, they finally arrive at a simple and elegant conclusion, which means they will be friends forever!

“Enjoyable and informative . . . Using this humorously presented book, children will truly improve their styles of writing” (School Library Journal). Writing “The road was bumpy” is okay . . . but isn’t it more fun to say “It felt like we were riding on square tires”? This lively guide shows kids how to make their writing more dramatic, more memorable, or just plain funnier—whether they’re writing for school or for creative expression. It explains six techniques: Similes Metaphors Onomatopoeia Alliteration Hyperbole Personification . . . and provides guidelines for their use, plenty of examples, and entertaining illustrations.

Once upon a time, Amy's future seemed golden. Training to be a world-class ice dancer with her partner Austin, she dreamed of Olympic glory and the day when Austin would see her as something more than just the little girl he skated with. Then, in the blink of an eye, her whole life changed. Four years later, she's just another face in the crowd at her university journalism program and everyone calls her Mia. Only her closest friends and family know anything about her past or the dreams she used to have. And that's what she thought she wanted, until another twist of fate throws her temporarily back into Austin's world. Can she keep the truth about who she is hidden from the one person who used to know her better than anyone? This is part one of a 2-book duet.

Originally published in 1986. The ghastly fate of a drowned man brought to a lake's surface in Wordsworth's "Prelude" typifies a fundamental pattern in Romantic writing, argues Cynthia Chase. Disfiguration involves not only a departure from representation but a disruption of the logic of figure or form, a decomposition of the figures composing the text. Ultimately it manifests the conflict between a work's meaning and its mode of performance. By means of an intense engagement with texts in the romantic tradition, Decomposing Figures rearticulates and recasts crucial concepts in recent literary theory, including the notion of the self-referential or self-reflexive nature of the literary work. Chase's readings show that, far from implying a privileged status, the work's self-reflexive structure entails its opacity, its inability to read itself, and the necessity of its decomposition.

Explores the rise of the idea of nothing in Western modernity and how its figuration is transforming and offering new possibilities. In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary history of ideas, Andrew W. Hass explores the ascendency of the concept of nothing into late modernity. He argues that the rise of the reality of nothing in religion, philosophy, and literature has taken place only against the decline of the concept of One: a shift from a sovereign understanding of the One (unity, universality) toward the “figure of the O”—a cipher figure that, as nonentity, is nevertheless determinant of other realities. The figuring of this O culminates in a proliferation of literary expressions of nothingness, void, and absence from 1940 to 1960, but by century’s end, this movement has shifted from linear progression to mutation, whereby religion, theology, philosophy, literature, and other critical modes of thought, such as feminism, merge into a shared, circular activity. The writer W. H. Auden lends his name to this O, his long poetic work The Sea and the Mirror an exemplary manifestation of its implications. Hass examines this work, along with that of a host of writers, philosophers, and theologians, to trace the revolutionary hermeneutics and creative space of the O, and to provide the reasoning of why nothing is now such a powerful force in the imagination of the twenty-first century, and of how it might move us through and beyond our turbulent times.

Over the past two hundred years, thousands of ancient Greek vases have been unearthed. Yet these artifacts remain a challenge: what did the images depicted on these vases actually mean to ancient Greek viewers? In this long-awaited book, Gloria Ferrari uses Athenian vases, literary evidence, and other works of art from the Archaic and Classical periods (520-400 B.C.) to investigate what these items can tell us about the ancient Greeks—specifically, their notions of gender. Ferrari begins by developing a theoretical perspective on visual representation, arguing that artistic images give us access to how their subjects were imagined rather than to the way they really were. For instance, Ferrari's examinations of the many representations of women working wool reveal that these images constitute powerful metaphors—metaphors, she argues, which both reflect and construct Greek conceptions of the ideal woman and her ideal behavior. From this perspective, Ferrari studies a number of icons representing blameless femininity and ideal masculinity to reevaluate the rites of passage by which girls are made ready for marriage and boys become men. Representations of the nude male body in Archaic statues known as kouroi, for example, symbolize manhood itself and shed new light on the much-discussed institution of paiderastia. And, in Ferrari's hands, imagery equating maidens with arable land and buried treasure provides a fresh view of Greek ideas of matrimony. Innovative, thought-provoking, and insightful throughout, Figures of Speech is a powerful demonstration of how the study of visual images as well as texts can reshape our understanding of ancient Greek culture.

A philosophical work that addresses the validity of the question: What is it for the human being to be an animal, and for this animal to be a spirit? Braine argues that the perspectives of materialism and dualism are different casts of the same flawed mold and offers a holistic alternative. Braine further argues that perception is inseparable from behavior and that the human propensity to produce language separates us from other animals. Culminating in a discussion of the meaning of death, this is rich and passionate philosophical argument for the human being as animal and soul.