Persona And Paradox

Although certain aspects of C.S. Lewis’s work have been studied in great detail, others have been comparatively neglected. This collection of essays looks at Lewis’s life and work, and those of his friends and associates, from many different angles, but all connected through a common theme of identity. Questions of identity are essential to the understanding of any writer. The ways authors perceive themselves and who they are, the communities they belong to by birth or choice, inevitably influence their work. The way they present other people, real or fictional, are also rooted in their own conception of identity. In this volume, scholars from several countries examine gender and family roles; national, regional, racial and professional identities; membership of a particular church; ideological attachments and personal descriptions, either with regard to Lewis and those who knew him and influenced him, or in a study of their writings. Authors studied here include J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams, George MacDonald and T.S. Eliot.

A powerful female, pre-adolescent, consumer demographic has emerged in tandem with girls becoming more visible in popular culture since the 1990s. Yet the cultural anxiety that this has caused has received scant academic attention. In Tweenhood, Melanie Kennedy rectifies this and examines mainstream, pre-adolescent girls' films, television programmes and celebrities from 2004 onwards, including A Cinderella Story (2004), Hannah Montana (2006) and Camp Rock (2008). Her book forges a dialogue between post-feminism, film and television, celebrity and most importantly; the figure of the tween. Kennedy examines how these media texts, which are so key to tween culture, address and construct their target audience by helping them to 'choose' an appropriately feminine identity. Tweenhood then, she argues, is transient and a discursive construct whose unpacking highlights the deification of celebrity and femininity within its culture.

The Persona Lifecycle is a field guide exclusively focused on interaction design's most popular new technique. The Persona Lifecycle addresses the "how" of creating effective personas and using those personas to design products that people love. It doesn’t just describe the value of personas; it offers detailed techniques and tools related to planning, creating, communicating, and using personas to create great product designs. Moreover, it provides rich examples, samples, and illustrations to imitate and model. Perhaps most importantly, it positions personas not as a panacea, but as a method used to complement other user-centered design (UCD) techniques including scenario-based design, cognitive walkthroughs and user testing. The authors developed the Persona Lifecycle model to communicate the value and practical application of personas to product design and development professionals. This book explores the complete lifecycle of personas, to guide the designer at each stage of product development. It includes a running case study with rich examples and samples that demonstrate how personas can be used in building a product end-to-end. It also presents recommended best practices in techniques, tools, and innovative methods and contains hundreds of relevant stories, commentary, opinions, and case studies from user experience professionals across a variety of domains and industries. This book will be a valuable resource for UCD professionals, including usability practitioners, interaction designers, technical writers, and program managers; programmers/developers who act as the interaction designers for software; and those professionals who work with developers and designers. Features * Presentation and discussion of the complete lifecycle of personas, to guide the designer at each stage of product development. * A running case study with rich examples and samples that demonstrate how personas can be used in building a product end-to-end. * Recommended best practices in techniques, tools, and innovative methods. * Hundreds of relevant stories, commentary, opinions, and case studies from user experience professionals across a variety of domains and industries.

While so much has been written about the English Protestant religious poets of the late 16th and earlier 17th centuries, there is relatively little study on the Catholic religious poets. Cousins fills this gap with his critical history of the Catholic religious poets major phase in the English Renaissance. In studying the Catholic religious poets from Southwell to Crashaw, this book focuses on the interplay in their verse between natively English and Counter-Reformation devotional literary traditions. Cousins puts forward particularly two arguments: that most of the more important Catholic poets write verse which expresses a Christ-centred vision of reality; that the divine agape receives almost as much attention in the Catholic poets' verse as does devout eros. In The Catholic Religious Poets Cousins defends the work of the Catholic religious poets arguing that this literary tradition deserves closer examination and higher valuation than it has usually been given.

Rarely does an author so thoroughly entertain and anger his readers as Edward Abbey does. This book focuses on Abbey's aesthetic and philosophy of paradox as they are reflected in his writings, and explores his literary technique of blurring traditional genres regarding fiction and nonfiction. Until now, no study has sufficiently treated the full complexity of Abbey's writing throughout his career - making this particular work not only original, but important.

This book examines reality using verbs in their real time, which, like a segment of clock time, runs from the occurrence of the cause to the inevitable effect. As argued here, errors in our decisions often result from a ‘noun approach’ to the problem. A good decision depends on whether it is made on the basis of real premises and whether the decision-maker is able to define what is ‘good’. These two eternal issues, ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ are the subject of inquiry here. The findings presented in this book invalidate the paradigm of ‘noun philosophy’ of the 20th century. It will appeal to philosophers, as well as managers and decision makers.

Richard Kearney is one of the leading global thinkers in both Continental philosophy and post-metaphysical philosophy of religion, as well as an esteemed Irish professor in philosophy, currently teaching at Boston College, Massachusetts, USA. Professor Kearney first visited South Africa in May as joint visiting academic of the Universities of Stellenbosch, Pretoria and North-West. The visit prompted the publication of this scholarly collected work, authored by South African and international scholars. These specialists in philosophy and religious studies analysed Kearney’s influential work and brought his scholarly perspectives into dialogue with other leading thinkers in the field, both from Africa and abroad. This publication will be the first collective attempt to engage his work from the perspective of the African continent. This collected work contributes significantly in an interdisciplinary way to Ricoeurdian studies. The target audience of the book is peers and specialists in the field of Continental philosophy and philosophy of religion.

Maria Plaza sets out to analyse the function of humour in the Roman satirists Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Her starting point is that satire is driven by two motives, which are to a certain extent opposed: to display humour, and to promote a serious moral message. She argues that, while the Roman satirist needs humour for his work's aesthetic merit, his proposed message suffers from the ambivalence that humour brings with it. Her analysis shows that this paradox is not only socio-ideological but also aesthetic, forming the ground for the curious, hybrid nature of Roman satire.