Posts & Reflections
Thoughts on philosophy and theology; helpful advice on teaching, learning, and coding.
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Brief comparative remarks on love in Bruno Latour’s Jubiler and Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’Adoration
In Jubiler ou les tourments de la parole religieuse (Rejoice, or the Torments of Religious Speech), Latour’s attempt to re-think religious discourse in the face of the double-click fantasy is drawn out of a consideration of lovers’ discourse, and it bears an interesting resemblance to Jean-Luc Nancy’s treatment of love in L’Adoration. Both texts
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Bruno Latour, Jubiler, ou les tourments de la parole religieuse (Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech) #1
Bruno Latour’s Jubiler, ou les tourments de la parole religieuse (Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002) is set to come out this year in English wish Polity Press as Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech. Though Latour claims that the book exhibits a rigorously scientific approach, it certainly reads as something of a complex
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Difficult Atheism in Paperback
Difficult Atheism is set to be released in paperback this month: £25 or $40, available for pre-order on Amazon.
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Lu Xun, Modernism and Madness
Lu Xun’s ‘A Madman’s Diary’, one of the set texts for week on Chinese modernism in the modernism unit, raises the interesting question of the relation of madness to modernism per se. It is already becoming clear in the course that the discourse around the limits of rationality is central to many different trends within
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Rule of thumb: use the Cambridge Companion as a jumping off point for research
If you are exploring a research topic for the modernism unit and don’t know where to start in your secondary reading, it is a good general rule of thumb to begin by seeing if there is a relevant essay in one of the Cambridge Companions. These essays provide excellent introductions to areas of a particular
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Some useful resources on Joyce’s Dubliners
This page gives some useful preliminary pointers to studying James Joyce’s Dubliners. The “selected web links” section looks particularly useful.
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Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ and the authoritative discourse of the liminally human
Perhaps it is because I have just finished the delightfully written To the Lighthouse, but reading Kafka’s ‘A report to an academy‘ this week for the up-coming modernism unit I am struck by the ambiguous narratorial position of the ‘former ape’ giving the report. Kafka’s brilliant conceit positions the speaker on the limits of humanity,
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The excess of meaning over language in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
The uneasy relation of language to meaning that is characteristic of much modernism punctuates Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Taking walk with “the atheist” Charles Tansley, Mrs. Ramsay, tired of being talked at, begins to let her mind wander in a way that detaches Tansley’s words from their intended meaning, first with the words taking on
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We learn of Mrs Ramsay’s death in a subordinate clause
Given the length at which To the Lighthouse dwells on the everyday thoughts of its characters, it comes as a brutal shock to read in the grim second section that: Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms,