Beckett

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David Baggett and William A. Drumin

The shower scene in Psycho; Cary Grant running for his life through a cornfield; innocent birds lined up on a fence waiting, watching these seminal cinematic moments are as real to moviegoers as their own lives. But what makes them so? What deeper forces are at work in Hitchcock s films that so captivate his fans? This collection of articles examines those forces with fresh eyes. These essays demonstrate a fascinating range of topics: Sabotage s lessons about the morality of terrorism and counter-terrorism; Rope s debatable Nietzschean underpinnings; Strangers on a Train s definition of morality. Some of the essays look at more overarching questions, such as why Hitchcock relies so heavily on the Freudian unconscious. In all, the book features 18 philosophers paying a special homage to the legendary auteur in a way that s accessible even to casual fans.

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Maurice Hunt

This study explores Shakespeare's representation of various kinds of physical and intellectual work in plays ranging from Hamlet and King Lear through Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens to the four late romances, King Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Of special interest is the analysis of Shakespeare's portrayal of birth labor, especially with regard to artistic creation and playwrighting in particular. The conflict of idleness versus arduous work becomes progressively more prominent in Shakespeare's Jacobean plays. Reformation Protestantism, the court of King James, and early modern English working conditions provide contexts for appreciating the contemporary importance of this conflict.

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Wilhelm Dilthey

"This is the fifth volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), a philosopher and historian of culture who has had a significant, and continuing, influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics and phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences. This volume presents Dilthey's principal writings on aesthetics and the philosophical understanding of poetry, as well as representative essays of literary criticism. The essay "The Imagination of the Poet" (also known as his Poetics) is his most sustained attempt to examine the philosophical bearings of literature in relation to psychological and historical theory. Also included are "The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and its Present Task," "Fragments for a Poetics," and two final essays discussing Goethe and Hḻderlin. The latter are drawn from Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, a volume that was acclaimed on publication as a classic of literary criticism and that continues to be a model for the geistesgeschichtliche approach to literary history."-- Publisher description.

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Deeanne Westbrook

Speaking of Gods analyzes the figurative-narrative creation of gods, their heavenly abodes, and behaviors, reaching back to the beginning of history in Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Persia and Greece, and continuing through the figures and narratives of a biblical tradition that includes the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an.