Books on the topic 'Container metaphors'

This book examines the role of philosophical metaphor and allegory in the Aeneid, focusing on tendentious allusions to Lucretian atomism. It argues that Virgil, drawing upon a popular strain of anti-atomist and anti-Epicurean arguments in Greek philosophy, deploys atomic imagery as a symbol of cosmic and political disorder. The first chapter of this study investigates the development of metaphors and analogies in philosophical texts ranging from Aristotle to Cicero that equate atomism with cosmological caprice and instability. The following three chapters track how Virgil applies this interpretation of Epicurean physics to the Aeneid, in which chaotic atomic imagery is associated with various challenges to the poem’s dominant narrative of divine order and Roman power. For Aeneas, the specter of atomic disorder arises at moments of distress and hesitation, while the association of various non-Trojan characters with atomism characterizes them as agents of violent disorder needing to be contained or vanquished. The final chapter summarizes findings, showing how Virgilian allusion to Lucretian physics often conflates poetic, political, and cosmological narratives, blurring the boundaries between their respective modes of discourse and revealing a general preference for hierarchical, teleological models of order.

Throughout the United States and indeed the world, organizations have become places of darkness, where emotional savagery and brutality are now commonplace and where psychological forms of violence--intimidation, degradation, dehumanization--are the norm. Stein succeeds in portraying this dramatically in his evocative, lucid new book, and in doing so he counters official pronouncements that simply because unemployment is low and productivity high, all is well. Through the use of symbolism and metaphor he gives us access to the interior experience of organizational life today. He employs a form of disciplined subjectivity, based on Freud's concept of counter-transference, and other methods to help us comprehend what such dominating notions as managed social change really mean. Downsizing, reengineering, managed care, endless organizational restructuring--all are presented as just business but in reality, says Stein, they are devastatingly personal in their effects. With numerous vignettes and anecdotes drawn from his formal and informal research, Dr. Stein shows us in often horrifying detail what work has come to be in so many of these dark places--but also what must happen, and can happen, to lift them into the light. Through consultations, observation, and personal experience, Stein documents the ordinary assaults on the human spirit, a form of violence in the workplace that usually escapes common classification. By that he means culturally sanctioned violence, such as everyday forms of intimidation, ridicule, goading, and doubling of workloads--all in an asserted effort to make the workplace more productive, more competitive. His examples, metaphors, symbols, images come from the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, and refer back to other horrors in other times, the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition among them. His book demonstrates precisely how brutal so many of our rational business practices have become, and how disposable all of us ultimately are, at all levels, in all organizations. Stein draws upon a variety of research techniques, including a form of counter-transference based on Freud's concept, to understand the inner meanings and feelings contained in workplace metaphors and symbols. An incisive foreword by Dr. David B. Friedman, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine, comments on this, puts the book in perspective and offers additional insights into Stein's themes and how brilliantly he develops them.

This essay examines Kafka’s novel, The Trial, in light of the interpretive controversy as to whether it contains any religious meaning. Drawing upon Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of an “inverse theology,” the essay sets forth a challenge to the theological interpretation of Kafka’s work most often associated with critics such as Max Brod and Gershom Scholem. The essay argues instead that the distinctive pathos of hopelessness in Kakfa’s novel derives from the way it evacuates religious metaphors and images of their redemptive content.

In this commentary Old Testament scholar Bo Lim and theologian Daniel Castelo work together to help the church recover, read, and proclaim the prophetic book of Hosea in a way that is both faithful to its message and relevant to our contemporary context. Though the book of Hosea is rich with imagery and metaphor that can be difficult to interpret, Lim and Castelo show that, with its focus on corporate and structural sin, Hosea contains a critically important message for today’s church.

From their shared beginnings in the mid-1940s on the East Coast of the United States, people classified as autistic and musical works identified as serial or twelve-tone have been described and stigmatized in strikingly similar ways. Both are understood as excessively isolated or alone, with each entity self-contained and self-enclosed. Both are understood as uncommunicative, or communicating in atypical ways, with an excess of private meanings and self-references, and as demonstrating an unproductive preference for routines and rituals. Similar descriptive metaphors have accreted around each, including inaccessible fortresses, incomprehensible aliens, and unfeeling machines. Autism and postwar twelve-tone music may thus be thought of as related forms of cultural modernism (in its postwar American incarnation). This essay both documents the shared stigmatization and pushes back against it. Neurodiversity and cultural diversity require and reward appropriate accommodation, in the recognition that pleasure and value may take many different forms.

This concluding chapter summarizes the major points posited so far in this book, and contains the author's personal reflections on the need for new cartographies of study in the presence of these naturecultural paradigms. It emphasizes the need to replace insular and narrowly focused areas of study with communal histories and communal storytelling. Naturecultural visions show us that individual disciplines are each imbued with cultural norms and histories while being blind to those influences. Hence, the chapter also returns to the metaphor of ghosts in representing the silenced eugenic history of ecology and evolutionary biology and our consequent refusal to suitably acknowledge the horrors of eugenics.

This book re-examines how Bonhoeffer employs musical patterns of thought and language to a theological end. It outlines how the significance of Bonhoeffer’s musico-theology has not been sufficiently recognised, and sets the stage for a rigorous re-examination. It becomes clear that through the lens of his musical metaphor of polyphony, Bonhoeffer demonstrates how his account of Christian formation contains a latent pneumatology. Tarassenko demonstrates that incorporation of this pneumatology is key in deepening one’s understanding of Bonhoeffer. It allows the relationship between Christology and Christian formation in Bonhoeffer’s thought to become fully realised. The appeal to polyphony articulates this pneumatology, as an indirect but nevertheless exceedingly successful means of contouring an account of the Spirit’s work.

From Outbreak to The Walking Dead, apocalyptic narratives of infection, contagion and global pandemic are an inescapable part of twenty-first-century popular culture. Yet these fears and fantasies are too virulent to be simply quarantined within fictional texts. The vocabulary and metaphors of outbreak narratives have permeated how news media, policymakers and the general public view the real world and the people within it. In an age where fact and fiction seem increasingly difficult to separate, contagious bodies (and the discourses that contain them) continually blur established boundaries between real and unreal, legitimacy and frivolity, science and the supernatural. Where previous scholarly work has examined the spread of epidemic realities in horror fiction, the essays in this collection also consider how epidemic fantasies and fears influence reality. Initiating dialogue between scholarship from cultural and media studies, and scholarship from the medical humanities and social sciences, this collection gives readers a fuller picture of the viropolitics of contagious bodies in contemporary global culture.

In group-structured populations in which some other assumptions are satisfied, kin and group selectionist methods provide formally equivalent conditions for change. However, this only shows an equivalence between two statistical methodologies, and this is compatible with there being a real, causal distinction between kin and group selection processes. This chapter pursues a Hamilton-inspired, population-centred approach to drawing that distinction, on which the differences between kin and group selection are differences of degree in the structural properties of populations. The relevant properties are K, the overall degree to which genealogical kin interact differentially, and G, the overall degree to which the population contains stable, internally integrated, and externally isolated social groups. A spatial metaphor (‘K-G space’) provides a useful framework for thinking about these differences.

This chapter traces the cumulative influence of Wordsworth’s reading of a series of topographical and antiquarian studies on the poetry and prose he produced between 1807 and 1810. These sources contain extensive details about medieval monastic life in the north of England and describe how powerful coenobitic communities shaped the cultural and geographical landscapes they inhabited. The chapter shows how knowledge of the civic operation of the monastic world influenced Wordsworth’s thinking about primogeniture, living legacy, memorialization, and familial and democratic representation. It explains why Wordsworth was particularly drawn to St Basil, suggesting that aspects of Basil’s monastic system infiltrated The Tuft of Primroses (1808) and the Convention of Cintra (1809), and that the saint’s formulation of the Holy Trinity inflected Wordsworth’s Essays uponEpitaphs (1810). The chapter offers a new context in which to interpret Wordsworth’s metaphor of language as the ‘incarnation’ of thought.

Like Faerie Queene and Poly-Olbion, Milton’s Paradise Lost interrogates the essential meaning-making structures of poetry, using the enabling, distortive logics of cartography to think the work of representation. This chapter considers the ways the map’s origin as product of the military arms race haunts Milton’s epic, and how the poem probes the map’s tendency to disrupt the figurative structures on which poetry relies. Space, consciously framed for discursive consideration, defies the poem’s dominant use of simile and analogy, and the disruptions posed by the landscapes in Paradise Lost destabilize the figurative language that should contain violence within the poem—but fail, at sites of represented terrain, to blunt the materialization of corporeal injury. The poem triangulates figurative language, violence, and the topographical representation, such that the representation of terrain often accompanies the transformation of figurative injury into material damage, a perversion of the poem’s penchant for turning metaphor into concretion.

The book aims to provide a comprehensive study of the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of Kant’s first Critique. It argues that Kant conceives of ‘critique’ as a kind of winnowing exercise, aimed to separate the wheat of good metaphysics from the chaff of bad. However, he uses a less familiar metaphor to make this point, namely, that of ‘the fiery test of critique’. This turns out to be, not a medieval ordeal (a trial by fire), but rather a metallurgical assay: so-called ‘cupellation’—a procedure in which ore samples are tested for their precious-metal content. The upshot is that critique has a positive, investigatory side: it seeks not merely to eliminate the dross of bad ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics but also to uncover any hidden nuggets of value that might be contained in traditional speculative metaphysics. There are both gold and silver to be found. The gold is the indirect proof of Transcendental Idealism afforded by the resolution of the Antinomies, the silver Kant’s defence of theoretically grounded ‘doctrinal beliefs’ in a wise and great originator and in an afterlife. In the course of making these points, the book engages with Kant’s views on a number of central problems in philosophy and meta-philosophy, including: the explanation of the enduring human impulse towards metaphysics, correct philosophical method, the limits of self-knowledge, the possibility of human freedom, the resolution of metaphysical paradox (‘Antinomy’), the justification of faith, the nature of scepticism, and the role of ‘as if’ reasoning in natural science.

Patterns of pearl cultivation and circulation reveal vernacular practices that shaped emerging imperial ideas about value and wealth in the early modern world. Pearls’ variability and subjective beauty posed a profound challenge to the imperial impulse to order and control, underscoring the complexity of governing subjects and objects in the early modern world. Qualitative, evaluative language would play a prominent role in crown officials’ attempts to contain and channel this complexity. The book’s title reflects the evolving significance of the term barrueca (which became “baroque” in English), a word initially employed in the Venezuelan fisheries to describe irregular pearls. Over time, this term lost its close association with the jewel but came to serve as a metaphor for irregular, unbounded expression. Pearls’ enduring importance lies less in the revenue they generated than in the conversations they prompted about the nature of value and the importance of individual skill and judgment, as well as the natural world, in its creation and husbandry. The stories generated by pearls—an unusual, organic jewel—range globally, crossing geographic and imperial boundaries as well as moving across scales, linking the bounded experiences of individuals to the expansion of imperial bureaucracies. These microhistories illuminate the connections between these small- and large-scale historical processes, revealing the connections between empire as envisioned by monarchs, enacted in law, and experienced at sea and on the ground by individuals.