Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 210.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Sat, 01 Sep 2001 06:26:24 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: books of interest, with request for comments
Members of Humanist may be interested to know of the following, which are
perhaps new only to me. Comments and further recommendations would be most
welcome.
1. Caroline A Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing
Art (London: Routledge, 1998. I encountered this book because of Galison's
fine essay, "Judgement Against Objectivity" (pp. 327-59), which is but one
in a series of articles coming out of Galison's study of the historicity of
the idea of objectivity; see also his paper in the ACLS Occasional Papers
47 volume, The Humanities and the Sciences,
<http://www.acls.org/op47-1.htm>, which doubtless I have mentioned before.
The editors of Picturing Science comment, "Analytic attempts to distinguish
'art' and 'science' often founder at the boundaries drawn between them' (p.
1). Indeed -- and much is in that past participle "drawn".
2. Charles Ess and Fay Sudweeks, eds., Culture, Technology, Communication:
Towards an Intercultural Global Village (Albany NY: State University of New
York Press, 2001). This volume came out of a conference held in London in
1998, Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication, first in
what has become a series. An intellectually exciting event (I was there but
only made trouble on the sidelines) that has fortunately survived into
print. The essays in the book work out consequences of the fact that, as
Susan Herring says in her Foreward, "the world is getting smaller" in part
through communication technologies. With our mobile phones, e-mail &c we
tend to regard this as a good thing and think no more about it. What these
essays do inter alia is to burn away the "good" as an unqualified
qualifier. As a friend once said about another matter, "it isn't
necessarily a good thing, but it is certainly a thing."
3. Mikael Hard and Andrew Jamison, eds., The Intellectual Appropriation of
Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press,
1998). This book examines the social and intellectual responses to
technology during the 1st four decades of the last century. It came out of
a project at the Department of the Theory of Science at Gothenburg
(Goteborg, Sweden) and so a most welcome majority of essays are from
Scandinavian scholars. I have not read this book yet; comments from anyone
who has would be welcome, of course.
4. Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost: Studies in Imagination (New York:
Ecco Press, 1976). This is a literary-critical study of imagination in
writers from Shakespeare to the modernists. I'm not sure what to say about
it yet; I mention it here to solicit comments from anyone familiar with
Donoghue, even more with the topic. I would be most greatful for pointers
to studies from any discipline on this topic -- other than Northrop Frye's
series of lectures, The Educated Imagination, which I have read.
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Senior Lecturer /
Centre for Computing in the Humanities / King's College London /
Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
+44 (0)20 7848-2784 / ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/
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