Bøger af Morse Peckham

This book is an attempt to find the central nerve of nineteenth-century culture, to discover the problem which unifies the most important cultural documents in the century's philosophy, literature, painting and music. The author sketches how, with the collapse of the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century, it became necessary for the individual to derive order, meaning and value from his own identity rather from the objective world. Professor Peckham sees four stages in the nineteenth century's effort to solve the problem of finding a ground for human identity: the period of discovery and analogy from man to nature (sometimes called Romanticism), the period of Transcendentalism, the period of Objectism (sometimes, though less inclusively, called Realism or Naturalism), and the period of Stylism (sometimes inadequately called Aestheticism). At the end of this process, Nietzsche asserted that human identity exists but has no grounds in nature or the divine. This enabled him to do what the nineteenth century above all wished to do: to recognise the reality of human life in the contraries and opposites of human experience without falsifying them by comfortable but illusory reconciliation.

Explanation and Power was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.The meaning of any utterance or any sign is the response to that utterance or sign: this is the fundamental proposition behind Morse Peckham's Explanation and Power. Published in 1979 and now available in paperback for the first time, Explanation and Power grew out of Peckham's efforts, as a scholar of Victorian literature, to understand the nature of Romanticism. His search ultimately led back to-and built upon-the tradition of signs developed by the American Pragmatists. Since, in Peckham's view, meaning is not inherent in word or sign, only in response, human behavior itself must depend upon interaction, which in turn relies upon the stability of verbal and nonverbal signs. In the end, meaning can be stabilized only by explanation, and when explanation fails, by force. Peckham's semiotic account of human behavior, radical in its time, contends with the same issues that animate today's debates in critical theory - how culture is produced, how meaning is arrived at, the relation of knowledge to power and of society to its institutions. Readers across a wide range of disciplines, in the humanities and social sciences, will welcome its reappearance.

This book is an attempt to find the central nerve of nineteenth-century culture, to discover the problem which unifies the most important cultural documents in the century's philosophy, literature, painting and music.