The current conception of political literature is still influenced, to a significant extent, by the commitment debate between Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács, in which the political power of the literary imagination rests either in its abstract freedom from political realities (Adorno), or in its close fidelity to them (Lukács).

This essay suggests that an understanding of James Kelman’s writing, as a singular form of political literature, requires us to move beyond this opposition. In blending a writing that is deeply committed to locality and to place with a writing affiliated to the abstractions of Kafka and Beckett, Kelman’s work suggests new ways of imagining the terms in which the mind is both free from and bound to its determining conditions. The essay offers a reading of Kelman’s later novels – Translated Accounts, You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free and pre-eminently Kiron Smith, boy – in order to develop an account of a political imagination that is attuned to the particular cleaving that Kelman performs, between freedom and servitude, between place and the dismantling of place.

This chapter argues that the New York School of Poets occupy a complex transitional moment in relation to both the history of sexuality and the history of poetry and modern art. Their work is governed by both the epistemology of the closet that shapes high modernism from earlier in the twentieth century and, looking forward to Stonewall and Gay Liberation, also presents utopian potentialities in its experimental forms of sociability.

Interpreters often cite Kant’s Stufenleiter of representations (A320/B376) as providing a “definition” of intuition. This misunderstands the peculiar logic of Porphyrian classification, which I clarify by reviewing its history. Porphyrian trees do offer conceptual analyses, I argue, but do not purport to provide a uniquely correct, much less exhaustive, account of the analysand. Different orderings of differentia, as well as different differentia, are often possible. Which terms and which kinds of terms appear as differentia in the analysis depends on the goals and constraints on the philosophical inquiry to which the analysis contributes. It is therefore illegitimate to extract a “definition” of intuition from Kant’s Stufenleiter. First, its analysis targets <idea of reason> (not <intuition>), and, second, it does not purport to give a uniquely correct account of that concept (much less of <intuition>), as a definition must.

Kripke finds in Wittgenstein an argument for the conclusion that there are no meaning facts and considers the consequences of this outcome for the meaning of meaning-ascribing sentences. One immediate consequence is that their meaning cannot be given by their truth conditions. Kripke proposes instead that meaning ascriptions obtain their meaning from (i) their assertibility conditions and (ii) the non-representational function that the practice of asserting these sentences in these conditions plays in our lives, accepting that these sentences can’t play the role of representing the world. I present a strategy for avoiding this outcome. Meaning ascriptions obtain their meanings from their assertibility conditions, but they successfully perform the function of representing the world. The states of affairs they represent can be singled out with definitions by abstraction, using the synonymy conditions generated by their assertibility conditions. When meaning facts are construed in this way, the argument that Kripke finds in Wittgenstein does not establish that they don’t exist.

Focused on twentieth-century art criticism, this chapter shows how critics and essayists such as Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss, Susan Sontag, and Michael Fried addressed the problems of medium and abstraction. The rise in the prominence of the essay on visual art during this period corresponds with the ascendancy of abstract representational painting and sculpture. It is as if the retreat from figuration opened a breach through which language – in the form of the essay – took up the role of advance guard. The essay enacted the experience of visual art rather than merely describing and judging it. In parallel with the proliferation of abstraction, writing on art turned away from representing the art object and toward the production of a self-sufficient experience. Pointing to nothing outside itself, the autonomous abstract work was matched by the essay attempting to become a wholly independent force of intellectual creation. The chapter traces how essayists responded to modernist and abstract art, and elucidates the role this writing played in settings such as art schools, magazines, museums, and other institutions that funded, displayed, and popularized the art of the day.

In this book, we have aimed to explain the principles of computational neuroscience by showing how the underlying mechanisms are being modelled, together with presenting critical accounts of examples of their use. In some chapters, we have placed the modelling work described in its historical context where we felt this would be interesting and useful. We now make some brief comments about where the field of computational neuroscience came from and where it might be going.

Discourses about comics focus very often on their narrative dimension to the extent that they are frequently considered as narratives per se. Driven by the ambition to rethink established formulas, alternative publishers show examples of works that invite to move beyond this approach. This chapter looks at comics that do not tell a story (in the narrow sense of the word) or question familiar narratives. It focuses on abstract comics or comics made of series of unrelated images. Building on the works of creators that tend to remain under the radar such as Rosaire Appel, Renée French, Tim Gaze, or Bianca Stone, this chapter delineates possibilities for understanding these creations and the specific kinds of pleasure they generate. By highlighting their links with other media, in particular music and poetry, it emphasizes how the reader’s response is closely linked to their horizon of expectations. Finally, it shows that the study of comics that are at the limits of narration allow to reassess how we see comics in general, including those that privilege the story.

Expertise implies that people are usually good problem solvers in their area of expertise but expertise doesn’t necessarily imply that they are creative. Creativity requires that the solutions are not only correct but also novel and useful. New solutions, such as using dental floss to hang objects on a wall, are needed in daily life when typical solutions are not readily available. One approach to studying creativity is to observe creative people such as artists, sculptors, jazz musicians, and actors. Another approach is to conduct controlled experiments such as evaluating the effectiveness of examples in producing creative products. The Geneplore model of thinking provides a helpful framework for dividing creative thought into generation and exploration phases. Broad states of mind – exploring the environment rather than exploiting accumulated knowledge – contribute to producing novel solutions. In contrast, anxiety can have a negative impact of creativity. Across many diverse content domains from the arts to the sciences, rated anxiety was greater for activities that required creativity.

Literary adaptions in comics are not a recent phenomenon, but until recently the cultural status of this kind of work has always been very low, and a certain distrust has dominated the debates for many decades, the main reason of this suspicion being the fear that “fidelity” to the adapted model might jeopardize the proper creative possibilities of the adapting medium. More and more recent examples from the graphic novel field, which aims at becoming a literary practice itself, do not only show that literary adaptations can be very valuable, they also demonstrate that it is possible to use the notion of fidelity itself in highly creative ways. Taking its departure from specific case studies, Olivier Deprez’s adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle (2003), Paul Karasik (script) and David Mazzuchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (2005), Simon Grennan’s adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (2015), and Sébastien Conard’s adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Watt (2019), this chapter examines the most important techniques that can be used to transfer a novel into a visual narrative in print. It pays particular attention to the visuality of the text as it is transferred from one medium to another (typography, page layout, text as drawing).

This chapter provides an overview of approaches to formal modeling in the domain of categorization. The core psychological processes addressed by models are: generating a classification decision in response to a stimulus and constructing category representations based on supervised experience. A taxonomy is provided that organizes the formal models in terms of their use of a fixed, combined, or constructed approach to predicting categories under either a cue-based or item-based framework. The chapter gives in-depth coverage of a leading approach (exemplar models) as well as an emerging alternative: a constructed cue-based model (DIVA) that differs from competing accounts by learning to reconstruct the input features via sets of category-specific weights and using the degree of reconstructive success (i.e., goodness-of-fit to the category) to determine the likelihood of membership.

While trudging through the landscape of his rambles, Coleridge filled his notebooks with reference to and drawings of geometric figures. The question arises: Given his fascination with the uncultivated, irregular wild hills and rivers of his rambles, why would he utilize the fixed, abstracted geometric idiom removed from time? This chapter addresses this seeming contradiction by suggesting that his attraction to the geometric figure in his landscape descriptions is neither perplexing nor inconsistent but rather an expression of his immersion in an environment that nurtured a geometric frame of mind and believed in a mathematical ordering of the entire universe. Beginning with his mathematical training both at Christ’s Hospital School and at the University of Cambridge, Coleridge inherited a cultural conviction that one should take Euclid seriously. Furthermore, this training sharpened his powers of attention, abstraction, and an a priori intuition. Ultimately, his attachment to a geometric perspective did not distract him from his attraction to the sensuous movements, sounds, and colors of his natural surroundings. He intertwined them both and in so doing tempered his contemporaries’ way of thinking that separated the two modes of perception.

This introduction offers an account of Jacobi’s importance for intellectual history and describes how he positioned himself at the centre of critical debates in a way that would shape the intellectual terrain for coming generations.