Game Theory and Postwar American Literature

Game Theory and Postwar American Literature

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781137601346

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""This publication provides a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of game-theoretic social dilemmas in immediate postwar American literature. The discussion introduces the most common social dilemmas, the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock, as a means of interpreting works by Faulkner, McCoy, Kellogg, Bradbury, Capote, and Hansberry."--Provided by the publisher"


Book Synopsis Game Theory and Postwar American Literature by :

Download or read book Game Theory and Postwar American Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""This publication provides a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of game-theoretic social dilemmas in immediate postwar American literature. The discussion introduces the most common social dilemmas, the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock, as a means of interpreting works by Faulkner, McCoy, Kellogg, Bradbury, Capote, and Hansberry."--Provided by the publisher"


Game Theory and Postwar American Literature

Game Theory and Postwar American Literature

Author: Michael Wainwright

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-14

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1137601337

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If game theory, the mathematical simulation of rational decision-making first axiomatically established by the Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann, is to prove worthy of literary hermeneutics, then critics must be able to apply its models to texts written without a working knowledge of von Neumann's discipline in mind. Reading such iconic novels as Fahrenheit 451, In Cold Blood, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye from the perspective of the four most frequently encountered coordination problems - the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock, Game Theory and Postwar American Literature illustrates the significant contribution of mathematical models to literary interpretation. The interdisciplinary approach of this book contributes to an understanding of the historical, political, and social contexts that surround the texts produced in the post-Cold War years, as well as providing a comprehensive model of joining game theory and literary criticism.


Book Synopsis Game Theory and Postwar American Literature by : Michael Wainwright

Download or read book Game Theory and Postwar American Literature written by Michael Wainwright and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If game theory, the mathematical simulation of rational decision-making first axiomatically established by the Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann, is to prove worthy of literary hermeneutics, then critics must be able to apply its models to texts written without a working knowledge of von Neumann's discipline in mind. Reading such iconic novels as Fahrenheit 451, In Cold Blood, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye from the perspective of the four most frequently encountered coordination problems - the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock, Game Theory and Postwar American Literature illustrates the significant contribution of mathematical models to literary interpretation. The interdisciplinary approach of this book contributes to an understanding of the historical, political, and social contexts that surround the texts produced in the post-Cold War years, as well as providing a comprehensive model of joining game theory and literary criticism.


Game Theory and Minorities in American Literature

Game Theory and Minorities in American Literature

Author: Michael Wainwright

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1137588225

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This interdisciplinary monograph applies the theory of games of strategy (or game theory) to an important subset of American literature: minoritarian texts. Fittingly, John von Neumann's game theory, as a mathematical subdiscipline practically abandoned by its founder after the publication of 'Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele' (1928), but purposefully reengaged with on his permanent relocation to America in 1938, carries the minoritarian credentials of a Hungarian-born national of Jewish descent. The state of international politics in the late 1930s certainly contributed to von Neumann's renewed interest in his theory, but a socioeconomic environment built on the legacy of slavery focused a reengagement with coordination problems that would last until his death. In these strategic situations, people must make choices in the knowledge that other people face the same options and that the outcome for each person will result from everybody's decisions. The four most frequently encountered coordination problems are the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock Minoritarians find majoritarian attempts to control these social dilemmas particularly challenging. Hence, a game-theoretically inflected hermeneutic that identifies the logical, rational, and strategic state of human interrelations not only helps to categorize, but also to analyze minoritarian texts. The authors under detailed consideration are Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet A. Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Mohsin Hamid.


Book Synopsis Game Theory and Minorities in American Literature by : Michael Wainwright

Download or read book Game Theory and Minorities in American Literature written by Michael Wainwright and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary monograph applies the theory of games of strategy (or game theory) to an important subset of American literature: minoritarian texts. Fittingly, John von Neumann's game theory, as a mathematical subdiscipline practically abandoned by its founder after the publication of 'Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele' (1928), but purposefully reengaged with on his permanent relocation to America in 1938, carries the minoritarian credentials of a Hungarian-born national of Jewish descent. The state of international politics in the late 1930s certainly contributed to von Neumann's renewed interest in his theory, but a socioeconomic environment built on the legacy of slavery focused a reengagement with coordination problems that would last until his death. In these strategic situations, people must make choices in the knowledge that other people face the same options and that the outcome for each person will result from everybody's decisions. The four most frequently encountered coordination problems are the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock Minoritarians find majoritarian attempts to control these social dilemmas particularly challenging. Hence, a game-theoretically inflected hermeneutic that identifies the logical, rational, and strategic state of human interrelations not only helps to categorize, but also to analyze minoritarian texts. The authors under detailed consideration are Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet A. Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Mohsin Hamid.


How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind

Author: Paul Erickson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-11-22

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 022604677X

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In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.


Book Synopsis How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind by : Paul Erickson

Download or read book How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind written by Paul Erickson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.


The Rational Shakespeare

The Rational Shakespeare

Author: Michael Wainwright

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-08-22

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 3319952587

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The Rational Shakespeare: Peter Ramus, Edward de Vere, and the Question of Authorship examines William Shakespeare’s rationality from a Ramist perspective, linking that examination to the leading intellectuals of late humanism, and extending those links to the life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. The application to Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets of a game-theoretic hermeneutic, an interpretive approach that Ramism suggests but ultimately evades, strengthens these connections in further supporting the Oxfordian answer to the question of Shakespearean authorship.


Book Synopsis The Rational Shakespeare by : Michael Wainwright

Download or read book The Rational Shakespeare written by Michael Wainwright and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-22 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rational Shakespeare: Peter Ramus, Edward de Vere, and the Question of Authorship examines William Shakespeare’s rationality from a Ramist perspective, linking that examination to the leading intellectuals of late humanism, and extending those links to the life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. The application to Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets of a game-theoretic hermeneutic, an interpretive approach that Ramism suggests but ultimately evades, strengthens these connections in further supporting the Oxfordian answer to the question of Shakespearean authorship.


The Race Card

The Race Card

Author: Tara Fickle

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2019-11-19

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1479884367

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Winner, 2020 American Book Award, given by the Before Columbus Foundation How games have been used to establish and combat Asian American racial stereotypes As Pokémon Go reshaped our neighborhood geographies and the human flows of our cities, mapping the virtual onto lived realities, so too has gaming and game theory played a role in our contemporary understanding of race and racial formation in the United States. From the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment to the model minority myth and the globalization of Asian labor, Tara Fickle shows how games and game theory shaped fictions of race upon which the nation relies. Drawing from a wide range of literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, Fickle illuminates the ways Asian Americans have had to fit the roles, play the game, and follow the rules to be seen as valuable in the US. Exploring key moments in the formation of modern US race relations, The Race Card charts a new course in gaming scholarship by reorienting our focus away from games as vehicles for empowerment that allow people to inhabit new identities, and toward the ways that games are used as instruments of soft power to advance top-down political agendas. Bridging the intellectual divide between the embedded mechanics of video games and more theoretical approaches to gaming rhetoric, Tara Fickle reveals how this intersection allows us to overlook the predominance of game tropes in national culture. The Race Card reveals this relationship as one of deep ideological and historical intimacy: how the games we play have seeped into every aspect of our lives in both monotonous and malevolent ways.


Book Synopsis The Race Card by : Tara Fickle

Download or read book The Race Card written by Tara Fickle and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2020 American Book Award, given by the Before Columbus Foundation How games have been used to establish and combat Asian American racial stereotypes As Pokémon Go reshaped our neighborhood geographies and the human flows of our cities, mapping the virtual onto lived realities, so too has gaming and game theory played a role in our contemporary understanding of race and racial formation in the United States. From the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment to the model minority myth and the globalization of Asian labor, Tara Fickle shows how games and game theory shaped fictions of race upon which the nation relies. Drawing from a wide range of literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, Fickle illuminates the ways Asian Americans have had to fit the roles, play the game, and follow the rules to be seen as valuable in the US. Exploring key moments in the formation of modern US race relations, The Race Card charts a new course in gaming scholarship by reorienting our focus away from games as vehicles for empowerment that allow people to inhabit new identities, and toward the ways that games are used as instruments of soft power to advance top-down political agendas. Bridging the intellectual divide between the embedded mechanics of video games and more theoretical approaches to gaming rhetoric, Tara Fickle reveals how this intersection allows us to overlook the predominance of game tropes in national culture. The Race Card reveals this relationship as one of deep ideological and historical intimacy: how the games we play have seeped into every aspect of our lives in both monotonous and malevolent ways.


Faulkner and Money

Faulkner and Money

Author: Jay Watson

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2019-06-27

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1496822552

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Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Gloria J. Burgess, David A. Davis, Sarah E. Gardner, Richard Godden, Ryan Heryford, Robert Jackson, Gavin Jones, Mary A. Knighton, Peter Lurie, John T. Matthews, Myka Tucker-Abramson, Michael Wainwright, Jay Watson, and Michael Zeitlin The matter of money touches a writer's life at every point—in the need to make ends meet; in dealings with agents, editors, publishers, and bookstores; and in the choice of subject matter and the minutiae of imagined worlds. William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha was no exception. The people and communities he wrote about stayed deeply entangled in personal, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as did the author himself. Faulkner's economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century. The Faulkner met within these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason. Faulkner and Money brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel Laureate and new questions about his art. Essays in this collection address economies of debt and gift giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.


Book Synopsis Faulkner and Money by : Jay Watson

Download or read book Faulkner and Money written by Jay Watson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Gloria J. Burgess, David A. Davis, Sarah E. Gardner, Richard Godden, Ryan Heryford, Robert Jackson, Gavin Jones, Mary A. Knighton, Peter Lurie, John T. Matthews, Myka Tucker-Abramson, Michael Wainwright, Jay Watson, and Michael Zeitlin The matter of money touches a writer's life at every point—in the need to make ends meet; in dealings with agents, editors, publishers, and bookstores; and in the choice of subject matter and the minutiae of imagined worlds. William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha was no exception. The people and communities he wrote about stayed deeply entangled in personal, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as did the author himself. Faulkner's economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century. The Faulkner met within these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason. Faulkner and Money brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel Laureate and new questions about his art. Essays in this collection address economies of debt and gift giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.


Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

Author: Kevin Brazil

Publisher: Oxford English Monographs

Published: 2019-02-06

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0198824459

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Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.


Book Synopsis Art, History, and Postwar Fiction by : Kevin Brazil

Download or read book Art, History, and Postwar Fiction written by Kevin Brazil and published by Oxford English Monographs. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.


A Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture

A Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture

Author: Josephine Hendin

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 0470756381

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This Concise Companion is a guide to the creative output of the United States in the postwar period, in its diverse energies, shapes and forms. Embraces diversity, covering Vietnam literature, gay and lesbian literature, American Jewish fiction, Italian American literature, Irish American writing, emergent ethnic literatures, African American writing, jazz, film, drama and more. Shows how different genres and approaches opened up creative possibilities and interacted in the postwar period. Portrays the postwar United States split by differences of wealth and position, by ethnicity and race, and by agendas of left and right, but united in the intensity of its creative drive.


Book Synopsis A Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture by : Josephine Hendin

Download or read book A Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture written by Josephine Hendin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Concise Companion is a guide to the creative output of the United States in the postwar period, in its diverse energies, shapes and forms. Embraces diversity, covering Vietnam literature, gay and lesbian literature, American Jewish fiction, Italian American literature, Irish American writing, emergent ethnic literatures, African American writing, jazz, film, drama and more. Shows how different genres and approaches opened up creative possibilities and interacted in the postwar period. Portrays the postwar United States split by differences of wealth and position, by ethnicity and race, and by agendas of left and right, but united in the intensity of its creative drive.


The World the Game Theorists Made

The World the Game Theorists Made

Author: Paul Erickson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-11-04

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 022609717X

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Today, game theory is central to our understanding of capitalist markets, the evolution of social behavior in animals, and much more. Both the social and biological sciences have seemingly fused around the game. Yet the ascendancy of game theory and theories of rational choice more generally remains a rich source of misunderstanding. To gain a better grasp of the widespread dispersion of game theory and the mathematics of rational choice, Paul Erickson uncovers its history during the poorly understood period between the publication of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern s seminal "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior" in 1944 and the theory s revival in economics in the 1980s. "The World the Game Theorists Made "reveals how the mathematics of rational choice was a common, flexible language that could facilitate wide-ranging debate on some of the great issues of the time. Because it so actively persists in the sciences and public life, assessing the significance of game theory for the postwar sciences is especially critical now."


Book Synopsis The World the Game Theorists Made by : Paul Erickson

Download or read book The World the Game Theorists Made written by Paul Erickson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-11-04 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, game theory is central to our understanding of capitalist markets, the evolution of social behavior in animals, and much more. Both the social and biological sciences have seemingly fused around the game. Yet the ascendancy of game theory and theories of rational choice more generally remains a rich source of misunderstanding. To gain a better grasp of the widespread dispersion of game theory and the mathematics of rational choice, Paul Erickson uncovers its history during the poorly understood period between the publication of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern s seminal "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior" in 1944 and the theory s revival in economics in the 1980s. "The World the Game Theorists Made "reveals how the mathematics of rational choice was a common, flexible language that could facilitate wide-ranging debate on some of the great issues of the time. Because it so actively persists in the sciences and public life, assessing the significance of game theory for the postwar sciences is especially critical now."