In today?s globalised world, terms such as multiculturalism and pluralism assume a shared culture with shared values and convictions about openness, democracy, and equality. This in turn can be seen as a monoculture of views and attitudes. Yet being able to deal with differences, paradoxes, and ambiguities results from a learning process and does not just happen on its own. Art has played a pivotal role in this process since the dawn of modernity, and artists in particular have the ability to play with cultural conventions. This book gives a platform to art and artists who dare to challenge the rules of our globalised, monocultural society, and explores their successes and failures.

Embodying Ambiguity traces the shifts in the representation of the androgyny myth in the literature and aesthetics of the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century. Catriona MacLeod examines important pedagogic implications of the androgyny ideal for Classical, Romantic, and Realist texts, beginning with Aristophane's narrative of the origin of human sexuality in Plato's Symposium and including the hermaphroditic androgyny proposed by Winckelmann and the heterosexual complementary model found in Schiller and Schlegel.

It has become commonplace to associate art and aesthetic experience with the category of ambiguity. Indeed, when we talk about art, we cannot do without the dynamic force of ambiguity just as the aesthetic itself cannot do without it. The great efforts to disambiguate aesthetic practices and their associated theories and contexts would eliminate art's unique ability to reshape our knowledge of the world, our sensory encounters with it, and our moral or political positions in it. The essays collected in this volume present different perspectives on this central category and develop interdisciplinary connections. Contributors include Frauke Berndt, Joy H. Calico, Stephan Kammer, Lutz Koepnick, Verena Krieger, Richard Langston, Rachel Mader, Lily Tonger-Erk, Gabriel Trop, and Thomas Wortmann.

In Potential Images Dario Gamboni explores ambiguity in modern art, considering images that rely to a great degree on a projected or imaginative response from viewers to achieve their effect. Ambiguity became increasingly important in late 19th- and early 20th-century aesthetics, as is evidenced in works by such artists as Redon, Cezanne, Gauguin, Ensor and the Nabis. Similarly, the Cubists subverted traditional representational conventions, requiring their viewers to decipher images to extract their full meanings. The same device was taken up in the various experiments leading to abstraction. For example, it was Kandinsky's intention that his work could be interpreted in both figurative and non-figurative ways, and Duchamp's Readymades suggested the radical conclusion that 'it is the beholder who makes the picture'. These invitations to viewers to participate in the process of artistic communication had social and political implications, as they accorded artist and beholder symmetrical, almost interchangeable, roles.

Ours is an age of offense, a time of reactionary shock—always received, never given. Ours is an age that has forgone cultural narratives, a time of individualism—wherein personal identities trump the collective spirit. Ours is an age of failing earth, a time of ecological collapse—yet the consumption of global capitalism continues to run amok. But don't fear. You have the correct worldview, the best solutions. It’s not your fault these things are happening. It’s the president’s, the immigrant’s, and the Islamicist’s. Or perhaps It’s the socialist’s, the tree hugger’s, and the baby killer’s. But it’s not your fault. Never yours. For the world exists as you see it—in an echo chamber lined with golden pixels. Do I still have your attention? Then join me. Within the covers of Narrativizing Theories, I dive into ambiguity and aesthetics to depict how clashing worldviews exist side by side yet remain mutually incompatible. I examine how cultures distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable beliefs, embodiments, and identities. And I outline an aesthetic theory of ambiguity that highlights—through the twists and turns of literature—the provisionality of knowledge and the narrativization of reality.

Ambiguity in the sense of two or more possible meanings is considered to be a distinctive feature of modern art and literature. It characterizes the "open artwork" (Eco) and is generated by "disruptive tactics" (Wellershoff) and strategies to engender uncertainty. While ambiguity is seen as a "paradigm of modernity" (Bode), there is skepticism regarding its use in the pre-modern era. Older studies were dominated by the conviction that there was a lack of ambiguity in pre-modernity because, according to the rules of the "old rhetoric", ambiguity was seen as an avoidable error (vitium) and a violation of the dictate of clarity (perspicuitas). The aim of the volume is to re-examine the putative "absence of ambiguity" in the pre-modern era. Is it not possible to find clear examples of deliberately employed (intended) ambiguity in antiquity? Are the oracles and riddles, the Palinode of Stesichoros and Socrates (Phaedrus), the dissoi logoi of rhetoric, the ambiguities of the tragedies all exceptions or do they not indicate a distinct interest in the artistic use of ambiguity? The presentations of the conference, which will include scholars from various philologies, will combine a recourse to theoretical concepts of intended ambiguity with exemplary analyses from the field of pre-modern art and literature.

Examines seven types of ambiguity, providing examples of it in the writings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot.

"Eisenberg′s book is refreshing, in addition to its theoretical merits, for the presence of a distinctive human voice, unafraid to express passion, anger and hope. Readers will benefit enormously from the substance of his book, but also from its form." —HUMAN RELATIONS In Strategic Ambiguities: Essays on Communication, Organization, and Identity, Eric M. Eisenberg, an internationally recognized leader in the theory and practice of organizational communication, collects and reflects upon more than two decades of his writing. Strategic Ambiguities is a provocative journey through the development of a new aesthetics of communication that rejects fundamentalisms and embraces a contingent, life-affirming worldview. Strategic Ambiguities: Explores the role of language and communication in the construction of social structures and personal identities. Provides a useful intellectual and historical context for students through framing chapters and head notes developed especially for this volume. Chronicles the historical development of an important argument about communicating and organizing through the sustained focus on a single theorist. Intended Audience: This text is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses such as Organizational Communication, Communication Theory, and Organizational Behavior in the fields of Communication, Business & Management, and Educational Leadership. "This collection of essays is insightful, thought-provoking, and forward-looking. Eric Eisenberg takes on challenging positions, writes in a cogent and accessible manner, and always stimulates new scholarship. This work will be an important teaching tool, not just for the innovative content of the writing, but also for the historical narrative of organizational communication embedded in it." —Steve May, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Lay audiences will find the text rich with evocative narratives even as the theoretical moves will engage students and teacher-scholars. This edited compilation is likely to serve as a springboard for future inquiry and an invaluable resource for teaching and learning in undergraduate and graduate communication courses." —THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION

Ever since it was first published in 1930, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity has been perceived as a milestone in literary criticism—far from being an impediment to communication, ambiguity now seemed an index of poetic richness and expressive power. Little, however, has been written on the broader trajectory of Western thought about ambiguity before Empson; as a result, the nature of his innovation has been poorly understood. A History of Ambiguity remedies this omission. Starting with classical grammar and rhetoric, and moving on to moral theology, law, biblical exegesis, German philosophy, and literary criticism, Anthony Ossa-Richardson explores the many ways in which readers and theorists posited, denied, conceptualised, and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts between antiquity and the twentieth century. This process took on a variety of interconnected forms, from the Renaissance delight in the ‘elegance’ of ambiguities in Horace, through the extraordinary Catholic claim that Scripture could contain multiple literal—and not just allegorical—senses, to the theory of dramatic irony developed in the nineteenth century, a theory intertwined with discoveries of the double meanings in Greek tragedy. Such narratives are not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, they provide an insight into the foundations of modern criticism, revealing deep resonances between acts of interpretation in disparate eras and contexts. A History of Ambiguity lays bare the long tradition of efforts to liberate language, and even a poet’s intention, from the strictures of a single meaning.