William Ian Miller

Outrageous Fortune (eBook, ePUB)

Gloomy Reflections on Luck and Life

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In this book, William Ian Miller offers his reflections on the perverse consequences, indeed often the opposite of intended effects, of so-called 'good things'. Noted for his remarkable erudition, wit, and playful pessimism, Miller here ranges over topics from personal disasters to literary and national ones. Drawing on a truly immense store of knowledge encompassing literature, philosophy, theology, and history, he excavates the evidence of human anxieties around scarcity in all its forms (from scarcity of food to luck to where we stand in the eyes of others caught in a game of musical chairs we often do not even know we are playing). With wit and sensitivity, along with a large measure of fearless self-scrutiny, he points to and invites us to recognize the gloomy, neurotic, despondent tendencies of reasonably sentient human life. The book is a careful examination of negative beliefs, inviting an experience of bleak fellow-feeling among the author, the reader and many a hapless soul across the centuries. Just what makes you more nervous, he asks, a run of good luck, or a run of bad?

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. November 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780197530702
• Artikelnr.: 60472415

Autorenporträt

William Ian Miller is the Thomas G. Long Professor of Law at University of Michigan. He also has been a visiting professor at Yale, the University of Chicago, the University of Bergen, the University of Tel Aviv, and Harvard, and in 2008, was the Carnegie Centenary Trust Professor at the University of St. Andrews, where he is now also an honorary professor of history. He is the author of multiple books, including Humiliation (1993), The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), The Mystery of Courage (2000), Faking It (2003), and Losing It (2011).

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments
A Somewhat Dour Introduction
1. May You Have My Luck
2. Competition
3. The Messenger
4. Vile Jelly
5. The Law of Conservation of Good Things
6. A Jaundiced View of Authenticity (and Identity)
7. Lord of the Table: Judges and the Last Supper
8. Odds and the End
9. Epilogue: Go Litel Boke Amidst a Flurry of Auto-Antonyms
Works Cited