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15 - William James, Mysticism and the Modernist Epiphany
- Edited by Suzanne Hobson, Queen Mary University of London, Andrew Radford, University of Glasgow
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 20 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 January 2023, pp 250-264
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- Chapter
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Summary
THE IDEAS AND personal accounts of mystical phenomena contained in the American philosopher and psychologist William James’s massively influential The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902) – which he first shared as part of his 1901–02 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh – stimulated literary, scholarly and popular debates during his own lifetime, and have continued to do so long after his death in 1910. Still, despite a recent surge of interest in James’s literary legacy, and despite David H. Evans’s contention that James was ‘closer perhaps than any other single figure to the center of the confluence of intellectual currents that defined the culture of modernism’, James is still championed by literary critics primarily as the pragmatist who coined the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’. Such assessments grossly underplay his impact on modern literature and society as a whole. Indeed, Varieties, specifically, came to serve as a touchstone for prominent writers across multiple generations, religious orientations and literary movements; its notion of ‘personal’ as opposed to ‘institutional’ religion in particular seems to have anticipated, and even helped spur, the widespread privatisation of religion that sociologists have routinely associated with the mid twentieth century.
Varieties provides not only prophetic commentary on broader socio-religious changes – such as the rise of liberal theology in Protestant churches and seminaries, or the increase in interfaith dialogue and awareness in the decades following the inaugural World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago (1893) – but also an interpretive framework through which critics can better understand the heterogeneous forms of mystical experience that would continue to populate modernist, postmodernist and contemporary literatures. In a 2018 essay, Valeria Taddei made important inroads in this latter, largely unexplored area of inquiry. She demonstrates that the language of mystical experience and conversion narratives deployed in the numerous textual fragments excerpted in James’s book is in many ways indistinguishable from the language of epiphanies so central to literary modernism. However, Varieties did not just inspire modernist writers by providing them with compelling, ready-made templates of what Sharon Kim, in a similarly groundbreaking study, calls spirituality’s ‘discursive form[s]’.
Chapter 7 - Wind Energy
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- By Ryan Wiser, Zhenbin Yang, Maureen Hand, Olav Hohmeyer, David Infield, Peter H. Jensen, Vladimir Nikolaev, Mark O'Malley, Graham Sinden, Arthouros Zervos, Naïm Darghouth, Dennis Elliott, Garvin Heath, Ben Hoen, Hannele Holttinen, Jason Jonkman, Andrew Mills, Patrick Moriarty, Sara Pryor, Scott Schreck, Charles Smith, Christian Kjaer, Fatemeh Rahimzadeh
- Edited by Ottmar Edenhofer, Ramón Pichs-Madruga, Youba Sokona, Kristin Seyboth, Susanne Kadner, Timm Zwickel, Patrick Eickemeier, Gerrit Hansen, Steffen Schlömer, Christoph von Stechow, Patrick Matschoss
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- Book:
- Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation
- Published online:
- 05 December 2011
- Print publication:
- 21 November 2011, pp 535-608
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Summary
Executive Summary
Wind energy offers significant potential for near-term (2020) and long-term (2050) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions. A number of different wind energy technologies are available across a range of applications, but the primary use of wind energy of relevance to climate change mitigation is to generate electricity from larger, grid-connected wind turbines, deployed either on- or offshore. Focusing on these technologies, the wind power capacity installed by the end of 2009 was capable of meeting roughly 1.8% of worldwide electricity demand, and that contribution could grow to in excess of 20% by 2050 if ambitious efforts are made to reduce GHG emissions and to address the other impediments to increased wind energy deployment. Onshore wind energy is already being deployed at a rapid pace in many countries, and no insurmountable technical barriers exist that preclude increased levels of wind energy penetration into electricity supply systems. Moreover, though average wind speeds vary considerably by location, ample technical potential exists in most regions of the world to enable significant wind energy deployment. In some areas with good wind resources, the cost of wind energy is already competitive with current energy market prices, even without considering relative environmental impacts. Nonetheless, in most regions of the world, policy measures are still required to ensure rapid deployment. Continued advances in on- and offshore wind energy technology are expected, however, further reducing the cost of wind energy and improving wind energy's GHG emissions reduction potential.