Chapter 8 investigates the complex relationship between online offensive language and creativity. We demonstrate how creativity extends beyond literary contexts to everyday online interactions. The chapter showcases a vast array of creative tools that are used to cause offence and attests to the fact that while creativity could be enriched by the resources available on various online platforms (e.g., memes and emojis), written language remains central to creative communication. We demonstrate how creative language tools categorised under, for example, tropes, figures of diction and figures of thought, help the offender construct remarks that target sensitive aspects such as appearance, race, gender and personality. We also argue that creative language functions on multiple levels, with its interpretation often requiring a pragmatic layer that extends beyond simple word recognition.

When Elizabeth Maconchy entered the British compositional scene in 1930 with the premiere of her orchestral suite, The Land, she and her fellow composers had an unsettled relationship with the prevailing musical styles of Europe. Whereas continental composers were highly regarded by British critics as cutting edge, their British contemporaries were faulted as derivative, unoriginal, and too steeped in national traditions to contribute to the ‘new’ music. Constant Lambert argued his rival countrymen (and women) had let their moment to be ‘modern’ pass them by. This chapter examines the scope of modernism on the continent and scholars’ difficulties in pinning down a precise functional definition of the so-called ‘modernist’ style. Practitioners of European modernism sought to be sensational or at the very least individual. British modernism, on the other hand, tended toward the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’, an eclecticism that is not bound to any specific ideology.

Emerson’s aesthetics addresses fundamental philosophical questions on the reality of beauty, experience, and the nature of art and creativity. A central thread running throughout his aesthetic views is the love of beauty, which celebrates a felt appreciation for the diverse beauties found in nature and society in and for themselves. The experiential self as it exists in a connatural relationship with its surroundings has the potential to enjoy such deep folds of qualitative significance. Emerson, moreover, theorizes the existence of an absolute form of beauty having a metaphysical primacy. Beauty exists as the ultimate ideal of human conduct and thought and as the primordial ground or first cause of the universe. In this aesthetic cosmology, art through its imaginative symbolic appropriations of its environment shares in the greater metamorphic processes of a creatively polyphonous and open universe.

The link between creativity and serious mental illness (SMI) is widely discussed. Jackson Pollock is one example of a giant in the field of art who was both highly creative and experiencing an SMI. Pollock created a new genre of art known as abstract expressionism (“action painting”) defined as showing the frenetic actions of painting. The question arises whether his SMI playedany role in the way he created his drip paintings, especially when he was overactive and manic. Furthermore, did visual hallucinations or enhanced visual perception associated with mania or psychosis facilitate Pollock in embedding and camouflaging images under layers of thrown paint? Seeing images in Pollocks drip paintings has been a controversy ever since these paintings were created. Some experts attribute this to pareidolia—perceiving specific images out ofrandom or ambiguous visual patterns—a phenomenon known to be enhanced by fractal fuzzy edges such as seen in Rorschach ink blots as well as in Pollock drip paintings. So, are Pollock’s drip paintings merely giant Rorschach images, or did Pollock insert polloglyphs—images that are encrypted that tell a story about Pollock’s inner being—into his paintings and then disguise them with drippings? Here, we explore answers to these questions and discuss images that Pollock included in his earliest sketches and used repeatedly in his abstract paintings and later in his drip paintings to argue that these images are not accidental.

This chapter introduces ideation methods, the second phase of Life Design, where creativity meets clarity. Moving beyond self-reflection, you’ll learn how to generate bold, surprising, and actionable ideas for your life. The Core Method, Core of Creativity, helps balance divergent and convergent thinking to unlock insight and momentum. From wild ideas to grounded next steps, you’ll warm up your creative muscles, generate possibilities, and choose prototypes to test. Two optional methods deepen the process: Opportunity Bingo turns your interests, strengths, and values into fresh combinations, while Future Scenarios stretches your imagination across multiple life paths to surface new options and insights. Whether you ideate alone or with others, the tools in this chapter help you move from stuck to sparked – making creativity a habit and possibility a practice.

Chapter 4 tackles the first stage of the social life of the image: its birth. Ways of understanding the intentions and motivations of image producers are presented followed by a discussion of the social position of image producers and its relevance to understanding images and visual culture. The method of qualitative interview is applied on a case example of a political caricature image.

Why is God as well as justice called the truth? How does truth relate to deserts and the conatus, to beauty, generosity and grace toward others and toward all beings – be they persons, animals, plants, species, econiches, ecosystems, and the monuments of nature and culture?

This chapter explores the contributions of social and personality psychologists to the development of Cold War liberal philosophy and social theory. Psychologists helped to define “totalitarianism,” one of the central concepts of Cold War liberalism, as an expression of individual psychopathology – a result of the failure of people in a given society to develop a coherent, healthy sense of self. This state of psychological health, the antidote to totalitarianism, was often referred to as the “productive” character or personality and was defined by an individual’s capacity to express their selfhood in creative work. Cold War liberals identified myriad techniques to promote the productive character and discourage totalitarian psychopathology, including social-democratic policymaking, new childrearing methods, and the practice of both scientific research and spiritual searching. They also sought to develop productive characters in the supposedly psychologically immature societies of the postcolonial world, an elite-driven approach to social and economic development that laid the groundwork for the rise of neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the late twentieth century. The productive, anti-totalitarian personality, argued many Cold War liberal development experts and their neoliberal and neoconservative successors, was an entrepreneurial personality, the psychic wellspring of economic growth.

William James dedicates two lectures of his Varieties of Religious Experience to what he calls “The Sick Soul.” In these lectures, William combines pragmatist insights, anecdotal commentary, and examples from literary history to explore the phenomenon of human suffering. James, I argue, stresses a hermeneutics of suffering that does not inevitably comply with the promise of an experiential openness towards understanding. Rather, he treats suffering both a source of and a challenge to such an openness, and he thus offers an understanding of suffering that is indicative of a larger discourse in philosophical thinking. In a comparative reading of James’s Varieties, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s struggle with the death of his son Waldo, and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, I will discuss suffering as a way of understanding that allows us, in turn, to make suffering accessible to understanding as such. James, Emerson, and Gadamer remind us that suffering is neither self-serving nor self-sufficient. As it marks an impaired connectivity within the self and between self and world, hermeneutics of suffering expresses a failed sense of connectivity and conditions the sufferer’s reconnection with the social world. Both in reading and in writing, James, Emerson, and Gadamer recurrently turn to literary and philosophical imagination to test the limits of action and passion, of doing and enduring, to center suffering as a hermeneutic process that may be unavoidable in the human experience, but that always already entails the conditions of its own overcoming.

The notion of making it big has different meanings for different people. Sometimes it is a precise moment in time when everything clicks. Other times, it can be a slow process. And sometimes, a big break that took many years can look like an overnight sensation to the outside world. People in this chapter talk about how the creative life isn’t always about fame and acclaim.

Artists can have a wide variety of relationships with their parents. We have already discussed supportive relationships. Sometimes, artists have parents who are simply uninterested. Other times, they have parents who are worried about their child’s ability to support themselves if they pursue the arts. In these cases, most parents could be won over by their child’s hard work and passion; if not, a taste of success was usually enough to win over a hesitant parent.

Many young artists try their hand at a variety of creative forms. Even those who know their passion early on may still dabble a bit in related domains, often fueled by the need to explore different artforms and endless curiosity. Many artists might use insights or skills learned in one domain throughout their career, even if they ultimately do not keep creating in that area. Some artists whose stories are told in this chapter kept shifting areas into college and young adulthood. Most stayed within the arts, but some found their way to the arts from other areas from sports to science. Other times, artists will work across multiple domains for their whole career.