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<p>Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of A
History of Asking by Steven Connor. <br>
</p>
<p><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: "Times
New
Roman",serif;color:windowtext;mso-fareast-language:EN-GB">Like
all Open Humanities Press books, </span>A History of Asking<span
style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: "Times New
Roman",serif;color:windowtext;mso-fareast-language:EN-GB">
is available open access (it can be downloaded for free): <br>
</span></p>
<p><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: "Times
New
Roman",serif;color:windowtext;mso-fareast-language:EN-GB"><a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/data-farms/">http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-history-of-asking/</a></span></p>
<p><b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times
New Roman",serif;
color:windowtext;mso-fareast-language:EN-GB">Book description:</span></b></p>
Asking is one of the simplest and most familiar of human actions,
and has a right to be thought of as single most powerful and most
variously cohering form of social-symbolic gesture. Because so much
is at stake in the act of asking, asking, or asking for, almost
anything, whether information, help, love or respect, can be asking
for trouble, so a great deal of care must be taken with the ways in
which asking occurs and is responded. A History of Asking is the
first attempt to grasp the unity and variety of the technics and
technologies of asking, in all its modalities, as they extend across
a spectrum from weak forms like begging, pleading, praying,
imploring, beseeching, entreating, suing, supplicating and
soliciting, through to the more assertively and even aggressively
self-authorising modes of asking, like proposing, offering,
inviting, requesting, appealing, applying, petitioning, claiming and
demanding. The book considers the history of 6 broad modes of
petitory practice. The act of begging, both among animals and humans
is considered in terms of its theatrics. The institution of the
political petition, protocols for which seem to arise in also every
system of government of which we have knowledge, is tracked through
from late medieval to nineteenth-century Britain. The act of prayer,
central to religious practice, though often the last form of
religious behaviour to fall away among those lapsing from adherence,
and one of the religious practices that is most likely to be adhered
to in the absence of any other religious commitment, is the subject
of sustained scrutiny. The appeal of prayer is essentially to the
fact of participation in language, and the specific forms of
commitment to the condition of being bound, bindable, or biddable by
it. Wooing and the associated economics of seduction and
solicitation are tracked through from the formalisation of the
conventions of courtly love in the 12th century through to modern
techniques of flirtation. The book revives the antique term
‘suitage’ in order to discuss all the forms of sueing and suitorship
for favours or advantage, as well as, more broadly the act, pursued
almost life-long, of trying to get one another to do things for us,
in particular in indirect or vicarious forms of what may be called
‘interpetition’, such as the dedications of books to patrons, the
institution of the testimonial or letter of reference and the
practices of flattery. A History of Asking concludes with a
discussion of the many ways in which our necessarily parasitic
relations on each other in a complex society are both conveyed and
dissimulated, especially through the ways in which we summon and
salute different kinds of service.
<p></p>
<p><b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times
New Roman",serif;
color:windowtext;mso-fareast-language:EN-GB">Author Bio</span></b></p>
Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English Emeritus in the
University of Cambridge and Professor of Living Well with Technology
at King’s College London. He is a writer, critic and broadcaster,
who has published books on Dickens, Beckett, Joyce and
postmodernism, as well as on topics such as ventriloquism, skin,
flies, air and numbers. His website at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://stevenconnor.com">http://stevenconnor.com</a>
includes lectures, broadcasts, unpublished work and work in
progress.
<p><b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times
New Roman",serif;
color:windowtext;mso-fareast-language:EN-GB"></span></b></p>
<br>
<p>---<br>
</p>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures">http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/">https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/</a>
Website: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.garyhall.info">http://www.garyhall.info</a>
Mastodon: @garyhall@hcommons.social
Director of Open Humanities Press: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.openhumanitiespress.org">http://www.openhumanitiespress.org</a>
Latest:
Journal article (open access) 'Defund Culture': <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/defund-culture">https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/defund-culture</a>
Book review: ‘Review of Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage' by Matthew Kirschenbaum: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/721475">https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/721475</a>
Blog post: 'Experimenting With Copyright Licences': <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/combinatorial-books-documentation-copyright-licences-post6/release/1">https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/combinatorial-books-documentation-copyright-licences-post6/release/1</a>
</pre>
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