Best of
Academia
1995
Inventing Ireland
Declan Kiberd - 1995
In a book unprecedented in its scope and approach, Declan Kiberd offers a vivid account of the personalities and texts, English and Irish alike, that reinvented the country after centuries of colonialism. The result is a major literary history of modern Ireland, combining detailed and daring interpretations of literary masterpieces with assessments of the wider role of language, sport, clothing, politics, and philosophy in the Irish revival.In dazzling comparisons with the experience of other postcolonial peoples, the author makes many overdue connections. Rejecting the notion that artists such as Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett became modern to the extent that they made themselves "European," he contends that the Irish experience was a dramatic instance of experimental modernity and shows how the country's artists blazed a trail that led directly to the magic realism of a Garc a M rquez or a Rushdie. Along the way, he reveals the vital importance of Protestant values and the immense contributions of women to the enterprise. Kiberd's analysis of the culture is interwoven with sketches of the political background, bringing the course of modern Irish literature into sharp relief against a tragic history of conflict, stagnation, and change.Inventing Ireland restores to the Irish past a sense of openness that it once had and that has since been obscured by narrow-gauge nationalists and their polemical revisionist critics. In closing, Kiberd outlines an agenda for Irish Studies in the next century and detects the signs of a second renaissance in the work of a new generation of authors and playwrights, from Brian Friel to the younger Dublin writers.
Computational Fluid Dynamics
John D. Anderson Jr. - 1995
It can also serve as a one-semester introductory course at the beginning graduate level, as a useful precursor to a more serious study of CFD in advanced books. It is presented in a very readable, informal, enjoyable style.
Blues In Schwarz Weiss
May Ayim - 1995
Her unique ability to passionately transformdiverse subject matters into poetic language is revealed in this important collection of translated pieces. Her play with language is effective and at times transformative, as it expresses and exposes dangerous stereotypes and messages hiddenin the everyday use oflanguage and human behavior. Here, her readers will be surprised and frequentlyconfronted with Ayim's keen and powerful observationsof the complexities of life and the compelling richness of humor and irony within them."These poems have] passion and irony and always a strong magnetic force...for even her humor, her playing with words and her punch lines never veil the strength of her protest against racism, sexism, and all the other isms that add sadness to our society. In May's voice, I found the echo of other sounds fromthe diaspora. Her unrestrainedness, her humor and lyric expressiveness equal those of Lion-Gontron Damas, one of the fathers of Negritude....An extraordinary voice.Unique and already in the hearts of all of us that are persecuted and fullof thirst."--Maryse Condi, from the introduction to the German edition.
Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change
Maxine Greene - 1995
The author argues for schools to be restructured as places where students reach out for meanings and where the previously silenced or unheard may have a voice. She invites readers to develop processes to enhance and cultivate their own visions through the application of imagination and the arts. Releasing the Imagination should be required reading for all educators, particularly those in teacher education, and for general and academic readers. --
Choice
Maxine Greene, with her customary eloquence, makes an impassioned argument for using the arts as a tool for opening minds and for breaking down the barriers to imagining the realities of worlds other than our own familiar cultures.... There is a strong rhythm to the thoughts, the arguments, and the entire sequence of essays presented here. --
American Journal of Education
Releasing the Imagination gives us a vivid portrait of the possibilities of human experience and education's role in its realization. It is a welcome corrective to current pressures for educational conformity. --Elliot W. Eisner, professor of education and art, Stanford UniversityReleasing the Imagination challenges all the cant and clich� littering the field of education today. It breaks through the routine, the frozen, the numbing, the unexamined; it shocks the reader into new awareness. --William Ayers, associate professor, College of Education, University of Illinois, Chicago
Linguistics of American Sign Language: An Introduction
Clayton Valli - 1995
The newly revised section offers new units on verbs in ASL, simple sentences in ASL, classifier predicates, syntax, and basic sentence types. The fourth edition also features groundbreaking research on iconic signs in ASL and the relationship between metaphor and iconicity in signed languages; variation in ASL; the different functions of space in ASL; and the artistic forms of ASL, including storytelling, percussion signing, drama, comedy, and poetry.Updated references and expanded readings delineate all of the linguistic basics, including phonology, semantics, and language use. The fourth edition also provides new homework assignments that correspond to the ASL stories signed on the special DVD enclosed with this new volume.
Word Smart: How to Build an Educated Vocabulary
The Princeton Review - 1995
That’s why more than one million people have used this book to improve their vocabularies. To find out which words you absolutely need to know, The Princeton Review researched the vocabularies of educated adults by analyzing major newspapers and books and focusing on the words that people misunderstand or misuse. We also examined the SAT and other standardized tests to determine which words are tested most frequently.All of the entries in Word Smart, 4th Edition are necessary for an impressive vocabulary, and learning and using these words effectively can help you to get better grades, score higher on tests, and communicate more confidently at work.
Review Questions and Answers for Veterinary Technicians [With CDROM]
Thomas P. Colville - 1995
This new and updated edition matches the presentation of the exam and reflects the seven domains of the VTNE to ensure the most accurate and effective exam prep available.
Cambridge IELTS 1 Academic
Vanessa Jakeman - 1995
The Student's Book contains an introduction to the different modules of the exam together with an explanation of the different IELTS question types and how to approach them. The inclusion of annotated keys and tapescripts for each test makes the book ideal for students working partly or entirely on their own. The Audio CDs contain listening material carefully chosen to reflect the reality of the exam in terms of timing, format and the types of speaker and accent used.
Banal Nationalism
Michael Billig - 1995
While traditional theorizing has tended to the focus on extreme expressions of nationalism, the author turns his attention to the everyday, less visible forms which are neither exotic or remote, he describes as `banal nationalism'.The author asks why people do not forget their national identity. He suggests that in daily life nationalism is constantly flagged in the media through routine symbols and habits of language. Banal Nationalism is critical of orthodox theories in sociology, politics and social psychology for ignoring this core feature of national identity. Michael Billig argues forcefully that wi
This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class
C.L. Dews - 1995
Describing conflict and frustration, this book exposes a divisive middle-class bias in the university setting.
Language: The Basics
R.L. Trask - 1995
It features chapters on 'Language in Use', 'Attitudes to Language', 'Children and Language' and 'Language, Mind and Brain'.
Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qur'an, Mi'raj, Poetic and Theological Writings
Michael A. Sells - 1995
Although the later Sufi writings by mystics such as Rumi are known and available in translation, access to the crucial early period of Islamic mysticism has been far more limited.This volume opens with an essay on the place of spirituality within the Islamic tradition. Immediately following are the foundation texts of the pre-Sufi spirituality: the Qur'an passages most important to the mystical tradition; the accounts of Muhammad's heavenly ascent (Mi'raj); and the crucial work of early poets in setting a poetic sensibility for speaking of union with the divine beloved.The volume then presents the sayings attributed to the key early figures of Islamic spirituality: Ja'far as-Saddiq, the Sixth Imam of the Shi'ite Tradition; Rabi'a, the most famous woman saint of classical Islam; Muhasibi, the founder of Islamic moral psychology; Bistami, whose sayings on mystical union have generated fascination and controversy throughout the Islamic tradition; Tustari, a pioneer in the mystical interpretation of the Qur'an; Junayd, who helped place Sufi mysticism at the center of the Islamic tradition; Hallaj, famous for his ecstatic utterances and martyrdom; and Niffari, whose sayings are considered among the deepest mystical expressions within Islam.The sayings of these pioneers are embedded in the later stratum of analytical and synoptic writings of later Sufi thinkers: Sarraj; Sulami; Qushayri; and 'Attar. Extensive portions of these writers are translated into English for the first time.
The Essential Mcluhan
Marshall McLuhan - 1995
A whole new generation is turning to his work to understand a global village made real by the information superhighway and the overwhelming challenge of electronic transformation. “Before anyone could perceive the electric form of the information revolution, McLuhan was publishing brilliant explanations of the perceptual changes being experienced by the users of mass media. He seemed futuristic to some and an enemy of print and literacy to others. He was, in reality, a deeply literate man of astonishing prescience. Tom Wolfe suggested aloud that McLuhan’s work was as important culturally as that of Darwin or Freud. Agreement and scoffing ensued. Increasingly Wolfe’s wonder seems justified.” From the Introduction Here in one volume, are McLuhan’s key ideas, drawn from his books, articles, correspondence, and published speeches. This book is the essential archive of his constantly surprising vision.
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community
Lois Parkinson Zamora - 1995
In this critical anthology, the first of its kind, editors Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris show magical realism to be an international movement with a wide-ranging history and a significant influence among the literatures of the world. In essays on texts by writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Abe Kobo, Gabriel García Márquez, and many others, magical realism is examined as a worldwide phenomenon.Presenting the first English translation of Franz Roh’s 1925 essay in which the term magical realism was coined, as well as Alejo Carpentier’s classic 1949 essay that introduced the concept of lo real maravilloso to the Americas, this anthology begins by tracing the foundations of magical realism from its origins in the art world to its current literary contexts. It offers a broad range of critical perspectives and theoretical approaches to this movement, as well as intensive analyses of various cultural traditions and individual texts from Eastern Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, the Caribbean, and Australia, in addition to those from Latin America. In situating magical realism within the expanse of literary and cultural history, this collection describes a mode of writing that has been a catalyst in the development of new regional literatures and a revitalizing force for more established narrative traditions—writing particularly alive in postcolonial contexts and a major component of postmodernist fiction.
The Corinthian Body
Dale B. Martin - 1995
Other members of the Corinthian church, however, viewed the body as hierarchical—as a microcosm of the universe—and were not particularly concerned about body boundaries or pollution. These differing views of the human body (and also of the church as the body of Christ) led to differing opinions on a variety of subjects—including the role of rhetoric and philosophy in a hierarchical society, the eating of meat sacrificed to idols, prostitution, sexual desire and marriage, and the resurrection of the body. Martin explores these conflicts by drawing on ancient medical writings, modern anthropological approaches, and feminist and ideological methods of critical analysis. He shows how Paul's understanding of the body prevailed among the less well-educated inhabitants of the Roman Empire, who occupied relatively low socioeconomic levels. The minority who espoused the ideas of hierarchy, on the other hand, were usually of higher social status and were better educated. And it was along these same class lines, Martin argues, that the Corinthian church itself was divided.
Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation
Carole Tonkinson - 1995
Essays, poems, photographs, and letters explore the link between Buddhism and the Beats--with previously unpublished material from several beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Diane diPrima.
Bugs in Writing: A Guide to Debugging Your Prose
Lyn Dupre - 1995
As computers become ubiquitous in our society, more people are focusing on learning technology--often at the expense of developing more basic academic skills, most notably proper writing.Revised and enhanced, this critically acclaimed and highly praised handbook provides a light, but thorough approach to learning better writing style.
Raising Holy Hell
Bruce Olds - 1995
Viewed in the North as a saint of freedom and in the South as the devil incarnate, Brown was a visionary who not only foretold but made inevitable the bloody apocalypse of the Civil War. An intricate mosaic of alternating narrative voices, Bruce Old's Raising Holy Hell is an explosive, multitextured evocation of the prophetic madness of the man who saw an America damned by the sin of slavery.
New Objectivity
Sergiusz Michalski - 1995
Between the years 1922 and 1930, Neue Sachlichkeit-the New Objectivity'-exerted a decisive influence on the development of art, turning away from the main currents of avant-garde for the first time, to explore new avenues. It thus articulated the cultural ideals of Weimar Germany more precisely than Expressionism or the Bauhaus. In focusing on the society of the 1920s and the objective representation of the world around them, the artists of the New Objectivity offered a visual barometer of the lifestyle of their day, a factor that contributed to the popularity of the movement.
No Bath, But Plenty of Bubbles: An Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front, 1970-73
Lisa Power - 1995
It gathers the accounts of people who were involved and the papers they wrote, as well as the comments of bemused bystanders. A chronology gives context to the GLF against a background of events of the time.
The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism
Joseph W. Childers - 1995
With literary and cultural studies arguably the fastest growing areas of study in the humanities, many readers both within and outside the academy find it imperative to keep abreast of developments in these fields."The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism" helps to initiate the curious generalist into the often exclusionary world of these theoretical vocabularies, and to authoritatively refresh the memories of specialists themselves on certain necessary terms and their roots.
Shame and Its Sisters
Silvan S. Tomkins - 1995
In Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work published over the last thirty years of his life, Tomkins developed an ambitious theory of affect steeped in cybernetics and systems theory as well as in psychoanalysis, ethology, and neuroscience. The implications of his conceptually daring and phenomenologically suggestive theory are only now—in the context of postmodernism—beginning to be understood. With Shame and Its Sisters, editors Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank make available for the first time an engaging and accessible selection of Tomkins’s work.Featuring intensive examination of several key affects, particularly shame and anger, this volume contains many of Tomkins’s most haunting, diagnostically incisive, and theoretically challenging discussions. An introductory essay by the editors places Tomkins’s work in the context of postwar information technologies and will prompt a reexamination of some of the underlying assumptions of recent critical work in cultural studies and other areas of the humanities. The text is also accompanied by a biographical sketch of Tomkins by noted psychologist Irving E. Alexander, Tomkins’s longtime friend and collaborator.
The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization
Walter D. Mignolo - 1995
Exploring the many connections among writing, social organization, and political control, including how alphabetic writing is linked with the exercise of power, Walter D. Mignolo claims that European forms of literacy were at the heart of New World colonization. It has long been acknowledged that Amerindians were at a disadvantage in facing European invaders because native cultures did not employ the same kind of texts (hence "knowledge") that the Europeans valued. Yet no one but Mignolo has so thoroughly examined either the process or the implications of conquest and destruction through language. The book continues to challenge commonplace understandings of New World history and to stimulate new colonial and postcolonial scholarship. Walter D. Mignolo is Professor in the Department of Romance Studies and the Program in Literature, Duke University.
Women: Images and Realities: A Multicultural Anthology
Amy Kesselman - 1995
It presents a multidisciplinary collection of academic essays and analyses, personal narratives, and fiction and poetry about women's lives. The selections illustrate the variety of women's experiences, primarily in the United States, considering both commonalities and differences among women and appreciating women's diverse approaches to living and fostering change.
Langston Hughes and the *Chicago Defender*: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62
Langston Hughes - 1995
He has been referred to as the "Dean of Black Letters" and the "poet low-rate of Harlem." But it was as a columnist for the famous African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender that Hughes chronicled the hopes and despair of his people. For twenty years, he wrote forcefully about international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture. None of the racial hypocrisies of American life escaped his searing, ironic prose. This is the first collection of Hughes's nonfiction journalistic writings. For readers new to Hughes, it is an excellent introduction; for those familiar with him, it gives new insights into his poems and fiction.
On the Name
Jacques Derrida - 1995
What happens, above all, when it is necessary to sur-name, renaming there where, precisely, the name comes to be found lacking? What makes the proper name into a sort of sur-name, pseudonym, or cryptonym at once singular and singularly untranslatable?"Jacques Derrida thus poses a central problem in contemporary language, ethics, and politics, which he addresses in a liked series of the three essays. Passions: "An Oblique Offering" is a reflection on the question of the response, on the duty and obligation to respond, and on the possibility of not responding—which is to say, on the ethics and politics of responsibility. Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum) considers the problematics of naming and alterity, or transcendence, raised inevitably by a rigorous negative theology. Much of the text is organized around close readings of the poetry of Angelus Silesius.The final essay, Khora, explores the problem of space or spacing, of the word khora in Plato's Tmaeus. Even as it places and makes possible nothing less than the whole world, khora opens and dislocates, displaces, all the categories that govern the production of that world, from naming to gender. In addition to readers in philosophy and literature, Khora will be of special interest to those in the burgeoning field of "space studies"(architecture, urbanism, design).
The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture
Lawrence Buell - 1995
This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in The Environmental Imagination, the most ambitious study to date of how literature represents the natural environment. With Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone, Buell gives us a far-reaching account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more ecocentric way of being. In doing so, he provides a major new understanding of Thoreau's achievement and, at the same time, a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.The green tradition in American writing commands Buell's special attention, particularly environmental nonfiction from colonial times to the present. In works by writers from Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry, John Muir to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson to Leslie Silko, Mary Austin to Edward Abbey, he examines enduring environmental themes such as the dream of relinquishment, the personification of the nonhuman, an attentiveness to environmental cycles, a devotion to place, and a prophetic awareness of possible ecocatastrophe. At the center of this study we find an image of Walden as a quest for greater environmental awareness, an impetus and guide for Buell as he develops a new vision of environmental writing and seeks a new way of conceiving the relation between human imagination and environmental actuality in the age of industrialization. Intricate and challenging in its arguments, yet engagingly and elegantly written, The Environmental Imagination is a major work of scholarship, one that establishes a new basis for reading American nature writing.
Silver Rights
Constance Curry - 1995
“Silver Rights is pure gold!” (Julian Bond). Introduction by Marian Wright Edelman.
How to Write a Better Thesis
David Evans - 1995
Offering concrete examples of common structural problems, and numerous devices, tricks, and tests by which to avoid them, in a direct and conversational tone, it proves that the astute researcher must no longer regard writing as the last chore but rather as a crucial part of the research process. This updated edition reflects the changes in research style brought about by the Internet.
Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890-1950
Susan L. Smith - 1995
Smith also sheds new light on the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment by situating it within the context of black public health activity, reminding us that public health work had oppressive as well as progressive consequences.
Eating Disorders and Obesity: A Comprehensive Handbook
Christopher G. Fairburn - 1995
From leading international authorities, 112 concise chapters encapsulate the latest information on all pertinent topics, from biological, psychological, and social processes associated with risk, to clinical methods for assessment and intervention. Suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter replace extended references and enhance the practical value and readability of the volume.
Tietz Fundamentals of Clinical Chemistry
Carl A. Burtis - 1995
Accurate chemical structures are included to explain the key chemical features of relevant molecules. Offering complete, accurate coverage of key topics in the field, it's everything that you expect from the Tietz name!More than 500 illustrations and easy-to-read tables help you understand and remember key concepts.Key words, learning objectives, and other student-friendly features reinforce important material.Chapter review questions are included in an appendix to test your knowledge.A two-color design makes it easier to read and easy to find important topics.In-depth, reader-friendly content is appropriate for MT/CLS and MLT/CLT students and may also be used by laboratory practitioners, pathology residents, and others.A new chapter on newborn screening discusses the basic principles, screening recommendations, inborn errors, methods, and interpretation of results.A comprehensive glossary provides easy-to-find definitions of key terms.An Evolve website provides regular updates of content, answers to review questions, and web links to related sites for further research and study.
Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature
Simon Gaunt - 1995
Simon Gaunt offers new readings of canonical Old French and medieval Occitan texts such as the Chanson de Roland, Chretien de Troyes' Chevalier de la charrete, and lyrics by Bernart de Ventadorn. In addition, he considers many less well-known works and less familiar genres such as hagiography and the fabliaux. Drawing on contemporary feminist theory, he examines how masculinity, as well as femininity, is constructed in medieval French and Occitan texts, and he shows that gender is a crucial element in the formation of the ideologies that underpin medieval literary genres.
Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture
Terry Eagleton - 1995
Heathcliff and the Great Hunger examines Irish culture from Swift to Joyce, in the light of the tortuous, often tragic, history that conditioned it.
Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language
Norman Fairclough - 1995
This text covers four main areas: Language, Ideology and Power; Discourse and Sociocultural Change; Textual Analysis in Social Research; and Critical Language Awareness.
College Girls: A Century in Fiction
Shirley Marchalonis - 1995
Underlying all arguments was the folk wisdom which declared that women could not live and work together. To counteract such beliefs, women’s colleges tried to create a special kind of space and new role models that would allow women to exist for a short time in idyllic (or, at least, idealized) conditions. The debate over women’s education, for the good or ill of society, generated a great deal of "print," including short stories and novels. Shirley Marchalonis guides us through the history of this fiction, its depiction of the complexities of the college experience, and the conflicting attitudes that teetered between fascination and fear, celebration and regret. Using novels, short stories, and some juvenile fiction from 1865 to 1940--all of it specifically about college “girls”--she examines these ideas, the way they developed over time, and their significance in understanding women’s education and women’s history. The debate over separate colleges for women continues to this day and can be better understood in the context of this informative and entertaining look at the past.
Basic Concepts And Models For Interpreter And Translator Training (Benjamins Translation Library)
Daniel Gile - 1995
It is written for I/T trainers who are in search of a methodological basis for their teaching program. The author deals with essential translation and interpretation phenomena and difficulties encountered by students and professionals alike. The underlying theory is based on insights from psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology and I/T research. The 'concepts' and 'models' are easy to understand and the chapters include teaching suggestions and examples.Suitable for I/T trainers and practitioners.
Ornamentation: A Question & Answer Manual
Valery Lloyd-Watts - 1995
A synthesis of years of scholarly research resulting in a logical, easy to follow, and accurate volume.
State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante
T.C. McCaskie - 1995
T.C. McCaskie gives a detailed and nuanced historical portrait of precolonial Asante. The book is both a profound historical reconstruction of an African polity, and a deeply informed meditation on Asante concepts and ideas. Throughout the book, the Asante experience is consistently discussed in relation to a broad range of historiography and critical theory.
So You Want to Be an Interpreter?: An Introduction to Sign Language Interpreting
Janice H. Humphrey - 1995
Enhance your knowledge of American Sign Language and interpreting with this reader-friendly resource. Explains the interpreting process, ethics, the job market, and much more. For beginners to seasoned interpreters, for in-class use or independent study. Includes thought questions and practice activities.
The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "The Other" and the Myth of Modernity
Enrique Dussel - 1995
A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience
Simon J. Charlesworth - 1995
He applies to their life stories the interpretative tools of philosophy and social theory, drawing in particular on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty. Charlesworth argues the culture described in this book is not unique to Rotherham and the problems identified in this book will be familiar to economically powerless and politically dispossessed people everywhere.
Sappho is Burning
Page duBois - 1995
Her poetry, dating from the seventh century B.C.E., comes to us in fragments, her biography as speculation. How is it then, Page duBois asks, that this poet has come to signify so much? Sappho Is Burning offers a new reading of this archaic lesbian poet that acknowledges the poet's distance and difference from us and stresses Sappho's inassimilability into our narratives about the Greeks, literary history, philosophy, the history of sexuality, the psychoanalytic subject.In Sappho is Burning, duBois reads Sappho as a disruptive figure at the very origin of our story of Western civilization. Sappho is beyond contemporary categories, inhabiting a space outside of reductively linear accounts of our common history. She is a woman, but also an aristocrat, a Greek, but one turned toward Asia, a poet who writes as a philosopher before philosophy, a writer who speaks of sexuality that can be identified neither with Michel Foucault's account of Greek sexuality, nor with many versions of contemporary lesbian sexuality. She is named as the tenth muse, yet the nine books of her poetry survive only in fragments. She disorients, troubles, undoes many certitudes in the history of poetry, the history of philosophy, the history of sexuality. DuBois argues that we need to read Sappho again.
The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle and Sexuality
Ramsay Burt - 1995
Taking issue with formalist and modernist accounts of dance, which dismiss gender and sexuality as irrelevant, he argues that prejudices against male dancers are rooted in our ideas about the male body and male behaviour.Building upon ideas about the gendered gaze developed by film and feminist theorists, Ramsay Burt provides a provocative theory of spectorship in dance. He uses this to examine the work of choreographers like Nijinsky, Graham, Bausch, while relating their dances to the social, political and artistic contexts in which they were produced. Within these re-readings, he identifies a distinction between institutionalised modernist dance which evokes an essentialist, heroic, `hypermasculinity'; one which is valorised with reference to nature, heterosexuality and religion, and radical, avant garde choreography which challenges and disrupts dominant ways of representing masculinity.The Male Dancer will be essential reading for anyone interested in dance and the cultural construction of gender.
Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness
Elaine Tyler May - 1995
Chronicling astonishing shifts in public attitudes toward reproduction, from the association of barrenness with sin in colonial times, to the creation of laws for compulsory sterilization in the early twentieth century, from the baby craze of the 1950s, to the rise in voluntary childlessness in the 1990s, to the increasing reliance on startling reproductive technologies today, Elaine Tyler May reveals the intersection between public life and the most private part of our lives--sexuality, procreation, and family.