Each guide includes an author biography, chapter summaries, creative cross-curricular activities, vocabulary builders, reproducibles, and discussion questions.

    From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose economies of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities.In Carson's view Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. Economy of the Unlost begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of fifth-century b.c. Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the negative design of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences--Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair--as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the virtuosic interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility.

    -- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature -- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism -- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index

    The novel has been hailed as one of the most striking early examples of postmodernism and has become a famous test case for theories about reading because of the apparent impossibility of deciding between several radically different interpretations. Does the book have two narrators, as it first appears, or one? How much is fantasy and how much is reality? Whose fantasy and whose reality are they? Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer and hitherto the foremost proponent of the idea that Pale Fire has one narrator, John Shade, now rejects this position and presents a new and startlingly different solution that will permanently shift the nature of critical debate on the novel. Boyd argues that the book does indeed have two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern--and more interesting than ever.In presenting his arguments, Boyd shows how Nabokov designed Pale Fire for readers to make surprising discoveries on a first reading and even more surprising discoveries on subsequent readings by following carefully prepared clues within the novel. Boyd leads the reader step-by-step through the book, gradually revealing the profound relationship between Nabokov's ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics. If Nabokov has generously planned the novel to be accessible on a first reading and yet to incorporate successive vistas of surprise, Boyd argues, it is because he thinks a deep generosity lies behind the inexhaustibility, complexity, and mystery of the world. Boyd also shows how Nabokov's interest in discovery springs in part from his work as a scientist and scholar, and draws comparisons between the processes of readerly and scientific discovery.This is a profound, provocative, and compelling reinterpretation of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

    As a Stanislavsky disciple and founder of her own highly esteemed acting conservatory, the extravagant actress was also an eminent acting teacher, training her students--among them Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert DeNiro--in the art of script interpretation. The classic lectures collected here, delivered over a period of forty years, bring to life the plays of the three fathers of modern drama: Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Anton Chekhov. With passionate conviction and shrewd insight, Adler explains how their plays forever changed the world of dramaturgy while offering enduring insights on society, class, culture, and the role of the actor. She explores the struggles of Ibsen's characters to free themselves from societal convention, the mortal conflicts that trap Strindberg's men and women, and the pain of loss and transition lyrically evoked by Chekhov. A majestic volume, Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov allows us to experience the work of these masters "as if to see, hear and feel their genius for the first time." (William H. Gass)

    His evaluative comments are worthwhile, and his recounting of historical developments is both accessible and informative. Fans will appreciate his attention to detail, while casual readers will benefit from his skilled survey.” — Library Journal

    A major collection of writings from one of the most important twentieth century French authors, "The Blanchot Reader" includes six works of fiction ("Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, When the Time Comes, Vicious Circles, Thomas the Obscure", and "The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me") and extended selections of critical and philosophical essays from his major book, "The Gaze of Orpheus".

    In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Don DeLillo, Wood relates their fiction to questions of religious and philosophical belief. He suggests that the steady ebb of the sea of faith has much to do with the revolutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is.        In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.

    Chapters focus on the supernatural elements of the work, as well as the author´s treatment of the physical self.

    Reprint.

    If you fall asleep in your English classes, this book is like drinking ten cups of coffee. Maybe eleven, depending upon your body weight. For high school students and up."The most obvious virtue of Leithart's book is its scope. In a single volume he provides a defense for the value of reading classical literature, a methodology for integrating that literature with the Christian faith, and a reader's guide to the works of classical literature that a contemporary reader would most benefit from reading." -Leland Ryken, Wheaton College"[A]nyone can read this volume and expect to gain a heightened awareness of the importance of Christian thinking to all of life and the great void that exists in societies that are not undergirded by such thinking." -Byron Snapp, Calvary Herald

    Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.

    He created a rich mythology where love, fear, fantasy and the supernatural play an essential role. Intimate yet universal, passionate yet precise, their brilliant alchemy of realism and magic made Graves's poems some of the finest of the last century. In this edition the poems appear without critical apparatus or commentary. The volume represents in its purest form the achievement of Graves's seventy productive years.

    Sebald completed this controversial book before his death in December 2001. On the Natural History of Destruction is his harrowing and precise investigation of one of the least examined silences of our time. In it, the novelist examines the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment and the reasons for the astonishing absence of this unprecedented trauma from German history and culture. This historical void is in part a repression of things -- such as the death by fire of the city of Hamburg at the hands of the RAF -- too terrible to bear. But rather than record the crises about them, writers sought to retrospectively justify their actions under the Nazis. For Sebald, this is an example of deliberate cultural amnesia. His analysis of its effects in and outside Germany has already provoked angry painful debate. Sebald's novels are rooted in meticulous observation. His essays are novelistic. They include his childhood recollections of the war that spurred his horror at the collective amnesia around him. There are moments of black humor and, throughout, the sensitivity of his intelligence. This book is a study of suffering and forgetting, of the morality hidden in artistic decisions, and of both compromised and genuine heroics.

    His body of work was small — thirteen features and one short film, made over five decades — but it established him as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.Though Bresson's subjects and sources ranged widely — his films are derived from Diderot, Dostoevsky, Bernanos, and Tolstoy, from the transcripts of the trial of Joan of Arc and the Arthurian legends — his severe style remained constant. Awed, inspired, and sometimes mystified by the beauty and austere perfectionism of Bresson's style, critics and directors have been moved to passionate debate about his singular ideas on the use of sound, actors, editing, and music.Despite, or perhaps of, his rejection of the core tenets of traditional filmmaking, Bresson exerted a profound influence on many directors, from the French New Wave and American independents to countless contemporary Asian and European auteurs. Robert Bresson (Revised) , as its title suggests, updates and amends the original volume, which accompanied a major retrospective of the director's films and was the first English-language collection of essays on Bresson in many decades. Greatly expanded and richly illustrated, this examination of Bresson's vision and style draws together over two dozen important articles by leading critics and scholars, including classics studies by Susan Sontag and André Bazin, and commentaries by Roland Barthes and Alberto Moravia. Provocative new analyses by such august film historians as David Bordwell, Jean-Michel Frodon, and Shigehiko Hasumi join a selection of articles by emerging scholars that break new ground in relating Bresson's cinema to hitherto unexamined intellectual, aesthetic, and philosophical currents. The book is rounded out by four essential interviews with Bresson; the illuminating testimony of L. H. Burel, the cinematographer of four of his greatest films; and several essays by leading directors, from Michael Haneke tot the Dardenne brothers, which reveal why Bresson is considered first and foremost "a film-maker's filmmaker.

    With wrenching dramatic intensity, it captures the character and the mind of an extraordinary talent -- from his days as a struggling young writer in Greenwich Village, through the turbulent Vietnam era, to his years as a professor of English literature at Berkeley. This is an unforgettable portrait of an artist in the world -- from one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.

    The genre arose from a ferment of activity from which the Pre-Raphaelites emerged along with Leighton's luxurious classical mythologies, as well as a fascinating diversity in other artistic fields. Christopher Wood, a leading expert who has not only studied but also bought, owned, and sold examples of everything he writes about, takes us through the artistry of Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Waterhouse, and others to show the succession of movements characterizing the Victorian period.

    Although he saw himself chiefly as a poet, publishing a number of books of poetry, he also left behind a sparkling comic novel, four children's books, numerous translations, haunting letters, and four collections of essays. Edited by Brad Leithauser, No Other Bookdraws from these four essay collections, reminding us that Jarell the poet was also, in the words of Robert Lowell, "a critic of genius."

    Treichler has become a singularly important voice among the significant theorists on the AIDS crisis. Dissecting the cultural politics surrounding representations of HIV and AIDS, her work has altered the field of cultural studies by establishing medicine as a legitimate focus for cultural analysis. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic is a comprehensive collection of Treichler’s related writings, including revised and updated essays from the 1980s and 1990s that present a sustained argument about the AIDS epidemic from a uniquely knowledgeable and interdisciplinary standpoint. “AIDS is more than an epidemic disease,” Treichler writes, “it is an epidemic of meanings.” Exploring how such meanings originate, proliferate, and take hold, her essays investigate how certain interpretations of the epidemic dominate while others are obscured. They also suggest ways to understand and choose between overlapping or competing discourses. In her coverage of roughly fifteen years of the AIDS epidemic, Treichler addresses a range of key issues, from biomedical discourse and theories of pathogenesis to the mainstream media’s depictions of the crisis in both developed and developing countries. She also examines representations of women and AIDS, treatment issues, and the role of activism in shaping the politics of the epidemic. Linking the AIDS tragedy to a uniquely broad spectrum of contemporary theory and culture, this collection concludes with an essay on the continued importance of theoretical thought for untangling the sociocultural phenomena of AIDS—and for tackling the disease itself. With an exhaustive bibliography of critical and theoretical writings on HIV and AIDS, this long-awaited volume will be essential to all those invested in studying the course of AIDS, its devastating medical effects, and its massive impact on contemporary culture. It should become a standard text in university courses dealing with AIDS in biomedicine, sociology, anthropology, gay and lesbian studies, women’s studies, and cultural and media studies.

    How does poetry create feeling? What are fractal poetics?In a series of provocative, beautifully written essays concerning "the good strangeness of poetry," Fulton contemplates the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome, the aesthetics of complexity theory, and the need for "cultural incorrectness." She also meditates on electronic, biological, and linguistic screens; falls in love with an outrageous 17th-century poet; argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters; and calls for a courageous poetics of "inconvenient knowledge." Contents PreambleI. ProcessHead Notes, Heart Notes, Base NotesScreens: An Alchemical ScrapbookII. PoeticsSubversive PleasuresOf Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body EclecticFractal Amplifications: Writing in Three DimensionsIII. PowersThe Only Kangaroo among the BeautyUnordinary Passions: Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of NewcastleHer Moment of Brocade: The Reconstruction of Emily DickinsonIV. PraxisSeed InkTo Organize a WaterfallV. PenchantsA Canon for InfidelsThree Poets in Pursuit of AmericaThe State of the ArtMain Thingsri0VI. PremisesThe Tongue as a MuscleA Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge

    In this new compendium, the writers describe their art and lives, creating a unique and fascinating record of their inspirations.

    Poetry. Translated from the Spanish by Michelle Gil- Montero. In this book of lyric critical essays, Argentinian poet and critic María Negroni writes about Gothic works—ranging from Horace Walpole's classic novel The Castle of Otranto to Julia Kristeva's Black Sun to James Cameron's film Aliens—and develops an accumulative, absorbing, transnational theory of politics and aesthetics. In the introduction she writes: "I want to share something of that fascinating imaginary, packed with castles and lakes, crypts and laboratories, music boxes and evil gardens, urban ruins and boats like coffins ferrying magnificent dreams. Because in that atmosphere, it is my impression, something crucial materializes: a purely sentimental domain where it is suddenly possible to perceive, under any light, the critical link between childhood and atrocity, art and crime, passion and fear, and the desire for fusion and writing."

    This book is rich of consolations because it takes the cry of lament seriously."" --Jurgen Moltmann ""A timely, accessible, and valuable book. The recovery of the biblical traditions of loss and hurt is intrinsically worth doing, more worth doing in an increasingly disestablished society."" --Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary, Emeritus ""This cross-disciplinary collaboration is . . . poignant and compelling testimony to the personal and communal power of lament and its importance to the practice of ministry. This book is the one that I have been waiting for."" --Christie Cozad Neuger, Brite Divinity School ""Few books in the literature of lament have drawn together so much material from the biblical, theological, and pastoral spheres as Rachel's Cry."" --Patrick D. Miller, Princeton Theological Seminary ""Honesty with God is the doorway to authentic hope and faith. . . . This is one of the most liberating books I have read in a long time."" --James Newton Poling, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary ""This is the first book to bring scattered discussions together into one coherent whole . . . with deep Christian insight and conviction, with vivid examples, and with learning which is as gracefully communicated as it is broad and deep in its substance. I will be keeping it near at hand, so as to return to it often."" --Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University ""Rachel's Cry is not only a timely book, it is an urgently needed resource for people who long for a way to live with irrational suffering. Unless we recover the prayer of lament, we are in danger of being trapped in powerlessness, cynicism, and despair."" --Herbert Anderson, Catholic Theological Union, Emeritus ""I found it difficult to put this book down. Rachel's Cry convincingly argues that an authentic and empowering spirituality requires the language of lament and protest alongside praise and thanksgiving."" --Nancy J. Ramsay, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary Kathleen M. Billman is dean of academic affairs and professor of pastoral theology and counseling at Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. Daniel L. Migliore is Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary.

    The twenty-eight essays of this volume--among them, War and the Intellectuals, the analysis of the warfare state that made Bourne the foremost critic of American entry into World War 1, and Trans-National America, his manifesto for cultural pluralism in America--show Bourne at his most passionate and incisive as they trace his search for the true wellsprings of nationalism and American culture.

    Writers from Homer to Heaney instruct us in the art of mental composition, even as their poems progress. Just as painters understand paint, composers musical instruments, and sculptors stone or metal, verbal artists understand the only material in which their creations will get made--the back-lit tissue of the human brain. In her brilliant synthesis of literary criticism, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, Elaine Scarry explores the principal practices by which writers bring things to life for their readers.

    How Like a Leaf will be a welcome inside view of the author's thought.

    . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”

    Featuring more than 500 A-Z articles, it throws new and often unexpected light on the most familiar of Dickens's works, and explores the experiences, events, and literature on which he drew. There is also a chronology of Dickens' life, a list of characters in his works, a list of entries by theme, a family tree, three maps, an invaluable bibliography, and a general index. Compiled by a distinguished editorial team, and written in a lucid, easy style that would have pleased him, The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens offers a more authoritative and accessible range of information than any other reference work on Dickens.

    He considers the influence of Picasso and Rembrandt and speaks of Eastern conventions and their relevance to his work. He points to Laurel and Hardy's lasting appeal in his conviction that popularity and art are not incompatible. Hockney and his work have long been the subjects of controversy—few 20th century artists have so successfully surmounted their cult image for three decades; yet and he remains one of our most relentlessly dedicated, versatile, and original painters.

    In it Eliot gives voice to the deep intellectual uncertainty that had existed from the 1870s and to his own sense of the collapse of civilization. Stephen Coote's critical study outlines the historical background that led Eliot to his bleak vision of humanity. He gives a close account of the development of the poem and disucsses fully its arguments, allusions, poetic techniques and patterns of imagery. There is also a chapter on the crucial role played by Ezra Pound in editing the manuscript. Above all, he seeks to elucidate the way in which Eliot drew upon the rich tradition of past centuries, bringing together myth and life-enhancing poetry to create a work that has become a seminal part of our heritage.

    

    Reinterpreting the writings of key figures in the history of realpolitik, he argues that national interests are framed in the language of justice, and indicates the dangers arising from the unilateral exercise of American power in the post-Cold War world.

    It covers the broad sweep of Tate's critical concerns: poetry, poets, fiction, the imagination, language, literature, and culture.

    This book is a collection of material extracted from McLuhan's many scattered remarks, essays and various writings on religion. It is a powerful expose of his brilliant insights into theology, the Church and the Global Village and shows the deeply Christian side of a man considered by many to be one of the most important thinkers of our time.

    Why is it only with the Romantics that suspicion, not just of motive but of the very tools of art, language, and form, has become so insistent? Why could Shakespeare depict suspicion with such power and insight in the figures of Hamlet and lago, yet himself work with such apparent ease within the conventions of his time?To understand Romantic suspicion, the author argues, we need to understand what it supplanted and why. To that end he turns to the work created in what he calls cultures of trust, to Homer and the Hebrew Bible, to Dante and Shakespeare, before examining the interplay of trust and suspicion in a number of Romantic and post-Romantic writers from Wordsworth to Beckett. In a final chapter Josipovici draws on Wittgenstein's later work to round out his argument that making comes before knowing, utterance before understanding, and that trust is not blind faith but rather a deep confidence in our being in the world and therefore in time and language. It is out of such confidence, he concludes, that art is always made, even if it is an art, like that of Kafka and Beckett, that turns the light of suspicion fiercely on itself.

    Facisilies of the original Russian material are followed by complete English translations. Also included in this book is Ayn Rand's "movie diary," in which she recorded details of her viewing of hundreds of films in Soviet Russia, Europe and the United States during the 1920's.

    In four lectures, based on a wide range of texts -- Aristotle's Poetics; humanist Lorenzo Valla's tract exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery; an early 18th-century Jesuit historical account purporting to record the diatribe of a Mariana Island native against Spanish rule; and Proust's commentary on Flaubert's style -- he demonstrates that rhetoric, if properly understood, is related not only to ornament but to historical understanding and truth. Ginzburg discovers a middle ground between the empiricist or positivist view of history, and the current postmodern tendency to regard any historical account as just one among an infinity of possible narratives, distinguished or measured not by the standard of truth, but by rhetorical skill. As a whole, these lectures stake out a position that both mediates and transcends warring factions in the current historiographical debate.

    With Robert DeNiro, one of the most talented young actors from this film, Scorsese went on to make some of the greatest American films of the postwar period, including Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990). A Scorsese film seldom fails to stir controversy, for his devotion to realism has led him to forthrightly depict violence and its frightening randomness in the modern world. His biblical film also created quite a stir. This adaptation of Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ generated outrage among conservative religious leaders.Scorsese, however, has not limited himself to contemporary, violent urban dramas or new interpretations of biblical subjects. Other widely heralded Scorsese films include Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), New York, New York (1977), The Last Waltz (1978), The King of Comedy (1983), After Hours (1985), The Color of Money (1986), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino (1995), and Kundun (1998).These interviews begin with conversations about the highly autobiographical Mean Streets (1973), which first brought Scorsese serious attention, and end with conversations about Kundun, an overtly political biography of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, released in early 1998."I look for a thematic idea running through my movies, he says, and I see that it's the outsider struggling for recognition. I realize that all my life I've been an outsider, and above all, being lonely but never realizing it."

    A final section on style, language and metre offers a case-study in a close reading of a section of the Aeneid. The book communicates a sense of why reading Virgil matters and how the study of this author is always open to new ideas and fresh insights. No knowledge of Latin is presumed.

    In a detailed reading of three American poets—Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Lyn Hejinian—and two African-Caribbean poets, Kamau Brathwaite and M. Nourbese Philip, Paul Naylor argues that these writers have produced new forms of poetry that address the "holes," or erasures, in history that more traditional poetry neglects.

    We meet the difficult, even unsavory private man: hypochondriac and nervous, narcissistic and vainglorious, isolated and greedy for love, shy and often ungenerous. But we are also introduced to a man who lived an eventful life, was capable of great kindness, loved dogs, doted on his daughters, and listened to Jack Benny.We experience Mann's tragedy as the quintessential German forced by the rise of National Socialism first into inner exile and then into real exile in Switzerland, Princeton, and California. His letters from this time reveal the torment that exile represented for a writer whose work, indeed whose very self, was inextricably bound up with the German language.The book provides fresh and sometimes startling insights into both famous and little-known episodes in Mann's life and into his writing--the only realm in which he ever felt free. It shows how love, death, religion, and politics were not merely themes in Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and other works, but were woven into the fabric of his existence and preoccupied him unrelentingly. It also teases out what is known about what Mann considered his celibate homoeroticism and what others have labeled closeted homosexuality. In particular, we learn about his affection for the young man who inspired the character of Tadzio in Death in Venice. And, against the unfocused accusations of anti-Semitism that have been leveled at Mann, the book examines in human detail his relationships with Jewish writers, friends, and family members.This is the richest available portrait of Thomas Mann as man and writer--the place to start for anyone wanting to know anything about his life, work, or times.

    He gained a reputation as an innovator whose bold literary adventures were tempered by exacting discipline. Berryman was also an active, prolific, and perceptive critic whose own experience as a major poet served to his advantage.Berryman was a protege of Mark Van Doren, the great Shakespearean scholar, and the Bard's work remained one of his most abiding passions -- he would devote a lifetime to writing about it. His voluminous writings on the subject have now been collected and edited by John Haffenden. This book shows that Berryman's interest in Shakespeare was that of an expert scholar who thought seriously and deeply about his subject.

    This is a book for all fans of musical theatre, and a must for directors and actors. Scott Miller's thoughtful analyses of some of the great works of the musical theatre take the buff or the professional on a journey of discovery. Each chapter looks at one musical, addressing:textual and musical themesways in which production design can support those themesinsight into the motivation and background of the charactershistorical and social context of the action of the showand much more.Miller spotlights The Music Man, Chicago, The King and I, Passion, Ragtime, Sunday in the Park with George, and others. All are innovative works, providing a springboard for the kind of in-depth discussion among directors, their actors, and designers that can make working on a musical - or just seeing one - the most satisfying experience you've ever had. You'll never look at musicals the same way again! Visit Scott's website at http: //www.geocities.com/Broadway/3164/

    The work begins by examining Spinoza’s notion of the materiality of writing, a notion developed through his examination of scripture. It then postulates the three fundamental principles of Spinoza’s philosophy: there can be no liberation of the mind without a liberation of the body, and no liberation of the individual without a collective liberation, and that the written form of these propositions itself possesses a corporeal existence, not as the realization or materialization of a pre-existing mental, spiritual intention, but as a body among other bodies. Ultimately, the book prompts us to consider Spinoza’s philosophy anew, by replacing questions like “Who has read it?” and “Of those, how many of us have understood it?” with “What material effects has it produced, not only on or in minds, but on bodies as well?” and “To what extent has it moved bodies and what has it moved them to?”

    What distinguishes this encyclopedia from the others in the field is its critical stance.

         A compilation of twelve stories, one for each month of the year, including: The New Year's Eve Adventure; Fate and Mrs Pepperpot; Mrs Pepperpot helps Arne; Spring Cleaning; Easter Chicks; The Cuckoo; Midsummer Romance; Mrs Pepperpot and the Pedlar; The Moose Hunt; Mrs Pepperpot and the Weather; Mrs Pepperpot in Hospital; Mrs Pepperpot's Christmas.

    The subject of some of the best and most provocative work in contemporary philosophy, skepticism has been addressed not only by top epistemologists but also by several of the world's finest philosophers who are most known for their work in other areas of the discipline. Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader brings together the most important recent contributions to the discussion of skepticism. Covering major approaches to the skeptical problem, it features essays by Anthony Brueckner, Keith DeRose, Fred Dretske, Graeme Forbes, Christopher Hill, David Lewis, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, Hilary Putnam, Ernest Sosa, Gail Stine, Barry Stroud, Peter Unger, and Ted Warfield. The book opens with a thorough introduction that outlines the skeptical problem, explains the dominant responses to skepticism, and discusses the strengths, weaknesses, and unresolved issues of each response, providing undergraduate students and nonphilosophers with the background and context necessary to understand the essays. Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader serves as an ideal text for courses in epistemology and skepticism and will also appeal to professional philosophers and interested general readers.

    Translating the Unspeakable gathers eighteen of her essays written over nearly twenty years, combining autobiography and criticism to examine what it means for any artist to innovate instead of following an already traveled path.In autobiographical passages Fraser tells how her generation was influenced by revolutions in art and philosophy during the early 1960s and how she spent years pursuing idiosyncratic means of rediscovering the poem's terms. By the 1970s her evolving poetics were challenged by questions of gender, until immersion in feminist/modernist scholarship led her to initiate greater dialogue among experimentalist poets. Other essays examine modernist women writers, their contemporary successors, and the visual poetics they have practiced. By exploring the work of such poets as H. D., Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, and Barbara Guest, Fraser conveys their struggle to establish a presence within accepted poetic conventions and describes the role experimentation plays in helping women overcome self-imposed silence.All of Fraser's writings explore how the search to find one's own way of speaking into a very private yet historic space—of translating the unspeakable—drives poetic experimentation for women and men alike. This provocative book provides a glimpse into the thought processes ofthe poetic mind, enhancing our understanding of innovative writing.

    But this edge is one of deeply considered and concerned authority. A poet-critic engages closely with his masters, with his peers, with those whom he regards as falling short. This collection is an adventure of sensibility."—George SteinerWilliam Logan has been called the most dangerous poetry critic since Randall Jarrell. A critic of intensity and savage wit, he is the most irritating and strong-minded reviewer of contemporary poetry we have. A survey of American, British, and Irish poetry in the eighties and early nineties, Reputations of the Tongue is a book of poetry criticism more honest than any since Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age.The book opens with an essay arguing with Eliot over tradition and individual talent; it closes with a close scrutiny of contemporary British and Irish poetry. At the heart of the book are long essays on W. H. Auden, W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and Geoffrey Hill--and the reviews of major and minor contemporary poets that have earned Logan his reputation.Appearing in publications like the New York Times, Washington Post, Poetry, Parnassus, and Sewanee Review, Logan’s reviews have been noted for their violence, intelligence, candor, and humor. Many aroused tempers on first publication, leading one Pulitzer Prize winner to offer to run the critic over with a truck. Even as he tackles the radical excess of Ashbery and Ginsberg, however, Logan lauds the rich quietudes of Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, the froth and verbal fervor of Amy Clampitt, the philosophical comedies of Gjertrud Schnackenberg.The essays in this collection take the long view. Aspiring to more than miscellany or gossip, Reputations of the Tongue is the work of a critic for whom the reviewing of poetry is still a high calling.William Logan is the author of four books of poems, Sad-faced Men, Difficulty, Sullen Weedy Lakes, and Vain Empires , and a book of criticism, All the Rage. He has won the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. He teaches at the University of Florida, where he is Alumni/ae Professor of English. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, and Cambridge, England.

    Reading Theatre is a long-awaited translation of the first volume.Clear and systematic in its approach, the book covers all the basic elements of theatrical text and performance. Ubersfeld begins by refuting the view of performance as the simple 'translation' of a dramatic text, and outlines a much more complex dynamic. In subsequent chapters she similarly begins with a brief critique of simplistic models and then teases out the complexities of action, character, space, time, and dialogue. A range of specific examples brings substance and clarity to her points.Ubersfeld shows how such formal analysis can enrich the work of theatre practitioners, offering a fruitful reading of the symbolic structures of stage space and time, and opening up multiple possibilities for interpreting a play's lines of action. Though firmly grounded in formalist and semiotic studies, the book exhibits a refreshing scepticism about scientific positivism, stressing the fundamental ambiguity of any dramatic text as well as the sociohistorical grounding of particular text and performance styles.A pioneering work, this contemporary classic continues to inform debates in theatre semiotics. Addressed as much to actors and directors as to students and scholars, it will be read widely in theatre circles throughout the English-speaking world.

    Gardner approaches their poetry in light of philosopher Stanley Cavell’s remarkably similar engagement with the issues of skepticism and linguistic finitude. The skeptic’s refusal to settle for anything less than perfect knowledge of the world, Cavell maintains, amounts to a refusal to accept the fact of human finitude. Gardner argues that both Cavell and the poets he discusses reject skepticism’s world-erasing conclusions but nonetheless honor the truth about the limits of knowledge that skepticism keeps alive. In calling attention to the limits of such acts as describing or remembering, the poets Gardner examines attempt to renew language by teasing a charged drama out of their inability to grasp with certainty. Juxtaposed with Gardner’s readings of the work of the younger poets are his interviews with them. In many ways, these conversations are at the core of Gardner’s book, demonstrating the wide-ranging implications of the struggles and mappings enacted in the poems. The interviews are themselves examples of the charged intimacy Gardner deals with in his readings.

    In recent decades this famous poem has become the subject of fresh and searching controversy. What is the poem’s fundamental meaning? Does it endorse or undermine values of empire and patriarchy? Is its world view comic or tragic? Many studies of the poem have focused primarily on selected books. The approach here is comprehensive.An introduction by editor Christine Perkell discusses the poem’s historical background, its reception from antiquity to the present, and its most important themes. The book-by-book readings that follow both explicate the text and offer a variety of interpretations.

    Perhaps Jack Kerouac's most famous phrase is his description of his own writing as "spontaneous bop prosody," and Coolidge understands that prosody, the secret, still underground language of America. Nobody writes about Kerouac with such attention to his sound, and Coolidge's prose is as remarkable as Kerouac's. Simultaneously criticism and poetry, this is writing that returns the reader to the utter originality of Kerouac's improvisations ("blues/and haikoos"). Poet to poet, each listening to and hearing the life of the other, Coolidge and Kerouac breathe together in the poems of their prose.Now It's Jazz includes an afterword by David Meltzer, poet and jazz anthologist, in whose correspondence with Coolidge many of these ideas first found expression. With the late Tina Meltzer on vibes, Clark (drums) and David (guitar) formed a trio known as Mix, successor to their 1960s band Serpent Power.

    The essays in this volume offer a balanced exposition and critique of Rorty's views on knowledge, language, truth, science, morality and politics. Written by a distinguished roster of philosophers, this introduction presents a valuable overview of Rorty's philosophical vision. It will appeal as well to students in the social sciences, literary studies, cultural studies and political theory. Charles Guigon, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, has published widely on existentialism, psychotherapy and Heidegger, and edited the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (1993). Provost and Professor at the University of New Hampshire, David R. Hiley, is also the author of other works, including Philosophy in Question: Essays on a Pyrrhonian Theme (University of Chicago, 1988) and The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science and Culture (Cornell, 1991).

    This book explains why such a claim was possible to advance and impossible to defend. Ian Baucom reveals how Englishness emerged against the institutions and experiences of the British Empire, rendering English culture subject to local determinations and global negotiations. In his view, the Empire was less a place where England exerted control than where it lost command of its own identity.Analyzing imperial crisis zones--including the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, the Amritsar massacre of 1919, and the Brixton riots of 1981--Baucom asks if the building of the empire completely refashioned England's narratives of national identity. To answer this question, he draws on a surprising range of sources: Victorian and imperial architectural theory, colonial tourist manuals, lexicographic treatises, domestic and imperial cricket culture, country house fetishism, and the writings of Ruskin, Kipling, Ford Maddox Ford, Forster, Rhys, C.L.R. James, Naipaul, and Rushdie--and representations of urban riot on television, in novels, and in parliamentary sessions. Emphasizing the English preoccupation with place, he discusses some crucial locations of Englishness that replaced the rural sites of Wordsworthian tradition: the Morant Bay courthouse, Bombay's Gothic railway station, the battle grounds of the 1857 uprising in India, colonial cricket fields, and, last but not least, urban riot zones.

    

    In this first volume, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, John Pocock follows Gibbon through his youthful exile in Switzerland and his criticisms of the Encyclopedie and traces the growth of his historical interests down to the conception of the Decline and Fall itself.

    In this new collection he treats a variety of topics in ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history with special reference to the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Adorno.

    Employing psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, and the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting argues that black women historically invoked both desire and primal fear in French men. By inspiring repulsion, attraction, and anxiety, they gave rise in the nineteenth-century French male imagination to the primitive narrative of Black Venus. The book opens with an exploration of scientific discourse on black females, using Sarah Bartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus, and natural scientist Georges Cuvier as points of departure. To further show how the image of a savage was projected onto the bodies of black women, Sharpley-Whiting moves into popular culture with an analysis of an 1814 vaudeville caricature of Bartmann, then shifts onto the terrain of canonical French literature and colonial cinema, exploring the representation of black women by Baudelaire, Balzac, Zola, Maupassant, and Loti. After venturing into twentieth-century film with an analysis of Josephine Baker’s popular Princesse Tam Tam, the study concludes with a discussion of how black Francophone women writers and activists countered stereotypical representations of black female bodies during this period. A first-time translation of the vaudeville show The Hottentot Venus, or Hatred of Frenchwomen supplements this critique of the French male gaze of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both intellectually rigorous and culturally intriguing, this study will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, feminist and gender studies, black studies, and cultural studies.

    The Bible in question is not only the canonical text and its authoritative commentaries but also the Bible as experienced in sermon and liturgy, hymn and song, fresco and illumination, or even in the aphorisms of everyday speech.The Commedia took shape against the panorama of this divine narrative. In chapters devoted to Virgil and Ovid, the author explores strategies of allusion and citation, showing how Dante reinterprets these authors in the light of biblical revelation, correcting their vision and reorienting their understanding of history or human love. Dante finds his authority for making these interpretive moves in a "scriptural self" that is constructed over the course of the Commedia.That biblical selfhood enables him to choose among various classical and Christian traditions, to manipulate arguments and time lines, and to forge imaginary links between the ancient world and his own "modern uso." He rewrites Scripture by reactivating it, by writing it again. To the inspired parchments of the Old and New Testaments he boldly adds his own "testamental" postscript.

    The book draws on extensive archival research, bringing to light exciting and neglected manuscript and printed sources. Offering a bold new narrative of the whole period, and a timely reminder that England has a republican as well as a royalist heritage, it will be of compelling interest to historians as well as literary scholars.

    Starting with the Aboriginal understanding of the spiritual significance of the desert, it traces the attempts of the early colonists to conquer this alien space; the changing estimate of the inland explorers in fiction and art as heroes, failures, or psychological studies of obsession; the rediscovery of the desert in the twentieth century by travelers, artists, novelists, photographers and film makers; its interest for ecotourism and as a spiritual experience.

    In one wayward strand, waywardness itself is at work, delay becomes almost predictable, triviality is auspicious, and failure is cheerfully admired. This is loiterature. Loiterature is the first book to identify this strand, to follow its path through major works and genres, and to evaluate its literary significance. By offering subtle resistance to the laws of "good social order," loiterly literature blurs the distinctions between innocent pleasure and harmless relaxation on the one hand, and not-so-innocent intent on the other. The result is covert social criticism that casts doubt on the values good citizens hold dear—values like discipline, organization, productivity, and, above all, work. It levels this criticism, however, under the guise of innocent wit or harmless entertainment. Loiterature distracts attention the way a street conjurer diverts us with his sleight of hand.    If the pleasurable has critical potential, may not one of the functions of the critical be to produce pleasure? The ability to digress, Ross Chambers suggests, is at the heart of both, and loiterature’s digressive waywardness offers something to ponder for critics of culture as well as lovers of literature.

    These are, on the one hand, the metafictional tendency to blur the boundaries between story-telling and history, to enhance the linguistic component of writing, and to underline the constructedness of the world created in a way that aligns Ackroyd with other postmodernist writers of historiographic metafiction; and on the other, the attempt to achieve mythical closure, expressed, for example, in Ackroyd's fictional treatment of London as a mystic centre of power. This mythical element evinces the influence of high modernists such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and links Ackroyd's work to transition-to-postmodern writers such as Lawrence Durrell, Maureen Duffy, Doris Lessing and John Fowles.

    In Critical Images Schmidt argues that these visual images presented critical interpretations that both formed and represented the novel's historical reception. Schmidt analyses both Spanish and English illustrations, including those by William Hogarth, John Vanderbank, Francis Hayman, José del Castillo, and Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, and explores several of the iconographic traditions present in the illustrations: the burlesque, which focuses on the work's slapstick humour; the satirical, which emphasizes Cervantes's supposed didactic, Enlightenment message; and the sentimental, which highlights Don Quixote's purity of heart and purpose. Schmidt demonstrates that the illustrations offset the neoclassical criticism contained in the same volumes and reveals an intriguing variety of historical readings, highlighting the debates, controversies, and conflicts of interests surrounding interpretations of Don Quixote. Dealing with such topical issues as canon formation, visual semiotics, and the impact of visual media on public opinion, Critical Images will be of great value not only to literary scholars and literary historians but also to art historians and those engaged in cultural and media studies.

    Victorian Sappho traces the emergence of this idealized feminine figure through reconstructions of the Sapphic fragments in late-nineteenth-century England. Yopie Prins argues that the Victorian period is a critical turning point in the history of Sappho's reception; what we now call "Sappho" is in many ways an artifact of Victorian poetics. Prins reads the Sapphic fragments in Greek alongside various English translations and imitations, considering a wide range of Victorian poets--male and female, famous and forgotten--who signed their poetry in the name of Sappho. By "declining" the name in each chapter, the book presents a theoretical argument about the Sapphic signature, as well as a historical account of its implications in Victorian England. Prins explores the relations between classical philology and Victorian poetics, the tropes of lesbian writing, the aesthetics of meter, and nineteenth-century personifications of the "Poetess." as current scholarship on Sappho and her afterlife. Offering a history and theory of lyric as a gendered literary form, the book is an exciting and original contribution to Victorian studies, classical studies, comparative literature, and women's studies.

    From the Arabian Sea to the Indian Ocean, from the northern Himalayas to its southernmost tip, the subcontinent's overwhelming profusion of art and design excites the eyes.Street furniture, architecture, transport, billboards, posters, packaging, animals, and people are all used as the media of calculated design and spontaneous expression. Ancient or modern, permanent or transient, India's street art has evolved in a myriad of styles reflecting regional variation and concerns.Barry Dawson's photographs are not only a colorful journey through India's cities, towns, and villages, but also a graphic celebration of its creative street culture, an inspirational sourcebook of vibrant ideas for students and practitioners of art and design, as well as a lively visual record for visitors.

    From Warhol to the super-brats of the eighties like Koons and Schnabel right up to the young players of the nineties, they are all brought to life in this readable but thoughtful book.

    Not only were African-American viewers watching disproportionately more network television than the general population but, as Nielsen finally realized, they preferred black shows. As a result, African-American producers, writers, directors, and stars were given an unusual degree of creative control over shows such as The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Roc, Living Single, Martin, and New York Undercover.Locating a persistent black nationalist desire--a yearning for home and community--in shows produced by and for African Americans, Kristal Brent Zook shows how these productions revealed complex and contradictory politics of gender, sexuality, and class. Incorporating interviews with such prominent executives, producers, and stars as Keenen Ivory Wayans, Quincy Jones, Robert Townsend, Charles Dutton, and Yvette Lee Bowser, this study looks at both production and reception among African-American viewers. Zook provides nuanced readings of the shows themselves as well as the political and historical contexts in which they emerged.Though much of black television during this time was criticized for being trivial or buffoonish, Color by Fox reveals its deep-rooted ties to African-American protest literature, autobiography, and a collective desire for social transformation.

    Throughout this important volume, the author underscores two vital themes: one, that visual presentation of slavery in England and America has been utterly dishonest to its subject, and the other a meditation on whether the ruptures of the slave experience - middle passage, bondage, and torture -- can be adequately represented and remembered.

    Her challenging new book definitively establishes the centrality of lesbianism as sexual obsession and aesthetic model in Proust's vast novel A la recherche du temps perdu.Traditional readings of the Recherche have dismissed Proust's Gomorrah--his term for women who love other women--as a veiled portrayal of the novelist's own homosexuality. More recently, queer-positive rereadings have viewed the novel's treatment of female sexuality as ancillary to its accounts of Sodom and its meditations on time and memory. Ladenson instead demonstrates the primacy of lesbianism to the novel, showing that Proust's lesbians are the only characters to achieve a plenitude of reciprocated desire. The example of Sodom, by contrast, is characterized by frustrated longing and self-loathing. She locates the work's paradigm of hermetic relations between women in the self-sufficient bond between the narrator's mother and grandmother. Ladenson traces Proust's depictions of male and female homosexuality from his early work onward, and contextualizes his account of lesbianism in late-nineteenth-century sexology and early twentieth-century thought.A vital contribution to the fields of queer theory and of French literature and culture, Ladenson's book marks a new stage in Proust studies and provides a fascinating chapter in the history of a literary masterpiece's reception.