In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

    In this unparalleled book, Marshall Berman takes account of the social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world and the impact of modernism on art, literature and architecture. This new edition contains an updated preface addressing the critical role the onset of modernism played in popular democratic upheavals in the late 1920s.

    To search out the finest Spanish recipes, Penelope Casas traveled over 25,000 miles, crisscrossing the country. Region by region, she found local cooks and discovered their secrets, often putting to paper recipes that had never before been set down. In The Foods and Wines of Spain, she brings us savory meat and fish pies from the Celtic lands of Galicia; a legendary bean dish from the coastal mountains of Asturias; the renowned romesco sauce of ground almonds and dried sweet peppers from Cataluña; paellas from the rice paddies of Valencia; simple but exquisite fish dishes from Andalucía; breads from the wheat fields of Castilla; honey-drenched pastries from Extremadura; and much more.

    The culmination of de Certeau's lifelong engagement with the human sciences, this volume is both an analysis of Christian mysticism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an application of this influential scholar's transdisciplinary historiography.

    Using a wealth of examples, Arnheim considers the factors that determine the overall organization of visual form in works of painting, sculpture, and architecture.

    

    Susan Sontag's prefatory essay is one of her finest acts of criticism, informed by intellectual sympathy and a sure sense of the contours of the mind she is describing.

    Jordan has traveled the back roads and hidden trails of rural Texas in search of such cemeteries. With camera in hand, he has visited more than one thousand cemeteries created and maintained by the Anglo-American, black, Indian, Mexican, and German settlers of Texas. His discoveries of sculptured stones and mounds, hex signs and epitaphs, intricate landscapes and unusual decorations represent a previously unstudied and unappreciated wealth of Texas folk art and tradition. Texas Graveyards not only marks the distinct ethnic and racial traditions in burial practices but also preserves a Texas legacy endangered by changing customs, rural depopulation, vandalism, and the erosion of time.

    Text and the City is the first book of his work to appear in English. A literary and cultural critic deeply engaged with European critical thought, Maeda was a brilliant, insightful theorist of modernity for whom the city was the embodiment of modern life. He conducted a far-reaching inquiry into changing conceptions of space, temporality, and visual practices as they gave shape to the city and its inhabitants. James A. Fujii has assembled a selection of Maeda’s essays that question and explore the contours of Japanese modernity and resonate with the concerns of literary and cultural studies today.Maeda remapped the study of modern Japanese literature and culture in the 1970s and 1980s, helping to generate widespread interest in studying mass culture on the one hand and marginalized sectors of modern Japanese society on the other. These essays reveal the broad range of Maeda’s cultural criticism. Among the topics considered are Tokyo; utopias; prisons; visual media technologies including panoramas and film; the popular culture of the Edo, Meiji, and contemporary periods; maps; women’s magazines; and women writers. Integrally related to these discussions are Maeda’s readings of works of Japanese literature including Matsubara Iwagoro’s In Darkest Tokyo, Nagai Kafu’s The Fox, Higuchi Ichiyo’s Growing Up, Kawabata Yasunari’s The Crimson Gang of Asakusa, and Narushima Ryuhoku’s short story “Useless Man.” Illuminating the infinitely rich phenomena of modernity, these essays are full of innovative, unexpected connections between cultural productions and urban life, between the text and the city.

    In its analytical profundity it can be compared to his Philosophy of Modern Music, but in the range of its topics and the clarity of its arguments it stands alone among Adorno’s writings on music. At the book’s core are illuminating studies of the founders of modern music: Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, as well as sympathetic rediscoveries of Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker. Especially significant is Adorno’s “dialectical portrait” of Stravinsky in which he both reconsiders and refines the damning indictment he gave in Philosophy on Modern Music. In ‘Vers une musique informelle’, an influential essay, he plots a course for a music of the future ‘which takes up the challenge of an unrevised, unrestricted freedom’. More unexpectedly, there are moving accounts of earlier works, including Bizet’s Carmen and Weber’s Der Freischutz, along with an entertainingly caustic “Natural History of the Theatre.” Which explores the hierarchies of the auditorium, from upper circle to foyer.‘The positive element of kitsch’, Adorno remarks, ‘lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.’ Musical kitsch is the target of several of the shorter pieces: on Gounod’s Ave Maria or Tchaikovsky’s ‘clumsy naivety’; on the ‘Penny Serenade’ of the transformation of Mozart into chocolate-box rococo. Yet even while Adorno demolishes ‘commodity music’ he is sustained by the conviction that music is supremely human because it retains the capacity to speak of inhumanity and to resist it. It is a conviction which reverberates throughout these writings. For Adorno, music and philosophy were inextricably linked: Quasi una Fantasia will enlarge our understanding of both.

    This book focuses on the self-images and social contexts of the nineteenth-century immigrants, their descendants, and the Americanized writers.

    

    Based on fieldwork among the Purépecha of Michoacán, Mexico, some of the most talented artisans of the New World, the book is not so much a work of ethnography as of philosophy—a cultural critique of modernism. García Canclini delineates three interpretations of popular culture: spontaneous creation, which posits that artistic expression is the realization of beauty and knowledge; "memory for sale," which holds that original products are created for sale in the imposed capitalist system; and the tourist outlook, whereby collectibles are created to justify development and to provide insight into what capitalism has achieved.Transforming Modernity argues strongly for popular culture as an instrument of understanding, reproducing, and transforming the social system in order to elaborate and construct class hegemony and to reflect the unequal appropriation and distribution of cultural capital. With its wide scope, this book should appeal to readers within and well beyond anthropology—those interested in cultural theory, social thought, and Mesoamerican culture.

    And such is Daniel O'Keefe's magisterial study of magic. This is a book that has drawn upon research in many disciplines to produce a truly general (and hence explanatory) theory of magic - a theory which will interest scholars in philosophy, sociology, religion, anthropology, history, psychology and other fields. But even more, this is a book that will appeal to every educated layperson who wants to understand magic's persistence. Here he will learn that magic was at one time the province of much of human understanding and that magical roots remain alive in many institutions of modern life; that magic once helped the human self to emerge and later shaped the institutions of the individual which still support that self; that a full understanding of the human experience even today requires a systematic explanation of magic; that without such understanding we may succumb in regression to a dangerous remedy which once helped us to advance. Through magic humanity has forever rebelled and then enslaved itself anew in structures of alienation of its own making. This is the story of the human past. It is also the record of the secular present, when even in a scientific age magical protest serves to remind us of the transcendent in everyday life. Yet, concomitantly and perennially, magic's Pyrrhic victories obscure man's native understanding that this transcendence is partly of his own making. This darkening of vision is evident in the current rash of escapist cults and mechanical rituals for transforming the self and the world. However, as this book emphasizes, even in less exotic forms the influence of magic remains pervasive...."

    The rich heritage. The haunting sorrow and mesmerizing beauty captured in the solemn eyes of the saints. Explore the world of the Northern New Mexican Santo in this coloring book unlike any other. "Santos of Spanish New Mexico" is a perfect introduction for both young and old into the art of carving and painting images of saints that represent the care and love of the community that the Santero (maker of saint images) comes from. The Santero is a self-taught craftsman who utilizes handmade tools, pine, aspen, cedar or cottonwood root to fashion representations, figurines, and objects in honor of the patron deities brought to the New World by their ancestors during the late 16th century. Learn a little about the saints and the various depictions you can recognize anywhere throughout Northern New Mexico. A tradition handed down from generation to generation, the art of making Santos is still very much alive and thriving in this special region of the world. Care has been taken to be faithful to the artistic details of the original works. Like the folk art he has endeavored to reproduce, Al Chapman's drawings in this book are simple and sincere. This book is a good companion to "What is a New Mexico Santo?" by Eluid Levi Martinez and "Santos, A Coloring Book of New Mexico Saints" by Marie Romero Cash, both from Sunstone Press.

    This revised edition continues the book's concrete focus on the major subjects and fields of law. New essays on emerging fields and the latest trends and cases have been added to updated versions of the now-classic essays from earlier editions.A unique assortment of leading scholars and practitioners in law and related disciplines—political science, economics, sociology, criminology, history, and literature—raise basic questions about law, challenging long-held ideals like the separation of law from politics, economics, religion, and culture. They address such issues contextually and with a keen historical perspective as they explain and critique the law in a broad range of areas.This third edition contains essays on all of the subjects covered in the first year of law school while continuing the book's tradition of accessibility to non-law-trained readers. Insightful and powerful, The Politics of Law makes sense of the debates about judicial restraint and the range of legal controversies so central to American public life and culture.