John J. L. Mood has assembled a collection of Rilke's strongest work, presenting commentary along with the selections. Mood links into an essay passages from letters that show Rilke's profound understanding of men and women and his ardent spirituality, rooted in the senses.Combining passion and sensitivity, the poems on love presented here are often not only sensual but sexual as well. Others pursue perennial themes in his work—death and life, growth and transformation. The book concludes with Rilke's reflections on wisdom and openness to experience, on grasping what is most difficult and turning what is most alien into that which we can most trust.

    The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology.Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.

    It is a strident critique of logocentrism and phallogocentrism, having much in common with Jacques Derrida's earlier thought. The essay also calls for an acknowledgment of universal bisexuality or polymorphous perversity, a precursor of queer theory's later emphases, and swiftly rejects many kinds of essentialism which were still common in Anglo-American feminism at the time. The essay also exemplifies Cixous's style of writing in that it is richly intertextual, making a wide range of literary allusions.(From Wikipedia)

     In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were only three major television networks broadcasting original programs and news. And there was only one Harlan Ellison taking them all to task in a series of weekly essays he wrote for the countercultural, underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, a.k.a. "The Freep." For nearly four years, he channel surfed through the mire of ABC, CBS, and NBC, finding little of value but much to critique. No one offered a more astute analysis of the idiot box's influence on American culture, or its effects on the intelligence and psyche of viewers.The Other Glass Teat: Further Essays of Opinion on the Subject of Television collects Ellison's final fifty columns, presenting his thoughts on everything from dramas and sitcoms to game shows and roundtable discussions, unleashing his fury against sponsors, the nightly news, and the broadcasts of President Nixon--warning readers about the commander-in-chief's war against the media long before the Watergate scandal broke. As television has evolved into wireless streaming services and digital interactions on portable devices, Ellison's timeless rage against the machine has become prophecy. His plea to unplug is an even more necessary call to action in the face of the twenty-first century's media onslaught. Also available: The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on the Subject of Television

    Lewis read a paper to students at Cambridge attacking theologians who ‘claim to see fern-seed and can’t see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight.’These seven essays show Lewis at his most vigorous, defending his vision of a full-blooded, orthodox Christianity in his matchless prose style.Among the subjects he addresses are the difference between forgiveness and excusing, the individual ‘member’ of the Christian Body, ‘The World’s Last Night’, and the implications of there being life on other planets.

    Florence King's celebrated field guide to the land below the Mason-Dixon Line is now blissfully back in print, just in time for the Clinton era. The Failed Souther Lady's classic primer on Dixie manners captures such storied types as the Southern Woman (frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy, and scatterbrained--all at the same time), the Self-Rejuvenating Virgin, and the Good Ole Boy in all his coats and stripes. (The Clinton questions--is he a G.O.B. or isn't he?--Miss king covers in her hilarious new Afterword.) No one has ever made more sharp, scathing, affectionate, real sense out of the land of the endless Civil War than Florence King in these razor-edged pages.

    They take the reader from the backwoods roads of Georgia, to the high altitude of Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico; from the social decay of Atlantic City, to Scotland, where a pilgrimage for art's sake leads to a surprising encounter with history on a hilltop with a view of a fifth of the entire country. McPhee's writing is more than informative; these are stories, artful and full of character, that make compelling reading. They play with and against one another, so that Pieces of the Frame is distinguished as much by its unity as by its variety. Subjects familiar to McPhee's readers—sports, Scotland, conservation—are treated here with intimacy and a sense of the writer at work.

    Hybrids of the short story and the essay, the eleven pieces in The King of the Ants present Herbert's very different "apocryphal" views of the mythological past.

    Confronting difficult philosophical questions with a novelist's eye, Percy rewards us again and again with his keen insights into the way that language possesses all of us.

    Archaic beliefs in magic and ecstasy meet current notions of the power of the spoken word. Waldman writes, "The poem is a textured energy field or modal structure. The poems for performance seem to manifest as psychological states of mind. They come together in a mental, verbal, physical, and emotional form, making their particular demands on my voice and body. I am the ‘energumen.’ The poem is the experience." Also included in this book are three essays on the oral tradition in poetry. One essay discusses the history and occasion of the title poem. The others treat such topics as performance art and poetic tradition, ethnopoetics, intoxication and transformation, Tibetan Buddhism, and the renewed ascendency of feminine energy in writing. Anne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry. She is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado."Anne Waldman is one of the fastest, wisest women to run with the wolves in some time." — The New York Times Book ReviewAnne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to be Born, and Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets).

    The existence of a national culture is illustrated in a collection of anthropological essays considering social values, beliefs, and practices in the United States.The title is inspired by the essay "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" by Horace Miner in American Anthropologist, 1956, 58(3), 503-507.

    comes a brilliant collection of critical essays. "The critic and the poet in him are at no odds with the novelist".

    [

    These were often fun, humorous observations on the very real issues of the day, such as the Depression, the rise of Nazism and Prohibition, to more perennial themes such as love, parenthood, education and friendship. Available for the first time in the Routledge Classics series in a single volume, this pithy, provocative and often-personal collection of essays brings together the very best of Russell's many contributions to the New York American, and proves just as engaging for today's readers as they were in the 1930s.

    The "book as book" has been removed from the oral tradition by such features as prefaces, footnotes, and indexes. Books have become voiceless in some sense - they are to be read silently, not recited aloud. How this mechanical change affected the possibilities of fiction is Kenner's subject.

    the readings of mr harris a journalist in america

    magazine and reprinted in the collection In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, 1983) follows the author on a journey through Eatonville, FL to find the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston. At the time, Hurston had fallen out of popularity and died in a welfare home. A collection was taken up for her burial and her grave sat unmarked in a run-down cemetery. Walker, pretending to be Hurston’s niece, is accompanied by Charlotte Hunt, who is researching Hurston.

    

    When it was first published, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge proved to be a seminal work in the psychoanalytic study of Faulkner's fiction, especially of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! This softcover reissue of John Irwin's masterful exposition unwinds the mystery of unconscious desire and doubling that inform the novels.

    

    The author is very well-known for his best-selling books of problems; in this volume he seeks to share his appreciation of the elegant and ingenious approaches used in thinking about even elementary mathematics. Standard high school courses in algebra and geometry furnish a sufficient basis for understanding each essay. Topics include number theory, geometry, combinatorics, logic and probability, and the methods used often involve an interaction between these disciplines. Some of the essays are easy to read, others more challenging; some of the exercises are routine, others lead the reader deeper into the subject.

    Explores five women poets, ranging from Sappho to Emily Dickinson, through brief biographies and selections of their poetry.

    Gaylor spares no one in her trenchant analysis of where the responsibility lies for the suffering, degradation and death caused by anti-abortion laws.

    Softcover Trade Paperback

    He describes his encounters with those philosophers and literary authors (most of them his contemporaries) whose writings have most significantly contributed to the construction of his own philosophy of “Otherness”: Agnon, Buber, Celan, Delhomme, Derrida, Jabès, Kierkegaard, Lacroix, Laporte, Picard, Proust, Van Breda, Wahl, and, most notably, Blanchot.At the same time, Levinas’s own texts are inscriptions and documents of those encounters with “Others” around which his philosophy is turning. Thus the texts simultaneously convey an immediate experience of how his intellectual position emerged and how it is put into practice. A third potential function of the book is that it unfolds the network of references and persons in philosophical debates since Kierkegaard.The essays in this volume are both philosophical and literary, yet the mode of approach always remains philosophical. In treating those figures with whom Levinas most fruitfully engaged, he seeks the theoretical perspectives most helpful in clarifying their work, but his main concern is to bring out what he sees as the significance of their writings. Throughout, the predominant leitmotif in the essays is the precarious role of poetic and philosophical language in making possible the encounter with "the Other."