Best of
Theory

1975

The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays


Mikhail Bakhtin - 1975
    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.

The Laugh of the Medusa


Hélène Cixous - 1975
    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)

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature


Gilles Deleuze - 1975
    In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka's work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.

Wages Against Housework


Silvia Federici - 1975
    We say it is unwaged work.They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.Every miscarriage is a work accident.Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions…but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.

The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. 1


Peter Weiss - 1975
    The three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance is the crowning achievement of Peter Weiss, the internationally renowned dramatist best known for his play Marat/Sade. The first volume, presented here, was initially published in Germany in 1975; the third and final volume appeared in 1981, just six months before Weiss’s death. Spanning the period from the late 1930s to World War II, this historical novel dramatizes antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe. Living in Berlin in 1937, the unnamed narrator and his peers—sixteen- and seventeen-year-old working-class students—seek ways to express their hatred for the Nazi regime. They meet in museums and galleries, and in their discussions they explore the affinity between political resistance and art, the connection at the heart of Weiss’s novel. Weiss suggests that meaning lies in embracing resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding. The novel includes extended meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature. Moving from the Berlin underground to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War and on to other parts of Europe, the story teems with characters, almost all of whom are based on historical figures. The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the truly great works of postwar German literature and an essential resource for understanding twentieth-century German history.

The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community


Mariarosa Dalla Costa - 1975
    A simple idea with profound revolutionary consequences. If the workers of the world are not all in the factory, and are not all men, where does that leave us?

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society


Raymond Williams - 1975
    Now revised to include new words and updated essays, Keywords focuses on the sociology of language, demonstrating how the key words we use to understand our society take on new meanings and how these changes reflect the political bent and values of society.

The Book of Margins


Edmond Jabès - 1975
    Jabès's importance as a thinker, philosopher, and Jewish theologian cannot be overestimated, and his enigmatic style—combining aphorism, fictional dialogue, prose meditation, poetry, and other forms—holds special appeal for postmodern sensibilities. In The Book of Margins, his most critical as well as most accessible book, Jabès is again concerned with the questions that inform all of his work: the nature of writing, of silence, of God and the Book. Jabès considers the work of several of his contemporaries, including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Roger Caillois, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Leiris, Emmanuel Lévinas, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and his translator, Rosmarie Waldrop. This book will be important reading for students of Jewish literature, French literature, and literature of the modern and postmodern ages. Born in Cairo in 1912, Edmond Jabès lived in France from 1956 until his death in 1991. His extensively translated and widely honored works include The Book of Questions and The Book of Shares. Both of these were translated into English by Rosmarie Waldrop, who is also a poet. Religion and Postmodernism series

The Newly Born Woman


Hélène Cixous - 1975
    In it, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément put forward the concept of écriture feminine, exploring the ways women’s sexuality and unconscious shape their imagination, their language, and their writing. Through their readings of historical, literary, and psychoanalytic accounts, Cixous and Clément explore what is hidden and repressed in culture, revealing the unconscious of history.

Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995


Gilles Deleuze - 1975
    This title also documents Deleuze's increasing involvement with politics.

Roland Barthes


Roland Barthes - 1975
    "Barthes par Barthes is a genuinely post-modern autobiography, an innovation in the art of autobiography comparable in its theoretical implications for our understanding of autobiography to Sartre's The Words."--Hayden White, University of California

For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question


Harry Haywood - 1975
    Haywood stood against the "liquidationist line" of integration and insisted on a national revolutionary movement based on the principle of self-determination for the Black Belt South as still relevant and imperative for liberation of African Americans. This piece is relevant today as an important document in the history of the CPUSA, the New Communist Movement, the struggle against revisionism in Marxism-Leninism, and the struggle for a correct political line regarding the African American National Question.

Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History


Jan Patočka - 1975
    Patocka begins with prehistory, approached through the "natural world" as conceived by Husserl and Heidegger.According to Patocka, nature is as an alien construct, and history, which began as a quest for higher meaning, ends with life as self-sustaining consumption. Patocka explains how Europe declined from its Greek heritage to seek power rather than truth, splintering into ethnic subdivisions, and then how the Enlightenment moved Europe from an ethical to a material orientation.This book includes a translation of the Preface to the French Edition by Paul Ricoeur.

Conflict Sociology: A Sociological Classic Updated


Randall Collins - 1975
    The first edition represented the most powerful and comprehensive statement of conflict theory in its time. Here, Sanderson has retained the core chapters and added discussions on Collins's and others' work in recent years. An afterword summarizes Collins's latest forays into microsociological theorizing and attempts to demonstrate how his newer microsociology and older macrosociology are connected.

Anarchism: The Feminist Connection


Peggy Kornegger - 1975
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Selected Works: The Period of the War of Resistance Against Japan


Mao Zedong - 1975
    He had also been one of the founders of the Chinese Communist party in 1921, and he is regarded, along with Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin, as one of the three great theorists of Marxian communism. Mao Tse-tung was born on Dec. 26, 1893, into a well-to-do peasant family in Shao-shan, Hunan province. As a Marxist thinker and the leader of a socialist state, Mao gave theoretical legitimacy to the continuation of class struggle in the socialist and communist stages of development. He stressed the importance of land redistribution for the benefit of the rural peasantry, and his theories have strongly influenced the non-industrialized Third World.

The Formation Of National States In Western Europe


Charles Tilly - 1975
    This book brings the discussion into a realm where the time span is considerable and the documentation is vast--the formation of national states in western Europe.Through a series of essays on major state-making activities, the authors ask what processes and preconditions brought powerful national states, rather than some other form of political organization, into a dominant position in western Europe.The essays compare the experience of major European states between 1500 and 1900 with respect to war-making, policing, taxation, control of food supply, and recruitment and training of professionals and officials. The aim is to determine how well that experience fits available models of political change, especially ideas of political development.

Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy


Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. - 1975
    

Readings and feelings: an introduction to subjective criticism


David Bleich - 1975
    

Splines and Variational Methods


P.M. Prenter - 1975
    Its self-contained treatment explains the application of theoretic notions to the kinds of physical problems that engineers regularly encounter. The text’s first half concerns approximation theoretic notions, exploring the theory and computation of one- and two-dimensional polynomial and other spline functions. Later chapters examine variational methods in the solution of operator equations, focusing on boundary value problems in one and two dimensions. Additional topics include least squares and other Galerkin methods. Many helpful definitions, examples, and exercises appear throughout the book. A classic reference in spline theory, this volume will benefit experts as well as students of engineering and mathematics.

Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics


Peter Szondi - 1975
    This first English edition of one of his most lucid and interesting series of lectures, translated by Martha Woodmansee and with a foreword by Joel Weinsheimer, opens up his work in hermeneutics to English-speaking readers. Peter Szondi here traces the historical development of hermeneutics through examination of the work of German Enlightenment theorists, which yields valuable insights into the material theory of interpretation.

Proper Names


Emmanuel Levinas - 1975
    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."

The Dark Dove: The Sacred and Secular in Modern Literature


Eugene Webb - 1975
    He demonstrates the connection between modern literature and religious tradition, and shows how conceptions of the sacred and its relation to the secular have been transformed in modern literary imagery.Webb considers the writers he discusses to be the true explorers of their generation, who have had to find a new symbolic language in which to understand and express their "idea of the holy." Because the sacred consists of "additude" and "experience" as well as "concept," Webb maintains that it receives its most direct and adequate expression in works of imaginative literature, where imagery can combine the intellectual and emotional elements of the sacred and communicate them to the reader.