Best of
Theory

1976

Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays


Stanley Cavell - 1976
    Previous edition hb ISBN (1976): 0-521-21116-6 Previous edition pb ISBN (1976): 0-521-29048-1

The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume II: The History of Eroticism and Volume III: Sovereignty


Georges Bataille - 1976
    In the second and third volumes, The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, Bataille explores the same paradox of utility from an anthropological and an ethical perspective, respectively. The History of Eroticism analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life.

Symbolic Exchange and Death


Jean Baudrillard - 1976
    This major work, appearing in English for the first time, occupies a central place in the rethinking of the humanities and social sciences around the idea of postmodernism.It leads the reader on an exhilarating tour encompassing the end of Marxism, the enchantment of fashion, symbolism about sex and the body, and the relations between economic exchange and death. Most significantly, the book represents Baudrillard's fullest elaboration of the concept of the three orders of the simulacra, defining the historical passage from production to reproduction to simulation.A classic in its field, Symbolic Exc

Introduction to Analytic Number Theory


Tom M. Apostol - 1976
    For this reason, the book starts with the most elementary properties of the natural integers. Nevertheless, the text succeeds in presenting an enormous amount of material in little more than 300 pages."--MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS

The Reflexive Universe: Evolution of Consciousness


Arthur M. Young - 1976
    Arthur Young's Theory of Process provides a model for the evolution of consciousness out of light (the quantum of action), offering hope for an age in search of value and meaning. This is a facsimile of the original 1976 Delacorte edition, with typographic corrections in the text and a new introduction by Huston Smith.

Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain


Stuart Hall - 1976
    Looking in detail at the wide range of post-war youth subcultures, from teds, mods and skinheads to black Rastafarians, Resistance through Rituals considers how youth culture reflects and reacts to cultural change. This text represents the collective understanding of the leading centre for contemporary culture, and serves to situate some of the most important cultural work of the twentieth century in the new millennium.

Megastructure: Urban Futures Of The Recent Past


Reyner Banham - 1976
    

The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction


Michel Foucault - 1976
    Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

Mimologics


Gérard Genette - 1976
    First argued in Plato’s Cratylus more than two thousand years ago, mimology has left an important mark in virtually every major art and artistic theory thereafter.  Fascinating and many-faceted, mimology is the basis of language sciences and incites occasional hilarity. Its complicated traditions require a sure grip but a light touch. One of the few scholars capable of giving mimology such genial attention is Gérard Genette. Genette treats matters as basic and staid as the alphabet and as reverberating as the letter R in ur-linguistics.  Genette has emerged as one of the two or three chief literary critics of modern France. He is the major practitioner of narratological criticism, a pioneer in structuralism, and a much admired literary historian. His single most important book, Mimologics bridges mainstream literary history and Genette’s expertise in critical method by undertaking an intensive study of the most vexed of literary problems: language as a representation of reality. Deeply learned, the book draws upon the traditions—both sane and eccentric—of philosophy, linguistics, poetics, and comparative literature.

Masks of Black Africa


Ladislas Segy - 1976
    In this stunning collection, 247 photographs of masks, identified by tribe, place, and ritual use, are featured. Dogon, Senufo, many more.

Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos


Donna J. Haraway - 1976
    Harrison, Joseph Needham, and Paul Weiss as a springboard for a discussion about a shift in developmental biology from a vitalism-mechanism framework to organicism. The book deftly interweaves Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigm change into this wide-ranging analysis, emphasizing the role of model, analogy, and metaphor in the paradigm and arguing that any truly useful theoretical system in biology must have a central metaphor.

Theories of Vision from Al-kindi to Kepler


David C. Lindberg - 1976
    Yet the full import of Kepler's arguments can be grasped only when they are viewed against the background of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance visual theory. David C. Lindberg provides this background, and in doing so he fills the gap in historical scholarship and constructs a model for tracing the development of scientific ideas. David C. Lindberg is professor and chairman of the department of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy


Nicolas Abraham - 1976
    Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's work is at once the account of the Wolf Man's psychological inventions, a reading of his dreams and symptoms, and a critique of basic Freudian notions.

Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism


Michael Löwy - 1976
    

Garvey and Garveyism


Amy Jacques Garvey - 1976
    Here she gives an insider detailed account of Garvey, Garveyism and this nascent period of Black Nationalism. Like all great dreamers and planners, Marcus Garvey dreamed and planned ahead of his time and his peoples' ability to understand the significance of his life's work. A set of circumstances, mostly created by the world colonial powers, crushed this dreamer, but not his dreams. Due to the persistence and years of sacrifice of Mrs. Amy Jacques Garvey, widow of Marcus Garvey, a large body of work by and about this great nationalist leader has been preserved and can be made available to a new generation of black people who have the power to turn his dreams into realities. From the introduction by John Henrik Clarke

The Analogy Of The Faerie Queene


James Nohrnberg - 1976
    These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Collected Writings On Literature And Revolution


Victor Serge - 1976
    

A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature


Leo Bersani - 1976
    

The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism?


Abdallah Laroui - 1976
    

Scientist as Subject: The Psychological Imperative


Michael J. Mahoney - 1976
    A new introduction updates his discussion in light of subsequent developments, including such aspects of academia as politics and tenure, publication and power relations, science studies and constructivist inquiry, and what have come to be called the "science wars."

Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality


Michel Henry - 1976
    In his original and richly detailed study of Marx's philosophy, Henry emphasizes the importance of approaching Marx's writings directly, rather than through the intermediary of subsequent interpretations, which often have been politically motivated. In contrast to the usual depiction of Marxian thought as an economically oriented analysis of social reality, Henry contends that in Marx's theory philosophy is primary. Therefore, Marx's writings must properly be viewed--and judged--within the context of the modern philosophical tradition. Marx's basic concern, Henry demonstrates, is with the nature of the human being, the real conditions of human individuality. Central to Henry's reading of Marx, and elaborated here with unprecedented thoroughness, is the theory of praxis, a conception of the individual not as a thinking being, in the Cartesian tradition, but as a laboring being, a producer and consumer situated in a concrete social world. This novel and provocative contribution to the current debate about the nature and meaning of Marx's thought is essential for students of philosophy, Marxism, and political theory. Kathleen McLaughlin's excellent translation of Henry's abridgement of his two-volume work preserves the power and freshness of the French original.

Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society


Northrop Frye - 1976
    The essays in Spiritus Mundi--the title comes from one of Yeat's best known poems, "The Second Coming," and refers to the book that was supposedly the source of Yeat's apocalyptic vision of a "great beast, slouching toward Bethlehem"--are arranges in three groups of four essays each. The first four are about the "contexts of literature," the second are about the "mythological universe," and the last are studies of four of the great visionary or myth-making poets who have been enduring sources of interest for Frye: Milton, Blake, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens.The volume is full of agreeable surprises: a delightful piece on charms and riddles is followed by an illuminating essay on Shakespearean romance. Like most of the other essays in the book, these two are compressed and elegant expositions of ideas that in the hands of a lesser writer would have required a book. In another selection Frye rescues Spengler from neglect and argues for the inclusion of The Decline of the West among the major imaginative books produced by the Western world. Elsewhere he advances the case for placing Copernicus in a pantheon composed primarily of literary figures. OF particular interest are several essays in which Frye comments personally and reflectively on the influence he has had on the study of literature and the reactions elicited by his work. In "The Renaissance of Books" he dissents from the opinion of the McLuhanites that the written word is showing signs of obsolescence and argues that books are "the technological instrument that makes democracy possible."As the dozen essays collected here amply attest, Northrop Frye continues to be the most perceptive and most persuasive exponent of the power of mythological imagination--or as he himself calls it, "the mythological habit of mind"--written in English.

Movies and Methods: Vol. II


Bill Nichols - 1976
    Now there is again ferment in the field. Movies and Methods, Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggest its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity—from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticisms to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and early eighties. The writings collected in this volume exhibit not only a strong sense of personal engagement but als a persistent awareness of the social importance of the cinema in our culture. Movies and Methods, Volume II, will prove as invaluable to the serious student of cinema as its predecessor; it will be an essential reference work for years to come.