The French surrealist continues to be important for his groundbreaking focus on the visceral, the erotic, and the relation of society to the primeval. This collection of prewar writings remains the volume in which Batailles's positions are most clearly, forcefully, and obsessively put forward. This book challenges the notion of a "closed economy" predicated on utility, production, and rational consumption, and develops an alternative theory that takes into account the human tendency to lose, destroy, and waste. This collection is indispensible for an understanding of the future as well as the past of current critical theory.Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a librarian by profession, was founder of the French review Critique. He is the author of several books, including Story of the Eye, The Accused Share, Erotism, and The Absence of Myth.

    Anderson, Cornell University"The book is a splendid achievement. Because Scott listens closely to the villagers of Malaysia, he enormously expands our understanding of popular ideology and therefore of popular politics. And because he is also a brilliant analyst, he draws upon this concrete experience to develop a new critique of classical theories of ideology."—Frances Fox Piven, Graduate Center of the City University of New York“An impressive work which may well become a classic.”—Terence J. Byres, Times Literary Supplement“A highly readable, contextually sensitive, theoretically astute ethnography of a moral system in change…. Weapons of the Weak is a brilliant book, combining a sure feel for the subjective side of struggle with a deft handling of economic and political trends.”—John R. Bown, Journal of Peasant Studies“A splendid book, a worthy addition to the classic studies of Malay society and of the peasantry at large…. Combines the readability of Akenfield or Pig Earth with an accessible and illuminating theoretical commentary.”—A.F. Robertson, Times Higher Education Supplement“No one who wants to understand peasant society, in or out of Southeast Asia, or theories of change, should fail to read [this book].”—Daniel S. Lev, Journal of Asian Studies“A moving account of the poor’s refusal to accept the terms of their subordination…. Disposes of the belief that theoretical sophistication and intelligible prose are somehow at odds.”—Ramachandra Guha, Economic and Political Weekly“A seminally important commentary on the state of peasant studies and the global literature…. This enormously rich work in Asian and comparative studies is… an essential contribution to participatory development theory and practice.”—Guy Gran, World DevelopmentJames C. Scott is professor of political science at Yale University.

    The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

    First published in German in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, Into the Universe of Technical Images outlines the history of communication technology as a process of increasing abstraction.Flusser charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans.

    This is the last of Bakhtin's extant manuscripts published in the Soviet Union. All but one of these essays (the one on the Bildungsroman) were written in Bakhtin's later years and thus they bear the stamp of a thinker who has accumulated a huge storehouse of factual material, to which he has devoted a lifetime of analysis, reflection, and reconsideration.

    It chronicles a renaissance of feminist theory through the so-called third wave of the present day, which follows significant "waves" of earlier periods: the fifteenth through early eighteenth centuries as well as the more widely recognized nineteenth century; and the 1960s through the 80s.

    Koselleck explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: What kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? Koselleck explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity?

    Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most influential texts in gender studies, men's studies and gay studies," this book uncovers the homosocial desire between men, from Restoration comedies to Tennyson's Princess.

    It confronts the basic premise underlying the scientific tradition that all questions can be answered by employing empirical, testable, replicable research techniques. The authors maintain that there are scientific facts that existing paradigms cannot explain, and argue against traditional positivistic inquiry. They suggest an alternative approach supporting the use of the naturalistic paradigm.

    This "stunning," "magnificent" first book by "the great man of Nabokov studies," which "provides not only the best commentary on Ada, but also a brilliant overview of Nabokov's metaphysics," has now been updated with a new preface, four additional chapters and two comprehensive new indexes.

    Hejduk, an intellectual descendant of the heroic period of modern architecture, has consistently used and maneuvered the modernist vocabulary, forcing it, in the design process, to reflect his personal poetic vision. Sections, plans, and axonometrics are complemented with rough or thumbnail sketches showing their germination. These beautiful drawings take on a narrative strength when grouped together and serve to illuminate Hejduk's architectonic thoughts. Also integrated within the book are his site-specific sculptures, like the Berlin Masque, and watercolors from the Italian Sketches. Highly recommended. Dennis L. Dollens, "SITES."

    Exploring the deleterious effects of the systematic downgrading of the senses in Western philosophy, Michel Serres — a member of the Académie Française and one of France's leading philosophers — traces a topology of human perception. Writing against the Cartesian tradition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically, the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience. The fragile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalog it, is disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society and information technology. Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less interested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle's label. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could?

    Consisting of eight stencil-like disks that can be placed over ltten's color wheel to compare cool and warm values, complementary colors, and different hues and intensities, this useful and innovative tool helps designers explore a myriad of harmonious color.

    It is an extension of notes on the theater and theatergoing that have been accumulating for some time. It does not have an argument, or set out to prove a thesis, and it will not be one of those useful books one reads for the fruits of its research. Rather, it is a form of critical description that is phenomenological in the sense that it focuses on the activity of theater making itself out of its essential materials: speech, sound, movement, scenery, text, etc. Like most phenomenological description, it will succeed to the extent that it awakens the reader's memory of his own perceptual encounters with theater. If the book fails in this it will be about as interesting to read as an anthology of someone else's dreams. In any case, this book is less concerned with the scientific purity of my perspective and method than with retrieving something from the theater experience that seems to me worthy of our critical admiration.

    Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

    Explores the historical and cultural evolution of the theoretical language of the stage

    Several of the essays have been previously published (though they have not all been widely available), and several appear here for the first time in print.

    

    Her subtle and provocative studies of Balzac, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Melville, Poe, Bathes, Lacan, Austin, and Derrida take a refreshing new approach to the fundamental questions of meaning, interpretation, and the relationship between literature and criticism.In each of seven essays, a clear, precise, and detailed reading of the rhetoric of one of more literary or critical works reveals the text's fundamental discrepancies, ambuquities, and contradictions. If rhetoric is seen as language's capacity to differ from literal statement, and if to differ can also mean to disagree, then the reading of the rhetoric of literature and theory here is an attempt to capture the logic of a text's own disagreement with itself.

    

    

    The author argues that what is needed is not a more literal theology, but a better understanding of metaphor. Soskice offers here an account of metaphor and religious language that not only illuminates the way in which theists speak of God, but also contributes to our understanding of the workings of metaphor in scientific theory and other disciplines.

    Marx.” S. S. Prawer’s highly influential work explores how the world of imaginative literature—poems, novels, plays—infused and shaped Marx’s writings, from his unpublished correspondence, to his pamphlets and major works. In exploring Marx’s use of literary texts, from Aeschylus to Balzac, and the central role of art and literature in the development of his critical vision, Karl Marx and World Literature is a forensic masterpiece of critical analysis.

    This edition includes updated material in the light of recent work in Romanticism and Romantic poetry. The book discusses the concerns that linked the Romantic poets, from their responses to the political and social upheavals around them to their interest in the poet's visionary and prophetic role. It includes helpful and authoritative discussions of figures such as Blake, Clare, Coleridge, Crabbe, Keats, Scott, Shelley and Wordsworth.

    In this book, thought seeks a new form, a new "prose". To this end, it brings into play the strategies of the apology, the aphorism, the short story, the fable, the riddle, and all those "simple forms" that are today no longer used, but whose task it has always been to bring about in the reader an experience, an awakening--rather than attempting to put forth a theory. It is only in this sense--insofar as thought contends with the exposition of an Idea--that the problem of "thought" becomes, in these "treatises," a poetic problem. These are little ideas or forms that, in their brevity, compress that which cannot in any way be forgotten, since according to the platonic admonition, it would be put in "the shortest possible measure".

    

    At the same time people also have powerful (if unconscious) stereotypes about the norms and standards of their own language and those of others - often at variance with observable behaviour. The view of language use proposed here derives from the authors' extensive fieldwork in the Creole-speaking Caribbean and among West Indian communities in London, and is forcefully illustrated by the data they present, which include recorded conversations and stories. The authors re-examine such concepts as 'a language', 'correct usage', 'race' and 'ethnic groups' and clearly reveal the complex role of language in establishing relationships within regional and social communities and at the state or national level.

    

    The histories of medicine, art, mythology, architecture, technology, and conceptions of the afterlife come into play as the changing role of water in our lives is revealed.

    It includes some of Hegel’s earliest critical writings—which reveal much about his thinking before the first mature exposition of his position in 1807—as well as Schelling’s justification of the new philosophy of nature against skeptical and religious attack. This edition contains George di Giovanni’s extensive corrections, new preface, and thoroughly updated bibliography.CONTENTS: Preface.Part I: The Critical Philosophy and Its First Reception. Introduction: The Facts of Consciousness (Di Giovanni). K. L. REINHOLD, The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge. G. E. SCHULZE, from Aenesidemus. J. G. FICHTE, Review of Aenesidemus. S. MAIMON, from Letters of Philaletes to Aenesidemus. J. S. BECK, from The Standpoint from which Critical Philosophy is to be Judged.Part II: The Critical Philosophy and the Critical Journal of Schelling and Hegel. Introduction: Skepticism, Dogmatism and Speculation in the Critical Journal. (Harris). HEGEL & SCHELLING, The Critical Journal, Introduction: On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism Generally, and its Relationship to the Present State of Philosophy. G. W. F. HEGEL, How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (as Displayed in the Works of Mr. Krug). G. W. F. HEGEL, Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy, Exposition of its Different Modifications and Comparison to the Latest Form with the Ancient One. F. W. J. SCHELLING, On the Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy in General. Bibliography. Index.George di Giovanni is Professor of Philosophy, McGill University.H. S. Harris is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Glendon College, York University.

    Using only original sources, Kruft has undertaken the monumental task of researching, organizing, and analyzing the significant statements put forth by architectural theorists over the last two thousand years. The result is a text that is authoritative and complete, easy to read without being reductive.

    Narrative, poetry, drama, myths, songs, letters, Biblical discourse and graffiti as well as stylistics and rhetorics are the topics treaded by twelve well-known specialists selected and introduced by Teun A. van Dijk.

    In them one finds a pathos and urgency, a spirit of breaking away and a projection toward a new way of seeing, thinking, and living together that has its origins in the artistic and intellectual unrest of this century's second decade.Bloch's literary essays are not, strictly speaking, "theoretical" pieces, certainly not applications to literature of some pre-existing conceptual apparatus. Collectively they represent a field of experiment in which a thinker of astonishing originality exposes his thought to the provocation of literary, musical, and artistic works, but also to such phenomena as advertisements, landscapes, clichés and obsessive images, films, and forms of interaction in country and city. What is the function of musical accompaniment in a silent film? How does a writer's birthplace imprint itself on his intellect? What is the philosophical import of the detective novel? Why is anxiety more acute when its stimulus is aural rather than visual? What is the relation between modern art and the machinery of factory production? Such are the questions encountered here. Seldom is writing less automatic, willing to take more risks, and, quite simply, so fresh and refreshingly new.The pieces gathered here, which date from 1913 to 1964, are held together by Bloch's view of the human as being always beyond itself, as anticipating itself and never positively there. This thrust beyond the horizon of positivity expresses itself in wishes, hopes, fantasies, dreams, imaginative creations, and utopian projects. Bloch’s attention is always, and in the most diverse gestures, works, and productions, alert to the energies of political transcendence.

    But underlying these cultural ideals are less happy paradoxes. Settling the land meant banishing the Indians and destroying the wilderness; Jeffersonian landscapes were created with the help of the new country's enslaved citizens; and economic opportunities in the cities were purchased at the high price of self-commercialization. In this study of the popular 19th- and early 20th-century American novel, Philip Fisher demonstrates how such works as Dreiser's Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Cooper's The Deerslayer worked to make these three hard facts of the 19th-century American experience familiar and tolerable--or familiar and intolerable--to their wide audience of readers. His perceptive analysis proves that the most important cultural work was accomplished not by novels generally taken to be at the core of the American literary canon--those of Hawthorne, Melville, or Twain--but rather by books which never abandoned the ambition to be widely read.

    In an attempt to place these thinkers within the wider context of the crisis-oriented modernism and postmodernism that have been the source of much of what is most original and creative in twentieth-century art and thought.

    In The Cosmic Web, N. Katherine Hayles seeks to establish the scope of the field concept and to assess its importance for contemporary thought. She then explores the literary strategies that are attributable directly or indirectly to the new paradigm; among the texts at which she looks closely are Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Nabokov's Ada, D. H. Lawrence's early novels and essays, Borges's fiction, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

    The argument flows from Martin Heidegger's lament in his Letter on Humanism that modern philosophers have failed to understand that the essence of action is accomplishment. Dallmayr's lucid essays are a step toward achieving that understanding. Dallmayr assesses and puts into perspective the work of many of the seminal thinkers of the 20th century - Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, J�rgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott - as he takes up such topics as the plausibility of friendship as a model for political relations, the relationship between political praxis and experience, Heidegger's ontology of freedom, Foucault's treatment of power, and the merits and disadvantages of Habermasian critical theory. The result is a stimulating and original contribution to current political discourse that explores and advocates the manifold possible levels of active political life below and above the level of the State. Fred Dallmayr has established a reputation as a theorist and critic who is equally well attuned to European and American currents of philosophical and political thought. Like Hannah Arendt, he sees the essay as an ideal form for exercises in theorizing en route while venturing beyond traditional categories and philosophical benchmarks. His aim in this book is not a close-knit propositional framework but a set of tentative and partially continuous explorations that are provocative and inviting, like the movements of a musical suite.

    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.