Best of
Theory

1987

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza


Gloria E. Anzaldúa - 1987
    Writing in a lyrical mixture of Spanish and English that is her unique heritage, she meditates on the condition of Chicanos in Anglo culture, women in Hispanic culture, and lesbians in the straight world. Her essays and poems range over broad territory, moving from the plight of undocumented migrant workers to memories of her grandmother, from Aztec religion to the agony of writing. Anzaldua is a rebellious and willful talent who recognizes that life on the border, "life in the shadows," is vital territory for both literature and civilization. Venting her anger on all oppressors of people who are culturally or sexually different, the author has produced a powerful document that belongs in all collections with emphasis on Hispanic American or feminist issues.

Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist


Hazel V. Carby - 1987
    Carby revises the history of the period of Jim Crow and Booker T. Washington, depicting a time of intense cultural and political activity by such black women writers as Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Hopkins.

The New Sentence


Ron Silliman - 1987
    Linguistics. Originally appearing in 1977 and now in its 11th printing, THE NEW SENTENCE by Ron Silliman is a classic collection of essays by one of the sharpest minds in American contemporary poetic thought. It is a collection with rich insight into Silliman's own monumental poetical work and the writing of his peers, a book which both illuminates the concerns of the era in which it was written and radiates outward with a tremendous scope that continues to bear fruit for the contemporary reader. Ron Silliman is a terrific prose critic...positively bristles with intellectual and political energy of a very high order -Bruce Boone.

Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I


Jacques Derrida - 1987
    In Volume I, Derrida advances his reflection on many topics: psychoanalysis, theater, translation, literature, representation, racism, and nuclear war, among others. The essays in this volume also carry on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, Flaubert, Freud, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, Levinas, and Ponge. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of seminal essays (for example, "Psyche: Invention of the Other," "The Retrait of Metaphor," "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," "Tours de Babel" and "Racism's Last Word"), as well as three essays that appear here in English for the first time.

Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney


Horace Campbell - 1987
    It traces the cultural, political and spiritual sources of this movement of resistance, hightlighting the quest for change among an oppressed people. This book serves to break the intellectual traditions which placed the stamp of millenarianism on Rasta.

Spiritual Perspectives And Human Facts


Frithjof Schuon - 1987
    Schuon, the foremost representative of the Perennialist school of comparative religious thought, writes on an extraordinary range of subjects, including the limitations of modern civilization and its modes of thought, the role of aesthetics and symbolism in art and nature, the “way of love” and the “way of knowledge” in religion, and the Hindu Vedanta. Of particular interest are the groundbreaking sections on the interplay between love, knowledge and universal virtue in spiritual life.

The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction


Emily Martin - 1987
    Contrasting the views of medical science with those of ordinary women from diverse social and economic backgrounds, anthropologist Emily Martin presents unique fieldwork on American culture and uncovers the metaphors of economy and alienation that pervade women's imaging of themselves and their bodies. A new preface examines some of the latest medical ideas about women's reproductive cycles.

Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics


Raewyn W. Connell - 1987
    This exceptional book seeks to integrate gender and sexuality into the mainstream of social and political theory with the aim of challenging and transforming these traditional areas.The book is an original contribution to the theory, setting out for the first time a systematic framework for the social analysis of gender and sexuality. It is written with a clarity and scope that also make it useful as an introductory textbook sexual politics.The book reviews theories of gender from feminism to psychoanalysis, sex role theory, and sociobiology. It maps the structure of gender relations in contemporary life and in history; proposes a new approach to femininity and masculinity; and offers a wide-ranging analysis of sexual politics and the dynamics of change, from working-class feminism to the dilemmas of the "men's movement."Connell has produced a major work of synthesis and scholarship which will be of unique value to students and professionals in sociology, politics, psychology, women's studies, gay studies, and to anyone interested in sexual politics.

The Book of Shares


Edmond Jabès - 1987
    As we approach sharing let us ask: "What belongs to me?"Balance sheet of a life ratified by death.Whatever exists has no existence unless shared.Possessions under seal are lost possessions.At first sight, giving, offering yourself in order to receive an equivalent gift in return, would seem to be ideal sharing.But can All be divided?Can a feeling, a book, a life be shared entirely?On the other hand, if we cannot share all, what remains and will always remain outside sharing? What has never, at the heart of our possessions, been ours?And what if we can share the vital desire to share, our only means of escape from solitude, from nothingness?

The Origin of Perspective


Hubert Damisch - 1987
    It examines whether perspective evolved as an approximation to normal perception or whether it was a symbolic form, one wary of discoursing about space.

Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture


Frank Lloyd Wright - 1987
    It was a role Wright often disdained but which he also obviously enjoyed. Including thoughtful analysis with introductions by editor Patrick J. Meehan, AIA, Truth Against the World provides the first comprehensive, single-volume collection of Wright's most important speeches during his 70-year career to diverse audiences--high school and college students, architects, engineers, business executives, and society matrons. Topics covered by the 32 presentations include Wright's thoughts on Beaux Arts architecture and the Columbian World Exposition of 1893, organic architecture, prefabricated housing, hospital design, the use of the machine in design, and contemporary society, among many others.

Dialectical Materialism


V.G. Afanasyev - 1987
    An introduction to the basic ideas of philosophy as a science, materialism, the categories and laws of motion of nature, society and human thought, dialectics, the theory of knowledge.

Barcelonas


Manuel Vázquez Montalbán - 1987
    An erudite and impassioned guide, Montalban finds a controversy in every building, a story in every street, illuminating the city’s rich history and turbulent politics, its art, gastronomy and football. There are many Barcelonas, and Montalban knows them all: the lavish art-nouveau houses in Vallvidrera where he himself lives; the labyrinthine squalor of the Barri Xino, setting for Genet’s Thief’s Journal; the Barri Gotic where the independent Catalan Kingdom between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries created a nationalist consciousness which has endured for half a millennium; the oneiric Parc Guell, designed by the city’s most celebrated architect, Antoni Gaudi.But this definitive survey is one unlikely to be endorsed by the Oficina de Turismo. For Montalban is fiercely critical of the values of the new ‘Olympic’ Barcelona: the misery of the inner-city slums where one person dies every second day from a heroin overdose; the speculation which has compounded overcrowding in a metropolis with the highest population density in Europe; the ravaging of working-class suburbs to make way for an aseptic international centre. Once Europe’s most utopian city, Barcelona, he argues, ‘has become a market, and everything is up for sale’.For visitors, Barcelonas will prove a stimulating, indispensable companion. And for everyone interested in art and architecture, politics and sport, it will provide an enthralling introduction to the great European city.

Does Writing Have a Future?


Vilém Flusser - 1987
    In his introduction, Flusser proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing—and much that cannot be—can be recorded and transmitted by other means.Confirming Flusser’s status as a theorist of new media in the same rank as Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler, the balance of this book teases out the nuances of these developments. To find a common denominator among texts and practices that span millennia, Flusser looks back to the earliest forms of writing and forward to the digitization of texts now under way. For Flusser, writing—despite its limitations when compared to digital media—underpins historical consciousness, the concept of progress, and the nature of critical inquiry. While the text as a cultural form may ultimately become superfluous, he argues, the art of writing will not so much disappear but rather evolve into new kinds of thought and expression.

Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare


Stanley Cavell - 1987
    Reissued with a new preface and a new essay on Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Coriolanius, Hamlet and The Winter's Tale, this famous collection of essays on Shakespeare's tragedies considers the plays as responses to the crisis of knowledge and the emergence of modern skepticism.

The Violence of Abstraction


Derek Sayer - 1987
    

Plato's Symposium


Stanley Rosen - 1987
    Rosen was also one of the first to study in detail the philosophical significance of the phenomenon of concrete human sexuality, as it is presented by Plato in the diverse characters of the main speakers in the dialogue. His analysis of the theoretical significance of pederasty in the dialogue was highly controversial at the time, but is today accepted as central to Plato's dramatic phenomenology of human existence.Rosen discusses a variety of topics that had previously been neglected in the secondary literature, including the problem of the hybristic nature of the philosopher, the poetical dimension of Plato's conception of philosophy, and the theoretical implication of the difference between Platonic writing and Socratic conversation.

Collected Works: Volume One


James Connolly - 1987
    

Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism


Matei Călinescu - 1987
    The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise.Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.

Time: The Familiar Stranger (Tempus)


J.T. Fraser - 1987
    This wide-ranging, learned, and accessible book surveys the enormous variety of our understandings of time, both in the everyday world and in the specialized realms of the sciences and humanities. From the majestic visions of time and the timeless in major religions, derived from ordinary activity, J.T.Fraser offers the general reader a history of the idea and experience of time.

Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors


Leo Strauss - 1987
    Here is an entirely new and complete English translation of Strauss's work, which takes as its ideal the exacting standards of accuracy that Strauss himself emphasized in his own work. It includes a prefatory essay introducing the argument of each of the four sections of Philosophy and Law.This is a fresh and challenging treatment of the perennial conflict between reason and revelation, or philosophy and religion. Strauss's key contention in this book is that the most influential modern approaches to this conflict have run aground in ways that reflect their loss of key insights developed by the medieval philosophers of Islam and their Jewish pupils, especially Maimonides. Strauss challenges the modern view that scientific enlightenment must ultimately amount to atheism, and that therefore there can be no such thing as enlightened religion. Through a careful, original, and detailed treatment of central works of the medieval Islamic-Jewish tradition, especially Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, Strauss aims to recover their key insights into this question.

A World of Difference


Barbara Johnson - 1987
    Through subtle and probing analyses of texts by Wordsworth, Poe, Baudelaie, Mallarm�, Thoreau, Mary Shelley, Zora Neale HUrston, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others, she attempts to transfer the analysis of difference from the realm of linguistic universality or deconstructive allegory into contexts in which difference is very much at issue in the world. New to the paperback edition is a preface that readdresses the question of the politics of deconstruction in the context of current discussion about the life and works of Paul de Man.

Cinders


Jacques Derrida - 1987
    White Derrida customarily devotes his powers of analysis to exacting readings of texts from Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Heidegger, readers of Cinders will soon discover that here Derrida is engaged in a poetic self-analysis. Ranging across his numerous writings over the past twenty years, Derrida discerns a recurrent cluster of arguments and images, all involving in one way or another ashes and cinders. First published in 1982, revised in 1987, and printed here in a bilingual edition, Cinders enables readers to follow the development of Derrida's thinking from 1968 to the present as it defines itself as a persistent questioning of origins that invariably leads to the thought of ash and cinder. Written in a highly condensed poetic style, Cinders reveals some of Derrida's most probing etymological and philosophical reflections on the relation of language to the human. It also contains some of his most essential elaborations of his thinking on the feminine and on the legacy of the Holocaust in contemporary poetry and philosophy.Uniquely accessible to readers who have only recently begun to read Derrida and essential for all those familiar with Derrida's work, Cinders is an evocative and thoughtful contribution to our understanding of deconstruction.

False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy


Roberto Mangabeira Unger - 1987
    It presents both a way of explaining society and a program for changing it. The explanation develops a radical alternative to Marxism, showing how we can account for established social arrangements without denying their contingency or our freedom. The program offers a progressive alternative to the now-dominant ideological conceptions of neoliberalism and social democracy: a set of institutional innovations that would democratize markets, deepen democracy and empower individuals.

Death in the Midst of Life: Social and Cultural Influences on Death


Jack Kamerman - 1987
    Focuses on the health care professions and the institutional care of the dying.

Periphyseon: Division of Nature


John Scotus Eriugena - 1987
    

The Lessons Of Modernism, And Other Essays


Gabriel Josipovici - 1987
    

Age of Sex Crime


Jane Caputi - 1987
    Jane Caputi argues that the sensationalized murders by men such as Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, Hillside Strangler, and the Yorkshire Ripper represent a contemporary genre of sexually political crimes. The awful deeds function as a form of patriarchal terrorism, "disappearing" women at a rate of some four thousand annually in the United States alone. Caputi asks us not only to name the phenomenon of sexually political murder, but to recognize sex crime in all of its various interconnecting manifestations.

Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms


Franco Moretti - 1987
    However, it is the fact that these texts are so central to our contemporary notion of literature that sometimes hinders our ability to understand them. Franco Moretti applies himself to this problem by drawing skilfully on structuralist, sociological and psycho-analytic modes of enquity in order to read these texts as literary systems which are tokens of wider cultural and political realities. In the process, Moretti offers us compelling accounts of various literary genres, explores the relationships between high and mass culture in this century, and considers the relevance of tragic, Romantic and Darwinian views of the world.

Learning By Expanding: An Activity Theoretical Approach To Developmental Research


Yrjö Engeström - 1987
    

Perspectives in Cultural Anthropology


Herbert Applebaum - 1987
    It provides a deeper understanding of the major theoretical orientations which have historically guided and currently guide anthropological research.

Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens: Design Principles, Aesthetic Values


David A. Slawson - 1987
    Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens explains the fundamental principles of this tradition and describes how those principles may be applied to a much wider range of environments than exists in Japan.In the first section the author draws on his own experience as an apprentice to a master gardener in Kyoto, as well as his considerable knowledge of Japanese classical texts, to present the garden design process in terms of three primary aesthetic considerations:Scenic effects-reproductions of appealing natural landscape forms.Sensory effects-varieties of scale, framing, rhythm, motion, and spatial quality.Cultural effects-the incorporation of allusions to classical literature, poetry, and painting.The final section comprises a complete translation of a classic gardening manual used by Buddhist monks in medieval Japan. Its rules for planting trees and setting rocks still make good design sense today, and the author includes numerous garden descriptions as examples of how ancient masters practiced their craft.This clear, authoritative work, fully illustrated with diagrams and photographs, elucidates much about the Japanese compositional sense. But at the same time it is a plea for a more holistic approach to landscape design-a recognition that a garden should conform to certain natural principles as well as meet the emotional needs of those who view it.

Zionism: False Messiah


Nathan Weinstock - 1987
    The achievement of the author has been to weave together, with great sensitivity, scholarship and historical judgement, the different strands of this story: the situation of the Jews under the Tsar and of the Arabs under the Ottoman Empire; the changing relations among the three main protagonists in Palestine-- the Arabs, the Jews and the British--following World War I and the Balfour Declaration; the political alignments and class antagonisms within the two communities contending for Palestine (their economic, cultural, political, and social development); the diplomatic and international factors blocking or furthering the realization of the Zionist project, and , finally the three cornered military contest between the Arabs, the Jewish settlers, and the British Mandate presence which came to a temporary halt with the successful consolidation and expansion of the State of Israel and the creation of the Palestinian Diaspora.

Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories


Mieke Bal - 1987
    . . extraordinarily vital . . . engaging and daunting . . . " —Society for Old Testament Study Book List"Bal's readings are strong and original . . . they are bound to receive enduring attention." —Journal of ReligionBal reads five familiar love stories from the Bible, including David and Bathsheba and Samson and Delilah, differently. In the past, readings of these stories have represented woman's love as lethal, women as victimizers to be avoided lest one be killed by their love. Bal questions these interpretations and reveals a dominant patriarchal ideology of interpretation.

Photons and Atoms: Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics


Claude Cohen-Tannoudji - 1987
    Beginning with the elementary quantum theory and classical electrodynamics, the book then develops the theory of low-energy interactions between matter and radiation, including the necessary mathematics. It provides a fundamental framework for the dynamics of the electromagnetic field and nonrelativistic charged particles, and presents the physical content of the theory and various formulations of the theory. This work bridges the gap between the short treatments of QED offered in laser optics texts and advanced works for field theorists.

Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice


Libreria delle donne Di Milano - 1987
    

Swords Into Plowshares: Nonviolent Direct Action For Disarmament


Arthur J. Laffin - 1987
    

Sketches, Projects And Executed Buildings By Otto Wagner Complete Reprint Of The Original Volumes Published In 1889, 1897, 1906, 1922


Otto Wagner - 1987
    

Schr Dinger Operators: With Applications to Quantum Mechanics and Global Geometry


Richard G. Froese - 1987
    Emphasizing the progress made in the last decade by Lieb, Enss, Witten and others, the three authors don t just cover general properties, but also detail multiparticle quantum mechanics including bound states of Coulomb systems and scattering theory. This corrected and extended reprint contains updated references as well as notes on the development in the field over the past twenty years."

Systems of Family Therapy: An Adlerian Integration


Robert Sherman - 1987
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Baroque-'N'-Roll, and Other Essays


Brigid Brophy - 1987