Best of
Theory

1989

Modernity and the Holocaust


Zygmunt Bauman - 1989
    Zygmunt Bauman explores the silences found in debates about the Holocaust, and asks what the historical facts of the Holocaust tell us about the hidden capacities of present-day life. He finds great danger in such phenomena as the seductiveness of martyrdom; going to extremes in the name of safety; the insidious effects of tragic memory; and the efficient, "scientific" implementation of the death penalty. Bauman writes, "Once the problem of the guilt of the Holocaust perpetrators has been by and large settled . . . the one big remaining question is the innocence of all the rest, not the least the innocence of ourselves."Among the conditions that made the mass extermination of the Holocaust possible, according to Bauman, the most decisive factor was modernity itself. Bauman's provocative interpretation counters the tendency to reduce the Holocaust to an episode in Jewish history, or to one that cannot be repeated in the West precisely because of the progressive triumph of modern civilization. He demonstrates, rather, that we must understand the events of the Holocaust as deeply rooted in the very nature of modern society and in the central categories of modern social thought.

Women, Culture, and Politics


Angela Y. Davis - 1989
    A collection of her speeches and writings which address the political and social changes of the past decade as they are concerned with the struggle for racial, sexual, and economic equality.

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project


Susan Buck-Morss - 1989
    In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose materialist metaphysics he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century ur-form of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time--from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons--as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south--Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples--and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of dialectics at a standstill. She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of afterimages to have the last word.

Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism


Trinh T. Minh-ha - 1989
    methodologically innovative... precise and perceptive and conscious... " --Text and Performance QuarterlyWoman, Native, Other is located at the juncture of a number of different fields and disciplines, and it genuinely succeeds in pushing the boundaries of these disciplines further. It is one of the very few theoretical attempts to grapple with the writings of women of color." --Chandra Talpade MohantyThe idea of Trinh T. Minh-ha is as powerful as her films... formidable... " --Village Voice... its very forms invite the reader to participate in the effort to understand how language structures lived possibilities." --ArtpaperHighly recommended for anyone struggling to understand voices and experiences of those 'we' label 'other'." --Religious Studies Review

The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change


David Harvey - 1989
    In this new book, David Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the term in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience.But the book is much more than this: in the course of his investigation the author provides a social and semantic history – from the Enlightenment to the present – of modernism and its expression in political and social ideas and movements, as well as in art, literature and architecture. He considers in particular how meaning and perception of time and space themselves vary over time and space, and shows that this variance affects individual values and social processes of the most fundamental kind.This book will be widely welcomed, not only for its clear and critical account of the arguments surrounding the propositions of modernity and postmodernity, but as an incisive contribution to the history of ideas and their relation to social and political change.

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity


Richard Rorty - 1989
    This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable but it cannot advance liberalism's social and political goals. In fact, Rorty believes that it is literature and not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. Specifically, it is novelists such as Orwell and Nabokov who succeed in awakening us to the cruelty of particular social practices and individual attitudes. Thus, a truly liberal culture would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. Rorty uses a wide range of references--from philosophy to social theory to literary criticism--to elucidate his beliefs.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity


Judith Butler - 1989
    This is the text where Judith Butler began to advance the ideas that would go on to take life as "performativity theory," as well as some of the first articulations of the possibility for subversive gender practices, and she writes in her preface to the 10th anniversary edition released in 1999 that one point of Gender Trouble was "not to prescribe a new gendered way of life [...] but to open up the field of possibility for gender [...]" Widely taught, and widely debated, Gender Trouble continues to offer a powerful critique of heteronormativity and of the function of gender in the modern world.

Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961-84


Michel Foucault - 1989
    Composed of every extant interview made by Foucault from the mid-60s until his death in 1984, Foucault Live sheds new light on the philosopher's ideas about friendship, the intent behind his classical studies, while clarifying many of the professional and popular misinterpretations of his ideas over the course of his career. As Gilles Deleuze noted, "the interviews in this book go much further than anything Foucault ever wrote, and they are indispensable in understanding his life work." Most notably, Foucault Live includes interviews he made with the gay underground press during his stays in America during the 1970s. In them, Foucault suggests that homosexuality presents a new paradigm for ways of living beyond the predictable, binary couple. All of the philosopher's interests, from madness and delinquency to film and sexuality, and their resultant writings, are probed by knowledgeable critics and journalists. After reading this book, the reader can explore key notions such as episteme, savoir and connaissance, archeology, and archive, without the knitted brow that plagued Foucault's public when he was alive. This is the guide to Foucault's life as an agent provocateur in the world of philosophy and scholarship.

The Sublime Object of Ideology


Slavoj Žižek - 1989
    From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish joke, Zizek’s acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion that make up human society.Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political significance of these fantasies of control.

Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays


Édouard Glissant - 1989
    Selected essays from the rich and complex collection of Edouard Glissant, one of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the Caribbean, examine the psychological, sociological, and philosophical implications of cultural dependency.

Technology as Symptom and Dream


Robert Romanyshyn - 1989
    Robert Romanyshyn's latest book examines the claim that the development of linear perspective vision was and is indispensable to the emergence of our technological world. It does so by telling the story of how an artistic technique has become a cultural habit of mind.

Knees of a Natural Man


Henry Dumas - 1989
    

The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy


Charles Bernstein - 1989
    THE POLITICS OF POETIC FORM: POETRY AND PUBLIC POLICY is a series of essays from a discussion that occurred at the New School for Social Research in New York. The discussion mines the relationship between poetic composition and political expression. Poetry's relationship to public policy typically has a questionable margin of relation. Not only does this volume posit that poetry is a dynamic medium for the consideration of political ideas, it focuses on the ideological weight specific formal innovations bring to poetry. Some of the writers include Jerome Rothenberg, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey and Charles Bernstein.

The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective


Antonio Benítez Rojo - 1989
    This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benítez-Rojo redefines the Caribbean by drawing on history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and nonlinear mathematics. His point of departure is chaos theory, which holds that order and disorder are not the antithesis of each other in nature but function as mutually generative phenomena. Benítez-Rojo argues that within the apparent disorder of the Caribbean—the area’s discontinuous landmasses, its different colonial histories, ethnic groups, languages, traditions, and politics—there emerges an “island” of paradoxes that repeats itself and gives shape to an unexpected and complex sociocultural archipelago. Benítez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, Guillén, Carpentier, García Márquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and Rodríguez Juliá.

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940


Walter Benjamin - 1989
    Benjamin, acknowledged today as one of the leading literary and social critics of his day, was known during his lifetime by only a small circle of his friends and intellectual confreres. Scholem recognized the genius of his friend and mentor during their student days in Berlin, and the two began to correspond after Scholem's emigration to Palestine. Their impassioned exchange draws the reader into the very heart of their complex relationship during the anguished years from 1932 until Benjamin's death in 1940.

Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification


Bruce Lincoln - 1989
    Without overlooking the role of coercive force in the maintenance (or overthrow) of social structures, Lincoln argues his thesis with compelling illustrations drawn from such diverse areas as Platonic philosophy, the Upanishads of India, ancient Celtic banquets, professional wrestling, and the Spanish Civil War. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary study--which draws on works in history, semiotics, anthropology, sociology, classics, and indology--offers challenging new insights into the complex dynamics of social cohesion and change.

A Vindication of the Rights of Whores


Gail Pheterson - 1989
    Now, 200 years later, prostitutes are calling for similar rights and equality. The need o speak out for the rights of sex workers became clear to Margo St. James, a former prostitute, in the early 1970s. She founded Coyote (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) in 1973 and went on to establish a network of prostitutes, social workers and politicians.The book consists of the voices of a diverse group of prostitutes, sex worker's rights activists and feminist scholars from around the world, discussing their lives and their concerns.It includes the complete text of the World Charter for Prostitutes' Rights; unedited transcripts of workshop arranged by topic from the First World Whores' Congress held in Amsterdam in February 1985 and Second World Whores' Congress at the European Parliament held in Brussels in October 1986; position papers; as well as interviews with various participants.

The Unbroken Thread: The Development of Trotskyism Over 40 Years


Ted Grant - 1989
    

A Dictionary of Stylistics


Katie Wales - 1989
    A Dictionary of Stylistics draws material from stylistics and a range of related disciplines such as sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics and traditional rhetoric, the fully revised Dictionary of Stylistics provides a valuable reference work for students and teachers of stylistics, as well as critical discourse analysis and literary criticism.

Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self


Nikolas Rose - 1989
    This governmentality perspective has had important implications for a range of academic disciplines including criminology, political theory, sociology and psychology and has generated much theoretical innovation and empirical investigation. The second edition contains a new introduction, which sets out the methodological and conceptual bases of this approach. Also, a new final chapter has been added that considers some of the implications of recent developments in the government of subjectivity.

Zone 3: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1


Michel Feher - 1989
    They show how different cultures at different times have entwined physical capacities and mental mechanisms in order to construct a body adapted to moral ideas or social circumstances -- the body of a charismatic citizen or a visionary monk, a mirror image of the world or a reflection of the spirit.Each volume emphasizes a particular perspective. Part 1 explores the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial, and to the machines that imitate or simulate it. Part 2 covers the junctures between the body's "outside" and "inside" by studying the manifestations -- or production -- of the soul and the expression of the emotions and, on another level, by examining the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain, and death. Part 3 brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how organs or bodily substances can be used to justify or challenge the way human societies function and, conversely, how political and social functions tend to make the bodies of the persons filling them the organs of a larger body -- the social body or the universe as a whole.Among the contributors to Fragments for a History of the Human Body are Mark Elvin, Catherine Gallagher, Fran�oise H�ritier-Aug�, Julia Kristeva, William R. LaFleur, Thomas W. Laqueur, Jacques Le Goff, Nicole Loraux, Mario Perniola, Hillel Schwartz, Jean Starobinski, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Caroline Walker Bynum.

Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology


Leonard B. Meyer - 1989
    He explores why, out of the abundance of compositional possibilities, composers choose to replicate some patterns and neglect others.Meyer devotes the latter part of his book to a sketch-history of nineteenth-century music. He shows explicitly how the beliefs and attitudes of Romanticism influenced the choices of composers from Beethoven to Mahler and into our own time. "A monumental work. . . . Most authors concede the relation of music to its cultural milieu, but few have probed so deeply in demonstrating this interaction."—Choice"Probes the foundations of musical research precisely at the joints where theory and history fold into one another."—Kevin Korsyn, Journal of American Musicological Society"A remarkably rich and multifaceted, yet unified argument. . . . No one else could have brought off this immense project with anything like Meyer's command."—Robert P. Morgan, Music Perception"Anyone who attempts to deal with Romanticism in scholarly depth must bring to the task not only musical and historical expertise but unquenchable optimism. Because Leonard B. Meyer has those qualities in abundance, he has been able to offer fresh insight into the Romantic concept."—Donal Henahan, New York Times

Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science


William Irwin Thompson - 1989
    This book surveys the present, from Post-Modern theory to a science encompassing Chaos theory and the Gaia hypothesis, and finds in it the threads out of which a future conceptual landscape might be woven.

Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing


Alison M. Jaggar - 1989
    Some contributors challenge and revise western conceptions of the body as the domain of the biological and 'natural, ' the enemy of reason, typically associated with women.

The Novel and The Police


D.A. Miller - 1989
    Through a series of readings in the work of the decisive triumvirate of Victorian fiction, Dickens, Trollope and Wilkie Collins, Miller investigates the novel as an oblique form of social control.

Rape of the Wild: Man's Violence against Animals and the Earth


Andree Collard - 1989
    a welcome addition to ecofeminist literature... " --Feminist for Animal Rights"Rape of the Wild is a very moving, passionately written expose of men's subjugation and exploitation of the natural environment and of women." --Forest History SocietyThis visionary and inspiring book is a cogent analysis of man's use and misuse of his environment and an impassioned plea for a feminist ecological revolution.

The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends


David H. Richter - 1989
    This bestseller balances a comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory — from Plato to the present — with the most thorough editorial support for understanding these challenging readings.

Knowledge and Evidence


Paul K. Moser - 1989
    Since the time of Plato philosophers have wondered what exactly knowledge is. This book develops a new account of perceptual knowledge which specifies the exact sense in which knowledge has foundations. The author argues that experiential foundations are indeed essential to perceptual knowledge, and he explains what knowledge requires beyond justified true beliefs. In challenging prominent sceptical claims that we have no justified beliefs about the external world, the book outlines a theory of rational belief.

The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune


Kristin Ross - 1989
    Yet it was the moment of two significant spatial events: France’s expansion on a global scale, and, in the spring of 1871, the brief existence of the Paris Commune - the construction of revolutionary urban space. Arguing that space, as a social fact, is always political and strategic, Kristen Ross has written a book that is at once history and geography of the Commune’s anarchist culture - its political language and social relations, its values, strategies, and stances.Central to her analysis of the Commune as social space and oppositional culture is a close textual reading of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry. His poems - a common thread running through the book - are one set of documents among many in Ross’s recreation of the Communard experience. Rimbaud, Paul Lafargue, and the social geographer Elisee Reclus serve as emblematic figures moving within and on the periphery of the Commune; in their resistance to the logic and economy of a capitalist conception of work, in their challenge to work itself as a term of identity, all three posed a threat to the existing order. Ross looks at these and other emancipator notions as aspects of Communard life, each with an analogous strategy in Rimbaud’s poetry. Applying contemporary theory to a wealth of little-known archival material, she has written a fresh, persuasive, and original book.

Spaces Like Stairs


Gail Scott - 1989
    Scott writes of women, community and writing, tracing the effect of fiction upon theory, and theoretical thinking upon fictional text.

A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book


Edmond Jabès - 1989
    literature/Jewish Studies, tr Rosmarie Waldrop

The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution


Sheldon S. Wolin - 1989
    The provisions of our own Constitution regarding slavery--and disregarding women--show that even a liberal constitution does not legitimate all types of politics. What is constituted, rather, are conditions that favor certain forms of politics over others.The Presence of the Past explores the relationship between present-day American politics and the COnstitution of 1787. Wolin does not attempt to establish the real meaning of the document or the intent of the Founders. (A constitution is not a revelation and the Philadelphia Convention was not an epiphanic moment.) Instead, he examines the Constitution from a breathtaking variety of perspectives, drawing meanings from the text that is our richest source of American values, myths, ideologies, and theories. And he shows how the Constitution created the American version of the modern state and how the ideology of bicentennialism works to obscure the contradictions between the state and democracy.In a variety of ways, The Presence of the Past concerns itself with kinds of loss--the loss of democratic values, the weakening of democratic elements in our institutions, the stifling of democratic hopes. In the explorations of our constitutional culture, Wolin connects a wide range of topics, from a discussion of the Federalist Papers to the Irangate scandal, from the dieas of Montesquieu and Tocqueville to the political implications of Allan Bloom's polemic on education.

The Rustle of Language


Roland Barthes - 1989
    --The Baroque side --What becomes of the signifier --Outcomes of the text --Reading Brillat-Savarin --An idea of research --Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure ... --Preface to Renaud Camus's Tricks --One always fails in speaking of what one loves --Writers, intellectuals, teachers --To the seminar --The indictment periodically lodged ... --Learning the movie theater --The image --Deliberation

Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science


Donna J. Haraway - 1989
    Haraway's discussions of how scientists have perceived the sexual nature of female primates opens a new chapter in feminist theory, raising unsettling questions about models of the family and of heterosexuality in primate research.

Applied Logistic Regression


David W. Hosmer - 1989
    "An interesting, useful, and well-written book on logistic regression models . . . Hosmer and Lemeshow have used very little mathematics, have presented difficult concepts heuristically and through illustrative examples, and have included references." --Choice"Well written, clearly organized, and comprehensive . . . the authors carefully walk the reader through the estimation of interpretation of coefficients from a wide variety of logistic regression models . . . their careful explication of the quantitative re-expression of coefficients from these various models is excellent." --Contemporary Sociology"An extremely well-written book that will certainly prove an invaluable acquisition to the practicing statistician who finds other literature on analysis of discrete data hard to follow or heavily theoretical." --The StatisticianIn this revised and updated edition of their popular book, David Hosmer and Stanley Lemeshow continue to provide an amazingly accessible introduction to the logistic regression model while incorporating advances of the last decade, including a variety of software packages for the analysis of data sets. Hosmer and Lemeshow extend the discussion from biostatistics and epidemiology to cutting-edge applications in data mining and machine learning, guiding readers step-by-step through the use of modeling techniques for dichotomous data in diverse fields. Ample new topics and expanded discussions of existing material are accompanied by a wealth of real-world examples-with extensive data sets available over the Internet.

Michel Foucault


Didier Eribon - 1989
    Hailed by distinguished historians and lionized on his frequent visits to America, he continues to provoke lively debate. The nature and merits of his accomplishments remain tangled in controversy. Rejecting traditional liberal and Marxist "dreams of solidarity", Foucault became the very model of the modern intellectual, replacing Sartre as the figure of the eminent Parisian and cosmopolitan master thinker.Foucault himself discouraged biographical questions, claiming that he was "not at all interesting". Didier Eribon's account contests that assertion. Well acquainted with Foucault before his death, Eribon has drawn from the eyewitness accounts of Foucault's closest friends and associates from all phases of his life - his mother, his schoolteachers, his classmates, his friends and enemies in academic life, and his celebrated companions in political activism, including Jean Genet, Simone Signoret, and Yves Montand. Eribon has methodically retraced the footsteps of his peripatetic subject, from France to Sweden to Poland to Germany to Tunisia to Brazil to Japan to the United States. Who was this man, Michel Foucault?In the late 1950s Foucault emerged as a budding young cultural attache, friendly with Gaullist diplomats. By the mid-1960s he appeared as one of the avatars of structuralism, positioning himself as a new star in the fashionable world of French thought. A few months after the May 1968 student revolt, with Gaullism apparently shaken, he emerged as an ultra-leftist and a fellow traveler of Maoists. Yet during this same period, Eribon shows, he was quietly and adroitly campaigning for a chair in the College de France - the very pinnacle of the conservative French academic system.This book follows the career of one extraordinary intellectual and reconstructs the cultural, political and intellectual life of France from the postwar years to the present. It is the story of a man and his time.

Zone 4: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 2


Michel Feher - 1989
    They show how different cultures at different times have entwined physical capacities and mental mechanisms in order to construct a body adapted to moral ideas or social circumstances -- the body of a charismatic citizen or a visionary monk, a mirror image of the world or a reflection of the spirit.Each volume emphasizes a particular perspective. Part 1 explores the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial, and to the machines that imitate or simulate it. Part 2 covers the junctures between the body's "outside" and "inside" by studying the manifestations -- or production -- of the soul and the expression of the emotions and, on another level, by examining the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain, and death. Part 3 brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how organs or bodily substances can be used to justify or challenge the way human societies function and, conversely, how political and social functions tend to make the bodies of the persons filling them the organs of a larger body -- the social body or the universe as a whole.Among the contributors to Fragments for a History of the Human Body are Mark Elvin, Catherine Gallagher, Fran�oise H�ritier-Aug�, Julia Kristeva, William R. LaFleur, Thomas W. Laqueur, Jacques Le Goff, Nicole Loraux, Mario Perniola, Hillel Schwartz, Jean Starobinski, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Caroline Walker Bynum.

Repression And Recovery: Modern American Poetry Politics Of Cultural Memory


Cary Nelson - 1989
    A poststructuralist literary history - Nelson's premise that the history of modernist culture is one we no longer know we have forgotten and he aims to recover the political questions many forgotten modern poets looked straight in the eye.

Schizoanalytic Cartographies


Félix Guattari - 1989
    Over the course of eight closely argued chapters, he presents a breathtakingly new reformulation of the structures of individual and collective subjectivity. Based on research into information theory and new technologies, Guattari articulates a vision of a humanity finally reconciled with its relationship to machines.Schizoanalytic Cartographies is a visionary yet highly concrete work, providing a powerful vantage point on the upheavals of our present epoch, powerfully imagining a future 'post-media' era of technological development. This long overdue translation of this substantial work offers English-speaking readers the opportunity finally to fully assess Guattari's contribution to European thought.

Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies


James Watson - 1989
    It provides an aid to the study of interpersonal communication, the theory of communication, media history, and technological development, balancing the specifics of, for example, legislation affecting media performance with the major themes central to most programs of study-audience, cultural interaction through media, globalization and issues surrounding the impact of technology on society, and the nature of ownership and control. The Dictionary of Media & Communication Studies is also accessible to the general reader interested in keeping up with media events and curious to explore some of the subject's fascinating terrain.

Chebyshev and Fourier Spectral Methods


John P. Boyd - 1989
    Includes 7 appendices and over 160 text figures.

From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film


Anton Kaes - 1989
    How can Hitler and the Holocaust, how can the complicity and shame of the average German be narrated and visualized? How can Auschwitz be reconstructed? Anton Kaes argues that a major shift in German attitudes occurred in the mid-1970s--a shift best illustrated in films of the New German Cinema, which have focused less on guilt and atonement than on personal memory and yearning for national identity.To support his claim, Kaes devotes a chapter to each of five complex and celebrated films of the modern German era: Hans Jurgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany, a provocative restaging of German history in postmodern tableaux; The Marriage of Maria Braun, the personal and political reflection on postwar Germany with which Rainer Werner Fassbinder first caught the attention of American and European audiences; Helma Sanders-Brahms's feminist and autobiographical film Germany, Pale Mother, relating the unexplored role of German women during and after the war; Alexander Kluge's The Patriot, a self-reflexive collage of verbal and visual quotations from the entire course of the German past; and, finally, Edgar Reitz's Heimat, a 16-hour epic rendering of German history from 1918 to the present from the perspective of everyday life in the provinces.Despite radical differences in style and form, these films are all concerned with memory, representation, and the dialogue between past and present Kaes draws from a variety of disciplines, interweaving textual interpretation, cultural history, and current theory to create a dynamic approach to highly complex and multi-voiced films. His book will engage readers interested in postwar German history, politics, and culture; in film and media studies; and in the interplay of history, memory, and film.

Eurocentrism


Samir Amin - 1989
    Written by one of the world's foremost political economists, this original and provocative essay takes on one of the great "ideological deformations" of our time: Eurocentrism. Rejecting the dominant Eurocentric view of world history, which narrowly and incorrectly posits a progression from the Greek and Roman classical world to Christian feudalism and the European capitalist system, Amin presents a sweeping reinterpretation that emphasizes the crucial historical role played by the Arab Islamic world. Throughout the work, Amin addressesa broad set of concerns, ranging from the ideological nature of scholastic metaphysics to the meanings and shortcomingsof contemporary Islamic fundamentalism. This second edition contains a new introduction and concluding chapter, both of which make the author's arguments even more compelling.

Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity


Stanley Rosen - 1989
    He urges that we do not dismiss the classical heritage but appropriate it, for this appropriation is an indispensable step in the process of legitimizing our historical experience.

The Lie of the Truth: And Other Parables from the Way of Liberation


René Daumal - 1989
    essay, tr Jesse Browner

Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology


Darrell Y. Hamamoto - 1989
    Within this context, Hamamoto traces what he describes as the dominant liberal democratic ideology implicit within situation comedy and explains its enduring popularity. Critically analyzing four decades of television situation comedies from The Honeymooners to The Bill Cosby Show, Hamamoto shows how the sitcom reflects, explains, legitimates, and challenges the society in which it is grounded, illuminating the power of laughter both to reaffirm and to question existing social structures. . . . Hamamoto offers a well-researched and refreshingly lucid study, immensely readable for its astute scholarship. Indispensable for students and scholars of television, popular culture, and comedy. ChoiceNervous Laughter examines forty years of situation comedy, decade by decade, providing the first truly panoramic view of TV's most popular dramatic form. Within this context, Hamamoto traces what he describes as the dominant liberal democratic ideology implicit within situation comedy and explains its enduring popularity. Examining liberal democratic culture, politics, and society he demonstrates how the sitcom resolves social contradictions. Borrowing freely from the social sciences, history, and literary criticism he explains the curious grip the TV sitcom has had on its audience for over forty years. This book critically assesses the relationship between the media and society bringing questions of power, equality, and democracy to the foreground. Nervous Laughter is important reading for both the specialist and the general reader in its analysis of postwar American society.Nervous Laughter is a study of liberal democratic culture, politics, and society. It describes the ways affirmative aspects and contradictions of liberal democratic ideology are given form in television situation comedy. It provides a close reading of forty years of television texts. Arguing against mainstream theories of mass communications, the author presents an analytic framework that looks instead at conflict and contradiction within class society. Challenging the legitimacy of airwave control by non-democratic social institutions, Nervous Laughter concludes with a modest agenda that might lead to democratization of television.

Jan Patocka: Philosophy and Selected Writings


Erazim V. Kohák - 1989
    Patocka, who was forced to retire prematurely from Charles University in Prague for his political convictions, died of a brain hemorrhage while under Czech police interrogation for having signed the human rights manifesto Charta 77. Although many of his works are available in French and German, in this volume Erazim Kohák has translated Patocka's central philosophical texts into English for the first time. As a student and personal friend of Husserl, Patocka was keenly aware of the focal role of reason in the constitution of experienced reality. Simultaneously, as a student of Heidegger, he was no less aware of the irreducible autonomy of that reality. This double recognition led Patocka on a lifelong philosophical quest for a synthesis that would bridge modernity's split between the freedom of humans and the givenness of the world and, more broadly, between the Enlightenment and romanticism. For the philosophical reader, Patocka's perceptive writings provide the most helpful key to understanding the basic modern dialogue acted out by Husserl and Heidegger. Yet Patocka, widely respected for his writings on culture and the arts as well as for his studies of J. A. Comenius and the history of science, offers much more: a comprehensive attempt to come to terms with our intellectual heritage and our divided present. Kohák, as well as translating the writings, provides a comprehensive introduction, covering the full scope of Patocka's thought, and a complete bibliography of his writings. The result is an intellectually rich volume equally well suited as an introduction to Patocka, an advanced study in phenomenology, and a historical insight into philosophy behind the Iron Curtain since 1938.

Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science


Mary Jacobus - 1989
    This groundbreaking collection addresses such scientific issues as artificial fertilization, the "crisis" in childbirth management, and the medical invention of "female" maladies and the debates surrounding them. In the process it makes an important attempt to remedy the traditional division between science and non-science by focusing on the interconnection of literary, social, and scientific discourses concerning the female body.The editors have brought together noted feminist scholars and critics from various fields. Contributers include Susan Bordo, Mary Ann Doane, Donna Haraway, Emily Martin, Mary Poovey and Paula A. Treichler.

Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory


M.H. Abrams - 1989
    Spanning three decades, the essays concern themselves with the most central development themes in recent criticism, from the New Criticism to the much-debated “Newreading” and “New Historicism.” Two other essays discuss the emergence of the remarkably influential modern view that a work in the fine arts is an autonomous object, and another offers an extraordinary overview of the history of criticism from Plato and Aristotle to Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man.

The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology


Paul Stoller - 1989
    For most anthropologists, Stoller contends, tasteless theories are more important than the savory sauces of ethnographic life. That they have lost the smells, sounds, and tastes of the places they study is unfortunate for them, for their subjects, and for the discipline itself.The Taste of Ethnographic Things describes how, through long-term participation in the lives of the Songhay of Niger, Stoller eventually came to his senses. Taken together, the separate chapters speak to two important and integrated issues. The first is methodological--all the chapters demonstrate the rewards of long-term study of a culture. The second issue is how he became truer to the Songhay through increased sensual awareness.

The Anatomy of Victory: Battle Tactics 1689-1763


Brent Nosworthy - 1989
    Many books have been written about the battles of that period, but few tell how the soldiers actually fought those battles using the weapons at hand. This book does. Painstakingly researched, and using actual battles for illustration, it tells the reader the "how" and "why" about the tactics used by infantry, cavalry and artillery. Well written, it provides a valuable resource to historians and history lovers of that long ago age.

Military Effectiveness, Volume 1: The First World War


Allan Reed Millett - 1989
    This book covers World War I.

Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible"


Linda Williams - 1989
    For the 1999 edition, Williams has written a new preface and a new epilogue, "On/scenities," illustrated with 25 photographs. She has also added a supplementary bibliography.

To Make It Home: Photographs of the American West


Robert Adams - 1989
    Photographs show children, parents, the elderly, night scenes, landscapes farms, and suburban homes.

Essays in the Theory of Society


Ralf Dahrendorf - 1989
    

Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy


Wayne C. Anderson - 1989
    Each essayist shares Anderson’s views of nonfiction prose as crossing genre and discipline boundaries.In Part I: Readings, contributors examine seven nonfiction authors from different critical methodologies. These include aesthetic analysis, linguistic, rhetorical, formalist, psychoanalytical, feminist, and deconstructionist approaches. Richard Selzer, Stephen Crane, and George Orwell are among the writers examined. These essays provide not only a grammar of critical approaches to nonfiction but also offer introductions to several of the major nonfiction writers of this century.The genre and theory questions raised in Part I, particularly problems of definition and boundary of literary nonfiction, are reviewed in Part II: Generalizations and Definitions. Carl H. Klaus looks at how essayists themselves conceived and refined the essay form and what this tells us about the nature of this type of prose. Klaus points out that "essay" has been a very slippery term, both historically and theoretically. As Peter Elbow examines the prose of Gretel Ehrlich and Richard Selzer, he explores how we account for the literary quality of voice in nonfiction and what this says about the nature of voice.In Part III: Implications for Pedagogy, five contributors, including Jim W. Corder and Chris Anderson, show how the theories expressed in the earlier essays can be applied to the classroom. All of the contributors argue that literary nonfiction, by its nature, reveals the complexity, power, and rhetorical possibilities of language—and that this ought to be the unifying concern of rhetoric and composition as a discipline.

Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding (Theory and History of Literature)


Hans Robert Jauss - 1989
    

Theory of Finite Automata: With an Introduction to Formal Languages


John Carroll - 1989