Best of
Theory

1990

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment


Patricia Hill Collins - 1990
    In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.

Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle


Thomas Sankara - 1990
    Workers and peasants in that West African country established a popular revolutionary government and began to combat the hunger, illiteracy, and economic backwardness imposed by imperialist domination.

Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts


James C. Scott - 1990
    Peasants, serfs, untouchables, slaves, laborers, and prisoners are not free to speak their minds in the presence of power. These subordinate groups instead create a secret discourse that represents a critique of power spoken behind the backs of the dominant. At the same time, the powerful also develop a private dialogue about practices and goals of their rule that cannot be openly avowed. In this book, renowned social scientist James C. Scott offers a penetrating discussion both of the public roles played by the powerful and powerless and the mocking, vengeful tone they display off stage—what he terms their public and hidden transcripts. Using examples from the literature, history, and politics of cultures around the world, Scott examines the many guises this interaction has taken throughout history and the tensions and contradictions it reflects.

Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics


bell hooks - 1990
    She values postmodernism's insights while warning that the fashionable infatuation with "discourse" about "difference" is dangerously detachable from the struggle we must all wage against racism, sexism, and cultural imperialism.

Postscript on the Societies of Control


Gilles Deleuze - 1990
    

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature


Donna J. Haraway - 1990
    Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as creatures which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called outstanding, original, and brilliant, by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.)

Epistemology of the Closet


Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - 1990
    What is at stake in male homo/heterosexual definition? Through readings of Melville, Nietzsche, Wilde, James and Proust, the author argues that the vexed imperatives to specify straight and gay identities have become central to every important form of knowledge of the 20th century.

Negotiations, 1972-1990


Gilles Deleuze - 1990
    A provocative guide to Deleuze by Deleuze, this collection traces the intellectual journey of one of the most important French philosophers and clarifies the key critical concepts in the work of this vital figure who has had an impact on aesthetics, film theory, psychoanalysis and cultural studies.

The Limits of Interpretation


Umberto Eco - 1990
    Umberto Eco focuses here on what he once called "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation"--that is, the belief that many interpreters have gone too far in their domination of texts, thereby destroying meaning and the basis for communication.

Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins


Jacques Derrida - 1990
    Selected by Derrida from the prints and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict blindness—fictional, historical, and biblical. From Old and New Testament scenes to the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon and the blinding of Polyphemus, Derrida uncovers in these images rich, provocative layers of interpretation. For Derrida drawing is itself blind; as an act rooted in memory and anticipation, drawing necessarily replaces one kind of seeing (direct) with another (mediated). Ultimately, he explains, the very lines which compose any drawing are themselves never fully visible to the viewer since they exist only in a tenuous state of multiple identities: as marks on a page, as indicators of a contour. Lacking a "pure" identity, the lines of a drawing summon the supplement of the word, of verbal discourse, and, in doing so, obscure the visual experience. Consequently, Derrida demonstrates, the very act of depicting a blind person undertakes multiple enactments and statements of blindness and sight. Memoirs of the Blind is both a sophisticated philosophical argument and a series of detailed readings. Derrida provides compelling insights into famous and lesser known works, interweaving analyses of texts—including Diderot's Lettres sur les aveugles, the notion of mnemonic art in Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life, and Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. Along with engaging meditations on the history and philosophy of art, Derrida reveals the ways viewers approach philosophical ideas through art, and the ways art enriches philosophical reflection. An exploration of sight, representation, and art, Memoirs of the Blind extends and deepens the meditation on vision and painting presented in Truth and Painting. Readers of Derrida, both new and familiar, will profit from this powerful contribution to the study of the visual arts.

Justice and the Politics of Difference


Iris Marion Young - 1990
    It critically analyzes basic concepts underlying most theories of justice, including impartiality, formal equality, and the unitary moral subjectivity. Starting from claims of excluded groups about decision making, cultural expression, and division of labor, Iris Young defines concepts of domination and oppression to cover issues eluding the distributive model. Democratic theorists, according to Young do not adequately address the problem of an inclusive participatory framework. By assuming a homogeneous public, they fail to consider institutional arrangements for including people not culturally identified with white European male norms of reason and respectability. Young urges that normative theory and public policy should undermine group-based oppression by affirming rather than suppressing social group difference. Basing her vision of the good society on the differentiated, culturally plural network of contemporary urban life, she argues for a principle of group representation in democratic publics and for group-differentiated policies. This is an innovative work, an important contribution to feminist theory and political thought, and one of the most impressive statements of the relationship between postmodernist critiques of universalism and concrete thinking.... Iris Young makes the most convincing case I know of for the emancipatory implications of postmodernism. --Seyla Benhabib, State University of New York at Stony Brook

Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression


Sandra Lee Bartky - 1990
    She critiques both the male bias of current theory and the debilitating dominion held by notions of "proper femininity" over women and their bodies in patriarchal culture.

The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice


Rachel Blau DuPlessis - 1990
    It probes the work of H.D., William Carlos Williams, and Marcel Duchamp, among others, and includes DuPlessis’s pioneering essay “For the Etruscans,” described in American Literature as “one of the finest pieces of criticism in the feminist literary tradition.”“This is one of the most pleasurable works of criticism I have read in years. These essays fuse disparate voices, colloquial, theoretical, autobiographical. They intercut DuPlessis’s own words with those of other writers and poets. They draw together aspects of being usually sundered in criticism, without imposing systems or closure.” --Helen Carr, New Formations

Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century


Jonathan Crary - 1990
    He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

Oneself as Another


Paul Ricœur - 1990
    Oneself as Another, the clearest account of his "philosophical ethics," substantiates this position and lays the groundwork for a metaphysics of morals.Focusing on the concept of personal identity, Ricoeur develops a hermeneutics of the self that charts its epistemological path and ontological status.

Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland


William Ian Miller - 1990
    Bloodtaking and Peacemaking delves beneath the chaos and brutality of the Norse world to discover a complex interplay of ordering and disordering impulses. Miller's unique and engaging readings of ancient Iceland's sagas and extensive legal code reconstruct and illuminate the society that produced them. People in the saga world negotiated a maze of violent possibility, with strategies that frequently put life and limb in the balance. But there was a paradox in striking the balance—one could not get even without going one better. Miller shows how blood vengeance, law, and peacemaking were inextricably bound together in the feuding process. This book offers fascinating insights into the politics of a stateless society, its methods of social control, and the role that a uniquely sophisticated and self-conscious law played in the construction of Icelandic society. "Illuminating."—Rory McTurk, Times Literary Supplement"An impressive achievement in ethnohistory; it is an amalgam of historical research with legal and anthropological interpretation. What is more, and rarer, is that it is a pleasure to read due to the inclusion of narrative case material from the sagas themselves."—Dan Bauer, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

On Language


Roman Jakobson - 1990
    Some appear here in print for the first time, others are newly translated into English. Jakobson's general view of the science of linguistics is followed by a range of topics from his contributions to linguistic metatheory and the interdiscplinary perspectives of linguistics to the sound and meaning system of language, the interrelationship between sound and meaning. More than a convenient access to Jakobson's basic works, On Language presents a broad profile of the polymathic general linguist who suggested radical innovations in every area of linguistic theory.

Jazz Anecdotes


Bill Crow - 1990
    One good story leads to another until someone says, amid the laughter, Somebody ought to write these down! With Jazz Anecdotes, somebody finally has. Drawing on a rich verbal tradition, bassist and jazz writer Bill Crow has culled stories from interviews, biographies and autobiographies, the remarkable collection of oral histories compiled by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, and his own columns to paint fascinating and very human portraits of jazz musicians. Organized around general topics--teaching and learning, stage fright, life on the road, prejudice and discrimination, and the importance of a good nickname--Jazz Anecdotes shows the jazz world as it really is and suggests why it gives its devotees a kick like no other. In addition, it offers extended sections on jazz greats such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and the fabulous Eddie Condon, who seems to have lived his entire life with the anecdotist in mind. With its unique blend of sparkling dialogue and historical and social insight, Jazz Anecdotes will delight anyone who loves a good story. It offers a fresh perspective on the joys and hardships of a musician's life as well as a rare glimpse of the personalities who created America's most distinctive music.

Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture


Catherine Clément - 1990
    Examining moments of “syncopation” in the discourses of Plato, Descartes, Pascal, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, the author critiques a classical Western logocentric philosophy that always tries to master any fissure of uncertainty.

Poetics of Architecture: Theory of Design


Anthony C. Antoniades - 1990
    Poetics of Architecture explores the fundamental theories of Modern and Postmodern design and attempts to reconcile all that is worthwhile in these two movements into a new inclusivist attitude toward architecture. Anthony C. Antoniades looks at the many intangible and tangible channels one can harness in creating architectural design. By opening up architecture to the full range of creative influences, he tries to help readers produce designs that are richer on spatial, sensual, spiritual, and environmental levels. Some of the intangible channels to creativity explored in the book include fantasy, metaphor, the paradoxical and metaphysical, the primordial and untouched, poetry and literature, and the exotic and multicultural. Among the tangible channels covered are history and the study of precedents, mimesis and literal interpretation, geometry, materials, and the role of nature. The author presents rich and imaginative discussions of these various channels, explaining which were favored during the Modern and Postmodern movements and clarifying his theoretical analyses through the use of many vivid examples, tables, and illustrations. Included among the examples in the volume are many distinguished projects and theories by a wide range of noted architects such as Asplund, Aalto, Utzon, Pikionis, Barragin, Pietila, Predock, and Legorreta, who are latecomers to the attention of the media. Antoniades also provides fascinating material on the study of architectural biographies as a means of achieving an all-inclusive creativity in architectural design. Highly original yet based on solid principles, Poetics of Architecture will help architects, designers, and students increase their versatility and creativity in the studio. It will also deepen their understanding and appreciation of the creative process and its many influences.

Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics


Gary Saul Morson - 1990
    This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty years, he experienced both dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking, returned to abandoned insights that he then developed in unexpected ways, and worked through new ideas only loosely related to his earlier concernsSmall wonder, then, that Bakhtin should have speculated on the relations among received notions of biography, unity, innovation, and the creative process. Unity—with respect not only to individuals but also to art, culture, and the world generally—is usually understood as conformity to an underlying structure or an overarching scheme. Bakhtin believed that this idea of unity contradicts the possibility of true creativity. For if everything conforms to a preexisting pattern, then genuine development is reduced to mere discovery, to a mere uncovering of something that, in a strong sense, is already there. And yet Bakhtin accepted that some concept of unity was essential. Without it, the world ceases to make sense and creativity again disappears, this time replaced by the purely aleatory. There would again be no possibility of anything meaningfully new. The grim truth of these two extremes was expressed well by Borges: an inescapable labyrinth could consist of an infinite number of turns or of no turns at all.Bakhtin attempted to rethink the concept of unity in order to allow for the possibility of genuine creativity. The goal, in his words, was a "nonmonologic unity," in which real change (or "surprisingness") is an essential component of the creative process. As it happens, such change was characteristic of Bakhtin's own thought, which seems to have developed by continually diverging from his initial intentions. Although it would not necessarily follow that the development of Bakhtin's thought corresponded to his ideas about unity and creativity, we believe that in this case his ideas on nonmonologic unity are useful in understanding his own thought—as well as that of other thinkers whose careers are comparably varied and productive.

Laws of Media: The New Science


Marshall McLuhan - 1990
    Works such as The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride , From Cliche to Archetype , and Understanding Media have established his reputation throughout the world and have profoundly influenced our understanding of contemporary communication. In his later years McLuhan was working on a 'unified field' theory of human culture, an effort in which he collaborated with and was assisted by his son, Eric McLuhan. This book is the result of that collaboration. The McLuhans are retrieving another way of understanding our world, a way known to some ancient Greeks (but not Aristotle), to medieval thinkers, to Francis Bacon and Giambattista Vico, and to T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in this century. It is based on the use of words and the conseuqent power of the 'logos' to shape all the elements of culture - media - with which we surround ourselves. The authors explain how the invention of the alphabet led to the dominance of visual-space conceptualizations over those of acoustic space and its creative words (and word-plays). They consider the differences between the left- and right-hand sides of our brains, and use Gestalt theories of figure and ground to explore the underlying principles that define media. 'Media, ' the word so closely connected with Marshall McLuhan's thought, is here explored in its broadest meaning, encompassing all that has been created by humans: artefacts, information, ideas - every example of human innovation, from computer program to a tea cup, from musical arrangement to the formula for a cold remedy, from an X-ray machine to the sentence you're reading right now. All these are media to whcih can be applied the laws the McLuhans have developed. The laws are based on a set of four questions - a tetrad - that can be applied to any artefact or idea: What does it enhance or intensify? What does it render obsolete or displace? What does it retrieve that was previoulsy obsolesced? What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme? Inherent in every human innovation is an answer to each of the questions of this tetrad; anything that does not contain answers to these four questions is not the product of human creation. The laws identified by the McLuhans consitute a new scientific basis for media studies, testable, and able to allow for prediction. It takes in all human activities and speech; it breaks down barriers and reconsiders them as mere intervals. In the McLuhan tradition, this New Science offers a while new understanding of human creation, and a vision that could reshape our future.

Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art


Georges Didi-Huberman - 1990
    According to Didi-Huberman, visual representation has an "underside" in which seemingly intelligible forms lose their clarity and defy rational understanding. Art historians, he goes on to contend, have failed to engage this underside, where images harbor limits and contradictions, because their discipline is based upon the assumption that visual representation is made up of legible signs and lends itself to rational scholarly cognition epitomized in the "science of iconology."To escape from this cul-de-sac, Didi-Huberman suggests that art historians look to Freud's concept of the "dreamwork," not for a code of interpretation, but rather to begin to think of representation as a mobile process that often involves substitution and contradiction. Confronting Images also offers brilliant, historically grounded readings of images ranging from the Shroud of Turin to Vermeer's Lacemaker.

Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge


J.T. Fraser - 1990
    And while developing a theory of time as conflict, J. T. Fraser does offer many things indeed--an enormous range of ideas about matter, life, death, evolution, and value.

The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris


Bernardus Silvestris - 1990
    In form, it is a prosimetrum, in which passages of prose alternate with verse passages in various classical meters. The philosophical basis of the work is the Platonism of contemporary philosophers associated with the cathedral school of Chartres—one of whom, Thierry of Chartres, is the dedicatee of the work. According to a marginal note in one early manuscript, the Cosmographia was recited before Pope Eugene III when he was traveling in France (1147–48). - Wikipedia

Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay


Robert DiYanni - 1990
    Known for its exceptionally clear presentation of the elements of literature and for its innovative and beautifully illustrated poetry section featuring full-color art, DiYanni's LITERATURE truly inspires students to embrace the pleasures of reading and writing about literature.

Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988


Northrop Frye - 1990
    This collection of twenty-four of Northrop Frye's essays, nine of which have never been published and several of which have appeared only in obscure sources, focuses on the fundamental themes that have dominated Frye's career and made him one of the world's most influential critics.

Four Decades of Scientific Explanation


Wesley C. Salmon - 1990
    Salmon points out, not all deductive arguments are qualified explanations. The validity of the explanation must itself be examined. Four Decades of Scientific Explanation provides a comprehensive account of the developments in scientific explanation that transpired in the last four decades of the twentieth century. It continues to stand as the most comprehensive treatment of the writings on the subject during these years.Building on the historic 1948 essay by Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, "Studies in the Logic of Explanation,” which introduced the deductive-nomological (D-N) model on which most work on scientific explanation was based for the following four decades, Salmon goes beyond this model's inherent basis of describing empirical knowledge to tells us “not only what, but also why.” Salmon examines the predominant models in chronological order and describes their development, refinement, and criticism or rejection.Four Decades of Scientific Explanation underscores the need for a consensus of approach and ongoing evaluations of methodology in scientific explanation, with the goal of providing a better understanding of natural phenomena.

Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction


Scott Bukatman - 1990
    Demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge, both of the history of science fiction narrative from its earliest origins, and of cultural theory and philosophy, Bukatman redefines the nature of human identity in the Information Age. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theories of the postmodern—including Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, and Jean Baudrillard—Bukatman begins with the proposition that Western culture is suffering a crisis brought on by advanced electronic technologies. Then in a series of chapters richly supported by analyses of literary texts, visual arts, film, video, television, comics, computer games, and graphics, Bukatman takes the reader on an odyssey that traces the postmodern subject from its current crisis, through its close encounters with technology, and finally to new self-recognition. This new "virtual subject," as Bukatman defines it, situates the human and the technological as coexistent, codependent, and mutally defining.Synthesizing the most provocative theories of postmodern culture with a truly encyclopedic treatment of the relevant media, this volume sets a new standard in the study of science fiction—a category that itself may be redefined in light of this work. Bukatman not only offers the most detailed map to date of the intellectual terrain of postmodern technology studies—he arrives at new frontiers, providing a propitious launching point for further inquiries into the relationship of electronic technology and culture.

Desire for Origins: New Languages, Old English, and Teaching and Tradition


Allen J. Frantzen - 1990
    Frantzen doesn't (directly) try to argue against this perception-- instead, he tries to investigate *why* this perception exists. His answer is an insightful and eye-opening investigation into the relationship among scholarship, ideology, and cultural relevance.

Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture


Russell Ferguson - 1990
    It engages fundamental issues raised by attempts to define such concepts as mainstream, minority, and other, and opens up new ways of thinking about culture and representation. All of the texts deal with questions of representation in the broadest sense, encompassing not just the visual but also the social and psychological aspects of cultural identity. Included are important theoretical writings by Homi Bhabha, Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Monique Wittig. Their work is juxtaposed with essays on more overtly personal themes, often autobiographical, by Gloria Anzaldua, Bell Hooks, and Richard Rodriguez, among others. This rich anthology brings together voices from many different marginalized groups - groups that are often isolated from each other as well as from the dominant culture. It joins issues of gender, race, sexual preference, and class in one forum but without imposing a false unity on the diverse cultures represented. Each piece in the book subtly changes the way every other piece is read. While several essays focus on specific issues in art, such as John Yau's piece on Wilfredo Lam in the Museum of Modern Art, or James Clifford's on collecting art, others draw from debates in literature, film, and critical theory to provide a much broader context than is usually found in work aimed at an art audience. Topics range from the functions of language to the role of public art in the city, from gay pornography to the meanings of black hair styles. Out There also includes essays by Rosalyn Deutsche, Richard Dyer, Kobena Mercer, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Gerald Vizenor and Simon Watney, as well as by the editors.Copublished with the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Distributed by The MIT Press.

Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy


Samuel Farber - 1990
    While attempting to synthesize a wealth of available historical material, the author assesses the extent to which the disappearance of Soviet democracy was due to objective circumstances, for example the impact of the Civil War, and the extent to which it was the result of Bolshevik politics and ideology. The author shows how there were, contrary to later Stalinist and Cold War mythologies, significant disputes within the pre-Stalinist Bolshevik camp about the preservation of the substantial democratic elements of the October upheaval.

The Significance of Theory (The Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory 2)


Terry Eagleton - 1990
    This book reflects the breadth of his interests. It offers a view of his career to date, raising a number of central issues in literature, culture and politics.

The New Radicals in the Multiversity and Other S.D.S. Writings on Student Syndicalism (Sixties Series)


Carl Davidson - 1990
    Cultural Writing.A spectre is haunting our universities-- the spectre of a radical and militant nationally co-ordinated movement for student power. --Carl Davidson. This is the second book from the Sixties Series of Charles H. Kerr, Publishers of Anti-Establishment Literature Since 1886. Davidson in these essays explored various analogies and connections between students and the working class, and outlined a theory of student syndicalism that characterized a critical phase in the development of SDS. Drawing not only on classical Marxism but also on IWW and anarcho-syndicalist ideas as well as on newer revolutionary currents such as the Dutch Provos and the French Situationists, these writings were among the most original and influential documents of the American New Left in its dynamic first decade. A quarter of a century later, Davidson's essays remain an unexcelled how-to manual for insurgent students seeking to gain some measure fo control over their lives. In a new Afterword, the author situates the rise of st

Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions


Karla Jay - 1990
    This book is the first anthology to discuss the subject of lesbianism as it relates to the critical interaction among readers, writers, and literary critics. It explores lesbian texts in terms of identification, meaning, and interpretation, and examines the complex entanglements of identity, voice, intersubjectivity, textualities, and sexualities. A wonderful exploration of the varieties of life choices lesbians can and do make. This book once again proves that telling the truth aboutyourself is a revolutionary act.--Rita Mae Brown They will probably drum Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow out of the academy for this one...A college text that is witty, literate, interesting, and can be read for fun. What's the world coming to? Lesbian Texts and Contexts: dry title, wonderful book.--Barbara Grier, Editor Naiad Press To call this collection much-needed or eagerly awaited would be the understatement of the year. It's thrilling ot think of the new readings of classic texts, the new directions for theory, and--maybe best of all--the new range of literary encounters in the classroom, that will be enabled by this radical intervention on the critical scene.--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Duke University Excellent, ...challenging, sexy, ...never boring.--Outweek.

GPS Satellite Surveying


Alfred Leick - 1990
    This edition includes coverage of the latest advances in receiver technology and GPS signal structure. It also provides more up-to-date information on the state-of-the-art in GPS as applied to surveying and explores the technologies and techniques leading to the convergence of navigation and surveying.

Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World


Michael Holquist - 1990
    Widely acknowledged as an exceptional guide to Bakhtin and dialogics, this book now includes a new introduction, concluding chapter and a fully updated bibliography.He argues that Bakhtin's work gains coherence through his commitment to the concept of dialogue, examining Bakhtin's dialogues with theorists such as Saussure, Freud, Marx and Lukacs, as well as other thinkers whose connection with Bakhtin has previously been ignored.Dialogism also includes dialogic readings of major literary texts, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Gogol's The Notes of a Madman and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which provide another dimension of dialogue with dialogue.

A Finite Thinking


Jean-Luc Nancy - 1990
    While using Heidegger's Being and Time as its permanent point of reference and dispute, this collection also confronts other important philosophers, such as Kant, Nietzsche, and Derrida. The projects of these pivotal thinkers of finitude are relentlessly pushed to their extreme, with respect both to their unexpected horizons and to their as yet unexplored analytical potential. A Finite Thinking shows that, paradoxically, where the thought of finitude comes into its own it frees itself, not only to reaffirm a certain transformed and transformative presence, but also for a non-religious reconsideration and reaffirmation of certain theologemes, as well as of the body, heart, and love. This book shows the literary dimension of philosophical discourse, providing important enabling ideas for scholars of literature, cultural theory, and philosophy.

California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party


Dorothy Ray Healey - 1990
    As a strike leader, opponent of McCarthyism, Vietnam war protestor, candidate for public office, and mentor to Angela Davis, she won fame as "a tough lady red," one of the few women to rise to Communist party leadership.

Why the Self is Empty


Philip Cushman - 1990
    Of particular interest is the historical shift from the Victorian, sexually restricted self to the post-World War II empty self. The empty self is soothed and made cohesive by becoming "filled up" with food, consumer products, and celebrities. Its historical antecedents, economic constituents, and political consequences are the focus of this article. The two professions most responsible for healing the empty self, advertising and psychotherapy, find themselves in a bind: They must treat a psychological symptom without being able to address its historical causes. Both circumvent the bind by employing the life-style solution, a strategy that attempts to heal by covertly filling the empty self with the accoutrements, values, and mannerisms of idealized figures. This strategy solves an old problem but creates new ones, including an opportunity for abuse by exploitative therapists, cult leaders, and politicians. Psychology's role in constructing the empty self, and thus reproducing the current hierarchy of power and privilege, is examined.

Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature


Clare A. Simmons - 1990
    

Abstract and Concrete Categories: The Joy of Cats


Jirí Adámek - 1990
    Its unique approach stresses concrete categories, and each categorical notion features several examples that clearly illustrate specific and general cases.A systematic view of factorization structures, this volume contains seven chapters. The first five focus on basic theory, and the final two explore more recent research results in the realm of concrete categories, cartesian closed categories, and quasitopoi. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, it requires an elementary knowledge of set theory and can be used as a reference as well as a text. Updated by the authors in 2004, it offers a unifying perspective on earlier work and summarizes recent developments.

The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology


Bonnie Kime Scott - 1990
    The Gender of Modernism... will be nothing less than an absolutely necessary text for Modernist studies." --Shari Benstock"Scott and her contributing editors... effectively brings together the issues of gender and modernism into a volume recommended for reference and classroom use." --James Joyce Literary Supplement..". a treasure trove for anyone interested in the literature and history of modern times." --Susan GubarAuthors included are: Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, Nancy Cunard, H.D., T.S. Eliot, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Nella Larsen, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, Rose Macaulay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Katherine Mansfield, Charlotte Mew, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jean Rhys, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, Antonia White, Anna Wickham, and Virginia Woolf

Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction


J. Paul Hunter - 1990
    To understand the origins of the novel as a species and to read individual novels well, we must know several pasts and traditions—even non-fictional and non-narrative traditions, even non-“artistic” and non-written pasts—that at first might seem far removed from the pleasures readers find in modern novels.

New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time


Ernesto Laclau - 1990
    Examining the meanings of social struggle in the context of late capitalism, Laclau situates the re-making of political identities within a framework of democratic revolution. The critical method is one which describes major structural changes in the contemporary world-system at the same time as it theorizes a coherent and radical interpretative form. This marriage of politics and theory allows the book to embrace topics ranging from the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis to the historical significance of May 1968 and forms of political struggle in the third world. In a final section of illuminating interviews the author expounds his most recent thought on politics and philosophy.

The Coming Community


Giorgio Agamben - 1990
    Agamben’s exploration is, in part, a contemporary response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures.

The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida


John Forrester - 1990
    John Forrester probes the origins of psychoanalysis and its most beguiling concept, the transference, which is at once its institutional axis and experimental core. He explores the most seductive of all recent psychoanalytic traditions, that inspired by Jacques Lacan, whose radical questioning of psychoanalytic effects has been continued implicitly by Michel Foucault and explicitly by Jacques Derrida. Other key questions addressed include the significance of speech in the talking cure, and the relationship between the 'real' of psychoanalysis and the fictionality of the 'truth' it offers. Dr Forrester also focuses on the relationship between psychoanalysis and the feminine, on analysis and gossip, on the borderline of seduction and rape, and on the women who have played such a crucial role in the history of psychoanalysis, as patients, analysts or both.

Childhood, Culture, and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860-1931


Carolyn Steedman - 1990
    Her passionate belief that children's lives could be transformed by fresh air, cleanliness and emotional nurturing led her to champion their cause through her prolific writing and speaking, and to create, in the slums of Deptford, a garden for underprivileged children, through whom she reclaimed her own lost childhood. Taking McMillan's life and work as her starting point, Carolyn Steedman explores a profund tranformation in Western sensibility, and looks at the psychological and political fate of this woman who devoted her life to children.

The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum


Rosalind Krauss - 1990
    Points to the Guggenheim and its developing satellites under the directorship of Thomas Krens as the model for this new industrialized museum.

Programming In Martin Löf's Type Theory: An Introduction


Bengt Nordström - 1990
    One such formalism is the type theory developed by Per Martin-L f. Well suited as a theory for program construction, it makes possible the expression of both specifications and programs within the same formalism. Furthermore, the proof rules can be used to derive a correct program from a specification as well as to verify that a given program has a certain property. This book contains a thorough introduction to type theory, with information on polymorphic sets, subsets, monomorphic sets, and a full set of helpful examples.

Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud


Mark Edmundson - 1990
    Instead, he reads Freud by analogy with major imaginative writers for whom the figuring and refiguring of the self is a central activity. His readings expose a dialectic between the therapeutic Freud and Freud the sublime author and challenge the normative role of psychoanalysis both in society and in literary criticism.Edmundson begins by comparing the Oedipal passage in The Interpretation of Dreams with works of Sophocles and Shakespeare. He reads Freud's "On Narcissism" through the lens of Eve's Narcissus scene in Paradise Lost; considers the papers on therapeutic technique against Wordsworth's Prelude and major lyrics; and places the ethos of "Mourning and Melancholia" in contrast to the American "refusal to mourn" that informs Emerson's essays. The readings show that even as Freud is representing general human limits, he is frequently reinventing himself symbolically in ways that defy his own normative standards. Edmundson asks, then, whether Freud's self-creating drive, or that exemplified by any of the "literary" authors in the study, can serve as an example of useful resistance against the tendencies that normative psychoanalysis reinforces within society.

Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic


Eugenia C. Delamotte - 1990
    Exploring the psychological, religious, and epistemological context of this anxiety, DeLamotte argues that the Gothic vision focuses simultaneously on the private demons of the psyche and the social realities that helped to shape them. Her analysis includes works of English and American authors, among them Henry James, Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Bront�, Charlotte Bront�, and a number of often neglected popular women Gothicists.

Holden Caulfield


Harold Bloom - 1990
    - Examines the most complex and memorable characters in Western literature - A selection of critical essays provides in-depth analysis of the character considered in each volume - A concise character profile discusses the character's key personality traits and physical attributes - Contains an editor's note and introduction by Harold Bloom

Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory


David Garland - 1990
    Drawing on theorists from Durkheim to Foucault, he insightfully critiques the entire spectrum of social thought concerning punishment, and reworks it into a new interpretive synthesis."Punishment and Modern Society is an outstanding delineation of the sociology of punishment. At last the process that is surely the heart and soul of criminology, and perhaps of sociology as well—punishment—has been rescued from the fringes of these 'disciplines'. . . . This book is a first-class piece of scholarship."—Graeme Newman, Contemporary Sociology"Garland's treatment of the theorists he draws upon is erudite, faithful and constructive. . . . Punishment and Modern Society is a magnificent example of working social theory."—John R. Sutton, American Journal of Sociology"Punishment and Modern Society lifts contemporary penal issues from the mundane and narrow contours within which they are so often discussed and relocates them at the forefront of public policy. . . . This book will become a landmark study."—Andrew Rutherford, Legal Studies"This is a superbly intelligent study. Its comprehensive coverage makes it a genuine review of the field. Its scholarship and incisiveness of judgment will make it a constant reference work for the initiated, and its concluding theoretical synthesis will make it a challenge and inspiration for those undertaking research and writing on the subject. As a state-of-the-art account it is unlikely to be bettered for many a year."—Rod Morgan, British Journal of CriminologyWinner of both the Outstanding Scholarship Award of the Crime and Delinquency Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association's Crime, Law, and Deviance Section

Compact Numerical Methods for Computers: Linear Algebra and Function Minimisation


J.C. Nash - 1990
    This edition has been revised and updated, the main difference being that the algorithms are presented in Turbo Pascal.

The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History


Alessandro Portelli - 1990
    Examining cultural conflict and communication between social groups and classes in industrial societies, he identifies the way individuals strive to create memories in order to make sense of their lives, and evaluates the impact of the fieldwork experience on the consciousness of the researcher. By recovering the value of the story-telling experience, Portelli's work makes delightful reading for the specialist and non-specialist alike.