Best of
Theory

1992

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination


Toni Morrison - 1992
    She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

Black Looks: Race and Representation


bell hooks - 1992
    In these twelve essays, bell hooks digs ever deeper into the personal and political consequences of contemporary representations of race and ethnicity within a white supremacist culture.

Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Impacts)


Paulo Freire - 1992
    Pedagogy of Hope represents a chronicle and synthesis of the ongoing social struggles of Latin America and the Third World since the landmark publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Here, Freire once again explores his best-known analytical themes--with even deeper understanding and a greater wisdom. Certainly, all of these themes have to be analyzed as elements of a body of critical, liberationist pedagogy. In this book, we come to understand the author's pedagogical thinking even better, through the critical seriousness, humanistic objectivity, and engaged subjectivity which, in all of Freire's books, are always wedded to a unique creative innovativeness. Pedagogy of Hope is a testimonial to the inner vitality of generations that have not prospered, and to the often silent, generous strength of millions who refuse to let hope be extinguished: people throughout the world who have been empowered by Pedagogy of the Oppressed and all of Paulo Freire's writings.

The Straight Mind: And Other Essays


Monique Wittig - 1992
    These political, philosophical, and literary essays mark the first collection of theoretical writing from the acclaimed novelist and French feminist writer Monique Wittig.

"Coming to Writing" and Other Essays


Hélène Cixous - 1992
    A collection of six essays, translated from the French, in which Cixous explores how the problematics of the sexes - viewed as a paradigm for all difference, the organizing principle behind identity and meaning - manifest and write themselves in texts.

An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology


Pierre Bourdieu - 1992
    Yet, despite the influence of his work, no single introduction to his wide-ranging oeuvre is available. This book, intended for an English-speaking audience, offers a systematic and accessible overview, providing interpretive keys to the internal logic of Bourdieu's work by explicating thematic and methodological principles underlying his work. The structure of Bourdieu's theory of knowledge, practice, and society is first dissected by Loic Wacquant; he then collaborates with Bourdieu in a dialogue in which they discuss central concepts of Bourdieu's work, confront the main objections and criticisms his work has met, and outline Bourdieu's views of the relation of sociology to philosophy, economics, history, and politics. The final section captures Bourdieu in action in the seminar room as he addresses the topic of how to practice the craft of reflexive sociology. Throughout, they stress Bourdieu's emphasis on reflexivity—his inclusion of a theory of intellectual practice as an integral component of a theory of society—and on method—particularly his manner of posing problems that permits a transfer of knowledge from one area of inquiry into another. Amplified by notes and an extensive bibliography, this synthetic view is essential reading for both students and advanced scholars.

The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867-1893)


Charles Sanders Peirce - 1992
    Volume 1 presents twenty-five key texts, chronologically arranged, beginning with Peirce's "On a New List of Categories" of 1867, a highly regarded alternative to Kantian philosophy, and ending with the first sustained and systematic presentation of his evolutionary metaphysics in the "Monist Metaphysical Series" of 1891-1893. The book features a clear introduction and informative headnotes to help readers grasp the nature and significance of Peirce's thought system. Bringing together all the writings needed for the study of Peirce's systematic philosophy and its development, Volume 1 is ideal for classroom use. Volume 2, covering the period from 1894 until Peirce's death in 1914, will highlight the development of his system of signs and his mature pragmatism."...a first-rate edition, which supersedes all other portable Peirces.... all the Peirce most people will ever need." --Louis Menand, The New York Review of Books"The Monist essays are included in the first volume of the compact and welcome Essential Peirce; they are by Peirce's standards quite accessible and splendid in their cosmic scope and assertiveness." --London Review of Books

The Gift of Death


Jacques Derrida - 1992
    Derrida analyzes Patocka's Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Levinas, and Kierkegaard.A major work, The Gift of Death resonates with much of Derrida's earlier writing and will be of interest to scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism, along with scholars of ethics and religion.Collection: Religion and Postmodernism Series

A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari


Brian Massumi - 1992
    When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze's entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text within current debates on postmodern culture and politics.Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of state-happy Marxism and school-building strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.

About Looking


John Berger - 1992
    In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twentieth century? What is it about looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti? In asking these and other questions, Berger quietly -- but fundamentally -- alters the vision of anyone who reads his work.

Incorporations (Zone, #6)


Jonathan Crary - 1992
    Essays, image-text projects, photographic dossiers, and philosophical and scientific articles examine the multiple emergences over the last 100 years of new models of life based on technological and biological developments, whose roots go back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but whose full expression is only beginning to emerge.These new transformations and modalities are discussed and figured in relation to an older set of models that long ago began to dissolve - the classical notions of unity, interiority, and organism. In its heterogeneous approach, Zone 6: Incorporations provides a rich cartographic description of the particular capacities and trajectories of the contemporary body drawing on the work of neurologists, anthropologists, filmmakers, architects, philosophers, historians, biologists, dancers, novelists, and artists.Contributors include: Paul Rabinow, Eve Sedgwick, Francois Dagognet, Peter Eisenman, J. G. Ballard, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze, Klaus Theweleit, Elaine Scarry, Francisco Varela, Liz Diller, Ric Scofidio, John O'Neill, Manuel DeLanda, and Ana Barado.

Lebbeus Woods: Anarchitecture: Architecture is a Political Act (Architectural Monographs No 22)


Lebbeus Woods - 1992
    His drawings are propositions of new ways of living, rather than merely new ways of building. His architecture is instructive: ‘…these projects propose new social structures, implemented by new urban forms and architecture, intended to be realised within existing cities,,’ but it is never prescriptive, always urging possibilities for social, cultural and political transformation.This Monograph illustrates the range of Lebbeus Woods’ ideas. The projects featured here are from the past decade, but have been developed over a whole career, and include the recent Zagreb Free Zone and Berlin Free Zone designs as well as the earlier projects such as Four Cities and Centricity. Together with texts by the architect, they show an architecture informed by science and politics; the free zones and freespaces Woods designs become a ‘second nature’, a terra nova. Peter Noever, in his introduction to the architect’s work writes: ‘Lebbeus Woods’ criticism is shattering. He creates autonomous fields of force with his projects, murderously visionary images: real, frightening, and at the same time liberating.’ As we can see in the work presented in this volume, the force behind the images, models and installations is immense, illustrating an architecture instrumental to the processes of experimentation, change and freedom.Contents:6 AT THE OUTERMOST BOUNDARY by Peter Noever8 ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political ActPROJECTS20 Four Cities24 Centricity34 Timesquare40 Turbulence46 Heterarchies50 Underground Berlin64 Aerial Paris76 D.M.Z.84 Stations88 Solohouse96 Berlin Free Zone110 Zagreb Free Zone128 Antigravity Houses134 Double Landscape, Vienna142 Glossary144 Biography

Lyric Philosophy


Jan Zwicky - 1992
    Her aim is not to dismiss the role of analysis in philosophy; rather she strives to augment its resources and thereby give to philosophy a voice with greater range and integrity.Two parallel texts, on facing pages, run through the book. The primary one is Zwicky's, which begins with a critique of existing criteria for defining a work as philosphy, and then develops the notion of lyric in its relation to two other key terms: technology and domesticity. She finishes with an exploration of meaning, form, and content in lyric contexts.The parallel text consists of quotations from other authors. It serves as commentary on, illustration of, and reaction to, the main text; as a way of acknowledging intellectual debts; and as a way of providing an historical context for some of the main text's claims.Highly original in its thought and presentation, Zwicky's discussion makes an exciting contribution to contemporary philosophy, forging new connections and expanding old boundaries.

The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Meridian-Crossing Aesthetics)


Pierre Bourdieu - 1992
    Drawing upon the history of literature and art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Bourdieu develops an original theory of art conceived as an autonomous value. He argues powerfully against those who refuse to acknowledge the interconnection between art and the structures of social relations within which it is produced and received. As Bourdieu shows, art’s new autonomy is one such structure, which complicates but does not eliminate the interconnection.The literary universe as we know it today took shape in the nineteenth century as a space set apart from the approved academies of the state. No one could any longer dictate what ought to be written or decree the canons of good taste. Recognition and consecration were produced in and through the struggle in which writers, critics, and publishers confronted one another.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film


Carol J. Clover - 1992
    Carol Clover argues, however, that these films work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero - the figure, often a female, who suffers pain and fright but eventually rises to vanquish the forces of oppression.

Guy Debord


Anselm Jappe - 1992
    Anselm Jappe rejects recent attempts to set Debord up as a "postmodern" icon, arguing that he was a social theorist in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition—not a precursor of Jean Baudrillard but an heir of the young Georg Lukács of History and Class Consciousness (1923). Neither hagiographical nor sectarian, Guy Debord places its subject squarely in his historical context: the politicizing Letterist and Situationist "anti-artists" who, in the European aftermath of World War II, sought to criticize and transcend the Surrealist legacy. The book offers a lively, critical, and unusually reliable account of Debord's "last avant-garde" on its way from radical bohemianism to revolutionary theory. Jappe also discusses Debord's films, which are largely inaccessible at present. This English language edition of the book has been revised by the author and features an updated critical bibliography of Debord and the Situationists.»

Commentary on Plato's Parmenides


Proclus - 1992
    Glenn Morrow's death occurred while he was less than halfway through the translation, which was completed by John Dillon. A major work of the great Neoplatonist philosopher, the commentary is an intellectual tour de force that greatly influenced later medieval and Renaissance thought. As the notes and introductory summaries explain, it comprises a full account of Proclus' own metaphysical system, disguised, as is so much Neoplatonic philosophy, in the form of a commentary.

The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts


Axel Honneth - 1992
    Moving smoothly between moral philosophy and social theory, Honneth offers insights into such issues as the social forms of recognition and nonrecognition, the moral basis of interaction in human conflicts, the relation between the recognition model and conceptions of modernity, the normative basis of social theory, and the possibility of mediating between Hegel and Kant.

Sheaves in Geometry and Logic: A First Introduction to Topos Theory


Saunders Mac Lane - 1992
    Frank Adams. His clear insights have inspired many mathematicians, including both of us. In January 1989, when the first draft of our book had been completed, we heard the sad news of his untimely death. This has cast a shadow on our subsequent work. Our views of topos theory, as presented here, have been shaped by continued study, by conferences, and by many personal contacts with friends and colleagues-including especially O. Bruno, P. Freyd, J.M.E. Hyland, P.T. Johnstone, A. Joyal, A. Kock, F.W. Lawvere, G.E. Reyes, R Solovay, R Swan, RW. Thomason, M. Tierney, and G.C. Wraith. Our presentation combines ideas and results from these people and from many others, but we have not endeavored to specify the various original sources. Moreover, a number of people have assisted in our work by pro- viding helpful comments on portions of the manuscript. In this respect, we extend our hearty thanks in particular to P. Corazza, K. Edwards, J. Greenlees, G. Janelidze, G. Lewis, and S. Schanuel.

Notes to Literature, Volume 2


Theodor W. Adorno - 1992
    Also included are Adorno's reflections on a variety of subjects: literary titles, the physical qualities of books, political commitment in literature, the light-hearted and the serious in art, and the use of foreign words in writing, to name a few.

A Identidade Cultural na Pós-Modernidade


Stuart Hall - 1992
    Part of the book "Modernity and its futures", translated to portuguese (Brazil) under the name of "A identidade cultural na pós-modernidade".

The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society


Gillian Rose - 1992
    Extending across the disciplines from philosophy to theology, Judaica, law, social and political theory, literary criticism, feminism and architecture, this book stakes itself on a renewed potential for sustained critique. Against the grain of much contemporary thought, this work of criticism offers the reader a way beyond the spurious alternatives of "totalization" or acknowledgement of the "other". The Broken Middle expounds the phenomenology of the diremption of law and ethics. By reconstructing the suppressed political history of modernity, it shows that contemporary thought belongs to a tradition which has become ancient. Following this drama in the configuration of anxiety of beginning, equivocation of the ethical, and agon of authorship, the logos opens out of the pathos of the concept.

Discourse and Social Change


Norman Fairclough - 1992
    The author shows how concern with the analysis of discourse can be combined, in a systematic and fruitful way, with an interest in broader problems of social analysis and social change. Fairclough provides a concise and critical review of the methods and results of discourse analysis, discussing the descriptive work of linguists and conversation analysts as well as the more historically and theoretically oriented work of Michel Foucault. He develops an original framework for discourse analysis which firmly situates discourse in a broader context of social relations bringing together text analysis, the analysis of processes of text production and interpretation, and the social analysis of discourse events.

Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea Lā E Pono Ai? How Shall We Live in Harmony?


Lilikalā K. Kame'eleihiwa - 1992
    In the end, everything and everyone goes back to the aina (land). Have a good read. It's the truth about what happened in Hawaii over a hundred years ago and why Hawaiians still struggle in the aftermath of greed.

Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation


Mary Louise Pratt - 1992
    The study of travel writing has, however, tended to remain either naively celebratory, or dismissive, treating texts as symptoms of imperial ideologies.Imperial Eyes explores European travel and exploration writing, in conjunction with European economic and political expansion since 1700. It is both a study in the genre and a critique of an ideology. Pratt examines how travel books by Europeans create the domestic subject of European imperialism, and how they engage metropolitan reading publics with expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to the very few. These questions are addressed through readings of travel accounts connected with particular sentimental historical travel writing. It examines the links with abolitionist rhetoric; discursive reinventions of South America during the period of its independence (1800-1840); and 18th-century European writings on Southern Africa in the context of inland expansion.

Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture


Roberto Schwarz - 1992
    Roberto Schwarz’s writings have had a profound effect throughout Latin America. This is the first volume of those writings to appear in English. Taking its title from what has probably been Schwarz’s most influential essay, Misplaced Ideas first examines the slave-owning Brazil of the nineteenth century, to show the persistent gap between liberal ideology based on the free market, and the reality of forced labour. The essays which follow range across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and across film and fiction, theatre and music. They include four pieces on the great novelist Machado de Assis, and a powerful essay on the sometimes bizarre ways Brazilian culture reacted to the imposition of military rule. Throughout, Schwarz continually demonstrates the wit and sharpness which make his writings both a challenge and a pleasure to read.

Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy


Gary J. Miller - 1992
    The former stresses the importance of managerial leadership and cooperation among employees, while the latter focuses on the engineering of incentive systems that will induce efficiency, and profitability, by rewarding worker self-interest. In this innovative book, Gary Miller bridges the gap between these literatures. He demonstrates that it is impossible to design an incentive system based on self-interest that will effectively discipline all subordinates and superiors and obviate or overcome the roles of political conflict, collective action, and leadership in an organization. Applying game theory to the analysis of the roles of cooperation and political leadership in organizational hierarchies, he concludes that the organization whose managers can inspire cooperation and the transcendence of short-term interest in its employees enjoys a competitive advantage.

Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book Machine, the Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group, 1973-1982


Steve McCaffery - 1992
    From scholasticism to pop-up books, the Book of Nature to comic strips, these frequently witty, often irreverent and methodically mischievious reports document a vital era, not only in the intellectual growth of two individuals, but in the history of critical collaboration in North America.With a revised format, additional bibliography and profuse illustrations, this book will prove to be of inestimable value to anyone tracing the poetic archeology of the seventies in Anglophone Canada.

Looking for Genet: Literary Essays and Reviews


Alfred Chester - 1992
    Here too are sketches from his penniless bohemian life in Paris, seven "Letters from Morocco" written for the New York Herald Tribune, and Chester's final piece--the half-mad, previously unpublished "Letter from the Wandering Jew," a howl of rage and despair from his hated final home, Jerusalem. Together these pieces are testament to the life and the talent of the Sixties' most memorable literary iconoclasts.

Living Philosophy: Eco-Philosophy as a Tree of Life


Henryk Skolimowski - 1992
    He seeks to stop the rot, laying out a detailed argument for a new "ecological consciousness" concerned as much for our inner as our outer environment. Attacking modern analytical philosophy, the author claims it is not so much liberation of the mind as "confinement in the circus of technical virtuosity". Our political systems, he says, rob us of our highest attributes and reduce us to despair. Our architecture violates us, and the vacuum in our values breeds indulgence and indifference. The author foresees the tasks as nothing less than a recycling of our minds. For "without wisdom, we shall be like Don Quixote fighting with the windmills".

After Jews And Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture


Ammiel Alcalay - 1992
    Besides grounding Middle Eastern literary studies in ongoing theoretical debates, and also serving as a wide-ranging introduction to inaccessible and neglected literature, After Jews and Arabs will compel a revision of Jewish studies by placing contemporary Israeli culture within its Middle Eastern context and the terms of colonial, postcolonial, postcolonial, and multicultural discourse.

Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power


Peter Paret - 1992
    These essays provide an authoritative introduction to Carl von Clausewitz and enlarge the history of war by joining it to the history of ideas and institutions and linking it with intellectual biography.

Historical and Political Writings


Carl von Clausewitz - 1992
    Clausewitz was also a wide-ranging, innovative historian--his acerbic history of Prussia before 1806 became an underground classic long before it could be published--and a combative political essayist, whose observations on the affairs of Germany and Europe combine social egalitarianism with a nearly Bismarckian Realpolitik. In this companion volume to On War, the editors bring together Clausewitz's political writings and a selection of his historical works--material that is fascinating in its own right, important as a commentary on his theories of war, and a valuable source for understanding European ideas and attitudes during and after the Napoleonic era. None of these works has previously appeared in English, with one exception, which was published in a corrupt, censored text that has now been restored to its original form. The editors have contributed introductions for the historical and for the political parts of the volume, as well as brief introductions to the individual selections. Their analyses and the texts themselves reveal Clausewitz to be an exceptionally independent observer both of the past and of his own times, whose outlook is distinguished by an unideological pragmatism and a keen sense of the possibilities and shortcomings of state power.

The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West


Longxi Zhang - 1992
    In this comparative study, Zhang Longxi investigates the metaphorical nature of poetic language, highlighting the central figures of reality and meaning in both Eastern and Western thought: the Tao and the Logos. The author develops a powerful cross-cultural and interdisciplinary hermeneutic analysis that relates individual works of literature not only to their respective cultures, but to a combined worldview where East meets West. Zhang's book brings together philosophy and literature, theory and practical criticism, the Western and the non-Western in defining common ground on which East and West may come to a mutual understanding. He provides commentary on the rich traditions of poetry and poetics in ancient China; equally illuminating are Zhang's astute analyses of Western poets such as Rilke, Shakespeare, and Mallarmé and his critical engagement with the work of Foucault, Derrida, and de Man, among others. Wide-ranging and learned, this definitive work in East-West comparative poetics and the hermeneutic tradition will be of interest to specialists in comparative literature, philosophy, literary theory, poetry and poetics, and Chinese literature and history.

The Semiotics Of Passion: From States Of Affairs To States Of Feeling


Algirdas Julien Greimas - 1992
    

MIA, or Mythmaking in America


Howard Bruce Franklin - 1992
    or Mythmaking in America adds major new material about Ross Perot's role, the 1991-1992 Senate investigation, and illegal operations authorized by Ronald Reagan. “An important and compelling book. . . . Franklin raises and answers all of the hardest questions about an enduring piece of political mythology.”--The Philadelphia Inquirer“A calm and thoughtful book on a firestorm of a subject. . . . Intelligent, provocative, and courageous.”--Kirkus Reviews

The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway


Scott Donaldson - 1992
    In addition to analyzing his major texts, these chapters provide insight on Hemingway's relationship with gender history, journalism, fame, and the political climate of the 1930s. Contributors include both the most distinguished established figures and brilliant newcomers, all chosen with regard to the clarity and readability of their prose.

Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience


Christopher Bollas - 1992
    Christopher Bollas is such a writer. In the first part of Being a Character, Bollas shows how, as each person invests many of the objects in his life with his or her own unconscious meaning, each person subsequently voyages through an environment that constantly evokes the self's psychic history. Taking Freud's theory of dream work as a model for all unconscious thinking, Bollas argues that we dream work ourselves into becoming who we are, and he illustrates how the analyst and the patient use such unconscious processes to develop new psychic structures that the patient can use to alter his or her self experience. Building on this ground, the latter part of the book describes very special kinds of self experience, including the tragic madness of women cutting themselves, the odd experience of a cruising homosexual in bars and baths, the demented ferocity of the Fascist state of mind, and every person's self experience as a member of his or her historical epoch. He includes a seminal chapter on the Oedipus Complex, eloquently arguing that Sophocles and Freud point to an entirely different resolution to the Oedipus Complex than heretofore argued in any of the schools of psychoanalytic thought.

The Dirac Equation


Bernd Thaller - 1992
    Its applications are so widespread that a description of all aspects cannot be done with sufficient depth within a single volume. In this book the emphasis is on the role of the Dirac equation in the relativistic quantum mechanics of spin-1/2 particles. We cover the range from the description of a single free particle to the external field problem in quantum electrodynamics. Relativistic quantum mechanics is the historical origin of the Dirac equation and has become a fixed part of the education of theoretical physicists. There are some famous textbooks covering this area. Since the appearance of these standard texts many books (both physical and mathematical) on the non relativistic Schrodinger equation have been published, but only very few on the Dirac equation. I wrote this book because I felt that a modern, comprehensive presentation of Dirac's electron theory satisfying some basic requirements of mathematical rigor was still missing."

Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992


Midnight Notes Collective - 1992
    MIDNIGHT OIL is a political journey through two decades of social struggles, ranging from the oil fields of the Middle East and Africa to the coal mines of Appalachia and the homes and neighborhoods of America and Europe. Tracing the unifying themes of work, energy, oil and war, it draws a physiognomy of the planetary proletariat, connecting escaped indentured servants from India to oil workers sabotaging production in the Niger Delta; Gulf War resisters in New York to Kurdish rebels in Iraq; insurrectionary Iranian students to wildcat autoworkers in Detroit; housewives on rent strike in Italy to Boston burners of midnight oil. This book suggests new boundaries, hidden political commonalities and possible strategies for confronting the "New World Order."

Translation, Rewriting, And The Manipulation Of Literary Fame


André Lefevere - 1992
    Lefevere explores how the process of rewriting works of literature manipulates them to ideological and artistic ends, so that the rewritten text can be given a new, sometimes subversive, historical or literary status.

Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Volume 3 - Symbols


Pierre Nora - 1992
    It includes 13 essays on cultural icons from Joan of Arc to Descartes; the national motto of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; the tricolour flag; and the French language itself. The closing essay on commemoration provides an overview of the series.

Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic


Elisabeth Bronfen - 1992
    The conjuction of death, art and femininity forms a rich and disturbing strata of Western culture, explored here in fascinating detail by Elisabeth Bronfen. Her examples range from Carmen to Little Nell, from Wuthering Heights to Vertigo, from Snow White to Frankenstein. The text is richly illustrated throughout with thirty-seven paintings and photographs. The argument that this book presents is that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of our culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me," culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.

Terminology: Theory, Methods And Applications


Maria Teresa Cabré - 1992
    The book covers its subject comprehensively and deals among other things with concepts (the relation between linguistics, cognitive science, communication studies, documentation and computer science); Methodology, especially with regard to specialised language and dictionaries; the social-political challenges of the modern technological society and some solutions from a Terminological point of view; Terminology as a standard in multilingual communication and guardian of cultures. It is particularly suited as a course book.

Corpus (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)


Jean-Luc Nancy - 1992
    How have we thought "the body"? How can we think it anew? The body of mortal creatures, the body politic, the body of letters and of laws, the "mystical body of Christ"-all these (and others) are incorporated in the word Corpus, the title and topic of Jean-Luc Nancy's masterwork.

Modal and Tonal Counterpoint: From Josquin to Stravinsky


Harold Owen - 1992
    Book annotation not available for this title.

Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change


Ira Shor - 1992
    His work creatively adapts the ideas of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire for North American classrooms. In Empowering Education Shor offers a comprehensive theory and practice for critical pedagogy. For Shor, empowering education is a student-centered, critical and democratic pedagogy for studying any subject matter and for self and social change. It takes shape as a dialogue in which teachers and students mutually investigate everyday themes, social issues, and academic knowledge. Through dialogue and problem-posing, students become active agents of their learning. This book shows how students can develop as critical thinkers, inspired learners, skilled workers, and involved citizens. Shor carefully analyzes obstacles to and resources for empowering education, suggesting ways for teachers to transform traditional approaches into critical and democratic ones. He offers many examples and applications for the elementary grades through college and adult education.

Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity


Néstor García Canclini - 1992
    This now-classic work features a new introduction in which Nestor Garcia Canclini calls for a cultural politics to contain the damaging effects of globalization and responds to relevant theoretical developments over the past decade.Garcia Canclini questions whether Latin America can compete in a global marketplace without losing its cultural identity. He moves with ease from the ideas of Gramsci and Foucault to economic analysis, from appraisals of the exchanges between Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges to Chicano film and grafitti. Hybrid Cultures at once clarifies the development of democratic institutions in Latin America and reveals that the most destructive ideological trends are still going strong.

Confronting Tennessee Williams's a Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism


Philip C. Kolin - 1992
    Represented as individual points of view or touched upon in the analysis are the theories of Lacan and Foucault and the tenets of Marxism; the approaches of Feminism, Reader Response Criticism, Deconstructionism, Chaos and Anti-Chaos Theory, Translation Theory, Formalism, Mythology, Perception Theory, and Gender Theory; and the perceptions of Popular Culture, Film History and Theory, Southern Letters, and assorted cultural and regional studies. The volume introduction charts the course of Streetcar criticism from its inception to the present.Each essay begins by articulating the theoretical principles and methods behind the critical approach pursued, then applies these to readings from Streetcar, utilizing and documenting relevant major research. Insightful and challenging, the readings, individually and collectively, advance the study of the play and Tennessee Williams's canon and reputation generally. Each essay offers a fresh, provocative view of a play that has long been discussed in simplistic and dichotomized terms: Blanche as victim/Stanley as predator; Streetcar as a play about a failed southern belle meeting a brutish Pole; or Streetcar as a work of Southern literature. Viewing the play through the lenses of cultural and critical pluralism, the contributors open up the script and expand our awareness of the problems and possibilities offered by this great modern classic.

From Archetype to Zeitgeist: Powerful Ideas for Powerful Thinking


Herbert R. Kohl - 1992
    Organized by topic, each word is explained in a comprehensive yet concise definition, with a pronunciation guide and derivation added for easy reference. The book includes definitions of more than 150 words, from baroque to expressionism, iconography to pointillism, and archetype to zeitgeist.

Morals, Reason, and Animals


Steve F. Sapontzis - 1992
    This book evaluates criticisms of animal rights that have appeared in philosophical literature and explains the consequences of animal liberation for our diet, science, and treatment of the environment.

Baudelaire and Caricature


Michele Hannoosh - 1992
    This book argues for the crucial importance of the essays for his conception of modernity, so fundamental to the subsequent history of modernism. From the theory of the comic formulated in De l'essence du rire to his discussions of Daumier, Goya, Hogarth, Cruikshank, Bruegel, Grandville, Gavarni, Charlet, and many others, Baudelaire develops not only an aesthetic of caricature but also a caricatural aesthetic--dual and contradictory, grotesque, ironic, violent, farcical, fantastic, and fleeting--that defines an art of modern life. In particular, Baudelaire's insistence on the dualism and ambiguity of laughter has radical implications for such emblems of modernity as the city and the flaneur who roams its streets. The modern city is the space of the comic, a kind of caricature, presenting the flaneur with an image of dualism, one's position as subject and object, implicated in the same urban experiences one seems to control. The theory of the comic invests the idea of modernity with reciprocity, one's status as laugher and object of laughter, thus preventing the subjective construction and appropriation of the world that has so often been linked with the project of modernism. Comic art reflects what Walter Benjamin later defined as Baudelairean allegory, at once representing and revealing the alienation of modern experience. But Baudelaire also transforms the dualism of the comic into a peculiarly modern unity--the doubling of the comic artist enacted for the benefit of the audience, the self-generating and self-reflexive experience of theflaneur in a "communion" with the crowd. This study examines his views in the context of the history of comic theory and contemporary accounts of the individual artists. Complete with illustrations of the many works discussed, it illuminates the history and theory of caricature, t

We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: Popular Conservatism And Postmodern Culture


Lawrence Grossberg - 1992
    Bringing together cultural, political and economic analyses, Grossberg offers an interpretation of the contemporary politics of both rock and popular culture.

Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour


Michel Serres - 1992
    In these five lively interviews with sociologist Bruno Latour, this increasingly important cultural figure sheds light on the ideas that inspire his highly original, challenging, and transdisciplinary essays. Serres begins by discussing the intellectual context and historical events-- including the impact of World War II and Hiroshima, which for him marked the beginning of science's ascendancy over the humanities--that shaped his own philosophical outlook and led him to his lifelong mission of bringing together the texts of the humanities and the conceptual revolutions of modern science. He then confronts the major difficulties encountered by his readers: his methodology, his mathematician's fondness for "shortcuts" in argument, and his criteria for juxtaposing disparate elements from different epochs and cultures in extraordinary combinations. Finally, he discusses his ethic for the modern age--a time when scientific advances have replaced the natural necessities of disease and disaster with humankind's frightening new responsibility for vital things formerly beyond its control. In the course of these conversations Serres revisits and illuminates many of his themes: the chaotic nature of knowledge, the need for connections between science and the humanities, the futility of traditional criticism, and what he calls his "philosophy of prepositions"--an argument for considering prepositions, rather than the conventionally emphasized verbs and substantives, as the linguistic keys to understanding human interactions. For readers familiar with Serres's works as well as for the uninitiated, Conversations on a Life in Philosophy provides fascinating insights into the mind of this appealing, innovative and ardent thinker. Michel Serres has taught at Clermont-Ferrand, at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes) and at the Sorbonne. He has served as visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University and has been on the faculty of Stanford University since 1984. Bruno Latour, a philosopher and anthropologist, is Professor of Sociology, L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris. He has written several books and numerous articles on the ties between the sciences and the rest of culture and society. Roxanne Lapidus is Managing Editor of SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism. Conversations on a Life in Philosophy was originally published in France as Eclaircissements.

Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition


Ronald Burt - 1992
    The contrast between perfect competition and monopoly is replaced with a network model of competition. The basic element in this account is the structural hole: a gap between two individuals with complementary resources or information. When the two are connected through a third individual as entrepreneur, the gap is filled, creating important advantages for the entrepreneur. Competitive advantage is a matter of access to structural holes in relation to market transactions.

The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age


Sadie Plant - 1992
    Tracing the history, ideas and influences of this radical and inspiring movement from dada to postmodernism, it argues that situationist ideas of art, revolution, everyday life and the spectacle continue to inform a variety of the most urgent poltical events, cultural movements, and theoretical debates of our times.

Classical Architecture


Demetri Porphyrios - 1992
    The role of imitation, tectonics, ornament, and originality in architecture is discussed and complemented with excerpts from the major classical texts on architecture.This perceptive book, now available for the first time in paperback at a price accessible to students, celebrates the richness and relevance of traditional building forms and techniques, arguing for an historical, informed, innovative architecture.

London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin


Rob Nixon - 1992
    Naipaul stands as the most lionized literary mediator between First and Third World experience and is ordinarily viewed as possessing a unique authority on the subject of cross-cultural relations in the post-colonial era. In contesting this orthodox reading of his work, Nixon argues that Naipaul is more than simply an unduly influential writer. He has become a regressive Western institution, articulating a set of values that perpetuates political interests and representational modes that have their origin in the high imperial age. Nixon uses Naipaul's travel writing to probe the core theoretical issues raised by cross-cultural representation along metropolitan-periphery lines. With reference to economic theories of dependency, he critiques the vision, popularized by Naipaul, of the post-colonial world as divided between mimic and parasitic Third World nations on the one hand and, on the other, the benignly creative societies of the West.

Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life


Henri Lefebvre - 1992
    In the analysis of rhythms -- both biological and social -- Lefebvre shows the interrelation of space and time in the understanding of everyday life.With dazzling skills, Lefebvre moves between discussions of music, the commodity, measurement, the media and the city. In doing so he shows how a non-linear conception of time and history balanced his famous rethinking of the question of space. This volume also includes his earlier essays on "The Rhythmanalysis Project" and "Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Towns.">

Classical and Quantum Dynamics: From Classical Paths to Path Integrals


Walter Dittrich - 1992
    This new edition has been revised and enlarged with chapters on the action principle in classical electrodynamics, on the functional derivative approach, and on computing traces.

Le Jugement De Paris (Iconologie Analytique) (French Edition)


Hubert Damisch - 1992
    Damisch's tale begins with the judgment of Paris, in which Paris awards Venus the golden apple and thus forever links beauty with desire. The casting of this decision as a mistake following the revisions and repetitions of the motif of the judgment through art history, philosophy, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. This translation brings an important figure of the French art historical tradition to Anglo-American audiences.

The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture


George Kateb - 1992
    Kateb argues that democracy is founded on respect for the dignity of individuals as individuals, and that this respect transforms all human relations. Democratic individuality, in his view, is a way in which individuals whose rights are protected may dare to live their private lives and to conceive their roles as citizens. The book's ten essays explore democratic individuality in light of such topics as the power of political institutions to accommodate and express different values, the moral distinctiveness of representative democracy, the implications of the liberal social contract, and the possibility of human extinction.

Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari


Giuliana Bruno - 1992
    This innovative approach---the interweaving of examples of cinema with architecture, art history, medical discourse, photography, and literature--addresses the challenge posed by feminism to film study while calling attention to marginalized artists. An object of this critical remapping is Elvira Notari (1875-1946), Italy's first and most prolific woman filmmaker, whose documentary-style work on street life in Naples, a forerunner of neorealism, was popularly acclaimed in Italy and the United States until its suppression during the Fascist regime. Since only fragments of Notari's films exist today, Bruno illuminates the filmmaker's contributions to early Italian cinematography by evoking the cultural terrain in which she operated. What emerges is an intertextual montage of urban film culture highlighting a woman's view on love, violence, poverty, desire, and death. This panorama ranges from the city's exteriors to the body's interiors. Reclaiming an alternative history of women's filmmaking and reception, Bruno draws a cultural history that persuasively argues for a spatial, corporal interpretation of film language.

First & Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot


Kenneth Dean - 1992
    schizoanalysis: Reagan/Bush vs 1st Chinese Empire

The Green Thoreau


Henry David Thoreau - 1992
    Quotations from Thoreau's works reveal his love of the natural world and his desire to learn from nature.

Autoaesthetics: Strategies of the Self After Nietzsche


Stephen F. Barker - 1992
    Based on Nietzche's own practice of combining poetry and philosophy by transcending ressentiment and approaching life to its fullest, Autoaesthetics engages in a heated but intricate debate through and with Nietzche's re-articulation of the self as a strategic (and impossible) aesthetic creation. Stephen Barker argues that all notions of self are aesthetic, literary, strategic, and teleological, and must be seen not in the context of any essential self but as a complex series of self-articulations. He sets out a strategy of reading that combines Nietzschean "psychology" with subsequent theoretical investigations and shows how Nietzschean dialectics of the self are at work in all (self-defining) human experience in the (post)modern world. His book itself is a play of dialectics (again after Nietzche), designed for interdisciplinary scholars and graduate students interested in exploring the scope of literary and aesthetic theory and philosophy.

Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment


Albrecht Wellmer - 1992
    Focusing on the cultural and political aspects of Habermas's work, the essays take up critical theory and political practice, the sociology of political practice, historical-philosophical reflections on culture, moral development in childhood and society, and the foundations of critical social theory. Essays in a companion volume, Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, look at the metaphysical aspects of Habermas's work. Together, the two volumes underscore the richness and variety of Habermas's project.ContributorsJohann P. Amason, Andrew Arato, Seyla Benhabib, Hauke Brunkhorst, Cornelius Castoriadis, Jean Cohen, Helmut Dubiel, Klaus Eder, Günter Frankenberg, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Axel Honneth, Johann Baptist Metz, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, Claus Offe

Shows of Force: Power, Politics, and Ideology in Art Exhibitions


Timothy W. Luke - 1992
    Luke demonstrates in Shows of Force, artwork is capable of saying plenty, and much of the message resides in the way it is exhibited. By critically examining the exhibition of art in contemporary American museums, Luke identifies how art showings are elaborate works of theater that reveal underlying political, social, and economic agendas.The first section, “Envisioning a Past, Imagining the West,” looks at art exhibitions devoted to artworks about or from the American West. Luke shows how these exhibitions—displaying nineteenth- and early-twentieth century works by artists such as George Caleb Bingham, Frederic Remington, Frederic Edwin Church, and Georgia O’Keefe—express contemporary political agendas in the way the portray “the past” and shape new visions of “the West.”In “Developing the Present, Defining a World,” Luke considers artists from the post-1945 era, including Ilya Kabokov, Hans Haacke, Sue Coe, Roger Brown, and Robert Longo. Recent art exhibits, his analysis reveals, attempt to develop politically charged conceptions of the present, which in turn struggle to define the changing contemporary world and art’s various roles within it.Luke brings to light the contradictions encoded in the exhibition of art and, in doing so, illuminates the political realities and cultural ideologies of the present. Shows of Force offers a timely and surely controversial contribution to current discussions of the politics of exhibiting art.

People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective


Howard Eilberg-Schwartz - 1992
    The project of re-membering the Jewish body has both historical and constructive motivations. As a constructive project, this book describes, renews, and participates in the complex and ongoing modern discussion about the nature of Jewish bodies and the place of bodies in Judaism.

Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl's Theory of Art


Margaret Olin - 1992
    It reinterprets his studies in the light of a theory of "structural symbolism".

Categories and Computer Science


R.F.C. Walters - 1992
    Here, the theory is developed in a straightforward way, and is enriched with many examples from computer science.