Best of
Theory

1994

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom


bell hooks - 1994
    Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.Bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise critical questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself."To educate as the practice of freedom," writes bell hooks, "is a way of teaching that any one can learn." Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher's struggle to make classrooms work.–from the back of the book

Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations


bell hooks - 1994
    Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection of essays that pulls no punches. As hooks herself notes, interrogations of popular culture can be a 'powerful site for intervention, challenge and change'. And intervene, challenge and change is what hooks does best.

Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s


Michael Omi - 1994
    This second edition builds upon and updates Omi and Winant's groundbreaking research. In addition to a preface to the new edition, the book provides a more detailed account of the theory of racial formation processes. It includes material on the historical development of race, the question of racism, race-class-gender interrelationships, and everyday life. A final chapter updates the developments in American racial politics up to the present, focusing on such key events as the 1992 Presidential election, the Los Angeles riots, and the Clinton administration's racial politics and policies."…required reading for scholars engaged in historical, sociological, and cultural studies of race. In the new edition, the authors further develop their provocative theory of 'racial formation' and extend their political analyses into the 1990s. They introduce the concept of 'racial project', linking race as representation with race as it is embedded in the social structure." -- Angela Y. Davis

The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control, Volume 1


Theodore W. Allen - 1994
    Historical debate about the origin of racial slavery has focused on the status of the Negro in seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland. However, as Theodore W. Allen argues in this magisterial work, what needs to be studied is the transformation of English, Scottish, Irish and other European colonists from their various statuses as servants, tenants, planters or merchants into a single new all-inclusive status: that of whites. This is the key to the paradox of American history, of a democracy resting on race assumptions.Volume One of this two-volume work attempts to escape the “white blind spot” which has distorted consecutive studies of the issue. It does so by looking in the mirror of Irish history for a definition of racial oppression and for an explanation of that phenomenon in terms of social control, free from the absurdities of classification by skin color. Compelling analogies are presented between the history of Anglo-Irish and British rule in Ireland and American White Supremacist oppression of Indians and African-Americans. But the relativity of race is shown in the sea change it entailed, whereby emigrating Irish haters of racial oppression were transformed into White Americans who defended it. The reasons for the differing outcomes of Catholic Emancipation and Negro Emancipation are considered and occasion is made to demonstrate Allen’s distinction between racial and national oppression.

Conversations with Toni Morrison


Danille K. Taylor-Guthrie - 1994
    These collected interviews reveal her to be much more. She has shared space in her creative life for her career in publishing, in teaching, and in being a single parent. Writing, however, is one thing she "refuses to live without." These interviews beginning in 1974 reveal an artist whose creativity is intimately linked with her African American experience and is fueled by cultural and societal concerns. For twenty years she has created unforgettable characters in her acclaimed novels--The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz. Morrison tells her interviewers that her goal as a writer is to present African American life not as sociology but in the full range of its depth, magic, and humanity. "I want my work to capture the vast imagination of black people," she says. "That is, I want my books to reflect the imaginative combination of the real world, the very practical, shrewd, day-to-day functioning that black people do, while at the same time they encompass some great supernatural element." Though the scope and the magnitude of her art have brought her international acclaim, even some of her most ardent admirers have viewed her fiction mainly with a focus on class, race, and gender. In these interviews, however, she addresses the artist's concern with moral vision and with a resistance to critical attitudes that categorize black writing largely as sociology. From these interviews comes a greater understanding of Toni Morrison's purpose and the theme of love that streams through her fiction.

Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives


Dee L.R. Graham - 1994
    J. Simpson? Why women were no more supportive of the Equal Rights Amendment than men? Why women are no more likely than men to support a female political candidate? Why women are no more likely than men to embrace feminism--a movement by, about, and for women? Why some women stay with men who abuse them? "Loving to Survive" addresses just these issues and poses a surprising answer. Likening women's situation to that of hostages, Dee L. R. Graham and her co- authors argue that women bond with men and adopt men's perspective in an effort to escape the threat of men's violence against them.Dee Graham's announcement, in 1991, of her research on male-female bonding was immediately followed by a national firestorm of media interest. Her startling and provocative conclusion was covered in dozens of national newspapers and heatedly debated. In "Loving to Survive," Graham provides us with a complete account of her remarkable insights into relationships between men and women.In 1973, three women and one man were held hostage in one of the largest banks in Stockholm by two ex-convicts. These two men threatened their lives, but also showed them kindness. Over the course of the long ordeal, the hostages came to identify with their captors, developing an emotional bond with them. They began to perceive the police, their prospective liberators, as their enemies, and their captors as their friends, as a source of security. This seemingly bizarre reaction to captivity, in which the hostages and captors mutually bond to one another, has been documented in other cases as well, and has become widely known as Stockholm Syndrome.The authors of this book take this syndrome as their starting point to develop a new way of looking at male-female relationships. "Loving to Survive" considers men's violence against women as crucial to understanding women's current psychology. Men's violence creates ever-present, and therefore often unrecognized, terror in women. This terror is often experienced as a fear for any woman of rape by any man or as a fear of making any man angry. They propose that women's current psychology is actually a psychology of women under conditions of captivitythat is, under conditions of terror caused by male violence against women. Therefore, women's responses to men, and to male violence, resemble hostages' responses to captors."Loving to Survive" explores women's bonding to men as it relates to men's violence against women. It proposes that, like hostages who work to placate their captors lest they kill them, women work to please men, and from this springs women's femininity. Femininity describes a set of behaviors that please men because they communicate a woman's acceptance of her subordinate status. Thus, feminine behaviors are, in essence, survival strategies. Like hostages who bond to their captors, women bond to men in an effort to survive.This is a book that will forever change the way we look at male-female relationships and women's lives.

Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation


Thongchai Winichakul - 1994
    Siam Mapped challenges much that has been written on Thai history because it demonstrates convincingly that the physical and political definition of Thailand on which other works are based is anachronistic.

The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony


Maurice Blanchot - 1994
    More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns.The book consists of The Instant of My Death, a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot's narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical—from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life—but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of what it means to write about a (non)experience one cannot claim as one's own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness.Derrida's reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation between European intellectuals and World War II.

Nomadic Subjects


Rosi Braidotti - 1994
    Braidotti argues for a new kind of philosophical thinking, one that would include the insights of feminism and abandon the hegemonic mode that is conventionally adopted in high theory.

Unthinking Eurocentrism


Ella Shohat - 1994
    The book 'multiculturalizes' media studies by looking at Hollywood movie genres such as the western, the musical and the imperial film from multicultural perspectives, examining issues from the racial politics of casting to colonialist discourse and gender and Empire.More than just a critique of Eurocentrism and racism, Unthinking Eurocentrism also confirms artistic, cultural and political alternatives, discussing a wide range of non-Eurocentric media including Third World films, rap video and indigenous media. Synthesising literary theory, meida theory and cultural studies to form a challenging interdisciplinary study, the authors argue that current debatess about Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism are merely surface manifestations of a deep-rooted shift: the decolonisation of global culture.

¡Ya Basta!: Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising


Subcomandante Marcos - 1994
    And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution but a dreaming revolution.”—Naomi KleinThe most comprehensive collection of essays and communiqués by Subcomandante Marcos chronicles the written voice of the Zapatista movement and its struggle to open a space within the neoliberal, globalized landscape for the oppressed peoples of the world. Complete from their first public appearance in 1994 through their 10-year anniversary celebrations and period of restructuring in 2004.“The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas was certainly one of the most dramatic and important instances in our time of a genuine grassroots movement against oppression. In this volume, the writings of Subcomandante Marcos give eloquent expression to this movement, revealing both its philo-sophical foundations and its tactical ingenuity. I believe his words and the statements of the Zapatistas can inspire a new generation of activists and let them understand that it is possible for ordinary people, without military power, without wealth, to challenge state power successfully on behalf of social justice. [This] fantastic collection of Marcos’ words conveys the spirit of the Zapatistas as no other book I know has done.”—Howard Zinn“After over 500 years of conquest, the indigenous -people already know what the rest of us must learn about empires: that they exploit the many for the privileges of the few, that they ransack the cultures of antiquity, that they place a burden even on the mother countries. But in their actions and writings, the Zapatistas are inspiring a new generation to join the struggle for a better world. It’s our world too!”—Tom Hayden

Subversive Dialogues: Theory In Feminist Therapy


Laura S. Brown - 1994
    While much has been written on feminism and therapy, this bold book breaks new ground by making explicit and coherent the theoretical underpinnings of feminist therapy.Building on the revolutionary work of feminist scholars who have described how women employ strategies of knowing the world in a manner distinct from men, Laura S. Brown, noted for her pioneering work in the field of ethics and boundaries, shows how these insights should reshape the very nature of the therapeutic encounter. Therapy must be understood as an opportunity to help clients see the relationships between their behavior and the patriarchal society in which we are all embedded. Viewed in this light, feminist therapy affords both practitioner and client a chance to subvert the system in which women’s lives have been devalued.With meticulous care, the author examines key features of the therapeutic encounter with a feminist lens: the power of the therapist; assessment and diagnosis; the nature of change; the ethics of practice; and differences in race, class, and sexual identity. She constructs a vision of therapy that helps the client develop a sense of entitlement to satisfying and equal relationships outside the therapist’s office. She proposes that clients need help finding their “mother tongue” and retelling their story in a language freed from the patriarchal notions that have shaped and limited their experience. Her vision of therapy considers the dilemmas faced by feminist therapists who must work within a mental health system that is inherently sexist and use its flawed or problematic tools for testing and treatment.This powerful vision of feminist therapy is grounded throughout with case examples that illustrate how a dialogue between therapist and client can be healing, subversive, and transformative all at once.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists


Joan Copjec - 1994
    Ordinarily, these discourses only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede historicity to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical process, its generative principles, and its complex functionings.

Ways of the Tzaddikim: Orchos Tzaddikim (Torah Classics Library)


Moshe Chayim Luzzatto - 1994
    This is a newly researched, corrected, annotated and vowelized Hebrew edition with a contemporary English translation. Discusses refining character traits and maintaining a balance in all matters.

Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event: Together with the Vocabulary of Deleuze


François Zourabichvili - 1994
    From the publication of Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event to his untimely death in 2006, Fran�ois Zourabichvili was regarded as one of the most important new voices of contemporary philosophy in France. His work continues to make an essential contribution to Deleuze scholarship today.This edition makes two of Zourabichvili's most important writings on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze available in a single volume. A Philosophy of the Event (1994) is an exposition of Deleuze's philosophy as a whole, while the complementary Deleuze's Vocabulary (2003) approaches Deleuze's work through an analysis of key concepts in a dictionary form.This new translation is set to become an event within Deleuze Studies for many years to come.Key Features: Distinguishes Deleuze's notion of the event from the phenomenological, ontological and voluntarist conceptions that continue to lay claim to it today With an introduction by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, two of the world's leading commentators on Deleuze, explaining the key themes and arguments of Zourabichvili's work

Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community


Jack Collom - 1994
    It also discusses how to integrate poetry writing into the English class and essential topics such as sound and rhythm, traditional poetic forms, inventing and adapting exercises, revision, and publishing. "The lessons are presented with clarity, common sense, and sophisticated artistic sensibilities."-Missoula Independent "Poetry Everywhere will ease any trepidation [about writing poetry]."-English Journal

Simple Composition


Charles Wuorinen - 1994
    F. Peters Corporation in 1994. The author, the composer Charles Wuorinen, describes the book in this way : "--this book is written by a composer and is addressed to other composers - intending or actual, amateur or professional. Thus it is similar in intent to certain older books on the subject like Thomas Morley's "A Plain and Easie Introduction to Practical Musicke" (1597), for instance...It outlines present practice, and while it can be used for purely didactic purposes, it can also be employed in composing "real" music." "In writing this book, I intended it primarily as a guide for composers in search of practical advice and models of how one might work compositionally. But since my presentation made extensive use of the twelve-tone system in its simplest and most easily describable form, the book was taken as a primer in that system. The fact that I used twelve-tone relations for convenience and only because of their simplicity was somehow overlooked. Perhaps today in 1994 (the year this book was reissued after its first publication in 1979) the book may make a slightly different contribution than it originally did: to offer a basic outline of a musical system and method that has proved immensly rich since its introduction by Schoenberg seventy-five years ago, as well as to provide a few practical tips."---Charles Wuorinen

Fighting by Minutes: Time and the Art of War


Robert R. Leonhard - 1994
    Leonhard introduces a bold new theory that focuses on time as the critical component that controls all other aspects of war. Well-grounded in history, Leonhard's work is certain to take its place as a classic theory of war according to James R. McDonough, who wrote the foreword.

Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics--A Collection of Written Interviews


Samuel R. Delany - 1994
    Delany, whose theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy has won him a broad audience among academics and fans of postmodernist fiction, offers insights into and explorations of his own experience as writer, critic, theorist, and gay black man in his new collection of written interviews, a form he describes as a type of "guided essay." Gathered from sources as diverse as Diacritics and Comics Journal, these interviews reveal the broad range of his thought and interests.

A Woman's Unconscious Use of Her Body


Dinora Pines - 1994
    In this perceptive and engrossing book, an eminent psychoanalyst explores key moments of women's lives and sexuality, examining how their unconscious minds are expressed through their bodies and, conversely, how their body experiences impinge upon their minds. Drawing on numerous examples from her clinical practice, Dinora Pines tells vivid stories of how young, pregnant women learn to integrate reality with unconscious fantasies, hopes, and daydreams; how women cope with the psychological antecedents and consequences of miscarriage, abortion, and infertility; and how older women adjust to the end of fertility and to old age, with the attendant issues of loss. Pines concludes by discussing her work with Holocaust survivors and children of survivors who unconsciously somatize their emotional distress about the horrors of the war and postwar years. Throughout she enables us to see how the analytic encounter can reveal and relate the secrets of the mind and body and provide a space for thought and change.

Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions


Robert Allen Warrior - 1994
    

The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1


Nicolas Abraham - 1994
    Abraham and Torok advocate a form of psychoanalysis that insists on the particularity of any individual's life story, the specificity of texts, and the singularity of historical situations. In what is both a critique and an extension of Freud, they develop interpretive strategies with powerful implications for clinicians, literary theorists, feminists, philosophers, and all others interested in the uses and limits of psychoanalysis.Central to their approach is a general theory of psychic concealment, a poetics of hiding. Whether in a clinical setting or a literary text, they search out the unspeakable secret as a symptom of devastating trauma revealed only in linguistic or behavioral encodings. Their view of trauma provides the linchpin for new psychic and linguistic structures such as the "transgenerational phantom," an undisclosed family secret handed down to an unwitting descendant, and the intra-psychic secret or "crypt," which entombs an unspeakable but consummated desire. Throughout, Abraham and Torok seek to restore communication with those intimate recesses of the mind which are, for one reason or another, denied expression.Classics of French theory and practice, the essays in volume one include four previously uncollected works by Maria Torok. Nicholas Rand supplies a substantial introductory essay and commentary throughout. Abraham and Torok's theories of fractured meaning and their search for coherence in the face of discontinuity and disruption have the potential to reshape not only psychoanalysis but all disciplines concerned with issues of textual, oral, or visual interpretation.

Foreign Bodies


Alphonso Lingis - 1994
    Calling on the new means contemporary thinkers have used to understand the body, Alphonso Lingis explores forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity. The book contrasts the findings of theory with the practice of the body as formulated in quite different kinds of language--the language of plastic art (the artwork body builders make of themselves), biography, anthropology and literature. Lingis explains how we experience our own powers of perception, our postures, attitudes, gestures and purposive action; how our susceptibility to pain and excitability by pleasure acquiesce in and resist the ways they are identified and manipulated today; how cultures code our sensuality with phallic and with fluid identities; how others dress appeals to and puts demands on us.

The Theory of Architecture: Concepts, Themes and Practices


Paul-Alan Johnson - 1994
    This guide asserts that architectural theory does not direct practice, but is itself a form of reflective practice. Paul-Alan Johnson cuts through the jargon and mystery of architectural theory to clarify how it relates to actual applications in the field. He also reveals the connections between new and old ideas to enhance the reader's powers of critical evaluation. Nearly 100 major concepts, themes, and practices of architecture—as well as the rhetoric of architects and designers—are presented in an easily accessible format. Throughout, Johnson attempts to reduce each architectural notion into its essential concept. By doing so, he makes theory accessible for everyday professional discussion. Topics are arranged under ten headings: identification, definition, power, attitudes, ethics, order, authority, governance, relationship, and expression. Areas covered under these headings include: Utopic thought in theories of architecture Advocacy and citizen participation in architecture The basis of architectural quality and excellence The roles of the architect as artist, poet, scientist, and technologist Ethical obligations of architecture Rationales for models and methods of design How authority is determined in architecture How architects structure their concepts Conventions of communication within the architectural profession Each section begins by showing the etymology of key terms of the topic discussed, along with a summary history of the topic's use in architecture. Discussions probe the conceptual and philosophical difficulties of different theories, as well as their potential and limitations in past and present usage. Among the provocative issues discussed in terms of their relationship to architecture are chaos theory, feminism, service to the community, and the use of metaphor. Johnson points out with stunning clarity the intentions as well as the contradictions and inconsistencies of all notions and concepts. All architects and designers, as well as students and teachers in these disciplines, will gain many insights about architectural thought in this groundbreaking text.

An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics


Suzanne Eggins - 1994
    An approach which views language as a strategic, meaning-making resource, systemic linguistics focuses on the analysis of authentic, everyday texts, and asks both how people use language to make meanings, and how language itself is organised to enable those meanings to be made.The book offers both an overview of systemic theory and illustrations of how systemic techniques can be applied in the analysis of everyday texts. Written for students who may have little or no formal knowledge of linguistics, it covers most of the major concepts in systemic linguistics. In addition, it introduces readers to Halliday's functional grammatical analysis of English clauses, and presents the essentials of the systemic analysis of cohesive patterns in text.With its systemic theory of the relationship between language and context, systemic linguistics has applications in many fields where an understanding of how language functions to transmit social structure is important, in , for example, language education, cultural studies, stylistics, and women's studies. The book provides an accessible first step into systemics for those who wish to equip themselves with the conceptual and practical tools to analyse and explain how people make meanings with each other in everyday contexts.

Commedia Dell'arte: An Actor's Handbook


John Rudlin - 1994
    And it remians a central part of many drama school courses. In Commedia dell'arte in the Twentieth Century John Rublin first examines the orgins of this vital theatrical form and charts its recent revival through the work of companies like Tag, Theatre de Complicite and the influential methods of Jacques Lecoq. The second part of the book provides a unique practical guide for would-be practitioners: demonstrating how to approach the roles of Zanni, Arlecchion, Brighella, Pantalone, Dottore, and the Lovers in terms of movement, mask-work and voice. As well as offering a range of lazzi or comic business, improvisation exercises, sample monologues, and dialogues. No other book so clearly outlines the specific culture of Commedia or provides such a practical guide to its techniques. This immensely timely and useful handbook will be an essential purchase for all actors, students, and teachers.

Philosophy of Nonsense


Jean-Jacques Lecercle - 1994
    Using the resources of contemporary philosophy - notably Deleuze and Lyotard - he manages to bring out the importance of nonsense' - Andrew Benjamin, University of Warwick Why are we, and in particular why are philosophers and linguists, so fascinated with nonsense? Why do Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear appear in so many otherwise dull and dry academic books? This amusing, yet rigorous new book by Jean-Jacques Lecercle shows how the genre of nonsense was constructed and why it has proved so enduring and enlightening for linguistics and philosophy.

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life


Giorgio Agamben - 1994
    Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle’s notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over “life” is implicit.The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign’s status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective “naked life” of all individuals.

The Culture of Literacy


Wlad Godzich - 1994
    Wlad Godzich, one of the animators of the turn toward literary theory, seeks to restore historical consciousness to criticism after a period of painful depression. In this sweeping study, he considers the emergence of the modern state, the institutions and disciplines of culture and learning, as well as the history of philosophy, the history of historiography, and literary history itself. He offers a powerful account of semiotics; an important critical perspective on narratology; a profound discussion of deconstruction; and many brief, practical demonstrations of why Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger remain essential resources for contemporary critical thought.The culture of literacy is on the wane, Godzich argues. Throughout the modern period, language has been the institution that provided the condition of possibility for all other institutions, from university to church to state. But the pervasive crisis of meaning we now experience is the result of a shift in the modes of production of knowledge. The culture of literacy has been faced with transformations it cannot accommodate, and the existing organization of knowledge has been challenged. By wedding literature to a reflective practice of history, Godzich leads us toward a critique of political reason, and a profound sense of how postmodernity can overcome by deftly sidestepping the modern. This book will bring to a wider audience the work of a writer who is recognized as one of the most commanding figures of his generation for range, learning, and capacity for innovation.

Traditional Acupuncture: The Law of the Five Elements


Dianne M. Connelly - 1994
    Dr. Connelly shows how traditional acupuncture can make a difference, both in our moment-to-moment appreciation of life and in the way we hold life s bigger picture. Includes a description of the examination done before acupuncture treatment, as well as many case examples. Requires no technical knowledge; fine for the general reader interested in acupuncture and health. Trade Paperback

Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez


Franco Moretti - 1994
    How about "Moby-Dick"? Encyclopedia, novel or romance? Or even a 'singular medley, ' as one anonymous 1851 review put it? ... 'It is no longer a novel, ' T.S. Eliot said of "Ulysses." But if not novels, then what are they?" Literary history has long been puzzled by how to classify and treat these aesthetic monuments. In this highly original and interdisciplinary work, Franco Moretti builds a theory of the modern epic: a sort of super-genre that has provided many of the "sacred texts" of Western literary culture. He provides a taxonomy capable of accommodating "Faust," "Moby-Dick, The Nibelung's Ring, Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, The Man Without Qualities "and "One Hundred Years of Solitude." For Moretti the significance of the modern epic reaches well beyond the aesthetic sphere: it is the form that represents the European domination of the planet, and establishes a solid consent around it. Political ambition and formal inventiveness are here continuously entwined, as the representation of the world system stimulates the technical breakthroughs of polyphony, reverie and leitmotif; of the stream of consciousness, collage and complexity. Opening with an analysis of Goethe's "Faust" and the different historical roles of epic and the novel, Moretti moves through a discussion of Wagner's "Ring" and on to a sociology of modernist technique. He ends with a fascinating interpretation of "magic realism" as a compromise formation between a number of modernist devices and the return of narrative interest, and suggests that the west's enthusiastic reception of these texts (and "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in particular) constitutes a ritual self-absolution for centuries of colonialism.

A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem


Georges Canguilhem - 1994
    Trained as both a medical doctor and a philosopher, Canguilhem overlapped these practices to demonstrate that there could be no epistemology without concrete study of the actual development of the sciences and no worthwhile history of science without a philosophical understanding of the conceptual basis of all knowledge.A Vital Rationalist brings together for the first time some of Canguilhem's most important writings, including excerpts from previously unpublished manuscripts. Organized around the major themes and problems that have preoccupied Canguilhem throughout his intellectual career, this collection allows readers both familiar and unfamiliar with Canguilhem's work access to a vast array of conceptual and concrete meditations on epistemology, methodology, science, and history. Although Canguilhem is a demanding writer, Delaporte succeeds in identifying the main lines of his thought with unrivaled clarity and maps out the complex and crucial place this thinker holds in the history of twentieth-century French thought.

Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time


Gary Saul Morson - 1994
    Drawing on works by the Russian writers Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, by other writers as diverse as Sophocles, Cervantes, and George Eliot, by thinkers as varied as William James, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stephen Jay Gould, and from philosophy, the Bible, television, and much more, Gary Saul Morson examines the relation of time to narrative form and to an ethical dimension of the literary experience.Morson asserts that the way we think about the world and narrate events is often in contradiction to the truly eventful and open nature of daily life. Literature, history, and the sciences frequently present experience as if contingency, chance, and the possibility of diverse futures were all illusory. As a result, people draw conclusions or accept ideologies without sufficiently examining their consequences or alternatives. However, says Morson, there is another way to read and construct texts. He explains that most narratives are developed through foreshadowing and "backshadowing" (foreshadowing ascribed after the fact), which tend to reduce the multiplicity of possibilities in each moment. But other literary works try to convey temporal openness through a device he calls "sideshadowing." Sideshadowing suggests that to understand an event is to grasp what else might have happened. Time is not a line but a shifting set of fields of possibility. Morson argues that this view of time and narrative encourages intellectual pluralism, helps to liberate us from the false certainties of dogmatism, creates a healthy skepticism of present orthodoxies, and makes us aware that there are moral choices available to us.

The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923


Johanna Drucker - 1994
    In The Visible Word, Johanna Drucker shows how later art criticism has distorted our understanding of such works. She argues that Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists emphasized materiality as the heart of their experimental approach to both visual and poetic forms of representation; by mid-century, however, the tenets of New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized the visual and the literary.Drucker suggests a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists, based on a rereading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in the typographic experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s: Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara.Few studies of avant-garde art and literature in the early twentieth century have acknowledged the degree to which typographic activity furthered debates about the very nature and function of the avant-garde. The Visible Word enriches our understanding of the processes of change in artistic production and reception in the twentieth century.

God Between Their Lips: Desire Between Women in Irigaray, Brontë, and Eliot


Kathryn Bond Stockton - 1994
    To begin with the study's underlying paradox, "spiritual materialism": the author wishes to understand why the act of grasping materialities—a sob in the body or the body itself—has so often required a spiritual discourse; why materialism, as a way of naming matter-on-its-own-terms, and material relations that still lie submerged, hidden from view, evoke the shadowy forms we call "spiritual."

Manna: For the Mandelstams for the Mandelas


Hélène Cixous - 1994
     "Cixous draws parallels between two couples-Nelson and Winnie Mandela, who fought a decades-long struggle against South African apartheid, and the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who, with his wife, Nadezhda, waged a moral revolt against Stalinism. Each couple faced arbitrary arrests, imprisonment, and banishment for refusing to submit to a corrupt system. Each woman gave her husband hope and inspiration to carry on, yet was also a moving force in her own right. This extraordinary experimental fiction includes passages of astonishing beauty and a deep meditation on the wellsprings of political resistance." Publishers Weekly Perhaps France's best-known feminist thinker, Hélène Cixous is the author of over thirty volumes of fiction and critical theory. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray is assistant professor of English and women's studies at the University of Northern Iowa. Translation Inquiries: Des Femmes

The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority


John Patrick Diggins - 1994
    After suffering a brief eclipse in the post-World War II period, pragmatism has experienced a revival, especially in literary theory and such areas as poststructuralism and deconstruction. In this critique of pragmatism and neopragmatism, one of our leading intellectual historians traces the attempts of thinkers from William James to Richard Rorty to find a response to the crisis of modernism. John Patrick Diggins analyzes the limitations of pragmatism from a historical perspective and dares to ask whether America's one original contribution to the world of philosophy has actually fulfilled its promise."Diggins, an eminent historian of American intellectual life, has written a timely and impressive book charting the rich history of American pragmatism and placing William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Sidney Hook, and Richard Rorty in their times and in the light of contemporary concerns. The book also draws on an alternative set of American thinkers to explore the blind spots in the pragmatic temper."—William Connolly, New York Times Book Review"An extraordinarily ambitious work of both analysis and synthesis. . . . Diggins's book is rewarding in its thoughtfulness and its nuanced presentation of ideas."—Daniel J. Silver, Commentary"Diggins's superbly informed book comprises a comprehensive history of American pragmatic thought. . . . It contains expert descriptions of James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce, the first generation of American pragmatists. . . . Diggins is just as good on the revival of pragmatism that's taken place over the last 20 years in America. . . . [A] richly intelligent book."—Mark Edmundson, Washington Post Book World

Eating On The Street: Teaching Literacy in a Multicultural Society


Dave Schaafsma - 1994
    During a field trip in Detroit on a summer day in 1989, a group of African American fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders talked, laughed, and ate snacks as they walked.  Later, in the teacher’s lounge, Jeanetta, an African American teacher chided the teachers, black and white, for not correcting poor black students for “eating on the street,” something she saw as stereotypical behavior that stigmatized students.These thirty children from Detroit’s Cass Corridor neighborhood were enrolled in the Dewey Center Community Writing Project.  Taught by seven teachers from the University of Michigan and the Detroit public schools, the program guided students to explore, to interpret, and to write about their community.According to David Schaafsma, one of the teachers, the “eating on the street” controversy is emblematic of how cultural values and cultural differences affect education in American schools today.  From this incident Schaafsma has written a powerful and compelling book about the struggle of teaching literacy in a racially divided society and the importance of story and storytelling in the educational process.At the core of this book is the idea of storytelling as an interactive experience for both the teller and listener.  Schaafsma begins by telling his own version of the “eating on the street” conflict.  He describes the history of the writing program and offers rich samples of the students’ writing about their lives in a troubled neighborhood.  After the summer program, Schaafsma interviewed all the teachers about their own version of events, their personal histories, and their work as educators.  Eating on the Street presents all of these layered stories - by Schaafsma, his collegues, and the students - to illustrate how talking across multiple perspectives can enrich the learning process and the community-building process outside the classroom as well.These accounts have strong implications for multicultural education today.  They will interest teachers, educational experts, administrators, and researchers.  Uniting theory and practice, Eating on the Street is on the cutting edge of pioneering work in educational research.

Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism


Jiwei Ci - 1994
    This history, from 1949 to the present, has been extensively studied by scholars using the methods of history and political science. Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution makes an innovative departure from these studies through a series of reflections on the history of communist China as a history of consciousness.It focuses on important aspects of the Chinese experience - such as memory and amnesia, energy and meaning, and the center and periphery mentality - that are amenable more to a philosophical and psychological approach than to an empirical one.The author goes beyond the concept of utopianism that is customarily applied to the Chinese communist experience by viewing this epoch in terms of the movement from utopianism to nihilism to hedonism. He traces the path of Chinese communism from the early belief that denial and hard work combined with Marxism and Maoism would create a utopia of material and spiritual abundance to the disappointment of this belief and the ensuing search for individual pleasure and prosperity.In this progression, which the author describes as the unfolding of the hedonistic potential of utopianism, Marxism became China's road to capitalism and consumerism.The book consists of essays that approach the trajectory of utopianism-nihilism-hedonism from six different viewpoints: the impact of Marxism on China's relationship to itself and to the West, the manipulation of language and cultural memory, the effects of founding morality on a revolutionary teleology, the tension between the ascetic and the hedonistic aspects of utopianism, the paralysis of the will resulting from continual mobilizations and failures, and the relationship of past, present, and future as mirrored in constantly shifting beliefs.

Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception


Yuri Tsivian - 1994
    In contrast to standard film histories, Yuri Tsivian focuses on reflected images: it features the historical film-goer and early writings on film as well as examining the physical elements of cinematic performance. "Tsivian casts a probing beam of illumination into some of the most obscure areas of film history. And the terrain he lights up with his careful assembly and insightful reading of the records of early film viewing in Russia not only changes our sense of the history of this period but also . . . causes us to re-evaluate some of our most basic theoretical and historical assumptions about what a film is and how it affects its audiences."—Tom Gunning, from the Foreword"Early Cinema in Russia . . . reveals Tsivian's strengths very well and demonstrates why he is . . . the finest film historian of his generation in the former Soviet Union."—Denise Y. Youngblood, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television"A work of fundamental importance."—Julian Graffy, Recent Studies of Russian and Soviet Cinema

Feminist Theology from the Third World: A Reader


Ursula King - 1994
    Here are thirty-eight key texts, representing the voices of women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as those working among minorities in places such as Israel, the USA, and the Pacific. The readings are grouped under five headings: Doing Theology from Third World Women's Perspective, Women's Oppression and Cries of Pain, The Bible as a Source of Empowerment for Women, Challenging Traditional Theological Thinking, and A Newly Emerging Spirituality. All texts are placed in context by brief introductory comments, while the main introduction to the whole book provides a helpful overview of the major issues and developments in Christian-feminist thinking throughout the Third World and beyond. Among the contributors are: Chung Hyun Kyung (Korea); Ivone Gebara (Brazil); Kwok Pui-lan (Hong Kong); Mercy Amba Oduyoye (Ghana); Delores S. Williams (USA).

Event-Cities


Bernard Tschumi - 1994
    Tschumi has already expanded the field of contemporary architectural theory through his writings. Now, with Event-Cities, he enlarges some of his earlier concerns to address the issue of cities and their making. He explores contemporary architecture through its confrontation with the major programmes defining the edge of the 21st century - airports, business centres, multipurpose railroad cities, downtown areas and multimedia art centres - as well as video installations and domestic environments.

Cultural Politics - Queer Reading


Alan Sinfield - 1994
    Sinfield renews his call for an 'Englit' that incorporates ongoing study of the cultures of ethnicity, gender and sexuality.Challenging the assumptions that have shaped the study of English literature, Sinfield engages provocatively with topics such as the gendering of literary culture, the sexual politics of psychoanalysis during the Cold War and the history of cultural materialism. He discusses such key figures as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Arthur Miller, Holly Hughes, Audre Lorde and Jeanette Winterson.This influential investigation of the principles and practice that may form dissident reading, forms compelling argument for intellectual allegiances beyond the academy.

Sharing and Responding


Peter Elbow - 1994
    The activities featured in this book move from nonjudgmental kinds of responding to criticism to help build students' confidence and trust. It concludes with a summary of ways of responding and suggestions on how and when they are most useful.

Decoy


Elaine Equi - 1994
    "Exceedingly delicate work, infused with a sly and bawdy humor.... leaves the reader eager for more.... one of the most enjoyable and rewarding books of poetry."--The Nation

Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays


John N. Serio - 1994
    The inaccessibility of his work, even for practiced readers, is legendary among teachers and students alike, who have struggled for decades with his work's resistance to conventional teaching methods. Moreover, the solutions to Stevens's difficulty to be found in fifty years of accumulated commentary are not always enough in the classroom. In an attempt to address the specific problems of presenting Stevens to students, John N. Serio and B. J. Leggett have brought together twenty-four original essays, by an impressive array of Stevens scholars, to explore a variety of approaches. The complexity of his poetry, its shifting theoretical perspectives, and various other obstacles constitute the major themes of these essays as they deal with strategies, comparative approaches, prosody, rhetoric, diction, and larger contexts such as modernism, postmodernism, and contemporary theory. These essays offer practical, down-to-earth knowledge about Stevens's poetry; specific, time-tested techniques for successfully introducing students to Stevens; and an extensive introductory guide to primary and secondary sources. Besides examining the challenges of teaching Stevens, this volume demonstrates what Stevens can teach us about the kind of reading that goes on in the classroom.

Abuses


Alphonso Lingis - 1994
    "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me. . . . These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting."Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, Abuses contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, Abuses will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself."

Writing Histories of Rhetoric


Victor Vitanza - 1994
    Vitanza, is a historiography of rhetoric, summarizing what has recently been accomplished in the revision of traditional histories of rhetoric and discussing what might be accomplished in the future. Featuring a variety of approaches—classical, revisionary, and avant-garde—it includes articles by Janet M. Atwill, James A. Berlin, William A. Covino, Sharon Crowley, Hans Kellner, John Poulakos, Takis Poulakos, John Schilb, Jane Sutton, Kathleen Ethel Welch, Lynn Worsham, and Victor J. Vitanza. In the first essay, Sharon Crowley identifies the major players and primary issues in a chronological narrative of the debate about the writing of the history of rhetoric that has arisen between traditionalists / essentialists and revisionists/constructionists. In recent years, traditionalists have demanded a more complete and accurate history, while revisionists have sought a critical understanding of the various epistemological-ideological grounds upon which a history of rhetoric had been and could be constructed. Revisionists, in their search for multiple, contestatory histories, have begun to critique one another, breaking into two general groups: one favoring a political-social program, the other resisting and disrupting such an approach. Vitanza echoes Crowley’s review of this ongoing debate by asking a crucial question: What exactly does it mean to be a revisionist historian? By combining the disintegration of various revisionist and subversive positions into a communal "we," he asks an additional question: Who is the "we" writing histories of rhetoric? The essays that follow give a rich answer to Vitanza’s questions. They bring the writing of histories of rhetoric into the larger area of postmodern theory, raising neglected issues of race, gender, and class. Written with a variety of intentions, some of the essays are expository and highly argumentative while others are manifestos, innovative and far-reaching in tone. Still others are summaries and background studies, providing useful information to both the novice student and the experienced scholar. This book, situated at a juncture between two disciplines, composition studies and speech, will be a landmark collection for many years.

The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English


Rachel May - 1994
    In The Translator and the Text, Rachel May analyzes Russian literature in English translation, seeing it less as a substitute for the original works than as a subset of English literature, with its own cultural, stylistic, and narrative traditions.

Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney


Jahan Ramazani - 1994
    From Langston Hughes's lynch poems to Sylvia Plath's father elegies, modern poetry has tried to find a language of mourning in an age of mass death, religious doubt, and forgotten ritual. For this reason, Jahan Ramazani argues, the elegy, one of the most ancient of poetic genres, has remained one of the most vital to modern poets. Through subtle readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems, and the blues, Ramazani greatly enriches our critical understanding of a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. He also interprets the signal contributions to the American family elegy of Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich, Michael Harper, and Amy Clampitt. Finally, he suggests analogies between the elegy and other kinds of contemporary mourning art—in particular, the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.Grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning, Ramazani's readings also draw on various historical, formal, and feminist critical approaches. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the psychology of mourning or the history of modern poetry."Consists of full, intelligent and lucid exposition and close reading. . . . Poetry of Mourning is itself a welcome contribution to modern poetry's search for a 'resonant yet credible vocabulary of grief in our time."—Times Literary Supplement

Eros in Mourning: From Homer to Lacan


Henry Staten - 1994
    Then, in readings of Dante, Hamlet, La Princess de Clèves, Heart of Darkness, and Lacan, Staten depicts the "thanato-erotic" hysteria that is set off by the specter of the dead and decomposing body that is also the body of sexual love and which, in the "transcendentalizing" tradition, is more female than male. Yet, St. John, certain troubadours, and Milton offer glimpses of a more affirmative relation to "eros in mourning."

A Queer Reader


Patrick Higgins - 1994
    Arranging entries chronologically and drawing on sources from the Satyricon to Gay News, from Michelangelo&squo;s sonnets to a speech in the House of Lords, from sexually explicit graffiti found in Pompeii to a Playboy interview with David Bowie, Patrick Higgins uses novels, biographies, autobiographies, histories, and ephemera to present gay history as never before.

Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)


Michael Kelly - 1994
    Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas had only just begun to come to terms with one another's work when Foucault died in 1984; they had even discussed the possibility of a formal debate on "Enlightenment" in the neutral arena of the United States. In the decade since, Habermas and his supporters have continued to respond to Foucault in various ways, but Foucault's followers have not shown as strong an inclination to keep up his side of the dialogue. For this reason an invaluable exchange on the nature and limits of philosophy in the present age has never achieved its full potential.In this anthology Michael Kelly recasts the debate in a way that will open it up for further development. The book starts by juxtaposing key texts from the two philosophers; it then adds a set of reactions and commentaries by theorists who have taken up the two alternative approaches to power and critique. (Two of these essays were written especially for this volume.) The result is a guide for those seeking to understand and build on this important but unfinished debate.Essays by: Michel Foucault. Jü rgen Habermas. Axel Honneth. Nancy Fraser. Richard Bernstein. Thomas McCarthy. James Schmidt and Thomas E. Wartenberg. Gilles Deleuze. Jana Sawicki. Michael Kelly.

The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain


Robert Pepperell - 1994
    But, ironically, it is our very capacity for technological invention that has secured us so dominant a position in the world which may lead ultimately to (as some have put it) 'The End of Man'. If we are really capable of creating entities that exceed our own skills and intellect then the consequences for humanity are almost inconceivable. Nevertheless, we must now face up to the possibility that attributes like intelligence and consciousness may be synthesised in non-human entities--perhaps within our lifetime. Would such entities have human-like emotions; would they have a sense of their own being?The Posthuman Condition argues that such questions are difficult to tackle given the concepts of human existence that we have inherited from humanism, many of which can no longer be sustained. New theories about nature and the operation of the universe arising from sophisticated computer modelling are starting to demonstrate the profound interconnections between all things in reality where previously we had seen only separations. This has implications for traditional views of the human condition, consciousness, the way we look at art, and for some of the oldest problems in philosophy.First published in the 1990s, this important text has been completely revised by the author with the addition of new sections and illustrations.For further information see: www.post-human.net

Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes


Elizabeth Hill Boone - 1994
    Writing without Words challenges this orthodoxy, and with it widespread notions of literacy and dominant views of art and literature, history and geography. Asking how knowledge was encoded and preserved in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Mesoamerican cultures, the authors focus on systems of writing that did not strive to represent speech. Their work reveals the complicity of ideology in the history of literacy, and offers new insight into the history of writing. The contributors--who include art historians, anthropologists, and literary theorists--examine the ways in which ancient Mesoamerican and Andean peoples conveyed meaning through hieroglyphic, pictorial, and coded systems, systems inseparable from the ideologies they were developed to serve. We see, then, how these systems changed with the European invasion, and how uniquely colonial writing systems came to embody the post-conquest American ideologies. The authors also explore the role of these early systems in religious discourse and their relation to later colonial writing. Bringing the insights from Mesoamerica and the Andes to bear on a fundamental exchange among art history, literary theory, semiotics, and anthropology, the volume reveals the power contained in the medium of writing.Contributors. Elizabeth Hill Boone, Tom Cummins, Stephen Houston, Mark B. King, Dana Leibsohn, Walter D. Mignolo, John Monaghan, John M. D. Pohl, Joanne Rappaport, Peter van der Loo

Ian McEwan (Writers and Their Work)


Kiernan Ryan - 1994
    

Civil Society and Political Theory


Jean L. Cohen - 1994
    In this first serious work on the theory of civil society to appear in many years, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato contend that the concept of civil society articulates a contested terrain in the West that could become the primary locus for the expansion of democracy and rights.In this major contribution to contemporary political theory, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato argue that the concept of civil society articulates a contested terrain in the West that could become a primary locus for the expansion of democracy and rights.

Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society


Meyer Schapiro - 1994
    Schapiro's highly lucid arguments, graceful prose, and extraordinary erudition guide readers through a rich variety of fields and issues: the roles in society of the artist and art, of the critic and criticism; the relationships between patron and artist, psychoanalysis and art, and philosophy and art. Adapting critical methods from such wide-ranging fields as anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, biology, and other sciences, Schapiro appraises fundamental semantic terms such as "organic style," "pictorial style", "field and vehicle," and "form and content"; he elucidates eclipsed intent in a well-known text by Freud on Leonardo da Vinci, in another by Heidegger on Vincent van Gogh. He reflects on the critical methodology of Bernard Berenson, and on the social philosophy of art in the writings of both Diderot and the nineteenth century French artist/historian Eugene Fromentin. Throughout all of his writings, Meyer Schapiro provides us with a means of ordering our past that is reasoned and passionate, methodical and inventive. In so doing, he revitalizes our faith in the unsurpassed importance of both critical thinking and creative independence.

Socialism for a Sceptical Age


Ralph Miliband - 1994
    Among these developments are the collapse of Communist regimes, the fragmentation of the constituencies upon which earlier socialist advances had depended, changes in the organization and the dynamics of capitalism and a dearth of agencies committed to the socialist project. The book also takes up and seeks to rebut older objections to socialism, such as the notion that it is inevitably totalitarian, that it is based on too optimistic a view of human nature and that it fails to take account of the tendency of power to accumulate in the hands of minorities.The book argues that a social order dominated by the logic of capital and competition cannot, despite all the positive claims made on its behalf, produce the conditions which make true citizenship and community possible. By contrast, socialism offers an attractive and feasible programme for the realization of those ideals. Miliband argues that socialism cannot be seen as an answer to all the ills which have plagued humankind. Socialism, in his view, has to be understood as part of an age-old struggle for a more just society, and he believes that, seen in this light, socialism remains not only desirable but also perfectly possible. Moreover, he believes, socialism will, in time, come to command a majority support which its advancement requires. Socialism has to be seen as a permanent striving for the achievement of democracy, egalitarianism and the creation of an economy under democratic control.

Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History


Whitney Davis - 1994
    Evidence for the role of homosexuality in artistic creation has often not survived, in part because the direct expression of homosexuality has often been condemned in Western societies. Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History presents examples of contemporary art historical research on homoeroticism and homosexuality in the visual arts (chiefly painting and sculpture) of the Western tradition from the ancient to the modern periods. Chapters explore the dynamic interrelation of sexuality and visual art and emphasize problems of historical evidence and interpretation and the need to reconstruct social and cultural realities sometimes quite different from our own.Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History addresses contemporary art historians'interest in studying sexuality in the visual arts, examining such questions as: What are some of the present-day reasons for, and problems of, this research? How is it related to other research areas within art history and to wider public debates about the meaning, value, and propriety of works of art? While the book examines a variety of research problems and theoretical perspectives, most chapters focus on the historical interpretation of a particular work of art, artist, or visual convention. Chapters present new documentation of the importance of homosexuality in the production and reception of artworks in the Western tradition, develop models for approaching the question of how sexuality and visual creation are related, and explore researchers'experiences and obligations in working in the area of gay and lesbian studies in art history today.Contributing authors stress problems of historical evidence and reconstruction; the social and cultural construction of homosexuality; and the active role of visual conventions in shaping perceptions of homosexuals, homosexuality, and homosexual desire. They discuss both the biography of artists and the significance of individual works of art and the social reception and circulation of works of art in the context of wider religious, legal, medical, political, and economic relations. The book may revise readers'beliefs about the significance and value of a number of works of art hitherto forgotten, neglected, under-appreciated, or misinterpreted. Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History is an enlightening and informative book for art historians, museum professionals, scholars in the field of lesbian and gay studies, and art history students and professors.

Mothers Who Leave: Behind the Myth of Women Without Their Children


Rosemary Jackson - 1994
    Yet mothers who've left are still thought of as abnormal, immoral, even deviant. Drawing on her own experience and that of many other women, Rosie Jackson asks what can drive a mother to relinquish her children and examines the emotional aftermath. Exploding the myths that surround such mothers, myths that range from vampirism to hard-hearted feminism, she explores this dark side of mothering with unusual depth and sensitivity.

Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstitution of American Democracy


J. Peter EubenJennifer Roberts - 1994
    Such is the conviction expressed in this provocative book, which is certain to arouse widespread comment and discussion.What does it mean to be a citizen in a democracy? Indeed, how do we educate for democracy? These questions are addressed here by thirteen historians, classicists, and political theorists, who critically examine ancient Greek history and institutions, texts, and ideas in light of today's political practices and values. They do not idealize ancient Greek democracy. Rather, they use it, with all its faults, as a basis for measuring the strengths and shortcomings of American democracy. In the hands of the authors, ancient Greek sources become partners in an educational dialogue about democracy's past, one that goads us to think about the limitations of democracy's present and to imagine enriched possibilities for its future.The authors are diverse in their opinions and in their political and moral commitments. But they share the view that insulating American democracy from radical criticism encourages a dangerous complacency that Athenian political thought can disrupt.

Sagas and Popular Antiquarianism in Icelandic Archaeology


Adolf Friðriksson - 1994
    It covers: the Celts, Norsemen and Romans; religion (ritual sites and pagan burials); the assembly system; and the history of farming and the sagas.

The Heterodox Hegel


Cyril O'Regan - 1994
    O'Regan (religious studies, Yale U.) argues for a theological reading of Hegel which clarifies the religious or theological species Hegel thinks can be brought into rapprochement with philosophy; unites a number of different approaches to Hegel which have proven fruitful, if incomplete; and, within the bounds of a systematic approach, addresses que

Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition


Karen Lawrence - 1994
    She shows how writings by Margaret Cavendish, Frances Burney, Virginia Woolf, and others reconceive the meanings of femininity in relation to such apparent oppositions as travel/home, other/self, and foreign/domestic.

Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present


Angelyn Mitchell - 1994
    It begins with the Harlem Renaissance, continues through civil rights, the Black Arts Movement, and on into contemporary debates of poststructuralist and black feminist theory. Drawing on a quote from Frederick Douglass for the title of this book, Angelyn Mitchell explains in her introduction the importance for those "within the circle" of African American literature to examine their own works and to engage this critical canon. The essays in this collection—many of which are not widely available today—either initiated or gave critical definition to specific periods or movements of African American literature. They address issues such as integration, separatism, political action, black nationalism, Afrocentricity, black feminism, as well as the role of art, the artist, the critic, and the audience. With selections from Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and many others, this definitive collection provides a dynamic model of the cultural, ideological, historical, and aesthetic considerations in African American literature and literary criticism. A major contribution to the study of African American literature, this volume will serve as a foundation for future work by students and scholars. Its importance will be recognized by all those interested in modern literary theory as well as general readers concerned with the African American experience.Selections by (partial list): Houston A. Baker, Jr., James Baldwin, Sterling Brown, Barbara Christian, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, Sarah Webster Fabio, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. Lawrence Hogue, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Deborah E. McDowell, Toni Morrison, J. Saunders Redding, George Schuyler, Barbara Smith, Valerie Smith, Hortense J. Spillers, Robert B. Stepto, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Helen Washington, Richard Wright

Black American Prose Writers of the Harlem Renaissance


Harold Bloom - 1994
    -- Covers more than 1,400 of the most important authors who write in English-- Ranges from the author of Beowulf to present-day writers-- Includes writers in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-- Each volume covers approximately 12 authors and includes a concise biography, a selection of critical extracts, and a complete and up-to-date bibliography of the author's separate publications

Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient


John James Clarke - 1994
    Clarke seeks to uncover the seriousness and relevance of Jung's dialogue with the philosophical ideas of the east, which arise from the various forms of Buddhism, Chinese Taoism and Indian Yoga. Through his commentaries on the I Ching and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and various essays on Zen, eastern meditation and the symbolism of the mandala, Jung attempted to build a bridge of understanding between western psychology and the practices and beliefs of Asian religions, and thereby to relate traditional eastern thought to contemporary western concerns.This book offers a critical examination of this remarkable piece of intellectual bridge building: first by assessing its role in the development of Jung's own thinking on the human psyche; second by discussing its relationship to the wider dialogue between east and west; and third by examining it in the light of urgent contemporary concerns and debates about intercultural understanding.

Third World Feminism: A Critical Reader


Chandra Talpade Mohanty - 1994
    

The Music Pack


Ron van der Meer - 1994
    The Music Pack is filled with paper instruments, including piano and complete orchestra, 3-D models, and a 75-minute CD featuring 20 masterpieces of Western music from the recording archives of EMI Classics. (Performing Arts)

Seapower: Theory And Practice


Geoffrey Till - 1994
    The forms and practices of navies and maritime strategy are analysed through the development of eight historical and contemporary topics drawn from the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War and post-Cold War period .

In the Reading Gaol


Valentine Cunningham - 1994
    In the course of its critique this books inspects, with startling originality, texts from the Bible to Jane Eyre, Hamlet to Batman (the movie), Tristram Shandy to Finnegan's Wake, concentrating particularly on classic nineteenth-century realist novels such as Emma, Hard Times, Bleak House, Middlemarch, The Trumpet Major and Heart of Darkness, as well as classic twentieth-century novels, including Beckett's Watt and Golding's Rites of Passage .

The Archaeology of V. Gordon Childe: Contemporary Perspectives


David R. Harris - 1994
    Gordon Childe died 36 years ago, he remains the world's most renowned prehistorian. His What Happened in History, first published in 1942, is probably the most widely read book ever written by an archaeologist. His influence and reputation endure despite the fact that many of the theoretical ideas he propounded, as well as his interpretations of European and West Asian prehistory, have been profoundly modified, or even rejected, since his death. With contributions from such distinguished prehistorians as Kent V. Flannery, David Harris, Leo S. Klejn, John Mulvaney, Colin Renfrew, Michael Rowlands, and Bruce Trigger, The Archaeology of V. Gordon Childe is an attempt to evaluate Childe's achievement from different "partly national" perspectives and to assess how far, and why, his work remains significant today. The contributors examine such persistent themes in Childe's thought as the nature of culture and the role of diffusion in cultural evolution and debate the question of whether Childe anticipated "processual archaeology" in his famous models of the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions. Also included are evaluations of Childe's early career in Australia, his relations with Soviet archaeology, including a previously unknown letter from Childe to Soviet archaeologists, and his impact on American archaeology.

Crash: Nostalgia For The Absence Of Cyberspace


Robert Reynolds - 1994
    The show was curated in collaboration with Robert Reynolds. The show dedicated a large portion of its space to the exhibition of digital and online works, and using works as and in other forms of transmission. The show has a book edited by Thomas Zummer and Robert Reynolds that was published by Thread Waxing Space.

Architecture as a Translation of Music


Elizabeth Martin - 1994
    Small in scale, low in price, but large in impact, these books present and disseminate new and innovative theories.

Between the Sign and the Gaze


Herman Rapaport - 1994
    Reviewing the ways in which women have been fantasized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western culture, Herman Rapaport offers a series of brilliant insights into the concept of the fantasm in modern art.

Toward a New Poetics: Contemporary Writing in France


Serge Gavronsky - 1994
    In this collection of twelve interviews with some of France's most important poets and writers, Serge Gavronsky introduces American readers to these exciting new developments.As Gavronsky explains, a neolyricism is now replacing the formalism of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. In his substantial introduction, Gavronsky notes how the ideological definition of writing (écriture) has given way to more open forms of writing. Human experiences of the most ordinary kinds are finding a place in the text.These interviews offer a view of the poets' and writers' creative processes and range over such topics as current literary theory, the impact of American poetry in France, and the place of feminism in contemporary French writing. Each interview is accompanied by samples of the writer's work in French and in Gavronsky's English translations.Toward a New Poetics provides a highly informative cultural and critical perspective on contemporary writing in France, introducing us to works which are now transforming the idea of literature itself.

An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands


Alfred Arteaga - 1994
    The articulation and construction of these distinctions, the very language of difference, is the subject of An Other Tongue. This collection of essays by a group of distinguished scholars, including Norma Alarcón, Gayatri Spivak, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gerald Vizenor, explores the interconnections between language and identity.The Chicanos, the U.S./Mexico borderland polyglots whose sense of history, nationality, and race is as mixed as their language, are the book's prime example. But the authors recognize that border zones, like diasporas and post-colonial relations, occur globally, and their discussion of hybrid or mestizo identities ranges from the United States to the Caribbean to South Asia to Ireland. Drawing on personal experience, readings of poetry and fiction, and cultural theory, the authors detail the politics of being human through the mediation of language. What does "shadow" mean to the Native American Indian, or diaspora to the East Indian immigrant? How does British colonialism yet affect Irish and Indian nationalist literary production? Why is the split between Eastern and Western European language use necessarily schizophrenic? So much of our sense of difference today is constructed as we speak, and An Other Tongue speaks with eloquence to this phenomenon and will be of great interest to those concerned with the discourse of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and the remapping of world literature.Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Alfred Arteaga, Juan Bruce-Novoa, Cordelia Chávez Candelaria, Michael G. Cooke, Edmundo Desnoes, Eugene C. Eoyang, David Lloyd, Lydie Moudileno, Jean-Luc Nancy, Tejaswini Niranjana, Ada Savin, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Michael Smith, Tzvetan Todorov, Luis A. Torres, Gerald Vizenor

Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus


Bernard Stiegler - 1994
    This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.The Aristotelian concept persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars.Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers—Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela.