Best of
Theory

1996

Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage


Paulo Freire - 1996
    This book displays the striking creativity and profound insight that characterized Freire's work to the very end of his life-an uplifting and provocative exploration not only for educators, but also for all that learn and live.

Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement


Kimberlé Crenshaw - 1996
    Questioning the old assumptions of both liberals and conservatives with respect to the goals and the means of traditional civil rights reform, critical race theorists have presented new paradigms for understanding racial injustice and new ways of seeing the links between race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. This reader, edited by the principal founders and leading theoreticians of the critical race theory movement, gathers together for the first time the movement's most important essays.

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926


Walter Benjamin - 1996
    Harvard University Press is now undertaking to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a sense of the man and the many facets of his thought.

Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination


Avery F. Gordon - 1996
    ” —George Lipsitz“The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny.”  —American Studies International“Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles LemertDrawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.

War and Architecture


Lebbeus Woods - 1996
    Small in scale, low in price, but large in impact, these books present and disseminate new and innovative theories. The modest format of the books in the Pamphlet Architecture Series belies the importance and magnitude of the ideas within.

Bodies of Work: Essays


Kathy Acker - 1996
    From art and cinema, through politics, bodybuilding, science fiction and the city, they both reflect and challenge these times of radical change and puzzlement. Matching guts to theory, anger with compassion, Acker offers original views on the likes of Peter Greenaway, Samuel Delaney, Burroughs, de Sade, and Cronenberg's Crash. Collectively, these essays offer the reader a journey into strangeness, provocation and delight.

Being Singular Plural


Jean-Luc Nancy - 1996
    The fundamental argument of the book is that being is always “being with,” that “I” is not prior to “we,” that existence is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of this “being-with” not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the “I” and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a “society of spectacle” nor via some form of authenticity.The five shorter essays impressively translate the philosophical insight of “Being Singular Plural” into sophisticated discussions of national sovereignty, war and technology, identity politics, the Gulf War, and the tragic plight of Sarajevo. The essay “Eulogy for the Mêlée,” in particular, is a brilliant discussion of identity and hybridism that resonates with many contemporary social concerns.As Nancy moves through the exposition of his central concern, being-with, he engages a number of other important issues, including current notions of the “other” and “self” that are relevant to psychoanalytic, political, and multicultural concepts. He also offers astonishingly original reinterpretations of major philosophical positions, such as Nietzsche’s doctrine of “eternal recurrence,” Descartes’s “cogito,” and the nature of language and meaning.

The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic


Catherine Malabou - 1996
    Published here in English for the first time, it includes a substantial preface by Jacques Derrida in which he explores the themes and conclusions of Malabou's book.The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic restores Hegel's rich and complex concepts of time and temporality to contemporary philosophy. It examines his concept of time, relating it to perennial topics in philosophy such as substance, accident and the identity of the subject. Catherine Malabou's also contrasts her account of Hegelian temporality with the interpretation given by Heidegger in Being and Time, arguing that it is the concept of 'plasticity' that best describes Hegel's theory of temporality. The future is understood not simply as a moment in time, but as something malleable and constantly open to change through our interpretation. The book also develops Hegel's preoccupation with the history of Greek thought and Christianity and explores the role of theology in his thought.Essential reading for those interested in Hegel and contemporary continental philosophy, The Future of Hegel is also fascinating to those interested in the ideas of Heidegger and Derrida.

Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature


Rosemarie Garland-Thomson - 1996
    Rosemarie Garland Thomson examines disabled figures in sentimental novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, and the popular cultural ritual of the freak show.

Prospect


Anne Truitt - 1996
    In Prospect, Truitt looks at the far end of her life

Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture:: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965 - 1995


Kate Nesbitt - 1996
    Among the paradigms presented arearchitectural postmodernism, phenomenology, semiotics, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminism.By gathering these influential articles from a vast array of books and journals into a comprehensive anthology, Kate Nesbitt has created a resource of great value. Indispensable to professors and students of architecture and architectural theory, Theorizing a New Agenda also serves practitioners and the general public, as Nesbitt provides an overview, a thematic structure, and a critical introduction to each essay.The list of authors in Theorizing a New Agenda reads like a "Who's Who" of contemporary architectural thought: Tadao Ando, Giulio Carlo Argan, Alan Colquhoun, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, Marco Frascari, Kenneth Frampton, Diane Ghirardo, Vittorio Gregotti, Karsten Harries, Rem Koolhaas, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, Thomas Schumacher, Ignasi de Sol-Morales Rubi, Bernard Tschumi, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Anthony Vidler. A bibliography and notes on all the contributors are also included.

Rapid Eye 1


Simon DwyerKathy Acker - 1996
    Hacking into the new virtual geography, where time & space do not exist, but where thought survives, as in art. In this age of transition & sensory overload, new ideas & organisations of perception form to be marginalised, misunderstood, ignored, reviled. But melancholy can fuel creation. Imagination can replace fantasy. Hope can overcome fear. Different interpretations of the past & fresh approaches to art & technology can ensure the evolution & refinement of the perception of everyday life. In the virtual universe, there is no death.

Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays


Robin Evans - 1996
    No matter what the topic, however, he always drew on firsthand experience, arriving at his insights from direct observation.This book brings together eight of Evans's most significant essays. Written over a period of twenty years, from 1970, when he graduated from the Architectural Association, to 1990, they represent the diverse interests of an agile and skeptical mind. The book includes an introduction by Mohsen Mostafavi, a chronological account of the development of Evans's writing by Robin Middleton, and a bibliography by Richard Difford.

Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony


Bert Ligon - 1996
    A study of three basic outlines used in jazz improv and composition, based on a study of hundreds of examples from great jazz artists.

Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies


David Morley - 1996
    Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies is an invaluable collection of writings by and about Stuart Hall. The book provides a representative selection of Hall's enormously influential writings on cultural studies and its concerns: the relationship with Marxism; postmodernism and 'New Times' in cultural and political thought; the development of cultural studies as an international and postcolonial phenomenon, and Hall's engagement with urgent and abiding questions of 'race', ethnicity and identity.In addition to presenting classic writings by Hall and new interviews with Hall in dialogue with Kuan-Hsing Chen, the collection, which includes work by Angela McRobbie, Kobena Mercer, John Fiske, Charlotte Brunsdon, Ien Ang and Isaac Julien, provides a detailed analysis of Hall's work and his contribution to the development of cultural studies by leading cultural critics and cultural practitioners. The book also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Stuart Hall's writings.

Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts


Robert A. Sobieszek - 1996
    Burroughs has been practising a postmodern voodoo alchemy, via his cut-up and fold-in collage techniques, that accurately reflect our fragmented, postmodern society and experience. His novels, once banned and condemned, have over the years earned him membership in the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters and the title Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.

The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle


Kelly Hurley - 1996
    In particular, Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative abhuman identity in its place. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, strongly indebted to nineteenth-century scientific, medical and social theories, including evolutionism, criminal anthropology and degeneration theory.

Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body


Rosemarie Garland-Thomson - 1996
    Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal.Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum; the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such exhibits.Freakery is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture.

Kant after Duchamp


Thierry De Duve - 1996
    Although Duchamp's ready mades broke with all previously known styles, de Duve observes that he made the logic of modernist art practice the subject matter of his work, a shift in aesthetic judgment that replaced the classical this is beautiful with this is art. De Duve employs this shift (replacing the word beauty by the word art) in a rereading of Kant's Critique of Judgment that reveals the hidden links between the radical experiments of Duchamp and the Dadaists and mainstream pictorial modernism.

My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity


Eric L. Santner - 1996
    He would spend the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once released, he published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's famous case study of Schreber elevated the Memoirs into the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In light of Eric Santner's analysis, Schreber's text becomes legible as a sort of nerve bible of fin-de-si�cle preoccupations and obsessions, an archive of the very phantasms that would, after the traumas of war, revolution, and the end of empire, coalesce into the core elements of National Socialist ideology.The crucial theoretical notion that allows Santner to pass from the private domain of psychotic disturbances to the public domain of the ideological and political genesis of Nazism is the crisis of investiture. Schreber's breakdown was precipitated by a malfunction in the rites and procedures through which an individual is endowed with a new social status: his condition became acute just as he was named to a position of ultimate symbolic authority. The Memoirs suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject's self understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic persecutor, some other who threatens our borders and our treasures. Challenging other political readings of Schreber, Santner denies that Schreber's delusional system--his own private Germany--actually prefigured the totalitarian solution to this defining structural crisis of modernity. Instead, Santner shows how this tragic figure succeeded in avoiding the totalitarian temptation by way of his own series of perverse identifications, above all with women and Jews.

Process: A Tomato Project


Steve Baker - 1996
    Since its inception in 1991, the group's work has ranged across every conceivable medium, from photography and film to music and print, and it has established an international reputation with such advertising clients as Levi's, Pepsi, Nike, Sony, MTV, Philips, Orange telecommunications and Coca Cola, as well as projects for architect Richard Rogers.

Longer Views: Extended Essays


Samuel R. Delany - 1996
    Delany, a Nebula and Hugo award-winning author and a major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges what he calls "the hard-edged boundaries of meaning" by going beyond the customary limits of the genre in which he's writing. By radically reworking the essay form, Delany can explore and express the many layers of his thinking about the nature of art, the workings of language, and the injustices and ironies of social, political, and sexual marginalization. Thus Delany connects, in sometimes unexpected ways, topics as diverse as the origins of modern theater, the context of lesbian and gay scholarship, the theories of cyborgs, how metaphors mean, and the narrative structures in the Star Wars trilogy."Over the course of his career," Kenneth James writes in his extensive introduction, "Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by." Indeed, Delany challenges an impressive list of world-models here, including High and Low Art, sanity and madness, mathematical logic and the mechanics of mythmaking, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the limitations of our sexual vocabulary. Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany's unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views.

Counselling Skills and Theory


Margaret Hough - 1996
    It's also your guide to the nature of counselling, the skills needed to be a counsellor and managing the challenges of the counselling relationship!This new edition is suitable for a wide range of courses, including Foundation, Certificate, Diploma and Higher Education studies in Counselling. There is discussion of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme with expanded coverage of CBT approaches. It also references the latest BACP guidelines for counsellor training and best practice. The book reflects the impending requirement for statutory regulation of counsellors and psychotherapists via the Health Professions Council.Every year the Case Studies, Exercises, Handouts, and Resources tips in this book help thousands of trainees and established practitioners develop their understanding of the theories and practical skills required in this challenging and rewarding profession!

Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation


Bernard Stiegler - 1996
    For many years, Stiegler has explored the origins and philosophical, ethical, and political stakes of a global process he calls "the industrial temporalization of consciousness." Here, demonstrating that technology—including alphabetical writing—is memory, he argues that through new technologies of retention and inscription we have come to live in a world where time devours space, a disoriented world in which we have lost our bearings. Immersed in the multimedia of an over-connected world, with time and space as we know them abolished, we no longer find "cardinal points" to guide us and may even be led where we do not wish to go. We must therefore prepare to confront new spheres of ideological control and discover new possibilities in the digital environment.

Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics


Rosalyn Deutsche - 1996
    In Evictions Rosalyn Deutsche investigates - and protests against - the dominant uses of this interdisciplinary discourse.

The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism


Michael Oakeshott - 1996
    Yale University Press is continuing to make available the best of these illuminating works.In this polished and hitherto unknown work, Oakeshott argues that modern politics was constituted out of a debate, persistent through centuries of European political experience down to our own day, over the question "What should governments do?" According to Oakeshott, two different answers have dominated our thought since the fifteenth century. One, exemplified by such thinkers as Rousseau and Marx, expresses a belief in the capacity of human beings to control, design, and monitor all aspects of social and political life, a belief fostered by the intoxicating increase in power available to governments in modern times. On the other hand, sceptics such as Montaigne, Pascal, and Hobbes argued that governments cannot, in principle, produce perfection and that we should prevent concentrations of power that may result in tyrannies that oppress the dignity of the human spirit. Oakeshott exposes the pitfalls of both positions and shows the value of a middle ground that incorporates scepticism with enough faith to avoid total quietism. Readers of Oakeshott will find here the thinking that lies behind his famous definition of politics as "the pursuit of intimations.".

Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric


Victor J. Vitanza - 1996
    Vitanza concludes--rather rebegins in a sophistic-performative excursus--with a prelude to future (anterior) histories of rhetorics. Vitanza asks: What will have been anti-Oedipalizedized (de-negated) hysteries of rhetorics? What will have they looked like, sounded, read like? Or to ask affirmatively, what, then, will have libidinalized-hysteries of rhetorics looked, sounded, read like?

Soft Subversions


Félix Guattari - 1996
    Concepts such as "micropolitics," "schizoanalysis," and "becoming-woman" open up new horizons for political and creative resistance in the "postmedia era."Guattari's energetic analyses of art, cinema, youth culture, economics, and power formations introduce a radically inventive thought process engaged in liberating subjectivity from the standardizing and homogenizing processes of global capitalism.

Edly's Music Theory for Practical People


Ed Roseman - 1996
    Suess and PC for Dummies," Edly's Music Theory for Practical People is for anyone, teen to adult, who wants to enjoy learning what's going on inside music. This includes players and singers of any level desiring a deeper appreciation of music-- rock 'n' rollers wanting broader musical horizons, jazzers needing more knowledge of chords and scales, theory students needing supplementary help, or classically trained folks wanting to branch into popular styles or to read from fake books. The book begins simply - and at the beginning, reassuring and encouraging the reader through topics including modes, chord substitution, transposition, and much more. Each topic is accompanied by an explanation of what it is, how it's used, and why it is helpful. Berklee and Juilliard faculty endorsed.

Narrative Therapy in Practice: The Archaeology of Hope


Gerald Monk - 1996
    Written with scholarship, energy, practicality, and awareness.

The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism


Elinor Fuchs - 1996
    It is hard to imagine a better tour guide than Fuchs for a trip through the last thirty years of, as she puts it, what we used to call the 'avant-garde.'" --Essays in Theatre..". an insightful set of theoretical 'takes' on how to think about theatre before and theatre after modernism." --Theatre Journal"In short, for those who never experienced a 'postmodern swoon, ' Elinor Fuchs is an excellent informant." --Performing Arts Journal..". a thoughtful, highly readable contribution to the evolving literature on theatre and postmodernism." --Modern Drama"A work of bold theoretical ambition and exceptional critical intelligence.... Fuchs combines mastery of contemporary cultural theory with a long and full participation in American theater culture: the result is a long-needed, long-awaited elaboration of a new theatrical paradigm." --Una Chaudhuri, New York University"What makes this book exceptional is Fuchs' acute rehearsal of the stranger unnerving events of the last generation that have--in the cross-reflections of theory--determined our thinking about theater. She seems to have seen and absorbed them all." --Herbert Blau, Center for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee"Surveying the extraordinary scene of the postmodern American theater, Fuchs boldly frames key issues of subjectivity and performance with the keenest of critical eyes for the compelling image and the telling gesture." --Joseph Roach, Tulane University..". Fuchs makes an exceptionally lucid and eloquent case for the value and contradictions in postmodern theater." --Alice Rayner, Stanford University"Arguably the most accessible yet learned road map to what remains for many impenetrable territory...an obligatory addition to all academic libraries serving upper-division undertgraduates and above." --Choice"A systematic, comprehensive and historically-minded assessment of what, precisely, 'post-modern theatre' is, anyway." --American TheatreIn this engrossing study, Elinor Fuchs explores the multiple worlds of theater after modernism. While The Death of Character engages contemporary cultural and aesthetic theory, Elinor Fuchs always speaks as an active theater critic. Nine of her Village Voice and American Theatre essays conclude the volume. They give an immediate, vivid account of contemporary theater and theatrical culture written from the front of rapid cultural change.

Field Quantization


Walter Greiner - 1996
    The initial chapters deal with the quantum mechanics of systems having many degrees of freedom and with classical Lagrangian field theory. Subsequently, both the traditional method of canonical quantization and the modern approach using path integrals are studied. The material is presented in considerable detail and accompanied by a large number of worked examples and exercises.

Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance


Joseph Roach - 1996
    Iroquois Indians visit London in the early part of the eighteenth century and give birth to the "feathered people" in the British popular imagination.What do these seemingly disparate strands of culture share over three hundred years and several thousand miles of ocean? Artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance from the eighteenth century to the present in London and New Orleans, Cities of the Dead takes a look at a rich continuum of intercultural exchange that reinvents, recreates, and restores history.Complemented with fifty-five illustrations, including spectacular photos of the famed Mardi Gras Indians, this fascinating work employs an entirely unique approach to the study of culture. Rather than focusing on one region, Cities of the Dead explores broad cultural connections over place and time, showing through myriad examples how performance can revise the unwritten past.

C. L. R. James on the Negro Question


Scott McLemee - 1996
    The first collection of writings on African-American topics by this internationally influential pan-African thinker

Gaze and Voice as Love Objects


Renata Salecl - 1996
    The voice hypnotizes, seduces, disarms. Are gaze and voice part of the relationship we call love . . . or hate? If so, what part? How do they function? This provocative book examines love as the mediating entity in the essential antagonism between the sexes, and gaze and voice as love’s medium. The contributors proceed from the Lacanian premise that “there is no sexual relationship,” that the sexes are in no way complementary and that love—figured in the gaze and the voice —embodies the promise and impossibility of any relation between them.The first detailed Lacanian elaboration of this topic, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects examines the status of gaze, voice, and love in philosophy from Plato to Kant, in ideology from early Christianity to contemporary cynicism, in music from Hildegard of Bingen to Richard Wagner, in literature from Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and in cinema from Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom to Kieslowski’s A Short Film on Love. Throughout, the contributors seek to show that the conflict between the sexes is the site of a larger battle over the destiny of modernity. With insights into the underlying target of racist and sexist violence, this book offers surprising revelations into the nature of an ancient enigma—love.Approaching its topic with utter disregard for predominant multiculturalist and deconstructionist commonplaces, this volume will be indispensable for anyone interested in the uses of psychoanalysis for philosophy, cultural studies, and the analysis of ideology.Contributors. Elisabeth Bronfen, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Zizek, Alenka Zupancic

Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. 2: Selected Writings in Art Criticism, 1967-1992


Adrian Piper - 1996
    Out of Order, Out of Sight is an artistic and intellectual autobiography and an (occasionally scathing) commentary on mainstream art, art criticism, and American culture of the last twenty-five years.Piper is an internationally recognized conceptual artist and the only African American in the early conceptual art movement of the 1960s. The writings in Out of Order, Out of Sight trace the development of her thinking about her artwork and the art world, and her evolving awareness of herself as a creative, racial, and gendered subject situated in an often limiting and always absurd cultural and social context.

Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality


Crispin Sartwell - 1996
    He explores what happens if we love this world precisely as it is, with all of its pain, with all of its evil, with all of its bizarre and arbitrary and monstrous thereness. In a highly personal and brutally direct style, Sartwell explores the themes of transgressive sexuality, political anarchism, addiction, death, and embodiment.The author engages contemporary and historical debates in cultural criticism, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy, and expresses deep suspicions about them. He asserts that scientific philosophical conceptualization is a movement toward death, a rejection of realityThe author engages contemporary and historical debates in cultural criticism, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy, and expresses deep suspicions about them. He asserts that scientific philosophical conceptualization is a movement toward death, a rejection of realityMoral and political values--the ethical rejection of the particular precisely from within the particular--are, Sartwell claims, an assault on human authenticity. Thus, transgression--which is described as the affirmation of embodiment through obscenity--is something we radically require.

Road that Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile


Ann M. Pendleeton-Jullian - 1996
    I am very positive about this book and certainly recommend it. The questions it raises are extremely important for the practice of architecture, and particularly for the teaching of the discipline. The author describes the "Open City" and its theoretical premises with great love. The existence of the experimental city itself is rather unknown in North America. This is a work that deserves to be better known in the English speaking world, in the context of other important pedagogical experiments in architecture ranging from the Bauhaus and Ulm to Cooper Union."

God's Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible


Stephen D. Moore - 1996
    God's Gym is about divinity, physical pain, and the visions of male perfectability. Weaving together his obsession with human anatomy and dissection, an interest in the technologies of torture, the cult of physical culture, and an expert knowledge of biblical criticism, Moore explains the male narcissism at the heart of the biblical God. God's Gym is an intensely personal book, brimming with our culture's phobias and fascinations about male perfectability.

Terrors and Experts


Adam Phillips - 1996
    To understand any psychoanalyst's work--both as a clinician and as a writer--we should ask what he or she loves, because psychoanalysis is about the unacceptable and about love, two things that we may prefer to keep apart, but that Freud found to be inextricable. If it is possible to talk about psychoanalysis as a scandal, without spuriously glamorizing it, then one way of doing it is simply to say that Freud discovered that love was compatible, though often furtively, with all that it was meant to exclude. There are, in other words--and most of literature is made up of these words--no experts on love. And love, whatever else it is, is terror.In a manner characteristically engaging and challenging, charming and maddening, Adam Phillips teases out the complicity between desire and the forbidden, longing and dread. His book is a chronicle of that all-too-human terror, and of how expertise, in the form of psychoanalysis, addresses our fears--in essence, turns our terror into meaning.It is terror, of course, that traditionally drives us into the arms of the experts. Phillips takes up those topics about which psychoanalysis claims expertise--childhood, sexuality, love, development, dreams, art, the unconscious, unhappiness--and explores what Freud's description of the unconscious does to the idea of expertise, in life and in psychoanalysis itself. If we are not, as Freud's ideas tell us, masters of our own houses, then what kind of claims can we make for ourselves? In what senses can we know what we are doing? These questions, so central to the human condition and to the state of psychoanalysis, resonate through this book as Phillips considers our notions of competence, of a professional self, of expertise in every realm of life from parenting to psychoanalysis. Terrors and Experts testifies to what makes psychoanalysis interesting, to that interest in psychoanalysis--which teaches us the meaning of our ignorance--that makes the terrors of life more bearable, even valuable.

The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics


Giorgio Agamben - 1996
    This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia Virgil is Dante's guide.The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise.Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

Outside Belongings


Elspeth Probyn - 1996
    Instead, Probyn proposes a model of identity that takes into account the desires of individuals, and groups of individuals, to belong. The main ideas she considers--"the outside", "the surface", and "belonging"--allow her to articulate, in concrete terms, her precise concerns about sexuality and nationality.

Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation


Michael Gamer - 1996
    Michael Gamer analyzes how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions while, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of Gothic literature played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology, tracing the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century.

In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression


Tim Cresswell - 1996
    Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.What is the relationship between place and behavior? In this fascinating volume, Tim Cresswell examines this question via "transgressive acts" that are judged as inappropriate not only because they are committed by marginalized groups but also because of where they occur.In Place/Out of Place seeks to illustrate the ways in which the idea of geographical deviance is used as an ideological tool to maintain an established order. Cresswell looks at graffiti in New York City, the attempts by various "hippie" groups to hold a free festival at Stonehenge during the summer solstices of 1984–86, and the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in Berkshire, England. In each of the cases described, the groups involved were designated as out of place both by the media and by politicians, whose descriptions included an array of images such as dirt, disease, madness, and foreignness.Cresswell argues that space and place are key factors in the definition of deviance and, conversely, that space and place are used to construct notions of order and propriety. In addition, whereas ideological concepts being expressed about what is good, just, and appropriate often are delineated geographically, the transgression of these delineations reveals the normally hidden relationships between place and ideology-in other words, the "out-of-place" serves to highlight and define the "in-place." By looking at the transgressions of the marginalized, Cresswell argues, we can gain a novel perspective on the "normal" and "taken-for-granted" expectations of everyday life. The book concludes with a consideration of the possibility of a "politics of transgression," arguing for a link between the challenging of spatial boundaries and the possibility of social transformation.Tim Cresswell is currently lecturer in geography at the University of Wales.

The Making of a Psychotherapist


Neville Symington - 1996
    It discusses psychotherapy in relation to such areas as modes of cure, conscience.

Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch


Beate Lohser - 1996
    Focusing upon Freud's definition of the primary task of treatment and the division of labor between himself and his patient, the authors compare the five cases as well as the cases of the Rat Man and the Wolf Man both to Freud's own papers on technique and to current ideals of mainstream analytic treatment. Their findings reveal an unexpected Freud, an active, personal, and emotionally engaged clinician quite different from the dominant image of the Freudian analyst as uninvolved, neutral interpreter of transference and resistance. Raising important questions about the nature of the primary task, the pitfalls of task displacement, and the roles of neutrality and authority, this book makes a valuable contribution to current psychoanalytic dialogue.

Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond


Gregory Nagy - 1996
    It stresses the role of performance and the performer in the re-creative process of composition-in-performance. It addresses questions of authority and authorship in the making of oral poetry, and it examines the efforts of ancient scholars to edit a definitive text of the real Homer.

Applications Of Cdma In Wireless/Personal Communications


Vijay K. Garg - 1996
    This book provides background on spread spectrum technologies, and then offers an in-depth technical explanation of how CDMA implements spread spectrum techniques.

Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa


David Chidester - 1996
    The book offers a detailed analysis of the ways in which European travelers, missionaries, settlers, and government agents, as well as indigenous Africans, engaged in the comparison of alternative religious ways of life as one dimension of intercultural contact. Focusing primarily on ninteenth-century frontier relations, David Chidester demonstrates that the terms and conditions for comparison--including a discrouse about "otherness" that were established during this period still remains.A volume in the series Studies in Religion and Culture

What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions


James Schmidt - 1996
    It has rarely been noticed, however, that at the end of the Enlightenment, German thinkers had already begun a scrutiny of their age so wide-ranging that there are few subsequent criticisms that had not been considered by the close of the eighteenth century. Among the concerns these essays address are the importance of freedom of expression, the relationship between faith and reason, and the responsibility of the Enlightenment for revolutions.Included are translations of works by such well-known figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Georg Hamann, as well as essays by thinkers whose work is virtually unknown to American readers. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.

Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City


Graeme Gilloch - 1996
    This book is a timely and lucid study of Benjamin's lifelong fascination with the city and forms of metropolitan experience.Benjamin's critical and complex account of the modern urban environment is traced through a number of key texts: the pioneering sketches of Naples, Marseilles and Moscow; his childhood reminiscences of Berlin; and his brilliant and unfinished studies of nineteenth-century Paris and the poet Charles Baudelaire.Gilloch emphasizes the importance of these writings for an interpretation of Benjamin's work as a whole, and highlights their relevance for our contemporary understanding of modernity.

From Marx to Gramsci


Paul Le Blanc - 1996
    A dedication to working-class revolution gives coherence to the influential philosophical, economic, sociological, and historical works of these writers.Paul Le Blanc's introductory essay probes the structure and dynamics of Marxism as a political orientation, tracing connections among components that can be found in the readings: the theory of capitalist development, the theory of the labor movement, the strategy of revolution, the conception of the transition to socialism. Others identified with the Marxist tradition—such as Plekhanov, Kautsky, Stalin, Mao—are also discussed, and attention is given to perspectives of such varied critics of Marxism as Sidney Hook, Bertram D. Wolfe, James Burnham, Daniel Bell, Robert Heilbroner, and C. Wright Mills. Historical reflections are blended with discussion of the durability of capitalism, the disappointment of hopes for workers' revolution, the "collapse of communism," issues of race and gender, the environment, and challenges of the twenty-first century.

The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History


Bob Perelman - 1996
    Drawing on materials from popular culture, avoiding the standard stylistic indications of poetic lyricism, and using nonsequential sentences are some of the ways in which language writers make poetry a more open and participatory process for the readers. Reading this kind of writing, however, may not come easily in a culture where poetry is treated as property of a special class. It is this barrier that Bob Perelman seeks to break down in this fascinating and comprehensive account of the language writing movement. A leading language writer himself, Perelman offers insights into the history of the movement and discusses the political and theoretical implications of the writing. He provides detailed readings of work by Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Charles Bernstein, among many others, and compares it to a wide range of other contemporary and modern American poetry.A variety of issues are addressed in the following chapters: "The Marginalization of Poetry," "Language Writing and Literary History," "Here and Now on Paper," "Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice," "Write the Power," "Building a More Powerful Vocabulary: Bruce Andrews and the World (Trade Center)," "This Page Is My Page, This Page Is Your Page: Gender and Mapping," "An Alphabet of Literary Criticism," and "A False Account of Talking with Frank O'Hara and Roland Barthes in Philadelphia."

Theory & Harmony for the Contemporary Musician


Arnie Berle - 1996
    This essential guide is a full course for today's musician. It covers everything from the fundamentals of sound and music notation to popular song forms and chord scales for improvisation.

Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe


Ian P. Watt - 1996
    The original Counter Reformation myths saw the individualism of Don Juan, Don Quixote, and Faust as a problem to be quelled by death or mockery. However, the Romantic period, a time more favorably disposed toward myth, saw their dissension not as unacceptable disorder, but rather as admirable and heroic behavior. This incisive study traces attitudes toward these figures and the Romantic product Robinson Crusoe from disapproval to awe to skepticism, examining them as icons of such problems as solitude, narcissism, and the claims of the self versus the claims of the community. Pointedly, none of these figures marries or has a lasting relationship, save for the selfless devotion of a single male servant. Watt argues that the myths of Don Juan, Don Quixote, Faust, and Robinson Crusoe remain the distinctive products of Western society, embodying the most basic values of modern culture.

Contemporary Plays by Women of Color


Kathy Perkins - 1996
    This compelling collection includes works by award-winning and well-known playwrights such as Anna Deavere Smith, Cherrie Moraga, Pearl Cleage, Marga Gomez and Spiderwoman, as well as many exciting newcomers. Contemporary Plays by Women of Color is the first anthology to display such an abundance of talent from such a wide range of today's women playwrights. The plays tackle a variety of topics - from the playful to the painful - and represent numerous different approaches to playmaking. The volume also includes: * an invaluable appendix of published plays by women of color * biographical notes on each writer * the production history of each play Contemporary Plays by Women of Color is a unique resource for practitioners, students and lovers of theatre, and an inspiring addition to any bookshelf.

Towards a 'Natural' Narratology


Monika Fludernik - 1996
    This book is both an historical survey and theoretical study, with the author drawing on an enormous range of examples from the earliest oral study to contemporary experimental fiction. She uses these examples to prove that recent literature, far from heralding the final collapse of narrative, represents the epitome of a centuries long developmental process.

Being Human: The Problem of Agency


Margaret Scotford Archer - 1996
    This book is a revindication of the concept of humanity, rejecting contemporary social theory that seeks to diminish human properties and powers. Archer argues that being human depends on an interaction with the real world in which practice takes primacy over language in the emergence of human self-consciousness, thought, emotionality and personal identity--all of which are prior to, and more basic than, our acquisition of a social identity.

Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine


Arthur Kleinman - 1996
    Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate.Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems—for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain—are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics.Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.

Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth


Philip Core - 1996
    Jean Cocteau, as camp a figure as Paris has ever produced, said in Vanity Fair in 1922, 'I am a lie that tells the truth.' This paradox is the basis of Philip Core's personal definitions of camp, seen from the inside. His savagely witty depicts of more than two centuries of camp find it embodied in personalities and places, objects and artefacts. He has written a Who's Who and a What's What of camp, a deceptively descriptive and factual lexicon, allowing the reader to build up a kaleidoscopic picture of camp through the ages. It is complemented with 150 rare and stunning photographs and a vivacious foreword by England's foremost authority on surrealism, eccentric behaviour and hats - jazz singer George Melly.

The Lesbian Almanac: The most comprehensive reference


Lesbian and Gay Community - 1996
    Compiled by two nationally known and highly respected gay and lesbian organizations, The Lesbian Almanac is a complete reference on lesbian culture and history--chronicling everything from the lesbian community's fascinating past to the issues and ideas that concern it most today.

Art Into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents


Nick Kaye - 1996
    Nick Kaye's introductory essay to the volume offers a useful context for the reader and each interview is preceded by an informative biographical sketch.

Aesthetic Ideology


Paul De Man - 1996
    The texts collected here were written or delivered as lectures during the last years of de Man's life, between 1977 and 1983. Many of them have never been available previously in any form.

Anti-Racism Education: Theory and Practice


George J. Sefa Dei - 1996
    Studying anti-racism as a proactive, process-oriented approach to addressing the racial and ethnocultural differences that students bring to schools, this book captures the relational aspects of social difference and argues for the analyzation of the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual oppression.

Understanding Masculinities


Máirtín Mac an Ghaill - 1996
    It brings together overviews of the key theoretical debates with new empirical material, focusing on different social and cultural arenas, and the wide range of masculinities which exist. Full description

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis


Dylan Evans - 1996
    Yet his writings are notorious for their complexity and idiosyncratic style. Emphasising the clinical basis of Lacan's work, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis is an ideal companion to his ideas for readers in every discipline where his influence is felt. The Dictionary features: * over 200 entries, explaining Lacan's own terminology and his use of common psychoanalytic expressions* details of the historical and institutional context of Lacan's work* reference to the origins of major concepts in the work of Freud, Saussure, Hegel and other key thinkers* a chronology of Lacan's life and works.

Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis


Erik Olin Wright - 1996
    The research in the book covers a wide range of topics, including the class character of friendship patterns, class mobility, the sexual division of labor in housework, gender differences in managerial authority, and class consciousness. What unites the topics is not a preoccupation with a common object of explanation, but rather a common explanatory factor: class.

The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century


Hal Foster - 1996
    Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today.After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s; Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real; to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites; If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-garde; it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation; and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City


Libero AndreottiGil J. Wolman - 1996
    The writings included in Theory of the Derive, many published here in English for the first time, are predominantly critical texts, revealing Situationism's aims, focus, breadth of vision, and development. Begun in 1957 by various artists and writers representing avant-garde organizations, the Situationist International was, from its inception, a revolutionary cultural organization. Seeing its project as one of merging art and life in practice, it developed over the next decade, implementing incisive critiques of post-war consumer culture and proposing radical projects of urban utopian design. Against the oppressive, stifling conditions imposed in technocratic city planning, the Situationist International sought to develop new forms of collective action and agitation that would promote free use and transformation of the urban environment. Its tactics, slogans, and visions of an alternative OEnitary urbanism' were especially influential in the events of the May 1968 uprising in France and have since been important influences on radical currents in many countries.

Pamphlet Architecture 13: Edge of a City


Steven Holl - 1996
    Small in scale, low in price, but large in impact, these books present and disseminate new and innovative theories. The modest format of the books in the Pamphlet Architecture Series belies the importance and magnitude of the ideas within.

The Magic of the State


Michael Taussig - 1996
    Set in the enchanted mountain of a spirit-queen presiding over an unnamed, postcolonial country, this ethnographic work of ficto-criticism recreates in written form the shrines by which the dead--notably the fetishized forms of Europe's Others, Indians and Blacks--generate the magical powers of the modern state.

Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent Cognitive Scientists


Peter Baumgartner - 1996
    Born of computer science, this effort has sparked a continuing debate among the psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and linguists who have pioneered--and criticized--artificial intelligence. Are there general principles, as some computer scientists had originally hoped, that would fully describe the activity of both animal and machine minds, just as aerodynamics accounts for the flight of birds and airplanes? In the twenty substantial interviews published here, leading researchers address this and other vexing questions in the field of cognitive science.The interviewees include Patricia Smith Churchland (Take It Apart and See How It Runs), Paul M. Churchland (Neural Networks and Commonsense), Aaron V. Cicourel (Cognition and Cultural Belief), Daniel C. Dennett (In Defense of AI), Hubert L. Dreyfus (Cognitivism Abandoned), Jerry A. Fodor (The Folly of Simulation), John Haugeland (Farewell to GOFAI?), George Lakoff (Embodied Minds and Meanings), James L. McClelland (Toward a Pragmatic Connectionism), Allen Newell (The Serial Imperative), Stephen E. Palmer (Gestalt Psychology Redux), Hilary Putnam (Against the New Associationism), David E. Rumelhart (From Searching to Seeing), John R. Searle (Ontology Is the Question), Terrence J. Sejnowski (The Hardware Really Matters), Herbert A. Simon (Technology Is Not the Problem), Joseph Weizenbaum (The Myth of the Last Metaphor), Robert Wilensky (Why Play the Philosophy Game?), Terry A.Winograd (Computers and Social Values), and Lotfi A. Zadeh (The Albatross of Classical Logic). Speaking Minds can complement more traditional textbooks but can also stand alone as an introduction to the field.Originally published in 1995.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings


Peter R. Schmidt - 1996
    In Making Alternative Histories, eleven scholars from Africa, India, Latin America, North America, and Europe debate and discuss how to respond to the erasures of local histories by colonialism, neocolonial influences, and the practice of archaeology and history as we know them today in North America and much of the Western world. Making Alternative Histories presents a profound challenge to traditional Western modes of scholarship and will be required reading for Western archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians.

Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later


Jerome Kohn - 1996
    Born in Germany, Arendt studied with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. She escaped after the Nazis came to power; remained stateless until 1951, when she became a U.S. citizen; was the first woman appointed to a full professorship at Princeton; and became a prominent "public intellectual" whose positions were often controversial. Her major works include The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, The Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind (unfinished at her death). Now, twenty years later, this collection of fifteen essays brings her work into dialogue with those philosophical views that are at center stage today -- in critical theory, communitarianism, virtue theory, and feminism. The essays are divided into four sections: Political Action and Judgment; Ethics and the Nature of Evil; Self and World; and Gender and Jewishness. An extensive bibliography of work on Arendt in English is included as an appendix.

Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species


Maureen N. McLane - 1996
    Maureen McLane reveals how Romantic writers participated in a new-found consciousness of human beings as a species, engaging with major discourses on moral philosophy, political economy and anthropology by preeminent theorists such as Malthus, Godwin and Burke. The book provides original readings of canonical works, including Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and has much to say about the place of Romantic poetry within its culture.

Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political


Seyla BenhabibSheldon S. Wolin - 1996
    From nationalist and ethnic revivals in the countries of east and central Europe to the former Soviet Union, to the politics of cultural separatism in Canada, and to social movement politics in liberal western-democracies, the negotiation of identity/difference has become a challenge to democracies everywhere. This volume brings together a group of distinguished thinkers who rearticulate and reconsider the foundations of democratic theory and practice in the light of the politics of identity/difference. In Part One J�rgen Habermas, Sheldon S. Wolin, Jane Mansbridge, Seyla Benhabib, Joshua Cohen, and Iris Marion Young write on democratic theory. Part Two--on equality, difference, and public representation--contains essays by Anne Phillips, Will Kymlicka, Carol C. Gould, Jean L. Cohen, and Nancy Fraser; and Part Three--on culture, identity, and democracy--by Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, Fred Dallmayr, Joan B. Landes, and Carlos A. Forment. In the last section Richard Rorty, Robert A. Dahl, Amy Gutmann, and Benjamin R. Barber write on whether democracy needs philosophical foundations.

Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality


Melissa Raphael - 1996
    Addressing religious studies and women's studies students and all those interested in contemporary spirituality, Raphael counters reformist feminism's recurrent criticism of goddess feminism as naively essentialist and sub-political. She presents spiritual feminism as a set of religio-political manoeuvres that powerfully resist such patriarchal degradations of female/natural generativity as environmental destruction, weight-reducing diets, and menstrual taboos.

Small Buildings


Mike Cadwell - 1996
    Small in scale, low in price, but large in impact, these books present and disseminate new and innovative theories.

Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media


Samuel Weber - 1996
    Through precise and inventive readings of Kant, Heidegger and Benjamin, Weber demonstrates how key aesthetic categories such as from are transformed in a way that anticipates and participates in the radical shift from a work-oriented to a medium-oriented conception of art and reality.

Saussure's First Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1907): From the Notebooks of Albert Riedlinger


Ferdinand de Saussure - 1996
    Saussure's Cours de linguistique generale has been one of the seminal books of the twentieth century, having shaped modern linguistics and semiology, and having importantly affected anthropology, philosophy and literary studies. Yet the book was written by Saussure's colleagues, based on student notes taken during the three occasions when Saussure gave his lectures on general linguistics. For Saussure's first course, the notebooks of Albert Riedlinger are certainly the best and the most detailed. They have loomed large in our knowledge of Saussurean linguistics, but a number of Saussure's statements, as recorded by Riedlinger, have never been known to a larger public. Until now, those notes themselves have been unavailable, except in fragmented and incomplete form in Engler's unwieldy and hard-to-find edition of the Cours. Now, the best of the student notes to all three courses will be available for the first tim"

Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics


Lisa Lowe - 1996
    Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture.Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the “foreigner-within.” In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant—at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation—displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a “failed” integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders.In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.

Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter


Jo Anna Isaak - 1996
    The book provides a provocative and valuable account of the diversity and revolutionary potential of women's art practice.

Marching Through Chaos


John A. English - 1996
    Victory in the Cold War, moreover, seems to have increased the attractiveness of this potentially dangerous model. In fact, NATO's attempts to replace conventional armies with nuclear technology represented a misreading of history inasmuch as war has always been more of a social than technological phenomenon. From his succinct survey of the growth and operations of field armies from medieval times to the Gulf War, English concludes that the legitimately constituted conventional army of the nation-state still remains the best instrument for bringing some semblance of order to the destructive chaos of war.The development of field armies has involved much more sophistication than generally supposed. In both practice and theory, army operations have been as knowledge-based and intellectually rigorous as any academic discipline, ensuring them an enduring place as a practical means of applying massive force. Fortunately, the NATO attempt to replace conventional armies with nuclear technology was never tested in a real war. But English suggests that the likelihood of deterrence continuing in war, because of its transmutability, also offers hope that it can be controlled in the future, as it was in the past, by social forces. This book offers a longer, more realistic view of war than that normally embraced by technocrats in search of better weapons and peacemakers in search of utopia.This book also addresses in detail the questions of why armies became so large and why war itself transmutated. The technological transformation of war that occurred after 1815 is discussed, in turn, for the effect it exerted upon the future operations of armies. A novel perspective on the tactical and operational progression of warfighting up to the end of World War II is also provided through an examination of modern defensive theory. On a more elevated plane, the book critically assesses the ways in which nuclear deterrence ultimately affected NATO's defensive posture in central Europe. Also subjected to detailed scrutiny are the theoretical and practical dimensions of ground force concepts for the defense of the NATO central front. Finally, English evaluates ground force operations in the Gulf War with a view to drawing relevant conclusions and lessons for the future.

Merleau Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting


Veronique M. Foti - 1996
    Presents a collection of current American and European scholarship on three foci in the thought of Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961): the problem of difference in post-war Heideggerian and poststructuralist thought; the thematization of materiality; and the ontology and theory of painting.

Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures


David Watkin - 1996
    It also sheds new light on eighteenth-century British and continental architectural theory. Dr Watkin enters Soane's private dialogue with an astonishing array of philosophers, architectural theorists, art-historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, whose writings he studied while preparing his lectures on architecture at the Royal Academy from 1809. The texts he studied range from classical authors to many of his most famous contemporaries. The book relates Soane's reading to his own architecture and to his lectures, which are published here in full for the first time, with over one hundred and fifty of his superb lecture illustrations, including twenty-five in colour. Recipient of the 1997 Sir Banister Fletcher Prize

English Authors Series: A. S. Byatt


Kathleen Coyne Kelly - 1996
    An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writer's work.Each volume features:-- A critical, interpretive study and explication of the author's works-- A brief biography of the author-- An accessible chronology outlining the life, the work, and relevant historical context-- Aids for further study: complete notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography and an index-- A readable style presented in a manageable length

Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities


David Howes - 1996
    When they are exported, they can act as a means of communication or domination. However, there is no guarantee that the intentions of the producer will be recognized, much less respected, by the consumer from another culture. Cross-Cultural Consumption is a fascinating guide to the cultural implications of the globalization of a consumer society. The chapters address topics ranging from the clothing of colonial subjects in South Africa and the rise of the hypermarket in Argentina, to the presentation of culture in international tourist hotels. Through their examination of cultural imperialism and cultural appropriation of the representation of otherness and identity, Howes and his contributors show how the increasingly global flow of goods and images challenges the very idea of the cultural border and creates new spaces for cultural invention. Marian Bredin, Concordia University, Constance Classen, Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago, Mary Crain, University of Barcelona, Carol Handrickson, Marlboro Colleg

Neither Capitalism Nor Socialism: Theories of Bureaucratic Collectivism


Ernest E. HaberkernHal Draper - 1996
    The analysis was extended to include the new states that arose in the post WWII era, particularly Mao's China and Tito's Yugoslavia. Perhaps of more contemporary importance is the attempt to understand what was happening to modern capitalism. Of particular interest is the discussion of the "Permanent Arms Economy" and its effect on capitalism.

Women Are from Pluto, Men Are from Uranus: The Big Bang and Other Premature Theories of Love: A Parody


Mike Nichols - 1996
    

Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy


Barbara Ching - 1996
    Written to redress the longstanding neglect and denigration of the rural, this book argues that the cultural dominance of the city has been reinforced by postmodern theory's near fixation on the urban and the sophisticated.The essays explore rural identity in a number of cultures and situations, and look at issues of contemporary interest. Topics covered include the uses of popular and high culture, the explosion of high technology, the social and economic impact of ecological policy, the role of labor in the global marketplace, museum curatorship, and post-colonial politics. Throughout, the essays address the many ways in which place identity alters and influences the experience of race, class, gender and ethnicity.