Best of
Theory

2000

Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings


Subcomandante Marcos - 2000
    Introduced by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, and illustrated with beautiful black and white photographs, Our Word Is Our Weapon crystallizes "the passion of a rebel, the poetry of a movement, and the literary genius of indigenous Mexico."Marcos first captured world attention on January 1, 1994, when he and an indigenous guerrilla group calling themselves Zapatistas revolted against the Mexican government and seized key towns in Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas. In the six years that passed since their uprising, Marcos altered the course of Mexican politics and emerged an international symbol of grassroots movement-building, rebellion, and democracy. The prolific stream of poetic political writings, tales, and traditional myths which Marcos penned from 1994 to 2000 fill more than four volumes. Our Word Is Our Weapon presents the best of these writings, many of which have never been published before in English.Throughout this remarkable book we hear the uncompromising voice of indigenous communities living in resistance, expressing through manifestos and myths the universal human urge for dignity, democracy, and liberation. It is the voice of a people refusing to be forgotten the voice of Mexico in transition, the voice of a people struggling for democracy by using their word as their only weapon.

Where We Stand: Class Matters


bell hooks - 2000
    Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan Coop boards, Where We Stand is a successful black woman's reflection--personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest--on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them.

Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality


Anne Fausto-Sterling - 2000
    In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms - sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed - and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.

The Language of Inquiry


Lyn Hejinian - 2000
    Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address.Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.

The Edward Said Reader


Edward W. Said - 2000
    Whether he is writing of Zionism or Palestinian self-determination, Jane Austen or Yeats, music or the media, Said's uncompromising intelligence casts urgent light on every subject he undertakes. The Edward Said Reader will prove a joy to the general reader and an indispensable resource for scholars of politics, history, literature, and cultural studies: in short, of all those fields that his work has influenced and, in some cases, transformed.

Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan


Alenka Zupančič - 2000
    In attempting to interpret such a revolutionary proposition in a more ‘humane’ light, and to turn Kant into our contemporary—someone who can help us with our own ethical dilemmas—many Kantian scholars have glossed over its apparent paradoxes and impossible claims. This book is concerned with doing exactly the opposite. Kant, thank God, is not our contemporary; he stands against the grain of our times. Lacan on the face of it appears the very antithesis of Kant—the wild theorist of psychoanalysis compared to the sober Enlightenment thinker. His concept of the Real, however, provides perhaps the most useful backdrop to this new interpretation of Kantian ethics. Constantly juxtaposing her readings of the two philosophers. Alenka Zupan?i? summons up an ‘ethics of the Real’, and clears the ground for a radical restoration of the disruptive element in ethics.

Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature


John Bellamy Foster - 2000
    Or does it? This startling new account overturns conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a more rational approach to the current environmental crisis.Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx's neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature.Marx's Ecology covers many other thinkers, including Epicurus, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Ludwig Feuerbach, P. J. Proudhon, and William Paley.By reconstructing a materialist conception of nature and society, Marx's Ecology challenges the spiritualism prevalent in the modern Green movement, pointing toward a method that offers more lasting and sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis.

Methodology of the Oppressed


Chela Sandoval - 2000
    Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity.What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed". This methodology -- born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange -- holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics.Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression.

Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality


Sara Ahmed - 2000
    Using feminist and postcolonial theory this book examines the impact of multiculturalism and globalization on embodiment and community whilst considering the ethical and political implication of its critique for post-colonial feminism.A diverse range of texts are analyzed which produce the figure of 'the stranger', showing that it has alternatively been expelled as the origin of danger - such as in neighbourhood watch, or celebrated as the origin of difference - as in multiculturalism. The author argues that both of these standpoints are problematic as they involve 'stranger fetishism'; they assume that the stranger 'has a life of its own'.

Night-Vision: Illuminating War & Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain


Butch Lee - 2000
    hegemony, and the need for a revolutionary movement of the oppressed to overthrow it all.From Night-Vision: "The transformation to a neo-colonial world has only begun, but it promises to be as drastic, as disorienting a change as was the original european colonial conquest of the human race. Capitalism is again ripping apart & restructuring the world, and nothing will be the same. Not race, not nation, not gender, and certainly not whatever culture you used to have. Now you have outcast groups as diverse as the Aryan Nation and the Queer Nation and the Hip Hop Nation publicly rejecting the right of the u.s. government to rule them. All the building blocks of human culture—race, gender, nation, and especially class—are being transformed under great pressure to embody the spirit of this neo-colonial age."

Pedagogy of Indignation (Critical Narrative)


Paulo Freire - 2000
    Pedagogy of Indignation delves ever deeper into the themes that concerned him throughout his life. The book begins with a series of three deeply moving reflective "pedagogical letters" to the reader about the role of education for one's development of self. He also speaks directly to the reader about the relationship to risk in one's life and he delves deeper than before into the daily life tensions between freedom and authority. Building on these interconnected themes, Freire sharpens our sense of the critical faculties of children and how a teacher may work with children to help them realize their potential intellectually and as human beings. Subsequent chapters explore these topics in relation to the wider social world: the social constitution of the self in the work of educators; critical citizenship; and the necessity of teaching "from a position" about the world that goes beyond literacy programs to include the legacy of colonialism in peoples' resistance movements today. The book's poignant interludes, written by Ana Maria Araujo Freire, reveal Paulo's thoughts about the content of this book as he was completing it during the last weeks and days of his life.

Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality


Tara Smith - 2000
    Smith argues that human beings need to be moral in order to live, explaining how life is the standard of morality, how flourishing is the proper end and reward of living morally, and how an intelligent egoism is the path to flourishing.

Shorter Views


Samuel R. Delany - 2000
    Delany brings his remarkable intellectual powers to bear on a wide range of topics. Whether he is exploring the deeply felt issues of identity, race, and sexuality, untangling the intricacies of literary theory, or the writing process itself, Delany is one of the most lucid and insightful writers of our time. These essays cluster around topics related to queer theory on the one hand, and on the other, questions concerning the paraliterary genres: science fiction, pornography, comics, and more. Readers new to Delany's work will find this collection of shorter pieces an especially good introduction, while those already familiar with his writing will appreciate having these essays between two covers for the first time.

Memory, History, Forgetting


Paul Ricœur - 2000
    Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.“His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal “Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review

Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America


Aníbal Quijano - 2000
    One of the foundations of that pattern of power was the social classification of the world population upon the base of the idea of race, a mental construct that expresses colonial experience and that pervades the most important dimensions of world power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. This article discusses some implications of that coloniality of power in Latin American history.

The Time That Remains: A Commentary On The Letter To The Romans


Giorgio Agamben - 2000
    Situating Paul's texts in the context of early Jewish messianism, this book is part of a growing set of recent critiques devoted to the period when Judaism and Christianity were not yet fully distinct, placing Paul in the context of what has been called "Judaeo-Christianity." Agamben's philosophical exploration of the problem of messianism leads to the other major figure discussed in this book, Walter Benjamin. Advancing a claim without precedent in the vast literature on Benjamin, Agamben argues that Benjamin's philosophy of history constitutes a repetition and appropriation of Paul's concept of "remaining time." Through a close reading and comparison of Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and the Pauline Epistles, Agamben discerns a number of striking and unrecognized parallels between the two works.

Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative


Mary Burger - 2000
    The anthology includes renowned writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lydia Davis and Kevin Killian, writers who have spent years pondering the meaning of storytelling and how storytelling functions in our culture, as well as presenting a new generation of brilliant thinkers and writers, like Christian Bök, Corey Frost, Derek McCormack and Lisa Robertson.Contemporizing the friendly anecdotal style of Montaigne and written by daring writers of different ages, of different origins, from many different regions of the continent, from Mexico to Montreal, these essays run the gamut of mirth, prose poetry, tall tales and playful explorations of reader/writer dynamics. They discuss aesthetics founded on new explorations in the field of narrative, the mystery that is the body, questions of how representation may be torqued to deal with gender and sexuality, the experience of marginalized people, the negotiation between different orders of time, the 'performance' of outlaw subject matter.Brave, energetic and fresh, Biting the Error tells a whole new story about narrative.Biting the Error is edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy and Gail Scott, the co-founders of the Narrativity Website Magazine, based at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.

Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader


Barbara A. Crow - 2000
    Yet the role radical feminism played within the women's movement remains hotly contested. For some, radical feminism has made a lasting contribution to our understanding of male privilege, and the ways the power imbalance between men and women affects the everyday fabric of women's lives. For others, radical feminism represents a reflexive hostility toward men, sex, and heterosexuality, and thus is best ignored or forgotten.Rather than have the movement be interpreted by others, Radical Feminism permits the original work of radical feminists to speak for itself. Comprised of pivotal documents written by U.S. radical feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, Radical Feminism combines both unpublished and previously published manifestos, position papers, minutes of meetings, and newsletters essential to an understanding of radical feminism. Consisting of documents unavailable to the general public, and others in danger of being lost altogether, this panoramic collection is organized around the key issues of sex and sexuality, race, children, lesbianism, separatism, and class. Barbara A. Crow rescues the groundbreaking original work of such groups as The Furies, Redstockings, Cell 16, and the Women's Liberation Movement. Contributors include Kate Millet, Susan Brownmiller, Shulamith Firestone, Rosalyn Baxandall, Toni Morrison, Ellen Willis, Anne Koett, and Vivan Gornick.Gathered for the first time in one volume, these primary sources of radical feminism fill a major gap in the literature on feminism and feminist thought. Radical Feminism is an indispensable resource for future generations of feminists, scholars, and activists.

Essential Anatomy: For Healing and Martial Arts


Marc Tedeschi - 2000
    Overviews of philosophical and conceptual underpinnings are followed by detailed drawings and diagrams of the body's internal systems, as seen by both traditions. Written in a clear and concise style, this beautiful and informative book presents information previously unavailable in any single text, making it an essential work for students, healing professionals, and martial artists. This lavishly illustrated book includes:    • Over 147 color drawings and 54 duotone photographs    • An easy-to-understand overview of Western anatomical concepts    • A detailed overview of Eastern medical principles, including information previously available only in specialized, costly medical texts    • A comprehensive listing of Oriental pressure points and meridians in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, cross-referenced to nerves, blood vessels, and other anatomical landmarks    • Twenty essential self-massage and revival techniques    • Detailed principles of pressure point fighting, as used in traditional Asian martial arts

Richard Gomez at ang Mito ng Pagkalalake, Sharon Cuneta at ang Perpetwal na Birhen, at Iba Pang Sanaysay Ukol sa Bida sa Pelikula Bilang Kultural na Texto


Rolando B. Tolentino - 2000
    The book speaks about how society and the present political climate help mold the current bida sa pelikula to embody the dreams, aspirations, and hopes of a people and their country.

The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation


Michael Perelman - 2000
    But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism’s creation: For it to succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this? Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they were forced into the factories with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage labor. To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labor and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more practical writings of the classical economists. He argues that these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and goals of classical political economy—to separate a rural peasantry from their access to land. This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds important light on the rise of capitalism to its present state of world dominance. Historians of political economy and Marxist thought will find that this book broadens their understanding of how capitalism took hold in the industrial age.

Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II


Margaret D. Stetz - 2000
    Scholars of Asian history and politics, feminists, human rights activists, documentary filmmakers, visual artists, and novelists have begun to address the subject of the comfort system; to take up the cause of the surviving comfort women's sturggles; to call attention to sexual violence against women, especially during wartime; to consider the links among militarism, racism, imperialism, and sexism; and to include this history into 20th-century political history. This volume contains a cross-section of responses to the issues raised by the former comfort women and their new visibility on the international stage. Its focus is on how theorists, historians, researchers, activists, and artists have been preserving, interpreting, and disseminating the legacies of the comfort women and also drawing lessons from these. The essays consider the impact and influence of the comfort women's stories on a wide variety of fields and describe how those stories are now being heard or read and used in Asian and in the West.

The Unknown Karen Horney: Essays on Gender, Culture, and Psychoanalysis


Karen Horney - 2000
    It includes pieces on feminine psychology and the relations between the sexes as well as on other aspects of psychoanalytic theory. The editor's introductions set these works in context, showing their significance for Horney's thought and their relation to her other writings. The material in Part 1 provides an important supplement to Feminine Psychology, the book that established Horney as the first great psychoanalytic feminist. It reveals aspects of Horney's early thought not fully developed elsewhere, along with the views about feminine psychology and the relations between the sexes that reflect her later thinking. Part 2 deepens our understanding of the final two phases of Karen Horney's thought - her break with Freud and proposal of a new psychoanalytic paradigm in the 1930s, and her mature theory, developed in the 1940s. In presenting eighteen previously unpublished pieces, four essays that have not been available in English, and other texts that have been difficult to locate, this collection makes accessible an important segme

Dangerous Border Crossers


Guillermo Gómez-Peña - 2000
    This anthology of G�mez-Pe�a's performance chronicles, diary entries, poems, essays, and texts, sheds an extraordinary light on the life and work of this migrant provocateur.

Other Traditions


John Ashbery - 2000
    Among those whom John Ashbery reads at such times are John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. Less familiar than some, under Ashbery's scrutiny these poets emerge as the powerful but private and somewhat wild voices whose eccentricity has kept them from the mainstream--and whose vision merits Ashbery's efforts, and our own, to read them well.Deeply interesting in themselves, Ashbery's reflections on these poets of another tradition are equally intriguing for what they tell us about Ashbery's own way of reading, writing, and thinking. With its indirect clues to his work and its generous and infectious appreciation of a remarkable group of poets, this book conveys the passion, delight, curiosity, and insight that underlie the art and craft of poetry for writer and reader alike. Even as it invites us to discover the work of poets in Ashbery's other tradition, it reminds us of Ashbery's essential place in our own.

The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life


Michael Warner - 2000
    In place of sexual status quo, Warner offers a vision of true sexual autonomy that will forever change the way we think about sex, shame, and identity.

Countertransference and the Treatment of Trauma


Constance J. Dalenberg - 2000
    In a concise and practical format, this book shows mental health practitioners how they can both manage their countertransference reactions and use them as a force for healing in patients suffering from trauma. The author, a respected clinician and researcher, draws on empirical studies from the Trauma Research Institute and her own clinical experience to establish a set of common countertransference responses for various types of trauma. The author explores actual clinical cases, dissects dialogue transcripts, and goes through the span of treatment to outline the various methods for dealing with countertransference, such as when and how to disclose countertransference reactions to patients.

Chain No. 7: Memoir / Anti-Memoir


Juliana Spahr - 2000
    The works gathered here reveal memoir as re-invention, as generic interplay, as conversations among works, as travel back and forth and across times and states of mind. One can see in these works the political and psychic stakes involved in self-representation. Features work by C. S. Giscombe, Lisa Jarnot, Shirin Neshat, Edwin Torres, Ron Silliman, Anne Waldman, and Rosmarie Waldrop.

1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity


Albert Einstein - 2000
    This volume presents Albert Einstein's 1912 manuscript on the special theory of the relativity, one of the most revolutionary and influential scientific documents of the twentieth century.

Classics of Strategy and Counsel: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary: v. 1


Thomas Cleary - 2000
        •  Mastering the Art of War: Composed by two prominent statesmen-generals of classical China, this book develops the strategies of Sun Tzu's classic, The Art of War , into a complete handbook of organization and leadership.    •  The Lost Art of War: Written by Sun Bin, a linear descendant of Sun Tzu, this is another rich and practical Chinese text on political and military strategy.    •  The Silver Sparrow Art of War: A never-before-published translation of Sun Tzu's Art of War based on a more recently discovered version of the classic text.

Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship


Bruce Lincoln - 2000
    Lincoln then turns his attention to the period when myth was recuperated as a privileged type of narrative, a process he locates in the political and cultural ferment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, he connects renewed enthusiasm for myth to the nexus of Romanticism, nationalism, and Aryan triumphalism, particularly the quest for a language and set of stories on which nation-states could be founded.In the final section of this wide-ranging book, Lincoln advocates a fresh approach to the study of myth, providing varied case studies to support his view of myth—and scholarship on myth—as ideology in narrative form.

Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television


Jeffrey Sconce - 2000
    By offering a historical analysis of the relation between communication technologies, discourses of modernity, and metaphysical preoccupations, Sconce demonstrates how accounts of “electronic presence” have gradually changed over the decades from a fascination with the boundaries of space and time to a more generalized anxiety over the seeming sovereignty of technology. Sconce focuses on five important cultural moments in the history of telecommunication from the mid-nineteenth century to the present: the advent of telegraphy; the arrival of wireless communication; radio’s transformation into network broadcasting; the introduction of television; and contemporary debates over computers, cyberspace, and virtual reality. In the process of examining the trajectory of these technological innovations, he discusses topics such as the rise of spiritualism as a utopian response to the electronic powers presented by telegraphy and how radio, in the twentieth century, came to be regarded as a way of connecting to a more atomized vision of the afterlife. Sconce also considers how an early preoccupation with extraterrestrial radio communications tranformed during the network era into more unsettling fantasies of mediated annihilation, culminating with Orson Welles’s legendary broadcast of War of the Worlds. Likewise, in his exploration of the early years of television, Sconce describes how programs such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits continued to feed the fantastical and increasingly paranoid public imagination of electronic media. Finally, Sconce discusses the rise of postmodern media criticism as yet another occult fiction of electronic presence, a mythology that continues to dominate contemporary debates over television, cyberspace, virtual reality, and the Internet. As an engaging cultural history of telecommunications, Haunted Media will interest a wide range of readers including students and scholars of media, history, American studies, cultural studies, and literary and social theory.

At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture


James Edward Young - 2000
    Young was invited to join a German commission appointed to find an appropriate design for a national memorial in Berlin to the European Jews killed in World War II. As the only foreigner and only Jew on the panel, Young gained a unique perspective on Germany’s fraught efforts to memorialize the Holocaust. In this book, he tells for the first time the inside story of Germany’s national Holocaust memorial and his own role in it.In exploring Germany’s memorial crisis, Young also asks the more general question of how a generation of contemporary artists can remember an event like the Holocaust, which it never knew directly. Young examines the works of a number of vanguard artists in America and Europe—including Art Spiegelman, Shimon Attie, David Levinthal, and Rachel Whiteread—all born after the Holocaust but indelibly shaped by its memory as passed down through memoirs, film, photographs, and museums. In the context of the moral and aesthetic questions raised by these avant-garde projects, Young offers fascinating insights into the controversy surrounding Berlin’s newly opened Jewish museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, as well as Germany’s soon-to-be-built national Holocaust memorial, designed by Peter Eisenman.Illustrated with striking images in color and black-and-white, At Memory’s Edge is the first book in any language to chronicle these projects and to show how we remember the Holocaust in the after-images of its history.

The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief


Anne Anlin Cheng - 2000
    The Melancholy of Race proposes that racial identification is itself already a melancholic act--asocial category that is imaginatively supported through a dynamic of loss and compensation, by which the racial other is at once rejected and retained. Using psychoanalytic theories on mourning and melancholia as inroads into her subject, Cheng offers a closely observed and carefully reasonedaccount of the minority experience as expressed in works of art by, and about, Asian-Americans and African-Americans. She argues that the racial minority and dominant American culture both suffer from racial melancholia and that this insight is crucial to a productive reimagining of progressivepolitics. Her discussion ranges from Flower Drum Song to M. Butterfly, Brown v. Board of Education to Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight, and Invisible Man to The Woman Warrior, in the process demonstrating that racial melancholia permeates our fantasies of citizenship, assimilation, and socialhealth. Her investigations reveal the common interests that social, legal, and literary histories of race have always shared with psychoanalysis, and situates Asian-American and African-American identities in relation to one another within the larger process of American racialization. A provocativelook at a timely subject, this study is essential reading for anyone interested in race studies, critical theory, or psychoanalysis.

Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry


Lorenzo Thomas - 2000
    From early 20th-century writings to present-day poetry slams, African American poetry exhibits an impressive range of style and substance. Lorenzo Thomas has written an important new history of the genre that offers a critical reassessment of its development in the 20th century within the contexts of modernism and the troubled racial history of the United States. Basing his study on literary history, cultural criticism, and close readings, Thomas revives and appraises the writings of a number of this century's most important African American poets, including Margaret Walker, Amiri Baraka, Askia M. Toure, Harryette Mullen, and Kalamu ya Salaam. Thomas analyzes the work of Fenton Johnson within the context of emerging race consciousness in Chicago, contributes to critical appraisals of William Stanley Braithwaite and Melvin B. Tolson, and examines the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the book, Thomas demonstrates the continuity within the Afrocentric tradition while acknowledging the wide range of stylistic approaches and ideological stances that the tradition embraces. By reassessing the African American poetry tradition, Thomas effectively reassesses the history of all 20th-century American literature by exploring avenues of debate that have not yet received sufficient attention. Written with intelligence and humor, his book is itself an extraordinary measure that reflects years of scholarship and opens up African American poetry to a wider audience.

The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity


Tom Gunning - 2000
    It emphasizes Lang's reflection on modernity, and hones in on the problem of identity and subjectivity in a progressively more automated, impersonal world.

Naturalism (Routledge Studies in Twentieth Century Philosophy)


William Lane Craig - 2000
    The authors advocate the thesis that contemporary naturalism should be abandoned, in light of the serious objections raised against it. Contributors draw on a wide range of topics including: epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and agency, and natural theology.

Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing


Ann Vickery - 2000
    Contesting those increasingly normative accounts which seek to contain Language writing within familiar narratives of literary history, she draws on recent and hitherto unpublished archival material as well as interviews with the writers themselves. In a series of detailed readings and case studies, she investigates how gendered identities are made and consolidated through cultural practice and textual production. Accordingly, literary analysis is combined with an exploration of paratextual processes such as publishing, editing, theorizing, public readings, and talk series. Vickery further shows how Language writers tried to refigure authorship through processes such as collaboration, textual borrowing, clairvoyance, and counsel. The case studies include the works of Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Tina Darragh, Joan Retallack, Hannah Weiner, Bernadette Mayer, Rae Armantrout, and Fanny Howe, as well as the formative stages of the journals L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and HOW(ever), Lyn Hejinian's Tuumba Press, and Susan Howe's radio program "Poetry."

The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, Volume 2: Hermeneutical Calisthenics: A Morphology of Ritual-Architectural Priorities


Lindsay Jones - 2000
    Volume Two, an exercise in comparative morphology, offers a comprehensive framework of ritual-architectural priorities by looking at architecture as orientation, as commemoration, and as ritual context.

Ecological Aesthetics: Art In Environmental Design: Theory And Practice


Herman Prigann - 2000
    Approaches as different as Ecological Aesthetics, Art in Nature, Ecoart and Reclamation Art are united by a search for dialogue with natural processes. This book describes the diverse aspects of ecological aesthetics from the point of view of artists, landscape architects, scientists, philosophers and politicians. A special place among the work presented, by over fifty international artists and landscape architects, takes the landscape art of Herman Prigann, who also initiated this survey. Amongst the 17 authors are Jacques Leenhardt (F), Massimo Venturi Ferriolo (I), Udo Weilacher (D), Malcom Miles (GB), Tim Collins (USA). The book is co-produced with MD Berlin and sponsored by Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt.

Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel


Daniel Charles Gerould - 2000
    Daniel Gerould's landmark work, Theatre/Theory/Theatre, collects history's most influential Eastern and Western dramatic theorists - poets, playwrights, directors and philosophers - whose ideas about theatre continue to shape its future. In complete texts and choice excerpts spanning centuries, we see an ongoing dialogue and exchange of ideas between actors and directors like Craig and Meyerhold, and writers such as Nietzsche and Yeats. Each of Gerould's introductory essays shows fascinating insight into both the life and the theory of the author. From Horace to Soyinka, Corneille to Brecht, this is an indispensable compendium of the greatest dramatic theory ever written.

Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender


Charlotte E. Fonrobert - 2000
    Is the designated impurity of menstruation sexist? Or does ritual absence from sex during menstruation encourage a rhythmic reaffirmation of conjugal intimacy?This book offers a new perspective on the extensive rabbinic discussions of menstrual impurity, female physiology, and anatomy, and on the social and religious institutions those discussions engendered. It analyzes the functions of these discussions within the larger textual world of rabbinic literature and in the context of Jewish and Christian culture in late antiquity.How did gender work—how was it made to work—in rabbinic literature? How did that literature dictate the place of women in Jewish culture? In search of answers to these questions, the author analyzes the architectural metaphors deployed to describe female anatomy, arguing that this discursive construction operated culturally to associate women with the home and exclude them from rabbinic study halls.The author shows that rabbinic discourse is not completely controlled by rabbinic ideology, however. She analyzes talmudic discussions that allow alternative gender perspectives to emerge, indicating that women and their bodies were not completely objectified. This suggests that the Babylonian Talmud does not present a completely homogeneous gender structure, but contains a number of different, sometimes contradictory, possibilities.The book concludes with a study of early Christian texts that relate to the same biblical laws on menstrual impurity as rabbinic texts, focusing in particular on a Jewish-Christian text in which the anonymous author polemicizes against Jewish women converts who remain attached to the biblical laws. This text allows us to reconstruct women’s perspectives on the inscription of religious meaning onto their bodies and physiological processes.

Women and the Politics of Class


Johanna Brenner - 2000
    A major voice on the American left."--Mike Davis, May 2000 Is there a future for feminism? The debate over the direction and politics of the women's movement has been joined recently by post-feminists and anti-feminists, in addition to competing feminist perspectives. In Women and the Politics of Class, Johanna Brenner offers a distinctive view, arguing for a strategic turn in feminist politics toward coalitions centered on the interests of working-class women. Women and the Politics of Class engages many crucial contemporary feminist issues-abortion, reproductive technology, comparable worth, the impoverishment of women, the crisis in care-giving, and the shredding of the social safety net through welfare reform and budget cuts. These problems, Brenner argues, must be set in the political and economic context of a state and society dominated by the imperatives of capital accumulation. Drawing on historical explorations of the labor movement and working-class politics, Brenner provides a fresh materialist approach to one of the most important issues of feminist theory today: the intersection of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class.

The Range of Interpretation


Wolfgang Iser - 2000
    In this sense, we might even rephrase Descartes by saying: We interpret, therefore we are. While such a basic human disposition makes interpretation appear to come naturally, the forms it takes, however, do not. In this work, Iser offers a fresh approach by formulating an "anatomy of interpretation" through which we can understand the act of interpretation in its many different manifestations.

The Continental Aesthetics Reader


Clive Cazeaux - 2000
    The reader is clearly divided into six sections: Nineteenth Century German Aesthetics * Phenomenology and Hermeneutics * Marxism and Critical Theory * Modernism * Poststucturalism and Postmodernism * Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Each section is clearly placed in its historical and philosophical context by Clive Cazeaux. The readings featured are the most widely read and representative writings of each movement and are from the following major thinkers: Kant Sartre Benjamin Lyotard Hegel Levinas Blanchot Deleuze Nietzsche Marx Bloch FreudHeidegger Lukacs Bataille LacanDufrenne Adorno Foucault KristevaBachelard Marcuse Barthes IrigarayMerleau-Ponty Habermas Derrida CixousGadamer Jameson de ManVattimo Simmel BaudrillardIdeal for introductory courses in aesthetics, continental philosophy, art and visual studies, The Continental Aesthetics Reader provides a thorough introduction to some of the most influential writings on art and aesthetics from Kant to Derrida.

Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World


Eric R. Wolf - 2000
    Wolf is a legacy of some of his most original work, with an insightful foreword by Aram Yengoyan. Of the essays, six have never been published and two have not appeared in English until now. Shortly before his death, Wolf prepared introductions to each section and individual pieces, as well as an intellectual autobiography that introduces the collection as a whole. Sydel Silverman, who completed the editing of the book, says in her preface, "He wanted this selection of his writings over the past half-century to serve as part of the history of how anthropology brought the study of complex societies and world systems into its purview."

Women of Color and Philosophy: A Critical Reader


Naomi Zack - 2000
    Twelve contemporary women of color who are American academic philosophers consider the methods and subjects of the discipline from perspectives partly informed by their experiences as African American, Asian American, Latina, Mixed Race and Native American.

Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990


Patricia Yaeger - 2000
    Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture.For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it.Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies.The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Circles of Power: Shifting Dynamics in a Lesbian-Centered Community


Barbara Summerhawk - 2000
    The editors provide an in-depth analysis of the roots, heart, and spirit of this lively and largely lesbian circle of women which extends from the border of Northern California up the I-5 corridor through Eugene, Oregon.

Culture and Identity: The History, Theory and Practice of Psychological Anthropology


Charles Lindholm - 2000
    In this newly revised and updated edition, Lindholm provides a comprehensive introduction to psychological anthropology, deftly tracing the growth of the field, introducing the key theorists, and covering a broad range of contemporary topics such as identity, emotions, symbolic systems, and the psychology of groups.

The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic


Timothy Morton - 2000
    The Poetics of Spice includes discussion of a wide range of related topics--exoticism, orientalism, colonialism, the slave trade, race and gender issues, and, above all, capitalism. The book surveys literary, political, medical, travel, trade and philosophical texts, and includes new readings of Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Charlotte Smith and Southey among many others.

America's Johannesburg: Industrialization and Racial Transformation in Birmingham


Bobby M. Wilson - 2000
    In this critical analysis of why Birmingham became such a focal point, Bobby M. Wilson argues that AlabamaOs path to industrialism differed significantly from that in the North and Midwest. True to its antebellum roots, no other industrial city in the United States would depend so much upon the exploitation of black labor so early in its development as Birmingham. A persuasive exploration of the links between AlabamaOs slaveholding order and the subsequent industrialization of the state, WilsonOs study demonstrates that arguments based on classical economics fail to take into account the ways in which racial issues influenced the rise of industrial capitalism.

Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature


Amritjit Singh - 2000
    To think transnationally about literature, history, and culture requires a study of the evolution of hybrid identities within nation-states and diasporic identities across national boundaries.Studies addressing issues of race, ethnicity, and empire in U.S. culture have provided some of the most innova-tive and controversial contributions to recent scholarship. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature represents a new chapter in the emerging dialogues about the importance of borders on a global scale.This book collects nineteen essays written in the 1990s in this emergent field by both well established and up-and-coming scholars. Almost all the essays have been either especially written for this volume or revised for inclusion here.These essays are accessible, well-focused resources for college and university students and their teachers, displaying both historical depth and theoretical finesse as they attempt close and lively readings. The anthology includes more than one discussion of each literary tradition associated with major racial or ethnic communities. Such a gathering of diverse, complementary, and often competing viewpoints provides a good introduction to the cultural differences and commonalities that comprise the United States today.The volume opens with two essays by the editors: first, a survey of the ideas in the individual pieces, and, second, a long essay that places current debates in U.S. ethnicity and race studies within both the history of American studies as a whole and recent developments in postcolonial theory.Amritjit Singh, a professor of English and African American studies at Rhode Island College, is coeditor of Conversations with Ralph Ellison and Conversations with Ishmael Reed (both from University Press of Mississippi). Peter Schmidt, a professor of English at Swarthmore College, is the author of The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty's Short Fiction (University Press of Mississippi).

Guide to the Study of Religion


Russell T. McCutcheon - 2000
    What is religion? Can it be defined at all? Or is it too easily defined in far too many ways so as to make a "religion" a drifting signifier or whatever one's pleasure is? Does the study of religion require special, perhaps religious, tools of analysis and explanation? What is the difference between a knowledge of religion derived from practicing it and a knowledge about religion derived from nonreligious modes of inquiry? Sooner or later, any serious student of religion must face these questionsif religious practices are to be investigated in the light of the terms and aims of the social and human sciences in the modern university.The Guide to the Study of Religion provides a map of the key concepts and thought-structures for imagining and studying religion as a class of everyday social practices that lend themselves to no more or less difficult explanation than any other class of social phenomena.

Faking It: Poetics And Hybridity (The Writer As Critic Series, 7)


Fred Wah - 2000
    In this book, Wah demonstrates how writing poetry is writing critically. This scrapbook of Wah's work -- collected from fifteen years of his writing -- contains essays, reviews, journals, notes and, most importantly, poetic improvisations on contemporary poetry and identity. Faking It was written between 1984 and 1999 -- during major shifts in critical thinking and cultural production -- and the hybrid style of the book is an apt reflection of these changing times, as well as a reflection and study of Wah's own hybrid identity.

Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway


Nick Mansfield - 2000
    Where does my sense of self come from? Does it arise spontaneously or is it created by the media or society?This concern with the self, with our subjectivity, is now our main point of reference in Western societies. How has it come to be so important, and what are the different ways in which we can approach an understanding of the self? Nick Mansfield explores how our notions of subjectivity have developed over the past century. Analyzing the work of key modern and postmodern theorists such as Freud, Foucault, Nietzsche, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, and Haraway, he shows how subjectivity is central to debates in contemporary culture, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, postmodernism, and technology.

Files: Law and Media Technology


Cornelia Vismann - 2000
    (What is not on file is not in the world.) Once files are reduced to the status of stylized icons on computer screens, the reign of paper files appears to be over. With the epoch of files coming to an end, we are free to examine its fundamental influence on Western institutions. From a media-theoretical point of view, subject, state, and law reveal themselves to be effects of specific record-keeping and filing practices. Files are not simply administrative tools; they mediate and process legal systems. The genealogy of the law described in Vismann's Files ranges from the work of the Roman magistrates to the concern over one's own file, as expressed in the context of the files kept by the East German State Security. The book concludes with a look at the computer architecture in which all the stacks, files, and registers that had already created order in medieval and early modern administrations make their reappearance.

Che Guevara Speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings


Ernesto Che Guevara - 2000
    In twenty speeches, interviews, and letters, Guevara dissects the workings of the imperialist system with scientific clarity, unflinching truthfulness, and biting humor. Cuba has shown by its example, he says, that "a people can liberate themselves and keep themselves free."Preface by Joseph Hansen, index

The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880-1900


Sally Ledger - 2000
    It also included an outpouring of intellectual responses to the conflicting times from such eminent writers as T. H. Huxley, Emma Goldman, William James, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. In this important anthology, Ledger and Luckhurst make available to students, scholars, and general readers a large body of non-literary texts which richly configure the variegated cultural history of the fin-de-siècle years. That history is here shown to inaugurate many enduring critical and cultural concerns, with sections on Degeneration, Outcast London, The Metropolis, The New Woman, Literary Debates, The New Imperialism, Socialism, Anarchism, Scientific Naturalism, Psychology, Psychical Research, Sexology, Anthropology, and Racial Science. Each section begins with an Introduction and closes with Editorial Notes that carefully situate individual texts within a wider cultural landscape.

By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry


Molly McQuade - 2000
    This lively and richly varied collection offers more than two dozen essays that are uniformly original, challenging, playful, and ruthlessly individualistic.

2000 Most Challenging and Obscure Words


Norman W. Schur - 2000
    A collection of alphabetically organized English words and terms provides two thousand "definitions" that offer sample usage and etymology and that stand alone as informative, often hilarious miniature essays.

Education Is Politics: Critical Teaching Across Differences, Postsecondary a Tribute to the Life and Work of Paulo Freire


Ira Shor - 2000
    more than twenty-five years ago. This volume illuminates the recent work of teacher-scholars who take critical pedagogy one step further, demonstrating new ways to connect their fields to classroom practice.The third in a series of essays devoted to the memory of Paulo Freire, Education Is Politics, Postsecondary focuses on the college classroom, representing views from a range of disciplines. You'll discover critical pedagogy in classrooms devoted to the media, AIDS education, women's studies, disability studies, technology, statistics, and sociology, to name a few. You'll read hands-on reports from teachers who successfully experimented with innovative approaches to teaching. You'll read essays written by some important names in education and some noted Freirean innovators as well as lesser-known scholars whose work deserves wider reading. Although these educators work in different fields and in different classrooms, they have much in common. They have discovered that critical teaching begins with challenges to the status quo. They recognize that through critical pedagogy, we can invite students to question the way things are and imagine alternatives.This volume will be indispensable in college courses that focus on issues of race, class, and gender in education. It will be just as valuable to adult basic educators, community and worker educators, and teacher trainers.

Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture


David L. Gross - 2000
    Survival often depended on the memory of how to perform specific tasks, what values to honor, and what personal or collective identity to assume. Remembering, in short, put one in touch with the things that mattered, engendering wholeness and wisdom. Forgetting, on the other hand, led to emptiness, ignorance, and death.With the advent of modernity, however, doubts about the value of memory grew while the negative implications of forgetting were re-evaluated. In many quarters, forgetting came to be defended for the way it frees us from the past, opening the door to new perceptions, new possibilities, and new beginnings.Now, in late modernity, Gross argues, we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. For the first time in history, we are able to decide, without the pressure of social or cultural constraints, whether we want to remember or forget and to live our lives accordingly. But which is the better choice? Should we build our lives upon the meanings and values of a faded past? lf so, what ought we to remember, and for what purpose? On should we instead opt to forget what has come before and focus our attention on the present and future, thereby perpetually reinventing ourselves and the world we inhabit?According to Gross, our answers to these questions will determine notonly who we are but what we will become as we pass from late modernity into the terra incognita of the "postmodern" age.

Introduction to Ring Theory


Paul M. Cohn - 2000
    In this volume, Paul Cohn provides a clear and structured introduction to the subject.After a chapter on the definition of rings and modules there are brief accounts of Artinian rings, commutative Noetherian rings and ring constructions, such as the direct product. Tensor product and rings of fractions, followed by a description of free rings. The reader is assumed to have a basic understanding of set theory, group theory and vector spaces. Over two hundred carefully selected exercises are included, most with outline solutions.

Community, Gender, and Violence: Subaltern Studies XI


Partha Chatterjee - 2000
    The present volume concentrates on gender and national politics and introduces a wide range of new issues raised by the relations between community, gender and violence.

Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking


Walter D. Mignolo - 2000
    In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practice in the social sciences and area studies. He introduces the crucial notion of colonial difference into study of the modern colonial world. He also traces the emergence of new forms of knowledge, which he calls border thinking.Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of border gnosis, or what is known from the perspective of an empire's borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to dominate, and thus limit, understanding.The book is divided into three parts: the first chapter deals with epistemology and postcoloniality; the next three chapters deal with the geopolitics of knowledge; the last three deal with the languages and cultures of scholarship. Here the author reintroduces the analysis of civilization from the perspective of globalization and argues that, rather than one civilizing process dominated by the West, the continually emerging subaltern voices break down the dichotomies characteristic of any cultural imperialism. By underscoring the fractures between globalization and mundializacion, Mignolo shows the locations of emerging border epistemologies, and of post-occidental reason.In a new preface that discusses Local Histories/Global Designs as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History, Mignolo connects his argument with the unfolding of history in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture


Rita Felski - 2000
    How useful are these terms? What exactly do they mean? And how is our sense of these terms changing under the pressure of feminist analysis? In Doing Time, Rita Felski argues that it makes little sense to think of the modern and postmodern as opposing or antithetical terms. Rather, we need a historical perspective that is attuned to cultural and political differences within the same time as well as the leaky boundaries between different times. Neither the modern nor the postmodern are unified, coherent, or self-evident realities. Drawing on cultural studies and critical theory, Felski examines a range of themes central to debates about postmodern culture, including changing meanings of class, the end of history, the status of art and aesthetics, postmodernism as the end of sex, and the politics of popular culture. Placing women at the center of analysis, she suggests, has a profound impact on the way we thing about historical periods. As a result, feminist theory is helping to reshape our vision of both the modern and the postmodern.

Undomesticated Ground


Stacy Alaimo - 2000
    Feminists, troubled by the way in which such representations show women controlled by powerful natural forces and confined to domestic space, have sought to distance themselves from nature. In Undomesticated Ground, Stacy Alaimo issues a bold call to reclaim nature as feminist space. Her analysis of a remarkable range of feminist writings--as well as of popular journalism, visual arts, television, and film--powerfully demonstrates that nature has been and continues to be an essential concept for feminist theory and practice.Alaimo urges feminist theorists to rethink the concept of nature by probing the vastly different meanings that it carries. She discusses its significance for Americans engaged in social and political struggles from, for example, the Indian Wars of the early nineteenth century, to the birth control movement in the 1920s, to contemporary battles against racism and heterosexism. Reading works by Catherine Sedgwick, Mary Austin, Emma Goldman, Nella Larson, Donna Haraway, Toni Morrison, and others, Alaimo finds that some of these writers strategically invoke nature for feminist purposes while others cast nature as a postmodern agent of resistance in the service of both environmentalism and the women's movement.By examining the importance of nature within literary and political texts, this book greatly expands the parameters of the nature writing genre and establishes nature as a crucial site for the cultural work of feminism.

The Epic Hero


Dean A. Miller - 2000
    Drawing on diverse disciplines including classics, anthropology, psychology, and literary studies, this product of twenty years' scholarship provides a detailed typology of the hero in Western myth: birth, parentage, familial ties, sexuality, character, deeds, death, and afterlife. Dean A. Miller examines the place of the hero in the physical world (wilderness, castle, prison cell) and in society (among monarchs, fools, shamans, rivals, and gods). He looks at the hero in battle and quest; at his political status; and at his relationship to established religion. The book spans Western epic traditions, including Greek, Roman, Nordic, and Celtic, as well as the Indian and Persian legacies. A large section of the book also examines the figures who modify or accompany the hero: partners, helpers (animals and sometimes monsters), foes, foils, and even antitypes. The Epic Hero provides a comprehensive and provocative guide to epic heroes, and to the richly imaginative tales they inhabit.

Spartakus: The Symbology of Revolt


Furio Jesi - 2000
    Massive demonstrations followed and more than 500,000 Berliners took to the streets in January—only to be crushed by police and anticommunist paramilitary troops. Several leaders of the League were killed and the revolt was quashed. Through a detailed reconstruction of the events of that bloody winter, historian and critic Furio Jesi recasts our understanding of a foundational political difference—revolt or revolution? Drawing on a deep reserve of literary sources like Brecht, Eliade, Dostoyevsky, and Mann, Jesi outlines a uniquely incisive phenomenology of revolt that distinguishes between the purposeful historical temporality of revolution and the suspension of time that marks a revolt. And with the addition of an essay on the politics of time and revolution by Rosa Luxemburg, a founding leader of the Spartakus League, this volume becomes a crucial text at the intersection of history and philosophy.

Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means


Siegfried Zielinski - 2000
    Deep Time of the Media takes us on an archaeological quest into the hidden layers of media development - dynamic moments of intense activity in media design and construction that have been largely ignored in the historical-media archaeological record. Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history - fractures in the predictable - that help us see the new in the old. Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of dreamers and modelers of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. separated, Zielinski writes. He describes models and machines - including a theatre of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others - that make this connection. Uncovering these moments in the media-archaeological record, Zielinski says, brings us into a new relationship with present-day moments; these discoveries in the deep time media history shed light on today's media landscape and may help us map our expedition to the media future.

Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence


Sarah E. Chinn - 2000
    Chinn pulls together what seems to be opposite discourses--the information-driven languages of law and medicine and the subjective logics of racism--to examine how racial identity has been constructed in the United States over the past century. She examines a range of primary social case studies such as the American Red Cross' lamentable decision to segregate the blood of black and white donors during World War II, and its ramifications for American culture, and more recent examples that reveal the racist nature of criminology, such as the recent trial of O.J. Simpson. Among several key American literary texts, she looks at Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, a novel whose plot turns on issues of racial identity and which was written at a time when scientific and popular interest in evidence of the body, such as fingerprinting, was at a peak.

The Great Hoop of Life, Volume 1: A Traditional Medicine Wheel for Enabling Learning and for Gathering Wisdom


Paula Underwood - 2000
    It is designed to enable us to integrate sequence and logic with wholeness and intuition. It is designed to help us sensitize ourselves to information we might otherwise take for granted or ignore. It is designed to clarify the decision making pprocess, so that we won't fool ourselves about the nature and timing of the decisions we make as we move through life. The wheel takes into account wholeness of circumstance for the individual and for the community . . and provides us with a coherent means through which to understand our location in the context of all our relationships.

Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe


Robert Deam Tobin - 2000
    In German cities of the period, men identified as warm brothers wore broad pigtails powdered in the back, and developed a particular discourse of friendship, classicism, Orientalism, and fashion.There is much evidence, Robert D. Tobin contends, that something was happening in the semantic field around male-male desire in late eighteenth-century Germany, and that certain signs were coalescing around a queer proto-identity. Today, we might consider a canonical author of the period such as Jean Paul a homosexual; we would probably not so identify Goethe or Schiller. But for Tobin, queer subtexts are found in the writings of all three and many others.Warm Brothers analyzes classical German writers through the lens of queer theory. Beginning with sodomitical subcultures in eighteenth-century Germany, it examines the traces of an emergent homosexuality and shows the importance of the eighteenth century for the nineteenth-century sexologists who were to provide the framework for modern conceptualizations of sexuality. One of the first books to document male-male desire in eighteenth-century German literature and culture, Warm Brothers offers a much-needed reappraisal of the classical canon and the history of sexuality.

The Regulatory Craft: Controlling Risks, Solving Problems, and Managing Compliance


Malcolm K. Sparrow - 2000
    Malcolm K. Sparrow shows how the vogue prescriptions for reform (centered on concepts of customer service and process improvement) fail to take account of the distinctive character of regulatory responsibilities—which involve the delivery of obligations rather than just services.In order to construct more balanced prescriptions for reform, Sparrow invites us to reconsider the central purpose of social regulation—the abatement or control of risks to society. He recounts the experiences of pioneering agencies that have confronted the risk-control challenge directly, developing operational capacities for specifying risk-concentrations, problem areas, or patterns of noncompliance, and then designing interventions tailored to each problem. At the heart of a new regulatory craftsmanship, according to Sparrow, lies the central notion, "pick important problems and fix them." This beguilingly simple idea turns out to present enormously complex implementation challenges and carries with it profound consequences for the way regulators organize their work, manage their discretion, and report their performance. Although the book is primarily aimed at regulatory and law-enforcement practitioners, it will also be invaluable for legislators, overseers, and others who care about the nature and quality of regulatory practice, and who want to know what kind of performance to demand from regulators and how it might be delivered. It stresses the enormous benefit to society that might accrue from development of the risk-control art as a core professional skill for regulators.

Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts In Literary And Cultural Studies


Diana Brydon - 2000
    Ranging from the 1835 Declaration of Independence by Maori Chiefs in northern New Zealand to articles published in 1998, the papers in this set include articles by Gaytri C. Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Trin T. Minh-ha, Julie Stephens and Susie Tharu.

"Defects": Engendering the Modern Body


Helen Elizabeth Deutsch - 2000
    Women, declared a mid-eighteenth-century vindication, have been regarded since Aristotle as deformed amphibious things, "neither more or less than Monsters" (Beauty's Triumph 1758). This alliance of monstrosity with misogyny, along with the definition of sexual difference as aberration, is the starting point for this volume's investigation of monstrosity's cultural work in the eighteenth century and its simultaneous mapping and troubling of the range of differences.This collection investigates the conceptual and geographical mapping of early modern and Enlightenment ideas of monstrosity onto a range of differences that contested established categories. The essays consider the representations and material dimensions of phenomena as diverse as femininity and disfigurement, the material imagination and monstrous birth, ugliness as an aesthetic category, deafness and theories of sign language, and the exotic, racialized deformed. Collectively, they demonstrate that the emergence of sexual difference is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of a category of the human that is imagined and deformed, monstrous, and ugly. Contributors include Barbara Benedict, Jill Campbell, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Lennard Davis, Helen Deutsch, Robert Jones, Cora Kaplan, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Felicity Nussbaum, Stephen Pender, and Joel Reed.Helen Deutsch is Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture. Felicity Nussbaum is Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narrative.

'Being Alive Well': Health and the Politics of Cree Well-Being (Anthropological Horizons)


Naomi Adelson - 2000
    In it the author argues that definitions of health are not simply reflections of physiological soundness but convey broader cultural and political realities. The book begins with a treatise on the study of health in the social sciences and a call for a broader understanding of the cultural parameters of any definition of health. Following a chapter that outlines the history of the Whapmagoostui (Great Whale River) region and the people, Adelson presents the underlying symbolic foundations of a Cree concept of health, or miyupimaatisiiun. The core of this book is an ethnographic study of the Whapmagoostui Cree and their particular concept of "health" (miyupimaatisiiun or "being alive well"). That concept is mediated by history, cultural practices, and the contemporary world of the Cree, including their fundamental concerns about their land and culture. In the contemporary context, health - or more specifically, "being alive well" - for the Cree of Great Whale is an intimate fusion of social, political, and personal well-being, thus linking individual bodies to a larger socio-political reality.

Empire's Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books


M. Daphne Kutzer - 2000
    Nesbit, Hugh Lofting, A.A. Milne, and Arthur Ransome for the ways these writers consciously and unconsciously used the metaphors of empire in their writing for children.

Art and Complexity


John L. Casti - 2000
    Among others, it includes discussions on whether "good" art is "complex" art, how artists see the term "complex," and what poets try to convey in word about complex behavior in nature.

Cutting the Body: Representing Woman in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis


Eliane DalMolin - 2000
    Eliane DalMolin examines how Charles Baudelaire, François Truffaut, and Sigmund Freud, based on their inheritance of lyricism, shaped and perpetuated a cultural understanding of women that they continued to represent in late romantic images, despite their respective innovative talents and influences in bringing about three decisive cultural moments: modernism, New Wave cinema, and psychoanalysis.The work's originality comes primarily from its unique summoning of three distinct disciplines around the notion of the cut. It places the complex desire to cut the woman's body at the center of an investigation of male identity in Western culture through incisive discussions of poetry, cinema, and psychoanalysis. The terms of this inquiry disclose an uncanny male disposition to femininity and motherhood, and its direct implication in productive acts of cutting. Cutting the Body will appeal to literary scholars, film specialists, feminist theorists, and experts in psychoanalytical theory.Eliane DalMolin is Associate Professor of French, University of Connecticut. She is coeditor of Sites: The Journal of 20th-Century/Contemporary French Studies.

Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered


Leora Batnitzky - 2000
    Here, Leora Batnitzky argues that Rosenzweig's redirection of German-Jewish ethical monotheism anticipates and challenges contemporary trends in religious studies, ethics, philosophy, anthropology, theology, and biblical studies.This text, which captures the hermeneutical movement of Rosenzweig's corpus, is the first to consider the full import of the cultural criticism articulated in his writings on the modern meanings of art, language, ethics, and national identity. In the process, the book solves significant conundrums about Rosenzweig's relation to German idealism, to other major Jewish thinkers, to Jewish political life, and to Christianity, and brings Rosenzweig into conversation with key contemporary thinkers.Drawing on Rosenzweig's view that Judaism's ban on idolatry is the crucial intellectual and spiritual resource available to respond to the social implications of human finitude, Batnitzky interrogates idolatry as a modern possibility. Her analysis speaks not only to the question of Judaism's relationship to modernity (and vice versa), but also to the generic question of the present's relationship to the past--a subject of great importance to anyone contemplating the modern statuses of religious tradition, reason, science, and historical inquiry. By way of Rosenzweig, Batnitzky argues that contemporary philosophers and ethicists must relearn their approaches to religious traditions and texts to address today's central ethical problems.

Handbook of Hope: Theory, Measures & Applications


C.R. Snyder - 2000
    New research has shown, however, that hope is closely related to optimism, feelings of control, and motivation toward achieving one's goals. The Handbook of Hope presents a comprehensive overview of the psychological inquiry into hope, including its measurement, its development in children, how its loss is associated with specific clinical disorders, and therapeutic approaches that can help instill hope in those who have lost theirs. A final section discusses hope in occupational applications: how the use of hope can make one a better coach, teacher, or parent.

Natural Enemies: People-Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective


John Knight - 2000
    Conflicts with wildlife are widespread, assume a variety of forms, and elicit a range of human responses. Wildlife pests are frequently demonized and resisted by local communities while routinely 'controlled' by state authorities. However, to the great concern of conservationists, the history of many people-wildlife conflicts lies in human encroachment into wildlife territory.In Natural Enemies the authors place the analytical focus on the human dimension of these conflicts - an area often neglected by specialists in applied ecology and wildlife management - and on their social and political contexts. Case studies of specific conflicts are drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe and America, and feature an assortment of wild animals, including chimpanzees, elephants, wild pigs, foxes, bears, wolves, pigeons and ducks.These anthropologists challenge the narrow utilitarian view of wildlife pestilence by revealing the cultural character of many of our 'natural enemies'. Their reports from the 'front-line' expose one fact - human conflict with wildlife is often an expression of conflict between people.

Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture


Gayle Wald - 2000
    E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race’s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests, and desires. Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the “passing plot” to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists' restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described “voluntary Negro.” Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her investigation of “post-passing” testimonials in postwar African American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while constructing “positive” images of black achievement and affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal contradictions of John Howard Griffin’s 1961 auto-ethnography Black Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of passing in the context of the recent discourse of “color blindness.” Wald’s analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.

The Jameson Reader


Fredric Jameson - 2000
    This book brings together key essays and excerpts from the broad spectrum of Frederic Jameson's writings, providing an accessible introduction to the intricacies of his thought and uncovering new and exciting aspects of his work.

The Revolution: Quotations from Revolution Party Chairman R. U. Sirius


R.U. Sirius - 2000
    U. Sirius has won a devoted following for his brash, insightful writings and daring media pranks. Packed with bite-sized strategies for improving life on the planet, this collection of his latest dictates and musings will jar any complacent mind into decisive revolutionary action. Eliminate taxes for incomes less than $100,000. Legalize pleasure drugs. Stop policing the world. Put environmental concerns before profits. Stop censorship and defend privacy on the Internet. Always on the edge, Sirius is now at the helm of radical reform.

Movies


Gilbert Adair - 2000
    From the Lumiere brothers' first public film screening at the end of the nineteenth century to the technical wizardry of today, cinema has recorded, created, even revised our history. Its images, icons, follies, and foibles endure as part of our collective consciousness. However, does the end of the century also herald the "end of cinema"? Has mainstream, formulaic, big-budget moviemaking triumphed over other alternatives? Covering a panoramic range of genres and styles, from B-movies and Nazi propaganda films to independent features and animated productions, and with texts by Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, Colette, John Updike, Umberto Eco, and other modern visionaries, this eclectic volume is a refreshing look at the ever-fascinating world of the movies and a much-needed corrective to the Hollywood bias.

Literary Feminisms


Ruth Robbins - 2000
    Feminist literary theories are pluralist, borrowing from other types of theory, such as marxism or postmodernism, but they always remain woman-centered. Courses in women's writing, literature and gender, and philosophy and literature proliferate--requiring readers to reconsider many of the basic assumptions on which the study of literature was originally founded.

Artist's Communities: A Directory of Residencies in the United States That Offer Time and Space for Creativity


Tricia Snell - 2000
    Each listing includes information on contacting the community, the art disciplines served, facilities, housing, meals, selection process and fees.

Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity


Sharon Patricia Holland - 2000
    Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through “the space of death” gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide. Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other “minorities” in society is, like death, “almost unspeakable.” She gives voice to—or raises—the dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory.Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.

Lectures On Lie Groups


Wu Yi Hsiang - 2000
    It uses a non-traditional approach and organization. There is a proper balance between, and a natural combination of, the algebraic and geometric aspects of Lie theory, not only in technical proofs but also in conceptual viewpoints. For example, the orbital geometry of adjoint action, is regarded as the geometric organization of the totality of non-commutativity of a given compact connected Lie group, while the maximal tori theorem of É. Cartan and the Weyl reduction of the adjoint action on G to the Weyl group action on a chosen maximal torus are presented as the key results that provide a clear-cut understanding of the orbital geometry.

Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture


Michael Joyce - 2000
    His concerns include hypertext and interactive fiction, the geography of cyberspace, and interactive film, and Joyce here searches out the emergence of network culture in spaces ranging from the shifting nature of the library to MOOs and other virtual spaces to life along a river.While in this collection Joyce continues to be one of our most lyrical, wide-ranging, and informed cultural critics and theorists of new media, his essays exhibit an evolving distrust of unconsidered claims for newness in the midst of what Joyce calls "the blizzard of the next," as well as a recurrent insistence upon grounding our experience of the emergence of network culture in the body.Michael Joyce is Associate Professor of English, Vassar College. He is author of a number of hypertext fictions on the web and on disk, most notably Afternoon: A Story.His previous books are Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics and Moral Tale and Meditations: Technological Parables and Refractions.

The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and Gender


Himani Bannerji - 2000
    Though they begin from experiences of non-white people living in Canada, they provide a critical theoretical perspective capable of exploring similar issues in other western and also third world countries. This reading of 'difference' includes but extends beyond the cultural and the discursive into political economy, state, and ideology. It cuts through conventional paradigms of current debates on multiculturalism. In particular, these essays take up the notion of 'Canada' - as the nation and the state - as an unsettled ground of contested hegemonies. They particularly draw attention to how the state of Canada is an unfinished one, and how the discourse of culture helps it to advance the legitimation claim which is needed by any state, especially one arising in a colonial context, with unsolved nationality problems. The myth of the 'two founding peoples', anglos and francophones, has always conveniently ignored the reality of First Nations. More recently, it has also ignored the entrance of non-European immigrants who may have a history of being indentured and politically marginalised and only begin struggling for political enfranchisement in their new homeland.

Traces Of A Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women


Jacqueline Jones Royster - 2000
    Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women. With a shift in educational opportunity after the Civil War, African American women gained access to higher education and received formal training in rhetoric and writing. By the end of the nineteenth-century, significant numbers of African American women operated actively in many public arenas.In her study, Royster acknowledges the persistence of disempowering forces in the lives of African American women and their equal perseverance against these forces. Amid these conditions, Royster views the acquisition of literacy as a dynamic moment for African American women, not only in terms of their use of written language to satisfy their general needs for agency and authority, but also to fulfill socio-political purposes as well.Traces of a Stream is a showcase for nineteenth-century African American women, and particularly elite women, as a group of writers who are currently underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated both an analytical theory and an ideological perspective that are useful in gaining a more generative understanding of literate practices as a whole and the practices of African American women in particular. Royster tells a tale of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative ways of seeing, reading, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to establish a more suitable place for the contributions and achievements of African American women writers.

Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio


Paul Apostolidis - 2000
    In Stations of the Cross political theorist Paul Apostolidis shows how a critical component of this movement’s popular culture—evangelical conservative radio—interacts with the current U.S. political economy. By examining in particular James Dobson’s enormously influential program, Focus on the Family—its messages, politics, and effects—Apostolidis reveals the complex nature of contemporary conservative religious culture. Public ideology and institutional tendencies clash, the author argues, in the restructuring of the welfare state, the financing of the electoral system, and the backlash against women and minorities. These frictions are nowhere more apparent than on Christian right radio. Reinvigorating the intellectual tradition of the Frankfurt School, Apostolidis shows how ideas derived from early critical theory—in particular that of Theodor W. Adorno—can illuminate the political and social dynamics of this aspect of contemporary American culture. He uses and reworks Adorno’s theories to interpret the nationally broadcast Focus on the Family, revealing how the cultural discourse of the Christian right resonates with recent structural transformations in the American political economy. Apostolidis shows that the antidote to the Christian right’s marriage of religious and market fundamentalism lies not in a reinvocation of liberal fundamentals, but rather depends on a patient cultivation of the affinities between religion’s utopian impulses and radical, democratic challenges to the present political-economic order. Mixing critical theory with detailed analysis, Stations of the Cross provides a needed contribution to sociopolitical studies of mass movements and will attract readers in sociology, political science, philosophy, and history.

Invisible Fences: Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature


Steven Monte - 2000
    How have prose poems been identified as such, and why have similar works been excluded from the genre? What happens when we read a work as a prose poem? How have prose genres such as the novel affected prose poetry and modern poetry in general? In Invisible Fences Steven Monte places prose poetry in historical and theoretical perspective by comparing its development in the French and American literary traditions. In spite of its apparent formal freedom, prose poetry is constrained by specific historical circumstances and is constantly engaged in border disputes with neighboring prose and poetic genres. Monte illuminates these constraints through an examination of works that have influenced the development of the prose poem as well as through a discussion of genre theory and detailed readings of poems ranging from Charles Baudelaire's "La Solitude" to John Ashbery's "The System." Monte explores the ways in which literary-historical narratives affect interpretation: why, for example, prose poetry tends to be seen as a revolutionary genre and how this perspective influences readings of individual works. The American poets he discusses include Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Ashbery; the French poets range from Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarmé to Max Jacob. In exploring prose poetry as a genre, Invisible Fences offers new perspectives not only on modern poetry, but also on genre itself, challenging current theories of genre with a test case that asks for yet eludes definition.