Best of
Theory

2005

Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire


Angela Y. Davis - 2005
    Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI’s "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

Liberalism: A Counter-History


Domenico Losurdo - 2005
    Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism


Hal Foster - 2005
    Adopting an innovative year-by-year approach, Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh present more than one hundred short essays, each focusing on a crucial event - such as the creation of a seminal work, the publication of an artistic manifesto, or the opening of a major exhibition - to tell the story of the dazzling diversity of practice and interpretation that characterized the art of the period. are explored in depth, as are the frequent and sustained antimodernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. Illustrating the authors' fine texts are more than six hundred of the most important works of the century, most reproduced in full colour. The book's flexible structure and extensive cross-referencing allow readers to plot their own course through the book and to follow any one of the many narratives that unfold through the century, whether that be the history of a medium such as photography or painting, the development of art in a particular country, the influence of a movement such as Surrealism or feminism, or the emergence of a stylistic or conceptual category like abstraction or minimalism. and issues surrounding the art. In their perceptive introductions, the four authors set out and explain the different methods of art history at work in the book, providing the reader with the conceptual tools to further his or her own study. Two roundtable discussions - one at mid-century, the other at the close of the book - consider some of the questions raised by the preceding decades and look ahead to the art of the future. A glossary of terms and concepts completes this extraordinary volume.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism


David Harvey - 2005
    Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934


Walter Benjamin - 2005
    Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1, 1927-1930


Walter Benjamin - 2005
    Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred


M. Jacqui Alexander - 2005
    Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity.In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity


Hartmut Rosa - 2005
    He identifies three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time.According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match the future. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.

Kiki Smith


Kiki Smith - 2005
    Her subject matter is as wide-ranging as the materials her work has encompassed. In the 1980s, with her earliest figural sculptures in plaster, glass and wax, Smith developed an elaborate vocabulary around the forms and functions of the body and its metaphorical as well as physical relationship to society. By the early 1990s, she began to engage with themes of a more religious and mythological nature. Her re-imaginings of biblical women as inhabitants of physical bodies--rather than as abstract bearers of doctrine--led her to make series of sculptural works related to the figure of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lilith and others. The artist has more recently considered fairy tales and folk narratives as well as nurturing a growing menagerie of work concerned with animals and the natural world. Smith has now earned a considerable reputation as a virtuoso printmaker and draftsperson, and as a re-inventor of the startling sculptural possibilities present in materials ranging from paper and resin to bronze and porcelain. Organized by the Walker Art Center with the full collaboration of the artist, the exhibition Kiki Smith represents the artist's first full-scale monograph.

Ugly Feelings


Sianne Ngai - 2005
    In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology


E. Patrick JohnsonCathy J. Cohen - 2005
    Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Including work by scholars based in English, film studies, black studies, sociology, history, political science, legal studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, the volume showcases the broadly interdisciplinary nature of the black queer studies project.The contributors consider representations of the black queer body, black queer literature, the pedagogical implications of black queer studies, and the ways that gender and sexuality have been glossed over in black studies and race and class marginalized in queer studies. Whether exploring the closet as a racially loaded metaphor, arguing for the inclusion of diaspora studies in black queer studies, considering how the black lesbian voice that was so expressive in the 1970s and 1980s is all but inaudible today, or investigating how the social sciences have solidified racial and sexual exclusionary practices, these insightful essays signal an important and necessary expansion of queer studies.Contributors. Bryant K. Alexander, Devon Carbado, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Keith Clark, Cathy Cohen, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jewelle Gomez, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae G. Henderson, Sharon P. Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, Kara Keeling, Dwight A. McBride, Charles I. Nero, Marlon B. Ross, Rinaldo Walcott, Maurice O. Wallace

Huey: Spirit of the Panther


David Hilliard - 2005
    Newton remains one of the most misunderstood political figures of the twentieth century. As cofounder and leader of the Black Panther Party for more than twenty years, Newton (1942-1989) was at the forefront of the radical political activism of the 1960s and '70s. Raised in poverty in Oakland, California, and named for corrupt Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, Newton embodied both the passions and the contradictions of the civil rights movement he sought to advance. In this first authorized biography, Newton's former chief of staff David Hilliard teams up with best-selling authors Keith and Kent Zimmerman to tell the whole story of the man behind the organization that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover infamously dubbed "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."

Coming After: Essays on Poetry


Alice Notley - 2005
    These essays and reviews are among the first to deal with a generation of poets notorious for their refusal to criticize and theorize, assuming the stance that "only the poems matter." The essays are characterized by Notley's strong, compelling voice, which transfixes the reader even in the midst of professional detail. Coming After revives the possibility of the readable book of criticism.

Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction


Todd May - 2005
    However, Todd May organizes his introduction around a central question at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy: How might we live? He demonstrates how Deleuze offers a view of the cosmos as a living entity that provides ways of conducting our lives that we may not have even dreamed of.

The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978


Roland Barthes - 2005
    Not published in France until 2002, and appearing in English for the first time, these creative and engaging lectures deepen our understanding of Roland Barthes's intellectual itinerary and reveal his distinctive style as thinker and teacher.The Neutral (le neutre), as Barthes describes it, escapes or undoes the paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in Western thought and discourse. These binaries are found in all aspects of human society ranging from language to sexuality to politics. For Barthes, the attempt to deconstruct or escape from these binaries has profound ethical, philosophical, and linguistic implications.The Neutral is comprised of the prewritten texts from which Barthes lectured and centers around 23 "figures," also referred to as "traits" or "twinklings," that are possible embodiments of the Neutral (sleep, silence, tact, etc.) or of the anti-Neutral (anger, arrogance, conflict, etc.). His lectures draw on a diverse set of authors and intellectual traditions, including Lao-tzu, Tolstoy, German mysticism, classical philosophy, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and John Cage. Barthes's idiosyncratic approach to his subjects gives the lectures a playful, personal, and even joyous quality that enhances his rich insights.In addition to his reflections on a variety of literary and scholarly works, Barthes's personal convictions and the events of his life shaped the course and content of the lectures. Most prominently, as Barthes admits, the recent death of his mother and the idea of mourning shape several of his lectures.

Beyond Nature and Culture


Philippe Descola - 2005
    Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture?Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the “four ontologies”— animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh.

Profanations


Giorgio Agamben - 2005
    In Profanations, Agamben has assembled for the first time some of his most pivotal essays on photography, the novel, and film. A meditation on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains, Profanations proves yet again that Agamben is one of the most provocative writers of our time. In ten essays, Agamben ponders a series of literary and philosophical problems: the relation among genius, ego, and theories of subjectivity; the problem of messianic time as explicated in both images and lived experience; parody as a literary paradigm; and the potential of magic to provide an ethical canon.The range of topics and themes addressed here attest to the creativity of Agamben's singular mode of thought and his persistent concern with the act of witnessing, sometimes futile, sometimes earth-shattering. -In Praise of Profanity, - the central essay of this short but dense book, confronts the question of profanity as the crucial political task of the moment. An act of resistance to every form of separation, the concept of profanation reorients perceptions of how power, consumption, and use interweave to produce an urgent political modality and desire: to profane the unprofanable. Agamben not only provides a new and potent theoretical model but describes it with a writerly style that itself forges inescapable links among literature, politics, and philosophy.

For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook


Waziyatawin Angela Wilson - 2005
    The authors begin with the belief that Indigenous Peoples have the power, strength, and intelligence to develop culturally specific decolonization strategies for their own communities and thereby systematically pursue their own liberation. These scholars and writers demystify the language of colonization and decolonization to help Indigenous communities identify useful concepts, terms, and intellectual frameworks in their struggles toward liberation and self-determination. This handbook covers a wide range of topics, including Indigenous governance, education, language, oral tradition, repatriation, images and stereotypes, and truth-telling. It aims to facilitate critical thinking while offering recommendations for fostering community discussions and plans for meaningful community action.

Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures


Gayatri Gopinath - 2005
    Focusing on queer female diasporic subjectivity, Gopinath develops a theory of diaspora apart from the logic of blood, authenticity, and patrilineal descent that she argues invariably forms the core of conventional formulations. She examines South Asian diasporic literature, film, and music in order to suggest alternative ways of conceptualizing community and collectivity across disparate geographic locations. Her agile readings challenge nationalist ideologies by bringing to light that which has been rendered illegible or impossible within diaspora: the impure, inauthentic, and nonreproductive.Gopinath juxtaposes diverse texts to indicate the range of oppositional practices, subjectivities, and visions of collectivity that fall outside not only mainstream narratives of diaspora, colonialism, and nationalism but also most projects of liberal feminism and gay and lesbian politics and theory. She considers British Asian music of the 1990s alongside alternative media and cultural practices. Among the fictional works she discusses are V. S. Naipaul’s classic novel A House for Mr. Biswas, Ismat Chughtai’s short story “The Quilt,” Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night. Analyzing films including Deepa Mehta’s controversial Fire and Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, she pays particular attention to how South Asian diasporic feminist filmmakers have reworked Bollywood’s strategies of queer representation and to what is lost or gained in this process of translation. Gopinath’s readings are dazzling, and her theoretical framework transformative and far-reaching.

Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy


Bruno Latour - 2005
    In a time of political turmoil and anticlimax, this book redefines politics as operating in the realm of "things." Politics is not just an arena, a profession, or a system, but a concern for things brought to the attention of the fluid and expansive constituency of the public. But how are things made public? What, we might ask, is a republic, a "res publica," a public thing, if we do not know how to make things public? There are many other kinds of assemblies, which are not political in the usual sense, that gather a public around things--scientific laboratories, supermarkets, churches, and disputes involving natural resources like rivers, landscapes, and air. The authors of "Making Things Public"--and the ZKM show that the book accompanies--ask what would happen if politics revolved around disputed things. Instead of looking for democracy only in the official sphere of professional politics, they examine the new atmospheric conditions--technologies, interfaces, platforms, networks, and mediations that allow things to be made public. They show us that the old definition of politics is too narrow; there are many techniques of representation--in politics, science, and art--of which Parliaments and Congresses are only a part.The authors include such prominent thinkers as Richard Rorty, Simon Schaffer, Peter Galison, Richard Powers, Lorraine Daston, Richard Aczel, and Donna Haraway; their writings are accompanied by excerpts from John Dewey, Shakespeare, Swift, La Fontaine, and Melville. More than 500 color images document the new idea of what Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel call an "object-oriented democracy."

For Space


Doreen Massey - 2005
    the idea that space is not something static and neutral, a frozen entity, but is something intertwined with time and thus ever changing - also when we are not occupying it. Doreen's descriptions of her journey through England for example are clear and precise accounts of this idea, and she very sharply characterizes the attempts not to recognize this idea as utopian and nostalgic." - Olafur EliassonIn this book, Doreen Massey makes an impassioned argument for revitalising our imagination of space. She takes on some well-established assumptions from philosophy, and some familiar ways of characterising the twenty-first century world, and shows how they restrain our understanding of both the challenge and the potential of space.The way we think about space matters. It inflects our understandings of the world, our attitudes to others, our politics. It affects, for instance, the way we understand globalisation, the way we approach cities, the way we develop, and practice, a sense of place. If time is the dimension of change then space is the dimension of the social: the contemporaneous co-existence of others. That is its challenge, and one that has been persistently evaded. For Space pursues its argument through philosophical and theoretical engagement, and through telling personal and political reflection. Doreen Massey asks questions such as how best to characterise these so-called spatial times, how it is that implicit spatial assumptions inflect our politics, and how we might develop a responsibility for place beyond place.This book is "for space" in that it argues for a reinvigoration of the spatiality of our implicit cosmologies. For Space is essential reading for anyone interested in space and the spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities. Serious, and sometimes irreverent, it is a compelling manifesto: for re-imagining spaces for these times and facing up to their challenge.

The Visible and the Revealed


Jean-Luc Marion - 2005
    Covering the ground from some of his earliest writings on this topic to very recent reflections, they are particularly useful for understanding the progression of Marion's thought on such topics as the saturated phenomenon and the possibility of something like "Christian Philosophy." The book contains his seminal pieces on the saturated phenomenon and on the gift, although the essays also explore more recent developments of his thought on these topics.Several chapters explicitly explore the boundary line between philosophy and theology or their mutual enrichment and influence. In one of the final pieces, "The Banality of Saturation," Marion considers some of the most recent objections brought against his notion of the saturated phenomenon and responds to them in detail, suggesting that saturated phenomena are neither as rare nor as inflexible as often assumed. The work contains two chapters not previously available in English and brings together several other pieces previously translated but now difficult to find. For readers interested in the relation between the two disciplines, this is indispensable reading.

Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists


Prison Research Education Action - 2005
    A reprint of this 1976 classic, with a new introduction from Critical Resistance.

Introduction to Systems Theory


Niklas Luhmann - 2005
    Through his many books he developed a highly original form of systems theory that has been hugely influential in a wide variety of disciplines.In Introduction to Systems Theory, Luhmann explains the key ideas of general and sociological systems theory and supplies a wealth of examples to illustrate his approach. The book offers a wide range of concepts and theorems that can be applied to politics and the economy, religion and science, art and education, organization and the family. Moreover, Luhmann's ideas address important contemporary issues in such diverse fields as cognitive science, ecology, and the study of social movements.This book provides all the necessary resources for readers to work through the foundations of systems theory - no other work by Luhmann is as clear and accessible as this. There is also much here that will be of great interest to more advanced scholars and practitioners in sociology and the social sciences.

Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship


Leela Gandhi - 2005
    M. Forster famously observed in his Two Cheers for Democracy. Forster’s epigrammatic manifesto, where the idea of the “friend” stands as a metaphor for dissident cross-cultural collaboration, holds the key, Leela Gandhi argues in Affective Communities, to the hitherto neglected history of western anti-imperialism. Focusing on individuals and groups who renounced the privileges of imperialism to elect affinity with victims of their own expansionist cultures, she uncovers the utopian-socialist critiques of empire that emerged in Europe, specifically in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century. Gandhi reveals for the first time how those associated with marginalized lifestyles, subcultures, and traditions—including homosexuality, vegetarianism, animal rights, spiritualism, and aestheticism—united against imperialism and forged strong bonds with colonized subjects and cultures.Gandhi weaves together the stories of a number of South Asian and European friendships that flourished between 1878 and 1914, tracing the complex historical networks connecting figures like the English socialist and homosexual reformer Edward Carpenter and the young Indian barrister M. K. Gandhi, or the Jewish French mystic Mirra Alfassa and the Cambridge-educated Indian yogi and extremist Sri Aurobindo. In a global milieu where the battle lines of empire are reemerging in newer and more pernicious configurations, Affective Communities challenges homogeneous portrayals of “the West” and its role in relation to anticolonial struggles. Drawing on Derrida’s theory of friendship, Gandhi puts forth a powerful new model of the political: one that finds in friendship a crucial resource for anti-imperialism and transnational collaboration.

Just Sex?: The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape


Nicola Gavey - 2005
    This shift in perception has revealed the startling frequency of occurrences of date rape, obscuring the divide between rape and what was once just sex. Just Sex? combines an overview of the existing literature with an analysis of recent research to examine the psychological and cultural implications of this new epidemic. The result is the conclusion that feminist theory on sexual victimisation has gone both too far and not far enough. The reader is presented with a challenging and original perspective on the issues of rape, sex and the body, incorporating subjects including:* rape as a social problem* the social constructionism of sex, subjectivity and the body* heterosexuality under the microscopeThis book succeeds in making a valuable contribution to feminist and social contructionist work on rape that will be of interest to those studying psychology, gender studies, cultural studies and sociology. Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape was selected as a 2005 winner of AWP's (Association for Women in Psychology) distinguished publication award.

Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma


Jerome S. Bernstein - 2005
    Building on Jungian theory, Jerome Bernstein argues that a greater openness to transrational reality experienced by Borderland personalities allows new possibilities for understanding and healing confounding clinical and developmental enigmas.There are many people whose experiences of reality is outside the mainstream of Western culture; often they see themselves as abnormal because they have no articulated frame of reference for their experience. The concept of the Borderland personality explains much of their experience.In three sections, this book examines the psychological and clinical implications of the evolution of consciousness and looks at how the new Borderland consciousness bridges the mind-body divide. Subjects covered include:- Genesis: Evolution of the Western Ego- Transrational Data in a Western Clinical Context: Synchronicity- Trauma and Borderland Transcendence- Environmental Illness Complex- Integration of Navajo and Western healing approaches for Borderland Personalities.Living in the Borderland challenges the standard clinical model, which views normality as an absence of pathology and which equates normality with the rational. Jerome S. Bernstein describes how psychotherapy itself often contributes to the alienation of Borderland personalities by misperceiving the difference between the pathological and the sacred. The case studies included illustrate the potential this has for causing serious psychic and emotional damage to the patient.This challenge to the orthodoxies and complacencies of Western medicine's concept of pathology will interest Jungian Analysts, Psychotherapists, Psychiatrists and other physicians, as well as educators of children.Jerome S. Bernstein is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience


Ann Lauterbach - 2005
    Lauterbach's dazzling range of formal strategies, her search for methods that engage contemporary issues of identity, event, and description, extend to her prose writings, collected for the first time in "The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. At the center of this new book are a series of seven essays, originally written in the mid-1990s, which engage the interstices between poetics, politics, and memoir. Lauterbach advocates an active engagement with language, at once imaginative, philosophical, and practical; these writings demonstrate a radical relationship between how, and what, we know. By turns meditative and polemical, lyrical and descriptive, they argue for the centrality of art in a democratic society. Also included in this wide-ranging collection are brilliant, provocative essays on Whitman and Emerson, illuminating remarks on poets Fanny Howe, Michael Palmer, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Barbara Guest, as well as considerations of artists David Smith, John Currin, and Joe Brainard.

Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan


Jacques Derrida - 2005
    Themes central to all ofDerrida's writings thread the intense confrontation between the most famousphilosopher of our time and the Jewish poet writing in German who, perhapsmore powerfully than any other, has testified to the European experience ofthe twentieth century.They include the date or signature and its singularity; the notion of the trace;temporal structures of futurity and the "to come"; the multiplicity of languageand questions of translation; such speech acts as testimony and promising, butalso lying and perjury; the possibility of the impossible; and, above all, the questionof the poem as addressed and destined beyond knowledge, seeking to speak toand for the irreducibly other.The memory of encounters with thinkers who have also engaged Celan's workanimates these writings, which include a brilliant dialogue between twointerpretative modes--hermeneutics and deconstruction. Derrida's approach toa poem is a revelation on many levels, from the most concrete ways of reading--for example, his analysis of a sequence of personal pronouns--to the mostsweeping imperatives of human existence (and Derrida's writings are alwaysa study in the imbrication of such levels). Above all, he voices the call toresponsibility in the ultimate line of Celan's poem: "The world is gone, I must carry you," which sounds throughout the book's final essay like a refrain.Only two of the texts in this volume do not appear here in English for the first time. Of these, Schibboleth has been entirely retranslated and has been set following Derrida's own instructions for publication in French; A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text was substantially rewritten by Derrida himself and basically appears here as the translation of a new text.Jacques Derrida's most recent books in English translation include Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida (with Catherine Malabou). He died in Paris on October 8, 2004.Thomas Dutoit teaches at the Universit� de Paris 7. He translated Aporias and edited On the Name, both by Jacques Derrida.

Theory for Art History


Jae Emerling - 2005
    This book includes key concepts, biography, survey of work, bibliography of primary texts, and a bibliography of secondary criticism.Adapted from Theory for Religious Studies, by William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal.

Marshall McLuhan-Unbound: A Publishing Adventure


Marshall McLuhan - 2005
    Such was McLuhan's philosophy about these two forms. The essay is the freer form and one better suited to exploration than the longer meditation, the book. Traditionally, when a writer published a new piece, the publisher would send a couple of copies of the magazine plus ten or a dozen copies of just the article with the mag's cover offprints to be given to friends, students, colleagues.This startling new series puts the reader in the place of colleague and co-researcher. Instead of giving the reader just another collection of articles and interviews, McLuhan Unbound gives you offprints of the original essays. You experience the feel of the ideas when they were fresh.The offprint is more portable than the book, and so lends itself to being carried around and read and discussed more easily than books. Here the reader can experience the full range of McLuhan's interests, the full scope and application of his techniques of discovery. See how the two McLuhans, the literary academic and the public media expert are really one.As a flint when struck produces many sparks some of which result in fire, so the essay form contains many sparks some of which resulted in books and others which ought to have, had the writer had time. Some of these articles were written before the subsequent book was envisioned: they are preliminary forays into new territory. Some were written after the book and encapsulate major themes; some set out additional discoveries or matters left out of the book; some present material discovered as a result of writing the book. The McLuhan Unbound offprints series is not the last word in presenting McLuhan's ideasand discoveries, but the first.

African Gender Studies: A Reader


Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí - 2005
    Bringing together the essential writing on this topic from the last 25 years, these essays discuss gender in Africa from a multi-disciplinary perspective. With a theoretical and conceptual focus, African Gender Studies will inform debate in African Studies, Women's Studies, History, Sociology and Anthropology.

Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent


Thomas Glave - 2005
    Exposing the hypocrisies of liberal multiculturalism, Glave offers instead a politics of heterogeneity in which difference informs the theory and practice of democracy. At the same time, he experiments with language to provide a model of creative writing as a tool for social change. From the death of black gay poet Essex Hemphill to the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib, Glave puts forth an ethical understanding of human rights to make vital connections across nations, races, genders, and sexualities.Thomas Glave is assistant professor of English at SUNY Binghamton. He is author of Whose Song? and Other Stories.

Diary, 1901-1969


Korney Chukovsky - 2005
    As benefactor to many writers including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, he stood for several decades at the center of the Russian literary milieu. It is no exaggeration to claim that Chukovsky knew everyone involved in shaping the course of twentieth-century Russian literature. His voluminous diary, here translated into English for the first time, begins in prerevolutionary Russia and spans nearly the entire Soviet era. It is the candid commentary of a brilliant observer who documents fifty years of Soviet literary activity and the personal predicament of the writer under a totalitarian regime.From descriptions of friendship with such major literary figures as Anna Akhmatova and Isaac Babel to accounts of the struggle with obtuse and hostile censorship, from the heartbreaking story of the death of the daughter who had inspired so many stories to candid political statements, the extraordinary diary of Kornei Chukovsky is a unique account of the twentieth-century Russian experience.

The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous


Tom Shippey - 2005
    But where did the concepts come from? Who invented them? Almost two centuries ago, Jacob Grimm assembled what was known about such creatures in his work on 'Teutonic Mythology', which brought together ancient texts such as Beowulf and the Elder Edda with the material found in Grimm's own famous collection of fairy-tales. This collection of essays now updates Grimm, adding much material not known in his time, and also challenges his monolithic interpretations, pointing out the diversity of cultural traditions as well as the continuity of ancient myth.

Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory


David Herman - 2005
    As accounts of what happened to particular people in particular circumstances and with specific consequences, stories have come to be viewed as a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change.However, the very predominance of narrative as a focus of interest across multiple disciplines makes it imperative for scholars, teachers, and students to have access to a comprehensive reference resource.

A New History of German Literature


David E. Wellbery - 2005
    German culture has been central to Europe, and it has contributed the transforming spirit of Lutheran religion, the technology of printing as a medium of democracy, the soulfulness of Romantic philosophy, the structure of higher education, and the tradition of liberal socialism to the essential character of modern American life.In this book leading scholars and critics capture the spirit of this culture in some 200 original essays on events in German literary history. Rather than offering a single continuous narrative, the entries focus on a particular literary work, an event in the life of an author, a historical moment, a piece of music, a technological invention, even a theatrical or cinematic premiere. Together they give the reader a surprisingly unified sense of what it is that has allowed Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Luther, Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Jelinek, and Sebald to provoke and enchant their readers. From the earliest magical charms and mythical sagas to the brilliance and desolation of 20th-century fiction, poetry, and film, this illuminating reference book invites readers to experience the full range of German literary culture and to investigate for themselves its disparate and unifying themes.Contributors include: Amy M. Hollywood on medieval women mystics, Jan-Dirk Muller on Gutenberg, Marion Aptroot on the Yiddish Renaissance, Emery Snyder on the Baroque novel, J. B. Schneewind on Natural Law, Maria Tatar on the Grimm brothers, Arthur Danto on Hegel, Reinhold Brinkmann on Schubert, Anthony Grafton on Burckhardt, Stanley Corngold on Freud, Andreas Huyssen on Rilke, Greil Marcus on Dada, Eric Rentschler on Nazi cinema, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on Hannah Arendt, Gordon A. Craig on Gunter Grass, Edward Dimendberg on Holocaust memorials.

The Southern Question


Antonio Gramsci - 2005
    During ten years of political imprisonment under Mussolini's Fascist government, Gramsci produced The Prison Notebooks, a continued meditation on subjects and relationships first proposed within the pages of this essay. The purpose in re-introducing the essay is to emphasize how Gramsci's analysis of social stratification of Northern and Southern Italy in 1926 is relevant to current discussions about state formation, diasporas, and strategic alliances.

Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States


Jan Cohen-Cruz - 2005
    Forged by the collaborative efforts of professional artists and local residents, this unique field brings performance together with a range of political, cultural, and social projects, such as community-organizing, cultural self-representation, and education. Local Acts presents a long-overdue survey of community-based performance from its early roots, through its flourishing during the politically-turbulent 1960s, to present-day popular culture. Drawing on nine case studies, including groups such as the African American Junebug Productions, the Appalachian Roadside Theater, and the Puerto Rican Teatro Pregones, Jan Cohen-Cruz provides detailed descriptions of performances and processes, first-person stories, and analysis. She shows how the ritual side of these endeavors reinforces a sense of community identification while the aesthetic side enables local residents to transgress cultural norms, to question group habits, and to incorporate a level of craft that makes the work accessible to individuals beyond any one community. The book concludes by exploring how community-based performance transcends even national boundaries, connecting the local United States with international theater and cultural movements.

Keeping the Peace: Mindfulness and Public Service


Thich Nhat Hanh - 2005
    In clear and simple prose, he speaks to all who work in difficult, people-orientated jobs, and shows how to transform anger, stress, and frustration.In this original and groundbreaking work, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that mindfulness practices can be an integral part of training for public service and can become a key component in creating peace and community. He encourages all of us to "serve with compassion" in our worklife and supporting each other as a Sangha (community). He makes a compelling case for the belief that the first step in keeping the peace is cultivating inner peace.

Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology


Elisabeth Le Guin - 2005
    In analyzing the striking qualities of Boccherini's music—its virtuosity, repetitiveness, obsessively nuanced dynamics, delicate sonorities, and rich palette of melancholy affects—Le Guin develops a historicized critical method based on the embodied experience of the performer. In the process, she redefines the temperament of the musical Enlightenment as one characterized by urgent, volatile inquiries into the nature of the self.

Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power


Elizabeth Grosz - 2005
    Time Travels brings her trailblazing essays together to show how reconceptualizing temporality transforms and revitalizes key scholarly and political projects. In these essays, Grosz demonstrates how imagining different relations between the past, present, and future alters understandings of social and scientific projects ranging from theories of justice to evolutionary biology, and she explores the radical implications of the reordering of these projects for feminist, queer, and critical race theories.Grosz’s reflections on how rethinking time might generate new understandings of nature, culture, subjectivity, and politics are wide ranging. She moves from a compelling argument that Charles Darwin’s notion of biological and cultural evolution can potentially benefit feminist, queer, and antiracist agendas to an exploration of modern jurisprudence’s reliance on the notion that justice is only immanent in the future and thus is always beyond reach. She examines Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration in light of the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and William James, and she discusses issues of sexual difference, identity, pleasure, and desire in relation to the thought of Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray. Together these essays demonstrate the broad scope and applicability of Grosz’s thinking about time as an undertheorized but uniquely productive force.

Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom


Linda M.G. Zerilli - 2005
    In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Linda M. G. Zerilli argues that the persistence of this subject-centered frame severely limits feminists' capacity to think imaginatively about the central problem of feminist theory and practice: a politics concerned with freedom. Offering both a discussion of feminism in its postmodern context and a critique of contemporary theory, Zerilli here challenges feminists to move away from a theory-based approach, which focuses on securing or contesting "women" as an analytic category of feminism, to one rooted in political action and judgment. She revisits the democratic problem of exclusion from participation in common affairs and elaborates a freedom-centered feminism as the political practice of beginning anew, world-building, and judging.  In a series of case studies, Zerilli draws on the political thought of Hannah Arendt to articulate a nonsovereign conception of political freedom and to explore a variety of feminist understandings of freedom in the twentieth century, including ones proposed by Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, and the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. In so doing, Zerilli hopes to retrieve what Arendt called feminism's lost treasure: the original and radical claim to political freedom.

The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction


Robert Warrior - 2005
    Yet, Robert Warrior argues, nonfiction has been the primary form used by American Indians in developing a relationship with the written word, one that reaches back much further in Native history and culture. Focusing on autobiographical writings and critical essays, as well as communally authored and political documents, The People and the Word explores how the Native tradition of nonfiction has both encompassed and dissected Native experiences. Warrior begins by tracing a history of American Indian writing from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, then considers four particular moments: Pequot intellectual William Apess’s autobiographical writings from the 1820s and 1830s; the Osage Constitution of 1881; narratives from American Indian student experiences, including accounts of boarding school in the late 1880s; and modern Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday’s essay “The Man Made of Words,” penned during the politically charged 1970s. Warrior’s discussion of Apess’s work looks unflinchingly at his unconventional life and death; he recognizes resistance to assimilation in the products of the student print shop at the Santee Normal Training School; and in the Osage Constitution, as well as in Momaday’s writing, Warrior sees reflections of their turbulent times as well as guidance for our own. Taking a cue from Momaday’s essay, which gives voice to an imaginary female ancestor, Ko-Sahn, Warrior applies both critical skills and literary imagination to the texts. In doing so, The People and the Word provides a rich foundation for Native intellectuals’ critical work, deeply entwined with their unique experiences. Robert Warrior is professor of English and Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is author of Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minnesota, 1994) and coauthor, with Paul Chaat Smith, of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee.

Twentieth Century French Philosophy: Key Themes And Thinkers


Alan D. Schrift - 2005
     Offers discussion and cross-referencing of ideas and figures Provides Appendix on the distinctive nature of French academic culture

The American Civilizing Process


Stephen Mennell - 2005
    But isthat how the rest of the world sees it? And if not, why not? Stephen Mennell leads up to such contemporary questions through a careful study of the whole span of American development, from the first settlers to the American Empire. He takes a novel approach, analysing the USA's experience in the light of Norbert Elias's theory of civilizing (and decivilizing) processes. Drawing comparisons between the USA and other countries of the world, the topics discussed include: * American manners and lifestyles * Violence in American society * The impact of markets on American social character * American expansion, from the frontier to empire * The 'curse of the American Dream' and increasing inequality * The religiosity of American life Mennell shows how the long-term experience of Americans has been of growing more and more powerful in relation to their neighbours. This has had all-pervasive effects on the way they see themselves, their perception of the rest of the world, and how the rest of the world sees them. Mennell's compelling and provocative account will appeal to anyone concerned about America's role in the world today, including students and scholars of American politics and society.

Handbook of Psychobiography


William Todd Schultz - 2005
    It brings together for the first time the world's leading psychobiographers, writing lucidly on many of the major figures of our age - from Osama Bin Laden to Elvis Presley. The first section of the book addresses the subject of how to construct an effective psychobiography. Editor William Todd Schultz introduces the field, provides valuable definitions of good and bad psychobiography, discusses an optimal structure for biographical data. Dan McAdams explores the question of what psychobiographers might learn from current research in personality psychology. Alan Elms delivers wise advice on the tricky subject of theory choice in psychobiography. William Runyan asks why Van Gogh cut off his ear, and in the process explains how one evaluates competing interpretations of the same event in a subject's life. And Kate Isaacson describes a template for use in multiple-case psychobiography. Never before has method in psychobiography been so clearly and explicitly addressed. Those just getting started in the field will find in Section One a detailed roadmap for success. The remaining sections of the book are composed of richly engaging case studies of famous artists, psychologists, and politicians. They address compelling questions such as: What are the subjective origins of photographer Diane Arbus's obsession with freaks? In what ways did the early loss of Sylvia Plath's father affect her poetry and presage her suicide? Out of what painful life experience did James Barrie drive himself to invent Peter Pan? Why did Elvis experience such difficulty singing the song Are You Lonesome Tonight? What accounts for Bin Laden's radicalism, Kim Jong Il's paranoia, George W. Bush's conflict with identity? Why did Freud go so disastrously astray in his analysis of Leonardo? What made psychologist Gordon Allport's meeting with Freud so pungently significant? How did the loss of his father determine major elements of Nietzsche's philosophy? These questions and many more get answered, often in surprising and incisive fashion. Additional chapters take up the lives of Harvard operationist S.S. Stevens, Erik Erikson, Edith Wharton, Saddam Hussein, Truman Capote, Kathryn Harrison, Jack Kerouac, and others. Within each case study, tips are proffered along the way as to how psychobiography can be done more cogently, more intelligently, and more valuably.

Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn


Adele E. Clarke - 2005
    Extending Anselm Strauss′s ecological social worlds/arenas/discourses framework, this book offers researchers three kinds of maps that place an emphasis on the range of differences rather than commonalities, as found via the traditional grounded theory approach. These maps include situational, social worlds/arena, and positional maps.

Chronicles of Consensual Times


Jacques Rancière - 2005
    Consensus does not mean peace. Instead it refers to a map of operations of war, of a topography of the visible, of what is possible and what can be thought, in which war and peace live side-by-side. Lying at the heart of these consensual times are new forms of racism and ethnic cleansing, humanitarian wars and wars against terror. Consensus also implies using time in a way that sees in it a thousand devious turns. This is evident in the incessant diagnoses of the present and of amnesiac politics, in the farewells to the past, the commemorations, and the calls to remember. But all these twists and turns tend toward the same goal: to show that there is only one reality to which we are obliged to consent. What stands in the way of this undertaking is politics. These chronicles aim to re-open that space wherein politics once more becomes thinkable.

Foucault and the Government of Disability


Shelley Lynn Tremain - 2005
    Over the last thirty years, politicized conceptions of disability have precipitated significant social change, including the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, the redesign of urban landscapes, the appearance of closed-captioning on televisions, and the growing recognition that disabled people constitute a marginalized and disenfranchised constituency. The provocative essays in this volume respond to Foucault's call to question what is regarded as natural, inevitable, ethical, and liberating, while they challenge established understandings of Foucault's analyses and offer fresh approaches to his work. The book's roster of distinguished international contributors represents a broad range of disciplines and perspectives, making this a timely and necessary addition to the burgeoning field of disability studies.

The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry


Elisabeth A. Frost - 2005
    Elisabeth Frost focuses on a diverse group of poets--Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Sonia Sanchez, Susan Howe, and Harryette Mullen--who make language the site of feminist politics. Her study captures the range of aesthetics and politics in the work of avant-garde women poets; challenges the ways in which avant-garde writing has been defined and categorized; expands traditional conceptions of feminism and feminist poetics; and addresses issues of gender and race, allowing for discussion of a rich range of feminist and linguistic concerns.

Caribbean Reasonings: After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter


Anthony Bogues - 2005
    Her work is ditinctively Caribbean in the ways it deals with the practice of writing and cultural criticism as forms of social pracrtice. Her rich source of investigation of some of the compelling questions that currently face humanity makes her not just a major Caribbean figure, but a world class intellectual.

What's Queer About Queer Studies Now?


David L. Eng - 2005
    The mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity—as a mass-mediated consumer lifestyle and an embattled legal category—demands a renewal of queer studies that also considers the global crises of the late twentieth century. These crises, which are shaping national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies, include the ascendance and triumph of neoliberalism; the clash of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and patriotisms; and the return to “moral values” and “family values” as deterrents to political debate, economic redistribution, and cultural dissent. In sixteen timely essays, the contributors map out an urgent intellectual and political terrain for queer studies and the contemporary politics of identity, family, and kinship. Collectively, these essays examine the limits of queer epistemology, the potentials of queer diasporas, and the emergence of queer liberalism. They rethink queer critique in relation to the war on terrorism and the escalation of U.S. imperialism; the devolution of civil rights and the rise of the prison-industrial complex; the continued dismantling of the welfare state; the recoding of freedom in terms of secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and the politics of citizenship, migration, and asylum in a putatively postracial and postidentity age.Contributors. Michael Cobb, David L. Eng, Roderick A. Ferguson, Elizabeth Freeman, Gayatri Gopinath, Judith Halberstam, Janet R. Jakobsen, Joon Oluchi Lee, Martin F. Manalansan IV, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong'o, Hiram Perez, Jasbir K. Puar, Chandan Reddy, Teemu Ruskola, Nayan Shah, Karen Tongson, Amy Villarejo

Event-Cities 3: Concept vs. Context vs. Content


Bernard Tschumi - 2005
    There is no architecture without a concept, an overriding idea that gives coherence and identity to a building. But there is also no architecture without context--historical, geographical, cultural--or content (what happens inside). Concept, context, and content may be in unison or purposely discordant. Against the contextualist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which called for architecture to blend in with its surroundings, Tschumi argues that buildings may or may not conform to their settings--but that the decision should always be strategic.Through documentation of recent projects--including the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, a campus athletic center in Cincinnati, museums in Sao Paolo, New York, and Antwerp, concert halls in France, and a speculative urban project in Beijing--Tschumi examines different ways that concept, context, and content relate to each other in his work. In the new Acropolis Museum, for example, Tschumi looks at the interaction of the concept--a simple and precise museum with the clarity of ancient Greek buildings--with the context (its location at the base of the Acropolis, 800 feet from the Parthenon) and the content, which incorporates archaeological excavations on the building site into the fabric of the museum. Through provocative examples, Tschumi demonstrates that the relationship of concept, context, and content may be one of indifference, reciprocity, or conflict--all of which, he argues, are valid architectural approaches. Above all, he suggests that the activity of architecture is less about the making of forms than the investigation and materialization of concepts.

Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker


David E. James - 2005
    The director of nearly four hundred short films, including "Dog Star Man, parts I-IV, and The "Roman Numeral Series, Brakhage is widely recognized as one of the great artists of the medium. His short films eschewed traditional narrative structure and his innovations in fast cutting, hand-held camerawork and multiple superimpositions created an unprecedentedly rich texture of images that provided the vocabulary for the explosion of independent filmmaking in the 1960s. "Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker chronicles both the director's personal and formal development. The essays in this book--by historians, filmmakers and other artists--assess Brakhage's contributions to the aesthetic and political history of filmmaking, from his emergence on the film scene and the establishment of his reputation, to the early-1980s. The result is a remarkable tribute to this lyrical, visionary artist.

Triumph Of Painting


The Saatchi Gallery - 2005
    The title, 'The Triumph of Painting', refered to the primacy of painting at the root of artistic expression. The exhibition opened with the work of five of the greatest modern European painters: Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Jorg Immendorff and the late Martin Kippenberger. This was followed by a show of a new generation of painters including a number of Brtish artists such as Cecily Brown and Dexter Dalwood. The final part of the show consisted entirely of the work of new young painters.Following the success of 100, which was published for the opening of the Saatchi Gallery in 2003, The Triumph of Painting, which comes in a much larger format, presents vivid, full-page reproductions of over 200 of the 350 paintings exhibited, and includes essays by Alison Gingeras and Barry Schwabsky. It should stand as the definitive book of current art.

Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System


Barbara Vinken - 2005
    Vinken shows how fashion trends are informed by the past. Chanel, under the direction of Karl Lagerfeld, is viewed as the only fashion house to have remained fresh after one hundred years, yet is this success essentially proof of the self-referential qualities fashion has adopted? What inspired the fetish for labels at the end of the twentieth century? Answering these questions and many more, this thought-provoking book shows how beauty, gender, sexuality, commerce, and dandyism have persisted in defining the fashion system.

Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control Since the Sixteenth Century


Michael A. Palmer - 2005
    Over the centuries most admirals yielded to the natural temptation to find in new technologies a means to assert centralized control over their forces. But other commanders have recognized the fog for what it is: a constant level of uncertainty resistant to mere technological solution.In this grand history of naval warfare, Michael Palmer observes five centuries of dramatic encounters under sail and steam. From reliance on signal flags in the seventeenth century to satellite communications in the twenty-first, admirals looked to the next advance in technology as the one that would allow them to control their forces. But while abilities to communicate improved, Palmer shows how other technologies simultaneously shrank admirals' windows of decision. The result was simple, if not obvious: naval commanders have never had sufficient means or time to direct subordinates in battle.Successful commanders as distant as Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) and Arleigh Burke (1901-1996) accepted this reality. They sought solutions to the dilemmas of command in the personal indoctrination of subordinates through discussion, comradeship, and displays of trust and confidence. Such leaders created a commonality of vision and fostered a high degree of individual initiative. Their decentralized approach to command resulted in a resiliency that so often provided the key to success in battle.Palmer's exciting and enlightening history reveals the myriad efforts of naval commanders to navigate the fog of war.

The Paradise of Submission: A Medieval Treatise on Ismaili Thought


Nasir al-Din al-Tusi - 2005
    This is a new English translation of his Rawda-yi taslim--the single most important Ismaili text from the Alamut period. In this work the Persian and English texts are edited and published together for the first time. This is Tusi’s major Ismaili work and the most important primary source on Ismaili doctrines during the Alamut period.

Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727


Karen Bloom Gevirtz - 2005
    Fascinated by the problematic idea of a unified self underpinning modes of thinking, female novelists innovated narrative structures to interrogate this idea.

Space, the City and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms


Fran Tonkiss - 2005
    Space, the City and Social Theory offers a clear and critical account of key approaches to cities and urban space within social theory and analysis.

Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital


Jens Hanssen - 2005
    The Lebanese capital stands for Arab cosmopolitanism and cultural effervescence but also for its tragedies of destruction. This book examines the historical formation of Beirut as a multiply contested Mediterranean city.Fin de Siecle Beirut is a landmark contribution to the growing literature in Ottoman studies, in Arab cultural history and on Mediterranean cities. Combining urban theory, particularly Henri Lefebvre's work on cities and capitalism, with postcolonial methodology, the central thesis of this book is that modern Beirut is the outcome of persistent social and intellectual struggles over the production of space. The city of Beirut was at once the product, the object, and the project of imperial and urban politics of difference: overlapping European, Ottoman, and municipal civilising missions competed in the political fields of administration, infrastructure, urban planning, public health, education, public morality, journalism, and architecture.Jens Hanssen offers a comprehensive, original account of the emergence of modern Beirut out of an economic shift away from Acre in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. He argues that the Ottoman government's decision to heed calls for the creation of a new province around Beirut and grant it provincial capital status in 1888 paved the way for fundamental urban and regional reconfigurations long before colonial policies during the French Mandate period. This new Ottoman province came to constitute the territorial embodiment of regional self-determination for Arab nationalists in Beirut until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.Drawing on published and unpublished Ottoman government documents, Arabic sources, and European archival material, Hanssen's book traces the urban experience of modernity in the Ottoman Empire. The transformation of everyday life in late nineteenth-century Beirut and the concomitant policies of urban management is vividly set against the devastating civil war in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860.

Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective


Carl Knappett - 2005
    So integral is it to our everyday lives that we take it for granted. This attitude has also afflicted the academic analysis of material culture, although this is now beginning to change, with material culture recently emerging as a topic in its own right within the social sciences. Carl Knappett seeks to contribute to this emergent field by adopting a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach that is rooted in archaeology and integrates anthropology, sociology, art history, semiotics, psychology, and cognitive science. His thesis is that humans both act and think through material culture; ways of knowing and ways of doing are ingrained within even the most mundane of objects. This requires that we adopt a relational perspective on material artifacts and human agents, as a means of characterizing their complex interdependencies. In order to illustrate the networks of meaning that result, Knappett discusses examples ranging from prehistoric Aegean ceramics to Zande hunting nets and contemporary art.Thinking Through Material Culture argues that, although material culture forms the bedrock of archaeology, the discipline has barely begun to address how fundamental artifacts are to human cognition and perception. This idea of codependency among mind, action, and matter opens the way for a novel and dynamic approach to all of material culture, both past and present.

Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database


Lev Manovich - 2005
    They have also invited contributions from leaders in other cultural fields: DJ Spooky, Scanner, George Lewis, and Johann Johannsson (music), servo (architecture), Schoenerwissen/OfCD (information visualization), and Ross Cooper Studios (media design). The results of their three-year explorations are the three films presented on this DVD. Although the films resemble the familiar genres of cinema, the process by which they were created demonstrates the possibilities of soft(ware) cinema. A cinema, that is, in which human subjectivity and the variable choices made by custom software combine to create films that can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same image sequences, screen layouts and narratives. Mission to Earth, a science fiction allegory of the immigrant experience, adopts the variable choices and multi-frame layout of the Soft Cinema system to represent variable identity. Absences is a lyrical black and white narrative that relies on algorithms normally deployed in military and civilian surveillance applications to determine the editing of video and audio. Texas, a database narrative, assembles its visuals, sounds, narratives, and even the identities of its characters, from multiple databases. The DVD was designed so that every viewing of each film generates a different version.

Analysing Learner Language


Rod Ellis - 2005
    This book provides a clear introduction to the main methods of analyzing samples of learner language by examining the theoretical and research bases for each.

Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management


J. Peter Brosius - 2005
    Their overview of this transnational movement reveals important links between environmental management and social justice agendas for sustainable use of resources by local communities. In this volume, leaders who have been instrumental in creating and shaping CBNRM describe their model programs; the countermapping movement and collective claims to land and resources; legal strategies for gaining rights to resources and territories; biodiversity conservation and land stabilization priorities; and environmental justice and minority rights. This book will be of value to instructors, practitioners and activists in anthropology, cultural geography, environmental justice, environmental policy, political ecology, indigenous rights, conservation biology, and CBNRM.

Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview


Jacques Derrida - 2005
    They revisited his life's work and his impending death in a long, surprisingly accessible, and moving final interview. Sometimes called "obscure" and branded "abstruse" by his critics, the Derrida found in this book is open and engaging, reflecting on a long career challenging important tenets of European philosophy from Plato to Marx. The contemporary meaning of Derrida's work is also examined, including a discussion of his many political activities. But, as Derrida says, "To philosophize is to learn to die"; as such, this philosophical discussion turns to the realities of his imminent death--including life with a fatal cancer. In the end, this interview remains a touching final look at a long and distinguished career.

A Companion to Narrative Theory


James Phelan - 2005
    Comprises 35 original essays written by leading figures in the field Includes contributions from pioneers in the field such as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, J. Hillis Miller and Gerald Prince Represents all the major critical approaches to narrative and investigates and debates the relations between them Considers narratives in different disciplines, such as law and medicine Features analyses of a variety of media, including film, music, and painting Designed to be of interest to specialists, yet accessible to readers with little prior knowledge of the field

Towards Non-Being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality


Graham Priest - 2005
    The book will be of central interest to anyone who is concerned with intentionality in the philosophy of mind or philosophy of language, the metaphysics of existence and identity, the philosophy of fiction, the philosophy of mathematics, or cognitive representation in AI.

Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy


Guillermo Gómez-Peña - 2005
    In Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy, he pushes the boundaries still further, exploring what's left for artists to do in a post-9/11 repressive culture of what he calls 'the mainstream bizarre'.Over forty-five photos document his artistic experiments and the text not only explores and confronts his political and philosophical parameters; it offers groundbreaking insights into his, and his company's, methods of production, development and teaching.The result is an extraordinary and inspiring glimpse into the life and work of one of the most daring, innovative and challenging performance artists of our age.

Shaping the Future: Nietzsche's New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices


Horst Hutter - 2005
    Hutter structures his argument around the belief that Nietzsche, despite his ostensive enmity to Platonism and Socratism, understood himself to be a Socratic and someone called upon by fate to renew the Platonic task of being a philosophical legislator of modern souls, culture, and political society. Hutter also considers the paths of reasoning opened up by Pierre Hadot in his studies of ancient philosophers as teachers of life and not just as providers of 'true' opinions and doctrines about the world.Shaping the Future applies the reasonings of Hadot to the work of Nietzsche, arguing that Nietzsche himself, throughout his philosophical career, conceived of doctrines as never identical to philosophy itself, but instead as a means of self-creation that had to be related to working on oneself. Hutter makes a great contribution to the study of Nietzsche and the growing movement that sees philosophy as a practical activity and way of life.

Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories


Paul H. Kratoska - 2005
    Mistreatment of workers was a major grievance, both in widely publicized cases such as the use of prisoners of war and forced Asian labor to construct the Thailand-Burma Death Railway, and in a very large number of smaller projects. In this book an international group of specialists on the Occupation period examine the labor needs and the recruitment and use of workers (whether forced, military, or otherwise) throughout the Japanese empire. This is the first study to look at Japanese labor policies comparatively across all the occupied territories of Asia during the war years. It also provides a graphic context for examining Japanese colonialism and relations between the Japanese and the people living in the various occupied territories.

Absolute Essentials Of Music Theory For Guitar


Don J. MacLean - 2005
    This easy to follow guide shows you all the need to know basics, demystified, chapter, by chapter. Discover how easy it is to understand: reading music, the fretboard, scales, intervals, chords, harmonized scales, and rhythm. Music theory has never been easier! Learn the basics of music theory at your own pace. All theoretical concepts are applied to the guitar. Perfect for the beginner to intermediate player. Test yourself answer key included. What are you waiting for? Your understanding of music theory starts here.

Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man - Race, Class and the Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Re


Loren Goldner - 2005
    Herman Melville (1818-1891) came to this perspective in the feverish production of six novels of the sea, culminating in Moby Dick, in the 1846-1851 period. As the whaling ship Pequod was destroyed by Moby Dick, the Indian harpooner Tashtego nailed a red flag to the mast, also catching the wing of a sky-hawk, with its "imperial beak." The 1848-1850 conjuncture in the Atlantic world witnessed the birth of communism (Marx), modern art (Courbet, Flaubert), the end of classical political economy, and the formulation of the entropy law, or Second Law of Thermodynamics. Their simultaneity was not accidental, and Melville's work echoes each of them. 1848, in Europe, had been the year of the eruption of "the dangerous classes"; in America, it marked the end of interclassist Jeffersonian-Jacksonian populism, over the slavery issue. The link between communism, modernism, neoclassical economics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the beginning of the "dissolution of the object" in the "dream worlds" of a new mass consumption. This study attempts to situate Melville's works in this convergence.

Narrative Identities: Psychologists Engaged in Self-Construction


George Yancy - 2005
    Yancy and Hadley have done just this, and their edited book offers a fascinating way to gain greater insight into the theoretical ideas of key psychologists through their self-construction."- Psychologist`…There is much to be inspired by, to reflect upon, to learn from, and to understand from a thorough reading of this book.' - Nordic Journal of Music Therapy`A collection of papers in which psychologists from assorted theoretical orientations take part in an exercise to discover how they came to be the `particular epistemic agents they have become'. Narrative, social constructionist, feminist, postmodernist, poststructuralist, hermeneutic, existential, phenomenological, humanistic, critical, psychoanalytic, performative, social therapeutic - they are all here.'- Journal of Analytical Psychology`Thirteen leading psychologists offer personal reflections on their professional identities within the context of their larger social lives. Their conceptions of self hood are examined through the lens of the theoretical presuppositions used in their daily work. These include narrative, feminist, social constructionist, postmodernist, hermeneutic, critical, poststructuralist, humanistic, and psychoanalytical therapeutic approaches'. - Book News`What a fascinating and illuminating work! Yancy and Hadley have succeeded in stimulating a group of accomplished narratologists in psychology…to deliberate on the ways in which their life experiences are related to their scholarly explorations of narrative. The authors…grace us with illuminating and articulate insights into the close linkages between personal and intellectual development.'- Ken Gergen, Mustin Professor of Psychology, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, 0200The contributors address challenging questions about identity in relation to personality development, language and socialisation. They demonstrate how their cultural and historical contexts influenced their theoretical approaches to the nature of `self' and how these ideas in turn shaped how they perceive their personal histories.0400Preface. 1. The Poetics of My Identity, Theodore R. Sarbin, University of California, Santa Cruz. 2. Lessons from Relics about Self and Identity, Karl E. Scheibe, Wesleyan University. 3. Objects, Meanings, and Connections in My Life and Career, David E. Leary, University of Richmond. 4. From Poppies to Ferns: The Discursive Production of a Life, Gerald Monk, San Diego State University. 5. Performing a Life (Story), Lois Holzman, Eastside Institute. 6. A Psychologist without a Country, or Living Two Lives in the Same Story, Dan P. McAdams, Northwestern University. 7. Life as a Symphony, Christopher M. Aanstoos, State University of West Georgia. 8. Moving On by Backing Away, John Shotter, University of New Hampshire. 9. Living with Authority in "The Between", Hendrika Vande Kemp. 10. The Personal/Psychological and the Pursuit of a Profession, Adelbert H. Jenkins, New York University. 11. On Growing up as a "Pre-Modernist", Steen Halling, Seattle University. 12. Life Reflections of a Nomadic Subject, Tod Sloan, Lewis and Clark College. 13. Autobiography, Ilene Serlin.01000301http://www.biblioimages.com/jkp/getim...

Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing


Rocío G. Davis - 2005
    Collapsing the perceived divisions between the "ethnic" and the "aesthetic" in Asian American literary criticism, the eleven original essays in this volume provide theoretically sophisticated and formally sensitive readings of works in prose, poetry, and drama. These contributions bring discussions of genre, canonicity, narrative, and literary value to the fore to show how aesthetic and formal concerns play an important part in the production and consumption of these works. By calling for a more balanced mode of criticism, this collection invites students and scholars to reinvest in the literary, not as a negation of the sociopolitical, but as a complementary strategy in reading and understanding Asian American literature.

Moral Vision: How Everyday Life Shapes Ethical Thinking


Duane L. Cady - 2005
    Cady critiques the contemporary inclination to model reason after textbook natural science, noting that our values are not conclusions of proofs or derivations but frameworks in which such reasoning may take place, frameworks that we struggle to understand and explain. Cady goes on to suggest a rich conception of reason beyond that of stereotypical science, one that reflects aesthetic, historical, experiential, and pluralistic aspects of moral thinking, one that widens and deepens descriptions of how moral thinking typically happens. This book will be of interest to anyone wondering what philosophy may contribute to our contemporary struggle with conflicting values and value collisions, both personal as well as cultural.

Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture


Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey - 2005
    Theorists such as Edouard Glissant argue that the dialectic between Caribbean "nature" and "culture," engendered by this unique and troubled history, has not heretofore been brought into productive relation. Caribbean Literature and the Environment redresses this omission by gathering together eighteen essays that consider the relationship between human and natural history. The result is the first volume to examine the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region.In its exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, this collection focuses on four overlapping themes: how Caribbean texts inscribe the environmental impact of colonial and plantation economies; how colonial myths of edenic and natural origins are revisioned; what the connections are between histories of biotic and cultural creolization; and how a Caribbean aesthetics might usefully articulate a means to preserve sustainability in the context of tourism and globalization. By creating a dialogue between the growing field of ecological literary studies, which has primarily been concerned with white settler narratives, and Caribbean cultural production, especially the region's negotiation of complex racial and ethnic legacies, these essays explore the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.The volume includes an extensive introduction by the editors and essays by Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, Trenton Hickman, Shona Jackson, LeGrace Benson, Jana Evans Braziel, George B. Handley, Renee K. Grossman, Isabel Hoving, Natasha Tinsley, Helen Tiffen, Hena Maes-Jelinek, Heidi Bojsen, Ineke Phaf-Reinberger, Eric Prieto, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, as well as interviews with Walcott and Raphael Confiant. It will appeal to all those interested in Caribbean, literary, and ecocritical studies.

.45 Dangerous Minds: The Most Intense Interviews from Seconds Magazine


Steven Blush - 2005
    Interviewees include Marilyn Manson, David Bowie, JG Ballard, Henry Rollins, Allen Ginsberg, Anton LaVey, Joe Coleman, Peter Sotos, Joe D'Allesandro, Ron Jeremy, Wayne Kramer, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, John Waters, Richard Ramirez, Charles Manson, Ed Sanders and Robert Williams.Contributors include Michael Moynihan, Carlo McCormick, Boyd Rice, David Aaron Clarke, Art Deco and John Aes-Nihil.Steven Blush is the author of "American Hardcore. He lives in New York.

Critical Disability Theory: Essays in Philosophy, Politics, Policy, and Law


Dianne Pothier - 2005
    In this book, twenty-four scholars from a variety of disciplines contend that achieving equality for the disabled is not fundamentally a question of medicine or health, nor is it an issue of sensitivity or compassion. Rather, it is a question of politics, and of power and powerlessness. This book argues that we need a new understanding of participatory citizenship that encompasses the disabled, new policies to respond to their needs, and a new vision of their entitlements.

Recumbents


Michel Deguy - 2005
    Bilingual--first English translation.Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (2006)Winner of the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work (2006)Hailed as one of France's most influential living poets, Michel Deguy has remained largely inaccessible to English-language readers. Recumbents is the first English translation of the most critically-acclaimed volume of this poet's work. The word recumbents refers to funereal sculptures (gisants), reclining lovers, and the literal imprint of those and other figures on the page. The collection includes a poem for the dead, "Procession," written by Deguy in the wake of his father's suicide, and poems dedicated to all phases of Eros. These are interwoven with passages on rhetoric or what Deguy calls poetic reason. This bilingual edition also includes a meditation on Deguy's work by deconstructionism's foundational thinker, Jacques Derrida.

Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture


Tina Chen - 2005
    Asian American acts of impersonation, she argues, foreground the limits of subjectivity even as they insist on the undeniable importance of subjecthood. By decoupling imposture from impersonation, Chen shows how Asian American performances have often been misinterpreted, read as acts of betrayal rather than multiple allegiance. A central paradox informing the book—impersonation as a performance of divided allegiance that simultaneously pays homage to and challenges authenticity and authority—thus becomes a site for reconsidering the implications of Asian Americans as double agents. In exploring the possibilities that impersonation affords for refusing the binary logics of loyalty/disloyalty, real/fake, and Asian/American, Double Agency attends to the possibilities of reading such acts as "im-personations"—dynamic performances, and a performance dynamics—through which Asian Americans constitute themselves as speaking and acting subjects.

Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representations


Inés Hernández-Ávila - 2005
    The authors examine the avenues that Native American women have chosen for creative, cultural, and political expressions, and discuss the points of convergence between Native American feminisms and other feminisms. Individual contributors articulate their positions around issues such as identity, community, sovereignty, culture, and representation. This engaging volume crystallizes the myriad realities that inform the authors' intellectual work, and clarifies the sources of inspiration for their roles as individuals and indigenous intellectuals, reaffirming their paramount commitment to their communities and Nations. It will be of great value to Native writers as well as instructors and students in Native American studies, women's studies, anthropology, cultural studies, literature, and writing and composition.

Feminism After Bordieu


Lisa Adkins - 2005
    A meeting ground for mainstream social theory and contemporary feminist theory.Brings feminist theory face to face with Pierre Bourdieu's social theory.Demonstrates how much Bourdieu's theory has to offer to contemporary feminism.Comprises a series of contributions from key contemporary feminist thinkers.Defines new territories for feminist theorizing.Transforms and advances Bourdieu's social and cultural theory.

Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture


Karen Sanchez-Eppler - 2005
    By putting children at the center of our thinking about American history, Karen Sánchez-Eppler recognizes the important part childhood played in nineteenth-century American culture and what this involvement entailed for children themselves.Dependent States examines the ties between children's literacy training and the growing cultural prestige of the novel; the way children functioned rhetorically in reform literature to enforce social norms; the way the risks of death to children shored up emotional power in the home; how Sunday schools socialized children into racial, religious, and national identities; and how class identity was produced, not only in terms of work, but also in the way children played. For Sánchez-Eppler, nineteenth-century childhoods were nothing less than vehicles for national reform. Dependent on adults for their care, children did not conform to the ideals of enfranchisement and agency that we usually associate with historical actors. Yet through meticulously researched examples, Sánchez-Eppler reveals that children participated in the making of social meaning. Her focus on childhood as a dependent state thus offers a rewarding corrective to our notions of autonomous individualism and a new perspective on American culture itself.

Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture


Sylvia Lavin - 2005
    Design can help lower this nervous overhead."--Richard Neutra, 1954Sylvia Lavin's "Form Follows Libido" argues that by the 1950s, some architects felt an urge to steer the cool abstraction of high modernism away from a neutral formalism toward the production of more erotic, affective environments. Lavin turns to the architecture of Richard Neutra (1892-1970) to explore the genesis of these new mood-inducing environments. In a series of engaging essays weaving through the designs and writings of this Vienna-born, California-based architect, Lavin discovers in Neutra a sustained and poignant psychoanalytic reflection set in the context of a burgeoning psychoanalytic culture in America.Lavin shows that Neutra's redirection of modernism constituted not a lyrical regression to sentimentality but a deliberate advance of architectural theory and technique to engage the unconscious mind, fueled by the ideas of psychoanalysis that were being rapidly disseminated at the time. In Neutra's responses to a vivid range of issues, from psychoanalysis proper to the popular psychology of tele-evangelical prayer, Lavin uncovers a radical reconstitution of the architectural discipline.Arguing persuasively that the received historical views of both psychoanalysis and architecture have led to a suppression of their compelling coincidences and unorthodoxies, Lavin sets out to unleash midcentury architecture's hidden libido. Neither Neutra nor psychoanalysis emerges unscathed from her investigation of how architecture came to be saturated by the intrigues of affect, often against its will. If Reyner Banham sought to put architecture "on the couch," then Lavin, through Neutra, leaps beyond Banham's ameliorative aim to lure contemporary architecture into the lush and dangerous liaisons of environmental design.

Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions


Fredric Jameson - 2005
    Dick, UrsulaK. LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson, and more.Jameson’s essential essays, including “The Desire Called Utopia,”conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.

Shakespeare and Women


Phyllis Rackin - 2005
    In so doing, this book seeks to challenge currently prevalent views of Shakespeare's women-both the women he depicted in his plays and the women he encountered in the world he inhabited.Chapter 1, A Usable History, analyses the implications and consequences of the emphasis on patriarchal power, male misogyny, and women's oppression that has dominated recent feminist Shakespeare scholarship, while subsequent chapters propose alternative models for feminist analysis. Chapter 2, The Place(s) of Women in Shakespeare's World, emphasizes the frequently overlooked kinds of social, political, and economic agency exercised by the women Shakespeare would have known in both Stratford and London. Chapter 3, Our Canon, Ourselves, addresses the implications of the modern popularity of plays such as The Taming of the Shrew which seem to endorse women's subjugation, arguing that the plays--and the aspects of those plays--that we have chosen to emphasize tell us more about our own assumptions than about the beliefs that informed the responses of Shakespeare's first audiences. Chapter 4, Boys will be Girls, explores the consequences for women of the use of male actors to play women's roles. Chapter 5, The Lady's Reeking Breath, turns to the sonnets, the texts that seem most resistant to feminist appropriation, to argue that Shakespeare's rewriting of the idealized Petrarchan lady anticipates modern feminist critiques of the essential misogyny of the Petrarchan tradition. The final chapter, Shakespeare's Timeless Women, surveys the implication of Shakespeare's female characters in the process of historical change, as they have been repeatedly updated to conform to changing conceptions of women's nature and women's social roles, serving in ever-changing guises as models of an unchanging, universal female nature.

Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent


Daphne Patai - 2005
    Theory, as the many theoretical ism's (among them postcolonialism, postmodernism, and New Historicism) are now known, once seemed so exciting but has become ossified and insular. This iconoclastic collection is an excellent companion to current anthologies of literary theory, which have embraced an uncritical stance toward Theory and its practitioners. Written by nearly fifty prominent scholars, the essays in Theory's Empire question the ideas, catchphrases, and excesses that have let Theory congeal into a predictable orthodoxy. More than just a critique, however, this collection provides readers with effective tools to redeem the study of literature, restore reason to our intellectual life, and redefine the role and place of Theory in the academy.

Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes


Martin Puchner - 2005
    Ranging from the Communist Manifesto to the manifestos of the 1960s and beyond, it highlights the varied alliances and rivalries between socialism and repeated waves of avant-garde art. Martin Puchner argues that the manifesto--what Marx called the "poetry" of the revolution--was the genre through which modern culture articulated its revolutionary ambitions and desires. When it intruded into the sphere of art, the manifesto created an art in its own image: shrill and aggressive, political and polemical. The result was "manifesto art"--combinations of manifesto and art that fundamentally transformed the artistic landscape of the twentieth century.Central to modern politics and art, the manifesto also measures the geography of modernity. The translations, editions, and adaptations of such texts as the Communist Manifesto and the Futurist Manifesto registered and advanced the spread of revolutionary modernity and of avant-garde movements across Europe and to the Americas. The rapid diffusion of these manifestos was made "possible by networks--such as the successive socialist internationals and international avant-garde movements--that connected Santiago and Zurich, Moscow and New York, London and Mexico City. Poetry of the Revolution thus provides the point of departure for a truly global analysis of modernism and modernity.

Durkheim's Ghosts: Cultural Logics and Social Things


Charles Lemert - 2005
    These engaging and innovative essays by Charles Lemert bring together his writings on the contributions of French social theory past and present. Rather than merely interpret the theories, Lemert uses them to explore the futures of sociology, social theory, and culture studies. He offers the reader original insights into Durkheim's legacy and broader traditions of the cultural and social sciences.

On Matters Southern: Essays about Literature and Culture, 1964-2000


Marion Montgomery - 2005
    He has published more than 20 major works of criticism in the past 40 years. This volume presents 16 of his essays, selected and edited by Michael M. Jordan with a foreword by noted historian Eugene D. Genovese. It is a good introduction to the thinking and writing of a man who speaks for southern conservatism with passion and imagination, with head and heart, exercising both faith and reason. This work is divided into five sections--The Author at Work and at Home, On Place and Region, On Fugitives, Agrarians, and New Critics, On Individual Authors and On Books and Schooling. In the essays Montgomery discusses the importance of place in all serious literature, but especially in southern letters. He notes differences between southern and northern fiction. He pays tribute to Andrew Lytle, Madison Jones, and M.E. Bradford, and explicates the fiction of Walker Percy. Taken together, the essays reveal Montgomery's gifts and temperament: a keen intellect combined with a reverential awareness of the importance of tradition.

Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture


John Szwed - 2005
    With reviews written for the Village Voice and articles from academic journals, this volume includes essays, commentary, and meditations on James Agee and Walker Evans, Cuban folklorist Lydia Cabrera, Lafcadio Hearn, Melville Herskovits, Josef Skorvecky, Patrick Chamoiseau, pop song writer Ellie Greenwich, and jazz musicians Sonny Rollins, Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, and Ornette Coleman. Also included are pieces on the prehistory of hip hop, the blues, popular dance instruction songs, tap dance, and African American set dancing; creole writing and creolization; race and culture; and authenticity, representation, nostalgia, and obscenity in American popular culture, with excursions into jazz in Africa, Russia, and Argentina.Written about a country with cultural crossroads everywhere, where the question of race is thoroughly woven into the fabric of society, these essays cross boundaries and shed light on the complexities of American life.

Nature's Panorama: Thoreau on the Seasons


Henry David Thoreau - 2005
    Today that book continues to provoke, inspire, and change lives all over the world, and each rereading is fresh and challenging. Yet as Thoreau's countless admirers know, there is more to the man than Walden. An engineer, poet, teacher, naturalist, lecturer, and political activist, he truly had multiple lives to lead, and each one speaks forcefully to us today.Sponsored by the Thoreau Society, the brief, handsomely presented books in this series offer the thoughts of a great writer on a variety of topics, some that we readily associate with him, some that may be surprising. Each volume includes selections from his familiar published works as well as from less well known lectures, letters, and journal entries. The books include original engravings by renowned illustrator and book artist Barry Moser.

The Critique of Psychology: From Kant to Postcolonial Theory


Thomas Teo - 2005
    The Critique of Psychology is the first book to trace this alternate history, from a unique perspective that complements the many existing empirical, theoretical, and social histories of the field.Thomas Teo cogently synthesizes major historical and theoretical narratives to describe two centuries of challenges to—and the reactions of—the mainstream. Some of these critiques of content, methodology, relevance, and philosophical worldview have actually influenced and become integrated into the canon; others pose moral questions still under debate. All are accessibly presented so that readers may judge their value for themselves:- Kant’s critique of rational and empirical psychology at the end of the 18th century- The natural-scientific critique of philosophical psychology in the 19th century- The human-scientific critique of natural-scientific psychology- The Marxist traditions of critique- Feminist and postmodern critiques and the contemporary mainstream- Postcolonial critiques and the shift from cross-cultural to multicultural psychology This is not a book of critique for critique’s sake: Teo defines the field as a work in progress with goals that are evolving yet constant. In emphasizing ethical and political questions faced by psychology as a discipline, this visionary book points students, academics, and practitioners toward new possibilities for their shared future.

Memory, Music, and Religion: Morocco's Mystical Chanters


Earle H. Waugh - 2005
    Waugh addresses such probing questions while exploring a rich vein of Islam in Morocco--the mystical chanters. In this book, a detailed study of the interplay between memory, music, and religion, Waugh opens new areas of thought, particularly regarding a theme that cuts across religious traditions: the role of memory in religious formation.Since the glorious days of Andalusia, Muslim poetic and musical traditions have found a vibrant home among Moroccan Sufis. Through rituals of dhikr, or remembrance, the old forms of music and word blend into a new form of worship for today. In this study, Waugh probes the depths of religious memory within Islam and notes the singular importance of memory in comprehending the meaning and styles of music. Showing how the powerful tradition of music nurtures the Muslim soul, Waugh brings new insights to the study of the religious function of memory.

MSC: The Driving Force of Cultures


Heiner Mühlmann - 2005
    It describes cultures as systems which are controlled by MSC and decorum. While MSC is a neologism meaning 'maximal stress cooperation' decorum is a very old term. It is as old as Western culture itself, and is furthermore, the translation of the even older Greek word 'prepon'. Decorum and prepon mean 'to be suitable, to be fitting'. It is all about the fitting of cultural medial contents to elementary cultural behavioural types and behavioural phases. These behavioural units are subject to a type of ranking system in which that which is essential is sorted from that which less essential. - corum then means - the representations of the media must 'fit' the ranking of the cultural behaviour. It is MSC which assumes the top position in this ranking. In 1996 and the two previous years when I was working on my book 'The Nature of Cultures' less than 5 years had passed since the Iron Curtain had been lifted. Many believed at that time that with ending of the Cold War, which was more or less de facto peace anyway, that a new and better age of peace was dawning.

Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life


Arland Thornton - 2005
    Implicit in this developmental paradigm—one that has affected generations of thought on societal development—was the assumption that one could "read history sideways." That is, one could see what the earlier stages of a modern Western society looked like by examining contemporaneous so-called primitive societies in other parts of the world.In Reading History Sideways, leading family scholar Arland Thornton demonstrates how this approach, though long since discredited, has permeated Western ideas and values about the family. Further, its domination of social science for centuries caused the misinterpretation of Western trends in family structure, marriage, fertility, and parent-child relations. Revisiting the "developmental fallacy," Thornton here traces its central role in changes in the Western world, from marriage to gender roles to adolescent sexuality. Through public policies, aid programs, and colonialism, it continues to reshape families in non-Western societies as well.

Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation


Simon O'Sullivan - 2005
    The argument is made for a return to aesthetics--an aesthetics of affect--and for the theorization of art as an expanded and complex practice. Staging a series of encounters between specific Deleuzian concepts--the virtual, the minor, the fold, etc.--and the work of artists that position their work outside of the gallery or "outside" of representation--Simon O'Sullivan takes Deleuze's thought into other milieus, allowing these "possible worlds" to work back on philosophy.

Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality


Martha Mockus - 2005
    While other scholars have studied Oliveros as a disciple of John Cage and a contemporary of composers Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, Gordon Mumma, and Robert Ashley, Sounding Out resituates Pauline Oliveros in a gynecentric network of feminist activists, writers, artists and musicians. This book shows how the women in Oliveros's life were central sources of creative energy and exchange during a crucial moment in feminist and queer cultural history. Crafting a dynamic relationship between feminism and music-making, this book offers a queerly original analysis of Oliveros's work as a musical form of feminist activism and argues for the productive role of experimental music in lesbian feminist theory.Sounding Out combines key elements of feminist theories of lesbian sexuality with Oliveros's major compositions, performances, critical essays, and interviews. It also includes previously unpublished correspondence between Oliveros and Edith Guttierez, Jill Johnston, Annea Lockwood, Kate Millett, and Jane Rule.