Best of
Theory

2010

The Promise of Happiness


Sara Ahmed - 2010
    It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way.Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

Left Hemisphere: Mapping Contemporary Theory


Razmig Keucheyan - 2010
    The struggle between radical movements and the forces of reaction will be merciless. A crucial battlefield, where the outcome of the crisis will in part be decided, is that of theory. Over the last twenty-five years, radical intellectuals across the world have produced important and innovative ideas.The endeavour to transform the world without falling into the catastrophic traps of the past has been a common element uniting these new approaches. This book – aimed at both the general reader and the specialist – offers the first global cartography of the expanding intellectual field of critical contemporary thought. More than thirty authors and intellectual currents of every continent are presented in a clear and succinct manner. A history of critical thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is also provided, helping situate current thinkers in a broader historical and sociological perspective.

Horse and Rider: Poems


Melissa Range - 2010
    Her mixture of free and formal verse is populated with warriors, weapons, animals, and figures from the Bible and mythology. In a galloping triptych of ancient and apocalyptic visions, these vigorous poems probe the recurring image of the horse and its sometimes troubled, sometimes loving relationship with its rider.

Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit


Sally Mann - 2010
    Throughout her career, Mann has fearlessly pushed her exploration of the human form, tackling often difficult subject matter and making unapologetically sensual images that are simultaneously bold and lyrical. This beautifully produced publication includes Mann's earliest platinum prints from the late 1970s, Polaroid still lifes, early color work of her children, haunting landscape images, recent self-portraits and nude studies of her husband. These series document Mann's interest in the body as principal subject, with the associated issues of vulnerability and mortality lending an elegiac note to her images. In bringing them together, author and curator John Ravenal examines the varied ways in which Mann's experimental approach, including ambrotypes and gelatin-silver prints made from collodian wet-plate negatives, moves her subjects from the corporeal to the ethereal. Ravenal also supplies a comprehensive introduction as well as individual entries on each series, and essays by David Levi Strauss ("Eros, Psyche, and the Mendacity of Photography") and Anne Wilkes Tucker ("Living Memory") add different, but equally illuminating perspectives to this work. Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit is a must for any serious library of photographic literature, students, scholars, collectors and others interested in her work.Sally Mann (born 1951) is one of America's most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally. Mann's many books include What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), and the Aperture titles At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994) and Proud Flesh (2009). She lives in Lexington, Virginia.

The Essential Guide to Effect Sizes


Paul D. Ellis - 2010
    Using a class-tested approach that includes numerous examples and step-by-step exercises, it introduces and explains three of the most important issues relating to the practical significance of research results: the reporting and interpretation of effect sizes (Part I), the analysis of statistical power (Part II), and the meta-analytic pooling of effect size estimates drawn from different studies (Part III). The book concludes with a handy list of recommendations for those actively engaged in or currently preparing research projects.

Perversity Think Tank


Supervert - 2010
    

The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II


Jacques Derrida - 2010
    As he moves back and forth between the two works, Derrida pursuesthe relations between solitude, insularity, world, violence, boredom and death as they supposedly affect humans and animals in different ways. Hitherto unnoticed or underappreciated aspects of Robinson Crusoe are brought out in strikingly original readings of questions such as Crusoe’s belief in ghosts, his learning to pray, his parrot Poll, and his reinvention of the wheel. Crusoe’s terror of being buried alive or swallowed alive by beasts or cannibals gives rise to a rich and provocative reflection on death, burial, and cremation, in part provoked by a meditation on the death of Derrida’s friend Maurice Blanchot.  Throughout, these readings are juxtaposed with interpretations of Heidegger's concepts of world and finitude to produce a distinctively Derridean account that will continue to surprise his readers.

The Russian Word's Worth: A Humorous and Informative Guide to Russian Language, Culture, and Translation


Michele A. Berdy - 2010
    This cultural study cum dictionary is a must for English-language people interested in Russia and for Russians learning English.

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire


Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands - 2010
    Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. As a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature.

Manhunts: A Philosophical History


Grégoire Chamayou - 2010
    Incorporating historical events and philosophical reflection, Grégoire Chamayou examines the systematic and organized search for individuals and small groups on the run because they have defied authority, committed crimes, seemed dangerous simply for existing, or been categorized as subhuman or dispensable.Chamayou begins in ancient Greece, where young Spartans hunted and killed Helots (Sparta’s serfs) as an initiation rite, and where Aristotle and other philosophers helped to justify raids to capture and enslave foreigners by creating the concept of natural slaves. He discusses the hunt for heretics in the Middle Ages; New World natives in the early modern period; vagrants, Jews, criminals, and runaway slaves in other eras; and illegal immigrants today. Exploring evolving ideas about the human and the subhuman, what we owe to enemies and people on the margins of society, and the supposed legitimacy of domination, Chamayou shows that the hunting of humans should not be treated ahistorically, and that manhunting has varied as widely in its justifications and aims as in its practices. He investigates the psychology of manhunting, noting that many people, from bounty hunters to Balzac, have written about the thrill of hunting when the prey is equally intelligent and cunning.An unconventional history on an unconventional subject, Manhunts is an in-depth consideration of the dynamics of an age-old form of violence.

What Is Marxism All About?: A Street Guide for Revolutionaries on a Move


LeiLani Dowell - 2010
    The Marxist definitions of these words will sharpen an understanding of society from a working-class perspective and the concepts will help 21st-century activists organize for radical and transformative change.

Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage


Ryan ConradCraig Willse - 2010
    This pocket-sized book of archival texts lays out some of the historical foundations of queer resistance to the gay marriage mainstream alongside more contemporary inter-subjective critiques that deal directly with issues of race, class, gender, citizenship, age, ability, and more. In portable book form, the critical conversations that are happening so readily on the internet will no longer be withheld from those with little to no online access like queer and trans prisoners, people of low income, rural folks and the technologically challenged. Contributors include Kate Bornstein, Eric Stanley, Dean Spade, Craig Willse, Kenyon Farrow, Kate Raphael, Deeg, John D’Emilio, Ryan Conrad, Yasmin Nair, Martha Jane Kaufman, Katie Miles, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.- - -"Against Equality makes the powerful argument that same-sex marriage is an essentially conservative cause, an effort to prop up a fundamentally unfair system. As an alternative, it offers us the inspiring vision of a truly radical queer politics, devoted to attacking injustice, not just allowing a few more gay people to benefit from it." – Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality"Rather than being merely anti-marriage, the book deliberately articulates multiple alternative visions – such as building and valuing our own grassroots familial 'networks of accountability' – thus edging us closer to true 'equality,' or dare I say liberation, celebrating our differences as queers. – Jessica Max Stein (Make/Shift Magazine)"A powerful, moving read from a side often overlooked by mainstream society. A must read for anyone 'for' or 'against' gay marriage." – Steve Mason (California State Inmate/Queer Librarian)[This Anthology] brings to light that a venomous black-and-white rhetorical split has developed on gay marriage. The dichotomous engagement with the issue is damaging to the cohesion of the GLBTQ community and stops discussions short. This collection offers valuable, if controversial, much needed nuance to a radically fractured debate." – Ericka Steckle (Bitch Magazine)

Disability Aesthetics


Tobin Anthony Siebers - 2010
    Along the way, Tobin Siebers revisits the beautiful and the sublime, 'degenerate' art and 'disqualified' bodies, culture wars and condemned neighborhoods, the art of Marc Quinn and the fiction of Junot Díaz---and much, much more. Disability Aesthetics is a stunning achievement, a must-read for anyone interested in how to understand the world we half create and half perceive."---Michael Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor in Literature, Pennsylvania State University"Rich with examples of the disabled body in both historical and modern art, Tobin Siebers's new book explores how disability problematizes commonly accepted ideas about aesthetics and beauty. For Siebers, disability is not a pejorative condition as much as it is a form of embodied difference. He is as comfortable discussing the Venus de Milo as he is discussing Andy Warhol. Disability Aesthetics is a prescient and much-needed contribution to visual & critical studies."---Joseph Grigely, Professor of Visual and Critical Studies, The School of the Art Institute of ChicagoDisability Aesthetics is the first attempt to theorize the representation of disability in modern art and visual culture. It claims that the modern in art is perceived as disability, and that disability is evolving into an aesthetic value in itself. It argues that the essential arguments at the heart of the American culture wars in the late twentieth century involved the rejection of disability both by targeting certain artworks as "sick" and by characterizing these artworks as representative of a sick culture. The book also tracks the seminal role of National Socialism in perceiving the powerful connection between modern art and disability. It probes a variety of central aesthetic questions, producing a new understanding of art vandalism, an argument about the centrality of wounded bodies to global communication, and a systematic reading of the use put to aesthetics to justify the oppression of disabled people. In this richly illustrated and accessibly written book, Tobin Siebers masterfully demonstrates the crucial roles that the disabled mind and disabled body have played in the evolution of modern aesthetics, unveiling disability as a unique resource discovered by modern art and then embraced by it as a defining concept.Tobin Siebers is V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature and Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His many books include Disability Theory and The Subject and Other Subjects: On Ethical, Aesthetic, and Political Identity.A volume in the series Corporealities: Discourses of Disability

Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value Form


Endnotes Collective - 2010
    Surplus population and capital's basic problem of labour characterise core dynamics underlying the shift in this horizon beyond the old programme of workers' power.Misery and Debt A re-reading and historical interpretation of Marx's “general law of accumulation”— the tendency for the expanded reproduction of capital to throw off more labour than it absorbs—in light of the growth of surplus populations and surplus capital in the world today.Notes on the New Housing Question Preliminary materials for a theory of home-ownership, credit, and housework in the post-war US economy. How is the fundamental separation between production and reproduction transformed when the home becomes the commodity through which all others are sold? Communisation and Value-Form Theory The theory of communisation and Marxian value-form theory emerge from the same historical moment, mutually complement each other, and point towards the same radical conception of revolution as the immediate transformation of social relations, one in which we cease to constitute value and it ceases to constitute us. The Moving Contradiction A reconstruction of the systematic dialectic of capital as a dialectic of class struggle. The forms of value which are constituted by and regulate social practice are totalising and self-reproducing through the subsumption of labour under capital. The totality so constituted is inwardly contradictory, and ultimately self-undermining: capitalist accumulation is a moving contradiction, i.e. a historical contradiction, between capital and proletariat. The History of Subsumption The philosophical/logical concept of subsumption is employed in various periodisations of capitalist society, such as those of Théorie Communiste, Jacques Camatte, and Antonio Negri. A critical examination of this concept and its historical uses.Sleep-Worker’s Enquiry Worker's enquiry in the cynical mode: the unrevolutionary working life of the web developer.

The Audio Programming Book [With CDROM]


Richard Boulanger - 2010
    Designed to be used by readers with varying levels of programming expertise, it not only provides the foundations for music and audio development but also tackles issues that sometimes remain mysterious even to experienced software designers. Exercises and copious examples (all cross-platform and based on free or open source software) make the book ideal for classroom use. Fifteen chapters and eight appendixes cover such topics as programming basics for C and C++ (with music-oriented examples), audio programming basics and more advanced topics, spectral audio programming; programming Csound opcodes, and algorithmic synthesis and music programming. Appendixes cover topics in compiling, audio and MIDI, computing, and math. An accompanying DVD provides an additional 40 chapters, covering musical and audio programs with micro-controllers, alternate MIDI controllers, video controllers, developing Apple Audio Unit plug-ins from Csound opcodes, and audio programming for the iPhone.The sections and chapters of the book are arranged progressively and topics can be followed from chapter to chapter and from section to section. At the same time, each section can stand alone as a self-contained unit. Readers will find The Audio Programming Book a trustworthy companion on their journey through making music and programming audio on modern computers.

On Freedom, Love, and Power


Jacques Ellul - 2010
    During the Second World War, he was active in the French resistance; his efforts to save Jews during this time eventually earned him the title .Righteous Among the Nations.. A towering intellectual figure, Ellul taught in Paris and at the University of Bordeaux, wrote and published extensively, and engaged throughout his career in a dialogue between the realities of technology and contemporary life, the tenets of the Christian faith, and the principles of human freedom. Transcribed here for the first time, this series of talks refines and clarifies some of Ellul's most controversial insights into what it means to understand and live out God's wishes.Ellul's evaluation of a number of interrelated books of Scripture, including Genesis, Job, Matthew, and John, challenges Jewish and Christian orthodoxies and more progressive interpretations alike by claiming that the Judeo-Christian tradition is both anti-moral and anti-religious. Promoting a life based on freedom and love, Ellul's thinking opens the door to, in his words, .thinking globally and acting locally..

Envisioning Real Utopias


Erik Olin Wright - 2010
    Yet there has been a global retreat by the Left: on the assumption that liberal capitalism is the only game in town, political theorists tend to dismiss as utopian any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations. As Fredric Jameson first argued, it is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism.Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. Building on a lifetime’s work analyzing the class system in the developed world, as well as exploring the problem of the transition to a socialist alternative, Wright has now completed a systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors. Envisioning Real Utopias aims to put the social back into socialism, laying the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century.

Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch


Eric Miller - 2010
    His work consistently probed the nations political and cultural terrain, considering the unruly thrust of Americas history and the possibilities of a better way. Hope in a Scattering Time is the first and only full biography of this towering intellectual figure. Miller plumbed Lasch's published writings, his correspondence, and interviews and correspondence with his friends, students, and colleagues to create this comprehensive biography. In these pages Eric Miller captures the evolving nature of Lasch's understanding of the world and his fight for clarity and insight in a muddled age. Christopher Lasch's sharp, prophetic stance caused many in his time to rethink what they thought they had understood, and to consider the world anew. Fifteen years after Lasch's death, the time is ripe to once again follow his lead and to reassess how we view and understand our world.

Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History


Mark A. Wrathall - 2010
    "Unconcealment" is the idea that what entities are depends on the conditions that allow them to manifest themselves. This concept, central to Heidegger's work, also applies to worlds in a dual sense: first, a condition of entities manifesting themselves is the existence of a world; and second, worlds themselves are disclosed. The unconcealment or disclosure of a world is the most important historical event, and Heidegger believes there have been a number of quite distinct worlds that have emerged and disappeared in history. Heidegger's thought as a whole can profitably be seen as working out the implications of the original understanding of unconcealment.

Neoconservatism: An Obituary For An Idea


C. Bradley Thompson - 2010
    C. Bradley Thompson has written (with Yaron Brook) the most comprehensive and original analysis of neoconservatism yet published and in the process has dealt it a mortal blow. "Neoconservatism" reveals publicly for the first time what the neocons call their philosophy of governance their plan for governing America. This book explicates the deepest philosophic principles of neoconservatism, traces the intellectual relationship between the political philosopher Leo Strauss and contemporary neoconservative political actors, and provides a trenchant critique of neoconservatism from the perspective of America s founding principles. The theme of this timely book--neoconservatism as a species of anti-Americanism--will shake up the intellectual salons of both the Left and Right. What makes this book so compelling is that Thompson actually lived for many years in the Straussian/neoconservative intellectual world. "Neoconservatism" therefore fits into the "breaking ranks" tradition of scholarly criticism and breaks the mold when it comes to informed, incisive, nonpartisan critique of neoconservative thought and action.

Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation


Seo-Young Chu - 2010
    Seo-Young Chu offers a bold challenge to this perception of the genre, arguing instead that science fiction is a form of "high-intensity realism" capable of representing non-imaginary objects that elude more traditional, "realist" modes of representation. Powered by lyric forces that allow it to transcend the dichotomy between the literal and the figurative, science fiction has the capacity to accommodate objects of representation that are themselves neither entirely figurative nor entirely literal in nature. Chu explores the globalized world, cyberspace, war trauma, the Korean concept of han, and the rights of robots, all as referents for which she locates science-fictional representations in poems, novels, music, films, visual pieces, and other works ranging within and without previous demarcations of the science fiction genre. In showing the divide between realism and science fiction to be illusory, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? sheds new light on the value of science fiction as an aesthetic and philosophical resource--one that matters more and more as our everyday realities grow increasingly resistant to straightforward representation.

Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self


Stacy Alaimo - 2010
    Drawing on feminist theory, environmental studies, and the sciences, Stacy Alaimo focuses on trans-corporeality, or movement across bodies and nature, which has profoundly altered our sense of self. By looking at a broad range of creative and philosophical writings, Alaimo illuminates how science, politics, and culture collide, while considering the closeness of the human body to the environment.

Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations


Diane Davis - 2010
    Rather than focus on the arguments and symbolic exchanges through which social relations are defined, Davis exposes an underivable rhetorical imperative, an obligation to respond that is as undeniable as the obligation to age. Situating this response-ability as the condition for, rather than the effect of, symbolic interaction, Davis both dissolves contemporary concerns about linguistic overdetermination and calls into question long-held presumptions about rhetoric’s relationship with identification, figuration, hermeneutics, agency, and judgment.Spotlighting a rhetorical “situation” irreducible to symbolic relations, Davis proposes quite provocatively that rhetoric—rather than ontology (Aristotle/Heidegger), epistemology (Descartes), or ethics (Levinas)—is “first philosophy.” The subject or “symbol-using animal” comes into being, Davis argues both with and against Emmanuel Levinas, only inasmuch as it responds to the other; the priority of the other is not a matter of the subject's choice, then, but of its inescapable predicament. Directing the reader’s attention to this inessential solidarity without which no meaning-making or determinate social relation would be possible, Davis aims to nudge rhetorical studies beyond the epistemological concerns that typically circumscribe theories of persuasion toward the examination of a more fundamental affectability, persuadability, responsivity.

Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want


Jan Verwoert - 2010
    Published in collaboration with Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, the book galvanizes central themes Verwoert has been developing in pursuit of a language to describe art’s transformative potential in conceptual, performative, and emotional terms. He analyzes the power of public gestures to constitute communities as well as the pressure to perform that governs the sphere of creative labor, in order to show how particular artists perform gestures and invoke community differently. Exploring the emotional power games that shape social relations, Verwoert looks for an alternative ethos of action and feeling, asking: How can a modernist approach to artistic form as a means of social critique be expanded to fully avow its subliminal affective undercurrents, and produce a pleasurably crooked form of criticality in art and writing?“If we perceive the pressure to perform to be innately linked to the regimentation of options, to imagine the ethos of a resistant practice implies an exploration of the conditions, situations, and potentialites that lie beyond the option menus and the exclusivity of the yes and no. In artistic practice this dedication to imagining other ways to perform and other ways to enjoy consumption means claiming the imagination and the aesthetic experience as a field of collective agency where workable forms of resistance can be devised.”Co-published with Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy

Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos


Peter E. Gordon - 2010
    They were arguably the most important thinkers in Europe, and their exchange touched upon the most urgent questions in the history of philosophy: What is human finitude? What is objectivity? What is culture? What is truth?Over the last eighty years the Davos encounter has acquired an allegorical significance, as if it marked an ultimate and irreparable rupture in twentieth-century Continental thought. Here, in a reconstruction at once historical and philosophical, Peter Gordon reexamines the conversation, its origins and its aftermath, resuscitating an event that has become entombed in its own mythology. Through a close and painstaking analysis, Gordon dissects the exchange itself to reveal that it was at core a philosophical disagreement over what it means to be human.But Gordon also shows how the life and work of these two philosophers remained closely intertwined. Their disagreement can be understood only if we appreciate their common point of departure as thinkers of the German interwar crisis, an era of rebellion that touched all of the major philosophical movements of the day life-philosophy, philosophical anthropology, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and existentialism. As Gordon explains, the Davos debate would continue to both inspire and provoke well after the two men had gone their separate ways. It remains, even today, a touchstone of philosophical memory.This clear, riveting book will be of great interest not only to philosophers and to historians of philosophy but also to anyone interested in the great intellectual ferment of Europe s interwar years."

Socialism or Barbarism? The Selected Writings (Get Political)


Rosa Luxemburg - 2010
    Her work was broad in scope tackling capitalism and socialism; globalization and imperialism; history; war and peace; social struggles, trade unions, political parties; class, gender, race; the interconnection of humanity with the natural environment. The editors provide an extensive and informative introduction outlining and evaluating her life and thought. This is the best introduction to the range of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought.

Collected Writings, Vol 3: On Policy, Practice and Contradiction


Mao Zedong - 2010
    Having conquered the country, he ruled the People's Republic of China from its establishment as a Communist state in 1949 until the time of his death in 1976. Brilliant and ruthless, his legacy includes guerrilla warfare tactics, violent cultural revolutions, and enduring Communist propaganda. He was named one of the 100 most influential figures of the 20th century by Time Magazine .Eric Margolis of the Huffington Post writes of Chairman Mao:"Mao was an accomplished poet, writer and historian, a profound thinker, and a superb military strategist. He crushed the US-backed Nationalist's 4.3-million strong armies in a series of titanic battles, forcing his rival, Chiang Kai-shek, to flee to Taiwan... The Great Helmsman united fractured, war-torn China, restoring its pride and self-confidence after two centuries of humiliation. Mao thwarted both Soviet and U.S. efforts to turn China into a client state, and built up China's military power... Mao's aides dared not tell him millions were starving. Red Emperor Mao was prodigal with his people's lives, and, according to aides who were close to him, was shockingly indifferent to their suffering. Mao horrified even brutal Soviet leaders by saying he was prepared to lose half his people to emerge victorious from a nuclear war..."The third volume in this special collection contains five important lectures and essays by Chairman Mao:*Part 1 - On Policy*Part 2 - On Practice*Part 3 - On Contradiction*Part 4 - On NewDemocracy*Part 5 - On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the PeopleExcerpt from Collected Writings of Chairman Mao - On Policy, Practice and Contradiction by Mao ZedongReprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Above all, Marxists regard man's activity in production as the most fundamental practical activity, the determinant of all his other activities. Man's knowledge depends mainly on his activity in material production, through which he comes gradually to understand the phenomena, the properties and the laws of nature, and the relations between himself and nature; and through his activity in production he also gradually comes to understand, in varying degrees, certain relations that exist between man and man. None of this knowledge can be acquired apart from activity in production. In a classless society every person, as a member of society, joins in common effort with the other members, enters into definite relations of production with them and engages in production to meet man's material needs. In all class societies, the members of the different social classes also enter, in different ways, into definite relations of production and engage in production to meet their material needs. This is the primary source from which human knowledge develops.

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century


Hazel Rose Markus - 2010
    Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe.Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do.Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

Critical Race Theory Matters: Education and Ideology


Margaret Zamudio - 2010
    Critical Race Theory Matters provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of this influential movement, shining its keen light on specific issues within education.

Gore Capitalism


Sayak Valencia - 2010
    Valencia argues that violence itself has become a product within hyper-consumerist neoliberal capitalism, and that tortured and mutilated bodies have become commodities to be traded and utilized for profit in an age of impunity and governmental austerity.In a lucid and transgressive voice, Valencia unravels the workings of the politics of death in the context of contemporary networks of hyper-consumption, the ups and downs of capital markets, drug trafficking, narcopower, and the impunity of the neoliberal state. She looks at the global rise of authoritarian governments, the erosion of civil society, the increasing violence against women, the deterioration of human rights, and the transformation of certain cities and regions into depopulated, ghostly settings for war. She offers a trenchant critique of masculinity and gender constructions in Mexico, linking their misogynist force to the booming trade in violence.This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to analyze the new landscapes of war. It provides novel categories that allow us to deconstruct what is happening, while proposing vital epistemological tools developed in the convulsive Third World border space of Tijuana.

Recommender Systems Handbook


Francesco Ricci - 2010
    It covers the key concepts in recommender systems and includes real-world applications and detailed case studies.

Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance


Will D. Campbell - 2010
    Campbell is one of the foremost prophets in American religious history. Like Clarence Jordan and Dorothy Day, Campbell incarnates the radical iconoclastic vocation of standing in contraposition to society, naming and smashing the racial, economic, and political idols that seduce and delude. In this anthology Campbell diagnoses a problem afflicting much of the church today. Zealous to make a difference in the world by acquiring the power of legislation and enforcement, Christians employ society's political science rather than the scandalous politics of Jesus. Although well-intentioned, Christians are, Campbell laments, mistakenly "up to our steeples in politics." Campbell's prescription is for disciples simply to incarnate the reconciliation that Christ has achieved. Rather than crafting savvy strategies and public policies, "Do nothing," Campbell counsels. "Be reconciled!" Yet his encouragement to "do nothing" is no endorsement of passivity or apolitical withdrawal. Rather, Campbell calls for disciples to give their lives in irrepressible resistance against all principalities and powers that would impede or deny our reconciliation in Christ--an unrelenting prophetic challenge leveled especially at institutional churches, as well as Christian colleges and universities. In sermons, difficult-to-access journal articles, and archival manuscripts, Campbell then develops what reconciliation looks like. Being the church, for example, means identifying with, and advocating for, society's "least one"-including violent offenders, disenfranchised minorities, and even militant bigots. In fact, in Campbell's ordo the scorned sectarian and disinherited denizen is often closer to the peculiar Christian genius than are society's well-healed powerbrokers. Disciples seeking to discern their calling can hardly do better than taking direction from this "bootleg," pulpitless preacher. Endorsements: "Will Campbell still has much to teach us all. Quirky and courageous, Christian and contrarian, his life of love and labor on behalf of civil rights-and plain civility to those in need-deserves a wider hearing than it usually receives. Many thanks to Richard Goode for spreading the word." --Douglas A. Sweeney, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School "In this remarkable collection, Will Campbell unmasks the 'powers that be, ' envisions an alternative order, and calls Christians to radical practices of resistance and reconciliation. The witness in these pages will call forth many adjectives: 'Unrealistic!' 'Outrageous!' 'Scandalous!' 'Shocking!' 'Foolish!' Most often, however, another word is best: Gospel. Unsettling and essential reading for contemporary Christians. --Charles L. Campbell Duke Divinity School "Will Campbell was supposed to be a Southern Baptist minister, a farmer, a docile rower of the white church's missionary boat; instead, he became a guerilla Protestant comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable across the South and beyond. He still preached, but seldom beneath the steeples . . . Historian Richard Goode, a close observer of Will Campbell's ministry and writings, has selected and introduced in this volume a distillation of the man's best work, and organized it into the two most compelling frames of Campbell's life: reconciliation and resistance. If they seem contradictory, well, so is Campbell, and the church, and the world." --John Egerton author of The Americanization of Dixie About the Contributor(s): Will D. Campbell was a Baptist preacher in Taylor, Louisiana, for two years before taking the position of Director of Religious Life at the University of Mississippi from 1954 to 1956. Forced to leave the university because of his ardent Civil Rights participation, Campbell served on the National Council of Ch

Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body


Harvey Young - 2010
    Innovative, creative, and provocative."---Davarian Baldwin, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Trinity CollegeIn 1901, George Ward, a lynching victim, was attacked, murdered, and dismembered by a mob of white men, women, and children. As his lifeless body burned in a fire, enterprising white youth cut off his toes and, later, his fingers and sold them as souvenirs. In Embodying Black Experience, Harvey Young masterfully blends biography, archival history, performance theory, and phenomenology to relay the experiences of black men and women who, like Ward, were profoundly affected by the spectacular intrusion of racial violence within their lives. Looking back over the past two hundred years---from the exhibition of boxer Tom Molineaux and Saartjie Baartman (the "Hottentot Venus") in 1810 to twenty-first century experiences of racial profiling and incarceration---Young chronicles a set of black experiences, or what he calls, "phenomenal blackness," that developed not only from the experience of abuse but also from a variety of performances of resistance that were devised to respond to the highly predictable and anticipated arrival of racial violence within a person's lifetime.Embodying Black Experience pinpoints selected artistic and athletic performances---photography, boxing, theater/performance art, and museum display---as portals through which to gain access to the lived experiences of a variety of individuals. The photographs of Joseph Zealy, Richard Roberts, and Walker Evans; the boxing performances of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali; the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, and Dael Orlandersmith; and the tragic performances of Bootjack McDaniels and James Cameron offer insight into the lives of black folk across two centuries and the ways that black artists, performers, and athletes challenged the racist (and racializing) assumptions of the societies in which they lived.Blending humanistic and social science perspectives, Embodying Black Experience explains the ways in which societal ideas of "the black body," an imagined myth of blackness, get projected across the bodies of actual black folk and, in turn, render them targets of abuse. However, the emphasis on the performances of select artists and athletes also spotlights moments of resistance and, indeed, strength within these most harrowing settings.Harvey Young is Associate Professor of Theatre, Performance Studies, and Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University.A volume in the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance

Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring


Harry C. Denny - 2010
    In Facing the Center, Harry Denny unpacks the identity matrices that enrich teachable moments, and he explores the pedagogical dynamics and implications of identity within the writing center.  The face of the writing center, be it mainstream or marginal, majority or miority, orthodox or subversive, always has implications for teaching and learning. Facing the Center will extend current research in writing center theory to bring it in touch with theories now common in cultural studies curricula. Denny takes up issues of power, agency, language, and meaning, and pushes his readers to ask how they themselves, or the centers in which they work, might be perpetuating cultures that undermine inclusive, progressive education.

The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment


Christian Thorne - 2010
    Thorne argues that despite its ascendance, anti-foundationalism is wrong. In The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment, he uses deft readings of a range of texts to offer new perspectives on the ongoing clash between philosophy and comprehensive doubt.The problem with anti-foundationalism is not, as is often thought, that it radiates uncertainty or will unglue the university, but instead that it is a system of thought--with set habits that generate unearned certainties. The shelves are full of histories of modern philosophy, but the history of the resistance to philosophical thought remains to be told. At its heart, The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment is a plea not to take doubt at its word--a plea for the return of a vanished philosophical intelligence and for the retirement of an anti-Enlightenment thinking that commits, over and over again, the very crimes that it lays at Enlightenment's door.

Louis Kahn: On the Thoughtful Making of Spaces: The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space


Michael Merrill - 2010
    Kahn's rethinking of modern architecture's paradigm of space belongs to his most important contributions to the metier. In tracing the genesis of the unbuilt project for the Dominican Motherhouse we are given a close-up view of Kahn at work on a few fundamental questions of architectural space: seeking the sources of its meaning in its social, morphological, landscape and contextual dimensions. This rich and multivalent project opens the way to a second section, which sheds new light on several of major works in a timely reappraisal of Kahn's work.The result of extensive research, illustrated with unpublished archival material and new analytic drawings, this affordable volume is an indispensible companion to Drawing to Find Out.

Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise


Bernard Stiegler - 2010
    Here, in volume three, he turns his attention to the prolematic relationship to technics he finds in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, particularly in the two versions of the Transcendental Deduction. Stiegler relates this problematic to the "cinematic nature" of time, which precedes cinema itself but reaches an apotheosis in it as the exteriorization process of schema, through tertiary retentions and their mechanisms. The book focuses on the relationship between these themes and the "culture industry"— as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer—that has supplanted the educational institutions on which genuine cultural participation depends. This displacement, Stiegler says, has produced a malaise from which current global culture suffers. The result is potentially catastrophic.

The Rey Chow Reader


Rey Chow - 2010
    Characteristically confronting both entrenched and emergent issues in the interlocking fields of literature, film and visual studies, sexuality and gender, postcolonialism, ethnicity, and cross-cultural politics, her works produce surprising connections among divergent topics at the same time as they compel us to think through the ethical and political ramifications of our academic, epistemic, and cultural practices. This anthology - the first to collect key moments in Chow's engaging thought - provides readers with an ideal introduction to some of her most forceful theoretical explorations. Organized into two sections, each of which begins with a brief statement designed to establish linkages among various discursive fields through Chow's writings, the anthology also contains an extensive Editor's Introduction, which situates Chow's work in the context of contemporary critical debates. For all those pursuing transnational cultural theory and cultural studies, this book is an essential resource.Praise for Rey Chow"[Rey Chow is] methodologically situated in the contentious spaces between critical theory and cultural studies, and always attending to the implications of ethnicity."--Social Semiotics"Rich and powerful work that provides both a dazzling synthesis of contemporary cultural theory and at the same time an exemplary critique of Chinese cinema."--China Information"Should be read by all who are concerned with the future of human rights, liberalism, multiculturalism, identity politics, and feminism."--Dorothy Ko"Wide-ranging, theoretically rich, and provocative... completely restructures the problem of ethnicity."--Fredric Jameson

The Evolution of Operational Art: From Napoleon to the Present


John Andreas Olsen - 2010
    An intermediate link between strategy and tactics has always existed, but a distinct concept that encompasses a systematic and deliberate plan of campaign for major operations is a mere two hundred years old.Based on country specific case-studies, The Evolution of Operational Art describes how the concepts that underpin operational art originated, how they received practical expression in various campaigns, and how they developed over time. The point of departure is the campaigns of 'the God of War', Napoleon Bonaparte. The book then proceeds with chapters on the evolution of operational art in Prussia / Germany, the Soviet Union / Russia, the UK, US, Israel, and China. The final chapter deals with the future of operational art in irregular warfare.Theory is critical to refining and improving existing methods of applying operational warfare, and its importance cannot be overstated; however, to be useful, theory and its accompanying vocabulary must be combined with a proper examination of historical trends and practical experience. The Evolution of Operational Art attempts to achieve that combination.This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

Going Public


Boris Groys - 2010
    Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessarily serve to undermine it. Following his recent books Art Power and The Communist Postscript, in Going Public Boris Groys looks to escape entrenched aesthetic and sociological understandings of art—which always assume the position of the spectator, of the consumer. Let us instead consider art from the position of the producer, who does not ask what it looks like or where it comes from, but why it exists in the first place.

Form, Function, Beauty = Gestalt (Architecture Words)


Max Bill - 2010
    What unites all the work is a clarity and precision of expression. Through both his designs and his writings Max Bill has long been a major figure of reference in the German-speaking world.

Group Theory: A Physicist's Survey


Pierre Ramond - 2010
    This book introduces physicists to many of the fascinating mathematical aspects of group theory, and mathematicians to its physics applications. Designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, this book gives a comprehensive overview of the main aspects of both finite and continuous group theory, with an emphasis on applications to fundamental physics. Finite groups are extensively discussed, highlighting their irreducible representations and invariants. Lie algebras, and to a lesser extent Kac-Moody algebras, are treated in detail, including Dynkin diagrams. Special emphasis is given to their representations and embeddings. The group theory underlying the Standard Model is discussed, along with its importance in model building. Applications of group theory to the classification of elementary particles are treated in detail.

Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance


Corinne J. Saunders - 2010
    This study looks at a wide range of medieval English romance texts, including the works of Chaucer and Malory, from a broad cultural perspective, to show that while they employ magic in order to create exotic, escapist worlds, they are also grounded in a sense of possibility, and reflect a complex web of inherited and current ideas. The book opens with a survey of classical and biblical precedents, and of medieval attitudes to magic; subsequent chapters explore the ways that romances both reflect contemporary attitudes and ideas, and imaginatively transform them. In particular, the author explores the distinction between the white magic' of healing and protection, and the more dangerous arts of nigromancy', black magic. Also addressed is the wider supernatural, including the ways that ideas associated with human magic can be intensified and developed in depictions of otherworldly practitioners of magic. The ambiguous figures of the enchantress and the shapeshifter are a special focus, and the faery is contrasted with the Christian supernatural - miracles, ghosts, spirits, demons and incubi. Professor CORINNE SAUNDERS Saunders teaches in the Department of English, University of Durham.

Thinking in Indian: A John Mohawk Reader


José Barreiro - 2010
    They reflect consistent engagement in Native issues and deliver a profoundly indigenous analysis of modern existence. Sovereignty, cultural roots and world view, land and treaty rights, globalization, spiritual formulations and fundamental human wisdom coalesce to provide a genuinely indigenous perspective on current events.

Nietzsche: A Complete Introduction


Roy Jackson - 2010
    It covers the key areas that students are expected to be confident in, outlining the basics in clear jargon-free English, and then providing added-value features like summaries of key books, and even lists of questions you might be asked in your seminar or exam.The book uses a structure that mirrors the way Nietzsche is studied on many university courses, with chapters looking at Nietzsche's life, The Birth of Tragedy, the revaluation of all values, the will to power, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, truth and perspectivism, religion, politics, and Nietsche's legacy

Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature


Ruth Bienstock Anolik - 2010
    The sixteen critical essays in this collection examine the ways in which those suffering from mental and physical ailments are refigured as Other, and how they are imagined to be monstrous. Together, the essays highlight the Gothic inclination to represent all ailments as visibly monstrous, even those, such as mental illness, which were invisible. Paradoxically, the Other also becomes a pitiful figure, often evoking empathy. This exploration of illness and disability represents a strong addition to Gothic studies.

The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class, and Gender


Michele Tracy Berger - 2010
    Taking stock of this transformative paradigm, The Intersectional Approach guides new and established researchers to engage in a critical reflection about the broad adoption of intersectionality that constitutes what the editors call a new "social literacy" for scholars.In eighteen essays, contributors examine various topics of interest to students and researchers from a feminist perspective as well as through their respective disciplines, looking specifically at gender inequalities related to globalization, health, motherhood, sexuality, body image, and aging. Together, these essays provide a critical overview of the paradigm, highlight new theoretical and methodological advances, and make a strong case for the continued use of the intersectional approach both within the borders of women's and gender studies and beyond.Contributors: Lidia Anchisi, Gettysburg CollegeNaomi Andre, University of MichiganJean Ait Belkhir, Southern University at New OrleansMichele Tracy Berger, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillKia Lilly Caldwell, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillElizabeth R. Cole, University of MichiganKimberle Crenshaw, University of California, Los AngelesBonnie Thornton Dill, University of MarylandMichelle Fine, Graduate Center, City University of New YorkJennifer Fish, Old Dominion UniversityMako Fitts, Seattle UniversityKathleen Guidroz, Mount St. Mary's UniversityIvette Guzman-Zavala, Lebanon Valley CollegeKaaren Haldeman, Durham, North CarolinaCatherine E. Harnois, Wake Forest UniversityAnaLouise Keating, Texas Woman's UniversityRachel E. Luft, University of New OrleansGary K. Perry, Seattle UniversityJennifer Rothchild, University of Minnesota, MorrisAnn Russo, DePaul UniversityNatalie J. Sabik, University of Michigan Jessica Holden Sherwood, University of Rhode IslandYvette Taylor, University of Newcastle, United Kingdom Nira Yuval-Davis, University of East LondonThe contributors are Lidia Anchisi, Naomi Andre, Jean Ait Belkhir, Michele Tracy Berger, Kia Lilly Caldwell, Elizabeth R. Cole, Kimberle Crenshaw, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Michelle Fine, Jennifer Fish, Mako Fitts, Kathleen Guidroz, Ivette Guzman-Zavala, Kaaren Haldeman, Catherine E. Harnois, AnaLouise Keating, Rachel E. Luft, Gary K. Perry, Jennifer Rothchild, Ann Russo, Natalie J. Sabik, Jessica Holden Sherwood, Yvette Taylor, and Nira Yuval-Davis. The editors are Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz.

Critical Terms for Media Studies


Mark B.N. Hansen - 2010
    Critical Terms for Media Studies defines, and at times, redefines, what this new and hybrid area aims to do, illuminating the key concepts behind its liveliest debates and most dynamic topics.Part of a larger conversation that engages culture, technology, and politics, this exciting collection of essays explores our most critical language for dealing with the qualities and modes of contemporary media. Edited by two outstanding scholars in the field, W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, the volume features works by a team of distinguished contributors. These essays, commissioned expressly for this volume, are organized into three interrelated groups: “Aesthetics” engages with terms that describe sensory experiences and judgments, “Technology” offers entry into a broad array of technological concepts, and “Society” opens up language describing the systems that allow a medium to function.A compelling reference work for the twenty-first century and the media that form our experience within it, Critical Terms for Media Studies will engage and deepen any reader’s knowledge of one of our most important new fields.

Empire and Nation: Selected Essays


Partha Chatterjee - 2010
    Beginning in the 1980s, his work, particularly within the context of India, has served as the foundation for subaltern studies, an area of scholarship he continues to develop.In this collection, English-speaking readers are finally able to experience the breadth and substance of Chatterjee's wide-ranging thought. His provocative essays examine the phenomenon of postcolonial democracy and establish the parameters for research in subaltern politics. They include an early engagement with agrarian politics and Chatterjee's brilliant book reviews and journalism. Selections include one never-before-published essay, "A Tribute to the Master," which considers through a mock retelling of an episode from the classic Sanskrit epic, The Mahabharata, a deep dilemma in the study of postcolonial history, and several Bengali essays, now translated into English for the first time. An introduction by Nivedita Menon adds necessary context and depth, critiquing Chatterjee's ideas and their influence on contemporary political thought.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science


Bruce Clarke - 2010
    Divided into three main sections, this volume:links diverse literatures to scientific disciplines from Artificial Intelligence to Thermodynamics surveys current theoretical and disciplinary approaches from Animal Studies to Semiotics traces the history and culture of literature and science from Greece and Rome to Postmodernism. Ranging from classical origins and modern revolutions to current developments in cultural science studies and the posthumanities, this indispensible volume offers a comprehensive resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers.With authoritative, accessible, and succinct treatments of the sciences in their literary dimensions and cultural frameworks, here is the essential guide to this vibrant area of study.

The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis


Félix Guattari - 2010
    I would rather see it as something that wraps itself around us in everyday objects, something that is involved with day-to-day problems, with the world outside. It would be the possible itself, open to the socius, to the cosmos...--from The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in SchizoanalysisIn his seminal solo-authored work The Machinic Unconscious (originally published in French in 1979), Felix Guattari lays the groundwork for a general pragmatics capable of resisting the semiotic enslavement of subjectivity. Concluding that psychoanalytic theory had become part and parcel of a repressive, capitalist social order, Guattari here outlines a schizoanalytic theory to undo its capitalist structure and set the discipline back on its feet. Combining theoretical research from fields as diverse as cybernetics, semiotics, ethnology, and ethology, Guattari reintroduces into psychoanalysis a -polemical- dimension, at once transhuman, transsexual, and transcosmic, that brings out the social and political--the -machinic---potential of the unconscious.To illustrate his theory, Guattari turns to literature and analyzes the various modes of subjectivization and semiotization at work in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, examining the novel as if he were undertaking a scientific exploration in the style of Freud or Newton. Casting Proust's figures as abstract (-hyper-deterritorialized-) mental objects, Guattari maps the separation between literature and science, elaborating along the way such major Deleuze-Guattarian concepts as -faciality- and -refrain, - which would be unpacked in their subsequent A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.Never before available in English, The Machinic Unconscious has for too long been the missing chapter from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus project: the most important political extension of May 1968 and one of the most important philosophical contributions of the twentieth century.

Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist


Barbara Tomlinson - 2010
    Are feminists really angry, unreasoning, man-haters who argue only from an emotional perspective as some claim? Does the incessant repetition of this trope make anti-feminism and misogyny a routine element in everyday speech? Tomlinson addresses these questions.

Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary


Fran Martin - 2010
    By examining representations of erotic and romantic love between women in popular films, elite and pulp fiction, and television dramas, Fran Martin shows how youthful same-sex love is often framed as a universal, even ennobling, feminine experience. She argues that a temporal logic dominates depictions of female homoeroticism, and she traces that logic across texts produced and consumed in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the twentieth century and the early twenty-first.

Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009


Ann Heilmann - 2010
    This field-defining book offers an interpretation of the recent figurations of neo-Victorianism published over the last ten years. Using a range of critical and cultural viewpoints, it highlights the problematic nature of this 'new' genre and its relationship to re-interpretative critical perspectives on the nineteenth century.

This Strange Idea of the Beautiful


François Jullien - 2010
    Bringing together ideas of beauty from both Eastern and Western philosophy, Jullien challenges the assumptions underlying our commonly agreed upon definition of what is beautiful and offers a new way of beholding art. Jullien argues that the Western concept of beauty was established by Greek philosophy and became consequently embedded within the very structure of European languages. And due to its relationship to language, this concept has determined ways of thinking about beauty that often go unnoticed or unchecked in discussions of Western aesthetics. Moreover, through globalization, Western ideals of beauty have even spread to cultures whose ancient traditions are based upon radically different aesthetic foundations; yet, these cultures have adopted such views without question and without recognizing the cultural assumptions they contain. Looking specifically at how Chinese texts have been translated into Western languages, Jullien reveals how the traditional Chinese refusal to isolate or abstract beauty is obscured in translation in order to make the works more understandable to Western readers. Creating an engaging dialogue between Chinese and Western ideas, Jullien reasseses the essence of beauty.

Strivings of the Negro People (From The Atlantic Archives)


W.E.B. Du Bois - 2010
    from Harvard. He was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to a free black woman of Dutch and African ancestry. When his father deserted the family, individuals rallied to help the gifted boy get the education that was to propel him to the forefront of the American civil-rights movement. An author, historian, sociologist, and civil-rights activist, Du Bois taught history and economics at Atlanta University, helped found the NAACP, wrote or edited 36 books and published more than 100 articles, and engaged in numerous controversies. This essay was written three decades after the end of the Civil War, at a time when Du Bois was working on a sociological treatise titled “The Study of the Negro Problems,” in which he proposed that rising black crime was a result of the strain of the new freedom, coupled with a lack of jobs and education. When he died, at age 95, Du Bois was celebrated by the African American community for his lifelong search for solutions to racism.The author begins this essay with what he calls “the unasked question” he continually encountered: “How does it feel to be a problem?” Meaning: how does it feel to be black in America after the end of the Civil War? He describes his unique personal history growing up in a small New England community, then attempts to explain, to the largely white, educated readers of The Atlantic Monthly, how it feels to be a victim of “that vast despair” called prejudice. As a black American, he says, one is “always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.” Du Bois dares to describe the corroding influence of racial hatred on white Americans, as well as black. The “Negro problem is a test of the great republic,” he writes. He spent his long life searching for solutions to America’s racial dilemma. In this essay, written at the beginning of a career that would witness Brown v. Board of Education and end on the day before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, Du Bois begins to ponder those solutions.

Digital Fandom: New Media Studies


Paul Booth - 2010
    By looking at how popular culture uses different digital technologies, Digital Fandom bolsters contemporary media theory by introducing new methods of analysis. Using the exemplars of alternate reality gaming and fan studies, this book takes into account a particular �philosophy of playfulness� in today's media in order to establish a �new media studies�. Digital Fandom augments traditional studies of popular media fandom with descriptions of the contemporary fan in a converged media environment. The book shows how changes in the study of fandom can be applied in a larger scale to the study of new media in general, and formulates new conceptions of traditional media theories.

The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism


David Harvey - 2010
    In The Enigma of Capital, he delivers an impassioned account of how unchecked neoliberalism produced the system-wide crisis that now engulfs the world. Beginning in the 1970s, profitability pressures led the capitalist class in advanced countries to shift away from investment in industrial production at home toward the higher returns that financial products promised. Accompanying this was a shift towards privatization, an absolute decline in the bargaining power of labor, and the dispersion of production throughout the developing world. The decades-long and ongoing decline in wages that accompanied this turn produced a dilemma: how can goods--especially real estate--sell at the same rate as before if workers are making less in relative terms? The answer was a huge expansion of credit that fueled the explosive growth of both the financial industry and the real estate market. When one key market collapsed--real estate--the other one did as well, and social devastation resulted. Harvey places today's crisis in the broadest possible context: the historical development of global capitalism itself from the industrial era onward. Moving deftly between this history and the unfolding of the current crisis, he concentrates on how such crises both devastate workers and create openings for challenging the system's legitimacy. The battle now will be between the still-powerful forces that want to reconstitute the system of yesterday and those that want to replace it with one that prizes social justice and economic equality. The new afterword focuses on the continuing impact of the crisis and the response to it in 2010. One of Huffington Post's Best Social and Political Awareness Books of 2010 Winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize for 2010 Praise for the Hardcover: "A lucid and penetrating account of how the power of capital shapes our world."--Andrew Gamble, Independent "Elegant... entertainingly swashbuckling... Harvey's analysis is interesting not only for the breadth of his scholarship but his recognition of the system's strengths."--John Gapper, Financial Times

An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought


Stefanos Geroulanos - 2010
    In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Kojève, Levinas, Heidegger, Koyré, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued that man could no longer fill the void left by the "death of God" without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject. In response, they contributed to a new belief that man should no longer be viewed as the basis for existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being, language, thought, and culture. This argument, which was to be paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate postwar thought. This intellectual history of these developments argues that at their heart lay a new atheism that rejected humanism as insufficient and ultimately violent.

Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Essays, and Poems


Carole Boyce Davies - 2010
    I spent my formative political years in Claudia Jones's London stamping ground of Notting Hill -- it was the classic centre of post-war black activism in Britain. Most West Indian immigrants in the 1950s came by boat to Southampton and the train from there took them into Paddington. Hence the large black community in that part of West London. So I know people who had worked with Claudia Jones and spoke of her with awe. She founded two of Black Britain's most important institutions; the first black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, and she was also one of the founding organizers of the Notting Hill Carnival.Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment transcends the silencing and erasure historically accorded women of achievement: it makes accessible and brings to wider attention the words of an often overlooked twentieth-century political and cultural activist, who tirelessly campaigned, wrote, spoke out, organized, edited and published autobiographical writings, poetry, essays on subjects close to her political heart -- human rights, peace, struggles related to gender, race and class -- this is a collection that unites the many facets of a woman whose identities as a radical thinker and as a black woman are not in conflict. --Book Jacket (from WorldCat)

Creating a Movement with Teeth: A Documentary History of the George Jackson Brigade


Daniel Burton-Rose - 2010
    The Brigade embraced bank robberies and armed insurrection to wage war against what they felt was an unjust government. Through a wide array of surveillance reports, feature articles from mainstream and alternative presses, and the organization’s prolific, spontaneous communications and substitutive political statements, this collection reveals this body of propaganda and meditations on praxis.

Conversations with Ian McEwan


Ryan Roberts - 2010
    McEwan (b. 1948) discusses his views on authorship, the writing process, and major themes found in his fiction, but he also expands upon his interests in music, film, global politics, the sciences, and the state of literature in contemporary society.McEwan's candid and forthcoming discussions with notable contemporary writers---Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Ian Hamilton, David Remnick, and Stephen Pinker---provide readers with the most in-depth portrait available of the author and his works.Readers will find McEwan to be just as engaging, humorous, and intelligent as his writings suggest. The volume includes interviews from British, Spanish, French, and American sources, two interviews previously available only in audio format, and a new interview conducted with the book's editor.

Gramsci's Historicism: A Realist Interpretation


Esteve Morera - 2010
    The author draw on many materials and sources, making accesible to the English-speaking reader a wide range of texts otherwise only available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Catalan. His book sheds light on Gramsci's basic philosophical and methodological principles, and will be useful as an introduction to Gramsci for students of political science, sociology, social science, history, and philosophy, as well as to scholars in the field.

The Southern Critics: An Anthology


Glenn C. Arbery - 2010
    Over the next few decades they and their followers would exert an enormous influence on the study of literature. Indeed, the “Southern Critics” included some of the most important American writers and critics of the twentieth century: Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, to name just a few. In The Southern Critics: An Anthology , editor Glenn C. Arbery gathers the most penetrating essays by these and other writers, bringing their significant contribution back into focus. Arbery’s enlightening commentary allows us to understand how the Southern Critics’ concern for the history and culture of the South informed all their work—not just the landmark Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930) but even their writings on literature and poetry, including their revolutionary “New Criticism.” Remarkably, the essays collected here speak to our time as much as to the Southern Critics’ own. In the twenty-first century we recognize the prescience of their warnings about would happen to art, leisure, and time itself when everything fell under the sway of the industrial model

Building in Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion


Marvin Trachtenberg - 2010
    In pre-modern Europe, the architect built not just with imagination, brick and mortar, but with time, using vast quantities of duration to erect monumental buildings that otherwise would have been impossible. Not mere medieval muddling-through, this entailed a sophisticated set of norms and practices. Virtually all the great cathedrals of France and the rest of Europe were built under this regime, here given the name ‘Building-in-Time’. In particular, the major works of pre-modern Italy, from the Pisa cathedral group to the cathedrals of Milan,Venice and Siena, and from the monuments of fourteenth-century Florence to the new St Peter’s – the apotheosis of the practice – are thus cast in an entirely new light. Even as ‘Building-in-Time’ was flourishing, the fifteenth-century Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti proposed a new temporal regime whereby time would ideally be excluded from the making of architecture (‘Building-outside-Time’). Planning and building, which had formed one fluid, imbricated process, were to be sharply divided, and the change that always came with time excluded from architectural facture. Ironically, it was Brunelleschi, as creator of the cupola of Florence cathedral and one of the supreme practitioners of Building-in-Time, who was the lynchpin of Alberti’s turn to the arts in the mid-1430s. That he arrived in Florence just at the moment Brunelleschi’s dome was being completed was crucial to Alberti’s subsequent career in visual culture. Yet his relationship to Brunelleschi was conflicted; first praising and attaching himself to Brunelleschi, later Alberti silently sought to banish him from history’s central stage. In telling this story, Marvin Trachtenberg rewrites the history of medieval and Renaissance architecture in Italy and recasts the turn to modernity in new terms, those of temporality and its role in architectural theory and practice. Recovering this lost element of the deep architectural past allows us also to see the present in a new way: that temporality is not any neutral or secondary factor in modern architecture culture, but an epistemic condition that silently affects all production and experience of the built environment.

The Derrida Dictionary


Simon Morgan Wortham - 2010
    Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Derrida's thought. Students will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Derrida's writings and detailed synopses of his key works.The Dictionary also includes entries on Derrida's major philosophical influences and those he engaged with, such as Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan and Levinas. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Derrida's philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Derrida Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying Derrida, deconstruction or modern European philosophy more generally.

Witnesses for the Future: Philosophy and Messianism


Pierre Bouretz - 2010
    All defined themselves as Jews and philosophers. Their intellectual concerns and worldviews often in conflict, they nevertheless engaged in fruitful conversation: through the dialogue between Zionist activism and heterodox forms of Marxism, in the rediscovery of hidden traditions of Jewish history, at the intersection of ethics and metaphysics. They shared a common hope for a better, messianic future and a deep interest in and reliance on the cultural sources of the Jewish tradition. In this magisterial work, Pierre Bouretz explores the thought of these great Jewish philosophers, taking a long view of the tenuous survival of German-Jewish metaphysical, religious, and social thought during the crises and catastrophes of the twentieth century. With deep passion and sound scholarship, Bouretz demonstrates the universal significance of this struggle in understanding the present human condition. The substantial and established influence of the book's subjects only serves to confirm this theory. Profoundly learned and amply documented, Witnesses for the Future explains how these important philosophers came to understand the promise of a Messiah. Its significant bearing on a number of fields -- including religious studies, literary criticism, philosophy of history, political theory, and Jewish studies -- encourages scholars to rethink and reassess the intellectual developments of the past 100 years.

Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict, and Terrorism


Ervin Staub - 2010
    It identifies principles and practices of prevention, and of reconciliation between groups after violence, or before violence thereby to prevent violence. It uses both past cases such asthe Holocaust, and contemporary ones such as Rwanda, the Congo, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, contemporary terrorism, and the relations between the Dutch and Muslim minorities, which also has relevance to other European countries, as examples. The book draws on the author's previous work on allthese issues, as well as on research in genocide studies, the study of conflict and of terrorism, and psychological research on group relations. It also describes the work of the author and his associates in real world settings, such as promoting reconciliation in Rwanda, Burundi and the Congo. Thebook considers what needs to be done to prevent impending or stop ongoing violence. It emphasizes early prevention, when violence generating conditions are present and a psychological and social evolution toward violence has begun, but not yet immediate danger of intense violence. The book considersthe role of difficult social or life conditions, repression, culture, the institutions or structure of society, the psychology of individuals and groups, and the behavior of witnesses or bystanders within and outside societies. It emphasizes psychological processes, such as differentiation betweenus and them and devaluation of the other, past victimization and psychological woundedness, the power of ideas and people's commitment to destructive ideologies. It considers humanizing the other, healing from past victimization, the creation of constructive ideologies and groups and how thesehelp people develop cultures and institutions that make violence less likely. The book asks what needs to be accomplished to prevent violence, how it can be done, and who can do it. It aims to promote knowledge, understanding, and active bystandership by leaders and government officials, membersof the media and citizens to prevent violence and create harmonious societies.

Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses


Monika Fludernik - 2010
    Using David Herman’s 1999 definition of "postclassical narratology" from Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (OSUP) as their launching point, these eleven essayists explore the various ways in which new approaches overlap and interrelate to form new ways of understanding narrative texts. Postclassical narratology has reached a new phase of consolidation but also continued diversification. This collection therefore discriminates between what one could call a critical but frame-abiding and a more radical frame-transcending or frame-shattering handling of the structuralist paradigm. Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses discusses a large variety of different aspects of narrative, such as extensions of classical narratology, new generic applications (autobiography, oral narratives, poetry, painting, and film), the history of narratology, the issue of fictionality, the role of cognition, and questions of authorship and authority, as well as thematic matters related to ethics, gender, and queering. Additionally, it uses a wide spectrum of critical approaches, including feminism, psychoanalysis, media studies, the rhetorical theory of narrative, unnatural narratology, and cognitive studies. In this manner the essays manage to produce new insights into many key issues in narratology. The contributors also demonstrate that narratologists nowadays see the object of their research as more variegated than was the case twenty years ago: they resort to a number of different methods in combination when approaching a problem, and they tend to ground their analyses in a rich contextual framework.

Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics


Asma Abbas - 2010
    It counters liberalism’s distorting domestications of human suffering, which are most acute in its politics of redress through justice, the law, representation and inclusion.  Radically rethinking the subjectivity of sufferers and arguing that our experience of the world is not prior to or outside of justice, but constitutive of it, the book recuperates a materialist politics that emphasizes sensuous activity, reclaims representation, and honors “the labor of suffering.”

Freddie the Frog and the Secret of Crater Island [With CD (Audio)]


Sharon Burch - 2010
    Freddie and Eli discover a buggy world under the azaleas. The two friends join the Blue Beetle Bugs in their quest to find the secret on Crater Island, (middle C) The Secret of Crater Island includes peek-through pages and an audio CD which includes the dramatized story, sing-a-long songs, and jam tracks to play along with the 12-Bar Blues. Ages 4-9.

Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction


Dan Goodley - 2010
    The book discusses the global nature of disability studies and disability politics, introduces key debates in the field and represents the intersections of disability studies with feminism, queer, and postcolonial theory. The book has a clear and coherent format which matches the interdisciplinary framework of disability studies - including chapters on sociology, critical psychology, discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and education. Each chapter engages with important areas of analysis such as the individual, society, community, and education to explore the realities of oppression experienced by disabled people and to develop the possibilities for addressing it.

The Sorceries and Scandals of Satan


Henry M. Tichenor - 2010
    Tichenor was a writer and magazine editor prominent in the socialist and freethinking movements during the Progressive Era of American history. His writings frequently condemned organized religion, Christianity in particular, as a tool used by the upper classes to maintain control over the working class. In the realm of opposition to religion, he has been ranked beside Clarence Darrow and Madalyn Murray O’Hair as a leading American freethinker of the twentieth century.In “The Sorceries and Scandals of Satan”, Tichenor employs the figure of Satan as a literary symbolic character to represent rebellion against tyranny — a symbolism with a robust tradition in literature and political works. In his book, the character symbol of Satan is employed as a foil against which to compare the horrors of organized religion, especially Christianity More importantly, however, Tichenor reminds us all that there was a time in American history that open skepticism and opposition to religion was a major facet of social political discourse so Americans certainly should not shy away from it today. Vocal opposition to religion is not novel or new.What is new is the Underworld Amusements republication of this important work. This edition uniquely includes a valuable and critically acclaimed foreword by Robert Merciless which details Tichenor’s biography as well as the times and trends which shaped his penetrating writing.“Some “Debsians” who think of Eugene Debs only as a pioneer labor and Socialist Party leader may not be aware of some of his more radical associates. Marx expressed the role of religion in justifying structered inequality by referring to it as the “opiate of the masses”. Tichenor chooses, in the “Sorceries and Scandals of Satan”, to develop the fictional struggle of “good” and “evil” from the vantage point of a “Good-seeking” personna called Satan.The books by Tichenor are a challenge worth undertaking, and we are fortunate to have this lesser known of his books re-released. It is fortunate also to have included the highly informative 21 page Foreword by Robert Merciless. Don’t dig into the text without first reading the Merciless essay which locates Tichenor’s work in the late 19th and early 20th century progressive movement.”-Charles KingSecretary, Eugene V. Debs Foundationand Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Indiana State University“Tichenor’s “The Sorceries and Scandals of Satan” is a withering and ironic indictment of Christianity wrought with passion and wry humor. Slaughter’s handsome re-publication resurrects an almost forgotten monument of diabolical rhetoric. Exposing the lunacy inherent in twisted tales of Christian saints and surreal biblical fables, Tichenor climaxes the book by detailing the horrors of European persecution of heretics and the murderous madness of the New England witch trials. He extols anti-Christian writing from Milton to Ingersoll with deft quotations, and even champions the pagan Greek deities over the foul phantasms enshrined by Christ-lovers. The informative foreword by R. Merciless places this classic of free-thought in a historical context, listing predecessors and descendants, offering a pithy guide to literate thinkers who have embraced Satan as an image inspiring joy in life and liberty of mind.”-Peter H. GilmoreHigh Priest, Church of SatanAuthor of The Satanic Scriptures“In the forward to the new edition of SaSoS, Merciless discusses the author, Henry M. Tichenor, known today only to a few scholars, mostly in the study of Socialism. Meticulous research into Tichenor’s life and works is presented in the foreword of this “lost” work, and Merciless puts the book into the context of Tichenor’s lifetime, and into today. Those who research the areas of freethought, atheism, non-theism and works controversial to organized religion should read this work.”-Timothy BingaFreethought HistorianContributor, New Encyclopedia of UnbeliefDirector of the Center for Inquiry

Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom


Anthony Bogues - 2010
    Central to this project of American supremacy is the elaboration and construction of a language of power in which a form of self-government appears as the form of sovereignty. Grappling with issues of power, race, slavery, violence, and the nature of postcolonial criticism and critical theory, Bogues offers reconsiderations of the writings of W. E. B. DuBois and Frantz Fanon in order to break holes in this accepted structure of empire. At its heart this is a work of radical humanistic theory that seeks to glean from the postcolonial world and empire an alternative to its imperial form of freedom.

Art and Phenomenology


Joseph D. Parry - 2010
    Through a close examination of art from recent centuries, Art and Phenomenology is one of the first books to explore visual art as a mode of experiencing the world itself, showing how in the words of Merleau-Ponty 'Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own'.An outstanding series of chapters by an international group of contributors examine the following questions:Paul Klee and the body in art colour and background in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of art self-consciousness and seventeenth-century painting Vermeer and Heidegger philosophy and the painting of Rothko embodiment in Renaissance art sculpture, dance and phenomenology. Art and Phenomenology is essential reading for anyone interested in phenomenology, aesthetics, and visual culture.

Works by Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct, the Blank Slate, the Stuff of Thought, Words and Rules, How the Mind Works


Books LLC - 2010
    Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: The Language Instinct, the Blank Slate, the Stuff of Thought, Words and Rules, How the Mind Works. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The Language Instinct is a book by Steven Pinker for a general audience, published in 1994. In it, Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. In addition, he deals sympathetically with Noam Chomsky's claim that all human language shows evidence of a universal grammar. In the final chapter Pinker dissents from the skepticism shown by Chomsky that evolution by natural selection is up to the challenge of explaining a human language instinct. Some of the areas of the brain involved in language processing: Broca's area, Wernicke's area, Supramarginal gyrus, Angular gyrus, Primary Auditory Cortex Pinker sets out to disabuse the reader of a number of common ideas about language, e.g. that children must be taught to use it, that most people's grammar is poor, that the quality of language is steadily declining, that language has a heavy influence on a person's possible range of thoughts (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), and that nonhuman animals have been taught language (see Great Ape language). Each of these claims, he argues, is false. Instead, Pinker sees language as an ability unique to humans, produced by evolution to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He compares language to other species' specialized adaptations such as spiders' web-weaving or beavers' dam-building behavior, calling all three "instincts." By calling language an instinct, Pinker means that it is not a human invention in the sense that metalworking and even writing are. While only some human cultures possess these technologies, all cultures possess language. ...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=24222

The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet


Thomas Streeter - 2010
    Streeter demonstrates that our ideas about what connected computers are for have been in constant flux since their invention. In the 1950s they were imagined as the means for fighting nuclear wars, in the 1960s as systems for bringing mathematical certainty to the messy complexity of social life, in the 1970s as countercultural playgrounds, in the 1980s as an icon for what's good about free markets, in the 1990s as a new frontier to be conquered and, by the late 1990s, as the transcendence of markets in an anarchist open source utopia.The Net Effect teases out how culture has influenced the construction of the internet and how the structure of the internet has played a role in cultures of social and political thought. It argues that the internet's real and imagined anarchic qualities are not a product of the technology alone, but of the historical peculiarities of how it emerged and was embraced. Finding several different traditions at work in the development of the internet--most uniquely, romanticism--Streeter demonstrates how the creation of technology is shot through with profoundly cultural forces--with the deep weight of the remembered past, and the pressures of shared passions made articulate.

Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11


Richard Grusin - 2010
    In response to the shock of 9/11, socially networked US and global media work to premediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear.

Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy


Anis S. Bawarshi - 2010
    The book presents an historical overview of genre; describes key issues and theories that have led to the reconceptualization of genre over the last thirty years; examines current research and lines of development in the study of genre; provides examples of various methodologies for conducting genre research; and explores the possibilities and implications for using genre to teach writing at various levels and within different disciplines. While the book examines various traditions that have shaped the field's understanding of and approaches to genre, what connects these various approaches is a commitment to the idea that genres reflect and coordinate social ways of knowing and acting in the world and thus provide valuable means of researching how texts function in various contexts and teaching students how to act meaningfully in multiple contexts. REFERENCE GUIDES TO RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION SERIES EDITOR, CHARLES BAZERMAN ABOUT THE AUTHORS ANIS BAWARSHI is Associate professor of English and Director of the Expository Writing Program at the University of Washington and author of Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition (2003); Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres (2004; with Amy Devitt and Mary Jo Reiff); A Closer Look: A Writer's Reader (2003; with Sidney I. Dobrin). MARY JO REIFF is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and author of Approaches to Audience: An Overview of the Major Perspectives (2004), co-author (with Amy Devitt and Anis Bawarshi) of Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres (2004), and co-editor (with Kirsten Benson) of Rhetoric of Inquiry (2009)."

In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Archaeology in Society)


Bjørnar Olsen - 2010
    It is often assumed, for example, that things are entirely 'constructed' by social or cultural perceptions and have no existence in and of themselves. Bjornar Olsen takes a different position. Drawing on a range of theories, especially phenomenology and actor-network-theory, Olsen claims that human life is fully mixed up with things and that humanity and human history emerge from such relationships. Things, moreover, possess unique qualities that are inherent in our cohabitation with them—qualities that help to facilitate existential security and memory of the past. This important work of archaeological theory challenges us to reconsider our ideas about the nature of things, past and present, demonstrating that objects themselves possess a dynamic presence that we must take into account if we are to understand the world we and they inhabit.

Damascus: Ottoman Modernity and Urban Transformation (1808-1918)


Stefan Weber - 2010
    In the course of the industrial revolution in Europe and the radical expansion of a world-wide network of traffic and communication, new ideas, techniques, goods and architectural forms spread and challenged locally established patterns of urban and social organization. These challenges led to an increasing orientation of urban and social structures toward supra-regional models. Still, Damascus never became a European city. Instead, houses, public buildings and bazaars were modernized in ways particular to Damascus. To understand the complexity of this process, this study examines society, architecture and urban planning including the documentation of over one thousand buildings of the endangered UNESCO World Heritage Site of Damascus. The history of these buildings and their transformation are discussed and many unpublished historical photographs provide an insight into lost urban textures and private worlds. The reader will be introduced into the rich legacy of Damascene public buildings and lavishly decorated courtyard houses. New forms of dwelling developed that corresponded to social changes within families, while behaviours in newly-constructed public areas, the adoption of different modes of dress, and the development of previously unknown interior designs mirrored the changing views of world, urban society and self. From a micro-historical approach, this book unfolds spaces of everyday life of local actors during one of the most important turning points in the history of the Middle East. Who were the agents of change and what types of local adaptations and innovations developed as responses to the challenges of modernity?

From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964


Millery Polyné - 2010
    It asserts bold new methods and conclusions on inter-American relations, Pan Americanism, and U.S.-Haitian relations."--David Sheinin, Trent University"Polyn has provided a clearly written, nuanced, deeply researched study about the multiple efforts among the Haitian and African American elite to advance both their national agendas and larger global commitments to the diaspora. No one has focused on Haiti the way he has." --Carol Anderson, Emory University"Adds an important and much-needed layer to our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of diasporic relations."--Carol Anderson, Emory UniversityHaiti has long been both a source of immense pride--because of the Haitian Revolution--and of profound disappointment--because of the unshakable realities of poverty, political instability, and violence--to the black diasporic imagination. Charting the long history of these multiple meanings is the focus of Millery Polyne's rich and critical transnational history of U.S. African Americans and Haitians.Stretching from the thoughts and words of American intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass, Robert Moton, and Claude Barnett to the Civil Rights era, Polyne's temporal scope is breathtaking. But just as impressive is the thematic range of the work, which carefully examines the political, economic, and cultural relations between U.S. African Americans and Haitians."From Douglass to Duvalier" examines the creative and critical ways U.S. African Americans and Haitians engaged the idealized tenets of Pan Americanism--mutual cooperation, egalitarianism, and nonintervention between nation-states--in order to strengthen Haiti's social, economic, and political growth and stability. The depth of Polyne's research allows him to speak confidently about the convoluted ways that these groups have viewed modernization, "uplift," and racial unity, as well as the shifting meanings and importance of the concepts over time.

Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination


Katherine Byrne - 2010
    This text explores the representations of tuberculosis in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Fears about gender roles, degeneration, national efficiency and sexual transgression all play their part in the portrayal of 'consumption', a disease which encompassed a variety of cultural associations. Through an examination of a range of Victorian texts, from well-known and popular novels by Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell to critically neglected works by Mrs Humphry Ward and Charles Reade, this work reveals the metaphors of illness which surrounded tuberculosis and the ways those metaphors were used in the fiction of the day. The book also contains detailed analysis of the substantial body of writing by nineteenth-century physicians which exists about this disease, and examines the complex relationship between medical 'fact' and literary fiction.

Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism


Anthony J. Hall - 2010
    Beginning with Christopher Columbus's inception of a New World Order in 1492, Anthony Hall draws on a massive body of original research to produce a narrative that is audacious, encyclopedic, and transformative in the new light it sheds on the complex historical processes that converged in the financial debacle of 2008 and 2009.

Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts


Tim Gillespie - 2010
    We know how rewarding it can be to engage students in complex works of thought provoking literature but we know how demanding the job can be, too. Tim Gillespie, who has taught in public schools for almost four decades, has found the lenses of literacy criticism a powerful tool for helping studnets tackle challenging literacy texts. TIm breaks down the dense language of critical theory into clear, lively, and thorough explanations of many schools of critical thought&Mdash;reader response, biographical, historical, psychologival, archetypal, genre based, moral, philosophical, feminist, political, fromalist postmodern.

Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium


Sanford Kwinter - 2010
    From the strange appearance of the 'Trojan Horse' that was the Centre Pompidou which served as the harbinger and template of the new idea of Europe, through the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s, to the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers in New York, a new world came into being that design thinking has yet to fully take into account. The City is here seen not only as the last frontier of human history currently under threat of total eclipse, it is the indomitable form of collective experience upon which one can count as assuredly as one can on death and taxes. Requiem, to quote from Thomas Daniell's introduction, is first and foremost redemptive: Kwinter's most negative assessments of the city are driven by a deep commitment to its sublime potentials--a desire to sacralize the most profane andfecund of human creations.

Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds


Murray Shanahan - 2010
    How does cognition influence an animal's behaviour? What are its neural underpinnings? How is the inner life of a human being constituted? What are the neural underpinnings of the conscious condition?Embodiment and the Inner Life approaches each of these questions from a scientific standpoint. But it contends that, before we can make progress on them, we have to give up the habit of thinking metaphysically, a habit that creates a fog of philosophical confusion. From this post-reflective point of view, the book argues for an intimate relationship between cognition, sensorimotor embodiment, and the integrative character of the conscious condition.Drawing on insights from psychology, neuroscience, and dynamical systems, it proposes an empirical theory of this three-way relationship whose principles, not being tied to the contingencies of biology or physics, are applicable to the whole space of possible minds in which humans and other animals are included. Embodiment and the Inner Life is one of very few books that provides a properly joined-up theory of consciousness, and will be essential reading for all psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists with an interest in the enduring puzzle of consciousness.

The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution


Michael Löwy - 2010
    Such radical reflections permit us to understand modern economic development across continents as a process of ferocious change, in which "advanced" and "backward" elements fuse, come into tension, and collide &mdash and how the resulting ruptures make it possible for the oppressed and exploited to change the world.

The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence


Randall Williams - 2010
    imperialist aims. Citing internationalists from W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon to, more recently, M. Jacqui Alexander and China Miéville, Williams insists on a reckoning of human rights with the violence of colonial modernity. Despite the emphasis on international human rights since World War II, Williams notes that the discourse of human rights has consistently reinforced the concerns of the ascendant global power of the United States. He demonstrates how the alignment of human rights with the interests of U.S. expansion is not a matter of direct control or conspiratorial plot but the result of a developing human rights consensus that has been shaped by postwar international institutions and debates, from the United Nations to international law. Williams probes high-profile cases involving Amnesty International, Nelson Mandela, the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission, Abu Ghraib, and Guantánamo, as well as offering readings of works such as Hotel Rwanda, Caché, and Death and the Maiden that have put forth radical critiques of political violence. The most forceful contradictions of international human rights discourse, he argues, come into relief within anticolonial critiques of racial violence. To this end, The Divided World examines how a human rights–based international policy is ultimately mobilized to manage violence—by limiting the access of its victims to justice.

Marx Through Post-Structuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze


Simon Choat - 2010
    Arguing that both Marx and the post-structuralists seek to produce a genuinely materialist philosophy, the author aims to develop a better understanding of both Marx and post-structuralism and in so doing to reflect on the possibilities and problems for materialist philosophy more broadly.Against the common assumption that post-structuralism begins with a rejection of Marx, Choat argues that Marx has been a key influence on post-structuralist thought and that each of the four thinkers examined affirms Marx's contemporary significance. By looking at how these thinkers have read Marx - analysing their direct comments, unspoken uses, and implicit criticisms - the book demonstrates that there is a distinct and original post-structuralist approach to Marx that allows us to read him in a new light.

Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought


David Biale - 2010
    Spanning the rich history of Judaism from the Bible to today, David Biale shows how the secular tradition these visionaries created is a uniquely Jewish one, and how the emergence of Jewish secularism was not merely a response to modernity but arose from forces long at play within Judaism itself.Biale explores how ancient Hebrew books like Job, Song of Songs, and Esther downplay or even exclude God altogether, and how Spinoza, inspired by medieval Jewish philosophy, recast the biblical God in the role of nature and stripped the Torah of its revelatory status to instead read scripture as a historical and cultural text. Biale examines the influential Jewish thinkers who followed in Spinoza's secularizing footsteps, such as Salomon Maimon, Heinrich Heine, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. He tells the stories of those who also took their cues from medieval Jewish mysticism in their revolts against tradition, including Hayim Nahman Bialik, Gershom Scholem, and Franz Kafka. And he looks at Zionists like David Ben-Gurion and other secular political thinkers who recast Israel and the Bible in modern terms of race, nationalism, and the state. Not in the Heavens demonstrates how these many Jewish paths to secularism were dependent, in complex and paradoxical ways, on the very religious traditions they were rejecting, and examines the legacy and meaning of Jewish secularism today.

Gestaltung Denken: Grundlagentexte Zu Design Und Architektur


Klaus Thomas Edelmann - 2010
    The first part contains texts by practitioners, i.e. architects and designers. The second features texts by theoreticians: cultural studies experts, philosophers, sociologists, historians of architecture and design. Each text represents a milestone in the history of/reflections on design and highlights design developments from early modernism to current debates. Each primary text is introduced and provided with commentary by a well-regarded specialist, who provides insights into the text's author, genesis, and publishing context. Many of the selected texts are difficult to locate and/or are long out of print. This reader makes these texts - each crucial to theoretical discussion on architecture and design - accessible once again. This publication is ideal for teaching the history and development of the design disciplines at academies of architecture and design, but also offers practicing architects and designers a basis for reflecting on their own work against the background of historic debates.

Integral Geometry and Radon Transforms


Sigurdur Helgason - 2010
    Examples and far-reaching generalizations lead to fundamental problems such as: (i) injectivity, (ii) inversion formulas, (iii) support questions, (iv) applications (e.g., to tomography, partial di erential equations and group representations). For the case of the plane, the inversion theorem and the support theorem have had major applications in medicine through tomography and CAT scanning. While containing some recent research, the book is aimed at beginning graduate students for classroom use or self-study. A number of exercises point to further results with documentation. From the reviews: "Integral Geometry is a fascinating area, where numerous branches of mathematics meet together. the contents of the book is concentrated around the duality and double vibration, which is realized through the masterful treatment of a variety of examples. the book is written by an expert, who has made fundamental contributions to the area." --Boris Rubin, Louisiana State University

Graph Spectra for Complex Networks


Piet Van Mieghem - 2010
    Because any complex network can be represented by a graph, and therefore in turn by a matrix, graph theory has become a powerful tool in the investigation of network performance. This self-contained book provides a concise introduction to the theory of graph spectra and its applications to the study of complex networks. Covering a range of types of graphs and topics important to the analysis of complex systems, this guide provides the mathematical foundation needed to understand and apply spectral insight to real-world systems. In particular, the general properties of both the adjacency and Laplacian spectrum of graphs are derived and applied to complex networks. An ideal resource for researchers and students in communications networking as well as in physics and mathematics.

A General Theory of Institutional Change


Shiping Tang - 2010
    Yet, no general theory of institutional change exists.Drawing from a diverse literature, this book develops a general theory of institutional change, based on a social evolutionary synthesis of the conflict approach and the harmony approach. The book argues that because the whole process of institutional change can be understood as a process of selecting a few ideas and turning them into institutions, competition of ideas and struggle for power to make rules are often at the heart of institutional change. The general theory not only integrates more specific theories and insights on institutional change that have been scattered in different fields into a coherent general theory but also provides fundamental new insights and points to new directions for future research.This book makes a fundamental contribution to all major fields of social sciences: sociology (sociological theory), political sciences, institutional economics, and political theory. It should be of general interest to scholars and students in all major fields of social science.

New Structures For Physics (Lecture Notes In Physics)


Bob Coecke - 2010
    These include the theory of monoidal categories and corresponding graphical calculi, Girard's linear logic, Scott domains, lambda calculus and corresponding logics for typing, topos theory, and more general process structures. Most of these structures are very prominent in computer science; the chapters here are tailored towards an audience of physicists.

Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination


M.F. Simone Roberts - 2010
    The years Murdoch spent studying philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge left an indelible imprint on her work. The essays in this book address both Murdoch's philosophy and writing in the context of Continental philosophy and postmodern fiction. Many of the twelve essays resist the prevailing critical orthodoxies, introducing instead new theories with which to approach one of Britain's most revered authors.

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil: Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies


Rafael de la Dehesa - 2010
    Rafael de la Dehesa focuses on the ways that LGBT activists have engaged with the state, particularly in alliance with political parties and through government health agencies in the wake of the AIDS crisis. He examines this engagement against the backdrop of the broader political transitions to democracy, the neoliberal transformation of state–civil society relations, and the gradual consolidation of sexual rights at the international level. His comparison highlights similarities between sexual rights movements in Mexico and Brazil, including a convergence on legislative priorities such as antidiscrimination laws and the legal recognition of same-sex couples. At the same time, de la Dehesa points to notable differences in the tactics deployed by activists and the coalitions brought to bear on the state. De la Dehesa studied the archives of activists, social-movement organizations, political parties, religious institutions, legislatures, and state agencies, and he interviewed hundreds of individuals, not only LGBT activists, but also feminists, AIDS and human-rights activists, party militants, journalists, academics, and state officials. He marshals his prodigious research to reveal the interplay between evolving representative institutions and LGBT activists’ entry into the political public sphere in Latin America, offering a critical analysis of the possibilities opened by emerging democratic arrangements, as well as their limitations. At the same time, exploring activists’ engagement with the international arena, he offers new insights into the diffusion and expression of transnational norms inscribing sexual rights within a broader project of liberal modernity. Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a landmark examination of LGBT political mobilization.

Kinds of Reasons: An Essay in the Philosophy of Action


Maria Alvarez - 2010
    The task requires a clear account of such things as reasons, desires, emotions and motives, and of how they combine to produce and explain human behaviour. In Kindsof Reasons, Maria Alvarez offers a fresh and incisive treatment of these issues, focusing in particular on reasons as they feature in contexts of agency. Her account builds on some important recent work in the area; but she takes her main inspiration from the tradition that receives its seminalcontemporary expression in the writings of G.E.M. Anscombe, a tradition that runs counter to the broadly Humean orthodoxy that has dominated the theory of action for the past forty years. Alvarez's conclusions are therefore likely to be controversial; and her bold and painstaking arguments will befound provocative by participants on every side of the debates with which she engages. Clear and directly written, Kinds of Reasons aims to stake out a distinctive position within one of the most hotly contested areas of contemporary philosophy.

The Artist's Mind: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Creativity, Modern Art and Modern Artists


George Hagman - 2010
    This book examines how contemporary psychoanalytic theory provides insight into understanding the psychological sources of creativity, Modern Art and modern artists.The Artist's Mind revisits the lives of eight modern artists including Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, from a psychoanalytical viewpoint. It looks at how opportunities for a new approach to art at the turn of the twentieth century offered artists a chance to explore different forms of creativity and artistic ambition. Key areas of discussion include:developmental sources of the aesthetic sense psychological functions of creativity and art psychology of beauty, ugliness and the Sublime. co-evolution of the modern self, modernism and art. cultural context of creativity, artistic identify and aesthetic experience. Through the examination of great artists' lives and psychological dynamics, the author articulates a new psychoanalytic aesthetic model that has both clinical and historical significance. As such this book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the origins and fate of Modern Art.