In the Break is an extended riff on “The Burton Greene Affair,” exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance—culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself—is improvisation.For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten’s concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other.Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten’s wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines—semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis—to understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten’s ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition.

    The result is a remarkable synthesis, which reflects well the subtleties of experience and yet avoids the pitfalls of arbitrary classification and facile generalization. For these reasons, and for its general tone and erudition and humanism, this book will surely be one that will endure when the current flurry of academic interest in environmental experience abates.” Canadian Geographer

    Following a brief account of the historical relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism, this Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have ledpoststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture. While the author discusses such well-known figures as Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, she also draws pertinent examples from literature, art, film, and popular culture, unfolding the poststructuralist account ofwhat it means to be a human being.About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundredsof key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam

    Derrida's philosophy is an initially puzzling array of oblique, deviant and yet rigorous tactics for destabilizing texts, meanings and identities. Deconstruction, as these strategies have been called, has been reviled as a politically pernicioius nihilism and celebrated as a liberatory politics of indifference.

    Uses essays and an interview to document the theories of Lacan that resulted in his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association."

    Packaged in a beautiful gift box, this deck of 64 cards contains 128 unique pieces of art exquisitely illustrated by five artists. Each vibrant card contains a powerful affirmation on one side and a visualization on the other to enlighten, inspire, and bring joy to your life.These cards are an outgrowth of the affirmative sayings I used to give my clients to help them find their inner strength as they worked on issues rangingfrom self-esteem to romance to prosperity and love. Post these cards in your home, workplace, car . . .or give them to friends and family. Read a different oneeach morning, and watch your day unfold effortlesslyand powerfully. - Louise Hay

    She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities--St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague--and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstahm, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.

    His work on the fantastic is indeed about a historical phenomenon that we recognize, about specific works that we may read, but it is also about the use and abuse of generic theory.As an essay in fictional poetics, The Fantastic is consciously structuralist in its approach to the generic subject. Todorov seeks linguistic bases for the structural features he notes in a variety of fantastic texts, including Potocki's The Sargasso Manuscript, Nerval's Aur lia, Balzac's The Magic Skin, the Arabian Nights, Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and tales by E. T. A. Hoffman, Charles Perrault, Guy de Maupassant, Nicolai Gogol, and Edgar A. Poe.

    In a slightly different version, it also appeared in the New York Review of Books, May 21, 1970.

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

    The book also provides a map of the development of cultural studies through discussion of its most influential approaches. Organized around a series of case studies, each chapter focuses on a different media form and presents a critical overview of the methodology for the actual study of popular culture. Individual chapters cover topics such as television, fiction, film, newspapers and magazines, popular music, and consumption (fan culture and shopping).For students new to the field, the book provides instantly usable theories and methods; for those more familiar with the procedures and politics of cultural studies, it provides a succinct and accessible overview.This edition has been revised, rewritten, and expanded throughout. The book now includes new sections on television audiences, reception theory, and globalization.

    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.

    Lovecraft (1890-1937), the most important American supernaturalist since Poe, has had an incalculable influence on all the horror-story writing of recent decades. Altho his supernatural fiction has been enjoying an unprecedented fame, it's not widely known that he wrote a critical history of supernatural horror in literature that has yet to be superceded as the finest historical discussion of the genre. This work is presented in this volume in its final, revised text. With incisive power, Lovecraft here formulates the esthetics of supernatural horror & summarizes the range of its literary expression from primitive folklore to the tales of his own 20th-century masters. Following a discussiom of terror-literature in ancient, medieval & renaissance culture, he launches on a critical survey of the whole history of horror fiction from the Gothic school of the 18th century (when supernatural horror found its own genre) to the time of De la Mare & M.R. James. The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, Vathek Charles Brockden Brown, Melmoth the Wanderer, Frankenstein, Bulwer-Lytton, Fouqué's Undine, Wuthering Heights, Poe (full chapter), The House of the Seven Gables, de Maupassant's The Horla, Bierce, The Turn of the Screw , M.P. Shiel, W.H. Hodgson, Machen, Blackwood & Dunsany are among those discussed in depth. He also notices a host of lesser writers--enough to draw up an extensive reading list. By charting so completely the background for his own concepts of horror & literary techniques, Lovecraft throws light on his own fiction as well as on the horror-literature which has followed. For this reason this book will be especially intriguing to those who've read his fiction as an isolated phenomenon. Any searching for a guide thru the inadequately marked region of literary horror, need search no further. Unabridged & corrected republication of 1945 edition. New introduction by E.F. Bleiler.

    “Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist… Let a hundred sexes bloom! …[And, let’s] construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power… You’re not exploited or oppressed because you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor because you are exploited…”

    This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls ‘non-space’ results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of ‘supermodernity’ to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena—a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history, Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, and non-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible.Unlike Baudelairean modernity, where old and new are interwoven, supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft, local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle. Auge does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.