Book picks similar to
A. S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity by Christien Franken
physical-books
theory
women-authors
21st-century
A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain
Christina Crosby - 2016
She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed.In A Body, Undone, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. Working with these resources, she recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and records growing into the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation.Deeply unsentimental, Crosby communicates in unflinching prose the experience of "diving into the wreck" of her body to acknowledge grief, and loss, but also to recognize the beauty, fragility, and dependencies of all human bodies. A memoir that is a meditation on disability, metaphor, gender, sex, and love, A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire.
Ricky Hatton's Vegas Tales
Ricky Hatton - 2015
Tens of thousands of British fans followed him there to watch these monumental bouts, and to soak up the unique atmosphere in Sin City.In Ricky's Hatton's Vegas Tales, he recalls the most memorable moments: from fight negotiations, through trash-talking transatlantic promotional tours, gruelling training camps, bizarre encounters with opponents, fans, A-list celebrities and boxing legends; all the way to fight-week mayhem and the epic post-fight benders that followed.With contributions from family, friends and the journalists who know him best, tributes from Mexican boxing legends Oscar De La Hoya and Marco Antonio Barrera, plus the hilarious recollections of rock 'n' roll superstar Noel Gallagher, this is an anecdote-driven romp through all the highs and lows of Ricky's Vegas fights, and the madness that preceded and followed each bout.What goes down in Vegas, stays in Vegas... until now!
After Theory
Terry Eagleton - 2003
His clear and accessible primer on literary theory was (and is) an indispensable guide to the post-modern era in the humanities. Now Eagleton argues that the golden age of cultural theory has ended, and with characteristic wit and verve, he traces its rise and fall from structuralism to post-colonial studies and beyond. In a new era of globalization and terrorism, Eagleton warns, the bundle of ideas known as post-modernism is essentially toothless. In this eloquent synthesis of a lifetime of learning, Eagleton challenges contemporary intellectuals to engage with a range of vital topics-love, evil, death, morality, religion, and revolution-that they've ignored over the past thirty years. Lively and provocative, Eagleton's latest will engage readers inside and outside the academy who are eager for a more holistic and humane way of "reading" the world. "A rare opportunity to enjoy the art of cultural and social diagnosis at its purest! Eagleton offers a unique combination of theoretical stringency and acerbic common-sense witticism, of critical historical reflection and the ability to ask the 'big' metaphysical questions." -- Slavoj Zizek
Teaching Literature
Elaine Showalter - 2002
Teaching Literature is an inspirational guidebook for all teachers of English and American literature in higher education.- Written by leading academic, prolific author and cultural journalist, Elaine Showalter- Original and provocative reflections on teaching literature in higher education- Encourages teachers to make their classroom practice intellectually exciting- Wide-ranging: covers the practical, theoretical, and methodological aspects of teaching literature- Highly practical - employs real examples from real classes and careers throughoutDraws on 40 years of international teaching experience
The Vertical Hour
David Hare - 2006
With her faith in academia beginning to erode and memories from her time in the Balkans and the Middle East haunting her, Nadia travels with her boyfriend, Philip Lucas, to rural England to visit her father, Oliver, who has his own past to reckon with. The challenge of Nadia's encounter with Oliver forces decisions on her that will affect her for the rest of her life.
For thirty-five years, David Hare has written plays that capture the flavor of our times and address the interconnection between our secret motives and our public politics. In The Vertical Hour, he continues his investigation of the morality of international intervention, and of how the war in Iraq impacts the lives of British and American citizens.
Applied Ballardianism: Memoir From a Parallel Universe
Simon Sellars - 2018
Ballard, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath reality's surface.Defeated by obsessive fears and the stultifying tedium of academia, yet certain that everything connects to Ballard, his thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss. Renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has plagued him throughout his life and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism.Only the darkest impulses and the most apocalyptic paranoia can uncover the technological mutations of inner space...
Cat Training in 10 Minutes
Miriam Fields-Babineau - 2003
This book will show you how to train your cat in just minutes a day. The training is based on positive reinforcement, so it really works and enhances the cat-owner bond.
The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - 1990
The Post-Colonial Critic
brings together a selection of interviews and discussions in which she has taken part over the past five years; together they articulate some of the most compelling politico-theoretical issues of the present. In these lively texts, students of Spivak's work will identify her unmistakeable voice as she speaks on questions of representation and self-representation, the politicization of deconstruction; the situations of post-colonial critics; pedagogical responsibility; and political strategies.
A Book of Women Poets: From Antiquity to Now
Aliki Barnstone - 1980
Here in one volume are the works of three hundred poets from six different continents and four millennia. This revised edition includes a newly expanded section of American poets from the colonial era to the present."[A] splendid collection of verse by women" (TIME) throughout the ages and around the world; now revised and expanded, with 38 American poets.
Undoing Gender
Judith Butler - 2004
In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern and fail to govern gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.
Field Study
Rachel Seiffert - 2004
Set against immense political upheaval, or evoking the intimate struggles between men and women, parents and children, this astonishing collection charts our desire for love, our fragility, and our strength. From the title piece, in which a young biologist conceals his discoveries at a polluted river from a local woman, to the family aided by an enemy in “The Crossing,” to the old man weighing his regrets in “Francis John Jones, 1924–” Seiffert’s acclaimed, refined prose movingly captures the lives of her characters in their most essential, secret moments.
Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art
Jacques Rancière - 2011
The book comprises a string of dramatic and evocative locales, each embodying specific artistic tendencies and together spanning the modern era--from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarme to the Folies-Bergere, attend a lecture by Emerson, and visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Ranciere uses these sites and events--some famous, others forgotten--to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the distinctions between the different arts along with the borders separating them from ordinary experience.This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from conventional understandings of modernism.
The Fall of Language in the Age of English
Minae Mizumura - 2008
Born in Tokyo but also raised and educated in the United States, Minae Mizumura acknowledges the value of a universal language in the pursuit of knowledge, yet also embraces the different ways of understanding offered by multiple tongues. She warns against losing this precious diversity.Universal languages have always played a pivotal role in advancing human societies, Mizumura shows, but in the globalized world of the Internet, English is fast becoming the sole common language of humanity. The process is unstoppable, and striving for total language equality is delusional--and yet, particular kinds of knowledge can be gained only through writings in specific languages.Mizumura calls these writings "texts" and their ultimate form "literature." Only through literature, and more fundamentally through the diverse languages that give birth to a variety of literatures, can we nurture and enrich humanity. Incorporating her own experiences as a writer and a lover of language, and embedding a parallel history of Japanese, Mizumura offers an intimate look at the phenomena of individual and national expression.
Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue
Alain Badiou - 2012
He explains in depth the tools Lacan gave him to navigate the extremes of his other two philosophical "masters," Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Élisabeth Roudinesco supplements Badiou's experience with her own perspective on the troubled landscape of the French analytic world since Lacan's death—critiquing, for example, the link (or lack thereof) between politics and psychoanalysis in Lacan's work. Their exchange reinvigorates how the the work of a pivotal twentieth-century thinker is perceived.
Caliban and the Witch
Silvia Federici - 2004
Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization."It is both a passionate work of memory recovered and a hammer of humanity's agenda." Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged"