Book picks similar to
Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary by Maynard Solomon
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literary-theory
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Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian
Richard D. Wolff - 2012
Each is developed and discussed in its own chapter, yet also differentiated from and compared to the other two theories. The authors identify each theory's starting point, its goals and foci, and its internal logic. They connect their comparative theory analysis to the larger policy issues that divide the rival camps of theorists around such central issues as the role government should play in the economy and the class structure of production, stressing the different analytical, policy, and social decisions that flow from each theory's conceptualization of economics.The authors, building on their earlier book Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical, offer an expanded treatment of Keynesian economics and a comprehensive introduction to Marxian economics, including its class analysis of society. Beyond providing a systematic explanation of the logic and structure of standard neoclassical theory, they analyze recent extensions and developments of that theory around such topics as market imperfections, information economics, new theories of equilibrium, and behavioral economics, considering whether these advances represent new paradigms or merely adjustments to the standard theory. They also explain why economic reasoning has varied among these three approaches throughout the twentieth century, and why this variation continues today--as neoclassical views give way to new Keynesian approaches in the wake of the economic collapse of 2008.
Anathema of Zos: The Sermon to the Hypocrites
Austin Osman Spare - 1927
The last occult (automatic) writing of Austin Osman Spare, the founder of Sigil Magic.
Modernism
Peter Childs - 2000
The author explains the pan-European origins of the radical literary changes which occurred in the novel, poetry and drama, as well as the many revolutions in art, film and aesthetic theory.
The End of All Evil
Jeremy Locke - 2006
Evil is found in words such as force, compulsion, tax, violence, theft, censure, and politics. Notice that in such things, there is no joy. None have any value to humanity. This book defines the doctrine of liberty, and teaches you why choices that affect your life can only rightfully be made by you.
Seven Nights
Jorge Luis Borges - 1977
The incomparable Borges delivered these seven lectures in Buenos Aires in 1977; attendees were treated to Borges erudition on the following topics: Dante's The Divine Comedy, Nightmares, Thousand and One Dreams, Buddhism, Poetry, The Kabbalah, and Blindness.
Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous Frauds
Melissa Katsoulis - 2009
When Dionysus the Renegade faked a Sophocles text in 400 BC (cunningly inserting the acrostic “Heraclides is ignorant of letters”) to humiliate an academic rival, he paved the way for two millennia of increasingly outlandish literary hoaxers. The path from his mischievous stunt to more serious tricksters like the fake Howard Hughes “autobiography” by Clifford Irving, Oprah-duper James Frey, takes in every sort of writer: from the religious zealot to the bored student, via the vengeful academic and the out-and-out joker. But whether hoaxing for fame, money, politics, or simple amusement, each perpetrator represents something unique about why we write. Their stories speak volumes about how reading, writing, and publishing have grown out of the fine and private places of the past into big-business, TV-book-club-led mass-marketplaces which, some would say, are ripe for the ripping. For the first time, the complete history of this fascinating sub-genre of world literature is revealed. Suitable for bookworms of all ages and persuasions, this is true crime for people who don’t like true crime, and literary history for the historically illiterate. A treat to read right through or to dip into, it will make you think twice next time you slip between the covers of an author you don’t know . . . .
Sound System: The Political Power of Music
Dave Randall - 2017
Music has a unique ability to unsettle the most fundamental political and social conventions—or, alternatively, to stabilize the status-quo. Sound System is the story of one musician’s journey to discover what exactly makes music so powerful. Years of touring, protesting, and performing have given Dave Randall an insider’s view of the music industry, enabling him to shed light on the most tightly held secrets of celebrity, commodification, and culture. He finds remarkable examples of music as a force of social change as well as something that has been used to keep people in their place throughout history. From the Glastonbury Festival to the Arab Spring, Pop Idol to Trinidadian Carnival, Randall finds political inspiration across the musical spectrum. A blistering, intelligent polemic about the political power of music, Sound System investigates the raves, riots, and revolution of contemporary culture to answer the question—how can we make music serve the interest of the many, rather than the few?
Wicked But Virtuous
Mirka Mora - 2000
Mora also offers a unique insight into the lives of her famous contemporaries - Boyd, Blackman, Perceval and others.
Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory
Mike Davis - 2018
In a series of searching, propulsive essays, Davis, the bestselling author of City of Quartz and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, explores Marx’s inquiries into two key questions of our time: Who can lead a revolutionary transformation of society? And what is the cause—and solution—of the planetary environmental crisis?Davis consults a vast archive of labor history to illuminate new aspects of Marx’s theoretical texts and political journalism. He offers a “lost Marx,” whose analyses of historical agency, nationalism, and the “middle landscape” of class struggle are crucial to the renewal of revolutionary thought in our darkening age. Davis presents a critique of the current fetishism of the “anthropocene,” which suppresses the links between the global employment crisis and capitalism’s failure to ensure human survival in a more extreme climate. In a finale, Old Gods, New Enigmas looks backward to the great forgotten debates on alternative socialist urbanism (1880–1934) to find the conceptual keys to a universal high quality of life in a sustainable environment.
The Ghost of Karl Marx
Ronan de Calan - 2010
It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life’s “big questions,” however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children—and curious grown-ups—to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Descartes to Socrates, Einstein, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging—and often funny—story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations. In The Ghost of Karl Marx, the philosopher is saddened when the town weavers must sell their cloth cheaply to compete with machines. The farmers too cannot sell their crops and have no money to buy new seeds. Forced to leave their work, the townspeople form an angry crowd in front of the factories, but what is to be done when there are so many hungry people and so few jobs to pay for food to eat? Concealed in one of the weavers’ sheets, the philosopher makes a solemn vow to give this story a happy ending by finding the Market, that infernal magician, and ridding the town of him once and for all. Plato & Co.’s clear approach and charming illustrations make this series the perfect addition to any little library.
Maybe the People Would Be the Times
Luc Sante - 2020
The glue holding the collection together is autobiography. Every item carries deep personal significance, and most are rooted in lived experience, in particular Sante’s youth on the Lower East Side of New York in the fertile 1970s and ’80s. He traces his deep engagement with music, his experience of the city, his progression as an artist and observer, his love life and ambitions. Maybe the People Would Be the Times is organized as a series of sequences, in which one piece leads into the next. Memoir flows into essay, fiction into critical writing, humor into poetry, the pieces answering and echoing one another, examining their subjects from multiple vantages. The collection shows Sante at his most lyrical, impassioned, and imaginative, a writer for whom every assignment brings the challenge of inventing a new form. “Luc Sante is a superb writer who can give astonishing form to floating moods and thoughts that no one noticed before.—JOHN ASHBERY
Simulacra and Simulation
Jean Baudrillard - 1981
Moving away from the Marxist/Freudian approaches that had concerned him earlier, Baudrillard developed in this book a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure.Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacra—the copy without an original—and simulation. These terms are crucial to an understanding of the postmodern, to the extent that they address the concept of mass reproduction and reproduceability that characterizes our electronic media culture.Baudrillard's book represents a unique and original effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a new concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.Sheila Glaser is an editor at Artforum magazine.
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Benedict Anderson - 1983
In this widely acclaimed work, Benedict Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the 'imagined communities' of nationality.Anderson explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time. He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was modularly adopted by popular movements in Europe, by the imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa.This revised edition includes two new chapters, one of which discusses the complex role of the colonialist state's mindset in the develpment of Third World nationalism, while the other analyses the processes by which, all over the world, nations came to imagine themselves as old.
Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London
Matthew Beaumont - 2015
In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Matthew Beautmont shines a light on the dark perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers from Shakespeare, the ecstatic strolls of William Blake, the feverish urges of opium addict De Quincey as well as the master night walker, Charles Dickens.
Militant Modernism
Owen Hatherley - 2009
This work features chapters ranging from a study of industrial and brutalist aesthetics in Britain, the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich in film and design, and the alienation effects of Brecht and Hanns Eisler on record and on screen.