Falling into Theory is a brief and inexpensive collection of essays that asks literature students to think about the fundamental questions of literary studies today.

    the golden age of the European novel discovers a new collective protagonist: youth. It is problematic and restless youth—“strange” characters, as their own creators often say—arising from the downfall of traditional societies. But even more than that, youth is the symbolic figure for European modernity: that sudden mix of great expectations and lost illusions that the bourgeois world learns to “read”, and to accept, as if it were a novel.The Way of the World, with its unique combination of narrative theory and social history, interprets the Bildungsroman as the great cultural mediator of nineteenth-century Europe: a form which explores the many strange compromises between revolution and restoration, economic take-off and aesthetic pleasure, individual autonomy and social normality. This new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the Bildungsroman in the years around the First World War (a crisis which opened the way for modernist experiments), and a new preface in which the author looks back at The Way of the World in the light of his more recent work.

    The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology.Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.

    This volume presents for the first time the original 1910 edition of this work, including Gandhi's Preface and Foreword, not found in other editions. This is the first fully annotated edition of the work, and the volume also includes Gandhi's correspondence with Tolstoy, Nehru and others. Anthony Parel's introduction sets the work in its historical and intellectual contexts. Short bibliographical notes on prominent figures mentioned in the text and a chronology of important events are also included as aids to the reader.

    The essays selected here by feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert range from the 1960s to 2006, emphasizing Rich’s lifelong intellectual engagement and fearless prose exploration of feminism, social justice, poetry, race, homosexuality, and identity.

    While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.

    Perloff traces the poet's development through his early years at Harvard and his interest in French Dadaism and Surrealism to his later poems that fuse literary influence with elements from Abstract Expressionist painting, atonal music, and contemporary film. This edition contains a new Introduction addressing O'Hara's homosexuality, his attitudes toward racism, and changes in poetic climate cover the past few decades. "A groundbreaking study. [This book] is a genuine work of criticism. . . . Through Marjorie Perloff's book we see an O'Hara perhaps only his closer associates saw before: a poet fully aware of the traditions and techniques of his craft who, in a life tragically foreshortened, produced an adventurous if somewhat erratic body of American verse."—David Lenson, Chronicle of Higher Education"Perloff is a reliable, well-informed, discreet, sensitive . . . guide. . . . She is impressive in the way she deals with O'Hara's relationship to painters and paintings, and she does give first-rate readings of four major poems."—Jonathan Cott, New York Times Book Review

    Parenti’s work has enlightened and enlivened readers for many years, covering a wide range of subjects.Here is a rich selection of his most lucid and penetrating writings on real history, political life, empire, wealth, class power, technology, culture, ideology, media, environment, sex, and ethnicity. Also included are a few choice selections drawn from his own life experiences and political awakening. Parenti goes where few political observers dare to tread. Time and again he takes the extra step beyond the parameters of permissible opinion, and time and again he succeeds in carrying the reader with him.The selections herein, that are reprinted from previously published works, have been revised and updated. Other offerings appear here for the very first time."Radical in the true sense of the word, [Parenti] digs at the roots which...sustain our public consciousness."—Los Angeles Times Book Review"Prominent leftist public intellectual Parenti has built a reputation for himself as a trenchant, yet engaging and accessible, critic of capitalism, imperialism, and other forms of exploitation and violence and this diverse collection of his writings will not disappoint his fans (nor, probably, convince his detractors). Over the course of the collection he takes on the corporate media, intellectual repression in academia, the stolen presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 (not that he's a fan of Al Gore or John Kerry), right wing judicial activism, free-market orthodoxies and mythologies, racism, sexism, homophobia, postmodern attacks on Marxism, the distortions of dominant history, ill-informed demonizations of the Venezuelan political process, his own life, and many other topics."—Book News, Inc."A prolific author, a charismatic speaker, and a regular guest on radio and television talk shows, Parenti communicates his message in an accessible, provocative, and historically informed style that is unrivaled among fellow progressive activists and thinkers."—Aurora OnlineMichael Parenti is a critically acclaimed author and an extraordinary public speaker. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University and has taught at a number of colleges and universities, in the United States and abroad. He is the author of twenty books, including Superpariotism , The Assassination of Julius Caesar, Inventing Reality, and Democracy for the Few.

    The subsequent “Companion Species Manifesto,” which further questions the human–nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound polarization.Manifestly Haraway brings together these momentous manifestos to expose the continuity and ramifying force of Haraway’s thought, whose significance emerges with engaging immediacy in a sustained conversation between the author and her long-term friend and colleague Cary Wolfe. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, Haraway and Wolfe join in a wide-ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human–nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.The conversation ends by revealing the early stages of Haraway’s “Chthulucene Manifesto,” in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene. Deeply dedicated to a diverse and robust earthly flourishing, Manifestly Haraway promises to reignite needed discussion in and out of the academy about biologies, technologies, histories, and still possible futures.

    In a philosophical approach to color, William Gass explores man's perception of the color blue as well as its common erotic, symbolic, and emotional associations.

    A book about our growing alienation from nature, it is also a brilliant meditation on the capacity of the writer to bring us back to earth, our home.In the first ecological reading of English literature, Jonathan Bate traces the distinctions among nature, culture, and environment and shows how their meanings have changed since their appearance in the literature of the eighteenth century. An intricate interweaving of climatic, topographical, and political elements poetically deployed, his book ranges from greenhouses in Jane Austen's novels to fruit bats in the poetry of Les Murray, by way of Thomas Hardy's woodlands, Dr. Frankenstein's Creature, John Clare's birds' nests, Wordsworth's rivers, Byron's bear, and an early nineteenth-century novel about an orangutan who stands for Parliament. Though grounded in the English Romantic tradition, the book also explores American, Central European, and Caribbean poets and engages theoretically with Rousseau, Adorno, Bachelard, and especially Heidegger.The model for an innovative and sophisticated new ecopoetics, The Song of the Earth is at once an essential history of environmental consciousness and an impassioned argument for the necessity of literature in a time of ecological crisis.

    This text covers four main areas: Language, Ideology and Power; Discourse and Sociocultural Change; Textual Analysis in Social Research; and Critical Language Awareness.

    It introduces an unusually wide range of theoretical approaches and highlights how useful they are in tackling key issues - from trade, production and finance to social divisions, development and the environment. The second edition has been revised and updated throughout with the addition of additional chapters on gender, on ideas, and on key current issues and debates.

    Building on the work of Foucault, Giddens, Jameson and Lefebvre, one of America's geographers argues for a rethinking of the dialectics of space, time and social being.

    Includes new chapter for assessing resources.