Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisBeginning theory has been helping students navigate through the thickets of literary and cultural theory for over two decades. This new and expanded fourth edition continues to offer readers the best single-volume introduction to the field. The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unravelled. Unlike many books which assume certain positions about the critics and the theories they represent, Beginning theory allows readers to develop their own ideas once first principles and concepts have been grasped. The book has been updated for this edition and includes a new introduction, expanded chapters, and an overview of the subject ('Theory after "Theory"') which maps the arrival of new 'isms' since the second edition appeared in 2002 and the third edition in 2009.Trade Review'There is no other book that offers such a comprehensive account of the field, combined with thoughtful, detailed exposition of the theoretical approaches under discussion. Far from being a modest survey of contemporary literary theory, it has had a vital role in shaping the way that theory is taught in Britain and North America.'English Association Newsletter‘In the fourth edition of his popular introduction to literary theory, Barry (emer., Aberystwyth Univ., Wales) amends and updates earlier versions (1995, 2002, 2009) and adds sections on newer theories such as consilience and posthumanism. The book is written explicitly for students of English literature, and in citing examples Barry tends to stick to the canonical—Wordsworth, Austen, Shakespeare, et al.—which renders the book less useful than it might be for students of other literatures and languages. Nevertheless, Barry’s readable text focuses helpfully on putting students at ease and giving them tools to think through difficult concepts and theories. In addition, practical exercises familiarize students new to the discipline with different ways of using theory to analyze literature. Most of the changes to the new edition are insubstantial, and some newer theories and practices, such as those relating to technology, are given short shrift. The majority of the references and suggestions for further reading are also the same as those used in earlier versions. Even so the book provides an approachable, understandable introduction to literary theory and would be useful to those not already in possession of the third edition.’M. Anderson, Southern Oregon University, Choice connect, Vol. 56, No. 2, October 2018 -- .Table of ContentsPreface to the fourth editionIntroduction1 Theory before 'theory'2 Structuralism 3 Post-structuralism and deconstruction 4 Postmodernism 5 Psychoanalytic criticism 6 Feminist criticism7 Queer theory8 Marxist criticism 9 New historicism and cultural materialism 10 Postcolonial criticism 11 Stylistics 12 Narratology 13 Ecocriticism14 Literary theory – a history in ten events15 Theory after 'Theory'AppendicesWhere do we go from here? Further readingIndex

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoceptionor the sensory perception of temperatureis being carefully studied and exploited as a tool of marketing, social control, and labor management. Yet air conditioning isn't for everybody: its reliance on carbon fuels divides the world into habitable, climate-controlled bubbles and increasingly uninhabitable environments where AC is unavailable. Hsuan Hsu''s Air Conditioning<Trade ReviewA cool blast of discomforting brilliance, Air Conditioning examines the conditioning of our indoor and interior climates of work, domesticity, and consumption. It is not inward looking to the sealed boxes and bubbles of air-conditioned detachment, but focused on the complex exchanges and inequalities involved in sustaining comfortable places, cooled bodies and technologies by making other places, and other (often poor and racialised) lives, uncomfortable and unliveable. Hsu’s book hums, ventilating ideas in an insistent, vital tone to show how this ordinary object, submerged within walls and behind vents, has mattered so much to us. * Peter Adey, Royal Holloway University of London, and author of Air (2014) *Hsuan L. Hsu demonstrates how air conditioning has radically transformed how we think, feel, and relate to others. After reading this book, you'll never be as comfortable in an air-conditioned room again – and that's exactly the point. * Bharat Venkat, Associate Professor of Society & Genetics, History, and Anthropology, Director of the UCLA Heat Lab, and author of At the Limits of Cure (2021) *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Why Air Conditioning? 1. Thermal Comfort 2. Bubbles: A Partial Typology 3. Weathermaking; Vicious Cycles 4. Cold Storage 5. The Racialization of Cooling 6. Global AC and the Great Uncooled Conclusion: Bursting Our Bubbles Index

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Book SynopsisFredric Jameson introduces here the major themes of French theory: existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In a series of accessible lectures, Jameson places this effervescent period of thought in the context of its most significant political conjunctures, including the Liberation of Paris, the Algerian War, the uprisings of May ’68, and the creation of the EU.The philosophical debates of the period come to life through anecdotes and extended readings of work by the likes of Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze, groups like Tel Quel and Cahiers du Cinéma, and contemporary thinkers such as Rancière and Badiou. Eclectic, insightful, and inspired, Jameson’s seminars provide an essential account of an intellectual moment comparable in significance to the Golden Age of Athens, historically fascinating and of persistent relevance.

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Book SynopsisJeff Jarvis holds the Leonard Tow Chair in Journalism Innovation and directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. He was creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, TV critic for TV Guide and People, Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, a media columnist for The Guardian, and president and creative director of Advance.net. He blogs at Buzzmachine.com, cohosts the podcast This Week in Google, and is the author of five books: What Would Google Do? (2009), Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (2011), Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News (2014), and Magazine (forthcoming, 2023) in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

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Book SynopsisIn On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. Drawing on a range of sources, including Last Tango in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Claudia Rankine, Christopher Isherwood, Bhanu Kapil, the Occupy movement, and resistance to anti-Black state violence, Berlant poses inconvenience as an affective relation and considers how we might loosen our attachments in ways that allow us to build new forms of life. Collecting strategies for breaking apart a world in need of disturbing, the book’s experiments in thought and writing cement Berlant’s status as one of the most inventive and influential thinkers of our time.Trade Review"The author is as sharp as ever at drawing from postcolonial, queer, and affect theory. Fans of Berlant’s bright, electrifying thinking will want to check this out." * Publishers Weekly *"In Inconvenience, that pedagogy is sly, confiding, and digressive. . . . On the Inconvenience of Other People is, finally, a book in all its feels—from happiness to a death wish—all at once. And it’s the last work of a scholar whose theory felt personal, and whose death was mourned far beyond those who knew Berlant: a perfect encapsulation of intimacy within publicity and the publicity of intimacy, a monument to their very work." -- Hannah Zeavin * Bookforum *"A coherent and helpful addition to the ideas, now influential throughout the culture, that Berlant wrought in 2011’s Cruel Optimism." -- Jo Livingstone * 4Columns *"Offers moments of stunning clarity with the kinds of pithy declarative revelations that can easily spiral a reader toward an entirely new outlook on life. Their writing is a paragon of world-breaking and world-making insight." -- Megan Volpert * Popmatters *"Berlant was anything but ordinary. They wanted their writing to draw the reader into the unpredictability of their own mind. . . . Berlant asked the reader to remain in the thought with them, accepting its formlessness and volatility. Writing was a race against life. . . . The breathlessness was left intact in the prose. If the result is that one sometimes comes away from Berlant’s books with only an impressionistic understanding, that might be an appropriate response to a theorist of vibes." -- Erin Maglaque * London Review of Books *"A book about proceeding in brokenness, On The Inconvenience of Other People is simultaneously an experiment, if not a map, on how to do theory in a damaged world." -- Lilly Markaki * LSE Review of Books *"Berlant offers brilliant insights about the progressive and regressive forces that produce, promote, and frustrate individuals' (perceived) freedoms. Recommended. Graduate students and faculty." * Choice *Table of ContentsNote to the Reader vii Preface. What Now? ix Introduction. Intentions 1 1. Sex. Sex in the Event of Happiness 31 2. Democracy. The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times 75 3. Life. On Being in Life without Wanting the World: No World Poetics, or, Elliptical Life 117 Coda. My Dark Places 149 Acknowledgments 175 Notes 177 Bibliography 205 Index 231

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Book SynopsisRadical alternatives to consent and traumaArguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience. Saketopoulou thereby shows why sexualities beyond consent may be worth risking-and how risk can solicit the future.Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to chart how trauma and sexuality join forces to surge through the aesthetic domain. Putting the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and phTrade ReviewLavishly brilliant. Rarely has a book so daringly startled me. Clarity, nuance, pain, even tenderness here braid uniquely, keyed to sexual collisions with race. A series of showstopping claims result, glistening with seduction. Never have I felt so welcomed into trauma as a mode of doing, a mode of expanding, a mode of greeting what is foreign in oneself. Take this invitation laced with surprise. * Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of Gender(s) *Making a vibrant argument for psychoanalysis’s importance in grappling with our modern racial dramas, Sexuality Beyond Consent weaves together insights from queer theory, performance studies, and critical race theory to explore overwhelm. Saketopoulou’s clear and compelling prose brings together clinical case studies, Laplanche, and Slave Play to arrive at an ethics for dealing with power and difference now—the result is a dazzling, brilliant read. * Amber Jamilla Musser, author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance *Offers nothing less than a theory of sexuality, one that refuses contemporary pieties. In a series of profound and sometimes personal reflections, Saketopoulou subjects our reigning models of consent to close scrutiny, and asks what happens when fantasy—intractable, recalcitrant, but also protean and surprising—belies our most dearly held political and ethical commitments. The result is a work that excavates the complex enmeshments of the sexed body, race, and history, and demonstrates the ongoing salience of psychoanalytic concepts to feminist and anti-racist cultural analysis. Saketopoulou’s critique of the liberal sexual subject is politically necessary and intellectually thrilling. * Damon Ross Young, University of California, Berkeley *This brilliant, often counter-intuitive examination of sexuality, race, and consent explores how we might yield to the opacity in ourselves. Saketopoulou unpacks with startling insight moments beyond the politics of identity and trauma to imagine how the surrendering of consent might lead to an ethical expansion rather than diminishment of the self. * David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Fredric Jameson, internationally recognized as a literary theorist and as America's most notable Marxist intellectual, has established a leading place in discussions of postmodernism. Jameson brings to the subject an immense range of reference both to artworks and to theoretical discussions; a strong hypothesis linking cultural changes to changes in the place of culture within the whole structure of life produced by a new phase of economic history (multinational capitalism); and a severely scholarly wish to analyze and understand, rather than praise or blame, the object of his study."—Jonathan Arac“A classic of late 20th-century Euroamerican critical thought.” -- Ned Lukacher * Choice *“An encyclopedic grasp of modern culture.” -- Stuart Hall * Marxism Today *“For anybody hoping to understand not just the cultural but the political and social implications of postmodernism . . . Jameson’s book is a fundamental, nonpareil text.” -- Gilbert Adair * Sunday Times (London) *“Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic, a prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep magisterially from Sophocles to science fiction. . . . Postmodernism is an intellectual blockbuster.” -- Terry Eagleton * Irish Times *“No one theorist illustrates the recent history of postmodernism’s history so well as Fredric Jameson.” -- Michael Bérubé * Voice Literary Supplement *“The scope and profundity of Postmodernism, covering theory, architecture, film, video, and economics, is truly staggering. . . . Brilliant . . .” -- Siauddin Sardar * The Independent *

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Book SynopsisTimothy Morton explores the foundations of the ecological crisis to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and rediscover playfulness and joy. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think.Trade ReviewIn often witty and humorous language, Timothy Morton provides a kind of affective atlas for the human era. The book calls for scholars to recognize the structures of entwinement between (the human) species and ecological phenomena and to develop modes of thought for accommodating them. -- Kate Marshall, University of Notre DameDark Ecology is a brave, brilliant interrogation of the presumptions that have driven our approach to the ecological and environmental challenges of our era. Anyone who is willing to ride the rollercoaster of ideas on which Morton takes us will reach the end brimming with new conceptual and intellectual energies with which to face up to our present limits and failures and to shape an alive and joyful future. -- Imre Szeman, University of AlbertaMorton is a master of philosophical enigma. In Dark Ecology he treats us to an obscure ecognosis, the essentially unsolvable riddle of ecological being. Prepare to be endarkened! -- Michael Marder, author of The Philosopher's Plant and PyropoliticsMorton commands readers' attention with his free-form style.... [Dark Ecology] extends his previous work to offer a seismically different vision of the future of ecology and humankind. * Publishers Weekly *With touches of humor, bits of information drawn from literature (ancient Latin and Greek), and plenty of philosophy, Morton takes readers on a strongly philosophical and semantic tour of 'the darkness and light' of human interrelatedness with the biosphere. * Choice *A playful, poetic parsing of our era's environmental crisis. * Rice Magazine *A rewarding hike. * Library Journal *Timothy Morton's new work by turns fascinates, mystifies, stuns, confuses, and excites...Readers who seek new vocabularies for thinking about the Anthropocene and the vexed relation between human society and biological life will find a lot to work with. * British Society for Literature and Science *[A] radical vision of what ecological thought can be. * Los Angeles Review of Books *Morton’s provocative book urges the reader to braid, to twist, or to play cat’s cradle with its looping logic. * Critical Inquiry *Morton disrupts the customary assumption that industrialization is the root cause of ecological crisis, such crisis being already contained in the agrilogistic drawing of a sharp boundary between human and nonhuman worlds. -- Charlene Elsby * The Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsBeginning After the EndThe First ThreadThe Second ThreadThe Third ThreadEnding Before the BeginningNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book explains how and why our brains think in stories. Angus Fletcher, an expert in neuroscientific approaches to narrative, identifies this capacity as “storythinking.”Trade ReviewFletcher’s done it again. His polymathic erudition and word-wizardry elegance pull off the equivalent of a Copernican revolution in our understanding of storytelling—in all its resplendent iterations. With Storythinking he invites us on an extraordinary odyssey that enriches understanding of our deep, instinctive impulse to create stories as makers and transformers of our world. Storythinking is nothing less than a cosmological paradigm shift that puts story making and thinking at the center of all that we do. -- Frederick Luis Aldama, award-winning author and Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, UT AustinAngus Fletcher explains why effective narrative prioritizes the unique, shifts viewpoints, and encourages conflict. Not for their own sake. It makes a writer create and clarify more thoughtful ideas and leads readers to intuit and retain the message. Both revelatory and pragmatic, and so gracefully explained. -- Shane Greenstein, author of How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New NetworkStorythinking is absolutely excellent: a much-needed reminder of and expansion on the transformative power of story, story as an enriched form of learning and as a valid epistemology. The book is a lovely, readable addition to academic and public life. I am eager to see the use of story resurrected! -- Lisa Miller, Ph.D., Professor & Founder, Spirituality Mind Body Institute, Teachers College, Columbia UniversityStory is a basic mental operation. Most of our experience, knowledge, and thinking is formed and organized by story: prediction, evaluation, planning, explanation, agents and actors, processes, goals. Story is an indispensable element of creativity. Human beings project from story to story and blend stories to create new concepts, new proposals, new science. How can we push the cognitive science of story forward? Fletcher, in this captivating and inspiring new book, leads the way. -- Mark Turner, author of The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and LanguageThe quickest way to elicit a scoff from 'serious thinkers' is to mention 'story'. But as someone who has built a career as a science communicator, who consistently straddles the line between art and science, and whose work is grounded in neuroscience, I know intuitively that storytelling is fundamental to how we think. Finally, Angus Fletcher brings his deep understanding of narrative together with his keen scientific mind to explain why we think in stories, why embracing story structure is the way forward, and how stories provide an architecture to thought as powerful and important as logic. Read this book. -- Indre Viskontas, Cognitive Neuroscientist, University of San Francisco[Storythinking] is a most unusual book, plumbing the depths of history to find where philosophy went off the rails, examining neurobiology for insight into creativity, and festooned with stories about great characters all the way through. I can honestly report I’ve never read anything like it. And that’s a good thing. * The Straight Dope *Table of Contents1. Story2. Story and Thinking3. The Origin of Story4. Why Our Schools Teach Logic, Not Story5. The Limits of Logic—or Why We Still Need Storythinking6. The Brain Machinery of Storythinking7. Improving Storythinking8. Storythinking for Personal Growth9. Storythinking for Social Growth10. Story’s Answer to the Meaning of LifeCoda: Conversations with a StorythinkerNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThe 50th Anniversary edition of the ground-breaking, worldwide bestselling feminist tract.The Female Eunuch retains that power of transformation; it asserts the possibility of creativity within female experience' GuardianA worldwide bestseller, translated into over twelve languages, The Female Eunuch is a landmark in the history of the women's movement.Drawing liberally from history, literature and popular culture, past and present, Germaine Greer's searing examination of women's oppression is at once an important social commentary and a passionately argued masterpiece of polemic.Probably the most famous, most widely read book on feminism ever.Trade Review‘A dazzling tract, erudite, outrageous, funny.’Cosmopolitan ‘Brilliantly written, quirky and sensible, full of bile and insight…The best feminist book so far’New York Times ‘A dazzling combination of erudition, eccentricity and eroticism.’Newsweek ‘Intelligent, funny and beautifully written’Vogue ‘Germaine Greer in THE FEMALE EUNUCH converted me to Women’s Lib, as much by her bawdy sense of humour as by the bite of her polemic’ Kenneth Tynan, Observer ‘A fine, continuous flow of angry power…terrific polemical force’ Listener

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Book SynopsisNow Tintinologists have the opportunity to better understand the complex and sometimes dark personality of Tintin's creator and his carefully crafted public persona.Trade ReviewIn this enthralling, deeply considered synthesis, brimming with anecdotes and perceptions, [Peeters] has enhanced our understanding and appreciation of the creator, the creation, and above all, the man. -- Paul Gravett The Comics Journal Model of economy and grace, mixing meticulous detail and stylized tableaux in perfect proportion so that the story is neither generic nor bogged down by excessive rendering. Slate Verdict: Carefully researched (there are extensive endnotes) and well written and translated, this fine study is most appropriate for sophisticated readers or dedicated Tintin fans. Library Journal Herge is a granular biography that pingpongs back and forth between the artist and his art, looking to build bridges of epiphany and exposition between the ideas expressed and the life lived. Washington Post Well, Blistering Barnacles!, as Captain Haddock would say. The great merit of Herge, Son of Tintin is that Georges Remi is allowed to emerge in three dimensions as what he in fact was: not an intellectual, not an activist, not a saint, but an ordinary man of his times. -- Cullen Murphy New York Times Book Review A 'must' for any TinTin or Herge fan. Midwest Book Review Why should readers consider another book on Georges Remi (Herge), the creator of Tintin? Because this one was written by a comics writer himself, a man who knows the medium from both its theory and practice, who interviewed Herge and those close to him, and who had access to a trove of vital letters, papers, and notebooks. ChoiceTable of ContentsIntroductionPart I: Georges Remi1. White2. Gray3. BlackPart II: Le Petit Vingtième4. The Doorway to Le Vingtième Siècle5. The Birth of Tintin6. A Young Man on the Page7. The Conqueror8. Under the Sign of Kih-OskhPart III: Chinese Ink (1934-1940)9. Another World10. Learning the Story11. Counterfeit Money12. History on the Spot13. The West, Always the WestPart IV: Spoils of War (1940– 1944)14. The Street-Singer's Career15. Here We Are, Captain!16. An Unlucky Star17. The Color War18. This Castle Is No Longer for Sale19. AnxietiesPart V: Intermittences (1944– 1953)20. The Hangover21. The Launch of Tintin22. The Forty-Year Alarm23. The Terrible Year24. Hergé Has Disappeared!25. Asking for the Moon26. A Black Hole27. ChillsPart VI: The Boss (1953– 1959)28. The Middle Years29. Fanny30. "International Tintin"31. The Demon of PurityPart VII: Monsieur Hergé (1960– 1983)32. The Final Bouquet33. The Studio Trap34. Another Life35. Building the Myth36. A Time of Pretenses37. The Alpha and the OmegaEpilogue: An Impossible LegacyAppendix: Character Names in French and EnglishNotesBibliographyIndex of NamesIndex of Works by Hergé

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Book SynopsisMany definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed. This book extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information is controlled in the Western world.Table of ContentsForeword by Frederic JamesonIntroduction1 The field: knowledge in computerized societies2 The problem: legitimation3 The method: language games4 The nature of the social bond: the modern alternative5 The nature of the social bond: the postmodern perspective6 The pragmatics of narrative knowledge7 The pragmatics of scientific knowledge8 The narrative function and the legitimation of knowledge9 Narratives of the legitimation of knowledge10 Delgitimation11 Research and it legitimation through performativity12 Education and its legitimation through performativity13 Postmodern science as the search for instabilities14 Legitimation by paralogyAppendixNotes Index

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Book SynopsisViolence and the Sacred is René Girard''s landmark study of human evil. Here Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard''s forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek tragedy and the lynchings and pogroms propagated by contemporary states illustrate his central argument that violence belongs to everyone and is at the heart of the sacred.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements 1.Sacrifice 2.The Sacrificial Crisis 3.Oedipus and the Surrogate Victim 4.The Origins of Myth and Ritual 5.Dionysus 6.From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double 7.Freud and the Oedipus Complex 8.Totem and Taboo and the Incest Prohibition 9.Levi-Strauss, Structuralism and the Marriage Laws 10.The Gods, the Dead, the Sacred and Sacrificial Substitution 11.The Unity of All Rites Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewPraise for * René Girard *The explosion of social media, the resurgence of populism, and the increasing virulence of reciprocal violence all suggest that the contemporary world is becoming more and more recognizably "Girardian" in its behavior -- Robert Pogue Harrison * The New York Review of Books *The man who helped us perhaps more than any other social thinker of our time to understand violence, death and martyrdom -- Jerry Bowyer * Forbes *Praise for * Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard by Cynthia L. Haven *Influential and comprehensive. Haven's Evolution of Desire is exemplary in its sensitivity ... Her readers are challenged but left free to make up their own minds -- Jonathan Benthall * TLS *A penetrating account of an important thinker - and as agile, profound, and affecting as its subject * Kirkus *Essential reading for Girard devotees and a perfect entrée for newcomers. Rich with details and ideas, Cynthia Haven's book gives everything it promises and something more: a personal account of a close friend. Highly recommended -- Maria StepanovaHere is a book that gives us Girard in all his genius and generosity. I can't recommend it enough -- Morgan Meis * The New Yorker *René Girard's provocative theories on violence, religion, desire, and scapegoating are intensely relevant to contemporary American society. Cynthia Haven offers an account of Girard's life and ideas that is as compelling as a good detective story. It should receive the widest possible readership -- David Streitfeld * Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The New York Times *

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Book SynopsisFrom Pinocchio to The Chronicles of Narnia to Charlotte''s Web, classic children''s tales have shaped generations of young people. In recent years, homeschoolers and new classical schools have put these masterpieces of children''s literature at the center of their curricula. And these stories continue to be embraced by parents, students, and educators alike. In Tending the Heart of Virtue, Vigen Guroian illuminates the power of classic tales and their impact on the moral imagination. He demonstrates how these stories teach the virtues through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, while he also unveils components of the good, the true, and the beautiful in plot and character. With clarity and elegance, Guroian reads deeply into the classic stories. He demonstrates how these stories challenge and enliven the moral imaginations of children. And he shows the reader how to get inside of classic stories and communicate their lessons to the child. For more than two decades Tending the Heart of Virtue has been embraced by parents, guardians, and teachers for whom the stories it discusses are not only beloved classics but repositories of moral wisdom. This revised and expanded second edition includes three new chapters in which Guroian inteprets such stories as Hans Christian Andersen''s The Ugly Duckling, the Grimms'' Cinderella, and John Ruskin''s The King of the Golden River. The concluding bibliographicsal essay has also been expanded.Trade ReviewWe need this book because we need children's books, but we have forgotten how to read them. Guroian writes for humbled giants who want to understand how stories develop the virtues and nurture the souls of children—and their parents * Andrew Kern, President, CiRCE Institute *It's hard not to treasure this book. Guroian conveys profound moral and spiritual truths with impressive scholarship and startling insight in prose as pure and lovely as a child's tale. * David V. Hicks, author of The Emperor's Handbook *Not only is this book a delight to read, it will also help educators and parents navigate the principles that make reading the classic stories to children so vital to their development. This is a must-read for religious or secular educators and parents. * Carroll Smith, Founder, Charlotte Mason Institute *Tending the Heart of Virtue...promises the surest fruits for Christian teachers and parents, although his focus on mythopoeic writers (including C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald) and the moral imagination will draw a larger audience. * Sarah O'Dell, Mythopoeic Society *Guroian's book remains a must-read for those interested in children's literature. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Preface to the Second Edition Introduction 1 Awakening the Moral Imagination 2 On Becoming a Real Human Child: Pinocchio 3 Love and Immortality in The Velveteen Rabbit and The Little Mermaid 4 Friends and Mentors in The Wind in the Willows, Charlottes Web, and Bambi 5 Evil and Redemption in The Snow Queen and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 6 Heroines of Faith and Courage: Princess Irene in The Princess and the Goblin and Lucy in Prince Caspian 7 The Triumph of Beauty in The Nightingale and The Ugly Duckling 8 The Goodness of Goodness: The Grimms' Cinderella and John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River 9 Obedience and the Path to Perfection in George MacDonald's The Wise Woman: A Double Story Conclusion: A Bibliographical Essay Notes Index

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Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back . . . You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked those pale chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!An English scientist regales his dinner guests with the tale of his travels to the year 802,701, where he discovers that the human race has evolved into two distinct societies. The Eloi, elegant and peaceful, yet lacking spirit, are terrorised by the sinister, light-fearing Morlocks, who live underground, surrounded by industry. And when his time machine mysteriously vanishes, the scientist must descend to the realm of the Morlocks in order to find his only hope of escape . . .H. G. Wells is considered a founding father of modern science fiction, coining the term time machine' and popularising the idea of time travel in literature.Trade Review‘[Wells’ work is] astonishingly rich in human and historical interest … he foresaw the invention of, among other things, television, tanks, aerial warfare and the atom bomb’ David Lodge ‘[Wells] contrives to give over humanity into the clutches of the Impossible and yet manages to keep it down (or up) to its humanity, to its flesh, blood, sorrow, folly’ Joseph Conrad ‘I personally consider the greatest of English living writers [to be] H. G. Wells’ Upton Sinclair ‘The father of science fiction’ Guardian

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Book SynopsisIn this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce.Trade ReviewExciting...a book for starting up trains of thought or discussion... It did make me think, as a writer, as a reader, as a teacher -- AS Byatt * Sunday Times *Here is scholarship made human... There has been no better populist study of fiction since Forster's Aspects of the Novel * Financial Times *It is wonderful to be clued in to some of the magic tricks of the trade; the point of view, the stream of consciousness, the use of names, the sense of place, time-shift and intertextuality * Los Angeles Times *Lodge has the knack of wearing his scholarship lightly... One finds here precisely that expansive, humane wisdom which is so sorely lacking in much narrow-minded modern criticism.... He gets to the bottom of things, telling us why we read fiction....admirers will find in The Art of Fiction concentrated essence of Lodge * Guardian *These essays are as fresh and as readable as ever -- David Evans * Independent *

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Book SynopsisSexistence develops a new philosophical account of sexuality that troubles our conceptions of existence.Table of ContentsPreliminaries | 1 A. Fatality? | 1 B. Liberation? | 5 C. Philosophy? | 10 D. Drive? | 17 E. Unsayable? | 21 1. Lifting | 26 2. Transmission | 28 3. Appropriation | 30 4. Fiction | 32 5. Real | 35 6. History | 38 7. Technics and Transcendence | 41 8. Excessive Nature | 45 9. Desire | 50 10. Continuous, Discontinuous | 53 11. Devouring | 57 12. Ass in Air | 61 13. Penetration | 66 14. Too Much, Too Little | 70 15. Sex Singular Plural | 74 16. not a word / I lacked | 79 17. Joy | 84 18. Troubles | 89 19. Love Unto Death | 97 20. Love Unto Life | 101 21. Erotic Novel | 108 Postlude | 119 Superfluous Supplement | 120 Notes | 123

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Book SynopsisContemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. "Flow" is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them. Considering original streaming TV, popular literature, artworld trends, and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion and today's intolerance of representation, and points to alternative forms in photography, TV, novels, and constructive theory that prioritize distance, impersonality, and big ideas instead.Trade ReviewThis brilliantly written, wild ride of a book is an enthralling, gloves-off critical intervention urgently needed in this moment. -- Jonathan Crary, author of 24/7 and Scorched EarthKornbluh offers a swift -- and much needed -- kick to one of the most insidious symptoms of our time: the demand for the now, the immediately felt, the one-off. Armed with a strong imperative: "Think!" which she reiterates in an uncommonly rich vocabulary and from a variety of perspectives, she succeeds at the very least in holding up this runaway trend. Together with her previous critiques of capitalism, Immediacy establishes Kornbluh as one of the most inventive new voices in the field. -- Joan Copjec, Brown University, author of Read My DesireAnna Kornbluh brilliantly reinvigorates critique for an age drowning under the deluge of self-presentation. Embracing structure over style, representation over personalization, and collectivity over narcissism, she creates a space for thinking -- the necessary space for politics. -- Jodi Dean, author of The Communist HorizonThe sensation of reading Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy is of someone turning on the light in a dark room. Suddenly one beholds a world one had only been stumbling through and can begin, with Kornbluh's help, to trace a whole new set of relations between the disparate phenomena that define contemporary culture. The shocking conceptual clarity and rightness of its dialectical reversal of everything we thought we knew about life lived under conditions of postmodern hyper-mediation should make this book the starting point of future discussions of the nature of the present. -- Mark McGurl, Stanford University, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of AmazonTo the things themselves! Fuck no, that's precisely the problem. In this book on the poetics of social forms, Kornbluh has expertly diagnosed the contemporary yen for immediacy and immanence, presence and reality, the indistinct blurs and liquid flows of seemingly authentic experience. Taking it all as a kind of social pathology, she reads contemporary style through the deterritorializations of hyper capitalism, and the crushing lateness of an economic logic that insists on no alternative for society and no future for the planet. What results is a plea for the labor of mediation, and an insistence on dialectics as the central mechanism of art and culture. -- Alexander R. Galloway, author of Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital AgeImmediacy masterfully exposes the common core of many different problems and phenomena that we do not necessarily think of as related. The imperative of immediacy and its suffocating logic are the hallmarks of what Kornbluh calls "too late capitalism". Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis and art she makes a vivid, passionate, and most compelling case for mediation that creates the much-needed capacity to imaginatively break with the merely given. An extremely precious book that goes far beyond purely academic concerns. -- Alenka Zupancic, author of Let Them RotAnna Kornbluh simply nails it in this fearless, witty, and conceptually powerful indictment of contemporary capitalist culture's desire to annihilate negation-while also "negating the negation" by showing how things might be otherwise. A stunning and unignorable book. -- Sianne Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form

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Book SynopsisMiniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing, a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world. Originally published in 1984 (Johns Hopkins University Press), and now available in paperback for the first time, this highly original book draws on insights from semiotics and from psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist criticism. Addressing the relations of language to experience, the body to scale, and narratives to objects, Susan Stewart looks at the 'miniature' as a metaphor for interiority and at the 'gigantic' as an exaggeration of aspects of the exterior. In the final part of her essay Stewart examines the ways in which the 'souvenir' and the 'collection' are objects mediating experience in time and space.Trade Review"Stewart's work provides an oasis in contemporary criticism, a place where theory and poetry, systematic reflection and the essayistic plunge into particular cases, come together in a refreshing synthesis."—W. J. T. Mitchell"The historical richness, psychological insight and sociological subtlety of the analyses Stewart develops in On Longing are exemplary for cultural studies."—Barbara Herrnstein Smith

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Book SynopsisThe scapegoat becomes the Lamb of God; "the foolish genesis of blood-stained idols and the false gods of superstition, politics, and ideologiesare revealed.Trade Review[Girard's] methods of extrapolating to find cultural history behind myths, and of reading hidden verification through silence, are worthy enrichments of the critic's arsenal. -- John Yoder Religion and Literature [Girard's] methods of extrapolating to find cultural history behind myths, and of reading hidden verification through silence, are worthy enrichments of the critic's arsenal. -- John Yoder Religion and LiteratureTable of ContentsChapter 1. Guillaume de Machaut and the JewsChapter 2. Stereotypes of PersecutionChapter 3. What is a Myth?Chapter 4. Violence and MagicChapter 5. TeotihuacanChapter 6. Ases, Curets, and TitansChapter 7. The Crime of the GodsChapter 8. The Science of MythsChapter 9. The Key Words of the Gospel PassionChapter 10. That Only One Man Should DieChapter 11. The Beheading of Saint John the BaptistChapter 12. Peter's DenialChapter 13. The Demons of GerasaChapter 14. Satan Divided Against HimselfChapter 15. History and the ParacleteIndex

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Book SynopsisA culmination of de Man's thoughts on philosophy, politics and history. The book presents an inquiry into the relation of rhetoric, epistemology and aesthetics, that offers radical notions of materiality. These texts were written or delivered as lectures during the last years of Man's life.Table of ContentsIntroduction: allegories of reference; the epistemolgy of metaphor; Pascal's allegory of persuasion; phenomenality and materiality in Kant; sign and symbol in Hegel's "Aesthetics"; Hegel on the sublime; Kant's materialism; Kant and Schiller; the concept of irony; reply to Raymond Geuss.

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Book SynopsisSince the book's first publication in 1988, Alain Badiou's Being and Event has established itself of one of the most important and controversial works in contemporary philosophy and its author as one of the most influential thinkers of our time. Being and Event is a comprehensive statement of Badiou's philosophical project and sees him recast the European philosophical tradition from Plato onwards, via a series of analyses of such key figures as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Rousseau, and Lacan. He thus develops the basis for a history of philosophy rivalling those of Heidegger and Deleuze in its depth.Now publishing in the Bloomsbury Revelations series to mark 25 years since the book's first publication in French, Being and Event is an essential read for anyone interested in contemporary thought.Trade Review"Badiou's approach is unique, rigorous, and interesting..." - Jill Stauffer, Theory & Event"[Badiou] develops, in the central passages of the book, his central notions of situations and events, and devotes many, often arresting pages to elucidating the mechanism by which the latter productively disrupt the former. The structure of experience is not merely open to change, pregnant with contingent revolution. This is a nice model and Badiou deploys it across a broad front." - Hugh Lawson-Tancred for The Liberal"A variety of scholars, including philosophers, mathematicians, and intellectual historians, would do well to examine this volume and seek in it threads that warrant continued examination in an era of nanotechnology and political terrorism."- Francisca Goldsmith, Library Journal, April 1, 2006 * Library Journal *"Two things are new in this much-anticipated translationof Badiou: the language and the preface. Both are instructive. TranslatorOliver Feltham stayed 'as close as possible to Badiou's syntax' but 'at theprice of losing fluidity.' Thankfully, Badiou addresses such dissonance and hislarger philosophical goals in an indispensable new preface—without which the 37weighty meditations might be lost to the layperson. Recommended..." - Publishers Weekly * Publishers Weekly *Table of ContentsNew Author's Preface Translator's Preface Introduction Book I Being: Multiple and Void. Plato/Cantor 1. The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology 2. Plato 3. Theory of the Pure Multiple: paradoxes and critical decision Technical Note: the conventions of writing 4. The Void: Proper name of being 5. The Mark Æ 6. Aristotle Book II Being: Excess, State of the Situation, One/Multiple, Whole/Parts, or Î/Ì? 7. The Point of Excess 8. The State, or Metastructure, and the Typology of Being (normality, singularity, excrescence) 9. The State of the Historico-social Situation 10. Spinoza Book III Being: Nature and Infinity. Heidegger/Galileo 11. Nature: Poem or matheme? 12. The Ontological schema of Natural Multiples and the Non-existence of Nature 13. Infinity: the other, the rule and the Other 14. The Ontological Decision: 'There is some infinity in natural multiples' 15. Hegel Book IV The Event: History and Ultra-one 16. Evental Sites and Historical Situations 17. The Matheme of the Event 18. Being's Prohibition of the Event 19. MallarméBook V The Event: Intervention and Fidelity. Pascal/Choice; Hölderlin/Deduction 20. The Intervention: Illegal choice of a name for the event, logic of the two, temporal foundation 21. Pascal 22. The Form-multiple of Intervention: is there a being of choice? 23. Fidelity, Connection 24. Deduction as operator of ontological fidelity 25. HölderlinBook VI Quantity and Knowledge. The discernable (or constructible): Leibniz/Gödel 26. The concept of quantity and the impasse of ontology 27. Ontological destiny of orientation within thought 28. Constructivist thought and the knowledge of being 29. The folding of being and the sovereignty of language 30. LeibnizBook VII The Generic: indiscernible and truth. The event - P.J.Cohen 31. The Thought of the Generic and Being in Truth 32. Rousseau 33. The Matheme of the Indiscernible: P.J.Cohen's strategy 34. The existence of the indiscernible: the power of the namesBook VIII Forcing: Truth and the Subject. Beyond Lacan 35. Theory of the subject 36. Forcing: from the indiscernible to the undecidable 37. Descartes / LacanAnnexes Appendixes Notes Dictionary

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsPreface | ix Parenthetical References | xv Prolegomena | 1 1 A Brief History of Theosemiotic | 15 2 Signs, Selves, and Semiosis | 43 3 Love in a Universe of Chance | 75 4 Theology as Inquiry, Therapy, Praxis | 107 5 Communities of Interpretation | 155 6 Rules for Discernment | 192 7 On Prayer and the Spirit of Pragmatism | 227 Postlude: The Play of Musement | 259 Acknowledgments | 265 Notes | 269 Index | 301

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Book SynopsisScience fiction is filled with spacecraft. On Earth, actual rockets explode over Texas while others make their way to Mars. But what are spacecraft, and just what can they teach us about imagination, ecology, democracy, and the nature of objects? Why do certain spacecraft stand out in popular culture?If ever there were a spacecraft that could be detached from its context, sold as toys, turned into Disney rides, parodied, and flit around in everyone's headthe Millennium Falcon would be it. Springing from this infamous Star Wars vehicle, Spacecraft takes readers on an intergalactic journey through science fiction and speculative philosophy, revealing real-world political and ecological lessons along the way. In this book Timothy Morton shows how spacecraft are never mere flights of fancy.Trade ReviewAs I read Morton’s account of his childhood engagement with space flight, I thought of my own, when my personal imaginary met world history, though I certainly didn’t think in those terms at the time. In pursuing Morton’s childhood, I’m not attempting to shoehorn Spacecraft into old-fashioned biographical criticism whereby one seeks to explain a text by finding its secrets in the author’s autobiography. It’s part of the story he’s telling, one common to many children whose imagination has been fired with visions of space travel. It’s a story born of a specific cultural imaginary common among children of the last decades of the previous century … Spacecraft, then, is a vehicle in which Morton meditates on futurality. The Millennium Falcon, along with hyperspace, is at the center of this meditation. * 3 Quarks Daily *Morton is the punk rock sci-fi geek artist philosopher of Now. In prose as precise and freewheeling as one of their flights-of-fancy spacecraft, this book takes us on a journey of the mind through the hyperspace of pop-culture and high thought, because It Is All Connected Can’t You See? I started reading this and lost a day but gained a light year. * Max Borenstein, screenwriter of Godzilla vs. Kong *This is a brilliantly provoking book about why spacecraft are not at all the same as spaceships, and how imaginary objects can transform our thinking. Morton offers an exuberant, acute, compact, and luminously uplifting guide to the ways in which human society might become a whole lot more progressive in the coming centuries. * Nicholas Royle, author of Veering: A Theory of Literature *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Ships and Craft 1. Garbage 2. Winnings 3. Luck 4. Lounge 5. Hyperspace 6. Anyone Index

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Book SynopsisPart memoir, part clinical case, part theoretical investigation, this book searches for the body. Jamieson Webster traces conversion’s shifting meanings in an intimate account of her own conversion from patient to psychoanalyst, as well as her continual struggle to apprehend the complexities of the patient’s body.Trade Review[Conversion Disorder] masterfully integrates some pretty heavy psych theory into a surprisingly personal framework. Intellectually dense but definitively accessible, the book illustrates what it is that makes Jamieson unique. * VICE *Conversion Disorder accomplishes a formidable task, for it is a book that speaks to readers who are making their very first forays into the study of psychoanalysis and to those scholars and clinicians who have long been thinking about the field’s most foundational questions, including hysteria, anxiety, the body and the training of new analysts. * PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY *Being dragged into the orbit of Webster’s mind is like entering the Magic Mountain: you go in as a visitor, and stay as a patient. -- Tom Mcarthy, author of Remainder and Satin IslandJamieson Webster’s new work reflects upon that aspect of hysteria—or conversion disorder—that has eluded the attention of most commentators: the indifference of the subject at the very moment that the symptom is most clearly enacted. This point of departure allows Webster to think about what the body contains but also what traverses the body at a level that is prior to speech, that is perhaps the condition of speech itself. This incisive and unsettling meditation gives us a form of psychoanalytic writing that tracks the transference as bodily transformation and impasse. It is written in and for our times, when the courage and difficulty of the slow labor of psychoanalysis provides a perspective that eludes the certitudes of dogma and the exhilarations of false promises. Webster’s book asks us to stay within the domain of difficult exchange where what registers and shifts at the level of the body lets us know more about what we can expect of life and what our own living carries of the lives of others. Beautifully written, theoretically brave, and disturbing in all the best ways. -- Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, BerkeleyJamieson Webster’s Conversion Disorder approaches the unscalable wall of failed sublimation that marks the problem of intensities that rise and fall without apparent events. “Through the question of affect, the body insists.” This is not affect theory in the usual critical sense—affect here means being affected, speaking to the kind of excitability that communicates beyond the scene. There’s beautiful writing here, giving us an account of the affective impasses of the symptom. -- Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, author of Cruel OptimismAs ever, Jamieson Webster's writing is provocative and challenging, inviting us to question the comfort zones of contemporary discourse. In her unique style, she combines a meditation on her own psychoanalytic practice with an engagement with clinical and conceptual issues that are relevant to all of us: anxiety, the body, desire, dreams, and what it means to listen to others. And, for the first time in psychoanalytic literature, there is an appendix about the author's appendix! -- Darian Leader, psychoanalyst and author of The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and DepressionConversion Disorder is a wonderful book and a pleasure to read—each page sparkles with insight. What I like in this book is the frankness of the author’s self-presentation—with her doubts about her profession, her family background marked by separation, and her many readings of philosophers, all interesting, some surprising, like Bachelard, but always bringing something relevant. -- Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and SciencesTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Daybreak2. Music of the Future3. Father Can’t You See4. Never the Right Man5. I Am Not a Muse6. Hysterical Ruinology7. Coitus Interruptus8. Three Visions of Psychoanalysis9. How to Splinter / How to Burn10. Forged in Stones11. The Sliding of the Ring12. The Analyst’s AnalysisAcknowledgmentsAppendixNotesReferencesIndex

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Book SynopsisSophie Williamson is Programme Curator: Exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre, London. She has written for frieze, Art Monthly and Aesthetica, and was the first recipient of the Gasworks Curatorial Fellowship in 2016 as well as completing a research residency at SOMA, Mexico City, through which she built a body of research on cultural translation and molecular curation.

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to turn modernity's wheels. Wars are fought over it. Some communities are displaced by its extraction, so that others may reap its benefits. But despite its heated history, few will ever see oil on the ground. Shrouded within a labyrinth of oil fields, pipelines, and manufacturies, it tends to be known only through its magical effects: the thrill of the road, the euphoria of flight, and the metamorphic allure of everything from vinyl records to celluloid film and synthetic clothing. Michael Tondre shows how hydrocarbon became today's pre-eminent power. How did oil come to structure selfhood and social relations? And to what extent is oil not only a commercial product but a cultural onesomething shaped by widely imagined

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Book SynopsisFollowing the narratives explored in Hominescence, Incandescent and The Bough, Michel Serres continues and concludes his ''grand story'' of humanity and humanism. This book weaves together and condenses the overriding philosophical narratives of the previous books and reflects upon Serres'' own humanist theoretical system. With characteristic breadth and imagination, in telling the story of humanity, Serres also tells us why Orpheus lost his friend Euridyce; why Eve was really tempted in the garden of Eden, the history of Fetishism and how human being learned to think. The book offers a challenge to the reader: a challenge to live in the fullness of one''s humanity.

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Book SynopsisThe second volume of The Ethics of Narrative completes the project of bringing together nearly all of Hayden White''s uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, including articles, essays, and previously unpublished lectures. As in the first volume, volume 2 features White''s trenchant articulations of his influential theories, as well as his explorations of a wide range of ideas and authors at the frontiers of critical theory, literature, and historical studies. These include the concept of utopia in history, modernism and postmodernism, constructivism, the conceptualization of historical periods such as the Sixties and the Enlightenment, the representation of the Holocaust in scholarly and literary writing, as well as essays on Frank Kermode, Saul Friedländer, and Krzysztof Pomian.

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Book SynopsisPostcolonialism explores the political, social, and cultural effects of decolonization, continuing the anti-colonial deconstruction of western dominance. This Very Short Introduction discusses both the history and key debates of postcolonialism, and considers its importance as a means of changing the way we think about the world.Robert J. C. Young examines the key strategies that postcolonial thought has developed to engage with the impact of sometimes centuries of western political and cultural domination. Situating the discussion in a wide cultural and geographical context, he draws on examples such as the status of indigenous peoples, of those dispossessed from their land, Algerian rai music, and global social and ecological movements. In this new edition he also includes updated material on race, slavery, and postcolonial gender politics. Above all, Young argues that postcolonialism offers a political philosophy of activism that contests the current situation of global inequality, which in a new way continues the anti-colonial struggles of the past and enables us to decolonize our own lives in the present.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readableTable of Contents1: Subaltern knowledge 2: History and power, from below and above 3: Space and land 4: Hybridity 5: Postcolonial feminism 6: Globalization from a postcolonial perspective 7: Translation

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Book SynopsisA collection of writing by Stephen Greenblatt - one of the most influential practitioners of new historicism. It features important writings by Greenblatt on culture, Renaissance studies, and Shakespeare.Trade Review“As a founder of the ‘new historicism’, Stephen Greenblatt has done more than establish a critical school; he has invented a habit of mind for literary criticism, which is indispensable to the temperament of our times, and crucial to the culture of the past. This admirable anthology represents the subtle play of pleasure and instruction, embodied in writings that move effortlessly between wonder and wisdom.” Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University “What a tribute to a long and distinguished career.”"For three decades Stephen Greenblatt has been the most articulate, thoughtful, and daring voice in early modern studies. The breadth of his reading is vast, the connections he makes are unexpected and often revelatory, and his writing is, quite simply, brilliant. Most of all, his willingness to take chances has made him an exciting and uniquely provocative critic. It is wonderful to have these classic essays in a single collection; and especially to have the most ephemeral of the pieces, the exquisite meditations on his visits to China and Laos, easily available. This is a beautifully conceived, indispensable volume." Stephen Orgel, Stanford UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments. Introduction: Greenblatt and New Historicism. Part One: Culture and New Historicism. 1 Culture. 2 Towards a Poetics of Culture. 3 The Touch of the Real. Part Two: Renaissance Studies. 4 The Wound in the Wall. 5 Marvelous Possessions. Part Three: Shakespeare Studies. 6 Invisible Bullets. 7 The Improvisation of Power. 8 Shakespeare and the Exorcists. 9 Martial Law in the Land of Cocaigne. Part Four: Occasional Pieces. 10 Prologue to Hamlet in Purgatory. 11 China: Visiting Rites. 12 China: Visiting Rites (II). 13 Laos is Open. 14 Story-Telling. Stephen Greenblatt: A Bibliography (1965-2003), compiled by Gustavo P. Secchi. Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Tree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the present. Trees tower over us and yet fade into background. Their lifespan outstrips ours, and yet their wisdom remains inscrutable, treasured up in the heartwood. They serve us in many ways—as keel, lodgepole, and execution site—and yet to become human, we had to come down from their limbs. In this book Matthew Battles follows the tree's branches across art, poetry, and landscape, marking the edges of imagination with wildness and shadow. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewWhat astonishingly good writing! What a joy of a book. What a mind, this Matthew Battles. As he writes about trees, Battles could as well be describing his own wild mind: 'uncanny, possessed of depths and mystery, and feral in ways beyond my ken, . . . overspilling with dark abundance, . . . richly disruptive to one’s daily commute.' * Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change (2016) and Piano Tide: A Novel (2016) *Battles … shows how trees--and perhaps more importantly our relationships with trees--are incredibly complicated. Even dappling--that wonderful light that comes through a tree’s leaves--is not as simple as it seems … He makes clear that trees and their data have important stories to tell. That is if we let them. * PopMatters *Table of ContentsPart One: Feral Trees The Tree of Heaven In a Dappled World A branching Heuristic Part Two: Garden and Forest In the Tree Museum From Ailanthus to Apple The Charter of the Forests Part Three: A Dark Abundance The Tree and/in History With and Without Us Notes Index

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Book SynopsisOne of our foremost commentators examines the work of a broad range of English, Irish, and American poets. Helen Vendler's essays, book reviews, and occasional prose from the past two decades, taken together, are an eloquent plea for the centrality in humanistic study and modern culture of poetry's subversive, sustaining, and demanding legacy.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales—related in language that is sharp, lively, and free of jargon—is delightful evidence that Grimm scholarship can give pleasure to the general reader.”—Janet Adam Smith, New York Review of Books“Tatar takes detours into literary history here and into comparative anthropology there. What results is at once intelligently eclectic and refreshingly commonsensical, a thoughtful ramble through the dark childhood woods that haunt our adult dreams.”—Carl Maves, San Francisco Chronicle“A clear, imaginative and fascinating illumination of the stories we thought we knew.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review“For scholars, students, and general readers, Tatar’s book is a balanced, sensitive, and informative guide to the content and context of Grimms’ fairy tales.”—Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor

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Book SynopsisA timely book which makes an important intervention in contemporary feminist theory. It uses an original methodology in "stealing" four figures from ancient Greek texts and reinterpreting them using theories of sexual difference. It will be welcomed by students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.Trade Review"Now, with the publication, in an excellent translation, of Adriana Cavarero's In Spite of Plato, the important contribution of Italian feminist thought to a feminine "rewriting" of Western philosophy can begin to be fully appreciated, since in her path-breaking work on Plato, Cavarero delineates both the methodology and the subject-matter of a new philosophy ... [with] great elegance and insight ... In Spite of Plato introduces the English-speaking world to a major feminist thinker, whose ideas seem certain to engender heated discussion among philosophers as well as feminists." Times Literary Supplement "There is much challenge and interest in the four closely focused essays of which her book consists ... lively writing." Times Higher Education Supplement "Insightful glimpses into ancient Greek texts ... the most impressive thing about it ... is the completeness of the author's vision." The Heythrop Journal "This short, but rich and unsettling book eventually made a far more powerful impression on me than I had expected ... this is a book of unusual depth and originality." Women's Philosophy Review "With few translations available, Italian feminist philosophy has received little attention in the Anglophone world. This welcome addition helps redress that situation ... there is much in Cavarero's book which ought to make the non-feminist mainstream of philosophy sit up and take notice too." Radical Philosophy "This book is an important development in the theory of sexuate difference ... as all feminists live under the dying light of Plato's sun there is good reason to read 'In Spite of Plato'." Literature and TheologyTable of ContentsForeword by Rosi Braidotti. Translator's Note. Introduction. 1. Penelope. 2. The Maidservant from Thrace. 3. Demeter. 4. Diotima. Bibliography. Index.

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Book SynopsisExamines Lacan''s key seminar on sexual difference, knowledge, desire, and love.This collection offers the first sustained, in-depth commentary on Seminar XX, Encore, considered the cornerstone of Lacan''s work on the themes of sexual difference, knowledge, jouissance, and love. Although Seminar XX was originally popularized as Lacan''s treatise on feminine sexuality, these essays, by some of today''s foremost Lacanian scholars, go beyond feminine sexuality to address Lacan''s significant intertwining concern with the rupture between reality and the real produced by modern science, and the implications of this rupture for subjectivity, knowledge, jouissance, and the body.The essays clarify basic concepts, but for readers already familiar with Lacan they also offer sophisticated workings-through of the more challenging and obscure arguments in Encore-both by tracing their historical development across Lacan''s ?uvre and by demonstrating their relation to particular philosophical, theological, mathematical, and scientific concepts. They cover much of the terrain necessary for understanding sexual difference-not in terms of chromosomes, body parts, choice of sexual partner, or varieties of sexual practice-but in terms of one''s position vis-à-vis the Other and the kind of jouissance one is able to obtain. In so doing, they make significant interventions in the debates regarding sex, gender, and sexuality in feminist theory, philosophy, queer theory, and cultural studies.

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Book SynopsisExplains why the American cultural obsession with enjoying ourselves actually makes it more difficult to do so.Winner of the 2004 Gary Olson Award for best book in cultural theory presented by JAC Exploring the emergence of a societal imperative to enjoy ourselves, Todd McGowan builds on the work of such theorists as Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zðizûek, Joan Copjec, and Theresa Brennan to argue that we are in the midst of a large-scale transformation-a shift from a society oriented around prohibition (i.e., the notion that one cannot just do as one pleases) to one oriented around enjoyment. McGowan identifies many of the social ills of American culture today as symptoms of this transformation: the sense of disconnection, the increase in aggression and violence, widespread cynicism, political apathy, incivility, and loss of meaning. Discussing these various symptoms, he examines various texts from film, literature, popular culture, and everyday life, including Toni Morrison''s Paradise, Tony Kushner''s Angels in America, and such films as Dead Poets Society and Trigger Effect. Paradoxically, The End of Dissatisfaction? shows how the American cultural obsession with enjoying ourselves actually makes it more difficult to do so.

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Book SynopsisIn Bodies That Matter, renowned theorist and philosopher Judith Butler argues that theories of gender need to return to the most material dimension of sex and sexuality: the body. Butler offers a brilliant reworking of the body, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the matter of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain sex from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She clarifies the notion of performativity introduced in Gender Trouble and via bold readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud explores the meaning of a citational politics. She also draws on documentary and literature with compelling interpretations of the film Paris is Burning, Nella Larsen's Passing, and short stories by Willa Cather.Trade Review"As a philosopher of gender [Judith Butler] is unparalleled." – Village Voice"Butler gives us a new way to think about the materiality of the body in the discursive performity operative in the materialization of sex. Following a common move in postmodern feminism, Butler sets out to demolish the sex/gender distinction that has formed the mainstay of the de Beauvorian and radical feminism's notion that gender, as a cultural construction, could be critiqued and politicized against the givenness of the body's biological sex. . . .What is new in Bodies That Matter is Butler's attempt to write more directly about race." – Signs"Extending the brilliant style of interrogation that made her 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity a landmark of gender theory/queer theory, Butler here continues to refine our understandings of the complexly performative character of sexuality and gender and to trouble our assumptions about the inherent subversiveness of dissident sexualities. . . . indispensable reading across the wide range of concerns that queer theory is currently addressing." – Artforum"What the implications/limitations of 'sexing' are and how the process works comprise the content of this strikingly perceptive book. . . . Butler has written a most significant and provocative work that addresses issues of immediate social concern." – The Boston Book Review "A brilliant and original analysis." – Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University, USA"...a classic." – Elizabeth GroszTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgements Part 1: 1. Bodies that Matter 2. The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary 3. Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex 4. Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion Part 2: 5. 'Dangerous Crossing': Willa Cather's Masculine Names 6. Queering, Passing: Nella Larsen Rewrites Psychoanalysis 7. Arguing with the Real 8. Critically Queer. Notes. Index

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Book SynopsisMore comprehensive and up-to-date than ever before.

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Book Synopsis

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