Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisThe first modernized and fully annotated edition of Puttenham's 1589 text.Trade ReviewThe first response to this critical edition of Puttenham's Art of English Poesy ought to be gratitude. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn, both of whom have made substantial scholarly contributions to a rhetorical understanding of early modern literature, have done all students, teachers, and scholars of early modern English literature a great service. This is now the best, most readily available edition of Puttenham’s text. If this new edition means that Puttenham’s Art is taught more often, that will be a good thing. Students will now more likely be examining an art of English poetry and not just a sociology of it in the wonderful prose argument in this historicized, yet aesthetically aware edition of the text. We should exhibit our gratitude by ordering it for our libraries and requiring it for our classes. -- Scott Crider * Sixteenth Century Journal *This fine edition of George Puttenham's Art of English Poesie, by Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn, presents a modernized, extensively glossed, and annotated text. The edition also provides a long, full, and often brilliant introduction, which sketches Puttenham’s biography, rehearses the evidence for his authorship of the Art, describes the cultural materials on which the book draws, analyzes its poetics, and discusses it as an embodiment of its author’s ambitions. -- William A. Oram * Modern Philology *Whigham and Rebhorn have undertaken an enormous task in annotating and modernizing such a difficult text, written in frequently complex prose and rife with obscure and sometimes concealed references.... Their readable, fully annotated version of Puttenham's treatise, in consultation with a facsimile of the 1589 text, will be extremely useful to students and seasoned literary critics. -- Stephen B. Dobranski * Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Documentary Life 2. Puttenham's Writings 3. The Authorship of the Art 4. Puttenham’s Archive 5. Poetics in the Art 6. Puttenham’s Ambitions 7. Editorial Conventions Bibliography Book 1 Book 2 Book 3 The "Table" The uncorrected state of sig. Ee2r Emendations Longer Notes Name Glossary Word Glossary Index to First Lines of Illustrative Quotations General Index

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Book SynopsisExplores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This work reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention.Trade Review"A series of fascinating, and frequently uncanny, meditations."--Year's Work in English Studies. "Authoritative analysis of the creative act... The translator's introduction is as excellent as the translation itself."--Library Journal.

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Book SynopsisIn Surprised by Sound, Roi Tartakovsky uncovers the mechanics of rhyme, revealing how and why it remains a vital part of poetry with connections to large questions about poetic freedom, cognitive and psychoanalytic theories, and the accidental aspects of language.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"At the end of the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologiae, an ambitious compendium of all orthodox philosophical and theological knowledge about the world. Seven hundred years later, science fiction author Stanislaw Lem writes his Summa Technologiae, an equally ambitious but unorthodox investigation into the perplexities and enigmas of humanity and its relationship to an equally enigmatic world in which it finds itself embedded. In this work Lem shows us science fiction as a method of inquiry, one that renders the future as tenuous as the past, with a wavering, ‘phantomatic’ present always at hand." —Eugene Thacker, author of After Life"Summa is a fantasia that follows certain lines of speculative thought as far as Lem can take them. Lem’s sober materialism may seem dehumanizing, but he brings back to the frontier a question that has plagued civilization since the beginning, and whose shifting, always insufficient answers have always signaled revolutions in culture: what is it to be human?" —Los Angeles Review of Books "With Summa Technologiae, his masterwork of non-fiction which has been translated into English for the first time, Lem has taken Western civilisation for a spin—with spectacular consequences. " —New ScientistTable of ContentsContents Translator’s Introduction. Evolution May Be Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts, but It’s Not All That Great: On Lem’s Summa Technnologiae Joanna ZylinskaSumma Technologie1. Dilemmas2. Two EvolutionsSimilaritiesDifferencesThe First CauseSeveral Naïve Questions3. Civilizations in the UniverseThe Formulation of the ProblemThe Formulation of the MethodThe Statistics of Civilizations in the UniverseA Catastrophic Theory of the UniverseA Metatheory of MiraclesMan’s UniquenessIntelligence: An Cccident or a Necessity?HypothesesVotum SeparatumFuture Prospects 4. IntelectronicsReturn to EarthA Megabyte BombThe Big GameScientific MythsThe Intelligence AmplifierThe Black BoxThe Morality of HomeostatsThe Dangers of ElectrocracyCybernetics and SociologyBelief and InformationExperimental MetaphysicsThe Beliefs of Electric BrainsThe Ghost in the MachineThe Trouble with Information Doubts and Antinomies5. Prolegomena to OmnipotenceBefore ChaosChaos and OrderScylla and Charybdis: On RestraintThe Silence of the DesignerMethodological Madness A New Linnaeus: About SystematicsModels and RealityPlagiarism and Creation On Imitology6. PhantomologyThe Fundamentals of PhantomaticsThe Phantomatic MachinePeripheral and Central PhantomaticsThe Limits of PhantomaticsCerebromaticsTeletaxy and PhantoplicationPersonality and Information7. The Creation of WorldsInformation FarmingLinguistic EngineeringThe Engineering of TranscendenceCosmogonic Engineering8. A Lampoon of EvolutionThe Reconstruction of the SpeciesConstructing LifeConstructing DeathConstructing ConsciousnessError-based ConstructsBionics and BiocyberneticsIn the Eyes of the DesignerReconstructing Man CyborgizationThe Autoevolutionary MachineExtrasensory PhenomenaConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisPeculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with an earlier affective turn that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. It offers a new way of thinking through affect historically and dialectically, drawing attention to repeating patterns and problems in affect theory's history.Table of ContentsNotes on Orthography and Translation | vii Introduction | 1 1 Eighteenth-Century Opera and the Mimetic Affektenlehre | 29 2 Comic Opera: Mimesis Exploded | 61 3 “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” and Other Dilemmas of Instrumental Music | 86 4 The Attunement Affektenlehre | 108 Coda: Affect after the Affektenlehre | 131 Acknowledgments | 143 Bibliography | 147 Index | 161

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Book SynopsisHowever divergent their analyses may be in other ways, some prominent anti-capitalist critics have remained critical of contemporary debates over reparative justice for groups historically oppressed and marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexual identity, sexual preference, and/or ability, arguing that the most these struggles can hope to produce is a more diversity-friendly capital. Meanwhile, scholars of gender and sexuality as well as race and ethnic studies maintain that, by elevating the socioeconomic above other logics of domination, anti-capitalist thought fails to acknowledge specific forms and experiences of subjugation. The thinkers and activists who appear in Totality Inside Out reject this divisive logic altogether. Instead, they aim for a more expansive analysis of our contemporary moment to uncover connected sites of political struggle over racial and economic justice, materialist feminist and queer critique, climate change, and aesthetic value. The re-imagined aTable of ContentsIntroduction: Totality Inside Out Kevin Floyd, with Brent Ryan Bellamy, Sarah Brouillette, Sarika Chandra, Chris Chen, and Jen Hedler Phillis | 1 1 Let the Dead Bury the Dead: Race, Gender, and Class Composition in the U.S. after 1965 Tim Kreiner | 29 2 (Un)making Value: Reading Social Reproduction through the Question of Totality Marina Vishmidt and Zoe Sutherland | 67 3 Tripartheid: How Global White Supremacy Triumphs through Neoliberalism Arthur Scarritt | 91 4 Remapping the Race/Class Problematic Sarika Chandra and Chris Chen | 135 5 On Artistic Autonomy as a Bourgeois Fetish Sarah Brouillette and Joshua Clover | 192 6 Ecology with Totality: The Case of Morton’s Hyperobjects and Klein’s This Changes Everything Brent Ryan Bellamy | 211 Acknowledgments | 237 List of Contributors | 239 Index | 243

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Book SynopsisOptical Impersonality will appeal to scholars and advanced students of modernist literature and visual culture and to those interested in the intersections of art, literature, science, and technology.Trade ReviewWalter's book certainly and productively opens up a rethinking of optical subjectivity, and offers engaging ways of critiquing the relationship between textual and imagistic form. British Society for Literature and Science Christina Walter makes clear that hers is an account of impersonality whose critical stakes turn on their difference from previous scholarship on the topic. Isis Walter displays her "individual talent," which lies in showing not just how writers like Eliot manipulate impersonality toward their own ends, but also how critics' misinterpretations of these maneuvers have led to an impoverished model of impersonal existence. Journal of Modern LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Eye Don't See: Embodied Vision, Ontology, and Modernist ImpersonalityThe Visual Vernacular, Imagetextuality, and Modernism'sOptical UnconsciousThe Modern Image and Impersonality's Critique of Identity1. A Protomodern Picture Impersonality: Walter Pater and Michael Field's VisionVision, Anders-streben, and Performance in The RenaissancePater contra Mérimée: Toward an Imperfect ImpersonalityThe Visual Field(s): Framing the Politics of Paterian Impersonality2. Images of Incoherence: The Visual Body of H.D. ImpersonalisteMixing an Imagist Pigment: Modern Art, Science, and Materiality in Sea Garden"Sign-posting" Impersonality in Notes on Thought and VisionClose Up and Impersonal: Subjectivity through the Camera Lens and the Talking CureBorderline's Aesthetic of Identity Dis-order3. Getting Impersonal: Body Politics and Mina Loy's "Anti-Thesis of Self-Expression"Feminism and Faces: Staving Off the Threat of Impersonal NegationOptical Experiments and a Poetics "Beyond the Personal""Insel in the Air": Weighing the Politics of Impersonality4. D. H. Lawrence's Impersonal Imperative: Vision, Bodies, and theRecovery of Identity"Chaos Lit Up by Visions": Poetic Attention and Its Material LimitsFrom Impersonality to "Creative Identity": A Critical Sleight of HandVisual Evolution and Identitarian Futurity in Lady Chatterley's Lover5. Managing the "Feeling into Which We Cannot Peer": T. S. Eliot'sImpersonal Matters"New and Wonderful Visions": The Science of Eliot's ImpersonalityThe Waste and Repair Land: Impersonality, but with GenderRedeeming the Still "Unread Vision": The Family Reunion's Dramatic BodiesAfterword: Modernist Futurity: The "Creative Contagion" of Impersonality and AffectA Shared Visual Vernacular: Affect Theory's ImpersonalityOpen Ended: Affecting Impersonality, Impersonalizing AffectNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHow does the work of influential theorist Bruno Latour offer a fresh angle on the practices and purposes of the humanities?In recent years, defenses of the humanities have tended to argue along predictable lines: the humanities foster empathy, the humanities encourage critical thinking, the humanities offer a counterweight to the cold calculations of the natural and social sciences. The essays in Latour and the Humanities take a different approach. Exploring the relevance of theorist Bruno Latour's work, they argue for attachments and entanglements between the humanities and the sciences while looking closely at the interests, institutions, and intellectual projects that shape the humanities within and beyond the university. The collection, which is written by a group of highly distinguished scholars from around the world, is divided into two sections. In the first part, authors engage in depth with Latour's work while also rethinking the ties between the humanities and the sciences. ETable of ContentsIntroduction, by Rita FelskiI. What Do the Humanities Do?1. Stephen Muecke, An Ecology of Institutions: Recomposing the Humanities 002. Antoine Hennion, From ANT to Pragmatism: A Journey with Bruno Latour at the CSI 003. Graham Harman, Demodernizing the Humanities with Latour4. Heather Love, Care, Concern, and the Ethics of Description5. Anders Blok and Casper Bruun Jensen, Redistributing Critique6. Steven Connor, Decomposing the Humanities7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Humanities in the Anthropocene: The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable8. Yves Citton, Fictional Attachments and Literary Weavings in the Anthropocene9. Simon During, Are the Humanities Modern?10. Nigel Thrift, The University of LifeII. Latour and the Disciplines11. David J. Alworth, Critique, Modernity, Society, Agency: Matters of Concern in Literary Studies12. Claudia Breger, Cinematic Assemblies: Latour and Film Studies13. Michael Witmore, Latour, the Digital Humanities, and the Divided Kingdom of Knowledge14. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Anthropotheology: Latour Speaking Religiously15. Gerard de Vries, Politics Is a "Mode of Existence": Why Political Theorists Should Leave Hobbes for Montesquieu 16. Patrice Maniglier, Art as Fiction: Can Latour's Ontology of Art Be Ratified by Art Lovers? (An Exercise in Anthropological Diplomacy17. Francis Halsall, Actor-Network Aesthetics: The Conceptual Rhymes of Bruno Latour and Contemporary ArtAfterwordLife among Conceptual Characters, by Bruno LatourContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisWhat might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature?If inanimate objects such as novels or poems have no mental properties of their own, then why do we talk about them as if they do? Why do we perceive the minds of characters, narrators, and speakers as if they were comparable to our own? In Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind, Joshua Gang offers a radical new approach to these questions, which are among the most challenging philosophical problems faced by literary study today. Recent cognitive criticism has tried to answer these questions by looking for similarities and analogies between literary form and the processes of the brain. In contrast, Gang turns to one of the twentieth century's most infamous psychological doctrines: behaviorism. Beginning in 1913, a range of psychologists and philosophersincluding John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Gilbert Ryleargued that many of the things we talk about as mental phenomena aren't at all intTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Literary Experience and the Concept of Mind1. Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading2. Inner Sights3. Mental Acts4. The Form of ThoughtCoda. Observations and/or ReflectionsNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisIn Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the five-hundred year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and an effect of power and open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.Trade Review“In this theoretically sophisticated and historically rigorous book, Christopher Chitty builds a compelling argument for an approach to the history of sexuality that is embedded in property relations, economic crises, and political institutions. The result is a modernized History of Sexuality that speaks to contemporary concerns with increasing forms of precarity. A work ahead of its time, Sexual Hegemony makes an uncannily prescient and powerful intervention. Its importance and brilliance cannot be overstated.” -- Petrus Liu, author of * Queer Marxism in Two Chinas *“[Sexual Hegemony] is extraordinary, even singular—and my hope is that it will change the way we think about sexuality and anticapitalist struggle alike.” -- Christopher Nealon, from the Introduction"Both a labor of love and a collaboration across the frontier of death, Sexual Hegemony is one of that desire’s most uniquely affecting expressions." -- Josephine Livingstone * The New Republic *“Sexual Hegemony is not a theory of sexuality but a history of it. It’s a history of the people who were left out of previous histories and who more closely resemble the same people left out of the modern, mainstream gay and lesbian movement…. In Chitty’s history, queerness is criminality and vice versa, and until we undo the stigmatization of those working against the regime of property and its armed wing, the state, our gender and sexuality will be, in Chitty’s phrase, only ‘partially emancipated.’… The implications of Chitty’s history are not just for those who study the broad movements of capitalism but also those who live within it now.” -- Adam Fales * Homintern *“Homosexuality is a modern invention, and 150 years later, we’re still arguing about what it means and where it came from, and whether it was invented at all. It is, to quote Andrew Holleran, ‘like a boarding school in which there are no vacations.’ Chitty invites us to burn the boarding school down, and in the ashes, with history as our guide, to build something for everyone.” -- Ben Miller * The Baffler *“Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony, an ambitious retelling of the history of capitalism through the politics of gay sex...suggests new substantive and methodological directions for the history of homosexuality—directions that could transform the meaning of queer politics in our moment.” -- Kate Redburn * Dissent Magazine *"Sexual Hegemony is thought provoking, theoretically intricate, and wide-ranging. Likely to become a significant text for advanced students and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, history, and philosophy. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." -- L. Hengehold * Choice *“Max Fox has done an excellent job in bringing together Chitty’s work and editing the texts into a coherent volume that (I have no doubt) will go down as a classic in queer history and political theory.” -- Matthew J. Cull * Women, Gender & Research *“Sexual Hegemony . . . is a book clearly shaped by the financial crisis of 2008, the failures of neoliberalism, and the supposed successes of gay rights activism in much of the developed world. . . . His work stands as an incitement for scholars to probe the entanglements of sexuality and capital in the past and in our own rapidly changing world.” -- Samuel Clowes Huneke * Journal of Social History *“Chitty’s passion and engagement are evident on every page. Few academic works attest so strongly to a young scholar’s desire to make sense of the world in all its complexity. It is fortunate that Chitty wrote as much as he did and that Max Fox and others made sure that what he wrote made it into print.” -- Ian Frederick Moulton * Journal of the History of Sexuality *“Chitty’s work opens many possibilities for postcolonial, decolonial and geographically grounded analysis. As a researcher of Chinese queer politics, Chitty provides a way of thinking about sexuality within East Asia’s long tradition of intersovereign trades, market civilization and proletarianization. . . . Sexual Hegemony will rock the world of Marxism as well as queer theory in the Anglophone academia.” -- Ian L Tian * Sexualities *“Among Sexual Hegemony’s most striking interventions is Chitty’s insistence (one supported by a rich historical archive) that heterosexism is a tool of class struggle rather than a prejudice rooted in morality or religion. . . . SexualHegemony takes no easy guesses at the shape future sexual solidarities will take. Instead, it offers a usable past that helps us think better about what it might look like to build them.” -- Heather Berg * GLQ *Table of ContentsForeword / Max Fox vii Introduction / Christopher Nealon 1 Part I: Sexual Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism 1. Homosexuality and Capitalism 21 2. Sodomy and the Government of Cities 42 3. Sexual Hegemony and the Capitalist World System 73 4. Homosexuality and Bourgeois Hegemony 106 Part II. Homosexuality and the Desire for History 5. Historicizing the History of Sexuality 141 6. Homosexuality as a Category of Bourgeois Society 167 Notes 193 Index 217

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Book SynopsisIn Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines withTrade Review“Drawing from black anticolonial thought and study, black poetics, music, and expressive arts, Katherine McKittrick's Dear Science and Other Stories is an experiment in materializing black method and black wonder in stories of black livingness and relation, in spite of conditions of racial colonial violence and antiblack science of maps, algorithms, and life chances. It insists on other sensoria, consciousness, creation, and knowing—a black sense of place.” -- Lisa Lowe, author of * The Intimacies of Four Continents *“Freedom is a place made through rehearsals of thought and human-environment inter-action. Katherine McKittrick's stories show geography in the making through their persistent refusal to recite empirics of suffering and catastrophe. What a gift to travel these surprising, complex paths through rage toward life. I am grateful for this book.” -- Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of * Change Everything! Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition *"In this innovative, rich work, Katherine McKittrick works tirelessly to make us aware of how Black thought is a form of knowledge production. McKittrick uses a fascinating essay structure — stories and letters to science — to discuss jazz, computer science, poetry, Black history, and more. It contains one of the most powerful analyses of scientific racism that I’ve read in recent times, arguing that sometimes our efforts to articulate race and racism as social phenomena actually reinforce the idea that they are somehow biological in nature." -- Chanda Prescod-Weinstein * Bookriot *"McKittrick’s prose is beautiful and timely, and she demonstrates that there is a cost to reducing Black life to any description without deep thought. Her readers—no matter their relationship to science—are pressed to question what we know, how we know, and who we know. Dear Science urges us to be cautious of a single narrative, to articulate our thoughts with exacting labor, and it provides insight into how we can create a universe beyond Black suffering." -- Edna Bonhomme * The Baffler *"Reading the richly poetic and sonically-driven Dear Science, we can see the many complex projects and thoughts of McKittrick’s work. The stories are citational observations and calls for a theory and method of storytelling and reading practice as a way to undo discipline (41), a reimagination of the academic text as a genre and incomplete visions of defining ‘science’. The text itself is artfully arranged, breaking from the conventional academic structure. . . ." -- Anna Nguyen * LSE Review of Books *"For those of us working inside, along, and through environmental studies, the environmental humanities, science studies, and all disciplines in between, Dear Science challenges us to confront the stories that our fields of study tell us about ourselves and the world around us and to consider what is possible if we center Black ways of knowing to imagine more equitable futures." -- Erin Gilbert and Leah Rubinsky * ISLE *"You are my black feminist answer to Borges and his short story, 'On Rigor in Science.' In the rigor and incisiveness of your stories you challenge and dismantle singular, unified, totalizing representations, narratives of classification and ways of knowing and being that discipline and punish, stifle, crush and suffocate. In their stead, you offer and practice relationality, generative collaborative praxis, black creative consciousness, method, and life. Thank you." -- Hazel Carby * Society and Space *"Dear Science is like no other scholarly book." -- Dina Georgis * Society and Space *"Dear Science and Other Stories is a one-of-a-kind,theoretical-practical-creative work that promises to intrigue, inspire, and question the reader, urging them toward new relational ways of thinking and living. It is a wonderful book, which encourages the reader to step out of their comfort zone and to explore interdisciplinary and cross-theory-making and art, in and through Black creativity and ‘livingness’, storytelling, and ways of knowing." -- Lena Anggren * Feminist Studies Association *"Katherine McKittrick's book about Black livingness and Black knowledge is a mind-altering and world-bending read that rarely leaves my side. I turn to it constantly, as a way to recognize the world that the Black studies tradition is constantly building. . . . A must-read for anyone interested in finding alternative ways of being and knowing rooted in abolition." -- Orlando Serrano * Smithsonian Magazine *"Refreshingly, Dear Science . . . [shows] what science misses in trying to define Black spiritual and corporeal existence. McKittrick urges Black studies thinkers to resist the hold of biocentric knowledge and to imagine ways of being and thinking that exist beyond and beside it." -- Cera Smith * The Black Scholar *"Dear Science is generous and expansive—disrupting normative disciplinary approaches often rehearsed in academic writing. It demands careful engagement and deep study. . . . Reading this book will, borrowing from Fanon, cause your heart to make your head swim." -- Jade How and Gada Mahrouse * Lateral *"Each exquisite sentence of Dear Science is comprised of layers of meaning. Still, McKittrick thought carefully about the importance of readability. . . . On each page of Dear Science, readers will find a reminder that Black (livingness) is beautiful, complex, and brilliant." -- Chanda Prescod-Weinstein * Catalyst *"Though McKittrick’s short book may seem humble, it offers a wide-ranging examination of both racist and liberatory methodologies. . . . To anyone working within Western academia, especially to those invested in anti-racist, feminist, and anti-colonial study, this book provides teachings, guidance, and support for re-examining one’s critical practices so they may better serve and imagine non-colonial futures." -- Tavleen Purewal * Letters in Canada *"By reading in and with black studies, Dear Science is a discipline-shattering love letter to the possibilities imbued in the black imagination." -- Ladipo Famodu & Temitope Famodu * Antipode *"McKittrick’s work, and Black Studies more broadly, are offering us a home, a safe space, outside, which is empowering and life-affirming and generous. I want us to applaud McKittrick’s work. I want us to celebrate and cherish and protect this place, outside, and to get lost in it." -- Lioba Hirsch * Antipode *Table of ContentsHe Liked to Say that This Love was the Result of a Clinical Error ix Curiosities (My Heart Makes My Head Swim) 1 Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor) 14 The Smallest Cell Remembers a Sound 35 Consciousness (Feeling like, Feeling like This) 58 Something That Exceeds All Efforts to Definitively Pin It Down 71 No Place, Unknown, Undetermined 75 Notes 79 Black Ecologies. Coral Cities. Catch a Wave 83 Charmaine's Wire 87 Polycarbonate, Aluminum (Gold), and Lacquer 91 Black Children 95 Telephone Listing 99 Failure (My Head Was Full of Misty Fumes of Doubt) 103 The Kick Drum Is the Fault 122 (Zong) Bad Made Measure 125 I Got Life/Rebellion Invention Groove 151 (I Entered the Lists) 168 Dear Science 186 Notes and Reminders 189 Storytellers 193 Diegeses and Bearings 211

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Book SynopsisBrian Russell Roberts dispels continental-centric US national mythologies to advance an alternative image of the United States as an archipelagic nation to better reflect its claims to archipelagoes in the Pacific and Caribbean.Trade Review“Brian Russell Roberts's astonishing new paradigm recasts the United States as a nation of islands and oceans, engaging Benoit Mandelbrot (among others) to elucidate the archipelagic fractals of the Pacific and the Caribbean. Examining works ranging from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to Florence Frisbie's Miss Ulysses from Puka-Puka to the visual arts by Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, this detail-rich study is eye-opening in every way. Essential reading for all Americanists.” -- Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University“Offering an important new theoretical way of understanding American literature and culture, Brian Russell Roberts suggests how ‘archipelagic thinking’ can induce us to reconceive American literary culture as something other than a landlocked affair. Borderwaters should resonate widely among Americanists across a broad range of disciplinary fields and is certain to be widely influential.” -- Paul Giles, author of * Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture *"The extraordinary contribution of Brian Russell Roberts’ recent book is not only to the advancement of the field of a specifically archipelagic American Studies which sits in ready conversation with Atlantic and Pacific discourse and study and in whose conception he has been for the last decade an innovator, but that it sets up the possibility for a renewal of dialogue within interdisciplinary global studies and world literary studies from the early modern to the present, with the archipelagic as dominant paradigm; the reach of this book is far greater than the field of contemporary American Studies in which it most obviously finds a home." -- Heather H. Yeung * New Global Studies *"This monograph marries the interdisciplinarity of American studies to that of the environmental humanities. Readers will find themselves parsing heady engagements with geology, marine biology, fractal geometry, international maritime law, philosophy, the visual arts, and literature. . . . Roberts often dredges from the archipelagic archives potent rereadings from the terraqueous sphere of American studies." -- Jason Frydman * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Archipelagic Thinking and the Borderwaters: A US-Eccentric Vision 1 1. Interlapping Continents and Archipelagoes of American Studies 45 2. Archipelagic Diaspora and Geographic Form 82 3. Borderwaters and Geometries of Being Amid 111 4. Fractal Temporality on Vulnerable Foreshores 159 5. Spiraling Futures of the Archipelagic States of America 202 Conclusion. Distant Reading the Archipelagic Gyre: Digital Humanities Archipelagoes 248 Notes 275 Bibliography 323 Index 359

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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 SynopsisLong awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman's Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity-a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of the queer, the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education's response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan's ab-sens and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, AlmodÓvar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory's engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing.Trade Review"This intervention is provocative in its paradoxes. . . . Bad Education thus poses a stunning criticism of all that ‘is’ by commanding a radical (re)turn to a deeply radical Lacan." -- Dylan Lackey * Invisible Culture *"Bad Education expands on Edelman’s widely influential claims in No Future, clarifying his framework and answering his critics. . . . Edelman doubles down on abstraction while engaging deeply with the work of recent Afro-pessimist critics. Refusing the charge that by pitching his argument at the level of structure rather than social reality he has disregarded race, Edelman instead argues that Blackness, like queerness, should be apprehended primarily as structure." -- Heather Love * Critical Inquiry *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xxi Introduction. Nothing Ventured: Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and Afropessimism 1 1. Learning Nothing: Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education 45 2. Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint 93 3. Funny/Peculiar/Queer: Michael Haneke’s Aesthetic Education 123 4. There Is No Freedom to Enjoy: Harriet Jacobs’s Negativity 162 Coda: Nothing Gained: Irony, Incest, Indiscernibility 207 Notes 261 Bibliography 317 Index 333

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Book SynopsisIn this elegant and personal new work, Michael P. Steinberg reflects on the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics—of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law. Modern renderings of the story of Moses, from Michelangelo to Spinoza to Freud to Schoenberg to Derrida, have seized on the story's ambivalences, its critical and self-critical power. These literal returns form the first level of the afterlife of Moses. They spin a persistent critical and self-critical thread of European and transatlantic art and argument. And they enable the second strand of Steinberg's argument, namely the depersonalization of the Moses and Exodus story, its evolving abstraction and modulation into a varied modern history of political beginnings. Beginnings, as distinct from origins, are human and historical, writes Steinberg. Political constitutions, as a form of beginning, imply the eventuality of their own renewals and their own reconstitutions. Motivated in part by recent reactionary insurgencies in the US, Europe, and Israel, this astute work of intellectual history posits the critique of myths of origin as a key principle of democratic government, affect, and citizenship, of their endurance as well as their fragility. Trade Review"Personal in this book in all the right ways, Michael Steinberg reaches the human and universal by turning over the German-Jewish past and connecting it to contemporary politics."—Samuel Moyn, Yale University"Steinberg's application of Said's distinction between 'origins' and 'beginnings' to the Moses myth of political founding is a tour de force powerful enough to force a rethinking much beyond Freud or Assmann."—Omri Boehm, The New School for Social ResearchTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction 1. Moses and Modernism 2. Under Lincoln's Eyes 3. Hannah Arendt Crosses the Atlantic 4. Yaron Ezrahi: Democracy and the Post-Epic Nation

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Book SynopsisWhat is critique? How is it used and abused? At a moment when popular discourse is saturated with voices confronting each other about not being critical enough, while academic discourses proclaim to have moved past critique, this provocative book reawakens the foundational question of what 'critique' is in the first place. Roy Ben-Shai inspects critique as an orientation of critical thinking, probing its structures and assumptions, its limits and its risks, its history and its possibilities. The book is a journey through a landscape of ideas, images, and texts from diverse sources—theological, psychological, etymological, and artistic, but mainly across the history of philosophy, from Plato and Saint Augustine, through Kant and Hegel, Marx and Heidegger, up to contemporary critical theory. Along the way, Ben-Shai invites the reader to examine their own orientation of thought, even at the moment of reading the book; to question popular discourse; and to revisit the philosophical canon, revealing affinities among often antagonistic traditions, such as Catholicism and Marxism. Most importantly, Critique of Critique sets the ground for an examination of alternative orientations of critical thinking, other ways of inhabiting and grasping the world.Trade Review"Ben-Shai exposes the rhizomatic orientations of critique, its multiple topologies, chronologies, positionalities, perversions and betrayals. A masterful analysis of where we are and what we are doing when we engage in critique."—Peg Birmingham, DePaul University"This is one hell of a book—a decisive intervention in the inheritance of the critical theory tradition. Political philosophers and political theorists will want to read this, as will everyone concerned with criticism in film and the arts today."—Anne O'Byrne, Stony Brook University"What does it mean to orient ourselves critically rather than in some other way? In answering this question Ben-Shai brilliantly shows how to critically circumscribe the limits of critique."—Andrew Cutrofello, Loyola University Chicago"Ben-Shai orients, in a remarkable way, the critical theory that emerged in particular from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno'sDialectic of Enlightenment(1944).... Valuable for those interested in social philosophy and critical theory. Highly recommended."—J. C. Swindal, CHOICE"If critique is the act of pointing, Ben-Shai points both at the hand of the finger that is pointing and its environment. The book aims to bring the structural premises and essential features of critique into view to limit its scope, which Ben-Shai fears has become relentlessly repetitious and blind to its own repetitions."—O. L. Silverman, Theory & EventTable of ContentsIntroduction: Critique as Orientation Overture 1. Chapter 1: Critique of the Spectacle or the Spectacle of Critique 2. Chapter 2: Critique of Power or the Power of Critique 3. Chapter 3: Critique of Injustice or the Injustice of Critique 4. Chapter 4: Critique of External Authority or the External Authority of Critique 5. Chapter 5: Moral Ontologies of Critique 6. Chapter 6: Political Ontologies of Critique 7. Chapter 7: Topologies of Critique 8. Chapter 8: Chronologies of Critique Conclusion: Critique and Its Betrayals.

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Book SynopsisConcentrating on W. H. Auden's work from the late 1930s, when he seeks to understand the poet's responsibility in the face of a triumphant fascism, to the late 1950s, when he discerns an irreconcilable "divorce" between poetry and history in light of industrialized murder, this startling new study reveals the intensity of the poet's struggles with the meanings of history. Through meticulous readings, significant archival findings, and critical reflection, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb presents a new image and understanding of Auden's achievement and reveals how his version of modernism illuminates urgent contemporary issues and theoretical paradigms: from the meaning of marriage equality to the persistence of fascism; from critical theory to psychoanalysis; from precarity to postcolonial studies. "The muse does not like being forced to choose between Agit-prop and Mallarmé," Auden writes with characteristic lucidity, and this study elucidates the probity, humor, and technical skill with which his responses to historical reality in the mid-twentieth century illuminate our world today. Trade Review"The beauty of Gottlieb's copiously productive engagement with Auden's 'marriage of inconvenience' between the poetic and the historic lies in her refusal to offer us any consolation in the turbulence of meanings or morals. In staying with Auden's anxiety of tone and temper, Gottlieb reveals her own integrity as an impeccable scholarly reader with a fine understanding of the give and take, the ebb and flow, of the performance of poetic justice."—Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University"Auden and the Muse of History brings new depths to Auden studies, while bringing Auden's work into sharp and revelatory focus. Gottlieb shows how the poems speak forcefully to today's world, while also showing how deeply rooted they were in the world where they were written."—Edward Mendelson, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction 1. States of Marriage 2. Poetry, Prose, and a Forgotten Practice 3. "Civilization Must Be Saved" Interlude: Interlude: The Falling Empire 4. Isotopes of Love 5. From Poem to Volume 6. Anthropology, Hell, "Goodbye" Coda: Closing and Opening Thoughts

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Book SynopsisThe Philology of Life retraces the outlines of the philological project developed by Walter Benjamin in his early essays on Hölderlin, the Romantics, and Goethe. This philological program, McLaughlin shows, provides the methodological key to Benjamin’s work as a whole. According to Benjamin, German literary history in the period roughly following the first World War was part of a wider “crisis of historical experience”—a life crisis to which Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) had instructively but insufficiently responded. Benjamin’s literary critical struggle during these years consisted in developing a philology of literary historical experience and of life that is rooted in an encounter with a written image. The fundamental importance of this “philological” method in Benjamin’s work seems not to have been recognized by his contemporary readers, including Theodor Adorno who considered the approach to be lacking in dialectical rigor. This facet of Benjamin’s work was also elided in the postwar publications of his writings, both in German and English. In recent decades, the publication of a wider range of Benjamin’s writings has made it possible to retrace the outlines of a distinctive philological project that starts to develop in his early literary criticism and that extends into the late studies of Baudelaire and Paris. By bringing this innovative method to light this study proposes “the philology of life” as the key to the critical program of one of the most influential intellectual figures in the humanities.Table of ContentsNote on Abbreviations | ix Introduction: The Philology of Life | 1 1. “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” | 15 2. The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism | 42 3. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” | 68 Coda: The Afterlife of Philology | 109 Acknowledgments | 127 Appendix: Sources for Benjamin’s “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (1924–25) | 129 Notes | 131 Bibliography | 179 Index | 189

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Book SynopsisA foundational book by one of the most distinguished German humanists of the last half century, Tempus joins cultural linguistics and literary interpretation at the hip. Developing two controversial theses—that sentences are not truly meaningful in isolation from their contexts and that verb tenses are primarily indicators not of time but of the attitude of the speaker or writer—Tempus surveys a dazzling array of ancient and modern texts from famous authors as well as casual speakers of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and English, with a final chapter extending the observations to Greek, Russian, and world languages. A classic in German and long available in many other languages, Tempus launched a new discipline, text linguistics, and established a unique career that was marked by precise observation, sensitive cultural outreach, and practical engagement with the situation of migrants. Weinrich’s robust and lucid close readings of famous and little-known authors from all the major languages of western Europe expand our literary horizons and challenge our linguistic understanding.Table of ContentsTranslators’ Note | ix Introduction | 1 Jane K. Brown and Marshall Brown 1 Tense in Texts | 9 Tense and Time, 9 • Text Linguistics, 11 • A Preliminary Reflection: Obstinate Signs, 14 • Tense Distribution, 17 • Two Tense Groups: Discussing and Narrating, 22 • On the Freedom of the Narrator, 25 2 Discussing–Narrating | 32 Syntax and Communication, 32 • Register, 36 • Tense in Different Genres, 42 • The World of Discussion, 45 • The World of Narrating, 50 • Tense in the Language of Children, 55 3 Perspective | 60 Time in Texts, 60 • The Future (using French as an example), 64 • The Perfekt in German, 69 • The Perfect in English, 75 • Thornton Wilder: The Ides of March, 78 • The Passé composé in French, 83 • The Passato prossimo in Italian, 87 • The Perfecto compuesto in Spanish, 91 • Narration, Past, Truth, 96 4 Highlighting | 101 Narrative Highlighting, 101 • Narrative Tempo in the Novel, 106 • Baudelaire: “Le vieux saltimbanque” (The Old Mountebank), 111 • Of the Tense of Death, 117 5 Tense in Novellas and Short Stories: Highlighting vs. Aspect | 121 Maupassant, 121 • Pirandello, 126 • Unamuno, Darío, Echegaray, 129 • Hemingway, 135 • Frame Narrative (Boccaccio), 142 • Narration in the Middle Ages, 147 • Frame and Highlighting in Modern Stories, 150 6 Tense Transitions 153 Tense in Dialogue, 153 • Descartes, Rousseau, and the Sequence of Tenses, 164 7 Tense Metaphors | 171 Tense Metaphors in Texts, 171 • Condition and Consequence, Reality and Unreality, 180 8 Tense Combinations | 186 Tense and Person, 186 • Tense and Adverbs, 190 • Combined Transitions, 197 • Semi-finite Verbs, 205 9 A Crisis in Narration? | 211 Tense in Old French, 211 • Evidence of Language Consciousness in French Classicism, 217 • The Time of Newspapers, 224 • Albert Camus: L’étranger, 227 • Oral Narration in French, 236 • A Parallel: Tense in South-German Dialects, 244 10 Other Languages—Other Tenses? | 252 Tense in Ancient Greek, 252 • Tense in Latin, 256 • Whorf, Spengler, and the Hopi Indians, 264 • Toward a New Method of Description, 270 Index | 275

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Book SynopsisOn Emerging from Hyper-Nation represents Ronald W. Sousa’s attempt to answer the question, “Why do I smile on reading one of Saramago’s ‘historical’ novels?” Why that reaction of emotional release? To answer the “smile question” the book engages in a critical mode that could be described as “discourse analysis.” It combines several critical strains and relies on basic concepts from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Adlerian psychology, and contemporary cognitive psychology for their discourse-analytical value rather than as entrées into psychoanalytical reading per se.The introductory chapter presents some of the concepts that underlie that compound analytical modality and sets out an overview of twentieth-century Portuguese social and economic history. Then, with an eye to answering the “smile question,” the book reads Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s three novels, Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), and The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989). Or, better, it seeks to read Sousa’s own reading of the three works, since focus falls on how each novel seeks to construct both its own reading and also Sousa as its reader.The discussion brings to light a number of textual phenomena that bear upon the “smile question.” Among them are that the novels invoke, often subtly, the fascist hermeneutical heritage remaining from before the revolution of 1974 as a constituent part of their communication with the reader; that they summon up historical trauma; that they function as Freudian-style “tendentious jokes”; and that, through these various invocations, they seek to constitute a postrevolutionary Portuguese subject. The reading of Sousa’s reading, then, ends up being a reading of some of the cultural forces at work in postrevolutionary Portugal.

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Book SynopsisThis book explores resistance as a widespread motif in medieval romance to consider themes of consent, gender, and desire. Medieval romance is usually considered a genre that celebrates love, desire, and sexuality within marriage. However, moments of resistance within it offer a point of tension, where normative scripts and expectations are exposed and opened up to challenge. This book explores such resistance as a widespread motif in the genre, tracing the subversive possibilities it presents, and through them uncovering how romance constitutes particular kinds of love as desirable, shaped by intersecting factors, including gender, status, race, religion, and morality. Drawing upon contemporary work on consent, the politics of desire, and asexuality, it examines how resistance is often transformed into acceptance, through consensual negotiation or coercive force: the romances discussed here demonstrate that a certain level of force, pressure, and persuasion is accepted as a means of forming relationships within the genre, but this reliance on coercion reveals the effort to which romances must go to uphold normative structures of desire. Considering a variety of works, from Marie de France's twelfth-century Guigemar to Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, Geoffrey Chaucer's Franklin's Tale to William Caxton's fifteenth-century prose romances, this book argues that romance teaches its readers what and whom to desire, as well as how to behave when negotiating their desires, and explores the wider implications for understanding consent, gender, and desire in medieval England. This book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative-Commons License CC-BY-NC-NDTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. 'Ar ye a knyght and ar no lovear?' Men Who Resist Love 2. 'But of love to lere': The Proud Lady in Love 3. 'Ne feolle hit þe of cunde / To spuse beo me bunde': Resisting Mésalliance 4. 'What wonder is it thogh she wepte'? Hierarchies of Desire, Race, and Empathy 5. 'What deyntee sholde a man han in his lyf / For to go love another mannes wyf'? Resisting Adultery, Resisting Rape Culture Conclusion: The Ends of Romance Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison—fiction, non-fiction, and other—drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts, Toni Morrison: A Literary Life, second edition provides an overview of Morrison’s intellectual growth as an artist. Linda Wagner-Martin aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty plus years. The revised edition includes new discussion of God Help the Child, The Origin of Others, and The Source of Self-Regard. These additions present and intensify scholarship on Morrison’s major literary contributions, but also trace her significant role as a public intellectual, bringing to light the consistency of Morrison’s aesthetic and political visions. Table of ContentsIntroduction: Morrison’s Early YearsSong of Solomon: One Beginning of Morrison’s CareerTar Baby and Other Folktales.- Beloved, Beloved, BelovedJazz and Morrison’s Trilogy: New York in the 1920sMorrison as Public IntellectualThe Nobel Prize in Literature and Morrison’s TrilogyMorrison and the Twenty-first Century: Love.- Morrison and Various MerciesMorrison and the Definitions of HomeGod Help the Child.- The Origin of Others and The Source of Self-RegardCoda

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Book SynopsisThis highly acclaimed study analyzes the various trends in English criticism during the first four decades of this century.Trade Review"One of the five works published within the last thirty years which in the opinion of representative scholars and critics have contributed most to the understanding of literature."--Contemporary Literary Scholarship "Abrams has written a remarkable book on the history of criticism, the most distinguished contribution of American scholarship in that field since the work of J.E. Spingarn."--Comparative Literature "The book is so rich in thought that it is invaluable for students of the romantic movement and indeed of the whole theory of criticism. I regard it as one of the most distinguished achievements of American literary scholarship of our day."--Modern Philology "With this book, M.H. Abrams has given us a remarkable study, admirably conceived and executed, a book of quite exceptional and no doubt lasting significance for a number of fields--for the history of ideas and comparative literature as well as for English literary history, criticism, and aesthetics."--Modern Language Journal "The past forty years have seen many attempts at ordering our ideas about literature; The Mirror and the Lamp stands out among them as a unique combination of rich historical scholarship and hard-won clarity of thought."--The Times Literary Supplement (London)

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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 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 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 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 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 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 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 SynopsisIn Poetics Aristotle treats Greek tragedy and epic. The subject of On the Sublime, attributed to an (unidentifiable) Longinus and probably composed in the first century AD is greatness in writing. On Style, attributed to an (unidentifiable) Demetrius and perhaps composed in the second century BC, analyzes four literary styles.Trade ReviewThis re-edition cum revision of the three most seminal ancient Greek treatises in the aesthetics of literature is much to be welcomed. Together with a new translation of Aristotle’s Poetics by Stephen Halliwell, it provides a spruced up version of W. H. Fyfe’s spirited rendering of On the Sublime, and a comprehensive revision of W. Rhys Roberts’ 1927 edition and translation of On Style. In all three cases new introductions and generous annotations bring the reader up to date with recent scholarship… The volume as a whole succeeds in meeting both the needs of non-classically trained readers and the requirements of scholars. For that reason it cannot be recommended too warmly. -- Suzanne Stern-Gillet * British Journal of Aesthetics *This set of revisions was past due, and its arrival is most welcome. The result is a useful and physically very beautiful little volume that, I predict, will see very heavy use. -- John T. Kirby * Classical Outlook *This volume completely supercedes its predecessor… The Loeb editors have chosen the world’s best scholars on these difficult authors for the revisions… Each ancient text is given a clear, informative introduction, outlining for general readers and specialists alike the basic problems and concerns of each essay, backed up with helpful bibliographical notes… In sum, this is an excellent, if overdue, revision of seminal criticism… Congratulations to the contributors and to the series editors for another splendidly produced volume which any scholar of classical literature should now possess. -- Richard Hawley * Classical Review *Under the general editorship of George Gould, the careful revision of the Loeb series continues, with this volume 23 of Aristotle. The Poetics is, of course, the jewel in this crown… It is a tall enough order, at the end of the twentieth century to attempt one translation of Aristotle's Poetics, but Stephen Halliwell has now produced two… This new Loeb edition is, by design, noticeably closer to the Greek than Halliwell's earlier translation. The Greek text itself is a vast improvement over that of Hamilton Fyfe's Loeb, which was based on Vahlen's edition of 1885.For this edition [of the treatise On Style], Doreen Innes has quite extensively revised that version—with notably favorable results—and has provided a generous introduction, once again with a structural synopsis and bibliographic notes.Possibly the next most important work of literary theory and criticism to survive the wreck of antiquity…is the brilliant treatise Peri hupseos, attributed to someone called Longinus… In this second Loeb edition, the earlier Hamilton Fyfe translation has been overhauled by Donald Russell, surely the greatest living authority on Longinus.

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Book SynopsisNarratives are artefacts of a special kind: they are intentionally crafted devices which fulfil their story-telling function by manifesting the intentions of their makers. But narrative itself is too inclusive a category for much more to be said about it than this; we should focus attention instead on the vaguely defined but interesting category of things rich in narrative structure. Such devices offer significant possibilities, not merely for the representation of stories, but for the expression of point of view; they have also played an important role in the evolution of reliable communication. Narratives and narrators argues that much of the pleasure of narrative communication depends on deep-seated and early developing tendencies in human beings to imitation and to joint attention, and imitation turns out to be the key to understanding such important literary techniques as free indirect discourse and character-focused narration. The book also examines irony in narrative, with an emTrade ReviewRich with examples drawn from both literature and film ... the book makes an interesting and important contribution not only to our understanding of the nature of narratives but also to the nature of our engagement with them. * Amy Kind, The Philosophical Quarterly *a rich study. * Adriana Boneta, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *abounds in analyses and arguments as Currie identifies and interrogates (generally successfully) strong counter-theses that challenge his own * Daniel D. Hutto, Times Literary Supplement *I expect Gregory Currie's new book, Narratives and Narrators, to attain the same importance and influence in philosophical thinking about narrative that his earlier books The Nature of Fiction and Image and Mind have had in the philosophy of fiction and film, respectively. It is an ambitious, careful, and philosophically rich work containing a number of novel and important arguments... The book has many virtues, and the greatest of them might be that it opens up new areas for exploration in the philosophic study of narrative. * James Harold, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *The book is ambitious in its topics and contains fresh approaches to various traditional problems ... full of thought-provoking arguments and intriguing proposals. * Jukka Mikkonen, Mind *This fairly short book does a lot of work ... consistently challenging * Raphael Lyne, Cambridge Quarterly *Table of ContentsPreface ; Acknowledgements ; Analytical contents ; 1. Representation ; 2. The content of narrative ; 3. Two ways of looking at a narrative ; 4. Authors and narrators ; 5. Expression and imitation ; 6. Resistance ; 7. Character-focused narration ; 8. Irony: a pretended point of view ; 9. Dis-interpretation ; 10. Narrative and character ; 11. Character scepticism ; In Conclusion ; Bibliography ; Indexes

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Book SynopsisMore than 450 succinct entries from A to Z help readers make sense of the interdisciplinary knowledge of cultural criticism that includes film, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, poststructuralist, and postmodernist theory as well as philosophy, media studies, linguistics.

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Book SynopsisA classical historian confronts our crises of time, radically calling into question our relations to the past, present, and future.Trade ReviewSince his classic Mirror of Herodotus, Francois Hartog has emerged as the most significant theorist of history and chronicler of our changing relationship to our own past that France has produced. In this series of meditative chapters, he takes us from the Greeks to the present once more, emphasizing how the theory of history must move from diagnosing the modern gap between expectation and experience to confronting the exigency of historical crisis today. Hartog's reflections are valuable for all humanists. -- Samuel Moyn, Columbia University In a book that should be required reading for anyone interested in history's role in contemporary society, Francois Hartog shows how unexamined assumptions about the past shape our understandings of ourselves and our place in history. -- Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles Francois Hartog's pioneering work on the concept of 'regimes of historicity' makes this book a must for scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities. A distinguished classical historian, Hartog uses specific, well-chosen examples to explain how understanding regimes of historicity will allow us to better understand the conditions of possibility for producing histories and, more generally, our own relationship to time. -- Robert Morrissey, University of Chicago Francois Hartog is perhaps the most important historian of historiography today... Regimes of Historicity should be required reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future writing of history. American Historical Review Regimes of Historicity should be required reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future writing of history. Time's BooksTable of ContentsPresentism: Stopgap or New State? Introduction: Orders of Time and Regimes of Historicity Orders of Time 1 1. Making History: Sahlins's Islands 2. From Odysseus's Tears to Augustine's Meditations 3. Chateaubriand, Between Old and New Regimes of Historicity Orders of Time 2 4. Memory, History, and the Present 5. Heritage and the Present Our Doubly Indebted Present: The Reign of Presentism Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThe last two decades have seen a burst of renewed interest in narrative theory across many academic disciplines as scholars analyze the power of storytelling in print and other media. Teaching Narrative Theory provides a comprehensive resource for instructors who aim to help students identify and understand the distinctive features of narrativity in a text or discourse and make use of the terms and concepts of the field.This volume in the Options for Teaching series is organized to assist teachers at different levels of instruction and in different disciplinary settings. In twenty-one essays, the contributors discuss narrative theory’s various teaching contexts (e.g., classes on literature, creative writing, and folklore and ethnography); key concepts and terms (e.g., story and plot, time and space, voice, perspective); applications beyond printed texts (e.g., film and digital media); and impact on other areas of theory (e.g., gender and ethnic studies). A glossary provides a guide to the challenging technical terminology characteristic of the field, and the volume as a whole emphasizes the importance of understanding and implementing technical terms in learning narrative theory.

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Book SynopsisHow did early modern scholarsas exemplified by Leibnizsearch for their origins in the study of language?Who are the nations of Europe, and where did they come from? Early modern people were as curious about their origins as we are today. Lacking twenty-first-century DNA research, seventeenth-century scholars turned to languageetymology, vocabulary, and even grammatical structurefor evidence. The hope was that, in puzzling out the relationships between languages, the relationships between nations themselves would emerge, and on that basis one could determine the ancestral homeland of the nations that presently occupied Europe. In Leibniz Discovers Asia, Michael C. Carhart explores this early modern practice by focusing on philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who developed a vast network of scholars and missionaries throughout Europe to acquire the linguistic data he needed. The success of his project was tied to the Jesuit search for an overland route tTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsConventions1. Grimaldi at the Gates of Muscovy (Fall 1689)2. Making the Worst of a Bad Assignment: Origines Guelficae and the Linguistic Project (Autumn 1690-Summer 1692)3. Building the Network (Winter 1691-Summer 1692)4. The Jesuit Search for an Overland Route to China (1685-1689)5. Seeking the Languages of Grand Tartary (August 1693-December 1694)6. Assembling Novissima Sinica (February-September 1695)7. Johan Gabriel Sparwenfeld and Gothic Origins (November 1695-December 1697)8. The Grand Embassy of Peter the Great (Summer-Fall 1697)9. The Jesuits of Paris and China (1689, November 1697-March 1698)10. The Foundations of Modern Historical Linguistics (1697-1716)AcknowledgmentsAppendix I. "Desiderata circa linguas quorundam populorum"Appendix II. Plan for a Moscow Academy of Sciences and ArtsNotesBibliographyIndex of LettersGeneral Index

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Book SynopsisTraces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work in the 1960s to the present, examining his key concepts – infancy, Voice, potentiality, sovereignty, bare life, messianism – in relation to key texts and concepts in Jacques Derrida’s work.Trade Review"In this impressive book, Kevin Attell changes our understanding of Giorgio Agamben. From now on we will have to see Agamben's work, from the very beginning, as in dialogue with Derrida. As a result an important thinker becomes still more significant to the shape of contemporary European theory." -- -Simon During University of Queensland "Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction is an enormously ambitious book covering the breadth of Giorgio Agamben's writings, from his earliest work on potentiality and discourse up through his later political and theological writings. Attell's interpretations, informed by vast philosophical erudition, presenting independent interpretations of all the texts that he treats, are paradigms for work on theory. This is one of the highest caliber works of theory or continental philosophy to appear in a long time." -- -Joshua Kates Indiana University "This remarkably rigorous, lucid, and open-minded study details the important differences between Agamben and Derrida, something many would regard as minor variants in a similarly deconstructive model, but which Derrida's late seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign affirm to be profound. Attell meticulously traces the trajectories of Derrida's and Agamben's careers, demonstrating in an elegant and textually based fashion the incisive nature of Agamben's engagement with Derrida, how so many of Agamben's major themes-potentiality, sovereignty, ban, messianic time, play and profanation, and the animal-could be considered as critical, indeed polemical, responses to Derrida's philosophical project. The strong distinction between Agamben's and Derrida's (and Benjamin's and Schmitt's) notions of messianic time is particularly dazzling." -- -Eleanor Kaufman University of California, Los AngelesTable of ContentsIntroduction: An Esoteric Dossier Part One: First Principles 1. Agamben and Derrida Read Saussure Overture: "Before the Law" Semiology and Saussure Semiology and the Sphinx 2. "The Human Voice" Introduction to Origin of Geometry Speech and Phenomena Infancy and History Excursus: Agamben and Derrida Read Benveniste Language and Death 3. Potenza and Differance Dunamis and Energeia Dunamis and Adunamia Writing and Potentiality Part Two: Strategy without Finality or Means without End 4. Sovereignty, Law, and Violence Abandoning the Logic of the Ban Means and Ends: Reading the "Critique of Violence" 5. Ticks and Cats Machines Bios and Zoe Heidegger and the Animal 6. A Matter of Time Prophet or Apostle Nun, jetzt Aufhebung Messianic Nun, jetzt Aufhebung Messianic

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Book SynopsisIn this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali offers a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon.Trade ReviewThis is a powerful and paradigm-shifting aesthetics of society, by a great philosophical talent. -- Simon Critchley, author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and UsBarbara Carnevali's concept of 'social aesthetics' is tremendously powerful, and explains a lot of otherwise baffling phenomena. Carnevali makes me think that the rise of Orban and Trump and the Brexit movement is better understood as a matter of social 'taste' than in terms of ideology, or economics, or identity. -- Blake Gopnik, author of WarholOscar Wilde famously quipped that only shallow people do not judge by appearances. This elegant, profound, and erudite book explores the startling proposition that we may indeed be what we seem. The reader of this book will not fail to be convinced that 'appearances' are constitutive of society. -- Eva Illouz, author of The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative RelationsEvery sentence in this brilliant book is a unit of thought; it’s as epigrammatic as Nietzsche and as seamlessly developed as, say, Hume. And it helps that it’s new. Carnevali has restored aesthetics to its central role in philosophy. -- Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice: A Life of ReadingTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsProloguePart I. Appearing: On the Aesthetic Foundations of Social Life1. Life as a Spectacle: Self-Display, Reflexivity, and Artifice2. Masks and Clothes: Medial Surfaces and the Dialectic of Appearing3. Aesthetic Mediation: A Theory of Representations4. Figures: Social Images5. Out of Control: The Alienated ImagePart II. Vanity and Lies: On the Hostility Toward Appearances6. “Vanity Fair”: The Frivolity of Worldliness7. Against the Mask: The Rise of Social Romanticism8. Against the Spectacle: The Crusade of Romantic Anticapitalism9. Against Aesthetic Values: Aestheticism, Aestheticization, and Staging10. Two Baptisms and a Divorce: Homo Economicus Versus Homo AestheticusPart III. Toward a Social Aesthetics: On the Sensible Logic of Society11. The Opening: Aesthetic Foundations of the Common World12. Aisthesis: Senses and Social Sensibility13. Social Taste and the Will to Please14. Aesthetic Labor and Social Design: The Value of Appearances15. Prestige and Other Magic SpellsConclusion: Social Immaterialism or the Philosophy of Andy WarholAfterwordAppendix: Illustrations Mentioned in the TextNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisChristina Sharpe interprets Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that grapple with the sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation, and their present-day legacies.Trade Review“Through compelling and intricate readings of visual and written texts, Sharpe is concerned with unpacking the intersection between violence, sex, and subjectivity in post-slavery subjects. Sharpe’s work is a poignant reflection on historical time and convincingly deals with the ways that the horrors of the past continue to structure the present. . . . Sharpe’s book is an eloquent and at times challenging analysis of the construction of post-slavery subjects as subjects who are by no means ‘post’ but continue to be structured by the past that is not quite past.” - Sam McBean, Elevate Difference“This is a bold, challenging book which is unrelenting in its interpretation of slavery and the effects it has had on subsequent generations, black and white. In effect, the monstrous intimacies continue.” - Danielle Mulholland, M/C Reviews“Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies succeeds in illuminating the complex entanglements of desire and horror at the heart of Black and White subjectification ‘after’ slavery. More profoundly, this text powerfully balances the fact of history’s monstrous persistence and the desire for what she identifies, after Dionne Brand, as a modality of Black life unhinged to historical narrative (129).” - Sarah Cervenak, Women’s Studies“The materials in Monstrous Intimacies register as being profoundly relevant not only for African American literature, but also for studies of the history of slavery in relation to the U.S. South. Moreover, her second chapter, focusing on the literature and culture of South Africa, addresses histories of racism, colonialism, and imperialism and speaks to discourses on the global South.” - Riché Richardson, Southern Literary Journal"Overall…Sharpe successfully demonstrates the presence of "monstrous intimacies" in each chapter. Most importantly, she creates a methodology for understanding the psychological development of post-slavery subjects and the seductive story-telling that represents his or her experience." - Denia Fraser, Kritikon Litterarum“Monstrous Intimacies is a remarkable study, lucid, engaging, and thoroughly engrossing.”—Sharon Patricia Holland, author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity“Monstrous Intimacies is an original, enriching look at the variety of artistic forms and practices that interrogate the illness of the post-slavery subject. It is international in its scope, interdisciplinary in its approach, and consistently intelligent in its execution.”—Ashraf Rushdy, author of Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction“Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies succeeds in illuminating the complex entanglements of desire and horror at the heart of Black and White subjectification ‘after’ slavery. More profoundly, this text powerfully balances the fact of history’s monstrous persistence and the desire for what she identifies, after Dionne Brand, as a modality of Black life unhinged to historical narrative (129).” -- Sarah Cervenak * Women's Studies *“This is a bold, challenging book which is unrelenting in its interpretation of slavery and the effects it has had on subsequent generations, black and white. In effect, the monstrous intimacies continue.” -- Danielle Mulholland * M/C Reviews *“Through compelling and intricate readings of visual and written texts, Sharpe is concerned with unpacking the intersection between violence, sex, and subjectivity in post-slavery subjects. Sharpe’s work is a poignant reflection on historical time and convincingly deals with the ways that the horrors of the past continue to structure the present. . . . Sharpe’s book is an eloquent and at times challenging analysis of the construction of post-slavery subjects as subjects who are by no means ‘post’ but continue to be structured by the past that is not quite past.” -- Sam McBean * Elevate Difference *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Making Monstrous Intimacies: Surviving Slavery, Bearing Freedom 1 1. Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Reading the "Days That Were Pages of Hysteria" 27 2. Bessie Head, Saartje Baartman, and Maru Redemption, Subjectification, and the Problem of Liberation 67 3. Isaac Julien's The Attendant and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Black Life 111 4. Kara Walker's Monstrous Intimacies 153 Notes 189 Bibliography 223 Index 243

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Book SynopsisCritical Theory and Animal Liberation is the first collection to approach our relationship with other animals from the critical or left tradition in political and social thought. Breaking with past treatments that have framed the problem as one of animal rights, the authors instead depict the exploitation and killing of other animals as a political question of the first order. The contributions highlight connections between our everyday treatment of animals and other forms of social power, mass violence, and domination, from capitalism and patriarchy to genocide, fascism, and ecocide. Contributors include well-known writers in the field as well as scholars in other areas writing on animals for the first time. Among other things, the authors apply Freud's theory of repression to our relationship to the animal, debunk the Locavore movement, expose the sexism of the animal defense movement, and point the way toward a new transformative politics that would encompass the human and animal Trade ReviewThis book breaks new ground in both critical theory and the ethics debate surrounding the mistreatment and domination of animals by humans. An indispensable collection for anyone interested in these areas of social critique, these essays sketch a comprehensive alternative to the prevailing strands of neo-Marxist and liberal philosophies. -- David Ingram, Loyola University, ChicagoSanbonmatsu has done the field of animal studies a great service by bringing together this rewarding collection of critical interventions. Just as feminist and phenomenological thinking injected needed doses of existential and hermeneutic sensitivity into the first wave of predominantly analytic animal ethics, so Critical Theory and Animal Liberation now joins pragmatism in projecting ethico-political engagement and socio-economic guidance across the new wave of animal theory. -- Ralph R. Acampora, Hofstra UniversityThis is an engaging analysis of some of the key issues in animal/human liberation, which makes it clear how connected the oppression of animals is to the oppression of other humans. All of the authors wonder how we can be sensitive to human suffering yet blind to animal suffering. The truth is, we cannot, or must not any longer. This book fulfills a long-awaited mandate demanding a deep change of view. I commend it highly. -- Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of AnimalsContributors examine how our hidden, institutionalized violence to animals, epitomized by industrial farming and laboratory experimentation, coexists with spectacles of human-caused suffering, degradation and destruction of animals in “visible but not seen” forms, such as circuses and road kill....Critical Theory and Animal Liberation looks not only at the obviously hidden suffering of animals on industrial farms and in laboratories but at the plight of animals who suffer and die openly in front of our eyes through human causation. * Karen Davis, President, United Poultry Concerns *Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, edited by John Sanbonmatsu, knits together a wide range of intersectional and interdisciplinary voices from across the spectrum of Critical Animal Studies. Nuanced and multifaceted, this text succeeds in applying critical perspectives in political and social thought to the problem of our relationship with other animals..../Critical Theory and Animal Liberation/ is an invaluable text for scholars and students of a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. In particular, this book is a must-have for anyone studying or writing within the burgeoning field of Critical Animal Studies. Perhaps the most compelling achievement of this text is its instrumental role in opening up new debates around critical, 'left' classical and contemporary Marxist and posthumanist thought all while sidestepping the popular currents in apolitical, mainstream animal studies. In addition, this book offers a first ambitious step into an uncharted territory -- moving away from the liberal ethics on which most animal 'rights' theory has, since its inception, been built. * Journal for Critical Animal Studies *Due to its exercise of deepening the critique of oppression and its potential to inspire a vision of the social world made whole, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation is a highly recommended read. * Humanimalia *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part I. Commodity Fetishism and Structural Violence Chapter 1: Procrustean Solutions to Animal Identity and Welfare Problems Karen Davis Chapter 2: Road Kill: Commodity Fetishism and Structural Violence Dennis Soron Chapter 3: Corporate Power, Ecological Crisis, and Animal Rights Carl Boggs Part II. Animals, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School Chapter 4: Humanism = Speciesism?: Marx on Humans and Animals Ted Benton Chapter 5: Reflections on the Prospects for a Non-Speciesist Marxism Renzo Llorente Chapter 6: Thinking With: Animals in Schopenhauer, Horkheimer, and Adorno Christina Gerhardt Chapter 7: Animal is to Kantianism as Jew Is to Fascism: Adorno's Bestiary Eduardo Mendieta Part III. Speciesism and Ideologies of Domination Chapter 8: Dialectic of Anthropocentrism Aaron Bell Chapter 9: Animal Repression: Speciesism as Pathology Zipporah Weisberg Chapter 10: Neuroscience (a Poem) Susan Benston Chapter 11: Everyday Rituals of the Master Race: Fascism, Stratification, and the Fluidity of "Animal" Domination Victoria Johnson Part IV. Problems in Praxis Chapter 12: Constructing Extremists, Rejecting Compassion: Ideological Attacks on Animal Advocacy from Right and Left John Sorenson Chapter 13: "Green" Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of the Local Vasile Stanescu Chapter 14: After MacKinnon: Sexual Inequality in the Animal Movement Carol Adams Chapter 15: Sympathy and Interspecies Care: Toward a Unified Theory of Eco- and Animal Liberation Josephine Donovan Note Index About the Editor and Contributors

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