Search results for ""connections""

Although Czech scenographer and painter Jaroslav Malina (1937-2016) lived in turbulent times, he won international respect for his work. Spanning Malina's entire life--from his early years in the Nazi protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, through four decades under communism and the period after the Velvet Revolution returned the Czech state to democracy--the essays and interviews in this volume examine the depth and breadth of his accomplishments. Essays by scholars from the Czech Republic, United Kingdom, and the United States clarify and illuminate Malina's contributions to art both in Central Europe and across the world. Exploring multiple aspects of Malina's career, they shed light on his roots in modernism, which characterized the years of the First Republic (1918-38), through the advent of postmodernism, contextualizing his accomplishments in a variety of media while adding insights about his methods and their philosophical underpinnings. Appearing in print for the first time, interview transcripts provide an intimate view of the impulses that guided Malina over the course of his career. Also featuring over one hundred and fifty color images that illustrate the connections between Malina's public scenographic work and his more personal paintings, this book reveals Malina as an artist who continued to work during difficult and changing times without ever losing a very human approach to life.

Read more less

Plotting narratives that blur the line between fact and fiction, David Lamelas is a pioneering figure of conceptual art. "Life as Activity: David Lamelas" draws vivid connections within the artist’s multifaceted practice and explores how his sculpture, film, video, and photography invite us to participate in fictional narratives while moving through space and time. Life as Activity: David Lamelas developed from a graduate seminar in Hunter College’s Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies and is supported by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), which advances scholarship and public engagement with art from Latin America. ISLAA proudly sponsors Hunter College as its inaugural university partner in the ISLAA Artist Seminar Initiative, an education and curatorial program that fosters intimate exchanges between students and living Latin American and Latinx artists. David Lamelas's works experiment with conventional formats in ways that make us acutely aware of the constructed nature of narrative and identity. Featuring his investigations of different media – including sculpture, photography, and film – the book charts new ground through a body of work that spans from 1966 to 2020. Made in Argentina, Europe and the United States, the twelve projects that make up the focus of the book demonstrate the inventive ways Lamelas produces works in which he directs his critical eye toward diverse contexts to reveal the proximity of fantasy and truth.

Read more less

From the Preface: Srinivasa Varadhan began his research career at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Calcutta, where he started as a graduate student in 1959. His first paper appeared in Sankhyá, the Indian Journal of Statistics in 1962. Together with his fellow students V. S. Varadarajan, R. Ranga Rao and K. R. Parthasarathy, Varadhan began the study of probability on topological groups and on Hilbert spaces, and quickly gained an international reputation. At this time Varadhan realised that there are strong connections between Markov processes and differential equations, and in 1963 he came to the Courant Institute in New York, where he has stayed ever since. Here he began working with the probabilists Monroe Donsker and Marc Kac, and a graduate student named Daniel Stroock. He wrote a series of papers on the Martingale Problem and Diffusions together with Stroock, and another series of papers on Large Deviations together with Donsker. With this work Varadhan's reputation as one of the leading mathematicians of the time was firmly established. Since then he has contributed to several other areas of probability, analysis and physics, and collaborated with numerous distinguished mathematicians. Varadhan was awarded the Abel Prize in 2007. These Collected Works contain all his research papers over the half-century spanning 1962 to early 2012. Volume IV includes the papers on particle systems.

Read more less

Do institutions matter in economic theory? Or is the economic analysis of institutions a distraction from the most important action? Indeed, does Vernon Smith’s notion of the “institution-free core” of formal economic theory encompass that most important action? Would that render an “economics of organization” almost devoid of economic content?The author takes up an approach that is more agnostic, inter-disciplinary and even a little irreverent. What can theory do and not do? Theory can stimulate questions about how parties manage competing demands for commitment and flexibility in their relationships but what blind spots persist? The book opens with an informal tour of the economics of system design out of which an economics of adaptation ultimately emerged. It then offers explorations, via the application of the economics of adaptation in both law and economics’ relating to how parties manage relationships within the firm, within the context of long-term contracts and, most vividly, within the context of antitrust conspiracy.Advanced undergraduates, graduate students and teaching faculty in economics, public policy, management and law will find the book relevant, as it maps out connections between literatures that are not often made explicit. For historians of economic thought the book lays out a much richer understanding of what the economics of organization is (and is not), and situates it next to design economics.

Read more less

There is no place, it seems, that feelings do not run high about feelings. Western civilization is still caught between adoration of the emotions as sublime and denigration of them as merely animal. Can we trust our feelings? Should we suppress them or should we indulge them? In what part of our persons do feelings occur? Contemporary Christianity is no less vexed about emotions. The rise of the charismatic movement in the late twentieth century, with its emphasis on experiential Christianity, has led to an equally strong reaction of suspicion against talk of the emotions as significant for the Christian life. Though these questions have an everyday, practical importance, they also point to profound theological questions about the nature of the triune God and the ascription of emotions to him in the Bible. Does God himself have feelings? This stimulating volume, based on the 2011 Moore College School of Theology, offers perspectives on emotions. Topics include a cultural overview, theological anthropology, the question of divine passions, the emotional life of Jesus, the Spirit’s work in perfecting emotions, preaching the Gospels for divine effects, and the place of the emotions in corporate worship including connections with singing and music. The contributors are Rhys Bezzant, Peter Bolt, Gerald Bray, Andrew Cameron, Keith Condie, Richard Gibson, David Höhne, Michael Jensen, David Peterson and Robert Smith.

Read more less

Beyond Trawlertown takes a journey through the British distant-water fishery and its port-city connections in an era of disruption. In 1976, defeat in the Anglo-Icelandic Cod Wars saw the British trawling fleet excluded from their traditional hunting grounds. Combining with wider global factors, the move brought an end to long-established trawling practices, with profound social, economic and cultural repercussions. Through a case study of the port of Hull, oral history and archival research explore the challenges, responses and legacy of rapid change. Although the emphasis is on Hull, this is far from a local history. Hull’s position among the world leading distant-water pioneers gives the story international significance. Focusing on memory, lived experience and place, the book goes beyond established narratives. Personal acts of remembering offer cultural perspectives on how global events and marine policy impact upon the seafaring communities that live with the consequences. The Cod Wars signaled an end, yet amid the disruption there were also new beginnings. And in the wake of an active fishery, the rhythms of the past continue to resonate in the negotiation of fishing heritage within the contemporary city. Through the convergence of time, place and memory, this holistic narrative of interweaving stories reveals the intricacies of our human interaction with the marine environment and the aftermath when its threads are broken.

Read more less

On 10 May 1941, on a whim, Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess flew a Messerschmitt Bf 110 to Scotland in a bizarre effort to make peace with Britain; Göring sent fighters to stop him but he was long gone. Imprisoned and tried at Nuremberg, he would die by his own hand in 1987, aged 93. That’s the accepted explanation. Ever since, conspiracy theories have swirled around the famous mission. How strong were Hess’s connections with the British establishment, including royalty? Was the death of the king’s brother, the Duke of Kent, associated with the Hess overture for peace? In the many books written about Hess, one obvious line of enquiry has been overlooked, until now: an analysis of the flight itself – the flight plan, equipment, data sheets, navigation system.Through their long investigation, authors John Harris and Richard Wilbourn have come to a startling conclusion: whilst the flight itself has been well recorded, the target destination has remained hidden. The implications are far reaching and lend credence to the theory that the British establishment has hidden the truth of the full extent of British/Nazi communications, in part to spare the reputations of senior members of the Royal Family. Using original photography, documentation and diagrams, Rudolf Hess sheds light on one of the most intriguing stories of the Second World War.

Read more less

Winner of the Australia and New Zealand Law and History Society (ANZLHS) Prize for 2023 Maritime workers occupy a central place in global labour history. This new and compelling account from Australia, shows seafaring and waterside unions engaged in a shared history of activism for legally regulated wages and safe liveable conditions for all who go to sea. Maritime Men of the Asia-Pacific provides a corrective to studies which overlook this region’s significance as a provider of the world’s maritime labour force and where unions have a rich history of reaching across their differences to forge connections in solidarity. From the ‘militant young Australian’ Harry Bridges whose progressive unionism transformed the San Francisco waterfront, to Australia’s successful implementation of the Maritime Labour Convention 2006, this is a story of vision and leadership on the international stage. Unionists who saw themselves as internationalists were also operating within a national and imperial framework where conflicting interests and differences of race and ideology had to be overcome. Union activists in India, China and Japan struggled against indentured labour and ‘coolie’ standards. They linked with their fellow-unionists in pursuing an ideal of international labour rights against the power of shipowners and anti-union governments. This is a complex story of endurance, cooperation and conflict and its empowering legacy.

Read more less

Writing the Ancestral River is an illuminating and unusual biography of the Kowie River in the Eastern Cape. This tidal river runs through the centre of what used to be called the Zuurveld, a formative meeting ground of different peoples who have shaped our history: Khoikhoi herders, Xhosa pastoralists, Dutch trekboers and British settlers. Their direct descendants continue to live in the area and interact in ways that have been decisively shaped by their shared history.Besides being a social history, this is also a natural history of the river and its catchment area, where dinosaurs once roamed and cycads still grow. As the book shows, the natural world of the Kowie has felt the effects of human settlement, most strikingly through the establishment of a harbour at the mouth of the river in the 19th century and the development of a marina in the late 20th century. Both projects have had a decisive and deleterious impact on the Kowie.People are increasingly reconnecting with nature and justice through rivers. Acknowledging the past, and the inter-generational, racialised privileges, damages and denials it established and perpetuates, is necessary for any shared future. By focusing on this ‘little’ river, the book raises larger questions about colonialism, capitalism, ‘development’ and ecology, and asks us to consider the connections between social and environmental injustice.

Read more less

Offers a European view of racial attitudes in the US during the era of the Harlem Renaissance and Jim Crow, with relevance to today's Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. Marylin, a novel by the Austrian writer Arthur Rundt about a mixed-race woman passing as white, moves from Chicago to New York City and concludes tragically on a Caribbean island. First published in 1928 and now translated into English, it offers a European view of racial attitudes in the US during the era of the Harlem Renaissance and Jim Crow. Rundt's short but powerful novel touches several vital issues in society today, engaging each in a way that prompts further examination and cross-fertilization. First, it sheds historical light on what has become painfully obvious in the Black Lives Matter era (if it wasn't before): the continued injustice experienced by Blacks in America as an effect of structural racism. Second, it confronts issues of migration and hybrid identities. Third, it has relevance for Women's Studies through the title character's interaction with the patriarchy. Through these connections, it responds to a growing current in German Studies concerned with diversity and inclusion and integrating the discipline into the broader humanities. An introduction and an afterword, both of them extensive and scholarly, contextualize the novel in its time and as it relates to ours.

Read more less

Many graffiti artists carry sketchbooks, called black books, and they ask crew members and others whose work they admire to inscribe their books with lettering or drawings. A few years ago, the Getty Research Institute invited artists, including Angst, Axis, Big Sleeps, Chaz, Cre8, Defer, EyeOne, Fishe, Heaven, Hyde, Look, ManOne, and Prime, to consider the idea of a citywide graffiti black book. During visits to the Getty Center, the artists viewed rare books related to calligraphy and letterforms, including works by Albrecht Durer and Leonardo da Vinci. The artists instantly recognized the connections to their own practices and were particularly drawn to a liber amicorum (book of friends), a form of autograph book popular in the seventeenth century. Passed from hand to hand, it was filled with signatures, poetry, and coats of arms, like a black book from another era. Inspired by this meeting of minds across centuries, these artists became both creators and curators, crafting their own pages and inviting others to contribute. Eventually 150 Los Angeles artists decorated 143 individual pages. These were bound together into an exquisite artists' book that became known as the Getty Graffiti Black Book. This publication reproduces each page from the original artists' book and recounts the story of an unprecedented collaboration across the diverse artistic landscape of Los Angeles.

Read more less

A pioneering study of how Picasso, Braque, and Gris engaged with the pictorial tradition of illusion and deception in their influential Cubist works The age-old tradition of pictorial illusionism, known as trompe l’oeil (“deceive the eye”), employs visual tricks that confound the viewer’s perception of reality and fiction, truth and falsehood. This radically new take on Cubism shows how Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris both parodied and paid homage to classic trompe l’oeil themes and motifs with wit and invention. More than one hundred illustrated works juxtapose Cubist paintings, drawings, and collages with related compositions by the old masters. Essays based on new research explore connections between the Cubists and the trompe l’oeil specialists of earlier centuries and their games of creative one-upmanship. The informed and engaging texts trace the changing status of trompe l’oeil over the centuries, reveal Braque’s training in artisanal trompe l’oeil techniques as an integral part of his Cubist practice, examine the materials used in Gris’s collages, and discuss the previously unstudied trompe l’oeil iconography within Cubist still lifes—including newspapers, word puns, pictures-within-pictures, imitation wood grain, and tools of the trade.Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University PressExhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (October 20, 2022–January 22, 2023)

Read more less

This book explores the frightening ways in which our prisons mirror the worst aspects of society-wide gender relations. It is part of the growing research on men and masculinities. The collection is unusual in that it contributions from activists, academics, and prisoners. The opening section, which features an essay by Angela Davis, focuses on the historical roots of the prison system, cultural practices surrounding gender and punishment, and the current expansion of corrections into the \u0022prison-industrial complex.\u0022 The next section examines the dominant or subservient roles that men play in prison and the connections between this hierarchy and male violence. Another section looks at the spectrum of intimate relations behind bars, from rape to friendship, and another at physical and mental health. The last section is about efforts to reform prisons and prison masculinities, including support groups for men. It features an essay about prospects for post-release success in the community written by a man who, after doing time in Soledad and San Quentin, went on to get a doctorate in counseling. The contributions from prisoners include an essay on enforced celibacy by Mumia Abu-Jamal, as well as fiction and poetry on prison health policy, violence, and intimacy. The creative contributions were selected from the more than 200 submissions received from prisoners.

Read more less

How the queer correspondence art of Ray Johnson disrupted art world conventions and anticipated today’s highly networked culture Once regarded as “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” Ray Johnson was a highly visible outlier in the art world, his mail art practice reflecting the changing social relations and politics of queer communities in the 1960s. A vital contribution to the growing scholarship on this enigmatic artist, Queer Networks analyzes how Johnson’s practice sought to undermine the dominant mechanisms of the art market and gallery system in favor of unconventional social connections. Utilizing the postal service as his primary means of producing and circulating art, Johnson cultivated an international community of friends and collaborators through which he advanced his idiosyncratic body of work. Applying both queer theory and network studies, Miriam Kienle explores how Johnson’s radical correspondence art established new modes of connectivity that fostered queer sensibilities and ran counter to the conventional methods by which artists were expected to develop their reputation. While Johnson was significantly involved with the Pop, conceptual, and neo-Dada art movements, Queer Networks crucially underscores his resistance to traditional art historical systems of categorization and their emphasis on individual mastery. Highlighting his alternative modes of community building and playful antagonism toward art world protocols, Kienle demonstrates how Ray Johnson’s correspondence art offers new ways of envisioning togetherness in today’s highly commodified and deeply networked world.

Read more less

A radical shift took place in medieval Europe that still shapes contemporary intellectual life: freeing themselves from the fixed beliefs of the past, scholars began to determine and pursue their own avenues of academic inquiry. In Knowledge True and Useful, Frank Rexroth shows how, beginning in the 1070s, a new kind of knowledge arose in Latin Europe that for the first time could be deemed “scientific.” In the twelfth century, when Peter Abelard proclaimed the primacy of reason in all areas of inquiry (and started an affair with his pupil Heloise), it was a scandal. But he was not the only one who wanted to devote his life to this new enterprise of “scholastic” knowledge. Rexroth explores how the first students and teachers of this movement came together in new groups and schools, examining their intellectual debates and disputes as well as the lifelong connections they forged with one another through the scholastic communities to which they belonged. Rexroth shows how the resulting transformations produced a new understanding of truth and the utility of learning, as well as a new perspective on the intellectual tradition and the division of knowledge into academic disciplines—marking a turning point in European intellectual culture that culminated in the birth of the university and, with it, traditions and forms of academic inquiry that continue to organize the pursuit of knowledge today.

Read more less

Upon their independence, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian governments turned to the Global South and offered military and financial aid to Black liberation struggles. Tangier and Algiers attracted Black American and Caribbean artists eager to escape American white supremacy; Tunis hosted African filmmakers for the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage; and young freedom fighters from across the African continent established military training camps in Morocco. North Africa became a haven for militant-artists, and the region reshaped postcolonial cultural discourse through the 1960s and 1970s. Maghreb Noir dives into the personal and political lives of these militant-artists, who collectively challenged the neo-colonialist structures and the authoritarianism of African states. Drawing on Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English sources, as well as interviews with the artists themselves, Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik expands our understanding of Pan-Africanism geographically, linguistically, and temporally. This network of militant-artists departed from the racial solidarity extolled by many of their nationalist forefathers, instead following in the footsteps of their intellectual mentor, Frantz Fanon. They argued for the creation of a new ideology of continued revolution—one that was transnational, trans-racial, and in defiance of the emerging nation-states. Maghreb Noir establishes the importance of North Africa in nurturing these global connections—and uncovers a lost history of grassroots collaboration among militant-artists from across the globe.

Read more less

Across the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics, Michael Gavin grapples with this development, describing how quantitative methods for the study of textual data offer powerful tools for historical inquiry and sometimes unexpected perspectives on theoretical issues of concern to literary studies. Student-friendly and accessible, the book advances this argument through case studies drawn from the Early English Books Online corpus. Gavin shows how a copublication network of printers and authors reveals an uncannily accurate picture of historical periodization; that a vector-space semantic model parses historical concepts in incredibly fine detail; and that a geospatial analysis of early modern discourse offers a surprising panoramic glimpse into the period's notion of world geography. Across these case studies, Gavin challenges readers to consider why corpus-based methods work so effectively and asks whether the successes of formal modeling ought to inspire humanists to reconsider fundamental theoretical assumptions about textuality and meaning. As Gavin reveals, by embracing the expressive power of mathematics, scholars can add new dimensions to digital humanities research and find new connections with the social sciences.

Read more less

The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur explores how a new kind of international military figure emerged from, and exploited, the seventeenth century's momentous political, military, commercial, and scientific changes. In the era of the Thirty Years' War, these figures traveled rapidly and frequently across Europe using private wealth, credit, and connections to raise and command the armies that rulers desperately needed. Their careers reveal the roles international networks, private resources, and expertise played in building and at times undermining the state. Suzanne Sutherland uncovers the influence of military entrepreneurs by examining their activities as not only commanders but also diplomats, natural philosophers, information brokers, clients, and subjects on the battlefield, as well as through strategic marital and family allegiances. Sutherland focuses on Raimondo Montecuccoli (1609–80), a middling nobleman from the Duchy of Modena, who became one of the most powerful men in the Austrian Habsburg monarchy and helped found a new discipline, military science. The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur explains how Montecuccoli successfully met battlefield, court, and family responsibilities while contributing to the world of scholarship on an often violent, fragmented political-military landscape. As a result, Sutherland shifts the perspective on war away from the ruler and his court to instead examine the figures supplying force, along with their methods, networks, and reflections on those experiences.

Read more less

New York City’s elite women who turned a feminist cause into a fashionable revolution In the early twentieth century over two hundred of New York's most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage movement. Their names—Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney and the like—carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women's right to vote into a fashionable cause. Although they were dismissed by critics as bored socialites “trying on suffrage as they might the latest couture designs from Paris,” these gilded suffragists were at the epicenter of the great reforms known collectively as the Progressive Era. From championing education for women, to pursuing careers, and advocating for the end of marriage, these women were engaged with the swirl of change that swept through the streets of New York City. Johanna Neuman restores these women to their rightful place in the story of women’s suffrage. Understanding the need for popular approval for any social change, these socialites used their wealth, power, social connections and style to excite mainstream interest and to diffuse resistance to the cause. In the end, as Neuman says, when change was in the air, these women helped push women’s suffrage over the finish line.

Read more less

2023 Finalist Best Academic Themed Book, College Level – English, International Latino Book Awards A contemplative exploration of cultural representations of Mexican American fathers in contemporary media. As a young girl growing up in Houston, Texas, in the 1980s, Domino Perez spent her free time either devouring books or watching films—and thinking, always thinking, about the media she consumed. The meaningful connections between these media and how we learn form the basis of Perez’s “slow” research approach to race, class, and gender in the borderlands. Part cultural history, part literary criticism, part memoir, Fatherhood in the Borderlands takes an incisive look at the value of creative inquiry while it examines the nuanced portrayal of Mexican American fathers in literature and film. Perez reveals a shifting tension in the literal and figurative borderlands of popular narratives and shows how form, genre, and subject work to determine the roles Mexican American fathers are allowed to occupy. She also calls our attention to the cultural landscape that has allowed such a racialized representation of Mexican American fathers to continue, unopposed, for so many years. Fatherhood in the Borderlands brings readers right to the intersection of the white cultural mainstream in the United States and Mexican American cultural productions, carefully considering the legibility and illegibility of Brown fathers in contemporary media.

Read more less

The first comprehensive collection on the subject of Hong Kong neo-noir cinemaThe first comprehensive collection on Hong Kong neo-noir cinema, this book examines the way Hong Kong has developed its own unique version of noir since the late 1940s, while drawing upon and enriching global neo-noir cinemas. With a range of contributions from established and emerging scholars, this book illuminates the origins of Hong Kong neo-noir, its styles and contemporary manifestations, and its connection to mainland China before and after the 1997 Handover.Case studies include classics such as 'The Wild, Wild Rose' (1960) and more recent films like 'Full Alert' (1997), 'Exiled' (2007) and 'Shinjuku Incident' (2008). It provides a fresh look at the careers of iconic figures Johnnie To, Jackie Chan and Fruit Chan. By examining the films of emigre Shanghai directors, the cool women killers, the hybrids and noir cityscapes, 'Hong Kong Neo-Noir' explores the complex connections between a vibrant cinema and global noir.ContributorsAdam Bingham, Edge Hill UniversityJinhee Choi, King's College LondonDavid Desser, University of IllinoisKenneth E. Hall, East Tennessee State UniversityLaw Kar, Hong Kong Film ArchiveKwai-Cheung Lo, Hong Kong Baptist UniversityGina Marchetti, University of Hong KongLisa Odham Stokes, Seminole State College in Central FloridaJulian Stringer, University of NottinghamKristof Van den Troost, Chinese University of Hong KongTony Williams, Southern Illinois University, CarbondaleEsther C. M. Yau, University of Hong Kong

Read more less

Deliver engaging, enquiry-driven lessons and help pupils gain a coherent chronological understanding of and across periods studied with this complete offering for Key Stage 3 History. Designed for the 2014 National Curriculum this supportive learning package makes history fun and inspiring to learn. Making Sense of History consists of four Pupil's Books with accompanying Dynamic Learning Teaching and Learning resources. Structured around big picture overviews and in-depth enquiries on different topics, the course develops pupils understanding of history and their ability to ask and explore valid historical questions about the past.- Help pupils come to a sound chronological understanding of the past and identify the most significant events, connections and patterns of change and continuity with specifically tailored big pictures of the period and of the topics within it.- Develop pupils' enquiry skills and help them become motivated and curious to learn about the past with purposeful and engaging enquiries and a focus on individuals' lives.- Ensure pupils' progress in their historical thinking through clear and balanced targeted coverage of the main second order concepts in history.- Support and stretch your pupils with differentiated material, including writing frames to support literacy and ideas for more challenge provided in the Dynamic Learning Teaching and Learning Resources.- Make assessment become a meaningful and manageable process through bespoke mark schemes for individual pieces of work.

Read more less

Of the "big three" components of electrical infrastructure, distribution typically gets the least attention. In fact, a thorough, up-to-date treatment of the subject hasn’t been published in years, yet deregulation and technical changes have increased the need for better information. Filling this void, the Electric Power Distribution Handbook delivers comprehensive, cutting-edge coverage of the electrical aspects of power distribution systems. The first few chapters of this pragmatic guidebook focus on equipment-oriented information and applications such as choosing transformer connections, sizing and placing capacitors, and setting regulators. The middle portion discusses reliability and power quality, while the end tackles lightning protection, grounding, and safety. The Second Edition of this CHOICE Award winner features: 1 new chapter on overhead line performance and 14 fully revised chapters incorporating updates from several EPRI projects New sections on voltage optimization, arc flash, and contact voltage Full-color illustrations throughout, plus fresh bibliographic references, tables, graphs, methods, and statistics Updates on conductor burndown, fault location, reliability programs, tree contacts, automation, and grounding and personnel protection Access to an author-maintained support website, distributionhandbook.com, with problems sets, resources, and online apps An unparalleled source of tips and solutions for improving performance, the Electric Power Distribution Handbook, Second Edition provides power and utility engineers with the technical information and practical tools they need to understand the applied science of distribution.

Read more less

Racial Castration, the first book to bring together the fields of Asian American studies and psychoanalytic theory, explores the role of sexuality in racial formation and the place of race in sexual identity. David L. Eng examines images—literary, visual, and filmic—that configure past as well as contemporary perceptions of Asian American men as emasculated, homosexualized, or queer.Eng juxtaposes theortical discussions of Freud, Lacan, and Fanon with critical readings of works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lonny Kaneko, David Henry Hwang, Louie Chu, David Wong Louie, Ang Lee, and R. Zamora Linmark. While situating these literary and cultural productions in relation to both psychoanalytic theory and historical events of particular significance for Asian Americans, Eng presents a sustained analysis of dreamwork and photography, the mirror stage and the primal scene, and fetishism and hysteria. In the process, he offers startlingly new interpretations of Asian American masculinity in its connections to immigration exclusion, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, multiculturalism, and the model minority myth. After demonstrating the many ways in which Asian American males are haunted and constrained by enduring domestic norms of sexuality and race, Eng analyzes the relationship between Asian American male subjectivity and the larger transnational Asian diaspora. Challenging more conventional understandings of diaspora as organized by race, he instead reconceptualizes it in terms of sexuality and queerness.

Read more less

What constitutes “blackness” in American culture? And who gets to define whether or not someone is truly African American? Is a struggling hip-hop artist more “authentic” than a conservative Supreme Court justice? In Authentic Blackness J. Martin Favor looks to the New Negro Movement—also known as the Harlem Renaissance—to explore early challenges to the idea that race is a static category.Authentic Blackness looks at the place of the “folk”—those African Americans “furthest down,” in the words of Alain Locke—and how the representation of the folk and the black middle class both spurred the New Negro Movement and became one of its most serious points of contention. Drawing on vernacular theories of African American literature from such figures as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker as well as theorists Judith Butler and Stuart Hall, Favor looks closely at the work of four Harlem Renaissance fiction writers: James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, and Jean Toomer. Arguing that each of these writers had, at best, an ambiguous relationship to African American folk culture, Favor demonstrates how they each sought to redress the notion of a fixed black identity. Authentic Blackness illustrates how “race” has functioned as a type of performative discourse, a subjectivity that simultaneously builds and conceals its connections with such factors as class, gender, sexuality, and geography.

Read more less

In a major rethinking of the functions, methods, and aims of narrative poetics, David Herman exposes important links between modernist and postmodernist literary experimentation and contemporary language theory. Ultimately a search for new tools for narrative theory, his work clarifies complex connections between science and art, theory and culture, and philosophical analysis and narrative discourse.Following an extensive historical overview of theories about universal grammar, Herman examines Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s The Trial, and Woolf’s Between the Acts as case studies of modernist literary narratives that encode grammatical principles which were (re)fashioned in logic, linguistics, and philosophy during the same period. Herman then uses the interpretation of universal grammar developed via these modernist texts to explore later twentieth-century cultural phenomena. The problem of citation in the discourses of postmodernism, for example, is discussed with reference to syntactic theory. An analysis of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover raises the question of cinematic meaning and draws on semantic theory. In each case, Herman shows how postmodern narratives encode ideas at work in current theories about the nature and function of language.Outlining new directions for the study of language in literature, Universal Grammar and Narrative Form provides a wealth of information about key literary, linguistic, and philosophical trends in the twentieth century.

Read more less

Henry Spearman, the balding economics professor with a knack for solving crimes, returns in The Mystery of the Invisible Hand--a clever whodunit of campus intrigue, stolen art, and murder. Having just won the Nobel Prize, Spearman accepts an invitation to lecture at Monte Vista University. He arrives in the wake of a puzzling art heist with plans to teach a course on art and economics--only to be faced with the alleged suicide of womanizing artist-in-residence Tristan Wheeler. When it becomes clear that Wheeler had serious enemies and a murderer is in their midst, Henry Spearman is on the case. Was Wheeler killed by a jilted lover, a cuckolded husband, or a beleaguered assistant? Could there have been a connection between Wheeler's marketability and his death? From the Monte Vista campus in San Antonio to the halls of Sotheby's in New York, Spearman traces the connections between economics and the art world, finding his clues in monopolies and the Coase conjecture, auction theory, and the work of Adam Smith. What are the parallels between a firm's capital and an art museum's collection? What does the market say about art's authenticity versus its availability? And what is the mysterious "death effect" that lies at the heart of the case? Spearman must rely on his savviest economic insights to clear up this artful mystery and pin down a killer.

Read more less

For any market to work properly, certain key elements are necessary: competition, pricing, rules, clearly defined offers, and easy access to information. Without these components, there would be chaos. Orderly Fashion examines how order is maintained in the different interconnected consumer, producer, and credit markets of the global fashion industry. From retailers in Sweden and the United Kingdom to producers in India and Turkey, Patrik Aspers focuses on branded garment retailers--chains such as Gap, H&M, Old Navy, Topshop, and Zara. Aspers investigates these retailers' interactions and competition in the consumer market for fashion garments, traces connections between producer and consumer markets, and demonstrates why market order is best understood through an analysis of its different forms of social construction. Emphasizing consumption rather than production, Aspers considers the larger retailers' roles as buyers in the production market of garments, and as potential objects of investment in financial markets. He shows how markets overlap and intertwine and he defines two types of markets--status markets and standard markets. In status markets, market order is related to the identities of the participating actors more than the quality of the goods, whereas in standard markets the opposite holds true. Looking at how identities, products, and values create the ordered economic markets of the global fashion business, Orderly Fashion has wide implications for all modern markets, regardless of industry.

Read more less

Higher category theory is generally regarded as technical and forbidding, but part of it is considerably more tractable: the theory of infinity-categories, higher categories in which all higher morphisms are assumed to be invertible. In Higher Topos Theory, Jacob Lurie presents the foundations of this theory, using the language of weak Kan complexes introduced by Boardman and Vogt, and shows how existing theorems in algebraic topology can be reformulated and generalized in the theory's new language. The result is a powerful theory with applications in many areas of mathematics. The book's first five chapters give an exposition of the theory of infinity-categories that emphasizes their role as a generalization of ordinary categories. Many of the fundamental ideas from classical category theory are generalized to the infinity-categorical setting, such as limits and colimits, adjoint functors, ind-objects and pro-objects, locally accessible and presentable categories, Grothendieck fibrations, presheaves, and Yoneda's lemma. A sixth chapter presents an infinity-categorical version of the theory of Grothendieck topoi, introducing the notion of an infinity-topos, an infinity-category that resembles the infinity-category of topological spaces in the sense that it satisfies certain axioms that codify some of the basic principles of algebraic topology. A seventh and final chapter presents applications that illustrate connections between the theory of higher topoi and ideas from classical topology.

Read more less

Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics), and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy.

Read more less

In The Twilight of the Middle Class, Andrew Hoberek challenges the commonly held notion that post-World War II American fiction eschewed the economic for the psychological or the spiritual. Reading works by Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and others, he shows how both the form and content of postwar fiction responded to the transformation of the American middle class from small property owners to white-collar employees. In the process, he produces "compelling new accounts of identity politics and postmodernism that will be of interest to anyone who reads or teaches contemporary fiction. Hoberek argues that despite the financial gains and job security enjoyed by the postwar middle class, the transition to white-collar employment paved the way for its current precarious state in a country marked by increasingly deep class divisions. Postwar fiction provided the middle class with various imaginative substitutes for its former property-owning independence, substitutes that since then have not only allowed but abetted this class's downward mobility. To read this fiction in the light of the middle-class experience is thus not only to restore the severed connections between literary and economic "history in the second half of the twentieth "century, but to explore the roots of the contemporary crisis of the middle class.

Read more less

Law punishes violence, yet law depends on violence. In this book, a group of leading interdisciplinary legal scholars seeks to map the inexorable but unstable relationship of law to violence. What does it mean to talk about the violence of law? Do high incarceration rates and increased reliance on capital punishment indicate that U.S. law is growing more violent at a time when violence is being restrained in other legal systems? How is the violence of law represented in popular culture and does this affect law's actual legitimacy? Does violence express or distort the essence of law? Does law's violence serve justice? In deeply original essays, the authors build on the seminal work of Robert Cover--one of the few legal scholars ever to consider the question of law and violence. In striving to situate his insights within current political, social, economic, and cultural contexts, they contemplate diverse and interrelated subjects surrounding the theme of law and violence. Among these are the purpose of law as punishment, the increasing number of executions in the United States, prison violence, racial disparity in sentencing, and the meaning of torture. The result is a remarkable volume that stimulates us to reconsider connections that we too often leave unexplored. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Marianne Constable, Peter Fitzpatrick, Thomas R. Kearns, Peter Rush, Jonathan Simon, Shaun McVeigh, and Alison Young.

Read more less

The Renaissance in the 19th Century examines the Italian Renaissance revival as a Pan-European critique: a commentary on and reshaping of a nineteenth-century present that is perceived as deeply problematic. The revival, located between historical nostalgia and critique of the contemporary world, swept the humanistic disciplines—history, literature, music, art, architecture, collecting.The Italian Renaissance revival marked the oeuvre of a group of figures as diverse as J.-D. Ingres and E. M. Forster, Heinrich Geymüller and Adolf von Hildebrand, Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt, H. H. Richardson and R. M. Rilke, Giosuè Carducci and De Sanctis. Though some perceived the Italian Renaissance as a Golden Age, a model for the present, others cast it as a negative example, contrasting the resurgence of the arts with the decadence of society and the loss of an ethical and political conscience. The triumphalist model had its detractors, and the reaction to the Renaissance was more complex than it may at first have appeared.Through a series of essays by a group of international scholars, volume editors Lina Bolzoni and Alina Payne recover the multidimensionality of the reaction to, transformation of, and commentary on the connections between the Italian Renaissance and nineteenth-century modernity. The essays look from within (by Italians) and from without (by foreigners, expatriates, travelers, and scholars), comparing different visions and interpretations.

Read more less

Oracle database administration is a complex and stressful job. In a series of easy-to-use checklists, this concise pocket reference summarizes the enormous number of tasks you must perform as an Oracle DBA. Each section takes a step-by-step "cookbook" approach to presenting DBA quick-reference material. This reference guide is divided into three major sections covering the main areas of an Oracle DBA's responsibilities. The first, on database management, describes how to maintain existing databases (with a checklist of daily, weekly, and monthly activities), prepare new databases for production, and back up and recover databases (with checklists for how to recover tables, data files, index files, control files, rollback segments, and active and inactive redo logs). The section on installation and configuration contains a summary of key procedures for installation on Unix, Windows NT, and VMS platforms. It also includes special steps for configuring a parallel database. Finally, the section on network management helps with installing, configuring, and testing Net8 software on server and client machines. Tasks include confirming network availability and Net8 connectivity, verifying Net8 name resolution, configuring Net8 clients (with LDAP or Oracle Names), configuring Net8 on the server, configuring the Multi-Threaded Server (MTS), tracing client connections, and tracing the Net8 listener. This book's quick-reference, step-by-step approach aims to take the stress out of DBA problem solving.

Read more less

With an Introduction by the author.'The prolific master of suburban mayhem has still got his mojo.' Evening StandardTime of My Life'One of Mr. Ayckbourn's most virtuosic experiments in postmodern narrative.' Wall Street JournalNeighbourhood Watch'Ayckbourn's tartly topical, pitch-black comedy, a startling evocation of the panic induced by nightmarish notions of "broken Britain"... An arresting, nastily comic cautionary tale.' The TimesArrivals and Departures'Ayckbourn's genius lies in his ability to write what you might call 'sad comedies,' uproariously funny farces that are at second glance deeply serious, at times despairing portraits of modern middle-class life and its discontents. On occasion, as in Arrivals & Departures, he puts the despair at centre stage, and what results is a play that at bottom can no longer be called a comedy at all.' Wall Street JournalHero's Welcome 'Alan Ayckbourn is the poet laureate of missed connections. In play after pensive, droll and acid play, Ayckbourn anatomizes how we fail to understand and trust our lovers and friends.' GuardianA Brief History of Women'As A Brief History of Women follows Spates at twenty year intervals through the next sixty years, it becomes progressively more funny, more tender, more Ayckbourn. Ayckbourn knows that moments of real connection between people are hard-won and hard to forget.' The Times

Read more less

This definitive source provides practicing professionals and students in the occupational, environmental, and public health and safety fields with the functional basics of biological monitoring. The author examines how environmental exposures to particular chemicals are related to concentrations of markers in body tissues and fluids. Biological Monitoring integrates the applied sciences of industrial/environmental hygiene, epidemiology, public health, occupational medicine, toxicology, biochemistry, and analytical chemistry with the basic sciences to interpret the connections between exposures and lifestyle/environmental influences, and their effects on humans. This comprehensive introduction provides dependable, detailed coverage of: * monitoring for harmful substances in the workplace * the benefits and limitations of testing for critical levels of toxic materials in bodily tissues and fluids * state-of-the-art developments in biological monitoring * a wide variety of toxic chemicals and selected physical agents * immunoassays * monitoring for HIV and AIDS * importance of exposure routes * the most up-to-date methods of health and medical surveillance * the interpretation of adduct concentrations * biological exposure indices * biological monitoring of pesticides * biological monitoring in the home and around hazardous waste sites * and much more This essential, compelling guide is the only inclusive and thorough introduction available. Biological Monitoring's rigorous, accessible, interdisciplinary approach makes this an invaluable reference and text for industrial and environmental hygienists, physicians, pharmacists, nurses, epidemiologists, toxicologists, laboratory technicians, chemical engineers, science graduate students, and the environmentally concerned.

Read more less

This book provides a comprehensive description of Radio Access Networks for UMTS . The main content is based upon the release 6 version of the 3GPP specifications. Changes since the release 99 version are described while some of the new features from the release 7 version are introduced. Starting from the high-level network architecture, the first sections describe the flow of data between the network and end-user. This includes a dedicated chapter describing the Iub transport network. Detailed descriptions of both HSDPA and HSUPA reflect the increasing importance of efficient high data rate connections. Signalling procedures are described for speech, video and PS data connection establishment, SMS data transfer, soft handover and inter-system handover. The more practical subjects of link budgets and radio network planning are also addressed. More than 180 example log files reinforce the reader's understanding Summary bullet points allow rapid access to the most important information Focus upon how data is transferred between the network and end-user Dedicated chapters provide detailed descriptions of both HSDPA and HSUPA Step-by-step analysis of common signalling procedures Key radio network planning subjects addressed Radio Access Networks for UMTS is ideal for mobile telecommunications engineers working for equipment vendors, operators and regulators. It will also appeal to system designers, technical managers and students.

Read more less

Tubular Structures XIII contains the latest scientific and engineering developments in the field of tubular steel structures, as presented at the 13th International Symposium on Tubular Structures (ISTS13), Hong Kong, 15 – 17 December 2010. The International Symposium on Tubular Structures (ISTS) has a longstanding reputation for being the principal showcase for manufactured tubing and the prime international forum for discussion of research, developments and applications in this field. The Symposium presentations herein include one invited ISTS Kurobane Lecture together with all the technical papers.Various key and emerging subjects in the field of hollow structural sections are covered, such as: special applications and case studies, static and fatigue behaviour of connections/joints, concrete-fi lled and composite tubular members and offshore structures, stainless steel and aluminium structures, earthquake and dynamic resistance, specifi cation and standard developments, material properties and structural reliability, impact resistance and brittle fracture, fi re resistance, casting and fabrication innovations. Research and development issues presented in this book are applicable to buildings, bridges, offshore structures, entertainment rides, cranes, towers and various mechanical and agricultural equipment.Tubular Structures XIII is thus a pertinent reference source for architects, civil and mechanical engineers, designers, steel fabricators and contractors, manufacturers of hollow sections or related construction products, trade associations involved with tubing, owners or developers of tubular structures, steel specification committees, academics and research students all around the world.

Read more less

Surrealism is widely thought of as an artistic movement that flourished in Europe between the two world wars. However, during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, diverse radical affinity groups, underground subcultures, and student protest movements proclaimed their connections to surrealism. Radical Dreams argues that surrealism was more than an avant-garde art movement; it was a living current of anti-authoritarian resistance.Featuring perspectives from scholars across the humanities and, distinctively, from contemporary surrealist practitioners, this volume examines surrealism’s role in postwar oppositional cultures. It demonstrates how surrealism’s committed engagement extends beyond the parameters of an artistic style or historical period, with chapters devoted to Afrosurrealism, Ted Joans, punk, the Situationist International, the student protests of May ’68, and other topics. Privileging interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and material culture approaches, contributors address surrealism’s interaction with New Left politics, protest movements, the sexual revolution, psychedelia, and other subcultural trends around the globe. A revelatory work, Radical Dreams definitively shows that the surrealist movement was synonymous with cultural and political radicalism. It will be especially valuable to those interested in the avant-garde, contemporary art, and radical social movements.In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jonathan P. Eburne, David Hopkins, Claire Howard, Michael Löwy, Alyce Mahon, Gavin Parkinson, Grégory Pierrot, Penelope Rosemont, Ron Sakolsky, Marie Arleth Skov, Ryan Standfest, and Sandra Zalman.

Read more less

Personal genome testing, gene editing for life-threatening diseases, synthetic life: once the stuff of science fiction, twentieth- and twenty-first-century advancements blur the lines between scientific narrative and scientific fact. This examination of bioengineering in popular and literary culture shows that the influence of science on science fiction is more reciprocal than we might expect.Looking closely at the work of Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers, and other authors, as well as at film, comics, and serial television such as Orphan Black, Everett Hamner shows how the genome age is transforming both the most commercial and the most sophisticated stories we tell about the core of human personhood. As sublime technologies garner public awareness beyond the genre fiction shelves, they inspire new literary categories like “slipstream” and shape new definitions of the human, the animal, the natural, and the artificial. In turn, what we learn of bioengineering via popular and literary culture prepares the way for its official adoption or restriction—and for additional representations. By imagining the connections between emergent gene testing and editing capacities and long-standing conversations about freedom and determinism, these stories help build a cultural zeitgeist with a sharper, more balanced vision of predisposed agency.A compelling exploration of the interrelationships among science, popular culture, and self, Editing the Soul sheds vital light on what the genome age means to us, and what’s to come.

Read more less

Publishers Weekly Best Book in Religion 2020 Foreword Review's INDIES Book of the Year Award, Religion In Theological Territories, David Bentley Hart, one of America's most eminent contemporary writers on religion, reflects on the state of theology "at the borders" of other fields of discourse—metaphysics, philosophy of mind, science, the arts, ethics, and biblical hermeneutics in particular. The book advances many of Hart's larger theological projects, developing and deepening numerous dimensions of his previous work. Theological Territories constitutes something of a manifesto regarding the manner in which theology should engage other fields of concern and scholarship. The essays are divided into five sections on the nature of theology, the relations between theology and science, the connections between gospel and culture, literary representations of and engagements with transcendence, and the New Testament. Hart responds to influential books, theologians, philosophers, and poets, including Rowan Williams, Jean-Luc Marion, Tomáš Halík, Sergei Bulgakov, Jennifer Newsome Martin, and David Jones, among others. The twenty-six chapters are drawn from live addresses delivered in various settings. Most of the material has never been printed before, and those parts that have appear here in expanded form. Throughout, these essays show how Hart's mind works with the academic veneer of more formal pieces stripped away. The book will appeal to both academic and non-academic readers interested in the place of theology in the modern world.

Read more less

The twenty-first century has witnessed a resurgence of economic inequality, racial exclusion, and political hatred, causing questions of collective identity and belonging to assume new urgency. In Making Worlds, Claudia Breger argues that contemporary European cinema provides ways of thinking about and feeling collectivity that can challenge these political trends.Breger offers nuanced readings of major contemporary films such as Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, Fatih Akın’s The Edge of Heaven, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, and Aki Kaurismäki’s refugee trilogy, as well as works by Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Through a new model of cinematic worldmaking, Breger examines the ways in which these works produce unexpected and destabilizing affects that invite viewers to imagine new connections among individuals or groups. These films and their depictions of refugees, immigrants, and communities do not simply counter dominant political imaginaries of hate and fear with calls for empathy or solidarity. Instead, they produce layered sensibilities that offer the potential for greater openness to others’ present, past, and future claims. Drawing on the work of Latour, Deleuze, and Rancière, Breger engages questions of genre and realism along with the legacies of cinematic modernism. Offering a rich account of contemporary film, Making Worlds theorizes the cinematic creation of imaginative spaces in order to find new ways of responding to political hatred.

Read more less

How can literary forms fashion a nation? Though genres such as the novel and newspaper have been credited with shaping a national imagination and a sense of community, during the rapid modernization of the Meiji period, Japanese intellectuals took a striking—but often overlooked—interest in poetry’s ties to national character. In Idly Scribbling Rhymers, Robert Tuck offers a groundbreaking study of the connections among traditional poetic genres, print media, and visions of national community in late nineteenth-century Japan that reveals the fissures within the process of imagining the nation.Structured around the work of the poet and critic Masaoka Shiki, Idly Scribbling Rhymers considers how poetic genres were read, written, and discussed within the emergent worlds of the newspaper and literary periodical in Meiji Japan. Tuck details attempts to cast each of the three traditional poetic genres of haiku, kanshi, and waka as Japan’s national poetry. He analyzes the nature and boundaries of the concepts of national poetic community that were meant to accompany literary production, showing that Japan’s visions of community were defined by processes of hierarchy and exclusion and deeply divided along lines of social class, gender, and political affiliation. A comprehensive study of nineteenth-century Japanese poetics and print culture, Idly Scribbling Rhymers reveals poetry’s surprising yet fundamental role in emerging forms of media and national consciousness.

Read more less

In the chaos of early-1990s Russia, the wife and stepdaughter of a paralyzed veteran conceal the Soviet Union’s collapse from him in order to keep him—and his pension—alive until it turns out the tough old man has other plans. Olga Slavnikova’s The Man Who Couldn’t Die tells the story of how two women try to prolong a life—and the means and meaning of their own lives—by creating a world that doesn’t change, a Soviet Union that never crumbled.After her stepfather’s stroke, Marina hangs Brezhnev’s portrait on the wall, edits the Pravda articles read to him, and uses her media connections to cobble together entire newscasts of events that never happened. Meanwhile, her mother, Nina Alexandrovna, can barely navigate the bewildering new world outside, especially in comparison to the blunt reality of her uncommunicative husband. As Marina is caught up in a local election campaign that gets out of hand, Nina discovers that her husband is conspiring as well—to kill himself and put an end to the charade. Masterfully translated by Marian Schwartz, The Man Who Couldn’t Die is a darkly playful vision of the lost Soviet past and the madness of the post-Soviet world that uses Russia’s modern history as a backdrop for an inquiry into larger metaphysical questions.

Read more less

Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) was one of the twentieth century's most original interpreters of the market economy. His penetrating analysis of globalization's disruptions and the Great Depression's underlying causes still serves as an effective counterargument to free market fundamentalism. This biography shows how the major personal and historical events of his life transformed him from a bourgeois radical into a Christian socialist but also informed his ambivalent stance on social democracy, communism, the New Deal, and the shifting intellectual scene of postwar America. The book begins with Polanyi's childhood in the Habsburg Empire and his involvement with the Great War and Hungary's postwar revolution. It connects Polanyi's idealistic radicalism to the political promise and intellectual ferment of Red Vienna and the horror of fascism. The narrative revisits Polanyi's oeuvre in English, German, and Hungarian, includes exhaustive research in five archives, and features interviews with Polanyi's daughter, students, and colleagues, clarifying the contradictory aspects of the thinker's work. These personal accounts also shed light on Polanyi's connections to scholars, Christians, atheists, journalists, hot and cold warriors, and socialists of all stripes. Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left engages with Polanyi's biography as a reflection and condensation of extraordinary times. It highlights the historical ruptures, tensions, and upheavals that the thinker sought to capture and comprehend and, in telling his story, engages with the intellectual and political history of a turbulent epoch.

Read more less

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work--the power of horror--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction.

Read more less

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work--the power of horror--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction.

Read more less

Can there be a novel of the international working class despite the conditions and constraints of economic globalization? What does it mean to invoke working-class writing as an ethical intervention in an age of comparative advantage and outsourcing? No Country argues for a rethinking of the genre of working-class literature. Sonali Perera expands our understanding of working-class fiction by considering a range of international texts, identifying textual, political, and historical linkages often overlooked by Eurocentric and postcolonial scholarship. Her readings connect the literary radicalism of the 1930s to the feminist recovery projects of the 1970s, and the anticolonial and postcolonial fiction of the 1960s to today's counterglobalist struggles, building a new portrait of the twentieth century's global economy and the experiences of the working class within it. Perera considers novels by the Indian anticolonial writer Mulk Raj Anand; the American proletarian writer Tillie Olsen; Sri Lankan Tamil/Black British writer and political journalist Ambalavaner Sivanandan; Indian writer and bonded-labor activist Mahasweta Devi; South African-born Botswanan Bessie Head; and the fiction and poetry published under the collective signature Dabindu, a group of free-trade-zone garment factory workers and feminist activists in contemporary Sri Lanka. Articulating connections across the global North-South divide, Perera creates a new genealogy of working-class writing as world literature and transforms the ideological underpinnings casting literature as cultural practice.

Read more less