Search results for ""Author Matthew Feldman""

This wide-ranging collection of academic essays examines the various undertakings by modern intellectuals and ideologues in the process of propaganda and political debate. Matthew Feldman calls attention to the substantial role played in post-Great War Europe and the US by religionsboth familiar monotheisms like Christianity and secular political faiths -- over the last century of upheaval and revolutionary change. While the first part considers Ezra Pound as a case study in fascist ʼconversion in Mussolinis Italy, leading to extensive propaganda, the second half examines other fascist ideologues like Martin Heidegger to fascist murderer Anders Behring Breivik, before turning to other leading ideologies in modern Europe and the US, communism and liberalism, covering key figures from Thomas Merton and Albert Camus to the Russian Constructionists and Samuel Beckett, with especial focus on the subjects of modern warfare, political terrorism, and genocide, ranging from Stalinist gulags to the war in Iraq. With thought-provoking discussion of the interplay between belief and modern politics as understood by familiar intellectual voices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and general readers alike.

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Anthony Barron explores the relationship between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the forms and themes of Becketts critical and creative writings. He shows that Becketts aesthetic preoccupations are consonant with some of Schopenhauers seminal arguments regarding the arational basis of artistic composition and appreciation and the impotence of reason in human affairs. While Becketts critical writings are, in places, formidably opaque, this work examines the ways in which such texts can be elucidated when their intertextual affinities with Schopenhauers arguments are revealed. Using Schopenhauers thought as a presiding interpretative framework, Barron demonstrates how the widespread presence of philosophical and theological ideas in Becketts creative texts signifies less about his personal convictions than it does about his authorial aims. He thereby highlights the ways in which discursive ideas were appropriated and manipulated by Beckett for purely literary ends. A central contention of this book is that to judge the place of ideas within Becketts art, we should ignore questions of their theoretical persuasiveness and consider their role as purely aesthetic devices, the value of which is revealed in terms of the existential impact they have upon his characters. In each of the chapters that deal with Becketts fiction, Barron underscores the artistically energizing tensions that exist between the concepts that Becketts characters invoke in their attempts to comprehend the import of their experiences and their conative and affective tribulations which invariably prove resistant to such analysis. Here the means by which such conceptual aporias engender semantic potentialities underpin an exploration of Becketts creative assimilation of rational discourse. While the focus of this publication is upon Becketts early and middle fiction, which was composed at a time when the relationship between the chaos of quotidian ordeals and the value of rational thought became most acutely relevant for him, numerous cross-references to his dramatic and poetical works are provided in order to highlight the overall significance of these issues within his oeuvre.

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This timely intervention exposes the euphemized language of the extreme right as a Trojan Horse of deception to re-gain greater influence on public policy. Since the end of the Second World War, the extreme right has been tactically using doublespeak', aping the language of liberal democracy. Attentive observation and accurate recognition of the extreme right pedigree means taking seriously their deliberately crafted slogans, symbols and themes. The essays in this book inquire into the extreme right's attempts at repackaging' contemporary ultranationalism to make it palatable to more mainstream European and American tastes.

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The dozen essays brought together here, alongside a newly-written introduction, contextualise and exemplify the recent "empirical turn" in Beckett studies. Characterised, above all, by recourse to manuscript materials in constructing revisionist interpretations, this approach has helped to transform the study of Samuel Beckett over the past generation. In addition to focusing upon Beckett's early immersion in philosophy and psychology, other chapters similarly analyse his later collaboration with the BBC through the lens of literary history. The book thus offers new readings of Beckett by returning to his archive of notebooks, letters, and drafts. In reassessing key aspects of his development as one of the 20th century's leading artists, this collection is of interest to all students of Beckett's writing as well as "historicist" scholars and critics of modernism more generally.

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