Search results for ""stanford university press""

This collection of essays by historians, historians of science and medicine, and literary and textual scholars—from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Spain—analyzes the achievements of Dr. Francisco Hernández (1515-87) in the history of medicine and science in Europe and the Americas. Celebrated in his own day as one of Spain's leading physicians and naturalists, he is now best remembered for his monumental work on the native plants and materia medica of central Mexico. Sent to New Spain in 1570 by King Philip II to research and describe the natural history of the region, to assess the medical usefulness of the natural resources, and to gather ethnographic materials for an anthropological history, Hernández was the first trained scientist to undertake scientific work in the New World. For seven years he gathered information throughout the Valley of Mexico, learning Nahuatl, recording local medical customs, studying indigenous medicines, and writing down all his observations. The result was The Natural History of New Spain, written in Latin, which consisted of six folio volumes filled with descriptions of over 3,000 plants previously unknown in Europe (along with descriptions of a much smaller number of animals and minerals) and ten folio volumes of paintings by Mexican artists illustrating the plants and animals he described. Hernández died before he could publish his Natural History, and the materials were placed in the Escorial, where they were extensively consulted, copied, abstracted, and translated by generations of scientists, medical specialists, and natural philosophers before they were destroyed by fire in 1671. Hernández's work was still regarded as authoritative on a number of New World botanical topics as late as the nineteenth century, and his writings remain in use in popular form in Mexico today. The sixteen essays in this volume treat the most important aspects of Hernández's experience, including his education, his heterodox beliefs, and the state of medicine in both Spain and New Spain during his era. Other essays show the dissemination of the knowledge Hernández accumulated, including his contributions to European botany and materia medica, his relationship to Spanish Baroque painting, the "globalization" of his work in the eighteenth century, and his place in nineteenth-century debates among Spanish scientists.

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This first volume of Niklas Luhmann's two-part final work was initially published in German in 1997. The culmination of his thirty-year theoretical project to reconceptualize sociology, it offers a comprehensive description of modern society on a scale not attempted since Talcott Parsons. Beginning with an account of the fluidity of meaning and the accordingly high improbability of successful communication, Luhmann analyzes a range of communicative media, including language, writing, the printing press, and electronic media as well as "success media," such as money, power, truth, and love, all of which structure this fluidity and make communication possible. An investigation into the ways in which social systems produce and reproduce themselves, the book asks what gives rise to functionally differentiated social systems, how they evolve, and how social movements, organizations, and patterns of interaction emerge. The advent of the computer and its networks, which trigger potentially far-reaching processes of restructuring, receive particular attention. A concluding chapter on the semantics of modern society's self-description bids farewell to the outdated theoretical approaches of "old Europe," that is, to ontological, holistic, ethical, and critical interpretations of society, and argues that concepts such as "the nation," "the subject," and "postmodernity" are vastly overrated. In their stead, "society"—long considered a suspicious term by sociologists, one open to all kinds of reification—is defined in purely operational terms. It is the always uncertain answer to the question of what comes next in all areas of communication.

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For many years English-language scholarship on late medieval and early modern Italy was largely dominated by work on Florence—as a city, culture, and economic and political entity. During the past few decades, however, scholarship has moved well beyond the “Florentine model” to explore the diversity of Italian urban and provincial life—the “many Italies” that stretched from the Apennines to the Mediterranean. This volume brings together a group of sixteen urban, social, religious, and economic historians of late medieval and early modern Italy whose work reflects this shift, and illustrates some of the significant new research directions of the field. At the volume’s core are questions important to all historians of late medieval and early modern Europe: What does the new work on Italy beyond Florence have to say about the traditional definition of the Renaissance, a definition that made Florence its paradigmatic expression? What new questions about the period in general have emerged as a result of decentering the Renaissance? How has the effort to view Florence in a wider set of Italian and Mediterranean political and economic networks shed new light on the history of city states? And how has this work led to a reexamination of the continuities connecting the late medieval world to the early modern period? In exploring the contours of Italy from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the volume creates a landscape against which to evaluate the current state of Florentine studies, the resurgence of Venetian studies, the renewed interest in Italy under Spanish rule, and the development of many other regional and local histories that are increasingly used by scholars to facilitate a broader understanding of Italy as a whole.

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Astronomy was a popular and important part of Victorian science, and British astronomers carried telescopes and spectroscopes to remote areas of India, the Great Plains of North America, and islands in the Caribbean and Pacific to watch the sun eclipsed by the moon. Examining the rich interplay between science, culture, and British imperial society in the late nineteenth century, this book shows how the organization and conduct of scientific fieldwork was structured by contemporary politics and culture, and how rapid and profound changes in the organization of science, advances in photography, and new printing technology remade the character of scientific observation. After introducing the field of Victorian science to the nonspecialist, the book examines the long periods of planning necessary for eclipse expeditions, and it recounts the day-to-day work of getting to field sites, setting up camp, and preparing for and observing eclipses. Operating behind the countless decisions made by scientists was a host of large-scale forces, including the professionalization and specialization of disciplines, the growth of service, and public funding for the sciences. Fieldwork also required close coordination with the many institutions and technological systems of British imperialism. The development of imaging technologies was, of course, crucial to observations of the solar corona. Eclipse observation taxed astronomers and their cameras to their limits, and it raised new questions about the trustworthiness of imaging technologies. In the late nineteenth century, scientists shifted from drawing to photographing natural phenomena, but the shift occurred gradually, unevenly, and against resistance. Victorian astronomers had to weigh carefully the merits of human and mechanical observation, and the difficulties of solar photography highlight the inseparability of images from technologies of observation and printing.

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The Romantic Performative develops a new context and methodology for reading Romantic literature by exploring philosophies of language from the period 1785-1835. It reveals that the concept of the performative, debated by twentieth-century theorists from J. L. Austin to Judith Butler, has a much greater relevance for Romantic literature than has been realized, since Romantic philosophy of language was dominated by the idea that something happens when words are spoken. By presenting Romantic philosophy as a theory of the performative, and Romantic literature in terms of that theory, this book uncovers the historical roots of twentieth-century ideas about speech acts and performativity. Romantic linguistic philosophy already focused on the relationship between speaker and hearer, describing speech as an act that establishes both subjectivity and intersubjective relations and theorizing reality as a verbal construct. But Romantic theorists considered utterance, the context of utterance, and the positions and identities of speaker and hearer to be much more fluid and less stable than modern analytic philosophers tend to make them. Romantic theories of language therefore yield a definition of the "Romantic performative" as an utterance that creates an object in the world, instantiates the relationship between speaker and hearer, and even founds the subjectivity of the speaker in the moment when the utterance occurs. The author traces the Romantic performative through its diverse development in the moral, political, and legal philosophy of Reid, Bentham, Kant and the German Idealists, Humboldt, and Coleridge, then explores its significance in literary texts by Coleridge, Godwin, Hölderlin, and Kleist. These readings demonstrate that Romantic writers mounted a deeper investigation than previously realized into the way the act of speaking generates subjective identity, intersubjective relations, and even objective reality. The project of the book is to read the language of Romanticism as performative and to recognize among its achievements the historical founding of the discourse of performativity itself.

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Tales from the Freudian Crypt is a fundamental reassessment of the Freud legend that aims to shake the very foundations of Freud studies. Writing from the perspective of intellectual history, the author traces the impact that Freud's essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle has had, and continues to have, on twentieth-century thought. Designed as both an introduction and a corrective to the vast literature on Freud, the book explores the trail left by Freud's late theory of the death drive, paying special attention to its ramifications in the fields of biography, biology, psychotherapy, philosophy, and literary theory. The author ironically concludes that if there were such a thing as a death drive, it would look like this seemingly endless and in many ways arbitrary proliferation of the literature on Freud. After first undertaking to demystify the pretensions of this literature, from the works of Sandor Ferenczi to those of Jacques Lacan, the author proposes a theory that sheds new light on the so-called cultural works of Freud's final years. He argues that the death drive theory was an elaborate ruse that Freud adopted to insulate his "findings" against criticism directed from outside the field of psychoanalysis—that Freud's troubling recourse to metapsychology was closely tied to his lifelong fear of suggestion. The author delivers a carefully reasoned, sustained blow to the culture of psychoanalysis—theoretical, therapeutic, institutional—which is driven by what it desires and fears most: death. In sum, Tales from the Freudian Crypt is offered as a kind of bankbook, audit, and investment plan for future work in Freud studies.

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In early modern England, while moralists railed against the theater as wasteful and depraved and inflation whittled away at the value of wages, people attended the theater in droves. On Demand draws on recent economic history and theory to account for this puzzling consumer behavior. He shows that during this period demand itself, with its massed acquisitive energies, transformed the English economy. Over the long sixteenth-century consumption burgeoned, though justifications for it lagged behind. People were in a curious predicament: they practiced consumption on a mass scale but had few acceptable reasons for doing so. In the literary marketplace, authors became adept at accommodating such contradictions fashioning works that spoke to self-divided consumers: Thomas Nashe castigated and satiated them at the same time . William Shakespeare satirized credit problems. Ben Jonson investigated the problems of global trade, and Robert Burton enlisted readers in a project of economic betterment.

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The study of Greece as an icon of culture appears to be as old as Greece itself, as if, like Pallas Athene springing from the head of Zeus, its cultural significance had attained full maturity at birth. In Silent Urns, the author reveals how Greece attained such significance as the result of the attempt to reconcile individuality, freedom, history, and modernity in eighteenth-century aesthetics. He argues that Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art (1764) produced this reconciliation by developing a concept of culture that effectively defined our modern understanding of the term, as well as our sense of what it is to be modern. From this reconciliation, Greece emerges as the form in which culture is first conceptualized as a historically and politically defined category. In readings of works by Keats, Schelling, Aeschylus, Shelley, and Hölderlin, the author studies different aspects of Winckelmann's conceptualization of culture as it passes into Romantic Hellenism. Through these readings—in which individuality, identity, freedom, the tragic, and memory are all discussed—the book demonstrates how Romanticism took issue with the legacy of Greece that emerged in the eighteenth century, and did so in the name of a freedom that our cultural modernity no longer recalls.

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Difference and Disavowal is a major rethinking of a central tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis—the repression theory. It centers on fundamental issues in practice and theory, beginning with a central conundrum for clinical psychoanalysis: how to understand apparently analyzable patients who resist the essential therapeutic measure of analysis—interpretation. The author finds the answer in a revision and expansion of Freud's theory of fetishism. Freud introduced the defense mechanism of disavowal in order to understand what he called the registration and repudiation of reality in fetishism. However, his understanding of the reality disavowed in fetishism is self-contradictory. The contradiction in Freud's argument can be resolved by understanding disavowal in terms of registration and repudiation of difference. The patients who resist interpretation register and repudiate the differentiating process implicit in every interpretation. The problem of resistance to interpretation expands the basic conception of the unconscious to include registration and repudiation of differentiating, processive reality. Freud's conception of an unconscious force that simultaneously differentiates, binds, and raises tension levels—Eros—demands integration with the theory of disavowal. This integration produces a theory of an inevitable trauma, an inevitable registration and repudiation of difference, as an essential element in psychoanalytic theories of mind, psychopathology, and treatment. At the end of his life Freud himself was beginning to rethink repression as the cornerstone of his work. He was beginning to see disavowal as the foundation of defensive process. Once disavowal is understood in relation to difference and Eros, one has a major tool with which to rethink the development of Freudian psychoanalysis from its earliest days to the present. The author shows how other analysts—such as Ferenczi, Abraham, Klein, Loewald, and Winnicott—have unwittingly but crucially contributed to the problem of resistance to interpretation

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Combining phenomenology and psychoanalysis in highly innovative ways, this book seeks to undo the binary opposition between appearance and Being that has been in place since Plato’s parable of the cave. It is, essentially, an essay on what could be called “world love,” the possibility and necessity for psychic survival of a profound and vital erotic investment by a human being in the cosmic surround. Here, the author takes her cue from Freud’s assertion that the “loss of reality” associated with psychosis is a function of a disturbance not in the capacity to reason or perceive, but rather in the capacity for world love, the libidinal and semiotic circuity by means of which such love actualizes itself. In an implicit challenge to poststructuralist thought, the author claims that this love is always in response to a call issued by the world—that the world has, as it were, a vocation: its beauty ought to be seen. We must think of our own being-in-the world as a response to a primordial calling out to respond to this beauty. We are, the author suggests, at the very core of our being, summoned to what she terms world spectatorship. Drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenological elaboration of care as the being distinctive of human being and the primarily Lacanian conceptualization of the language of desire specific to each human subject, this metapsychology of love attempts to integrate issues in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual culture, art history, and literary and film studies.

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Why did the social sciences become an integral part of Jewish scholarship beginning in the late nineteenth century? What part did this new scholarship play in the ongoing debate over emancipation and assimilation, Zionism and diasporism, the nature of Jewish identity, and the problem of Jewish continuity and survival. To answer these questions, this book traces the emergence and development of an organized Jewish social science in central Europe, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other social science modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and in the United States. The author locates the initial impetus for an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science in the Zionist movement, as Zionists looked to the social sciences to provide them with the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. In particular, the social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of Jewry in the diaspora. Social science also charted emancipation and assimilation, which were viewed as disintegrative agents for the dissolution of Jewish identity, and hence as a threat to the Jewish future. For Zionists, nationalism offered the means to reverse the process of dissolution. Yet Zionists were not alone in turning to the social sciences to advance their political agenda. This study also examines the involvement of non-Zionists in Jewish social science, focusing on the way liberal, assimilationist scholars utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance.

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Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major poet of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the tradition of American prophetic poetry. Jeffers consciously set himself apart from the poetry of his generation—by physical isolation at his home in Carmel, by his unusual poetic form, and by his stance as an “anti-modernist.” Yet his work represents a profound, and profoundly original, artistic response to problems that shaped modernist poetry and that still perplex poets today. Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers’s completed poems, both published and unpublished, are presented in a single, comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition of five volumes. The present volume is in four parts. An Introduction deals with the scope and principles of selection for the edition, including the decision to present the poems in chronological order, and gives a brief review of the textual evidence and commentary that form the bulk of this volume. The essay “Chronology” offers an overview of Jeffers’s career, the evidence for dating the poems, and the arguments drawn from that evidence. The two parts that follow describe the rationale and evidence for establishing the texts of the poems for this edition, and present, in the form of extensive commentary and tabulations for each poem, the material (notes, preliminary workings, revisions, discarded passages, and variations in published versions) that both complicate and enrich the study of Jeffers’s poetry and prose. These commentaries also incorporate a number of additional selections from Jeffers’s previously unpublished writings. There are three appendixes: tables of contents for original editions as well as some planned editions that were never published; poems (not included in this edition) that have appeared in posthumous compilations; and errata for the first four volumes. The book concludes with two indexes, of titles and of first lines.

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Something of a historical event, this book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Hélène Cixous, is a brief but densely layered account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia, an experience that ends with the unexpected turn of grieving for what is lost. Her literary inventiveness mines the coincidence in French between the two verbs savoir (to know) and voir (to see). Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" complexly muses on a host of autobiographical, philosophical, and religious motifs—including his varied responses to "Savoir." The two texts are accompanied by six beautiful and evocative drawings that play on the theme of drapery over portions of the body. Veils suspends sexual difference between two homonyms: la voile (sail) and le voile (veil). A whole history of sexual difference is enveloped, sometimes dissimulated here—in the folds of sails and veils and in the turns, journeys, and returns of their metaphors and metonymies. However foreign to each other they may appear, however autonomous they may be, the two texts participate in a common genre: autobiography, confession, memoirs. The future also enters in: by opening to each other, the two discourses confide what is about to happen, the imminence of an event lacking any common measure with them or with anything else, an operation that restores sight and plunges into mourning the knowledge of the previous night, a "verdict" whose threatening secret remains out of reach by our knowledge.

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The Czech philosopher Jan Patocka (1907-1977), who studied with Husserl and Heidegger, is widely recognized as the most influential thinker to come from postwar Eastern Europe. Refusing to join the Communist party after World War II, he was banned from academia and publication for the rest of his life, except for a brief time following the liberalizations of the Prague spring of 1968. Joining Vaclav Havel and Jiri Hajek as a spokesman for the Chart 77 human-rights declaration of 1977, Patocka was harassed by authorities, arrested, and finally died of a heart attack during prolonged interrogation. Plato and Europe, arguably Patocka's most important book, consists of a series of lectures delivered in the homes of friends after his last banishment from the academy just three years before his death. Here, he presents his most mature ideas about the history of Western philosophy, arguing that the idea of the care of the soul is fundamental to the philosophical tradition beginning with the Greeks. Explaining how the care of the soul is elaborated as the problem of how human beings may make their world one of truth and justice, Patocka develops this thesis through a treatment of Plato, Democritus, and Aristotle, showing how considerations about the soul are of central importance in their writings. He demonstrates in vivid fashion how this idea forms the spiritual heritage of Europe.

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Many Arab communities in Israel’s Galilee region are home to export-oriented textile factories, owned by multinational corporations, whose Jewish managers employ local Arab and Druse women as seamstresses and low-level work supervisors. Based on five years of ethnographic research, this book explores how these managers and workers negotiate the terms and meanings of factory work, integrating work culture with the norms and values of the host towns in order for employment arrangements to succeed. The entrance of industrial corporations into developing areas of the world, particularly in those industries employing primarily women, has generated tension between traditional familial and social roles and the demands of industrial working life. In Israel these tensions are further complicated by the social and political dynamics of Arab-Jewish conflict, as well as the strictly demarcated roles of women and men in traditional Arab society. The resolution of these tensions on the shop floor shapes the social relations of production, the factories’ management systems, family life in the industrial towns, and individual status and autonomy. The negotiation involves unequal power relations, manifested in a dual patriarchal structure: the Arab cultural practice of male domination of women as well as the formal management system of the textile concern, which dictates the nature of relationships between Jewish managers and Arab women workers. To meet their business goals, the managers must cooperate with the community that provides their workforce, adapting its norms and appropriating its worldview. The managers are constrained by the strict social rules of Arab and Druse society, and respond by attempting to harness and manipulate local family values to foster personal commitment, furthering production goals through paternal control. The consequence of this paternalism is a workforce that relates to the organization as family, identifies with its goals, and internalizes feelings of loyalty. However, the workforce also uses the plant as the arena for developing self-awareness and enhancing personal independence and status within the family. The seamstresses emerge as active shapers of the organizational culture, forcing the managers to adapt to and comply with their personal needs and perceptions of work.

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This pathbreaking study uses the extraordinary life of Meir Macnin, a prosperous Jewish merchant, as a lens for examining the Jewish community of Morocco and its relationship to the Sephardi world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Macnin, a member of one of the most prominent Jewish families in Marrakesh, became the most important merchant for the sultans who ruled Morocco, and was their chief intermediary between Morocco and Europe. He lived in London for about twenty years, and then shuttled between Morocco and England for fifteen years until his death in 1835. This book challenges accepted views of Muslim-Jewish relations by emphasizing the ambivalence in the relationship. It shows how elite Jews maneuvered themselves into important positions in the Moroccan state by linking themselves to politically powerful Muslims and by establishing key positions in networks of trade. The elite Jews of Morocco were also part of a wider Sephardi world that transcended national boundaries. However, Macnin remained more connected to Morocco, where Jews were, according to Islamic law, protégés of the ruler and still subject to specific legal disabilities. The early-nineteenth-century sultan Mawlay Sulayman confined Jews in a number of Moroccan cities to newly created Jewish quarters as part of a policy of defining boundaries between Muslims and Jews. Yet Macnin remained closely tied to royal power, and in 1822 he became the principal intermediary between Morocco and the European powers for Mawlay Sulayman’s successor, Mawlay ‘Abd al-Rahman. At the beginning of the period covered in this book, Meir Macnin belonged to a wide, transnational Sephardi world, and moved easily between Morocco and Europe. By the end of his life, however, this Sephardi diaspora had virtually come to an end. Emancipation in Western Europe and the growing identification of European Jews with the nations in which they lived meant that their affinity to their Sephardi heritage no longer transcended their national attachments. The gap between Moroccan and European Jewry grew, and a new kind of division—between “Western” and “Oriental” Jews—now existed within the Jewish world.

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While wartime collaboration in Europe has long been the subject of scholarly attention, relatively little has been published about Chinese collaboration with Japan, largely because essential source materials were inaccessible. Recent liberalization of archival policy in China and Taiwan has made possible this book, the first comprehensive treatment of Sino-Japanese collaboration over the full course of the war, at the level of both state and of society. Collaboration on the basis of a common “greater East Asian” interest was rare since the Japanese came as conquerors acting primarily to further their own national interest. But all Chinese living in the occupied areas had to decide on the degree to which they would accommodate Japanese power—whether political, military, or economic—in order to carry on with their lives. Whether it was Wang Jingwei as “head of state,“ or Chinese capitalists in Shanghai, or town and village elites in the rural areas, all sought to defend their interests while making the necessary concessions to the Japanese presence. However, even when Chinese sought a modus operandi with the Japanese, they found that a common and equal identity of interest did not exist. Whether expressed in terms of Chinese willingness to collaborate, or Japanese willingness to accept collaboration, the limits of accommodation for both were soon reached. The eleven essays in the volume explore the issue of collaboration from a number of vantage points. In the political sphere, essays range from the foreign policy of the Nationalist government, through the establishment of Japanese client regimes in central China, to the response of local elites in northern and central China to Japanese invasion and occupation. Essays on economic and cultural collaboration focus particularly on the workings of collaboration in Shanghai, the key economic and cultural center of occupied China.

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I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start. These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation. The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting. The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. The first part of this philosophical meditation—which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto—concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse." I am. We are. That's hardly anything. But enough to start.

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In this, one of the last published books planned by one of the major cultural philosophers of our time, Lyotard addresses, in his powerful and allusive critical voice, Malraux's reflections on art and literature. The result, more than a sequel to Lyotard's acclaimed biography Signé Malraux, tells us as much about Lyotard and his critical concerns as it does about Malraux. It gives us Lyotard's final thoughts on his long study of the critical, disruptive possibilities of art and of the relation between aesthetics and politics. At first glance, Lyotard's sympathetic and generous analysis of Malraux might be surprising to some, for Malraux's metaphysics of art seems far removed from, if not diametrically opposed to, Lyotard's postmodern, experimental approach. But this is perhaps the book's greatest achievement, for Lyotard succeeds both in giving a compelling critical reading of Malraux (and through him of an entire era of art criticism) and in presenting, complicating, and developing his own position on art and aesthetics. In order to present Lyotard's exquisitely compact style in the best possible way, the original French text appears on facing pages with the English translation.

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This book focuses on local bossism, a common political phenomenon where local power brokers achieve monopolistic control over an area's coercive and economic resources. Examples of bossism include Old Corruption in eighteenth-century England, urban political machines in the United States, caciques in Latin America, the Mafia in Southern Italy, and today's gangster politicians in such countries as India, Russia, and Thailand. For many years, the entrenchment of numerous provincial warlords and political clans has made the Philippines a striking case of local bossism. Yet writings on Filipino political culture and patron-client relations have ignored the role of coercion in shaping electoral competition and social relations. Portrayals of a "weak state" captured by a landed oligarchy have similarly neglected the enduring institutional legacies of American colonial rule and the importance of state resources for the accumulation of wealth and power in the Philippines. The author, by contrast, argues that the roots of bossism in the Philippines lie in the inauguration of formal democratic institutions at a relatively early stage of capitalist development. Poverty and insecurity leave many voters vulnerable to clientelist, coercive, and financial pressure, and the state's central role in capital accumulation provides the basis for local bosses' economic empires and political machines. These contradictions have encouraged bossism in the Philippines, as well as in other countries. The book elaborates these arguments through case studies of bosses in two Philippine provinces, Cavite and Cebu. The contrast between single-generation gangster politicians in Cavite and enduring commercial dynasties in Cebu reveals variation in the forms of bossism that reflect variations in the local political economies of the two provinces. Comparisons between bosses over successive historical periods highlight the gradual transformation of bossism through capitalist development. In sum, Capital, Coercion, and Crime provides a comparative historical analysis of bossism, drawing conclusions of great interest not only to scholars of Southeast Asia but to students of comparative politics as well.

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Since the Weimar era, German cinema has played a leading role in the innovation of gay and lesbian cinema, with the tantalizing sexual illegibility and gender instability of German films of the 1920s anticipating the queer sensibilities of the 1990s. From such cross-dressing Weimar comedies as Viktor und Victoria to the transgender fantasies of Ulrike Ottinger, Monika Treut, and Hans Scheirl, this filmic tradition explores the unconventional erotic, its directors inventing a visual language that goes beyond the trivialization and sensationalism of mainstream representations of gays and lesbians. This cinema crosses the boundaries between such classifications as male and female, gay and bisexual, normal and pathological, insisting that such transgressions cannot be entirely tamed, regulated, or closeted. Previous scholarship, reading this national cinema as sociopolitical commentary, has tended to ignore what falls outside a realist, hetero-normative paradigm. In this book, the author aims to rectify this neglect by rewriting German cinematic history queerly. She reexamines the Nazi movie star Zarah Leander via her gay fandom, showing how this actress haunts the drag performance of femininity in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She argues not only for the persuasiveness of the gay underground in the New German Cinema but also for cinema's pivotal role in German gay liberation. Other topics include the queering of nationality in the films of Monika Treut and Rosa von Praunheim, the fetishistic medium of experimental filmmaking in the works of Michael Brynntrup and Matthias Müller, and the androgynous appeal of "dyke noir animation." In conclusion, The Queer German Cinema juxtaposes the voices of several German filmmakers as they reflect on their art in terms of a counter-politics.

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Studying a range of writers, genres, and disciplines, this book interrogates the status of geopolitics as a powerful twentieth-century fiction. The first part argues, through a reading of anarchist and imperialist geographers, that geopolitics emerged as a pseudoscience from the breakdown of nineteenth-century ideas of culture. The book’s second part addresses the fate of the European hypothesis of culture, beginning with a chapter that studies the novels of Wilkie Collins within the historical context of democratic reform and the formalization of Empire. The next chapter finds, in the affinities between Olive Schreiner and Friedrich Nietzsche, a shared diagnosis of the nihilist positivism and eurocentrism of the culture hypothesis. The third part examines the relation between the utopian globalism of international socialism and the geopolitical dystopia of world war. One chapter delineates the geography of politics in the 1890s through the medium of R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s political journalism and early modernist sketch-artistry. The final chapter traces the meaning of “sabotage” from its anarcho-syndicalist origins to its geopolitical significance in early films of Alfred Hitchcock. Charting the contours of the long turn of the century, from 1860 to 1940, the book moves back and forth from Victorian to modernist fields of study to show how the nineteenth-century European hypothesis of culture haunts the twentieth-century fiction of geopolitics.

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Language and culture are often seen as unique characteristics of human beings. In this book the author argues that our ability to use a wide array of emotions evolved long before spoken language and, in fact, constituted a preadaptation for the speech and culture that developed among later hominids. Long before humans could speak with words, they communicated through body language their emotional dispositions; and it is the neurological wiring of the brain for these emotional languages that represented the key evolutionary breakthrough for our species. How did natural selection work on the basic ape anatomy and neuroanatomy to create the hominid line? The author suggests that what distinguished our ancestors from other apes was the development of an increased capacity for sociality and organization, crucial for survival on the African savanna. All apes display a propensity for weak ties, individualism, mobility, and autonomy that was, and is today, useful in arboreal and woodland habitats but served them poorly when our ancestors began to move onto the African plain during the late Miocene. The challenge for natural selection was to enhance traits in the species that would foster the social ties necessary for survival in the new environment. The author suggests that the result was a development of certain areas of the primate brain that encouraged strong emotional ties, allowing our ancestors to build higher levels of social solidarity. Our basic neurological wiring continues to reflect this adaptive development. From a sociological perspective that is informed by evolutionary biology, primatology, and neurology, the book examines the current neurological bases of our emotional repertoire and their implications for our social actions.

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Not long ago, everyone knew that Judaism came before Christianity. More recently, scholars have begun to recognize that the historical picture is quite a bit more complicated than that. In the Jewish world of the first century, many sects competed for the name of the true Israel and the true interpreter of the Torah—the Talmud itself speaks of seventy—and the form of Judaism that was to be the seedbed of what eventually became the Christian Church was but one of these many sects. Scholars have come to realize that we can and need to speak of a twin birth of Christianity and Judaism, not a genealogy in which one is parent to the other. In this book, the author develops a revised understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent Judaism in late antiquity, interpreting the two "new" religions as intensely and complexly intertwined throughout this period. Although the "officials" of the eventual winners in both communities—the Rabbis in Judaism and the orthodox leaders in Christianity—sought to deny it, until the end of late antiquity many people remained both Christians and Jews. This resulted, among other things, in much shared religious innovation that affected the respective orthodoxies as well. Dying for God aims to establish this model as a realistic one through close and comparative readings of contemporary Christian texts and Talmudic narratives that thematize the connections and differences between Christians and Jews as these emerged around the issue of martyrdom. The author argues that, in the end, the developing discourse of martyrology involved the circulation and exchange of cultural and religious innovations between the two communities as they moved toward sharper self-definition.

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Drawing on Nietzsche's prolific early notebooks and correspondence, this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher who abandoned classical philology. It traces the contours of his earliest philological thinking and opens the way to a fresh view of his later thinking. The book's primary aim is to displace the developmental logic that has been a controlling factor in Nietzsche's reception, namely the assumption that Nietzsche passed from a precritical phase to an enlightened phase in which he liberated himself from metaphysics. A subsidiary aim is to decenter the view that fastens onto The Birth of Tragedy as a dramatic turning point in Nietzsche's thought. For Nietzsche, questions about the religion, art, and history of the classical world are bound up with fundamental questions about knowledge, culture, history, and the status of the subject. From his early writings, Nietzsche finds it difficult to separate questions about modernity from those about antiquity. Nor are the problems of classical philology ever far from his mind, even toward the end of his career. By showing how frequently the "later" Nietzsche appears in the early writings, the author hopes to provoke reflection on the adequacy of current characterizations of Nietzsche, and not just to raise questions about the periodization of his life and thought. The book traces Nietzsche's efforts, throughout his career, to determine the ways in which philosophy and philology are symptomatic of modern cultural habits, ideologies, and imaginings. In the form of a cultural anthropology, he may even have outlined the most trenchant model still available for confronting the ghostly specters that haunt Western society. Nietzsche's incessant preoccupation with the symptomatology of the modern subject—its ailments, its allusions, and the signs of its irrepressible presence—unifies his oeuvre more than any other single question. The author argues that Nietzsche arrived at this inquiry from a philological perspective, according to which subjective identity is viewed as part of a historical process. Embodied in practices, habits, and institutions, these inheritances of culture—of which classical antiquity is a crucial part—undergo the vicissitudes of transmission, decipherment, reconstruction, reception, and especially falsification (whether through unwilled or deliberate misunderstanding). All of these factors are intimately bound up with the ways in which subjects form themselves.

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This book tells the story of how small farmers responded to a free-market onslaught that devastated one of the Western Hemisphere’s most advanced social-democratic welfare states. In the early 1980s, the Latin American debt crisis struck Costa Rica, leading to major cutbacks in the social programs that had permitted the rural poor to attain an acceptable standard of living and a modicum of dignity. Peasants were in the forefront of movements against these cutbacks, marching, blocking highways, and occupying government buildings. In the struggle to preserve their livelihood, the rural poor also formed alliances with wealthy farmers, negotiated with politicians, and embraced and then repudiated charismatic outsiders who came to live among them and to speak in their name. These rural activists combined class-bound politics with concerns about threatened peasant identities, practical analysis with sentimentality, grassroots democracy with conspiratorial secrecy, and selfless sacrifice with opportunism. The small farmers portrayed in this book are worldly, outspoken, exuberant, future-oriented, and fiercely proud. They could hardly be less like the unsophisticated and stoic rustics so prominent in the development literature or those contemporary peasants whose imminent disappearance is endlessly predicted by both right- and left-wing social scientists. The author argues that the experience of rural activism in Costa Rica in the 1980s and 1990s calls into question much current theory about collective action, peasantries, development, and ethnographic research. The book invites the reader to rethink debates about old and new social movements and to grapple with the ethical and methodological dilemmas of engaged ethnography.

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Of Minimal Things is an exploration and reassessment of the philosophical notion of relation. In contrast to the scholastic, ontological conception of relation as a thing of diminished being, this book views relation as the minimal and elemental theme and structure of philosophy. Drawing radical conclusions from the classical understanding of relation as a being-toward-another, it argues that rethinking relation engages the very possibility and limits of philosophical discourse. In the author's studies of Nietzsche and Benjamin, Husserl and Heidegger, Derrida and Blanchot, relation is shown to be central to their thought and to undergo elaborations that escape the ontological, categorial, and formalist ways in which the concept has traditionally been interpreted. Comprehending relation in terms of determination, foundation, mediatization, translation, or communication, these authors are shown to draw out and refine a host of structural implications of the notion that unseat its formalist and categorial conception. Studying the writings of Mallarmé and Kafka, the author argues that rethought from, and in light of the other to which a relation tends, philosophy necessarily opens up to and is implicated in its others, one such possible other being literature.

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This book explores the ambivalent and often contradictory ways in which English and French writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represented relations of intimacy between women. These representations included both a sexualized model of the “lesbian” tribade and an “idealized” model that portrayed female friendship as devoid of sexual expression. Although these two perceptions of female intimacy may seem mutually exclusive, the author argues that both operate as defining parameters, not only for literary representations of relations between women but also for cultural responses to those institutions in which women could gather—salon, convent, theater, or brothel. Despite increasing evidence of female homosocial and homosexual bonds during this period, representations of female intimacy have remained largely invisible within critical discourse. They are overshadowed either by a dominant heterosexual understanding of such institutions as marriage or prostitution or by historical patterns of male homosexual behavior, to which they often do not correspond. By broadening the concept of intimacy to include relations between women that may evade or subvert the boundaries of “compulsory” heterosexuality, the author argues, one can locate a duality of “polite” and eroticized models of female intimacy in the cultural discourses of both France and England. Analyzing a variety of legal, medical, and historical materials, as well as literary texts—by Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, Madeleine de Scudéry, Catherine Descartes, Delarivier Manley, and John Cleland—the author outlines a combination of cultural and historical circumstances that contributed to or were symptomatic of increasing consciousness and concern about female homosexuality in England and France. Relating this sexualized model of female intimacy to idealized images of female friendship in mainstream literary texts allows the author to recover an incipient discourse of female homosexuality. She also delineates cultural fantasies about the outcome of unregulated contact between women, as well as underlying fears that such intimacy could foster aberrant social and political behavior in addition to unauthorized sexual relations between women.

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This is the third volume to appear in an edition that will be the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation of all of Nietzsche's work. Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations, translated by Richard T. Gray, was published in 1995; Volume 3: Human, All Too Human (I), translated by Gary Handwerk, was published in 1997. The edition is a new English translation, by various hands, of the celebrated Colli-Montinari edition, which has been acclaimed as one of the most important works of scholarship in the humanities in the last half century. The present volume provides for the first time English translations of all of Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks from the summer of 1872 to the end of 1874. The major works published in this period were the first three Unfashionable Observations: "David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer," "On the Utility and Liability of History for Life," and "Schopenhauer as Educator." Translations of the preliminary notes for these pieces are coordinated with the translations of the published texts printed in Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations. The content of these notebooks goes far beyond the notes and plans for published and unpublished Unfashionable Observations, encompassing numerous sketches related to Nietzsche's major philological project from this period, a book on the pre-Platonic Greek philosophers. The ideas that emerged from Nietzsche's deliberations on these early Greek thinkers are absolutely central to his thought from this period and contribute in significant ways to the development of several of his major themes: the role of the philosopher vis-à-vis his age and the surrounding culture; the relationships among philosophy, art, and culture; the metaphorical nature of language and its relationship to knowledge; the unmasking of the modern drive for absolute "truth" as a palliative against the horror of existence; and Nietzsche's "unfashionable" attack on modern science and modern culture, especially on the Germany of the Bismarck Reich. These notebooks represent important transitional documents in Nietzsche's intellectual development, marking, among other things, the shift away from philological studies toward unabashed cultural criticism.

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Wenxin diaolong by Liu Xie (ca. 465-ca. 521) is arguably the most complex and comprehensive work of literary criticism in ancient China. For centuries it has intrigued and inspired Chinese literati, and modern English-speaking scholars have also found it an important source for inquiries into traditional Chinese poetics and aesthetics. The present volume of ten essays is the first book-length study in English of this classic work. The first two parts of the book focus on cultural traditions, showing how Liu canonized the Chinese literary tradition, assessing where Liu's work stands in that tradition, and demonstrating his debts to the intellectual currents of his time. The third part explores Liu's theory of literary creation by using contemporary critical perspectives to analyze Liu's conception of imagination. The fourth part presents three detailed studies of Liu's views on rhetoric: a close reading of his chapter on rhetorical parallelism, a discussion of his own use of parallelism as a means of analysis and textual production, and an investigation of his views on changes and continuities in Chinese literary styles. The book concludes with a critical survey of Asian-language scholarship on Wenxin diaolong in this century. The contributors are Zong-qi Cai, Kang-i Sun Chang, Ronald Egan, Wai-yee Li, Shuen-fu Lin, Richard John Lynn, Victor H. Mair, Stephen Owen, Andrew H. Plaks, Maureen Robertson, and Zhang Shaokang.

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This is the long-awaited second part of the author’s meticulously researched and scrupulously impartial study of the complicated and anguished history of Yugoslavia during the years of World War II. The previous volume dealt with the Chetniks, the resistance movement formed by officers of the defeated Yugoslav army who came to regard the Communist-led Partisans as their chief enemy, and who reached accords with the occupying powers—first with the Italians and then with the Germans. The present volume deals with the rule of the Axis powers in occupied Yugoslavia, along with the role of the other groups that collaborated with them—primarily the extremist Croatian nationalist organization known as the Ustashas. The book begins by briefly describing the establishment of Yugoslavia in 1918 and its internal history during the interwar period. It then discusses the breakup of the state in April 1941, the annexation or occupation of parts of its territory by its neighbors, and the establishment by the Ustashas of the independent state of Croatia as a German-Italian quasi protectorate, focusing on its governmental policies and its problems with the Bosnian Muslims. The book also examines the role of religion during the occupation, the destruction of the Yugoslav Jewish community, and the economic exploitation of Yugoslav territory by the Axis powers. The work concludes by discussing the wartime population losses of the country and the ultimate fate of the collaborationist forces.

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Parages brings together four essays by Derrida on the fictions of Maurice Blanchot. Three of the essays—"Living On," "Title To Be Specified," and "The Law of Genre," are by now canonical. The fourth, "Pace Not(s)" as well as Derrida's 1986 introduction to the French edition of the book, appear here in English for the first time. This was a breakthrough publication in the analysis of Blanchot, a notoriously difficult writer. It is safe to say Derrida contributed much to that writer's reputation in both French and English, always insisting on the philosophical pertinence of Blanchot's work to any discussion of the relationship between literature and critical thought. Through patient citation, and an ample collocation and readings of Blanchot's various motifs, Derrida explores a variety of questions, including the limits of genre, the procedure of crossing out, and the evocation of a non-dialectical and non-privative negativity. The book marks a crucial stage in Derrida's itinerary and provides a context for his later writings on apophatics in such works as On the Name (SUP, 1995) and his response to Heidegger on death in Aporias (SUP, 1993).

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In this collection of short meditations on various topics, Hans Blumenberg eschews academic ponderousness and writes in a genre evocative of Montaigne's Essais, Walter Benjamin's Denkbilder, or Adorno's Minima Moralia. Drawing upon an intellectual tradition that ranges from Aesop to Wittgenstein and from medieval theology to astrophysics, he works as a detective of ideas scouring the periphery of intellectual and philosophical history for clues—metaphors, gestures, anecdotes—essential to grasping human finitude. Images of shipwrecks, attempts at ordering the world, and questions of foundations are traced through the work of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Simmel, Husserl, Thomas Mann, and others. The book's reflections culminate in a rereading of the fable "Care Crosses the River" that lies at the center of Heidegger's analysis of Dasein in which the fable's elided Gnostic center is recovered: Care creates the human in its own image, as a reflection of its narcissism. At stake throughout are two inextricable elements of Blumenberg's thought: a theory of nonconceptuality as essential to philosophizing and an exploration of culture understood as humanity's unceasing attempts to relieve itself of the weight of the absolutism of reality.

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Museums today are more than familiar cultural institutions and showplaces of accumulated objects; they are the sites of interaction between personal and collective identities, between memory and history. The essays in this volume consider museums from personal experience and historical study, and from the memories of museum visitors, curators, and scholars. Representing a variety of fields—history, anthropology, art history, and museum scholarship—the contributors discuss museums across disciplinary boundaries that have separated art museums from natural history museums or local history museums from national galleries. The essays range widely over time (from the Renaissance to the second half of the twentieth century), and place (China, Japan, the United States, and Germany), in exhibitions explored (photography, Native American history, and “Jurassic technology”), and institution (the Chinese Imperial Collection, Renaissance curiosity cabinets, and modern art museums). Memory operates thematically among the essays in diverse and provocative ways. The papers are organized according to three suggestive themes: experimental ways of theorizing and designing contemporary museums with an explicit interest in history and memory; discussions of personal encounters with historical exhibits; and the professional risks at stake for collectors and curators who shape the institutional presentation of history and memory. The contributors are Susan A. Crane, Wolfgang Ernst, Michael Fehr, Paula Findlen, Tamara Hamlish, Alexis Joachimides, Suzanne Marchand, Julia A. Thomas, and Diana Drake Wilson.

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Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is the taint of vagueness and uncertainty. Marking the threshold region where luminous life seems suspended but death has not yet darkened the horizon, it belongs to an evasive and evanescent world, carrying the tint of smoke, fog, ashes, and dust. As the ambiguous space of thought and remembrance where things blend and blur, gray measures the difference between distance and proximity, shading into tinges of hesitation, hues of taciturnity, tones of time past and lost. Thus it may also be the spectral medium of literature itself—that grainy gas of language. Written with a lead pencil akin to those found in Nabokov, Rilke, Svevo, Poe, and Dickinson, The Gray Book chronicles the vicissitudes of such equivocal articulation—registering the graphite traces it leaves behind but also recording the dwindling span of its life. The book situates itself in a region beyond criticism but this side of literature, characterized by forgetting and finitude, and investigating important yet seemingly inaccessible "gray areas" in texts as old as those of Homer, and as recent as those of Beckett. Loosely arranging these literary finds according to a revision of the four elements, The Gray Book distances itself from tradition and treats not water but tears, not fire but vapor, not earth but grain, not air but clouds. The narrative thus construed, proceeding in the meandering movements of volatile thought rather than in the prudent steps of a treatise, appears gradually affected by its subject. Themes and facts previously confined to the realm of quoted texts leak into the narrative itself. The border between fiction and fact slowly dissolves as the book approaches the curious void that the author locates at the heart of "gray literature." Shaped by an omnipresent though increasingly unreliable narrator, The Gray Book may thus ultimately yield a poetics cast in the form of a ghost story.

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Toward the end of Henry James's career, Charles Scribner's Sons offered him the opportunity to publish his collected works in a single edition under the overall title The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907-1909). Rather than simply reprint his fictional oeuvre, James entered into a massive work of self-monumentalization: revising the texts extensively; writing prefaces that have become classic texts on prose aesthetics and the novelist's art; and omitting many works, among them some major novels. The thirty illustrations include all twenty-four frontispiece photographs made, under James's supervision, for the edition.

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The Journal of Socho is one of the most individual self-portraits in the literary history of medieval Japan. Its author, Saiokuken Socho (1448-1532)—the preeminent linked-verse (renga) poet of his time—was an eyewitness to Japan's violent transition from the medieval to the early modern age. Written between 1522 and 1527, during the Age of the Country at War (Sengoku jidai), his journal provides a vivid portrayal of cultural life in the capital and in the provinces, together with descriptions of battles and great warrior families, the dangers of travel through war-torn countryside, and the plight of the poor. The journal records four of Socho's journeys between Kyoto and Suruga Province, where he served as the poet laureate of the Imagawa house, as well as several shorter excursions and periods of rest at various hermitages. The diverse upbringing of its author—a companion of nobles and warlords, a student of the orthodox poetic neoclassicism of the renga master Sogi, and a devotee of the iconoclastic Zen prelate Ikkyu—afforded him rich insights into the cultural life of the period. The Journal of Socho is remarkable for its breadth and freshness of observation, whether of the activities of literary men and the affairs of great courtiers and daimyo or of the daily lives of local warriors and commoners. This variety of cultural detail is matched by the journal's wealth of prose genres: travel diary, eremitic writing, historical chronicle, conversation, and correspondence. In addition, Socho has given us more than 600 verses that together illustrate most of the principal poetic genres of the time: renga, waka, choka, wakan renku, and comic or unorthodox haikai verses.

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Tales from the Freudian Crypt is a fundamental reassessment of the Freud legend that aims to shake the very foundations of Freud studies. Writing from the perspective of intellectual history, the author traces the impact that Freud's essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle has had, and continues to have, on twentieth-century thought. Designed as both an introduction and a corrective to the vast literature on Freud, the book explores the trail left by Freud's late theory of the death drive, paying special attention to its ramifications in the fields of biography, biology, psychotherapy, philosophy, and literary theory. The author ironically concludes that if there were such a thing as a death drive, it would look like this seemingly endless and in many ways arbitrary proliferation of the literature on Freud. After first undertaking to demystify the pretensions of this literature, from the works of Sandor Ferenczi to those of Jacques Lacan, the author proposes a theory that sheds new light on the so-called cultural works of Freud's final years. He argues that the death drive theory was an elaborate ruse that Freud adopted to insulate his "findings" against criticism directed from outside the field of psychoanalysis—that Freud's troubling recourse to metapsychology was closely tied to his lifelong fear of suggestion. The author delivers a carefully reasoned, sustained blow to the culture of psychoanalysis—theoretical, therapeutic, institutional—which is driven by what it desires and fears most: death. In sum, Tales from the Freudian Crypt is offered as a kind of bankbook, audit, and investment plan for future work in Freud studies.

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This book studies Oxford University's transformation—and the political hazards for academics that ensued—when, after World War II, it changed from a private liberal-arts club with aristocratic pretensions into a state university heavily committed to the natural sciences, and with a middle-class constituency and a meritocratic ethos. Despite these changes, the author shows that Oxford has not been able to elude its long-standing Brideshead Revisited reputation. This antiquated image became a source of difficulties when the Labour Party in the 1960's sought to expand educational opportunities to promote the cause of social justice. In the 1980's the University again came under attack, this time for its supposedly anti-industrial ethos, as Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party attempted to reverse Britain's economic decline. The largely unrecognized process of internal change at Oxford is shown to have been driven by two distinct dynamics: its scientists took advantage of huge increases in government funding to build departmental empires, while an informal alliance of reform-minded arts dons strove to renew Oxford's collegiate traditions of scholarly excellence and self-governance. When the scientists and reformist dons revitalized the University in the light of changed social and economic conditions, they inadvertently eroded the foundations of its autonomy. During its transformation, Oxford lost its upper-class ties, its financial self-sufficiency, and its deferential friends in government. As a result, it was at its weakest when the Thatcher government sought to harness universities to the goals of economic competition. Consequently, Thatcherites successfully rewrote the compact between the state and universities, including the abolition of tenure for new faculty and the elimination of block grant funding. Thus, paradoxically, Oxford's internal renewal coincided with a surrender of its institutional independence.

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The devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of the most important elements in the development of a specifically Mexican tradition of religion and nationality over the centuries. The picture of the Virgen morena (Dark Virgin) is to be found everywhere throughout Mexico, and her iconography is varied almost beyond telling. Though innumerable books, both historical and devotional, have been published on the Guadalupan legend in this century alone, it is only recently that its textual sources have been closely studied. This volume makes available to the English-reading public an easily accessible translation from the original Nahuatl of the story itself and the entire book in which the story is embedded. The study also provides scholars with new perspectives on a text long at the center of Mexican intellectual currents. Through the use of technical philological methods, it indicates that the text may have been authored in the mid-seventeenth century by a Spanish-Mexican priest, based on an earlier text by a colleague of his, and that it was not the product of Nahuatl oral tradition. The story of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to a poor indigenous man less than fifteen years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico did not come into prominence until the mid-seventeeth century. The first known telling of the tale appeared in a book published in Spanish in 1648 by the priest Miguel Sánchez. On the heels of the Sánchez version, the story was included in the book Huei tlamahuiçoltica published in 1649 by Luis Laso de la Vega, the vicar of the Guadalupe chapel and a friend of Sánchez. It had little impact initially, but by the twentieth century, with indigenism triumphant, it had become the best known version. There have been a few translations of Laso de la Vega's apparition story into English but only on a popular or devotional level. The present edition offers a translation and transcription of the complete text of the 1649 edition, together with critical apparatus, including comparisons of the Sánchez and Laso de la Vega texts, and various linguistic, orthographic, and typographical matters that throw light on the date and manner of composition.

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This is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an “anthropology” of symbolic media generally. Central to the author’s argument is the proposition that the idea of literature—at least as it has been understood in the West since the eighteenth century—as the paradigm for artistic experience is both limited and limiting. In its place, the author offers a more general theory of aesthetic experience appropriate to a wide range of media (in the term’s broadest sense) and geared toward performativity and bodily experience. The author develops the idea of the “protoliterary” as a cultural-aesthetic discourse prior to and external to the “literary” as traditionally conceived in Western aesthetics. Manifestations of the protoliterary tend to occur within forms of multimedia theatricalization in which suggestive images of the body loom large. The appeal of the protoliterary lies in its ability to function on both cognitive and somatic levels, thereby neutralizing such distinctions as self/society and reality/fiction. The author’s argument is indebted to John Dewey’s belief in a basic human need for aesthetic experience, a need that can be met in a variety of ways, from tattoos and scarification, through sports, parades, and cosmetics, to literature, opera, and film. From this basis the book theorizes a history of the development of separate, hierarchical arts in the West while suggesting that independent histories of single arts and artistic experience are no longer desirable or even possible. Although the genesis of particular forms of media are inextricably linked to specific historical, sociological, and technological conditions, their potential functions and effects are not tied to those conditions, nor should they be.

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This book transcends the boundaries of Chinese studies and scholarship on Western literature and critical theory, bringing together the two fields in a way that questions both the application of Western theory to Chinese materials and the resistance to theory in sinological scholarship. Recognizing that social and historical reality is external to discourse and that knowledge has an inevitable ethical import, the author argues for the importance of reality and lived experience in understanding a culture as well as the moral responsibility of such understanding. The book examines the discrepancies between various Western representations of China and the reality of China; inquires into the cultural, historical, and political contexts within which such discrepancies arise; and points out the distortion of reality in the tendency toward cultural dichotomies, the tendency to view China as the conceptual opposite of the West. From a comparison of biblical exegesis and commentaries on the Confucian classics to the contemporary assimilation of Western critical theories in China, this book discusses a wide range of topics that situates the understanding of China and Chinese literature and culture in the broad perspective of East-West comparative studies. It studies not only the Confucian tradition, modern Chinese literature, and the students' movement for democracy in China, but also such Western topics as Origen and biblical interpretation, Montaigne and cultural critique, Jameson and postmodern theory, and the reception of Said's Orientalism in China.

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Giving the reader a unique window into the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy in President Bill Clinton’s first term, this book highlights the major foreign policy challenges faced and decisions made in a turbulent era. The book is organized around thirty seven key speeches by the Secretary of State, each introduced by an extensive essay that describes its policy context and purpose, and includes anecdotes, local color, and brief sketches of some of the leading figures on the world stage. These introductions, which constitute more than half the book, not only give the who, what, when, and where behind the speeches, but most important, explain the why and how. For example, the group of speeches on Bosnia is preceded by an incisive account of the twists and turns of U.S. policy leading up to the Dayton Conference and the intense negotiations, involving several volatile personalities, that led to the historic Dayton agreement. Among the other subjects covered by the essays are our relations with China, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Haiti, the Middle East, Africa, and South America; international organizations such as NATO and the United Nations; and the global issues of human rights, terrorism, nuclear threat, and the environment. The book begins with a Prologue that emphasizes Secretary Christopher’s long-standing interest in speeches as an instrument of public policy and the decision making behind this often overlooked aspect of statecraft. It also describes how the Secretary was offered the position by President-elect Clinton, the state of affairs as he found them when he took office, and his strategy and plans for U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War period. An epilogue recounts the Secretary’s decision to return to private life, offers his insights on the challenges facing the United States in the international arena in the years ahead, and sets forth some suggestions for future policy makers. Above all, this book provides ample evidence that the author took seriously the advice that United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas gave him when he served as the justice’s law clerk in the 1949 term: “Get out in the stream of history, and swim as fast as you can.”

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In Ecuador, every year since 1990 Indian protestors have brought the country to a standstill; in Mexico, Zapatista indigenous guerillas rose up in arms to protest North American free trade. In Brazil, shamans faced down bulldozers to block World Bank dams, while in Bolivia, peasants attacked U.S. troops for the right to grow coca. These are a few examples of the rise of a transnational human rights movement among the hemisphere’s most isolated and powerless people, Latin American Indians. This book tells the story of the unexpected impact of the Indian rights movement on world politics, from reforming the United Nations to evicting oil companies. Using a constructivist theoretical approach that synthesizes international relations, social movement theory, ethnic politics, and work on democratic transitions, the author argues that marginalized people have responded to globalization with new, internationalized forms of identity politics that reconstruct power relations. Based on case studies from Ecuador, Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, this book analyzes the implications of these human rights experiences for all of Latin America’s 40 million indigenous citizens, and the 300 million native people throughout the world. The thematic organization of the book allows the author to trace distinctive dynamics of interstate relations, global markets, and transnational civil society. The book concludes with an analysis of the movement’s impact and policy recommendations.

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Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto, a celebrated fifteenth-century Tuscan fresco in which the Virgin gestures to her partially open dress and her pregnant womb, is highly unusual in its iconography. Hubert Damisch undertakes an anthropological and historical analysis of an artwork he constructs as a childhood dream of one of humanity's oldest preoccupations, the mysteries of our origins, of our conception and birth. At once parodying and paying homage to Freud's seminal essay on Leonardo da Vinci, Damisch uses Piero's enigmatic painting to narrate our archaic memories. He shows that we must return to Freud because work in psychoanalysis and art has not solved the problem of what is being analyzed: in the triangle of author, work, and audience, where is the psychoanalytic component located?

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Dead Hands traces the fascinating career of a curious imaginative device: the wandering, disembodied, or ghostly hand. The author situates this familiar gothic convention in its richer literary and intellectual contexts, from early modern English drama through American fiction. Dexterously threading historical, theoretical, and formalist questions through readings of the plays of Shakespeare and Webster and the haunted tales of Maupassant, Le Fanu, and Twain, the book illuminates the complex social fictions invested in the faculties of the hand and tested by this evocative device. The book brings together a broad and eclectic array of "manual" iconography: from sixteenth-century religious imagery, medical anatomies, emblem books, witchcraft and folklore, to the popular metaphors of nineteenth-century industrialism, contemporary labor movements, and forensic science. Literary "dead hands" draw on and elaborate these varied traditions, to sometimes humorous and sometimes chilling effect. Across such disparate fields, the author argues, the figure of the "dead hand" represents a specific set of ideas about human agency: particularly, concerns about the fraught relationship between intentions (individual and collective) and meaningful action in the world. Severed and wandering, fictional dead hands challenge prevailing assumptions about bodily autonomy and control, directing us instead to the dependent, disabling, and self-alienating experiences of the acting self. In the process, they illuminate the changing assumptions about bodily experience—that "sense" of acting self—that sustain legal and political definitions of person in these different periods. Outlining the dynamic history of this device—first as it migrates from visual art onto the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and later as it prospers in Anglo-American gothic fiction—Dead Hands advances a comparatist reading of early modern and modern concepts of bodily action and its relation to interiority, authority, and identity.

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Elisha ben Abuya is one of the most intriguing figures in early rabbinic literature, consistently capturing the Jewish imagination as the arch-heretic, apostate, and great sinner. Because of the vague nature of the rabbinic sources relating to him, later generations, particularly in modern times, have been able to project upon him the visions of whatever they saw as either negative or ideal in the figure of the rebel apostate. This book systematically analyzes all sources referring to Elisha ben Abuya, and in so doing, confronts the difficulties of deriving reliable information from rabbinic materials and of writing the biography of a rabbinic hero. The author argues that we have no way of discovering the historical Elisha ben Abuya; he is the product of the creative handling of traditions by later generations. Later generations do not fancifully invent the figure of Elisha but interpret and transmit earlier traditions, trying to resolve the contradictions and to interpret the enigmas they encounter. In the context of this interpretive process, a unique historical image is created, a sage who is born out of tradition, not historical memory. The book also studies Rabbi Eleazar ben Arach. Here, too, the image of the sage does not stem from a historical memory of the sage but from an ideological function which the image of the sage fulfills. Eleazar has come down to us as one who forgot his Torah. Thus, both the sage who is said to have become the greatest of rabbinic sinners and the sage who is said to have forgotten his Torah are products of the literary creativity of rabbinic storytellers, who convey a particular ideology through the image of the rabbinic heroes they portray.

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The foundational question this book explores is: What happens when portraits are interpreted as imitations or likenesses not only of individuals but also of their acts of posing—when the observer's attention is redirected so that the primary object the portrait imitates becomes the likeness not of a person but of an act, the act of sitting for one's portrait? This shift of attention involves another: from the painter's to the sitter's part in the act of (self-)portrayal. At the ground level, Fictions of the Pose develops a hypothesis about the structure and meaning of portraiture. That foundation supports a first story devoted to the practices and politics of early modern Italian and Dutch portraiture and a second story devoted to Rembrandt's self-portraits, especially those in which he poses in fancy dress as if he were a patron. The author approaches the Rembrandt/Renaissance relation not as an art historian but as an interpreter trained in literary studies, taunted by the challenge of extending the practice of "close reading" from verbal to visual media and fascinated by the way this practice can show how individual works "talk back" to their contexts. The context for Rembrandt, the object and target of his "looking-glass theater," is the structure of patron/painter relations that developed during the Renaissance and influenced the very different conditions of patronage that emerged in the Dutch Republic around the turn of the seventeenth century. The book is in four parts. Parts One and Two comprise an interpretive study of the technical and sociopolitical conditions within which portraiture becomes an important if problematic medium of self-representation in early modern Europe. The major portion of these two sections considers the structure and the consequences of a system of practices and conventions that governs poses in commissioned portraits. In Part Three the scene shifts from Italian to Dutch portraiture. Part Four is devoted to self-portraits by Rembrandt that are interpreted as responses to the conditions depicted in the first three parts. Through a series of close readings of individual works, the author demonstrates the ironic, polemical, and political force of Rembrandt's self-portraits.

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