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books tagged “critical theory”
books tagged “critical theory”
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Adorno: A Critical Readerby Andrew Rubin, Nigel C. GibsonISBN 0631212493 (0-631-21249-3)
Softcover, Blackwell Pub
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Adorno: A Critical Reader'Book summary:Adorno: A Critical Reader presents a collection of new essays by many of the world's top critics that examine Adorno's lasting impact on the arts, politics, history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sociology. [via]
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Art in Theory 1648-1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideasby Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, Jason GaigerISBN 0631200649 (0-631-20064-9)
Softcover, Blackwell Pub
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The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Textsby David LodgeISBN 0670848484 (0-670-84848-4)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts'Book summary:Essays gathered from the Washington Post and the London Independent examine the art and artistry of some of the best writers working in the English language, covering such issues as suspense, symbolism, epistolary novels, intrusive authors, and more. [via]
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Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdomby Ernst BlochISBN 066500012X (0-665-00012-X)
Hardcover, Herder and Herder
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The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousnessby Paul GilroyISBN 0674076060 (0-674-07606-0)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness'Book summary:Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is,Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism.
Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison.
In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.
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Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrativeby Peter BrooksISBN 0674077253 (0-674-07725-3)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Societyby Gillian RoseISBN 0631182217 (0-631-18221-7)
Softcover, Blackwell Pub
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society'Book summary:The Broken Middle offers a startlingly original rethinking of the modern philosophical tradition and fundamentally rejects the anti-philosophy and anti-theory of post-modernity. Extending across the disciplines from philosophy to theology, Judaica, law, social and political theory, literary criticism, feminism and architecture, this book stakes itself on a renewed potential for sustained critique. Against the grain of much contemporary thought, this work of criticism offers the reader a way beyond the spurious alternatives of "totalization" or acknowledgement of the "other".
The Broken Middle expounds the phenomenology of the diremption of law and ethics. By reconstructing the suppressed political history of modernity, it shows that contemporary thought belongs to a tradition which has become ancient. Following this drama in the configuration of anxiety of beginning, equivocation of the ethical, and agon of authorship, the logos opens out of the pathos of the concept. [via]More editions of The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society:
The Challenge of Comparative Literatureby Claudio Guillen, Cola FranzenISBN 0674106881 (0-674-10688-1)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Changeby Frank KermodeISBN 0674133986 (0-674-13398-6)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Claude Levi-Straussby Edmund LeachISBN 0670019801 (0-670-01980-1)
Hardcover, Viking Press
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The Closing of the American Mindby Allan BloomISBN 0671657151 (0-671-65715-1)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Closing of the American Mind'Book summary:"The Closing of the American Mind, " a publishing phenomenon in hardcover, is now a paperback literary event. In this acclaimed number one national best-seller, one of our country's most distinguished political philosophers argues that the social/political crisis 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis. Allan Bloom's sweeping analysis is essential to understanding America today. It has fired the imagination of a public ripe for change. [via]
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The Closing of the American Mind/How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Studentsby Allan BloomISBN 0671479903 (0-671-47990-3)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Closing of the American Mind/How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students'Book summary:THE BRILLIANT AND CONTROVERSIAL CRITIQUE OF AMERICAN CULTURE WITH NEARLY A MILLION COPIES IN PRINT In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind , an appraisal of contemporary America that "hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy" ( The New York Times ) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom's argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today. [via]
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Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism An Anthologyby Richard Kearney, David M. RasmussenISBN 0631216103 (0-631-21610-3)
Hardcover, Blackwell Pub
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A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theoryby J. A. Cuddon, C. E. PrestonISBN 0631202714 (0-631-20271-4)
Hardcover, Blackwell Publishing Limited
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory'Book summary:The fourth edition of J.A. Cuddon's classic dictionary has been thoroughly revised and updated to maintain it as the most comprehensive and accessible work of its kind currently available, for students, teachers and general readers alike. Expanded to include many new entries, it has been improved throughout, in places rendered more concise, in others amended and extended, with both major and minor additions. The work of the third edition, to cover the schools and various terminologies of literary theory is continued, without compromising coverage afforded to more traditional critical terms and topics.
At this untimely death in 1996, Charles Cuddon, as he was known, had completed much of the revisory and updating work involved in preparing the edition. That work and other unfinished plans and outlines have since been overseen and developed by C.E. Preston of Sidney Sussex college, Cambridge, helped, as she acknowledges, by several of her academic colleagues. Among the entries extensively rewritten or newly contributed are:
* "CrimeFiction",
* "Dramatic Monologue",
* "Ellipsis",
* "Punctuation",
* "Rhyme",
* "Verse Novel", and
* "Sonnet Cycle".
After more than twenty years in print, Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory remains "a superlative work of reference that will be read for pleasure", just as it was acclaimed to be when first published in 1976. There is now no better memorial to its author's extraordinary polymathy and literary scholarship. [via]More editions of A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory:
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evilby Hannah ArendtISBN 0670001651 (0-670-00165-1)
Hardcover, Viking Press
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil'Book summary:While living in Argentina in 1960, Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped and smuggled to Israel where he was put on trial for crimes against humanity. The New Yorker magazine sent Hannah Arendt to cover the trial. While covering the technical aspects of the trial, Arendt also explored the wider themes inherent in the trial, such as the nature of justice, the behavior of the Jewish leadership during the Nazi Régime, and, most controversially, the nature of Evil itself.
Far from being evil incarnate, as the prosecution painted Eichmann, Arendt maintains that he was an average man, a petty bureaucrat interested only in furthering his career, and the evil he did came from the seductive power of the totalitarian state and an unthinking adherence to the Nazi cause. Indeed, Eichmann's only defense during the trial was "I was just following orders."
Arendt's analysis of the seductive nature of evil is a disturbing one. We would like to think that anyone who would perpetrate such horror on the world is different from us, and that such atrocities are rarities in our world. But the history of groups such as the Jews, Kurds, Bosnians, and Native Americans, to name but a few, seems to suggest that such evil is all too commonplace. In revealing Eichmann as the pedestrian little man that he was, Arendt shows us that the veneer of civilization is a thin one indeed. [via]
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The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Cultureby Lawrence BuellISBN 0674258622 (0-674-25862-2)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture'Book summary:The best writing about nature, literary scholar Lawrence Buell suggests, has at its root an argument that humans are accountable to the environment. In the American literary canon, the work that best demonstrates this thesis is Henry David Thoreau's classic Walden, a memoir celebrating at once the virtues of voluntary simplicity and the quest for political liberty. It is from Walden that much contemporary writing about nature derives, from the poems of the Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry to the back-to-the-land exhortations of Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard. In this study, Buell charts the growth of Thoreau's own environmental ethic and his lasting influence on writers of many kinds, among them Theodore Roethke, Gary Snyder, James Lovelock, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold. He also examines Thoreau's life, reminding his readers that although Thoreau will always be identified with that little Massachusetts pond, he was a wide-ranging traveler and thinker who was never quite comfortable at rest. Neither, Buell reminds us, is Thoreau always to be taken as a strictly reliable narrator; parts of Walden are fictionalized and embellished, and the book should not be reduced to "the autobiographical narrative alone," but instead should be seen as something of a parable. Buell's discussions will be of interest to any serious student of Thoreau's writings. --Gregory McNamee [via]
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Feminist Literary Theory: A Readerby Terry EagletonISBN 0631197346 (0-631-19734-6)
Softcover, Blackwell Pub
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The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poeticsby P.N. Medvedev, Albert J. Wehrle, M.M. BakhtinISBN 0674309219 (0-674-30921-9)
Softcover, Harvard University Press
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Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960-1990by Allan BloomISBN 0671747266 (0-671-74726-6)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Ideaby Arthur Oncken LovejoyISBN 0674361539 (0-674-36153-9)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea'Book summary:From later antiquity down to the close of the eighteenth century, most philosophers and men of science and, indeed, most educated men, accepted without question a traditional view of the plan and structure of the world.
In this volume, which embodies the William James lectures for 1933, Arthur O. Lovejoy points out the three principlesplenitude, continuity, and graduationwhich were combined in this conception; analyzes their origins in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists; traces the most important of their diverse samifications in subsequent religious thought, in metaphysics, in ethics and aesthetics, and in astronomical and biological theories; and copiously illustrates the influence of the conception as a whole, and of the ideas out of which it was compounded, upon the imagination and feelings as expressed in literature.
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A Guide to Critical Legal Studiesby Mark KelmanISBN 0674367561 (0-674-36756-1)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Has Feminism Changed Science?by Londa SchiebingerISBN 0674005449 (0-674-00544-9)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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The Heart of Darknessby Joseph ConradISBN 0671465686 (0-671-46568-6)
Softcover, Pocket Books
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Homosby Leo BersaniISBN 0674406206 (0-674-40620-6)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Homos'Book summary:Acclaimed for his intricate, incisive, and often controversial explorations of art, literature, and society, Leo Bersani now addresses homosexuality in America.
Hardly a day goes by without the media focusing an often sympathetic beam on gay life--and, with AIDS, on gay death. Gay plays on Broadway, big book awards to authors writing on gay subjects, Hollywood movies with gay themes, gay and lesbian studies at dozens of universities, openly gay columnists and even editors at national mainstream publications, political leaders speaking in favor of gay rights: it seems that straight America has finally begun to listen to homosexual America.
Still, Bersani notes, not only has homophobia grown more virulent, but many gay men and lesbians themselves are reluctant to be identified as homosexuals. In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the paradoxical desire to be invisibly visible. While acknowledging the dangers of any kind of group identification (if you can be singled out, you can be disciplined), Bersani argues for a bolder presentation of what it means to be gay. In their justifiable suspicion of labels, gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their own sophisticated awareness of how they have been socially constructed. By downplaying their sexuality, gays risk self-immolation--they will melt into the stifling culture they had wanted to contest.
In his chapters on contemporary queer theory, on Foucault and psychoanalysis, on the politics of sadomasochism, and on the image of "the gay outlaw" in works by Gide, Proust, and Genet, Bersani raises the exciting possibility that same-sex desire by its very nature can disrupt oppressive social orders. His spectacular theory of "homo-ness" will be of interest to straights as well as gays, for it designates a mode of connecting to the world embodied in, but not reducible to, a sexual preference. The gay identity Bersani advocates is more of a force--as such, rather cool to the modest goal of social tolerance for diverse lifestyles--which can lead to a massive redefining of sociality itself, and of what we might expect from human communities.
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How to Do Things With Wordsby J.L. AustinISBN 0674411528 (0-674-41152-8)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How to Do Things With Words'Book summary:John L. Austin was one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century. The William James Lectures presented Austin's conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts on a wide variety of philosophical problems. These talks became the classic How to Do Things with Words.
For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary. Students will find the new text clearer, and, at the same time, more faithful to the actual lectures. An appendix contains literal transcriptions of a number of marginal notes made by Austin but not included in the text. Comparison of the text with these annotations provides new dimensions to the study of Austin's work.
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Interpretation and Social Criticismby Michael WalzerISBN 0674459717 (0-674-45971-7)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Interpretation and Social Criticism'Book summary:What do social critics do? I How do they go about doing it? Where do their principles come from? How do critics establish their distance from the people and institutions they criticize?
Michael Walzer addresses these problems in succinct and engaging fashion, providing a philosophical framework for understanding social criticism as a social practice. Walzer maintains that social criticism is an ordinary activity--less the offspring of scientific knowledge than the "educated cousin of common complaint"-- and does not depend for its force or accuracy upon any sort of high theory. In his view, the social critic is not someone radically detached and disinterested, who looks at society as a total stranger and applies objective and universal principles. The true social critic must stand only a little to the side of his society--unlike Jean-Paul Sartre during the Algerian war, for example, who described himself as an enemy of his own people. And unlike Lenin, who judged Russian society against a standard worked out with reference to other places far away.
The "connected" critic is the model Walzer offers, one whose distance is measured in inches but who is highly critical nevertheless. John Locke is one example of the connected critic who argued for religious toleration not as a universal right ordained by reason but as a practical consequence of Protestant theology. The biblical prophets, such as Amos, were also men of their own day, with a particular quarrel to conduct with their fellows; the universalism of that quarrel is our own extrapolation. Walzer explains where critical principles come from, how much distance is "critical distance," and what the historical practice of criticism has actually been like in the work of social philosophers such as Marx, Gramsci, Koestler, Lenin, Habermas, and Rawls.
Walzer posits a moral world already in existence, a historical product, that gives structure to our lives but whose ordinances are always uncertain and in need of scrutiny, argument, and commentary. The social critic need bring to his task only the ordinary tools of interpretation. Philosophers, political theorists, and all readers seriously interested in the possibility of a moral life will find sustenance and inspiration in this book.
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Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derridaby Rodolphe GascheISBN 0674464435 (0-674-46443-5)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Jameson Readerby Michael Hardt, Kathi WeeksISBN 0631202706 (0-631-20270-6)
Softcover, Blackwell Pub
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The Killing of History: How a Discipline Is Being Murdered by Literary Criticismby Keith WindschuttleISBN 0646206389 (0-646-20638-9)
Hardcover, Access Pub Network
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Language in Literatureby Roman Jakobson, Stephen Rudy, Krystyna PomoraskaISBN 0674510283 (0-674-51028-3)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Language in Literature'Book summary:"Roman Jakobson was one of the great minds of the modern world," Edward J. Brown has written, "and the effects of his genius have been felt in many fields: linguistics, semiotics, art, structural anthropology, and, of course, literature." At every stage in his odyssey from Moscow to Prague to Denmark and then to the United States, he formed collaborative efforts that changed the very nature of each discipline he touched. This book is the first comprehensive presentation in English of Jakobson's major essays on the intertwining of language and literature: here the reader will learn how it was that Jakobson became legendary.
Jakobson reveals himself as one of the great explorers of literary art in our day--a critic who revealed the avant-garde thrust of even the most worked-over poets, such as Shakespeare and Pushkin, and enabled the reader to see them as the innovators they were. Jakobson takes the reader from literature to grammar and then back again, letting points of structural detail throw a sharp light on the underlying form and linking thereby the most disparate realms into a coherent whole. In his essays we can also learn to appreciate his search for a fully systematic, nonmetaphysical understanding of the workings of literature: Jakobson made possible a deep structural analysis that did not exist before.
Among the essential items in this collection are such classics as "Linguistics and Poetics" and "On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets" and illuminations of Baudelaire, Yeats, Turgenev, Pasternak, and Blake, as well as the famous pieces on Shakespeare and Pushkin. The essays include fundamental theoretical statements, structural analyses of individual poems, explorations of the connections between poetry and experience, and semiotic perspectives on the structure of verbal and nonverbal art. This will become a basic book for contemplating the function of language in literature--a project that will continue to engross the keenest readers.
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Law's Empireby Ronald DworkinISBN 0674518365 (0-674-51836-5)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Law's Empire'Book summary:With the incisiveness and lucid style for which he is renowned, Ronald Dworkin has written a masterful explanation of how the Anglo-American legal system works and on what principles it is grounded. Laws Empire is a full-length presentation of his theory of law that will be studied and debatedby scholars and theorists, by lawyers and judges, by students and political activistsfor years to come.
Dworkin begins with the question that is at the heart of the whole legal system: in difficult cases how do (and how should) judges decide what the law is? He shows that judges must decide hard cases by interpreting rather than simply applying past legal decisions, and he produces a general theory of what interpretation isin literature as well as in lawand of when one interpretation is better than others. Every legal interpretation reflects an underlying theory about the general character of law: Dworkin assesses three such theories. One, which has been very influential, takes the law of a community to be only what the established conventions of that community say it is. Another, currently in vogue, assumes that legal practice is best understood as an instrument of society to achieve its goals. Dworkin argues forcefully and persuasively against both these views: he insists that the most fundamental point of law is not to report consensus or provide efficient means to social goals, but to answer the requirement that a political community act in a coherent and principled manner toward all its members. He discusses, in the light of that view, cases at common law, cases arising under statutes, and great constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, and he systematically demonstrates that his concept of political and legal integrity is the key to Anglo-American legal theory and practice.
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Literary Theory: An Anthologyby Michael Ryan, Julie RivkinISBN 0631200290 (0-631-20029-0)
Softcover, Blackwell Pub
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Literary Theory: An Anthology'Book summary:Literary Theory: An Anthology is a unique combination of the classic statements in criticism and the new theories that have revolutionized literary study in the past several decades.
- Provides a major collection of primary theoretical texts.
- Shows how theoretical discourses have evolved.
- Helps students to understand how to work with theory.
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- Provides a major collection of primary theoretical texts.
Little Simon ABCby Mik BrownISBN 0671450379 (0-671-45037-9)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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Marshall McLuhanby Jonathan MillerISBN 0670458767 (0-670-45876-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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Martin Heideggerby George SteinerISBN 0670459097 (0-670-45909-7)
Hardcover, Viking Press
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The Masks of God: Creative Mythologyby Joseph CampbellISBN 0670461113 (0-670-46111-3)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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The Masks of God: Oriental Mythologyby Joseph CampbellISBN 0670460451 (0-670-46045-1)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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The Masks of God: Primitive Mythologyby Joseph CampbellISBN 0670460125 (0-670-46012-5)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology'Book summary:The author of such acclaimed books as Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth discusses the primitive roots of mythology, examining them in light of the most recent discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology[via]More editions of The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology:
The Mass Ornament: Weimer Essaysby Siegfried Kracauer, Thomas Y. LevinISBN 067455163X (0-674-55163-X)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Michel Foucaultby Didier Eribon, Betsy WingISBN 0674572866 (0-674-57286-6)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Michel Foucault'Book summary:At the time of his death in 1984, at the age of fifty-eight, Michel Foucault was widely regarded as one of the most powerful minds of this century. Hailed by distinguished historians and lionized on his frequent visits to America, he continues to provoke lively debate. The nature and merits of his accomplishments remain tangled in controversy. Rejecting traditional liberal and Marxist "dreams of solidarity," Foucault became the very model of the modern intellectual, replacing Sartre as the figure of the eminent Parisian and cosmopolitan master thinker.
Foucault himself discouraged biographical questions, claiming that he was "not at all interesting." Didier Eribon's captivating account overthrows that assertion. As a journalist well acquainted with Foucault for years before his death, Eribon was particularly well placed to conduct the dozens of interviews which are the cornerstone of this book. He has drawn upon eyewitness accounts by Foucault's closest associates from all phases of his life--his mother, his schoolteachers, his classmates, his friends and enemies in academic life, and his celebrated companions in political activism, including Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. Eribon has methodically retraced the footsteps of his peripatetic subject, from France to Sweden to Poland to Germany to Tunisia to Brazil to Japan to the United States. The result is a concise, crisply readable, meticulously documented narrative that debunks the many myths and rumors surrounding the brilliant philosophe--and forces us to consider seriously the idea that all his books are indeed, just as Foucault said near the end of his life, "fragments of an autobiography."
Who was this man, Michel Foucault? In the late 1950s Foucault emerged as a budding young cultural attaché, friendly with Gaullist diplomats. By the mid-1960s he appeared as one of the avatars of structuralism, positioning himself as a new star in the fashionable world of French thought. A few months after the May 1968 student revolt, with Gaullism apparently shaken, he emerged as an ultra-leftist and a fellow traveler of Maoists. Yet during this same period, Eribon shows, he was quietly and adroitly campaigning for a chair in the College de France--the very pinnacle of the French academic system. This book does more than follow the career of one extraordinary intellectual. It reconstructs the cultural, political, and intellectual life of France from the postwar years to the present. It is the story of a man and his time.
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Mikhail Bakhtinby Katerina Clark, Michael HolquistISBN 0674574176 (0-674-57417-6)
Softcover, Harvard University Press
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mikhail Bakhtin'Book summary:In such diverse fields as semiotics, literary theory, social theory, linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, Mikhail Bakhtin's importance is increasingly recognized. His posthumous fame comes in striking contrast to his obscurity during his lifetime (1895-1975), much of it spent as a semi-invalid in a succession of provincial towns. He received no public recognition, in the Soviet Union or abroad, until the last dozen years of his long life--not surprisingly, given the historical circumstances. His books on Freudianism (1927), on Formalism (1928), and on Marxism and the philosophy of language (1929) were published as the work of others, as were a number of important essays. His study of Dostoevsky appeared under his own name but only after his arrest and sentence to exile, and it quickly disappeared from sight. Some manuscripts were never published; one was used by Bakhtin for cigarette paper. His book on Rabelais, completed in 1940, remained unpublished for twenty-five years--until, in a less repressive political climate, friends had succeeded in negotiating a reissue of the book on Dostoevsky.
The Rabelais book, when translated, caused a stir among folklorists, anthropologists, and social historians, with its theory of carnival and of ritual inversions of hierarchy. The book on Dostoevsky aroused intense interest among literary theorists in the concept of the "polyphonic novel" and the many authorial voices to be heard therein. Similarly, as Bakhtin's other writings have appeared in translation, he has been hailed in disparate circles for his contributions to linguistic, psychoanalytic, and social theory. But among all those who have studied various aspects of Bakhtin's work, few have been in a position, or even attempted, to assess his total achievement.
It is the great merit of Clark and Holquist's book that they have endeavored, insofar as possible, to give us the complete life and the complete works of this complex and multifaceted figure. The authors have had unique access to the Bakhtin archive in Moscow, have traced further material in other cities in Europe, and have interviewed many persons who knew Bakhtin. The phases of his life are placed in their physical and intellectual milieux, and accounts are given of the figures who made up the various "Bakhtin circles" over the years. All of the works, published and unpublished, are discussed, in the context of European philosophical movements and the currents of thought of the time. Underlying and informing Bakhtin's particular theories in various fields was, in the authors' view, his lifelong meditation on the relation between self and other. The philosophy he evolved has come to be called dialogism, since it conceives of the world in terms of communication and exchange. It is a world view with wide-ranging implications for the human sciences.
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Mikhail Bakhtinby Michael Holquist, Katherina ClarkISBN 0674574168 (0-674-57416-8)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Moscow Diaryby Walter BenjaminISBN 0674587448 (0-674-58744-8)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Myths to Live byby Joseph CampbellISBN 0670503592 (0-670-50359-2)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Myths to Live by'Book summary:What is a properly functioning mythology and what are its functions? Can we use myths to help relieve our modern anxiety, or do they help foster it? In Myths to Live by, Joseph Campbell explores the enduring power of the universal myths that influence our lives daily and examines the myth-making process from the primitive past to the immediate present, retuning always to the source from which all mythology springs: the creative imagination.[via]Campbell stresses that the borders dividing the Earth have been shattered; that myths and religions have always followed the certain basic archetypes and are no longer exclusive to a single people, region, or religion. He shows how we must recognize their common denominators and allow this knowledge to be of use in fulfilling human potential everywhere.
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Of Critical Theory and Its Theoristsby Stephen Eric BronnerISBN 0631187383 (0-631-18738-3)
Softcover, Blackwell Pub
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On Languageby Roman Jakobson, Linda R. Waugh, Monique Monville-BurstonISBN 0674635353 (0-674-63535-3)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideologyby Michael RosenISBN 0674637798 (0-674-63779-8)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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The Open Workby Umberto Eco, Anna CancogniISBN 0674639766 (0-674-63976-6)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derridaby Stanley CavellISBN 0631192719 (0-631-19271-9)
Softcover, Blackwell Publishing Limited
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The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imaginationby Harriet RitvoISBN 0674673581 (0-674-67358-1)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination'Book summary:"Cats is 'dogs,' and rabbits is 'dogs,' and so's parrots; but this `ere 'tortis' is a insect," a porter explains to an astonished traveler in a nineteenth-century Punch cartoon. Railways were not the only British institution to schematize the world. This enormously entertaining book captures the fervor of the Victorian age for classifying and categorizing every new specimen, plant or animal, that British explorers and soldiers and sailors brought home. As she depicts a whole complex of competing groups deploying rival schemes and nomenclatures, Harriet Ritvo shows us a society drawing and redrawing its own boundaries and ultimately identifying itself. The experts (whether calling themselves naturalists, zoologists, or comparative anatomists) agreed on their superior authority if nothing else, but the laymen had their say--and Ritvo shows us a world in which butchers and artists, farmers and showmen vied to impose order on the wild profusion of nature. Sometimes assumptions or preoccupations overlapped; sometimes open disagreement or hostility emerged, exposing fissures in the social fabric or contested cultural territory. Of the greatest interest were creatures that confounded or crossed established categories; in the discussions provoked by these mishaps, monstrosities, and hybrids we can see ideas about human society--about the sexual proclivities of women, for instance, or the imagined hierarchy of nations and races. A thoroughly absorbing account of taxonomy--as zoological classification and as anthropological study--The Platypus and the Mermaid offers a new perspective on the constantly shifting, ever suggestive interactions of scientific lore, cultural ideas, and the popular imagination. [via]
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The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Artby James CliffordISBN 0674698436 (0-674-69843-6)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art'Book summary:The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group's identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and "the other" clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations? In discussions of ethnography, surrealism, museums, and emergent tribal arts, Clifford probes the late-twentieth century predicament of living simultaneously within, between, and after culture.
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Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solutionby Saul FriedlanderISBN 0674707664 (0-674-70766-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution'Book summary:Can the Holocaust be compellingly described or represented? Or is there some core aspect of the extermination of the Jews of Europe which resists our powers of depiction, of theory, of narrative? In this volume, twenty scholars probe the moral, epistemological, and aesthetic limits of an account or portrayal of the Nazi horror.
These essays expose to scrutiny questions that have a pressing claim on our attention, our conscience, and our cultural memory. First presented at a conference organized by Saul Friedlander, they are now made available for the wide consideration and discussion they merit.
Christopher Browning, Hayden White, Carlo Ginzburg, Martin Jay, Dominick LaCapra, and others focus first on the general question: can the record of his historical event be established objectively through documents and witnesses, or is every historical interpretation informed by the perspective of its narrator? The suggestion that all historical accounts are determined by a preestablished narrative choice raises the ethical and intellectual issues of various forms of relativization. In more specific terms, what are the possibilities of historicizing National Socialism without minimizing the historical place of the Holocaust.
Also at issue are the problems related to an artistic representation, particularly the dilemmas posed by aestheticization. John Felstiners, Yael S. Feldman, Sidra Ezahi, Eric Santner, and Anton Kaes grapple with these questions and confront the inadequacy of words in the face of the Holocaust. Others address the problem of fitting Nazi policies and atrocities into the history of Western thought and science. The book concludes with Geoffrey Hartmans's evocative meditation on memory.
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Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianityby Cornel WestISBN 0664223435 (0-664-22343-5)
Softcover, Presbyterian Pub Corp
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity'Book summary:In this, his premiere work, Cornel West provides readers with a new understanding of the African American experience based largely on his own political and cultural perspectives borne out of his own life's experiences. He challenges African Americans to consider the incorporation of Marxism into their theological perspectives, thereby adopting the mindset that it is class more so than race that renders one powerless in America. Armed with a new introduction by the author, this Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Prophesy Deliverance! is a must have.
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Prophesy Deliverance! an Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianityby Cornel WestISBN 0664244475 (0-664-24447-5)
Softcover, Presbyterian Pub Corp
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Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theoryby Malcolm BowieISBN 0631189262 (0-631-18926-2)
Softcover, Blackwell Pub
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory'Book summary:Malcolm Bowie is already well known as a writer who has made "theory" and "criticism" intelligible to each other in new ways. In this new collection he examines the meanings that psychoanalysis has ascribed to the tense and the devices by which later Lacan completes and complexifies Freud's discussions of temporality. "What kind of future can psychoanalysis have when it talks about futurity in this fashion?" In answering this question Malcolm Bowie focuses on an exemplary moment of crisis in the history of psychoanalytic thought. He challenges some of the fundamental Freudian assumptions about temporality of discourse and draws attention to a whole new range of opportunities that a "future-conscious" psychoanalysis might offer critics and theorists of other intellectual persuasions.
Bowie calls for a new openness towards art among psychoanalytic theorists, drawing his examples from a wide variety of artistic practices. Musicians (Mozart, Mahler, Schoenberg and Fauré), visual artists (Michelangelo, Leonardo, Tiepolo and Matisse) and writers (Goethe, Proust and Svevo) are all placed in an illuminating two-way relationship with the writings of Freud. [via]
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The Raymond Williams Readerby John HigginsISBN 0631213112 (0-631-21311-2)
Softcover, Blackwell Publishing Limited
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Reading for the Plotby Peter BrooksISBN 0674748921 (0-674-74892-1)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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The Return of Thematic Criticismby Werner SollorsISBN 0674766873 (0-674-76687-3)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmenby Charles RosenISBN 0674002024 (0-674-00202-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry & Belief from the Bible to the Presentby Harold BloomISBN 0674780280 (0-674-78028-0)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry & Belief from the Bible to the Present'Book summary:Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is criticism at its best.
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The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romanceby Northrop FryeISBN 0674796764 (0-674-79676-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Selections from Cultural Writingsby Antonio GramsciISBN 0674799860 (0-674-79986-0)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Sexual Politicsby Kate MillettISBN 067170740X (0-671-70740-X)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sexual Politics'Book summary:"Praised and denounced when it was first published in 1970, "Sexual Politics" not only explored history but also became part of it. Kate Millett's groundbreaking book fueled feminism's second wave, giving voice to the anger of a generation while documenting the inequities - neatly packaged in revered works of literature and art - of a complacent and unrepentant society. "Sexual Politics" laid the foundation for subsequent feminist scholarship by showing how cultural discourse reflects a systematized subjugation and exploitation of women. Identifying patriarchy as a socially conditioned belief system masquerading as nature, Millett demonstrates in detail how its attitudes and systems penetrate literature, philosophy, psychology, and politics. Her incendiary work rocked the foundations of the literary canon by castigating time-honored classics - from D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's "Lover" to Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" - for their use of sex to degrade and undermine women. A new introduction to this edition draws attention to some of the forms patriarchy has taken recently in consolidating its oppressive and dangerous control." [via]
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Signs of the Times: Destruction and the Fall of Paul De Manby David LehmanISBN 0671775944 (0-671-77594-4)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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The Singer of Talesby Albert Bates Lord, Stephen Mitchell, Gregory NagyISBN 0674002830 (0-674-00283-0)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Singer of Tales'Book summary:This 40th anniversary edition of Albert Lord's classic work includes a unique enhancement: a CD containing the original audio recordings of all the passages of heroic songs quoted in the book; a video publication of the kinescopic filming of the most valued of the singers; and selected photographs taken during Milman Parry's collecting trips in the Balkans.
Parry began recording and studying a live tradition of oral narrative poetry in order to find an answer to the age-old Homeric Question: How had the author of the Iliad and Odyssey composed these two monumental epic poems at the very start of Europe's literary tradition? Parry's, and with him Lord's, enduring contribution--set forth in Lord's The Singer of Tales--was to demonstrate the process by which oral poets compose.
Now reissued with a new Introduction and an invaluable audio and visual record, this widely influential book is newly enriched to better serve everyone interested in the art and craft of oral literature.
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Theories of Mythologyby Eric CsapoISBN 0631232486 (0-631-23248-6)
Softcover, Blackwell Pub
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The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Lifeby Michael WarnerISBN 0674004418 (0-674-00441-8)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life'Book summary:The Trouble with Normal argues passionately against same-sex marriage, but here's the twist: not because it denigrates the institution of marriage, but because it perpetuates the cultural shame attached to sex between consenting but unmarried adults. When gay men and lesbians try to claim that they're just like "normal folk," Michael Warner writes, they do a profound disservice to other queer folk who choose not to live in monogamous or matrimonial bliss and who believe that the solution to being stigmatized for your sexuality is not to pretend it doesn't exist. Same-sex marriage advocates, he continues, often seem to be willfully blind to the cultural ramifications of their position, viewing marriage as "an intensified and deindividuated form of coming out." They don't seem to realize that if society validates their relationships, other types of relationships will by necessity be invalidated. (He also makes a strong case for the fight against sexual shame's being more than a queer issue, citing 1998's presidential impeachment crisis: "[Bill] Clinton, certainly, was not the first to discover how hard it is in this culture to assert any dignity when you stand exposed as a sexual being.") Extending his analysis, Warner shows how the championing of married gays and lesbians as "normal" is part of the same cultural climate that leads to "quality of life" crackdowns against queercentric businesses--as is already underway in New York City--and a deliberate sabotage of safer-sex education that puts millions of Americans at continued risk of exposure to HIV. Warner's precise, straightforward argument is enlivened by numerous sharp zingers, as when he accuses Andrew Sullivan of "breath[ing] new and bitchy life into Jesuitical pieties" about sexual morality. The Trouble with Normal is a bold, provocative book that forces readers to reconsider what sexual liberation really means. --Ron Hogan [via]
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The Truth About Postmodernismby Christopher NorrisISBN 0631187189 (0-631-18718-9)
Softcover, Blackwell Pub
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Use and Abuse of Historyby Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Adrian Collins, J. KraftISBN 0672601729 (0-672-60172-9)
Softcover, Macmillan General Reference
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Walter Benjamin Selected Writings: 1935-1938by Walter Benjamin, Gary Smith, Michael W. Jennings, Marcus Bullock, Howard EilandISBN 0674008960 (0-674-00896-0)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1938-1940by Walter Benjamin, Michael W. JenningsISBN 0674010760 (0-674-01076-0)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1938-1940'Book summary:"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over Benjamin's writings in the final years of his life, the "victories wrested" in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most remarkable twentieth-century analyses of the emergence of modern society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin's own faith in the written word.
This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an ethic for the critic and artist--a subdued but resilient heroism. At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of how art adapts in an age of violence and repression.
Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final version of his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Also included in this volume is his influential piece "On the Concept of History," completed just before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of "the modern" (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under siege.
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The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaireby Walter BenjaminISBN 0674022874 (0-674-02287-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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