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"Unhuman Culture ranges over literature, art, and theory, ancient to postmodern, to explore the ways in which contemporary culture defines humanity in terms of all that it is not. It is not only art, in the narrow sense of the word, that we must recognize as unhuman. For better or worse, ours is now an unhuman culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Education is useless because it destroys our common sense, because it isolates us from the rest of humanity, because it hardens our hearts and swells our heads. Bookish persons have long been subjects of suspicion and contempt and nowhere more so, perhaps, than in the United States during the past twenty years. Critics of education point to the Nazism of Martin Heidegger, for example, to assert the inhumanity of highly learned people; they contend that an oppressive form of identity politics has taken over the academy and complain that the art world has been overrun by culturally privileged elitists. There are always, it seems, far more reasons to disparage the ivory tower than to honor it. ...
In her absorbing study of nineteenth-century mystical writings, Sarah Willburn formulates a new conception of individualism that offers a fresh look at Victorian subjectivity. Drawing upon extensive archival work in the British Library, Willburn analyzes séance accounts, novels about mediumship, and metaphysical treatises to make important connections between contemporary writings on mysticism and fictional works. Willburn presents the theories of compelling characters such as Newton Crosland and Lois Waisbrooker and provides exciting new readings of well-known texts by Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, Martineau, and Corelli. An understanding of the Victorian fascination with mysticism, Willburn a...
We do not see empty figures and outlines; we do not move in straight lines. Everywhere we are surrounded by dapple; the geometry of our embodied lives is curviform, meandering, bi-pedal. Our personal worlds are timed, inter-positional, and contingent. But nowhere in the language of cartography and design do these ordinary experiences appear. This, Dark Writing argues, is a serious omission because they are designs on the world: architects and colonizers use their lines to construct the places where we will live. But the rectilinear streets, squares, and public spaces produced in this way leave out people and the entire environmental history of their coming together. How, this book asks, can ...
A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophic...
"Save the World on Your Own Time is invariably smart, stimulating, and provocative. It is filled with insights and crackles with verve. It is a joy to take in." - Texas Law Review
Howard Frank Mosher has spent the greater part of his career depicting a relatively isolated section of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom. Yet, even as he writes about that particular area in the Green Mountain State, he is investigating age-old themes from among the best English and American literary works. His first novel, Disappearances (1977), signaled the arrival of a master craftsman harkening us back to Melville's Billy Budd and Moby-Dick, in terms of humankind's struggle against an ever present evil. A full 33 years after the publication of his first novel, the Vermont author, in Walking to Gatlinburg (2010), examined the polarity between cowardice and honor. In the intervening years, between Disappearances and Gatlinburg, Mosher explored crucial matters such as the disappearing wilderness, industrialization, black male/white female encounters, the necessity of humor, the quest for salvation, and the immortality of romantic love, all issues that he delved into as he staked out a unique terrain within the pantheon of Bunyan, Shakespeare, Dreiser, Twain, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Harper Lee, and others.
Studiul aduce o lumină nouă asupra operei lui Walter Scott, arătând relevanța ei în contextul contemporan. Combinând într-o abordare neo-formalistă teoriile lui Hayden White, Bogdan Ștefănescu și Mikhail Bakhtin, volumul de față demonstrează modul în care alteritatea, în ficțiunea lui Scott, aduce remediile necesare societății, dacă societatea permite existența alterității alături de ea, fără încercarea de a-i șterge diferențele. Importante sunt momentele de suspendare temporară a codurilor culturale, în stilul conservator al parodiei lui Bakhtin, permițând astfel o supapă de evacuare a tensiunilor sociale. Dincolo de jargonul tehnic, cartea pune în fața cititorului pasajele cele mai distractive din opera vastă a lui Scott, precum și un studiu interesant al iluminismului scoțian și al sferei publice care a reușit să încorporeze feedback-ul culturii populare, ajungând la început de secol XIX să exporte modelul său de succes în întreaga lume.
During the 19th century the U.S. and Britain came to share an economic profile unparalleled in their respective histories. This book suggests that this early high capitalism came to serve as the ground for a new kind of cosmopolitanism in the age of literary realism, and argues for the necessity of a transnational analysis based upon economic relationships of which people on both sides of the Atlantic were increasingly conscious. The nexus of this exploration of economics, aesthetics and moral philosophy is philanthropy. Pushing beyond reductive debates over the benevolent or mercenary qualities of industrial era philanthropy, the following questions are addressed: what form and function doe...
With the character of the doctor as her subject, Tabitha Sparks follows the decline of the marriage plot in the Victorian novel. As Victorians came to terms with the scientific revolution in medicine of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the novel's progressive distance from the conventions of the marriage plot can be indexed through a rising identification of the doctor with scientific empiricism. A narrative's stance towards scientific reason, Sparks argues, is revealed by the fictional doctor's relationship to the marriage plot. Thus, novels that feature romantic doctors almost invariably deny the authority of empiricism, as is the case in George MacDonald's Adela Cathcart. In contrast, ...