You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book explores the body’s physical limits and the ways in which the confines of the body are delineated, transgressed, or controlled in literary and philosophical texts. Drawing on classics, philosophy, religious studies, medieval studies, and critical theory and examining material ranging from Homer to Game of Thrones, this volume facilitates an interdisciplinary investigation into how the boundaries of the body define the human form in language. This volume’s essays suggest that the body’s meaning is perhaps never more evident than in the violation of its wholeness. The boundaries of the body are areas of transition between states and are therefore vulnerable. As individuals find themselves isolated from their world and one another, their bodies regularly allow for physical interactions, incur transgressions and violations, and undergo profound transformations. Thus sympathy, sexuality, disease, and violence are among the main themes of the volume, which, ultimately, reexamines the place of the body in our understanding of what it means to be human.
This collection offers a vibrant exploration of the bonds between sexual difference and political structure in Greek tragedy. In looking at how the acts of violence and tortured kinship relations are depicted in the work of all three major Greek tragic playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—the contributors shed light on the workings and failings of the Greek polis, and explore the means by which sexual difference and the city take shape in relation to each other. The volume complements and expands the efforts of current feminist interpretations of Antigone and the Oresteia by considering the meanings of tragedy for ancient Athenian audiences while also unveiling the reverberations of Greek tragedy's formulations and dilemmas in modern political life and for contemporary political philosophy.
On the night of September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka wrote his story "The Judgment," which came out of him "like a regular birth." This act of creation struck him as an unmistakable sign of his literary destiny. Thereafter, the search of many of his characters for the Law, for a home, for artistic fulfillment can be understood as a figure for Kafka's own search to reproduce the ecstasy of a single night. In Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, the preeminent American critic and translator of Franz Kafka traces the implications of Kafka's literary breakthrough. Kafka's first concern was not his responsibility to his culture but to his fate as literature, which he pursued by exploring "the limits of the hu...
Continuing the pioneering work in the field laid bare by the uncovering the Creative Condition of the human being in literature and fine arts, the elemental passion of place leads us through the creative imagination into the labyrinths of the ontopoiesis of life itself (Tymieniecka, in her inaugural study). Essays by A-T. Tymieniecka, Mary Catanzaro, W. Smith, Jadwiga Smith, L. Dunton-Downer, Jorge García Gomez, Ch. Eykmann, Marlies Kronegger, Eldon N. van Liere, Hans Rudnik make this collection a unique contribution to literary studies as well as to the metaphysics of life and of the human condition.
Ethel Matson is a sensible, semi-retired professor whose life up to this point has been concerned with the pursuit of rational, tangible knowledge and experiences. Then she starts having both strange encounters and incredibly lucid dreams. In these supposed dreams, Ethel and her enigmatic and unruly companion, Willy (whom Ethels husband regards as a figment of her imagination) set about exploring the core essences of ideas shed only mildly wondered about before, like the interdependence of faith and science -- and life and death. Is her subconscious mind suddenly springing to life, or is there something more going on? Journeys of the Mind: The Amazing Adventures of Ethel and Willy, by author and retired professor Carol Edler Baumann, brings us twenty-seven interconnected episodes in the unusual experiences of Ethel Matson. As we delve into the conscious world, the subconscious world, and the world that lies between, we are faced with the questions of what is real and what is imagined, and whether reality actually matters if in the end we discover truth and everlasting love.
Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Socrates, edited by Christopher Moore, provides almost unbroken coverage, across three-dozen studies, of 2450 years of philosophical and literary engagement with Socrates – the singular Athenian intellectual, paradigm of moral discipline, and inspiration for millennia of philosophical, rhetorical, and dramatic composition. Following an Introduction reflecting on the essentially “receptive” nature of Socrates’ influence (by contrast to Plato’s), chapters address the uptake of Socrates by authors in the Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Late Antique (including Latin Christian, Syriac, and Arabic), Medieval (including Byzantine), Renaissance, Early Modern, Late Modern, and Twentieth-Century periods. Together they reveal the continuity of Socrates’ idiosyncratic, polyvalent, and deep imprint on the history of Western thought, and witness the value of further research in the reception of Socrates.
The Figure of the Road examines the metaphor of the road, way, or path in works of representative humanities disciplines (literature, religion, philosophy, visual art, popular culture) to show how writers and artists anticipated the dilemma known to contemporary deconstruction as the «aporia» or «pathless place.» This tradition exposes the solution advocated in Derrida's late thought - the search for the «tout autre» - as a negative theology and suppression of writing's freedom to allegorize these insoluble problems. The Figure of the Road concludes by tracing the bleak, Beckett-like implications of this freedom for curriculum and ethics in a world understood as wholly figural.
This highly original work builds on two neglected facts about Virgil's Book of Bucolics: its popularity on the bawdy Roman stage and its impact as sequence poetry on readers and writers from the Classical world through the present day. The Bucolics profoundly influenced a wide range of canonical literary figures, from the contemporaneous Horace, Propertius, and Ovid through such successors as Calpurnius, Sannazaro, Marot, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Robert Frost, and W. H. Auden. As performed, the work scored early success. John Van Sickle's artfully rendered translation, its stage cues, and the explanatory notes treat for the first time the book's ten short pieces as a thematic web. He pay...
Kafka’s work has been attributed a universal significance and is often regarded as the ultimate witness of the human condition in the twentieth century. Yet his work is also considered paradigmatic for the expression of the singular that cannot be subsumed under any generalization. This paradox engenders questions not only concerning the meaning of the universal as it manifests itself in (and is transformed by) Kafka’s writings but also about the expression of the singular in literary fiction as it challenges the opposition between the universal and the singular. The contributions in this volume approach these questions from a variety of perspectives. They are structured according to the...
The exceptional weakness of the American labor movement has often been attributed to the successful resistance of American employers to unionization and collective bargaining. However, the ideology deployed against labor's efforts to organize at the grassroots level has received less attention. In Citizen Employers, Jeffrey Haydu compares the very different employer attitudes and experiences that guided labor-capital relations in two American cities, Cincinnati and San Francisco, in the period between the Civil War and World War I. His account puts these attitudes and experiences into the larger framework of capitalist class formation and businessmen's collective identities. Cincinnati and S...