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Having met with resistance in his attempts to reform the clergy in his native Xanten, Norbert (ca. 1080-1134) founded a religious community in France. His establishment was the first house of an eventually hugely successful order, the Canons Regular of Premontre, also known as the Premonstratensians or Norbertines. Although Norbert, who was appointed archbishop of Magdeburg in 1126, left no writings, his followers produced many important texts in their efforts to reform a lax and demoralized clergy. Yet, despite these authors' significance to the spirituality of their age, their words and their historical context are little-known to modern readers. This volume renders audible the voices of the twelfth-century followers of Norbert, presenting the most important early Premonstratensian texts (including two versions of the Vita Norberti), along with an introductory essay describing their place in twelfth-century religious life. Book jacket.
In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernis...
In eleven incisive, biting essays, Marxist philosopher Darko Suvin suggests that "capitalism (and all of us in Leviathan's belly) stands today in the presence of Yeats's rough beast advancing toward Bethlehem, that finance capitalism is not simply a stage but a recurrent 'Autumn' signal of transition from one world regime of accumulation and domination to another; it signals the destruction of the old regime and creation of a 'new' one." And to bolster his argument, Suvin points to the economic and social chaos creeping and growing through western society, bank failures, riots, unrest, loss of private capital, loss of middle-class jobs, increase in drug and alcohol abuse, proliferation of gu...
"Ehrhard Bahr's sophisticated introduction to the Los Angeles of the émigrés from Nazi Germany is a quintessential 'Hollywood' book: brilliant in casting, sunny in disposition, with hidden film noir touches. Bahr's reading of the central books of this world, by Bert Brecht, Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, his insights into Fritz Lang's films and Arnold Schoenberg's operas, make this a major contribution to American, German and world culture."—Sander L. Gilman, author of Bertolt Brecht's Berlin “At long last, émigré Los Angeles has been interpreted from the inside by an accomplished scholar of modern German culture. Weimar on the Pacific is a study of relevance to California, the nation, and contemporary Europe.”—Kevin Starr, Professor of History, University of Southern California
Kepler's successful solution to the problem of vision early in the seventeenth century was a theoretical triumph as significant as many of the more celebrated developments of the scientific revolution. Yet the full import of Kepler's arguments can be grasped only when they are viewed against the background of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance visual theory. David C. Lindberg provides this background, and in doing so he fills the gap in historical scholarship and constructs a model for tracing the development of scientific ideas. David C. Lindberg is professor and chairman of the department of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Long ago his mother had routinely cleaned the windows of the family home to invisibility. But the glass had shut him away nevertheless, a fading print of a boy, a creature as flat and boneless as the paper animals taped on the plaster. The symptoms of chronic disease had excluded him from the world outside-and the world inside, created from books piled high in the sickroom provided small compensation for his expected death. Only the vast histories of human conflict were a consolation. His reading and rereading of them intensified the enmity that nourished his remaining strength. Or that's what he chose to remember as he looked down on the quiet street below. In The Second Law of Dying, the ghostly presence of Nobel laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer lays out the map of moral choices for Dr. Hugo Haultain as he grinds his way through the abyss of degradation that poisons his life. Across several continents and ending in Schweitzer's remote African hospital, varying and inevitable circumstances give the notorious and depleted Dr. Haultain the daily option of turning violently on the world-or not.
Volume 10, dedicated to 'Comedy, Irony, Parody', celebrates the first decade of Comparative Criticism in a light-hearted vein. Michael Silk opens with a wide-ranging essay asserting the primacy of comedy and declaring its independence of tragedy. T. L. S. Sprigge explores philosophers who dared to write on laughter: Schopenhauer and Bergson. Bernard Harrison looks at the twentieth century's favourite comic novel, Tristram Shandy, in the light of Locke's views on 'the particular'. Peter Brand pursues the theatrical arts of disguises, masking, and gender-swapping through Renaissance Europe, from Ariosto to Shakespeare. Jane H. M. Taylor traces the danse macabre in modern 'black humour'. Christine Brooke-Rose, distinguished novelist and critic, reads from and comments on her own witty fictions. Michael Wood describes how Lolita outwitted her seducer.
Der Band enthält 15 Artikel zur Frage nach postmodernen Schreibweisen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Anders als viele eher theoretisierende Beiträge auf diesem Gebiet besteht die Mehrzahl der hier versammelten Aufsätze aus konkreten Textanalysen. Es gibt Beiträge zur bundesdeutschen Literatur aus den letzten vier Jahrzehnten, zur Literatur der DDR, der Schweiz und in Österreich, zu feministischer und interkultureller Literatur. Die Leitfrage ist fast allen Beiträgen lautet: Gibt es ein postmodernes Schreiben, das ein kritisches, politisches und ethisches Engagement nicht ausschließt und das an Vorstellungen von subjektiver Authentizität festhält?
The book sets out in-depth studies of consensual case dispositions in the UK, examining how plea bargaining has developed and spread in England and Wales. It also goes on to discusses in detail the problems that this practise poses for the rule of law by avoiding procedural safe-guards. The book draws on empirical research in its examination of the absence of informal settlements in the former GDR, offering a unique insight into criminal procedure in a socialist legal system that has been little studied.
Richard Wagner continues to be the most controversial artist in history, a perpetually troubling figure in our cultural consciousness. The unceasing debate over his works and their impact--for and against--is one reason why there has been no genuinely comprehensive modern account of his musical dramas until now. Dieter Borchmeyer's book is the first to present an overall picture of these musical dramas from the standpoint of literary and theatrical history. It extends from the composer's early works--still largely ignored--to the Ring Cycle and Parsifal, and includes Wagner's unfinished works and operas he never set to music. Through lively prose, we come to see Wagner as a librettist--and a...