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This book offers an innovative examination of the interactions of science and technology, art, and literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars in the history of art, literature, architecture, computer science, and media studies focus on five historical themes in the transition from energy to information: thermodynamics, electromagnetism, inscription, information theory, and virtuality. Different disciplines are grouped around specific moments in the history of science and technology in order to sample the modes of representation invented or adapted by each field in response to newly developed scientific concepts and models. By placing literary fictions and the plastic arts...
Work Flows investigates the emergence of "flow" as a crucial metaphor within Russian labor culture since 1870. Maya Vinokour frames concern with fluid channeling as immanent to vertical power structures—whether that verticality derives from the state, as in Stalin's Soviet Union and present-day Russia, or from the proliferation of corporate monopolies, as in the contemporary Anglo-American West. Originating in pre-revolutionary bio-utopianism, the Russian rhetoric of liquids and flow reached an apotheosis during Stalin's First Five-Year Plan and re-emerged in post-Soviet "managed democracy" and Western neoliberalism. The literary, philosophical, and official texts that Work Flows examines ...
The Philosophy of Living Experience is the single best introduction to the thought of Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), a Russian polymath who was co-founder, with Lenin, of the Bolshevik Party. His landmark achievements are Empiriomonism (1904–6), a philosophy of radical empiricism that he developed to replace what he considered to be the crude materialism of contemporary Marxists, and Tektology: Universal Organisational Science (1912–17), a precursor of cybernetics and systems theory. The Philosophy of Living Experience (1913) was written at a transitional point between the two; it is a final summing up of empiriomonism, an illustration of his theory of the social genesis of ideas, and an anticipation of Tektology.
Countless thousands of men and women around the world have good reason to be thankful that Frank Partridge survived three and a half years of brutal Japanese captivity. Had he not, they too would in all probability have died too. Taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore in February 1942, Frank was forced to endure appalling deprivation. Conditions on the Burma railway were notorious and the death rate was horrendous. On returning to Belfast in late 1945 Frank specialized in heart diseases. Convinced that the prompt application of electric shock after cardiac arrest could save lives he reasoned that ventricular defibrillation should be applied not just in hospitals but in the workplace, the home, the street or ambulance. His first ‘portable’ defibrillator was produced in 1965 and over the intervening years evolved into the compact units so prevalent today. The importance of Partridge’s invention was well demonstrated when US President Lyndon B Johnston’s life was saved in 1972. This stirring biography reveals the full story of a remarkable man who survived against the odds to save countless lives.
Though generally associated with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the idea of hegemony had a crucial history in revolutionary Russia where it was used to conceptualize the dynamics of political and cultural leadership. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study considers the cultural dimensions of hegemony, with particular focus on the role of language in political debates and in scholarship of the period. It is shown that considerations of the relations between the proletariat and peasantry, the cities to the countryside and the metropolitan centre to the colonies of the Russian Empire demanded an intense dialogue between practical politics and theoretical reflection, which led to critical perspectives now assumed to be the achievements of, for instance, sociolinguistics and post-colonial studies.
This single volume is an authoritative and accessible guide to the background and progress of the Revolution, written by a team of over forty specialist contributors. Beginning with the radical movements of the mid-nineteenth century, the Encyclopedia covers the development of the revolutionary movement created by the intelligentsia; the condition of the peasants, that of the working class, and of the army; the role of the Tsarist secret police; the 'agents provocateurs'; the revolutionaries' own underground. A substantial section is devoted to the emergence of liberation movements among the national minorities of the borderlands. The Encyclopedia also considers the formation of Soviet institutions, and examines too the emergence of revolutionary culture well before 1917, the avant-garde in art and theatre, and the relationship to the revolution of three major Russian writers, Blok, Gorky and Mayakovsky.
Reveals that during the World War I era modernists participated in a wide-ranging anarchist movement that encompassed lifestyles, literature, and art, as well as politics.
The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism.