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Here David Ellison explores the problems encountered by France's best experimental authors writing between 1956 and 1984, when faced with the question: "What should my writing be about?" These years are characterized by the rise of the "new novelists," who questioned the representational function of writing as they created works of imagination that turned in upon themselves and away from exterior reality. It became fashionable at one point to affirm that literature was no longer about the world but uniquely about the words on a page, the signifying surface of the text. Ellison tests this assumption, showing that even in the most seemingly self-referential fictions the words point to the world from which they can never completely separate themselves. Through close readings Ellison examines the novels and theoretical writings of authors whose works are fundamental to our perception of contemporary French writing and thought: Camus, Robbe-Grillet, Simon, Duras, Sarraute, Blanchot, and Beckett. The result is a new understanding of the link between the referential function of literary language and the problematic of the ethics of fiction.
"The Useless Mouths" and Other Literary Writings brings to English-language readers literary writings--several previously unknown--by Simone de Beauvoir. Culled from sources including various American university collections, the works span decades of Beauvoir's career. Ranging from dramatic works and literary theory to radio broadcasts, they collectively reveal fresh insights into Beauvoir's writing process, personal life, and the honing of her philosophy. The volume begins with a new translation of the 1945 play The Useless Mouths, written in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Other pieces were discovered after Beauvoir's death in 1986, such as the 1965 short novel "Misunderstanding in Mosco...
African Women Writing Resistance is the first transnational anthology to focus on women’s strategies of resistance to the challenges they face in Africa today. The anthology brings together personal narratives, testimony, interviews, short stories, poetry, performance scripts, folktales, and lyrics. Thematically organized, it presents women’s writing on such issues as intertribal and interethnic conflicts, the degradation of the environment, polygamy, domestic abuse, the controversial traditional practice of female genital cutting, Sharia law, intergenerational tensions, and emigration and exile. Contributors include internationally recognized authors and activists such as Wangari Maatha...
Considers the contributions and contemporary significance of Alan Watts.
Richly-illustrated consideration of the meaning of the carvings of non-human beings, from centaurs to eagles, found in ecclesiastical settings. Representations of monsters and the monstrous are common in medieval art and architecture, from the grotesques in the borders of illuminated manuscripts to the symbol of the "green man", widespread in churches and cathedrals. These mysterious depictions are frequently interpreted as embodying or mitigating the fears symptomatic of a "dark age". This book, however, considers an alternative scenario: in what ways did monsters in twelfth-century sculpture help audiences envision, perhaps even achieve, various ambitions? Using examples of Romanesque scul...
In the history of humanity as well as in the brief and recent history of the new paradigms in science, we find theories of the way the heavens and the earth are or should be. In this book our intention is to examine in depth those that build bridges. Humanity and consciousness are positioned as the foundation of the human being in the face of those who would reduce him to a genetic robot. Based on many years of work in the field, we are offering a possible doorway to healing as a bridge of knowledge in day-to-day life so that my masters, my patients, can receive what they have taught me: the magic of transforming an obstacle into a lever. This book is therefore both theoretical and practical, in order to assist in resolving those painful repetitions of our ancestors’ lives-blind programming and painful wounds, with a view to finding a healing path (nature’s, and therefore evolution’s, secret) in which the psychology of complexity serves to reconcile us with life in our afflicted and opportune world.
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy in the field of artistic research Gilles Deleuze’s intriguing concept of the dark precursor refers to intensive processes of energetic flows passing between fields of different potentials. Fleetingly used in Difference and Repetition, it remained underexplored in Deleuze’s subsequent work. In this collection of essays numerous contributors offer perspectives on Deleuze’s concept of the dark precursor as it affects artistic research, providing a wide-ranging panorama on the intersection between music, art, philosophy, and scholarship. The forty-eight chapters in this publication present a kaleidoscopic view of different fields of knowledge and art...
"Instead of proposing another theory of war, their goal is a more modest one of raising the theoretical consciousness of historians. Specifically, they argue that '1) ideology does influence theory, 2) historians do have ideologies as well as theories . . . about which they are not always conscious or consistent, and 3) we can better understand, compare, and evaluate what historians are saying when we comprehend their ideological and theoretical perspectives.' They attempt then, to classify historical interpretations of war according to their ideological/ theoretical orientations, however covert." --Perspective "Nelson and Olin .. . are concerned with enhancing history's social utility by ad...
The natural world is infinitely complex and hierarchically structured, with smaller units forming the components of larger systems: genes are components genomes, cells are building blocks of tissues and organs, individuals are members of populations, which, in turn, are parts of species. In the face of such awe inspiring complexity, scientists need tools like the hierarchy theory of evolution, which provides a theoretical framework and an interdisciplinary research program that aims to understand the way complex biological systems work and evolve. The multidisciplinary approach looks at the structure of the myriad intricate interactions across levels of organization that range from molecules to the biosphere. Evolutionary Theory: A Hierarchical Perspective provides an introduction to the theory, which is currently driving a great deal of research in bioinformatics and evolutionary theory. Written by a diverse and renowned group of contributors, and edited by the founder of Hierachy Theory Niles Eldredge, this work will help make transparent the fundamental patterns driving living sytems.