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Drawing on psychoanalytic and semiotic perspectives, this book examines discourses mediating the global War on Terror, including governmental speeches, legal documents, print and broadcast journalism, and military memoirs. The book argues that these discourses motivate, and are motivated by, a myth of imminent harm that purportedly justifies a series of "preemptive" measures such as war, torture, and targeted killing, as well as an array of intrusive domestic security procedures such as profiling and mass surveillance. Dominant themes include selective compassion in the mainstream media, the language of war and the sacrificial sublime, asymmetrical warfare and the nostalgia for total war, weaponized drones and just war theory, and the role of American exceptionalism in normalizing endless war. Scholars and students alike will take interest in this original contribution to the fields of cultural studies, psychoanalysis, media studies, rhetoric, critical international relations, and international humanitarian law and ethics.
This book argues that while pain is an irreducible neuro-physiological phenomenon, how pain is experienced is powerfully inflected by language and culture. Using Second Empire France after Napoleon III's seizure of power as a particularly revealing time of re-acculturation, it elaborates on the "culture of denial."
Confronting Evil: The Psychology of Secularization in Modern French Literature holds that the concept of evil is central to the psychology of secularism. Drawing on notions of secularization as a phenomenon of ambivalence or dualism in which religion continues to exist alongside secularity in exerting influence on modern French thought, author Scott M. Powers enlists psychoanalytic theory on mourning and sublimation, the philosophical concept of the sublime, Charles Taylor's theory of religious and secular "cross-pressures," and William James's psychology of conversion to account for the survival of religious themes in Baudelaire, Zola, Huysmans, and Céline. For Powers, Baudelaire's prose p...
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The Concept of the Foreign investigates the diverse and consequential uses of the concept of the foreign--a formidable and hitherto untheorized force in everyday discourse and practice. This highly original work--whose experimental nature moves beyond traditional academic bounds--undertakes to theorize the meanings, deployments, and consequences of 'foreignness', a term largely overlooked by academic debates. Innovative in format, the book comprises an introductory theoretical dialogue and seven essays, each authored by a scholar from a different discipline--anthropology, literary theory, psychology, philosophy, social work, history, and women's studies-who investigate how his/her disciplines engage and define the concept of the foreign. Drawing out literal and metaphorical meanings of 'foreignness' this wide-ranging volume offers much to scholars of postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies seeking new approaches to the study of alterity.
This anthology critically re-examines and re-articulates the discursive boundary that binds the region called East Asia in order to produce Trans-Pacific Studies. Recognizing that the creation of regional boundaries depends on a new configuration of both inter- and intra-national power relations and the ideological constructs that generate historical, ideological, and cultural effects, this volume proposes that the term “trans-Pacific” be mobilized to complicate the phrase “East Asian” as the boundary of academic discipline and socio-cultural discourse. The anthology also examines the historical conditions under which “East Asia” was constructed as an area and the trans-Pacific d...
Winders picks up the gauntlet thrown down by right-wing educators demanding a return to teaching the Great Works of literature, and shows how recent feminist and deconstructionist critical theories can deal with texts that are fundamentally patriarchal and elitist. He also points out where the new weapons need honing before they can bite into such tough, venerable material. A paper edition (unseen) is reported available for $12.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Explores the effects the evens to September 11, 2001 and their aftermath have had on fiction and film outside of the United States. This collection illustrates how 9/11 was global without using simple categorizations.
A Sun within a Sun is a sustained poetic reflection on the enterprise of poetry, on what poetry is and might be, not only for poet and theorist but also for reader, critic, teacher, and student. It sees poetry as life at its most genuine.Using Baudelaire and Mallarme as principal examples, but drawing on a wide range of poets and thinkers, from Greek mythology to Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Blake; from Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and Italo Calvino to William James and Henry Miller, Claire Chi-ah Lyu challenges contemporary poetic theory, using precise and acute deconstruction of poetic imagery to reconstruct language so that it celebrates both meaning and beauty. A Sun within a Sun explores the ...
In Fashioning Spaces, Heidi Brevik-Zender argues that in the years between 1870 and 1900 the chroniclers of Parisian modernity depicted the urban landscape not just in public settings such as boulevards and parks but also in dislocations, spaces where the public and the intimate overlapped in provocative and subversive ways. Stairwells, theatre foyers, dressmakers' studios, and dressing rooms were in-between places that have long been overlooked but were actually marked as indisputably modern through their connections with high fashion. Fashioning Spaces engages with and thinks beyond the work of critics Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin to arrive at new readings of the French capital. Examining literature by Zola, Maupassant, Rachilde, and others, as well as paintings, architecture, and the fashionable garments worn by both men and women, Brevik-Zender crafts a compelling and innovative account of how fashion was appropriated as a way of writing about the complexities of modernity in fin-de-siècle Paris.