Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book of the Year. This innovative cultural critique offers valuable insights into science fiction, thus enlarging our understanding of critical theory. Carl Freedman traces the fundamental and mostly unexamined relationships between the discourses of science fiction and critical theory, arguing that science fiction is (or ought to be) a privileged genre for critical theory. He asserts that it is no accident that the upsurge of academic interest in science fiction since the 1970s coincides with the heyday of literary theory, and that likewise science fiction is one of the most theoretically informed areas of the literary profession. Extended readings of novels by five of the most important modern science fiction authors illustrate the affinity between science fiction and critical theory, in each case concentrating on one major novel that resonates with concerns proper to critical theory. Freedman's five readings are: Solaris: Stanislaw Lem and the Structure of Cognition; The Dispossessed: Ursula LeGuin and the Ambiguities of Utopia; The Two of Them: Joanna Russ and the Violence of Gender; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: Samuel Delany and the Dialectics of Difference; The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick and the Construction of Realities.
This book offers (in the first six chapters) critical readings of six novels by China Miéville, which are followed (in the seventh chapter) by a theoretical meditation on some of the conceptual issues raised by and engaged in the Miéville oeuvre. There comes a moment in The City & the City, though it is not necessarily the same moment for every reader, when you realise that Beszel and Ul Qoma are not separate realms but the same space divided. Likewise, art and idea are often subject to absurd partition, but then along comes an author such as China Miéville who shows them to be, in truth, indissoluble. So argues Freedman's inordinately readable and just as rigorous account of Miéville's major novels. Highly recommended. (Mark Bould, University of the West of England) Freedman offers a compelling interpretation of Miéville's novels informed equally by an impressive range of literary influences and a carefully documented exploration of historical antecedents. Seeing Miéville's genre hybridity as an illustration of the power of dialectical thinking, Freedman illuminates the complex utopian project of Miéville's fiction. Freedman is one of our finest critical voices on Miéville, one of the most important speculative writers of the 21st century. (Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside)
The fundamental argument this book is, first, that Richard Nixon, though not generally regarded as a charismatic or emotionally outgoing politician like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, did establish profound psychic connections with the American people, connections that can be detected both in the brilliant electoral success that he enjoyed for most of his career and in his ultimate defeat during the Watergate scandal; and, second and even more important, that these connections are symptomatic of many of the most important currents in American life. The book is not just a work of political history or political biography but a study of cultural power: that is, a study in the ways that culture shapes our politics and frames our sense of possibilities and values. In its application of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and other theoretical tools to the study of American electoral politics, and in a way designed for the general as well as for the academic reader, it is a new kind of book. ,
The papers in this book have been collected in celebration of Carl Wellman, who, after forty-five years, is retiring from teaching. Here I would like to highlight a few of the moments which have shaped Carl as a person and a philosopher. Although his childhood was not unhappy, Carl faced considerable challenges growing up in Manchester, New Hampshire. He ne ver knew his father; he and his mother, Carolyn, had little money; and he fought a long battle with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, an illness which made hirn more familiar with hospitals than any young person should be. (His mother once told me that there were times when the doctors put Carl in his own hospital room because, while he was too young to be housed with adult men, they did not want the other children to see hirn die. ) Following a year of physician-prescribed rest after high school, the doctors recommended the University of Arizona in the misguided hope that the desert climate might improve his health. In spite of the doctors' hopes, life in Tucson was not easy. The heat takes its toll on everyone, but the desert was especially oppressive for Carl since his unusually sensitive eyes were no match for the intense sun. Still, Carl enjoyed college.
A dominant athlete in an era when women were discouraged from playing sports, Babe Didrikson Zaharias was a true trailblazer. Historic photos and easy-to-read text take readers into the athlete’s life. Zoom in even deeper with quick stats, a timeline, and bolded glossary terms. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Abdo Zoom is a division of ABDO.
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