Theoretical Anthropology is a major contribution to the historical and critical study of the assumptions underlying the development of modern cultural anthropology. In the new introduction, Martin Bidney discusses the present state of anthropology and contrasts it with the scene surveyed in Theoretical Anthropology. He discusses the relevance of David Bidney's work to our present concerns. Also included in this work is the second edition's introductory essay by David Bidney, written fifteen years after the first edition of Theoretical Anthropology. Here the author examines his original aims in writing this book. Theoretical Anthropology has helped to create among anthropologists the present climate of theoretical self-awareness and broad humanistic concerns. It has become a standard reference work for anthropologists as well as sociologists.
Poetry that responds to the Quran and to the tradition it created. Written for the general reader and the specialist, Muslim and non-Muslim, East-West Poetry responds to the Quran, scriptural heart of Islam, and to the tradition it created. An introduction relates the Quran to Hebrew and Christian biblical writing and to Rumi, who illumined the Quran with Sufi mystic wisdom; and we sample earlier Western poetic celebrations of Islamic culture. Rarely has a book been so timely as this one. It is an East-West collection that comes at just the right moment in our cultural history, now that America is reawakening to the plenitude of its varied traditions. The double role of the books author as researcher and poet benefits the reader of the 140 Islam-related lyrics offered here. Katharina Mommsen Martin Bidney has [brought] the Christian Gospel and the Muslim Quran together with the Torah to form a luminous torch of love and understanding. Khalil Semaan
Taking his cue from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, he postulates that any writer's epiphany pattern usually shows characteristic elements (earth, air, fire, water), patterns of motion (pendular, eruptive, trembling), and/or geometric shapes.
A festival of rhythmic adventure in 100 original modern poems, this book is a tribute to the Persian poet and mathematician Omar (1048-1131), featured in Edward FitzGerald's popular Victorian translation, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1889). A skeptical writer with a gift for singable verse, Omar wrote: "Some for the glories of This World; and some / Sigh, for the Prophet's Paradise to come; / Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, / Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!" The hundred new poems I feature here are my own original uses and adaptions of the popular medieval stanza form I have "owed" to the example of Omar, a quatrain (four-liner) in iambs with an appealing rhyme pattern. I've altered that form in myriad ways, hybridizing it with countless other stanza forms ancient and modern. Every poem should be read aloud for greater pleasure. My "blogatelles" (French "bagatelle" means a light musical piece) are blogs written like keyboard improvisations, relating the poems to my altering interests and life events. I've been shaping new verses into a modern Omar-tribute collection throughout the nearly 17 years of my retoolment (not "retirement"). Seeing and hearing how art and daily living intertwine, you'll be exploring the entertaining moods of senior poetry. I turned 78 in 2021.
Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion provides readers with close textual analyses regarding the role of subversive acts or tendencies in Victorian literature. By drawing clear cultural contexts for the works under review—including such canonical texts as Dracula, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and stories featuring Sherlock Holmes—the critics in this anthology offer groundbreaking studies of subversion as a literary motif. For some late nineteenth-century British novelists, subversion was a central aspect of their writerly existence. Although—or perhaps because—most Victorian authors composed their works for a general and mixed audience, many writers employed strategies designed to subvert genteel expectations. In addition to using coded and oblique subject matter, such figures also hid their transgressive material “in plain sight.” While some writers sought to critique, and even destabilize, their society, others juxtaposed subversive themes and aesthetics negatively with communal norms in hopes of quashing progressive agendas.
This book is like no other presentation of Rumi you have ever seen: a diversely representative 99-part translation set up as a talk show of conversations in artisanal lyrical verse, where every Rumi selection stimulates a carefully crafted sonnet as a modern-day comment-reply to a medieval Persian poet of world stature. The appealing poet Maulana (or Mevlana) Jalalaldin Muhammad Rumi(1207-1273) gave the impetus for the order of Whirling Dervishes, who emblemize, in their solemn, graceful circling dances with mystically symbolic gestures, the nature of the universe itself. The created world is a gigantic circle of fire that dances forever in amorous adoration around the Throne of God. This God is beyond all concepts: His 99 "names" are only rubrics of qualities or attributes. Closely allied with medieval mystic teacher Ibn Arabi, to whom Rumi is often compared, the Persian lyrical dancer-visionary sees us in God's likeness. God, Ultimate Being, is unknowable; the created world reflects him (or her, or it, or them) only obliquely and incompletely. We, too, are unmanifest, hidden even from ourselves, in our essential Being; and, as with the unmanifest nature of God, we can be known to ourselves only in fragmentary flashes. What does this mean for us? It means we must each be a poet, using metaphor to imagine whatever in ourselves cannot, because of its depth, be known by intellect. God is the First Poet, and we, created in His likeness, must be the creative artists of our imagined worlds as we seek, in our pilgrimage-lives, to imagine the two Great Unknowns, the unmanifest Ultimate Being in our Source and within us. In the book you are holding, I allow myself the privilege to converse with Rumi by means of "dialogic translation"-a newly conceived genre of literature. It's like a series of YouTube or podcast interviews I set up here with my medieval friend, the engaging Sufi mystic who unfailingly invigorates the hearer in many countries of the world today.
Jump in! The six "chapbook" collections were composed purely for pleasure - mine and yours. I have one theme and one technique. The theme is dialogue, and the technique is music made with words. Every numbered entry is dialogic, an encounter of two voices. First I write about fictive taxi drivers I talk with. Then I hold dialogues with 48 paintings by Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967), one of the world's most enjoyable painters. My third venture is to converse with the spirit of the Gallic ballade writer François Villon (1431-ca. 1463. I alter his ballad form in small ways while keeping the Frenchman's tight, sweet harmonies. Project number four is to reveal my "Russian Loves" by translating some all-time favorite lyrics from the Russian, while answering them with "replies" or commentary poems with similar forms or topics. I focus on Afanasy Fet (1820-1892), a major though neglected Russian master. The strangest item in this section is my re-translation of K. D. Balmont's version of Poe's "The Bells" back into English. Ten times better than Poe! My fifth offering is a set of "reactions" to the flash fictions of Franz Kafka. I include comments on his life and writing - plus a comment on a slightly longer story in my poem "Blumfeld's Two Balls." Don't skip this one... Finally, you get a tour of Dante's hell, freshly updated in a sonnet for each canto, with some "other treats" to clarify the medieval monsterpiece. You see that dialogue's my theme: I'm always responding to a mentor, a guide, a teacher, a friend. As for the technique - music made of words - I care just as much about that. Read every piece aloud and enjoy what it does for your ears. This is the fifteenth poetry book by Martin Bidney, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University.
For 600 years, roughly 1050 to 1650, Persian-writing poets created a renaissance of lyrical expression, a treasury of entertaining and thoughtful wordsong. I've selected 15 poets who amaze me from Joseph von Hammer's encyclopedic German anthology of 1818. I translate 7 poems by each poet, and in my "interviews" I reply to every poem in my own original verse, adding further context in a little "blogatelle." Each poet is a friend to me as well as a mentor. What unites them is an exploratory tradition. All are influenced by Sufi mysticism, an outlook based in Islam but trying to transcend it and all other scriptural religions. Love is the predominant focus: love for God and creation, for heaven and earth, for men and women, for wine and travel, and always for vigorous, mellifluent verse.
The Shi-Jing, or Book of Songs, is a rendering of China's oldest verse anthology of poets, from the 11th to the 7th century BCE. It's time we moderns got to know it well-for the sheer pleasure of experiencing the colorful multitude of 325 intimate voices. There's a direct, earnest warmth about the lyrical expressions of all the people we overhear, and it is a privilege to enter into their confidence. They are so alive they startle me, and they'll speak on what they care about. The poems are offered in the versions I translate using the endlessly varied melodious forms devised for them by the phenomenally gifted 19th-century poet-translator Friedrich Rückert. He is correct in saying he has "appropriated" [angeeignet] his materials. The anonymous collection is reshaped and newly crafted by this world-class German poet and linguistic genius, who was himself a major humanist educator. In disclosing that double role, Rückert's Shi-Jing may be called his own centrally symbolic achievement, his paradigm contribution to world literature.
Poetry that responds to the Quran and to the tradition it created. Written for the general reader and the specialist, Muslim and non-Muslim, East-West Poetry responds to the Quran, scriptural heart of Islam, and to the tradition it created. An introduction relates the Quran to Hebrew and Christian biblical writing and to Rumi, who illumined the Quran with Sufi mystic wisdom; and we sample earlier Western poetic celebrations of Islamic culture. Rarely has a book been so timely as this one. It is an East-West collection that comes at just the right moment in our cultural history, now that America is reawakening to the plenitude of its varied traditions. The double role of the books author as researcher and poet benefits the reader of the 140 Islam-related lyrics offered here. Katharina Mommsen Martin Bidney has [brought] the Christian Gospel and the Muslim Quran together with the Torah to form a luminous torch of love and understanding. Khalil Semaan
Taking his cue from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, he postulates that any writer's epiphany pattern usually shows characteristic elements (earth, air, fire, water), patterns of motion (pendular, eruptive, trembling), and/or geometric shapes.
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