In Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry, Peter Riley confronts our enduring and problematic investment in poetic vocation—a myth, he argues, that continues to inform how all our multifarious labors are understood, valued, and exploited. The book seeks to challenge a dominant cultural logic that frames contingent, non-vocational labor as a necessary sacrifice that frustrates the righteous progress towards realizing that seemingly purest of callings: Poet. Incorporating the often overlooked or excluded workaday ephemera of three canonical US Romantic poets—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Hart Crane—this volume offers new archival insights that call for a re-examination of celebrated literary careers and disputes their status as renowned or tragic icons of creative vocation. The poetry of Whitman the real estate dealer, Melville the customs inspector, and Crane the copywriter, Riley contends, does not constitute the formal inscription of an antagonistic or discreet poetic labor struggling against quotidian work towards the fulfilment of exceptional individual callings. Instead, the distracted forms of their poetry are always already intermingled with a variety of apparently lesser labors. Ousting poetic production from its default sanctuary of privileged exemption or transcendent repose, the volume refigures the work of the poet as a living sensuous activity that transgresses labor's various divisions and hierarchies. It consequently recasts the poet as a figure who actually unfastens the 'right of passage' vocational logic that does so much to secure and reproduce the current neoliberal paradigm.
This book reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers -- Emerson, Warner, and Melville -- to render loss in innovative ways. These three key writers rejected Calvinist and sentimental models of bereavement, creating instead the compensations of a mature American literature.
In this first comprehensive comparison of left-wing violence in the United States and West Germany, Jeremy Varon focuses on America's Weather Underground and Germany's Red Army Faction to consider how and why young, middle-class radicals in prosperous democratic societies turned to armed struggle in efforts to overthrow their states. Based on a wealth of primary material, ranging from interviews to FBI reports, this book reconstructs the motivation and ideology of violent organizations active during the 1960s and 1970s. Varon conveys the intense passions of the era--the heat of moral purpose, the depth of Utopian longing, the sense of danger and despair, and the exhilaration over temporary triumphs. Varon's compelling interpretation of the logic and limits of dissent in democratic societies provides striking insights into the role of militancy in contemporary protest movements and has wide implications for the United States' current "war on terrorism." Varon explores Weatherman and RAF's strong similarities and the reasons why radicals in different settings developed a shared set of values, languages, and strategies. Addressing the relationship of historical memory to political action, Varon demonstrates how Germany's fascist past influenced the brutal and escalating nature of the West German conflict in the 60s and 70s, as well as the reasons why left-wing violence dropped sharply in the United States during the 1970s. Bringing the War Home is a fascinating account of why violence develops within social movements, how states can respond to radical dissent and forms of terror, how the rational and irrational can combine in political movements, and finally how moral outrage and militancy can play both constructive and destructive roles in efforts at social change.
In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More's Utopia to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson maintained a lifelong interest in science. His journals, from the earliest to the last, document this interest--an interest reflected in his lectures, essays, letters, and poems. Emerging from Emerson's statements on science is a coherent attitude that can be defined as his scientific thinking. The purpose of Emerson and Science is to analyze this thinking and to indicate the relationship it bears to his total thought. An analysis of Emerson's scientific thinking reveals that science, especially Goethean science, affords the means to explore and present what the book elaborates as Emerson's monistic worldview. The pervasive influence of Goethe's science on the epistemological bases underlying that view is presented at length. In addition to illuminating Emerson's epistemological position, the context of science divulges how Emerson's interest in science kept him from the extremes of Swedenborg's mysticism and from falling prey--unlike many of his contemporaries--to the pseudo-sciences of the day, including phrenology, mesmerism, palmistry, astrology, and so forth. Emerson's interest in science also played an important role in his rejection of conventional religion and helped qualify his idealism, making him sympathetic to the claims of materialism. His focus on science kept him from accepting either of the main streams of the scientific thought of his age and led him to what the book defines as Emerson's "scientific mysticism," or "spiritual science." Peter Obuchowski, a professor emeritus of English language and literature, shows how the context of Emerson's approach to science provides a new focus for considering a number of the key issues that have become the hallmarks of Emersonian criticism--issues such as Emerson's optimism in relation both to his spiritually oriented worldview and to his faith in scientific progress, as well as his attitude to evil and his so-called philosophical naïveté.
A history of the evolving field of African art. Peter Probst offers the first book to explore the invention and development of African art as an art historical category. He starts his exploration with a simple question: What do we actually talk about when we talk about African art? By confronting the historically shifting answers to this question, Probst identifies the notion of African art as a conceptual vessel whose changing content manifests wider societal transformations. The perspective is a pragmatic and relational one. Rather than providing an affirmative answer to what African art is and what local meanings it has, Probst shows how the works labeled as "African art" figure in the historical processes and social interactions that constitute the Africanist art world. What Is African Art? covers three key stages in the field's history. Starting with the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, Probst focuses on the role of museums, collectors, and photography in disseminating visual culture and considers how early anthropologists, artists, and art historians imbued objects with values that reflected ideas of the time. He then explores the remaking of the field at the dawn of African independence with the shift towards contemporary art and the rise of Black Atlantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, he examines the postcolonial reconfiguration of the field driven by questions of heritage, reparation, and representation. Probst looks to the future, arguing that, if the study of African art is to move in productive new directions, we must look to how the field is evolving within Africa.
Management theory is vague about the experience of leading. Success, power, achievement are discussed but less focus is given to negative experiences leaders faced such as loneliness or disappointment. This book addresses difficult-to-explore aspects of leadership through well-known works of literature drawing lessons from fictional leaders.
Guatemala has long been a field for struggle between other powers, and today, racked by civil war, it avoids the full glare of international attention only because most of the Central American region is beset by similar problems. Despite a continued belief in the reconstitution of a unified Central American state arid a long-running claim to Belize, Guatemala has played a passive rather than an active role in international politics. The influence of international economic interests explains to a large degree why Guatemala has not been more active in the international arena. In this book, Professor Calvert examines Guatemala's history and the principal aspects of the country's faction-tom society and seeks to explain the problems—and their consistently violent manifestations—that have attended the course of the country's social, economic, and political development.
Eric Santner offers a radically new interpretation of Marx's labor theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. What Marx characterized as the dual character of the labor embodied in the commodity, he argues, is the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies transferred from the political theology of sovereignty to the realm of political economy. This genealogy, leading from the fetishism of the royal body to the fetishism of the commodity, also suggests a new understanding of the irrational core at the center of economic busyness today, its 24/7 pace. The frenetic negotiations of our busy-bodies continue and translate into the doxology of everyday life the liturgical labor that once sustained the sovereign's glory. Maintaining that an effective critique of capitalist political economy must engage this liturgical dimension, Santner proposes a counter-activity, which he calls "paradoxological." With commentaries by Bonnie Honig, Peter Gordon, and Hent de Vries, an introduction by Kevis Goodman, and a response from Santner, this important new book by a leading cultural theorist and scholar of German literature, cinema, and history will interest readers of political theory, literature and literary theory, and religious studies.
Disjunctive Poetics examines some of the experimental contemporary writers, including Stein and Zukofsky, whose work forms a counterpoint to the mainstream writing of our time. Peter Quartermain suggests that the explosion of such modern writing is linked to the severe political, social, and economic dislocation of non-English-speaking immigrants who arriving in America at the turn of the century found themselves uprooted from their tradition and disassociated from their culture.
“In a raw and unflinching account that details his harrowing journey as whistleblower in the Fast and Furious federal scandal, Forcelli shows the public and personal cost of standing up for justice.” —Jonathan Green, author of Sex Money Murder: A Story of Crack, Blood, and Betrayal Pete Forcelli was a highly respected federal agent in New York City, where he made an impact on violent crime by successfully targeting some of the city’s most violent street gangs by using federal racketeering and continuing criminal enterprise statutes in conjunction with federal prosecutors. In early 2007, he was promoted to a supervisory position in Phoenix and quickly discovered that federal prosecutors were not charging criminals for violating federal firearms laws, even in instances where they knew guns were being trafficked to ultra-violent drug cartels and then used in crimes that were shocking to the conscience. When those very same prosecutors spoke about possibly indicting John Dodson, a special agent who blew the whistle on Operation Fast and Furious, Forcelli stepped forward and contacted Congress. Forcelli became a whistleblower himself, detailing how federal prosecutors in Arizona not only failed to prosecute gun traffickers, but allowed a man who was making hundreds of hand grenades for the Sinaloa Cartel to continue his operations unabated for years. At that moment, those prosecutors and officials from the Department of Justice came after him, leading to a nearly four-year battle for Forcelli to clear his name. This book provides his insider’s account of the scandal that stands as one of the worst stains on federal law enforcement.
First published in 1990, this book presents an original and comprehensive overview of Australian economic thought. The authors stress, by way of introduction, the many important innovative contributions Australian economists have made to thought worldwide. As the argument develops, the work of major figures is discussed in detail in addition to the role of different journals and economic societies.
Lourie completed his trip. It took him three weeks and marked the first time anyone has traveled from the source of the Hudson to the mouth in a single vessel. The Hudson proved to be a very changeable river. It includes seven locks and nine power dams. The northern half is a true river with strong current, but the lower half is tidal, a sunken river from the days of glaciers. In its first 165 miles, it drops more than 4,000 feet to Albany. The second half falls no more than a foot. Lourie's account of his trip is a fresh look at one of America's great and complex waterways, one of the few, in fact, that still contains its historical and biological species of fish. It is also the longest inland estuary in the world. Henry Hudson called it the "great river of the mountains." Nowadays, too often the Hudson is stereotyped as a ruined, polluted industrial river. Its glorious past is compared to its present neglect. In River of Mountains, Peter Lourie combines the Hudson's rich history and descriptions of some of the region's most impressive landscape with the residents of its mill towns, the loggers, commercial fishermen, and barge pilots-all of whom are proof that the river is still a thriving, vital waterway. So, come with Peter Lourie on his trip, come explore with him from a canoe one of this country's great rivers, join him in his wonderful adventure.
First published in 1988. Moral innocence is of enduring interest because it seems to embody our ideals in their purest form. The place of moral innocence in politics is the central theme of Peter Johnson’s subtle and original book. Are there moral dispositions which are not only incompatible with politics but actually endanger it? If it is sometimes necessary to act badly in order to achieve desirable objectives, what moral standpoints would exclude such a course at action? Peter Johnson demonstrates convincingly why philosophical accounts of morality, past and present, are unable to explain moral innocence: its full impact on politics can only be grasped by putting aside traditional theories. Literature provides the key to a deeper understanding of the relationship between politics and morality. Melville’s Billy Budd, Shakespeare’s Henry VI, and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American reveal moral innocence at work in political circumstances of great intensity. Through these and other literary figures, we see at last the specific character of moral innocence and why it is connected with political disaster. This closely reasoned yet deeply passionate book illuminates a problem of great contemporary interest and nowhere more so than in American public life. Original in theme and content, it confronts central issues of concern to the modern mind, not simply to academics, both teachers and taught, but to all those interested in how they might be governed.
THE NATIONAL BESTSELLING BOOK THAT EVERY INVESTOR SHOULD OWN Peter Lynch is America's number-one money manager. His mantra: Average investors can become experts in their own field and can pick winning stocks as effectively as Wall Street professionals by doing just a little research. Now, in a new introduction written specifically for this edition of One Up on Wall Street, Lynch gives his take on the incredible rise of Internet stocks, as well as a list of twenty winning companies of high-tech '90s. That many of these winners are low-tech supports his thesis that amateur investors can continue to reap exceptional rewards from mundane, easy-to-understand companies they encounter in their daily lives. Investment opportunities abound for the layperson, Lynch says. By simply observing business developments and taking notice of your immediate world -- from the mall to the workplace -- you can discover potentially successful companies before professional analysts do. This jump on the experts is what produces "tenbaggers," the stocks that appreciate tenfold or more and turn an average stock portfolio into a star performer. The former star manager of Fidelity's multibillion-dollar Magellan Fund, Lynch reveals how he achieved his spectacular record. Writing with John Rothchild, Lynch offers easy-to-follow directions for sorting out the long shots from the no shots by reviewing a company's financial statements and by identifying which numbers really count. He explains how to stalk tenbaggers and lays out the guidelines for investing in cyclical, turnaround, and fast-growing companies. Lynch promises that if you ignore the ups and downs of the market and the endless speculation about interest rates, in the long term (anywhere from five to fifteen years) your portfolio will reward you. This advice has proved to be timeless and has made One Up on Wall Street a number-one bestseller. And now this classic is as valuable in the new millennium as ever.
At the close of the Second World War, modernist poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world, where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of both matter and mind. Following the overthrow of the Newtonian worldview and the recent, shocking displays of the power of the atom, physics led the way, with other disciplines often turning to the methods and discoveries of physics for inspiration. In Physics Envy, Peter Middleton examines the influence of science, particularly physics, on American poetry since World War II. He focuses on such diverse poets as Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka, and Rae Armantrout, among others, revealing how the methods and language of contemporary natural and social sciences—and even the discourse of the leading popular science magazine Scientific American—shaped their work. The relationship, at times, extended in the other direction as well: leading physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger were interested in whether poetry might help them explain the strangeness of the new, quantum world. Physics Envy is a history of science and poetry that shows how ultimately each serves to illuminate the other in its quest for the true nature of things.
The Ilkhanate: from Tegüder Aḥmad to Öljeitü -- Muslim Ilkhans, the Buddhists and the People of the Book -- Rashīd al-Dīn, Islam and the Mongols -- The Islam of Ghazan, his generals and his minister: the view from outside -- EPILOGUE -- Legitimation by Chinggisid descent -- Allegiance to Mongol norms and institutions -- Turkicization -- The exodus of Muslims from the Mongol world -- The spread of Islam across Eurasia -- The movement of peoples and the emergence of new ethnicities -- The integration of Eurasia within a single disease zone: the Black Death -- CONCLUSION -- APPENDIX 1 Glossary of Technical Terms -- APPENDIX 2 Genealogical Tables and Lists of Rulers -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX
“Josyph takes an aggressively unconventional approach to McCarthy’s work, combining elements of travelogue, interview and memoir.” —The Washington Post In Cormac McCarthy’s House, author, painter, photographer, and actor-director Peter Josyph draws on a wide range of experience to pose provocative, unexpected questions about McCarthy’s work. As a visual artist, Josyph wrestles with the challenge of rendering McCarthy’s former home in El Paso as a symbol of a great writer’s workshop. As an actor and filmmaker, he analyzes the high art of Tommy Lee Jones in The Sunset Limited and No Country for Old Men. Invoking the recent suicide of a troubled friend, he grapples with the issue of “our brother’s keeper” in The Crossing and The Sunset Limited. But for Josyph, reading the finest prose-poet of our day is a project into which he invites many voices, and his investigations include a talk with Mark Morrow about photographing McCarthy while he was writing Blood Meridian; an in-depth conversation with director Tom Cornford on the challenges of staging The Sunset Limited and The Stonemason; a walk through the streets, waterfronts, and hidden haunts of Suttree with McCarthy scholar and Knoxville resident Wesley Morgan; insights from the cast of The Gardener’s Son about a controversial scene in that film; actress Miriam Colon’s perspective on portraying the Dueña Alfonsa opposite Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses; and a harsh critique of Josyph’s views on The Crossing by McCarthy scholar Marty Priola, which leads to a sometimes heated debate. Illustrated with thirty-one photographs, Josyph’s unconventional journeys into the genius of Cormac McCarthy form a new, highly personal way of appreciating literary greatness.
As technologies for electronic texts develop into ever more sophisticated engines for capturing different kinds of information, radical changes are underway in the way we write, transmit and read texts. In this thought-provoking work, Peter Shillingsburg considers the potentials and pitfalls, the enhancements and distortions, the achievements and inadequacies of electronic editions of literary texts. In tracing historical changes in the processes of composition, revision, production, distribution and reception, Shillingsburg reveals what is involved in the task of transferring texts from print to electronic media. He explores the potentials, some yet untapped, for electronic representations of printed works in ways that will make the electronic representation both more accurate and more rich than was ever possible with printed forms. However, he also keeps in mind the possible loss of the book as a material object and the negative consequences of technology.
Sacred Estrangement analyzes certain works by important American writers and thinkers in the context of the &"rhetoric of conversion.&" Such analysis is especially valuable because it provides a reliable index of the relationship between the self and larger communities. Traditionally, &"conversion&" has served a socializing function, signifying that one has come into alignment with certain linguistic, behavioral, and cultural expectations. The socialization process is particularly apparent in the Christian conversion narratives of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries: by publicly testifying to a conversion experience, believers became empowered members, not only of God's elect community but also of a local population. As modern autobiography developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Christian pattern was secularized and individualized. Conversion became a model for many kinds of psychological change. With the coming of the twentieth century, however, the authors upon whom Peter Dorsey focuses, including William and Henry James, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, radically revised conversion rhetoric. If conversion had traditionally linked the search for illumination with the search for a defined social role, these writers increasingly used conversion as an index of estrangement from mainstream America. Dorsey documents this profound change in the way American intellectuals defined the &"self,&" not in terms of personal orientation toward or away from a given community, but as a resistance to such an orientation altogether, as if social forces by their &"nature&" were a threat to personal identity.
Peter Gibian explores the key role played by Oliver Wendell Holmes in what was known as America's 'Age of Conversation'. He was both a model and an analyst of the dynamic conversational form, which became central to many areas of mid-nineteenth-century life. Holmes' multivoiced writings can serve as a key to open up the closed interiors of Victorian America, whether in saloons or salons, parlours or clubs, hotels or boarding-houses, schoolrooms or doctors' offices. Combining social, intellectual, medical, legal and literary history with close textual analysis, and setting Holmes in dialogue with Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Fuller, Alcott and finally with his son, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, Gibian radically redefines the context for our understanding of the major literary works of the American Renaissance.
Behavioural Economics and Terrorism can be used as a guide to help us think about thinking and, in doing so, to appreciate the deep quirkiness of human behaviour. Each day, people draw on their understanding of human behaviour. This takes place subconsciously for the most part but as situations become more complex it becomes necessary to think more deliberately about how people make their decisions. This book can be used to better understand human action in such contexts. In the high-stakes world of counter-terrorism, every angle of advantage is critical. From terrorists’ operational choices to the way that information flows through intelligence agencies, the book explains the patterns of behaviour that systematically shape human decision-making, for good and for bad. Decision-makers’ use of reference points, their loss aversion, overconfidence, goals and aspirations all shape their choices under conditions of risk and uncertainty. This book helps to shed light on how to use these concepts (and more) to develop deeper insights into the way in which terrorists think about their attack methods and targets.
Beards and Masculinity in American Literature is a pioneering study of the symbolic power of the beard in the history of American writing. This book covers the entire breadth of American writing – from 18th century American newspapers and periodicals through the 19th and 20th centuries to recent contemporary engagements with the beard and masculinity. With chapters focused on the barber and the barbershop in American writing, the "need for a shave" in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, Whitman’s beard as a sanctuary for poets reaching out to the bearded bard, and the contemporary re-engagement with the beard as a symbol of Otherness in post-9/11 fiction, Beards and Masculinity in American Literature underlines the symbolic power of facial hair in key works of American writing.
This impressive volume is made up of eleven essays by a distinguished group of contributors, including both Lawrence specialists and well-known critics who work primarily in other areas. Nine of the essays were commissioned especially for this volume, and the other two were revised by their authors for book publication. Each engages in a fresh and provocative way an important aspect of Lawrence's writings. The book's organization follows the chronology of Lawrence's career, and the essays cover the full range of his creative achievement, from analyses of major novels and short fiction to reassessments of his poetry and visionary thought. No single ideology or methodology dominates the volume: the contributions include traditional humanistic studies and formalist readings as well as feminist approaches and analyses that reflect current poststructuralist theory. Some of the essays implicitly challenge the validity of others, and some may well cause controversy. Taken together, they illuminate the richness of Lawrence's writings and the multifaceted nature of his accomplishments. D. H. Lawrence; A Centenary Consideration will be rewarding reading both for Lawrencian specialists and for others interested in modem literature.
A collection of prefaces, reviews and articles by Americans on American and European fiction. Charted in these three volumes, which span 1776 to 1900, is the movement from anxious defences of the novel as a necessary vehicle of truth and morality to fully-fledged theoretical exfoliations.
All three Cross novels—plus two new stories—in one volume! “What comes across most sharply when reading the Cross novels is a sheer joy in storytelling.” —National Post This collection brings together the first three books of the Cross series. In The Mona Lisa Sacrifice, Cross has wandered the world for centuries, until he is drawn into a modern-day war between the angels over the fate of humanity. The Dead Hamlets finds Cross in a race against time to solve the mystery of why a strange and deadly ghost is haunting plays put on by the faerie court. And The Apocalypse Ark sees Cross trying to make up for past sins by chasing down Noah, who has gone mad and sails the seas in search of the Sunken City, which he plans to raise in order to unleash the end of the world. Cross is accompanied by a cast of characters as strange and fantastic as he is: the faerie queen Morgana; the quirky and unpredictable Alice, escapee of Wonderland; Captain Nemo and his crew of Atlanteans; a legion of angels who all have their own reasons to want Cross dead; and the ancient trickster god Judas, who is waging his own secret wars through the ages. This collection includes two new stories never before published: “A Different Kind of Wolf” and “The World Will Drown in Tears,” finding Cross caught up again in ancient struggles that only he seems destined to mitigate. Read the series today and find out why it’s been called “one of the strongest, and strangest, literary creations” (Vancouver Sun), “deliriously unhinged” (National Post), and “two-fisted, angel-punching action” (Quill & Quire).
In 1868, Frank Kimball and his brothers purchased a 26,000-acre Mexican land grant rancho in the San Diego area. The area comprised the present-day communities of National City, Bonita, and the western half of Chula Vista. Kimball developed National City first and secured a branch of the Santa Fe Railway. The railroad company financed the building of nearby Sweetwater Dam, thus allowing the development of Chula Vista in 1888 as a planned agricultural community. Chula Vista remained as planned until World War II when the arrival of Rohr Aircraft Corporation caused a population boom that would continue even after the war, creating the desirable bedroom community that Chula Vista is today.
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