C. Wright Mills’s 1959 book The Sociological Imagination is widely regarded as one of the most influential works of post-war sociology. At its heart, the work is a closely reasoned argument about the nature and aims of sociology, one that sets out a manifesto and roadmap for the field. Its wide acceptance and popular reception is a clear demonstration of the rhetorical power of Wright’s strong reasoning skills. In critical thinking, reasoning involves the creation of an argument that is strong, balanced, and, of course, persuasive. In Mills’s case, this core argument makes a case for what he terms the “sociological imagination”, a particular quality of mind capable of analyzing how individual lives fit into, and interact with, social structures. Only by adopting such an approach, Mills argues, can sociologists see the private troubles of individuals as the social issues they really are. Allied to this central argument are supporting arguments for the need for sociology to maintain its independence from corporations and governments, and for social scientists to steer away from ‘high theory’ and focus on the real difficulties of everyday life. Carefully organized, watertight and persuasive, The Sociological Imagination exemplifies reasoned argument at its best.
In The Poetry of Saying Robert Sheppard explores an array of ‘experimental’ writers and styles of writing many of which have never secured a large audience in Britain, but which are often fascinatingly innovative. As a published poet in this tradition, Sheppard provides a detailed and thought provoking account of the development of the British poetry movement from the 1950s. As well as analysing the work of individual poets such as Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth The Poetry of Saying also examines the influence of the Poetry Society and poetry magazines on the evolution of British poetry throughout this period. The overriding virtue of the poetry of this period is its diversity, a fact that Sheppard has not ignored. As well as providing a fascinating into the work of these poets, The Poetry of Saying offers an ‘insider’s’ commentary on the social, political and historical background during this exciting period in British poetry.
The Canada Company, with its base in England, was responsible for settling over two million acres of land in Upper Canada. Author Robert C. Lee focuses on the Huron Tract and on the dominant personalities (many of them Scottish-born) ranging from John Galt and Tiger Dunlop to the bishops Macdonell and Strachan, who had an impact on the company's operations. The politics of the day, coupled with the diversity of the players, create an astounding blend of vision, intrigue and mischief as a backdrop to the bottom-line profit aspirations of the company's shareholders. The founding of towns - Guelph, Goderich, Stratford, St. Marys and others in the area - is one of the legacies of the company. Lee's extensive research reveals a significant period in Ontario's history.
This book addresses the vexed status of literary value. Unlike other approaches, it pursues neither an apologetic thesis about literature’s defining values nor, conversely, a demystifying account of those values’ ideological uses. Instead, arguing that the category of literary value is inescapable, it focuses pragmatically on everyday scholarly and pedagogical activities, proposing how we may reconcile that category’s inevitability with our understandable wariness of its uncertainties and complicities. Toward these ends, it offers a preliminary theory of literary valuing and explores the problem of literary value in respect to the literary edition, canonicity and interpretation. Much of this exploration occurs within Chaucer studies, which, because of Chaucer’s simultaneous canonicity and marginality, provides fertile ground for thinking through the problem’s challenges. Using this subfield as a synecdoche, the book seeks to forge a viable rationale for literary studies generally.
During the 1920s a new generation of American sociologists tried to make their discipline more objective by adopting the methodology of the natural sciences. Robert Bannister provides the first comprehensive account of the emergence of this "objectivism" within the matrix of the evolutionism of Lester Ward and other founders of American sociology. Objectivism meant confining inquiry to the observable externals of social behavior and quantifying the results. Although objectivism was a marked departure from the theoretical and reformist sociology of the prewar years, and caused often-fierce intergenerational struggle, sociological objectivism had roots deep in prewar sociology. Objectivism first surfaced in the work of sociology's "second generation," the most prominent members of which completed their graduate work prior to World War I. It gradually took shape in what may be termed "realist" and "nominalist" variants, the first represented by Luther Lee Bernard and the second by William F. Ogburn and F. Stuart Chapin. For Bernard, a scientific sociology was radical, prescribing absolute standards for social policy. For Ogburn and Chapin, it was essentially statistical and advisory in the sense that experts would concern themselves exclusively with means rather than ends. Although the objectivists differed among themselves, they together precipitated battles within the American Sociological Society during the 1930s that challenged the monopoly of the Chicago School, paving the way for the informal alliance of Parsonian theorists and a new generation of quantifiers that dominated the profession throughout the 1950s. By shedding new light on the careers of Ward and the other founders and by providing original accounts of the careers of the leading objectivists, Bannister presents a unique look at the course of sociology before and after World War I. He puts theory formation in an institutional, ideological, and biographical setting, and thus offers an unparalleled look at the formation of a modern academic profession.
This book covers the mental health and psychology of pilots, including the psychological requirements for certification, environmental challenges, psychological problems among air crew, the effects of disruption to personal relationships, alcohol and drug misuse, and pilot reactions to accidents.
Quarrying is one of the oldest industries known to man, as, from early times, people have been making items from stone. However, the quarrying industry is only briefly mentioned in most archaeological and historical records, with some books only giving a passing account of this activity. This book alters this and provides an in-depth analysis of this important industry, not only with regards to Shropshire, but the whole country. Many structures in Shropshire and various parts of the country are constructed from stone quarried from this large county. This book shows that quarries are not just holes or scars on the landscape, highlighting the machinery used in extracting and processing the quarried minerals.
This book contributes to the ongoing discussion of the place of contemporary Galician writer Blanca Andreu’s work within the 1980s post-“novísimo” movement, as part of a larger resurgence of the Surrealist in Spanish poetry and its possible placement in the more recent mystical poetry of Spain. It provides a detailed textual analysis of her poetry, and in doing so reveals not only that her work encompasses notions of the surreal and the mystical but also, although Andreu has so far written entirely in Castilian (Spanish), that her poetry utilizes a variety of traditional Galician and Portuguese symbols and images. In this way her work challenges the boundaries between what we as readers may accept as a solely Castilian, Galician, or Spanish poetic. It bases its transtheoretical framework on findings from such fields as Galician studies, Iberian studies, mysticism studies, paradigm shift studies, and regional studies over the past two decades. Ultimately, this comprehensive and unique study shows how Andreu’s multifaceted transnational work may pertain to, and expand, our knowledge of each of these areas of focus.
What is the relationship between literary criticism and ethics? Does criticism have an ethical task? How can criticism be ethical after literary theory? Ethical Criticism seeks to answer these questions by examining the historical development of the ethics of criticism and the vigorous contemporary backlash against what is known as 'theory'. The book appraises current arguments about the ethics of criticism and, finding them wanting, turns to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Described as 'the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century', Levinas' thought has had a profound influence on a number of significant contemporary thinkers. By paying close attention to his major writings, Robert Eaglestone argues cogently and persuasively for a new understanding of the ethical task of criticism and theory.
Film theory: an introduction offers a highly readable account of film theory and is an indispensable resource for students. The discussion ranges from the late 1960s to the present, a period in which a number of conceptual strands, notably politics, semiotics and psychoanalysis were woven together in an ambitious synthesis. In this book, the authors chart the construction of this synthesis and its subsequent fragmentation, and clearly explain the various intellectual currents which have contributed to it. Divided into two parts, the first covers the conceptual background of film theory, dealing with historical materialism, semiotics and psychoanalysis, whilst in the second the authors concentrate on particular topics such as authorship, narrative, realism, the avant-garde and postmodernism. For this new edition, the authors have added a new foreword, a fully updated and expanded bibliography, and a 60-page Retrospect outlining developments within film theory since the book’s original publication in 1988. This Retrospect identifies a number of broad readings of Theory, each with a different perspective on the main content of the book. As such, it provides a new and original mapping of the ‘post-theory’ moment in this complex and often fractured terrain. Accessible and authoritative, this book is essential reading for students of film theory, or indeed anyone seeking a deeper understanding of modern cinema.
This book provides an introduction to the work of Irvine Welsh, placing his fiction in historical and theoretical context. It explores Welsh's biography, his impact on contemporary Scottish fiction and the cultural relevance of his work. Including a timeline of key dates, it also offers an overview of the critical reception his work has provoked
Moves from the discourses of dialectical negation to cultural-populist affirmation--that is, from Hegel to Madonna Studies--in order to envision a mode of critique that can persuasively describe and explain the cultural contradictions of late capitalism.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.
Media, Structures, and Power provides a sense of Babe's trajectory of thought over several decades, as well as his key role in the development of the communications field in Canada. - Kevin Dowler, Department of Communication Studies, York University
Here is a list of three dozen of the top literary locales in the country. The selection of sites is necessarily subjective, yet it attempts to represent geographical, historical, social, and cultural concerns as well as strictly literary interests. Had this list been prepared by the editors of Michelin Guide, they would have added asterisks or stars to the entries: * Interesting. ** Worth a detour. *** Worth a journey. It is the opinion of the author of Canadian Literary Landmarks that all thirty-six sites are "Worth a journey." It is recognized that the average person is unlikely to visit No. 1, not to mention No. 36, but as these sites happen to be the first and last entries in the book, they mark a convenient and symbolic beginning and ending. (No. 1 being L’Anse aux Meadows, Epaves Bay, Nfld. and No. 36 being the North Pole, NWT).
The collected essays of the cofounder of the New Narrative movement, on theory, identity, poetry, and muses from Kathy Acker to Georges Bataille. I read and wrote to invoke what seemed impossible—relation itself—in order to take part in a world that ceaselessly makes itself up, to “wake up” to the world, to recognize the world, to be convinced that the world exists, to take revenge on the world for not existing. —from Communal Nude Since cofounding San Francisco's influential New Narrative circle in 1979, Robert Glück has been one of America's finest prose stylists of innovative fiction, bending narrative into the service of autobiography, politics, and gay writing. This collection brings together for the first time Glück's nonfiction, a revelatory body of work that anchors his writing practice. Glück's essays explore the ways that storytelling and selfhood are mutually embedded cultural forms, cohering a fractured social reality where generating narrative means generating identity means generating community. “I'd laugh at (make art from) any version of self,” Glück writes, “I write about these forms—that are myself—to dispense with them, to demonstrate how they disintegrate before the world, the body.” For any body—or text—to know itself, it must first see how it sees the world, and understand itself as writing. Glück's essays affirm this radical narratorial precept in rich spirals of reading, self-reflection, anecdote, escapade, and “metatext.” These texts span the author's career and his creative affinities—from lost manifestos theorizing the poetics of New Narrative; to encomia for literary and philosophic muses (Kathy Acker, the HOW(ever) poets, Frank O'Hara, Georges Bataille, and others); to narrative journalism, book reviews, criticism, and public talks. Many of the texts are culled from obscure little magazines and ephemeral online sources; others have never been published. As lucid as story, as lush as theory, and as irresistible as gossip, Glück's essays are the quintessence of New Narrative theory in practice.
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