This book introduces the concept of 'narrative instability' in order to make visible a new trend in contemporary US popular culture, to analyze this trend's poetics, and to scrutinize its textual politics. It identifies those texts as narratively unstable that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to reconstruct what happened in a text's plot, who its characters are, which of its diegetic worlds are real, or how narrative information is communicated in the first place. Despite - or rather, exactly because of - their confusing and destabilizing tendencies, such texts have attained mainstream commercial popularity in recent years across a variety of media, most prominently in films, video games, and television series. Focusing on three clusters of instability that form around identities, realities, and textualities, the book argues that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male, middle-class Americans.
Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. ‘It can only be defined in a living context together with others.’ In this major new biography, Stefan Müller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole. Müller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.
This book describes a flexible and largely automated methodology for adding the estimation of power consumption to high level simulations at the electronic system level (ESL). This method enables the inclusion of power consumption considerations from the very start of a design. This ability can help designers of electronic systems to create devices with low power consumption. The authors also demonstrate the implementation of the method, using the popular ESL language “SystemC”. This implementation enables most existing SystemC ESL simulations for power estimation with very little manual work. Extensive case-studies of a Network on Chip communication architecture and a dual-core application processor “ARM Cortex-A9” showcase the applicability and accuracy of the method to different types of electronic devices. The evaluation compares various trade-offs regarding amount of manual work, types of ESL models, achieved estimation accuracy and impact on the simulation speed. Describes a flexible and largely automated ESL power estimation method; Shows implementation of power estimation methodology in SystemC; Uses two extensive case studies to demonstrate method introduced.
This book by two of the foremost researchers and writers in the field is the first part of a treatise that covers the subject in breadth and depth, paying special attention to the historical origins of the theory. Both individually and collectively these volumes have already become standard references.
In his articles Stefan Reif deas with Jewish biblical exegesis and the close analysis of the evolution of Jewish prayer texts. Some fourteen of these that appeared in various collective volumes are here made more easily available, together with a major new study of Numbers 13, an introduction and extensive indexes. Reif attempts to establish whether there is any linguistic, literary and exegetical value in the traditional Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Bible for the modern scientific approach to such texts and whether such an approach itself is always free of theological bias. He demonstrates how Jewish liturgical texts may illuminate religious teachings about wisdom, history, peace, forgiveness, and divine metaphors. Also clarified in these essays are notions of David, Greek and Hebrew, divine metaphors, and the liturgical use of the Hebrew Bible.
In this first compendium in the growing literature of behavioral teratology, readers will discover an easy-to-access, concise presentation that covers a huge range of subjects. The book synthesizes important findings that help explain why prenatal events may result in abnormal behavior and learning disabilities later in life. It goes further to examine the role of prenatal perturbations in conditions as varied as dyslexia, schizophrenia, fetal alcohol syndrome, and autism.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has proven to be the most effective form of treatment for social anxiety disorder. This revision of a highly regarded treatment manual presents an original treatment approach that includes specifically designed interventions to strengthen the relevant CBT strategies. This extensively revised volume builds upon empirical research to address the psychopathology and heterogeneity of social anxiety disorder, creating a series of specific interventions with numerous case examples and four new chapters on working with patients on medication, cultural factors, individual therapy, and monitoring on-track outcomes.
Cities are responsible for three-quarters of the world s energy consumption. If we are to reduce our demands on the planet s resources how can we make our urban areas more energy efficient? One way is to refit existing buildings with more thermally efficient building materials. But such retrofitting involves significant issues of social acceptance and public participation. Retrofitting the City provides an important corrective to the assumptions that have been made concerning the ability of people and places to cope with such residential transformation. Drawing upon case studies from a number of European cities that have undergone far-reaching change in their built environments, the author shows that supposedly inadaptable people and places show a strong, if often hidden, degree of flexibility in responding to economic change and building transformation.
This two-volume treatise is a standard reference in the field. It pays special attention to the historical aspects and the origins partly in applied problems—such as those of geometric optics—of parts of the theory. It contains an introduction to each chapter, section, and subsection and an overview of the relevant literature in the footnotes and bibliography. It also includes an index of the examples used throughout the book.
How to leverage existing resources to meet the current and future needs of cities Crumbling streets and bridges. Poorly performing schools and inadequate social services. These are common complaints in cities, which too often struggle just to keep the lights on, much less make the long-term investments necessary for future generations. It doesn’t have to be this way. This book by two internationally recognized experts in public finance describes a new way of restoring economic vitality and financial stability to cities, using steps that already have been proven remarkably successful. The key is unlocking social, human, and economic wealth that cities already own but is out of sight—or “hidden.” A focus on existing public wealth helps to shift attention and resources from short-term spending to longer-term investments that can vastly raise the quality of life for many generations of urban residents. A crucial first step is to understand a city’s balance sheet—too few cities comprehend how valuable a working tool this can be. With this in hand, taxpayers, politicians, and investors can better recognize the long-term consequences of political decisions and make choices that mobilize real returns rather than rely on more taxes, debt, or austerity. Another hidden asset is real estate. Even poor cities own large swathes of poorly utilized land, or they control underperforming utilities and other commercial assets. Most cities could more than double their investments with smarter use of these commercial assets. Managing the city’s assets smartly through the authors’ proposed Urban Wealth Funds—at arm’s-length from short-term political influence—will enable cities to ramp up much needed infrastructure investments.
This book provides an original study of the sizeable Portuguese community in Ayutthaya, the chief river-state in Siam, during a period of apparent decline (1640-1720). Portuguese populations were displaced from their chief settlements like Melaka and Makassar, and attracted to the river-states of mainland South-East Asia by a protective model of kingship, hopes of international trade and the opportunity to harvest souls. A variety of sources will be used to shed light on the fortunes and make-up of this displaced, mixed-race 'tribe', which was largely independent of the matrices of Portuguese colonial power, and fared poorly alongside other foreign communities in this remarkably open, dynamic environment. Circumstances changed for the better after the National Revolution of 1688, when Portuguese started to fill many of the jobs at court and in commerce previously occupied by Frenchmen and northern Europeans.
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