This first full-length study of Telemann's concertos, sonatas, and suites focuses on his imaginative mixing of styles and genres. Special attention is also devoted to the extra musical meanings and humor of his programmatic overture-suites, his unprecedented self-publishing enterprise, and the social resonances of his Polish-style works.
This first full-length study of Telemann's concertos, sonatas, and suites focuses on his imaginative mixing of styles and genres. Special attention is also devoted to the extra musical meanings and humor of his programmatic overture-suites, his unprecedented self-publishing enterprise, and the social resonances of his Polish-style works.
The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith. As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.
Take a deep breath. Air—without it, life on Earth would cease to exist. Though not usually seen, its presence is relied upon. At once both ethereal and physical, air has been associated with flight and spirit, and yet it has progressively become a territory that can be claimed through communications, warfare, travel, and scientific exploration. At the same time, air is no longer a completely reliable part of our daily life: like water, it has become an environmental element that must be watched closely for quality and purity. A Matter of Air investigates the meanings of air over the last three centuries, including our modern concern over emissions and climate change. Steven Connor looks at the human relationship with air, both positive and negative. His explorations include the dangers posed by radio atmospherics, poison gas, and haze as well as our continued fascination with effervescence and explosives. Drawing ideas from religion, science, art, literature, and philosophy, A Matter of Air creates a comprehensive history of the human perception of air. Thoroughly researched and written with wit and quirky enthusiasm, the book will appeal to a wide range of general readers interested in the environment, human history, and our most essential aspects of life.
This book studies the role played by Jews in the explosion of cultural innovation in Vienna at the turn of the century, which had its roots in the years following the Ausgleich of 1867 and its demise in the sweeping events of the 1930s. The author shows that, in terms of personnel, Jews were predominant throughout most of Viennese high culture, and so any attempts to dismiss the "Jewish aspect" of the intelligentsia are refuted. The book goes on to explain this "Jewish aspect," dismissing any unitary, static model and adopting a historical approach that sees the "Jewishness" of Viennese modern culture as a result of the specific Jewish backgrounds of most of the leading cultural figures and their reactions to being Jewish.
من دون الهواء، تتوقّف الحياة على الأرض، وهو غير مرئي ومع ذلك حاضر أبداً بطريقة أو بأخرى، وطالما ربط الناس بينه وبين الطيران، والروح، والتسامي، والتفاؤل، لكن تغيّر مفهوم الهواء مع تزايد سيطرة البشر عليه، عبر الإتصالات، والحرب، والسفر. والإستكشاف العلمي، فلم يعد الهواء جزءاً موثوقاً من حياتنا اليومية، وإنما قسماً آخر من البيئة يجب أن تخضع جودته ونقاوته لمراقبة وثيقة يتفحّص مادة الهواء معاني الهواء في القرون الثلاثة الماضية، بما في ذلك قلقنا الحديث من الإنبعاثات المفرطة وتغيّر المناخ. ومن الواضح أن قلقنا يستند إلى أسس صلبة، فقد أثّر البشر على الجوّ منذ إستخدام أكسيد النيتروز مروراً بتطوير التدفئة بالغاز والإنارة. وينظر المؤلّف البارز ستيفن كونور في هذا الأثر بإستعراض الظواهر الجوية الراديوية والغاز السامّ، بالإضافة إلى الخوف من التلوث الناجم عن إحراق الجثث، والقلق من الضباب. ويناقش الكتاب أيضاً الإفتتان المتزايد بالهواء والعملية الهوائية عبر إغراء الفوران وتطوير الموادّ المتفجرّة، ويقدّم كتاب مادّة الهواء نهجاً ثقافياً لتاريخ الهواء، ينهل من الدين، والعلم، والفنّ، والأدب، والفلسفة لوضع تاريخ شامل لفهم الناس للهواء.
Engaging some of the most canonical and thought-provoking anime, manga, and science fiction films, Tokyo Cyberpunk offers insightful analysis of Japanese visual culture. Steven T. Brown draws new conclusions about the cultural flow of art, as well as important technological issues of the day.
In this book, Steven Fraade explores the practice and conception of multilingualism and translation in ancient Judaism. Interrogating the deep and dialectical relationship between them, he situates representative scriptural and other texts within their broader synchronic - Greco-Roman context, as well as diachronic context - the history of Judaism and beyond. Neither systematic nor comprehensive, his selection of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek primary sources, here fluently translated into clear English, best illustrate the fundamental issues and the performative aspects relating to translation and multilingualism. Fraade scrutinizes and analyzes the texts to reveal the inner dynamics and the pedagogical-social implications that are implicit when multilingualism and translation are paired. His book demonstrates the need for a more thorough and integrated treatment of these topics, and their relevance to the study of ancient Judaism, than has been heretofore recognized.
Offering a wide-ranging study of contemporary literature, film, visual art, and performance by writers and artists who live and work in the United Kingdom but also maintain strong ties to postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean, Living Cargo explores how contemporary black British culture makers have engaged with the institutional archives of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade in order to reimagine blackness in British history and to make claims for social and political redress. Steven Blevins calls this reimagining “unhousing history”—an aesthetic and political practice that animates and improvises on the institutional archive, repurposing it toward different ends and new possibilities. He discusses the work of novelists, including Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen, and Bernardine Evaristo; filmmakers Isaac Julien and Inge Blackman; performance poet Dorothea Smartt; fashion designer Ozwald Boateng; artists Hew Locke and Yinka Shonibare; and the urban redevelopment of Bristol, England, which unfolded alongside the public demand to remember the city’s slave-trading past. Living Cargo argues that the colonial archive is neither static nor residual but emergent. By reassembling historical fragments and traces consolidated in the archive, these artists not only perform a kind of counter-historiography, they also imagine future worlds that might offer amends for the atrocities of the past.
Adorno's Poetics of Critique is a critical study of the Marxist culture-critic Theodor W. Adorno, a founding member of the Frankfurt school and widely regarded today as its most brilliant exponent. Steven Helmling is centrally concerned with Adorno's notoriously difficult writing, a feature most commentators acknowledge only to set it aside on the way to an expository account of 'what Adorno is saying'. By contrast, Adorno's complex writing is the central focus of this study, which includes detailed analysis of Adorno's most complex texts, in particular his most famous and complicated work, co-authored with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Helmling argues that Adorno's key motifs - dialectic, concept, negation, immanent critique, constellation - are prescriptions not merely for critical thinking, but also for critical writing. For Adorno the efficacy of critique is conditioned on how the writing of critique is written. Both in theory and in practice, Adorno urges a 'poetics of critique' that is every bit as critical as anything else in his 'critical theory.
Tea Sets and Tyranny offers a political history of politeness in early America, from its origins in the late seventeenth century to its remaking in the age of the Revolution.
It is difficult to write well even in one language. Yet a rich body of translingual literature -- by authors who write in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one -- exists. The Translingual Imagination is a pioneering study of the phenomenon, which is as ancient as the use of Arabic, Latin, Mandarin, Persian, and Sanskrit as linguae francae. Colonialism, war, mobility, and the aesthetics of alienation have combined to create a modern translingual canon. Opening with an overview of this vast subject, Steven G. Kellman then looks at the differences between ambilinguals -- those who write authoritatively in more than one language -- and monolingual translinguals -- those who write in only one language but not their native one. Kellman offers compelling analyses of the translingual situations of African and Jewish authors and of achievements by authors as varied as Mary Antin, Samuel Beckett, Louis Begley, J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Eva Hoffman, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Sayles. While separate studies of individual translingual authors have long been available, this is the first in-depth study of the general phenomenon of translingual literature.
As the director of Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World, Terrence Malick has created a remarkable body of work that enables imaginative acts of philosophical interpretation. Steven Rybin's Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film looks closely at the dialogue between Malick's films and our powers of thinking, showing how his work casts the philosophy of thinkers such as Stanley Cavell, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Andr Bazin, Edgar Morin, and Immanuel Kant in new cinematic light. With a special focus on how the voices of Malick's characters move us to thought, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film offers new readings of his films and places Malick's work in the context of recent debates in the interdisciplinary field of film and philosophy. Rybin also provides a postscript on Malick's recently-released fifth film, The Tree of Life.
Inspired by the commonplace books and epistolary tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which writers ranged through science, philosophy, music, theology, poetry, and anything else that struck their fancies, this book is a collaboration, an improvisation in two voices. Drawing on a variety of traditions and a cloud of witnesses, from Amos Wilder, Paul Ricoeur, and Theodor Adorno to Michael Taussig and Zhao Dongming, along with wide-ranging riffs on Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the authors search reality's mysteries with wit and insight.
How do we really think about the world? We may use words to tell stories about it or draw pictures to represent it, but one thing we do far more than either of those is make calculations of the things that are in it—and to do that we use numbers. Numbers give shape and texture to almost everything we feel, say, dream, and do, a fact that Steven Connor explores in this qualitative assessment of the quantifiable. Looking at how numbers play a part in nearly every aspect of our lives, he offers a fascinating portrait of the world as a world of numbers. Connor explores a host of thought-provoking aspects of our numerical existence. He looks at the unexpected oddities that shape the loneliest number—the number one. He looks at counting as a human phenomenon and the ways we negotiate crowds, swarms, and multitudes. He demonstrates the work of calculation as it lies at the heart of poetry, jokes, painting, and music. He shows how we use numbers to adjust to uncertainty and chance and how they help us visualize the world in diagrammatic ways, and he unveils how numbers even help us think about death. Altogether, Connor brings into relief an aspect of our lives so ubiquitous that we often can’t see it, unveiling a rich new way of thinking about our existence.
Facing the threats posed by dedicated suicide bombers who have access to modern technology for mass destruction and who intend to cause maximum human suffering and casualties, democratic governments have hard choices to make. On the one hand, they must uphold the basic values of democratic societies based on due process and human rights. On the other, they need to pre-empt the kind of destruction inflicted upon New York, Madrid, London, and Bali. The premise of this book is that for intelligence organizations to be able to face up to the challenges of global terrorism, they must think outside the box and utilize all of their resources effectively and creatively. To overcome the enemy, we must also secure the peace. Winning the hearts and minds of the terrorists' pool of potential recruits will be essential to cutting off the supply of suicide bombers. The support and cooperation of the people in countries where the terrorists strike must be sustained by ensuring they have confidence in the government and intelligence services. If a government and its intelligence services become so focused on pre-empting terrorist attacks that they infringe on the rights of their citizens and encroach on democratic norms, they unwittingly fall into a trap set by Al Qaeda and its kind. These organizations aim to destroy the democratic way of life so cherished in the West, and to incite the Muslim populations in democratic countries and their non-Muslim fellow citizens into a vicious circle of mutual hatred and violence. This book therefore addresses not only the question of how intelligence organizations can improve their efficacy in pre-empting terrorist outrages, but also the wider issue of removing the forces that sustain global terrorism as a scourge of the 21st century. The general public in the target countries and recruiting grounds must also be persuaded that—despite their rhetoric—the terrorists are not engaged in a holy war. Ultimately, the brand of global terrorism promoted by Osama bin Laden and his associates is meant to satisfy their own vanity and aspirations toward semi-divine status; the organization they have formed for this purpose is merely a global syndicate that commits serious crimes of a particularly heinous nature. Intelligence services of various countries need to find convincing evidence to prove this point. But it is up to governments, civil society, and the media in different parts of the world to work together if the evidence unearthed by national intelligence services is to be accepted by the general public. Unless the emotional or quasi-religious appeal of the global terrorists can be removed, the simple arrest of bin Laden and his close associates—or even the destruction of Al Qaeda as an organization—will not be sufficient to prevent others from rising to replace them.
Steven Connor provides in-depth analyses of the novel and its relationship with its own form, with contemporary culture and with history. He incorporates an extensive and varied range of writers in his discussions such as * George Orwell * William Golding * Angela Carter * Doris Lessing * Timothy Mo * Hanif Kureishi * Marina Warner * Maggie Gee Written by a foremost scholar of contemporary culture and theory, The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present offers not only a survey but also a historical and cultural context to British literature produced in the second half of this century.
By the end of World War II, religion appeared to be on the decline throughout the United States and Europe. Recent world events had cast doubt on the relevance of religious belief, and modernizing trends made religious rituals look out of place. It was in this atmosphere that the careers of Scholem, Eliade, and Corbin--the twentieth century's legendary scholars in the respective fields of Judaism, History of Religions, and Islam--converged and ultimately revolutionized how people thought about religion. Between 1949 and 1978, all three lectured to Carl Jung's famous Eranos circle in Ascona, Switzerland, where each in his own way came to identify the symbolism of mystical experience as a central element of his monotheistic tradition. In this, the first book ever to compare the paths taken by these thinkers, Steven Wasserstrom explores how they overturned traditional approaches to studying religion by de-emphasizing law, ritual, and social history and by extolling the role of myth and mysticism. The most controversial aspect of their theory of religion, Wasserstrom argues, is that it minimized the binding character of moral law associated with monotheism. The author focuses on the lectures delivered by Scholem, Eliade, and Corbin to the Eranos participants, but also shows how these scholars generated broader interest in their ideas through radio talks, poetry, novels, short stories, autobiographies, and interviews. He analyzes their conception of religion from a broadly integrated, comparative perspective, sets their distinctive thinking into historical and intellectual context, and interprets the striking success of their approaches.
In the twenty-first century, a network society is emerging. Fragmented, visually saturated, characterized by rapid technological change and constant social upheavals, it is dizzying, excessive, and sometimes surreal. In this breathtaking work, Steven Shaviro investigates popular culture, new technologies, political change, and community disruption and concludes that science fiction and social reality have become virtually indistinguishable. Connected is made up of a series of mini-essays-on cyberpunk, hip-hop, film noir, Web surfing, greed, electronic surveillance, pervasive multimedia, psychedelic drugs, artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, and the architecture of Frank Gehry, among other topics. Shaviro argues that our strange new world is increasingly being transformed in ways, and by devices, that seem to come out of the pages of science fiction, even while the world itself is becoming a futuristic landscape. The result is that science fiction provides the most useful social theory, the only form that manages to be as radical as reality itself. Connected looks at how our networked environment has manifested itself in the work of J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, K. W. Jeter, and others. Shaviro focuses on science fiction not only as a form of cultural commentary but also as a prescient forum in which to explore the forces that are morphing our world into a sort of virtual reality game. Original and compelling, Connected shows how the continual experimentation of science fiction, like science and technology themselves, conjures the invisible social and economic forces that surround us.
The metaphor of performance has been applied fruitfully by anthropologists and other social theorists to different aspects of human social existence, and furnishes a potentially helpful model in terms of which to think theologically about Christian life. After an introductory editorial chapter reflecting on the nature of artistic performance and its relationship to the notions of tradition and identity, Part One of this book attends specifically to the phenomenon of dramatic performance and possible theological applications of it. Part Two considers various aspects of the performance of Christian identity, looking at worship, the interpretation of the Bible, Christian response to elements in the contemporary media, the shape of Christian moral life, and ending with a theological reflection on the shape of personal identity, correlating it with the theatrical metaphors of 'character' and 'performing a part' in a scripted drama. Part Three demonstrates how art forms (including some technically non-performative ones - literature, poetry, painting) may constitute faithful Christian practices in which the tradition is authentically 'performed', producing works which break open its meaning in profound new ways for a constantly shifting context.
Robert De Niro at Work is the first critical study to examine how Robert de Niro, perhaps the finest screen actor of his generation, works with screenplays to imagine, prepare and denote his performance. In categorising the various ways in which De Niro works with a screenplay, this book will re-examine the relationship between actor and text. This book considers the screenplay as above all a working document and a material object, present at every stage of the filmmaking process. The working screenplay goes through various iterations in development and exists in many versions on set, each adapted and personalised for the specific use of the individual and their role. As the archive reveals, nobody works more closely with the script than the actor, and no actor works more on a script than De Niro.
Combining ethnography, film criticism, and his extensive knowledge of the Middle East, Steven C. Caton presents an innovative and fascinating examination of the classic film, Lawrence of Arabia. Caton is interested in why this epic film has been so compelling for so many people for more than three decades. In seeking an answer he draws from situations in his own life, biographies of the film's key participants, and analyses of issues relating to class, gender, colonialism, and cultural differences. The result is a many-prismed book that poses important questions of ethnographic representation and the discourse of power. Caton's approach is dialectical, and his readings of the film are situated within different historical periods, from the early 1960s to the present. Among the subjects he highlights are travel and colonialism in fieldwork and filmmaking, orientalism in the representation of the Other, and the film's ambiguous handling of masculinity and homosexuality. Caton looks at his own reactions to the film at various stages in his life and offers a thought-provoking account of the film's reception by today's high school and college students. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1999. Combining ethnography, film criticism, and his extensive knowledge of the Middle East, Steven C. Caton presents an innovative and fascinating examination of the classic film, Lawrence of Arabia. Caton is interested in why this epic film has been so
This path-breaking book reveals how Hollywood became "Hollywood" and what that meant for the politics of America and American film. Working-Class Hollywood tells the story of filmmaking in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a time when going to the movies could transform lives and when the cinema was a battleground for control of American consciousness. Steven Ross documents the rise of a working-class film movement that challenged the dominant political ideas of the day. Between 1907 and 1930, worker filmmakers repeatedly clashed with censors, movie industry leaders, and federal agencies over the kinds of images and subjects audiences would be allowed to see. The outcome of these battles was critical to our own times, for the victors got to shape the meaning of class in twentieth- century America. Surveying several hundred movies made by or about working men and women, Ross shows how filmmakers were far more concerned with class conflict during the silent era than at any subsequent time. Directors like Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and William de Mille made movies that defended working people and chastised their enemies. Worker filmmakers went a step further and produced movies from A Martyr to His Cause (1911) to The Gastonia Textile Strike (1929) that depicted a unified working class using strikes, unions, and socialism to transform a nation. J. Edgar Hoover considered these class-conscious productions so dangerous that he assigned secret agents to spy on worker filmmakers. Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly conservative directions. Appealing to people's dreams of luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy films that shifted popular attention away from the problems of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern belief that we are a classless nation.
Anne Middleton's essays have been among the most vigorous, learned, and influential in the field of medieval English literature. Their 'crux-busting' energies have illuminated local obscurities with generous learning lightly wielded. Their historically- and theoretically-informed meditations on the nature of poetic discourse traced how the generation of Chaucer and Langland devised a category of the literary that could embody a ethos of engaged, worldly consensus and make that consensus available to imaginative and rational consideration. And their reflections on the enterprise of literary study found a rational way, free of cant, to understand the work of the literary scholar. This volume reprints eight essays: ’The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,’ ’Chaucer's 'New Men' and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales,’ ’The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs: 'Ensamples Mo than Ten' as a Method in the Canterbury Tales,’ ’The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts,’ ’Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman,’ ’Making a Good End: John But as a Reader of Piers Plowman,’ ’William Langland's 'Kynde Name': Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,’ ’Life in the Margins, or, What's an Annotator to Do?’ It includes one essay previously unpublished, ’Playing the Plowman: Legends of Fourteenth-Century Authorship.’
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. In The Digital Logic of Death, Steven Pustay skillfully makes visible the immensely important but often overlooked role that moving images play in shaping our understanding of mortality. This relationship, he argues, is made all the more urgent by the technologies of the digital age, which have profoundly altered our ability to represent and contemplate death through moving images, resulting in an entirely new cultural logic of death. To draw out this new logic, Pustay presents accessible readings of otherwise dense and difficult philosophical approaches to death – such as those found in existentialism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory – by reading them through the lens of contemporary media. From art-house films like Irréversible and The Fountain to blockbusters like the Matrix trilogy, from television commercials for M&M's to pay-cable dramas like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, from first-person shooters like Bioshock to indie-games like LIMBO, Pustay shows how moving images have shifted our understanding of death in general and our recognition of our own finiteness in particular.
This volume contends against a major lacuna in the story of eschatology in the twentieth century by offering a historical and comparative analysis of Edward Schillebeeckx’s prophetic eschatology and Johann Baptist Metz’s apocalyptic eschatology with the goal of identifying relative advantages and limitations of these divergent eschatological frameworks for rendering a Christian account of hope that prompts action in the public arena. Rodenborn provides a fresh angle on eschatologies of hope.
This book redefines religious studies as a field in which a plurality of disciplines interact. A social science when understood as a body of knowledge, religion is also marked by discovery, appreciation, orientation, and application--an interplay of the arts and sciences. Teaching religious studies involves the question of the occupation of territories and disentangling occupation from violence.
Written for high school or beginning undergraduate students, this four-volume reference valiantly attempts to provide a historical framework for the perhaps overly broad concept of world trade. Entry topics were selected on trade organizations, influential people, commodities, events that affected trade, trade routes, navigation, religion, communic
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