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Reveries of the wild woman: primal scenes

Cixous, Hélène
All the time when I lived in Algeria, my native country, I dreamt of one day arriving in Algeria. Born in Oran, Algeria, Hélène Cixous spent her childhood in France's former colony. Reveries of the Wild Woman is her visceral memoir of a preadolescence that shaped her with intense feelings of alienation, yet also contributed, in a paradoxically essential way, to her development as a writer and philosopher. Born to a French father and an Austro-German mother, both Jews, Cixous experienced a childhood fraught with racial and gender crisis. In her moving story she recounts how small events--a new dog, the gift of a bicycle--reverberate decades later as symbols filled with social and psychological meaning. She and her family endure a double alienation, by Algerians for being French and by the French for being Jewish, and Cixous builds her story on the themes of isolation and exclusion she felt in particular under the Vichy government and during the Algerian Civil War. Yet she also concedes that memories of Algeria awaken in her a longing for her home country, and ponders how that stormy relationship has influenced her life and thought. A meditation on postcolonial identity and gender, Reveries of the Wild Woman is also a poignant recollection of how a girl's childhood is, indeed, author to the woman.
Northwestern University Press 2006-05-29 96 pages

Veils

Cixous, Hélène
Something of a historical event, this book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Hélène Cixous, is a brief but densely layered account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia, an experience that ends with the unexpected turn of grieving for what is lost. Her literary inventiveness mines the coincidence in French between the two verbs savoir (to know) and voir (to see). Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" complexly muses on a host of autobiographical, philosophical, and religious motifs―including his varied responses to "Savoir." The two texts are accompanied by six beautiful and evocative drawings that play on the theme of drapery over portions of the body. Veils suspends sexual difference between two homonyms: la voile (sail) and le voile (veil). A whole history of sexual difference is enveloped, sometimes dissimulated here―in the folds of sails and veils and in the turns, journeys, and returns of their metaphors and metonymies. However foreign to each other they may appear, however autonomous they may be, the two texts participate in a common genre: autobiography, confession, memoirs. The future also enters in: by opening to each other, the two discourses confide what is about to happen, the imminence of an event lacking any common measure with them or with anything else, an operation that restores sight and plunges into mourning the knowledge of the previous night, a "verdict" whose threatening secret remains out of reach by our knowledge.
Stanford University Press 2001 108 pages

World War II Combat Veterans Stories of Commitment and Valor

I. David Cohen
"From the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the Marine's invasion at Iwo Jima. From the Nary fighter pilots in the Pacific to the Air Force bomber pilots in Europe. From the paratroopers at Normandy, Holland and the Battle of the Bulge to the 10th Mountain Division (Alpine) fighting in the Apennine Mountains of Italy. From being a prisoner of war (POW) to the nurses who helped evacuate the German concentration camps you will read and experience the harrowing and heroic stories of eight World War II combat veterans who fought valiantly to keep our county free from tyranny."--Back cover
Independently Published 2019-03-20 156 pages

Resurrecting Hebrew

Stavans, Ilan
Here is the stirring story of how Hebrew was rescued from the fate of a dead language to become the living tongue of a modern nation. Ilan Stavans’s quest begins with a dream featuring a beautiful woman speaking an unknown language. When the language turns out to be Hebrew, a friend diagnoses “language withdrawal,” and Stavans sets out in search of his own forgotten Hebrew as well as the man who helped revive the language at the end of the nineteenth century, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. The search for Ben-Yehuda, who raised his eldest son in linguistic isolation–not even allowing him "to hear the songs of birds"–so that he would be “the first Hebrew-speaking child,” becomes a journey full of paradox. It was Orthodox anti-Zionists who had Ben-Yehuda arrested for sedition, and, although Ben-Yehuda was devoted to Jewish life in Palestine, it was in Manhattan that he worked on his great dictionary of the Hebrew language. The resurrection of Hebrew raises urgent questions about the role language plays in Jewish survival, questions that lead Stavans not merely into the roots of modern Hebrew but into the origins of Israel itself. All the tensions between the Diaspora and the idea of a promised land pulse beneath the surface of Stavans’s story, which is a fascinating biography as well as a moving personal journey. -- inside jacket cover.
Nextbook 2008 219 pages

Guns or butter: the presidency of Lyndon Johnson

Bernstein, Irving
The presidency of Lyndon Johnson was a pivotal moment in twentieth-century American history. From the decisive social programs of the Great Society, to the triumph of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, to the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and domestic unrest, it was an era of dramatic accomplishment and wrenching tragedy. In Guns or Butter, renowned historian Irving Bernstein brings those five climactic years of the sixties vividly to life, from the moment Lee Harvey Oswald aimed a rifle from the window of the Texas School Depository to the tense ballot-counting that put Richard Nixon in the White House in 1968.
Oxford University Press 1996-01-11 606 pages

Edith Wharton (20th Century Views)

Irving Howe
In this collection of criticisms, Edith Wharton's unique gifts as a story-teller and her superb talents as a craftsman are carefully evaluated. Her indebtedness to Henry James is re-examined. Her more notable novels, such as The Age of Innocence, which won a Pulitzer prize, The House of Mirth, her masterful social portrait, and Ethan Frome, her tale of New England poverty and frustration, are among the works reappraised. Society in Edith Wharton's old New York, at once sophisticated and provincial, dreaded scandal more than disease. Its refinement was a veneer, its conversation mere gossip, its standards double. Society performed conventional rites; intellectual winds seldom stirred the sands of this wasteland. Edith Wharton, placed in this milieu by birth and marriage, turned it into a subject for subtle satire. Though she was no rebel, Edith Wharton was fascinated by rebellion. She regarded pessimistically those who challenged social mores, pointing always to the exorbitant price exacted for the assertion of individual thought. She distrusted human nature and saw the human condition as a struggle between the generous and the mean. She believed that self-sacrifice is almost invariably useless. In this study of the woman and the artist, Irving Howe has included articles by Diana Trilling, E.K. Brown, Alfred Kazin, and Percy Lubbock. Here is Edith Wharton, the literary pioneer who pointed the road to realism, the social historian with enormous powers of recreation, the fine observer of emotions. This anthology should serve to enlarge Edith Wharton's appreciative audience and to reassert her influential place in American writing. Among the essays are: Justice to Edith Wharton (Edmund Wilson) Henry James's Heiress: The Importance of Edith Wharton (Q.D. Leavis) The Morality of Inertia (Lionel Trilling) Our Literary Aristocrat (Vernon L. Parrington) Edith Wharton and Her New Yorks (Louis Auchincloss)
Prentice Hall 1963-12-01 192 pages

Amenities of Literature

Isaac DIsraeli
Isaac D'Israeli's Amenities of Literature was published in 1841, when the author was seventy-five years old. The title was adopted to connect it with two preceding volumes, Curiosities of Literature and Miscellanies of Literature . As the author writes in the preface, this book was intended to form a portion of a much larger work that was never completed. "A history of our vernacular literature has occupied my studies for many years. It was my design, not to furnish an ari
Wilder Publications 2018-04-03 512 pages

Building: letters 1960-1975

Berlin, Isaiah
In the period covered here Isaiah Berlin creates Wolfson College, Oxford; John F. Kennedy becomes U.S. President (and is assassinated); Berlin dines with JFK on the day he is told of the Soviet missile bases in Cuba; the Six-Day Arab-Israeli war of 1967 creates problems that remain with us today; Richard M. Nixon succeeds Johnson as President and resigns over Watergate; and the long agony of the Vietnam War grinds on in the background. At the same time Berlin publishes some of his most important work, including Four Essays on Liberty--the key texts of his liberal pluralism--and the essays later included in Vico and Herder . He appears on the radio, on television, and in documentary films, and gives numerous lectures, especially his celebrated Mellon Lectures, later published as The Roots of Romanticism . Behind these public events is a constant stream of gossip and commentary, acerbic humor, and warm personal feeling. This new volume leaves no doubt that Berlin is one of the very best letter-writers of the 20th century.
Pimlico 2016-04-07 680 pages

Life and acting: techniques for the actor

Garfein, Jack
Arriving in America as a teenage Holocaust refugee, Jack Garfein would soon rise to the top of his field. Life and Acting is the product of more than sixty years in the world of theater and film, offering the kind of insight only gained by experience as both a teacher and practitioner. In Garfein's case, his experience is unparalleled--he has worked with a who's who of twentieth-century acting, especially those associated with the Actors Studio, the West Coast arm of which Garfein cofounded. In Life and Acting , Garfein distills his experience into a holistic technique for learning and teaching. "The Beginning" functions as a kind of memoir, focusing on Garfein's own education in the theater. "The Art" describes how Garfein's exposure to nontheater artists, particularly painters and writers, has contributed to his understanding of acting. "Basic Training" offers thirty-seven detailed lessons for teaching acting. In "Training for Film," Garfein applies his principles to acting in front of a camera. Like Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting and other classics of this genre, Life and Acting will be an invaluable resource for teachers as well as students.
Northwestern University Press 2010 292 pages

The "Shabbes goy": a study in halakhic flexibility

Katz, Jacob
From the Babylonian period to the twentieth century, strictly observant Jews have depended on a non-Jew, or "shabbes goy" to perform work that was forbidden on the Sabbath. The author traces the role of the "shabbes goy" through the centuries. Katz affords the "shabbes goy" the central role in this fascinating case study on the larger question of the adaptability of halakhah to the ever-changing circumstances of life.
Jewish Publication Society 1989 253 pages

Medieval Jerusalem: forging an Islamic city in spaces sacred to Christians and Jews

Lassner, Jacob
Medieval Jerusalem" examines an old question that has recently surfaced and given rise to spirited discussion among Islamic historians and archeologists: what role did a city revered for its holiness play in the unfolding politics of the early Islamic period? Was there an historic moment when the city, holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, may have been considered as the administrative center of a vast Islamic world, as some scholars on early Islam have recently claimed? The book also emphasizes the city's evolution as a revered Islamic religious site comparable to the holy cities Mecca and Medina. Examining Muslim historiography and religious lore in light of Jewish traditions about the city, Jacob Lassner points out how these reworked Jewish traditions and the imposing monumental Islamic architecture of the city were meant to demonstrate that Islam had superseded Judaism and Christianity as the religion for all monotheists. Jacob Lassner interrogates the literary sources of medieval Islamic historiography and their modern interpreters as if they were witnesses in a court of law, and applies the same method for the arguments about the monuments of the city's material culture, including the great archaeological discoveries along the south wall of the ancient Temple Mount
University of Michigan Press 2017 242 pages