5744 results for "Literature"

Upward mobility and the common good: toward a literary history of the welfare state

Robbins, Bruce
We think we know what upward mobility stories are about--virtuous striving justly rewarded, or unprincipled social climbing regrettably unpunished. Either way, these stories seem obviously concerned with the self-making of self-reliant individuals rather than with any collective interest. In Upward Mobility and the Common Good , Bruce Robbins completely overturns these assumptions to expose a hidden tradition of erotic social interdependence at the heart of the literary canon. Reinterpreting novels by figures such as Balzac, Stendhal, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Dreiser, Wells, Doctorow, and Ishiguro, along with a number of films, Robbins shows how deeply the material and erotic desires of upwardly mobile characters are intertwined with the aid they receive from some sort of benefactor or mentor. In his view, Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs becomes a key figure of social mobility in our time. Robbins argues that passionate and ambiguous relationships (like that between Lecter and Clarice Starling) carry the upward mobility story far from anyone's simple self-interest, whether the protagonist's or the mentor's. Robbins concludes that upward mobility stories have paradoxically helped American and European society make the transition from an ethic of individual responsibility to one of collective accountability, a shift that made the welfare state possible, but that also helps account for society's fascination with cases of sexual abuse and harassment by figures of authority. -- "Modern Language Quarterly"
Princeton University Press 2007 304 pages

Beginning/again: toward a hermeneutics of Jewish texts

Aryeh Cohen,Shaul Magid
Representing the spectrum of subfields within Jewish Studies, the contributing scholars to this volume use beginnings as a hermeneutic stance to analyze texts in their area. While each essay is a significant contribution to its own subfield - Bible, Talmud, Kabbalah, Modern Jewish Thought, Feminist and Cultural Studies - the essays taken as a whole present new possibilities for exploring the space that is Jewish Studies and beginning an inquiry into what might constitute a definable hermeneutics of Jewish texts.
Seven Bridges Press 2002 238 pages

Midnight is not in everyone's reach

Antunes, António Lobo
"A polyphonic novel set over the course of three days, Midnight is Not in Everyone's Reach is a stunning meditation on memory and time from Antonio Lobo Antunes, considered by many to be Portugal's greatest living writer. The year is 2011, and our aging narrator has returned to Alto da Vigia to say goodbye to the house where her family spent summers during her childhood. Divided into three sections, one for each day that she spends at the home, Midnight is Not in Everyone's Reach unspools in torrents of dialogue and surreal, feverish scenarios. Over these three days, the dead return to life, time splinters and freezes, and conversations flow from the past into the present and back again, as we journey across the narrator's corrosive psyche toward our real destination-the place inside herself where the family's grief-stricken secrets are kept"--
Dalkey Archive Press 2025 573 pages

Living our language: Ojibwe tales & oral histories

Treuer, Anton
A language carries a people's memories, whether they are recounted as individual reminiscences, as communal history, or as humorous tales. This collection of stories from Anishinaabe elders offers a history of a people at the same time that it seeks to preserve the language of that people.> As fluent speakers of Ojibwe grow older, the community questions whether younger speakers know the language well enough to pass it on to the next generation. Young and old alike are making widespread efforts to preserve the Ojibwe language, and, as part of this campaign, Anton Treuer has collected stories from Anishinaabe elders living at Leech Lake, White Earth, Mille Lacs, Red Lake, and St. Croix reservations. Based on interviews Treuer conducted with ten elders—Archie Mosay, Jim Clark, Melvin Eagle, Joe Auginaush, Collins Oakgrove, Emma Fisher, Scott Headbird, Susan Jackson, Hartley White, and Porky White—this anthology presents the elders' stories transcribed in Ojibwe with English translation on facing pages. These stories contain a wealth of information, including oral histories of the Anishinaabe people and personal reminiscences, educational tales, and humorous anecdotes. Treuer's translations of these stories preserve the speakers' personalities, allowing their voices to emerge from the page. This dual-language text will prove instructive for those interested in Ojibwe language and culture, while the stories themselves offer the gift of a living language and the history of a people.
Minnesota Historical Society Press 2001-05-01 272 pages

Once upon Argentina

Neuman, Andrés
"One day, a young man receives an unexpected letter from his grandmother, kicking off a literary adventure that brings home to him everything he has not seen. Once Upon Argentina relates the lives of the narrator's relatives-- a group of people from all over the world gathered in a land where immigrant traditions merge and thrive. The lives of these relatives intersect, like a set of Matryoshka dolls or a hall of mirrors, as the personal and social stories of twentieth century Argentina converge. Beyond these tales of hardship and triumph, Andres Neuman's novel experiments with the nature of the autobiography, encompassing prenatal memories, expanding the autofiction genre with a new voice and twist. Merging present and past, collective experiences and his own, the narrator explores a genealogy populated by unforgettable characters, offering us the story of the construction of a country, his Argentine childhood, and his early literary discoveries.With extraordinary delicacy and intensity, combining elegy, tragedy, and humor, Andres Neuman reveals a world as real as it is fantastic, as strange as it is our own. Once Upon Argentina is a coming-of-age tale, a political novel, and a love letter to the absent ones."--Publisher's website
Open Letter 2024-08-20 307 pages

The garden of Priapus: sexuality and aggression in Roman humor

Richlin, Amy
Statues of the god Priapus stood in Roman gardens to warn potential thieves that the god would rape them if they attempted to steal from him. In this book, Richlin argues that the attitude of sexual aggressiveness in defense of a bounded area serves as a model for Roman satire from Lucilius to Juvenal. Using literary, anthropological, psychological, and feminist methodologies, she suggests that aggressive sexual humor reinforces aggressive behavior on both the individual and societal levels, and that Roman satire provides an insight into Roman culture. Including a substantial and provocative new introduction, this revised edition is important not only as an in-depth study of Roman sexual satire, but also as a commentary on the effects of all humor on society and its victims.
Oxford University Press 1992 315 pages

Ideas of 'race' in the history of the humanities

Amos Morris-Reich,Dirk Rupnow
"This volume is concerned with the hitherto neglected role of the humanities in the histories of the idea of race. Its aim is to begin to fill in this significant lacuna. If, in the decades following World War II and the Holocaust - years that witnessed European decolonization and the African-American civil rights movement - the concept of 'race' slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural, political and scientific category, for much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century concepts of race enjoyed widespread currency in numerous fields of knowledge such as the history of art, history, musicology, or philosophy. Bringing together some of the most distinguished scholars in their respective fields, this is the first collective attempt to address the history of notions of race in the humanities as a whole."
Palgrave Macmillan 2017-05-04 337 pages

The marmara contract

Gold, Alan
Another riveting international thriller from bestselling author Alan Gold. Book Two in the Amra’s Journey trilogy. Book Two of Amra’s Journey that began with The Gift of Evil. For the past fifty years, the golden treasures of Troy have been lying in the basement of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Now, as the millennium approaches, Germany and Turkey are both reclaiming their treasures. But who really owns the precious antiquities? And how far is each country prepared to go to claim them as their own? American lawyer Sarah Kaplan, an expert on the reclamation of property, is drawn into the debate when the Turkish government employs her to get the treasure back. But things go very wrong and Sarah ends up in a Turkish gaol, accused of theft and blasphemy. Her only link with the outside world is the amulet she wears around her neck, passed down to her from her great-grandmother. Engraved with the symbols of the bull and owl of Troy, the amulet’s origin is a mystery. But gradually, through the unfolding of stories three thousand years apart, the secret of the amulet becomes known.
HarperCollins 1999-11-01 564 pages

The Nervous Housewife

Abraham Myerson
The Nervous Housewife has been regarded as significant work throughout human history, and in order to ensure that this work is never lost, we have taken steps to ensure its preservation by republishing this book in a contemporary format for both current and future generations. This entire book has been retyped, redesigned, and reformatted. Since these books are not made from scanned copies, the text is readable and clear.
Alpha Editions 2022-12-14 122 pages

Open Every Door

Zelda Popkin
""Open Every Door"" by Zelda Popkin is a novel about a young girl named Sarah who grows up in a small town in the early 1900s. Despite her humble beginnings, Sarah is determined to make something of herself and escape the limitations of her small town. She dreams of becoming a writer and attending college, but her family and community hold her back with their traditional values and expectations.As Sarah navigates the challenges of growing up and pursuing her dreams, she also grapples with issues of identity and belonging. She feels torn between her desire to fit in and be accepted by her community, and her need to be true to herself and follow her own path.Throughout the novel, Sarah encounters a variety of characters who help shape her journey, including a supportive teacher, a rebellious friend, and a mysterious stranger who offers her a glimpse of a different world. As she learns to navigate these relationships and find her own voice, Sarah discovers that the key to unlocking her potential is to open every door and embrace every opportunity that comes her way.""Open Every Door"" is a coming-of-age story that explores themes of identity, ambition, and the power of perseverance. It is a poignant and inspiring tale that will resonate with readers of all ages and backgrounds.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
Literary Licensing, LLC 2012-04 378 pages

An Austro-Libertarian Critique of Public Choice

Thomas J. Dilorenzo,Walter E. Block
"Dilorenzo and Block have rendered an invaluable service to scholars and students interested in Public Choice, Austrian Economics and Liberalism. Their critical analysis of Public Choice from the Austrian perspective is timely and relevant to clarify important misconceptions about both schools of thought that although in some aspects are complementary in many others offer a significantly different and even opposite approach. This is a most welcome book that was very necessary and fills an important vacuum in the literature." - Jesús Huerta de Soto"I congratulate DiLorenzo and Block for writing this important and courageous book chastising Public Choice. Austro-Libertarianism and Public Choice are to some degree complements; both veer in the direction of support for private property, fee enterprise and capitalism, and against government involvement in the economy. But they are also substitutes, in that the former is a consistent underpinning of the free marketplace, where the latter is not." - Han-Hermann Hoppe
Ludwig Von Mises Institute 2017-12-08 342 pages

Unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader

Gornick, Vivian
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. One of Library Journal 's Best Books of 2020. One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life I sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading—and re-reading—as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers , assesses womanhood in Colette’s The Vagabond and The Shackle , and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover . She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen’s prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, “a writer whose work has often made me love life more.” After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats . Guided by Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature’s power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who “still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L.”
Picador 2021-02-02 176 pages

Representation Theory and Complex Geometry

Ginzburg, Victor
see attached] This second edition of {it Representation Theory and Complex Geometry} provides an overview of significant advances in representation theory from a geometric standpoint. A geometrically-oriented treatment has long been desired, especially since the discovery of { l D}-modules in the early '80s and the quiver approach to quantum groups in the early '90s. The first half of the book fills the gap between the standard knowledge of a beginner in Lie theory and the much wider background needed by the working mathematician. Thus, Chapters 1-3 and 5-6 provide some basics in symplectic geometry, Borel--Moore homology, the geometry of semisimple groups, equivariant algebraic K-theory "from scratch," and the topology and algebraic geometry of flag varieties and conjugacy classes, respectively. The material covered by Chapters 5 and 6, as well as most of Chapter 3, has never been presented in book form. Chapters 3-4 and 7-8 present a uniform approach to representation theory of three quite different Weyl groups, Lie algebra sln, and the Iwahori--Hecke algebra. The results of Chapters 4 and 8, with complete proofs are not to be found elsewhere in the literature. This second edition contains substantial updates and revisions to include more standard classical results in chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6 as well as two new chapters. Chapter 9 treats the applications of { l D}-modules to Lie groups, and includes the study of * Differential operators on a semisimple group and on its flag manifold; * the famous Beilinson--Bernstein Localization Theorem reducing the study of {it g}-modules to that of { l D} modules; * the so-called Harish--Chandra holonomic system. Chapter 10 isdevoted to some very exciting developments connecting the representations of quantum groups to the geometry of "quiver varieties," introduced by Lusztig and Nakajima. The subject is closely related to many other important topics such as the McKay correspondence, semismall resolutions and Hilbert schemes. Overall, this chapter puts the representation theory of Kac--Moody algebras and quantum groups in this broader context. The exposition is practically self-contained with each chapter potentially serving as a basis for a graduate course or seminar. An excellent glossary of notation, comprehensive bibliography and extensive index round out this new edition. The techniques developed here play an essential role in the development of the Langlands program and can be successfully applied to representation theory, quantum groups and quantum field theory, affine Lie algebras, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics.
Birkhäuser Boston 2007-05 680 pages