Robin Lakoff gets to the heart of one of the most fascinating and pressing issues in American society today: who holds power and how they use it, keep it, or lose it. In a brilliant and vastly entertaining discussion of news events that have occupied an enormous amount of media space--political correctness, the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, Hillary Rodham Clinton as First Lady, O. J. Simpson's murder trial, the Ebonics controversy, and the Clinton sex scandal--Lakoff shows that the struggle for power and status at the end of the century is being played out as a war over language. Controlling language is a basis for all power, she says, and therefore it is worth fighting for. As a result, newly emergent groups, especially blacks and women, are contending with middle- to upper-class white men for a share in "language rights." Lakoff's introduction to linguistic theories and the philosophy of language lays the groundwork for an exploration of news stories that meet what she calls the UAT (Undue Attention Test). As the stories became the subject of talk-show debates, late-night comedy routines, Web sites, and magazine articles, they were embroidered with additional meanings, depending on who was telling the story. Race, gender, or both are at the heart of these stories, and each one is about the right to construct meanings from languagein short, to possess power. Because language tells us how we are connected to one another, who has power and who does not, the stories reflect the language war. We use language to analyze what we call "reality," the author argues, but we mistrust how language is used today--witness the "politics of personal destruction" following the Clinton impeachment. Yet Lakoff sees in the struggle over language a positive goal: equality in the creation of our national discourse. Her writing is accessible and witty, and her excerpts from the media are used to great effect.

"Between 1978 and 1979, Jacques Derrida delivered a seminar on the themes of "the gift" and "time" titled "Donner-le temps." The first part of that seminar was published in 1991. Given Time II is an archival discovery of the second installment that was promised but never came to fruition during Derrida's lifetime. The eight seminar sessions collected here represent Derrida's most advanced work on the problematic of the gift in Heidegger's thought, with deep dives into some of the richest and most difficult texts in the Heideggerian corpus, such as the essays "The Origin of the Work of Art," "The Thing," and "On Time and Being." Beyond Heidegger, Derrida skillfully engages Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and others on the topic of the gift. The themes discussed include the act of giving and receiving gifts, the necessary link between time and the gift, being as some "thing" given that exceeds things and beings as such, the sacrificial gift, and others. Through these analyses, Derrida begins to identify the paradox of gift giving: For the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since its mere appearance as gift puts it in the cycle of repayment and debt. Given Time II is a remarkable and uniquely Derridean treatment of an important subject in the work of Heidegger and beyond"-- Provided by publisher.

From the Preface: "The essays in Feminist Art Criticism are theoretical, and we selected them for several reasons. First, they show a diversity of concerns. These include spirituality, sexuality, the representation of women in art, the necessary inter-relationship of theory and action, women as artmakers, ethnicity, language itself, so-called postfeminism and critiques of hte art world, the discipline of art history and the practice of art criticism. Second, the contributors' work has not been either widely disseminated or readily available. Third, the essays, especially arranged as they are (chronologically), demonstrate a continuous feminist discourse in art from the early 1970s through the present, a discourse that is neither monolithic nor intellectually trendy but that rather exhibits many elements, the polemical, Marxist, lyrical, and poststructuralist being only a few.

Leo Stein (1872-1947) was an influential art collector and critic. It has been Stein's ironic fate to be referred to as "Gertrude's brother," ironic as for many years he was her mentor and counsellor. Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose is a model of lucidity, wisdom and classical simplicity. It ranges over a wide field of thought and criticism. Leo Stein's judgements on art and literature are crisp, perceptive and original. His approach to his subject is casual, anecdotal and, though often sharp and biting, finally mellow. Reading this book is like that rare experience of listening, enchanted, for an evening to a great conversationalist, a man informed and urbane, witty and wise.

In this book gender is the lens through which autobiography and biography are scrutinized. The authors show what is revealed when they magnify the gendered aspects of both men’s and women’s writing. The eternal questions of identity, choice, responsibility, happiness, tragedy, and even death are interpreted in terms of gender analysis. The book presents a sequence of studies from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century that includes individuals such as American poet Anne Sexton and German writers Christa Wolf and Paul Celan, and groups such as nineteenth-century Mexican women and members of the British working class. It extends the paradigm of “self-reflexive” literature to include and highlight the overlap between autobiography and biography, especially in the case of women who often wrote their lives obliquely through the biographies of their famous male relatives, e. g., Adèle Hugo and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. The authors refuse to accept a monolithic conception of gender. The studies of Charles and Mary Lamb, Nadezhda Durova, and John Stuart Mill demonstrate that even in the nineteenth century, a binary gender system is inadequate as a mode of approach to actual life stories.

Covering every aspect of the genre, this book presents more than 400 of the best, most original, historically significant and even worst works of horror from film and literature.

Symposium of the Whole traces a discourse on poetry and culture that has profoundly influenced the art of our time, with precedents going back two centuries and more. Beginning with a reassertion of the complexity of poetry among peoples long labeled “primitive” and “savage,” many recent poets have sought to base a new poetics over the fullest range of human cultures. The attempt to define an ethnopoetics has been significantly connected with the most experimental and future-directed side of Romantic and modern poetry, both in the Western world and, increasingly, outside it. As a visionary poetics and as a politics, this complex redefinition of cultural and intellectual values has involved a rarely acknowledged collaboration between poets and scholars, who together have challenged the narrow view of literature that has excluded so many traditions. In this gathering, the Rothenbergs follow the idea of an ethnopoetics from predecessors such as Vico, Blake, Thoreau, and Tzara to more recent essays and manifestos by poets and social thinkers such as Olson, Eliade, Snyder, Turner, and Baraka. The themes range widely, from the divergence of oral and written cultures to the shaman as proto-poet and the reemergence of suppressed and rejected forms and images: the goddess, the trickster, and the “human universe.” The book’s three ethnographic sections demonstrate how various poetries are structured and composed, how they reflect meaning and worldview, and how they are performed in cultures where all art may be thought of as art-in-motion. Among the poetries discussed are the language of magic; West African drum language and poetry; the Huichol Indian language of reversals; chance operations in African divination poetry; picture-writings and action-writings from Australia and Africa; and American Indian sacred-clown dramas and traditional trickster narratives. The cumulative effect is a new reading of the poetic past and present—in the editors’ words, “a changed paradigm of what poetry was or now could come to be.”

The Simone Weil Reader [hardcover] Simone Weil,George A. Panichas [Jan 01, 1977] …

Paul Cantor provides a new and clearly structured introduction to Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. Hamlet's status as tragic hero and the central enigma of the delayed revenge are seen in the light of the play's historical place in the Renaissance at the crossroads of the Christian and the classical traditions. The dramatic and poetic techniques used in the play are discussed, and a final chapter deals with the uniquely varied reception of Hamlet on the stage and in literature generally, from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Discusses the influence of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot, looks at Imagism, and includes profiles of others who shaped the Modernist movement

Doctors becoming ill, the shortcomings of opera, phoning Larkin from America, the peer with the Harold Wilson pin-up, the etiquette of poetry readings, this is Abse on the human race and, as his grandson corrects him, the egg-and-spoon race of life too. Witty, pointed, tender, gently self-mocking, Intermittent Journals is a stimulating, sometimes argumentative set of contemplations provoking both outright laughter and pause for serious thought.

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The Century of Artists' Books is the first full-length study of the development of artists' books as a twentieth century art-form. This work situates artists' books within the context of mainstream developments in the visual arts from Russian Futurism and Surrealism to Fluxus, Conceptual Art, to Postmodernism. Designed to raise critical and theoretical issues as well as provide a historical overview, this book explores more than two hundred individual books in relation to their structure, form, and conceptualization. Topics include the discussion of the poetics of the book, the book as a metaphor, the conceptual space of the book, and books as narrative and non-narrative sequences. Each chapter uses these specific issues to examine the works of well-known book artists and publishers. The book provides a foundation for future work in the history and critical interpretation of artists' books, as well as offering a structure for teaching artists' books to practitioners, collectors, and curators.

"A rich collection that I will use in teaching graduates and undergraduates about the weave of ethnography, narrative, the women's movement, and feminism. Crafted by an impressive range of scholars, the essays are empirically rich and theoretically cogent. But most important, they engage the complexities of multicultural, feminist, and multinational ethnographies and the stories that matter to politics, scholarship, and lives. With an ear for the tones of race and gender, this book answers the political, generic, and theoretical challenge of Writing Culture with layered essays that rewrite an important range of cultural conversations."—Donna Haraway, author of Professor , History of Consciousness Board, UCSC "Since the advent of the 'post-modern' in ethnography, we have been much in need of a marvelous volume such as this, placing 'woman' at the center of the debate. Women Writing Culture will prove as stimulating for our time as its great predecessor, Women, Culture and Society was for the 1970s."—Jose E. Limon, University of Texas "A groundbreaking book—provocative, illuminating, imaginative—and it is a pleasure to read. A trenchant yet always generous feminist critique of the masculinist bias in the theoretical canon of anthropological texts, it expansively and imaginatively maps the future directions of a feminist anthropology. In moving and courageous acts of reconstruction, the writers in this volume boldly cross disciplinary and generic lines, reading fiction as anthropology, writing theater as ethnography, getting personal, radically reconceiving the relationship of self and other and, thereby, the field itself. Feminist scholars of all disciplines will find here enabling textual and conceptual strategies as well as memorable voices and powerful stories."—Marianne Hirsch, Dartmouth College, author of The Mother-Daughter Plot

Provocative essays from one of America's most important cultural critics Think Again gathers one hundred of the best of Stanley Fish's provocative New York Times essays, pieces that have generated passionate discussion and debate. Addressing controversies about such hot-button topics as atheism, affirmative action, free speech, identity politics, guns, and postmodernism, Fish dissects the arguments put forth by different sides in order to explain how their arguments work or don't work. Brief and accessible yet challenging, these essays teach you not what to think but how to think more clearly, and provide all the powerful intellectual, cultural, and political analysis one expects from Fish, one of America's most influential thinkers.

Over the last two decades a major revaluation has been taking place of the colonial Puritan imagination. With the growth of interest in early American literature has come increasing recognition of its quality and a better understanding of its place in the continuity of American culture. However, much of the best critical work to date has been published as articles in scholarly journals, and in bringing together for the first time the best work in this growing field the present anthology fills a number of important needs. It is at once a valuabale and accessible introduction for students, a summing-up of a new enterprise, and a guide for further studies.

In this book, Barney explores her family tree, chronicles her friendships and associations through reprinted correspondence and recreated conversations, and evokes the golden age of her salon in gallery of literary portraits.

Text: English, Yiddish

The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx by Mikhail Lifshitz is a comprehensive study of the Marxist theory of art. The book explores the relationship between art and society, and how art reflects the political and economic structures of society. Lifshitz examines the Marxist perspective on the role of art in the revolution and the struggle for social change. He also delves into the Marxist critique of bourgeois art and the concept of alienation in art. The book includes a detailed analysis of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on art, as well as the works of other Marxist theorists such as Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci. The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx is a thought-provoking and insightful exploration of the Marxist perspective on art, and its relevance in the contemporary world.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.