"Verse is born free but everywhere in chains. It has been my project to rattle the chains." (from "The Revenge of the Poet-Critic") In My Way, (in)famous language poet and critic Charles Bernstein deploys a wide variety of interlinked forms—speeches and poems, interviews and essays—to explore the place of poetry in American culture and in the university. Sometimes comic, sometimes dark, Bernstein's writing is irreverent but always relevant, "not structurally challenged, but structurally challenging." Addressing many interrelated issues, Bernstein moves from the role of the public intellectual to the poetics of scholarly prose, from vernacular modernism to idiosyncratic postmodernism, from identity politics to the resurgence of the aesthetic, from cultural studies to poetry as a performance art, from the small press movement to the Web. Along the way he provides "close listening" to such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Laura Riding, Susan Howe, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Gertrude Stein, as well as a fresh perspective on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine he coedited that became a fulcrum for a new wave of North American writing. In his passionate defense of an activist, innovative poetry, Bernstein never departs from the culturally engaged, linguistically complex, yet often very funny writing that has characterized his unique approach to poetry for over twenty years. Offering some of his most daring work yet—essays in poetic lines, prose with poetic motifs, interviews miming speech, speeches veering into song—Charles Bernstein's My Way illuminates the newest developments in contemporary poetry with its own contributions to them. "The result of [Bernstein's] provocative groping is more stimulating than many books of either poetry or criticism have been in recent years."—Molly McQuade, Washington Post Book World "This book, for all of its centrifugal activity, is a singular yet globally relevant perspective on the literary arts and their institutions, offered in good faith, yet cranky and poignant enough to not be easily ignored."— Publishers Weekly "Bernstein has emerged as postmodern poetry's sous -chef of insouciance. My Way is another of his rich concoctions, fortified with intellect and seasoned with laughter."—Timothy Gray, American Literature

A big night out can be graduation, a prom, a family wedding, confirmation, or Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Whatever the occasion, it is a time when every young person wants to look her (or his) best. This is the book that has it all – tips on planning for the big day, a countdown for getting ready, how to look great in photos, a common-sense guide to party manners, and sound advice about making sure the evening is safe as well as fun. It provides a get-ready plan, the scoop on the comfortable versus excruciating shoe debate, what to do if a zipper breaks, and of course how to accept a compliment gracefully. Jeanne Beker, the mother of two teenage girls and fashion guru extraordinaire, writes wisely and sensitively, affirming that realities like a budget or non-model looks are no barrier to feeling and looking good. You’re on a budget? Scour vintage stores or your favorite aunt’s closet. You don’t look like a model? Take pleasure in finding your own style. From the big question of what to wear to the essential question of how to get home safely, this is a book that’s sure to make a big night out a treasured memory.

Provides suggestions for meaningful mitzvah projects to complement a bar or bat mitzvah celebration, focusing on creative and compassionate projects, and includes information on the importance of mitzvah in a Jewish teen's life.

The books in this series help students aged 12 and over understand the present political, social and economic situation in the Middle East, by exploring modern historical events in the region. This book examines why hoped-for economic, social and political reforms did not materialize after the 1991 Gulf War.

This book discusses the interaction between history, rabbinic literature and feminist studies. Recent approaches to rabbinic literature have overturned the traditional view of these writings and new literary methods were suggested, mostly denying them all historical value. But rabbinic literature constitutes the main source for the lives of Jews in Palestine and Babylonia during the late Roman period, and thus should not be totally rejected. This study suggests a new post-literary approach, i.e. it discusses the residue of the texts after these have been analyzed and dissected by literary critics. But mainly this is a book about women's history, adopting many assumptions of feminist criticism about the androcentric nature of all ancient texts, and approaches them with due suspicion. The Rabbis treated women differently from the way they treated men. This resulted in the former's marginalization and manipulation by the texts. On the other hand, however, it created an ironic situation whereby principles useful for the recovery of historical information on women, are useless when applied to men. This study describes such principles and demonstrates them with the help of many examples.

"Roston offers detailed and essentially new analyses of works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne, arguing that the seemingly contradictory presence of traditional and subversive elements in their major works actually creates the source of much of their literary achievement"--Provided by publisher.

Roston demonstrates that what emerges is not a fixed or monolithic pattern for each generation but a dynamic series of responses to shared challenges. The book relates leading English writers and literary modes to contemporary developments in architecture, painting, and sculpture, exploring by a close reading of the texts and the artistic works the insights such comparison offers.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

American Guy examines American norms of masculinity and their role in the law, bringing a range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives to the intersection of American gender, legal, and literary issues. The collection opens with a set of papers investigating "American Guys"--The heroic nonconformists and rugged individualists that populate much of American fiction. Diverse essays examine the manly men of Hemingway, Dreiser, and others, in their relation to the law, while also highlighting the underlying tensions that complicate this version of masculinity. A second set of papers examines "Outsiders"--men on the periphery of the American Guys who proclaim a different way of being male. These essays take up counter-traditions of masculinity ranging from gay male culture to Philip Roth's portrait of the Jewish lawyer. American Guy, a follow-up to Subversion and Sympathy, edited by Alison L. LaCroix and Martha C. Nussbaum, aims at reinvigorating the law-and-literature movement through original, cross-disciplinary insights. It embraces a variety of voices from both within and outside the academy, including several contributions from prominent judges. These contributions are particularly significant, not only as features unique to the field, but also for the light they throw on the federal bench. In the face of a large body of work studying judicial conduct as a function of rigid commitment to ideology, American Guy shows a side of the judiciary that is imaginatively engaged, aware of cultural trends, and reflective about the wider world and the role of the law in it. -- from dust jacket

Here is a sustained criticism of the "rather facile use" of rabbinic literature by New Testament scholarship. In particular, Neusner addresses the writings of Helmut Koester, Samuel Sandmel, Reginald Fuller, Harvey Falk, Geza Vermes, E.P. Sanders, S.J.D. Cohen, Morton Smith, John P. Meier, and Brad H. Young. The book begins with a study of the characteristics of rabbinic literature and a demonstration of why this literature cannot be easily used for the kind of history New Testament scholarship proposes to produce. Then follow critiques of the writings by various New Testament scholars and the differences between Professor Neusner and his critics. A concluding section pays tribute to the New Testament field for all it has taught the author.

Originally published in 1927, this text contains a translation of Adolf Erman's work into English. Erman's original intention was to bring the songs, stories and poems that have survived from ancient Egypt to the masses of the modern world. The literature of the Egyptian world provides a real insight into the day-to-day life of one of the oldest societies known to man and this translation ensures that these insights are afforded to an English audience. This title will be of interest to students of History, Classics and Literature.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

In Prayer and Laughter: The Religion and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia and Beyond is the culmination of a lifelong study of the Middle Ages by Anatoly Liberman, an internationally acclaimed medievalist and linguist. It contains an introduction, 21 chapters of different length, a bibliography, and indexes. The book opens with a bird's-eye view of the state of comparative mythology and proceeds with an analysis of the most important questions confronting a student of Germanic and Scandinavian religion. In his exposition, be it the characters of the Scandinavian gods, the creatures of lower mythology (such as dwarfs, trolls, and all kinds of devils), the nature of ancient rituals (such as initiation), shamanism, the origin of the runic alphabet, or the function of mythic animals, Liberman combines attention to detail with a broad view of the medieval world. His keen interest in the large picture is noticeable at every step, and he never loses sight of the methodological aspects the humanities pose (the use of structuralism beyond linguistics, among others), the idiosyncrasies of "the medieval mind," and the limits of reconstruction.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. 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 the original work.

Many cultures have myths about self-imitation, stories about people who pretend to be someone else pretending to be them, in effect masquerading as themselves. This great theme, in literature and in life, tells us that people put on masks to discover who they really are under the masks they usually wear, so that the mask reveals rather than conceals the self beneath the self.In this book, noted scholar of Hinduism and mythology Wendy Doniger offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation, whose widespread occurrence argues for both its literary power and its human value. The stories she considers range from ancient Indian literature through medieval European courtly literature and Shakespeare to Hollywood and Bollywood. They illuminate a basic human way of negotiating reality, illusion, identity, and authenticity, not to mention memory, amnesia, and the process of aging. Many of them involve marriage and adultery, for tales of sexual betrayal cut to the heart of the crisis of identity.These stories are extreme examples of what we common folk do, unconsciously, every day. Few of us actually put on masks that replicate our faces, but it is not uncommon for us to become travesties of ourselves, particularly as we age and change. We often slip carelessly across the permeable boundary between the un-self-conscious self-indulgence of our most idiosyncratic mannerisms and the conscious attempt to give the people who know us, personally or publicly, the version of ourselves that they expect. Myths of self-imitation open up for us the possibility of multiple selves and the infinite regress of self-discovery.Drawing on a dizzying array of tales-some fact, some fiction-The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was is a fascinating and learned trip through centuries of culture, guided by a scholar of incomparable wit and erudition.

Based on an intensive study of the original German text of Freud's writings, letters and journals, S. S. Prawer's new book is the first to make a full and systematic map of Freud's use of English literature. The great psychoanalyst has long been acclaimed as a polymath, as a practical doctor who was also a theoretician, as a writer of non-fiction which was also a counterpoint to the great novels of the early twentieth century, and as an essayist who, like Montaigne, absorbed all of the cultural world around him. Freud was fascinated by writings from many nations and languages, and his use of English shows the great range of his reading: from Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw, Henry Fielding to George Eliot, Mark Twain to Thornton Wilder; from scientific works by Maxwell and Darwin to the economics of Adam Smith, Malthus and Keynes, and from psychology and anthropology to the origins of religion. Though Freud's genius was unique, his sense of being a citizen of a world far wider than Vienna was not, and it can tell us much about the exchange of ideas across national and linguistic frontiers. Though he was a reader par excellence, he was also a case study in how world literature can be used by men and women who are not professional literary scholars or critics -- and of how much it can come to mean to them, and for their sense of who they are.

That rarest of things, a children's book for "children" of all ages.... In this picaresque and highly entertaining novel, Leutenlieb, a.k.a. Baron Munchausen (great-great-great grandson of his celebrated ancestor), takes us on a roller-coaster ride through the history of the Twentieth Century, introducing us along the way to a galaxy of iconic figures - from Hitler to Hemingway, from Al Capone to Greta Garbo - while describing how, with breath-taking imagination, brilliant ingenuity and technological expertise of staggering proportions (not to mention legendary modesty!) he succeeds in solving all the problems with which he is faced. The darker side is there too - two world wars, Nazi extermination camps and Soviet labour camps - but through it all our protagonist maintains his optimism, his integrity, his belief in the power of the indomitable human spirit, and his sense of humour. The full tragi-comedy of life is there. Shlomo Kalo, a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature and a story teller of international renown brings us a book of refreshing insights and ingenious humor that younger readers can enjoy too. Scroll up and grab your copy today!

As Library Journal notes: This massive anthology celebrates the 3000-year anniversary of the founding of the city of Jerusalem. It describes, from a Jewish perspective, the history and sociology of the city. Lavishly illustrated, the volume contains biblical quotations, rabbinic literature, travel writings, poems, songs, and fiction excerpts, the majority dating from the last 100 years. The living city amid a world of war is a theme present throughout. In the excerpts by S.Y. Agnon and Amos Oz, we are brought close to the modern dilemma and the eternal. This anthology shows and tells us how Jerusalem has lived in the hearts of the Jewish people.