G - Don't like to read philosophy? Shucks....just look at the pictures! I bought this book in college, just for a quick overview and darned if I didn't end up keeping it forever.

Like his compositions, Milton Babbitt's writings about music have exerted an extraordinary influence on postwar music and thinking about music. In essays and public addresses spanning fifty years, Babbitt has grappled profoundly with central questions in the composition and apprehension of music. These writings range from personal memoirs and critical reviews to closely reasoned metatheoretical speculations and technical exegesis. In the history of music theory, there has been only a small handful of figures who have produced work of comparable stature. Taken as a whole, Babbitt's writings are not only an invaluable testimony to his thinking--a priceless primary source for the intellectual and cultural history of the second half of the twentieth century--but also a remarkable achievement in their own right. Prior to this collection, Babbitt's writings were scattered through a wide variety of journals, books, and magazines--many hard to find and some unavailable--and often contained typographical errors and editorial corruptions of various kinds. This volume of almost fifty pieces gathers, corrects, and annotates virtually everything of significance that Babbitt has written. The result is complete, authoritative, and fully accessible--the definitive source of Babbitt's influential ideas.

Professor Postan's work on the social and economic history of the Middle Ages has had an enormous influence upon the study of the subject. His essays represent his major contribution and are an invaluable addition to the literature. Twenty-two essays are gathered together into two volumes. Previously published elsewhere, many in obscure places, over a period from 1928 to 1972, they are still greatly used and referred to today; their appearance in this more accessible form will be warmly welcomed by a wide range of students and scholars in all branches of medieval and economic history as well as by social scientists and economists generally. This volume contains such seminal pieces as The economic foundations of medieval society, The rise of a money economy, The chronology of labour services and The charters of the villeins.

"All is true," realist writers would say of their work, to which critics now respond: All is art and artifice. Offering a new approach to reading nineteenth-century realist fiction, Lilian R. Furst seeks to reconcile these contradictory claims. In doing so, she clarifies the deceptions, appropriations, intentions, and ultimately the power of literary realism.In close textual analyses of works ranging across European and American literature, including paradigmatic texts by Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Thomas Mann, Furst shows how the handling of time, the presentation of place, and certain narrational strategies have served the realists’ claim. She demonstrates how readers today, like those a hundred years ago, are convinced of the authenticity of the created illusion by such means as framing, voice, perspective, and the slippage from metonymy to metaphor. Further, Furst reveals the pains the realists took to conceal these devices, and thus to protect their claim to be employing a simple form. Taking into account both the claims and the covert strategies of these writers, All Is True puts forward an alternative to the conventional polarized reading of the realist text—which emerges here as neither strictly an imitation of an extraneous model nor simply a web of words but a brilliantly complex imbrication of the two.A major statement on one of the most enduring forms in cultural history, this book promises to alter not only our view of realist fiction but our understanding of how we read it.

In this eloquent and thought-provoking "autohistory," John Lukacs, distinguished historian and writer, describes the history of his own convictions and beliefs. The journey takes us from the Hungary of the 1930s and the ravaged Budapest of World War II to Lukacs’s discovery of the New World, his forays into the intellectual life of New York City, and finally his settling in Philadelphia. Along the way, Lukacs examines many of the major currents of our period, including fascism, communism, democracy, anti-Semitism, and the Christian realism from which springs the book’s title. What emerges is a mind that brings to bear on the conflicts of the twentieth century the erudition of the European heritage and the independence of the American. In prose as elegant as it is supple, Confessions of an Original Sinner is at once the vivid account of one man’s voyage and an important contribution to that small library that brings into sharp focus the major intellectual developments of our time.

The publication of Jacqueline de Romilly's Histoire et raison chez Thucydide in 1956 virtually transformed scholarship on Thucydides. Rather than mining The Peloponnesian War to speculate on its layers of composition or second-guess its accuracy, it treated it as a work of art deserving rhetorical and aesthetic analysis. Ahead of its time in its sophisticated focus upon the verbal texture of narrative, it proved that a literary approach offered the most productive and nuanced way to study Thucydides. Still in print in the original French, the book has influenced numerous Classicists and historians, and is now available in English for the first time in a careful translation by Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings. The Cornell edition includes an introduction by Hunter R. Rawlings III and Jeffrey Rusten tracing the context of this book's original publication and its continuing influence on the study of Thucydides. Romilly shows that Thucydides constructs his account of the Peloponnesian War as a profoundly intellectual experience for readers who want to discern the patterns underlying historical events. Employing a commanding logic that exercises total control over the data of history, Thucydides uses rigorous principles of selection, suggestive juxtapositions, and artfully opposed speeches to reveal systematic relationships between plans and outcomes, impose meaning on the smallest events, and insist on the constant battle between intellect and chance. Thucydides' mind found in unity and coherence its ideal of historical truth.

This volume presents, for the first time in English, Husserl’s seminal 1923/24 lecture course First Philosophy ( Erste Philosophie ) together with a selection of material from the famous research manuscripts of the same time period. The lecture course is divided into two systematic, yet interrelated parts (“Critical History of Ideas” and “Theory of the Phenomenological Reduction”). It has long been recognized by scholars as among the most important of the many lecture courses he taught in his career. Indeed it was deemed as crucially important by Husserl himself, who composed it with a view toward eventual publication. It is unsurprising, then, that First Philosophy is the only lecture course that is consistently counted among his major works. In addition to furnishing valuable insights into Husserl’s understanding of the history of philosophy, First Philosophy is his most sustained treatment of the phenomenological reduction,the central concept of his philosophical methodology. The selection of supplemental texts expands on the topics treated in the lectures, but also add other themes from Husserl’s vast oeuvre. The manuscript material is especially worthwhile, because in it, Husserl offers candid self-criticisms of his publicly enunciated words, and also makes forays into areas of his philosophy that he was loath to publicize, lest his words be misunderstood. As Husserl’s position as a key contributor to contemporary thought has, with the passage of time, become increasingly clear, the demand for access to his writings in English has steadily grown. This translation strives to meet this demand by providing English-speaking readers access to this central Husserlian text. It will be of interest to scholars of Husserl’s work, non-specialists, and students of phenomenology.

Carl Kaysen offers a penetrating economic analysis of the issues in the civil antitrust suit brought by the United States Government against the United Shoe Machinery Corporation under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. Kaysen, who served as clerk to Judge Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr. of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts for this case, provides background material on the technique of shoe machinery and shoe manufacture, on the history of the United Shoe Machinery, and on the Anti-Trust Laws.

While the overall purpose of this respected text is to teach students to think and write critically about film, it does so by considering the role that the movie industry itself has had in forging the dominant conventions in film aesthetics.

This volume of essays brings together some of the best work by Americanists concerned with the problem of ideology and its bearing upon American literature and culture. It projects neither a particular ideological view nor a particular view of ideology. On the contrary: these essays highlight the many uses of ideology as a critical term, and, in doing so, they open fresh avenues of inquiry and forums for discussion. They also demonstrate that, far from being parochial or reductive, ideological analysis is integral to considerations of formal structure and crucial to an understanding of the relations between literature and culture. Their essays deal variously with theoretical issues, with questions of theme, genre, and perspective, and with interpretations of particular authors and texts. The editors of the volume provide a general introduction to the nature and development of ideological critique, and an afterword that discusses the coherence of the volume as a whole and its implications for further study.

In this book Robert Pinsky writes about contemporary poetry as it reflects its modernist and Romantic past. He isolates certain persistent ideas about poetry's situation relative to life and focuses on the conflict the poet faces between the nature of words and poetic forms on one side, and the nature of experience on the other. The author ranges for his often surprising examples from Keats to the great modernists such as Stevens and Williams, to the contents of recent magazines. He considers work by Ammons, Ashbery, Bogan, Ginsberg, Lowell, Merwin, O'Hara, and younger writers, offering judgments and enthusiasms from a viewpoint that is consistent but unstereotyped. Like his poetry, Robert Pinsky's criticism joins the traditional and the innovative in ways that are thoughtful and unmistakably his own. His book is a bold essay on the contemporary situation in poetry, on the dazzling achievements of modernism, and on the nature or "situation" of poetry itself.

The Danger of Music gathers some two decades of Richard Taruskin's writing on the arts and politics, ranging in approach from occasional pieces for major newspapers such as the New York Times to full-scale critical essays for leading intellectual journals. Hard-hitting, provocative, and incisive, these essays consider contemporary composition and performance, the role of critics and historians in the life of the arts, and the fraught terrain where ethics and aesthetics interact and at times conflict. Many of the works collected here have themselves excited wide debate, including the title essay, which considers the rights and obligations of artists in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a series of lively postscripts written especially for this volume, Taruskin, America's "public" musicologist, addresses the debates he has stirred up by insisting that art is not a utopian escape and that artists inhabit the same world as the rest of society. Among the book's forty-two essays are two public addresses—one about the prospects for classical music at the end of the second millennium C. E., the other a revisiting of the performance issues previously discussed in the author's Text and Act (1995)—that appear in print for the first time.

America's current transformation from an industrial to a new information-based culture presents new challenges as well as new perspectives on old debates. This book offers a comprehensive survey of America's changing values. It examines notions of American exceptionalism and how the 'melting pot' is coping with race relations and changing demographics; it assesses the agenda of government, the domestic and global constraints, and how social exclusion can be tackled. Current changes in the US are likely to be a harbinger for other societies, and the authors examine new models of civic society, of learning and of reconfiguring social values for a fast-changing world.

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest 20th-century writers. "You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich," writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery." Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: "Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder." And it is about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: "Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards . . . [where there] are still . . . defeats in which everything is lost [and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope." In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.