Selected interviews and essays of Marjorie Perloff, a well-known critic.

Selected essays from the eminent British historian ranging from his specialty of 18th century England as well as his comments on being an historian and reviews of books.

""Film in the Battle of Ideas"" is a book written by John Howard Lawson, a screenwriter and member of the Hollywood Ten who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. The book explores the role of film in shaping public opinion and political ideology, particularly in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Lawson argues that film is a powerful tool for propaganda and that Hollywood has the ability to shape public opinion and influence political discourse. He examines the ways in which films have been used to promote various political ideologies, including fascism, communism, and capitalism, and argues that filmmakers have a responsibility to use their medium for the greater good. The book also delves into the political and cultural climate of Hollywood during the time period, including the effects of the Hays Code and the Red Scare. Overall, ""Film in the Battle of Ideas"" is an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of the intersection between film and politics.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.

Laws, or Halakhah, and narratives, or Aggadah, comprise the Torah. Halakhah, normative law, makes the same statement in terms of behavior that Aggadah, in its systematic and abstract mode, makes in terms of beliefs. The Halakhic theology focuses on the interior existence of Israelite. In this sourcebook, author Jacob Neusner derives from details of legal expositions some of the Halakhah's theological propositions, in order to show how normative laws of conduct express the narrative monotheism of the Torah. An introductory overview of the Halakhic theological program, seen through topical expositions of law, briefly compares Halakhic texts with Aggadic theological programs.

"First published in 1987, and encompassing texts from almost four decades, Kleist, moss, pheasants brings together autobiographical pieces, diary entries and reflections on fellow authors by Ilse Aichinger. As Richard Reichensperger remarks, the volume demonstrates the complex interconnections between historical events and Aichinger's life, thought and writing. The style, tone, and force of Kleist, moss, pheasants foreshadow the major achievements of Aichinger's late productive period around the turn of the millennium, which are evidenced in Film and fate and Improbable journeys."--Back cover.

This is the third book of essays on the United States and the world economy produced by the fruitful collaboration of Monthly Review editors Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff. In these essays, written between 1977 and 1981, the authors assess the results of efforts taken to stabilize the economy after the epochal changes of the early 1970s, the end of capitalism's "golden age," by attempts to counteract the effects of inflation, debt dependence, speculation, and financial instability.

Arguing that all human beings are incorrigibly autobiographical and that the most common mode of autobiography is oral and partial, this book maps out the diversity of autobiographical practices and seeks to introduce them to teachers and educators.

Do Old Testament poetry and narrative, wisdom-writing and prophecy work on us in the same way as do nonbiblical literary texts? Competent readers over the centuries have arrived at conflicting answers to this question. Some (from Longinus on) have maintained that biblical books offer examples of supreme literary art; others have passionately rejected this approach, insisting that beauty and pleasure are not the Bible's business. Poetry with a Purpose argues that, paradoxically, both views are right. Biblical poetics is marked by an unusual tension between aesthetic and nonaesthetic (even anti-aesthetic) modes of discourse. To understand this dialectic is to understand something quite fundamental about biblical texts and, more particularly, about the nature of the contract that governs their reading. The text summons the reader to respond to a familiar form but at the same instant undermines that response, deconstructs that form. The book of Ester, for example, displays the conventions of the Persian epic tradition, but its style is subtly challenged by the text itself. Similarly, the book of Job might seem to conform to the classical concept of tragedy but ultimately presents a uniquely biblical version of the form. While the prophets use the language of myth, they will often explode or "demythologize" their own language, affirming purposed at variance with the world of myth. Harold Fisch applies his remarkably fruitful thesis to a number of biblical texts and modes, among them biblical pastoral, the Song of Songs, Psalms, Hosea, and Ecclesiastes. Equally at home in biblical studies and in general literature and theory, the author has produced a highly original work of unusual range and scholarship.

How should religions disagree with one another today? How might they properly engage in dialogue concerning theory central beliefs when these radically contradict concerning the faith of others? In this book for the first time in Jewish-Christian discussions, a Jewish theologian investigates contemporary Christian doctrines of the Christ and responds to them out of his faith in God's continuing covenant with the people of Israel. Under the guidance of Christian colleagues, he responds to a wide range of Christological theory - Catholic and Protestant, liberal, neo-orthodox, evangelical and post-liberal - and probes the meaning of the Christ not only for the salvation of individual Christians but for their ethics and relations to society as well. In this unique perspective, Judaism Christianity both emerge in a new light. By pointing out the often subtle agreement of the faiths exile not flinching from a direct confrontation with matters in dispute, the unique characteristics of each religion are laid bare. And in carrying out this new form of definition by negation, the logic of inter-religious disagreement is worked out.

Dan Miron's erudite and rich essay chronicles and analyzes the rise and fall of the prophetic poem in modern Hebrew literature. While focusing on H. N. Bialik's contribution to the rise and decline of the prophetic poem, Miron analyzes the historical, literary, and artistic factors influencing the fate of the prophetic poem from its ascendancy during the period of Hebrew Romanticism of the late 1890s and early 1900s to its decline in the post-World War I era and its eventual demise with the rise of the new poetics and the establishment of the State of Israel. In addition to Bialik, Miron discusses the works of Avraham Mapu, M.L. Lilienblum, Issac Irter, Shaul Tchernikhovsky, A. Shlonsky, U. Z. Greenberg, Yonatan Ratosh, Haim Gouri, and Amir Gilboa, among others.

A collection of writing from the world's leading authority on jazz and popular song, including previously unpublished work. The world's leading authority on jazz and popular song, Benny Green was a prolific writer whose material spanned every aspect of the musical arts. As an insider who knew and worked with most of his subjects, Benny wrote from a matchless personal perspective. Now, for the first time, previously unpublished writing joins sleevenotes and live reviews, books and obituaries in a unique collection put together by his son, Dominic, following Benny Green's death in 1998. Included in SUCH SWEET THUNDER are discussions on the great songwriters and leading jazz singers; the role of jazz in musicals; the leading jazz musicians. From Ella Fitzgerald to Frank Sinatra, Irving Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein, SUCH SWEET THUNDER is essential reading for all music fans.

For the better part of its history sociology shared with commonsense its assumption of the 'nature-like' character of society - and consequently developed as the science of unfreedom. In this powerful and engaging work, first published in 1976, Professor Bauman outlines the historical roots of such a science and describes how the new trends in sociology emerging from phenomenology and existentialism do not challenge this preoccupation. Rather, he claims, they deepen and extend it by stressing the key role of commonsense, particularly the ways in which it is sustained and embedded in the routines and assumptions of everyday life.

A noted poet and critic explores the idea of humiliations in history, literature, art, current events, music, film--and his own life.

Cinema is a sensuous object, but in our presence it becomes also a sensing, sensual, sense-making subject. Thus argues Vivian Sobchack as she challenges basic assumptions of current film theory that reduce film to an object of vision and the spectator to a victim of a deterministic cinematic apparatus. Maintaining that these premises ignore the material and cultural-historical situations of both the spectator and the film, the author makes the radical proposal that the cinematic experience depends on two "viewers" viewing: the spectator and the film, each existing as both subject and object of vision. Drawing on existential and semiotic phenomenology, and particularly on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack shows how the film experience provides empirical insight into the reversible, dialectical, and signifying nature of that embodied vision we each live daily as both "mine" and "another's." In this attempt to account for cinematic intelligibility and signification, the author explores the possibility of human choice and expressive freedom within the bounds of history and culture.

In recent times, ethnicity and issues of origin have become a hotly debated topic among Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora. This is particularly true both of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, who for years had remained at the margins of the Israeli national narrative, as well as the Israeli Palestinian minority. Much the same may be said of Diaspora Jews. Among the public spaces where ethnicity has become more visible are museums, together with heritage centres, art galleries, and the Internet. The aim of Memory and Ethnicity is to investigate how ethnicity is represented and narrated in such spaces. How have groups of Jews from such different backgrounds as Morocco, Egypt, India or the US elaborated their past legacies and traditions vis-a-vis a variety of national narratives and cultural or political ideologies? This volume describes the emergence of a new museological scene - that mirrors a multi-vocal Jewish and Israeli public sphere in which ethnicity has become central to a nation's cultural imagination. By considering museums as places of memory where an ethnic/communal identity is displayed, Memory and Ethnicity analyses which memories are preserved, and which suppressed. This study sets out to enrich the understanding of Israeli and Jewish cultural history, and also to deepen the field of museum studies from little investigated perspectives.