We've all asked, "What is the world coming to?" But we seldom ask, "How bad was the world in the past?" Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the past was much worse. Evidence of a bloody history has always been around us: genocides in the Old Testament, gory mutilations in Shakespeare and Grimm, monarchs who beheaded their relatives, and American founders who dueled with their rivals. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were common features of life for millennia, then were suddenly abolished. How could this have happened, if human nature has not changed? Pinker argues that thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence.

Exploring the startling history of the heterosexual concept, Jonathan Ned Katz reveals that as late as the 1920s, heterosexuality was still defined in a major American dictionary as "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex." It was only through a slow process that heterosexuality became this society's dominant norm. Analyzing the work of such pioneering students of sexuality as Sigmund Freud and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Katz considers the effects of their ideas about the sacred primacy of heterosexuality on both scientific literature and popular culture. He also examines the varied commentaries on heterosexuality by such contemporary writers as James Baldwin, Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich, Kate Millett, and Michel Foucault.

This reinterpretation of the full sweep of English and American romantic poetry offers close readings of poems of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Yeats, and Stevens. It also reviews the crucial ideas of Emerson, Nietzsche, and in particular Freud, whose psychoanalytic theory of repression and defense Bloom undertakes to revise for purposes of literary criticism. "Bloom offers a fully defined alternative to the principal modes of contemporary criticism, from Freudian literary criticism (which he insists is neither Freudian nor literary criticism) to the New Criticism and structuralist and archetypal approaches. It is an original, vigorous, and passionate study which is both compelling and provocative."-The British Studies Monitor "Show me but one paragraph of Bloom's approaches to texts, and I'm hooked. . . . I find sheer delight in his ingenious ways."-Kenneth Burke "Bloom has made a remarkable contribution to poetic theory."-Phoebe Pettingell, The New Leader

Over the course of a monumental career, Claude Lévi-Strauss has interwoven artistic materials and themes into his seminal analyses of the “savage mind.” Now the world's most famous anthropologist turns his attention entirely to the domain of aesthetics. In a series of brilliant but meticulous studies, he ranges widely across the domains of painting, music, literature and the plastic arts, his fertile mind opening more general, philosophical perspectives. Look, Listen, Read begins with an analysis of Nicolas Poussin's method of visual composition, and after drawing a surprising parallel with Marcel Proust, moves into a fascinating discussion, joined by Ingres and Delacroix among others, on the art of painting. Next the author turns to music, taking his inspiration from an inquiry into certain chord modulations in Rameau's opera Castor et Pollux, which at the time of its composition were considered a musical breakthrough. The book then considers the nature of the “beautiful.” The reference point here remains the French Enlightenment, and in particular Diderot's reflections on painting. Focusing on the aesthetic controversies of this same period, but with regard to music, a fascinating series of chapters revives the work of the largely forgotten eighteenth-century musicologist Michel-Paul-Guy de Chabanon and his surprisingly contemporary discussion of music's partial resemblance to language. This leads to a consideration of the relations of words to music in opera, where Lévi-Strauss reveals something of his own tastes in music while engaging in a critical review of a work by his recently deceased friend and colleague, Michel Leires. The relation between sounds and colors is considered next, largely through a breathtaking examination of a famous but difficult poem by Arthur Rimbaud. There follows an exchange of notes with André Breton, written some fifty years ago, on the nature of the work of art. In the book's concluding chapters the author dons the more familiar mantle of the anthropologist, and by looking at the myths of the American Indians, offering an analysis of their understanding of the place of art and of the artist in their own societies. Look, Listen, Read is a truly original work, far removed from the intellectual fads that mark contemporary discussions on aesthetics, as Lévi-Strauss advances into new territory even as he remains faithful to his structuralist inspiration. The book weaves a dense tissue of connections, correspondences, and principles, while at the same time remaining sensitive to the specificities of each of the beaux-arts. In a valedictory statement capping a lifetime's work, Lévi-Strauss has made a major new contribution to our understanding of the place of art in human life, the nature of its appeal, the source of its creativity, and its universality.

Discusses Jewish identity in America as reflected in the culture of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Self-hatred or, at least, ambivalence about oneself in the face of native American values is one theme. Ch. 5 (pp. 98-125), "To Make 'a Jew': Projecting Antisemitism in Post-War America", analyzes two novels - Arthur Miller's "Focus" and Saul Bellow's "The Victim" - that explore the psychosocial dimensions of postwar antisemitism. They raise the question whether possibilities of Jewish-Gentile relations might lead to personal and social renovation. In "Focus", a crypto-fascist antisemite who has internalized racist stereotypes finally identifies symbolically as a Jew. In "The Victim", both Jew and Gentile partially overcome their mutual stereotyping. The main Jewish protagonist also overcomes some negative aspects of his self-image.

Gornick on V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth and the intimate relationship between emotional damage and great literature. Vivian Gornick, one of our finest critics, tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love , a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In this new collection, she turns her attention to another large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Great literature, she believes, is not the record of the achievement, but of the effort. Gornick, who emerged as a major writer during the second-wave feminist movement, came to realize that “ideology alone could not purge one of the pathological self-doubt that seemed every woman's bitter birthright.” Or, as Anton Chekhov put it so memorably: “Others made me a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.” Perhaps surprisingly, Gornick found particular inspiration for this challenge in the work of male writers—talented, but locked in perpetual rage, self-doubt, or social exile. From these men—who had infinitely more permission to do and be than women had ever known—she learned what it really meant to wrestle with demons. In the essays collected here, she explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Throughout the book, Gornick is at her best: interpreting the intimate interrelationship of emotional damage, social history, and great literature.

As Karen Malpede points out in her introduction to Acts of War, tragedy "arose as a complement to, perhaps also as an antidote to, war." The greatest of the early playwrights wrote from experience—Aeschylus and Sophocles were generals in the Athenian army, and Euripides was a combat veteran. Electronic media reports war instantly, but the stage provides an unrivaled venue for facing the horror of armed conflict on a human scale.This timely anthology of plays by American and British writers bears witness to the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for combatants and civilians alike and asks what it means to be a citizen in a democracy at war. From violence on the battlefield and in the cells of Guantanamo to the toll exacted on the homefront, the seven plays collected by Malpede, Messina, and Shuman explore in depth the costs of war. Sometimes with humor or erotic charge, always with compassion and surprising insight, these contemporary plays return to the theater a necessary social edge.Karen Malpede’s introduction sets the plays in the broader contexts of theater’s roots and recent history, while award-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges provides a foreword.