Author: C. P. Cavafy File Type: pdf a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe E. M. Forster E. M. Forsters description of C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) perfectly encapsulates the unique perspective Cavafy brought to bear on history and geography, sexuality and language in his poems. Cavafy writes about people on the periphery, whose religious, ethnic and cultural identities are blurred, and he was one of the pioneers in expressing a specifically homosexual sensibility. His poems present brief and vivid evocations of historical scenes and sensual moments, often infused with hisdistinctive sense of irony. They have established him as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. This volume presents the most authentic Greek text of the 154 authorized poems ever published, together with a new English translation that conveys the accent and rhythm of Cavafys individual tone of voice.**
Author: Benjamin Taylor
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Taylors endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Prousts imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book.Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzacs Omelette and Monsieur Prousts Library Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he becameagainst all expectationsone of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era. This insightful, beautifully written biography examines Prousts artistic strugglesthe search of the subtitleand stunning metamorphosis in the context of his times. Taylor provides an in-depth study of the authors life while exploring how Prousts personal correspondence and published works were greatly informed by his mothers Judaism, his homosexuality, and such dramatic events as the Dreyfus Affair and, above all, World War I. As Taylor writes in his prologue, Prousts Search is the most encyclopedic of novels, encompassing the essentials of human nature. . . . His account, running from the early years of the Third Republic to the aftermath of World War I, becomes the inclusive story of all lives, a colossal mimesis. To read the entire Search is to find oneself transfigured and victorious at journeys end, at home in time and in eternity too. **
Author: James Edward Burton
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The Philosophy of Science Fiction Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick explores the deep affinity between two seemingly quite different thinkers, in their attempts to address the need for salvation in (and from) an era of accelerated mechanization, in which humans capacity for destroying or subjugating the living has attained a planetary scale. The philosopher and the science fiction writer come together to meet the contradictory imperatives of a realist outlook-a task which, arguably, philosophy and science fiction could only ever adequately undertake in collaboration. Their respective approaches meet in a focus on the ambiguous status of fictionalizing, or fabulation, as simultaneously one of mechanizations most devastating tools, and the possibility of its undoing. When they are read together, the complexities and paradoxes thrown up by this ambiguity, with which both Bergson and Dick struggle on their own, open up new ways to navigate ideas of mechanism and mysticism, immanence and transcendence, and the possibility and meaning of salvation. The result is at once an original reading of both thinkers, a new critical theory of the sociocultural, political and ethical function of fictionalizing, and a case study in the strange affinity, at times the uncanny similarity, between philosophy and science fiction.**
Author: Lynn Waltz
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When Smithfield Foods opened its pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, in 1992, workers in the rural area were thrilled to have jobs at what was billed as the largest slaughterhouse in the world. However, they soon left in droves because of the fast, unrelenting line speed and high rate of injury. Those who stayed wanted higher wages and safer working conditions, but every time they tried to form a union, the company quickly cracked down, firing union leaders, assaulting organizers, and setting minority groups against each other. Author and journalist Lynn Waltz reveals how these aggressive tactics went unchecked for years until Sherri Buffkin, a higher-up manager at Smithfield, blew the lid off the companys corrupt practices. Through meticulous reporting, in-depth interviews with key players, and a mind for labor and environmental histories, Waltz weaves a fascinating tale of the nearly two-decade struggle that eventually brought justice to the workers and accountability to the food giant, pitting the worlds largest slaughterhouse against the worlds largest meatpacking union. Following in a long tradition of books that expose the horrors of the meatpacking industryfrom Upton Sinclairs The Jungle to Eric Schlossers Fast Food NationHog Wild uncovers rampant corporate environmental hooliganism, labor exploitation, and union-busting by one of the nations largest meat producers. Waltzs eye-opening examination sheds new light on the challenges workers face not just in meatpacking, but everywhere workers have lost their power to collectively bargain with powerful corporations. **
Author: Robert Hariman
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In this book, Robert Hariman demonstrates how matters of styleof diction, manners, sensibility, decor, and charismainfluence politics. In critical studies of classic texts, Hariman identifies four dominant political styles. The realist style, as found in Machiavellis The Prince, creates a world of sheer power, constant calculation, and emotional control this style is the common sense of modern political science. The courtly style, depicted in Kapuscinskis The Emperor, is characterized by high decorousness, hierarchies, and fixation on the body of the sovereign this style infuses mass media coverage of the American presidency. The republican style, reflected in Ciceros letters to Atticus, promotes the art of oratory, consensus, and civility it informs our ideal of democratic conversation. The bureaucratic style, as captured in Kafkas The Castle, emphasizes institutional procedures, official character, and the priority of writing this style structures everday life. Hariman looks at effective political artistry in figures from antiquity to modern politicians such as Vaclav Havel, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. He discusses the crises to which each style is susceptible, as well as the social and moral consequences of each styles success. **
Author: Alaric Hall
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The twelve articles in this volume promote the growing contacts between historical linguistics and medieval cultural studies. They fall into two groups. One examines the interrelation in Anglo-Saxon England between Latin and vernacular language and culture, investigating language-contact between Old English and Latin, the extent of Latinity in early medieval Britain, Anglo-Saxons attitudes to Classical culture, and relationships between Anglo-Saxon and Continental Christian thought. Another group uses historical linguistics as a method in the wider cultural study of medieval England, examining syntactic change, dialect, translation and semantics to give us access to politeness, demography, and cultural constructions of colour, thought and time. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of Anglo-Saxon culture and Middle English language.Contributors are Olga Timofeeva, Alaric Hall, Seppo Heikkinen, Jesse Keskiaho, John Blair, Kathryn A. Lowe, Antonette DiPaolo Healey, Lilla Kopar, C. P. Biggam, Agnes Kiricsi, Alexandra Fodor and Mari Pakkala-Weckstrom.
Author: Stuart Hall
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Sometimes I feel myself to have been the last colonial. This, in his own words, is the extraordinary story of the life and career of Stuart Hallhow his experiences shaped his intellectual, political, and theoretical work and how he became one of his ages brightest intellectual lights. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Kingston, Jamaica, still then a British colony, the young Stuart Hall found himself uncomfortable in his own home. He lived among Kingstons stiflingly respectable brown middle class, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white elite. As colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Kingston and across the world. In 1951 a Rhodes scholarship took Hall across the Atlantic to Oxford University, where he met young Jamaicans from all walks of life, as well as writers and thinkers from across the Caribbean, including V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming. While at Oxford he met Raymond Williams, Charles Taylor, and other leading intellectuals, with whom he helped found the intellectual and political movement known as the New Left. With the emotional aftershock of colonialism still pulsing through him, Hall faced a new struggle that of building a home, a life, and an identity in a postwar England so rife with racism that it could barely recognize his humanity. With great insight, compassion, and wit, Hall tells the story of his early life, taking readers on a journey through the sights, smells, and streets of 1930s Kingston while reflecting on the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain. Full of passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds. **
Author: Atina Grossmann
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In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. Jews, Germans, and Allies draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives.In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germanys surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters.Jews, Germans, and Allies shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.**
Author: Jarrett Zigon
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If we see that our contemporary condition is one of war and widely diffused complexity, how do we understand our most basic ethical motivations? What might be the aims of our political activity?A War on Peopletakes up these questions and offers a glimpse of a possible alternative future in this ethnographically and theoretically rich examination of the activity of some unlikely political actors users of heroin and crack cocaine, both active and former. The result is a groundbreaking book on how antidrug war political activity offers transformative processes that are termed worldbuilding and enacts nonnormative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key concepts as community, freedom, and care. **From the Inside Flap What would it mean for our conceptions of politics to have an anthropology not just of how people are, but of what they are working to become? How can anthropology capture the space in which people live ahead of themselves? This crucial, wholly original, and theoretically generative book shows us how key these questions are for the future of social thought and political life.Joel Robbins, Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge This theoretically daring, imaginative, and empirically grounded book leads the way to a new era of philosophical anthropology. Thoroughly inspiring!Miriam Ticktin, Professor of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research This is a remarkable and thought-provoking work.Talal Asad,Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, City University of New York, and author of On Suicide Bombing and Formations of the Secular Jarrett Zigons anthropology of potentiality bears all the hallmarks of his rich writing style with its close weaving of the philosophical, the empirical, and the political. Anthropologists have traditionally looked for alternative politics in the spaces of radical alterity. This book widens this to include the spaces of the unlikely. The unlikely alter-political source here is the world of heavy drug users.Ghassan Hage, Future Generation Professor of Anthropology, University of Melbourne, and author of Alter-Politics Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination About the Author Jarrett Zigonis the William and Linda Porterfield Professor of Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. His two most recent books areDisappointment Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuildingand HIV is Gods Blessing Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia.