Author: David Ben-Merre File Type: pdf Focuses on how nuances of poetic form alter how we have come to understand cultural aspects of time. Figures of Time proposes radically new ideas about the very poetic ground of culture. Presenting unique close readings of six modern poetsWallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and T. S. EliotDavid Ben-Merre brings recent theoretical questions about the rhetoric of modernism and poetic figuration into current discussions in critical theory. He argues that poetic spaces, often disjunctions of sound and sense, disrupt our culturally inherited notions of time, reimagining with an often irrational and anachronistic backward glance what we take to be historical chronologies, psychological perceptions of time, and collective scripts about causality. David Ben-Merre is Associate Professor of English at Buffalo State College, State University of New York. **

Author: Jean Baudrillard File Type: pdf The images from Abu Ghraib are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. The whole West is contained in the burst of sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies. Truth, but not veracity. As virtual as the war itself, their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the war.In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the end of art, Baudrillard celebrates arts new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole.Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylvere Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents Baudrillards writings on art in a complicitous dance with politics, economics, and media. Culminating with War Porn, a scathing analysis of the spectacular images from Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre of reality TV, the book folds back on itself to question the very nature of radical thought. The images from Abu Ghraib are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. The whole West is contained in the burst of sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies. Truth, but not veracity. As virtual as the war itself, their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the war.In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the end of art, Baudrillard celebrates arts new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole.Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylvere Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents Baudrillards writings on art in a complicitous dance with politics, economics, and media. Culminating with War Porn, a scathing analysis of the spectacular images from Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre of reality TV, the book folds back on itself to question the very nature of radical thought.Review[Baudrillard] proves himself to be as much of a thoughtful iconoclast as ever. Canadian ArtAbout the AuthorJean Baudrillard (1929--2007) was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur.

Author: Gary Tomlinson File Type: pdf span orphans 2 widows 2The rapid evolutionary development of modernspanspan orphans 2 widows 2Homo sapiensspanspan orphans 2 widows 2over the past 200,000 years is a topic of fevered interest in numerous disciplines. How did humans, while undergoing few physical changes from their first arrival, so quickly develop the capacities to transform their world? Gary Tomlinsonsspanspan orphans 2 widows 2Culture and the Course of Human Evolutionspanspan orphans 2 widows 2is aimed at both scientists and humanists, and it makes the case that neither side alone can answer the most important questions about our origins.spanbr orphans 2 widows 2span orphans 2 widows 2spanbr orphans 2 widows 2br orphans 2 widows 2span orphans 2 widows 2Tomlinson offers a new model for understanding this period in our emergence, one based on analysis of advancing human cultures in an evolution that was simultaneously cultural and biologicalaspanspan orphans 2 widows 2bioculturalspanspan orphans 2 widows 2evolution. He places front and center the emergence of culture and the human capacities to create it, in a fashion that expands the conceptual framework of recent evolutionary theory. His wide-ranging vision encompasses arguments on the development of music, modern technology, and metaphysics. At the heart of these developments, he shows, are transformations in our species particular knack for signmaking. With its innovative synthesis of humanistic and scientific ideas, this book will be an essential text.span

Author: Leslie C. Chang File Type: pdf Things That No Longer Delight Me is a collection of poems about family and memory. This book is filled with objects. The author writes I like objects for company, to decorate the plainest spaces, decorumandI amass details, jade bracelet, her animal-printdresses, an oval coral cameo.How do objects counter loneliness, she asks, and speak to us of how to behave?In Things That No Longer Delight Me, lyric is driven by a compulsion or need to collect, in order to make sense of the past and stay connected to it.And what if that connection were to be lost? Confronting loss, the book pieces together a family history from stories fragmented and overheard. It asks What is hearsay and what is history? It seeks to embody story, or historical detail, in lyric form. Resisting nostalgia, its poems respect what is diminished by grief or loss yet reveal details that hold sway over us and give us continuing pleasure.