front cover of G. W. Leibniz's Monadology
G. W. Leibniz's Monadology
Nicholas Rescher
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991

G.W. Leibniz’s Monadology, one of the most important pieces of the Leibniz corpus, is at once one of the great classics of modern philosophy and one of its most puzzling productions.  Because the essay is written in so condensed and compact a fashion, for almost three centuries it has baffled and beguiled those who read it for the first time.

Nicholas Rescher accompanies the text of the Monadology section-by-section with relevant excerpts from some of Leibniz’s widely scattered discussions of the matters at issue.  The result serves a dual purpose of providing a commentary of the <I>Monadology</I> by Leibniz himself, while at the same time supplying an exposition of his philosophy using the Monadology as an outline.

The book contains all of the materials that even the most careful study of this could text could require: a detailed overview of the philosophical background of the work and of its bibliographic ramifications; a presentation of the original French text together with a new, closely faithful English translation; a selection of other relevant Leibniz texts; and a detailed commentary.  Rescher also provides a survey of Leibniz’s use of analogies and three separate indices of key terms and expressions, Leibniz’s French terminology, and citations.

Rescher’s edition of the Monadology presents Leibniz’s ideas faithfully, accurately, and accessibly, making it especially valuable to scholars and students alike.

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Gaze and Voice as Love Objects
SIC 1
Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek, eds.
Duke University Press, 1996
The gaze entices, inspects, fascinates. The voice hypnotizes, seduces, disarms. Are gaze and voice part of the relationship we call love . . . or hate? If so, what part? How do they function? This provocative book examines love as the mediating entity in the essential antagonism between the sexes, and gaze and voice as love's medium. The contributors proceed from the Lacanian premise that "there is no sexual relationship," that the sexes are in no way complementary and that love—figured in the gaze and the voice —embodies the promise and impossibility of any relation between them.

The first detailed Lacanian elaboration of this topic, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects examines the status of gaze, voice, and love in philosophy from Plato to Kant, in ideology from early Christianity to contemporary cynicism, in music from Hildegard of Bingen to Richard Wagner, in literature from Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence to Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and in cinema from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom to Kieslowski's A Short Film on Love. Throughout, the contributors seek to show that the conflict between the sexes is the site of a larger battle over the destiny of modernity. With insights into the underlying target of racist and sexist violence, this book offers surprising revelations into the nature of an ancient enigma—love.

Contributors. Elisabeth Bronfen, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupancic

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Genre Matters
Essays in Theory and Criticism
Edited by Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson, and Jeremy Strong
Intellect Books, 2006
This collection of new essays addresses a topic of established and expanding critical interest throughout the humanities. It demonstrates that genre matters in a manner not constrained by disciplinary boundaries and includes new work on Genre Theory and applications of thinking about genre from Aristotle to Derrida and beyond. The essays focus on economies of expectation and competency, genre as media form, recent developments in television broadcast genres, translation and genericity, the role played by genre in film publicity, gender and genre, genre in fiction, and the problematics of classification. An introductory essay places the contributions in the context of a wide range of thinking about genre in the arts, media and humanities. The volume will be of interest to both undergraduates and postgraduates, especially those following courses on Genre Theory and Genre Criticism, and to academics working in a range of subject areas such as Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Media Studies and Literary Studies.
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Ghost Image
Hervé Guibert
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays—meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems—and not a single image. Hervé Guibert’s brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert’s parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been missed.

Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert’s particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues—answers, or even questions—about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, “I don’t even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl.” In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how—in writing—he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer.

With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert’s Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful—a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography.
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The Global Shelter Imaginary
Ikea Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief
Andrew Herscher
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Examines how the humanitarian order advances a message of moral triumph and care while abandoning the dispossessed

Prompted by a growing number of refugees and other displaced people, intersections of design and humanitarianism are proliferating. From the IKEA Foundation’s Better Shelter to Airbnb’s Open Homes program, the consumer economy has engaged the global refugee crisis with seemingly new tactics that normalize an institutionally sanctioned politics of evasion. Exploring “the global shelter imaginary,” this book charts the ways shelter functions as a form of rightless relief that expels recognition of the rights of the displaced and advances political paradoxes of displacement itself. 

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Grammars of Approach
Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque
Cynthia Wall
University of Chicago Press, 2019
In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of “approach.” In architecture, the term “approach” changed in that period from a verb to a noun, coming to denote the drive from the lodge at the entrance of an estate “through the most interesting part of the grounds,” as landscape designer Humphrey Repton put it.  The shift from the long straight avenue to the winding approach, Wall shows, swung the perceptual balance away from the great house onto the personal experience of the visitor. At the same time, the grammatical and typographical landscape was shifting in tandem, away from objects and Things (and capitalized common Nouns) to the spaces in between, like punctuation and the “lesser parts of speech”. The implications for narrative included new patterns of syntactical architecture and the phenomenon of free indirect discourse. Wall examines the work of landscape theorists such as Repton, John Claudius Loudon, and Thomas Whately alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers’ manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen to reveal a new landscaping across disciplines—new grammars of approach in ways of perceiving and representing the world in both word and image.
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Gramsci at Sea
Sharad Chari
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

How might an oceanic Gramsci speak to Black aquafuturism and other forms of oceanic critique? This succinct work reads Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the sea, focused in his prison notes on waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Sharad Chari argues that the imprisoned militant’s method is oceanic in form, and that this oceanic Marxism can attend to the roil of sociocultural dynamics, to waves of imperial power, as well as to the capacity of Black, Drexciyan, and other forms of oceanic critique to “storm” us on different shores.

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Greece
Modern Architectures in History
Alexander Tzonis and Alcestis P. Rodi
Reaktion Books, 2013
The remains of antiquity define Greek architecture in the popular imagination, but Greek edifices encompass far more than these ancient structures. Offered here is a comprehensive survey of modern Greek architecture of the past hundred-plus years.
The book explores the buildings and architects of modern Greece, ranging from nineteenth-century neoclassical edifices to minimalist contemporary works and urban renewal projects. The ideas driving the creation of these buildings are given full attention, as the authors examine the influence of the rise of Modernism in the arts and the characteristics of regional styles, while also considering the reasons behind the bland, functional structures that have dominated Greek cityscapes since World War II. Greecesituates this design survey within the nation’s tumultuous cultural and political history, including the two world wars, a military dictatorship, civil war, and the consumerist boom of the 1990s.

            A penetrating and thorough study, Greece offers a compelling account of modern Greek architecture that will be invaluable for all scholars of design and European history.
 
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Guilt and Defense
On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany
Theodor W. AdornoEdited, translated, and introduced by Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin
Harvard University Press, 2010
Beginning in 1949, Theodor W. Adorno and other members of the reconstituted Frankfurt Institute for Social Research undertook a massive empirical study of German opinions about the legacies of the Nazis, applying and modifying techniques they had learned during their U.S. exile. They published their results in 1955 as a research monograph edited by Friedrich Pollock. The study's qualitative results are published here for the first time in English as Guilt and Defense, a psychoanalytically informed analysis of the rhetorical and conceptual mechanisms with which postwar Germans most often denied responsibility for the Nazi past. In their editorial introduction, Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin show how Adorno’s famous 1959 essay “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” is comprehensible only as a conclusion to his long-standing research and as a reaction to the debate it stirred; this volume also includes a critique by psychologist Peter R. Hoffstater as well as Adorno’s rejoinder. This previously little-known debate provides important new perspectives on postwar German political culture, on the dynamics of collective memory, and on Adorno’s intellectual legacies, which have contributed more to empirical social research than has been acknowledged. A companion volume, Group Experiment and Other Writings, will present the first book-length English translation of the Frankfurt Group's conceptual, methodological, and theoretical innovations in public opinion research.
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Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures
Timothy Aubry
Harvard University Press, 2018

In the wake of radical social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies’ embrace of politics entailed a widespread rejection of aesthetic considerations. For scholars invested in literature’s role in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, appreciating literature’s formal beauty seemed frivolous and irresponsible, even complicit with the iniquities of the social order. This suspicion of aesthetics became the default posture within literary scholarship, a means of establishing the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s political commitments. Yet as Timothy Aubry explains, aesthetic pleasure never fully disappeared from the academy. It simply went underground.

From New Criticism to the digital humanities, Aubry recasts aesthetics as the complicated, morally ambiguous, embattled yet resilient protagonist in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first–century literary studies. He argues that academic critics never stopped asserting preferences for certain texts, rhetorical strategies, or intellectual responses. Rather than serving as the enemy of formalism and aesthetics, political criticism enabled scholars to promote heightened experiences of perceptual acuity and complexity while adjudicating which formal strategies are best designed to bolster these experiences. Political criticism, in other words, did not eradicate but served covertly to nurture reading practices aimed at achieving aesthetic satisfaction.

Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures shows that literary studies’ break with midcentury formalism was not as clean as it once appeared. Today, when so many scholars are advocating renewed attention to textual surfaces and aesthetic experiences, Aubry’s work illuminates the surprisingly vast common ground between the formalists and the schools of criticism that succeeded them.

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