Worlds Gone Awry

Worlds Gone Awry PDF Author: John J. Han
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476633770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Dystopian fiction captivates us by depicting future worlds at once eerily similar and shockingly foreign to our own. This collection of new essays presents some of the most recent scholarship on a genre whose popularity has surged dramatically since the 1990s. Contributors explore such novels as The Lord of the Flies, The Heart Goes Last, The Giver and The Strain Trilogy as social critique, revealing how they appeal to the same impulse as utopian fiction: the desire for an idealized yet illusory society in which evil is purged and justice prevails.

Worlds Gone Awry

Worlds Gone Awry PDF Author: John J. Han
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476633770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dystopian fiction captivates us by depicting future worlds at once eerily similar and shockingly foreign to our own. This collection of new essays presents some of the most recent scholarship on a genre whose popularity has surged dramatically since the 1990s. Contributors explore such novels as The Lord of the Flies, The Heart Goes Last, The Giver and The Strain Trilogy as social critique, revealing how they appeal to the same impulse as utopian fiction: the desire for an idealized yet illusory society in which evil is purged and justice prevails.

Ritual Gone Wrong

Ritual Gone Wrong PDF Author: Kathryn T. McClymond
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190613793
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The discipline of religious studies has historically tended to focus on discrete ritual mistakes occurring in the context of individual performances as outlined in ethnographic or sociological studies; scholars have largely overlooked the extensive discussions of ritual mistakes that exist in the religious literature of indigenous traditions. And yet ritual mistakes (ranging from the simple to the complex) happen all the time, and they continue to carry ritual "weight," even when no one seriously doubts their impact on the efficacy of a ritual. In Ritual Gone Wrong, Kathryn McClymond approaches ritual mistakes as an integral part of ritual life and argues that religious traditions can accommodate mistakes and are often prepared for them. McClymond shows that many traditions even incorporate the regular occurrence of errors into their ritual systems, developing a substantial literature on how rituals can be disrupted, how these disruptions can be addressed, and when disruptions have gone too far. Offering a series of case studies ranging from ancient India to modern day Iraq, and from medieval allegations of child sacrifice to contemporary Olympic ceremonies, McClymond explores the numerous ways in which ritual can go wrong, and demonstrates that the ritual is by nature fluid, supple, and dynamic-simultaneously adapting to socio-cultural conditions and, in some cases, shaping them.

The Belle Gone Bad

The Belle Gone Bad PDF Author: Betina Entzminger
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807128367
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
When Scarlett O’Hara fluttered her dark lashes, did she threaten only the gentleman in her parlor or the very culture that produced her? Examining the “bad belle” as a recurring character, The Belle Gone Bad finds that white southern women writers from the antebellum period to the present have used treacherous belles to subtly indict their culture from within. Combining the southern ideal of ladyhood with the sexual power of the dark seductress, the bad belle is the perfect figure with which to critique a culture that effectively enslaved both its white and black women. Betina Entzminger traces the development of the bad belle from nineteenth-century domestic novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth to contemporary novelist Kaye Gibbons. Coy and alluring like the traditional southern belle, the bad belle is also manipulative and knowing; the men subject to her cultivated charms often meet disastrous ends. By making the patriarch vulnerable to women who outwardly conform to the limiting conventions of womanhood but inwardly break all the rules, these writers challenged a society that stereotyped black women as promiscuous and forced white women onto pedestals while committing heinous acts in their name. Representations of the bad belle evolved along with southern society, and by the late twentieth century, many women writers expressed emancipation through the literal or figurative destruction of corrupt or would-be belles. The Belle Gone Bad shows that even writers who have been critically dismissed as too domestic or conservative to be innovative did—through the strategy of the bad belle character—challenge southern institutions and conceptions about race, class, and gender. What unites the dangerous belles created by several generations of women writing in the South, old and new, is their liberating potential.

Rights Gone Wrong

Rights Gone Wrong PDF Author: Richard Thompson Ford
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429969253
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 Since the 1960s, ideas developed during the civil rights movement have been astonishingly successful in fighting overt discrimination and prejudice. But how successful are they at combating the whole spectrum of social injustice-including conditions that aren't directly caused by bigotry? How do they stand up to segregation, for instance-a legacy of racism, but not the direct result of ongoing discrimination? It's tempting to believe that civil rights litigation can combat these social ills as efficiently as it has fought blatant discrimination. In Rights Gone Wrong, Richard Thompson Ford, author of the New York Times Notable Book The Race Card, argues that this is seldom the case. Civil rights do too much and not enough: opportunists use them to get a competitive edge in schools and job markets, while special-interest groups use them to demand special privileges. Extremists on both the left and the right have hijacked civil rights for personal advantage. Worst of all, their theatrics have drawn attention away from more serious social injustices. Ford, a professor of law at Stanford University, shows us the many ways in which civil rights can go terribly wrong. He examines newsworthy lawsuits with shrewdness and humor, proving that the distinction between civil rights and personal entitlements is often anything but clear. Finally, he reveals how many of today's social injustices actually can't be remedied by civil rights law, and demands more creative and nuanced solutions. In order to live up to the legacy of the civil rights movement, we must renew our commitment to civil rights, and move beyond them.

In This Arab Time

In This Arab Time PDF Author: Fouad Ajami
Publisher: Hoover Press
ISBN: 081791496X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In this collection of bold and wide-ranging essays, Fouad Ajami offers his views on the Middle East, commenting on the state of affairs in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt and more. He brings into focus the current struggles of the region through detailed historical standpoints and a highly personal perspective. The author discusses such landmark past events as the Algerian civil war, the state of the Arab world shortly after 9/11, and the pan-Arab awakening that began in 2011, as well as current events such as the Syrian rebellion and the repercussions of its brutal response from Bashar al-Assad. In addition, he sheds new light on some of the significant players in the Arab world, past and present, from Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel laureate of the Arabs, to Ziad Jarrah—the terrorist who is thought to have been at the controls of the plane forced down by its heroic passengers in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on 9/11.

Rational Changes in Science

Rational Changes in Science PDF Author: Joseph C. Pitt
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400937792
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
THE PROBLEMS OF SCIENTIFIC RATIONALITY Fashion is a fickle mistress. Only yesterday scientific rationality enjoyed considerable attention, consideration, and even reverence among phi losophers; "but today's fashion leads us to despise it, and the matron, rejected and abandoned as Hecuba, complains; modo maxima rerum, tot generis natisque potens - nunc trahor exui, inops", to cite Kant for our purpose, who cited Ovid for his. Like every fashion, ours also has its paradoxical aspects, as John Watkins correctly reminds in an essay in this volume. Enthusiasm for science was high among philosophers when significant scientific results were mostly a promise, it declined when that promise became an undeniable reality. Nevertheless, as with the decline of any fashion, even the revolt against scientific rationality has some reasonable grounds. If the taste of the philosophical community has changed so much, it is not due to an incident or a whim. This volume is not about the history of and reasons for this change. Instead, it provides a view of the new emerging image of scientific rationality in both its philosophical and historical aspects. In particular, the aim of the contributions gathered here is to focus on the concept around which the discussions about rationality have mostly taken place: scientific change.

Mercy Gone Bad

Mercy Gone Bad PDF Author: Jonah Chukwuemeka Agunwamba
Publisher: WestBow Press
ISBN: 1664288333
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
The book ‘Mercy Gone Wrong’ expresses that all men are equal in all aspects except in exposure and ability to utilize opportunities that only God supplies. Hence, we have no reason to boast about our spiritual and material attainment and acquisition. Rather, as recipients of God’s manifold mercies, we should eagerly show mercy to all men as we have the opportunity. In an in dept scriptural analysis, the book discusses that God exhibits His mercy in all His dealings with man. We should, therefore, by God’s grace cultivate this special attribute, integrate it into our relationships, and view other people’s failures from the periscope of mercy. The author explains how the practice of God’s kind of mercy can bring blessings to a man and his progeny, drawing testimonies from his life and others. The book illustrates how and how not to show mercy and the blessings that follow mercy givers. In addition, the book offers a guide to people with limited compassion or who lack the push to act on their compassion to improve and become good mercy givers. In this era of economic recession, when men tend to be selfish and interested only in their own affairs, the book is a refreshing and motivating call for people to manifest abundant mercy while being watchful against the fraudulent practices of evil men. Mercy is a vital tool for spreading the gospel in a hurting world.

Traditional Oral Epic

Traditional Oral Epic PDF Author: John Miles Foley
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520914481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
John Miles Foley offers an innovative and straightforward approach to the structural analysis of oral and oral-derived traditional texts. Professor Foley argues that to give the vast and complex body of oral "literature" its due, we must first come to terms with the endemic heterogeneity of traditional oral epics, with their individual histories, genres, and documents, as well as both the synchronic and diachronic aspects of their poetics. Until now, the emphasis in studies of oral traditional works has been placed on addressing the correspondences among traditions—shared structures of "formula," "theme," and "story-pattern." Traditional Oral Epic explores the incongruencies among traditions and focuses on the qualities specific to certain oral and oral-derived works. It is certain to inspire further research in this field.

Karma Gone Bad

Karma Gone Bad PDF Author: Jenny Feldon
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1402284225
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Made in America. Outsourced to India. At Home with Herself? A charming yet honest memoir of one Upper West side housewife who finds herself saying good-bye to Starbucks and all her notions of "home" when she and her husband are outsourced to Hyderabad. Jenny Feldon imagined life in India as a glitzy yoga whirlwind. Instead she found buffalo-related traffic jams. Jenny struggled to fight the depression, bitterness, and anger as her sense of self and her marriage began to unravel. And it was all India's fault—wasn't it? Equally frustrating, revealing, and amusing, this is the true story of an accidental housewife trapped in the third world.

Thoughts Gone Wrong

Thoughts Gone Wrong PDF Author: Isabelle Soucy Chartier
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1453515690
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In this captivating novel, an inventor, Dr. Turman, presents to the world the result of eleven years of vigorous planning and experiments: a device that allows people to record their thoughts. This new device is rapidly touted by the media as the invention of the decade, and it reaches a level of popularity that matches the most successful technological innovations of all time. It is welcomed onto the market with open arms, and quickly becomes the device for anyone and everyone. Yet the fame does not last as rumors of potential damage caused by this device surface. Before long, reports of thought-theft and use-related memory-loss tarnish the reputation of the device. Puzzled by these claims, Dr. Turman and the Thought Recorder team dig into the core of the matter and unravel the shocking truth.