Illuminations from the Past

Illuminations from the Past PDF Author: Ban Wang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804750998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
This book offers a cultural history of modern China by looking at the tension between memory and history. Mainstream books on China tend to focus on the hard aspects of economics, government, politics, or international relations. This book takes a humanistic look at modern changes and examines how Chinese intellectuals and artists experienced trauma, social upheavals, and transformations. Drawing on a wide array of sources in political and aesthetic writings, literature, film, and public discourse, the author has portrayed the unique ways the Chinese imagine and portray their own historical destiny in the midst of trauma, catastrophe, and runaway globalization.

Illuminations from the Past

Illuminations from the Past PDF Author: Ban Wang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804750998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a cultural history of modern China by looking at the tension between memory and history. Mainstream books on China tend to focus on the hard aspects of economics, government, politics, or international relations. This book takes a humanistic look at modern changes and examines how Chinese intellectuals and artists experienced trauma, social upheavals, and transformations. Drawing on a wide array of sources in political and aesthetic writings, literature, film, and public discourse, the author has portrayed the unique ways the Chinese imagine and portray their own historical destiny in the midst of trauma, catastrophe, and runaway globalization.

The Illuminations

The Illuminations PDF Author: Andrew O'Hagan
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 057127367X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
How much do we keep from the people we love? Why is the truth so often buried in secrets? Can we learn from the past or must we forget it? Standing one evening at the window of her house by the sea, Anne Quirk sees a rabbit disappearing in the snow. Nobody remembers her now, but this elderly woman was in her youth a pioneer of British documentary photography. Her beloved grandson, Luke, now a captain with the Royal Western Fusiliers, is on a tour of duty in Afghanistan, part of a convoy taking equipment to the electricity plant at Kajaki. Only when Luke returns home to Scotland does Anne's secret story begin to emerge, along with his, and they set out for an old guest house in Blackpool where she once kept a room.

Imagining the Past in France

Imagining the Past in France PDF Author: Elizabeth Morrison
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606060287
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
This exquisite volume beautifully reproduces and insightfully examines the most important illuminations found in French history manuscripts.

Illuminations of the Everyday: Philosophical and Cultural Expressions of Redemption in Weimar Germany

Illuminations of the Everyday: Philosophical and Cultural Expressions of Redemption in Weimar Germany PDF Author: Madeleine Claire Hall
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 159942391X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
Benjamin's work has been classified either according to the principles of historical materialism, or according to the principles of metaphysics. This fragmentation of his ideas, however, obscures the real impetus of his oeuvre, particularly in the interpretation of his central notion of redemption. If instead one considers Benjamin as a critic of the everyday in search of a mechanism for change, influenced by the historical condition and his intellectual contemporaries, then we are able better to understand his narrative. The Weimar Republic was a period dominated by the dialectic between hope and despair. The intellectual sphere of Critical Theory attempted to understand their condition of alienation and establish a solution. Redemption is key to Benjamin's approach. Redemption carries the stigma of theology and has therefore been dismissed because, unlike revolution, it has no historical precedent and appears to have limited value. In common with the other Critical Theorists, for Benjamin the conditions of alienation as well as the structure of its solution were in the everyday. Through the concepts of the dialectical image and now-time, Benjamin readdresses the question of revolution, which he finds to be limited by its maintenance of linear historic time. Benjamin's redemption is an amalgam of the historic and the metaphysical and represents a powerful social critique, propelled by revolutionary rhetoric.

Illuminations

Illuminations PDF Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 0805202412
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin's life in dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.

Old Stories Retold

Old Stories Retold PDF Author: Andrew G. Stuckey
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739123629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Old Stories Retold explores the ways modern Chinese narratives dramatize and embody the historical sense that links them to the past and to the Chinese literary tradition. Largely guided by Walter Benjamin’s discussions of history, G. Andrew Stuckey looks at the ways Chinese narrative engages a historical process that pieces together fragments of the past into new configurations to better serve present needs. By examining intertextual connections between separate texts, Stuckey seeks to discover traces of an “original,” whether it be thought of as the past, history, or tradition, when it has been rewritten in modern and contemporary Chinese fiction. Old Stories Retold shows how the articulation of the past into new historical configurations disrupts accepted understandings of the past, and as such, can be intentionally pitted against modernist historical knowledge to resist the modernist ends that this knowledge is mobilized to achieve.

Illuminations

Illuminations PDF Author: Mary Sharratt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547840578
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
From the author of Ecstasty, a novel of a girl who triumphed against impossible odds to become the most extraordinary woman of the Middle Ages. Hildegard von Bingen—Benedictine abbess, healer, composer, saint—experienced mystic visions from a very young age. Offered by her noble family to the Church at the age of eight, she lived for years in forced silence. But through the study of books and herbs, through music and the kinship of her sisters, Hildegard found her way from a life of submission to a calling that celebrated the divine glories all around us. In this brilliantly researched and insightful novel, Mary Sharratt offers a deeply moving portrait of a woman willing to risk everything for what she believed, a triumphant exploration of the life she might well have lived. “Sharratt brings one of the most famous and enigmatic women of the Middle Ages to vibrant life in this tour de force, which will captivate the reader from the very first page.” —Sharon Kay Penman, New York Times–bestselling author of The Land Beyond the Sea “One could not anticipate this majesty and drama…Illuminations is riveting, following von Bingen through…to emerge as one of the significant voices of the 12th century…Unforgettable.” —January Magazine “Gripping…Like Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, [Illuminations] is primarily about relationships forged under pressure.”—Publishers Weekly “Masterful.”—Saint Paul Pioneer Press

Illuminations

Illuminations PDF Author: Alan Moore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635578817
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
From New York Times bestselling author Alan Moore-one of the most influential writers in the history of comics-"a wonderful collection, brilliant and often moving" (Neil Gaiman) which takes us to the fantastical underside of reality. In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover--and in some cases even make and unmake--the various uncharted parts of existence. In "A Hypothetical Lizard," two concubines in a brothel of fantastical specialists fall in love with tragic ramifications. In "Not Even Legend," a paranormal study group is infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate. In "Illuminations," a nostalgic older man decides to visit a seaside resort from his youth and finds the past all too close at hand. And in the monumental novella "What We Can Know About Thunderman," which charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry's major players over the last seventy-five years, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business. From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to theoretical Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Illuminations is exactly that--a series of bright, startling tales from a contemporary legend that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.

Chinese Visions of World Order

Chinese Visions of World Order PDF Author: Ban Wang
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822372444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The Confucian doctrine of tianxia (all under heaven) outlines a unitary worldview that cherishes global justice and transcends social, geographic, and political divides. For contemporary scholars, it has held myriad meanings, from the articulation of a cultural imaginary and political strategy to a moralistic commitment and a cosmological vision. The contributors to Chinese Visions of World Order examine the evolution of tianxia's meaning and practice in the Han dynasty and its mutations in modern times. They attend to its varied interpretations, its relation to realpolitik, and its revival in twenty-first-century China. They also investigate tianxia's birth in antiquity and its role in empire building, invoke its cultural universalism as a new global imagination for the contemporary world, analyze its resonance and affinity with cosmopolitanism in East-West cultural relations, discover its persistence in China's socialist internationalism and third world agenda, and critique its deployment as an official state ideology. In so doing, they demonstrate how China draws on its past to further its own alternative vision of the current international system. Contributors. Daniel A. Bell, Chishen Chang, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Prasenjit Duara, Hsieh Mei-yu, Haiyan Lee, Mark Edward Lewis, Lin Chun, Viren Murthy, Lisa Rofel, Ban Wang, Wang Hui, Yiqun Zhou

The Book in Movement

The Book in Movement PDF Author: Magalí Rabasa
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822986868
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Over the past two decades, Latin America has seen an explosion of experiments with autonomy, as people across the continent express their refusal to be absorbed by the logic and order of neoliberalism. The autonomous movements of the twenty-first century are marked by an unprecedented degree of interconnection, through their use of digital tools and their insistence on the importance of producing knowledge about their practices through strategies of self-representation and grassroots theorization. The Book in Movement explores the reinvention of a specific form of media: the print book. Magalí Rabasa travels through the political and literary underground of cities in Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile to explore the ways that autonomous politics are enacted in the production and circulation of books.