Sublime Desire

Sublime Desire PDF Author: Amy J. Elias
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801867339
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
In its range and sophistication, Sublime Desire is a valuable addition to postmodernist studies as well as to studies of the historical romance novel.

Amorous Acts

Amorous Acts PDF Author: Frances L. Restuccia
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804751827
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Amorous Acts uses psychoanalytic concepts to show how queer theory is operating to put in place a non-heterosexist social order.

Colonial Memory

Colonial Memory PDF Author: Sarah De Mul
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9089642935
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Sarah De Mul is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Leuven. Her publications and research interests are in the field of comparative postcolonial studies, with a particular focus on gender, memory, and empire in Neerlandophone and Anglophone literature.

The Sublime Object of Ideology

The Sublime Object of Ideology PDF Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860919711
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In this provocative and original work, Slavoj _i_ek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author’s acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. _i_ek takes issue with analysts of the postmodern condition from Habermas to Sloterdijk, showing that the idea of a ‘post-ideological’ world ignores the fact that ‘even if we do not take things seriously, we are still doing them’. Rejecting postmodernism’s unified world of surfaces, he traces a line of thought from Hegel to Althusser and Lacan, in which the human subject is split, divided by a deep antagonism which determines social reality and through which ideology operates. Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations.

Spiritualising Life

Spiritualising Life PDF Author: Eknath Ranade
Publisher: Vivekananda Kendra
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Spiritualising Life has three volume, which contain the talks given by Mananeeya Eknathji Ranade on the workers who were undergoing training. These lectures are delivered to mould the life workers of Vivekananda Kendra, to become fit enough to fulfill the mission of the organisation. These talks deal with the essential qualities of an ideal worker and these in fact are coming from a person who is an embodiment of selfless service; makes it even more worthy to listen and emulate.

The Pornographic Age

The Pornographic Age PDF Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135001477X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Offering a piercing indictment of what we have let ourselves become, this short, critical work is a damning critique of the current age and of the democratic systems that characterize it. Alain Badiou argues that any truly radical politics must begin with dismantling the obscene (or pornographic) qualities of neoliberal capitalism. In The Pornographic Age he asks us to hold up a mirror to ourselves and confront the debasement of the political realities in which we live, the shock of which must galvanize us into action. It is only through this realization, this crucial confrontation with the perversity with which we conduct our daily lives that we can prompt true revolution. Including an afterword from international Badiou scholars A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens and a commentary by William Watkin, this book is a philosophical call to arms: Badiou's radical indictment of the current age is an exciting, no-holds-barred exploration of both how we live and how we might live.

Futurity

Futurity PDF Author: Amir Eshel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226924955
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century’s catastrophes at the expense of literature’s prospective vision. Considering several key literary works, Eshel argues in Futurity that by grappling with watershed events of modernity, these works display a future-centric engagement with the past that opens up the present to new political, cultural, and ethical possibilities—what he calls futurity. Bringing together postwar German, Israeli, and Anglo-American literature, Eshel traces a shared trajectory of futurity in world literature. He begins by examining German works of fiction and the debates they spurred over the future character of Germany’s public sphere. Turning to literary works by Jewish-Israeli writers as they revisit Israel’s political birth, he shows how these stories inspired a powerful reconsideration of Israel’s identity. Eshel then discusses post-1989 literature—from Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs to J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year—revealing how these books turn to events like World War II and the Iraq War not simply to make sense of the past but to contemplate the political and intellectual horizon that emerged after 1989. Bringing to light how reflections on the past create tools for the future, Futurity reminds us of the numerous possibilities literature holds for grappling with the challenges of both today and tomorrow.

The Gardens of Desire

The Gardens of Desire PDF Author: Stephen Gilbert Brown
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 9780791484968
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The Gardens of Desire is at once a model of literary interpretation and a groundbreaking psychocritical reading of a literary masterpiece, Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Shedding new light on the origins of the creative impulse in general, and on the psychological origins of the Recherche in particular, the book illuminates the hidden associations between matricidal, suicidal, sadistic, masochistic, homoerotic, and creative impulses as manifested in Proust's work. The book moves beyond traditional Freudian readings of Proust to consider the theories of Otto Rank, Jacques Derrida, and others, and provides provocative readings of the "privileged moments" that comprise many of the work's "critical cruxes," as well as a thought-provoking rereading of the novel's ending. Both elegant and accessible, this book boldly explores the violence of desire as it relates not only to Proust's narrator, but also to Proustian criticism itself, with its own violent desire to appropriate the essence of Proust's masterpiece.

The Covert Sphere

The Covert Sphere PDF Author: Timothy Melley
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801465478
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
In December 2010 the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acknowledged that it was providing major funding for thirteen episodes of Eagle Four—a new Afghani television melodrama based loosely on the blockbuster U.S. series 24. According to an embassy spokesperson, Eagle Four was part of a strategy aimed at transforming public suspicion of security forces into something like awed respect. Why would a wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national security as a concept and a transformation of democracy. In The Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new cultural imaginary, "the covert sphere." One of the surprising consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely substantially on fiction to "know," or imagine, their nation’s foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state was instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty that has plagued American society ever since—and, Melley argues, that would eventually find its fullest expression in postmodernism. The Covert Sphere traces these consequences from the Korean War through the War on Terror, examining how a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular entertainments—from The Manchurian Candidate through 24—as well as influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tim O’Brien, and many others.

Theology after Lacan

Theology after Lacan PDF Author: Clayton Crockett
Publisher: James Clarke & Company
ISBN: 0227902807
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This groundbreaking volume highlights the continuing relevance of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose linguistic reworking of Freudian analysis radicalised both psychoanalysis and its approach to theology. The book's fi rst section, Part I: Lacan, Religion, and Others, explores the application of Lacan's thought to the development and phenomena of religion. Part II: Theology and the Other Lacan moves through the physical world and into the metaphysical, probing theological issues and ideas of today's world with curiosity and in the light of Lacan. In both parts I and II, a central place is given to Lacan's exposition of the real, thereby refl ecting the impact of his later work. Topics traverse culture,art, philosophy and politics, as well as providing critical exegesis of Lacan's most gnomic utterances on theology, including The Triumph of Religion. Contributors include some of the most renowned readers and influential academics in their respective fields: Tina Beattie, Lorenzo Chiesa, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Adrian Johnston, Katerina Kolozova, Thomas Lynch, Marcus Pound, Carl Raschke, Kenneth Reinhard, Mario D'Amato, Noelle Vahanian and Slavoj Zizek.