The Future and Its Enemies

The Future and Its Enemies PDF Author: Virginia Postrel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439135320
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Today we have greater wealth, health, opportunity, and choice than at any time in history. Yet a chorus of intellectuals and politicians laments our current condition -- as slaves to technology, coarsened by popular culture, and insecure in the face of economic change. The future, they tell us, is dangerously out of control, and unless we precisely govern the forces of change, we risk disaster. In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel explodes the myths behind these claims. Using examples that range from medicine to fashion, she explores how progress truly occurs and demonstrates that human betterment depends not on conformity to one central vision but on creativity and decentralized, open-ended trial and error. She argues that these two opposing world-views -- "stasis" vs. "dynamism" -- are replacing "left" and "right" to define our cultural and political debate as we enter the next century. In this bold exploration of how civilizations learn, Postrel heralds a fundamental shift in the way we view politics, culture, technology, and society as we face an unknown -- and invigorating -- future.

The Future and Its Enemies

The Future and Its Enemies PDF Author: Virginia Postrel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439135320
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today we have greater wealth, health, opportunity, and choice than at any time in history. Yet a chorus of intellectuals and politicians laments our current condition -- as slaves to technology, coarsened by popular culture, and insecure in the face of economic change. The future, they tell us, is dangerously out of control, and unless we precisely govern the forces of change, we risk disaster. In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel explodes the myths behind these claims. Using examples that range from medicine to fashion, she explores how progress truly occurs and demonstrates that human betterment depends not on conformity to one central vision but on creativity and decentralized, open-ended trial and error. She argues that these two opposing world-views -- "stasis" vs. "dynamism" -- are replacing "left" and "right" to define our cultural and political debate as we enter the next century. In this bold exploration of how civilizations learn, Postrel heralds a fundamental shift in the way we view politics, culture, technology, and society as we face an unknown -- and invigorating -- future.

Virgins and Dynamos

Virgins and Dynamos PDF Author: Carolyn Dawn Lake
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : French literature
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description


Realism and Naturalism

Realism and Naturalism PDF Author: Richard Daniel Lehan
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299208745
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
In this intellectual and literary history of American, British, and Continental novels of realism and naturalism from 1850 to 1950, Richard Lehan argues that literary naturalism is a narrative mode that creates its own reality. Employing this strategy allows and encourages intertextuality - one novel talking or responding to another.

Male Authors, Female Subjects

Male Authors, Female Subjects PDF Author: Duco van Oostrum
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789051838770
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In the wake of feminist and poststructuralist contributions to literary study, how can we read images of women in literature written by men? Is it possible to read anything other than appropriation or misrepresentation in these male portraits of women? Starting with these questions, Van Oostrum looks for openings in a debate that seems to be firmly locked into traditional gender roles. While contemporary literary theory works hard to dismantle oppressive binaries, questions about the representation of an other' often lead back to a dizzying number of rigid identities. Through an examination of Henry Adams's and Henry James's attempts to write about American women, Van Oostrum tries to have it both ways, at once holding on to gendered cultural identity and at the same time challenging a stable personality. Using the sentimental fiction written by women in the 1850s, James and Adams write about the new women' of the turn of the 20th century. Traversing multiple oceans, they increasingly entangle concepts of gender and nationality, othering' not only women but the culture of Europe and the South Seas as well. An analogous movement of a male translation of female American sentimental fiction intersected with national identities, the author argues, takes place in two Dutch novels of the late 19th century. By looking through a Dutch lens at American literature, this book on possible gender crossings shows cultural identities always to be on the move. Crossing from the male author to the female subject on such an international landscape, the author tries to navigate a place for women within and beyond literature written by men.

Football Dynamo

Football Dynamo PDF Author: Marc Bennetts
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0753520257
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In 1991, the collapse of the USSR seemed to signal the death of the Russian football industry, as the money, the players and the fans left. But now the oligarchs who profited from the post-Soviet turmoil are supporting the nation's football clubs and their dreams of glory, resulting in unprecedented success. Along this journey into the heart of Russian football, Marc Bennetts meets the managers, oligarchs, players, pundits and fans that define the Russian Premier league, now the fastest-growing and most intriguing football league in the world. From Andrei Arshavin and the national team's adventures at Euro 2008 to the symbolism of a club from war-torn Chechnya lifting the Russian FA Cup, Football Dynamo uncovers shocking revelations about corruption, hooliganism and racism, but also the true beauty of the game and the country.

The Double-edged Sword

The Double-edged Sword PDF Author: Zoltán Simon
Publisher: Akademiai Kiado
ISBN: 9789630580625
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
This examination of American novels from 1900 to 1940 traces the literary treatment of the technological sublime, a simultaneous awe and fear of technology. The American technological sublime is a construct that can be useful in understanding the often conflicted and ambivalent reactions of enthusiasm and anxiety, exaltation and depression, associated with the patterns of development experienced in the US in this transitory period. The first four decades of the 20th century saw the culmination of the technological sublime in America: the loss of the innocently one-sided enthusiasm and technological republicanism of the 19th century to a fragmented, often paranoiac, and largely pessimistic vision of technology that became dominant of the literature after World War II. After an evaluation of earlier scholarship on the American technological sublime, the study examines four important decades in the development of the American technological sublime and some of the literary responses to it

The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature

The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature PDF Author: Kim Ileen Moreland
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813916583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
What does the existence of this impulse, in its various idiosyncratic manifestations, reveal about these writers and American culture?

The Nature of New York

The Nature of New York PDF Author: David Stradling
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801445101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Stradling shows how New York's varied landscape and abundant natural resources have played a fundamental role in shaping the state's culture and economy.

The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays

The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays PDF Author: Wystan Hugh Auden
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571107186
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
Auden speaks of the poet and his craft as well as literary figures and their works and observations on life in general.

Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture

Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture PDF Author: J.E. Force
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 940172282X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The influence of millenarian thinking upon Cromwell's England is well-known. The cultural and intellectual conceptions of the role of millenarian ideas in the `long' 18th century when, so the `official' story goes, the religious sceptics and deists of Enlightened England effectively tarred such religious radicalism as `enthusiasm' has been less well examined. This volume endeavors to revise this `official' story and to trace the influence of millenarian ideas in the science, politics, and everyday life of England and America in the 17th and 18th centuries.