Troubled Pleasures

Troubled Pleasures PDF Author: Kate Soper
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860915362
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
What happens when ‘life’s simple joys’ become complicated? When pleasure is transformed as a function of consumption, the innocent comforts of food, nature and place are embedded in complex practices of distribution and exploitation. Exotic and diverse objects of pleasure are made available only at the price of a heightened awareness of their origins, genealogies and possible effects; ‘authenticity’ recedes behind objects produced as pleasures. Troubled Pleasures considers the ways in which modern pleasure is fraught with unhappy implications, at the same time as contemporary critical arguments put into question the touchstones of identity, morality, subjectivity and desire. It brings together writings which explore the sources of pleasure’s ‘loss of innocence’, and which argue the case for a scrupulous ‘alternative hedonism’. Including essays on human needs, socialism and gender, a feminist response to Joyce’s Ulysses, and a fictional reflection on appetite and excess, Troubled Pleasures plots an Epicurean path between righteous asceticism and conspicuous consumption.

Troubled Pleasures

Troubled Pleasures PDF Author: Kate Soper
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860915362
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
What happens when ‘life’s simple joys’ become complicated? When pleasure is transformed as a function of consumption, the innocent comforts of food, nature and place are embedded in complex practices of distribution and exploitation. Exotic and diverse objects of pleasure are made available only at the price of a heightened awareness of their origins, genealogies and possible effects; ‘authenticity’ recedes behind objects produced as pleasures. Troubled Pleasures considers the ways in which modern pleasure is fraught with unhappy implications, at the same time as contemporary critical arguments put into question the touchstones of identity, morality, subjectivity and desire. It brings together writings which explore the sources of pleasure’s ‘loss of innocence’, and which argue the case for a scrupulous ‘alternative hedonism’. Including essays on human needs, socialism and gender, a feminist response to Joyce’s Ulysses, and a fictional reflection on appetite and excess, Troubled Pleasures plots an Epicurean path between righteous asceticism and conspicuous consumption.

Troubled Pleasures

Troubled Pleasures PDF Author: E. M. Beekman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 682

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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive examination of Dutch colonial literature in English. From the journals and travelogues produced by the early mariners, to the fictional recollections of repatriated colonials after the Second World War, E. M. Beekman's unique and magisterial survey of this major colonial literature places literary figures within specific epochs, provides biographical portraits, and examines works in relation not only to their own genres but also to the literatures and cultures beyond their colonial borders. Written by the leading authority in the field, this fascinating and wide-ranging study is enhanced by a consideration of the general political history of European expansion and of the Dutch East Indies.

The Trouble with Pleasure

The Trouble with Pleasure PDF Author: Aaron Schuster
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262528592
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
An investigation into the strange and troublesome relationship to pleasure that defines the human being, drawing on the disparate perspectives of Deleuze and Lacan. Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two of the most formidable figures of postwar French thought. Though the encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze's work, we are yet to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his career. In The Trouble with Pleasure, Aaron Schuster tackles this tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster focuses on drive and desire—the strange, convoluted relationship of human beings to the forces that move them from within—“the trouble with pleasure." Along the way, Schuster offers his own engaging and surprising conceptual analyses and inventive examples. In the “Critique of Pure Complaint” he provides a philosophy of complaining, ranging from Freud's theory of neurosis to Spinoza's intellectual complaint of God and the Deleuzian great complaint. Schuster goes on to elaborate, among other things, a theory of love as “mutually compatible symptoms”; an original philosophical history of pleasure, including a hypothetical Heideggerian treatise and a Platonic theory of true pleasure; and an exploration of the 1920s “literature of the death drive,” including Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, and Blaise Cendrars.

Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain

Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain PDF Author: David Wilkinson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137497807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
As the Sex Pistols were breaking up, Britain was entering a new era. Punk’s filth and fury had burned brightly and briefly; soon a new underground offered a more sustained and constructive challenge. As future-focused, independently released singles appeared in the wake of the Sex Pistols, there were high hopes in magazines like NME and the DIY fanzine media spawned by punk. Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain explores how post-punk’s politics developed into the 1980s. Illustrating that the movement’s monochrome gloom was illuminated by residual flickers of countercultural utopianism, it situates post-punk in the ideological crossfire of a key political struggle of the era: a battle over pleasure and freedom between emerging Thatcherism and libertarian, feminist and countercultural movements dating back to the post-war New Left. Case studies on bands including Gang of Four, The Fall and the Slits and labels like Rough Trade move sensitively between close reading, historical context and analysis of who made post-punk and how it was produced and mediated. The book examines, too, how the struggles of post-punk resonate down to the present.

Lacan and Deleuze

Lacan and Deleuze PDF Author: Bostjan Nedoh
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474408303
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
It is often said that Lacan is the most radical representative of structuralism, a thinker of negativity and alienation, whereas Deleuze is pictured as a great opponent of the structuralist project, a vitalist and a thinker of creative potentialities of desire. It seems the two cannot be further apart. This volume of 12 new essays breaks the myth of their foreignness (if not hostility) and places the two in a productive conversation. By taking on topics such as baroque, perversion, death drive, ontology/topology, face, linguistics and formalism the essays highlight key entry points for a discussion between Lacan's and Deleuze's respective thoughts. The proposed lines of investigation do not argue for a simple equation of their thoughts, but for a 'disjunctive synthesis', which acknowledges their differences, while insisting on their positive and mutually informed reading.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work PDF Author: Alain De Botton
Publisher: Emblem Editions
ISBN: 0771026323
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
From the international bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life comes this lyrical, erudite look at our world of work. We spend most of our time at work, but what we do there rarely gets discussed in the sort of lyrical and descriptive prose our efforts surely deserve. Determined to correct this lapse, armed with a poetic perspective and his trademark philosophical sharpness, Alain de Botton heads out into the world of offices and factories, ready to take in the beauty, interest, and sheer strangeness of the modern workplace. De Botton spends time in and around some less familiar work environments, including warehouses, container ports, rocket launch pads, and power stations, and follows scientists, landscape painters, accountants, cookie manufacturers, therapists, entrepreneurs, and aircraft salesmen as they do their jobs. Along the way, de Botton tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can pose about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? To what end do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also our planet? Equally intrigued by work’s pleasures and its pains, Alain de Botton offers a characteristically lucid and witty tour of the working day and night, in a book sure to inspire a range of life-changing and wise thoughts.

Boys, Girls and Achievement

Boys, Girls and Achievement PDF Author: Becky Francis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134579217
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Girls are now out-performing boys at GCSE level, giving rise to a debate in the media on boys' underachievement. However, often such work has been a 'knee-jerk' response, led by media, not based on solid research. Boys, Girls and Achievement - Addressing the Classroom Issues fills that gap and: *provides a critical overview of the current debate on achievement; *Focuses on interviews with young people and classroom observations to examine how boys and girls see themselves as learners; *analyses the strategies teachers can use to improve the educational achievements of both boys and girls. Becky Francis provides teachers with a thorough analysis of the various ways in which secondary school pupils construct their gender identities in the classroom. The book also discusses methods teachers might use challenge these gender constructions in the classroom and thereby address the 'gender-gap' in achievement.

The Sentimental Life of International Law

The Sentimental Life of International Law PDF Author: Gerry Simpson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192849794
Category : International law
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm's, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may be re-enabled by speaking different sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways. In this methodologically diverse and unusually personal account, Gerry Simpson brings to the surface international law's hidden literary prose and offers a critical and redemptive account of the field. He does so in a series of chapters on international law's bathetic underpinnings, its friendly relations, the neurotic foundations of its underlying social order, its screened-off comic dispositions, its anti-method, and the life-worlds of its practitioners. Finally, the book closes with a chapter in which international law is re-envisioned through the practice of gardening. All of this is put forward as a contribution to the project of making international law, again, a compelling language for our times.

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures PDF Author: Clarice Lispector
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811230678
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.” Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller. Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”

The Pleasures of Death

The Pleasures of Death PDF Author: Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807174688
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
The year 2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain, an artist whose music, words, and images continue to move millions of fans worldwide. As the first academic study that provides a literary analysis of Cobain’s creative writings, Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin’s The Pleasures of Death: Kurt Cobain’s Masochistic and Melancholic Persona approaches the journals and songs crafted by Nirvana’s iconic front man from the perspective of cultural theory and psychoanalytic aesthetics. Drawing on critiques and reformulations of psychoanalytic theory by feminist, queer, and antiracist scholars, Saint-Aubin considers the literary means by which Cobain creates the persona of a young, white, heterosexual man who expresses masochistic and melancholic behaviors. On the one hand, this individual welcomes pain and humiliation as atonement for unpardonable sins; on the other, he experiences a profound sense of loss and grief, seeking death as the ultimate act of pleasure. The first-person narrators and characters that populate Cobain’s texts underscore the political and aesthetic repercussions of his art. Cobain’s distinctive version of grunge, understood as a subculture, a literary genre, and a cultural practice, represents a specific performance of race and gender, one that facilitates an understanding of the self as part of a larger social order. Saint-Aubin approaches Cobain’s writings independently of the artist’s biography, positioning these texts within the tradition of postmodern representations of masculinity in twentieth-century American fiction, while also suggesting connections to European Romantic traditions from the nineteenth century that postulate a relation between melancholy (or depression) and creativity. In turn, through Saint-Aubin’s elegant analysis, Cobain’s creative writings illuminate contradictions and inconsistencies within psychoanalytic theory itself concerning the intersection of masculinity, masochism, melancholy, and the death drive. By foregrounding Cobain’s ability to challenge coextensive links between gender, sexuality, and race, The Pleasures of Death reveals how the cultural politics and aesthetics of this tragic icon’s works align with feminist strategies, invite queer readings, and perform antiracist critiques of American culture.