Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004333932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430
Get Book Here
Book Description
With the publication in English in 1930 of Civilization and its Discontents and its thesis that instinct – and, ultimately: nature – had been and must be forever subordinated in order that civilization might thrive and endure, Freud contributed what some contemporaries saw to the central debate of his era – a debate which had long preoccupied both official American pundits and the American populace at large. At the beginning of the new Millennium, evidence abounds that an American debate still rages over the meaning of “nature,” the rightful weight of instinct, and the status of civilization. The Millennium itself has appeared in popular and official discourses as an appropriate marker of an age in which nature is close to the edge of radical extinction and has also become more and more unreliable as a paradigm for representation and debate. At the same time, the contemporary tailoring of nature to postmodern needs and expectations inevitably reveals the conceptual difficulty of any possible, simple opposition between nature and culture as if they were clearly distinguishable domains. If nature, then, can clearly be seen as a discursive concept, it may also be a timeless concept insofar that it has been shaped, created, and used at all times. Every epoch, age and era had “its own nature,” with myth, history and ideology as its dominant shaping forces. From the Frontier to Cyberia, nature has been suffering the “agony of the real,” resurfacing in discursive strategies and demonstrating a powerful impact on American society, culture and self-definition. The essays in this collection “speak critically of the natural” and examine the American debate in the many guises it has assumed over the last century within the context of major critical approaches, psychoanalytical concepts, and postmodern theorizing.
Author: Bernd Herzogenrath
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1555537642
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 643
Get Book Here
Book Description
The first critical anthology of an important and singular contemporary composer
Author: Lynn Meskell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000181286
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Get Book Here
Book Description
Egypt looms large in the Western imagination. Whether it is our attraction to pharaonic art, the pyramids or practices of mummification, Egypts unique understanding of materiality speaks to us across space and time. Is it because the ancient Egyptians fetishized material objects that we find their culture captivating today? And what exactly do Egyptian remains tell us about biography, embodiment, memory, materiality, and the self? Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt takes New Kingdom Egypt (1539-1070 BC) as its starting point and considers how excavated objects reveal the complex ways that ancient Egyptians experienced their material world. From life to death, the material world instantiated, reflected and influenced social life and existence for ancient Egyptians. Thus, in Meskells unique approach to the materiality and sensuousness of subjects and objects, we uncover the philosophical, spiritual and human meanings embedded in these cultural artefacts. Meskells book explores the fundamental existential questions that not only preoccupied ancient Egyptians, but continue to fascinate people today. What is the essence of persons and things? How might we understand the situated experiences of material life, the constitution of the object world and its shaping of human experience? How might objects successfully mediate between worlds? In the final analysis, Meskell moves forward through time and examines the consumption and appreciation of these Egyptian material objects in the contemporary world. Materiality is our physical engagement with the world, our medium for inserting ourselves into the fabric of that world and our way of constituting and shaping culture in an embodied and external sense. From that perspective it is very much the domain of anthropology and archaeology.Drawing on a wide range of objects, artefacts, and artwork, from Valley of the Kings through to Las Vegas, Meskell provides an elegant analysis of the aesthetics of ancient Egyptian material culture
Author: Lindsey Michael Banco
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book Here
Book Description
He called the first atomic bomb “technically sweet,” yet as he watched its brilliant light explode over the New Mexico desert in 1945 in advance of the black horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he also thought of the line from the Hindu epic The Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the single most recognizable face of the atomic bomb, and a man whose name has become almost synonymous with Cold War American nuclear science, was and still is a conflicted, controversial figure who has come to represent an equally ambivalent technology. The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer examines how he has been represented over the past seven decades in biographies, histories, fiction, comics, photographs, film, television, documentaries, theater, and museums. Lindsey Michael Banco gathers an unprecedented group of cultural texts and seeks to understand the multiple meanings Oppenheimer has held in American popular culture since 1945. He traces the ways these representations of Oppenheimer have influenced public understanding of the atomic bomb, technology, physics, the figure of the scientist, the role of science in war, and even what it means to pursue knowledge of the world around us. Questioning and unpacking both how and why Oppenheimer is depicted as he is across time and genre, this book is broad in scope, profound in detail, and offers unique insights into the rise of nuclear culture and how we think about the relationship between history, imagination, science, and nuclear weapons today.
Author: Murphy Pizza
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004163735
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 661
Get Book Here
Book Description
Contemporary Paganism is a movement that is still young and establishing its identity and place on the global religious landscape. The members of the movement are simultaneously growing, unifying, and maintaining its characteristic diversity of traditions, identities, and rituals. The modern Pagan movement has had a restless formation period but has also been the catalyst for some of the most innovative religious expressions, praxis, theologies, and communities. As Contemporary Paganism continues to grow and mature, new angles of inquiry about it have emerged and are explored in this collection. This examination and study of contemporary Paganism contributes new ways to observe and examine other religions, where innovations, paradoxes, and inconsistencies can be more accurately documented and explained.
Author: Asbjørn Grønstad
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 908964010X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Get Book Here
Book Description
In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory. Grønstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but as a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs.
Author: Tom Dening
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191006750
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 880
Get Book Here
Book Description
Broad in scope and with global appeal The Oxford Textbook of Old Age Psychiatry, second edition is the definitive resource on old age psychiatry. It comprehensively provides the latest knowledge on the science and practice of treating later life mental disorders, focusing on the health and social issues that arise around ageing, dementia, co-morbidity, dependency, and the end of life in progressively ageing societies across the world. Published in previous incarnations as the much loved Psychiatry in the Elderly, this core resource for all old age psychiatrists, trainees, and other clinical professionals treating older people's mental health, has been fully revised, updated, and significantly expanded. Twelve months inclusive access to the online version, including the full text (which can be browsed by the contents list, index, or searched), links from references to external sources (via PubMed, ISI, and CrossRef), and the ability to download all figures and illustrations into PowerPoint ensures that it remains the leading text on old age psychiatry in the field. Maintaining the classic combination of comprehensive coverage, clear writing style, and the provision of authoritative and up-to-date information from earlier editions, this highly respected volume covers the underpinning basic science, both the neurobiological and social varieties, clinical practice, and specific disorders, as well as providing information on psychiatric services for older people, and medico-legal and ethical issues that often present hard challenges for those treating older patients. Taking a global approach by highlighting both the common burdens and the differences in management from country to country and with a much expanded cast of contributors providing a truly international perspective, The Oxford Textbook of Old Age Psychiatry, second edition includes information on all the latest improvements and changes in the field. New chapters are included to reflect the development of old age care; covering palliative care, the ethics of caring, and living and dying with dementia. Existing chapters have also been revised and updated throughout and additional information is included on brain stimulation therapies, memory clinics and services, and capacity, which now includes all mental capacity and decision making. Providing extensive coverage and written by experts the field, the second edition of the Oxford Textbook of Old Age Psychiatry is an essential resource; no old age psychiatrist, trainee, or anyone working in the field of mental health care for older people should be without a copy on their bookshelf.
Author: Cher Krause Knight
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813065321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this fascinating analysis, Cher Krause Knight peels back the actual and contextual layers of Walt Disney's inspiration and vision for Disney World in central Florida, exploring the reasons why the resort has emerged as such a prominent sociocultural force. Knight investigates every detail, from the scale and design of the buildings to the sidewalk infrastructure to which items could and could not be sold in the shops, discussing how each was carefully configured to shape the experience of every visitor. Expertly weaving themes of pilgrimage, paradise, fantasy, and urbanism, she delves into the unexpected nuances and contradictions of this elaborately conceived playland of the imagination.
Author: D.T. Runia
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004210806
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 519
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume, prepared with the collaboration of the International Philo Bibliography Project, is the third in a series of annotated bibliographies on the Jewish exegete and philosopher Philo of Alexandria. It contains a listing of all scholarly writings on Philo for the period 1997 to 2006.
Author: Anne Douglas
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462704260
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Get Book Here
Book Description
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, known as ‘the Harrisons’, dedicated five decades to exploring and demonstrating a new approach to artistic practice, centred on “doing no work that does not attend to the wellbeing of the web of life.” Their collaborative practice pioneered a way of drawing together art and ecology. They closely observed, often with irony and humour, how human intervention disrupts the dynamics of life as a web of interrelationships. The authors of this book ‘think with’ the Harrisons, critically tracing their poetics as a reimaging and reconfiguring of the arts in response to the unfolding planetary crisis. They draw parallels between the artists’ poetics and rethinking in the philosophy of science, particularly drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead. Thinking with the Harrisons is for anyone concerned with the implications of ecology as part of a reimagining of public life, including through the interaction of art and science. Throughout their joint practice, the Harrisons sought to engage policy makers, governments, ecologists, artists, and inhabitants of specific places, sensitizing us to the crises that emerge from grounded experiences of place and time.
