Social Structure and Forms of Conciousness, Volume 2: The Dialectic of Structure and History
Author: Istvan Meszaros File Type: pdf In The Dialectic of Structure and History, Volume Two of Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, Istvan Meszaros brings the comprehension of our condition and the possibility of emancipatory social action beyond the highest point reached to date. Building on the indicatory flashes of conceptual lightning in the Grundrisse and other works of Karl Marx, Meszaros sets out the relations of structure and agency, individual and society, base and superstructure, nature and history, in a dialectical totality open to the future. The project is brought to its conclusion by means of critique, an analysis that shows not only the inadequacies of the thought critiqued but at the same time their social historical cause. The crucial questions are addressed through critique of the highest point of honest and brilliant thought in capitals ascending phase, that of Adam Smith, Kant, and Hegel, as well as the irrationalities and dishonesty of the apologists of the capital systems descending phase, such as Hayek and Popper. The dead ends of both Levi-Strausss structuralism and post-modernism, arising from their denial of history, are placed in their context as capital-apologetics. What Meszaros, the leading Marxist philosopher of our times, has achieved is of world historical importance. He has cleared the philosophical ground to permit the illumination of a path to transcend the destructive death spiral of the capital system. **
Author: Larry Zuckerman
File Type: epub
The Potato tells the story of how a humble vegetable, once regarded as trash food, had as revolutionary an impact on Western history as the railroad or the automobile. Using Ireland, England, France, and the United States as examples, Larry Zuckerman shows how daily life from the 1770s until World War I would have been unrecognizable-perhaps impossible-without the potato, which functioned as fast food, famine insurance, fuel and labor saver, budget stretcher, and bank loan, as well as delicacy. Drawing on personal diaries, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, and other primary sources, this is popular social history at its liveliest and most illuminating.**
Author: Mark C. Taylor
File Type: epub
A rich exploration of the possibilities of representation after Modernism, Mark Taylors new study charts the logic and continuity of Mark Tanseys painting by considering the philosophical ideas behind Tanseys art. Taylor examines how Tansey uses structuralist and poststructuralist thought as well as catastrophe, chaos, and complexity theory to create paintings that please the eye while provoking the mind. Taylors clear accounts of thinkers ranging from Plato, Kant, and Hegel to Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and de Man will be an invaluable contribution to students and teachers of art. **
Author: R. Larry Todd
File Type: pdf
We know Robert Schumann in many ways as a visionary composer, a seasoned journalist, a cultured man of letters, and a genius who, having passed his mantle on to the young Brahms, succumbed to mental illness in 1856. Drawing on recent pathbreaking research, this collection offers new perspectives on this seminal nineteenth-century figure. In Part I, Leon Botstein and Michael P. Steinberg assess Schumanns efforts to place music at the center of German culture, in public and private sectors. Bernhard R. Appel offers a probing source study of one of Schumanns most personal works, the Album fur die Jugend, Op. 68, while John Daverio considers the generic identity of Das Paradies und die Peri, and Jon W. Finson reexamines the first version of the Eichendorff Liederkreis. Gerd Nauhaus investigates Schumanns approach to the symphonic finale, and R. Larry Todd considers the intractable issue of quotations and allusions in Schumanns music. Part II presents letters and memoirs, including unpublished correspondence between Clara Schumann and Felix and Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. In Part III, conflicting critical views of Schumann are juxtaposed. Some of these sources are translated into English for the first time. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. **
Author: Aaron Herald Skabelund
File Type: pdf
In 1924, Professor Ueno Eizaburo of Tokyo Imperial University adopted an Akita puppy he named Hachiko. Each evening Hachiko greeted Ueno on his return to Shibuya Station. In May 1925 Ueno died while giving a lecture. Every day for over nine years the Akita waited at Shibuya Station, eventually becoming nationally and even internationally famous for his purported loyalty. A year before his death in 1935, the city of Tokyo erected a statue of Hachiko outside the station. The story of Hachiko reveals much about the place of dogs in Japans cultural imagination.In the groundbreaking Empire of Dogs, Aaron Herald Skabelund examines the history and cultural significance of dogs in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan, beginning with the arrival of Western dog breeds and new modes of dog keeping, which spread throughout the world with Western imperialism. He highlights how dogs joined with humans to create the modern imperial world and how, in turn, imperialism shaped dogs bodies and their relationship with humans through its impact on dog-breeding and dog-keeping practices that pervade much of the world today.In a book that is both enlightening and entertaining, Skabelund focuses on actual and metaphorical dogs in a variety of contexts the rhetorical pairing of the Western colonial dog with native canines subsequent campaigns against indigenous canines in the imperial realm the creation, maintenance, and in some cases restoration of Japanese dog breeds, including the Shiba Inu the mobilization of military dogs, both real and fictional and the emergence of Japan as a pet superpower in the second half of the twentieth century. Through this provocative account, Skabelund demonstrates how animals generally and canines specifically have contributed to the creation of our shared history, and how certain dogs have subtly influenced how that history is told. Generously illustrated with both color and black-and-white images, Empire of Dogs shows that human-canine relations often expose how peopleespecially those with power and wealthuse animals to define, regulate, and enforce political and social boundaries between themselves and other humans, especially in imperial contexts.**
Author: V. S. Naipaul
File Type: epub
In the brilliant novel (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one manan Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Author: Victoria Finlay
File Type: epub
In this vivid and captivating journey through the colors of an artists palette, Victoria Finlay takes us on an enthralling adventure around the world and through the ages, illuminating how the colors we choose to value have determined the history of culture itself.How did the most precious color blue travel all the way from remote lapis mines in Afghanistan to Michelangelos brush? What is the connection between brown paint and ancient Egyptian mummies? Why did Robin Hood wear Lincoln green? In Color, Finlay explores the physical materials that color our world, such as precious minerals and insect blood, as well as the social and political meanings that color has carried through time.Roman emperors used to wear togas dyed with a purple color that was made from an odorous Lebanese shellfishwhich probably meant their scent preceded them. In the eighteenth century, black dye was called logwood and grew along the Spanish Main. Some of the first indigo plantations were started in America, amazingly enough, by a seventeen-year-old girl named Eliza. And the popular van Gogh painting White Roses at Washingtons National Gallery had to be renamed after a researcher discovered that the flowers were originally done in a pink paint that had faded nearly a century ago. Color is full of extraordinary people, events, and anecdotespainted all the more dazzling by Finlays engaging style.Embark upon a thrilling adventure with this intrepid journalist as she travels on a donkey along ancient silk trade routes with the Phoenicians sailing the Mediterranean in search of a special purple shell that garners wealth, sustenance, and prestige with modern Chilean farmers breeding and bleeding insects for their viscous red blood. The colors that craft our world have never looked so bright.From the Hardcover edition.
Author: Vasily Grossman
File Type: mobi
Edited and translated from the Russian by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova Knopf Canada is proud to present a masterpiece of the Second World War, never before published in English, from one of the great Russian writers of the 20th century a vivid eyewitness account of the Eastern Front and the ruthless truth of war.When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, Vasily Grossman became a special correspondent for the Red Star, the Red Armys newspaper. **A Writer at War** based on the notebooks in which Grossman gathered raw material for his articles depicts the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front, and the lives and deaths of soldiers and civilians alike. It also includes some of the earliest reportage on the Holocaust. In the three years he spent on assignment, Grossman witnessed some of the most savage fighting of the war the appalling defeats of the Red Army, the brutal street fighting in Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk (the largest tank engagement in history), the defense of Moscow, the battles in Ukraine and much more.Historian Antony Beevor has taken Grossmans raw notebooks, and fashioned them into a narrative providing one of the most even-handed descriptions at once unflinching and sensitive we have ever had of what he called the ruthless truth of war.*From the Hardcover edition.*
Author: Carl Niekerk
File Type: pdf
Ali and Nino is a novel published in German in 1937 under the alias Kurban Said, a love story between a Muslim man and a Christian woman set in Baku, Azerbaijan, during World War I and the countrys brief independence. It was a major success, translated into several other languages, but was forgotten by the end of World War II. Recent research by the journalist Tom Reiss has revealed the identity of the author as LevLeo Nussimbaum (1905-1942), a Jewish man born in Baku who converted to Islam, worked as a journalist in Berlin, and died forgotten in exile. Reisss discovery has spurred new interest in the novel, as has the fact that the book prefigures todays perceived conflicts between East and West or Islam and Christianity, but also suggests a more peaceful model of intercultural living in multiethnic Bakus melting pot of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The present volume collects twelve new essays on different aspects of the text by scholars from a variety of disciplines and cultural backgrounds. It is intended to showcase the suitability of Ali and Nino for inclusion in a curriculum focused on German, world literature, or area studies, and to suggest a variety of approaches to the novel while also appealing to its fans. Contributors Sara Abdoullah-Zadeh, Cori Crane, Chase Dimock, Christine Rapp Dombrowski, Elizabeth Weber Edwards, Anja Haensch, Kamaal Haque, Lisabeth Hock, Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, Carl Niekerk, Elke Pfitzinger, Soraya Saatchi, Daniel Schreiner, Azade Seyhan. Carl Niekerk is Professor of German with affiliate appointments in French, Comparative and World Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Cori Crane is Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of the Language Program in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at Duke University.