Author: Henri Lefebvre File Type: pdf Rhythmanalysis displays all the characteristics which made Lefebvre one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. In the analysis of rhythms -- both biological and social -- Lefebvre shows the interrelation of space and time in the understanding of everyday life.With dazzling skills, Lefebvre moves between discussions of music, the commodity, measurement, the media and the city. In doing so he shows how a non-linear conception of time and history balanced his famous rethinking of the question of space. This volume also includes his earlier essays on The Rhythmanalysis Project and Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Towns. **Review ...the most thorough account of Lefebvres work on time yet available to an English-speaking audience and, as such, it really demands to be read. ..Lefebvres work encourages rhythmanalysis as a sensibility, as close to the poetic as the scientific...a welcome addition to Lefebvres work available in English. As the most comprehensive translation of his studies of time and rhythm so far, it will be of very wide interest...Whoever we are, Rhythmanalysis will enrich our theoretical and empirical investigations. -- Dave Horton ...a remarkable achievement on the part of Stuart Elden. -- Neil Maycroft * Capital and Class * ...it represents the concise culmination of his though in a synthesis neatly summarized in the English subtitle of this book space, time and everyday life...Elden has performed a fine service to Lefebvre scholarship here. His book will help to orient an English-speaking audience to the sophisticated philosophical background of one of the most original calls to revolutionary thought and action of the twentieth century. -- Andrew Aitken * Radical Philosophy * About the Author Stuart Elden is a Professor of Political Geography at Durham University. Henri Lefebvre (1901-91) was a French Marxist sociologist, intellectual and philosopher. He held a range of academic posts both in France and America and wrote almost 70 books. His work influenced the development of philosophy, sociology, geography, political science and literary criticism. Gerald Moore is a graduate student at Downing College, Cambridge, working on contemporary French philosophy.

Author: Ann Christys File Type: pdf In the ninth century, Vikings carried out raids on the Christian north and Muslim south of the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal), going on to attack North Africa, southern Francia and Italy and perhaps sailing as far as Byzantium. A century later, Vikings killed a bishop of Santiago de Compostela and harried the coasts of al-Andalus. Most of the raids after this date were small in scale, but several heroes of the Old Norse sagas were said to have raided in the peninsula. These Vikings have been only a footnote to the history of the Viking Age. Many stories about their activities survive only in elaborate versions written centuries after the event, and in Arabic. This book reconsiders the Arabic material as part of a dossier that also includes Latin chronicles and charters as well as archaeological and place-name evidence. Arabic authors and their Latin contemporaries remembered Vikings in Iberia in surprisingly similar ways. How they did so sheds light on contemporary responses to Vikings throughout the medieval world. **Review Ann Christyss concise and well-written book fills a real need she has read carefully all relevant sources, in Arabic, Old Norse and Latin, concerning possible Viking visits to the coasts of the Iberian Peninsula in the ninth and tenth centuries, stripped away many romanticized details that have attached to the accounts over the years, and come up with a sober assessment that there were indeed occasional such attacks, but the shock and fear which the Vikings generated in coastal areas of the Iberian Peninsula were lasting, and greater than the actual threat. Ann Christys has made what might at first seem a small contribution to Viking history recognisable as not just significant but, in its field, definitive. Her knowledge of Arabic as well as Latin (and relevant modern languages) gives her work the edge on previous discussions of Vikings in the South. In methodological terms, her sifting-out of the grist in ninth-century sources adds something new to Viking historiography, while her critical analysis of later myths and their contexts is exemplary, illuminating, and enjoyable. The Vikings in Iberia are remarkably elusive - our picture of them shaped by genres as diverse as Ptolemaic geography, Scandinavian saga and crusading narrative, affected by the recurring need of foils for heroes - saintly or secular. Dr Christys uses her formidable linguistic range and scholarly judgment to track them. On the way we lose Viking cheese, but gain Viking mice! The overall result is a major addition to our knowledge not only of Vikings, but of early medieval Iberia, and especially of Iberian historiography, both Christian and Muslim. This is the first study of the Vikings in Iberia to be based on modern methodological principles and a profound knowledge of Muslim historiography. It puts this field of study on an entirely new footing and amounts to a true spring cleaning. This account of Scandinavian activity in Iberia and around the Mediterranean from the ninth to the eleventh centuries is based mainly on a thorough and very welcome analysis of the problems posed by medieval Muslim and Christian texts. It will be an invaluable guide to future students of the Vikings. Book Description A critical narrative of Viking activity in Iberia and the Mediterranean and written and material responses to it.

Author: Judith Halberstam File Type: pdf The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternativesto conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes low theory as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose ones way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated childrens films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido. **Review A lively and thought-provoking examination of how the homogenizing tendencies of modern society might be resisted through the creative application of failure, forgetting, and passivity, actions generally deemed of little value within todays capitalist models of success. . . . [A]s a close reader of popular culture, she is exemplary, and as a valiant attempt to find value in positions and attitudes such as negativity that our modern success-oriented society disdains, this study is never less than thrilling. - Publishers Weekly Queer Theory using Spongebob Squarepants? Totally there... Underdogs and shoddy queers can take wordy, erudite solace in Halberstams words. - Gay Times [H]ere is a book well worth the time and attention it takes to read it and to consider its implications. Most especially in that Judith Halberstam writes not only with authority, but also with genuine wit, which leaves the reader laughing out loud from time to time, something quite unknown until now in books of queer theory. Further, Ms. Halberstam presents her case with deep insight into human nature, and into our deepset cultural need to simplify our definition of the word successand, up until now, our seeming need to ignore the creative implications of failure. - Vinton Rafe McCabe, New York Journal of Books All losers are the heirs of those who have lost before them. The Queer Art of Failure narrates hilarious and swerving outlaw comedies of refusal, absurdity, and exuberant being, acting in solidarity with its resident artistsfrom SpongeBob SquarePants to Yoko Ono. But the book hums a dark tone, too. The arts of normative style, playing out on sexual, racialized, gendered, and colonial bodies and landscapes, are painful to witness, even here. No artist or critic can repair the damage, erasing history, but Judith Halberstam wields all of the weapons that intelligence (and cartoons) can bring against the harsh work of conventionality.Lauren Berlant, author of Cruel Optimism The Queer Art of Failure is a manifesto for cultural studies. It self-consciously risks being dismissed or trashed in order to rescue alternative objects of analysis, methods of knowing, and ways of communicating. Its stakes are clear. Its not attempting to argue for the recovery of its materials from obscurity it values forgetting and obsolescence. Its not claiming to retool our understanding of major work it traffics unapologetically in the minor. And it doesnt pretend to comprehensive scholarship it offers up plot summaries and allegorical readings with glee.Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories The Queer Art of Failure is inspired, provocative, and hilarious. More significantly, it is a deft evisceration of the regulative rigidities of disciplinarity and the pretensions of high theory. Judith Halberstams advocacy of silly archives and low theory is much more than a carnivalesque skewering of the earnest self-seriousness of much academic scholarship it is a populist clarion call for expansive democratic visions of what it is we are writing about and for whom we think we are writing. Lisa Duggan, author of The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy Failure abounds all around us economies collapse, nation-states falter, and malfeasance rules. In the face of our dismal situation, Judith Halberstam distills and repurposes the negative in order to think outside the tyranny of success. The Queer Art of Failure finds a new vitality in not winning, accumulating, doing, or knowing. Both counterintuitive and anti-anticipatable, this compelling book pushes beyond many of the impasses and blockages that limit our critical horizons today.Jose Esteban Munoz, author of Cruising Utopia The Then and There of Queer Futurity [H]ere is a book well worth the time and attention it takes to read it and to consider its implications. Most especially in that Judith Halberstam writes not only with authority, but also with genuine wit, which leaves the reader laughing out loud from time to time, something quite unknown until now in books of queer theory. Further, Ms. Halberstam presents her case with deep insight into human nature, and into our deepset cultural need to simplify our definition of the word successand, up until now, our seeming need to ignore the creative implications of failure. (Vinton Rafe McCabe, New York Journal of Books) Queer Theory using Spongebob Squarepants? Totally there... Underdogs and shoddy queers can take wordy, erudite solace in Halberstams words. (Gay Times) A lively and thought-provoking examination of how the homogenizing tendencies of modern society might be resisted through the creative application of failure, forgetting, and passivity, actions generally deemed of little value within todays capitalist models of success. . . . [A]s a close reader of popular culture, she is exemplary, and as a valiant attempt to find value in positions and attitudes such as negativity that our modern success-oriented society disdains, this study is never less than thrilling. (Publishers Weekly) About the Author Judith Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, as well as Female Masculinity and Skin Shows Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, both also published by Duke University Press.

Author: Lawrence Warner File Type: pdf Addressing the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner reveals the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics over the centuries created their own speculative narratives about the poem, which gradually came to be regarded as factually true. Warner begins by considering the possibility that Langland wrote a romance about a werewolf and bear-suited lovers, and he goes on to explore the methods of the poems localization, and medieval readers particular interest in its Latinity. Warner shows that the Protestant Piers was a reaction against the poems oral mode of transmission, reveals the extensive eighteenth-century textual scholarship on the poem by figures including the maligned Chaucer editor John Urry, and contextualizes its first modernization by a literary forger inspired by the 1790s Shakespeare controversies. This lively account of Piers Plowman challenges the way the poem has traditionally been read and understood.