Author: Alan D. Sokal File Type: pdf In May 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in the fashionable academic journal Social Text. The essay quoted hip theorists like Jacques Lacan, Donna Haraway, and Gilles Deleuze. The prose was thick with the jargon of poststructuralism.And the point the essay tried to make was counterintuitive gravity, Sokal argued, was a fiction that society had agreed upon, and science needed to be liberated from its ideological blinders. When Sokal revealed in the pages of Lingua Franca that he had written the article as a parody, the story hit the front page of the New York Times. It set off a national debate still raging today Are scholars in the humanities trapped in a jargon-ridden Wonderland? Are scientists deluded in thinking their work is objective? Are literature professors suffering from science envy? Was Sokals joke funny? Was the Enlightenment such a bad thing after all? And isnt it a little bit true that the meaning of gravity is contingent upon your cultural perspective? Collected here for the first time are Sokals original essay on quantum gravity, his essay revealing the hoax, the newspaper articles that broke the story, and the angry op-eds, letters, and e-mail exchanges sparked by the hoax from intellectuals across the country, including Stanley Fish, George F. Will, Michael Berube, and Katha Pollitt. Also included are extended essays in which a wide range of scholars ponder the long-term lessons of the hoax.
Author: Mary Kay Vaughan
File Type: pdf
In Portrait of a Young Painter, the distinguished historian Mary Kay Vaughan adopts a biographical approach to understanding the culture surrounding the Mexico City youth rebellion of the 1960s. Her chronicle of the life of painter Pepe Zuniga counters a literature that portrays post-1940 Mexican history as a series of uprisings against state repression, injustice, and social neglect that culminated in the student protests of 1968. Rendering Zunigas coming of age on the margins of formal politics, Vaughan depicts midcentury Mexico City as a culture of growing prosperity, state largesse, and a vibrant, transnationally-informed public life that produced a multifaceted youth movement brimming with creativity and criticism of convention. In an analysis encompassing the mass media, schools, politics, family, sexuality, neighborhoods, and friendships, she subtly invokes theories of discourse, phenomenology, and affect to examine the formation of Zunigas persona in the decades leading up to 1968. By discussing the influences that shaped his worldview, she historicizes the process of subject formation and shows how doing so offers new perspectives on the events of 1968. **
Author: Gregory Klyve
File Type: pdf
Comprehensive and clear explanations of key grammar patterns and structures are reinforced and contextualized through authentic materials. You will not only learn how to construct grammar correctly, but when and where to use it so you sound natural and appropriate. Latin Grammar You Really Need to Know will help you gain the intuition you need to become a confident communicator in your new language.**
Author: Francis Mulhern
File Type: epub
Voices of Sartre, Lukacs, Chomsky, Harvey and others in conversation with New Left Review.The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats. Lives on the Left brings together sixteen such interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since.Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new generation of readers.Lives on the Left includes interviews with Georg Lukacs, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Jiri Pelikan, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti, K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, Joao Pedro Stedile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi.New Left Review was founded in 1960 in London, which has remained its base ever since. In fifty years of publication, it has won an international reputation as an independent journal of socialist politics and ideas, attracting readers and contributors from every part of the world. A Spanish-language edition is published bi-monthly from Madrid.
Author: Vladimir A. Tsesis
File Type: pdf
Welcome to Gradieshti, a Soviet village awash in gray buildings and ramshackle fences, home to a large, collective farm and to the most oddball and endearing cast of characters possible. For three years in the 1960s, Vladimir Tsesisinestimable Soviet doctor and irrepressible jesterwas stationed in a village where racing tractor drivers tossed vodka bottles to each other for sport where farmers and townspeople secretly mocked and tried to endure the Communist way of life where milk for children, running water, and adequate electricity were rare where the worlds smallest, motley parade became the countrys longest and where one compulsively amorous Communist Party leader met a memorable, chilling fate. From a frantic pursuit of calcium-deprived, lunatic Socialist chickens to a father begging on his knees to Soviet officials to obtain antibiotic for his dying child, Vladimirs tales of Gradieshti are unforgettable. Sometimes hysterical, often moving, always a remarkable and highly entertaining insiders look at rural life under the old Soviet regime, they are a sobering expose of the terrible inadequacies of its much-lauded socialist medical system. **
Author: Paul Bew
File Type: pdf
Winston Churchill spent his early childhood in Ireland, had close Irish relatives, and was himself much involved in Irish political issues for a large part of his career. He took Ireland very seriously -- and not only because of its significance in the Anglo-American relationship. Churchill, in fact, probably took Ireland more seriously than Ireland took Churchill. Yet, in the fifty years since Churchills death, there has not been a single major book on his relationship to Ireland. It is the most neglected part of his legacy on both sides of the Irish Sea. Distinguished historian of Ireland Paul Bew now at long last puts this right. Churchill and Ireland tells the full story of Churchills life-long engagement with Ireland and the Irish, from his early years as a child in Dublin, through his central role in the Home Rule crisis of 1912-14 and in the war leading up to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922, to his bitter disappointment at Irish neutrality in the Second World War and gradual rapprochement with his old enemy Eamon de Valera towards the end of his life. As this long overdue book reminds us, Churchill learned his earliest rudimentary political lessons in Ireland. It was the first piece in the Churchill jigsaw and, in some respects, the last. **
Author: R. Douglas Spence
File Type: pdf
This richly detailed biography of Andrew Jackson Donelson (1799-1871) sheds new light on the political and personal life of this nephew and namesake of Andrew Jackson. A scion of a pioneering Tennessee family, Donelson was a valued assistant and trusted confidant of the man who defined the Age of Jackson. One of those central but background figures of history, Donelson had a knack for being where important events were happening and knew many of the great figures of the age. As his uncles secretary, he weathered Old Hickorys tumultuous presidency, including the notorious Petticoat War. Building his own political career, he served as US charge daffaires to the Republic of Texas, where he struggled against an enigmatic President Sam Houston, British and French intrigues, and the threat of war by Mexico, to achieve annexation. As minister to Prussia, Donelson enjoyed a ringside seat to the revolutions of 1848 and the first attempts at German unification. A firm Unionist in the mold of his uncle, Donelson denounced the secessionists at the Nashville Convention of 1850. He attempted as editor of the Washington Union to reunite the Democratic party, and, when he failed, he was nominated as Millard Fillmores vice-presidential running mate on the Know-Nothing party ticket in 1856. He lived to see the Civil War wreck the Union he loved, devastate his farms, and take the lives of two of his sons. **
Author: James L. Larson
File Type: pdf
The turbulence of the Protestant Reformation marks a turning point in European history, but the Scandinavian contribution to this revolution is not well known outside the Northern world. Reforming the North focuses on twenty-five years (1520-1545 A.D.) of this history, during which Scandinavians terminated the medieval Union of Kalmar, toppled the Catholic Church, ended the commercial dominance of the German Hanse, and laid the foundations for centralized states on the ruins of old institutions and organizations. This book traces the chaotic and often violent transfer of resources and authority from the decentralized structures of medieval societies to the early modern states and their territorial churches. Religious reform is regarded as an essential element in the process - in the context of social unrest, political conflict, and long-term changes in finance, trade, and warfare. Reforming the North offers a broad perspective on this turbulent period and on the implications of the Protestant Reformation for Northern history.**
Author: Theocritus
File Type: pdf
Under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who ruled Egypt in the middle of the third century B.C.E., Alexandria became the brilliant multicultural capital of the Greek world. Theocrituss poem in praise of Philadelphusat once a Greek king and an Egyptian pharaohis the only extended poetic tribute to this extraordinary ruler that survives. Combining the Greek text, an English translation, a full line-by-line commentary, and extensive introductory studies of the poems historical and literary context, this volume also offers a wide-ranging and far-reaching consideration of the workings and representation of poetic patronage in the Ptolemaic age. In particular, the book explores the subtle and complex links among Theocrituss poem, modes of praise drawn from both Greek and Egyptian traditions, and the subsequent flowering of Latin poetry in the Augustan age. As the first detailed account of this important poem to show how Theocritus might have drawn on the pharaonic traditions of Egypt as well as earlier Greek poetry, this book affords unique insight into how praise poetry for Ptolemy and his wife may have helped to negotiate the adaptation of Greek culture that changed conditions of the new Hellenistic world. Invaluable for its clear translation and its commentary on genre, dialect, diction, and historical reference in relation to Theocrituss Encomium, the book is also significant for what it reveals about the poems cultural and social contexts and about Theocritus devices for addressing his several readerships. COVER IMAGE The image on the front cover of this book is incorrectly identified on the jacket flap. The correct caption is Gold Oktadrachm depicting Ptolemy II and Arsinoe (mid-third century BCE by permission of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). **