Author: Averil Cameron File Type: pdf ul l*l ul Dialogues and Debates from Late Antiquity to Late Byzantium offers the first overall discussion of the literary and philosophical dialogue tradition in Greek from imperial Rome to the end of the Byzantine empire and beyond. Sixteen case studies combine theoretical approaches with in-depth analysis and include comparisons with the neighbouring Syriac, Georgian, Armenian and Latin traditions. Following an introduction and a discussion of Plutarch as a writer of dialogues, other chapters consider the Erostrophus, a philosophical dialogue in Syriac, John Chrysostoms On Priesthood, issues of literariness and complexity in the Greek Adversus Iudaeos dialogues, the Trophies of Damascus, Maximus Confessors Liber Asceticus and the middle Byzantine apocryphal revelation dialogues. The volume demonstrates a new frequency in middle and late Byzantium of rhetorical, theological and literary dialogues, concomitant with the increasing rhetoricisation of Byzantine literature, and argues for a move towards new and exciting experiments. Individual chapters examine the Platonising and anti-Latin dialogues written in the context of Anselm of Havelbergs visits to Constantinople, the theological dialogue by Soterichos Panteugenos, the dialogues of Niketas of Maroneia and the literary dialogues by Theodore Prodromos, all from the twelfth century. The final chapters explore dialogues from the empires Georgian periphery and discuss late Byzantine philosophical, satirical and verse dialogues by Nikephoros Gregoras, Manuel II Palaiologos and George Scholarios, with special attention to issues of form, dramatisation and performance. **

Author: Saud Joseph File Type: pdf The first decade of the 21st century witnessed an explosion in scholarly and public interest in women and Islamic cultures, globally. From misguided media representations, to politically motivated state manipulations, to agenda-driven Islamist movements, to feminist and international NGO projects - the subject and image of Muslim women has become iconic and riveting. This volume unpacks the representations, motivations, agendas, and projects by focusing on the advances in scholarly research on women and Islamic cultures in the first decade of the 21st century. The editors of the pioneering Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures bring together leading scholars, discipline by discipline, to critically analyze state of the art research on women and Islamic cultures from 2003-2013.

Author: Hans Koning File Type: epub The book is an idea that has finally found its time.--Publishers Weekly I think your book on Christopher Columbus is important. Im more grateful for that book than any other book I have read in a couple of years.--Kurt Vonnegut

Author: Madeline Gins File Type: pdf This manifesto is a verbal articulation of the authors visionary theory of how the human body, architecture, and creativity define and sustain one another. This revolutionary work by artist-architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins demonstrates the inter-connectedness of innovative architectural design, the poetic process, and philosophical inquiry. Together, they have created an experimental and widely admired body of work--museum installations, landscape and park commissions, home and office designs, avant-garde films, poetry collections--that challenges traditional notions about the built environment. This book promotes a deliberate use of architecture and design in dealing with the blight of the human condition it recommends that people seek architectural and aesthetic solutions to the dilemma of mortality. In 1997 the Guggenheim Museum presented an ArakawaGins retrospective and published a comprehensive volume of their work titled Reversible Destiny We Have Decided Not to Die. Architectural Body continues the philosophical definition of that project and demands a fundamental rethinking of the terms human and being. When organisms assume full responsibility for inventing themselves, where they live and how they live will merge. The artists believe that a thorough re-visioning of architecture will redefine life and its limitations and render death passe. The authors explain that Another way to read reversible destiny . . . Is as an open challenge to our species to reinvent itself and to desist from foreclosing on any possibility. Audacious and liberating, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of 20th-century poetry, postmodern critical theory, conceptual art and architecture, contemporary avant-garde poetics, and to serious readers interested in architectures influence on imaginative expression. **From Publishers Weekly ArakawaGins-as they are known in the visual arts world-have never been easy to categorize, as their oeuvre includes experimental poetry (Ginss What the President Will Say and Do!!), phenomenological mind-busters (the seminal conceptual bookinstallation The Mechanism of Meaning), dense meditations on proprioceptive being (Helen Keller or Arakawa), and their most sustained project, the architectural investigations called Reversible Destiny, which branched off into major shows at the Guggenheim, a few huge coffee-table books and an actual Reversible Destiny city now in construction in Japan. Architectural Body is one of their more approachable, but no less playful, distillations of the concepts. It envisions an individual obtaining control over the very forward movement of ones body through time by permitting architecture to expand the parameters of ones sensorium, even to cling to it-so that, literally, one wears ones house like a coat ROBERT But if Im to be a tent pole or a caryatid, how can I also sit in a chair? ARAKAWA If we initiate the form, other spines within the surrounding material will kick in and take over... for ten minutes at a time. That this book appears in a series devoted to poetics is just Gins and Arakawa argue for a new language for architecture-even new words, such as coordinology and bioscleave (for biosphere)-that is as strange and determined as William Blakes, and as icily postmodern (because they appear to be serious) as Baudrillard, Hakim Bey or the writers associated with Autonomedia. Architectural Body rings as a revolutionary call to personal agency that recalls the heady first years of Surrealism, but with a language that also fits such recent phenomena as the Burning Man festival, though this books feels bigger. 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review This is a strong and important work, as much for its polemic and contentious claims as for its utopian inflections. --Steve McCaffery, poet and Director of the North American Centre for Interdisciplinary Poetics We believe that people closely and complexly allied with their architectural surrounds can succeed in outliving their (seemingly inevitable) death sentences! --from the Introduction