Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
File Type: epub
A provocative essay collection that finds the Nobel laureate taking on the decline of intellectual lifeIn the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation--penned by none other than Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics at work today. Taking his cues from T. S. Eliot--whose essay Notes Toward a Definition of Culture is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished--Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun to be felt. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations today they have all but disappeared from public debate. But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. He is not content to merely sign a petition he will not bite his tongue. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.
Author: Rebecca Lemon
File Type: pdf
Rebecca Lemon illuminates a previously-buried conception of addiction, as a form of devotion at once laudable, difficult, and extraordinary, that has been concealed by the persistent modern link of addiction to pathology. Surveying sixteenth-century invocations, she reveals how early moderns might consider themselves addicted to study, friendship, love, or God. However, she also uncovers their understanding of addiction as a form of compulsion that resonates with modern scientific definitions. Specifically, early modern medical tracts, legal rulings, and religious polemic stressed the dangers of addiction to alcohol in terms of disease, compulsion, and enslavement. Yet the relationship between these two understandings of addiction was not simply oppositional, for what unites these discourses is a shared emphasis on addiction as the overthrow of the will.Etymologically, addiction is a verbal contract or a pledge, and even as sixteenth-century audiences actively embraced addiction to God and love, writers warned against commitment to improper forms of addiction, and the term became increasingly associated with disease and tyranny. Examining canonical texts including Doctor Faustus, Twelfth Night, Henry IV, and Othello alongside theological, medical, imaginative, and legal writings, Lemon traces the variety of early modern addictive attachments. Although contemporary notions of addiction seem to bear little resemblance to its initial meanings, Lemon argues that the early modern periods understanding of addiction is relevant to our modern conceptions of, and debates about, the phenomenon.
Author: Annalisa Coliva
File Type: pdf
This book explores the idea that self-knowledge comes in many varieties. We know ourselves through many different methods, depending on whether we attend to our propositional attitudes, our perceptions, sensations or emotions. Furthermore, sometimes what we call self-knowledge is not the result of any substantial cognitive achievement and the characteristic authority we grant to our psychological self-ascription is a conceptual necessity, redeemed by unravelling the structure of several interlocking concepts. This book critically assesses the main contemporary positions held on the epistemology of self-knowledge. These include robust epistemic accounts such as inner sense views and theory-theories weak epistemic accounts such as transparency theories and rational internalism and externalism as well as expressivist and constitutivist approaches. The author offers an innovative pluralist position on self-knowledge, emphasizing the complexity of the phenomenon and its resistance to any monistic treatment, to pose new and intriguing philosophical challenges. **
Author: Michael Harris
File Type: epub
Only one generation in history (ours) will experience life both with and without the Internet. For everyone who follows us, online life will simply be the air they breathe. Today, we revel in ubiquitous information and constant connection, rarely stopping to consider the implications for our logged-on lives.Michael Harris chronicles this massive shift, exploring what weve gainedand lostin the bargain. In this eloquent and thought-provoking book, Harris argues that our greatest loss has been that of absence itselfof silence, wonder and solitude. Its a surprisingly precious commodity, and one we have less of every year. Drawing on a vast trove of research and scores of interviews with global experts, Harris explores this loss of lack in chapters devoted to every corner of our lives, from sex and commerce to memory and attention span. The books message is urgent once weve lost the gift of absence, we may never remember its value.
Author: Stephen Mileson
File Type: pdf
Parks were prominent and, indeed, controversial features of the medieval countryside, but they have been unevenly studied and remain only partly understood. Stephen Mileson provides the first full-length study of the subject, examining parks across the country and throughout the Middle Ages in their full social, economic, jurisdictional, and landscape context. The first half of the book investigates the purpose of these royal and aristocratic reserves, which have been variously claimed as hunting grounds, economic assets, landscape settings for residences, and status symbols. An emphasis on the aristocratic passion for the chase as the key motivation for park-making provides an important challenge to more recent views and allows for a deeper appreciation of the connection between park-making and the expression of power and lordship. The second part of the book examines the impact of park creation on wider society, from the king and aristocracy to peasants and townsmen. Instead of the traditional emphasis on the importance of royal regulation, greater attention is paid to the effects of lordly park-making on other members of the landed elite and ordinary people. These widespread enclosures interfered with customary uses of woodland and waste, hunting practices, roads and farming not surprisingly, they could become a focus for aristocratic feud, popular protest and furtive resistance. Combining historical, archaeological, and landscape evidence this ground-breaking study provides fresh insight into contemporary values and how they helped to shape the medieval landscape.ReviewA clear, well documented synthesis with a wealth of primary material. Northern History This is a seminal work. It familiarises those new to the subject with previous approaches and theories, questions past assumptions, comes to novel conclusions and points the way forward. Southern History Society [an] excellent treatment of the medieval park. Susan Kilby, Rural History a thoughtful, reflective and intellectual first book which is a considerable credit to its author Tom Beaumont Jones, Medieval Archaeology [Mileson] makes good use of topographical evidence in particular (the book has some excellent maps) but its bedrock is written evidence, both documentary and literary, and its strength is that it makes a major contribution to integrating the study of parks into the wider perspective of English medieval social history. David Rollason, English Historical Review About the AuthorStephen Mileson started working for the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire in 2005 and has so far been researching and writing about the history of Henley-on-Thames and surrounding Chilterns parishes in the far south of the county. He has also been Lecturer in Medieval History at St Edmund Hall, Oxford since 2006, and previously worked on the Cambridge University Inquisitions Post Mortem editing project. His research interests include the social history of the medieval aristocracy and agrarian and landscape history.
Author: Al Cooper
File Type: epub
While white racism has global dimensions, it has an unshakeable lease on life in South African political organizations and its educational system. Donnarae MacCann and Yulisa Maddy here provide a thorough and provocative analysis of South African childrens literature during the key decade around Nelson Mandelas release from prison. Their research demonstrates that the literature of this period was derived from the same milieu -- intellectual, educational, religious, political, and economic -- that brought white supremacy to South Africa during colonial times. This volume is a signal contribution to the study of childrens literature and its relation to racism and social conditions.
Author: Jerry Palmer
File Type: pdf
This book analyses soldiers memoirs from the Great War of 1914-18 from Britain, France and Germany. It considers both the authors composition of the memoirs and the public response to them. It provides contextual analysis through a survey of the different types of contemporary writing about the Great War, through an analysis of changes in the language used to describe combat, and through an analysis of those people whose accounts of the war were either excluded or marginalised. It also considers the international response to the most successful of the texts. The purpose of the analysis is to show how soldiers memoirs contributed to the collective memory of the war and how they influenced public opinion about the war. These texts are both autobiographical and historical and their relationship to the fields of autobiography and historical writing is also considered, as well as to the distinction between fact and fiction. **
Author: Sheridan Palmer
File Type: epub
Bernard Smith began life as a ward of the State he would go on to become the father of Australian art history. In 2008, Smith invited writer and art historian Sheridan Palmer to write his biography. Through years of interviews and exclusive access to Smiths papers and library, Palmer reveals the unique character of an exceptional man. **