Author: Dave Robinson File Type: epub Philosophers have always enjoyed asking awkward and provocative questions, such as What is the nature of reality? What are human beings really like? What is special about the human mind and consciousness? Are we free to choose who we are and what we do? Can we prove that God exists? Can we be certain about anything at all? What is truth? Does language provide us with a true picture of the world? How should we behave towards each other? Do computers think? Introducing Philosophy is a comprehensive graphic guide to the thinking of all the significant philosophers of the Western world from Heraclitus to Derrida. It examines and explains their key arguments and ideas without being obscure or solemn. Lively and accessible, it is the perfect introduction to philosophers and philosophical ideas for anyone coming to the subject for the first time.

Author: William Gaddis File Type: epub A great masterpiece by William Gaddis, with a new introduction by Rick Moody. Winner of the 1976 National Book Award, J R is a biting satire about the many ways in which capitalism twists the American spirit into something dangerous, yet pervasive and unassailable. At the center of the novel is a hilarious eleven year oldJ Rwho with boyish enthusiasm turns a few basic lessons in capitalist principles, coupled with a young boys lack of conscience, into a massive and exploitative paper empire. The result is one of the funniest and most disturbing stories ever told about the corruption of the American dream.

Author: Martin Ruef File Type: pdf At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds. Analyzing trajectories among average Southerners, this is perhaps the most extensive sociological treatment of the transition from slavery since W.E.B. Du Boiss Black Reconstruction in America. In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmens Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, Ruef draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports. Through a resolutely comparative approach, Between Slavery and Capitalism identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today. **Review Winner of the 2015 Viviana Zelizer Award for Best Book, Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association [A] compelling analysis of the swiftly changing economic and social institutions in the American south after the Civil War.--Heather A. Haveman, *Administrative Science Quarterly* The book excels in providing a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding large-scale social change. . . . Ruef makes excellent use of a wide range of data, including both historical census data and interviews with former slaves conducted by the Federal Writers Project, to consider patterns of intergenerational status attainment among those who lived through emancipation. . . . A fine exemplar of a historical-comparative analysis of economic change.--Joseph O. Jewell, *American Journal of Sociology* From the Back Cover It would seem difficult to add any new knowledge to the history of the southern economy after the Civil War. But Martin Ruef has done just that. By arguing that the reconstruction of the southern economy was an uncertain and conflict-riven process, he suggests that the options that were pursued were a complex social construction that reflected the relative power of planters and their former slaves. Put simply, producing a labor market involved the construction of a new model of racial employment in the South. Ruefs book uses previously unexploited data sources to examine the construction of this market from the bottom up and shows how this affected the life chances of African Americans for at least two generations.--Neil D. Fligstein, University of California, Berkeley Ruef has written a marvelously clear and compelling account of the profound transformation of the Souths economy after the Civil War, explaining how former slaves and former slaveholders and other whites navigated the uncertain terrain left after the abolition of slavery. This is a model for how to triangulate among multiple historical sources--government censuses, credit ratings, archives on Southern plantations, and interviews with former slaves.--Heather A. Haveman, University of California, Berkeley Ruefs book is an absolute must read. His novel analysis--deploying economic sociologys concepts of classical uncertainty (unknown probabilities of known outcomes) and categorical uncertainty (unknown outcomes) to analyze the transitions to capitalism after the U.S. Civil War--can be fruitfully applied to countless situations of profound institutional change, past and present.--Rebecca Jean Emigh, University of California, Los Angeles Between Slavery and Capitalism tells a masterful, authoritative, and previously untold story about how pervasive uncertainty shaped the economy of the South following emancipation. Using an impressive array of data to test theory and draw conclusions, Martin Ruef takes up for empirical consideration what most have only speculated and theorized about.--Enobong Hannah Branch, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Author: Simon Kemp File Type: pdf This book explores the current state of French fiction through an examination of the work of five major French writers, viewed in the wider context of the current French literary scene. It evaluates the widely held, but little analyzed, notion that there has been a return to more conventional storytelling in the wake of an experimental period in French literary fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. The book deals with some of the most widely-studied writers on British and American university French courses in an accessible style, while offering a new perspective on recent trends in the French novel and entering forthrightly into current debates on narrative theory. The aims of the study are three-fold. Firstly, it examines in detail the work of five notable contemporary writers, namely Annie Ernaux, Pascal Quignard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz and Patrick Modiano. It uncovers the characteristics and uses of narrative form in these novelists work, exploring the relationship between form and subject-matter, and comparing their practice to that of mid-twentieth-century experimentalists. Secondly, the study inserts its writers into the broader context of turn-of-the-century French writing, from Amelie Nothomb and Daniel Pennac to Francois Bon and Marie NDiaye. Finally, the projects focus on narrative form allows it a more significant scope over the fiction of the period than other, less clearly defined studies have achieved.