Author: Jean Baudrillard File Type: epub The publication in France of Simulacra et Simulation in 1981 marked Jean Baudrillards first important step toward theorizing the postmodern. Moving away from the MarxistFreudian approaches that had concerned him earlier, Baudrillard developed in this book a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure. Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacrum-the copy without an original-and simulation, crucial to an understanding of the postmodern, to address the concept of mass reproduction and reproducibility that characterizes our electronic media culture. Translator Sheila Faria Glaser provides the first complete English edition of Baudrillards rich speculations on the simulacrum from the hologram to Apocalypse Now, clones to Crash, and Disneyland to Three Mile Island. Simulacra and Simulation represents a unique and original effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a new concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body. Jean Baudrillard, one of Frances leading intellectuals, began teaching in 1966 at Nanterre in Paris, where he spent most of his teaching career. -- Publisher description

Author: Julie Hanson File Type: pdf Julie Hansons award-winning collection, Unbeknownst, gives us plainspoken poems of unstoppable candor. They are astonished and sobered by the incoming data they are funny they are psychologically accurate and beautifully made. Hansons is a mind interested in human responsibilityto ourselves and to each otherand unhappy about the disappointments that are bound to transpire (Weve been like gods, our powers wasted). These poems are lonely with spiritual longing and wise with remorse for all that cannot last.The Kindergartners begins, All their lives theyve waited for the yellow bus to come for them, then moves directly to the present reality Now its February and the mat is wet. Settings and events are local and familiar, never more exotic than a yoga session at the Y, one of several instances where the body is central to the report and to the net result (I slip in and fold behind the wheel into the drivers seat like a thin young thing My organs are surely glistening. This car was made for me.). These poems are intimate revelations, thinking as they go, including the reader in the progress of their thoughts.From Publishers WeeklyThe Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native is older than most first-time authors, and her frequentlyeven disarminglyconversational poems draw on experience she writes as a daughter, a spouse, a mother, an adoptee, a friend, a traveler, a practitioner of yoga, and as an observer of gardens, kitchens, food. Yet many poets have taken on such domestic subjects, and done so (like Hanson) with sophistication (Hanson quotes Seneca, rewrites Sappho, includes a deft ghazal) what sets her apart? First of all, her winning wisdom, her genuinely good advice, proffered garrulously (Id rather have the kind of marriage where nothing is pre-sorted or arranged for presentation, where the plates, be they china or everyday, are set out without pretense) or else through a terse tableau The female cardinal isnt the least bit disappointed that the shade of red she is is brown. She looks at him and thinks, Arent we gorgeous? Second, her remarkable variety here are poems made entirely of maxims, poems made from anecdotes, poems made of fragments, slow-motion free verse, even a rapid prose poem here, too, are a panoply of tones, almost all friendly, hopeful, nostalgic, patient, delighted, or sad. (Mar.) (c) PWxyz, LLC. ReviewJulie Hansons poems are so winningly direct, so deft in tuning and alert in movement, that you only half-notice how beautifully oblique they arethe ways around a thing unsaid are myriad and freeand how entrancing. Until you look up at the end, a little surprised at how far youve been carried in a few moments, at how much youve been . . . not exactly told but shown how to feel.James Richardson, author, Interglacial New and Selected Poems and AphorismsA wry eye and a keen sense of the actual rule this delightful collection. In a sincere and compassionate attempt to get at the undertones of daily life, Hanson looks and speaks frankly about the intimate, the private, the deep insides of act and feeling. This is a book that uses thought as a microscope to reveal intricacies that open onto new intricaciesthe kind of book you look up from to find your own life richer, reverberating.Cole SwensenThe poems in Julie Hansons delightful Unbeknownst are natural and shapely, with a subtle architecture that you inhabit all the more fully because you hardly notice it. Their language is relaxed and exact, pervaded by an understated and touching humor, and yet the poems hover on the edge of mystery, the mystery of thought. They move in directions that are surprising and unpredictable but that in retrospect seem inevitable, as you slowly make out the shape of all of this, which is to think. Unbeknownst is a masterful and moving book.John Koethe