Author: Christina Smylitopoulos File Type: pdf In the last twenty-five years, the concept of space has emerged as a productive lens through which historians of the long eighteenth century can examine the varied and mutable issues at play in the creation and reception of objects, images, spectacles, and the built environment. This collection of essays investigates the potentialities afforded by space in eighteenth-century art and visual culture. Rather than being defined by a particular school of art or the type of space invoked, it invites global difference and reflects scholarly engagement in the eighteenth-century artistic phenomena of Italy, Mexico, and India, as well as Britain and France in immediate, imperial, and transnational contexts. The contributions here share an emphasis on agency, which in this context means the way in which objects, artists, architects, and patrons (in their many guises) have attempted to negotiate various artistic, political, philosophical, and socio-economic values through creating, reflecting, appropriating, denying, or reimagining space. Divided into two sections, the chapters in the first part, Memory, examine specific episodes of eighteenth-century art and visual culture that are acts of remembering, or a result of such action, or objects used to persuade through reminding. In these essays, spaces agency whether understood as real, theoretical, or imagined is harnessed by recalling past cultures so as to assert and reassert identities that are also bound by limiting factors, including class, religion, artistic methodology, and materiality. The chapters in the second section, Reform, demonstrate memorys perseverance in eighteenth-century attempts to strike off in new directions, and consider more concrete and purposeful cases of reaching toward the future. In this section, the capacity of space to inform the development, growth, and even transformation of this period is emphasized, revealing an interest in the incremental or radical reform of politics, psychological states, artistic eminence, and colonialimperial identities. This book invites a broader geographical scope to studies of space and underscores the ways in which agency can be productive to multifarious lines of artistic, cultural, and historical inquiry. **

Author: Daniel R. Ahern File Type: pdf In The Smile of Tragedy, Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsches attitude toward what he called the tragic age of the Greeks, showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of Dionysian pessimism, Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical separation is at the root of Western nihilism. Ahern explains why Nietzsche, in creating this precursor to a new aesthetics, rejects Aristotles medicinal interpretation of tragic art and concentrates on Apollinian cruelty as a form of intoxication without which there can be no art. Ahern shows that Nietzsche saw the human body as the vessel through which virtue and art are possible, as the path to an interpretation of selflessness, as the means to determining an order of rank among human beings, and as the site where ethics and aesthetics coincide.**ReviewNietzsche wrote that he sought to find a way into the ancient world, and added, I have perhaps found a new way. In this book, Ahern (Univ. of New Brunswick, Fredericton) follows Nietzsches thread. He argues that the key to Nietzsches aesthetics is his understanding of Dionysian pessimism, which inspires tragic wisdom. He also points out that Nietzsches philosophy is hard to grasp in rational categories because it is itself an expression of the same tragic wisdom that he describes in The Birth of Tragedy and elsewhere. . . . This is a scholarly work, written in a thoughtful, intelligent way. As part of the Literature and Philosophy series, it considers both literary and philosophical perspectives on Nietzsche. The author provides insight into tragic wisdom and explores its ramifications.R. White, ChoiceThe Smile of Tragedy is a valuable addition to the literature on Nietzsche. The book is clearly argued and well written, with an abundance of references to the primary sources seamlessly integrated into the text. Particularly impressive is the concise and sustained development of the exposition, the arc of which unfolds without loss of shape or focus.Malcolm Bull, University of OxfordAbout the Author Daniel R. Ahern is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. He is the author of Nietzsche as Cultural Physician (Penn State, 1995).

Author: Robert V. Levine File Type: pdf This volumeconsists of personal narrative accounts of the career journeys of some of the worldsmost eminent social psychologists. Eachcontributing psychologist is an esteemed scholar, an excellent writer, andhas a storyto tell. Together, the contributions cover a time range from Morton Deutsch to today, and touch upon virtually every important movement and person in the history of academic social psychology.This book provides a fascinating insight into the development of outstanding academic careers and will be a source of inspiration to seasoned researchers and beginning students alike, in the fields ofsocial psychology, history of psychology, and beyond.**

Author: James Schwoch File Type: pdf The completion of the Transcontinental Telegraph in 1861 completed telegraphys mile-by-mile trek across the West. In addition to linking the coasts, the telegraph represented an extraordinary American effort in many fields of endeavor to know, act upon, and control a continent. Merging new research with bold reinterpretation, James Schwoch details the unexplored dimensions of the frontier telegraph and its impact. The westward spread of telegraphy entailed encounters with environments that challenged Americans to acquire knowledge of natural history, climate, and a host of other fields. Telegraph codes and ciphers, meanwhile, became important political, military, and economic secrets. Schwoch shows how the governments use of commercial networks drove a relationship between the two sectors that served increasingly expansionist aims. He also reveals the telegraphs role in securing high ground and encouraging surveillance. Both became vital aspects of the American effort to contain, and conquer, the Wests indigenous peoples--and part of a historical arc of concerns about privacy, data gathering, and surveillance that remains pertinent today. Entertaining and enlightening, Wired into Nature explores an unknown history of the West.**ReviewDrawing on both detailed historical scholarship and a refreshing geographical sensibility, Wired into Nature provides a unique and important perspective on the vast strategic, ecological, and cultural impact of North Americas first electrical information network. James Schwoch brings important questions of environment, indigeneity, and surveillance back into the story of the telegraph, in a sweeping narrative that connects the mapping and exploitation of the American West to the development of the White House Situation Room. Schwoch reminds us that the story of communication infrastructure in American history involves not just the intensive development of urban technologies, consumers, and firms, but also the extensive reconfiguration of contested landscapes, involving both military and cultural struggles with nature, climate, and, most crucially, Native American peoples. This innovative work crosses the boundaries between military, political, technological, and environmental history, and is a must-read for students of our contemporary information society.--Gregory J. Downey, author of Telegraph Messenger Boys Labor, Technology, and Geography, 1850-1950 Wired into Nature is a rich and original exploration of the telegraph in the American West, grounded in meticulous archival research. It tells us a powerful story about the relationship between wires and nature, and unravels the hidden and formative connections between our communications systems and the environment, climate, and surveillance. James Schwoch brilliantly tracks the making and unmaking of the telegraph, from the draft animals that pulled its poles to the weaponized fires it ignited from its disruption by Native Americans to the early development of network security and from the weather reports it collected to its command in Washington. This book will transform our understanding of electronic communications networks, both past and present. If there is one history to read in the current moment, Wired into Nature is it.--Nicole Starosielski, coeditor of Signal Traffic Critical Studies of Media InfrastructuresAbout the Author James Schwoch is a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of The American Radio Industry and Its Latin American Activities, 1900-1939 and Global TV New Media and the Cold War, 1946 69 .