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

Author: Blanche H. Gelfant File Type: pdf Esteemed critic Blanche Gelfants brilliant companion gathers together lucid essays on major writers and themes by some of the best literary critics in the United States. Part 1 is comprised of articles on stories that share a particular theme, such as Working Class Stories or Gay and Lesbian Stories. The heart of the book, however, lies in Part 2, which contains more than one hundred pieces on individual writers and their work, including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, Andre Debus, Zora Neal Hurston, Anne Beattie, Bharati Mukherjee, J. D. Salinger, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as engaging pieces on the promising new writers to come on the scene.From Library JournalGelfant, former Robert E. Maxwell Professor in the Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth, has edited an eminently useful work. While there are other books on short stories and on the authors included here, this resource is unusually well done. The first 100 pages are devoted to thematic essays that focus on the form of the short story, the development of the genre, several distinct subject types (e.g., short stories of the Holocaust or of the working class), and four different ethnic groups (African American, Asian American, Chicano Latino American, and Native American). These especially well-crafted essays weave history and context around specific stories to illustrate points for further discussion. The remainder of the book is devoted to over 100 individual author essays that focus on reading for pleasure and understanding rather than critical interpretation. Entries discuss the development of each author and the content and meaning of his or her major short stories. From Hemingway and Raymond Carver to Elizabeth McCracken and Lorrie Moore, the writers included represent a wide range of time periods and styles. It is, perhaps, the bane of any collection that space limits who can be included, and this work does omit some authors most readers would expect to see. Kate Chopin and Stephen Crane, for example, are discussed only in the thematic essays. The collection also offers little on new short story writers who are expanding both the genre and its readership. Despite these small questions of coverage, this wonderful resource is essential for academic libraries and is highly recommended for public and school libraries.Neal Wyatt, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA. 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. From BooklistThese two titles share the topic of short stories. There is an overlap of 16 writers who are represented in both books, but there are also important differences between the covers.The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story begins with 11 essays on broad topics such as The American Short Story, 1807-1900, The African American Short Story, and American Short Stories of the Holocaust. After the general essays, some 113 author essays are arranged alphabetically, from Adams, Alice to Yezierska, Anzia. Each contains a brief biographical sketch, an overview of the writers career and major contributions, an analysis of some stories, and a selected bibliography. Essays range in length from four pages to a maximum of eight pages. Many of the writers covered--among them James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, and Edith Wharton--are firmly established in the canon, although there are also some relative newcomers, such as Rick Bass, Sandra Cisneros, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.Greenwoods book presents 47 contemporary short story writers whose major works were produced in the latter part of the twentieth century (1960s on), among them Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, and Maxine Hong Kingston. More than half come from ethnic groups who were not recognized in this field until the 1980s. Among them are American writers of Jewish, African, Native American, Asian, and Latin American descent. Other writers come from Great Britain, Africa, Canada, Ireland, West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. Approximately 30 of the writers are women.Entries begin with biographical information, followed by a brief review of existing criticism, a more detailed analysis of specific works, and a selected bibliography. The chapters about each writer vary in length from as little as 4 pages to as many as 15 pages for Robert Coover.The Columbia Companion offers deeper coverage of American short stories, while A Readers Companion to the Short Story in English provides a more global perspective. Both would be an asset to library collections at the high-school and college levels. Another fine volume, The Facts On File Companion to the American Short Story [RBB S 1 00], covers American writers from the early nineteenth through the twentieth centuries and has entries for literary terms and theories, influential magazines, important collections, awards, notable characters, and subgenres, as well as for authors. RBB American Library Association. lt

Author: Yang Mu File Type: pdf Two contemporary poets from Taiwan, Yang Mu (pen name for Wang Ching-hsien, b. 1940) and Lo Ching (pen name for Lo Ching-che, b. 1948), are represented in this bilingual edition of Chinese poetry ranging from the romantic to the postmodern. Both poets were involved in the selection of poems for this volume, the first edition in any language of their selected work. Their backgrounds, literary styles, and professional lifes are profiled and compared by translator Joseph R. Allen in critical essays that show how Yang and Lo represent basic directions in modern Chinese poetics and how they have contributed to the definition of modernism and postmodernism in China. The books organization reflects each poets method of composition. Yangs poems are chronologically arrangd, as his poetry tends to describe a narrative line that closely parallels his own biography. Los poems, which explore a world of concept and metaphor, are grouped by theme. Although each poet has a range of poetic voices, Yangs work can be considered the peak of high modernism in Chinese poetry, while Los more problematic work suggests the direction of new explorations in the art. In this way the two poets are mutually illuminating. Each group of poems is prefaced by an illustration that draws from another side of the poets intellectual life. For Yang, who is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington, these are excerpts from his academic work (written under the name C.H. Wang) in English. The poems by Lo, a well-known painter living in Taiwan, are illustrated by five of his own ink paintings. **

Author: Steven Horst File Type: pdf An argument that we understand the world through many special-purpose mental models of different content domains, and an exploration of the philosophical implications. Philosophers have traditionally assumed that the basic units of knowledge and understanding are concepts, beliefs, and argumentative inferences. In Cognitive Pluralism, Steven Horst proposes that another sort of unita mental model of a content domainis the fundamental unit of understanding. He argues that understanding comes not in word-sized concepts, sentence-sized beliefs, or argument-sized reasoning but in the form of idealized models and in domain-sized chunks. He argues further that this idea of cognitive pluralismthe claim that we understand the world through many such models of a variety of content domainssheds light on a number of problems in philosophy. Horst first presents the standard view of cognitive architecture assumed in mainstream epistemology, semantics, truth theory, and theory of reasoning. He then explains the notion of a mental model as an internal surrogate that mirrors features of its target domain, and puts it in the context of ideas in psychology, philosophy of science, artificial intelligence, and theoretical cognitive science. Finally, he argues that the cognitive pluralist view not only helps to explain puzzling disunities of knowledge but also raises doubts about the feasibility of attempts to unify the sciences presents a model-based account of intuitive judgments and contends that cognitive pluralism favors a reliabilist epistemology and a molecularist semantics. Horst suggests that cognitive pluralism allows us to view rival epistemological and semantic theories not as direct competitors but as complementary accounts, each an idealized model of different dimensions of evaluation. **