Author: Eileen A. Joy File Type: pdf The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that, when certain medieval and contemporary cultural texts are placed alongside each other, such as a fourteenth-century penitential handbook and the reality television show Survivor, they reveal certain mentalities and social conditions that persist over long durations of time. Several of the essays address overtly political subjects, such as political torture and suicide terrorism, while other essays attend to the various ways in which certain real-life fictions and cultural entertainments have always overdetermined our understanding of history, our current moment, and ourselves.ReviewThis book asks us to consider the gaps between the real and the staged, between truth and performance. More compellingly, it asks us to think about whether we can ever know the difference, whether we are so caught in prison houses of textual manipulation that resistance is, finally, futile. The book looks to medieval narratives of conversion, parody, temptation, power, torture, and finds resonances (both continuities and discontinuities) in such contemporary spectacles as reality television shows, images of the Bush White House, and photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison. Sometimes wild, often audacious, at times funny, and with haunting moments, this collection is always provocative, and it will be much discussed.--Martin B. Shichtman, Eastern Michigan UniversityCultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages stages a dazzlingly original, and a deeply provocative intervention at the intersections of past and present, high and low culture, scholarship and entertainment, and truth and fiction. The essays included here deftly interweave critical theory, medieval scholarship, and popular culture in ways that are both impassioned and informative. This collection shows how a period that is usually cast as distant and remote can provide lenses through which we can productively rethink our current preoccupations likewise, the collection demonstrates how familiar cultural forms that we might be tempted to dismiss as mere ephemera can resonate richly with the medieval literary traditions that represent the foundations of our western intellectual heritage.--Anne Clark Bartlett, DePaul UniversityContemporary entertainment, current politics and medieval history and culture are brought together in an attempt to investigate the intersecting relations between reality and fiction in relation to issues such as morality, identity, and justice, both in the past and the present. --The Times Higher Education SupplementAbout the AuthorEileen A. Joy is Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Myra J. Seaman is Associate Professor of English at College of Charleston. Kimberly K. Bell is Assistant Professor of English and Foreign Languages at Sam Houston State University. Mary K. Ramsey is Assistant Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Author: Susan Ford Wiltshire File Type: epub [test]

Author: Ozlem Goner File Type: pdf This book examines the ways in which states and nations are constructed and legitimated through defining and managing outsiders. Focusing on Turkey and the municipality of Dersim a region that has historically combined different outsider identities, including Armenian, Kurdish, and Alevi identities the author explores the remembering, transformation and mobilisation of everyday relations of power and the manner in which relationships with the state shape both outsider identities and the conception of the nation itself.Together with a discussion of the recent decade in which the history, identity, and nature of Dersim have been central to various social and political organisations, the author concentrates on three defining periods of state-outsider relationships the massacre and the following displacements in Dersim known as 1938 the growth of capitalism in Turkey and the leftist movements in Dersim between World War II and the coup detat of 1980 and the rise of the PKK and the state of exception in Dersim in the 1990s to show how outsiders came to be defined as exceptions to the law and how they were managed in different periods. Drawing on archival methods, field research, in-depth and multiple-session interviews and focus groups with three consecutive generations, this book offers a historical understanding of relationships of power and struggle as they are actualised and challenged at particular localities and shaped through the making of outsiderness. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology, anthropology and political science, as well as historians.**About the Author Ozlem Goner is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (CUNY). She earned degrees in Political Science and Sociology from Bogazici University, Turkey and her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her research interests focus on political sociology, memory, race and ethnicity, social movements, sociology of place and environment, qualitative methods, and classical, post-structural, postcolonial and feminist theory. Her work on memory and historicity neoliberalism, environment and identity and outsider identities in Turkey has been published in academic journals and edited volumes.

Author: Robert L. Heilbroner File Type: epub The final revision of this classic bestseller, the 7th edition defines the common thread linking the worlds greatest economic thinkers and explores the philosophies that motivate them. Hailed by Galbraith as a brilliant achievement, The Worldly Philosophers with over 2 million copies sold worldwide, not only enables us to see more deeply into our history, but helps us to better understand our own times. Heilbroner provides the new theme that connects thinkers as different as Adam Smith and Karl Marx the desire to understand how a capitalist society works. A new chapter conveys a concern that todays increasingly scientific economics may overlook fundamental social and political issues that are central to economics. The bestselling classic that examines the history of economic thought from Adam Smith to Karl Marxall the economic lore most general readers conceivably could want to know, served up with a flourish (The New York Times).The Worldly Philosophers not only enables us to see more deeply into our history but helps us better understand our own times. In this seventh edition, Robert L. Heilbroner provides a new theme that connects thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The theme is the common focus of their highly varied ideasnamely, the search to understand how a capitalist society works. It is a focus never more needed than in this age of confusing economic headlines. In a bold new concluding chapter entitled The End of the Worldly Philosophy? Heilbroner reminds us that the word end refers to both the purpose and limits of economics. This chapter conveys a concern that todays increasingly scientific economics may overlook fundamental social and political issues that are central to economics. Thus, unlike its predecessors, this new edition provides not just an indispensable illumination of our past but a call to action for our future.