Author: Raymond Williams File Type: pdf First published in 1976, Keywords is neither a defining dictionary, nor a specialist glossary. It is the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary a shared body of words and meanings concerned with the practices and institutions described as culture and society. In a series of connecting essays, Raymond Williams investigates how these keywords have been formed, altered, redefined, influenced, modified, confused and reinforced as the historical contexts in which they were applied changed to give us their current meaning and significance. Keywords extends Raymond Williams previous work to study the actual language of cultural transformation.
Author: N. J. Crowson
File Type: mobi
This textbook provides a comprehensive account of Britains uneasy relationship with continental Europe from 1918 to the present day. Unlike other books on the subject, the author considers Europe in its broadest sense and examines a wider history than just Britains relations with the European Union (EU). This includes pre-war history and the role of key political institutions outside the EU such as the Council of Europe and the Western European Union. Subjects covered includeul lhow the experience of the inter-war years and the Second World War helped shape attitudes towards the EUl leuropean perspectives on Britain as well as the other way round l lkey theories on European integration l lthe changing nature of Britains global role l lissues of sovereignty and legitimacy l lthe role of political parties and the Europeanisation of national government l lthe rise of Euroscepticism in British politics and how Europe has become entwined in the ideological battles of the main political parties.l ulExploring the political, diplomatic and military relationship between Britain and Europe, this accessible and wide-ranging textbook is essential core reading for students of British and European history and politics. **
Author: J. Dudley Andrew
File Type: pdf
Both a history of film theory and an introduction to the work of the most important writers in the field, Andrews volume reveals the bases of thought of such major theorists as Munsterberg, Arnheim, Eisenstein, Balazs, Kracauer, Bazin, Mitry, and Metz.
Author: Leon J. Weinberger
File Type: pdf
Critical Edition with introduction and commentary by Leon J. WeinbergerThis is the first in-depth study of three 11th- to 12th-century poets from Balkan Byzantium. Included are all of the known works by Moses b. Hiyya, Joseph b. Jacob Qalai, and Isaac b. Judah, collected from rare manuscripts and printed editions and from Geniza collections at Oxford and Cambridge. These works provide the evidence that the Balkan synagogue poets favored distinctive literary forms even as they show the strong influence of the Hispanic-Hebrew writers. Completing the volume are indexes of rabbinic, Aramaic, and payyetanic usages and tables of metonymical terms.Published by the Hebrew Union College Press, distributed by The University of Alabama Press. **
Author: Terence Cave
File Type: pdf
Terence Caves work has made a major contribution to the rethinking of the relationship between literature, history and culture over the last half-century. Retrospectives brings together substantially revised versions of studies written since 1970 together they constitute a searching methodological investigation of the practice of reading past texts. How do our ways of reading such texts compare with those practiced in the periods when they were written? How do we distinguish between what a text meant in its own time and what it has come to mean over time? And how might reading provide access to past experiences? The books epicentre is early modern French culture, but it extends to that cultures ancient Greek and Roman models, its European contexts, and the afterlives of some of its themes, from Pascal via George Eliot to Angela Carter. **
Author: John Roberts
File Type: epub
Why the avant-garde of art needs to be rehabilitated today Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicized. Yet few have put forward a sustained defence of this development. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is the first book to look at the legacy of the avant-garde in relation to the deepening crisis of contemporary capitalism. An invigorating revitalization of the Frankfurt School legacy, Robertss book defines and validates the avant-garde idea with an erudite acuity, providing a refined conceptual set of tools to engage critically with the most advanced art theorists of our day, such as Hal Foster, Andrew Benjamin, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Paolo Virno, Claire Bishop, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri. **Review Simultaneously performs and advocates the conceptual terms through which [Roberts] understands a contemporary avant-garde program. *Red Wedge* Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is without question the most informed, cogent, and intellectually grounded defence of avant-garde praxis today. Roberts provides a vision of art that is disabused of the business models of the neoliberal culture industries, that neither dissolves politics into art nor attempts to insulate art from functioning as an emancipatory revolutionary force. Marc James Leger, author of Brave New Avant Garde and *The Neoliberal Undead* Over the last two decades, John Roberts has established himself as probably the most original Marxist critic of the contemporary visual arts around. Andrew Hemingway Praise for The Intangibilities of Form Robertss Intangibilities of Form is a truly important book. It offers an unusually thoughtful, and genuinely radical, alternative to dominant ways of understanding the nature of art in the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. Alex Potts The Intangibilities of Form proposes nothing less than a powerfully original labor theory of culture, highlighting the prominence of a context shaped by the readymade, to account for the constitutive interlacing of contemporary art and technology, skill, and deskilling. By situating the instance of conceptual art within an environment of production marked by the structuring logic of the commodity form and social division of labor, he has both restored to art criticism and art history a lost vocation, and delivered to cultural studies and its current explanatory ambitions a demanding challenge. Harry Harootunian About the Author John Robertsis Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. His books include The Art of Interruption Realism, Photography and the Everyday, The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech), Philosophizing the Everyday, and The Necessity of Errors. He is also a contributor to Radical Philosophy, Oxford Art Journal, Historical Materialism, Third Text, and Cabinet magazine.
Author: Joe Nickell
File Type: epub
As a former private investigator and forensic writer, Joe Nickell has spent much of his career identifying forged documents, working undercover to infiltrate theft rings, and investigating questioned deaths. Now he turns his considerable investigative skill toward the paranormal, researching the most well-known and mysterious phenomena all over the worldspontaneous human combustion, UFO visitations, auras, electronic poltergeists, and many, many morewith an eye toward solving these mysteries rather than promoting or dismissing them. Real-Life X-Files Investigating the Paranormal examines the cases of over forty paranormal mysteries. Using a hands-on approach, Nickell visits the scene of the so-called unexplainable activity whenever possible and attempts to physically duplicate the miraculous. Whether hes inflicting stigmata on himself or recreating the liquefying blood of Saint Januarius, Nickell does whatever necessary to eliminate the probable before considering the supernatural. What is left is that much more fascinating. Nickell reports on familiar legends from American history such as the supernatural events surrounding Abraham Lincolns death and the supposed crash landing of an alien spacecraft near Roswell, New Mexico. He closely examines claims of the miraculous, from rose petals bearing the likeness of Jesus to photographs of a golden door to heaven. Controversial mysteries such as clairvoyance and spirit painting, haunted places, and freaks of nature are just a few of the many topics covered. Suspenseful, engrossing, funny, and grounded in scientific methodology, Real-Life X-Files provides real explanations for the paranormal activities that have intrigued human beings for centuries. **From Booklist Nickell is no armchair skeptic. In order to debunk paranormal claims effectively, he knows its not enough to make ill-informed pronouncements from a distance. In this collection of articles reprinted from Skeptical Inquirer magazine, Nickell does excellent background research, which he follows up in many cases with on-site investigations of mysteries ranging from crop circles and lake monsters to spiritualist mediums and stigmata. His previous forensic experience as a private investigator is put to good use when he looks into apparent spontaneous human combustion. He tackles the mysterious and elusive treasure of Nova Scotias Oak Island--the money pit--and concludes that it is a natural formation and that Masonic groups may have had a hand in planting some confusing artifacts. Some of his targets are little more than curiosities, such as Magnetic Hill, where cars seemingly roll uphill, or the giant Coleman frog, which is rather obviously a manufactured model. Others seem more worthy of deconstruction, like mysterious faces appearing on rose petals, spirit paintings, and Fox-TVs famous alien autopsy film. George Eberhart American Library Association. lt Review Nickell does excellent background research, which he follows up in many cases with on-site investigations of mysteries ranging from crop circles and lake monsters to spiritualist mediums and stigmata.Booklist Examines forty-seven paranormal cases, ranging from a supposedly petrified girl buried in eastern Kentucky, to spontaneous human combustion, to UFO visitations, to auras, to stigmata, to haunted houses, to ghostly photos, to police psychics, to communicating with the dead.Ozarks Mountaineer Whoever said that the truth is both stranger and more entertaining than fiction describes this book exactly.Skeptical Inquirer It may not be as fun as being fooled, but its refreshing to see an experienced professional who has investigated hundreds of alleged paranormal occurrences. . . . A fascinating book.WTBF
Author: Mamiko Suzuki
File Type: pdf
Gendered Power sheds light on the sources of power for three prominent women of the Meiji period Meiji Empress Haruko public speaker, poet, and diarist Nakajima Shoen and educator and prolific author Shimoda Utako. By focusing on the role Chinese classics (kanbun) played in the language employed by elite women, the chapters focus on how Empress Haruko, Shoen, and Shimoda Utako contributed new expectations for how women should participate in a modernizing Japan. By being in the public eye, all three women countered criticism of and commentary on their writings and activities, which they parried by navigating gender constraints. The success or failure as women ascribed to these three figures sheds light on the contradictions inhabited by them during a transformative period for Japanese women. By proposing and interrogating the possibility of Meiji womens power, the book examines contradictions that were symptomatic of their struggles within the vast social, cultural, and political transformations that took place during the period. The book demonstrates that an examination of that conflict within feminist history is crucial in order to understand what radical resistance meant in the face of women-centered authority. **About the Author Mamiko C. Suzuki is Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah.
Author: Wolfgang Ernst
File Type: pdf
Wolfgang Ernst has demonstrated that the knowledge of time-giving (chrono-poetical) media and their temporal essence enriches the tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of time. This book, a translated and abridged edition of Ernsts two major volumes, Chronopoetik and Gleichursprunglichkeit, undertakes this on three levels a close analysis of time-critical moments within media technologies descriptions of how media temporalities affect and disrupt the traditional human sense of time and questioning the traditional position of media time within cultural history. The book brings together two fields of inquiry the technological analysis of media time processes and the venerable tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of time. Ernst argues that the scientific inquiry into the nature of time is enriched by the media-technological context. The book exposes a media theoretical approach to contemporary media culture that derives from the combination of philosophical reflection on the essence of technology and a close analysis of technological devices themselves. Ultimately Ernst addresses a fundamental concern of past, contemporary and future media culture the position of technology in culture under the focused perspective of its tempor(e)alities. **ReviewChronopoetics is not about media history, but offers a close reading of the signal realities of our times. Written by leading media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, this inspiring and provocative book cuts across so-called old and new media as well as between technical details and contemporary theory. Media philosophy unfolds as a microcosmos of temporalities. (Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton, author of A Geology of Media.) Wolfgang Ernsts Chronopoetics is a voice from the white-hot core of the machine universe. He follows the things themselves with a relentlessness unmatched by any media theorist since Harold Innis. In focusing on signals that shuttle through our technical and natural systems at speeds too fast and intervals too small to be perceived by a human subject, Ernst might, at first, seem provocatively inhumane. But in the end his revelation of the poetics of time-critical processes offers its own stark enlightenment (John Durham Peters, A. Craig Baird Professor, The University of Iowa) About the AuthorWolfgang Ernst is Professor of Media Theories at the Institute of Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt University, Germany. His many publications include Digital Memory and the Archive (2013). Anthony Enns, the translator, is Associate Professor of English at Dalhousie University, Canada.
Author: Maxine Berg
File Type: pdf
Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britains urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the eighteenth century.Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain is cultural history at its best, built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. Maxine Berg traces how this new consumer society of the eighteenth century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialization itself. Global markets for the consumer goods of private and domestic life inspired the industrial revolution and British products won the world.Review...deserves to be the final word on the luxury debate in Britian Martyn Powell, Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature Luxury and Pleasure is an interesting, accessible and well-illustrated synthesis of new research and recent writing, and helpfully concludes by pointing to further areas of research Hannah Smith, History Journal She aims to re-connect product and process, and succeeds triumphantly. Massive detail, briskly summarized, is subordinated to a series of arguments that give this powerful but combative work its freshness. Toby Barnard, TLS ...rewarding account... Toby Barnard, Times Literary Supplement It offers fresh insights not only into the character and motivations of American consumers, but also the broader social and cultural relationships between Britain and her (ex-)colonies. Urban History Journal, Vol. 341 Readers will find this book valuable Joyce Burnette, English Historical Review About the AuthorMaxine Berg is Professor of History at the University of Warwick where she has taught since 1978. She is also Director of the Warwick Eighteenth-Century Centre and has recently become a Fellow of the British Academy.