Author: Gerhard Richter File Type: pdf

Author: Catherine Osborne File Type: pdf Few books on love can claim to make significant contributions to our understanding both of ancient views on eros and of its place in the Christian tradition. On the basis of a new and sympathetic reading of Plato, Catherine Osborne shows that the long-standing distrust of eros, rather than agape, as a model for the believers relation to God in Christian thought derives from a misunderstanding of ancient thought on love. Focussing on a number of classic texts, including Platos Symposium and Lysis, Aristotles Ethics and Metaphysics, and famous passages in Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, Dionysius the Areopagite, Plotinus, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, she shows that love is not motivated by a need that seeks fulfilment. On the contrary, Dr Osborne argues, to seek a motive for love, whether in Platos account or our own, is to pursue a philosophical confusion. To mention love is to mention the motive that explains our response of affection or devotion or desire the response cannot be the motive for our love, but is an attitude that belongs in a vision of the beloved transfigured by love. It is for this reason that we have to restore the image of Cupid, whose mischievous darts picture the impossibility of seeking some further grounds or explanation for love.

Author: John Berryman File Type: pdf A wild, masterful Pulitzer Prize-winning cycle of poems that half a century later still shocks and astoundsJohn Berryman was hardly unknown when he published 77 Dream Songs, but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation. A spooky collection in the words of Robert Lowell-a maddening work of genius. As Henri Cole notes in his elegant, perceptive introduction, Berryman had discovered a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax. Berryman had also discovered his most enduring alter ego, a paranoid, passionate, depressed, drunk, irrepressible antihero named Henry or, sometimes, Mr. Bones We touch at certain points, Berryman claimed, of Henry, But I am an actual human being. Henry may not be real, but he comes alive on the page. And while the most famous of the Dream Songs begins, Life, friends, is boring, these poems never are. Henry lusts seeing a woman Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken paprika he can barely restrain himself only the fact of her husband & four other people kept me from springing on her. Henry despairs All the world like a woolen lover once did seem on Henrys side. Then came a departure. Henry, afraid of his own violent urges, consoles himself Nobody is ever missing. 77 Dream Songs won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, but Berrymans formal and emotional innovations-he cracks the language open, creates a new idiom in which to express eternal feelings-remain as alive and immediate today as ever.

Author: Vladimir N. Brovkin File Type: pdf Following the Russian Revolution, the cultural and political landscape of Russia was strewn with contradictions. The dictatorship, censorship and repression of the Communist party existed alongside private enterprise, the black market and open debates on Socialism. In Russian Society and politics 1921-1929 Vladimir Brovkin offers a comprehensive cultural, political, economic and social history of developments in Russia in the 1920s. By examining the contrast between Bolshevik propaganda claims and social reality, the author explains how Communist representations were variously received and resisted by workers, peasants, students, women, teachers and party officials. He presents a picture of cultural diversity and rejection of Communist constraints through many means including unauthorised protest, religion, jazz music and poetry. In Russian Society and Politics 1921-1929 Vladimir Brovkin argues that these trends, if left unchecked, endangered the Communist Partys monopoly on political power. The Stalinist revolution can thus be seen as a pre-emptive strike against this independent and vibrant society as well as a product of Stalins personality and communist ideology.