Download or read book Agonies of the Intellectual written by Allan Stoekl and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term intellectual first came into use at the turn of the century as a reproach to a group of writers who defended Dreyfus against the military and government of France. The role and status of the intellectual has been closely scrutinized and fiercely disputed ever since--and not only in France. Intellectual movements emanating from Paris have repeatedly crossed the Atlantic in great waves. In Agonies of the Intellectual Allan Stoekl sorts out the theoretical foundations of the French intellectual from Emile Durkheim, a founder of modern sociology, through the interbellum communists, the postwar ex-istentialists, and the recent structuralists, deconstructionists, and postmodernists. He treats the works of Paul Nizan, Drieu la Rochelle, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Paulhan, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard. Taking as his starting point Durkheim's thesis that modern intellectuals are "secular clerics," Stoekl differentiates them from the older traditions of priests, philosophes, and academics. His concern is the very real crisis of duty felt by intellectuals who have demonstrated their agony not only in print but also in confrontation, wartime resistance, or collaboration. They have agonized about their powers, their responsibilities, and their relations to other people. Agonies of the Intellectual looks hard at the difficult intersection of thought and act: decision.
Download or read book After the Deluge written by Julian Bourg and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Madame de Pompadour's famous quip, 'Apr_s nous, le deluge, ' serves as fitting inspiration for this lively discussion of postwar French intellectual and cultural life. Over the past thirty years, North American and European scholarship has been significantly transformed by the absorption of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories from French thinkers. But Julian Bourg's seamlessly edited volume proves that, historically speaking, French intellecutal and cultural life since World War Two has involved much more than a few infamous figures and concepts. Motivated by a desire to narrate and contextualize the deluge of 'French theory, ' After the Deluge showcases recent work by today's brightest scholars of French intellectual history that historicizes key debates, figures, and turning points in the postwar era of French thought. Relying on primary and archival sources, contributors examine, among other themes: left-wing critiques of the Left, the internationalizing of thought, the institutional and affective conditions of cultural life, and the religious imagination. They revive neglected debates and figures, and they explore the larger impact of political quarrels. In an afterword, preeminent French historian Fran_ois Dosse heralds the arrival of a new generation, a historiographical sensibility that brings fresh, original perspectives and a passion for French history to the contemporary French intellectual arena. After the Deluge adds significant depth and breadth to our understanding of postwar French intellectual and cultural history.
Download or read book In the House of the Hangman written by Jeffrey K. Olick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-09 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central question for both the victors and the vanquished of World War II was just how widely the stain of guilt would spread over Germany. Political leaders and intellectuals on both sides of the conflict debated whether support for National Socialism tainted Germany's entire population and thus discredited the nation's history and culture. The tremendous challenge that Allied officials and German thinkers faced as the war closed, then, was how to limn a postwar German identity that accounted for National Socialism without irrevocably damning the idea and character of Germany as a whole. In the House of the Hangman chronicles this delicate process, exploring key debates about the Nazi past and German future during the later years of World War II and its aftermath. What did British and American leaders think had given rise to National Socialism, and how did these beliefs shape their intentions for occupation? What rhetorical and symbolic tools did Germans develop for handling the insidious legacy of Nazism? Considering these and other questions, Jeffrey K. Olick explores the processes of accommodation and rejection that Allied plans for a new German state inspired among the German intelligentsia. He also examines heated struggles over the value of Germany's institutional and political heritage. Along the way, he demonstrates how the moral and political vocabulary for coming to terms with National Socialism in Germany has been of enduring significance—as a crucible not only of German identity but also of contemporary thinking about memory and social justice more generally. Given the current war in Iraq, the issues contested during Germany's abjection and reinvention—how to treat a defeated enemy, how to place episodes within wider historical trajectories, how to distinguish varieties of victimhood—are as urgent today as they were sixty years ago, and In the House of the Hangman offers readers an invaluable historical perspective on these critical questions.
Download or read book The Most High written by Maurice Blanchot and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2001-05-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Blanchot describes a world where the Absolute has finally overcome all other rivals to its authority. The State is unified, universal, and homogenous, promising perfect satisfaction. Why then does it find revolt everywhere? Could it be the omnipresent police? The plagues? The proliferating prisons and black markets? Written in part as a description of post-World War II Europe, Blanchot's dystopia charts with terrible clarity the endless death of god in an era of constantly metamorphosing but strangely definitive ideologies."-Translation Review Maurice Blanchot has been for a half century one of France's leading authors of fiction and theory. Two of his most ambitious works, The Space of Literature and The Writing of the Disaster, are also available in Bison Books editions. Allan Stoekl is the author of On Bataille and Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (Nebraska 1992).
Download or read book Kundera and the Ambiguity of Authorship written by Christine Angela Knoop and published by MHRA. This book was released on 2011 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scholarly debate about authorship has not only transcended all aspects of literary studies, but has also prompted contemporary authors to counter, subvert, and challenge it. One author to whom this applies in particular is Milan Kundera. In this study, Christine Knoop re-examines Kundera's essayistic and novelistic work against the background of the theoretical paradigms of literary authority, intention, and ownership. In so doing, she demonstrates how he overcomes traditional theoretical distinctions by postulating the existence of both a strong, powerful author figure and of potentially boundless literary meaning. Kundera's radically ambiguous conception of the author in the novel, developed primarily to influence the reader, is discussed and developed to cast new light on the critical debate about authorship at large while maintaining his primary conjecture that authorship as such is perpetually hybrid, dynamic, and unfinished. Christine Angela Knoop is a Postdoctoral Research Associate for Comparative Literature at Freie Universitat Berlin.
Download or read book The Agony of Eros written by Byung-Chul Han and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the “inferno of the same.” Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources—Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the “pornographication” of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today's “burnout society.” To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself. Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han's ongoing analysis of contemporary society. This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say—as Rimbaud desired it—the “reinvention” of love. —from the foreword by Alain Badiou
Download or read book Black White and in Color written by Hortense J. Spillers and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-04-28 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black, White, and in Color offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past twenty years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act-one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project. Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essays collected in Black, White, and in Color all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature will want to read them.
Download or read book Closing of the American Mind written by Allan Bloom and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of American Cultural Intellectual History written by Mary Kupiec Cayton and published by Macmillan Reference USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 822 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of American thought and culture throughout history examines the individuals and documents that revealed significant ideas, issues, and movements.
Download or read book The Lost Soul of American Politics written by John P. Diggins and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1986-08-15 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lost Soul of American Politics is a provocative new interpretation of American political thought from the Founding Fathers to the Neo-Conservatives. Reassessing the motives and intentions of such great political thinkers as Madison, Thoreau, Lincoln, and Emerson, John P. Diggins shows how these men struggled to create an alliance between the politics of self-interest and a religious sense of moral responsibility—a tension that still troubles us today.
Download or read book Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature written by P. Leonard and published by Springer. This book was released on 2000-05-15 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature is a collection of essays which considers how recent critical theory contributes to debates about mystical and negative theology. This collection draws upon a wide range of material, including Biblical texts, autobiographical, confessional and fictional writing from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, divinity in English, German, Spanish and French traditions, as well as work on God and metaphysics by Schelling, Weil, Levinas, Derrida, de Ma, Irigaray, and Cixous.
Download or read book Ogoni s Agonies written by Abdul Rasheed Naʼallah and published by Africa Research and Publications. This book was released on 1998 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book offers a wide range of perspectives on the crisis. It includes detailed historical analyses of the Ogoni people, of Nigerian politics, and of the international responses to the Saro-Wiwa execution. It also includes a strong body of critical responses to the work of Ken Saro-Wiwa, and to his importance as a Nigerian intellectual and activist.
Download or read book Agonies of Empire written by Michael Cox and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Cox outlines the ways in which five American Presidents from Clinton to Biden have addressed their predecessors' legacies while dealing with an empire under increasing stress. He sets out a critical framework for US foreign policy, the US’s relationship with its enemies and rivals, and whether it is now in long term decline.
Download or read book New Directions in American Intellectual History written by John Higham and published by Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Radical Visions and American Dreams written by Richard H. Pells and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1973 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Depression of the 1930s was more than an economic catastrophe to many American writers and artists. Attracted to Marxist ideals, they interpreted the crisis as a symptom of a deeper spiritual malaise that reflected the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, and they advocated more sweeping social changes than those enacted under the New Deal. In Radical Visions and American Dreams, Richard Pells discusses the work of Lewis Mumford, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Wilson, and Orson Welles, among others. He analyzes developments in liberal reform, radical social criticism, literature, the theater, and mass culture, and especially the impact of Hollywood on depression-era America. By placing cultural developments against the background of the New Deal, the influence of the American Communist Party, and the coming of World War II, Pells explains how these artists and intellectuals wanted to transform American society, yet why they wound up defending the American Dream. A new preface enhances this classic work of American cultural history.
Download or read book The Postcolonial Intellectual written by Oliver Lovesey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing a neglected dimension in postcolonial scholarship, Oliver Lovesey examines the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as repeatedly evoked by the fabled troika of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha and by members of the pan-African diaspora such as Cabral, Fanon, and James. Lovesey’s primary focus is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, one of the greatest writers of post-independence Africa. Ngũgĩ continues to be a vibrant cultural agitator and innovator who, in contrast to many other public intellectuals, has participated directly in grassroots cultural renewal, enduring imprisonment and exile as a consequence of his engagement in political action. Lovesey’s comprehensive study concentrates on Ngũgĩ’s non-fictional prose writings, including his largely overlooked early journalism and his most recent autobiographical and theoretical work. He offers a postcolonial critique that acknowledges Ngũgĩ’s complex position as a virtual spokesperson for the oppressed and global conscience who now speaks from a location of privilege. Ngũgĩ’s writings, Lovesey shows, display a seemingly paradoxical consistency in their concerns over nearly five decades at the same time that there have been enormous transformations in his ideology and a shift in his focus from Africa’s holocaust to Africa’s renaissance. Lovesey argues that Ngũgĩ’s view of the intellectual has shifted from an alienated, nearly neocolonial stance to a position that allows him to celebrate intellectual activism and a return to the model of the oral vernacular intellectual even as he challenges other global intellectuals. Tracing the development of this notion of the postcolonial intellectual, Lovesey argues for Ngũgĩ’s rightful position as a major postcolonial theorist who helped establish postcolonial studies.
Download or read book The American Journal of Theology written by University of Chicago. Divinity School and published by . This book was released on 1897 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vols. 2-6 include "Theological and Semitic literature for 1898- 1901, a bibliographical supplement to the American journal of theology and the American journal of Semitic languages and literatures. By W. Muss-Arnolt." (Separately paged)
