Download or read book Yvain written by Chretien de Troyes and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1987-09-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.

Download or read book Charles Pettigrew First Bishop elect of the North Carolina Episcopal Church written by Bennett H Wall and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-10 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Download or read book Fluxus Forms written by Natilee Harren and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art. . . . Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples,” writes artist George Maciunas in his Fluxus manifesto of 1963. Reacting against an elitist art world enthralled by modernist aesthetics, Fluxus encouraged playfulness, chance, irreverence, and viewer participation. The diverse collective—including George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and Robert Watts—embraced humble objects and everyday gestures as critical means of finding freedom and excitement beyond traditional forms of art-making. While today the Fluxus collective is recognized for its radical neo-avant-garde works of performance, publishing, and relational art and its experimental, interdisciplinary approach, it was not taken seriously in its own time. With Fluxus Forms, Natilee Harren captures the magnetic energy of Fluxus activities and collaborations that emerged at the intersections of art, music, performance, and literature. The book offers insight into the nature of art in the 1960s as it traces the international development of the collective’s unique intermedia works—including event scores and Fluxbox multiples—that irreversibly expanded the boundaries of contemporary art.

Download or read book King of the World written by Philip Mansel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 669 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis XIV was a man in pursuit of glory. Not content to be the ruler of a world power, he wanted the power to rule the world. And, for a time, he came tantalizingly close. Philip Mansel’s King of the World is the most comprehensive and up-to-date biography in English of this hypnotic, flawed figure who continues to captivate our attention. This lively work takes Louis outside Versailles and shows the true extent of his global ambitions, with stops in London, Madrid, Constantinople, Bangkok, and beyond. We witness the importance of his alliance with the Spanish crown and his success in securing Spain for his descendants, his enmity with England, and his relations with the rest of Europe, as well as Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We also see the king’s effect on the two great global diasporas of Huguenots and Jacobites, and their influence on him as he failed in his brutal attempts to stop Protestants from leaving France. Along the way, we are enveloped in the splendor of Louis’s court and the fascinating cast of characters who prostrated and plotted within it. King of the World is exceptionally researched, drawing on international archives and incorporating sources who knew the king intimately, including the newly released correspondence of Louis’s second wife, Madame de Maintenon. Mansel’s narrative flair is a perfect match for this grand figure, and he brings the Sun King’s world to vivid life. This is a global biography of a global king, whose power was extensive but also limited by laws and circumstances, and whose interests and ambitions stretched far beyond his homeland. Through it all, we watch Louis XIV progressively turn from a dazzling, attractive young king to a belligerent reactionary who sets France on the path to 1789. It is a convincing and compelling portrait of a man who, three hundred years after his death, still epitomizes the idea of le grand monarque.

Download or read book The Challenge of Nietzsche written by Jeremy Fortier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most widely read authors in the world, from the time of his death to the present—as well as one of the most controversial. He has been celebrated as a theorist of individual creativity and self-care but also condemned as an advocate of antimodern politics and hierarchical communalism. Rather than treating these approaches as mutually exclusive, Jeremy Fortier contends that we ought instead to understand Nietzsche’s complex legacy as the consequence of a self-conscious and artful tension woven into the fabric of his books. The Challenge of Nietzsche uses Nietzsche as a guide to Nietzsche, highlighting the fact that Nietzsche equipped his writings with retrospective self-commentaries and an autobiographical apparatus that clarify how he understood his development as an author, thinker, and human being. Fortier shows that Nietzsche used his writings to establish two major character types, the Free Spirit and Zarathustra, who represent two different approaches to the conduct and understanding of life: one that strives to be as independent and critical of the world as possible, and one that engages with, cares for, and aims to change the world. Nietzsche developed these characters at different moments of his life, in order to confront from contrasting perspectives such elemental experiences as the drive to independence, the feeling of love, and the assessment of one’s overall health or well-being. Understanding the tension between the Free Spirit and Zarathustra takes readers to the heart of what Nietzsche identified as the tensions central to his life, and to all human life.

Download or read book Still Life written by Fernando Domínguez Rubio and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Iconic works of art such as Jackson Pollock's One and Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night draw around 3 million viewers to New York's Museum of Modern Art annually. However, between the museum's permanent collection and its temporary exhibits on display, only just a fraction of MoMA's vast collection and the infrastructures that support it are visible to the public. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio dives deep into the institutions, technologies, and histories that have made MoMA a cultural powerhouse. Domínguez Rubio seeks to uncover the considerable forces that support and sustain this growth. He shows us the veritable army of conservators, art movers, and curators who try to fend off the slow and inevitable deterioration of the works in MoMA's prestigious collection, as well as the enormous and idiosyncratic technologies they rely on, ranging from air conditioning units to specially designed storage containers. And indeed, the vast majority of MoMA's immense collection is in storage. Of the museum's 1,221 works by Picasso, only 24 are regularly on display. These works are thus not only subject to the elements, but to trends in the art world. The prestige of a museum, then, is ultimately as fragile as the works it contains: not only do works of art decay over time, their perceived importance is constantly in flux"--

Download or read book The Angel in the Marketplace written by Ellen Wayland-Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The popular image of a midcentury adwoman is of a feisty girl beating men at their own game, a female Horatio Alger protagonist battling her way through the sexist workplace. But before the fictional rise of Peggy Olson or the real-life stories of Patricia Tierney and Jane Maas came Jean Wade Rindlaub: a female power broker who used her considerable success in the workplace to encourage other women—to stick to their kitchens. The Angel in the Marketplace is the story of one of America’s most accomplished advertising executives. It is also the story of how advertisers like Rindlaub sold a postwar American dream of capitalism and a Christian corporate order. Rindlaub was responsible for award-winning, mega sales-generating advertisements for all things domestic, including Oneida silverware, Betty Crocker cake mix, Campbell’s soup, and Chiquita bananas. Her success largely came from embracing, rather than subverting, the cultural expectations of women. She believed her responsibility as an advertiser was not to spring women from their trap, but to make that trap more comfortable. Rindlaub wasn’t just selling silverware and cakes; she was selling the virtues of free enterprise. By following the arc of Rindlaub’s career from the 1920s through the 1960s, we witness how a range of cultural narratives—advertising chief among them—worked powerfully to shape women’s emotional and economic behavior in support of the free market system. Alongside Rindlaub’s story, Ellen Wayland-Smith provides a riveting history of how women were repeatedly sold the idea that their role as housewives was more powerful, and more patriotic, than any outside the home. And by buying into the image of morality through an unregulated market, many of these women helped fuel backlash against economic regulation and socialization efforts throughout the twentieth century. The Angel in the Marketplace is a nuanced portrayal of a complex woman, one who both shaped and reflected the complicated cultural, political, and religious forces defining femininity in America at mid-century. This compelling account of one of advertising’s most fervent believers is a tale of a Mad Woman we haven’t been told.

Download or read book Charter School City written by Douglas N. Harris and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the tragedy and destruction that came with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, public schools in New Orleans became part of an almost unthinkable experiment—eliminating the traditional public education system and completely replacing it with charter schools and school choice. Fifteen years later, the results have been remarkable, and the complex lessons learned should alter the way we think about American education. New Orleans became the first US city ever to adopt a school system based on the principles of markets and economics. When the state took over all of the city’s public schools, it turned them over to non-profit charter school managers accountable under performance-based contracts. Students were no longer obligated to attend a specific school based upon their address, allowing families to act like consumers and choose schools in any neighborhood. The teacher union contract, tenure, and certification rules were eliminated, giving schools autonomy and control to hire and fire as they pleased. In Charter School City, Douglas N. Harris provides an inside look at how and why these reform decisions were made and offers many surprising findings from one of the most extensive and rigorous evaluations of a district school reform ever conducted. Through close examination of the results, Harris finds that this unprecedented experiment was a noteworthy success on almost every measurable student outcome. But, as Harris shows, New Orleans was uniquely situated for these reforms to work well and that this market-based reform still required some specific and active roles for government. Letting free markets rule on their own without government involvement will not generate the kinds of changes their advocates suggest. Combining the evidence from New Orleans with that from other cities, Harris draws out the broader lessons of this unprecedented reform effort. At a time when charter school debates are more based on ideology than data, this book is a powerful, evidence-based, and in-depth look at how we can rethink the roles for governments, markets, and nonprofit organizations in education to ensure that America’s schools fulfill their potential for all students.

Download or read book CEO Leadership written by Thomas A. Cole and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporate governance for public companies in the United States today is a fragile balance between shareholders, board members, and CEOs. Shareholders, who are focused on profits, put pressure on boards, who are accountable for operations and profitability. Boards, in turn, pressure CEOs, who must answer to the board while building their own larger vision and strategy for the future of the company. In order for this structure to be successful in the long term, it is imperative that boards and CEOs come to understand each other’s roles and how best to work together. Drawing on four decades of experience advising boards and CEOs on how to do just that, Thomas A. Cole offers in CEO Leadership a straightforward and accessible guide to navigating corporate governance today. He explores the recurring question of whose benefit a corporation should be governed for, along with related matters of corporate social responsibility, and he explains the role of laws, market forces, and politics and their influence on the governance of public companies. For corporate directors, he provides a comprehensive examination of the roles, responsibilities, and accountability the role entails, while also offering guidance on how to be as effective as possible in addressing both routine corporate matters and special situations such as mergers and acquisitions, succession, and corporate crises. In addition, he offers practical suggestions for CEOs on leadership and their interactions with boards and shareholders. Cole also mounts a compelling case that a corporate culture that celebrates diversity and inclusion and has zero tolerance for sexual misconduct is critical to long-term business success. Filled with vignettes from Cole’s many years of experience in the board room and C-suite, CEO Leadership is an invaluable resource for current and prospective directors, CEOs, and other senior officers of public companies as well as the next generation of corporate leaders and their business and financial advisors.

Download or read book The Toddler in Chief written by Daniel W. Drezner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-03-25 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. . . . And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.”—An anonymous senior administrative official in an op-ed published in a New York Times op-ed, September 5, 2018 Every president faces criticism and caricature. Donald Trump, however, is unique in that he is routinely characterized in ways more suitable for a toddler. What’s more, it is not just Democrats, pundits, or protestors who compare the president to a child; Trump’s staffers, subordinates, and allies on Capitol Hill also describe Trump like a small, badly behaved preschooler. In April 2017, Daniel W. Drezner began curating every example he could find of a Trump ally describing the president like a toddler. So far, he’s collected more than one thousand tweets—a rate of more than one a day. In The Toddler-in-Chief, Drezner draws on these examples to take readers through the different dimensions of Trump’s infantile behavior, from temper tantrums to poor impulse control to the possibility that the President has had too much screen time. How much damage can really be done by a giant man-baby? Quite a lot, Drezner argues, due to the winnowing away of presidential checks and balances over the past fifty years. In these pages, Drezner follows his theme—the specific ways in which sharing some of the traits of a toddler makes a person ill-suited to the presidency—to show the lasting, deleterious impact the Trump administration will have on American foreign policy and democracy. The “adults in the room” may not be able to rein in Trump’s toddler-like behavior, but, with the 2020 election fast approaching, the American people can think about whether they want the most powerful office turned into a poorly run political day care facility. Drezner exhorts us to elect a commander-in-chief, not a toddler-in-chief. And along the way, he shows how we must rethink the terrifying powers we have given the presidency.

Download or read book Power and Time written by Dan Edelstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-12-11 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.

Download or read book A Philosopher s Economist written by Margaret Schabas and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconsiders the centrality and legacy of Hume’s economic thought and serves as an important springboard for reflections on the philosophical underpinnings of economics. Although David Hume’s contributions to philosophy are firmly established, his economics has been largely overlooked. A Philosopher’s Economist offers the definitive account of Hume’s “worldly philosophy” and argues that economics was a central preoccupation of his life and work. Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind show that Hume made important contributions to the science of economics, notably on money, trade, and public finance. Hume’s astute understanding of human behavior provided an important foundation for his economics and proved essential to his analysis of the ethical and political dimensions of capitalism. Hume also linked his economic theory with policy recommendations and sought to influence people in power. While in favor of the modern commercial world, believing that it had and would continue to raise standards of living, promote peaceful relations, and foster moral refinement, Hume was not an unqualified enthusiast. He recognized many of the underlying injustices of capitalism, its tendencies to promote avarice and inequality, as well as its potential for political instability and absolutism. Hume’s imprint on modern economics is profound and far-reaching, whether through his close friend Adam Smith or later admirers such as John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. Schabas and Wennerlind’s book compels us to reconsider the centrality and legacy of Hume’s economic thought—for both his time and ours—and thus serves as an important springboard for reflections on the philosophical underpinnings of economics.

Download or read book Rousseau s Reader written by John T. Scott and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-05-06 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On his famous walk to Vincennes to visit the imprisoned Diderot, Rousseau had what he called an “illumination”—the realization that man was naturally good but becomes corrupted by the influence of society—a fundamental change in Rousseau’s perspective that would animate all of his subsequent works. At that moment, Rousseau “saw” something he had hitherto not seen, and he made it his mission to help his readers share that vision through an array of rhetorical and literary techniques. In Rousseau’s Reader, John T. Scott looks at the different strategies Rousseau used to engage and persuade the readers of his major philosophical works, including the Social Contract, Discourse on Inequality, and Emile. Considering choice of genre; textual structure; frontispieces and illustrations; shifting authorial and narrative voice; addresses to readers that alternately invite and challenge; apostrophe, metaphor, and other literary devices; and, of course, paradox, Scott explores how the form of Rousseau’s writing relates to the content of his thought and vice versa. Through this skillful interplay of form and content, Rousseau engages in a profoundly transformative dialogue with his readers. While most political philosophers have focused, understandably, on Rousseau’s ideas, Scott shows convincingly that the way he conveyed them is also of vital importance, especially given Rousseau’s enduring interest in education. Giving readers the key to Rousseau’s style, Scott offers fresh and original insights into the relationship between the substance of his thought and his literary and rhetorical techniques, which enhance our understanding of Rousseau’s project and the audiences he intended to reach.

Download or read book Ahab s Rolling Sea written by Richard J. King and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing—or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the “best book ever written about nature,” and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael’s sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851. A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville’s novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow’s nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851—at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab’s and Ishmael’s worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville’s narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism. Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab’s Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep—from whale hunters to climate refugees.

Download or read book Amber Waves written by Catherine Zabinski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of a staple grain we often take for granted, exploring how wheat went from wild grass to a world-shaping crop. At breakfast tables and bakeries, we take for granted a grain that has made human civilization possible, a cereal whose humble origins belie its world-shaping power: wheat. Amber Waves tells the story of a group of grass species that first grew in scattered stands in the foothills of the Middle East until our ancestors discovered their value as a source of food. Over thousands of years, we moved their seeds to all but the polar regions of Earth, slowly cultivating what we now know as wheat, and in the process creating a world of cuisines that uses wheat seeds as a staple food. Wheat spread across the globe, but as ecologist Catherine Zabinski shows us, a biography of wheat is not only the story of how plants ensure their own success: from the earliest bread to the most mouthwatering pasta, it is also a story of human ingenuity in producing enough food for ourselves and our communities. Since the first harvest of the ancient grain, we have perfected our farming systems to grow massive quantities of food, producing one of our species’ global mega crops—but at a great cost to ecological systems. And despite our vast capacity to grow food, we face problems with undernourishment both close to home and around the world. Weaving together history, evolution, and ecology, Zabinski’s tale explores much more than the wild roots and rise of a now-ubiquitous grain: it illuminates our complex relationship with our crops, both how we have transformed the plant species we use as food, and how our society—our culture—has changed in response to the need to secure food sources. From the origins of agriculture to gluten sensitivities, from our first selection of the largest seeds from wheat’s wild progenitors to the sequencing of the wheat genome and genetic engineering, Amber Waves sheds new light on how we grow the food that sustains so much human life.

Download or read book What Gardens Mean written by Stephanie Ross and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What Gardens Mean, Stephanie Ross draws on philosophy as well as the histories of art, gardens, culture, and ideas to explore the magical lure of gardens. Paying special attention to the amazing landscape gardens of eighteenth-century England, she situates gardening among the other fine arts, documenting the complex messages gardens can convey and tracing various connections between gardens and the art of painting. What Gardens Mean offers a distinctive blend of historical and contemporary material, ranging from extensive accounts of famous eighteenth-century gardens to incisive connections with present-day philosophical debates. And while Ross examines aesthetic writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Joseph Addison’s Spectator essays on the pleasures of imagination, the book’s opening chapter surveys more recent theories about the nature and boundaries of art. She also considers gardens on their own terms, following changes in garden style, analyzing the phenomenal experience of viewing or strolling through a garden, and challenging the claim that the art of gardening is now a dead one. (ed.)

Download or read book Vincent s Books written by Mariella Guzzoni and published by . This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'I have a more or less irresistible passion for books' Vincent van GoghVincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was famously driven by his passion for God, for art - and for books. Vincent's life with books is examined here chapter by chapter, from his early adulthood, when he considered becoming a pastor, to his decision to be a painter, to the end of his life. He moved from Holland to Paris to Provence; at each moment, ideas he encountered in books defined and guided his thoughts and his life. Vincent's letters to his brother refer to at least 200 authors. Books and readers - whether dreaming or deeply absorbed - are frequent subjects of his paintings.Vincent not only read fiction, he also knew many works of art from detailed descriptions and illustrations in monographs, biographies and museum guides. Always keeping up to date, he never missed the latest literary and artistic magazines. This thought-provoking and original study takes the reader on an artistic-literary journey through Vincent's discoveries, his favourite authors and best-loved books, revealing a continuous dialogue between his own work, the artists and the authors who inspired him, and giving life to his comment: 'Books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me.'