Download or read book Reassembling the Strange written by Thomas Anderson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how Westerners understood and processed Madagascar and its environment during the nineteenth century. Madagascar’s unique ecosystem crafted its reputation as a strange place full of unusual species. Westerners, however, often minimized Madagascar’s peculiar features to stress the commonality of its fauna and flora with the world. The attempt to understand the island through science led to a domestication of its environment that created the image of a tame and known world capable of being controlled and used by Western powers. At the heart of the exploration of Madagascar and its transformation in Western eyes from a strange world to a cash crop colony were missionaries and naturalists who relied upon global experiences to master the island by normalizing the peculiar qualities of Madagascar’s environment. This book reveals how the environment played a dominant role in understanding the island and its people, and how current environmental debates have evolved from earlier policies and discussions about the environment.
Download or read book Reassembling the Strange written by Thomas J. Anderson and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reassembling the Social written by Bruno Latour and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-09-06 with total page 813 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as 'wooden' or 'steely'. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a 'social explanations' of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of 'the social' to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the 'assemblages' of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a 'sociology of associations', has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.
Download or read book Tourism in Natural and Agricultural Ecosystems in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries written by Martino Lorenzo Fagnani and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the roots of one of the main human activities that can be developed in natural and agricultural ecosystems: tourism. Attention to natural and agricultural ecosystems and their conservation has intensified in recent decades, responding to increasing social sensitivity to the environment, as also witnessed by Agenda 2030. The book explores the development of tourism in natural and agricultural ecosystems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when some of its essential features derived from the practices of exploration, scientific study, business, healing practices, and also a desire for personal growth. This research is intended to open up international scholarly debate and discussion and draw in contributions from all disciplines and geographical areas. In addition, it intends to add an important piece to the mosaic of international literature that has rarely considered the origins of nature and rural tourism in an array of practices not always embodying a stated intent of recreation. This book is based on handwritten documents and travelogues circulating during the period in question. Most of the travel experiences analyzed regard men and women of European descent, but their travels were global, with ecosystems considered on all populated continents. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars alike interested in tourism history and the history of science and travel.
Download or read book Stranger to the Truth written by Lisa C. Hickman and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2013-10-21 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a privileged, eighteen year old end up in prison, convicted of one of the rarest of crimes--matricide? The literary nonfiction Stranger to the Truth explores the fatal intersection in the lives of Noura Jackson, her circle of dissolute Memphis friends, and the death of Nouras mother, Jennifer, on the eve of a popular outdoor festival. The brutal attack seemed to reflect personal and exponential rage. Tragedy stalked Noura. Her father was fatally shot when she was seventeen. A mystery never solved. A year later an auto accident claimed her best friend. Both mother and daughter were reeling from shock, grief, and confusion. The tension between them escalated until Nouras difficult teenage years yielded to something much darker. More than a whodunit, this fact-based account tells a spellbinding tale of impetuous youth and a single parent who too late assumes the role of disciplinarian, saying no to the demands of her daughter who will not listen. Weaving multiple points of view, back stories, and extensive research, Stranger to the Truth corrals a timely, complex story in an absorbing narrative. Praise for Stranger to the Truth In Stranger to the Truth, Ms. Hickman has taken a local tragedy and, with eloquence and empathy, given it universal application. The reader will find not only a gripping story, but also a moving exploration of the shadows that dwell within us all. --Howard Bahr, author of The Black Flower, The Year of Jubilo, and The Judas Field
Download or read book Heroism as a Global Phenomenon in Contemporary Culture written by Barbara Korte and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heroes and heroic discourse have gained new visibility in the twenty-first century. This is noted in recent research on the heroic, but it has been largely ignored that heroism is increasingly a global phenomenon both in terms of production and consumption. This edited collection aims to bridge this research void and brings together case studies by scholars from different parts of the world and diverse fields. They explore how transnational and transcultural processes of translation and adaptation shape notions of the heroic in non-Western and Western cultures alike. The book provides fresh perspectives on heroism studies and offers a new angle for global and postcolonial studies.
Download or read book Surrealism written by Natalya Lusty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the salient ideas and practices that have shaped Surrealism as a protean intellectual and cultural concept that fundamentally shifted our understanding of the nexus between art, culture, and politics. By bringing a diverse set of artistic forms and practices such as literature, manifestos, collage, photography, film, fashion, display, and collecting into conversation with newly emerging intellectual traditions (ethnography, modern science, anthropology, and psychoanalysis), the essays in this volume reveal Surrealism's enduring influence on contemporary thought and culture alongside its anti-colonial political position and international reach. Surrealism's fascination with novel forms of cultural production and experimental methods contributed to its conceptual malleability and temporal durability, making it one of the most significant avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. The book traces how Surrealism's urgent political and aesthetic provocations have bequeathed an important legacy for recent scholarly interest in thing theory, critical vitalism, new materialism, ontology, and animal/human studies.
Download or read book Strange Red Cow written by Sara Bader and published by Clarkson Potter Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This amusing, enlightening, and truly one-of-a-kind collection examines 300 years of classified advertisements and reveals a rich cultural history of America.
Download or read book Stranger America written by Josh Toth and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contradictory ideals of egalitarianism and self-reliance haunt America’s democratic state. We need look no further than Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and victory for proof that early twentieth-century anxieties about individualism, race, and the foreign or intrusive "other" persist today. In Stranger America, Josh Toth tracks and delineates these anxieties in America’s aesthetic production, finally locating a potential narrative strategy for circumnavigating them. Toth’s central focus is, simply, strangeness—or those characters who adamantly resist being fixed in any given category of identity. As with the theorists employed (Nancy, i ek, Derrida, Freud, Hegel), the subjects and literature considered are as encompassing as possible: from the work of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen to that of Philip K. Dick, Woody Allen, Larry David, and Bob Dylan; from the rise of nativism in the early twentieth century to object-oriented ontology and the twenty-first-century zombie craze; from ragtime and the introduction of sound in American cinema to the exhaustion of postmodern metafiction. Toth argues that American literature, music, film, and television can show us the path toward a new ethic, one in which we organize identity around the stranger rather than resorting to tactics of pure exclusion or inclusion. Ultimately, he provides a new narrative approach to otherness that seeks to realize a truly democratic form of community.
Download or read book Arcimboldo written by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a man’s chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together on canvas and panel to assemble the strange heads and faces that constitute one of Renaissance art’s most striking oeuvres. The first major study in a generation of the artist behind these remarkable paintings, Arcimboldo tells the singular story of their creation. Drawing on his thirty-five-year engagement with the artist, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann begins with an overview of Arcimboldo’s life and work, exploring the artist’s early years in sixteenth-century Lombardy, his grounding in Leonardesque traditions, and his tenure as a Habsburg court portraitist in Vienna and Prague. Arcimboldo then trains its focus on the celebrated composite heads, approaching them as visual jokes with serious underpinnings—images that poetically display pictorial wit while conveying an allegorical message. In addition to probing the humanistic, literary, and philosophical dimensions of these pieces, Kaufmann explains that they embody their creator’s continuous engagement with nature painting and natural history. He reveals, in fact, that Arcimboldo painted many more nature studies than scholars have realized—a finding that significantly deepens current interpretations of the composite heads. Demonstrating the previously overlooked importance of these works to natural history and still-life painting, Arcimboldo finally restores the artist’s fantastic visual jokes to their rightful place in the history of both science and art.
Download or read book Prince of Networks Bruno Latour and Metaphysics written by Graham Harman and published by re.press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prince of Networks is the first treatment of Bruno Latour specifically as a philosopher. It has been eagerly awaited by readers of both Latour and Harman since their public discussion at the London School of Economics in February 2008. Part One covers four key works that display Latour’s underrated contributions to metaphysics: Irreductions, Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern, and Pandora’s Hope. Harman contends that Latour is one of the central figures of contemporary philosophy, with a highly original ontology centered in four key concepts: actants, irreduction, translation, and alliance. In Part Two, Harman summarizes Latour’s most important philosophical insights, ...
Download or read book In the Gathering Woods written by Adria Bernardi and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2000-10-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize WinnerSelected by Frank ConroyIn the Gathering Woods, contains a cast of characters who hail from the same Italian ancestors, but whose stories come at us unbounded by time and space. The book opens early in the twentieth century, with a narrator's boyhood recollections of gathering mushrooms with his grandfather—a narrator who seems still haunted by a terrifying local legend that tormented him as a boy. We skip backward to a young shepherd-artist in the Apennine mountains in the 1500s, who yearns to be discovered, as Giotto was. Later, a preverbal baby accumulates bits of the conversation carried on by adults at the table above her head; a neurologist from Chicago returns to the Apennines to deposit shards of glass at a grave.Whether they speak in the lost dialect of an immigrant, of infancy, or of an adolescent girl's school lessons, these stories call up fragments of language in a struggle to understand and attempt to console through the act of reassembling. The language of these stories is both lyrical and comic, providing insight through the details of Bernardi's writing.
Download or read book The Jack Daly Trilogy written by Peter Larner and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012-08-18 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time, the first three books in the Jack Daly crime thriller series are available in one volume. Lost in a hurricane finds Jack in a web of political intrigue as he joins a strange group of seemingly mad scientists intent on contolling the weather. Deathbed Confessions tells the story of two runaway brothers whose arrival in London erupts in violence. When their story resurfaces forty years later, Jack needs to discover what his late mother's involvement was. And, finally, the Unfolding Path, becomes personal as Jack faces his worst nightmare. When faced with a man who has nothing to lose Jack's Italian wife Ludo decides the only person to send is a man who has everything to lose.
Download or read book The Afterlives of Frankenstein written by Robert I. Lublin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-22 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the treatment of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in popular art and culture, this book examines adaptations in film, comics, theatre, art, video-games and more, to illuminate how the novel's myth has evolved in the two centuries since its publication. Divided into four sections, The Afterlives of Frankenstein considers the cultural dialogues Mary Shelley's novel has engaged with in specific historical moments; the extraordinary examples of how Frankenstein has suffused our cultural consciousness; and how the Frankenstein myth has become something to play with, a locus for reinvention and imaginative interpretation. In the final part, artists respond to the Frankenstein legacy today, reintroducing it into cultural circulation in ways that speak creatively to current anxieties and concerns. Bringing together popular interventions that riff off Shelley's major themes, chapters survey such works as Frankenstein in Baghdad, Bob Dylan's recent “My Own Version of You”, the graphic novel series Destroyer with its Black cast of characters, Jane Louden's The Mummy!, the first Japanese translation of Frankenstein, “The New Creator”, the iconic Frankenstein mask and Kenneth Brannagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein film. A deep-dive into the crevasses of Frankenstein adaptation and lore, this volume offers compelling new directions for scholarship surrounding the novel through dynamic critical and creative responses to Shelley's original.
Download or read book Judson s Eden written by Keith Laumer and published by Gateway. This book was released on 2016-02-29 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Marl Judson, fleeing a rapacious government that wanted not just his fabulous wealth but his life, crash-landed on a uninhabited planet, he thought he was marooned without hope of rescue, so he prepared himself to live out his remaining years as best he could amidst the planet's weird hallucinogenic flora. But head-twistting flowers (which Judson learned to avoid) were only part of the planet's weirdness: it was possessed of some sort of field effect which made time play strange tricks; temporal anomalies sometimes resulted in cause preceding effect and bizarre compressions and expansions of the normal pace of events. In such an environment time had no meaning; has Jusdson lived centuries alone, or only decades? Or is it years? Or all of the above? He doesn't quite know, but when another ship crashes the strange time effects allow(ed) him to conduct an experiment aimed at producing a perfect society, a veritable Judson's Eden. The the Snake arrives in the form of the government that marooned him - and the Snake wants Judson's Eden for itself.
Download or read book Play Among Books written by Miro Roman and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.
Download or read book A Field Guide to Awkward Silences written by Alexandra Petri and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri shares her stories of awkwardness in this insightful and supremely funny debut. Most twentysomethings avoid awkwardness. Not Alexandra Petri. She auditioned for America’s Next Top Model. She lost Jeopardy! by answering “Who is that dude?” One time, she let some cult members baptize her, just to be polite. Alexandra Petri is a connoisseur of the kind of awkwardness most people spend lifetimes avoiding. If John Hodgman and Amy Sedaris had a baby. . .they would never let Petri babysit it. Here, the Washington Post columnist turns her satirical eye on her own life—with hilarious results. And she’s here to tell you that interesting things start to happen when you stop caring what people think.
