Download or read book Visual and Other Pleasures written by Laura Mulvey and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2009-02-27 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Laura Mulvey's first collection of essays contains a new introduction in which she re-assesses her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."

Download or read book Pleasure Zones written by David Bell and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2001-07-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a subculture appropriate space within the dominant culture? What is the city's relationship to the body? Geographers from England and New Zealand apply queer theory in their consideration of the human body as a vehicle for understanding relationships between people and place. These provocative essays examine the body as an entity constricted by gender, sexuality, race, class, nationality, and disability. They also look at sexual identity as it relates to communities, and how humans "do" gender through regulated practices such as heterosexuality. Pleasure Zones tackles topics such as the politics of gay men's health; the relationship of sex and death to the city; erotic urban landscapes, and how public policy labels lesbians. Each essay attempts to reconcile queer theory and social and cultural theory with the discipline of geography. The result is an illuminating and accessible look at the formation of personal and collective identities. Building on two decades of geography that recognizes the body as a politicized site of struggle, and applying the perspective of the sexual dissident, Pleasure Zones brings a fascinating variety of human experiences into sharp relief.

Download or read book Lost in Thought written by Zena Hitz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us. Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity.

Download or read book Small Pleasures written by Clare Chambers and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ann Patchett—an astonishing, keenly observed period piece about an ordinary British woman in the 1950s whose dutiful life takes a sudden turn into a pitched battle between propriety and unexpected passion. "With wit and dry humor...quietly affecting in unexpected ways. Chambers' language is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: big pleasure wrought from small details."--The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It’s a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape. That all changes when a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth. Jean seizes onto the bizarre story and sets out to discover whether Gretchen is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys, including Gretchen’s gentle and thoughtful husband Howard, who mostly believes his wife, and their quirky and charming daughter Margaret, who becomes a sort of surrogate child for Jean. Gretchen, too, becomes a much-needed friend in an otherwise empty social life. Jean cannot bring herself to discard what seems like her one chance at happiness, even as the story that she is researching starts to send dark ripples across all their lives…with unimaginable consequences. Both a mystery and a love story, Small Pleasures is a literary tour-de-force in the style of The Remains of the Day, about conflict between personal fulfillment and duty; a novel that celebrates the beauty and potential for joy in all things plain and unfashionable.

Download or read book Society of Pleasures written by Kathryn A. Hoffmann and published by MacMillan. This book was released on 1997 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the days of Louis XIV, the experience of pleasure was as much a social and political tool as as essential ingredient in personal life. Kathryn Hoffmann, in an interdisciplinary volume, explores this 'society of pleasures' by studying the strange couplings of pleasure, power and knowledge which took shape within it. She analyzes the politics of pleasure and knowledge arising in notions of public rights, conundrums of aesthetics, and the politics of erotics. In so doing, Hoffmann reveals that the society of pleasures was not law, or policy, or an exact procedure of totalizing power, but a state and a people where the logic of pleasure always contained the trap of violent oppression, a place where desire and forces, the caress and the grip, informed and fed upon each other. A unique work which manages to intertwine both canonical literary works and documents from the margins of history, philosophy, and gastronomy, Society of Pleasures locates the passions and essence of a legendary society and traces the routes to the modern in the fissures of an absolutist dream.

Download or read book Enchanting Pleasures written by Eloisa James and published by Dell. This book was released on 2009-09-02 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People magazine named Eloisa James’ novel Midnight Pleasures “Page Turner of the Week” and raved “Romance writing does not get much better than this.” Now the acclaimed author returns with another sumptuous tale of passion and misadventure in Regency England. . . . Gabrielle Jerningham cherishes the portrait of her betrothed, the perfect Peter Dewland . . . until she meets his commanding older brother Quill. But it is Peter to whom she has been promised. And how can she possibly transform her voluptuous, outspoken self into the poised gentlewoman Peter requires? When Gabby’s shocking décolletage plunges to her waist at her first ball, Peter is humiliated. But Quill comes to the rescue, to the peril of his heart. An accident years before has left Quill plagued by headaches—the kind that grows more excruciating with strenuous exercise. Needless to say, this hardly bodes well for siring progeny. But the very sight of Gabby leaves Quill breathless. One forbidden kiss and Quill vows to have her, headaches—and Peter—be damned! But it will take a clever man—and a cleverer woman--to turn the tables on propriety and find their way to true love. . . . BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Eloisa James's Paris in Love. Praise for Enchanting Pleasures “Another winner . . . delightful heroine, masterful hero, and an ingenious plot: intelligent, sexy fun.”—Kirkus Reviews “Charasmatic characters and a healthy dose of humor . . . once again, James weaves a story as rich in plot as in character.”—Publishers Weekly

Download or read book The pleasures of society written by Pleasures and published by . This book was released on 1824 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Serfdom Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia written by Richard Stites and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Serf-era and provincial Russia heralded the spectacular turn in cultural history that began in the 1860s. Examining the role of arts and artists in society’s value system, Richard Stites explores this shift in a groundbreaking history of visual and performing arts in the last decades of serfdom. Provincial town and manor house engaged the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg while thousands of serfs and ex-serfs created or performed. Mikhail Glinka raised Russian music to new levels and Anton Rubinstein struggled to found a conservatory. Long before the itinerants, painters explored town and country in genre scenes of everyday life. Serf actors on loan from their masters brought naturalistic acting from provincial theaters to the imperial stages. Stites’s richly detailed book offers new perspectives on the origins of Russia’s nineteenth-century artistic prowess.

Download or read book The Pursuit of Pleasure written by Keith Middlemas and published by London ; New York : Gordon & Cremonesi. This book was released on 1977 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comparison between the ideal of a true gentleman and its practice, between public duty and private pleasures, as they were enjoyed by gentlemen in Edwardian England.

Download or read book The Book of Pleasures written by Raoul Vaneigem and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The City s Pleasures written by Shirine Hamadeh and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The City's Pleasures is the first historical investigation of the tremendous changes that affected the fabric and architecture of Istanbul in the century that followed the decisive return of the Ottoman court to the capital in 1703. These were spectacular times that witnessed the most extraordinary urban expansion and building explosion in the history of the city. Showing how architecture and urban form became involved in the representation and construction of a changing social order, Shirine Hamadeh reassesses the dominance of the paradigm of Westernization in interpretations of this period and challenges the suggestion that change in the eighteenth century could only occur by turning toward a now superior West. Drawing on a genre of Ottoman poetry written in celebration of the built environment and on a vast array of related textual and visual sources, Hamadeh demonstrates that architectural change was the result of a dynamic synthesis between internal and external factors, and closely mirrored the process of décloisonnement of the city's social landscape. Examining novel forms, spaces, and decorative vocabularies; changing patterns of patronage; and new patterns of architectural perception; The City's Pleasures shows how these exposed and reinforced the internal dynamics that were played out between a society in flux and a state anxious to recreate an ideal system of social hierarchies. Profoundly hybrid in nature, the new architectural idiom reflected a growing permeability between elite and middle-class sensibilities, an unprecedented degree of receptivity to Western and Eastern foreign traditions, and a clear departure from the parameters of the classical canon. Innovation became the new operative doctrine. As the built environment was experienced, perceived, and appreciated by contemporary observers, it increasingly revealed itself as a perpetual source of sensory pleasures.

Download or read book Intoxication and Society written by Jonathan Herring and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intoxicants, substances that alter a person's mental and physiological state, are a continuing obsession. In their effect on the mind and body, intoxicants go to the heart of what it means to be human. In the tensions between 'free' and uninhibited consumption on the one hand, and the pressures of social regulation and personal responsibility on the other, they also illuminate the daily paradoxes, and sheer complexity, of living in modern Western societies. Yet this complexity, and the rich history that underpins it, is often lost in the current debates over public policy. Intoxication and Society sets out to supplement the contemporary discourse surrounding intoxication with a more nuanced appreciation of the history and nature of what is very much a multidimensional problem. It does so by employing an interdisciplinary framework that includes contributions from leading academics in law, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, neuroscience and social psychology. The result is a subtle historical and contemporary rereading of the social construction of intoxication that will provide a secure basis for analysis as society continues to respond to the problematic pleasures of intoxication.

Download or read book For Business and Pleasure written by Mara Laura Keire and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mara L. Keire’s history of red-light districts in the United States offers readers a fascinating survey of the business of pleasure from the 1890s through the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Anti-vice reformers in the late nineteenth century accepted that complete eradication of disreputable pleasure was impossible. Seeking a way to regulate rather than eliminate prostitution, alcohol, drugs, and gambling, urban reformers confined sites of disreputable pleasure to red-light districts in cities throughout the United States. They dismissed the extremes of prohibitory law and instead sought to limit the impact of vice on city life through realistic restrictive measures. Keire’s thoughtful work examines the popular culture that developed within red-light districts, as well as efforts to contain vice in such cities as New Orleans; Hartford, Connecticut; New York City; Macon, Georgia; San Francisco; and El Paso, Texas. Keire describes the people and practices in red-light districts, reformers' efforts to limit their impact on city life, and the successful closure of the districts during World War I. Her study extends into Prohibition and discusses the various effects that scattering vice and banning alcohol had on commercial nightlife.

Download or read book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction written by Alan Jacobs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.

Download or read book Pleasures written by Lonnie Barbach and published by Sphere. This book was released on 1985 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Pleasures and Perils written by Debra Curtis and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pleasures and Perils follows a group of young girls living on Nevis, an island society in the Eastern Caribbean. In this provocative ethnography, Debra Curtis examines their sexuality in gripping detail: why do Nevisian girls engage in sexual activity at such young ages? Where is the line between coercion and consent? How does a desire for wealth affect a girl's sexual practices? Curtis shows that girls are often caught between conflicting discourses of Christian teachings about chastity, public health cautions about safe sex, and media enticements about consumer delights. Sexuality's contradictions are exposed: power and powerless¡ness, self-determination and cultural control, violence and pleasure. Pleasures and Perils illuminates the methodological and ethical issues anthropologists face when they conduct research on sex, especially among girls. The sexually explicit narratives conveyed in this book challenge not only the reader's own thoughts on sexuality but also the broader limits and possibilities of ethnography.

Download or read book Sadomasochism written by Peggy J. Kleinplatz and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book has been co-published as Journal of Homosexuality volume 50, numbers 2/3, 2006