Download or read book American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature Social Thought and Political History written by Peter Swirski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States today is afflicted with political alienation, militarized violence, institutionalized poverty, and social agony. Worst of all, perhaps, it is afflicted with chronic and acute ahistoricism. America insist on ignoring the context of its present dilemmas. It insists on forgetting what preceded the headlines of today and on denying continuity with history. It insists, in short, on its exceptionalism. American Utopia and Social Engineering sets out to correct this amnesia. It misses no opportunity to flesh out both the historical premises and the political promises behind the social policies and political events of the period. These interdisciplinary concerns provide, in turn, the framework for the analyses of works of American literature that mirror their times and mores. Novels considered include: B.F. Skinner and Walden Two (1948), easily the most scandalous utopia of the century, if not of all times; Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), an anatomy of political disfranchisement American-style; Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace (1982), a neo-Darwinian beast fable about morality in the thermonuclear age; Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome (1986), a diagnostic novel about engineering violence out of America’s streets and minds; and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), an alternative history of homegrown ‘soft’ fascism. With the help of the five novels and the social models outlined therein, Peter Swirski interrogates key aspects of sociobiology and behavioural psychology, voting and referenda procedures, morality and altruism, multilevel selection and proverbial wisdom, violence and chip-implant technology, and the adaptive role of emotions in our private and public lives.
Download or read book American Utopia written by Peter Swirski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Black Tuesday to the White House, from Plato to Robert Nozick, from Eugene Debs to Richard Nixon, from Peter Cornelis Plockhoy to the hippie communes of the Sixties, from universal basic income to utopian basic income, from proverbial wisdom to multilevel selection, from Big Data to paleomorality, from Prisoner’s Dilemma to social-engineering Israeli kindergartens, from time travel to gene engineering, from the pretzel logic of meritocracy to deaggressing humanity, American Utopia maps the pitfalls and windfalls of social reform in the name of the human use of human beings. Interrogating the assumptions behind four outré utopias by Thomas M. Disch, Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut, and Margaret Atwood, the book interrogates the assumptions that have historically been central to the utopian project. Whence the seeds of social discontent? Whence our taste for egoism and altruism? For waging war and waging peace? Can we bioengineer human nature to specifications? Should we? Who makes better guardians: humans or machines? And who will guard the guardians?
Download or read book American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature Social Thought and Political History written by Peter Swirski and published by Taylor & Francis US. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States today is afflicted with political alienation, militarized violence, institutionalized poverty, and social agony. Worst of all, perhaps, it is afflicted with chronic and acute ahistoricism. America insist on ignoring the context of its present dilemmas. It insists on forgetting what preceded the headlines of today and on denying continuity with history. It insists, in short, on its exceptionalism. American Utopia and Social Engineering sets out to correct this amnesia. It misses no opportunity to flesh out both the historical premises and the political promises behind the social policies and political events of the period. These interdisciplinary concerns provide, in turn, the framework for the analyses of works of American literature that mirror their times and mores. Novels considered include: B.F. Skinner and Walden Two (1948), easily the most scandalous utopia of the century, if not of all times; Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), an anatomy of political disfranchisement American-style; Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace (1982), a neo-Darwinian beast fable about morality in the thermonuclear age; Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome (1986), a diagnostic novel about engineering violence out of America’s streets and minds; and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), an alternative history of homegrown ‘soft’ fascism. With the help of the five novels and the social models outlined therein, Peter Swirski interrogates key aspects of sociobiology and behavioural psychology, voting and referenda procedures, morality and altruism, multilevel selection and proverbial wisdom, violence and chip-implant technology, and the adaptive role of emotions in our private and public lives.
Download or read book American Crime Fiction written by Peter Swirski and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Swirski looks at American crime fiction as an artform that expresses and reflects the social and aesthetic values of its authors and readers. As such he documents the manifold ways in which such authorship and readership are a matter of informed literary choice and not of cultural brainwashing or declining literary standards. Asking, in effect, a series of questions about the nature of genre fiction as art, successive chapters look at American crime writers whose careers throw light on the hazards and rewards of nobrow traffic between popular forms and highbrow aesthetics: Dashiell Hammett, John Grisham, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain, Nelson DeMille, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Download or read book Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature written by Emma Staniland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration. Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.
Download or read book Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture written by Denis Jonnes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demands placed on many young Americans as a result of the Cold War give rise to an increasingly age-segregated society. This separation allowed adolescents and young adults to begin to formulate an identity distinct from previous generations, and was a significant factor in their widespread rejection of contemporary American society. This study traces the emergence of a distinctive post-war family dynamic between parent and adolescent or already adult child. In-depth readings of individual writers such as, Arthur Miller, William Styron, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor and Sylvia Plath, situate their work in relation to the Cold War and suggest how the figuring of adolescents and young people reflected and contributed to an empowerment of American youth. This book is a superb research tool for any student or academic with an interest in youth culture, cultural studies, American studies, cold war studies, twentieth-century American literature, history of the family, and age studies.
Download or read book Identity Diaspora and Return in American Literature written by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.
Download or read book Nabokov History and the Texture of Time written by Will Norman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov's fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself -- that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism -- this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author's characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov's understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov's major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in Nabokov's attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time. In reading his response to the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and Cold War, Norman redresses the commonly-expressed admiration for Nabokov's heroic resistance to history by suggesting the ethical, aesthetic, and political costs of reading and writing in its denial. This book offers a rethinking of Nabokov's location in literary history, the ideological impulses which inform his fiction, and the importance of temporal aesthetics in negotiating the matrices of modernism.
Download or read book Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction written by Peter Ferry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction is an interdisciplinary study that presents masculinity as a key thematic concern in contemporary New York fiction. This study argues that New York authors do not simply depict masculinity as a social and historical construction but seek to challenge the archetypal ideals of masculinity by writing counter-hegemonic narratives. Gendering canonical New York writers, namely Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, and Don DeLillo, illustrates how explorations of masculinity are tied into the principal themes that have defined the American novel from its very beginning. The themes that feature in this study include the role of the novel in American society; the individual and (urban) society; the journey from innocence to awareness (of masculinity); the archetypal image of the absent and/or patriarchal father; the impact of homosocial relations on the everyday performance of masculinity; male sexuality; and the male individual and globalization. What connects these contemporary New York writers is their employment of the one of the great figures in the history of literature: the flâneur. These authors take the flâneur from the shadows of the Manhattan streets and elevate this figure to the role of self-reflexive agent of male subjectivity through which they write counter-hegemonic narratives of masculinity. This book is an essential reference for those with an interest in gender studies and contemporary American fiction.
Download or read book Nature Class and New Deal Literature written by Stephen Fender and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-08-22 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book looks at how popular memory favors the country Depression over the economic crisis in the nation’s cities and factories. Over eighty years after it happened, the Depression still lives on in iconic images of country poor whites – in the novels of John Steinbeck, the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, the documentary films of Pare Lorenz and the thousands of share-croppers’ life histories as taken down by the workers of the Federal Writers’ Project. Like the politicians and bureaucrats who accomplished the New Deal’s radical reforms in banking, social security and labor union law, the artists, novelists and other writers who supported or even worked for the New Deal were idealists, well to the left of center in their politics. Yet when it came to hard times on the American farm, something turned them into unwitting reactionaries. Though they brought these broken lives of the country poor to the notice and sympathy of the public, they also worked unconsciously to undermine their condition. How and why? Fender shows how the answer lies in clues overlooked until now, hidden in their writing -- their journalism and novels, the "life histories" they ghost wrote for their poor white clients, the bureaucratic communications through which they administered these cultural programs, even in the documentary photographs and movies, with their insistent captions and voice-overs. This book is a study of literary examples from in and around the country Depression, and the myths on which they drew.
Download or read book Handbook on Evolution and Society written by Alexandra Maryanski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 669 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Handbook on Evolution and Society" brings together original chapters by prominent scholars who have been instrumental in the revival of evolutionary theorizing and research in the social sciences over the last twenty-five years. Previously unpublished essays provide up-to-date, critical surveys of recent research and key debates. The contributors discuss early challenges posed by sociobiology, the rise of evolutionary psychology, the more conflicted response of evolutionary sociology to sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology. Chapters address the application and limitations of Darwinian ideas in the social sciences. Prominent authors come from a variety of disciplines in ecology, biology, primatology, psychology, sociology, and the humanities. The most comprehensive resource available, this vital collection demonstrates to scholars and students the new ways in which evolutionary approaches, ultimately derived from biology, are influencing the diverse social sciences and humanities.
Download or read book The Transnationalism of American Culture written by Rocío G. Davis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural productions, examining how they serve as ways of perceiving American culture. Visiting literature, film, and music, it considers how manifestations of American culture have traveled and what has happened to the texts in the process, including how they have been commodified.
Download or read book Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction written by Aliki Varvogli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a critical study and analysis of American fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on novels that ‘go outward’ literally and metaphorically, and it concentrates on narratives that take place mainly away from the US’s geographical borders. Varvogli draws on current theories of travel globalization and post-national studies, and proposes a dynamic model that will enable scholars to approach contemporary American fiction and assess recent changes and continuities. Concentrating on work by Philip Caputo, Dave Eggers, Norman Rush and Russell Banks, the book proposes that American literature’s engagement with Africa has shifted and needs to be approached using new methodologies. Novels by Amy Tan, Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers are examined in the context of travel and globalization, and works by Chang-rae Lee, Ethan Canin, Dinaw Mengestu and Jhumpa Lahiri are used as examples of the changing face of the American immigrant novel, and the changing meaning of national belonging.
Download or read book Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction written by Patricia Okker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction explores the vibrant tradition of serial fiction published in U.S. minority periodicals. Beloved by readers, these serial novels helped sustain the periodicals and communities in which they circulated. With essays on serial fiction published from the 1820s through the 1960s written in ten different languages—English, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Italian, Polish, Norwegian, Yiddish, and Chinese—this collection reflects the rich multilingual history of American literature and periodicals. One of this book’s central claims is that this serial fiction was produced and read within an intensely transnational context: the periodicals often circulated widely, the narratives themselves favored transnational plots and themes, and the contents surrounding the fiction encouraged readers to identify with a community dispersed throughout the United States and often the world. Thus, Okker focuses on the circulation of ideas, periodicals, literary conventions, and people across various borders, focusing particularly on the ways that this fiction reflects the larger transnational realities of these minority communities.
Download or read book The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology Volume 2 written by David M. Buss and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 888 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete exploration of the real-world applications and implications of evolutionary psychology The exciting and sometimes controversial science of evolutionary psychology is becoming increasingly relevant to more fields of study than ever before. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Volume 2, Integrations provides students and researchers with new insight into how EP draws from, and is applied in, fields as diverse as economics, anthropology, neuroscience, genetics, and political science, among others. In this thorough revision and expansion of the groundbreaking handbook, luminaries in the field provide an in-depth exploration of the foundations of evolutionary psychology as they relate to public policy, consumer behavior, organizational leadership, and legal issues. Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain the reasons behind friendship, leadership, warfare, morality, religion, and culture — in short, what it means to be human. This enlightening text provides a foundational knowledgebase in EP, along with expert insights and the most up-to-date coverage of recent theories and findings. Explore the vast and expanding applications of evolutionary psychology Discover the psychology of human survival, mating parenting, cooperation and conflict, culture, and more Identify how evolutionary psychology is interwoven with other academic subjects and traditional psychological disciplines Discuss future applications of the conceptual tools of evolutionary psychology As the established standard in the field, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Volume 2 is the definitive guide for every psychologist and student to understand the latest and most exciting applications of evolutionary psychology.
Download or read book Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism written by Aparajita Nanda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As new comparative perspectives on race and ethnicity open up, scholars are identifying and exploring fresh topics and questions in an effort to reconceptualize ethnic studies and draw attention to nation–based approaches that may have previously been ignored. This volume, by recognizing the complexity of cultural production in both its diasporic and national contexts, seeks a nuanced critical approach in order to look ahead to the future of transnational literary studies. The majority of the chapters, written by literary and ethnic studies scholars, analyze ethnic literatures of the United States which, given the nation’s history of slavery and immigration, form an integral part of mainstream American literature today. While the primary focus is literary, the chapters analyze their specific topics from perspectives drawn from several disciplines, including cultural studies and history. This book is an exciting and insightful resource for scholars with interests in transnationalism, American literature and ethnic studies.
Download or read book Stanislaw Lem written by Peter Swirski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future brings a welter of unknown elements of Lem's life, career, and literary legacy to light in order to mete out cognitive justice to the writer who preferred to be known as the philosopher of the future.
