Download or read book The Future of Nostalgia written by Svetlana Boym and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nostalgia. In 1733 a Russian commander, disgusted with the debilitating homesickness rampant among his troops, buried a soldier alive as a deterrent to nostalgia. In her new book, Svetlana Boym develops a comprehensive approach to this elusive ailment. Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities -- St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstam, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, from love letters on Kafka's grave to conversations with Hitler's impersonator, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.
Download or read book Longing for the Future written by Rosetta G. Caponetto and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on a longing projected mostly toward the past (mal d’Afrique) alongside a longing toward the future (afro-optimism), and the different manifestations, shifting meanings, and potential points of contact of these two stances. The volume introduces a new perspective into the discussion of Somalia in Italian Studies. This is an intersectional work of Italian Studies scholarship, whose contributors help re-imagine the field and its relationship to Somalia with their diverse backgrounds, unique insights, and global breadth. The book integrates the current scholarship on Somalia with the most recent theoretical studies on nostalgia, visionary affect, colonial ruins, silenced archives, melancholy, ecology, food and diaspora, classical studies and performativity, storytelling, afro-fabulation and queer literature, media and humanitarianism, and afro optimism. The book will serve as an invaluable reference in multidisciplinary programs such as Global History, Africana Studies, Diaspora Studies, Migration Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Integrity and Global Studies, as well as Italian Studies and various core courses. Because of its interdisciplinary discussion of Somalia, the volume will draw the interest of a large readership among scholars, and non-scholars, from different disciplines and geographic affiliation.
Download or read book The Promise of Nostalgia written by Nicola Sayers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Promise of Nostalgia analyses a range of texts to explore nostalgia as a prominent affect in contemporary American cultural production.
Download or read book If the Future is a Fetish written by Sarah Sgro and published by YesYes Books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. In her debut poetry collection, IF THE FUTURE IS A FETISH, Sgro explores a vision of motherhood severed from conventional ideas of partnership and family. Between tales of fraught monogamy and fleeting first fucks, she depicts the mother as a figure steeped in loss, depression, and dynamic sexual identity, bearing memory and trauma as their own kind of offspring. Collaging words from plant life experts, adolescent psychologists, and scholars, Sgro reckons with a longing for the future that is invested in queer desire, maternal drives, and the spaces in between. "Why are the poet and the poem so toxic and damned? Because they are carriers, processing liquid flushed from pleasure and damage. Sgro is opening space inside toxicity. When the space is born an impure baby, the poet wants the baby. The baby is a fetus, a fetish, a trauma-processing plant, a poem. The poems within IF THE FUTURE IS A FETISH rage, pull back, smash down. It's an open system. Sgro's thrilling, monstrous poems are coming to touch you."--Catherine Wagner "For trauma survivors, our futures eroticize that which we lived through, scored as we are by our bodies' pasts. Survival must affirm that future. In IF THE FUTURE IS A FETISH, we experience a gravid violence, Sgro's speaker the queer anorexic mother pulsating meaning into 'basement operas' and 'tenderilous' growth. This is a psychosexual novel-in-verse, one displeased with its phenomenologies but chanting them anyway. It wretches in Plathian disgust; coats its throat in 2 mg of Xanax; and consumes its daughters with Goya-level anguish. Paperclips itch under wrist skin, women soak through their True Religion jeans, an assemblage of lovers--J., A., M., and X.--function as a Greek chorus of S.'s sexual failings; and still, 'the world returns like a dog to its vomit.' Rarely do I read a collection so succinct in its viscera, where there is a math to every gory line. How lucky am I to have read Sgro who writes with annihilating purpose about the body in absence, violation, vexation, abundance, and martyrdom. This debut collection is a lingual maelstrom, its music a steady waltz over the future's piss."--Natalie Eilbert
Download or read book Reclaiming Nostalgia written by Jennifer K. Ladino and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often thought of as the quintessential home or the Eden from which humanity has fallen, the natural world has long been a popular object of nostalgic narratives. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, Jennifer Ladino assesses the ideological effects of this phenomenon by tracing its dominant forms in American literature and culture since the closing of the frontier in 1890. While referencing nostalgia for pastoral communities and for untamed and often violent frontiers, she also highlights the ways in which nostalgia for nature has served as a mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice.
Download or read book Life Events written by Karolina Waclawiak and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Buzzfeed's 29 Books We Couldn't Put Down This Year “Every page of this novel is a point of no return; once you’ve read Karolina Waclawiak's Life Events, you will never see life, death, grief, and healing the same way.”—Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives A woman at a crossroads learns the only way to reclaim her life is to help others die Karolina Waclawiak’s breakout novel, Life Events, follows Evelyn, who, at thirty-seven, is on the verge of divorce and anxiously dreading the death of everyone she loves. She combats her existential crisis by avoiding her husband and aimlessly driving along the freeways of California looking for an escape—one that eventually comes when she discovers a collective of “exit guides.” Evelyn enrolls in their training course, where she learns to provide companionship and a final exit for terminally ill patients seeking a conscious departure. She meets Daphne, a dying woman still full of life; Lawrence, an aging porn king; and Daniel, who seems too young to die and whom Evelyn falls for, despite knowing better, not to mention the exit guide code. Each client opens something new in Evelyn, allowing her a chance to access her own grief and confront the self-destructive ways she suppresses her pain. When Evelyn travels through the Southwest to an afterlife convention to further her death education, she must finally face her complicated relationship with her alcoholic father and reconcile her life choices. Sensitively observed and darkly funny, Life Events is a moving, enlivening story of the human condition: the doldrums of loneliness, the consuming regret of past mistakes, and the thrill, finally, of finding meaning—and love—where you least expect it.
Download or read book Tiny Beautiful Things written by Cheryl Strayed and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Soon to be a Hulu Original series • The internationally acclaimed author of Wild collects the best of The Rumpus's Dear Sugar advice columns plus never-before-published pieces. Rich with humor and insight—and absolute honesty—this "wise and compassionate" (New York Times Book Review) book is a balm for everything life throws our way. Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills—and it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar—the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild—is the person thousands turn to for advice.
Download or read book Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age written by Dolly Jorgensen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking study of how emotions motivate attempts to counter species loss. This groundbreaking book brings together environmental history and the history of emotions to examine the motivations behind species conservation actions. In Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age, Dolly Jørgensen uses the environmental histories of reintroduction, rewilding, and resurrection to view the modern conservation paradigm of the recovery of nature as an emotionally charged practice. Jørgensen argues that the recovery of nature—identifying that something is lost and then going out to find it and bring it back—is a nostalgic practice that looks to a historical past and relies on the concept of belonging to justify future-oriented action. The recovery impulse depends on emotional responses to what is lost, particularly a longing for recovery that manifests itself in such emotions as guilt, hope, fear, and grief. Jørgensen explains why emotional frameworks matter deeply—both for how people understand nature theoretically and how they interact with it physically. The identification of what belongs (the lost nature) and our longing (the emotional attachment to it) in the present will affect how environmental restoration practices are carried out in the future. A sustainable future will depend on questioning how and why belonging and longing factor into the choices we make about what to recover.
Download or read book What Nostalgia Was written by Thomas Dodman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-01-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.
Download or read book The Book of Longings written by Sue Monk Kidd and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extraordinary novel . . . a triumph of insight and storytelling.” —Associated Press “A true masterpiece.” —Glennon Doyle, author of Untamed An extraordinary story set in the first century about a woman who finds her voice and her destiny, from the celebrated number one New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings In her mesmerizing fourth work of fiction, Sue Monk Kidd takes an audacious approach to history and brings her acclaimed narrative gifts to imagine the story of a young woman named Ana. Raised in a wealthy family with ties to the ruler of Galilee, she is rebellious and ambitious, with a brilliant mind and a daring spirit. She engages in furtive scholarly pursuits and writes narratives about neglected and silenced women. Ana is expected to marry an older widower, a prospect that horrifies her. An encounter with eighteen-year-old Jesus changes everything. Their marriage evolves with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where Ana makes a home with Jesus, his brothers, and their mother, Mary. Ana's pent-up longings intensify amid the turbulent resistance to Rome's occupation of Israel, partially led by her brother, Judas. She is sustained by her fearless aunt Yaltha, who harbors a compelling secret. When Ana commits a brazen act that puts her in peril, she flees to Alexandria, where startling revelations and greater dangers unfold, and she finds refuge in unexpected surroundings. Ana determines her fate during a stunning convergence of events considered among the most impactful in human history. Grounded in meticulous research and written with a reverential approach to Jesus's life that focuses on his humanity, The Book of Longings is an inspiring, unforgettable account of one woman's bold struggle to realize the passion and potential inside her, while living in a time, place and culture devised to silence her. It is a triumph of storytelling both timely and timeless, from a masterful writer at the height of her powers.
Download or read book Media and Nostalgia written by K. Niemeyer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Media and Nostalgia is an interdisciplinary and international exploration of media and their relation to nostalgia. Each chapter demonstrates how nostalgia has always been a media-related matter, studying also the recent nostalgia boom by analysing, among others, digital photography, television series and home videos.
Download or read book Common Places written by Svetlana BOYM and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boym provides a view of Russia that is historically informed, replete with unexpected detail, and stamped with authority. Alternating analysis with personal accounts of Russian life, she conveys the foreignness of Russia and examines its peculiar conceptions of private life and common good, of Culture and Trash, of sincerity and banality.
Download or read book Latitudes of Longing written by Shubhangi Swarup and published by One World/Ballantine. This book was released on 2020 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A spellbinding work of literature, Latitudes of Longing follows the interconnected lives of characters searching for true intimacy. The novel sweeps across India, from an island, to a valley, a city, and a snow desert to tell a love story of epic proportions. We follow a scientist who studies trees and a clairvoyant who speaks to them; a geologist working to end futile wars over a glacier; octogenarian lovers; a mother struggling to free her revolutionary son; a yeti who seeks human companionship; a turtle who transforms first into a boat and then a woman; and the ghost of an evaporated ocean as restless as the continents. Binding them all together is a vision of life as vast as the universe itself. A young writer awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in India for this novel, Shubhangi Swarup is a storyteller of extraordinary talent and insight. Richly imaginative and wryly perceptive, Latitudes of Longing offers a soaring view of humanity: our beauty and ugliness, our capacity to harm and love each other, and our mysterious and sacred relationship with nature"--
Download or read book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier Clay with bonus content written by Michael Chabon and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics, now with special bonus material by the author “It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal—smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read.”—The Washington Post Book World One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Decade • Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize A “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus” (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939. A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age. Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award
Download or read book Longing for the Bomb written by Lindsey A. Freeman and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-04-13 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longing for the Bomb traces the unusual story of the first atomic city and the emergence of American nuclear culture. Tucked into the folds of Appalachia and kept off all commercial maps, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was created for the Manhattan Project by the U.S. government in the 1940s. Its workers labored at a breakneck pace, most aware only that their jobs were helping "the war effort." The city has experienced the entire lifespan of the Atomic Age, from the fevered wartime enrichment of the uranium that fueled Little Boy, through a brief period of atomic utopianism after World War II when it began to brand itself as "The Atomic City," to the anxieties of the Cold War, to the contradictory contemporary period of nuclear unease and atomic nostalgia. Oak Ridge's story deepens our understanding of the complex relationship between America and its bombs. Blending historiography and ethnography, Lindsey Freeman shows how a once-secret city is visibly caught in an uncertain present, no longer what it was historically yet still clinging to the hope of a nuclear future. It is a place where history, memory, and myth compete and conspire to tell the story of America's atomic past and to explain the nuclear present.
Download or read book Homo Irrealis written by André Aciman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times–bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative—all best expressed in this book as the might-be and the might-have-been. One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, C. P. Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection on the imagination’s power to forge a zone outside of time’s intractable hold.
Download or read book Mediated Nostalgia written by Ryan Lizardi and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considering the current rash of film remakes, vintage video game downloads, and box sets of bygone television shows, media today is obsessed with nostalgia. Instead of presenting a past that functions as an adaptive mirror with which we can compare our contemporary situation, the past is instead presented as an individualized version that transfixes us as uncritical citizens of our own culture. Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media argues that the cultural implication of a cross-media eternal return to nostalgia is an increasing reliance on defining who we are as people and societies by what media we consumed as children. The unblinking eye toward the past knows no progress, or at the very least, does not employ the past to compare and adaptively engage with the present or future. Examining film, literature, television, and video games, Ryan Lizardi tackles the idea of why that strong sense of nostalgia is such a popular tactic for the media industry, and why it is problematic.
