Download or read book Toward a Genealogy of Individualism written by Daniel Shanahan and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary study examines the emergence, rise, and decline of individualism as a central feature of the Western world view. Building on research into the concept of self, Daniel Shanahan argues that the seeds of individualism - that system of beliefs in which the individual becomes the final arbiter of truth - were sown in ancient civilisations where subjective consciousness first became apparent. He then traces the evolution of the Western self-concept through its various historical representations: the analog self of the Greeks and Hebrews; the authorised self of Augustine and the Christian era; and the empowered self of modernity.
Download or read book Destined for Equality written by Robert Max Jackson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Men and women remain unequal in the United States, but in this provocative book, Robert Max Jackson demonstrates that gender inequality is irrevocably crumbling. Destined for Equality, the first integrated analysis of gender inequality's modern decline, tells the story of that progressive movement toward equality over the past two centuries in America, showing that women's status has risen consistently and continuously. Jackson asserts that women's rising status has been due largely to the emergence of modern political and economic organizations, which have transformed institutional priorities concerning gender. Although individual politicians and businessmen generally believed women should remain in their traditional roles, Jackson shows that it was simply not in the interests of modern enterprise and government to foster inequality. The search for profits, votes, organizational rationality, and stability all favored a gender-neutral approach that improved women's status. The inherent gender impartiality of organizational interests won out over the prejudiced preferences of the men who ran them. As economic power migrated into large-scale organizations inherently indifferent to gender distinctions, the patriarchal model lost its social and cultural sway, and women's continual efforts to rise in the world became steadily more successful. Total gender equality will eventually prevail; the only questions remaining are what it will look like, and how and when it will arrive.
Download or read book Steeped in Blood written by Frances J. Latchford and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What personal truths reside in biological ties that are absent in adoptive ties? And why do we think adoptive and biological ties are essentially different when it comes to understanding who we are? At a time when interest in DNA and ancestry is exploding, Frances Latchford questions the idea that knowing one's bio-genealogy is integral to personal identity or a sense of family and belonging. Upending our established values and beliefs about what makes a family, Steeped in Blood examines the social and political devaluation of adoptive ties. It takes readers on an intellectual journey through accepted wisdom about adoption, twins, kinship, and incest, and challenges our naturalistic and individualistic assumptions about identity and the biological ties that bind us, sometimes violently, to our families. Latchford exposes how our desire for bio-genealogical knowledge, understood as it is by family and adoption experts, pathologizes adoptees by posing the biological tie as a necessary condition for normal identity formation. Rejecting the idea that a love of the self-same is fundamental to family bonds, her book is a reaction to the wounds families suffer whenever they dare to revel in their difference. A rejoinder to rhetoric that defines adoptees, adoptive kin, and their family intimacies as inferior and inauthentic, Steeped in Blood's view through the lens of critical adoption studies decentres our cultural obsession with the biological family imaginary and makes real the possibility of being family in the absence of blood.
Download or read book New Visions of Community in Contemporary American Fiction written by Magali Cornier Michael and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2008-04 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this engaging, optimistic close reading of five late twentieth-century novels by American women, Magali Cornier Michael illuminates the ways in which their authors engage with ideas of communal activism, common commitment, and social transformation. The fictions she examines imagine coalition building as a means of moving toward new forms of nonhierarchical justice; for ethnic cultures that, as a result of racist attitudes, have not been assimilated, power with each other rather than power over each other is a collective goal.Michael argues that much contemporary American fiction by women offers models of care and nurturing that move away from the private sphere toward the public and political. Specifically, texts by women from such racially marked ethnic groups as African American, Asian American, Native American, and Mexican American draw from the rich systems of thought, histories, and experiences of these hybrid cultures and thus offer feminist and ethical revisions of traditional concepts of community, coalition, subjectivity, and agency.Focusing on Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Michael shows that each writer emphasizes the positive, liberating effects of kinship and community. These hybrid versions of community, which draw from other-than-dominant culturally specific ideas and histories, have something to offer Americans as the United States moves into an increasingly diverse twenty-first century. Michael provides a rich lens through which to view both contemporary fiction and contemporary life.
Download or read book Imperial Boredom written by Jeffrey A. Auerbach and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial Boredom offers a radical reconsideration of the British Empire during its heyday in the nineteenth century. Challenging the long-established view that the empire was about adventure and excitement, with heroic men and intrepid women eagerly spreading commerce and civilization around the globe, this thoroughly researched, engagingly written, and lavishly illustrated account suggests instead that boredom was central to the experience of empire. Combining individual stories of pain and perseverance with broader analysis, Professor Auerbach considers what it was actually like to sail to Australia, to serve as a soldier in South Africa, or to accompany a colonial official to the hill stations of India. He reveals that for numerous men and women, from explorers to governors, tourists to settlers, the Victorian Empire was dull and disappointing. Drawing on diaries, letters, memoirs, and travelogues, Imperial Boredom demonstrates that all across the empire, men and women found the landscapes monotonous, the physical and psychological distance from home debilitating, the routines of everyday life wearisome, and their work tedious and unfulfilling. The empires early years may have been about wonder and marvel, but the Victorian Empire was a far less exciting project. Many books about the British Empire focus on what happened; this book concentrates on how people felt.
Download or read book Beyond Orientalism written by Fred Reinhard Dallmayr and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores some steps toward non-assimilative encounters in the "global village."
Download or read book The Origins of the Individualist Self written by Michael Mascuch and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the emergence of the concept of self-identity in modern Western culture, as it was both reflected in and advanced by the development of autobiographical practice in early modern England. It offers a fresh and illuminating appraisal of the nature of autobiographical narrative in general and of the early modern forms of biography, diary and autobiography in particular. The result is a significant and original contribution to the history of individualism. Michael Mascuch argues that the definitive characteristic of individualist self-identity is the personal capacity to produce a unified retrospective autobiographical narrative, and he stresses that this capacity was first demonstrated in England during the last decade of the eighteenth century. He examines the long-term process of innovation in written discourse leading up to this event, from the first use of blank almanacs and common place books by the pious in the late sixteenth century, through the popular criminal biographies of the late seventeenth century, to the printed-for-the-author scandalous memoirs of the mid-eighteenth century. While offering a detailed account of a significant period in the rise of a modern literary genre, Origins of the Individualist Self also addresses topics which are central in the fields of literary and cultural theory and social and cultural history.
Download or read book Reconstructing Individualism written by James M. Albrecht and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America has a love–hate relationship with individualism. In Reconstructing Individualism, James Albrecht argues that our conceptions of individualism have remained trapped within the assumptions of classic liberalism. He traces an alternative genealogy of individualist ethics in four major American thinkers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, and Ralph Ellison. These writers’ shared commitments to pluralism (metaphysical and cultural), experimentalism, and a melioristic stance toward value and reform led them to describe the self as inherently relational. Accordingly, they articulate models of selfhood that are socially engaged and ethically responsible, and they argue that a reconceived—or, in Dewey’s term, “reconstructed”—individualism is not merely compatible with but necessary to democratic community. Conceiving selfhood and community as interrelated processes, they call for an ongoing reform of social conditions so as to educate and liberate individuality, and, conversely, they affirm the essential role individuality plays in vitalizing communal efforts at reform.
Download or read book Gospel of Glory written by Richard Bauckham and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout Christian history, the Gospel of John's distinctive way of presenting the life, works, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus have earned it labels such as "the spiritual Gospel" and "the maverick Gospel." It has been seen as the most theological of the four canonical Gospels. In this volume Richard Bauckham, a leading biblical scholar and a bestselling author in the academy, illuminates main theological themes of the Gospel of John. Bauckham provides insightful analysis of key texts, covering topics such as divine and human community, God's glory, the cross and the resurrection, and the sacraments. This work will serve as an ideal supplemental text for professors and students in a course on John or the four Gospels. It will also be of interest to New Testament scholars and theologians.
Download or read book Liberal Rights and Political Culture written by Zhenghuan Zhou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-14 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the liberal concept of rights presupposes and is grounded in an individualistic culture or shared way of relating, and that this particular shared way of relating emerged only in the wake of the Reformation in the modern West.
Download or read book Myths of Modern Individualism written by Ian Watt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Ian Watt examines the myths of Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan and Robinson Crusoe, as the distinctive products of modern society. He traces the way the original versions of Faust, Don Quixote and Don Juan - all written within a forty-year period during the Counter Reformation - presented unflattering portrayals of the three figures, while the Romantic period two centuries later recreated them as admirable and even heroic. The twentieth century retained their prestige as mythical figures, but with a new note of criticism. Robinson Crusoe came much later than the other three, but his fate can be seen as representative of the new religious, economic and social attitudes which succeeded the Counter-Reformation. The four figures help to reveal problems of individualism in the modern period: solitude, narcissism, and the claims of the self versus the claims of society. They all pursue their own view of what they should be, raising strong questions about their heroes' character and the societies whose ideals they reflect.
Download or read book The Experimental Self written by Judy Little and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on Bakhtin, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and, other modern thinkers, Little (English, Southern Illinois U.) challenges the notion that Western individuality is oppressive and destructive, and examines the political complexity of the self in the novels of 20th-century women. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Truth for Human Existence and Happiness written by Paul Sites and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2010-07-23 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a response to postmodernists who take the position that there is no foundation for truth; there are only stories. We posit two types of truth, truth about existence created by scientists, which serves as a foundation of truth for existence. Truth about existence describes human nature, a major component being the human sense of self. Following George Herbert Mead, the self is not an entity, it is process. It is not substantative; it is functional. There are two phases to the self, the "I" phase and the "Me"-phase. The "I"- phase has its roots in biology, so when the needs of the self are not being gratified, individuals suffer. When individuals suffer, life is without meaning; individuals despair. It is human needs and their inherent tie to suffering that points the way to truth for human existence and happiness. Because other people value what they need, needs and their corresponding values serve as the foundation for truth about existence upon which truth for human existence is constructed.
Download or read book Something Greater written by Jeanne Choy Tate and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every day, Americans rub shoulders with the cultures of the world--on the sidewalks of their cities and, increasingly, in small towns and rural areas. As civil discourse becomes increasingly divisive, many long for our nation to better deal with its diversity. Yet Americans also wonder how far the nation can stretch to embrace diversity and still maintain an identity. Ethnic and faith communities, Americans of many varieties, share a fear of losing their traditions. Will the next generation still honor the values of caring for others and contributing to community life? The psychology of individualism that underlies American life is no longer adequate to guide a future filled with diversity. America's children may have wings to soar into the future, but they lack roots connecting them to a shared heritage. Something Greater explores the impact of individualism on American child-rearing practices, and its inability to deal with diversity while sustaining life together in families and communities. By contrasting the intergenerational values of biblical and Chinese communities and current infant research with her own experiences in San Francisco's Chinatown, the author reveals how the living stories of heritage that lie at the heart of human development speak to a deep American hunger for shared values and connectedness in family and community.
Download or read book Space of a Garden Space of Culture written by Grzegorz Gazda and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents the phenomenon of the garden and its various cultural features. It compares historical aspects of the garden with its contemporary models and focuses on various cultural traditions and different ways of presentation of this problem, in the context of world literature, problems of visual arts, questions of architecture, ecology, universal aspects of language, as well as philosophical problems of axiology and aesthetics. All those contexts combine to form a picture of a phenomenon that could be called “the metaphor of the garden”, containing a universal anthropological image of “space” in which dynamic re-evaluation of rhetorical models take place and the order of Nature complements cultural models of human understanding of reality.
Download or read book Challenges of Literary Texts in the Foreign Language Classroom written by Lothar Bredella and published by Gunter Narr Verlag. This book was released on 1996 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Monstrous Reflection written by Petra Rehling and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-07-22 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
