Aesthetic Relation
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One of the best-known continental theorists writing today, Grard Genette here explores our aesthetic relation to works of art. Through an analysis of the views of thinkers ranging from David Hume and Immanuel Kant to Monroe C. Beardsley, Arthur Danto, and Nelson Goodman, Genette seeks to identify the place of the aesthetic in a theory of artistic appreciation. His discussion is rich in detailed examples drawn from all of the arts. The Aesthetic Relation is a companion volume to The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence, published by Cornell in 1997. Taken together, the two books offer a comprehensive theory of art which addresses the work of art as at once object and action. Genette maintains that our aesthetic relation to all types of objects presupposes that special attention is paid to their outward aspect (rather than to their usefulness) when appraising them. Such appraisals, while wholly subjective and temporary, are expressed as objective and universal judgments about the items in question....
Read more about: Aesthetic Relation »Nickel and Dimed
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Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty level wages. Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them, in order to find out how anyone survives on six to seven dollars an hour. Ehrenreich left home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find and accepted whatever jobs she was offered from cleaning to care work, waitressing to folding clothes at Wal-Mart. So began a gruelling, hair-raising and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of working America.
... Read more about: Nickel and Dimed »Global Woman
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In a remarkable pairing, two renowned social critics offer a groundbreaking anthology that examines the unexplored consequences of globalization on the lives of women worldwide. Women are moving around the globe as never before. But for every female executive racking up frequent flier miles, there are multitudes of women whose journeys go unnoticed. Each year, millions leave Mexico, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and other third world countries to work in the homes, nurseries, and brothels of the first world. This broad-scale transfer of labor associated with women’s traditional roles results in an odd displacement. In the new global calculus, the female energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones, often to the detriment of the families left behind. The migrant nanny – or cleaning woman, nursing care attendant, maid – eases a “care deficit” in rich countries, while her absence creates a “care deficit” back home. Confronting a range of topics, from the fate of Vietnamese mail-order brides to the importation of Mexican nannies in Los Angeles and the selling of Thai girls to Japanese brothels,...
Read more about: Global Woman »True Hallucinations & The Archaic Revival: Two Classics in One V
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Truce Halluciinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise is a mesmerizing, surreal account of the bizarre adventures of Terence McKenna, his brother Dennis, and a small band of their friends, is a wild ride of exotic experience and scientific inquiry. Exploring the Amazon Basin in search of mythical shamanic hallucinogens, they encounter a host of unusual characters — including a mushroom, a flying saucer, pirate Mantids from outer space, an appearance by James and Nora Joyce in the guise of poultry, and translinguistic matter — and discover the missing link in the development of human consciousness and language. Cited by the L.A. Weekly as “the culture’s foremost spokesman for the psychedelic experience,” Terrence McKenna is an underground legend as a brilliant raconteur, adventurer, and expert on the experiential use of mind-altering plants. In the essays, interviews, and narrative adventures collected in Archaic Revival : Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution,...
Read more about: True Hallucinations & The Archaic Revival: Two Classics in One V »Sadomasochism of Everyday Life
Price: $22.00
In one form or another, suffering pervades our culture. But why do we torture ourselves in so many areas of everyday life? Why do we work to the point of exhaustion and pain? Why do women put up with men who abuse them (and men put up with women who abuse them)? Why do workers endure terrible bosses? Why do we subject ourselves to terrible service at the bank and in restaurants? In The Sadomasochism of Everyday Life, John Munder Ross, Ph.D, explains why we tolerate these and other familiar situations that cause us pain and suffering and shows how people fall into destructive patterns of behavior that are mutually reinforcing. Surveying American culture from the boardroom to the bedroom, Ross finds that just about everyone is entangled in this cycle. In a fascinating review of sadomasochistic film and literature, Ross traces the history of this phenomenon in popular culture, which indicates our continuing captivation with the dynamics of power and powerlessness....
Read more about: Sadomasochism of Everyday Life »Resisting Representation
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Resisting Representation brings together some of the most provocative essays by leading scholar Elaine Scarry. Through her readings of texts by Hardy, Beckett, Boethius, Thackeray, and others, Scarry examines the ability of language to accommodate conceptions of truth and cognition and also analyses phenomena such as physical pain and physical labour whose materiality might exclude them form reflexes of language. Renowned scholar Elaine Scarry’s book, The Body in Pain, has been called by Susan Sontag “extraordinary…large-spirited, heroically truthful.” The Los Angeles Times called it “brilliant, ambitious, and controversial.” Now Oxford has collected some of Scarry’s most provocative writing. This collection of essays deals with the complicated problems of representation in diverse literary and cultural genres–from her beloved sixth-century philosopher Boethius, through the nineteenth-century novel, to twentieth-century advertising. We often assume that all areas of experience are equally available for representation. On the contrary, these essays present discussions of experiences and concepts that challenge, defeat, or block representation. Physical pain, physical labor,...
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