Imperial Fictions
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SynopsisThis is a study of Western representations of the East, especially the world of Islam. It focuses on nineteenth-century travel literature, particularly the works of Antoine Galland, Edward William Lane, Richard Burton, Charles Montagu Doughty and T.E. Lawrence. The author argues that “Western writers,travelers, poets, and painters have depicted the East in a manner that accords more with their own fantasies than with reality. . . . {They present} imagesof sensual harems and of cruel sultans, of women versed in the arts of eroticplay and tantalizing desire, seducing men both passionate and violent.” (Am Hist Rev) Bibliography. Index. From The CriticsThe New York Times Book ReviewIn much the same way their fellow Victorians swarmed over the world classifying new phyla of butterflies, gentlemen adventurers like T.E. Lawrence and Sir Richard Burton set out to catalogue ‘scientifically’ the living habits of the Eastern Moslems. The poet and translator Rana Kabbani claims in this provocative and appropriately subversive book that their vision was fatally clouded....
Read more about: Imperial Fictions »Acts of Fiction
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Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsA Note on TranslationsIntroduction1 Traveling Miscognito: Revolution and Symbolic Resolution 12 Viral Fictions: Sade and the Pox of Libertinism 433 Politics and Paleontology: Reading the Past in Balzac’s Colonel Chabert and Cesar Birotteau 674 Traveling from the Orient to Aurelia: Nerval Looks for the Words 1015 The Esthetic Mask: Irony and Allegory in Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris 125Conclusion 149Appendix: “Le Mauvais Vitrier” 155Works Cited 161Index 169
... Read more about: Acts of Fiction »The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism
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The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism differentiates the “Social Justice Left” from “Cultural Radicalism” and the various social movements for individual freedom.In The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism, Stanley Aronowitz asks the question, “Is there anything left of the Left?” With the rise of Newt Gingrich and his “Contract With America,” how is it that conservativism staged such a remarkable recovery after being discounted in the turbulent 1960s? Aronowitz addresses these and other burning issues of contemporary politics. Stanley Aronowitz is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at City University of New York. He is the co-editor of Technoscience and Cyberculture (Routledge, 1995), and author of Dead Artists, Live Theories and Other Cultural Problems (Routledge, 1993) and The Politics of IdentityN (Routledge, 1991), among many other titles.
... Read more about: The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism »Remote Control
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“Like her work as a visual artist, Kruger’s essays, published in such journals as Artforum and the Village Voice, are about the ideological messages encoded in popular culture and how those messages convey certain attitudes toward the roles of women and minorities. Probing such seemingly innocuous television programming as “L.A. Law,” “Entertainment Tonight,” “The Home Shopping Club,” “Good Morning, America,” and the Iran-Contra hearings, as well as more subversive cultural products such as the independent films of Yvonne Rainer and Chantal Ackerman, Howard Stern’s radio show, and the work of Andy Warhol, Kruger deconstructs media and art and shows how words and images manipulate and obscure meaning as they are force-fed down our throats. Kruger is an important contemporary artist, and her writing, while somewhat dense and polemical, is worthy of examination.” — Benjamin Segedin
... Read more about: Remote Control »Marxist Intellectuals and the Chinese Labor Movement
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... Read more about: Marxist Intellectuals and the Chinese Labor Movement »The Disenchantment of Art
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Rochlitz’s critical reading of the philosopher’s work from On Language as Such and on the Language of Man to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction values Benjamin’s sublime vision within its historical context, relating his ideas about language to current theoretical discussions. Benjamin believed that art was a pure language directly related to God, and like many of his contemporaries amended this idea to accommodate the revolutionary imperatives of the 1930s. The volume is a French translation originally published under the title Le desenchantement de l’art: La philosophie de Walter Benjamin .
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