Böcker av Andrew Stafford

Roland Barthes Writing the Political: History, Dialectics, Self is a re-reading and a re-purposing for the twenty-first century of the work and the critical theories of France's most important writer of the twentieth century. Drawing on articles and chapters published since 2007, and including new material written for the volume, it argues that Barthes's wide-ranging analyses and critical essays - from Voltaire to Nietzsche, Marx to myth, gay love to Japan - can be applied to debates and controversies in the contemporary world. By applying his 1958 essay on Voltaire to the aftermath in France of the 2015 terrorist attacks, by using Edouard Glissant's work as an unspoken dialogue to look at post-colonial writing strategies, the volume sets out what a dialectical critical practice might look like in our complex world of political, ethical and aesthetic choices.In order to address the complexity of his critical practice, the study takes up a seldom-discussed notion which Barthes had originally developed in relation to the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet: that of the 'double grasp'. This 'double grasp' is used to think through photography and innovative forms of historiography (including a comparison with the work of Walter Benjamin), but also to account for the 'stereographic' approach with which Barthes read Balzac, visited Japan and then China, and even considered both the writing self and the imagined self.The book considers the persistence - and the functions - of myth in the era of image-saturated social media, using both early Marx and early Nietzsche, whilst relating Barthes's radical homosexuality and his questioning of binary structures to today's debates on post-gender. The volume ends with discussion of Barthes's essay-writing and its similarities with the theories on the essay of Hungarian Marxist George LukaA s in his 1910 'Letter to Leo Popper', and asks whether the essay, in its many Barthesian guises, is the future for radical forms of writing in the twenty-first century.

Set to the soundtrack of music that has shaped a generation, Something To Believe In will resonate with anyone whose life has been saved by rock 'n' roll. Born in Melbourne's outer suburbs in the 1970s, Andrew Stafford grew up in a time when music was a way out and a way up. His passion for rock 'n' roll led him to a career as a journalist and music critic, but along the way his battles with family illness, mental health and destructive relationships threatened to take him down. Andrew Stafford delves bravely and deeply into a life that has been shaped and saved by music's beat. From the author of the cult classic Pig City comes a memoir of music, madness, and love.

A 10th anniversary edition of this cult classic with a new introduction From cult heroes the Saints and the Go-Betweens to national icons Powderfinger and international stars Savage Garden, Brisbane has produced more than its share of great bands. But behind the music lay a ghost city of malice and corruption.Pressed under the thumb of the Bjelke-Petersen government and its toughest enforcers - the police - Brisbane''s musicians, radio announcers and political activists braved ignorance, harassment and often violence to be heard.Pig City''s reputation has grown in the decade since its first publication. In 2007, Queensland Music Festival staged the book as an all-day music event, headlined by the first performance in nearly 30 years by the original line-up of the Saints.This updated 10th anniversary edition features a scathing new introduction by the author, assessing the changing shape of Brisbane, its music, and troubling developments since the return of the state of Queensland to conservative governance.