Böcker av Jane Bennett

Theorizes the political agency of things and natural phenomena-such as trash, food, weather, and electricity-to examine how non-human elements exert force on human politics and social relations.

Exploring the question of human agency amidst a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences, Jane Bennett draws upon Whitman, Thoreau, Caillois, Whitehead, and other poetic writers to link a non-anthropocentric model of self to a democratic pluralism and a syntax and style of writing appropriate to the entangled world in which we live.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

The microwave is a convenience appliance that almost everyone has in their home, including hotel rooms and college dorms. But the meals that can be made in the microwave do not have to be limited to heating water and cooking prepared processed foods. ¿There are lots and lots of delicious microwave meals that can be prepared in a fraction of the time that it takes in a conventional oven. This cookbook explores many of the scrumptious, mouth watering recipes that are quick and easy to prepare in the microwave.

Thoreau's encounters with nature, the author argues, allowed him to resist his all-too-human tendency toward intellectual laziness, social conformity and political complacency. Bennett pursues this theme by constructing a series of dialogues between Thoureau and modern contemporaries.

A diverse collection of essays on environmentalism informed by recent developments in social and literary theory.