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When it was originally published in 1991, Feminine Endings was immediately controversial for its unprecedented intermingling of cultural criticism and musical studies, an approach that came to be called "the New Musicology." Through case studies of works ranging from the canonical -- operas by Monteverdi and Bizet -- to the contemporary -- the performance art of Diamanda Galas and popular songs by Madonna -- Susan McClary focuses on the ways music produces images of gender, desire, pleasure, and the body, and explores the gender-based metaphors that circulate in discourse about music. The now classic work features a new introduction that discusses the critical reception it received and the debates it has inspired.

Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argues the essays in this wide-ranging collection that asks the question, what happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture?

In this work, Agamben draws on philology, the psychoanalysis of toys, medieval physics and psychology, and contemporary linguistics and philosophy, in an attempt to reconfigure the epistemological foundation of Western culture. He dismisses the possibility of a metalanguage.

The long-awaited republication of this captivating account of the star’s life.Louise Brooks left Wichita, Kansas, for New York City at age fifteen and lived the kind of life of which legends are made. From her beginnings as a dancer to her years in Hollywood, Berlin, and beyond, she was hailed and reviled as a new type of woman: independent, intellectually daring, and sexually free. In this widely acclaimed, first and only comprehensive biography, Barry Paris traces Brooks’s trajectory from her childhood through her fall into obscurity and subsequent "resurrection" as a brilliant writer and enduring film icon.

For the health of the psyche and the culture, for the individual and the whole society, oblivion is as necessary as memory. One must know how to forget, Marcus Auge suggests, not just to live fully in the present but also to comprehend the past.

From a parsing of Lacan's claim that "commenting on a text is like doing an analysis," to sustained readings of "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious," "The Direction of the Treatment," and "Subversion of the Subject" (with particular attention given to the workings of the Graph of Desire), Fink's book is a work of unmatched.

This is a collection of fifteen 'fables' that ask, in the words of Jean-Francois Lyotard, "how to live, and why?" Here, Lyotard provides a mixture of anarchistic, irreverence and sober philosophical reflection on a wide range of topics with attention to issues of justice and ethics, aesthetics and judgement.

This work explores the issues of men's studies and contemporary theories of gender within the context of the Middle Ages.

Maurice Blanchot here sustains a dialogue with a number of thinkers, including Kafka, Pascal, Nietzsche, Brecht, and Camus, who are central to the history of Western thought and who have influenced virtually all the themes that inflect contemporary literary and philosophical debate.

People of the Bomb mixes empathic and vivid portraits of individual weapons scientists with hard-hitting scrutiny of defense intellectuals' inability to foresee the end of the cold war, government rhetoric on missile defense, official double standards about nuclear proliferation, and pork barrel politics in the nuclear.

To remain unconsumed by consumer society was the goal of the first volume. Delving even deeper, this volume develops a social history of "making do" based on microhistories that move from the private sphere of dwelling, cooking and homemaking to the public experience of living in a neighbourhood).

Originally published in 1970, The Urban Revolution marked Henri Lefebvre's first sustained critique of urban society, a work in which he pioneered the use of semiotic, structuralist, and poststructuralist methodologies in analyzing the development of the urban environment. Although it is widely considered a foundational book in contemporary thinking about the city, The Urban Revolution has never been translated into English-until now. This first English edition, deftly translated by Robert Bononno, makes available to a broad audience Lefebvre's sophisticated insights into the urban dimensions of ???.

In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on "The Burton Greene Affair, " exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-grade in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance--culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself--is improvisation. For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten's concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other. Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten's wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines--semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis--to understand thepoliticized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten's ambitious intellectual project--to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition.

¿Noise is a model of cultural historiography. . . . In its general theoretical argument on the relations of culture to economy, but also in its specialized concentration, Noise has much that is of importance to critical theory today.¿ SubStance¿For Attali, music is not simply a reflection of culture, but a harbinger of change, an anticipatory abstraction of the shape of things to come. The book¿s title refers specifically to the reception of musics that sonically rival normative social orders. Noise is Attali¿s metaphor for a broad, historical vanguardism, for the radical soundscapes of the western continuum that express structurally the course of social development.¿ EthnomusicologyJacques Attali is the author of numerous books, including Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order and Labyrinth in Culture and Society.

Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1982.

The basis for the Academy Award winning film "Gods and Monsters" Starring Ian McKellan and Brendan Fraser. James Curtis is the author of a well-received biography on Preston Sturges and a new book, W.C. FIELDS, just published by Knopf and favorably reviewed in the NYTBR.

Rorty seeks to tie philosophy’s past to its future by connecting what he sees as the positive (and neglected) contributions of the American pragmatic philosophers to contemporary European developments. What emerges from his explorations is a revivified version of pragmatism that offers new hope for the future of philosophy.“Rorty’s dazzling tour through the history of modern philosophy, and his critical account of its present state (the best general introduction in print), is actually an argument that what we consider perennial problems--mind and body, consciousness and objects, the foundations of knowledge, the fact/value distinction--are merely the dead-ends this picture leads us into.” Los Angeles Times Book Review“It can immediately be said that Consequences of Pragmatism must be read by both those who believe that they agree and those who believe that they disagree with Richard Rorty. [He] is far and away the most provocative philosophical writer working in North America today, and Consequences of Pragmatism should make this claim even stronger.”The Review of Metaphysics“Philosophy, for Rorty, is a form of writing, a literary genre, closer to literary criticism than anything else, a criticism which takes for one of its major concerns the texts of the past recognized as philosophical: it interprets interpretations. If anyone doubts the continued vigor and continuing relevance of American pragmatism, the doubts can be laid to rest by reading this book.” Religious Studies Review

This investigation of power and the body offers an account of the nature of force as it functions in religious rituals, sorcery, political relations, and other social domains. It should be of interest to those interested in how bodies and power circulate in a range of human contexts and cultures.

This is a detailed case study of the workings of the "development" industry in one country, Lesotho. It shows how, despite "expertise" these projects can often fail and have serious repercussions upon the country.

Skeptical of received wisdom, Reed casts a critical eye on political trends in the black community over the past thirty years. He examines the rise of a new black political class in the aftermath of the civil rights era, and bluntly denounces black leadership that is not accountable to a black constituency; such leadership, he says, functions as a proxy for white elites. Reed debunks as myths the 'endangered black male" and the "black underclass, " and punctures what he views as the exaggeration and self-deception surrounding the black power movement and the Malcolm X revival. He chastises the Left, too, for its failure to develop an alternative politics, then lays out a practical leftist agenda and reasserts the centrality of political action.