rhetoric
Language in the Confessions of Augustine
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Burton, Philip, PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, USA, Philip Burton explores Augustine's treatment of language in his Confessions - a major work of Western philosophy and literature, with continuing intellectual importance. One of Augustine's key concerns is the story of his own encounters with language: from his acquisition of language as a child, through his career as schoolboy orator then star student at Carthage, to professor of rhetoric at Carthage and Rome. Having worked his way up to the eminence of Court Orator to the Roman Emperor at Milan, Augustine rediscovered the catholic Christianity of his childhood - and decided that this was incompatible with his rhetorical profession. Over the next ten years, he gradually reinvents himself as a different sort of language professional: a Christian intellectual, commentating on Scripture and preaching to his flock.
Walking Across America: A Hitchhiker's Guide to a Nation in
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Keefer, Rick, PUBLISHER: PublishAmerica, After traveling and encountering so many individuals for which the anational identitya just doesnat fit, I decided to ask questions and to see what the people are really about. The manufactured ideals and the false sense of unity are failing as the corporate lies create global instabilities. Socially and economically, the lies, manipulations, and rhetoric of 100 years are coming to a possibly dangerous conclusion. Do we as a nation want to continue the atrocities within our borders and around the globe, or do we want to change the way in which we live to do what is best for the global community? I have walked the highways around this beautiful country, helping friends along the way. I look to a new beginning and a new way of thinking about our nation and the policies that have led to the global crisis of today.
New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Sundquist, Eric J. / Elliott, Emory, PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press, Increased interest in the role of women and minorities in establishing the canon of American literature has led to renewed interest in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The essays in this volume set out to provide contemporary readers with a critical and historical interpretation of the novel that reflects the best of recent scholarship. In his introduction Eric J. Sundquist attempts to show that Uncle Tom's Cabin boldly takes issue with both proslavery arguments and prevailing prejudices among abolitionists, employing the forms of popular melodrama and heated rhetoric to carry its complex argument. The individual essays examine the influence of Stowe's novel on the characterization of women in the American novel and on later women writers, the role of women in the antislavery movement, the literary exchanges between Stowe and her contemporaries; Uncle Tom's Cabin and the tradition of the Gothic novel, and the characterizations of blacks in this novel and in later works.
On Frost: The Best from American Literature
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Cady, Edwin H. / Cady / Edwin H. Cady, PUBLISHER: Duke University Press, Contents Robert Frost and the Sound of Sense (), Robert S. Newdick The Humanistic Idealism of Robert Frost (), Hyatt Howe Waggoner Robert Frost's Asides on His Poetry (), Reginald L. Cook Frost on Frost: The Making of Poems (), Reginald L. Cook The Unity of Frost's Masques (), W. R. Irwin Religion in Robert Frost's Poetry: The Play for Self-Possession (), Anna K. Juhnke Frost's Poetry of Fear (), Eben Bass Robert Frost's Dramatic Principle of "Oversound" (), Tom Vander Ven Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens: "What to Make of a Diminished Thing" (), Todd M. Lieber Robert Frost: "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows" (), Priscilla M. Paton Frost's Synecdochism (), George F. Bagby, Jr. Comparing Conceptions: Frost and Eddington, Heisenberg, and Bohr (), Guy Rotella "The Place is the Asylum": Women and Nature in Robert Frost's poetry (), Katherine Kearns Frost and Modernism (), Robert Kern "The Lurking Frost": Poetic and Rhetoric in "Two Tramps in Mud Time" (), Walter Jost The Resentments of Robert Frost (), Frank Lentricchia
Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Bruce, Jr. Dickson D. / Bruce, Dickson D., PUBLISHER: University of Texas Press, This provocative book draws from a variety of sources--literature, politics, folklore, social history--to attempt to set Southern beliefs about violence in a cultural context. According to Dickson D. Bruce, the control of violence was a central concern of antebellum Southerners. Using contemporary sources, Bruce describes Southerners' attitudes as illustrated in their duels, hunting, and the rhetoric of their politicians. He views antebellum Southerners as pessimistic and deeply distrustful of social relationships and demonstrates how this world view impelled their reliance on formal controls to regularize human interaction. The attitudes toward violence of masters, slaves, and "plain-folk"--the three major social groups of the period--are differentiated, and letters and family papers are used to illustrate how Southern child-rearing practices contributed to attitudes toward violence in the region. The final chapter treats Edgar Allan Poe as a writer who epitomized the attitudes of many Southerners before the Civil War.
Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Kollin, Susan, PUBLISHER: University of Nebraska Press, "Postwestern Cultures" synthesizes the most critical topics of contemporary scholarship of the American West within a single volume. This interdisciplinary anthology features leading scholars in the varied fields of western American literary studies and includes new regional studies, global studies, studies of popular culture, environmental criticism, gender and queer theory, and multiculturalism. "Postwestern Cultures," like all successful studies of western American literature, is necessarily diverse and wide-ranging; it grasps the multifaceted quality of the landscape, literature, and critical analysis by engaging postmodern theory, spatial theory, cultural studies, and transnational and transcultural understandings of the local. This collection emphasizes the importance of understanding the region not as a confined or static space but as a constantly changing entity in both substance and form. It examines subjects ranging from the use of frontier rhetoric in Japanese American internment camp narratives to the emergence of agricultural tourism in the New West to the application of geographer J. B. Jackson's theories to abandoned western landscapes.
Jobs for All: A Plan for the Economic and Social
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Collins, Sheila D. / Ginsburg, Helen / Goldberg, Gertrude S., PUBLISHER: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Written by members of New Initiatives for Full Employment (NIFE), Jobs for All is a program to ensure suitable jobs at good wages for everyone who wants to work. Full employment is both an ethical impera- tive and the key to economic justice and prosperity. It is critical in securing those civil and political rights that are the bedrock of American democracy. People who are denied their right to a job cannot participate effectively as citizens in political or economic life. Jobs for All rejects the cruel contradiction between the rhetoric of the "work ethic" and the denial of jobs to millions. Full employment is feasible and achievable in the modern global economy. The key barriers are political and ideological, not technical or economic. This book, by demonstrating the feasibility of full employment, seeks to empower those who are now being denied economic justice and points the way toward making America truly a land of opportunity for everyone.
Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Dailey, Jane Elizabeth, PUBLISHER: University of North Carolina Press, Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics. Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians--from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans.
The Strange Sad War Revolving: Walt Whitman, Reconstruction,
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Mancuso, Luke, PUBLISHER: Camden House (NY), Walt Whitman's prolific Reconstruction project has remained the most uncultivated decade in Whitman studies for over a century. This first book-length analysis seeks to point the way for a needed recovery of Whitman's publications by embedding them in the legislative discourse of black emancipation and its stormy aftermath. The supposed absence of race relations in Whitman's post-war texts has recently become a source of curiosity and denunciation. However, from to , the Congressional 'workshop' was seeking to forge interracial civil rights legislation through surveillance of the implementation of such egalitarianism, as manifested in the Civil War Amendments, the Enforcement Acts of , and the Civil Rights Act of . The analysis of the hegemonic shift in Whitman's implementation of his democratic poetics constitutes the innovative contribution in these pages. By welcoming ex-slaves into the Union, as well as ex-Rebel states, Whitman's Reconstruction texts enlisted his representations in the federalizing rhetoric of civil rights protection that would lapse for almost a century, before recovery in the Second Reconstruction of the s and s. Acquista Ora
Dryden in Revolutionary England
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Bywaters, David A., PUBLISHER: University of California Press, In , when he wrote "Absalom and Achitophel," John Dryden was poet laureate and historiographer royal at the court of his patron Charles II, and the acknowledged champion of a successful political cause. Only a few years later, Dryden's conversion to Roman Catholicism, followed by James II's deposition for favoring Catholics, had cost the poet both his honors and his public. In no way, however, did Dryden accept the status of a political has-been. David Bywaters argues convincingly that this post-revolutionary phase of Dryden's career reveals a polemic as consistent as that of earlier periods. Dryden not only lived on in the country that had metaphorically cast him out but also remained a public literary figure, responding in his work to contemporary political changes. Between and he developed a subtle and powerful rhetoric in order to reconstruct his political and literary authority. Discussing both major and less-studied works, "Dryden in Revolutionary England" tells us much about the relation between politics and literature during a crucial, formative moment.
Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Liestol, Gunnar / Morrison, Andrew / Rasmussen, Terje, PUBLISHER: MIT Press (MA), Arguing that "first encounters" have already applied traditional theoretical and conceptual frameworks to digital media, the contributors to this book call for "second encounters," or a revisiting. Digital media are not only objects of analysis but also instruments for the development of innovative perspectives on both media and culture. Drawing on insights from literary theory, semiotics, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, media studies, sociology, and education, the contributors construct new positions from which to observe digital media in fresh and meaningful ways. Throughout they explore to what extent interpretation of and experimentation with digital media can inform theory. It also asks how our understanding of digital media can contribute to our understanding of social and cultural change. The book is organized in four sections: Education and Interdisciplinarity, Design and Aesthetics, Rhetoric and Interpretation, and Social Theory and Ethics. The topics include the effects on reading of the multimodal and multisensory aspects of the digital environment, the impact of practice on the medium of theory, how digital media are dissolving the boundaries between leisure and work, and the impact of cyberspace on established ethical principles.
Iran Under Ahmadinejad: The Politics of Confrontation
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Ansari, Ali M., PUBLISHER: Routledge, The election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the summer of thrust Iran into the international limelight in a way that few would have predicted. Robust, confrontational and given to bombastic rhetoric, Ahmadinejad has drawn condemnation from the West and praise from the Middle Eastern street in almost equal measure. This Paper looks at the details of his political rise and assesses his presidency to date within the context of the dynamics of Iranian politics. Examining the key themes of his presidency, it assesses the effectiveness of his policies and analyzes his populist approach, in particular his use of nationalism and the cult of the Twelfth Imam. The author argues that Ahmadinejad, far from retrenching the conservative values of the early revolution, is very much a product of the social and political changes which have occurred since the end of the Iran-Iraq War; that his populism in both politics and economics, along with the maintenance of a confrontational posture abroad, represents an ad hoc, and somewhat incoherent, attempt to disguise the growing contradictions which afflict the Islamic Republic, and the conservative vision of an unaccountable Islamic autocracy in the face of growing dissatisfaction, especially among key sections of the elite.
Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man:
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Blank, Paula, PUBLISHER: Cornell University Press, Shakespeare's poems and plays are rich in reference to "measure, number, and weight," which were the key terms of an early modern empirical and quantitative imagination. Shakespeare's investigation of Renaissance measures of reality centers on the consequences of applying principles of measurement to the appraisal of human value. This is especially true of efforts to judge people as better or worse than, or equal to, one another. With special attention to the Sonnets, Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet, Paula Blank argues that Shakespeare, in his experiments with measurement, demonstrates the incommensurability of the aims and operations of quantification with human experience.From scales and spans to squares and levels to ratings and rules, Shakespeare's rhetoric of measurement reveals the extent to which language in the Renaissance was itself understood as a set of alternative measures for figuring human worth. In chapters that explore attempts to measure human feeling, weigh human equalities (and inequalities), regulate race relations, and deduce social and economic merit, Blank shows why Shakespeare's measures are so often exposed as "mismeasures"-equivocal, provisional, and as unreliable as the men and women they are designed to assess.
Feminist Interp. Wollstonecraft-PR
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Falco, Maria J., PUBLISHER: Penn State University Press, Essays in honor of the bicentennial of the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman -- a revolutionary work that argued on behalf of the political, economic, and social equality of women. Combining the liberalism of Locke and the "civic humanism" of Republicanism, Mary Wollstonecraft explored the need of women for coed and equal education with men, economic independence whether married or not, and representation as citizens in the halls of government. In doing so, she foreshadowed and surpassed her much better known successor, John Stuart Mill. Ten feminist scholars prominent in the fields of political philosophy, constitutional and international law, rhetoric, literature, and psychology argue here that Wollstonecraft, by reason of the scope and complexity of her thought, belongs in the "canon" of political philosophers along with Rousseau and Burke, her contemporaries, both of whom she strenuously engaged in political debate. These essays explore the many aspects of her thought that resound so tellingly to the modern woman, including her ground-breaking attempt to be completely self-sufficient. The final bibliographical essay outlines the changing interpretations of Wollstonecraft's work over the past two hundred years and evaluates her standing among political theorists today.
With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Logan, Shirley Wilson, PUBLISHER: Southern Illinois University Press, "O woman, woman upon you I call; for upon your exertions almost entirely depends whether the rising generation shall be any thing more than we have been or not. O woman, woman your example is powerful, your influence great."--Maria W. Stewart, "An Address Delivered Before the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston" () Here--in the only collection of speeches by nineteenth-century African-American women--is the battle of words these brave women waged to address the social ills of their century. While there have been some scattered references to the unique roles these early "race women" played in effecting social change, until now few scholars have considered the rhetorical strategies they adopted to develop their powerful arguments. In this chronological anthology, Shirley Wilson Logan highlights the public addresses of these women, beginning with Maria W. Stewart's speech at Franklin Hall in , believed to be the first delivered to an audience of men and women by an American-born woman. In her speech, she focused on the plight of the Northern free black. Sojourner Truth spoke in at the Akron, Ohio, Women's Rights Convention not only for the rights of black women but also for the rights of all oppressed nineteenth-century women. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper struggled with the conflict between universal suffrage and suffrage for black men. Anna Julia Cooper chastised her unique audience of black Episcopalian clergy for their failure to continue the tradition of the elevation of womanhood initiated by Christianity and especially for their failure to support the struggling Southern black woman. Ida B. Wells's rhetoric targeted mob violence directed at Southern black men. Her speech was delivered less than a year after her inaugural lecture on this issue--following a personal encounter with mob violence in Memphis. Fannie Barrier Williams and Victoria Earle Matthews advocated social and educational reforms to improve the plight of Southern black women. These speeches--all delivered between and --are stirring proof that, despite obstacles of race and gender, these women still had the courage to mount the platform in defense of the oppressed. Introductory essays focus on each speaker's life and rhetoric, considering the ways in which these women selected evidence and adapted language to particular occasions, purposes, and audiences in order to persuade. This analysis of the rhetorical contexts and major rhetorical tactics in the speeches aids understanding of both the speeches and the skill of the speakers. A rhetorical timeline serves as a point of reference. Historically grounded, this book provides a black feminist perspective on significant events of the nineteenth century and reveals how black women of that era influenced and were influenced by the social problems they addressed. "A government which can protect and defend its citizens from wrong and outrage and doe
Sorcery and Sovereignty: Taxation, Power, and Rebellion in
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Redding, Sean, PUBLISHER: Ohio University Press, Rebellions broke out in many areas of South Africa shortly after the institution of white rule in the late nineteenth century and continued into the next century. However, distrust of the colonial regime reached a new peak in the mid-twentieth century, when revolts erupted across a wide area of rural South Africa. All these uprisings were rooted in grievances over taxes. Rebels frequently invoked supernatural powers for assistance and accused government officials of using witchcraft to enrich themselves and to harm ordinary people. As Sean Redding observes in Sorcery and Sovereignty, beliefs in witchcraft and supernatural powers were part of the political rhetoric; the system of taxation--with all its prescribed interactions between ruler and ruled--was intimately connected to these supernatural beliefs. In this fascinating study, Redding examines how black South Africans' beliefs in supernatural powers, along with both economic and social change in the rural areas, resulted in specific rebellions and how gender relations in black South African rural families changed. Sorcery and Sovereignty explores the intersection of taxation, political attitudes, and supernatural beliefs among black South Africans, shedding light on some of the most significant issues in the history of colonized Africa.
Affirmative Action - CL
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Fiscus, Ronald J. / Wasby, Stephen L. / Fish, Stanley, PUBLISHER: Duke University Press, Few issues are as mired in rhetoric and controversy as affirmative action. This is certainly no less true now as when Ronald J. Fiscus's "The Constitutional Logic of Affirmative Action" was first published in . The controversy has, perhaps, become more charged over the past few years. With this compelling and rigorously reasoned argument for a constitutional rationale of affirmative action, Fiscus clarifies the moral and legal ramifications of this complex subject and presents an important view in the context of the ongoing debate. Beginning with a distinction drawn between principles of compensatory and distributive justice, Fiscus argues that the former, although often the basis for judgments made in individual discrimination cases, cannot sufficiently justify broad programs of affirmative action. Only a theory of distributive justice, one that assumes minorities have a right to what they would have gained proportionally in a nonracist society, can persuasively provide that justification. On this basis, the author argues in favor of proportional racial quotas--and challenges the charge of "reverse discrimination" raised in protest in the name of the "innocent victims" of affirmative action--as an action necessary to approach the goals of fairness and equality. "The Constitutional Logic of Affirmative Action" focuses on Supreme Court affirmative action rulings from "Bakke" () to "Croson" () and includes an epilogue by editor Stephen L. Wasby that considers developments through . General readers concerned with racial justice, affirmative action, and public policy, as well as legal specialists and constitutional scholars will find Fiscus's argument passionate, balanced, and persuasive.
Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Laderman, Gary, PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, USA, Though it has often been passionately criticized--as fraudulent, exploitative, even pagan--the American funeral home has become nearly as inevitable as death itself, an institution firmly embedded in our culture. But how did the funeral home come to hold such a position? What is its history? And is it guilty of the charges sometimes leveled against it? In Rest in Peace, Gary Laderman traces the origins of American funeral rituals, from the evolution of embalming techniques during and after the Civil War and the shift from home funerals to funeral homes at the turn of the century, to the increasing subordination of priests, ministers, and other religious figures to the funeral director throughout the twentieth century. In doing so he shows that far from manipulating vulnerable mourners, as Jessica Mitford claimed in her best-selling The American Way of Death (), funeral directors are highly respected figures whose services reflect the community's deepest needs and wishes. Indeed, Laderman shows that funeral directors generally give the people what they want when it is time to bury our dead. He reveals, for example, that the open casket, often criticized as barbaric, provides a deeply meaningful moment for friends and family who must say goodbye to their loved one. But he also shows how the dead often come back to life in the popular imagination to disturb the peace of the living. Drawing upon interviews with funeral directors, major historical events like the funerals of John F. Kennedy and Rudolf Valentino, films, television, newspaper reports, proposals for funeral reform, and other primary sources, Rest in Peace cuts through the rhetoric to show us the reality--and the real cultural value--of the American funeral.
Finding Our Unity in the Scriptures
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Huffstetler, Joel W., PUBLISHER: Authorhouse, This book grew out of a Bible Conference at Kanuga Conference Center in October, , led by Dr. George L. Carey, the 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury. Archbishop Carey's theme was the life and ministry of St. Paul, with a focus on the Letter to the Ephesians. I was privileged to serve as a workshop leader and preacher during the conference, and I chose as the theme of my workshop to study St. Paul and reconciliation, using Ephesians as our primary text. The main thrust of the workshop was to study selected passages from Ephesians in detail, and to look to St. Paul's writings for guidance regarding reconciliation in the Body of Christ. We live in a time when there is such a pressing need in the Church for reconciliation, a rekindling of a spirit of love and mutual respect rather than the judgment and suspicion which all too often characterize relations among Christians who find themselves in disagreement with one another regarding the divisive issues of our time. This book advocates a renewed realization that in Jesus Christ what unites us as Christians is far greater than what divides us. These essays on selected passages from Ephesians and the concluding essay, The Way Forward, are offered in the cause of reconciliation. They are suitable for study by individuals as well as parish and diocesan study groups seeking reconciliation in the Church. Study questions are presented at the end of each chapter to foster reflection and discussion. "I welcome this book as an offering to us all. It presents one means for discovering a receptive stance to God's will for us, even in the midst of the harsh rhetoric and self-justifying proclamations of our day. I am grateful to Joel Huffstetler for hiscontribution to the forming of an attitude of the heart committed to reconciliation." From the Afterword by The Rt. Rev. Charles G. vonRosenberg, Bishop of East Tennessee.
Exploring College Writing: Reading, Writing and Researching
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Melzer, Dan, PUBLISHER: Equinox Publishing (UK), Exploring College Writing: Reading, Writing and Researching across the Curriculum is a rhetoric for first-year and sophomore composition courses that uses a constructivist, ethnographic approach to introducing students to academic reading, writing, and researching. This text will be especially useful to composition instructors who wish to provide students with both a general overview of academic discourse and an introduction to the purposes, audiences, and genres of writing across disciplines. This textbook works from the premise that the best way to initiate students to academic discourse is to have them explore academic literacies using an ethnographic, fieldwork approach to their own institution. Students are cast in the role of researchers, exploring their own experiences as college writers and investigating writing in General Education and in their prospective majors. The book provides instructors and students sequences of engaging and exploratory "Writing to Learn" and "Learn by Doing" activities and formal, extended writing projects that ask students to interview professors, analyze writing assignments, and reflect on their own reading, writing, and researching processes and histories. These writing projects connect to students' interests, experiences, and goals and provide them with a sense of purpose and audience for writing. The organization of Exploring College Writing moves students from reflection to investigation. Part I of the book provides a broad introduction to academic reading, writing, and researching and introduces students to the rhetorical situations, genres, and common college thinking and writing strategies. Part I presents students with prompts that ask them to explore the similarities and differences between high school and college literacy and reflect on their own literacy histories. Part II asks students to think critically about their reading, writing, and researching processes and to explore strategies for college reading, writing, and researching processes. Part II includes prompts that ask students to explore college reading, writing, and researching processes and practice academic research and making academic arguments. Part III introduces students to writing across the curriculum and the idea of disciplines and discourse communities. Part IV asks students to investigate the reading, writing, and researching assigned in the General Education and major courses at their campus and to consider discipline-specific ways of writing and thinking. Unlike other textbooks Exploring College Writing uses authentic student and professional texts from across disciplines in a variety of genres such as lab reports, scholarly book reviews, ethnographies and case studies to guide and inspire the writing process.
Bridges Across an Impossible Divide: The Inner Lives of Arab
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Gopin, Marc, PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, USA, Peace between Arabs and Jews seems forever out of reach, both sides caught in a never-ending cycle of violence and revenge. But while treaties and other top-down solutions have had little lasting effect, peacemakers on the ground are creating real change--within themselves and with their enemies. In Bridges across an Impossible Divide, American professor and Rabbi Marc Gopin offers an unprecedented exploration of the spiritual lives of Arab and Jewish peacemakers who have evolved deep friendships despite decades of war and suffering on all sides. The peacemakers included in this book have little or no formal training in conflict resolution or diplomacy, however through trial and error they have devised their own unique methods of looking inward and reaching out across enemy lines. Gopin provides insightful analysis of the lessons to be learned from these peace builders, outlining the characteristics that make them successful. He argues that lasting conflict and misery between enemies is the result of an emotional, cognitive, and ethical failure to self-examine, and that the true transformation of a troubled society is brought about by the spiritual introspection of extraordinary, determined individuals. The book is unique in that its central body is the actual words of peacemakers themselves as they speak of their struggles to overcome the death of loved ones and to find common ground with adversaries. Most of these accounts are from peacemakers who have hardly written before. This is a treasure trove for scholars and the general public who seek to understand the conflict and its peacemakers at a far deeper level. These remarkable stories reveal a level of inner examination that is rarely encountered in the literature of political science, international relations, or even conflict resolution theory. They show how building friendships invigorates the effort to bring equality, nonviolent social change, and reconciliation to warring peoples. Bridges across an Impossible Divide takes readers beyond the rhetoric of political leaders into the spiritual lives of men and women actually making peace with their enemies.
Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity,
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Olsen, Christopher J., PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, USA, This groundbreaking study of the politics of secession combines traditional political history with current work in anthropology and gender and ritual studies. Christopher J. Olsen has drawn on local election returns, rural newspapers, manuscripts, and numerous county records to sketch a new picture of the intricate and colorful world of local politics. In particular, he demonstrates how the move toward secession in Mississippi was deeply influenced by the demands of masculinity within the state's antiparty political culture. Face-to-face relationships and personal reputations, organized around neighborhood networks of friends and extended kin, were at the heart of antebellum Mississippi politics. The intimate, public nature of this tradition allowed voters to assess each candidate's individual status and fitness for public leadership. Key virtues were independence and physical courage, as well as reliability and loyalty to the community, and the political culture offered numerous chances to demonstrate all of these (sometimes contradictory) qualities. Like dueling and other male rituals, voting and running for office helped set the boundaries of class and power. They also helped mediate the conflicts between nineteenth-century American egalitarianism, democracy, and geographic mobility, and the South's exaggerated patriarchal hierarchy, sustained by honor and slavery. The political system, however, functioned effectively only as long as it remained a personal exercise between individuals, divorced from the anonymity of institutional parties. This antiparty tradition eliminated the distinction between men as individuals and as public representatives, which caused them to assessand interpret all political events and rhetoric in a personal manner. The election of and success of the Republicans' antisouthern, free soil program, therefore, presented an "insulting" challenge to personal, family, and community honor. As Olsen shows in detail, the sectional controversy engaged men where they measured themselves, in public, with and against their peers, and linked their understanding of masculinity with formal politics, through which the voters actually brought about secession. Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi provides a rich new perspective on the events leading up to the Civil War and will prove an invaluable tool for understanding the central crisis in American politics.
Boswell: Citizen of the World, Man of Letters
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Lustig, Irma S., PUBLISHER: University Press of Kentucky, " These eleven original essays by well-known eighteenth-century scholars, five of them editors of James Boswell's journal or letters, commemorate the bicentenary of Boswell's death on May . The volume illuminates both the life and the work of one of the most important literary figures of the age and contributes significantly to the scholarship on this rich period. In the introduction, Irma S. Lustig sets the tone for the volume. She reveals that the essays examining Boswell as "Citizen of the World" are deliberately paired with those that analyze his artistic skills, to emphasize that "Boswell's sophistication as a writer is inseparable from his cosmopolitanism." The essays in Part I focus on the relationship of the Enlightenment, at home and abroad, to Boswell's personal development. Marlies K. Danziger restores to significant life the continental philosophers and theologians Boswell consulted in his search for religious certainty. Peter Perreten examines Boswell's enraptured study of Italian antiquity and his responses to the European landscape. Richard B. Sher and Perreten document the personal and aesthetic influence of Henry Home, Lord Kames, Scottish jurist and leading Enlightenment figure, on Boswell. Michael Fry discusses Boswell's relationship with Henry Dundas, political manager for Scotland, and Thomas Crawford examines Boswell's long-standing interest in the volatile political issues of the period, including the French Revolution, through his correspondence with William Johnson Temple. In evaluation Boswell's performance as Laird of Auchinleck, John Strawhorn documents his efforts to improve the estate by use of new agricultural methods. The essays in Part II study aspects of Boswell's artistry in Life of Johnson, the magnum opus that set a standard for biography. Carey McIntosh examines Boswell's use of rhetoric, and William P. Yarrow offers a close scrutiny of metaphor. Isobel Grundy invokes Virginia Woolf in demonstrating Boswell's acceptance of uncertainty as a biographer. John B. Radner reveals Boswell's self-assertive strategies in his visit with Johnson at Ashbourne in September , and, finally, Lustig examines as a "subplot" of the biography Johnson's patient efforts to win the friendship of Margaret Montgomerie Boswell. An appendix by Hitoshi Suwabe serves scholars by providing the most exact account to date of Boswell's meetings with Johnson. Acquista Ora
Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Fuller, Steve, PUBLISHER: University of Chicago Press, Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is one of the best known and most influential books of the twentieth century. Whether they adore or revile him, critics and fans alike have tended to agree on one thing: Kuhn's ideas were revolutionary. But were they? Steve Fuller argues that Kuhn actually held a profoundly conservative view of science and how one ought to study its history. Early on, Kuhn came under the influence of Harvard President James Bryant Conant (to whom "Structure" is dedicated), who had developed an educational program intended to help deflect Cold War unease over science's uncertain future by focusing on its illustrious past. Fuller argues that this rhetoric made its way into "Structure," which Fuller sees as preserving and reinforcing the old view that science really is just a steady accumulation of truths about the world (once "paradigm shifts" are resolved). Fuller suggests that Kuhn, deliberately or not, shared the tendency in Western culture to conceal possible negative effects of new knowledge from the general public. Because it insists on a difference between a history of science for scientists and one suited to historians, Fuller charges that "Structure" created the awkward divide that has led directly to the "Science Wars" and has stifled much innovative research. In conclusion, Fuller offers a way forward that rejects Kuhn's fixation on paradigms in favor of a conception of science as a social movement designed to empower society's traditionally disenfranchised elements. Certain to be controversial, "Thomas Kuhn" must be read by anyone who has adopted, challenged, or otherwise engaged with "The Structure of ScientificRevolutions." "Structure will never look quite the same again after Fuller. In that sense, he has achieved one of the main aims of his ambitious and impressively executed project."--Jon Turney, "Times Higher Education Supplement" "Philosophies like Kuhn's narrow the possible futures of inquiry by politically methodizing and taming them. More republican philosophies will leave the future open. Mr. Fuller has amply succeeded in his program of distinguishing the one from the other."--William R. Everdell, "Washington Times" Acquista Ora
The Life of Adam Smith
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Ross, Ian Simpson, PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, USA, Few would argue that Adam Smith was one of the great minds of the eighteenth century. He is perceived through his best-known book, The Wealth of Nations, as the founder of economics as a science, and his ideas about the free market and the role of the state (in relation to it) continue to influence modern economic thought. Yet Smith achieved even more as a man of letters, as a moralist, historian, and critic. The Life of Adam Smith, the first full-scale biography of Smith in a hundred years, is a superb account of Smith's life and work, encompassing a career that spanned some of the defining moments in world history, including the American and French Revolutions. Here author Ian Simpson Ross examines Smith's family life, education, career, intellectual circle (including David Hume and Francois Quesnay), and his contemporaries (the likes of Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson), bringing to life this great thinker and author. Readers will meet Smith as a student at a lively Glasgow University and at a sleepy Oxford; a freelance lecturer delivering popular classes on rhetoric; an innovative university teacher ("by far the most useful, and therefore," Smith wrote, "by far the happiest and most honourable period of my life"); then a tutor travelling abroad with a Duke; an acclaimed political economist; a policy advisor to governments during and after the American Revolution; and finally, if paradoxically in view of his strongly held tenets, a Commissioner of Customs coping with free traders in the smuggling business. But it his impact as a writer that continues to set Adam Smith apart today. The Wealth of Nations, published in , as the British Parliament was deep in debate about the American colonies, continues to influence modern economic theory throughout the world. Ross sheds new light on this classic work and on its meaning for today. And he also paints a vivid portrait of Smith's personal life, revealing a man of singular generosity of spirit, who believed that with wit and logic and sensitivity to our feelings, we might aspire to virtue rather than wealth, and so become members of a truly civil society. Upon Adam Smith's death in , a friend wrote of him, "Happy are those who at the close of life can reflect that they have lived to a valuable purpose by contributing, as he did, to enlighten mankind, and to spread the blessings of peace and liberty and virtue." The Life of Adam Smith illuminates the world of a man whose legacy of thought concerns and affects us all.