Crowds and Power

Crowds and Power
Author: Elias Canetti
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2000
Genre: Collective behavior
ISBN: 9781842120545

How do crowds work? What is the nature of their unique creation - the demagogue? This is the renowned and original analysis of one of the 20th century's most threatening and influential phenomena by the Nobel Prize-winning thinker Elias Canetti.

The Conservationist

The Conservationist
Author: Nadine Gordimer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1408832976

Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm. As the upheaval in Mehring's world increasingly resembles that in the country as a whole, it becomes clear that only a seismic shift in ideas and concrete action can avert annihilation.

Ornaments of the Metropolis

Ornaments of the Metropolis
Author: Henrik Reeh
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2004
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262182379

Variations on the theme of the ornament in Kracauer's urban writings, suggesting ways in which the subjective can reappropriate urban life.

Kafka's Travels

Kafka's Travels
Author: J. Zilcosky
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137076372

In 1916, Kafka writes of The Sugar Baron , a dime-store colonial adventure novel, '[it] affects me so deeply that I feel it is about myself, or as if it were the book of rules for my life.' John Zilcosky reveals that this perhaps surprising statement - made by the Prague-bound poet of modern isolation - is part of a network of remarks that exemplify Kafka's ongoing preoccupation with popular travel writing, exoticism, and colonial fantasy. Taking this biographical peculiarity as a starting point, Kafka's Travels elegantly re-reads Kafka's major works ( Amerika , The Trial , The Castle ) through the lens of fin-de siecle travel culture. Making use of previously unexplored literary and cultural materials - travel diaries, train schedules, tour guides, adventure novels - Zilcosky argues that Kafka's uniquely modern metaphorics of alienation emerges out of the author's complex encounter with the utopian travel discourses of his day.

Baudrillard Live

Baudrillard Live
Author: Mike Gane
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2002-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134912412

Jean Baudrillard arouses strong opinions. In this collection of his most important interviews the reader gains a unique and accessible overview of Baudrillard's key ideas. The collection includes many interviews that appear in English for the first time as well as a fascinating interview and encounter between the editor and Baudrillard in Paris.

The Attraction of Things

The Attraction of Things
Author: Roger Lewinter
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 93
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811226107

Stunning fragments that offer an epiphany of grace and beauty The Attraction of Things concerns the entirety of beauty and the possibility of grace, relayed via obsessions with rare early gramophone records, the theater, translation, dying parents: all these elements are relayed in a dizzying strange traffic of cultural artifacts, friendships, losses, discoveries, and love. Roger Lewinter believes that in the realm of art, “the distinction between life and death loses its relevance, the one taking place in the other.” Whereas Story of Love in Solitude is a group of small stories, The Attraction of Things is a continuous narrative (more or less) of a man seeking (or stumbling upon) enlightenment. “The Attraction of Things,” states Lewinter, “is the story of a being who lets himself go toward what attracts him, toward what he attracts—beings, works, things—and who, through successive encounters, finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where the bolt of illumination strikes. This is the story of a letting go toward the illumination.”

Kafka's Zoopoetics

Kafka's Zoopoetics
Author: Naama Harel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2020-05-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472902091

Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.

Bilingual Minds

Bilingual Minds
Author: Aneta Pavlenko
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2006-03-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1847699812

Do bi- and multilinguals perceive themselves differently in their respective languages? Do they experience different emotions? How do they express emotions and do they have a favourite language for emotional expression? How are emotion words and concepts represented in the bi- and multilingual lexicons? This ground-breaking book opens up a new field of study, bilingualism and emotions, and provides intriguing answers to these and many related questions.