Signature Pieces

Signature Pieces
Author: Peggy Kamuf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501726374

Some contemporary approaches to literature still accept the separation of historical, biographical, external concerns from formal, internal ones. On the borderline that lends this division between inside and outside its apparent coherence is signature. In Peggy Kamuf’s view, studying signature will help us to rediscover some of the stakes of literary writing beyond the historicist/formalist opposition. Drawing on Derrida’s extensive work on signatures and proper names, Kamuf investigates authorial signature in key writers from Rousseau to Woolf, as well as the implications of signature for the institutions of authorship and criticism.

Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720-1850

Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720-1850
Author: Richard Adelman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2018-03-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351009508

This edited collection, Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, aims to address the genealogy and formation of political economy as a knowledge project from 1720 to 1850. Through individual essays on both literary and political economic writers, this volume defines and analyses the formative moves, both epistemological and representational, which proved foundational to the emergence of political economy as a dominant discourse of modernity. The collection also explores political economy’s relation to other discourses and knowledge practices in this period; representation in and of political economy; abstraction and political economy; fictional mediations and interrogations of political economy; and political economy and its ‘others’, including political economy and affect, and political economy and the aesthetic. Essays presented in this text are at once historical and conceptual in focus, and manifest literary critical disciplinary expertise whilst being of genuinely broad and interdisciplinary interest. Amongst the writers whose work is addressed are: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, Jane Marcet, J. S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith. The introduction, by the editors, sets up the conceptual, theoretical and analytical framework explored by each of the essays. The final essay and response bring the concerns of the volume up to date by engaging with current economic and financial realities, by, respectively, showing how an informed and critical history of political economy could transform current economic practices, and by exploring the abundance of recent conceptual art addressing representation and the unpresentable in economic practice.

Just Property

Just Property
Author: Christopher Pierson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2016-07-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0191654213

Property remains the bedrock of the societies we all inhabit. It underpins our core institutions - including families, states and economies - and it is the medium through which the intensifying politics of inequality is played out. There is plenty of evidence that its importance is increasing in a world of growing wealth inequality and depletion of natural resources. Volume Two of Just Property traces the development of ideas about property in the Western world from the early eighteenth century, through the Enlightenment and the experience of the French Revolution, to the critical stance of socialists and anarchists in the nineteenth century. It ranges across the thought of Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, the Abbe de Sieyes, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin. Many themes persist from an earlier period, as does the influence of Christianity and the Roman Law but there are also many innovations. In general, the authority of God and the natural law recedes and the themes of utility and securing general welfare became more prominent. In the wake of Locke, labour, though sometimes in the form of 'past labour', that is capital, attains a new prominence. For its admirers, a newly-unfettered private property is the means of securing personal freedom, constraining authoritarian governments, promoting the arts and sciences, and delivering an unprecedented improvement in the material condition of the whole population. For its critics, private property is the central component in a new political economy of systemic and unlimited class exploitation. It penetrates everywhere and corrupts everything that it touches. With these arguments, we are clearly on the terrain of modernity, witnessing a set of arguments and counter-arguments with which we all still struggle.

People's Power

People's Power
Author: Peter Roman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2019-07-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000315266

The study on which this book is based began in 1986 with the fifth legislative session of the Cuban municipal assemblies. The research on which the book is based was supported in part by grants from the City University of New York PSC/CUNY Research Foundation.

Democratic Legitimacy

Democratic Legitimacy
Author: Frederick M. Barnard
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2001
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780773522770

Barnard demonstrates that in a democracy accountability is more than damage control and must be part of considerations in the political forum before decisions are made, not just after the fact when trying to assign blame.".

The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics

The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics
Author: Melissa Matthes
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0271031107

The bonds among republican citizens are created, in part, through the stories told and retold as the foundational myths of the republic. In this book, Melissa Matthes takes advantage of the way in which republican theorists in different eras—Livy, Machiavelli, and Rousseau—retell the story of the rape of Lucretia to support their own conceptions of republicanism. The recurring presentation of this story as theater by these different theorists reveals not only the performative elements of republicanism but, as Matthes argues, adds to Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on the oral dimensions of speech and hearing the important idea of public space as a visual field. Lucretia’s story also helps illuminate the gendering of republicanism, particularly the aspects of violence and subordination that lie at its very origin. By focusing attention on this underlying and deeply gendered quality of republics, Matthes brings republican theory into fruitful dialogue with feminism.

Instinct and Intimacy

Instinct and Intimacy
Author: Margaret Ogrodnick
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780802006127

As a philosopher of intimacy, he stresses the importance of intimate relations and private sentiments in building community bonds.