Wes and Carlo are celebrating their fifth anniversary, but rather than spending the day at the Pennsylvania Renn Faire where they met and worked together, they have to be at home eighty miles apart from each other. So close, yet so far. Add in some technical difficulties and it’s definitely not the spectacular dinner and a movie they wanted it to be. Neither is happy with the situation, but they both agree that continuing their quarantine is for the best, even if the Renn Faire is reopening without them. It’s tough, but they’re willing to make the sacrifice until it's safe to be together again.
In Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life, renowned French philosopher Renaud Barbaras aims to construct the basis for a phenomenology of life. Called an introduction because it has to deal with philosophical limits and presuppositions, it is much more, as Barbaras investigates life in its phenomenological senses, approached through the duality of its intransitive and transitive senses. Originally published in French (Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie) Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life first defines the problem of life phenomenologically, then studies the failures of the phenomenological movement to adequately think about life, and finally elaborates a new, original, and productive approach to the problem. Combining original interpretations and expert readings of philosophers such as Heidegger, Henry, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty, Barbaras offers a powerful and important contribution to phenomenology and continental thought.
In Negotiating the New in the French Novel Teresa Bridgeman applies insights from pragmatic theory to the French novel in order to examine its discourse conventions. Focussing on texts by some of the greatest and most innovative French novelists - Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Celine, Sarraute and Perec - Bridgeman analyses how these authors established their own conventions, challenged reader expectations and drew conventions from other literary and non-literary forms. Negotiating the New in the French Novel shows the development of changing perceptions of genre, author and reader. This book will make fascinating reading for students of French literature - particularly of the nineteenth century novel, students of Stylistics and of Narratology.
Japan in the early seventeenth century was a wild place. Serial killers stalked the streets of Kyoto at night, while noblemen and women mingled freely at the imperial palace, drinking saké and watching kabuki dancing in the presence of the emperor's principal consort. Among these noblewomen was an imperial concubine named Nakanoin Nakako, who in 1609 became embroiled in a sex scandal involving both courtiers and young women in the emperor's service. As punishment, Nakako was banished to an island in the Pacific Ocean, but she never reached her destination. Instead, she was shipwrecked and spent fourteen years in a remote village on the Izu Peninsula before she was finally allowed to return to Kyoto. In 1641, Nakako began a new adventure: she entered a convent and became a Buddhist nun. Recounting the remarkable story of this resilient woman and her war-torn world, G. G. Rowley investigates aristocratic family archives, village storehouses, and the records of imperial convents. She follows the banished concubine as she endures rural exile, receives an unexpected reprieve, and rediscovers herself as the abbess of a nunnery. While unraveling Nakako's unusual tale, Rowley also reveals the little-known lives of samurai women who sacrificed themselves on the fringes of the great battles that brought an end to more than a century of civil war. Written with keen insight and genuine affection, An Imperial Concubine's Tale tells the true story of a woman's extraordinary life in seventeenth-century Japan.
Radical Orthodoxy is a remarkable collection of papers that aims to reclaim the world by situating concerns and activities within a theological framework.
