From a cuneiform tablet to a Chicago prison, from the depths of the cosmos to the text on our T-shirts, Lawrence Weschler finds strange connections wherever he looks. The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge -- at least, it does if you're looking through Weschler's giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art, his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays sure to illuminate, educate, and astound.
With a unique focus on message, method, and medium, Convergences asks students to think about what, why, and how we communicate. What's the best way to tell the story of your life, through words or pictures? How would the Gettysburg Address be received if Lincoln had delivered it on PowerPoint? Why did Benetton design a marketing campaign around death row inmates? Convergences asks these questions, among others. Convergences has been put together to help students explore the many different kinds of compositions that surround them. Clusters bring together texts from multiple media and genres -- essays, advertisements, the Web, news, comics, television, and film, among others -- with a methodology to read them. And the new edition does even more to suggest a vocabulary students can use to talk about all kinds of texts, both in the book and in ix -- a ground-breaking CD-ROM exploring fundamental concepts of visual rhetoric -- that comes with every copy of Convergences.
By pairing essays with other kinds of compositions — a TV show, a news report, a photo, an ad, a cast-off grocery list — Convergences asks students to respond to all kinds of visual and verbal texts. Its organization into six broad thematic chapters — each of which is broken out into six clusters — presents the materials in a way that is compelling and teachable. Convergences urges students to ask: Why did that author write that essay? Where was it published, and for what audience? What is the message of that poem? Why is that image on that Web site? Who thinks that joke is funny? How is that ad getting me to buy things I don’t need? And, most importantly — how do I make meaning of it all? With its full-color design, varied themes and texts, and helpful reading and writing support, Convergences inspires students to read the world in new ways — and to respond thoughtfully in their own compositions.
An Economist Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year A Fast Company “7 Books Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says You Need to Lead Smarter” Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today’s wealthy nations soared from twenty percent to almost seventy. Since then, that share has plummeted to where it was in 1900. As the renowned economist Richard Baldwin reveals, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalization that is drastically different from the old. The nature of globalization has changed, but our thinking about it has not. Baldwin argues that the New Globalization is driven by knowledge crossing borders, not just goods. That is why its impact is more sudden, more individual, more unpredictable, and more uncontrollable than before—which presents developed nations with unprecedented challenges as they struggle to maintain reliable growth and social cohesion. It is the driving force behind what Baldwin calls “The Great Convergence,” as Asian economies catch up with the West. “In this brilliant book, Baldwin has succeeded in saying something both new and true about globalization.” —Martin Wolf, Financial Times “A very powerful description of the newest phase of globalization.” —Larry Summers, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury “An essential book for understanding how modern trade works via global supply chains. An antidote to the protectionist nonsense being peddled by some politicians today.” —The Economist “[An] indispensable guide to understanding how globalization has got us here and where it is likely to take us next.” —Alan Beattie, Financial Times
“What the future fortunes of [Gramsci’s] writings will be, we cannot know. However, his permanence is already sufficiently sure, and justifies the historical study of his international reception. The present collection of studies is an indispensable foundation for this.” —Eric Hobsbawm, from the preface Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci’s masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary. Gramscian terms such as “civil society” and “hegemony” are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci’s purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci’s writings, is absorb Gramsci’s methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of “grand explanatory schemes,” the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his Nota: “Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived in by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society.” The rigor of Santucci’s examination of Gramsci’s life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself. Readers will be enlightened and inspired by every page.
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book for 2011 With the British Industrial Revolution, part of the world's population started to experience extraordinary economic growth—leading to enormous gaps in wealth and living standards between the industrialized West and the rest of the world. This pattern of divergence reversed after World War II, and now we are midway through a century of high and accelerating growth in the developing world and a new convergence with the advanced countries—a trend that is set to reshape the world. Michael Spence, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, explains what happened to cause this dramatic shift in the prospects of the five billion people who live in developing countries. The growth rates are extraordinary, and continuing them presents unprecedented challenges in governance, international coordination, and ecological sustainability. The implications for those living in the advanced countries are great but little understood. Spence clearly and boldly describes what's at stake for all of us as he looks ahead to how the global economy will develop over the next fifty years. The Next Convergence is certain to spark a heated debate how best to move forward in the post-crisis period and reset the balance between national and international economic interests, and short-term fixes and long-term sustainability.
Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, reveals in this book the creative but mostly hidden alliance between American pragmatism and American poetry. He brilliantly traces pragmatism as a philosophical and literary practice grounded in a linguistic skepticism that runs from Emerson and William James to the work of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, and on to the cultural debates of today. More powerfully than ever before, Poirier shows that pragmatism had its start in Emerson, the great example to all his successors of how it is possible to redeem even as you set out to change the literature of the past. Poirier demonstrates that Emerson--and later William James--were essentially philosophers of language, and that it is language that embodies our cultural past, an inheritance to be struggled with, and transformed, before being handed on to future generations. He maintains that in Emersonian pragmatist writing, any loss--personal or cultural--gives way to a quest for what he calls "superfluousness," a kind of rhetorical excess by which powerfully creative individuals try to elude deprivation and stasis. In a wide-ranging meditation on what James called "the vague," Poirier extols the authentic voice of individualism, which, he argues, is tentative and casual rather than aggressive and dogmatic. The concluding chapters describe the possibilities for criticism created by this radically different understanding of reading and writing, which are nothing less than a reinvention of literary tradition itself. Poirier's discovery of this tradition illuminates the work of many of the most important figures in American philosophy and poetry. His reanimation of pragmatism also calls for a redirection of contemporary criticism, so that readers inside as well as outside the academy can begin to respond to poetic language as the source of meaning, not to meaning as the source of language.
The C&C framework, which was been pioneered and advocated by GCI at the United Nations throughout the 1990s, is the most widely supported framework proposal in the global debate on what to do about climate change.
Sixteen-year-old Mera Kellen wished her life was a little less unsolved. Vivid dreams with messages from mysterious women. Mystifying occurrences with no explanation. A secretive mother with a hidden past. Not exactly the stuff teenage dreams are made of. Things get even more inexplicable when her mom suddenly vanishes, and Mera is sent to Convergence, Maine to live with her maternal grandmother, Ida, who Mera never knew existed. In Convergence, whispers of a horrific event in the village's history follow Mera wherever she goes, the Kellen name inspiring fear in the townspeople. As if there weren't enough unanswered questions in her life, there's also the stirring sensation that awakened in Mera's core as soon as she arrived in Convergence, like the ocean's tide extended to the pit of her stomach...Realizing the key to finding her mother is in the secrets of the past, Mera resolves to uncover the mystery of her family's infamy and the source of the power growing within her. This search brings Mera to a dangerous revelation about who and what she really is-one that threatens to destroy everyone she loves.
In an essay on Biblical Theology published in 1982, Paul Beauchamp points out a striking convergence between a prominent Roman Catholic scholar of the period, Roland de Vaux, and the leading Protestant Old Testament theologian of the day, Gerhard von Rad. Both saw looming on the horizon the need for a Biblical Theology in which both Testaments were taken seriously as part of a single, comprehensive theological reflection. There was genuine excitement at the prospect of the methods of tradition-historical reading, already harnessed by von Rad toward a specifically theological goal, turning now to a Biblical Theology proper. Where did that project and the excitement go? With Convergences, Christopher Seitz returns to the period in question. In the later work of von Rad and Martin Noth, Seitz identifies the clear foreshadowing of what would become canonical interpretation reflected especially in the work of Brevard Childs. Seitz further reveals that the work of Beauchamp, largely unknown in the Anglophone world, would ultimately line up with Childs in a great many areas (typology, concern with the final form, appreciation for the history of biblical interpretation before the modern era). These scholars reached common shores by distinctive routes and via different interlocutors. Convergences displays such lines of connection and how they spill over from the academy into the interests of the church, including Roman Catholic understandings of the place of Scripture since the mid-twentieth century. Seitz studies the emergence of the lectionary conception, the ressourcement movement, and non-Catholic interest in the prior history of interpretation and figural reading. Convergences maintains that much of what was accomplished in a hopeful coalescence around the canonical form of Scripture remains relevant for biblical interpretation in our present period. Here, we find a form of catholicity that offers hope and promise for our day in spite of cultural, ecclesial, and academic distinctives. --Harry P. Nasuti, Professor of Theology, Fordham University
