Middle Easterners today struggle to find solutions to crises of economic stagnation, political gridlock, and cultural identity. In recent decades Islam has become central to this struggle, and almost every issue involves fierce, sometimes violent debates over the role of religion in public life. In this post-9/11 updated edition R. Stephen Humphreys presents a thoughtful analysis of Islam's place in today's Middle East and integrates the medieval and modern history of the region to show how the sacred and secular are tightly interwoven in its political and intellectual life.
hese eleven compelling stories reveal the interplay and varying hues of two basic elements of human experience -- memory and desire, Gladys Swan's characters are frequently forced to shed their illusions as they struggle to shape their lives. The title story, like many of the others in the collection, has as its backdrop the beautiful but sometimes harsh landscape of the American Southwest. There a reclusive farmer known as Goat Man takes in a young Mexican boy as his companion. When the greed of a tax collector and the complicity of a community destroy Goat Man, the boy vanishes into the night but returns in the form of a legend, a reminder to the residents of the valley of their changing, crueler world. In another story a traveling carnival breaks down when a sandstorm does final damage to the dreams of the company, and a tired, almost defeated woman attempts to regroup and continue what has been so hopefully called "Carnival for the Gods." An older couple, carrying their Jewish past to a "Land of Promise." Discovers instead an alien territory and must struggle from day to day, one leaning to the past, the other inclining toward an unattainable vision of the future. In "The Ink Feather" a small, lonely girl, witness to endless quarrels between her mother and her much older brother, draws comfort from the world of her dolls and the prospect of adventure outside the mist-covered windows of her house. In "Getting an Education" a diffident young woman, "trying to be a student and to discover what she ought to be learning," finds insight in the details of the lives around her, especially the secretive, eccentric existence of one of her professors. A widowed grandmother, in "Black Hole," is impregnated during a chance encounter with a nameless stranger and shocks her family when she determines to give birth to and raise her child. Like that grandmother, all of the characters in these fictions -- whether from the comfortable middle class or the fringes of society -- are at odds with themselves and their world. It is Gladys Swan's special gift that she can so seamlessly depict the particular terrors and wonders of their lives. This is a mesmerizing collection.
T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf were almost exact contemporaries, readers and critics of each others' work, and friends for over twenty years. Their writings, though, are rarely paired. Modernism, Memory, and Desire proposes that some striking correspondences exist in Eliot and Woolf's poetic, fictional, critical, and autobiographical texts, particularly in their recurring turn to the language of desire, sensuality, and the body to render memory's processes. The book includes extensive archival research on some mostly unknown bawdy poetry by T. S. Eliot while offering readings of major work by both writers, including The Waste Land, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Orlando and To the Lighthouse. McIntire juxtaposes Eliot and Woolf with several major modernist thinkers of memory, including Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin, to offer compelling reconsiderations of the relation between textuality, remembrance and the body in modernist literature.
Melanie Klein Today, Volume 1 is the first of two volumes of collected essays devoted to developments in psychoanalysis based on the work of Melanie Klein. The papers are arranged into four groups: the analysis of psychotic patients, projective identification, on thinking, and pathalogical organisation.
This ground breaking new work draws together a cross-section of South African scholars to provide a lively and comprehensive review of the under-researched area of heritage practice following the introduction of the National Heritage Resources Act. Looking at the daily heritage debates, from naming streets to projects such as the Gateway to Robben Island, Desire Lines addresses the innovative strategies that have emerged in the practice of defining, identifying and developing heritage sites. In a unique multi-disciplinary approach, contributions are featured from a broad spectrum of fields, including the built environment and public culture and education. Showcasing work from tour operators and museum curators alongside that of university-based scholars, this book is a comprehensive and singularly authoritative volume that charts the development of new and emergent public cultures in post-apartheid South Africa through the making and unmaking of its urban spaces. This pioneering collection of essays and case studies is an indispensable guide for those working within or studying heritage practice.
The first comprehensive treatment of how "an American poet so profoundly shaped or affected the modern British novel," this--in the words of James E. Miller, Jr.--details "an extraordinary and even exciting literary fact, worthy of full documentation and exploration. "The book begins with an introduction describing how The Waste Land blew into England in 1922, as William Empson said, "not unlike an east wind." Although the critics disagree over what the poem means, all writers since 1922 have felt its influence in some degree, even if only in rejecting it. The author then traces echoes of The Waste Land in 17 major British novelists, confining himself to cases where the evidence is too strong to be explained as coincidence. The authors are divided into three groups. Part I assesses the poem's early impact, as seen in the work of writers already established at the time of its publication. Novelists discussed in this section include E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley. There is also a chapter on Richard Aldinton that contains a fascinating revaluation, based on extensive research, of Aldington's personal quarrel with Eliot. Part II examines the different sort of influence The Waste Land exerted on novelists who came to prominence in the decade before World War II. For these writers--among them Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Christopher Isherwood, C. S. Lewis, and Graham Greene--the poem was a basic part of their literary education, and was therefore woven more deeply, and frequently, into the fabric of their work. Part III focuses on two writers of the postwar era, Iris Murdoch and Anthony Burgess. With the rest of their generation they had been forced to recognize a horror more oppressive than the banality and blight of Eliot's "Unreal City," yet they found in the The Waste Land images and meanings so compelling that the poem retains an undeniable presence in their work. In his conclusion, Dr. Crawford attributes The Waste Land's uniquely powerful impact to four qualities: its timing in providing "prototypes for almost every modern problem"; its challenging elusiveness; its ambiguity, which "allows every reader to draw his own conclusion regarding the poem's meaning"; and its haunting symbols and descriptions. The "rhetoric of fiction" is especially sensitive to such qualities. The result is the British novelists "have helped to 'define' The Waste Land by their varied use of it."
This new collection brings together a selection of Val Mulkerns' short fiction from three collections, Antiquities (AndrE Deutsch, 1978), An Idle Woman, (Poolbeg Press, 1980) and A Friend of Don Juan (John Murray, 1988). The stories take us from the cell of a rebel prisoner in 1916 through hard times in Dublin of the 1930s, the changing world of Ireland in the 60s and 70s and finally the eponymous 'Memory and Desire, ' a quintessential tale of the 80s. Irish author Colm TOibIn described the title story as "one of the finest short stories that has been published in Ireland for many years." Sebastian Barry has described Val Mulkerns as "a masterly writer in the tradition of SeAn O FaolAin" and Booker Prize winner Anne Enright has said about the collection: "When writing is this accurate, this good, it does not fade." In her Irish Times review of the work, Enright continued: "it is remarkable how these stories, published between 1978 and 1988, consistently point to things we pretended, in those days, not to know." The collection, often taking in characters largely ignored by Irish fiction writers, provides a keen and compelling glimpse of Irish society with prose that Sebastian Barry also called, "beautiful stories so composed they border on a very special Mulkernsian wildness."
Desire and Distance constitutes an important new departure in contemporary phenomenological thought, a rethinking and critique of basic philosophical positions concerning the concept of perception presented by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, though it departs in significant and original ways from their work. Barbaras's overall goal is to develop a philosophy of what "life" isone that would do justice to the question of embodiment and its role in perception and the formation of the human subject. Barbaras posits that desire and distance inform the concept of "life." Levinas identified a similar structure in Descartes's notion of the infinite. For Barbaras, desire and distance are anchored not in meaning, but in a rethinking of the philosophy of biology and, in consequence, cosmology. Barbaras elaborates and extends the formal structure of desire and distance by drawing on motifs as yet unexplored in the French phenomenological tradition, especially the notions of "life" and the "life-world," which are prominent in the later Husserl but also appear in non-phenomenological thinkers such as Bergson. Barbaras then filters these notions (especially "life") through Merleau-Ponty.
