"These short, condensed prose poems demonstrate that the illogical has a logic of its own, and that the "real is underpinned by the surreal, rather than the other way around.""--
‘Gruffness and anger is passed along from person to person until a little dog starts a chain of happiness that reverses the trend. [A] pleasant picture book [that touches on] emotional maturity.’ —ALA Children’s Services Division.
Broken family bonds can be one of the most intense sources of conflict. This book - which provides vital insights into the dynamics of family and other forms of violence - explores the damage caused to familial and social bonds by escalating feelings of shame during marital quarrels. Theories and research from large-scale conflict, marital dispute and communication processes are reviewed and provide a background for Retzinger's new integrative theory, which focuses on social bonds. The theory is applied to four case studies of marital quarrels in order to advance understanding of the escalation and resolution of conflict. The book includes a description of an intensive case study method for analyzing discourse and provides
Critical Theory and Marital Quarrels: Dynamics of Passionate Speech analyzes the pneumatics of conflict through a discursive archeology of police reports, court proceedings, psychiatric cases, therapy sessions, eighteenth-century relationship advice literature, and the nineteenth-century fiction. Todor Hristov argues that in order to extract knowledge from the noise of the marital fights, preachers, moralists, physicians, alienists, sociologists discarded the words as a slag, and in consequence, they were unable to explain either the recurrence or the power of discord. This study is intended as an analysis of the discursive mechanism of contentious speech based on concepts derived from critical theory, discourse analysis, speech act theory and semiotics. The discursive mechanism of quarreling is summed up in the concept of passionate speech relevant beyond family scenes, to scenes of political or public contention. This book applies the concept to examine critically the language of contemporary couples therapy and to describe the unintended effects of the passions shared by the clients and the therapists.
Part memoir, part meditation, this book is an exploration of death from an “insider’s” point of view. Using the threads of her brother’s early death and her twenty years of work in hospice care, Eve Joseph utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable and illuminate her travels through the land of the dying. This is neither an academic text nor a self-help manual; rather, it is a foray into the land of death and dying as seen through the lens of art and the imagination. Rather than relying solely on narrative, In the Slender Margin gains momentum from a build-up of thematic resonances. Joseph writes toward thinking about death and in the process finds the brother she lost as a young girl. She wrote the book as a way to understand what she had seen: the mysterious and the horrific. Replete with literary allusions and references, from Joan Didion and Susan Sontag to D. H. Lawrence and Voltaire, this is an absolutely absorbing and inspired consideration of how we die and how we deal with it; a profoundly moving and helpful meditation on the mystery that awaits us all.