Inventing the Egghead
Inventing the Egghead

Author: Aaron Lecklider

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-04-09

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0812244869

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Throughout the twentieth century, popular songs, magazine articles, plays, posters, and novels alternated between representing intelligence as empowering and as threatening. In Inventing the Egghead, Aaron Lecklider cracks open this paradox by examining representations of intelligence to reveal brainpower's stalwart appeal and influence.

The Feast of the Goat
The Feast of the Goat

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2011-03-04

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1429921781

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WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE In The Feast of the Goat, this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' (Bookforum), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit. Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. "A fierce, edgy and enthralling book ... Mr. Vargas Llosa has pushed the boundaries of the traditional historical novel, and in doing so has written a book of harrowing power and lasting resonance."--The New York Times

Beyond Tomorrow
Beyond Tomorrow

Author: Ingo Cornils

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1640140352

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Shows German Science Fiction's connections with utopian thought, and how it attempts Zukunftsbewältigung: coping with an uncertain but also unwritten future.

Re-thinking Europe
Re-thinking Europe

Author: Nele Bemong

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 904202352X

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Re-Thinking Europe sets out to investigate the place of the idea of Europe in literature and comparative literary studies. The essays in this collection turn to the past, in which Europe became synonymous with a tradition of peace and tolerance beyond national borders, and enter into a critical dialogue with the present, in which Europe has increasingly become associated with a history of oppression and violence. The different essays together demonstrate how the idea of Europe cannot be thought apart from the tension between the regional and the global, between nationalism and pluralism, and can therefore be re-thought as an opportunity for an identity beyond national or ethnic borders. Engaging contemporary discourses on hybrid, postcolonial, and transnational identity, this volume shows how literature can function as both a vital tool to forge new identities and a power subversive of such attempts at identity-formation. Like Europe, it is always marked by the tension between integration and resistance. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of modern literature, comparative literature, and European studies, as well as people concerned with cultural memory and the relation between literature and cultural identity.

Floating Islands
Floating Islands

Author: Richard J. Heggen

Publisher: Richard Heggen

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 1227

ISBN-13:

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Floating Islands in science, history, the arts and any number of sightings elsewhere

Hope & Scorn
Hope & Scorn

Author: Michael J. Brown

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-10-02

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 022672770X

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Intellectuals “have been both rallying points and railed against in American politics, vessels of hope and targets of scorn,” writes Michael J. Brown as he invigorates a recurrent debate in American life: Are intellectual public figures essential voices of knowledge and wisdom, or out-of-touch elites? Hope and Scorn investigates the role of high-profile experts and thinkers in American life and their ever-fluctuating relationship with the political and public spheres. From Eisenhower’s era to Obama’s, the intellectual’s role in modern democracy has been up for debate. What makes an intellectual, and who can claim that privileged title? What are intellectuals’ obligations to society, and how, if at all, are their contributions compatible with democracy? For some, intellectuals were models of civic engagement. For others, the rise of the intellectual signaled the fall of the citizen. Carrying us through six key moments in this debate, Brown expertly untangles the shifting anxieties and aspirations for democracy in America in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Hope and Scorn begins with “egghead” politicians like Adlai Stevenson; profiles scholars like Richard Hofstadter and scholars-turned-politicians like H. Stuart Hughes; and ends with the rise of public intellectuals such as bell hooks and Cornel West. In clear and unburdened prose, Brown explicates issues of power, authority, political backlash, and more. Hope and Scorn is an essential guide to American concerns about intellectuals, their myriad shortcomings, and their formidable abilities.

Collected Early Fiction, 1949-1964: Collected novellas
Collected Early Fiction, 1949-1964: Collected novellas

Author: Arno Schmidt

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 9781564780669

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The novella was Schmidt's preferred form at the beginning of his writing career, and this volume collects the ten novellas he wrote between "Entymesis" (1949) and "Republica Intelligentsia" (1957). The settings range from ancient Greece to 21st-Century America, but all react to the stifling conservatism and cold prudery of Adenauer Germany. Bursting with intellectual and sexual energies, resuscitating the German language after two decades of Nazi subjugation, these novellas revolutionized German literature in the 1950s and retain their power to shock and delight forty years later. Schmidt has been called a "giant of the modernist tradition, an enormously important talent in the fictional line of cruel comedy that runs from Rabelais through Swift and Joyce" ("New York Review of Books"). This edition of his collected fiction should restore Schmidt to his rightful place at the forefront of 20th-century writing.

Belighted Fiction
Belighted Fiction

Author: Eckhard Gerdes

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2001-05-29

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0595184367

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In a literary world where we see the constant rush of lemmings diving gleefully off cliffs into the seas of mediocrity and convention, it is refreshing to find that there are creative writers out there who are willing to keep the lighthouse of the avant-garde lit. In this collection one finds fiction fulfilling its core purposes: to warn, to enlighten, to illuminate. As editor Eckhard Gerdes says in his foreword, if you're looking for conventions, buy yourself a fez! What you'll find here is thought-provoking and emotive work, charged with the spirit of delight and wonder as each new possibility is uncovered. This is, without a doubt, some of the best writing of our times. The works in this collection can rub elbows with the great and hold their own. If there is an afterlife, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Richard Brautigan, Italo Calvino, Laurence Sterne, Donald Barthelme, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Samuel Beckett, Kenneth Patchen, and Eugene Ionesco are all looking at this work and are nodding and smiling.