Assembly of the Severed Head
Author: Hugh Lupton
Publisher:
Published: 2018-06
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9780992946050
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The Severed Head
Author: Julia Kristeva
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 0231157207
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRenowned philosopher and cultural theorist Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) offers an extended consideration of artistic figurations of the severed head, the organizing theme to an exhibition she coordinated at the Louvre in 1998. Though she follows a single historical trajectory, moving from Paleolithic skull cults to antique Greek sculpture to the Surrealist drawings, Kristeva eschews the disciplinary constraints of art history, instead employing psychoanalysis to explore the intertwined problems of representation and mortality posed by the severed head. For Kristeva, the capacity to figure the life of the mind first requires a confrontation with this horrific object that stands at the boundary between life and death, registering not only the loss of corporeal form but also subjective interiority. Though this book does not engage with recent images of decapitation, it is not without contemporary political-cultural import; for Kristeva, these cruel artistic figurations offer us the capacity to contemplate the sacred within a technology-driven contemporary visual culture. Verdict While a challenging text, this beautifully written and richly layered meditation on mortality and representation will undoubtedly appeal to those readers interested in semiotic and psychoanalytically informed readings of art.-Jonathan Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr.(c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
The Severed Tower
Author: J. Barton Mitchell
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2013-11-19
Total Pages: 398
ISBN-13: 1250009472
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn an alien-invaded post-apocalyptic world, the children forge deeper into the most dangerous lands in search of The Severed Tower, an infamous location in the middle of the world's most dangerous landscape: The Strange Lands, a place where the laws of physics have completely broken down. But the closer they get to the Tower, the more precarious things become.
Assembly
Author: Natasha Brown
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2021-09-14
Total Pages: 85
ISBN-13: 0316268461
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis blistering, fearless, and unforgettable literary novel finds a woman with everything on the line and a life-or-death decision waiting for her—perfect for fans of Claudia Rankine and Jenny Offill. Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Go to college, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy an apartment. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep quiet. And keep going. The narrator of Assembly is a black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can’t escape the question: is it time to take it all apart? Assembly is a story about the stories we live within – those of race and class, safety and freedom, winners and losers.And it is about one woman daring to take control of her own story, even at the cost of her life. With a steely, unfaltering gaze, Natasha Brown dismantles the mythology of whiteness, lining up the debris in a neat row and walking away. "Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway meets Claudia Rankine's Citizen...as breathtakingly graceful as it is mercilessly true.”—Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy and Asylum Road A woman confronts the most important question of her life in this blistering, fearless, and unforgettable literary debut from "a stunning new writer." (Bernardine Evaristo) “A quiet, measured call to revolution…This is the kind of book that doesn’t just mark the moment things change, but also makes that change possible.”—Ali Smith, author of Summer "Brilliant. Brown's gaze is piercing."—Avni Doshi, author of Burnt Sugar
Folk Tales of Song and Dance
Author: Pete Castle
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2021-02-26
Total Pages: 227
ISBN-13: 0750996943
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe life of the travelling musician hasn't changed much over the millennia. For a prehistoric harper, a medieval fiddler or a modern guitar player, the experience is pretty much the same: there are times when everything goes well and others when nothing does. But it's not just performing that can go wrong – listening can also be dangerous! Can you stop dancing when you get tired or must you keep going until the music stops ... if it ever does? What happens if it carries on past midnight? What if it turns you to stone? Pete Castle has selected a variety of traditional tales from all over the UK (and a few from further afield) to enthral you, whether you are a musician, a dancer, or a reader who likes to keep dangerous things like singing and dancing at arm's length.
Discovering the Brain
Author: National Academy of Sciences
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 1992-01-01
Total Pages: 195
ISBN-13: 0309045290
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe brain ... There is no other part of the human anatomy that is so intriguing. How does it develop and function and why does it sometimes, tragically, degenerate? The answers are complex. In Discovering the Brain, science writer Sandra Ackerman cuts through the complexity to bring this vital topic to the public. The 1990s were declared the "Decade of the Brain" by former President Bush, and the neuroscience community responded with a host of new investigations and conferences. Discovering the Brain is based on the Institute of Medicine conference, Decade of the Brain: Frontiers in Neuroscience and Brain Research. Discovering the Brain is a "field guide" to the brainâ€"an easy-to-read discussion of the brain's physical structure and where functions such as language and music appreciation lie. Ackerman examines: How electrical and chemical signals are conveyed in the brain. The mechanisms by which we see, hear, think, and pay attentionâ€"and how a "gut feeling" actually originates in the brain. Learning and memory retention, including parallels to computer memory and what they might tell us about our own mental capacity. Development of the brain throughout the life span, with a look at the aging brain. Ackerman provides an enlightening chapter on the connection between the brain's physical condition and various mental disorders and notes what progress can realistically be made toward the prevention and treatment of stroke and other ailments. Finally, she explores the potential for major advances during the "Decade of the Brain," with a look at medical imaging techniquesâ€"what various technologies can and cannot tell usâ€"and how the public and private sectors can contribute to continued advances in neuroscience. This highly readable volume will provide the public and policymakersâ€"and many scientists as wellâ€"with a helpful guide to understanding the many discoveries that are sure to be announced throughout the "Decade of the Brain."
The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue
Author: Patricia Palmer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 197
ISBN-13: 1107041848
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores actual and literary depictions of beheadings in sixteenth-century Ireland and addresses how violence is transcribed into art.
The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon
Author: Laure Murat
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-09-15
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 022602587X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon is built around a bizarre historical event and an off-hand challenge. The event? In December 1840, nearly twenty years after his death, the remains of Napoleon were returned to Paris for burial—and the next day, the director of a Paris hospital for the insane admitted fourteen men who claimed to be Napoleon. The challenge, meanwhile, is the claim by great French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) that he could recount the history of France through asylum registries. From those two components, Laure Murat embarks on an exploration of the surprising relationship between history and madness. She uncovers countless stories of patients whose delusions seem to be rooted in the historical or political traumas of their time, like the watchmaker who believed he lived with a new head, his original having been removed at the guillotine. In the troubled wake of the Revolution, meanwhile, French physicians diagnosed a number of mental illnesses tied to current events, from “revolutionary neuroses” and “democratic disease” to the “ambitious monomania” of the Restoration. How, Murat asks, do history and psychiatry, the nation and the individual psyche, interface? A fascinating history of psychiatry—but of a wholly new sort—The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon offers the first sustained analysis of the intertwined discourses of madness, psychiatry, history, and political theory.
The Taming of the Demons
Author: Jacob P. Dalton
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-06-28
Total Pages: 325
ISBN-13: 0300153929
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Taming of the Demons examines mythic and ritual themes of violence, demon taming, and blood sacrifice in Tibetan Buddhism. Taking as its starting point Tibet's so-called age of fragmentation (842 to 986 C.E.), the book draws on previously unstudied manuscripts discovered in the "library cave" near Dunhuang, on the old Silk Road. These ancient documents, it argues, demonstrate how this purportedly inactive period in Tibetan history was in fact crucial to the Tibetan assimilation of Buddhism, and particularly to the spread of violent themes from tantric Buddhism into Tibet at the local and the popular levels. Having shed light on this "dark age" of Tibetan history, the second half of the book turns to how, from the late tenth century onward, the period came to play a vital symbolic role in Tibet, as a violent historical "other" against which the Tibetan Buddhist tradition defined itself. -- Georges Dreyfus
The Ballad of John Clare
Author: Hugh Lupton
Publisher: Dedalus Retro
Published: 2023-11-29
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781915568465
DOWNLOAD EBOOK'The first novel from, the renowned storyteller Hugh Lupton opens with a scene that could be straight out of Thomas Hardy... A helpless observer of the damage that enclosure is doing to his beloved landscape and the people who live there, a young man torn between romantic love for his muse, Mary Joyce, and the consequences of a moment's folly with a woman named Betsy Jackson, Clare comes to see that ' the bright world has begun, one by one, to break its promises.' Yet, while the immediate causes of his grief and disillusionment are personal, they are always intricately linked to what is happening to the land - and it is to Lupton's great credit that, in this engaging and lyrical novel, he brings this relationship between emotional and psychological life and the environment into play at every turn. This vision transforms a bittersweet love story that takes place 'seven generations ago' into a study of the politics of land use, revealing the true nature of British agriculture as systematic exploitation of land and people whose tragic consequences Lupton notes in an afterward, 'we are reaping the full harvest of today.' John Burnside in The Times
