The Urban Mystique
The Urban Mystique

Author: STEPHENS. JOSH

Publisher:

Published: 2020-04-17

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9781716036439

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Josh Stephens grew up in Los Angeles knowing that it was a perfectly pleasant place, with enviable weather, an impressive natural environment, and Hollywood glamour. But, still, he wondered whether a great city shouldn't be something ... more. With a title inspired by Betty Friedan's account of life in the suburbs, The Urban Mystique is equal part lamentation and celebration. It collects some of Josh's work from the California Planning & Development Report and elsewhere, covering everything from the minutiae of setbacks, the regional impacts of transit investments, the promise of smart growth and sustainability, the precariousness of urban politics in the 21st century, and the ineffable complexities that make all cities, be they in California or anywhere else, wondrous, maddening, and fascinating.

On Essays
On Essays

Author: Thomas Karshan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-09-04

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0191082112

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Montaigne called it a ramble; Chesterton the joke of literature; and Hume an ambassador between the worlds of learning and of conversation. But what is an essay, and how did it emerge as a literary form? What are the continuities and contradictions across its history, from Montaigne's 1580 Essais through the familiar intimacies of the Romantic essay, and up to more recent essayists such as Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Claudia Rankine? Sometimes called the fourth genre, the essay has been over-shadowed in literary history by fiction, poetry, and drama, and has proved notoriously resistant to definition. On Essays reveals in the essay a pattern of paradox: at once a pedagogical tool and a refusal of the methodical languages of universities and professions; politically engaged but retired and independent; erudite and anti-pedantic; occasional and enduring; intimate and oratorical; allusive and idiosyncratic. Perhaps because it is a form of writing against which literary scholarship has defined itself, there has been surprisingly little work on the tradition of the essay. Neither a comprehensive history nor a student companion, On Essays is a series of seventeen elegantly written essays on authors and aspects in the history of the genre - essays which, taken together, form the most substantial book yet published on the essay in Britain and America.