Marjorie Perloff's stunning book was one of the first to offer a serious and far-reaching examination of the momentous flourishing of Futurist aesthetics in the European art and literature of the early twentieth century. Offering penetrating considerations of the prose, visual art, poetry, and carefully crafted manifestos of Futurists from Russia to Italy, Perloff reveals the Moment's impulses and operations, tracing its echoes through the years to the work of "postmodern" figures like Roland Barthes. This updated edition, with its new preface, reexamines the Futurist Moment in the light of a new century, in which Futurist aesthetics seem to have steadily more to say to the present.

When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century’s catastrophes at the expense of literature’s prospective vision. Considering several key literary works, Eshel argues in Futurity that by grappling with watershed events of modernity, these works display a future-centric engagement with the past that opens up the present to new political, cultural, and ethical possibilities—what he calls futurity.

 

In this innovative approach to the practice of social science, Charles Ragin explores the use of fuzzy sets to bridge the divide between quantitative and qualitative methods. Paradoxically, the fuzzy set is a powerful tool because it replaces an unwieldy, "fuzzy" instrument—the variable, which establishes only the positions of cases relative to each other, with a precise one—degree of membership in a well-defined set.

Ragin argues that fuzzy sets allow a far richer dialogue between ideas and evidence in social research than previously possible. They let quantitative researchers abandon "homogenizing assumptions" about cases and causes, they extend diversity-oriented research strategies, and they provide a powerful connection between theory and data analysis. Most important, fuzzy sets can be carefully tailored to fit evolving theoretical concepts, sharpening quantitative tools with in-depth knowledge gained through qualitative, case-oriented inquiry. This book will revolutionize research methods not only in sociology, political science, and anthropology but in any field of inquiry dealing with complex patterns of causation.

Bird traces Dostoevsky’s path from his harsh childhood through his years as a political revolutionary and finally to his development into a writer, who fought his battles through the printed word. Delving into Dostoevsky’s youth, Bird reveals his struggles with epilepsy and his despotic treatment at the hands of his father, a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. Bird reveals how Dostoevsky, who championed the downtrodden throughout his career, first came into contact with the poor and oppressed through the hospital. He then outlines the years after Dostoevsky’s arrest and near-execution for being a member of an underground liberal intellectual group in 1849, detailing his subsequent exile with hard labor in Siberia and compulsory service in the army. As Bird illuminates how these grueling experiences contributed to the writing of novels like Notes from the Underground, he also describes how they instilled in the author a craving for social justice and quest for form that spurred his literary achievements. A fascinating look at this major writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky will pique the interest of any lover of literature.