Beginning in the last third of the twentieth century, Australian literary and cultural studies underwent a profound transformation to become an important testing ground of new ideas and theories. How do Australian cultural products project a sense of the nation today? How do Australian writers, artists, and film directors imagine the Australian heritage and configure its place in a larger world that extends beyond Australia's shores?
Ranging from the country's colonial beginnings to its more globally oriented present, the nineteen essays by distinguished scholars working on the cutting edge of the field present a multi-faceted view of the vast land down under. A central theme is the relation of cultural products to nature and history. Issues explored include problems of race and gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, individual and national identity, subjective experience and international connections. Among others, the essays treat major authors such as Peter Carey, David Malouf, and Judith Wright.
A perennial garden is an ever-changing source of delight. Each season brings new colors and textures in flowers and foliage. As the years go by, perennial plantings mature and interweave into forms more beautiful and surprising than a season's growth of annuals can ever give. Best of all, a perennial garden can grow almost anywhere with plants suited to local soils, temperatures, and rainfall.
This book is a complete guide to perennial gardening in Texas and similar regions of eastern New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas. In Part One, Julie Ryan offers a historical sketch of cottage gardens and perennial borders, with a sampler of some of their modern variations. In Part Two, she defines the major ecological regions of Texas and, with words and color photographs, takes you on a tour of lovely public and private gardens in each region.
You'll find all the "how to" information for creating your own garden in Part Three. Ms. Ryan describes and pictures over 300 flowering perennials, bulbs, foliage plants, and old roses suitable for Texas gardens, with lists of companion annuals, vines, shrubs, and small trees. Accompanying charts provide quick reference to each plant's preferred regions and cultivation requirements. In addition, Ms. Ryan discusses how to design a garden and select plants, prepare the beds, and deal with garden pests. She concludes with substantial lists of resources, including mail-order suppliers of perennials, bulbs, and old roses.
The first work to combine literary criticism with other forms of death penalty–abolitionist writing, Demands of the Dead demonstrates the active importance of literature and literary criticism to the struggle for greater justice in the United States. Gathering personal essays, scholarly articles, and creative writings on the death penalty in American culture, this striking collection brings human voices and literary perspectives to a subject that is often overburdened by statistics and angry polemics. Contributors include death-row prisoners, playwrights, poets, activists, and literary scholars.
Highlighting collaborations between writers inside and outside prison, all within the context of the history of state killing laws and foundational concepts that perpetuate a culture of violent death, Demands of the Dead opens with a pamphlet dictated by Willie Francis, a teenager who survived a first execution attempt in Louisiana’s electric chair before he was subsequently killed by the state in 1947.
Writers are a conspicuous part of U.S. death-penalty history, composing a vibrant literary record of resistance to state killing. This multigenre collection both recalls and contributes to this tradition through discussions of such writers as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Gertrude Atherton, Ernest Gaines, Sonia Sanchez, Kia Corthron, and Sherman Alexie. A major contribution to literary studies and American prison studies, Demands of the Dead asserts the relevance of storytelling to ethical questions and matters of public policy.
The history of the United States is often told as a movement westward, beginning at the Atlantic coast and following farmers across the continent. But cities played an equally important role in the country’s formation. Towns sprung up along the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, as Spaniards and Englishmen took Indian land and converted it into private property. In this reworking of early American history, Mary P. Ryan shows how cities—specifically San Francisco and Baltimore—were essential parties to the creation of the republics of the United States and Mexico.
Baltimore and San Francisco share common roots as early trading centers whose coastal locations immersed them in an international circulation of goods and ideas. Ryan traces their beginnings back to the first human habitation of each area, showing how the juggernaut toward capitalism and nation-building could not commence until Europeans had taken the land for city building. She then recounts how Mexican ayuntamientos and Anglo American city councils pioneered a prescient form of municipal sovereignty that served as both a crucible for democracy and a handmaid of capitalism. Moving into the nineteenth century, Ryan shows how the citizens of Baltimore and San Francisco molded landscape forms associated with the modern city: the gridded downtown, rudimentary streetcar suburbs, and outlying great parks. This history culminates in the era of the Civil War when the economic engines of cities helped forge the East and the West into one nation.
For those who undergo it, infertility treatment is costly, time-consuming, invasive, and emotionally and physically arduous, yet technology remains the focus of most public discussion of the topic. Drawing on concepts from medical ethics, feminist theory, and Roman Catholic social teaching, Maura A. Ryan analyzes the economic, ethical, theological, and political dimensions of assisted reproduction.
Taking seriously the experience of infertility as a crisis of the self, the spirit, and the body, Ryan argues for the place of reproductive technologies within a temperate, affordable, sustainable, and just health care system. She contends that only by ceasing to treat assisted reproduction as a consumer product can meaningful questions about medical appropriateness and social responsibility be raised. She places infertility treatments within broader commitments to the common good, thereby understanding reproductive rights as an inherently social, rather than individual, issue. Arguing for some limits on access to reproductive technology, Ryan considers ways to assess the importance of assisted reproduction against other social and medical prerogatives and where to draw the line in promoting fertility. Finally, Ryan articulates the need for a compassionate spirituality within faith communities that will nurture those who are infertile.
Ryan evaluates the nature and effectiveness of U.S. trade diplomacy with Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China in the 1970s and 1980s by examining the diplomatic strategies used by the U.S. Trade Representative to enforce Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which was designed to protect free trade and competition through investigations, negotiations, and sanctions.
Ryan shows the different trade diplomacy tactics the East Asian governments pursued during dispute settlement negotiations with the USTR. The study also evaluates the fit between the East Asian political economies and the rules and principles of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) regime. It explores the capabilities of the multilateral and minilateral regional institutions of trade dispute in the Pacific to settle emerging trade disputes. In the debate over rule-based or power-based diplomacy, Ryan concludes that U.S. trade diplomacy was most successful when it was rule-based, and that it gained significant compliance with GATT and other fair trade agreements.
Ryan interviewed many of the key trade negotiators in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Beijing, and Washington. His analysis is based on the largest, most systematic, market sector-specific data set yet presented on U.S. export trade dispute settlement in the Pacific. It studies the structure of state power, the structures of international business competition in manufacturing, agriculture, and services, the international and regional institutions of trade diplomacy, and the national governmental institutions of trade diplomacy in the Pacific.
Anyone interested in international trade or diplomacy will find this book a source of new insight into the dynamics of trans-Pacific trade.
Often depicted as one of the world’s most strictly isolationist and relentlessly authoritarian regimes, North Korea has remained terra incognita to foreign researchers as a site for anthropological fieldwork. Given the difficulty of gaining access to the country and its people, is it possible to examine the cultural logic and social dynamics of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea?
In this innovative book, Sonia Ryang casts new light onto the study of North Korean culture and society by reading literary texts as sources of ethnographic data. Analyzing and interpreting the rituals and language embodied in a range of literary works published in the 1970s and 1980s, Ryang focuses critical attention on three central themes—love, war, and self—that reflect the nearly complete overlap of the personal, social, and political realms in North Korean society. The ideology embedded in these propagandistic works laid the cultural foundation for the nation as a “perpetual ritual state,” where social structures and personal relations are suspended in tribute to Kim Il Sung, the political and spiritual leader who died in 1994 but lives eternally in the hearts of his people and still weaves the social fabric of present-day North Korea.
Cradled among the world’s highest mountains—and sheltering one of its most devout religious communities—Tibet is, for many of us, an ultimate destination, a place that touches the heavens, a place only barely in our world, at its very end. In recent decades Western fascination with Tibet has soared, from the rise of Tibetan studies in academia to the rock concerts aimed at supporting its independence to the simple fact that most of us—far from any base camp—know exactly what a sherpa is. And yet any sustained look into Tibet as a place, any attempt to find one’s way around its high plateaus and through its deep history, will yield this surprising fact: we have barely mapped it. With this atlas, Karl E. Ryavec rights that wrong, sweeping aside the image of Tibet as Shangri-La and putting in its place a comprehensive vision of the region as it really is, a civilization in its own right. And the results are absolutely stunning.
The product of twelve years of research and eight more of mapmaking, A Historical Atlas of Tibet documents cultural and religious sites across the Tibetan Plateau and its bordering regions from the Paleolithic and Neolithic times all the way up to today. It ranges through the five main periods in Tibetan history, offering introductory maps of each followed by details of western, central, and eastern regions. It beautifully visualizes the history of Tibetan Buddhism, tracing its spread throughout Asia, with thousands of temples mapped, both within Tibet and across North China and Mongolia, all the way to Beijing. There are maps of major polities and their territorial administrations, as well as of the kingdoms of Guge and Purang in western Tibet, and of Derge and Nangchen in Kham. There are town plans of Lhasa and maps that focus on history and language, on population, natural resources, and contemporary politics.
Extraordinarily comprehensive and absolutely gorgeous, this overdue volume will be a cornerstone in cartography, Asian studies, Buddhist studies, and in the libraries or on the coffee tables of anyone who has ever felt the draw of the landscapes, people, and cultures of the highest place on Earth.
A Wisconsin story that serves as a national warning
UW Struggle provides an on-the-ground view of the smoldering attack on public higher education in Wisconsin. Chuck Rybak, who works in the University of Wisconsin System, provides important glimpses into the personal lives of those affected, the dismantling of tenure protections, the diminishment of shared governance, and how faculty remain the scapegoat for all of the university’s problems. This is a chronicle of failed leadership and what actions, if any, can protect this vital American institution.
John Rybicki offers up an unafraid set of poems in this charged book of verse. We Bed Down Into Water is rich with imagery of family, love, illness, death, and, indeed, water, which seeps in throughout the pages: rivers, pools, rain, and tears. His moving stories, in both prose and verse, struggle to hang on to a vision of the world that can still allow benevolence, luck, and laughter. In this, the collection embodies a contradiction: it is a tender book of fury, a book of bleak hopefulness.
Rybicki’s work is steeped in challenge: the biological and spiritual challenge posed by his beloved’s recurrent cancer or the daily challenges of an adopted child who could be, all too easily, lost. He spins these phenomenal struggles into a lyrical book that offers hope and awakens the reader into a new way of seeing.
Jennifer Rycenga recovers a pioneering example of antiracism and Black-white cooperation. At once an inspirational and cautionary tale, Canterbury Academy succeeded thanks to far-reaching networks, alliances, and activism that placed it within Black, women’s, and abolitionist history. Rycenga focuses on the people like Sarah Harris, the Academy’s first Black student; Maria Davis, Crandall’s Black housekeeper and her early connection to the embryonic abolitionist movement; and Crandall herself. Telling their stories, she highlights the agency of Black and white women within the currents, and as a force changing those currents, in nineteenth-century America.
Insightful and provocative, Schooling the Nation tells the forgotten story of remarkable women and a collaboration across racial and gender lines.
The U.S. Supreme Court—at least until Bush v. Gore—had seemed to float along in an apolitical haze in the mind of the electorate. It was the executive branch and the legislative branch that mucked about in politics getting dirty, the judicial branch kept its robes—and nose—clean. The U.S. Supreme Court and the Electoral Process makes it abundantly clear however that before, during, and after the judicial decision that made George W. Bush the President of the United States, everything was, is, and will likely be, politics-including the decisions handed down by the highest court in the land.
This revised and updated edition takes into account not only the recent famous (or infamous, depending on the reader's point of view) judicial decision on the Presidency, but a myriad of others as well in which the U.S. Supreme Court has considered the constitutionality of a wide range of issues involving voting and elections, representation, and political participation. Practitioners and academics in both law and political science examine a number of court actions that directly affect how we choose those who govern us, and how those decisions have affected our electoral politics, constitutional doctrine, and the fundamental concepts of democracy, including: racial redistricting, term limits, political patronage, campaign finance regulations, third-party ballot access, and state ballot initiatives limiting civil liberties.
Of the first edition, CHOICE said, The U.S. Supreme Court and the Electoral Process "plumbs the Supreme Court's constitutive apolitical role as 'primary shaper of the electoral system' and reveals the pervasive involvement of the Court in the political process."
Any landscape has an unseen component: a subjective component of experience, memory, and narrative which people familiar with the place understand to be an integral part of its geography but which outsiders may not suspect the existence of—unless they listen and read carefully. This invisible landscape is make visible though stories, and these stories are the focus of this engrossing book.
Traveling across the invisible landscape in which we imaginatively dwell, Kent Ryden—himself a most careful listener and reader—asks the following questions. What categories of meaning do we read into our surroundings? What forms of expression serve as the most reliable maps to understanding those meanings? Our sense of any place, he argues, consists of a deeply ingrained experiential knowledge of its physical makeup; an awareness of its communal and personal history; a sense of our identity as being inextricably bound up with its events and ways of life; and an emotional reaction, positive or negative, to its meanings and memories.
Ryden demonstrates that both folk and literary narratives about place bear a striking thematic and stylistic resemblance. Accordingly, Mapping the Invisible Landscape examines both kinds of narratives. For his oral materials, Ryden provides an in-depth analysis of narratives collected in the Coeur d'Alene mining district in the Idaho panhandle; for his consideration of written works, he explores the “essay of place,” the personal essay which takes as its subject a particular place and a writer's relationship to that place.
Drawing on methods and materials from geography, folklore, and literature, Mapping the Invisible Landscape offers a broadly interdisciplinary analysis of the way we situate ourselves imaginatively in the landscape, the way we inscribe its surface with stories. Written in an extremely engaging style, this book will lead its readers to an awareness of the vital role that a sense of place plays in the formation of local cultures, to an understanding of the many-layered ways in which place interacts with individual lives, and to renewed appreciation of the places in their own lives and landscapes.
The first book in English on the founder of Arabic linguistic theory, this interdisciplinary collection explores the contributions to Arabic intellectual history of al-Khalil ibn Ahmad, (d. A.H. 175/A.D. 791).
Al-Khalil was distinguished in his own time as a lexicographer, phonologist, grammarian, educator and musicologist. In the Arab world, his stature is almost legendary, although information on his life, his works and his achievements is fragmented. He is remembered principally for two achievements: the creation of the first dictionary of the Arabic language (Kitab al-'ayn, "The Book of 'ayn"), and discovery of the rule-governed metrical systems used in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. His biographers also cite publications on musical theory and have preserved fragments of his poetry. In addition to these achievements, he was also the teacher of the medieval Islamic world's most distinguished authority on Arabic grammar, Sibawayh.
Conceived as a tribute to al-Khalil’s influence on Arabic language sciences, this book provides a new and broader perspective on al-Khalil’s talents, character, and fields of interest. It should be of interest to Arabic linguists, medievalists, historians of linguistics, theoretical linguists, historians of science and scholars of medieval Arab intellectual history.
This guide clearly and succinctly presents the basic tenets of teaching foreign languages specifically for Arabic teachers. Consolidating findings from second language acquisition (SLA) research and applied linguistics, it covers designing curricula, theory and methods, goals, testing, and research, and intersperses practical information with background literature in order to help teachers improve their teaching of Arabic as a foreign language (TAFL).
Karin C. Ryding, a well-regarded scholar of Arabic linguistics and former president of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, frames the discussion with SLA literature and suggests practical and effective ways of helping students learn. Ryding discusses issues at the core of Arabic teaching effectiveness and the achievement of communicative competence, such as the teaching of pronunciation, speaking, reading, listening, and writing; teaching mixed-level classes; creative classroom organization; corrective feedback; and use of activities and exercises, with plenty of examples from Arabic and tips for teachers. She also covers materials development and proficiency testing, providing study questions and recommended readings for each chapter.
This guide, which can be used as a textbook, is the first of its kind aimed specifically at TAFL, and should be of interest to Arabic instructors-in-training, academics, graduate students, linguists, department chairs, language coordinators, and teacher trainers. It also serves as a resource for teachers of other less commonly taught languages (LCTLs), who struggle with similar issues.
This new edition, updated and with additional exercises, equips those who work, travel, and study in Arab countries with an educated form of spoken Arabic that functions flexibly in the face of various regional colloquial variants in the Arab world.
Because the Arabic language has a number of very different spoken vernaculars, being able to speak and be understood in all Arab countries has become a challenge for English speakers. Ryding and Mehall have designed a course that teaches a standardized variant of spoken Arabic that is close to, but more natural than, the literary Modern Standard Arabic.
With a non-grammar-based approach, this book fosters communicative competence in Arabic on all levels and develops speaking proficiency without abandoning Arabic script. It has proven to be clear, effective, and relevant to the needs of Americans living and working in the Arab East. Task-based lessons feature basic dialogues between Americans and Arabs, explanations of new structures, vocabulary expansion, and exercises; and provide gradual access to the sounds and script of Arabic by emphasizing listening and reading comprehension first, then slowly adding oral exercises and activities until the student has achieved basic proficiency.
Not intended for self-instruction for beginners, Formal Spoken Arabic Basic Course with MP3 Files assumes some previous knowledge of Modern Standard Arabic, Arabic script and phonology, and previous or simultaneous instruction in orthography. This new edition includes a CD of MP3 audio exercises that are keyed to the text and drill students on listening and speaking.
Lessons cover topics including:
Heads of StateCities and CountriesOfficial TitlesGeographySystems of GovernmentLost LuggageGetting AcquaintedEstablishing Common GroundSeeking and Giving InformationPersonal Needs and FamilyHandling ProblemsEating OutBargaining and Buying
Al-'Arabiyya is the annual journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic and serves scholars in the United States and abroad. Al-'Arabiyya includes scholarly articles and reviews that advance the study, research, and teaching of Arabic language, linguistics, literature, and pedagogy.
This Arabic language-learning classic is now enhanced with a bound-in CD of MP3 files. Designed to provide beginners in Arabic with maximum linguistic and cultural exposure in a short period (about 100 hours of contact time), this book consists of sixteen lessons with dialogs and exercises dealing with day-to-day scenarios: greeting people, getting a taxi, making phone calls, asking directions, discussing the weather, and effectively communicating with police and duty officers. The lessons help the reader to navigate situations at gas stations, marketplaces, restaurants, and in their own households.
Formal Spoken Arabic (FSA) is a kind of lingua franca that is more natural than speaking Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the literary form of the language. FSA uses the shared features of the various urban colloquial dialects, defaulting to Levantive (terms common to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan) where the spoken dialects diverge. Each lesson includes cultural notes on American-Arab interactions, notes on learner strategies for managing Arabic conversations with a limited amount of language, and grammar explanations in clear, non-technical language. Although the main dialogue for each lesson is presented in Arabic script, transcriptions are used to accelerate spoken performance. The FAST Course includes grammatical explanations, English-Arabic and Arabic-English glossaries, appendices listing common idioms, courtesy expressions and other useful terms, instructor's notes, and drills aided and accompanied by the CD.
Originally created for diplomats, this is an expanded and enhanced edition of a work originally developed by the U.S. State Department as a six-week intensive, or "FAST" (Familiarization and Short-Term) course, and is easily adaptable for students in Middle East area studies. Travelers heading for posts in the Arab world who quickly need to gain a basic ability to converse in day-to-day situations will find Formal Spoken Arabic FAST Course an invaluable companion.
The concept of marriage as a union of a man and a woman was fundamentally challenged by the introduction of registered partnership in Denmark in 1989. Odd Couples is the first comprehensive history of registered partnership and gay marriage in Scandinavia. It traces the origins of laws which initially were extremely controversial—inside and outside the gay community—but have now gained broad popular and political support, as well as the positive effects and risks involved in state recognition of lesbian and gay couples. Through a comparison of how these laws have been received and practiced in all of the Scandinavian countries, including Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the author presents a nuanced study of a fascinating political process that began in the 1960s and continues to change the way we understand family, sexuality and nation.
Whether it's the sudden, plunging dives of Brown Pelicans, the singing and aerial displays of Northern Mockingbirds, or the communal nesting of Purple Martins, innate and learned behaviors are some of the most fascinating things to observe in Texas birds. Even casual birdwatchers eventually ask, "why do they do that?" while serious birders and ornithologists seek to understand all the behaviors involved in feeding, flying, mating, and rearing young. But until now, it has been hard to find this information in one handy source.
In this comprehensive, yet easy-to-use book, Kent Rylander distills data from many sources to provide an authoritative guide to the behavior of Texas birds. He begins by explaining the principles of animal behavior and illustrating how they can be applied to interpreting bird behaviors in the field. The majority of the book is devoted to accounts of more than 400 species of birds that are most likely to be encountered by Texas birdwatchers. Each account describes such behaviors as feeding, courtship, parenting, and other behaviors that are significant for that species. References to interesting and important articles from scientific journals are incorporated in the species accounts where appropriate, and line drawings illustrate some of the behaviors described.
The “Silver Age” (c. 1890-1917) has been one of the most intensely studied topics in Russian literary studies, and for years scholars have been struggling with its precise definition. Firmly established in the Russian cultural psyche, it continues to influence both literature and mass media. The Archaeology of Anxiety is the first extended analysis of why the Silver Age occupies such prominence in Russian collective consciousness.
Galina Rylkova examines the Silver Age as a cultural construct-the byproduct of an anxiety that permeated society in reaction to the social, political, and cultural upheavals brought on by the Bolshevik Revolution, the fall of the Romanovs, the Civil War, and Stalin's Great Terror. Rylkova's astute analysis of writings by Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak and Victor Erofeev reveals how the construct of the Silver Age was perpetuated and ingrained.
Rylkova explores not only the Silver Age's importance to Russia's cultural identity but also the sustainability of this phenomenon. In so doing, she positions the Silver Age as an essential element to Russian cultural survival.
“How has unbelief come to dominate so many Western societies? The usual account invokes the advance of science and rational knowledge. Ryrie’s alternative, in which emotions are the driving force, offers new and interesting insights into our past and present.”
—Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age
Why have societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? We think we know the answer, pointing to science and reason as the twin culprits, but in this lively, startlingly original reconsideration, Alec Ryrie argues that people embraced unbelief much as they have always chosen their worldviews: through the heart more than the mind.
Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, he shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. As Protestant radicals eroded time-honored certainties and ushered in an age of anger and anxiety, some defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics, setting in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious times.
“Well-researched and thought-provoking…Ryrie is definitely on to something right and important.”
—Christianity Today
“A beautifully crafted history of early doubt…Unbelievers covers much ground in a short space with deep erudition and considerable wit.”
—The Spectator
“Ryrie traces the root of religious skepticism to the anger, the anxiety, and the ‘desperate search for certainty’ that drove thinkers like…John Donne to grapple with church dogma.”
—New Yorker
The dramatic story of Christianity from its origins to the present day, told through more than one hundred stunning color maps.
With over two billion practicing believers today, Christianity has taken root in almost all parts of the globe. Its impact on Europe and the Americas in particular has been fundamental. Through more than one hundred beautiful color maps and illustrations, Christianity traces the history of the religion, beginning with the world of Jesus Christ. From the consolidation of the first Christian empire—Constantine’s Rome—to the early Christian states that thrived in Ireland, Ethiopia, and other regions of the Roman periphery, Christianity quickly proved dynamic and adaptable.
After centuries of dissemination, strife, dogmatic division, and warfare in its European and Near Eastern heartland, Christianity conquered new worlds. In North America, immigrants fleeing persecution and intolerance rejected the established Church, and in time revivalist religions flourished and spread. Missionaries took the Christian message to Latin America, Africa, and Asia, bringing millions of new converts into the fold.
Christianity has served as the inspiration for some of the world’s finest monuments, literature, art, and architecture, while also playing a major role in world politics and history, including conquest, colonization, conflict, and liberation. Despite challenges in the modern world from atheism and secularism, from scandals and internal divisions, Christianity continues to spread its message through new technologies while drawing on a deep well of history and tradition.
In Alberto Álvaro Ríos’s new picaresque novel, momentous adventure and quiet connection brings twenty people to life in a small town in northern Mexico. A Good Map of All Things is home to characters whose lives are interwoven but whose stories are their own, adding warmth and humor to this continually surprising communal narrative. The stories take place in the mid-twentieth century, in the high desert near the border—a stretch of land generally referred to as the Pimería Alta—an ancient passage through the desert that connected the territory of Tucson in the north and Guaymas and Hermosillo in the south. The United States is off in the distance, a little difficult to see, and, in the middle of the century, not the only thing to think about. Mexico City is somewhere to the south, but nobody can say where and nobody has ever seen it.
Ríos has created a whimsical yet familiar town, where brightly unique characters love fiercely and nurture those around them. The people in A Good Map of All Things have secrets and fears, successes and happiness, winters and summers. They are people who do not make the news, but who are living their lives for the long haul, without lotteries or easy answers or particular luck. Theirs is the everyday, with its small but meaningful joy. Whether your heart belongs to a small town in Mexico or a bustling metropolis, Alberto Álvaro Ríos has crafted a book that is overflowing with comfort, warmth, and the familiar embrace of a tightly woven community.
The topic of this book is self-consciousness, which is a kind of knowledge, namely knowledge of oneself as oneself, or self-knowledge. Sebastian Rödl's thesis is that self-knowledge is not empirical; it does not spring from sensory affection. Rather, self-knowledge is knowledge from spontaneity; its object and its source are the subject's own activity, in the primary instance its acts of thinking, both theoretical and practical thinking, belief and action.
The chapters of this book cover action and belief, freedom and reason, receptive knowledge and the second person. Each of these topics deserves its own book. And yet they would all be books on self-consciousness, for self-consciousness is the principle of their respective subject matters. Contemporary theories have been badly served by failing to acknowledge this. Taking the full measure of this insight requires a major conceptual reorientation in action theory, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology, which is begun in this book. As it can be said to be the principal thought animating Kant and his Idealist successors that self-consciousness occupies this central position, the book can be read as an attempt to recover and rejuvenate the achievement of the German Idealist tradition.
Self-Consciousness and Objectivity undermines a foundational dogma of contemporary philosophy: that knowledge, in order to be objective, must be knowledge of something that is as it is, independent of being known to be so. Sebastian Rödl revives the thought—as ancient as philosophy but largely forgotten today—that knowledge, precisely on account of being objective, is self-knowledge: knowledge knowing itself. Thus he intervenes in a discussion that runs through the work of Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, Adrian Moore, and others, who seek to comprehend the claim to objectivity we raise in making judgments. While these authors think that the quest for objectivity demands that we transcend the first person, Rödl argues that it is through the first-person thought contained in every judgment that our judgments possess the objectivity that defines knowledge.
Self-Consciousness and Objectivity can be read as an introduction to absolute idealism, for it dismantles a stubborn obstacle to absolute idealism’s reception: the notion that it is a species of idealism, which is understood to be the assertion that the world depends upon the mind. As Rödl brings out, absolute idealism is the resolute rejection of that idea.
The implications of this work are profound. It undercuts a number of contemporary presumptions, such as that judgment is a propositional attitude, that inference is a mental process, and that there is an empirical science of the capacity for objective knowledge. All of these presumptions flow from the erroneous notion that the objectivity of knowledge stands opposed to its first-person character.
The publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift in 1879 forever altered the landscape for many Western philosophers. Here, Sebastian Rödl traces how the Fregean influence, written all over the development and present state of analytic philosophy, led into an unholy alliance of an empiricist conception of sensibility with an inferentialist conception of thought.
According to Rödl, Wittgenstein responded to the implosion of Frege’s principle that the nature of thought consists in its inferential order, but his Philosophical Investigations shied away from offering an alternative. Rödl takes up the challenge by turning to Kant and Aristotle as ancestors of this tradition, and in doing so identifies its unacknowledged question: the relation of judgment and truth to time. Rödl finds in the thought of these two men the answer he urges us to consider: the temporal and the sensible, and the atemporal and the intelligible, are aspects of one reality and cannot be understood independently of one another. In demonstrating that an investigation into the categories of the temporal can be undertaken as a contribution to logic, Rödl seeks to transform simultaneously our philosophical understanding of both logic and time.
Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms—Yhwh, God, or Allah—by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE.
That we can address such enigmatic questions at all may come as a surprise. But as Römer makes clear, a wealth of evidence allows us to piece together a reliable account of the origins and evolution of the god of Israel. Römer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological, and exegetical work and on recent discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when he emerged somewhere in Edom or in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula as a god of the wilderness and of storms and war. He became the sole god of Israel and Jerusalem in fits and starts as other gods, including the mother goddess Asherah, were gradually sidelined. But it was not until a major catastrophe—the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah—that Israelites came to worship Yhwh as the one god of all, creator of heaven and earth, who nevertheless proclaimed a special relationship with Judaism.
A masterpiece of detective work and exposition by one of the world’s leading experts on the Hebrew Bible, The Invention of God casts a clear light on profoundly important questions that are too rarely asked, let alone answered.
Explore the opportunities and challenges of Septuagint studies
Recent research into the Septuagint has revealed numerous examples of modifications of the meaning of the Hebrew text in the course of its translation into Greek. This collection of essays by one of the leading scholars on the Septuagint shows how complex the translation of individual books was, provides reasons for differences between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, and paves the way for a theology of the Septuagint. Articles introduce the field of Septuagint studies, the problem of the Letter of Aristeas, and the Hellenistic environment and the hermeneutics of Hellenistic Judaism.
Features:
In this expanded second edition, award-winning Iranian filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum renew their illuminating cross-cultural dialogue on Kiarostami's work. The pair chart the filmmaker's late-in-life turn toward art galleries, museums, still photography, and installations. They also bring their distinct but complementary perspectives to a new conversation on the experimental film Shirin. Finally, Rosenbaum offers an essay on watching Kiarostami at home while Saeed-Vafa conducts a deeply personal interview with the director on his career and his final feature, Like Someone in Love.
Chronicles of a Caesarean partisan.
Sallust, Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86–35 BC), a Sabine from Amiternum, acted as tribune against Cicero and Milo in 52, joined Caesar after being expelled from the Senate in 50, was restored to the Senate by Caesar and took part in his African campaign as praetor in 46, and was then appointed governor of New Africa (Numidia). Upon his return to Rome he narrowly escaped conviction for malfeasance in office, retired from public life, and took up historiography. Sallust’s last work, the annalistic Histories in five books, is much more expansive than his monographs on Catiline and Jugurtha (LCL 116), treating the whole of Roman history at home and abroad in the post-Sullan age. Although fragmentary, it provides invaluable information and insight about a crucial period of history spanning the period from 78 to around 67 BC.
Although Sallust is decidedly unsubtle and partisan in analyzing people and events, his works are important and significantly influenced later historians, notably Tacitus. Taking Thucydides as his model but building on Roman stylistic and rhetorical traditions, Sallust achieved a distinctive style, concentrated and arresting; lively characterizations, especially in the speeches; and skill at using particular episodes to illustrate large general themes.
For this volume, which completes the Loeb Classical Library edition of Sallust’s works, John T. Ramsey has freshly edited the Histories and the two pseudo-Sallustian Letters to Caesar, supplying ample annotation.
Sallust, Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86-35 BCE) of Amiternum, after a wild youth became a supporter of Julius Caesar. He was tribune in 53; expelled from the Senate in 50; was quaestor in 49, praetor in 46. He saw Caesar triumph in Africa and became governor of Numidia, which he oppressed. Later in Rome he laid out famous gardens, retired from public life, and wrote a monograph on Catiline's conspiracy and one on the war with Jugurtha (both extant), and a history of Rome 78-67 BCE (little survives).
Though biased, Sallust's extant work is valuable. It shows lively characterisation (in speeches after Thucydides's manner) and attempts to explain the meaning of events. The work on Catiline has been called a study in social pathology. Sallust's style anticipates that of the early Empire.
Two military monographs.
Sallust, Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86–35 BC), a Sabine from Amiternum, acted against Cicero and Milo as tribune in 52, joined Caesar after being expelled from the Senate in 50, was restored to the Senate by Caesar and took part in his African campaign as praetor in 46, and was then appointed governor of New Africa (Numidia). Upon his return to Rome he narrowly escaped conviction for malfeasance in office, retired from public life, and took up historiography. Sallust’s two extant monographs take as their theme the moral and political decline of Rome, one on the conspiracy of Catiline and the other on the war with Jugurtha.
Although Sallust is decidedly unsubtle and partisan in analyzing people and events, his works are important and significantly influenced later historians, notably Tacitus. Taking Thucydides as his model but building on Roman stylistic and rhetorical traditions, Sallust achieved a distinctive style, concentrated and arresting; lively characterizations, especially in the speeches; and skill at using particular episodes to illustrate large general themes.
For this edition, Rolfe’s text and translation of the Catiline and Jugurtha have been thoroughly revised in line with the most recent scholarship.
Ghada Samman’s first full-length novel, originally published in Arabic in 1974, is a creative and daring work prophetically depicting the social and political causes of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. The story opens in a taxi in which we meet the five central characters, each seeking something to give life meaning: security, fame, wealth, dignity, recognition, freedom from fear and from tradition-sanctioned, dehumanizing practices. Once they reach the capital city of Beirut, on which they’ve pinned their hopes, they all discover, man and woman alike, that they are victims of forces either partially or completely beyond their control, such as political corruption, class discrimination, economic and sexual exploitation, destruction of the natural environment, and blind allegiance to tradition.
Beirut ’75 addresses struggles of Arab society, particularly the Lebanese, but the message is one of the universal human condition. Thus, in addition to this superb English-language presentation, Samman’s novel has already appeared in German (two editions), French, and Italian versions.
Winner of The University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation.
Latin America is a profoundly philanthropic region with deeply rooted traditions of solidarity with the less fortunate. Recently, different forms of philanthropy are emerging in the region, often involving community organization and social change.
This volume brings together groundbreaking perspectives on such diverse themes as corporate philanthropy, immigrant networks, and new grant-making and operating foundations with corporate, family, and community origins.
Over the last several decades, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and psycholinguists have investigated the implicit and explicit continuum in language development and use from theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives. This book addresses these perspectives in an effort to build connections among them and to draw pedagogical implications when possible.
The volume includes an examination of the psychological and neurological processes of implicit and explicit learning, what aspects of language learning can be affected by explicit learning, and the effects of bilingualism on the mental processing of language. Rigorous empirical research investigations probe specific aspects of acquiring morphosyntax and phonology, including early input, production, feedback, age, and study abroad. A final section explores the rich insights provided into language processing by bilingualism, including such major areas as aging, third language acquisition, and language separation.
Transitions: Legal Change, Legal Meanings illustrates the various intersections, crises, and shifts that continually occur within the law, and how these moments of change interact with and comment on contemporary society.
Rural Environmental Planning for Sustainable Communities offers an explanation of the concept of Rural Environmental Planning (REP) along with case studies that show how to apply REP to specific issues such as preserving agricultural lands, planning river and lake basins, and preserving historical sites.
The ancient Middle East was the theater of passionate interaction between Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and Romans. At the crossroads of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian peninsula, the area dominated by what the Romans called Syria was at times a scene of violent confrontation, but more often one of peaceful interaction, of prosperous cultivation, energetic production, and commerce--a crucible of cultural, religious, and artistic innovations that profoundly determined the course of world history.
Maurice Sartre has written a long overdue and comprehensive history of the Semitic Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel) from the eve of the Roman conquest to the end of the third century C.E. and the dramatic rise of Christianity. Sartre's broad yet finely detailed perspective takes in all aspects of this history, not just the political and military, but economic, social, cultural, and religious developments as well. He devotes particular attention to the history of the Jewish people, placing it within that of the whole Middle East.
Drawing upon the full range of ancient sources, including literary texts, Greek, Latin, and Semitic inscriptions, and the most recent archaeological discoveries, The Middle East under Rome will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars. This absorbing account of intense cultural interaction will also engage anyone interested in the history of the Middle East.
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