BiblioVault - Books about Age

I Made You to Find Me

The Coming of Age of the Woman Poet and the Politics of Poetic Address

Jane Hedley

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

When Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Gwendolyn Brooks began to write poetry during the 1940s and ’50s, each had to wonder whether she could be taken seriously as a poet while speaking in a woman’s voice. I Made You to Find Me, the last line of one of Sexton’s early poems, calls attention to how resourcefully the “I-you” relation had to be staged in order for this question to have an affirmative answer. Whereas Rich tried at first to speak to her own historical moment in the register of universality, Plath openly aspired to be “the Poetess of America.” For Brooks, womanhood and “blackness” were inextricable markers of poetic identity.

Jane Hedley’s approach engages biographical, formal, and rhetorical analysis as means to explore each poet’s stated intentions, political stakes, and rhetorical strategies within their own historical context. Sexton’s aggressively social persona called attention to the power dynamics of intimate relationships; Plath’s poems lifted these relationships onto a different plane of reality, where their tragic potential could be more readily engaged. Rich’s poems bear witness to the enormous difficulty, notwithstanding the crucial importance, of reciprocity—of making “you” to find “we.” For Brooks, the crucial question has been whether she could presuppose an “American” audience without compromising her allegiance to “blackness.”

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Ideologies in the Age of Extremes

Liberalism, Conservatism, Communism, Fascism 1914-1991

Willie Thompson

Pluto Press, 2010

This is a history of political ideologies during the period famously described by Eric Hobsbawn as ‘The Age of Extremes’ - from the First World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ideologies in the Age of Extremes introduces the key ideologies of the age; liberalism, conservatism, communism and fascism. Willie Thompson identifies the political influence of mass movements as a key feature. He uses a powerful approach that considers the different ideologies in relation to each other. This allows him to shows that they often emerged from a common root or merged into a common future, stealing each other’s clothes and reinventing themselves as the stark opposite of a competing ideology.

This sophisticated yet accessible analysis will be of great interest to students of 20th century history and political theory.

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"If You Tolerate This . . . "

The Spanish Civil War in the Age of Total War

Edited by Martin Baumeister and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum

Campus Verlag, 2008

The Spanish Civil War has been called the quintessential expression of violent ideological confrontation in 1930s Europe. Despite this reputation, researchers have neglected to properly explore the Spanish experience in the context of the history of twentieth-century warfare. To fill this gap, “If You Tolerate This . . . ” brings together an international group of scholars to address the Spanish Civil War’s role in the development of total war.

Examining such topics as military violence, the experience of war, and the culture of war, this anthology traces how the differentiation between civilian and military sectors crumbled with the onset of civil war. Individual memory and collective identity in Spain, the authors argue, became synonymous with mass killing and mass dying. Offering a unique perspective on one of European history’s most fraught events, this volume will be necessary reading for students and scholars of twentieth-century Spain and military history.

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The Image in Dispute

Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography

Edited by Dudley Andrew

University of Texas Press, 1997

Photography, cinema, and video have irrevocably changed the ways in which we view and interpret images. Indeed, the mechanical reproduction of images was a central preoccupation of twentieth-century philosopher Walter Benjamin, who recognized that film would become a vehicle not only for the entertainment of the masses but also for consumerism and even communism and fascism.

In this volume, experts in film studies and art history take up the debate, begun by Benjamin, about the power and scope of the image in a secular age. Part I aims to bring Benjamin's concerns to life in essays that evoke specific aspects and moments of the visual culture he would have known. Part II focuses on precise instances of friction within the traditional arts brought on by this century's changes in the value and mission of images. Part III goes straight to the image technologies themselves—photography, cinema, and video—to isolate distinctive features of the visual cultures they help constitute.

As we advance into the postmodern era, in which images play an ever more central role in conveying perceptions and information, this anthology provides a crucial context for understanding the apparently irreversible shift from words to images that characterized the modernist period. It will be important reading for everyone in cultural studies, film and media studies, and art history.

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Immigrant Fictions

Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization

Rebecca Walkowitz

University of Wisconsin Press

Immigrant Fictions is a groundbreaking collection that brings together studies of world literature, book history, narrative theory, and the contemporary novel to challenge methods of critical reading based on national models of literary culture. Contributors suggest that contemporary novels by immigrant writers need to be read across several geographies of production, circulation, and translation. Analyzing work by David Peace, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Iva Pekarkova, Yan Geling, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Anchee Min, and Monica Ali, these essays take up a range of critical topics, including the transnational book and the migrant writer, the comparative reception history of postcolonial fiction, transnational criticism and Asian-American literature in the U. S., mobility and feminism in translation, linguistic mediation and immigrating fictions, migration and the politics of narrative form.

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Imprint and Trace

Handwriting in the Age of Technology

Sonja Neef

Reaktion Books, 2011

Today, writing by hand seems a nearly archaic process. Nearly all of our written communication is digital—our letters are via email or text message, our manuscripts are composed using word processors, our journals are blogs, and we sign checks to pay bills with the push of a button. Sonja Neef believes that what we have lost in our modern technological conversation is the ductus—the physical and material act of handwriting.

In Imprint and Trace Neef argues, however, that handwriting throughout its history has always been threatened with erasure. It exists in a dual state: able to be standardized, repeated, copied—much like an imprint—and yet persistently singular, original, and authentic as a trace or line. Throughout its history, from the first prehistoric handprint, through the innovations of stylus, quill, and printing press, handwriting has revealed an interweaving, ever-changing relationship between imprint and trace. Even today, in the age of the digital revolution, the trace of handwriting is still an integral part of communication, whether etched, photographed, pixelated, or scanned.

Imprint and Trace presents an essential re-evaluation of the relationships between handwriting and technology, and between the various imprints and traces that define communication.

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Indigenous Textual Cultures

Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire

Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla, editors

Duke University Press, 2020

As modern European empires expanded, written language was critical to articulations of imperial authority and justifications of conquest. For imperial administrators and thinkers, the non-literacy of “native” societies demonstrated their primitiveness and inability to change. Yet as the contributors to Indigenous Textual Cultures make clear through cases from the Pacific Islands, Australasia, North America, and Africa, indigenous communities were highly adaptive and created novel, dynamic literary practices that preserved indigenous knowledge traditions. The contributors illustrate how modern literacy operated alongside orality rather than replacing it. Reconstructing multiple traditions of indigenous literacy and textual production, the contributors focus attention on the often hidden, forgotten, neglected, and marginalized cultural innovators who read, wrote, and used texts in endlessly creative ways. This volume demonstrates how the work of these innovators played pivotal roles in reimagining indigenous epistemologies, challenging colonial domination, and envisioning radical new futures.

Contributors. Noelani Arista, Tony Ballantyne, Alban Bensa, Keith Thor Carlson, Evelyn Ellerman, Isabel Hofmeyr, Emma Hunter, Arini Loader, Adrian Muckle, Lachy Paterson, Laura Rademaker, Michael P. J. Reilly, Bruno Saura, Ivy T. Schweitzer, Angela Wanhalla

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Information Please

Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines

Mark Poster

Duke University Press, 2006

Information Please advances the ongoing critical project of the media scholar Mark Poster: theorizing the social and cultural effects of electronically mediated information. In this book Poster conceptualizes a new relation of humans to information machines, a relation that avoids privileging either the human or the machine but instead focuses on the structures of their interactions. Synthesizing a broad range of critical theory, he explores how texts, images, and sounds are made different when they are mediated by information machines, how this difference affects individuals as well as social and political formations, and how it creates opportunities for progressive change.

Poster’s critique develops through a series of lively studies. Analyzing the appearance of Sesame Street’s Bert next to Osama Bin Laden in a New York Times news photo, he examines the political repercussions of this Internet “hoax” as well as the unlimited opportunities that Internet technology presents for the appropriation and alteration of information. He considers the implications of open-source licensing agreements, online personas, the sudden rise of and interest in identity theft, peer-to-peer file sharing, and more. Focusing explicitly on theory, he reflects on the limitations of critical concepts developed before the emergence of new media, particularly globally networked digital communications, and he argues that, contrary to the assertions of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, new media do not necessarily reproduce neoimperialisms. Urging a rethinking of assumptions ingrained during the dominance of broadcast media, Poster charts new directions for work on politics and digital culture.

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Is There God after Prince?

Dispatches from an Age of Last Things

Peter Coviello

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Essays considering what it means to love art, culture, and people in an age of accelerating disaster.

This is a book about loving things—books, songs, people—in the shadow of a felt, looming disaster. Through lyrical, funny, heart-wrenching essays, Peter Coviello considers pieces of culture across a fantastic range, setting them inside the vivid scenes of friendship, dispute, romance, talk, and loss, where they enter our lives. Alongside him, we reencounter movies like The Shining, shows like The Sopranos; videos; poems; novels by Sam Lipsyte, Sally Rooney, and Paula Fox; as well as songs by Joni Mitchell, Gladys Knight, Steely Dan, Pavement, and the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, Prince.

Navigating an overwhelming feeling that Coviello calls “endstrickenness,” he asks what it means to love things in calamitous times, when so much seems to be shambling toward collapse. Balancing comedy and anger, exhilaration and sorrow, Coviello illuminates the strange ways the things we cherish help us to hold on to life and to its turbulent joys. Is There God after Prince? shows us what twenty-first-century criticism can be, and how it might speak to us, in a time of ruin, in an age of “Last Things.”

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