BiblioVault - Books about Change

Defining the National Interest

Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy

Peter Trubowitz

University of Chicago Press, 1998

The United States has been marked by a highly politicized and divisive history of foreign policy-making. Why do the nation's leaders find it so difficult to define the national interest?

Peter Trubowitz offers a new and compelling conception of American foreign policy and the domestic geopolitical forces that shape and animate it. Foreign policy conflict, he argues, is grounded in America's regional diversity. The uneven nature of America's integration into the world economy has made regionalism a potent force shaping fights over the national interest. As Trubowitz shows, politicians from different parts of the country have consistently sought to equate their region's interests with that of the nation. Domestic conflict over how to define the "national interest" is the result. Challenging dominant accounts of American foreign policy-making, Defining the National Interest exemplifies how interdisciplinary scholarship can yield a deeper understanding of the connections between domestic and international change in an era of globalization.

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The Designer

Half a Century of Change in Image, Training, and Technique

Rosemary Sassoon

Intellect Books, 2008

Design is one of the most rapidly changing fields in the art world, as professionals, students, and teachers must reckon with new technologies before the older versions have much time to collect dust. In The Designer, Rosemary Sassoon surveys fifty years of change in the world of design, evaluating the skills that have been lost, how new techniques affect everyday work, and how training methods prepare students for employment. This indispensable volume reveals how design is both an art and a skill—one with a rich past and momentous relevance for the future.

Along the way, Sassoon traces the fascinating trajectory of her own career, from its beginning at art school and an early apprenticeship to her work as an established professional, with advice for designers at every stage of their own development. Weaving together biography and career advice, theory and practice, The Designer provides a unique history of the art form and looks ahead to an age of ever-changing attitudes to drawing, aesthetics, and artistic practice.

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De-Stalinisation Reconsidered

Persistence and Change in the Soviet Union

Edited by Thomas M. Bohn, Rayk Einax, and Michel Abeßer

Campus Verlag, 2014

Joseph Stalin’s death was a defining event in Soviet history. In its aftermath, the state was forced to reconceive its political, economic, social, and cultural identity. This volume includes new contributions from an international collection of researchers that critically engage with this period of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union. Together, they offer fresh perspectives not just on Stalinism, but also on questions of change and continuity in Soviet politics, modernization, and society more generally, moving broad-scale processes such as urbanization into the center of interpreting Soviet history. And in so doing, De-Stalinisation Reconsidered makes clear that the Soviet history of the 1950s and ’60s is crucial for understanding not only glasnost and perestroika, but contemporary Russia, as well.

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Doing What Comes Naturally

Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary & Legal Studies

Stanley Fish

Duke University Press, 1989

In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely personal point of view? In Doing What Comes Naturally, Stanley Fish refuses the dilemma posed by this question and argues that while we can never separate our judgments from the contexts in which they are made, those judgments are nevertheless authoritative and even, in the only way that matters, objective. He thus rejects both the demand for an ahistorical foundation, and the conclusion that in the absence of such a foundation we reside in an indeterminate world. In a succession of provocative and wide-ranging chapters, Fish explores the implications of his position for our understanding of legal, literary, and psychoanalytic interpretation, the nature of professional and institutional culture, and the place of reason in a world that is rhetorical through and through.

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Doris Lessing

The Poetics of Change

Gayle Greene

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Doris Lessing has been a chronicler of our age for nearly half a century, and a study of her writing career does not yield easy generalizations. Difficult though she is to categorize, she is always concerned with change, with a search for "something new" against "the nightmare repetition" of history. The feminist quest she articulated in The Children of Violence and The Golden Notebook entered the culture with the force of a new myth: these books changed lives. The Golden Notebook--together with such works as The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique--raised the consciousness of a generation of women readers and played a major part in making the second wave of feminism. It is the power of Lessing's novels to change people's lives, the effect she had raising the consciousness of a generation of women and the effect she continues to have on young readers, that is the subject of this book.

Gayle Greene employs an eclectic range of approaches (psychoanalytic, Marxist, biographical, historical, intertextual, formalist, feminist) to shed new light on Lessing's remarkable achievement. She sees Lessing as a feminist writer, not in offering strong female role models who climb top the top of existing social structures, but in envisioning, and indeed helping to bring about, a transformation of those structures. Lessing critiques Western values of individualism, competition, and materialism in terms similar to those developed by feminism; and, in getting us to view our culture from without, in teaching us to read cultural constructs as systems, her novels perform the deconstructing and demystifying work of feminism.

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