Results by title

3 books match the query 'Contract'

cover of A Probable State: The Novel, the Contract, and the Jews

A Probable State

The Novel, the Contract, and the Jews

Irene Tucker

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Why has the realist novel been persistently understood as promoting liberalism? Can this tendency be reconciled with an equally familiar tendency to see the novel as a national form? In A Probable State, Irene Tucker builds a revisionary argument about liberalism and the realist novel by shifting the focus from the rise of both in the eighteenth century to their breakdown at the end of the nineteenth. Through a series of intricate and absorbing readings, Tucker relates the decline of realism and the eroding logic of liberalism to the question of Jewish characters and writers and to shifting ideas of community and nation.

Whereas previous critics have explored the relationship between liberalism and the novel by studying the novel's liberal characters, Tucker argues that the liberal subject is represented not merely within the novel, but in the experience of the novel's form as well. With special attention to George Eliot, Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and S. Y. Abramovitch, Tucker shows how we can understand liberalism and the novel as modes of recognizing and negotiating with history.
[more]
cover of Contract With The Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s

Contract With The Skin

Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s

Kathy O'Dell

University of Minnesota Press, 1998

Places masochistic performance within a social and historical context.

Having yourself shot. Putting out fires with your bare hands and feet. Biting your own body and photographing the marks. Sewing your own mouth shut. These seemingly aberrant acts were committed by performance artists during the 1970s. Why would anyone do these things? What do these kinds of masochistic performances tell us about the social and historical context in which they occurred? Fascinating and accessibly written, Contract with the Skin addresses such questions through a reconsideration of these acts in relation to psychoanalytic and legal concepts of masochism.

O’Dell argues that the growth of masochistic performance during the 1970s must be seen in the context of society’s response to the Vietnam War and contemporaneous changes in theories of contract. She contends that the dynamic that exists between audience and performer during these masochistic acts relates to tensions resulting from ruptures in the social contract. Indeed, as the war in Vietnam waned, so did masochistic performance, only to reemerge in the 1980s in relation to the “war on AIDS” and the censorious “culture wars.”Focusing on 1970s performance artists Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Gina Pane, and collaborators Marina Abramovi´c/Ulay as well as those with similar sensibilities from the late 1980s onward (Bob Flanagan, David Wojnarowicz, Simon Leung, Catherine Opie, Ron Athey, Lutz Bacher, and Robby Garfinkel), O’Dell provides photographic documentation of performances and quotations from interviews with many of the artists. Throughout, O’Dell asks what we can do about the institutionalized forms of masochism for which these performances are metaphors. Contract with the Skin is a provocative guide to this little-studied area, and offers new ways of thinking about performance art and artistic production.
[more]
cover of DEATH OF CONTRACT: SECOND EDITION

DEATH OF CONTRACT

SECOND EDITION

Grant Gilmore / Edited by Ronald K. L. Collins

The Ohio State University Press, 1995

The Death of Contract is a masterful commentary on the common law, especially the law of promissory obligation known as contracts. In this slim and lively book, the late Yale law professor Grant Gilmore examines the birth, development, death, and even the resurrection of a body of American law. It is both a modern-day reply to and a funeral oration for an American legal classic—Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Common Law. Gilmore argues that the rigid, formalistic approach of classical contract law fails to reflect the realities of modern contractual relationships. He traces the historical development of contract law, highlighting its origins in the nineteenth century and its subsequent decline as courts increasingly recognized the limitations of strict adherence to formal rules, and analyzes how contract law has been absorbed into tort law. He contends that the boundaries between contract and tort have blurred, leading to a more flexible, equitable approach to enforcing promises. This shift reflects broader changes in societal values and the legal system's adaptation to these changes.

The second edition, with an instructive and timely foreword by Ronald K. L. Collins, challenges anyone interested in the life of the law to think about where it has come from and where it is trending. A new bibliography of early reviews and contemporary responses reveals how considerable the interest was, and continues to be, in this modern anti-classic.

[more]