pennsylvania state university press apr 1991 (13 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Brazilian Spiritism (espiritismo, kardecismo) is an important middle-class religious movement whose followers believe in communication with the dead via spirit mediums and in healing illnesses by means of spiritual therapies. Unlike Anglo-Saxon Spiritualists, Brazilian Spiritualists count among their number a well-developed and institutionalized intellectual elite that has reinterpreted northern hemisphere parapsychology and developed its own alternative medicine and sociology of religion. As a result, the mediation between popular religion (especially Afro-Brazilian religious practices) and the orthodoxies of the universities, the state, and the medical profession. Situating Spiritist intellectual thought in what he calls a broader ideological arena, Hess examines Spiritism in the context of religion, science, political ideology, medicine, and even the social sciences. Hess challenges the legacy of French sociologist Roger Bastide, who saw in Spiritism an elitist, middle-class ideology. In the process, Spirits and Scientists provides a new approach to middle-class religious movements in Latin America.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A comprehensive study of the influence Spenser had on the forms, images, and style of the principal Romantic poets and how Spenserianism pervades not just their writings but also the subconscious thinking and spirit of the Romantic era.Edmund Spenser's tremendous popularity among the Romantics has always been recognized, but his role in their poetics has never been extensively explored because of a widely shared scholarly assumption about the intellectual superficiality of their response to him. Many of the Romantics honored Spenser as their favorite poet, the muse that inspired their own creative ambitions, but their love of him has often been discounted as a fatuous worship of the beauty of his work in total disregard of his thought. Kucich shows how this stereotype has been based on several notorious statements about Spenser that do not fully reflect the range and complexity of the Romantics' response to him. To measure this response accurately, Kucich has uncovered a wealth of commentary on Spenser in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He reveals how Spenserianism became a cultural tradition in the eighteenth century that eventually developed into and helped sustain a habit of mind that is central to Romantic poetics---the open-ended interior debate that many leading Romantic scholars are now discussing as the principal conditioning force in Romantic poetics.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - William F. Edmiston revises current theories of what narratologists call 'focalization' and applies his revised theory to four eighteenth-century French memoir-novels.Hindsight and Insight contributes to our knowledge of the history and evolution of the novel by demonstrating that France's earliest novelists were already engaged in the kinds of narrative experimentation that are usually associated with modern writers. It presents an analysis of the narrative point of view in both its theoretical aspects and its practical applications. Edmiston exposes the inadequacies of current concepts of focalization and proposes a revised concept that is applicable to personal narration, one that can accommodate all the focal possibilities available to the first-person narrator. He applies this concept to four French memior-novels: Les Egarements du coeur et de l'esprit by Marivaux, Manon Lescaut by Revost, and La Religieuse by Diderot.Each of these well-known novels offers a different case study and raises specific theoretical questions of selective focalization, forms of reported speech, problems of temporal ambiguity, manipulation of the reader, narratorial reliability, and cognitive privilege. Edmiston's study proposes a reading of the novels that resolves certain problems of interpretation raised by other recent studies.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The Origins of Federal Support for Higher Education revises the traditional interpretation of the land-grant college movement, whose institutions were brought into being b the 1862 Morrill Act to provide for 'the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.' Rather than being the inevitable consequence of the unfolding dynamic of institutional and socioeconomic forces, Williams argues, it was the active intervention and initiate of a handful of educational leaders that secured the colleges' future---above all, the activities of George W. Atherton. For nearly three decades, Atherton, who was the seventh president of the Pennsylvania State University, worked to secure consistent federal financial support for the colleges, which in their early years received little assistance from the states they were designed to benefit. He also helped to develop the institutions as comprehensive 'national' universities grounded in the liberal arts and sciences---a conception that countered the prevailing view of the colleges as mainly agricultural schools.Atherton became the prime mover in the campaign to enact the 1887 Hatch Act, which encouraged the establishment of agricultural experiment stations at land-grant colleges. The act marked the federal government's first effort to provide continuous funding to research units associated with higher education institutions. At the same times, Atherton played a key role in the formation of the first association of such institutions: The Associations of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations. It was the Association that provided the critical mass needed to lobby Congress successively and to approach the many opportunities and threats the land-grant colleges faced during the 1885-1906 period. Atherton was also deeply involved in the campaign for the Morrill Act of 1890, which provided long-sought annual appropriations to land-grant colleges for a broad range of academic programs and encouraged steady growth in state support during the 1890s. Roger Williams traces the motives and tactics behind a series of laws that made the federal government irreversibly committed to funding higher education and scientific research and provides rich new insights into the complexities, polarities, and inherent contradictions of the history of the American land-grant movement.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - In 1660, Edmund Waller was an eminent poet whose claims to fame rivaled those of even his most illustrious predecessors, while Andrew Marvell has scarcely an reputation at all. Today, however, that situation is completely reversed. A.B. Chambers's study shows that Waller has been unjustly neglected in recent times and that, together, some of the work of Waller and Marvell bridged the gap between the work of the early seventeenth century and the Restoration. Chambers suggests that Waller and Marvell are mutually illuminating, that their poems have substantial intrinsic interest, and that they opened the door through which Dryden made his entrance to become the dominant literary figure of the Restoration. Chambers situates important poems by both authors within historical and literary contexts as an aid to elucidating both meaning and poetic achievement, but he also pays close historical attention to details of language, syntax, and metrics that supply meaning. He provides a significant new reading of Marvell's ''To His Coy Mistress,'' while also situating the poem within Marvell's poetic and political careers. He also presents a fuller, more accurate picture of the period by taking into account the conceptual and poetic problems that both authors necessarily confronted and by examining the curiously inverted parallelism of the strategies that they employed in addressing those problems. A.B. Chambers is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the editor of The Works of John Dryden, Volume 4 (California, 1974).

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Critical Issues in Social Theory is an analytical survey of persistent controversies that have shaped the field of sociology. It defines, clarifies, and proposes solutions to these 'critical issues' through commentary on the writings of such influential social theorists as Hobbes, Marx, Durkeim, Weber, Mead, Merton, Parsons, and Schutz. Instead of being just another history, or another classification of theories, Rhoads's four-part model allows him to focus attention on issues that remain at the core of sociological theory today. First, Rhoads analyzes the controversy over positivism as the proper methodological model for the study of human society. Is there one science, of which sociology is a branch, or do the peculiarities of sociology's subject matter require a modification of the scientific method borrowed from the natural sciences Rhoads next considers the relationship of individuals to society and its structures. Does society have a mode of existence distinct from its members, or is it merely an abstraction derived from the characteristics of individuals Third, a discussion of social order raises the question of whether social order is the consequence of rules and their underlying moral values, or the product of continuous construction based on self-interest. Finally, the relative importance of consensus and conflict in social relationships is addressed. Is society better understood as a community united by beliefs, values, and rules, or is the social dynamic of continual conflict over beliefs, values, and rules more fundamental In coming to grips with these issues, the author in some instances takes sides and in others arrives at a synthesis of diverse perspectives. In the final chapter he points to the limitations on the possibility of rational action that come to light in the clashes over these basic issues.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'We can feel the exhilaration that runs through this book as it focuses again and again on the mortal ecstasies of time. We can also feel the anxiety of this book, one that always touched with a sorrow that accompanies the mingling of death and deep love. Exhilaration and sorrow, and the combination of painstaking scholarly work with exceptional poetic sensitivity, are the hallmarks of the essays.' -Charles Scott in Research in Phenomenology'An impassioned book, an excellent book, a book to be read and reread.' - Pierre Trotignon in Revue Philosophique de la France et de L'Etranger'David Krell, already known as the outstanding translator of Heidegger into English, author of a number of excellent scholarly presentations of translated volumes- notably Heidegger's Neitzsche- offers us here a solid collection of brilliant essays.I heartily commend this fine book to to its readers. It is a book both lyrical and witzig with a humor inspired (in part) by Jacques Derrida. An authentic knowing permeates it- the kind of knowledge that prolonged acquaintance with the 'matter' of thought alone can give.' -Michel Haar in Les Etudes PhilosophiquesDavid Farrel Krell is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at DePaul University and author of Postponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Neitzsche (Indiana, 1986) and Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Indiana, 1990). He is also the editor and translator of Heidegger's four-volume Neitzsche, Early Greek Thinking, and Basic Writings (Harper and Row, 1979).

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This book continues the official history of the CIA begun in Arthur Darling's The Central Intelligence Agency Ludwell Lee Montague's book is one of the first documents, along with Darling's history, to be declassified and made available under the CIA's Historical Review Program, launched in 1985. Montague was a leading government official who participated in the interdepartmental debate over the postwar organization of U.S. intelligence that occurred in 1945. He drafted many of the policies of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during this bureaucratic struggle, including JIC 239/5, the plan that was also the basis for the establishment of the Central Intelligence Group, the predecessor of the CIA. He served as General Smith's executive assistant when Smith was appointed Director of Central Intelligence in 1950. Montague contends that Smith is so important to the development of the intelligence community that the history of the community can legitimately be thought of as 'pre-Smith and post-Smith.' The book focuses on the initiatives that Smith implemented in order to reform the U.S. intelligence community, which was under heavy criticism at the time for a series of intelligence failure. The reorganization of the intelligence community described her contains, with just a few exceptions, the predecessors of the major organizational components of today's CIA. This book serves as an important companion to Arthur Darling's book in that it provides both background material and Montague's opinion concerning how Darling's study came into existence. Most of this work survived the declassification process relatively intact to give us a detailed analysis of a critical period in the development of the intelligence community.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Plato's conversations of Socrates are among the most accessible philosophical texts most of us have ever read, yet the more one pursues the art or intelligibility of this writing, the more mysterious and paradoxical the Platonic texts become. What does it mean to study Plato, not philosophically as a maker of arguments, not poetically as a maker of dialogues, but literally as a maker of texts This is a question that Jacques Derrida has made his own, and in this book Farness creates a dialogue with Derrida on Plato's texts.Missing Socrates also provides a dialogue between Plato and Socrates on the question of speech versus writing and a study of the materiality of Plato's writing. Included among the various dialogues and themes developed here are rhetoric and courtroom practice in the Apology of Socrates; religion, skepticism, and the idea of transcendence in the euthyphro; artistic practice and tradition in the Ion; education and political discipline in the Charmides; and rhetoric, writing, commemoration, and the motives of authorship in Phaedrus. In each of these discursive settings, Socrates unsuccessfully seeks a place or a mode for philosophy; Farness shows that the dialogues of Plato uncannily supply that lackJay Farness is Associate Professor of English at Northern Arizona University.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Allen's study deals with Lawrence's lifelong interest in the medieval world, especially medieval literature, and its considerable influence on his view of himself and of the Arabs with whom he fought in an archaic theater of war, and hence his own literary production. The Medievalism of Lawrence of Arabia investigates the influence Lawrence's interest in medieval life and literature had on his attitudes toward life in general and--in content, theme, and diction--on his masterpiece, Seven Pillars of Wisdon, in particular. M.D. Allen begins with a brief biography of T.E. Lawrence--his early interest in things medieval and his somewhat controversial B.A. thesis on crusader castles. Allen then reveals the extent to which Lawrence's ideas about honor, warfare, and chivalry in the Arab war against the Turks were shaped by his reading in medieval writings such as Malory's Morte D'Arthur. (Both, as he makes clear, were warrior societies dominated by horses.) Lawrence's reading in the nineteenth-century medievalsims is also explored, as in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Ruskins writing on art, where the parallel between Ruskin's ideas on ornament and Lawrence's ideas about the dignity of war is demonstrated. Allen then identifies the medieval and neomedieval texts of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and shows why and to what effect Lawrence borrowed from chivalric, neochivalric, and pseudochivalric works, and sometines transmogrified them, revealing Lawrence's greatest inspiration to be an English translation of the Moallakat (which is, so to speak, the Arabic Beowulf). Allen sheds new light on many aspects of the influence of medievalism on Lawrence's thought and writing. M.D. Allen is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Center--Fox Valley.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.