Bob Dylan's iconic 1962 song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" stands at
the crossroads of musical and literary traditions. A visionary
warning of impending apocalypse, it sets symbolist imagery within a
...structure that recalls a centuries-old form. Written at the height
of the 1960s folk music revival amid the ferment of political
activism, the song strongly resembles-and at the same time
reimagines-a traditional European ballad sung from Scotland to
Italy, known in the English-speaking world as "Lord Randal."
Alessandro Portelli explores the power and resonance of "A Hard
Rain's A-Gonna Fall," considering the meanings of history and
memory in folk cultures and in Dylan's work. He examines how the
ballad tradition to which "Lord Randal" belongs shaped Dylan's song
and how Dylan drew on oral culture to depict the fears and crises
of his own era. Portelli recasts the song as an encounter between
Dylan's despairing vision, which questions the meaning and
direction of history, and the message of resilience and hope for
survival despite history's nightmares found in oral traditions. A
wide-ranging work of oral history, Hard Rain weaves
together interviews from places as varied as Italy, England, and
India with Portelli's autobiographical reflections and critical
analysis, speaking to the enduring appeal of Dylan's music. By
exploring the motley traditions that shaped Dylan's work, this book
casts the distinctiveness and depth of his songwriting in a new
light.
The story of filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's life and work, including his significant impact on Japan and the worldA thirtieth†'century toxic jungle, a bathhouse for tired gods, a red†'haired fish girl, ...and a furry woodland spirit-what do these have in common? They all spring from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki, one of the greatest living animators, known worldwide for films such asMy Neighbor Totoro,Princess Mononoke,Spirited Away,Howl's Moving Castle, andThe Wind Rises.Japanese culture and animation scholar Susan Napier explores the life and art of this extraordinary Japanese filmmaker to provide a definitive account of his oeuvre. Napier insightfully illuminates the multiple themes crisscrossing his work, from empowered women to environmental nightmares to utopian dreams, creating an unforgettable portrait of a man whose art challenged Hollywood dominance and ushered in a new chapter of global popular culture.
Touching on the role and destiny of Haiti in the Americas, Haiti Unbound engages with long-standing issues of imperialism and resistance culture in the transatlantic world. Glover's timely project ...emphatically articulates Haiti's regional and global centrality, combining vital 'big picture' reflections on the field of postcolonial studies with elegant close-reading-based analyses of the philosophical perspective and creative practice of a distinctively Haitian literary phenomenon. Providing insightful and sophisticated blueprints for the reading and teaching of the Spiralists' prose fiction, it will serve as a point of reference for the works of these authors and for the singular socio-political space out of and within which they write.
Robert Boncardo investigates how Stéphane Mallarmé, one of modernity's most ingenious yet obscure poets, became an object of major political significance for French intellectuals. He asks how this ...most refined and seemingly aristocratic of poets became the writer of choice for leftist intellectuals and reflects on the ambivalent relation between literature and its political destiny in modernity. With in-depth studies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, along with shorter analyses of Jean-Claude Milner and Quentin Meillassoux, he situates Mallarmé within the philosophical and political projects of some of France's greatest thinkers.
In this paper, the author presents the results of a survey conducted electronically from the beginning of March to the end of May 2021 among students of nine high schools in Varaždin on their ...knowledge and attitudes about fascism and anti-fascism. The survey consisted of 20 questions, and the answers were given by 356 students. This paper does not bring critiques or suggestions of the history curriculum for high schools, but presents some of its results. Special attention was paid to the events marking the 80th anniversary of the persecution of Jews in Varaždin (1941-2021), which were held during July 2021.
While many baby boomers are downsizing to a simpler retirement lifestyle, photographer and writer Judy Blankenship and her husband Michael Jenkins took a more challenging leap in deciding to build a ...house on the side of a mountain in southern Ecuador. They now live half the year in Cañar, an indigenous community they came to know in the early nineties when Blankenship taught photography there. They are the only extranjeros (outsiders) in this homely, chilly town at 10,100 feet, where every afternoon a spectacular mass of clouds rolls up from the river valley below and envelopes the town. In this absorbing memoir, Blankenship tells the interwoven stories of building their house in the clouds and strengthening their ties to the community. Although she and Michael had spent considerable time in Cañar before deciding to move there, they still had much to learn about local customs as they navigated the process of building a house with traditional materials using a local architect and craftspeople. Likewise, fulfilling their obligations as neighbors in a community based on reciprocity presented its own challenges and rewards. Blankenship writes vividly of the rituals of births, baptisms, marriages, festival days, and deaths that counterpoint her and Michael’s solitary pursuits of reading, writing, listening to opera, playing chess, and cooking. Their story will appeal to anyone contemplating a second life, as well as those seeking a deeper understanding of daily life in the developing world.
Gregory Benford is perhaps best known as the author of Benford's law of controversy: "Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available." That maxim is a quotation from ...Timescape, Benford's Nebula and Campbell Award-winning 1980 novel, which established his work as an exemplar of "hard science fiction," dedicated to working out the consequences of modern science rather than substituting pseudoscience for fantasy. Like many other current science fiction writers, Benford has tackled the major genres: space travel, time travel, technology running amok, prolonged longevity, searing apocalyptic cosmic events, and alien life, which he theorizes to be more likely viral than intelligent. An astrophysicist by training and profession, Benford has published more than twenty novels, over one hundred short stories, some fifty essays, and myriad articles that display both his scientific rigor as well as a recognition of literary traditions. In this study, George Slusser explores the extraordinary, seemingly inexhaustible display of creative energy in Gregory Benford's life and work. Presenting Benford's ideas on science and the writing of science fiction, the volume addresses the writer's literary production and his place in contemporary science fiction. By identifying direct sources and making parallels with other works and writers, Slusser reveals the vast scope of Benford's knowledge, both of literature and of the major scientific and philosophical issues of our time. Slusser also discusses Benford's numerous scientific articles and nonfiction books and includes a new interview with Benford.
The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva is the latest addition to the highly acclaimed series, The Library of Living Philosophers. The book epitomizes the objectives of this acclaimed series; it contains ...critical interpretation of one of the greatest philosophers of our time, and pursues more creative regional and world dialogue on philosophical questions. The format provides a detailed interaction between those who interpret and critique Kristeva's work and the seminal thinker herself, giving broad coverage, from diverse viewpoints, of all the major topics establishing her reputation. With questions directed to the philosopher while they are alive, the volumes in The Library of Living Philosophers have come to occupy a uniquely significant place in the realm of philosophy. The inclusion of Julia Kristeva constitutes a vital addition to an already robust list of thinkers. The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva exemplifies world-class intellectual work closely connected to the public sphere. Kristeva has been said to have inherited the intellectual throne left vacant by Simone de Beauvoir, and has won many awards, including the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.Julia Kristeva's autobiography provides an excellent introduction to her work, situating it in relation to major political, intellectual, and cultural movements of the time. Her upbringing in Soviet-dominated Bulgaria, her move to the French intellectual landscape of the 1960s, her visit to Mao's China, her response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, her participation in a papal summit on humanism, her appointment by President Chirac as President of the National Council on Disability, and her setting up of the Simone de Beauvoir prize, honoring women in active and creative fields, are all major moments of this fascinating life. The major part of the book is comprised of thirty-six essays by Kristeva's foremost interpreters and critics, together with her replies to the essays. These encounters cover an exceptionally wide range of theoretical and literary writing. The strong international and multidisciplinary focus includes authors from over ten countries, and spans the fields of philosophy, semiotics, literature, psychoanalysis, feminist thought, political theory, art, and religion. The comprehensive bibliography provides further access to Kristeva's writings and thought.The preparation of this volume, the thirty-sixth in the series, was supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Of the conceptual artists who began their careers in the 1960s and 1970s-Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, and Mel Bochner among them-Barry Le Va may be the most elusive. As this first study ...of his work reveals, his rigorously planned art was instigated to mask its creator's intentions and methods, presenting itself as an "aftermath" of modernism's claim to permanency and civil society's preferred mode of monumentalism.
For Michael Maizels, Le Va's work constitutes a particularly productive subject of inquiry because it clearly articulates the interconnection between the avant-garde's distrust of autonomous art objects, two decades of social unrest, the emergence of information theory, and lingering notions of scientific objectivity.Barry Le Va: The Aesthetic Aftermathexplores how Le Va used such materials as shattered glass, spent bullets, sound recordings, scattered flour, and meat cleavers embedded in a floor to challenge the interlocking assumptions behind blind faith in lasting beauty, just government, and perfectible knowledge. Taking inspiration from popular crime novels as well as contemporary art theory, Le Va charged his viewers to attempt, like detectives at a crime scene, to decipher an order underlying the apparent chaos.
Le Va's installations were designed to erode not simply the presumed autonomy of the art object but also the economic and political authority of the art establishment. In his concluding chapter, Maizels looks at the more fixed work of the past two decades in which Le Va turned to architectural themes and cast concrete to probe the limits of dynamism and the idea of permanence.