Imagining Sculpture: A Short Conjectural History
【ISBN】9783777437583
【著者】Stanley Abe
【出版社】Hirmer Publishers (February 19, 2023)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】J3 /A138 /E
【简 介】Imagining Sculpture is the story of the absence of a powerful European idea: Sculpture. In China statues, stele, and other figural objects were made for millennia but were not categorized as Sculpture. Imagining Sculpture explains how they were seen in China as objects beyond the category of Sculpture. Stanley Abe has written a series of short historical and fictional vignettes about travelers, scholars, officials, collectors, and antiquarians who encounter statues, figures, and effigies in China and the West from the fourteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Imagining Sculpture is visual, cinematic, and sumptuous, featuring rare photographs, paintings, sketches, letters, and ephemera. With little text, images propel the narrative.
The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America
【ISBN】9780226821481
【著者】Adrian Johns
【出版社】University of Chicago Press (April 5, 2023)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】G442 /J65 /E
【简 介】Reading is perhaps the essential practice of modern civilization. For centuries, it has been seen as key to both personal fulfillment and social progress, and millions today depend on it to participate fully in our society. Yet, at its heart, reading is a surprisingly elusive practice. This book tells for the first time the story of how American scientists and others have sought to understand reading, and, by understanding it, to improve how people do it.
Starting around 1900, researchers—convinced of the urgent need to comprehend a practice central to industrial democracy—began to devise instruments and experiments to investigate what happened to people when they read. They traced how a good reader’s eyes moved across a page of printed characters, and they asked how their mind apprehended meanings as they did so. In schools across the country, millions of Americans learned to read through the application of this science of reading. At the same time, workers fanned out across the land to extend the science of reading into the social realm, mapping the very geography of information for the first time. Their pioneering efforts revealed that the nation’s most pressing problems were rooted in drastic informational inequities, between North and South, city and country, and white and Black—and they suggested ways to tackle those problems.
Today, much of how we experience our information society reflects the influence of these enterprises. This book explains both how the science of reading shaped our age and why, with so-called reading wars still plaguing schools across the nation, it remains bitterly contested.
Discourse and Power: An Introduction to Critical Narratology: Who Narrates Whom?
【ISBN】9781032426402
【著者】Peter V. Zima
【出版社】Routledge; 1st edition (May 31, 2023)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】I045 /Z71 /E
【简介】Discourse and Power: An Introduction to Critical Narratology: Who Narrates Whom? is both an introduction to discourse research and an application of the concept of discourse to the problem of power.
Divided into two sections, Part One is a presentation of the most important theories of discourse in which the link between discourse and power or language and power is central. It provides a critical overview of the most important discourse theories: Foucault, Bourdieu, Fairclough and Greimas’s structural semiotics. In Part Two, the section on practice, the insights gained in the first part of the book are applied to analyses of particular discourses and their involvement in power relations. Ranging from psychiatric, legal, political, literary and scientific discourses, examples include the presidential speeches of Obama, Trump and Biden and the novels of Camus and Pirandello. The book demonstrates that it is possible in theoretical discourse to reduce the power factor to a minimum, improve theoretical innovation, and thus pave the way for new insights in social sciences.
This is an important and timely text from a leading scholar, suitable for use in discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis and rhetoric courses.
East Central Europe and Communism: Politics, Culture, and Society, 1943–1991
【ISBN】9781032318202
【著 者】Sabrina P. Ramet
【出版社】Routledge; 1st edition (March 23, 2023)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】F151.0 /R172 /E
【简介】 The communists of East Central Europe came to power promising to bring about genuine equality, paying special attention to achieving gender equality, to build up industry and create prosperous societies, and to use music, art, and literature to promote socialist ideals. Instead, they never succeeded in filling more than a third of their legislatures with women and were unable to make significant headway against entrenched patriarchal views; they considered it necessary (with the sole exception of Albania) to rely heavily on credits to build up their economies, eventually driving them into bankruptcy; and the effort to instrumentalize the arts ran aground in most of the region already by 1956, and, in Yugoslavia, by 1949.
Communism was all about planning, control, and politicization. Except for Yugoslavia after 1949, the communists sought to plan and control not only politics and the economy, but also the media and information, religious organizations, culture, and the promotion of women, which they understood in the first place as involving putting women to work. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Robert K. Merton on functionalist theory, this book shows how communist policies were repeatedly undermined by unintended consequences and outright dysfunctions.
More Than the Great Wall: The Northern Frontier and Ming National Security, 1368–1644
【ISBN】9781538159026
【著者】John W. Dardess
【出版社】Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (October 18, 2019)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】K248 /D216m2 /E
【简介】This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive analysis of Ming China’s pursuit of national security along its 1,700 miles of northern frontier. Drawing on a wealth of original sources, John Dardess vividly portrays how Ming China’s emperors, officials, and commanders in the field thought, argued, and made decisions in real time as they worked to defend their country. Despite common perceptions of the central role of the so-called Great Wall of China, Dardess convincingly shows that the wall was but a minor piece in a much bigger effort to battle Tatar looting. Dardess immerses readers in the day-to-day world of the Ming as he explores the question of how leaders kept their country safe over the 276 years the dynasty ruled.
The Anthropology of Drugs
【ISBN】9780367625245
【著者】Neil Carrier, Lisa L. Gezon
【出版社】Routledge; 1st edition (July 28, 2023)
【馆藏地】医科馆外文图书区
【索书号】R969.3 /C316 /E
【简 介】From khat to kava to ketamine, drugs are constitutive parts of cultures, identities, economies and livelihoods. This much-needed book is a clear introduction to the anthropology of drugs, providing a cutting-edge and accessible overview of the topic. The authors examine and assess the following key topics:
How drugs feature in anthropology and the work of anthropologists and the general role of drugs in society
Comparison between biochemical and pharmacological approaches to drugs and bio-socio-cultural models of understanding drugs
Evolutionary origins of psychotropic drug sensitivity and archaeological evidence for the spread of psychoactive substances in pre-history
Drugs in spiritual and religions contexts, considering their role in altered states of consciousness, divination and healing
Stimulant drugs and the ambivalence with which they are treated in society
Addiction and dependency
Drug economies, livelihoods and the production and distribution segments of drug commodity chains
Drug policies and drug wars
Drugs, race and gender
The future of the study of drugs and anthropological professional engagements with solving drug problems
With the inclusion of chapter summaries and many examples, further reading and case studies – including drug tourism, drug industries in the Philippines and Mexico, Afghanistan and the ‘Golden Triangle’ and the opioid crisis in North America – The Anthropology of Drugs is an ideal introduction for those coming to the topic for the first time, and also for those working in the professional and health sectors. It will be of interest to students of anthropology and to those in related disciplines including sociology, psychology, health studies and religion.
Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London
【ISBN】9780241470923
【作者】Caroline Knowles
【出版社】Penguin (October 3, 2023)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】C912.8 /K73 /E
【简介】London is a plutocrat's paradise, with more resident billionaires than New York, Hong Kong or Moscow. Far from trickling down, their wealth is burning up the environment and swallowing up the city. But what do we really know about London's super rich, and the lives they lead?
To find out more about this secretive elite, sociologist Caroline Knowles walks the streets of London from the City to suburban Surrey. Her walks reveal how the wealthy shape the capital in their image, creating a new world of gated communities and luxury developments. A move behind closed doors takes us ever further into the dark heart of the plutocratic city, from multimillion-dollar mansions to gentlemen's clubs. Along the way we meet a wide and wickedly entertaining cast of millionaires, billionaires and those who serve them: bankers, aristocrats, tech tycoons, Conservative party donors, butlers, bodyguards, divorce lawyers and many more.
Jaw-dropping, enraging and enlightening, Serious Money explodes the fiction that wealth is a condition to aspire to, revealing the isolation and paranoia which accompany it when the plutocrat's recompense - a life of unlimited luxury - ultimately proves hollow. It is a powerful reminder that it is not just the super-rich who get to make the city: we make it too, and could demand something different. Because serious money is good for no one - not even the rich.
The Enigma of Meaning: Wittgenstein and Derrida, Language and Life
【ISBN】9781476689821
【著者】Gregory Desilet
【出版社】McFarland (March 3, 2023)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】H0-05 /D457 /E
【简介】 This work focuses on humanity's first technology--language--by placing the views of two of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century in direct confrontation on the topic of language/sign communication. It addresses the dominant role of language by the unexpected means of exposing the limits of words and signs for conveying meaning. Identifying these limits leads to the surprising realization that such limits are also precisely what make communication possible.
Wittgenstein strives to shore up the foundation of meaning through a deeper understanding of the tension between rules and practice in the use of signs--while Derrida strives to expose the tension in the nature of the sign itself. This tension underscores the presence of the sign as intimately bound up with its absence. As a result, these two approaches feature contrasting roles for interpretation between a sign and its meaning. Highlighting the differences between these approaches reveals the play of hazards and benefits for language users when faced with alternative ways of understanding and accessing the power and potential of language.
What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project
【ISBN】9780268202323
【著者】Ann Hartle
【出版社】Thames & Hudson (June 20, 2023)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】B503.915 /H331 /E
【简介】In this bold book, Ann Hartle, one of the most important interpreters of sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, explores the modern notion of civility―the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the Western world―and asks, why has it disappeared? Concerned with the deepening cultural divisions in our postmodern, post-Christian world, she traces their roots back to the Reformation and Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne’s philosophical project of drawing on ancient philosophy and Christianity to create a new social bond to reform the mores of his culture is perhaps the first act of self-conscious civility. After tracing Montaigne’s thought, Hartle returns to our modern society and argues that this framing of civility is a human, philosophical invention and that civility fails precisely because it is a human, philosophical invention. She concludes with a defense of the central importance of sacred tradition for civility and the need to protect and maintain that social bond by supporting nonpoliticized, nonideological, free institutions, including and especially universities and churches. What Happened to Civility is written for readers concerned about the deterioration of civility in our public life and the defense of freedom of religion. The book will also interest philosophers who seek a deeper understanding of modernity and its meaning, political scientists interested in the meaning of liberalism and the causes of its failure, and scholars working on Montaigne’s Essays.
Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State
【ISBN】9781583679494
【作 者】István Mészáros
【出版社】Monthly Review Press (February 22, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】D0-02 /M586 /E
【简介】István Mészáros was one of the greatest political theorists of the twentieth century. Left unfinished at the time of his death, Beyond Leviathan is written on the magisterial scale of his previous book, Beyond Capital, and meant to complement that work. It focuses on the transcendence of the state, along with the transcendence of capital and alienated labor, while traversing the history of political theory from Plato to the present. Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, and Vico are only a few of the thinkers discussed in depth. The larger objective of this work is no less than to develop a full-edged critique of the state, in the Marxian tradition, and set against the critique of capital. Not only does it provide, for the first time, an all-embracing Marxian theory of the state, it gives new political meaning to the notion of “the withering away of the state.” In his definitive, seminal work, Mészáros seeks to illuminate the political preconditions for a society of substantive equality and substantive democracy.