Peter C. Bouteneff, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Robert Saler (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823289752
- eISBN:
- 9780823297108
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823289752.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology, cultural and media studies, and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality. Arvo Pärt: Sounding ...
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Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology, cultural and media studies, and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality. Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred focuses on the representational dimensions of Pärt’s music (including the trope of silence), writing and listening past the fact that its storied effects and affects are carried first and foremost as vibrations through air, impressing themselves on the human body. In response, this ambitiously interdisciplinary volume asks: What of sound and materiality as embodiments of the sacred, as historically specific artifacts, and as elements of creation deeply linked to the human sensorium in Pärt studies? In taking up these questions, the book “de-Platonizes” Pärt studies by demystifying the notion of a single “Pärt sound.” It offers innovative, critical analyses of the historical contexts of Pärt’s experimentation, medievalism, and diverse creative work; it re-sounds the acoustic, theological, and representational grounds of silence in Pärt’s music; it listens with critical openness to the intersections of theology, sacred texts, and spirituality in Pärt’s music; and it positions sensing, performing bodies at the center of musical experience. Building on the conventional score-, biography-, and media-based approaches, this volume reframes Pärt studies around the materiality of sound, its sacredness, and its embodied resonances within secular spaces.Less
Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology, cultural and media studies, and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality. Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred focuses on the representational dimensions of Pärt’s music (including the trope of silence), writing and listening past the fact that its storied effects and affects are carried first and foremost as vibrations through air, impressing themselves on the human body. In response, this ambitiously interdisciplinary volume asks: What of sound and materiality as embodiments of the sacred, as historically specific artifacts, and as elements of creation deeply linked to the human sensorium in Pärt studies? In taking up these questions, the book “de-Platonizes” Pärt studies by demystifying the notion of a single “Pärt sound.” It offers innovative, critical analyses of the historical contexts of Pärt’s experimentation, medievalism, and diverse creative work; it re-sounds the acoustic, theological, and representational grounds of silence in Pärt’s music; it listens with critical openness to the intersections of theology, sacred texts, and spirituality in Pärt’s music; and it positions sensing, performing bodies at the center of musical experience. Building on the conventional score-, biography-, and media-based approaches, this volume reframes Pärt studies around the materiality of sound, its sacredness, and its embodied resonances within secular spaces.
Becky L. Schulthies
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823289714
- eISBN:
- 9780823297115
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823289714.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
What does it mean to connect as Moroccans via mass media when there is widespread feeling of communicative failure? This book approaches the question by exploring situated talk about communicative ...
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What does it mean to connect as Moroccans via mass media when there is widespread feeling of communicative failure? This book approaches the question by exploring situated talk about communicative failure, which speaks to how Moroccans seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez. Over the last decade, laments of language and media failure in Fez have focused on communicative channels and were not just about social relations that used to be and had been lost, but also what ought to be and had yet to be realized. These channels, or mediums that connected people, ranged from objects such as devotional prayer beads and remote controls; to interactional forms such as storytelling registers, dress styles, and non-standard Arabic writing; and to media platforms like television news, Moroccan religious stations, or WhatsApp group chats. This book describes these multimodal channels and analyzes how, why, and when they moved from facilitator (intermediating connecting mechanism) to meddler (mediating sociality actor). Laments about communicative channel failures precipitated relationality projects by the state and several Fassi calibrations of those efforts. These laments were ways of speaking that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing formations of Moroccan public relationality. Rather than furthering the discourse about Morocco’s conflict between liberal secularists and religious conservatives, this ethnography shows the subtle range of ideologies and practices evoked in Fassi homes to calibrate appropriate Moroccan sociality and political consciousness.Less
What does it mean to connect as Moroccans via mass media when there is widespread feeling of communicative failure? This book approaches the question by exploring situated talk about communicative failure, which speaks to how Moroccans seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez. Over the last decade, laments of language and media failure in Fez have focused on communicative channels and were not just about social relations that used to be and had been lost, but also what ought to be and had yet to be realized. These channels, or mediums that connected people, ranged from objects such as devotional prayer beads and remote controls; to interactional forms such as storytelling registers, dress styles, and non-standard Arabic writing; and to media platforms like television news, Moroccan religious stations, or WhatsApp group chats. This book describes these multimodal channels and analyzes how, why, and when they moved from facilitator (intermediating connecting mechanism) to meddler (mediating sociality actor). Laments about communicative channel failures precipitated relationality projects by the state and several Fassi calibrations of those efforts. These laments were ways of speaking that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing formations of Moroccan public relationality. Rather than furthering the discourse about Morocco’s conflict between liberal secularists and religious conservatives, this ethnography shows the subtle range of ideologies and practices evoked in Fassi homes to calibrate appropriate Moroccan sociality and political consciousness.
Gareth Williams
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823289882
- eISBN:
- 9780823297153
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823289882.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book clears a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. It considers globalization as a new, and increasingly unmoored, ...
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This book clears a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. It considers globalization as a new, and increasingly unmoored, ordering for which modern political theory, including its theories of political subjectivation, has proven largely obsolete. Globalization is the hollowing out and expiration of the political-theological imagination of the modern juridical system of states. In this regard Infrapolitical Passages provides (1) a theory of globalization as a crisis of symbolic organization and (2) a theory of global economic warfare as the positing itself of both directionlessness and facticity. In contrast, the work of clearing proposes “infrapolitics” as a distance from the biopolitical, which it understands as the contemporary forms of domination, that is, as the production of specific forms of subjectivity that pertain to the age of the ontology of the commodity. It is the relation of the subject to domination—and the subsequent obscuring of any question for being—that signals the need to circumvent the instrumentalization of life as a relation of subordination to the metaphysics of subjectivity, representation, and politics.Less
This book clears a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. It considers globalization as a new, and increasingly unmoored, ordering for which modern political theory, including its theories of political subjectivation, has proven largely obsolete. Globalization is the hollowing out and expiration of the political-theological imagination of the modern juridical system of states. In this regard Infrapolitical Passages provides (1) a theory of globalization as a crisis of symbolic organization and (2) a theory of global economic warfare as the positing itself of both directionlessness and facticity. In contrast, the work of clearing proposes “infrapolitics” as a distance from the biopolitical, which it understands as the contemporary forms of domination, that is, as the production of specific forms of subjectivity that pertain to the age of the ontology of the commodity. It is the relation of the subject to domination—and the subsequent obscuring of any question for being—that signals the need to circumvent the instrumentalization of life as a relation of subordination to the metaphysics of subjectivity, representation, and politics.
S. Jonathon O'Donnell
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823289677
- eISBN:
- 9780823297177
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823289677.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical “spiritual warfare” ...
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Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical “spiritual warfare” demonologies in contemporary America, which envision the world as built on a clash of divine and demonic forces in which humanity is enmeshed. Situating spiritual warfare in the context of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire-management, it exposes the theological foundations that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current US political order—queer- and transphobia, Islamophobia, antiblackness, and settler colonialism. The book argues that demonologies are not merely tools of dehumanization but ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxies: models of the “right ordering” of reality that create uneven geographies of space and stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Demonologies constitute and consolidate these geographies and stratifications by enabling the framing of other orders as passing orders—as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. But these orders are unwilling to pass on, instead giving structure to deviant desires that resist sovereign power. Demonstrating these structures of resistance in demonologies of three figures—the Jezebel spirit, the Islamic Antichrist, and Leviathan—Passing Orders explores how demons exceed their designated role as self-consolidating others to embody alternative possibilities that unsettle orthotaxic claims over territory, time, and truth. Ultimately, it reimagines demons as a surprising source of political and social resistance, reflecting fragile and fractious communities bound by mutual passing and precarity into strategic coalitions of solidarity, subversion, and survival.Less
Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical “spiritual warfare” demonologies in contemporary America, which envision the world as built on a clash of divine and demonic forces in which humanity is enmeshed. Situating spiritual warfare in the context of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire-management, it exposes the theological foundations that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current US political order—queer- and transphobia, Islamophobia, antiblackness, and settler colonialism. The book argues that demonologies are not merely tools of dehumanization but ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxies: models of the “right ordering” of reality that create uneven geographies of space and stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Demonologies constitute and consolidate these geographies and stratifications by enabling the framing of other orders as passing orders—as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. But these orders are unwilling to pass on, instead giving structure to deviant desires that resist sovereign power. Demonstrating these structures of resistance in demonologies of three figures—the Jezebel spirit, the Islamic Antichrist, and Leviathan—Passing Orders explores how demons exceed their designated role as self-consolidating others to embody alternative possibilities that unsettle orthotaxic claims over territory, time, and truth. Ultimately, it reimagines demons as a surprising source of political and social resistance, reflecting fragile and fractious communities bound by mutual passing and precarity into strategic coalitions of solidarity, subversion, and survival.
Marc Redfield
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823289066
- eISBN:
- 9780823297191
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823289066.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European ...
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In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. Building on Jacques Derrida’s Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, but following its own itinerary, this book interprets the episode in Judges together with texts by Celan, passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!, and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern, pursuing the track of a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers Celan a locus of poetico-political affirmation.Less
In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. Building on Jacques Derrida’s Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, but following its own itinerary, this book interprets the episode in Judges together with texts by Celan, passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!, and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern, pursuing the track of a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers Celan a locus of poetico-political affirmation.
J. Daniel Elam
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823289790
- eISBN:
- 9780823297221
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823289790.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead ...
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World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead inexpertise, unknowing, unintelligibility, and collective unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success. This book shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, this book foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of four thinkers, Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way of rather to disavow mastery and expertise altogether. Reading was antiauthoritarian precisely because it urged readers to refuse authorship and, relatedly, authority. To become or remain a reader, and divest oneself of authorial claims, was to challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics.Less
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead inexpertise, unknowing, unintelligibility, and collective unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success. This book shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, this book foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of four thinkers, Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way of rather to disavow mastery and expertise altogether. Reading was antiauthoritarian precisely because it urged readers to refuse authorship and, relatedly, authority. To become or remain a reader, and divest oneself of authorial claims, was to challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics.
Genevieve Yue
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823289554
- eISBN:
- 9780823297146
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823289554.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
For decades, feminist film analysis has been focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the ...
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For decades, feminist film analysis has been focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the filmstrip itself? What does feminist analysis have to offer in understanding the film image before it enters the realm of representation? In Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, Genevieve Yue explores how gender and sexual difference have been deeply embedded within film materiality. Though the industrial practices she examines are typically hidden from view, they are no less gendered than the images projected onscreen. In rich archival and technical detail, Yue examines three sites of technical film production: the film laboratory, editing practices, and the film archive. Within each site, she locates a common motif, the vanishing female body, which is transformed into material to be used in the making of a film. Yue develops a theory of gender and film materiality through readings of narrative film, early cinema, experimental film, and moving image art. In this original work of feminist media history, Girl Head shows how gender has had a surprising and persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen.Less
For decades, feminist film analysis has been focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the filmstrip itself? What does feminist analysis have to offer in understanding the film image before it enters the realm of representation? In Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, Genevieve Yue explores how gender and sexual difference have been deeply embedded within film materiality. Though the industrial practices she examines are typically hidden from view, they are no less gendered than the images projected onscreen. In rich archival and technical detail, Yue examines three sites of technical film production: the film laboratory, editing practices, and the film archive. Within each site, she locates a common motif, the vanishing female body, which is transformed into material to be used in the making of a film. Yue develops a theory of gender and film materiality through readings of narrative film, early cinema, experimental film, and moving image art. In this original work of feminist media history, Girl Head shows how gender has had a surprising and persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen.
Jacques Derrida
John D. Caputo (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823290284
- eISBN:
- 9780823297139
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823290284.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to ...
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This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to questions put to him at a roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, community, and the messianic. Derrida refutes the charges of relativism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The roundtable is marked by an unusual clarity that continues into the second part of the book, in which one of Derrida's most influential readers elaborates upon Derrida's comments and supplies material for further discussion. The new Introduction discusses the original context of the book and traces the development of deconstruction since Derrida's death in 2004, from the rise of new materialisms to return to religion. Long one of the most lucid and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language, and an ideal volume for students, the book will also prove illuminating for those already familiar with Derrida's work.Less
This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to questions put to him at a roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, community, and the messianic. Derrida refutes the charges of relativism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The roundtable is marked by an unusual clarity that continues into the second part of the book, in which one of Derrida's most influential readers elaborates upon Derrida's comments and supplies material for further discussion. The new Introduction discusses the original context of the book and traces the development of deconstruction since Derrida's death in 2004, from the rise of new materialisms to return to religion. Long one of the most lucid and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language, and an ideal volume for students, the book will also prove illuminating for those already familiar with Derrida's work.
Margaret M. McGuinness and Jeffrey M. Burns (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823289646
- eISBN:
- 9780823297184
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823289646.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
This volume tells the little-known story of the Dominican Family—priests, sisters, brothers, contemplative nuns, and lay people—and integrates it into the history of the United States. Starting after ...
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This volume tells the little-known story of the Dominican Family—priests, sisters, brothers, contemplative nuns, and lay people—and integrates it into the history of the United States. Starting after the Civil War, the book takes a thematic approach through twelve essays examining Dominican contributions to the making of the modern United States by exploring parish ministry, preaching, health care, education, social and economic justice, liturgical renewal and the arts, missionary outreach and contemplative prayer, ongoing internal formation and renewal, and models of sanctity. It charts the effects of the United States on Dominican life as well as the Dominican contribution to the larger U.S. history. When the country was engulfed by wave after wave of immigrants and cities experienced unchecked growth, Dominicans provided educational institutions; community, social, and religious centers; and health care and social services. When epidemic disease hit various locales, Dominicans responded with nursing care and spiritual sustenance. As the United States became more complex and social inequities appeared, Dominicans cried out for social and economic justice. Amidst the ugliness and social dislocation of modern society, Dominicans offered beauty through the liturgical arts, the fine arts, music, drama, and film, all designed to enrich the culture. Through it all, the Dominicans cultivated their own identity as well, undergoing regular self-examination and renewal.Less
This volume tells the little-known story of the Dominican Family—priests, sisters, brothers, contemplative nuns, and lay people—and integrates it into the history of the United States. Starting after the Civil War, the book takes a thematic approach through twelve essays examining Dominican contributions to the making of the modern United States by exploring parish ministry, preaching, health care, education, social and economic justice, liturgical renewal and the arts, missionary outreach and contemplative prayer, ongoing internal formation and renewal, and models of sanctity. It charts the effects of the United States on Dominican life as well as the Dominican contribution to the larger U.S. history. When the country was engulfed by wave after wave of immigrants and cities experienced unchecked growth, Dominicans provided educational institutions; community, social, and religious centers; and health care and social services. When epidemic disease hit various locales, Dominicans responded with nursing care and spiritual sustenance. As the United States became more complex and social inequities appeared, Dominicans cried out for social and economic justice. Amidst the ugliness and social dislocation of modern society, Dominicans offered beauty through the liturgical arts, the fine arts, music, drama, and film, all designed to enrich the culture. Through it all, the Dominicans cultivated their own identity as well, undergoing regular self-examination and renewal.
Kenneth B. Kidd
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823289592
- eISBN:
- 9780823297207
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823289592.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. After ...
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Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. After centuries of ignoring the child, some philosophy now considers the child an exemplary practitioner as well as subject. This attitude drives the Philosophy for Children or P4C movement, which got its start in the United States in the early 1970s and has since spread to other countries and continents. P4C has affirmed children’s literature as important philosophical work. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in some children’s classics and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children’s literature. After examining the P4C movement, the book turns its attention to theory for beginners and especially in the form of illustrated or graphic guides. These guides emerged from the anticolonial and Marxist work of Mexican activist and author-illustrator Eduardo del Rio, aka Rius. Rius’ Cuba Para Principiantes, or Cuba for Beginners (1970), kicked off the Beginners graphic series, emphasizing the self-teaching of political-critical awareness. The genre gradually went mainstream, losing the political edge. If philosophy is for children, and theory is for beginners, then children’s literature might also be described as a literature for minors. The third and final chapter pursues that idea, proposing more specifically that children’s and young adult literature can sometimes function as queer theory for kids.Less
Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. After centuries of ignoring the child, some philosophy now considers the child an exemplary practitioner as well as subject. This attitude drives the Philosophy for Children or P4C movement, which got its start in the United States in the early 1970s and has since spread to other countries and continents. P4C has affirmed children’s literature as important philosophical work. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in some children’s classics and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children’s literature. After examining the P4C movement, the book turns its attention to theory for beginners and especially in the form of illustrated or graphic guides. These guides emerged from the anticolonial and Marxist work of Mexican activist and author-illustrator Eduardo del Rio, aka Rius. Rius’ Cuba Para Principiantes, or Cuba for Beginners (1970), kicked off the Beginners graphic series, emphasizing the self-teaching of political-critical awareness. The genre gradually went mainstream, losing the political edge. If philosophy is for children, and theory is for beginners, then children’s literature might also be described as a literature for minors. The third and final chapter pursues that idea, proposing more specifically that children’s and young adult literature can sometimes function as queer theory for kids.
Against Sustainability
Circling the Elephant
John Fante's Ask the Dust
Noir Affect
