Portents of the Real PDF Download

Author: Susan Willis
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781844670239
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Renowned cultural theorist reveals the deeper meanings of popular cultural phenomena in post-9/11 life in America.

Author: Philip E. Wegner
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390760
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Through virtuoso readings of significant works of American film, television, and fiction, Phillip E. Wegner demonstrates that the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 fostered a unique consciousness and represented a moment of immense historical possibilities now at risk of being forgotten in the midst of the “war on terror.” Wegner argues that 9/11 should be understood as a form of what Jacques Lacan called the “second death,” an event that repeats an earlier “fall,” in this instance the collapse of the Berlin Wall. By describing 9/11 as a repetition, Wegner does not deny its significance. Rather, he argues that it was only with the fall of the towers that the symbolic universe of the Cold War was finally destroyed and a true “new world order,” in which the United States assumed disturbing new powers, was put into place. Wegner shows how phenomena including the debate on globalization, neoliberal notions of the end of history, the explosive growth of the Internet, the efflorescence of new architectural and urban planning projects, developments in literary and cultural production, new turns in theory and philosophy, and the rapid growth of the antiglobalization movement came to characterize the long nineties. He offers readings of some of the most interesting cultural texts of the era: Don DeLillo’s White Noise; Joe Haldeman’s Forever trilogy; Octavia Butler’s Parable novels; the Terminator films; the movies Fight Club, Independence Day, Cape Fear, and Ghost Dog; and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In so doing, he illuminates fundamental issues concerning narrative, such as how beginnings and endings are recognized and how relationships between events are constructed.

Author: Susanne William Rasmussen
Publisher: L'ERMA di BRETSCHNEIDER
ISBN: 9788882652401
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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The Romans were a superstitious bunch with public portents forming an integral role in most political and social ceremonies and rituals. This detailed analysis of prodigia (unusual events that were reported to the Senate who then proclaimed that event as an unfavourable portent) does not look at what these events reveal about Roman psychology but, instead, focuses on the sociological consequences of this complete integration of politics and religion during the Republican period. Much of the book comprises a table of prodigies, gathered from primary sources, notably Livy's Ab urbe condita and Julius Obsequens' Ab anno-urbis conditae DV prodigium liber . This data is supported by detailed discussions of Cicero and public divination, the relationship between divination and science, the types of portents and the nature of religio-politics. Danish summary.

Author: Östasiatiska museet
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Author:
Publisher: Yahya Bin Shamoon
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Author: Elaine G. Breslaw
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814798519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 535

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Breslaw (history, U. of Tennessee) has created a fascinating reader--for undergraduate classes in history, anthropology, religious studies, or women's studies--surveying the subject of witches, witch hunts, and the larger political context of both. The sections, which cover Christian perspectives, non-Christian beliefs, diabolical possession, issues of gender, and a lengthy section on the Salem witch trials, each include an introduction by Breslaw, primary sources, then secondary commentaries on the sources. The latter are excerpts from books and articles. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Rania Huntington
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173825
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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To discuss the supernatural in China is “to talk of foxes and speak of ghosts.” Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter. Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. As the most ambiguous alien in the late imperial Chinese imagination, the fox reveals which boundaries around the human and the ordinary were most frequently violated and, therefore, most jealously guarded. Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time: the narrative boundaries of genre and texts; domesticity and the outside world; chaos and order; the human and the non-human; class; gender; sexual relations; and the progression from animal to monster to transcendent. As “middle creatures,” foxes were morally ambivalent, endowed with superhuman but not quite divine powers; like humans, they occupied a middle space between the infernal and the celestial.

Author: Steven R. Bates
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Sometimes the best way to let one know what something is, is to let one know what it isn't. Today's typical academic book in eschatology provides the reader with a brief history of the various positions in the field followed by why certain positions should be considered the better options. This is not that book. Over the course of twelve chapters, six sequences will be presented from the three major sources in the New Testament regarding the subject, i.e., Paul's letters to the Thessalonians, the Olivet Discourse, and John's visions in Revelation. Through a careful reconciliation of those six sequences, Dr. Steven R. Bates will show that there's only one sequence of end-times, which he has labeled "The Post-Armageddon, Premillennial Resurrection." He asserts that had any other sequence of end-times been correct, whether pre-tribulationism, pre-wrath, mid-tribulationism, historic pre-millennialism, post-millennialism, a-millennialism, preterism, or any other sequence that one could possibly imagine, then the proponents of that postulation should be able to take the same six sequences from Scripture and reconcile them precisely with one another, sentence by sentence, and prove whatever sequence they propose. But, of course, no one will ever attempt such an endeavor because it's theoretically impossible. Scripture's six sequences only confirm one sequence, and it is the one which has been presented in The Sequence.

Author: James E. Dustin
Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
ISBN: 1639037802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Chapters include the following: Lawsuits: These are actual lawsuits allowed into our nation's courts. The only way this chapter would be stranger is if it listed lawsuits so absurd they were not allowed into the courts. Hunting and Fishing: I live in a small drinking town with a hunting and fishing problem. Weather: This includes a column on the benefits of climate change, a subject that most news reports ignore, and why we in Walden, Colorado, are in favor of global warming. Politics: The first column is my abortive attempt to run for president of the United States. Another is on what we should learn from the Greeks, and another on state stereotyping. Yes, that happened. Internet English: This is the Age of the Text. So why do so many of these texters not know basic English? Sadly, examples abound. Technology: I've suggested a number of new inventions. You'll like the Fleshomatic. EEKs: Hope you're not one. Health: You don't realize the value of an eye until you've lost one. Advertising: Dilbert once observed that if marketing worked, it would be illegal. But it must work on some of us. Bureaucracies: If learning about what our government workers are actually doing doesn't drop you into a state of depression, you might be heavily medicated. Human Behavior: None of these columns seemed to fit anywhere else, like what if the passage of an asteroid made us all smarter?

Author: Franklin Brunell Krauss
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cults
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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