Tales of a Severed Head PDF Download

Author: Rachida Madani
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300176287
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 172

View

Book Description
A brilliant retelling of the classic Arab tale of Scheherazade, set in the present day

Author: Julia Kristeva
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231157207
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208

View

Book Description
Renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) offers an extended consideration of artistic figurations of the severed head, the organizing theme to an exhibition she coordinated at the Louvre in 1998. Though she follows a single historical trajectory, moving from Paleolithic skull cults to antique Greek sculpture to the Surrealist drawings, Kristeva eschews the disciplinary constraints of art history, instead employing psychoanalysis to explore the intertwined problems of representation and mortality posed by the severed head. For Kristeva, the capacity to figure the life of the mind first requires a confrontation with this horrific object that stands at the boundary between life and death, registering not only the loss of corporeal form but also subjective interiority. Though this book does not engage with recent images of decapitation, it is not without contemporary political-cultural import; for Kristeva, these cruel artistic figurations offer us the capacity to contemplate the sacred within a technology-driven contemporary visual culture. Verdict While a challenging text, this beautifully written and richly layered meditation on mortality and representation will undoubtedly appeal to those readers interested in semiotic and psychoanalytically informed readings of art.-Jonathan Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr.(c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Author: Iris Murdoch
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101495839
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 199

View

Book Description
A novel about the frightfulness and ruthlessness of being in love, from the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, “this is nothing to do with happiness.” A Severed Head was adapted for a successful stage production in 1963 and was later made into a film starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, and Ian Holm.

Author: Frances Larson
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 1847088015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

View

Book Description
Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and cryonicists promise that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever. From shrunken heads to trophies of war; from memento mori to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.

Author: Henry Glassie
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307828247
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

View

Book Description
Here are 125 magnificent folktales collected from anthologies and journals published from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with tales of the ancient times and continuing through the arrival of the saints in Ireland in the fifth century, the periods of war and family, the Literary Revival championed by William Butler Yeats, and the contemporary era, these robust and funny, sorrowful and heroic stories of kings, ghosts, fairies, treasures, enchanted nature, and witchcraft are set in cities, villages, fields, and forests from the wild western coast to the modern streets of Dublin and Belfast. Edited by Henry Glassie With black-and-white illustrations throughout Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

Author: Hugh Lupton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780992946050
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1555977197
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 175

View

Book Description
A collection of short stories centered around the West includes tales of a deaf Native American girl wandering in the desert and a young boy coping with the death of his sister by angling for trout in the creek where she drowned.

Author: Marie Heaney
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 9780590680523
Category : Folklore
Languages : en
Pages : 108

View

Book Description
A sampling of some of the most famous Irish legends.

Author: Richard Lee Byers
Publisher: Aconyte
ISBN: 183908054X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

View

Book Description
The young Heimdall must undertake a mighty quest to save Odin – and all of Asgard – in the first heroic fantasy novel set in Marvel’s incredible Legends of Asgard It is a dark time for Asgard. The All-Father is trapped in a bewitched Odinsleep, inspiring an all-out assault from the Frost Giants. They evade the gods’ defenses with uncommon ease, as if guided by augury. Heimdall, a quick-witted young warrior still finding his place amongst Asgard’s defenders, believes it no coincidence that Odin lies enchanted and that the Giants are so well-informed. Sneaking into Odin’s inner chambers, he discovers that the severed head of Mimir, a great source of wisdom, is missing. Accompanied by his sister, Lady Sif, Heimdall must quest across the Nine Realms to retrieve it, lest mighty Asgard fall.

Author: Larissa Tracy
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004211551
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 387

View

Book Description
Capitalizing upon the enduring fascination with decapitation in European culture, this collection examines--through a variety of critical lenses--the recurring "roles/rolls" of severed human heads in the medieval and early modern imagination.