Rereading the Machine in the Garden PDF Download

Author: Eric Erbacher
Publisher: Campus Verlag
ISBN: 3593501910
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The volume reexamines the trope of the intrusive machine and the regenerative pastoral garden, laid out fifty years ago by Leo Marx in "The Machine in the Garden," one of the founding texts of American Studies. Contributions explore the lasting influence of the trope in American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectics where nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. They trace this dialectic trope in filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; they explore its function in the aftermath of the civil war, the rural electrification during the New Deal, in landscape art, and in ethnic literatures; and they discuss the historical premises and lasting influence of Leo Marx's seminal study.

Author: Patricia Meyer Spacks
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674267478
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn’t to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment. Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen’s fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.

Author: Paula Fox
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393318944
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
First published in 1970 to great acclaim, this novel stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature--a novel that, according to Irving Howe, ranks with "Billy Budd" and "The Great Gatsby".

Author: Wendy Lesser
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547346891
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year: A look at the pleasures and surprises of rereading. Compared with reading, the act of rereading is far more personal—it involves a complex interaction of our past selves, our present selves, and literature. With candor and humor, this “inspired intellectual romp, part memoir, part criticism” takes us on a guided tour of the author’s own return to books she once knew—from the plays of Shakespeare to twentieth-century novels by Kingsley Amis and Ian McEwan, from the childhood favorite I Capture the Castle to classic novels such as Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn, from nonfiction by Henry Adams to poetry by Wordsworth—as she reflects on how the passage of time and the experience of aging has affected her perceptions of them (Lawrence Weschler). A cultural critic and the acclaimed author of Why I Read, Wendy Lesser conveys an infectious love of reading and inspires us all to take another look at the books we’ve read to find the unexpected treasures they might offer. “Delightful.” —Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce “Anyone who has ever approached a once favorite book later in life . . . will find in this memoir moments of bittersweet recognition.” —The New York Times Book Review “Reflect[s] deeply and candidly on how a reader’s life experiences alter her perceptions of literature . . . [Lesser] has truly fascinating and original things to say about a compelling assortment of writers, including George Orwell, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Dostoyevsky, and Shakespeare.” —Booklist

Author: William R. Handley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139440152
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
In Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley argues that although scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence surrounding marriages and families. He examines works of historiography,as well as writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others, to argue that these works highlight white Americans' anxiety about what happens to American 'character' when domestic enemies such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth century, no longer threaten its homes. Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorise national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.

Author: Edward Jackson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350117781
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality: Hideousness, Neoliberalism, Spermatics is the first full-length study of perhaps the most controversial aspect of Wallace's work – male sexuality. Departing from biographical accounts of Wallace's troubled relationship to sex, the book offers new and engaging close readings of this vexed topic in both his fiction and non-fiction. Wallace consistently returns to images of sexual toxicity across his career to argue that, when it comes to sex, men are immutably hideous. He makes this argument by drawing on a variety of neoliberal logics and spermatic metaphors, which in their appeal to apparently neutral economic processes and natural bodily facts, forestall the possibility that men can change. The book therefore provides a revisionist account of Wallace's attitudes towards capitalism, as well as a critical dissection of his approach to masculinity and sexuality. In doing so, David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality shows how Wallace can be considered a neoliberal writer, whose commitment to furthering male sexual toxicity is a disturbing but undeniable part of his literary project.

Author: Kjetil Fallan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429891989
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
The Culture of Nature in the History of Design confronts the dilemma caused by design’s pertinent yet precarious position in environmental discourse through interdisciplinary conversations about the design of nature and the nature of design. Demonstrating that the deep entanglements of design and nature have a deeper and broader history than contemporary discourse on sustainable design and ecological design might imply, this book presents case studies ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century and from Singapore to Mexico. It gathers scholarship on a broad range of fields/practices, from urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture, to engineering design, industrial design, furniture design and graphic design. From adobe architecture to the atomic bomb, from the bonsai tree to Biosphere 2, from pesticides to photovoltaics, from rust to recycling – the culture of nature permeates the history of design. As an activity and a profession always operating in the borderlands between human and non-human environments, design has always been part of the environmental problem, whilst also being an indispensable part of the solution. The book ventures into domains as diverse as design theory, research, pedagogy, politics, activism, organizations, exhibitions, and fiction and trade literature to explore how design is constantly making and unmaking the environment and, conversely, how the environment is both making and unmaking design. This book will be of great interest to a range of scholarly fields, from design education and design history to environmental policy and environmental history.

Author: Andressa Schröder
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839441226
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Cultures as well as individuals continually balance the demands of nostalgia and sustainability as they construct historical narratives of ›futures worth preserving‹. The aim of this volume is to explore those narratives and the underlying assumptions which inform them. Drawing on a range of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, the chapters investigate cultural assumptions about which aspects of the past deserve to be remembered and which aspects of the present should be sustained for the future. In the process, they reveal how contemporary definitions of sustainability are informed by a nostalgic yearning for the past, and how nostalgia is motivated by a reciprocal longing to sustain the past for the future.

Author: Clare Hayes-Brady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100908108X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 763

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Book Description
David Foster Wallace is regarded as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book introduces readers to the literary, philosophical and political contexts of Wallace's work. An accessible and useable resource, this volume conceptualizes his work within long-standing critical traditions and with a new awareness of his importance for American literary studies. It shows the range of issues and contexts that inform the work and reading of David Foster Wallace, connecting his writing to diverse ideas, periods and themes. Essays cover topics on gender, sex, violence, race, philosophy, poetry and geography, among many others, guiding new and long-standing readers in understanding the work and influence of this important writer.

Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501144197
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
Set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine A "wondrously frightening" (Publishers Weekly) tale of terror and #1 national bestseller about a writer's pseudonym that comes alive and destroys everyone on the path that leads to the man who created him. Thad Beaumont is a writer, and for a dozen years he has secretly published violent bestsellers under the name of George Stark. But Thad is a healthier and happier man now, the father of infant twins, and starting to write as himself again. He no longer needs George Stark and so, with nationwide publicity, the pseudonym is retired. But George Stark won't go willingly. And now Thad would like to say he is innocent. He'd like to say he has nothing to do with the twisted imagination that produced his bestselling novels. He'd like to say he has nothing to do with the series of monstrous murders that keep coming closer to his home. But how can Thad deny the ultimate embodiment of evil that goes by the name he gave it--and signs its crimes with Thad's bloody fingerprints? The Dark Half is "a chiller" (The New York Times Book Review), so real and fascinating that you'll find yourself squirming in Stephen King's heart-stopping, blood-curdling grip--and loving every minute of it.