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"Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language," said T. S. Eliot. We experience Baudelaire in myriad ways through his multifaceted writing. His sensuous poems--dreams of escape to an impossible, preferably tropical, elsewhere--draw us in with their descriptive and perceptual richness. There is also the bitter, compassionate, and desolate Baudelaire. Ultimately, Baudelaire's true genius might reside in his expressive force and in the tension between his passions and intellect. The latter is most evident in his control of rhetoric and poetic form, and--given the poems' density of language, thought, and feeling--his astonishing clarity. This new English rendition of Baudelaire by award-winning translator Beverley Bie Brahic includes poems from his celebrated volumes: Les Fleurs du mal, Les âEpaves, Le Spleen de Paris, and Paradis artificiels. It also includes several of his prose poems, as well as an excerpt from his famous essay on wine and hashish. The poems in verse have Baudelaire's French originals on facing pages; the prose poems, unaccompanied by their originals, are printed near the poems in verse with which they resonate. Complete with the translator's illuminating introduction and notes, this beautifully crafted volume is an important addition to Baudelaire's work in English translation. -- provided by publisher
Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the late '80s, this title presents a narrative of a passionate, and ultimately tragic, relationship between Mali and Farid set against the simultaneous decline of Egyptian-Lebanese society. It chronicles the casualties of social conventions, religious divisions, and cultural cliches.
In recent years, social workers have raised concern about the appearance of a new category among the working poor. This book tells about how we live in geographical space and how work and patterns of domicile affect our status and our inner being.
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's poetry dwells in spaces of paradox, seeking out the words, metaphors, and images that capture both the peaceful stillness of snow and the desperate cry of human experience. A Cry in the Snow often draws on these two fertile tropes: the beauty of nature and the power and limitations of language. A trilingual poet who has published in French, English, and her native Romanian, Radulescu seeks to harness the elemental aspects of human experience, working between language and the mysterious power of silence. Combining poems from two French-language collections, Un Cri dans la neige (A Cry in the Snow) and a poetic prose sequence, Journal aux yeux fermés (Journal with Closed Eyes), this collection presents the distinctive and powerful French poems of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu to an English-language readership for the first time.
Collects the remarkable letters and poems sent by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire to his fiancee, Madeleine Pages, during World War I.
Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Few can be said to have had as broad an impact on European art in the twentieth century as these two cultural giants. Pablo Picasso, a pioneering visual artist, created a prolific and widely influential body of work. Gertrude Stein, an intellectual tastemaker, hosted the leading salon for artists and writers between the wars in her Paris apartment, welcoming Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound to weekly events at her home to discuss art and literature. It comes as no surprise, then, that Picasso and Stein were fast friends and frequent confidantes. Through Picasso and Stein's casual notes and reflective letters, this volume of correspondence between the two captures Paris both in the golden age of the early twentieth century and in one of its darkest hours, the Nazi occupation through mentions of dinner parties, lovers, work, and the crises of the two world wars. Illustrated with photographs and postcards, as well as drawings and paintings by Picasso, this collection captures an exhilarating period in European culture through the minds of two artistic greats.
Writing in 2007, French social philosopher André Gorz was remarkably prophetic, foretelling the international economic meltdown of 2008: "The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry--until that inevitable point when the bubbles burst, leading to serial bank crashes and threatening the global system of credit with collapse and the real economy with a severe, prolonged depression." This prescient article is collected in Ecologica alongside many of Gorz's final writings and interviews, which together offer practical and often path-breaking set of solutions to our current economic and political problems. In his writings Gorz condemns the speculative global economic system and anatomizes its terminal crisis. Advocating an exit from capitalism through the self-limitation of needs and the networked use of the latest technologies, he outlines a practical, democratically based solution to our current predicament. Compiled by Gorz, Ecologica is intended as a final distillation of his work and thought, a guide to the survival of our planet. It is a work of political, rather than scientific ecology--Gorz aruges that the key to planetary survival is not a surrender to environmental experts and eco-technocrats, but a switch to non-consumerist modes of living that would amount to a type of cultural revolution. Praise for André Gorz"To my mind the greatest of modern French social thinkers."--Herbert Gintis, author of Schooling in Capitalist America"Gorz's work was always within the Utopian tradition--a label he welcomed but which was used pejoratively by his opponents. . . . Many of his derided early warnings about globalization and environmental degradation have become commonplace discourses in political debates today. Ultimately, Gorz's Utopianism was expressed in a very practical sense--we never know how far along the road we are if we have no idea of the destination."--Independent
A play that recounts the tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo Republic and an African nationalist hero.
"'Poâesie et photographie' was originally delivered as the Lezione Sapegno for 2009 at the University of Val d'Aoste, The text of that lecture was subsequently published by Nino Aragno of Turin, Italy. The present version is a greatly amended and developed version of the original lecture, which it supersedes."--Page [vi].
Brings together essays written just after World War II. This title features essays that range across the author's reflections on collaboration, resistance and liberation in post-war Europe, his thoughts and observations after his extended trip to the USA in 1945, and an examination of the failings of philosophical materialism.
When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother, Marie, wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie's first great love, a much older teacher who she describes as a great dinosaur.
Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy, semiological essays on mass culture, then unsettled the literary critical establishment with heretical writings on the French classics, before going on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century (Empire of Signs, S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes). In 1976, the one-time structuralist 'outsider' was elected to a chair at France's pre-eminent academic institution, the College de France, choosing to style himself its Professor of Literary Semiology, though this last somewhat hedonistic and more 'subjectivist' phase of his intellectual adventure was cut short by his untimely death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since the publication in 2002 of the expanded version of his Oeuvres completes [Complete Works], edited by Eric Marty. The present collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews and other occasional journalistic pieces, all drawn from that comprehensive source, attempts to give English-speaking readers access to the most significant previously untranslated material from the various stages of Barthes's career. It is divided (not entirely scientifically) into five themed volumes entitled: Theory, Politics, Literary Criticism, Signs and Images (Art, Cinema, Photography), and Interviews. Barthes's earliest interest is in literature--in theatre and the classic realist novel, but also in the more experimental writers of the 1940s and 50s (literature of the absurd, nouveau roman etc.). The articles translated in this volume run from his mid-1950s writings on popular poetry, the giants of the nineteenth century novel (Hugo, Maupassant, Zola), and the narrative innovations of Robbe-Grillet and his associates through to writings from his later years on Sade, Rousseau and Voltaire, and the longer study 'Masculine, Feminine, Neuter' which is, in the words of his French editor, the 'first outline' of his remarkable critical work S/Z.
Takes us to the unchartered frontiers of the forbidden. From initiation ceremonies to crises of hysteria, from suicide attempts to the ecstasies of witches, the author explores in simple but scholarly terms the responses that civilizations have offered to the humanistic need for escape from the body.
Tells a story that centers on two young women: Voltairine, a dancer who no longer dances but whose body is still haunted by the movement of dance, and her soulmate Emile, a young woman recovering from unexpected cardiac arrest. The girls are inseparable, and both their lives have been shattered by the horror of rape.
Franz Kafka was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His writing contributed greatly to existentialism, and the term "Kafkaesque" is now synonymous with the literature of the surreal, the complex, and the illogical. This book dives deep into Kafka's mind, examining his motives rather than the results.
A collection of poems that echo each other, returning to and elaborating upon key images, thoughts, feelings, and people. Intriguing and enigmatic, it is a mixture of sonnet sequences and prose poems.
Features Max, a French journalist looking for his next story, and Lena, an American singer, who were once lovers, but now friends. They travel with Lena's new man, Thibault and with Max's barely masked jealousy. Then they meet the striking Colonel Strether, the epitome of military decorum and bearing.
Argues that the use of the terms 'war' and 'terror' dehumanize the enemy and permit treatment that would otherwise be impermissible. This title examines the implications and corrupting impact of the attempt to impose 'good' through violence and the attempt to spread democratic values by unethical means.
Rejecting not only the identification of the aesthetic with the work of art, but also the Kantian association of the aesthetic with subjectively universal judgment, the author's analysis of aesthetic relations opens up a space for a theory of art that is free of historicism and capable of engaging with noncanonical and non-Western arts.
In Paris, Montreal, Seville, Berlin, and towns large and small, the author has dreamt - and she has remembered her dreams. In this small volume, she shares her dreams of the years 2008-10, a time of global upheaval that happened to coincide with upheavals in her own life.
After the failed revolutions of 1848, Galicia has been brought under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, and the Zemka family find themselves embroiled in the struggle for Polish independence. This is a history of Eastern Europe told in miniature through the tumultuous saga of one family as they try to reclaim their estate.
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