Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Art, ethics, and environment; a free enquiry into the vulgarly received notion of nature.
The Nature in the Kingdom of Ends conference was held in Selfoss, Iceland at an undisclosed date, the title an allusion to Kant and affirmation that the environment, as well as other people, should be considered their own ends, rather than mere means for someone else's ends. Scholars of art, philosophy, and various social and natural sciences explore such topics as the role of nature in the definition of sacred space in medieval Europe; nature, values, and our duties towards animals; and toward a culture of nature. No index is provided. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Being in time to the music.
Ross (sociology, Fatih U.) returns to the roots of phenomenological thinking in this challenging text. Invoking Plato, Heidegger, Hegel, and Marx, he seeks the meaning of existence, along the way describing his ideas in musical forms that lead to harmony and the accordance of truth, justice, and beauty; wrestling with being and non-being; invoking the music of wonder from understanding to caring; arguing and agreeing with Hegel; and coming to rest in the final chapter by re-founding the thoughts of Marx and Engels, isolating levels of materiality, and focusing on the communist idea and its applications to this century. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The brief and turbulent life of modernising conservatism.
Mitchell describes the domestic industrial policy of the British Conservative Party from 1945 to 1964, through the administrations of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home. Though initially a response to the admitted inefficiency of British industry, he says, it eventually encompassed the overlapping realms of economic regeneration after World War II, foreign policy, and social improvement. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
City visions; the work of Iain Sinclair.
Scholars of English literature analyze the poetry, prose, and film of contemporary London artist Sinclair. Their topics include the vorticist visionary mode of Wyndham Lewis and Iain Sinclair, the politics of his poetics in The Kodak Mantra Diaries, re-writing Conrad, and his carceral London. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Colonial visions, postcolonial revisions; images of the Indian diaspora in Malaysia.
Indians mostly from the south of the country went to Malaysia in droves during the 19th century to work in the rubber plantations established by the colonial government. They were called coolies, and the term has retained its derogatory sense these hundred years and more. Pilai (language study and linguistics, National U. of Malaysia) seeks to rehabilitate the term and the people who were so named by revealing the oppressive conditions and processes in which it was used. It should be a badge of honor, she says, for those who endured and survived. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Heroes and saints; the moment of death in cross-cultural pespectives.
The way in which the moment of death is conceptualized and ritually treated is a reflection of the preoccupations and religious values of a group, state Granoff and Shinohara (professors of religious studies, Yale U.) in introducing ten essays on the subject. Drawing on primary sources in the early literature of death, multidisciplinary contributors first discuss the heroic death — as vs. a bad death — in European (pagan and Christian) and Asian Buddhist/non-Buddhist religious texts. Subsequent essays focus on rites and mindsets accompanying death, including sanctification of the body of holy women, pollution taboos, deathbed moral instruction, and "death-managing" monks. The book lacks an index. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The many worlds of circus.
In introducing 22 chapters by circus scholars and enthusiasts, Sugarman (whose credits include being author of Circus for Everyone: Circus Learning Around the World; a contributing editor of Spectacle, the circus arts quarterly; and a member of the Circus Historical Society) provides a brief historical overview of this form of art/entertainment from introduction of the minimum 42-foot ring in the 18th century to Cirque du Soleil. Themes showcased include representations of minorities and gender, circus in the other arts (from Disney to James Joyce), in other countries, and the former world of petty crime-oriented "grift shows." Images include early circus art and photos, and a graphic from the Circus Kirk website. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
New voices in linguistics.
The first Scandinavian Ph.D. Conference in Linguistics and Philology was held in Bergen, Norway in June 2005, and a selection of 20 papers by attending doctoral candidates in linguistics is presented here as a promise or warning of where the discipline might be a generation hence. Divided into sections on theoretical and empirical approaches, they discuss such topics as the inferential present perfect in mainland Scandinavian, structures for compounds within the minimalist program, a Danish learner's acquisition of British English vowels, and Anglicisms in Chilean and Norwegian adolescent language. There is no index. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Paris and the Right in the twentieth century.
Paris, France has had a long and storied association with the political left, but Wardhaugh (junior research fellow, modern History, Christ Church, Oxford, UK) argues that the relationship between the French capital and the right is also one that has had a decisive influence on the political life of France as well as its intellectual and cultural development. In this volume, French and British scholars from history, literary studies, and political science explore this relationship in ten individual essays. Topics addressed include the Paris political career of Jean-Baptiste Marchand, an icon of the anti-Dreyfusard right; the political battle for the streets of Paris in 1934-1938; the reception of the Paris electorate to the nationalist messages of Jean-Marie Le Pen; Paris as a theater for the construction of the conservative leadership of Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac; and representations of Paris by writers with right-wing sympathies, including Charles Maurras, Robert Brasillach, Jacques Laurent, Roger Nimier, and Antoine Blondin. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Political Islam and human security.
Concerned with political ideologies inspired by and framed within Islamic ideas and concepts, mostly Australian political scientists follow their government and media leaders by emphasizing the violent manifestations of these ideologies and movements both within their indigenous national locales and in their increasingly adversarial encounters with the West. The 13 studies consider Islam in the West, Indonesia, and the Middle East and Central Asia. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Recognition in politics; theory, policy and practice.
This collection of 14 papers combines philosophical and social science understandings on the broad issue of political recognition. A first set of contributions theorize the question of recognition in politics, addressing such topics as "Keynesian-Westphalian" representations of nation states as a gerrymandering of political space, links between political recognition claims and justice claims, attempts to resolve the views on political recognition of Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, and Australian indigenous claims of recognition and their connection to universal conceptions of justice. A second set of papers discuss multiculturalism and recognition, while a final group examines particular issues of social policy, including constructions of the "drug using welfare client" in Australian drug policy and construction of welfare services as a means of overcoming humiliation and disrespect by disadvantaged parents. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
"Revelations of character"; ethos, rhetoric, and moral philosophy in Montaigne.
A dozen papers selected from conferences in Atlanta in October 2005 and San Francisco in March 2006 provide rhetorical and relational, political and ethical, epistemological and philosophical, and cultural and anthropological perspectives on the moral philosophy of French essayist Montaigne (1533-92). (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Shifting the geography of reason; gender, science and religion.
The 22 papers of this collection were delivered in earlier form at the First Annual Meeting of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, held in Barbados in May 2004. The title refers to the notion that "reason" is determined by geography and, consequently, European reason, such as the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, are not necessarily universal, particularly concerning issues of race and power. Topics include Paget Henry, V.S. Naipaul, Frantz Fanon, and liberation theology. Professors and three doctoral candidates of philosophy, French translation, Latin American cultural studies, art history, and sociology. Not indexed. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Tennessee Williams and his contemporaries.
This collection of lively transcribed panel discussions, taken from those presented at the March 2006 conference, includes commentary on re-reading, teaching, and interpreting a wide range of aspects of Williams's production and life, including his early and late work, his attention to his contexts, and his relations with Carson McCullers, Lillian Hellman and William Inge. Participants describe the various ways they teach the plays, analyze Williams's connections with and uses of the bizarre, and exchange information about the surprising finds they have made in the playwright's unpublished materials and discuss the relevant ethical and aesthetic considerations. Editor Bray (English, Middle Tennessee State U.) has done a masterful job of indexing this oral record. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
V.M. Chernov; theorist, leader, politician.
Convinced that the political losers should be part of history as well as the winners, Trapeznik (history, U. of Otago, New Zealand) examines the difficulty with creating a socialist revolution in a backward agricultural country by focusing on Chernov (1873-1952) and the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia during the years up to and immediately following the 1917 revolution. He characterizes Chernov and the Party as the major rival of Russian Marxism. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
What determines content?; the internalism/externalism dispute.
Marvan (philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) and his contributors survey, in a critical manner, the debates on internalism and externalism in the philosophy of language and mind and seek to continue the ongoing discussion. Their main goal is to demonstrate the philosophical significance and richness of the debate on a wide range of issues and to stimulate discussions even amongst non-specialists. Topics include the interaction of publicity and externalism with inner states, internalist constraints on content externalism, intersubjectivity externalism, having a concept, arguments for externalism, reference and deference, external and internal aspects in the semantics of names, externalism and apriority in the transmission of warrant, Jessica Brown against the reductio, content externalism and Fregean sense, explanatorily redundant object-dependent beliefs, Wittgenstein's externalism, morally alien thought, and temporal externalism in terms of constitutive norms and theories of vagueness. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Words and dictionaries from the British Isles in historical perspective.
Commencing with quotes about growing interest in the history of linguistics and English lexicography, English professors Considine (U. of Alberta) and Iamartino (U. of Milan) introduce 11 conference-based essays that address dictionary-making as extended in time, non-printed manuscript dictionaries, increasing use of online material, and the legitimacy of auto-/biographical sources (e.g., Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman). Illustrations show trends in lexigraphical features and the transcription of source texts. An early example of this genre cited in the bibliography reads: Baret, John. (1574) "An aluearie or triple dictionarie in English, Latin, and French, very profitable for all such as be desirous of any of those three languages...." (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
