This wide-ranging and provocative study traces Gertrude Stein's production of avant-garde texts that radically disrupted traditional notions of how fiction should be defined, valued, and read. The book combines feminist and postmodern perspectives to illuminate new facets of Stein’s novels and to situate them within an expanded definition of the postmodern. The author argues that if we fail to consider the contexts within which postmodern innovations occur, and if we subsume all formal dis...

Women's Experimental Writingconsiders six contemporary authors who use experimental methods and negative modes of critique in their fiction and feminism. The authors covered are Valerie Solanas, Kathy Acker, Theresa Cha, Chantel Chawaf, Jeanette Winterson, and Lynda Barry.These writers all share a commitment to combining extreme content with formally radical techniques in order to enact varieties of gender, sex, race, class and nation-based experience that, they suggest, m...

The epidemic of mass rape in the former Yugoslavia has illustrated once again, and in particularly brutal fashion, the inextricable relationship between national politics, sexual politics, and body politics. The nexus of these three forces is highly charged in any culture, at any time in history, but especially so among cultures in which rapid, even cataclysmic, changes in material realities and national self-conceptions are eroding or overwhelming previously secure boundaries.The p...

Critical Theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose-and, if at all possible, cure-the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well as many of its seminal texts and empirical...

“Marvelously entertaining, exciting and informative.” —Guardian“An engaging and accessible history.” —New York Review of BooksThis group biography is “an exhilarating page-turner” and “outstanding critical introduction” to the work and legacy of the Frankfurt School, and the great 20th-century thinkers who created it (Washington Post).In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and in...

Sociology is concerned with modern society, but has never come to terms with one of the most distinctive and horrific aspects of modernity - the Holocaust.The book examines what sociology can teach us about the Holocaust, but more particularly concentrates upon the lessons which the Holocaust has for sociology. Bauman's work demonstrates that the Holocaust has to be understood as deeply involved with the nature of modernity. There is nothing comparable to this work available in the...

"Even more valuable than its widely praised predecessor, The Culture of Narcissism." —John W. AldridgeFaced with an escalating arms race, rising crime and terrorism, environmental deterioration, and long-term economic decline, people have retreated from commitments that presuppose a secure and orderly world. In his latest book, Christopher Lasch, the renowned historian and social critic, powerfully argues that self-concern, so characteristic of our time, h...

From the creator of the Cuck Philosophy YouTube channel comes this timely and explosive re-evaluation of Marx and Nietzsche for the 21st-century left.Modernity has been defined by humanity's capacity for self-destruction.Over the last century, the means which threaten not only life's joy but its very existence have only multiplied. At the same time, as a new wave of nationalism and right-wing politics spreads across the world, fewer and fewer people are bei...

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive...

Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose -- and, if at all possible, cure -- the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well as many of its seminal texts and emp...

In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized artworks to showcase the 'perverse Jewish spirit' pervading German culture. It contained work by Jewish artists, but also those were queer or foreign. It was an event that sought to define degeneracy and put it on display. This exhibition, Entartete Kunst, is just a single episode in a long running culture war, one that has always been fought on terms set by fascism. In A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, So Mayer gives us a new frame through whic...

A panoramic, interdisciplinary survey of Russian lives and "a must-read for any scholar engaging with Russian culture" ( The Russian Review).In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized Russian daily life from pre-revolutionary times through the post-Soviet present. Microanalyses and transnational perspectives shed new light on the formation and elabo...