Political Monsters And Democratic Imagination

Author : Patrick McGee
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2016-09-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501320064

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Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination by Patrick McGee Pdf

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.

Author : Patrick McGee
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2016-09-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501320071

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Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination by Patrick McGee Pdf

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.

Author : Judith Paltin
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2020-12-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781108842235

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Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd by Judith Paltin Pdf

This book argues that literary modernists engaged creatively with modernity's expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities; their work clarifies how popular subjectivity evolves from a nineteenth-century liberal citizenry to the contemporary sense of a range of political multitudes struggling with conditions of oppression.

Author : Yaron Ezrahi
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2015-07-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1107529921

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Imagined Democracies by Yaron Ezrahi Pdf

This book proposes a revisionist approach to democratic politics. Yaron Ezrahi focuses on the creative unconscious collective imagination that generates ever-changing visions of legitimate power and authority, which compete for enactment and institutionalization in the political arena. If, in the past, political authority was grounded in fictions such as the divine right of kings, the laws of nature, historical determinism, and scientism, today the space of democratic politics is filled with multiple alternative social imaginaries of the desirable political order. Exposure to electronic mass media has made contemporary democratic publics more aware that credible popular fictions have greater impact on shaping our political realities than do rational social choices or moral arguments. The pressing political question in contemporary democracy is, therefore, how to select and enact political fictions that promote peace, not violence, and how to found the political order on checks and balances between alternative political imaginaries of freedom and justice.

Author : Patrick McGee
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 186 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2022-06-21
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781666741711

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Comedy, Book Two by Patrick McGee Pdf

Comedy is a philosophical poem in the form of waking dream, inspired by Dante and William Blake. In book two, Cinematic Revolutions, the narrator, having passed through a cinema screen at the end of book one, arrives in the middle of a World War I field of dying men. An indescribable human figure appears who warns that these cinematic images are not real but projections of the cinematic mind with its power of empathy. Assuming different shapes and identities, this generic being becomes the narrator’s guide. Through a series of dialogues and encounters, cinema and the visual culture it generates are identified with a cultural revolution—the nonviolent revolution—that surpasses the violent revolutions of the twentieth century. This view is articulated through encounters with Russian revolutionary Trotsky, twelve modernist writers and the philosopher Wittgenstein, Hitchcock, three dictators (Hitler, Stalin, Mao), a cinematic Jesus Christ, Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Interspersed among these encounters are cinematic visions from directors like Eisenstein, Chaplin, and others. From Paris to Memphis, passing through Pasolini’s black and white desert in Gospel according to Saint Matthew, descending into the dark underworld of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, rising into a Hollywood heaven of the forties, and standing on top of the Empire State Building with King Kong, cinematic images channel revolutionary desires and the necessity of nonviolence.

Author : Patrick McGee
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2020-06-09
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781725266773

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Comedy, Book One by Patrick McGee Pdf

Comedy is a philosophical poem for the twenty-first century inspired by Dante’s Commedia. It can be read as an ironic dream or fantasy that addresses the democratic idea. Book One, Archival Resurrections, explores the transindividual nature of human thought, which autonomously expands while it passes through different minds in historical time. On a walk in Seattle, the Narrator encounters his dead teacher, who becomes his guide through a world inside his own head where he encounters people from his personal past and past philosophers, poets, and statesmen, including Dante, Christine de Pizan, Spinoza, William Blake, Jefferson, Hamilton, Sally Hemings, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Marx, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and others. Part of the poem takes place in a library in the shape of an inverted cone, the antithesis of Dante’s purgatory. Later, under the assumption that imagination is topological or plastic, there are visitations to Blake’s cottage in Felpham, Lincoln’s White House, Marx’s London, and Wilde’s and Joyce’s Dublin. Joyce’s Volta cinema is the gateway to Book Two, entitled Cinematic Revolutions, which will envision the twentieth century through its signature aesthetic form. Book Three, as yet untitled, will explore lived cityscapes as forms of life that gestate in themselves different possibilities for the future.

Author : Robert Michels
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 1968
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780029212509

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Political Parties by Robert Michels Pdf

In this book Michels analyzes the tendencies that oppose the realization of democracy, and claims that these tendencies can be classified in three ways: dependence upon the nature of the individual; dependence upon the nature of the political structure; and dependence upon the nature of organization. This edition, described by Morris Janowitz as a "classic of modern social science" and by Melvin Tumin as "the beginning of a tradition", offers a landmark study in political science. Following its original publication in 1910, the study and analysis of political parties was established as a new branch of science. Political Parties continues to be a foundation work in the literature and is a necessary addition to the libraries of contemporary political scientists, sociologists, and historians. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Author : Yingkun Zhang
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 472 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Electronic
ISBN : WISC:89095503132

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No More Gods and Monsters by Yingkun Zhang Pdf

Author : Michael J. Blouin
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2022-11-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501381720

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The Presidents of American Fiction by Michael J. Blouin Pdf

The Presidents of American Fiction brings together American literature, history, and political science to explore the most influential fictionalized accounts of the presidency from the early 19th century to the time of Trump. Of late, popular understandings of the presidency are being radically re-written-consider, for example, the distinctive myths that accompanied the ascent of the Obama and Trump administrations-and many readers of all stripes are radically reimagining the office and its holder. Placing these changes within a broader cultural context, Michael J. Blouin investigates narratives involving fictional presidents, from the supposedly factual to the outright fantastical, within their distinct literary and historical moments. The author considers representative texts including works penned by James Fenimore Cooper from the Jacksonian moment, Gore Vidal in the age of Nixon and Vietnam, and Philip Roth in the neoliberal period. Through detailed readings that question how American presidents function as characters within the popular imagination, this book examines the presidency as a complex, ever-evolving trope, and in so doing enhances our appreciation of American literature's inextricable link with American politics.

Author : Marie-Hélène Huet
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 1993
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0674586514

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Monstrous Imagination by Marie-Hélène Huet Pdf

What woeful maternal fancy produced such a monster? This was once the question asked when a deformed infant was born. From classical antiquity through to the Enlightenment, the monstrous child bore witness to the fearsome power of the mother's imagination. What such a notion meant and how it reappeared, transformed, in the Romantic period are the questions explored in this book, a study of theories linking imagination, art and monstrous progeny.

Author : C. Boggs
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2011-08-09
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0230115748

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Phantom Democracy by C. Boggs Pdf

In a powerful new book, Boggs traces the historical evolution of American politics by focusing on the gradual triumph of corporate and military power over democratic institutions and practices. The consequences of expanding United States global presence since World War II - involving an integrated and interwoven system of power based in the permanent war economy, national security-state, and corporate interests - has meant erosion of democratic politics, strengthening of the imperial presidency, increased corporate and military influence over elections and legislation, weakening of popular governance, and diminution of citizenship. The events of 9/11 and their aftermath, including the War on Terror, two lengthy wars and foreign occupations, new threats of war, and massive increases in Pentagon spending, have only deepened the trend toward ever-more concentrated forms of power in a society that ostensibly embraces democratic values. Such developments, Boggs argues, have deep origins in American history going back to the founding documents, ideological precepts of the Constitution, early oligarchic rule, slavery, the Indian wars, and westward colonial expansion.

Author : Halford John Mackinder,Sir Halford John Mackinder
Publisher : DIANE Publishing
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 1962
Category : Geography
ISBN : 9781428981515

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Democratic Ideals and Reality by Halford John Mackinder,Sir Halford John Mackinder Pdf

Author : Russell L. Hanson
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 450 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 1982
Category : Electronic
ISBN : MINN:31951001041870N

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The Democratic Imagination in America by Russell L. Hanson Pdf

Author : Patrick McGee
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 1997-08-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0521589088

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Cinema, Theory, and Political Responsibility in Contemporary Culture by Patrick McGee Pdf

McGee explores the political significance of aesthetic analysis in the context of cultural studies, and asks how political responsibility can be reconciled with the concept of the university as a democratic institution.

Author : Kenneth A. Shepsle
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2017-09-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 022647318X

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Rule Breaking and Political Imagination by Kenneth A. Shepsle Pdf

“Imagination may be thought of as a ‘work-around.’ It is a resourceful tactic to ‘undo’ a rule by creating a path around it without necessarily defying it. . . . Transgression, on the other hand, is rule breaking. There is no pretense of reinterpretation; it is defiance pure and simple. Whether imagination or disobedience is the source, constraints need not constrain, ties need not bind.” So writes Kenneth A. Shepsle in his introduction to Rule Breaking and Political Imagination. Institutions are thought to channel the choices of individual actors. But what about when they do not? Throughout history, leaders and politicians have used imagination and transgression to break with constraints upon their agency. Shepsle ranges from ancient Rome to the United States Senate, and from Lyndon B. Johnson to the British House of Commons. He also explores rule breaking in less formal contexts, such as vigilantism in the Old West and the CIA’s actions in the wake of 9/11. Entertaining and thought-provoking, Rule Breaking and Political Imagination will prompt a reassessment of the nature of institutions and remind us of the critical role of political mavericks.