Paradise past

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David Brackett

"Tracing the diverse streams of American popular music from the 1920s to the present, The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates addresses such questions as: How did the musicians who made the music explain it? Who listened to popular music and why? What was the major impression made by it on society at large? Why do some types of popular music still matter today?" "In this richly textured and chronologically organized anthology, well-known scholar David Brackett brings together more than 100 readings from a diverse range of sources and by writers who have played an integral part in the development of popular music criticism. He includes articles from mainstream and specialized magazines, scholarly journals, and newspapers, as well as interviews and autobiographies of musicians and other music industry insiders. Representing a wide variety of time periods, styles, and genres--and including groundbreaking criticism on disco, hip-hop, rap, and techno--the selections introduce students to important social and cultural issues raised by the study of popular music. Topics covered include the role of race, class conflict, gender roles, regional differences in the reception of popular music, and the relative value of artistry versus commerce. Extensive editorial introductions and headnotes supply context for the selections, provide links between different eras and genres, clarify the issues raised by the documents, and explain their historical significance. An ideal text for courses in popular music history, The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates will also be of interest in courses on American music, American studies, media studies, history, and sociology."--Jacket.

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Paul Davies

The conclusions reached in The Ideal Real are not the same as those reached by most commentary on Beckett's works. Most Beckett criticism seeks falsely to over-simplify or align Beckett's point of view with existentialism, the absurd, or the pessimistic nihilism underlying much postmodern thought. Beckett, though one of the century's leading intellects, was also an intuitive who realized the Western empirical mind was an out-dated program that had long ceased to be of any help in understanding the human situation. The "disintegration" of mind and body felt by his characters reflects the disastrous effect of the continued imposition of that "reason-ridden" consciousness. At the same time it opens the door to a new possibility. . The Beckett heroes, whose experiences are discussed in this book, were conditioned by a "humanistic" education much like Beckett's; but they come to find that the self they were taught to see as their own is nonexistent. Having nothing in their acquired personality to cope with this crisis, Murphy, Molloy, Moran, Malone, and all that follow find themselves dying to their old self, to everything a Western liberal education could think of as self. Early on, Beckett saw clues to the situation in the work of Jung, the "mind doctor" who represented the opposite of the empirical tradition. Jung, like the esoteric schools, saw a potential human whose development was sometimes delayed or prevented by the very system the claimed to "educate" and "civilize" the personality. The existence of this potential self has been doubted by many modern thinkers, but Beckett's stories show "a soul denied in vain" since it is the enabler of all speech, whether apparently denying or affirming. No knowledge can be considered apart from the knower. In The Ideal Real, Paul Davies argues that Beckett saw this potential self emerging in the world of imagination and symbol, especially in this age where language alone has come to be seen as the vehicle of education and the determiner of identity. He renders in prose the collapse of the illusive world of self to which the European cult of personality devoted three centuries, and witnesses its annihilation in the death before death - the white light of contemporary physics, the "void" of Zen - from which all trace of personality has fallen. From the 1920s to Beckett's last year, this study follows all the stages his fiction writing went through in order to face this matter uncompromisingly. The perspective taken by Davies sees the postmodern critical climate as an inadequate and reductive context within which to contemplate and comment on works of art. It seeks to recognize that creative imagination is a vital aspect of all mental activity that is not doomed to the inferno of Beckett's lost world.

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von Ulrich Klan und Dieter Nelles

Die Arbeit umfasst die Herkunftsgeschichte der Freien Arbeiterunion (FAUD) sie stellt mit dem regionalen Schwerpunkt Ruhrgebiet deren politische Betätigung in der Märzrevolution 1920 oder den Erwerbslosenunruhen dar und schildert die innerorganische Kontroversen um Strategie und Taktik. Der zweite Teil widmet sich den internen Gruppen und Themen wie z.B. Jugendautonomie, Syndikalistische Arbeiterjugend Nacktkultur, Frauenbünde sowie freie Schulen. (Quelle: aLibro)

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Chafika Soliman Hamamsy

"Between the reign of Muhammad Ali Pasha (1805-48) and the end of the Second World War, a dramatic transformation of the Egyptian sociopolitical scene took place, particularly within the confines of the ruling class. During that period, and owing in large measure to Muhammad Ali's reforms, a new class system emerged, with its revised gradations from lower to upper strata. The central concern of this book is the change that took place in upper-class Egyptian society, from a staunch conservatism toward more westernized, liberal norms in the hundred years spanning the turn of the nineteenth century." "The district of Zamalek, on the Nile island Gezira, became, for a variety of reasons, the preferred neighborhood for a fast growing, rapidly evolving upper middle class, and by the mid-1920s it had become the abode of an elite group whose way of life was manifestly more westernized than that of its predecessors. Zamalek was the focal point of social change, and its elite role models actively engaged in the creation of these new social norms." "By following the lives of one family, this book describes how these people lived, interacted, and changed, often under the impetus of international events, and looks at some of the beliefs and traditions upon which their life was based. As Egypt enters the twenty-first century with a noticeable reappearance of the veil and an apparent return to the values of the past, this account by someone who grew up within that group is a timely examination of the social westernization of twentieth-century Egypt, the forces that led to it, and the events that made it possible."--BOOK JACKET.