The rhetoric of identity in Isocrates

Sample

Yitzhak Laor

>Υπάρχει μια πολύ στενή σχέση ανάμεσα σε εκείνους που αυτοαποκαλούνται "στρατόπεδο της ειρήνης" στο Ισραήλ και στους ομολόγους τους της ευρωπαϊκής Αριστεράς. Το βιβλίο αυτό ρίχνει αλύπητα φως στη σχέση τους, που είναι ιδιαίτερα έντονη στο πεδίο της λογοτεχνίας. Αναλύει την υποδοχή στην Ευρώπη των έργων του Άμος Οζ, του Α. Μπ. Γιεοσούα και του Νταβίντ Γκρόσσμαν, διερευνά τον τρόπο με τον οποίο οι συγγραφείς αυτοί μεταμφιέζονται σε ανθρώπους που προωθούν την ειρήνη και τους λόγους που η κριτική ανταποκρίνεται με τέτοιον ενθουσιασμό. Δείχνει ότι οι Ισραηλινοί διανοούμενοι -οι περισσότεροι είναι ασκεναζίμ, εκκοσμικευμένοι και υποστηρικτές των Εργατικών- θεωρείται από τους αντίστοιχους στην Ευρώπη ότι ανήκουν στους "δικούς μας", φτάνει να μένουν πάντα εκεί μακριά, στην Ανατολή. Αντίστοιχα, οι ίδιοι Ισραηλινοί διανοούμενοι νοιάζονται πρωταρχικά να ανήκουν -ή να φαίνεται ότι ανήκουν, πάση θυσία- στην ευρωπαϊκή ιντελλιγκέντσια. Αντικειμενικά, αυτό που έχουν κοινό είναι ο φόβος και το μίσος για την Ανατολή. - Mαρξιστικό Bιβλιοπωλείο

Sample

John M. Grammer

In a group of five biographical and critical sketches that cover the period from 1810 to 1861, John M. Grammer explores the process by which "the South" was created as a concept in American culture. Three of the five Virginians Grammer examines were politicians with a literary bent - John Taylor, John Randolph, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. The other two, George Fitzhugh and Joseph Glover Baldwin, were fiction writers fascinated with politics. United in their desire to represent the South as a refuge of pastoral and republican order in an America where, as Emerson observed, "the ancient manners were giving way," all of these men aspired to speak for their region; and all of them, sooner or later, found that they had to begin by reinventing it. Grammer relates the debate over southern identity not only to the wish to defend slavery or agrarian life but to the larger search for order in the aftermath of an age of revolution. He also connects it to the long-standing American concern, born of the ideology of republicanism, over the mortality of American society. Southerners' search for a stable identity and their at times fierce defense of slavery were, according to Grammer, a response to what J. G. A. Pocock has called "the Machiavellian moment" in republican cultures - the moment when the republic is made to recognize its finitude in time. He maintains that we can best understand our antebellum southern writers by thinking of them not as the unwitting ancestors of Faulkner, but as the fully self-conscious contemporaries of Emerson and Whitman, the heirs of Jefferson and Hamilton - as citizens of a young republic facing what looked more and more like its imminent demise. With increasing mechanization and westward expansion transforming their formerly stable world, all antebellum Americans lived in a Machiavellian moment, and as Grammer deftly demonstrates, the long effort to mold the South into a symbol of order, like Whitman's search for a suitably symbolic America, must be understood in relation to that condition. A major, innovative contribution to the fields of both southern history and southern literary criticism, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South is a valuable volume for all students of the South.

Sample

Coreen Brown

"The Creative Vision of Bessie Head examines Head's literary works in chronological order and reveals how each reflects Head's claim that "Every story or book starts with what I need." Drawing upon the revelations gleaned from Head's personal letters, this critical appraisal attempts to account for the way in which Bessie Head, born in South Africa in 1937, insists on a romantic resolution in order to compensate for the poverty, feelings of loneliness, and isolation she experiences as she struggles to survive in a racist and sexist society. Head's origins were less than fortunate, for as the child of a white woman committed to a mental institution and of a black father whose identity was never foreclosed, Head was fostered and then placed in an orphanage. As a single mother she sought exile in Botswana and it was here that she died prematurely in 1986." "The Bessie Head Papers, as yet unpublished, are housed in the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe, Botswana, and contain almost two thousand items, many of them personal letters to friends. These letters, a selection of which are included in the appendix herein, are a revealing commentary on the compulsion that provided for Head's creativity, especially with regards to the most complex of her novels. Speaking at her funeral a friend remarked that it was when she was writing that Head could push her fears and anxieties to one side and it was here that the 'realist and dreamer achieved a brief communion" (Eilerson 1995, 294). Thus, Head's creative vision, invoked at times of crises, shows clearly the nature of the artist's power and its value as a means to restore the equilibrium of society."--Jacket.

Sample

Janet Galligani Casey

"The Novel and the American Left focuses exclusively on left-leaning fiction of the Depression era, lending visibility and increased critical validity to these works and showing the various ways in which they contributed not only to theorizations of the Left but also to debates about the content and form of American fiction. In theoretical terms, the collection as a whole contributes to the larger reconceptualization of American modernity currently under way. More pragmatically, individual essays suggest specific authors, texts, and approaches to teachers and scholars seeking to broaden and/or complicate more traditional "'American modernism" syllabi and research agendas." "The selected essays take up, among others, such "hard-core" leftist writers as Mike Gold and Myra Page, who were associated with the Communist Party; the popular novels of James M. Cain and Kenneth Fearing, whose works were made into successful films; and critically acclaimed but nonetheless "lost" novelists such as Josephine Johnson, whose Now in November (Pulitzer Prize, 1936) anticipates and complicates the more popular agrarian mythos of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath." "This volume will be of interest not only to literary specialists but also to historians, social scientists, and students of American cultural studies."--BOOK JACKET.