A Human Eye Essays On Art In Society 1997 2008

“Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters.”—Nadine Gordimer Across more than three decades Adrienne Rich’s essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators’ worlds.

The study of the full career of an award-winning writer who evolved from traditional to radical Among the most celebrated American poets of the past half century, Adrienne Rich was the recipient of awards ranging from the Bollingen Prize, to the National Book Award, to the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. In Understanding Adrienne Rich, Jeannette E. Riley assesses the full scope of Rich's long career from 1957 to her death in 2012 through a chronological exploration of her poetry and prose. Beginning with Rich's first two formally traditional collections, published in the late 1950s, then moving to the increasingly radical collections of the 1960s and 1970s, Riley details the evolution of Rich's feminist poetics as she investigated issues of identity, sexuality, gender, the desire to reclaim women's history, the dream of a common language, and a separate community for women. Riley then tracks how Rich's writing shifted outward from the 1980s and 1990s to the end of her career as she evaluated her own life and place within her society. Rich examined her country's history as well, asking readers to consider what responsibility each person has—individually and communally—for changing the conditions under which we live. This book documents Rich's developing charge that poetry carries the ability to create social change and engage people in the democratic process. Throughout, Understanding Adrienne Rich interweaves explications of Rich's poetry with her prose, offering a close look at the development of the author's voice from formalist poet, to feminist visionary, to citizen poet. In doing so, this volume provides a survey of Rich's career and her impact on American literature and politics.

One a lyric "confessional" poet and essayist, the other a jazz "spoken-word" performance artist, Adrienne Rich and Jayne Cortez were American feminist superheroes who produced extensive bodies of poetic work that reveal strangely overlapping visions, but in radically different voices and poetic styles. This book reconsiders the poetry activism of Cortez and Rich side-by-side, engaging poetics theory, cultural studies, and popular media in its literary analyses. A collection of eight integrated chapters by multiple poetry critics, as well as an artist-statement narrative by Wonder Woman sculptor Linda Stein, the book focuses upon the voice of bravado, the various calls for global justice, and Third Wave feminist "intersectional" critiques all embodied within these two women's poetic texts. The book also examines the twentieth-century figure of the American superhero, particularly Wonder Woman, bringing popular-culture studies into conversation with literary criticism, as well as visual art through the inclusion of Stein's commentary and illustrations. This beautiful and compelling book experiments with the festschrift concept by inviting multiple and competing disciplinary views on U.S. feminist poetics, women's art and aesthetics, racial and sexual identities, as well as politics and performance—all in tribute to the power of poetry by Cortez and Rich.

This book analyzes the different conceptions of authenticity that are behind conflicts over who and what should be recognized as authentically Jewish. Although the concept of authenticity has been around for several centuries, it became a central focus for Jews since existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre raised the question in the 1940s. Building on the work of Sartre, later Jewish thinkers, philosophers, anthropologists, and cultural theorists, the book offers a model of Jewish authenticity that seeks to balance history and tradition, creative freedom and innovation, and the importance of recognition among different groups within an increasingly multicultural Jewish community. Author Stuart Z. Charmé explores how debates over authenticity and struggles for recognition are a key to understanding a wide range of controversies between Orthodox and liberal Jews, Zionist and diaspora Jews, white Jews and Jews of color, as well as the status of intermarried and messianic Jews, and the impact of Jewish genetics. In addition, it discusses how and when various cultural practices and traditions such as klezmer music, Israeli folk dance, Jewish yoga and meditation, and others are recognized as authentically Jewish, or not.

Human ecology - the study and practice of relationships between the natural and the social environment - has gained prominence as scholars seek more effectively to engage with pressing global concerns. In the past seventy years most human ecology has skirted the fringes of geography, sociology and biology. This volume pioneers radical new directions. In particular, it explores the power of indigenous and traditional peoples' epistemologies both to critique and to complement insights from modernity and postmodernity. Aimed at an international readership, its contributors show that an inter-cultural and transdisciplinary approach is required. The demands of our era require a scholarship of ontological depth: an approach that can not just debate issues, but also address questions of practice and meaning. Organized into three sections - Head, Heart and Hand - this volume covers the following key research areas: Theories of Human Ecology Indigenous and Wisdom Traditions Eco-spiritual Epistemologies and Ontology Research practice in Human Ecology The researcher-researched relationship Research priorities for a holistic world With the study of human ecology becoming increasingly imperative, this comprehensive volume will be a valuable addition for classroom use.

A career-spanning selection of the lucid, courageous, and boldly political prose of National Book Award winner Adrienne Rich. Adrienne Rich was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major intellectual voice of her generation. Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of her most renowned essays into one volume, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice, her prophetic vision, and her revolutionary views on social justice. Rich’s essays unite the political, personal, and poetical like no other. Essential Essays is edited and includes an introduction by leading feminist scholar, literary critic, and poet Sandra M. Gilbert. Emphasizing Rich’s lifelong intellectual engagement, the essays selected here range from the 1960s to 2008. The volume contains one of Rich’s earliest essays,“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” which discusses the need for female self-definition, along with excerpts from her ambitious, ground-breaking Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. As the New York Times wrote, Rich “brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse,” as evidenced in her 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Also among these insightful and forward-thinking works are: “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity”; excerpts from What Is Found There, about the need to reexamine the literary canon; “Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts”; “Poetry and the Forgotten Future”; and other writings that profoundly shaped second-wave feminism, each balanced by Rich’s signature blend of research, theory, and self-reflection.

Metaphor and dialectic are modes of thinking that influence the ways in which we identify what we have in common with others, how we differ and how we manage this diversity to achieve organizational goals. This book explores how we can become more aware of these unconscious processes and challenge stereotypes.