Between Memory And Desire

Middle Easterners today struggle to find solutions to crises of economic stagnation, political gridlock, and cultural identity. In recent decades Islam has become central to this struggle, and almost every issue involves fierce, sometimes violent debates over the role of religion in public life. In this post-9/11 updated edition R. Stephen Humphreys presents a thoughtful analysis of Islam's place in today's Middle East and integrates the medieval and modern history of the region to show how the sacred and secular are tightly interwoven in its political and intellectual life.

T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf were almost exact contemporaries, readers and critics of each others' work, and friends for over twenty years. Their writings, though, are rarely paired. Modernism, Memory, and Desire proposes that some striking correspondences exist in Eliot and Woolf's poetic, fictional, critical, and autobiographical texts, particularly in their recurring turn to the language of desire, sensuality, and the body to render memory's processes. The book includes extensive archival research on some mostly unknown bawdy poetry by T. S. Eliot while offering readings of major work by both writers, including The Waste Land, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Orlando and To the Lighthouse. McIntire juxtaposes Eliot and Woolf with several major modernist thinkers of memory, including Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin, to offer compelling reconsiderations of the relation between textuality, remembrance and the body in modernist literature.

This is more than a literary critique — it is a work of perception, of analysis that reveals a portrait of Kundera the novelist as one of the greatest demystifiers of our time. This significant work deals with all of Milan Kundera’s novels up to his most recent work, Slowness, which marks the beginning of a new phase of his writing. It is the first work that studies Kundera as a novelist, rather than a philosopher or intellectual guide, and the only one that diverges from the beaten path in examining and in reflecting on the composition and style of these novels, to discern the underlying humanity and originality of the work as a whole and to finally establish the connections and correlation within and between the novels — connections that conventional criticism can never reveal.

This volume joins the pragmatic philosophy of Deleuze to current affairs. The twelve new essays in this volume use a contemporary context to think through and with Deleuze. Engaging the here and now, the contributors use the Deleuzian theoretical apparatus to think about issues such as military activity in the Middle East, refugees, terrorism, information and communication, and the State. The book is aimed both at specialists of Deleuze and those who are unfamiliar with his work but who are interested in current affairs. Incorporating political theory and philosophy, culture studies, sociology, international studies, and Middle Eastern studies, the book is designed to appeal to a wide audience.

'Memory and Utopia' looks at the connection between memory and forgetfulness in Europe during the twentieth century. Drawing on oral history and feminist theory and practice, the book highlights how women struggled to be recognized as full subjects. The themes of utopia and desire in the 1968 movements of students, women and workers are explored. 'Memory and Utopia' examines the sense of belonging to Europe that has emerged in the last twenty years. The book analyses European identity as expressed through identities based on gender, age and culture to explore an inclusive and non-hierarchical subjectivity.

This volume, a useful aid to psychoanalytic scholars and clinicians, is a collection of papers containing W.R. Bion's discussion of memory and desire and attention and interpretation, providing a scientific approach to insight in psycho-analysis and groups.

hese eleven compelling stories reveal the interplay and varying hues of two basic elements of human experience -- memory and desire, Gladys Swan's characters are frequently forced to shed their illusions as they struggle to shape their lives. The title story, like many of the others in the collection, has as its backdrop the beautiful but sometimes harsh landscape of the American Southwest. There a reclusive farmer known as Goat Man takes in a young Mexican boy as his companion. When the greed of a tax collector and the complicity of a community destroy Goat Man, the boy vanishes into the night but returns in the form of a legend, a reminder to the residents of the valley of their changing, crueler world. In another story a traveling carnival breaks down when a sandstorm does final damage to the dreams of the company, and a tired, almost defeated woman attempts to regroup and continue what has been so hopefully called "Carnival for the Gods." An older couple, carrying their Jewish past to a "Land of Promise." Discovers instead an alien territory and must struggle from day to day, one leaning to the past, the other inclining toward an unattainable vision of the future. In "The Ink Feather" a small, lonely girl, witness to endless quarrels between her mother and her much older brother, draws comfort from the world of her dolls and the prospect of adventure outside the mist-covered windows of her house. In "Getting an Education" a diffident young woman, "trying to be a student and to discover what she ought to be learning," finds insight in the details of the lives around her, especially the secretive, eccentric existence of one of her professors. A widowed grandmother, in "Black Hole," is impregnated during a chance encounter with a nameless stranger and shocks her family when she determines to give birth to and raise her child. Like that grandmother, all of the characters in these fictions -- whether from the comfortable middle class or the fringes of society -- are at odds with themselves and their world. It is Gladys Swan's special gift that she can so seamlessly depict the particular terrors and wonders of their lives. This is a mesmerizing collection.

This text explores the theme of passion and sexual obsession in the novella. Many famous novellas by English, French, German and Russian writers of the 17th to the 20th centuries are concerned with this theme, and many have become the basis for famous operas, including Werther, Manon Lescaut, La Traviata and Death in Venice.