Seeing Double

The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) has been labeled the very icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. Seeing Double reconsiders this iconic literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life. In doing so, it revises some of our most common assumptions about the unresolved tensions that emerged in Baudelaire’s writing during a time of political and social upheaval. Françoise Meltzer argues that Baudelaire did not simply describe the contradictions of modernity; instead, his work embodied and recorded them, leaving them unresolved and often less than comprehensible. Baudelaire’s penchant for looking simultaneously backward to an idealized past and forward to an anxious future, while suspending the tension between them, is part of what Meltzer calls his “double vision”—a way of seeing that produces encounters that are doomed to fail, poems that can’t advance, and communications that always seem to falter. In looking again at the poet and his work, Seeing Double helps to us to understand the prodigious transformations at stake in the writing of modern life.

A psychologist and collector, Block has put his life's work, his enthusiasm, and his knowledge into this treasure trove of puzzles, illusions, and double diversions. Each page is guaranteed to surprise and delight, while celebrating the amazing flexibility and creativity of the human mind. and mind-bending illustrations that trick the eye into seeing two different images-and never both at the same time. Double illusions, upside-downs, ambiguous images and ambigrams are smartly organized by technique and illusory effect, with vivid descriptions of the psychological impact of each image as well as current scientific explanations for each stunning effect. Psychologist and collector J. Richard Block has put his life's work, his enthusiasm, and his knowledge into this wonderfully fun, informative treasure trove of classic and contemporary puzzles, illusions and double diversions.

The world is never going to make complete sense to us, yet we find that conclusion almost impossible to accept. Can we live, and feel at home, in a world composed at best of incompatible fragments of meaning? This is the theme that runs through this collection of essays by Raymond Geuss. Drawing on a characteristically wide range of insights from moral and political philosophy, history, and aesthetics, he addresses topics such as knowledge (of self, the world, and others), language, the visual and the auditory, authority, hope, and the success and failure of life projects. He argues that, to get by in our bewildering world, we must embrace the virtue of ‘double vision’: that is, immersing ourselves in and learning the ways of the culture surrounding us, even as we feel alienated from it. Together the essays explore some of the consequences of abandoning the idea of a unitary view of the world, while at the same time trying to avoid quietism. Seeing Double is a compelling collection of work by one of the world’s most versatile and creative philosophers.

When, in the third century B.C.E., the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt, they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people. Offering a new and expanded understanding of Alexandrian poetry, Susan Stephens argues that poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Ptolemaic rule. Her work successfully positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically, and imaginatively. The Alexandrian poets were image-makers for the Ptolemaic court, Seeing Double suggests; their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support nor to subvert the status quo, but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively re-created, examined, and critiqued. Seeing Double depicts Alexandrian poetry in its proper context—within the writing of foundation stories and within the imaginative redefinition of Egypt as "Two Lands"—no longer the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, but of a shared Greek and Egyptian culture.

All is not well in the state of Niagra, the America of the African continent. The General - the Unique Miracle of the Century - has banned all but country and western music; a giant statue of Elvis desecrates the sacred Amuz Rock, street children are terrorised by the General's Disposal Units and someone is conducting experiments on unwitting Evangelical Christians. In Xanadu, Bob Marley, the sign painter, draws portraits that are more real than the real, more human than human and longs for the mother stolen from him by Idi Amin Ogwu. And in the oil-rich province of Lidiziam, villagers who refuse the attentions of the Burton Holly corporation, and its promises of US dollars in exchange for their oil, are massacred. The nation rejoices when idealistic young army officers stage a bloodless coup, but the revolution and dreams of utopian democracy are short-lived. A US-led 'coalition of the willing' sponsors a counter-coup and reinstates the General. The young idealists are rounded up, tortured and murdered. Forced to flee to the secret caves of Lidiziam, the girlfriends, wives and sisters of the revolutionaries gather together a guerrilla army of women and children and prepare to wage a very unorthodox war against the General and his powerful allies. Seeing Double is a provocative contemporary tale of dictatorship, kleptocracy, globalization and greed. It is a story of idealism, love, ganja, Sade, country & western music, Elvis, the art of sign painting, the war against terror and the politics of haute couture. With caustic humour and keen observation, Patrick Wilmot has written a satire that is as unforgiving in its analysis of world events as it is entertaining.

This collection of more than 175 seductive and mind-bending illustrations trick the eye into seeing two different images--but never both at the same time.

Blackness and Value investigates the principles by which 'value' operates, and asks if it is useful to imagine that the concepts of racial blackness and whiteness in the United States operate in terms of these principles. Testing these concepts by exploring various theoretical approaches and their shortcomings, Lindon Barrett finds that the gulf between 'the street' (where race is acknowledged as a powerful enigma) and the literary academy (where until recently it has not been) can be understood as a symptom of racial violence. The book traces several interrelations between value and race, such as literate/illiterate, the signing/singing voice, time/space, civic/criminal, and academy/street, and offers relevant and fresh readings of two novels by Ann Petry. While approaches to race and value are commonly examined historically or sociologically, this intriguing study provides a new critical approach that speaks to theorists of race as well as gender and queer studies.