Subversive Seduction

Male-male rivalry and female passive choice, the two principal tenets of Darwinian sexual selection, raise important ethical questions in The Descent of Man--and in the decades since--about the subjugation of women. If female choice is a key component of evolutionary success, what impact does the constraint of women's choices have on society? The elaborate courtship plots of 19th century Spanish novels, with their fixation on suitors and selectors, rivalry, and seduction, were attempts to grapple with the question of female agency in a patriarchal society. By reading Darwin through the lens of the Spanish realist novel and vice versa, Travis Landry brings new insights to our understanding of both: while Darwin's theories have often been seen as biologically deterministic, Landry asserts that Darwin's theory of sexual selection was characterized by an open ended dynamic whose oxymoronic emphasis on "passive" female choice carries the potential for revolutionary change in the status of women.

The hidden truth about the French way of life: it's all about seduction—its rules, its pleasures, its secrets France is a seductive country, seductive in its elegance, its beauty, its sensual pleasures, and its joie de vivre. But Elaine Sciolino, the longtime Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, has discovered that seduction is much more than a game to the French: it is the key to understanding France. Seduction plays a crucial role in how the French relate to one another—not just in romantic relationships but also in how they conduct business, enjoy food and drink, define style, engage in intellectual debate, elect politicians, and project power around the world. While sexual repartee and conquest remain at the heart of seduction, for the French seduction has become a philosophy of life, even an ideology, that can confuse outsiders. In La Seduction, Sciolino gives us an inside view of how seduction works in all areas, analyzing its limits as well as its power. She demystifies the French way of life in an entertaining and personal narrative that carries us from the neighborhood shops of Paris to the halls of government, from the gardens of Versailles to the agricultural heartland. La Seduction will charm you and encourage you to lower your defenses about the French. Pull up a chair and let Elaine Sciolino seduce you.

Rape does not have to happen. The fact that it does--and in the United States a rape is reported every six minutes--indicates that we live in a rape-prone culture where rape or the threat of rape functions as a tool for enforcing sexual difference and hierarchy. Rape and Representation explores how cultural forms construct and reenforce social attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence. The essays proceed from the observation that literature not only reflects but also contributes to what a society believes about itself. Fourteen essays by authors in the fields of English, American and African-American, German, African, Brazilian, Classical, and French literatures and film present a wide range of texts from different historical periods and cultures. Contributors demythologize patriarchal representation in literature and art in order to show how it makes rape seem natural and inevitable. Contributors include: the editors, John J. Winkler, Patricia Klindiest Joplin, Susan Winnett, Ellen Rooney, Coppélia Kahn, Eileen Julien, Marta Peixoto, Kathryn Gravdal, Carla Freccero, Nellie V. McKay, Nancy A. Jones, and Froma I. Zeitlin. Their work raises pressing--and often difficult--questions for feminist criticism.

Imagining an encounter between Moliere's Don Juan and Austin, this bold yet subtle meditation contemplates the seductive promises of speech and of love, in a telling exchange among philosophy, linguistics, literature, and Lacanian theory."

"Victor Brombert's title, borrowed from William Wordsworth's ingenious metaphor, "the pensive citadel," refers to the singular world of universities. In essays on the paradoxical nature of laughter, the art of rereading, Shakespeare, Montaigne (his model as essayist), and more, Brombert reflects on a lifetime of learning whose institutional supports have greatly changed since he began his university career in the 1950s. Yet, as Christy Wampole writes in her foreword, for all that has changed, so much of Brombert's long experience as a reader and teacher is richly familiar: "the angst of not doing enough during one's sabbatical, the stage fright before an important lecture, or the recurrent teaching-related nightmares. But also the good things: the joy of learning from one's students, of discovering something new each time you reread a book whose meanings you thought you'd depleted, or of realizing that you've changed the lives of many through your vocation." A veteran of D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge who witnessed history's worst nightmares first hand, Brombert nevertheless approaches literature with a lightness of spirit, making the case for intellectual mobility and an openness to change. Indeed, the central section of this deeply pleasurable book, entitled "The Ludic Mode," stresses the playful aspect of all serious commerce with ideas, of all good teaching and good learning"--

Seductive Reasoning takes a provocative look at contemporary Anglo-American literary theory, calling into question the critical consensus on pluralism's nature and its status in literary studies. Drawing on the insights of Marxist and feminist critical theory and on the works of Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault, Rooney reads the pluralist’s invitation to join in a "dialogue" as a seductive gesture. Critics who respond find that they must seek to persuade all of their potential readers. Rooney examines pluralism as a form of logic in the work of E. D. Hirsch, as a form of ethics for Wayne Booth, as a rhetoric of persuasion in the books of Stanley Fish. For Paul de Man, Rooney argues, pluralism was a rhetoric of tropes just as it was, for Fredric Jameson, a form of politics.

"The question, 'Who am I?' resounded throughout the surrealist movement. The exploration of dreams and the unconscious prompted surrealists to reject the notion of a unified, indivisible self by revealing the subject to be haunted by otherness and instability. In this book David Lomas explores the surrealist concepts of the self and subjectivity from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Employing a series of case studies devoted to individual artists, Lomas arrives at a radically new account of surrealist art and its cultural and intellectual roots." "Weaving together psychoanalytic and historical material, the author analyses works by Ernst, Dali, Masson, Miro and Picasso with regard to such themes as automatism, hysteria, the uncanny and the abject. Lomas focuses closely on individual artworks, examines the specific circumstances in which they were produced and offers new insights into the artists and their projects as well as the theories of Bataille, Breton and others. Lomas demonstrates the powerful connection between the history of psychoanalysis and the history of surrealism, and along the way shows the unique value of psychoanalytic theory as a tool for the art historian."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The paradoxical logic of transparency and mediation Transparency is the metaphor of our time. Whether in government or corporate governance, finance, technology, health or the media – it is ubiquitous today, and there is hardly a current debate that does not call for more transparency. But what does this word actually stand for and what are the consequences for the life of individuals? Can knowledge from the arts, and its play of visibility and invisibility, tell us something about the paradoxical logics of transparency and mediation? This Obscure Thing Called Transparency gathers contributions by international experts who critically assess the promises and perils of transparency today.