Symbolism 2018

This special issue of Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics explores the various functions of metaphor in life writing. Looking at a range of autobiographical subgenres (pathography, disability narratives, memoirs of migration, autofiction) and different kinds of metaphors, the contributions seek to ‘map’ the possibilities of metaphor for narratively framing an individual life and for constructing notions of selfhood.

A Booklist Top 10 First Novels of 2012 pick A Bookpage Best Books of 2012 pick “A richly emotional portrait of a family that had me spellbound from page one.”—Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild The night before Janie’s sister, Hannah, is born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, and Janie is told to keep Hannah safe. Years later, when Hannah inexplicably cuts all ties and disappears, Janie goes to find her. Thus begins a journey that will force her to confront her family’s painful silence, the truth behind her parents’ sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and her own conflicted feelings toward Hannah. Weaving Korean folklore within a modern narrative of immigration and identity, Forgotten Country is a fierce exploration of the inevitability of loss, the conflict between obligation and freedom, and a family struggling to find its way out of silence and back to one another.

In the tradition of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, acclaimed novelist David Chariandy's latest is an intimate and profoundly beautiful meditation on the politics of race today. When a moment of quietly ignored bigotry prompted his three-year-old daughter to ask "what happened?" David Chariandy began wondering how to discuss with his children the politics of race. A decade later, in a newly heated era of both struggle and divisions, he writes a letter to his now thirteen-year-old daughter. David is the son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, and he draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including the legacies of slavery, indenture, and immigration, as well as the experiences of growing up a visible minority within the land of one's birth. In sharing with his daughter his own story, he hopes to help cultivate within her a sense of identity and responsibility that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for the future.

To achieve sustained competitive advantage, you must create and deliver something that’s valuable, rare, and hard to imitate–and you can’t do that with a run-of-the-mill workforce. Your workforce needs to be strikingly different, obsessively focused on delivering on your unique value proposition. Compared with everyone else’s workforce, your people need to be downright strange! This book is about everything it takes to build a workforce that’s strange and extraordinary enough to execute your most powerful strategies and your unique value proposition. It’s about understanding exactly how your workforce needs to be different...creating an end-to-end Strange Workforce Value Chain...implementing workforce systems that support your unique goals...establishing detailed metrics based on what makes you unique...using those metrics to drive clarity throughout your entire organization, and steer it toward success. If you’re tasked with executing strategy through people, and “balanced scorecards” and “strategy maps” just haven’t been enough, take your next and greatest leap forward: make the Change to Strange. · Why “normal” workforces just won’t cut it anymore Everyone says their people make the difference. Most everyone’s wrong. · Create your strange workforce in four steps Imagine, pinpoint your gaps, prioritize, and act. · What your customers must notice for you to win Link your real performance drivers to specific workforce deliverables. · Rearchitect your workforce to break from the pack Organize to get strategic results from the right people. · Leverage the magic of measurement Implement metrics that work–and keep them working.

A classic encyclopedia of symbols by Catalan polymath Joan Cirlot that illuminates the symbolic underpinnings of myth, modern psychology, literature, and art. Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s A Dictionary of Symbols is a feat of scholarship, an act of the imagination, and a tool for contemplation, as well as a work of literature, a reference book that is as indispensable as it is brilliant and learned. Cirlot was a composer, a poet, an art critic, and a champion of modern art whose interest in surrealism helped to bring him to the study of symbolism. Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, René Guénon, Erich Fromm, and Gaston Bachelard also helped to shape his thinking in a book that explores the space between the world at large and the world within, where, as Cirlot sees it, nothing is meaningless, everything is significant, and everything is in some way related to something else. Running from “abandonment” to “zone” by way of “flute” and “whip,” spanning the cultures of the world, and including a wealth of visual images to further bring the reality of the symbol home, A Dictionary of Symbols, here published for the first time in English in its original, significantly enlarged form, is a luminous and illuminating investigation of the works of eternity in time.

The landmark text about the inner workings of the unconscious mind—from the symbolism that unlocks the meaning of our dreams to their effect on our waking lives and artistic impulses—featuring more than a hundred images that break down Carl Jung’s revolutionary ideas “What emerges with great clarity from the book is that Jung has done immense service both to psychology as a science and to our general understanding of man in society.”—The Guardian “Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is limitless.” Since our inception, humanity has looked to dreams for guidance. But what are they? How can we understand them? And how can we use them to shape our lives? There is perhaps no one more equipped to answer these questions than the legendary psychologist Carl G. Jung. It is in his life’s work that the unconscious mind comes to be understood as an expansive, rich world just as vital and true a part of the mind as the conscious, and it is in our dreams—those personal, integral expressions of our deepest selves—that it communicates itself to us. A seminal text written explicitly for the general reader, Man and His Symbolsis a guide to understanding the symbols in our dreams and using that knowledge to build fuller, more receptive lives. Full of fascinating case studies and examples pulled from philosophy, history, myth, fairy tales, and more, this groundbreaking work—profusely illustrated with hundreds of visual examples—offers invaluable insight into the symbols we dream that demand understanding, why we seek meaning at all, and how these very symbols affect our lives. By illuminating the means to examine our prejudices, interpret psychological meanings, break free of our influences, and recenter our individuality, Man and His Symbols proves to be—decades after its conception—a revelatory, absorbing, and relevant experience.

This special issue of Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics explores the various functions of metaphor in life writing. Looking at a range of autobiographical subgenres (pathography, disability narratives, memoirs of migration, autofiction) and different kinds of metaphors, the contributions seek to ‘map’ the possibilities of metaphor for narratively framing an individual life and for constructing notions of selfhood.

Once upon a time in a faraway land there lived the rarest of rare birds. The Dream Bird.George is a day child. He rollicks and romps in the light. But at night, George just can¿t seem to get to sleep. That is, until Gran tells him a bedtime story about a magical bird who sings children to sleep.Will the Dream Bird's magic work on George? A stunning bedtime book that will enchant readers young and old.