The Look Of Things

Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stephan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and "reality effect" of photography and film. Poetry around 1900 self-reflectively celebrated its own words as both transparent signs and material objects, Strathausen says. In Aestheticism, this means that language harbors the potential to literally present the things it signifies. Rather than simply describing or picturing the physical experience of looking, as critics have commonly maintained, modernist poetry claims to enable a more profound kind of perception that grants intuitive insights into the very texture of the natural world.

Jenna Albertsen, a writer, has just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction but cant find the thing she wants most, love. She is saddened that her stepfather, Ned Albertsen, who raised her and whom she adores, cant get his novel published. But she is also shocked to hear that her dear friend Maribeth has committed suicide because her husband has gotten someone pregnant and wants a divorce to marry the girl. She flies home for the funeral and is comforted by her old friend, Brian Bradshaw, who has just been released from the Army, due to wounds suffered in Alghanistan.

The Shakespearean image of a tempest and its aftermath forms the beginning as well as a major guiding thread of Logic of Imagination. Moving beyond the horizons of his earlier work, Force of Imagination, John Sallis sets out to unsettle the traditional conception of logic, to mark its limits, and, beyond these limits, to launch another, exorbitant logic—a logic of imagination. Drawing on a vast range of sources, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as developments in modern logic and modern mathematics, Sallis shows how a logic of imagination can disclose the most elemental dimensions of nature and of human existence and how, through dialogue with contemporary astrophysics, it can reopen the project of a philosophical cosmology.

Charles Travis presents a series of connected essays on current topics in philosophy of perception. The book is informed throughout by a number of central insights of Gottlob Frege's, notably about some intrinsic differences between objects of thought and objects of perception, and about the essential publicity of thought, and hence of its objects. Travis addresses a number of key questions, including how perception can make the world bear for the perceiver on the thing for him to do or think; what it might be for there to be perceptual experiences indistinguishable from ones of perceiving (hence from experiences of one's surroundings); what it might be for things to look a certain way to the experiencer, where this is not for things to look that way; what the upshot of (sub-personal) perceptual processing might be, what sorts of capacities are drawn on in representing something as (being) something. Besides Frege, the essays owe much to J. L. Austin, something to J. M. Hinton, and more than a little to John McDowell and to Thompson Clarke. They engage critically with McDowell and with Clarke, as well as with such philosophers as Christopher Peacocke, Tyler Burge, Jerry Fodor, Elisabeth Anscombe, A. J. Ayer, and H. A. Prichard.

Katharina’s husband isn’t coming home for the weekend—again—so she’s on her own. When their chaotic daughter Helli has a nosebleed, Kat has to dash off to school to pick her up. Then their son, Alex, announces he’s bringing his new girlfriend home for the first time. Kat’s best friend from college is coming around tonight too, and she’s wondering if she should try to seduce him—but first she needs to do the shopping, the vacuuming and the laundry, deal with an exploding clothes-dryer, find their neighbour’s severed thumb in the front yard and catch a couple of escaped rodents. When she’s got all that sorted, perhaps she’ll have time to think about the thing she’s been trying not to think about—the lump she’s just found in her breast. Because you can’t just die and leave a huge mess for someone else to clean up...can you? And wasn’t there supposed to be more to life than this? Mareike Krügel lives in Schleswig-Holstein with her husband and their two children. She has received numerous literary awards, including the Friedrich Hebbel Prize. Look at Me is her fourth novel, and the first to be translated into English. ‘Funny, moving and thought-provoking.’ BookMooch ‘Kat and her family are deeply flawed but likeable characters; you want to cheer them on...A good read, suitable for long, dark evenings.’ Otago Daily Times ‘A quirky ride that masterfully blends a sardonic sense of humour with a deeply embedded fear of mortality.’ Readings ‘For all the chaos of Katharina’s life and for all the humour of her narrative voice, this well-written and surprisingly complex novel has an unexpected gravitas.’ Age ‘Definitely one of those “read in one sitting”, “hard to put down” books.’ Nudge Books ‘An enjoyable and thought provoking read.’ MindFood 'With a heroine so well-realised she feels like a friend, and piercingly true ruminations on the strange courses that life can take, Look At Me is a wildly impressive English-language debut.’ Culturefly ‘Full of whimsical inner monologues and snappy one liners.’ Booklist ‘Krügel knows her way around both the salty and sweet of marriage and motherhood.’ Kirkus Reviews

The Scheme of Things, a coming-of-age story with a thriller twist, poses the question: Have you ever had a secret? For young Henry Dodge, every day is an exercise in keeping his. Whether it's his sketchbook falling into the hands of his older brother, John, or saying the wrong thing to his parents Big Ed and Kate, which may tip them off to the fact that he knows he is different. He would rather spend his afternoons with his friend Kelley, perfecting their disco moves than join in with the neighborhood boys and their sporting ways. When Danny Woodson moves into the neighborhood and becomes his brother's best friend, Henry's world is turned upside down, as his attraction to him is electrifying. In an effort to find a place to hide, Henry turns to TV, movies and music that provide him a great escape, a solace, which he can't get from the world-at-large. Unfortunately, the nighttime soap operas of the 80's plant the seeds of a scheme that involves running away to find Danny in Los Angeles. But the City of Angels holds only devils in disguise, backstabbing and heartache, as Henry thinks he has found shelter in The Palace of King George and his court of supporting players. In a tale that is equal parts comedy and heartbreak, Henry struggles to find acceptance and eventually going against the grain to find his place in the scheme of things.

Written by one of America's foremost geographers, Postmodern Geographies contests the tendency, still dominant in most social science, to reduce human geography to a reflective mirror, or, as Marx called it, an "unnecessary complication." Beginning with a powerful critique of historicism and its constraining effects on the geographical imagination, Edward Soja builds on the work of Foucault, Berger, Giddens, Berman, Jameson and, above all, Henri Lefebvre, to argue for a historical and geographical materialism, a radical rethinking of the dialectics of space, time and social being. Soja charts the respatialization of social theory from the still unfolding encounter between Western Marxism and modern geography, through the current debates on the emergence of a postfordist regime of "flexible accumulation." The postmodern geography of Los Angeles, exposed in a provocative pair of essays, serves as a model in his account of the contemporary struggle for control over the social production of space.