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THE DARKROOM contains the script for Duras' 1977 radically experimental film Le camion (The Truck), as well as four manifesto-like propositions in which Duras protests that most movies "beat the imagination to death" because they "are the same every time they are played." She also accuses the gatekeepers of traditional cinema of treating intelligence as if it were a "class phenomenon" and distinguishes her own approach: a cinema based on ideas and sensory experience. In the dialogue with Michelle Porte at the end of the book, Duras further describes her filmmaking style, discussing everything from her biography to her critique of Marxism. Much of the film consists of the sounds and images of a truck rumbling through an industrial landscape dotted with dilapidated, immigrant shantytowns. Periodically, the images of the truck are interrupted by cutaways of Duras and Gérard Depardieu sitting in Duras' living room, reading from a script that includes a dialogue between a staunchly communist truck driver and an anonymous, ethnically-unidentifiable woman who stands in as an alter-ego for Duras and at the same time is a substitute for "everyone." Neither of the characters are ever shown on-screen. Via an afterimage effect, the juxtaposed voice-over text and cutaways help the film's audience members project their own images of the truck driver and hitchhiker onto the screen. The truck driver quickly decides the hitchhiker is "a reactionary" suffering from some kind of "mental disturbance." Using the "mad," uneducated woman (who, is, nevertheless, interested in everything from the position of the earth in the universe to politics to such august personalities as Proust, Corneille, and Marx), Duras criticizes the invasion of Prague by the Soviets in 1968 and its support by the French Communist Party. Between the images of the truck, juxtaposed voice-overs, and cutaways to Duras and Depardieu, the art of film becomes the art of opening audience members to the possibility of engaging multiple faculties-not only the visual and the aural, but also memory, imagination, and desire.
Considered an eerie attack on realism, when first published in 1934, Miklós Szentkuthy's debut novel Prae so astonished Hungarian critics that many deemed it monstrous, derogatorily referred to Szentkuthy as cosmopolitan, and classified him alien to Hungarian culture. Incomparable and unprecedented in Hungarian literature, Prae compels recognition as a serious contribution to modernist fiction, as ambitious in its aspirations as Ulysses or À la recherche du temps perdu. With no traditional narration and no psychologically motivated characters, in playing with voices, temporality, and events, while fiction, Prae is more what Northrop Frye calls an anatomy (à la Lucian, Rabelais, & Burton) or Menippean satire: the basic concern of the book is intellectual, its pervading mood is that of a comedy of ideas. As a virtual novel that preempts every possibility for its realization, it is a novel but only virtually so, a book which is actually a prae-paration for an unwritten (unwritable) novel. In this, it maintains the freedom and openness of its potentialities, indicative for instance in the Non-Prae diagonals, a series of passages that intercut the novel and continually fracture space and time to engage in what one of the figures of the book calls the culture of wordplay or dogmatic accidentalism. "The book's title," said Szentkuthy, "alludes to it being an overture. A multitude of thoughts, emotions, ideas, fantasies, and motifs that mill and churn as chimes, an overture to my subsequent oeuvre." By challenging the then prevailing dogmas and conventions of prose writing, Szentkuthy was said to have created a new canon for himself but later derided as insignificant for supposedly not acquiring followers. Largely unread at the time, Prae eventually gained cult status and would be reprinted in 1980 and 2004. To some critics, the book is not only one of the representative experimental works of the early 20th century, but in its attempt to bring 'impossible literature' into being, it also presages the nouveau roman by almost 30 years. And in its rejection of sequentiality and celebration of narrative shuffling, long before Burroughs & Gysin, Prae enacts what is conceptually akin to the cut-up. Few of Szentkuthy's contemporaries would reveal with equal bravura and audacity the new horizons that were opened up for narrative forms after the era of realism. In Frivolities & Confessions, Szentkuthy said that his goal with Prae was "to absorb the problems of modern philosophy and mathematics into modern fashion, love, and every manifestation of life." Translated for the first time since its original publication in 1934, upon its 80th anniversary, this legendary and controversial Hungarian modernist novel is now at last available in English.
"I'm plotting revolution against this lie that the majority has a monopoly of the truth. What are these truths that always bring the majority rallying round? Truths so elderly they are practically senile. And when a truth is as old as that, gentlemen, you can hardly tell it from a lie." – Dr Stockmann (in Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People) Contra Mundum is a handbook for all those who think there is something fundamentally wrong with the world. The ancient Gnostics claimed that the world was actually created and ruled by the Devil (the Demiurge), hence why everything is so hideous, unfair and horrific. Modern Gnostics (Illuminists) assert that the problem with the world is that it's ruled by the forces of unreason rather than reason, by Mythos rather than Logos, by silly story-based religions rather than mathematics, philosophy and science.
In this work, the author invites the reader to travel along with him as he investigates many of the political questions that have long confronted our society: Congress vs. the President, is it deadlock, gridlock or two majorities? The American community, is it pluralism or orthodoxy? What do Americans mean by "All men are created equal"? Who should control our public schools? Is the genius of the American people for self-government failing? A posthumous collection originally published by 1971 by Arlington House, this reprinted edition includes for the first time Kendall's provocative essay, "The 'Open Society' and its Fallacies"--as relevant today as when it was first written. The essays, speeches, and part of a projected book included in this work direct the reader's attention to subjects that reflect the general theme running through all of Kendall's political thought--the ways that majority rule can bring about government that is sound and just.
The reader will find here the true aftermath of the adventures of Ahab, self-described captain, survivor of his last fight against a giant fish. We will see how this retiree with a wooden leg tried to sell his whale story to the highest bidder - in the form of a Broadway musical, then a Hollywood script. Along the way, we will encounter Cole Porter and his chorus girls, but also Cary Grant, Orson Welles, Joseph von Sternberg and Scott Fitzgerald, drowned in his alcohol, as well as a host of producers, shady to varying degrees. We will remember the passage of young Ahab embarking at seventeen for London in the hope of playing Shakespeare there, and the circumstances which presided over the meeting of the librettist Da Ponte with Herman Melville in 1838. We will learn, ultimately, the best way to make the Manhattan cocktail a success and with what tenacity the indestructible Moby Dick seeks revenge on his nemesis.
Trumpspeak is a witty, no-holds-barred assessment of Trump's mastery - or otherwise - of English and a thoughtful consideration of the ethical issues involved in translating someone you are at extreme odds with. Nearly two decades into her career as a press translator, and after eight years of Barack Obama's refined rhetoric, Bérengère Viennot was shocked to have to start thinking about how to Frenchify Donald Trump's bigly mangled syntax. Viennot's witty book pulls no punches in exploring how Trumpspeak breaks all the rules of political discourse. Trump's rambling speech patterns, peppered with incoherent grammar, vulgarity, hyperbole, sarcasm, and invective, point at a tenuous grasp of reality and culture. Behind Viennot's sparkling, incisive takedown of Trump lie a number of important issues: How does violent rhetoric possibly lead to violent acts? What does Trumpspeak say about the state of modern democracy? And why is "covfefe" a problem for everyone on the planet, not just in America? Trumpspeak holds up an unforgiving mirror not just to the president of the United States himself, but to the state of our modern democracies.
Fernando Pessoa claimed to be inhabited by thousands of philosophies, all of which he intended to develop in his unfinished project of English-language Philosophical Essays. The resulting fragments were never published by Pessoa himself and almost the entirety of them are presented in this edition for the very first time in history. This volume exhibits Pessoa s musings and wild insights on the history of philosophy, the failures of subjectivity, and the structure of the universe to reveal an unexpectedly scholarly, facetious, and vigorous theoretical mind. Written under the pre-heteronyms of Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search, these texts constitute the foundation for the fabrication of Pessoa s future heteronyms. They are the testimony of a writer who referred to himself as a poet animated by philosophy. Through editor Nuno Ribeiro s careful critical efforts, a new and fundamental facet of the work of one of modernity s most seminal geniuses has now been brought to light in a remarkably reliable and clear fashion. "
A leading young theologian and public intellectual shows how the life and legacy of Chuck Colson can equip Christians to live a bold and loving faith in the public square. During his life, Chuck Colson was the preeminent evangelical in American public life. He dedicated himself to public witness in the mold of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and William Wilberforce, creating and leading efforts such as Prison Fellowship, Angel Tree, Breakpoint, and the Centurions program. He worked tirelessly on behalf of humanity because he believed that all people needed help to flourish. He knew the importance of working practically to advance truth and justice in public. And he knew that to be courageous—and to speak and act courageously in line with Scripture—was by definition to be loving. Chuck Colson’s life reveals there is no division between truth and love, between embracing biblical guidance and loving our neighbor. The Colson Way uses the legacy and wisdom of Colson to show Christians a way of living in a public square increasingly hostile to evangelical conviction.
Western culture is degenerate. Conservative Christians have exerted considerable energy fighting cultural decline, but their efforts amount to minor skirmishes compared to the war that needs to happen with the church and her teaching of divorce and remarriage. The blame for our cultural depravity has generally been directed toward liberalism, feminism, and the homosexual agenda. Contra Mundum Swagger debunks that view. Christians shouldn't be directing their efforts in fighting these battles at first. It's a strategic mistake. Rather Christians ought to destroy the idols in the church that have perpetuated them. Jack Shannon admonishes church leadership who, by allowing divorce and remarriage to happen, have caused God's people to sin and lose their cultural dominance. At the same time, these figures have harshly judged the outside unbelieving world, but judgment begins in the house of the Lord. While the criticisms in this book are often difficult, they're imparted with love. Ultimately, Contra Mundum Swagger doesn't seek to point blame; it strives to help reform. Only by accepting how the church has erred can we take the necessary steps to call her to genuine repentance and rebuild a Christian society that lives by God's Word.