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An exploration of one of the most universal human obsessions charts the rise of longevity science from its alchemical beginnings to modern-day genetic interventions and enters the world of those whose lives are shaped by a belief in immortality.
Argues for a new kind of criticism, one that mediates between literal and allegorical modes of interpretation.
The literature on physiognomy—the art of studying a person's outward appearance, especially the face, in order to determine character and intelligence—has flourished in recent years in the wake of renewed scholarly interest in the history and politics of the body. Virtually no attention, however, has been devoted to the vocabulary and rhetoric of physiognomy. The Face of Immortality addresses this gap, arguing that the trend in Western culture has been to obliterate the face, which is manifested in criticism as a disregard for the letter. Denouncing this trend, Davide Stimilli draws on Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, English, and German sources in order to explore the terminology and historical development of physiognomy. Stimilli takes physiognomy to be the resistance to such an obliteration of the face, and argues that it offers a model for a theory of reading that does not discount the letter as inessential. Elaborating on the work of Walter Benjamin, he defines the task of physiognomical criticism as transliteration (which preserves the letter) rather than translation (which obliterates it). The Face of Immortality is meant to exemplify the method and test the reach of such a criticism, which aims at mediating between philology and philosophy, between literal and allegorical modes of interpretation.
The Face of Truth examines in depth the Vedantic theology of Rāmānuja, the most important and well-known of the classical Hindu theologians. Julius Lipner clearly analyzes Rāmānuja's theory of sacred language and divine predication, his views on the nature of the self, God, and the relationship between infinite and finite being. In addition to offering new insights into and analyses of religious matters, The Face of Truth exposes the theology of language — the understanding of religious language and God. This is consistent with Lipner's other purpose — the furthering of inter-religious dialogue, especially between Hindu and Christian points of view. Lipner has also translated several technical Sanskrit terms into English, making his point intelligible to non-Sanskrit readers. Drawing together the complex strands of Rāmānujan thought, Lipner succeeds in increasing inter-religious understanding.
Provides an accessible account of the variety and subtlety of Greek and Roman philosophy of death, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius.
“A tragicomedy about the paradoxes of trying to be a decent human, and—maybe even trickier—of trying to be a decent mom” by the author of A Perfect Life (Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors). Professor Maxine Sayers once found her personal and professional life so fulfilling that she founded the Institute for Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. But when her beloved husband dies, she is so devastated she can barely get out of bed. To make matters worse, her son, Zach, abruptly quit his job in Silicon Valley and has been out of contact for seven months. But Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden realization that a favorite former student (and a former close friend of her son) might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that Zach might either be involved in or has become a victim of this extremist’s bombing. Deserting her teaching responsibilities, her ailing mother, and an appealing suitor, Maxine is compelled to set out in search of her son in order to warn and protect him—even though she knows she should report her suspicions to the FBI to prevent greater carnage. “The Professor of Immortality is intimate and sweeping, funny and terrifying, and most of all dead-on in its observations of what it means to want to know everything about people we love while still being frightened of what we might find out: it’s a detective story, and a story of motherlove. Eileen Pollack is a splendid writer.” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway “In this exceptional novel, Eileen Pollack writes with great immediacy about the impact of grief on a parent’s perception of the world. Tender, wry, full of unexpected revelations, The Professor of Immortality gripped me from the first scene, and the urgent questions it poses have stayed with me.” —Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose; to explore thoroughly the great, themes of existence.
"What if God is only a ghost in a cosmic machine?"
"At last, she arrives at the fatal end of the plank . . . and, with her hands crossed over her chest, falls straight downward, suspended for a moment in the air before being devoured by the burning pit that awaits her. . . ." This grisly 1829 account by Pierre Dubois demonstrates the usual European response to the Hindu custom of satis sacrificing themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands—horror and revulsion. Yet to those of the Hindu faith, not least the satis themselves, this act signals the sati's sacredness and spiritual power. Ashes of Immortality attempts to see the satis through Hindu eyes, providing an extensive experiential and psychoanalytic account of ritual self-sacrifice and self-mutilation in South Asia. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork in northern India, where the state-banned practice of sati reemerged in the 1970s, as well as extensive textual analysis, Weinberger-Thomas constructs a radically new interpretation of satis. She shows that their self-immolation transcends gender, caste and class, region and history, representing for the Hindus a path to immortality.