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Phantom Communities reconsiders the status of the simulacrum--sometimes defined as a copy of a copy, but more rigorously defined as a copy that subverts the legitimacy and authority of its model--in light of recent debates in literature, art, philosophy, and cultural studies. The author pursues two interwoven levels of analysis. On one level, he explores the poetics of the simulacrum, considered as a form that internalizes repetition, through close readings of a number of exemplary literary texts, paintings, and films from both the Anglo-American and French traditions, including works by Jean Genet, Pierre Klossowski, René Magritte, Andy Warhol, J. G. Ballard, Balthus, and Raúl Ruiz. Through his readings of these works, the author follows the transformations of the simulacrum, showing how its vicissitudes provide an optic for remapping the postmodern canon. On another level, the author offers an account of the role played by the simulacrum as a theoretical concept that assumes varying analytical and ideological valences in the writings of such theorists as Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In so doing, Phantom Communities intervenes in ongoing interdisciplinary debates concerning the historical and ideological limits of postmodernism, as well as the utopian possibilities of art, literature, and philosophy in a postmodern context. Moving between these debates and the interpretation of individual works, the author shows how they converge on the fundamental aesthetic and ideological problem raised by the postmodern culture of the simulacrum: imagining the virtual communities that, at the margins of postmodern culture, are at once figured and eclipsed by its proliferating images.
Why do some men, women and even children assault, batter, rape, mutilate and murder? In his stunning new book, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes provides a startling and persuasive answer. Why They Killexplores the discoveries of a maverick American criminologist, Dr. Lonnie Athens -- himself the child of a violent family -- which challenge conventional theories about violent behavior. By interviewing violent criminals in prison, Dr. Athens has identified a pattern of social development common to all seriously violent people -- a four-stage process he calls "violentization": -- First, brutalization: A young person is forced by violence or the threat of violence to submit to an aggressive authority figure; he witnesses the violent subjugation of intimates, and the authority figure coaches him to use violence to settle disputes. -- Second, belligerency: The dispirited subject, determined to prevent his further violent subjugation, heeds his coach and resolves to resort to violence. -- Third, violent performances: His violent response to provocation succeeds, and he reads respect and fear in the eyes of others. -- Fourth, virulency: Exultant, he determines from now on to utilize serious violence as a means of dealing with people -- and he bonds with others who believe as he does. Since all four stages must be fully experienced in sequence and completed to produce a violent individual, we see how intervening to interrupt the process can prevent a tragic outcome. Rhodes supports Athens's theory with historical evidence and shows how it explains such violent careers as those of Perry Smith (the killer central to Truman Capote's narrative In Cold Blood), Mike Tyson, "preppy rapist" Alex Kelly, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Why They Kill challenges with devastating evidence the theory that violent behavior is impulsive, unconsciously motivated and predetermined. It offers compelling insights into the terrible, ongoing dilemma of criminal violence that plagues families, neighborhoods, cities and schools.
These readings explore the implications of deviance for both the individual and society, examining the responses of society to deviant behaviour and the reasons why certain people violate the social norm. The text probes the deviant categories; the motivations behind deviant behaviour; and the efforts of those considered deviant to shake the label.
This book examines the intersecting communitarian endeavors of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Colette Peignot, known post-humously as Laure. Through detailed analysis of a series of interlocking texts that the four authors wrote on, for, and to one another on such topics as love, friendship, and fraternity, it explores these authors' theoretical elaborations of community, their actual communities, and the relation between the two.
Returning (to) Communities offers an innovative collection of examples and case studies into what has become a hotly disputed topic. The chapters present a wide-ranging series of interventions into the new debates over the concepts and practices of “community” and the communal. For this book, scholars have been gathered from across Europe and Australia as well as from the United States, and several contributors are involved in community practice. Returning (to) Communities is essential reading to researchers and students in social policy, sociology, ethnic studies, cultural analysis, media studies, and across all of the social sciences and humanities concerned with the communal and the collective.
How do countries create and replicate socio-economic success? This book argues that success comes from how people make sense of their institutions when they are placed under stress. When institutional frameworks are challenged, a range of agents engaged in sensemaking processes that invoke certain identities on 'who we are', contain normative claims about 'how things should be', and involve strategies on 'how to get there'. Sensemaking about the future and the past is crucial to institutional competitiveness and includes prospective and retrospective points of departure, as well as focusing on developing abstract causes of change or replicating success from previous experience. This book brings together a range of world-class scholars from Comparative Political Economy, Institutional Theory, and Organizational Sociology to discuss how sensemaking processes create institutional change. The contributors investigate a range of cases that cover different institutions linked to competitiveness, including labour, public management, think tanks, firms, innovation policies, tax and housing policies, and welfare systems. With a strong focus on the Nordic experience and comparisons with advanced industrialized economies, this volume provides an innovative and original framework for understanding institutional change.
Through a series of 45 carefully selected readings (20 new to this edition), Deviant Behavior explores the ramifications of deviance for both the individual and society, examining the responses of society to deviant behavior and the reasons why certain people violate the social norm. Overall, the text probes the establishment and maintenance of deviant categories; the motivations behind deviant behavior; the formal and informal labelling of individuals and particular segments of society as deviant; the effects of institutionalization; the efforts of those considered deviant to shake the label; and the way deviant categories and structures can be altered.
Drawing on social-criticism, self-help manuals, and the social scientific analysis of American character, In Conflict No Longer examines American thinking about individualism, conformity, and community from 1920 through 1995. Taviss-Thomson's analysis reveals a basic shift in American culture: from a belief that the individual is necessarily in conflict with society and that the self chafes against the constraints imposed by society, to a belief that the self is expressed in the groups, relationships, and subcultures that help shape it. Taviss-Thomson contends that this new model of a relational or 'embedded' self arose due to a weakening of traditional identities based on occupation, social class, gender and age which left individuals freer to construct their own identities. In an age where Americans increasingly abandon the traditional mythology of an individual struggling against social constraints, In Conflict No Longer forecasts a picture of American culture for the next millennium.
Before Superman, before Batman, there was—the Phantom! Making its debut as an American newspaper comic strip in 1936, The Phantom was the forerunner of the comic-book superhero genre that today animates vast billion-dollar franchises spanning print, film, television, video games, and licensed merchandise. But you’ve probably never heard of it—you probably think Superman inaugurated the genre. That’s because, despite its American origins, The Phantom comic strip has enjoyed far greater popularity with international audiences, most notably in Australia, Sweden, and India, where it has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and comic books. The paradox of the character’s relative obscurity in the United States, offset by his phenomenal success in these three markedly different countries, is the subject of The Phantom Unmasked. By tracing the publication history of The Phantom in magazines and comic books across international markets since the mid-1930s, author Kevin Patrick delves into the largely unexplored prehistory of modern media licensing industries. He also explores the interconnections between the cultural, political, economic, and historical factors that fueled the character’s international popularity. The Phantom Unmasked offers readers a nuanced study of the complex cultural flow of American comic books around the world. Equally important, to provide a rare glimpse of international comics fandom, Patrick surveyed the Phantom’s “phans”—as they call themselves—and lets them explain how and why they came to love the world’s first masked superhero.
A rich and detailed account of indigenous history in central and southern Mexico from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, Mexico's Indigenous Communities is an expansive work that destroys the notion that Indians were victims of forces beyond their control and today have little connection with their ancient past. Indian communities continue to remember and tell their own local histories, recovering and rewriting versions of their past in light of their lived present. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano focuses on a series of individual cases, falling within successive historical epochs, that illustrate how the practice of drawing up and preserving historical documents-in particular, maps, oral accounts, and painted manuscripts-has been a determining factor in the history of Mexico's Indian communities for a variety of purposes, including the significant issue of land and its rightful ownership. Since the sixteenth century, numerous Indian pueblos have presented colonial and national courts with historical evidence that defends their landholdings. Because of its sweeping scope, groundbreaking research, and the author's intimate knowledge of specific communities, Mexico's Indigenous Communities is a unique and exceptional contribution to Mexican history. It will appeal to students and specialists of history, indigenous studies, ethnohistory, and anthropology of Latin America and Mexico