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This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most
influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the
conceptions underlying the history of art. The author's basic idea
is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of
visual experience and that it could be said to generate an
oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the
cloud.
Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), the first president of the Republic of
China, has left a supremely ambivalent political and intellectual
legacy--so much so that he is claimed as a Founding Father by both
the present rival governments in Taipei and Beijing. In Taiwan, he
is the object of a veritable cult; in the People's Republic of
China, he is paid homage as "pioneer of the revolution," making
possible the Party's claims of continuity with the national past.
Western scholars, on the other hand, have tended to question the
myth of Sun Yat-sen by stressing the man's weaknesses, the
thinker's incoherences, and the revolutionary leader's many
failures.
This new edition of Portuguese: An Essential Grammar is a practical reference guide to the most important aspects of modern European Portuguese. Combining traditional and function-based grammar, the book sets out the complexities of Portuguese in short, readable sections. Explanations are clear, free from jargon and substantiated by examples. Throughout, the emphasis is on Portuguese as used by native speakers. This third edition: reflects the new orthographic agreement; includes an expanded section on verbs and pronouns, as well as a new section on syntax; provides authentic examples to illustrate grammar in context; focuses on Portuguese as used in Portugal and Africa; links to Basic Portuguese: A Grammar and Workbook, which offers a valuable set of language practice exercises; includes a detailed contents list and index for easy access to information. An important addition to Routledge's collection of grammars on the variants of Portuguese, this is an ideal reference source for the learner and user of European Portuguese. It is suitable for either independent study or for students in schools, colleges, universities and adult classes of all types.
This is the history of the development through the ages of Plato's "Atlantis" story - the imperialist island state that disappeared in a cataclysm, leaving Athens to survive it...Instead of simply focusing on the various attempts to 'find' Atlantis - all of which are futile for the very good reason that Plato made the island up - the author re-examines the very different uses made of the myth in different contexts and periods. He shows how Plato's myth was reinterpreted in the medieval period and after through conflation with the search for the lost tribes of Israel; how it became involved with the debate about whether Europe should look back to its origins in the Classical or Biblical worlds; how the myth was reinterpreted with a more geographical emphasis following Columbus' discovery of America; and how it was used in the "Enlightenment" to add colour to nationalist attempts to claim antiquity by finding unrecognised origins. Written in a clear and interesting way, Pierre Vidal-Naquet's original ideas rest on deep knowledge supported by primary references and illustrations.
Between becoming king of Macedonia in 336 BC and his death in 323, Alexander the Great conquered not only the Greek city states but also Persia and as far east as the Punjab in India, as far south as Egypt. Claude Mosse describes the progress of Alexander's career in the first part of her book, while the second examines the effects of his conquests on the history of the ancient, medieval and modern world. Central to the book is the myth of Alexander and how the image of Alexander was created and evolved over the centuries. From the illustrious son of Zeus down to the absolute monarch idealised by Louis XIV, from the valiant knight of the crusaders to the Moslem philosopher-king, the author reveals the gamut of contrasts that make up the legend of this extraordinary hero of history and myth.
In "Comparing the Incomparable," Marcel Detienne challenges the cordoning off of disciplines that prevent us from asking trans-cultural questions that would permit one society to shed light on another. Some years ago, he undertook the study of "construction sites" grouped around general questions to be put to historians and ethnologists about their particular areas of expertise. Four of these comparative experiments are presented in the chapters of this book. The first concerns myths and practices related to the founding of cities or sacred spaces from Africa to Japan to Ancient Greece. The second looks at "regimes of historicity" and asks why we speak of history and what we mean by it, which leads to a comparison of cultural philosophies and of the ways different cultures express themselves, be they oral, written, or visual. The third chapter, following in the footsteps of comparative philologist Georges Dumezil, turns to polytheistic pantheons, arguing that we should not only look at the gods in and of themselves but also at the relations between them. The final section of the book examines how, from Ancient Greek democracy to the Ochollo of Ethiopia to the French Revolution, peoples form a consciousness of themselves that translates into assembly practices. A deliberately post-deconstructionist manifesto against the dangers of incommensurability, Detienne argues for and engages in the constructive comparison of societies of a great temporal and spatial diversity. The result testifies to what new and illuminating insights his comparatist method can produce.
The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany presents a new interpretation of National Socialism, arguing that art in the Third Reich was not simply an instrument of the regime, but actually became a source of the racist politics upon which its ideology was founded. Through the myth of the "Aryan race," a race pronounced superior because it alone creates culture, Nazism asserted art as the sole raison d'etre of a regime defined by Hitler as the "dictatorship of genius." Michaud shows the important link between the religious nature of Nazi art and the political movement, revealing that in Nazi Germany art was considered to be less a witness of history than a force capable of producing future, the actor capable of accelerating the coming of a reality immanent to art itself.
100+ Fun Ideas for Practising Primary Languages through Drama and Performance provides teachers with effective and creative language learning activities based on drama, dance and performance. The activities are linked to the Foreign Language Programmes of Study in the September 2014 National Curriculum and show how drama, performance and art can be used to achieve substantial progression in all four language learning skills. The 100+ fun ideas are clearly laid out and simple to deliver, providing an invaluable resource to non-specialist and specialist teachers alike.
foreword by Pierre Vidal-Naquet The acclaimed French classicist Marcel Detienne's first book traces the odyssey of "truth," aletheia, from mytho-religious concept to philosophical thought in archaic Greece. Detienne begins by examining how truth in Greek literature first emerges as an enigma. He then looks at the movement from a religious to a secular thinking about truth in the speech of the sophists and orators. His study culminates with an original interpretation of Parmenides' poem on Being.
"The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece" offers the first comprehensive inquiry into the deity of sexual love, a power that permeated daily Greek life. Avoiding Foucault's philosophical paradigm of dominance/submission, Claude Calame uses an anthropological and linguistic approach to re-create indigenous categories of erotic love. He maintains that Eros, the joyful companion of Aphrodite, was a divine figure around which poets constructed a physiology of desire that functioned in specific ways within a network of social relations. Calame begins by showing how poetry and iconography gave a rich variety of expression to the concept of Eros, then delivers a history of the deity's roles within social and political institutions, and concludes with a discussion of an Eros-centered metaphysics. Calame's treatment of archaic and classical Greek institutions reveals Eros at work in initiation rites and celebrations, educational practices, the Dionysiac theater of tragedy and comedy, and in real and imagined spatial settings. For men, Eros functioned particularly in the symposium and the gymnasium, places where men and boys interacted and where future citizens were educated. The household was the setting where girls, brides, and adult wives learned their erotic roles--as such it provides the context for understanding female rites of passage and the problematics of sexuality in conjugal relations. Through analyses of both Greek language and practices, Calame offers a fresh, subtle reading of relations between individuals as well as a quick-paced and fascinating overview of Eros in Greek society at large.
This new edition of Portuguese: An Essential Grammar is a practical reference guide to the most important aspects of modern European Portuguese. Combining traditional and function-based grammar, the book sets out the complexities of Portuguese in short, readable sections. Explanations are clear, free from jargon and substantiated by examples. Throughout, the emphasis is on Portuguese as used by native speakers. This third edition: reflects the new orthographic agreement; includes an expanded section on verbs and pronouns, as well as a new section on syntax; provides authentic examples to illustrate grammar in context; focuses on Portuguese as used in Portugal and Africa; links to Basic Portuguese: A Grammar and Workbook, which offers a valuable set of language practice exercises; includes a detailed contents list and index for easy access to information. An important addition to Routledge's collection of grammars on the variants of Portuguese, this is an ideal reference source for the learner and user of European Portuguese. It is suitable for either independent study or for students in schools, colleges, universities and adult classes of all types.
Pericles has the rare distinction of giving his name to an entire period of history, embodying what has often been taken as the golden age of the ancient Greek world. "Periclean" Athens witnessed tumultuous political and military events, and achievements of the highest order in philosophy, drama, poetry, oratory, and architecture. Pericles of Athens is the first book in decades to reassess the life and legacy of one of the greatest generals, orators, and statesmen of the classical world. In this compelling critical biography, Vincent Azoulay takes a fresh look at both the classical and modern reception of Pericles, recognizing his achievements as well as his failings. From Thucydides and Plutarch to Voltaire and Hegel, ancient and modern authors have questioned Pericles's relationship with democracy and Athenian society. This is the enigma that Azoulay investigates in this groundbreaking book. Pericles of Athens offers a balanced look at the complex life and afterlife of the legendary "first citizen of Athens."
Despite the rousing stories of male heroism in battles, the Trojan
War transcended the activities of its human participants. For
Homer, it was the gods who conducted and accounted for what
happened. In the first part of this book, the authors find in
Homer's "Iliad" material for exploring the everyday life of the
Greek gods: what their bodies were made of and how they were
nourished, the organization of their society, and the sort of life
they led both in Olympus and in the human world. The gods are
divided in their human nature: at once a fantasized model of
infinite joys and an edifying example of engagement in the world,
they have loves, festivities, and quarrels.
This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most
influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the
conceptions underlying the history of art. The author's basic idea
is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of
visual experience and that it could be said to generate an
oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the
cloud.
A classic work that rereads questions of "muthos" and "logos" in multifaceted contexts. When Jean-Pierre Vernant first published Myth and Thought among the Greeks in 1965, it transformed the field of ancient Greek scholarship, calling forth a new way to think about Greek myth and thought. In eighteen essays-three of which, along with a new preface, are translated into English for the first time-Vernant freed the subject of ancient Greece from its philological chains and reread the questions of "muthos" and "logos" within multifaced and transdisciplinary contexts-of religion, ritual, and art, philosophy, science, social and economic institutions, and historical psychology. A major contribution to both the humanities and the social sciences, Myth and Thought among the Greeks aims to come to terms with a single, essential question: How were individual persons in ancient Greece inseparable from a social and cultural environment of which they were simultaneously the creators and products? Seven themes organize this stellar work-from "Myth Structures" and "Mythic Aspects of Memory and Time" to "The Organization of Space," "Work and Technological Thought," and "Personal Identity and Religion." A master storyteller, an innovative, precise, and original thinker, Vernant continues to change the narratives we tell about the histories of civilizations and the histories of human beings in their individual and collective identities.
Pericles has had the rare distinction of giving his name to an entire period of history, embodying what has often been taken as the golden age of the ancient Greek world. "Periclean" Athens witnessed tumultuous political and military events, and achievements of the highest order in philosophy, drama, poetry, oratory, and architecture. "Pericles of Athens" is the first book in more than two decades to reassess the life and legacy of one of the greatest generals, orators, and statesmen of the classical world. In this compelling critical biography, Vincent Azoulay provides an unforgettable portrait of Pericles and his turbulent era, shedding light on his powerful family, his patronage of the arts, and his unrivaled influence on Athenian politics and culture. He takes a fresh look at both the classical and modern reception of Pericles, recognizing his achievements as well as his failings while deftly avoiding the adulatory or hypercritical positions staked out by some scholars today. From Thucydides and Plutarch to Voltaire and Hegel, ancient and modern authors have questioned the great statesman's relationship with democracy and Athenian society. Did Pericles hold supreme power over willing masses or was he just a gifted representative of popular aspirations? Was Periclean Athens a democracy in name only, as Thucydides suggests? This is the enigma that Azoulay investigates in this groundbreaking book. "Pericles of Athens" offers a balanced look at the complex life and afterlife of the legendary "first citizen of Athens" who presided over the birth of democracy.
In "Comparing the Incomparable," Marcel Detienne challenges the cordoning off of disciplines that prevent us from asking trans-cultural questions that would permit one society to shed light on another. Some years ago, he undertook the study of "construction sites" grouped around general questions to be put to historians and ethnologists about their particular areas of expertise. Four of these comparative experiments are presented in the chapters of this book. The first concerns myths and practices related to the founding of cities or sacred spaces from Africa to Japan to Ancient Greece. The second looks at "regimes of historicity" and asks why we speak of history and what we mean by it, which leads to a comparison of cultural philosophies and of the ways different cultures express themselves, be they oral, written, or visual. The third chapter, following in the footsteps of comparative philologist Georges Dumezil, turns to polytheistic pantheons, arguing that we should not only look at the gods in and of themselves but also at the relations between them. The final section of the book examines how, from Ancient Greek democracy to the Ochollo of Ethiopia to the French Revolution, peoples form a consciousness of themselves that translates into assembly practices. A deliberately post-deconstructionist manifesto against the dangers of incommensurability, Detienne argues for and engages in the constructive comparison of societies of a great temporal and spatial diversity. The result testifies to what new and illuminating insights his comparatist method can produce.
"The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece" offers the first comprehensive inquiry into the deity of sexual love, a power that permeated daily Greek life. Avoiding Foucault's philosophical paradigm of dominance/submission, Claude Calame uses an anthropological and linguistic approach to re-create indigenous categories of erotic love. He maintains that Eros, the joyful companion of Aphrodite, was a divine figure around which poets constructed a physiology of desire that functioned in specific ways within a network of social relations. Calame begins by showing how poetry and iconography gave a rich variety of expression to the concept of Eros, then delivers a history of the deity's roles within social and political institutions, and concludes with a discussion of an Eros-centered metaphysics. Calame's treatment of archaic and classical Greek institutions reveals Eros at work in initiation rites and celebrations, educational practices, the Dionysiac theater of tragedy and comedy, and in real and imagined spatial settings. For men, Eros functioned particularly in the symposium and the gymnasium, places where men and boys interacted and where future citizens were educated. The household was the setting where girls, brides, and adult wives learned their erotic roles--as such it provides the context for understanding female rites of passage and the problematics of sexuality in conjugal relations. Through analyses of both Greek language and practices, Calame offers a fresh, subtle reading of relations between individuals as well as a quick-paced and fascinating overview of Eros in Greek society at large.
This introduction to the Ancient Greek economy has proved popular in France, and has also been translated into Italian and Greek; this first English edition is of the second French edition of 2007. Migeotte tries to avoid getting bogged down in the theoretical debates which have characterised the last half-century of research on the ancient economy, instead providing a survey first of institutions and frameworks (the polis in particular) and then of the different sectors of the economy (agriculture, crafts, trade), he goes back to the primary sources and archaeology, allowing the reader to form their own impressions, as well as setting out his own more nuanced ideas. Above all he emphasises the diversity of the Ancient Greek economy and the co-existence of traits which appear both primitive and proto-capitalist.
This book explores the possible relations between Western types of rationality and Buddhism. It also examines some cliches about Buddhism and questions the old antinomies of Western culture ("faith and reason," or "idealism and materialism"). The use of the Buddhist notion of the Two Truths as a hermeneutic device leads to a double or multiple exposure that will call into question our mental habits and force us to ask questions differently, to think "in a new key." Double Exposure is somewhat of an oddity. Written by a specialist for nonspecialists, it is not a book of vulgarization. Although it aims at a better integration of Western and Buddhist thought, it is not an exercise in comparative philosophy or religion. It is neither a contribution to Buddhist scholarship in the narrow sense, nor a contribution to some vague Western "spirituality." Cutting across traditional disciplines and blurring established genres, it provides a leisurely but deeply insightful stroll through philosophical and literary texts, dreams, poetry, and paradoxes.
This book explores the possible relations between Western types of
rationality and Buddhism. It also examines some cliches about
Buddhism and questions the old antinomies of Western culture
("faith and reason," or "idealism and materialism"). The use of the
Buddhist notion of the Two Truths as a hermeneutic device leads to
a double or multiple exposure that will call into question our
mental habits and force us to ask questions differently, to think
"in a new key."
This is a book about identity, about how the ancient Greeks saw themselves and others, and what this tells us in turn about Greek mentality and culture. It looks at voyagers and explorers, at travels in reality and in the mind, and shows what these reveal at key points in Greek history from the creation of Homer's monumental epic around 700 BC to the high Roman imperial period some eight hundred years later. The author takes us first to the journeyings of Odysseus, considering the returning warrior's concerns of witness and memory and finding in the epic the themes that will preoccupy the Greeks over the centuries. He then travels to Egypt with Herodotus, to the problematically 'barbarian' world of Persia and the Near East with Alexander the Great, to old Greece with the fictional Scythian Anacharsis, to the new Greek world under Roman domination with Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassos and Strabo, and finally to the Asia Minor of the first-century AD sage Apollonius of Tyana in the company of Philostratos. He examines both what their representations of these lands meant in their own day and how they were received in later times. He looks in particular at the importance of the invention of the barbarian and the "other", first in the theoretical process of desribing and accounting for the outside world, and secondly at the justification it gives for the practical reshaping of alien space through conquest and assimilation -- themes which have had, as he points out, a more recent resonance. Francois Hartog draws widely on ancient and modern authors to create a cultural history of ancient Greece that sheds a new and revealing light on the Greeks and the history of humankind more generally.
The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany presents a new interpretation of National Socialism, arguing that art in the Third Reich was not simply an instrument of the regime, but actually became a source of the racist politics upon which its ideology was founded. Through the myth of the "Aryan race," a race pronounced superior because it alone creates culture, Nazism asserted art as the sole raison d'etre of a regime defined by Hitler as the "dictatorship of genius." Michaud shows the important link between the religious nature of Nazi art and the political movement, revealing that in Nazi Germany art was considered to be less a witness of history than a force capable of producing future, the actor capable of accelerating the coming of a reality immanent to art itself.
Despite the rousing stories of male heroism in battles, the Trojan
War transcended the activities of its human participants. For
Homer, it was the gods who conducted and accounted for what
happened. In the first part of this book, the authors find in
Homer's "Iliad" material for exploring the everyday life of the
Greek gods: what their bodies were made of and how they were
nourished, the organization of their society, and the sort of life
they led both in Olympus and in the human world. The gods are
divided in their human nature: at once a fantasized model of
infinite joys and an edifying example of engagement in the world,
they have loves, festivities, and quarrels.
Rich with implications for the history of sexuality, gender issues, and patterns of hellenic literary imagining, Marcel Detienne's landmark book, first published in 1972, recast long-standing ideas about the fertility myth of Adonis. The author challenges Sir James Frazer's thesis that the vegetation god Adonis - whose premature death was mourned by women and whose resurrection marked a joyous occasion - represented the annual cycle of growth and decay in agriculture. Using the analytic tools of structuralism, Detienne shows instead that the festivals of Adonis depict a seductive but impotent and fruitless deity - whose physical ineptitude led to his death in a boar hunt, after which his body was found in a lettuce patch. Contrasting the festivals of Adonis with the solemn ones dedicated to Demeter, the goddess of grain, he reveals the former as a parody and negation of the institution of marriage. Detienne considers the short-lived gardens that Athenian women planted in mockery for Adonis's festival, and explores the function of such vegetal matter as spices, mint, myrrh, cereal, and wet plants in religious practice and in a wide selection of myths. His inquiry exposes, among many things, the way sin which women of various martial statuses were regarded and attitudes toward sexual activity ranging from "perverse" acts to marital relations. |
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