This volume suggests that reading and writing about literature are ways to gain an ethical understanding of how we live in the world. Postmodern narrative is an important way to reveal and discuss who are society's victims, inviting the reader to become one with them. A close reading of fiction by Toni Morrison, Patrick Suskind, D.M. Thomas, Ian McEwan and J.M. Coetzee reveals a violence imposed on gender, race and the body-politic. Such violence is not new to the postmodern world, but reflects Western culture's religious traditions, as this book demonstrates through a reading of stories from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament.

The first post 9-11 election gave the U.S. a choice between two big-government, high-tax globocops quibbling over the details, not an alternative to the aggressive international militarism that makes America the natural and logical target of terrorism. This book looks at the progression from republic protected by militia to empire protected by standing armies in Athens and Rome - and the similar progression in America. It looks at an alternative: The Swiss way, which has kept Switzerland free and republican for 700 years in the center of a warlike continent. America once understood and followed Washington's Great Rule and J. Q. Adams' admonition not to go out into the world in search of monsters to destroy. America was then the light of freedom, not the sword. Now it has picked up the sword only to see the light grow dimmer year by year. (Newly updated and expanded for 2007)CONTACT [email protected]

Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries considers aesthetic imaginaries as they constitute and are constituted by and in our shared realities. With contributions from twelve scholars working in the fields of literary studies, visual studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and digital culture, this book takes a multidisciplinary approach to "aesthetic imaginaries," which tests the conceptual potential from an array of perspectives and methodologies. It probes into the continuous creation and re-creation of figures for the future that invariably nod to their pasts, whether with a spirit of respect, disgust, hope, or play. It is particularly in the intersections between ideas and formations of "shared realities" and what Ranjan Ghosh has called "entangled figurations" that the full and intricate promise of the aesthetic imaginary as analytic and conceptual prism comes into its own. As the chapters in this collection demonstrate, "knots" of various aesthetic imaginaries disseminate and manifest variously across place and time, to weave and interweave again, and to offer themselves in each instance as contours-so-far of cultural and aesthetic histories.