The Turning Ruin 4

China’s literary and cultural production at the turn of the twenty-first century is marked by heterogeneity, plurality, and diversity. Given its complexity, the literary/cultural production of this period perhaps can be understood most productively as a response to a global modernity that has touched and transformed all aspects of contemporary Chinese reality. The eleven essays in this book offer an introduction to some of the most important works published at the turn of the twenty-first century. In combining textual analysis of specific works with theoretical insights, and in locating the texts in their sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts, the essays explore key theoretical issues and intellectual concerns of the time. They collectively draw a broad contour of new developments, major trends, and radical changes, capturing the intellectual and cultural Zeitgeist of the age. All in all, these essays offer new theoretical approaches to, and critical perspectives on, contemporary Chinese literature and culture..

.

Critics have traditionally characterized classic horror by its use of shadow and suggestion. Yet the graphic nature of early 1930s films only came to light in the home video/DVD era. Along with gangster movies and "sex pictures," horror films drew audiences during the Great Depression with sensational content. Exploiting a loophole in the Hays Code, which made no provision for on-screen "gruesomeness," studios produced remarkably explicit films that were recut when the Code was more rigidly enforced from 1934. This led to a modern misperception that classic horror was intended to be safe and reassuring to audiences. The author examines the 1931 to 1936 "happy ending" horror in relation to industry practices and censorship. Early works like Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Raven (1935) may be more akin to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Hostel (2005) than many critics believe..

.

.

The Turning YearThis one's for the records.2009 has been a complex novel, from the prosaic Chapter One, all the way to Chapter Twelve, where I, the protagonist, is left wondering why it all went downthe way it did. In the opening pages of January, how could I have ever knownthat in two months' timeI'd meet the girl of my dreams, and feel her, touch her in waysI never thought possible?How could I have knownthat this connection would happen, fulfilling my urges, yet at the same timesigning the order of executionon the heart of someone who had only committed the crimeof trusting me?But soon I lost them both, left them hating meand wanting to be rid of me..

"This collection of fifteen essays offers a sample of German Shakespeare studies at the turn of the century. The articles are written by scholars in the old "Bundeslander" and deal with topics such as culture, memory and natural sciences in Shakespeare's work, Shakespearean spin-offs, and the reception of Venice and Shylock in Germany. Series: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries."--Publisher's website..

Focusing on conversion as one of early modern Europe’s most pressing issues, the present book offers a comprehensive reading of artistic and literary ways in which spiritual transformations and exchanges of religious identities were given meaning..

Originally published in 1999. If religion once seemed to have played out its role in the intellectual and political history of Western secular modernity, it has now returned with a vengeance. In Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Hent de Vries argues that a turn to religion discernible in recent philosophy anticipates and accompanies this development in the contemporary world. Though the book reaches back to Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, and earlier, it takes its inspiration from the tradition of French phenomenology, notably Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and, especially, Jacques Derrida. Tracing how Derrida probes the discourse on religion, its metaphysical presuppositions, and its transformations, de Vries shows how this author consistently foregrounds the unexpected alliances between a radical interrogation of the history of Western philosophy and the religious inheritance from which that philosophy has increasingly sought to set itself apart. De Vries goes beyond formal analogies between the textual practices of deconstruction and so-called negative theology to address the necessity for a philosophical thinking that situates itself at once close to and at the farthest remove from traditional manifestations of the religious and the theological. This paradox is captured in the phrase adieu (à dieu), borrowed from Levinas, which signals at once a turn toward and a leave-taking from God—and which also gestures toward and departs from the other of this divine other, the possibility of radical evil. Only by confronting such uncanny and difficult figures, de Vries claims, can one begin to think and act upon the ethical and political imperatives of our day..

The monograph produces a new interpretation of the opening chapter of 1 Samuel by combining several hermeneutical models, including the theory of chaotic (dynamically unstable) systems and the most recent, essentially post-modern, form criticism, to produce a new interpretation of the opening chapters of 1 Samuel. It argues that 1 Samuel 1-8 is an integral literary unit whose stance on such pivotal issues as monarchy and cultic centralization poorly agrees with that of the balance of Deuteronomy - Kings. In the diachronic perspective, this unit can be construed as a post-Deuteronomistic redactional interpolation polemically directed against several planks of the Deuteronomic/Deuteronomistic agenda. In the synchronic perspective, the pattern of relationship between 1 Samuel 1-8 and the balance of Genesis - Kings calls for a non-linear, multi-dimensional reading of the corpus. Both interpretational trajectories lead to the conclusion that the thrust of the Former Prophets in its final form is controlled to a considerable extent by non-Deuteronomistic elements..

Playing on the frequently used metaphors of the 'turn toward' or 'turn back' in scholarship on religion, The Turn Around Religion in America offers a model of religion that moves in a reciprocal relationship between these two poles. In particular, this volume dedicates itself to a reading of religion and of religious meaning that cannot be reduced to history or ideology on the one hand or to truth or spirit on the other, but is rather the product of the constant play between the historical particulars that manifest beliefs and the beliefs that take shape through them. Taking as their point of departure the foundational scholarship of Sacvan Bercovitch, the contributors locate the universal in the ongoing and particularized attempts of American authors from the seventeenth century forward to get it - whatever that 'it' might be - right. Examining authors as diverse as Pietro di Donato, Herman Melville, Miguel Algarin, Edward Taylor, Mark Twain, Robert Keayne, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Paule Marshall, Stephen Crane, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik, among many others-and a host of genres, from novels and poetry to sermons, philosophy, history, journalism, photography, theater, and cinema-the essays call for a discussion of religion's powers that does not seek to explain them as much as put them into conversation with each other. Central to this project is Bercovitch's emphasis on the rhetoric, ritual, typology, and symbology of religion and his recognition that with each aesthetic enactment of religion's power, we learn something new..

.

Specifically designed for undergraduates, the series will be a powerful resource for anyone engaged in the critical analysis of major American novels and other important texts..

The first book to trace Brazil's reckoning with dictatorship through the collision of politics and cultural production..

This first volume of the Handbook of Asset and Liability Management presents the theories and methods supporting models that align a firm's operations and tactics with its uncertain environment. Detailing the symbiosis between optimization tools and financial decision-making, its original articles cover term and volatility structures, interest rates, risk-return analysis, dynamic asset allocation strategies in discrete and continuous time, the use of stochastic programming models, bond portfolio management, and the Kelly capital growth theory and practice. They effectively set the scene for Volume Two by showing how the management of risky assets and uncertain liabilities within an integrated, coherent framework remains the core problem for both financial institutions and other business enterprises as well. *Each volume presents an accurate survey of a sub-field of finance *Fills a substantial gap in this field *Broad in scope.

.

.