Countercurrents

Download or read book Countercurrents written by Raymond Adolph Prier and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their readings of texts, the authors address the topics of theory, narrative, aesthetics, the idea of the text, and of specific moments in cultural history. The chapters cover a range of authors: Plato, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Chariteo, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Kleist, Gode, Edith Wharton, Pirandello, Kafka, Sartre, Saint-John Perse, Paz, Roubaud, Sanguineti, and Tomlinson. They also deal with philosophers: Peirce, Nietzsche, Saussure, Husserl, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Heidegger, Jakobson, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The book opens up our relationships to the past and the usefulness or otherwise of the metaphors we use in our attempt to understand and participate in it. Although Countercurrents deals diversely with literary periods, authors, and critics, it speaks within the civilized and civilizing universe of our language and the texts we create. Running beneath the antihumanistic flotilla that skims the surface of texts for theory, the authors plumb for treasures from the ocean's floor.

Download or read book Currents and Countercurrents written by Robert E. Buswell, Jr. and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2005-05-31 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soon after the inception of Buddhism in the sixth or fifth century B.C.E., the Buddha ordered his small band of monks to wander forth for the welfare and weal of the many, a command that initiated one of the greatest missionary movements in world religious history. But this account of a monolithic missionary movement spreading outward from the Buddhist homeland of India across the Asian continent is just one part of the story. The case of East Asian Buddhism suggests another tale, one in which the dominant eastward current of diffusion creates important eddies, or countercurrents, of influence that redound back toward the center. These countercurrents have had significant, even profound, impact on neighboring traditions. In East Asia perhaps the most important countercurrent of influence came from Korea, the focus of this volume. Chapters examine the role played by the Paekche kingdom in introducing Buddhist material culture (especially monastic architecture) to Japan and the impact of Korean scholiasts on the creation of several distinctive features that eventually came to characterize Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. The lives and intellectual importance of the monks Sungnang (fl. ca. 490) and Wonch’uk (613–696) are reassessed, bringing to light their role in the development of early intellectual schools within Chinese Buddhism. Later chapters discuss the influential teachings of the semi-legendary master Musang (684–762), the patriarch of two of the earliest schools of Ch’an; the work of a dozen or so Korean monks active in the Chinese T’ient’ai tradition; and the Huiyin monastery.

Download or read book From Counterculture to Cyberculture written by Fred Turner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

Download or read book Counter-currents written by Edgar A. Pieterse and published by Jacana Media. This book was released on 2010 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The City of Cape Town is heading for disaster and is already in deep crisis if one cares to look close enough. The recent proliferation of public construction, public squares and public housing along the N2 towards the airport is little more than a mirage compared with the direction of more underlying trends. Cape Town's grim future is born out of the confluence of the globalised economic and ecological collapse that is fast becoming the defining feature of the twenty-first century. It is manifested most starkly in the dire situation that faces the majority of the city's residents, who are excluded from the formal economy and must rely on substandard public services and their own makeshift shelters. The scenario is serious enough to draw everyone's attention but should be set against the broader issues of long-term economic resilience and environmental sustainability to achieve a low-carbon society - so we have our work cut out for us. The purpose of this volume is to demystify these challenges and present readers with a creative portfolio of thinking, practice and strong vision to show that we can find alternatives - and, moreover, that these alternatives are already emerging in (marginal) sections of the state, civil society and the business sectors."--Introduction.

Download or read book The Tragedy of American Science written by Clifford D. Conner and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the destructive history of science-for-profit, including its toll on the US pandemic response, by the author of A People’s History of Science. Despite a facade of brilliant technological advances, American science has led humanity to the brink of interrelated disasters. In The Tragedy of American Science, historian of science Clifford D. Conner describes the dual processes by which this history has unfolded since the Second World War, addressing the corporatization and the militarization of science in the US. He examines the role of private profit considerations in determining the direction of scientific inquiry—and the ways those considerations have dangerously undermined the integrity of sciences impacting food, water, air, medicine, and the climate. In addition, he explores the relationship between scientific industries and the US military, discussing the innumerable financial and human scientific resources that have been diverted from other critical areas in order to further military aggrandizement and technological development. While the underlying problems may appear intractable, Conner compellingly argues that replacing the current science-for-profit system with a science-for-human-needs system is not an impossible utopian dream—and the first step to a better future is grappling with the mistakes of the past.

Download or read book Counter-currents written by Sophie Winthrop Weitzel and published by . This book was released on 1888 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The System of Equatorial Countercurrents in the Ocean written by Nikolaĭ Konstantinovich Khanaĭchenko and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: