Search results for "Michael Docherty"
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Los Angeles
No city occupies as many paradoxical positions in the popular imagination as Los Angeles. It is the new frontier and the end of the trail; it is American Eden and Babylon by the Pacific; it is by turns celebrated and condemned for its diversity; it is the city of perpetual renewal and the city of imminent apocalypse. This collection reveals LA in all its contradictions by documenting a literary tradition as kaleidoscopic and cacophonous as the city itself. The writings explored by Los Angeles: A Literary History record how a dusty cow town morphed into a global metropolis within a matter of decades, and how this unprecedented transformation came to define the experience of modernity. Los Angeles's literature has long gone underappreciated, the city's culture dismissed as flat and frivolous: this volume upturns that narrative, reshaping American literary history by resituating LA as its beating heart.
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Docherty
'His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.'Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his small town. But the world is changing, and, lying next to him, Conn's father Tam has decided that his son's life will be different from his own. Gritty, dark and tender, McIlvanney's Docherty is a modern classic.
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Elmhirsts of Dartington
Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst were the founders of Dartington - she the daughter of an American millionaire who was once Secretary to the US Navy; he the son of a Yorkshire parson and secretary to Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal before he married Dorothy. They were the twentieth century’s most substantial private patrons of architecture in England as well as of the arts and education.Dartington School was one of the most famous experimental schools in the world. Bertrand Russell sent his children there, as did Aldous Huxley and the Freuds. Dartington College of Arts and its associated Summer School of Music were equally famous in the world of the arts. Bernard Leach taught pottery, Mark Tobey painting, and Imogen Holst music. The Amadeus Quartet was formed there. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were frequent performers.In a setting of great beauty, school and college belonged to a general experiment in rural reconstruction. Dartington Glass was made in the Devonshire countryside and exported world-wide. So were Dartington Textiles, Dartington Furniture and Dartington Pottery. This book, originally published in 1982 (and reissued in 1996), describes how a unique combination of education, arts, industry and agriculture came to be put together.The result was one of the hardiest Utopian communities of modern times. It eventually overcame the strong local opposition to such a daring undertaking. The author finds the origins of modern Dartington in the founders’ hopes that mankind would be liberated through education; that a new flowering of the arts would transform a society impoverished by industrialisation and secularisation; and that a society seeking to draw together town and country would combine the best of both worlds. This book is an extraordinary memoir of two people and the place they made.
R 2,304.98
American Horror Fiction
"Insights" brings contemporary criticism on neglected literary and cultural areas. Each contribution concentrates on a study of a particular work, author or genre in its artistic, historical and cultural context.;This criticism on American horror fiction 1798-1983 offers critical and theoretical perspectives. Each essay deals with a major figure in the genre from Gothic to modern feminist reworkings and aim to illustrate the fact that modern theory can usefully be applied to any text or genre.;The essays discuss the work of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P.Lovecraft, William Faulkner, Robert Bloch, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and S.M.Charnas.
R 1,538.58
Criticism and Modernity
Criticism and Modernity traces the conditions under which criticism emerges as a socio-cultural practice within the institutionalized forms of European modernity and democracy. It argues that criticism is born out of anxieties about national supremacy in the late seventeenth century, with the consequence that the emergent national cultures of the eighteenth century and since become sites for the regulation of the democratic subject through the academic formof arguments about the proper relations of aesthetics to ethics and politics. The central issue is that of legitimation: how can subjective aesthetic experiences regulate the norms of ethical justice? That question is posed not as an abstract philosophical issue, but rather as a question properly locatedwithin the struggles for national culture. The usual Germanic source of modern aesthetics and criticism is here placed in the broader European context, involving contests between England, France, Scotland, Ireland, and the emergent Germany and Italy. Writers addressed include Corneille, Dryden, Molière, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer; and, throughout, the legacy of these thinkers is found in the most recent contemporary theory, in work by Agamben, Badiou, Lyotard, MacIntyre, and others.A closing chapter considers the formation of the university across modern Europe, in Vico's Naples, Humboldt's Berlin, Newman's Dublin, Blair's Edinburgh, the France of Alain and Benda, the England of Leavis, as well as our contemporary institutional predicaments.
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Confessions
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.This book explores what is at stake in our confessional culture. Thomas Docherty examines confessional writings from Augustine to Montaigne and from Sylvia Plath to Derrida, arguing that through all this work runs a philosophical substratum - the conditions under which it is possible to assert a confessional mode - that needs exploration and explication. Docherty outlines a philosophy of confession that has pertinence for a contemporary political culture based on the notion of 'transparency'. In a postmodern 'transparent society', the self coincides with its self-representations. Such a position is central to the idea of authenticity and truth-telling in confessional writing: it is the basis of saying, truthfully, 'here I take my stand'. The question is: what other consequences might there be of an assumption of the primacy of transparency? Two areas are examined in detail: the religious and the judicial. Docherty shows that despite the tendency to regard transparency as a general social and ethical good, our contemporary culture of transparency has engendered a society in which autonomy (or the very authority of the subject that proclaims 'I confess') is grounded in guilt, reparation and victimhood.
R 1,558.00
Literature and Capital
What is the value of literature? In this important new work, Thomas Docherty charts a new economic history of literary culture and its institutions in the modern age. From the literary patronage of the early modern period, through the colonial exploitation of the 18th and 19th centuries to the institutionalisation of “literature” in the neoliberal university of the 21st century, Literature and Capital explores the changing ways in which literary culture has both resisted and become complicit with exploitative economic notions of value. Drawing on the work of economic and political thinkers such as Thomas Piketty, Naomi Klein, Edward Said and Raymond Williams, the book includes readings of work by a wide range of canonical authors from Shakespeare, Donne and Swift to Tolstoy, Woolf and Ishiguro.
R 3,825.00
Universities at War
"Docherty is not only is a brilliant critic of those forces that would like to transform higher education into an extension of the market-place... he is also a man of great moral and civic courage, who under intense pressure from the punishing neoliberal state has risked a great deal to remind us that higher education is a civic institution crucial to creating the formative cultures necessary for a democracy to survive, if not flourish."- Henry Giroux, McMasters University"Docherty engages with the secular university in its present crisis, reflecting on its origins and on its role in the future of democracy. He tackles the urgent issue of inequality with a compelling denunciation of the ways of entrenched privilege; he offers a view of governance and representation from the perspective of those who are silenced; and exposes the fundamental damage done to thought by management-speak. Docherty is moral, passionate and committed and this is a fierce and important book."- Mary Margaret McCabe, King′s College LondonThere is a war on for the future of the university worldwide. The stakes are high, and they reach deep into our social condition.On one side are self-proclaimed modernisers who view the institution as vital to national economic success. Here the university is a servant of the national economy in the context of globalization, its driving principles of private and personal enrichment necessary conditions of ‘progress’ and modernity.Others see this as a radical impoverishment of the university’s capacities to extend human possibilities and freedoms, to seek earnestly for social justice, and to participate in the endless need for the extension of democracy.This book analyses the former position, and argues for the necessity of taking sides with the latter. It does so with a sense of urgency, because the market fundamentalists are on the march. The fundamental war that is being fought is not just for scholars, but for a better – more democratic, more just, more emancipatory – form of life.Choose sides.
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Twentieth-Century European Drama
This volume offers critical and theoretical perspectives on some of the major figures in European drama in the 20th century. There are 13 essays, covering Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Anouilh, Fernando Arrabal, Jean Genet, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel, contemporary German theatre, and Dario Fo and Franca Fame. These essays combine contemporary theory with a discussion of the dramatic work and theories of theatre and drama of the playwrights who created modern drama in Europe. Brian Docherty is the co-editor of "Nineteenth-Century Suspense: From Poe to Conan Doyle", and editor of "American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre", "American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King", "Twentieth Century American Drama", "American Modernist Poetry", "Twentieth Century British Poetry 1900-50", Twentieth Century British Poetry 1950-90" and "The Beat Generation".
R 3,086.32
Michael Douglas: Acting on Instinct
In the shadow of his father Kirk's overpowering fame, Michael Douglas forged a career for himself and became recognised in his own right as an award-winning actor and producer.But fame has taken its toll on Michael's personal life. His struggles with sexual addiction, his treatment for alcoholism and drug dependency and the break-up of his first marriage show another side to Michael's success. In 2010, his troubled past came back to haunt him when Cameron, his eldest son, was sentenced to five years in prison for drug dealing.Yet, despite a rocky road, Michael has found happiness later in life. His marriage to Catherine Zeta Jones meant a second shot at fatherhood and gave him strength following a devastating diagnosis of advanced throat cancer at the age of 65.This is the compelling and remarkable story of a Hollywood son who waged a battle against the odds to achieve his fame and fortune, and has kept on fighting with every challenge he faces.
R 1,160.00
Michael Douglas Memoir
Hollywood icon Michael Douglas tells the unfiltered story of his life for the first time. "This book is about where I came from, what I fought against, and what I chose for myself. Fame can blur the truth; this is my attempt to bring it back into focus." A legendary actor and Hollywood Icon whose five-decade career spans film, television, and producing, Michael Douglas has won two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, five Golden Globes, a Primetime Emmy, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the AFI Life Achievement Award, among many others. Douglas starred in and produced some of the most successful movies of all time, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Romancing the Stone, The China Syndrome, Fatal Attraction, Black Rain, Wall Street, Basic Instinct, Disclosure, The Game, Wonder Boys, Traffic, and Behind the Candelabra. His films have defined cultural moments and sometimes whole decades. In this raw, career-sweeping memoir, he tells the unfiltered story of his life. Initially dismissed as only Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas' handsome son, Douglas stunned Hollywood and the world when he won his first Oscar at just thirty years old for producing the multi-Academy Award winning classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Once told he would be nothing more than a television actor, he walked off the hit series The Streets of San Francisco to become a global movie star whose films have grossed billions of dollars. Rejected for serious acting roles that he saw go to his Hollywood pals Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, he refused to be typecast and won his second Academy Award for his iconic performance as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Beginning with Douglas's childhood and complicated relationship with his father, the memoir traces his path to success with news-breaking behind-the-scenes stories of his rise to fame. Yet as Douglas's fame rose, so did his personal struggles, and here for the first time is the full, candid story of the challenges he and his family faced, from affairs with some of the most celebrated actresses in Hollywood, his own serious drug addiction which threaten to destroy his first marriage and career, the heartbreaking battle to save his son from a terrible drug addiction that sent him to federal prison at thirty-one years old, and an against-all-odds battle with stage four cancer. His love affair with Oscar winner Catherine Zeta Jones was initially dismissed as just another Hollywood relationship, but they proved the skeptics wrong about their age gap and stayed together through relationship troubles, health issues, tabloid gossip and are still going strong after twenty-five years of marriage.
R 798.00
Michael Douglas Memoir
Hollywood icon Michael Douglas tells the unfiltered story of his life for the first time. "This book is about where I came from, what I fought against, and what I chose for myself. Fame can blur the truth; this is my attempt to bring it back into focus." A legendary actor and Hollywood Icon whose five-decade career spans film, television, and producing, Michael Douglas has won two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, five Golden Globes, a Primetime Emmy, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the AFI Life Achievement Award, among many others. Douglas starred in and produced some of the most successful movies of all time, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Romancing the Stone, The China Syndrome, Fatal Attraction, Black Rain, Wall Street, Basic Instinct, Disclosure, The Game, Wonder Boys, Traffic, and Behind the Candelabra. His films have defined cultural moments and sometimes whole decades. In this raw, career-sweeping memoir, he tells the unfiltered story of his life. Initially dismissed as only Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas' handsome son, Douglas stunned Hollywood and the world when he won his first Oscar at just thirty years old for producing the multi-Academy Award winning classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Once told he would be nothing more than a television actor, he walked off the hit series The Streets of San Francisco to become a global movie star whose films have grossed billions of dollars. Rejected for serious acting roles that he saw go to his Hollywood pals Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, he refused to be typecast and won his second Academy Award for his iconic performance as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Beginning with Douglas's childhood and complicated relationship with his father, the memoir traces his path to success with news-breaking behind-the-scenes stories of his rise to fame. Yet as Douglas's fame rose, so did his personal struggles, and here for the first time is the full, candid story of the challenges he and his family faced, from affairs with some of the most celebrated actresses in Hollywood, his own serious drug addiction which threaten to destroy his first marriage and career, the heartbreaking battle to save his son from a terrible drug addiction that sent him to federal prison at thirty-one years old, and an against-all-odds battle with stage four cancer. His love affair with Oscar winner Catherine Zeta Jones was initially dismissed as just another Hollywood relationship, but they proved the skeptics wrong about their age gap and stayed together through relationship troubles, health issues, tabloid gossip and are still going strong after twenty-five years of marriage.
R 964.00
Never Surrender
Winston Churchill embarks on a battle of wills with Adolf Hitler in the run-up to Dunkirk. The compelling new historical novel from the acclaimed author of Winston’s War. Winston Churchill at his lowest ebb – pitted in personal confrontation with Adolf Hitler, and with ghosts from his tormented past. Friday 10 May 1940. Hitler launches a devastating attack that within days will overrun France, Holland and Belgium, and bring Britain to its knees at Dunkirk. It is also the day Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister. He is the one man capable of standing in Hitler's way – yet Churchill is still deeply mistrusted within his own Cabinet and haunted by the memory of his tortured father. Never Surrender is a novel about the courage and defiance that were displayed in abundance – not just by Churchill, but by ordinary men and women over three of the most momentous weeks in British history.
R 573.00
Complicity
Complicity argues that all existing modes of cultural critique are regarded as legitimate and productive if and only if they are complicit with the very ideologies and values that the criticism sets out to undermine. Through philosophical, literary and theoretical analysis, Thomas Docherty shows how easy it has been for criticism to become essentially an act of political collaboration with existing governmental power. The book explores the various ways in which, both historically and theoretically, critical activity has become complicit with the over-arching social and political norms that it aims to undermine. Philosophically, ethically and politically, criticism’s fundamental impulse is too often intrinsically negated. In extreme political form, this places criticism in line with collaborationist activity. Docherty then finds a productive way out of the double-bind in which criticism has traditionally found itself, through an idea of criticism as a mode of ‘reserve’, a mode of commitment that eschews fundamentalism of all kinds.
R 1,411.00
Political English
From post-truth politics to “no-platforming” on university campuses, the English language has been both a potent weapon and a crucial battlefield for our divided politics. In this important and wide-ranging intervention, Thomas Docherty explores the politics of the English language, its implication in the dynamics of political power and the spaces it offers for dissent and resistance. From the authorised English of the King James Bible to the colonial project of University English Studies, this book develops a powerful history for contemporary debates about propaganda, free speech and truth-telling in our politics. Taking examples from the US, UK and beyond - from debates about the Second Amendment and free-speech on campus, to the Iraq War and the Grenfell Tower fire - this book is a powerful and polemical return to Orwell’s observation that a degraded political language is intimately connected to an equally degraded political culture.
R 3,384.00
Confessions
This book explores what is at stake in our confessional culture. Thomas Docherty examines confessional writings from Augustine to Montaigne and from Sylvia Plath to Derrida, arguing that through all this work runs a philosophical substratum - the conditions under which it is possible to assert a confessional mode - that needs exploration and explication. Docherty outlines a philosophy of confession that has pertinence for a contemporary political culture based on the notion of 'transparency'. In a postmodern 'transparent society', the self coincides with its self-representations. Such a position is central to the idea of authenticity and truth-telling in confessional writing: it is the basis of saying, truthfully, 'here I take my stand'. The question is: what other consequences might there be of an assumption of the primacy of transparency? Two areas are examined in detail: the religious and the judicial.Docherty shows that despite the tendency to regard transparency as a general social and ethical good, our contemporary culture of transparency has engendered a society in which autonomy (or the very authority of the subject that proclaims 'I confess') is grounded in guilt, reparation and victimhood.
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R 388.00
If the Mute Timber
Tom Docherty's first collection, If the Mute Timber, begins 'not with a book / nor even an attentive ear', but with the elusive fragment of its title. The poems situate themselves in medias res: among birds or gravestones, between lines of prayer, in the flux of appearances. Places without words become focal points: the poems seek articulation in life before birth and after death; in animal and imagined lives; in works of music, painting, and architecture; and in the varied silences of human and divine relationships. In one sense, the poems are variations on the vanitas-but the transience of life and its artefacts is transposed to an offering, a potential key in which to register the work. When followed to their natural end, fragments become sentences, notes are sung. If the Mute Timber finds a range of forms-syllabics, near-sonnets, metrically shifting rhyme-patterns-that aim to bring particular sense to the 'sencelesse' (as the epigraph from Sidney has it). And not only sense but also sensuousness. The poems seem often to come so close to something as to touch it (or taste it or see it). But what? The sound 'in another place', the 'perfect ending / at which one never arrives'. In their balancing act, looking both back and ahead, these poems cannot end where they have begun; their phrasing brings about change, as to fragments on which new light is cast: 'yes, it is saying / then, then, then ...'.
R 520.11
Literature and Capital
What is the value of literature? In this important new work, Thomas Docherty charts a new economic history of literary culture and its institutions in the modern age. From the literary patronage of the early modern period, through the colonial exploitation of the 18th and 19th centuries to the institutionalisation of “literature” in the neoliberal university of the 21st century, Literature and Capital explores the changing ways in which literary culture has both resisted and become complicit with exploitative economic notions of value. Drawing on the work of economic and political thinkers such as Thomas Piketty, Naomi Klein, Edward Said and Raymond Williams, the book includes readings of work by a wide range of canonical authors from Shakespeare, Donne and Swift to Tolstoy, Woolf and Ishiguro.
R 1,117.00
Moon Girl
Leila loves bright colours but finds the shadows a little scary. That's until she meets Moon Girl.Together they go on a night-time adventure, painting moonlight in the darkness and discoveringthe world after the sun sets. Thomas Docherty's stunning illustrations light up the night and turn it into a thing of beauty, curiosity,and wonder. From the author and illustrator of the critically acclaimed Into the Wild.
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Independence Day
Independence Day moves on from previous work, while still retaining some continuities in theme, style and approach. It is a book of journeys, literal and metaphorical, making use of ekphrastic techniques. The poems here start out from north London, taking the reader to San Francisco, New York, Baku, Kuala Lumpur, France, Russia, and back again, while remaining firmly grounded in the writer's locale. As ever, political realities and social issues are not neglected; these poems move to a contemporary music without losing seriousness of purpose without resorting to agit-prop.
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R 4,331.00
Complicity
Complicity argues that all existing modes of cultural critique are regarded as legitimate and productive if and only if they are complicit with the very ideologies and values that the criticism sets out to undermine. Through philosophical, literary and theoretical analysis, Thomas Docherty shows how easy it has been for criticism to become essentially an act of political collaboration with existing governmental power. The book explores the various ways in which, both historically and theoretically, critical activity has become complicit with the over-arching social and political norms that it aims to undermine. Philosophically, ethically and politically, criticism’s fundamental impulse is too often intrinsically negated. In extreme political form, this places criticism in line with collaborationist activity. Docherty then finds a productive way out of the double-bind in which criticism has traditionally found itself, through an idea of criticism as a mode of ‘reserve’, a mode of commitment that eschews fundamentalism of all kinds.
R 4,414.00
R 305.00
Political English
From post-truth politics to “no-platforming” on university campuses, the English language has been both a potent weapon and a crucial battlefield for our divided politics. In this important and wide-ranging intervention, Thomas Docherty explores the politics of the English language, its implication in the dynamics of political power and the spaces it offers for dissent and resistance. From the authorised English of the King James Bible to the colonial project of University English Studies, this book develops a powerful history for contemporary debates about propaganda, free speech and truth-telling in our politics. Taking examples from the US, UK and beyond - from debates about the Second Amendment and free-speech on campus, to the Iraq War and the Grenfell Tower fire - this book is a powerful and polemical return to Orwell’s observation that a degraded political language is intimately connected to an equally degraded political culture.
R 1,088.00
R 559.76
