Search results for "jonathan decter"
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Dominion Built of Praise
A constant feature of Jewish culture in the medieval Mediterranean was the dedication of panegyric texts in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and other languages to men of several ranks: scholars, communal leaders, courtiers, merchants, patrons, and poets. Although the imagery of nature and eroticism in the preludes to these poems is often studied, the substance of what follows is generally neglected, as it is perceived to be repetitive, obsequious, and less aesthetically interesting than other types of poetry from the period. In Dominion Built of Praise, Jonathan Decter demurs. As is the case with visual portraits, panegyrics operate according to a code of cultural norms that tell us at least as much about the society that produced them as the individuals they portray. Looking at the phenomenon of panegyric in Mediterranean Jewish culture from several overlapping perspectives—social, historical, ethical, poetic, political, and theological—he finds that they offer representations of Jewish political leadership as it varied across geographic area and evolved over time.Decter focuses his analysis primarily on Jewish centers in the Islamic Mediterranean between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and also includes a chapter on Jews in the Christian Mediterranean through the fifteenth century. He examines the hundreds of panegyrics that have survived: some copied repeatedly in luxurious anthologies, others discarded haphazardly in the Cairo Geniza. According to Decter, the poems extolled conventional character traits ascribed to leaders not only diachronically within the Jewish political tradition but also synchronically within Islamic and, to a lesser extent, Christian civilization and political culture. Dominion Built of Praise reveals more than a superficial and functional parallel between Muslim and Jewish forms of statecraft and demonstrates how ideas of Islamic political legitimacy profoundly shaped the ways in which Jews conceptualized and portrayed their own leadership.
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Iberian Jewish Literature
This stimulating and graceful book explores Iberian Jewish attitudes toward cultural transition during the 12th and 13th centuries, when growing intolerance toward Jews in Islamic al-Andalus and the southward expansion of the Christian Reconquista led to the relocation of Jews from Islamic to Christian domains. By engaging literary topics such as imagery, structure, voice, landscape, and geography, Jonathan P. Decter traces attitudes toward transition that range from tenacious longing for the Islamic past to comfort in the Christian environment. Through comparison with Arabic and European vernacular literatures, Decter elucidates a medieval Hebrew poetics of estrangement and nostalgia, poetic responses to catastrophe, and the refraction of social issues in fictional narratives.Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.
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Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain
The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain: Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts investigates the relationship between the Bible and the cultural production of Iberian societies between the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 and the Expulsion of 1492. During this turbulent and transformative period, the Bible intersected with virtually all aspects of late medieval Iberian culture: its languages of expression, its material and artistic production, and its intellectual output in literary, philosophical, exegetic, and polemical spheres. The articles in this cross-cultural and interdisciplinary volume present instantiations of the Hebrew Bible’s deployment in textual and visual forms on diverse subjects (messianic exegesis, polemics, converso liturgy, Bible translation, conversion narrative, etc.) and utilize a broad range of methodological approaches (from classical philology to Derridian analysis).
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Jonathan Dean
Jonathan Dean (1924-2014) was a distinguished U.S. diplomat (1950-1980) and from 1984 to 2007 global security adviser to the Union of Concerned Scientists, Washington, D.C. During the 1980s and 1990s he was a pioneering conceptual thinker, writer and speaker on détente in Europe, global cooperative security, arms control and disarmament. He authored: Watershed in Europe (1987), Meeting Gorbachev’s Challenge (1989) and Ending Europe’s Wars (1994). This volume contains his biography and bibliography, six texts on détente and arms control in Europe in the 1980s: Beyond First Use; MBFR; Alternative Defence; Berlin; A Crisis Management Center; Conventional Arms Control in Europe and six texts on the new security order in Europe since the 1990s: Components of a Post-Cold War Security System for Europe; Constraining Technological Weapons Innovation; NATO Enlargement: Act II; Ten Years after the Wall; Future Security in Space; Rethinking Security: Return to the Grotean Pattern.
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Jonathan Demme
The films of Jonathan Demme (b. 1944) reflect his ebullient personality and are often infused with his love for Caribbean culture, pop music, fashion, and characters who reveal offbeat tastes and depths. He emerged from the 1970s American Renaissance that produced Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and others. His movies are funny, humane, and often unclassifiable by genre. With conversations from the 1970s to the present, Jonathan Demme: Interviews focuses on Demme's artistry, on his filmmaking philosophy, and especially on his progressive social and political concerns and how these have influenced the subject matter he has chosen to film. Although best known for his Oscar-winning dramas The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, Demme has also achieved acclaim for comedies (Married to the Mob; Something Wild), documentaries (The Agronomist; My Cousin Bobby; Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains), and concert performance films (Stop Making Sense; Neil Young: Heart of Gold). In this volume, he discusses his troubles with studios, his need to balance documentaries with fiction films, his early work as a critic and publicist, and his apprenticeship with Roger Corman working on ""B"" movies.
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Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is the first critical biography of one of today’s most important novelists. Drawing on unpublished emails and both published and private interviews, Philip Weinstein conveys the feel and heft of Franzen’s voice as he ponders the purposes and problems of his life and art, from his earliest fiction to his most recent novel, Purity.Franzen’s work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a wide audience of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one’s fiction has staying power, is high art? More acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the later novels on which his reputation rests?Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage unpacks the becoming of Franzen as a person and a writer—from his ultra-sensitive Midwestern childhood, through his heady years at Swarthmore College, his marriage, and the alienating decade of the 1990s, up to his spectacular ascent and assimilation into pop culture as one of the literary figures of his generation. Weinstein joins biography and criticism in ways that fully respect their differences, but that also grant that the work comes, however unpredictably, out of the life.
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Dreadful Fate of Jonathan York
Discover the horrible fate of Jonathan York as he sets out on his journey through a spooky forest with an alarming party of travelmates! "...[a] hair-raising tribute to the life-changing power of stories . . . Merritt shows both a knack for evocative phrasing ... and a deft hand at crafting flamboyantly icky monsters in creepy settings." --Kirkus Reviews, STARRED review Jonathan York has led a boring life - a pointless degree from the community college, a lackluster job at the General Store, and never any desire for something more exciting. But when fate leaves him stranded in a sinister land, he finds himself seeking an adventure of his own. Along the way he encounters ghoulish thieves, ravenous swamp monsters, a dastardly ice cream conspiracy, and a necromancer bent on human sacrifice. In this beautifully illustrated, four-color novel, Jonathan York's life takes a decidedly spooky turn!
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Memoirs of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was born in Dublin and studied at the city's Trinity College. He gained his B.A. in 1686 before going to England where he took a Master's degree at Oxford in 1692. Subsequently, Swift lived between England and Ireland for a number of years. He moved from England in 1714 after the Tory party he supported lost power. Back in Ireland as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, he turned his talents to supporting Irish causes. During this period he wrote some of his best work, including Gulliver's Travels, the satirical masterpiece which has been continuously in print since its publication in 1726. Written by Sir Walter Scott, this is the second part of a two-volume biography of Swift, first published in 1826. This volume covers the period from the publication of Gulliver's Travels, and includes a transcript of his last will and testament.
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Memoirs of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was born in Dublin and studied at the city's Trinity College. He gained his B.A. in 1686 before going to England where he took a Master's degree at Oxford in 1692. Subsequently, Swift lived between England and Ireland for a number of years. He moved permanently from England in 1714 after the Tory party he supported lost power. Back in Ireland as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, he turned his talents to supporting Irish causes. During this period he wrote some of his best work, including Gulliver's Travels, the satirical masterpiece which has been continuously in print since its publication in 1726. Written by Sir Walter Scott, this is the first part of a two-volume biography of Swift, first published in 1826. This volume covers his early life up to his appointment as Dean of St Patrick's and his involvement in Irish politics.
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Political Biography of Jonathan Swift
Most famous as the author of "Gulliver's Travels", Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was one of the most important propagandists and satirists of his day. This study seeks to contextualize Swift within the political arena of his day.
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