From a cuneiform tablet to a Chicago prison, from the depths of the cosmos to the text on our T-shirts, Lawrence Weschler finds strange connections wherever he looks. The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge -- at least, it does if you're looking through Weschler's giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art, his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays sure to illuminate, educate, and astound.

Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy in dialogue.

This textbook is an alternative to a classical introductory book in point-set topology. The approach, however, is radically different from the classical one. It is based on convergence rather than on open and closed sets. Convergence of filters is a natural generalization of the basic and well-known concept of convergence of sequences, so that convergence theory is more natural and intuitive to many, perhaps most, students than classical topology. On the other hand, the framework of convergence is easier, more powerful and far-reaching which highlights a need for a theory of convergence in various branches of analysis.Convergence theory for filters is gradually introduced and systematically developed. Topological spaces are presented as a special subclass of convergence spaces of particular interest, but a large part of the material usually developed in a topology textbook is treated in the larger realm of convergence spaces.

Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, reveals in this book the creative but mostly hidden alliance between American pragmatism and American poetry. He brilliantly traces pragmatism as a philosophical and literary practice grounded in a linguistic skepticism that runs from Emerson and William James to the work of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, and on to the cultural debates of today. More powerfully than ever before, Poirier shows that pragmatism had its start in Emerson, the great example to all his successors of how it is possible to redeem even as you set out to change the literature of the past. Poirier demonstrates that Emerson--and later William James--were essentially philosophers of language, and that it is language that embodies our cultural past, an inheritance to be struggled with, and transformed, before being handed on to future generations. He maintains that in Emersonian pragmatist writing, any loss--personal or cultural--gives way to a quest for what he calls "superfluousness," a kind of rhetorical excess by which powerfully creative individuals try to elude deprivation and stasis. In a wide-ranging meditation on what James called "the vague," Poirier extols the authentic voice of individualism, which, he argues, is tentative and casual rather than aggressive and dogmatic. The concluding chapters describe the possibilities for criticism created by this radically different understanding of reading and writing, which are nothing less than a reinvention of literary tradition itself. Poirier's discovery of this tradition illuminates the work of many of the most important figures in American philosophy and poetry. His reanimation of pragmatism also calls for a redirection of contemporary criticism, so that readers inside as well as outside the academy can begin to respond to poetic language as the source of meaning, not to meaning as the source of language.

In an essay on Biblical Theology published in 1982, Paul Beauchamp points out a striking convergence between a prominent Roman Catholic scholar of the period, Roland de Vaux, and the leading Protestant Old Testament theologian of the day, Gerhard von Rad. Both saw looming on the horizon the need for a Biblical Theology in which both Testaments were taken seriously as part of a single, comprehensive theological reflection. There was genuine excitement at the prospect of the methods of tradition-historical reading, already harnessed by von Rad toward a specifically theological goal, turning now to a Biblical Theology proper. Where did that project and the excitement go? With Convergences, Christopher Seitz returns to the period in question. In the later work of von Rad and Martin Noth, Seitz identifies the clear foreshadowing of what would become canonical interpretation reflected especially in the work of Brevard Childs. Seitz further reveals that the work of Beauchamp, largely unknown in the Anglophone world, would ultimately line up with Childs in a great many areas (typology, concern with the final form, appreciation for the history of biblical interpretation before the modern era). These scholars reached common shores by distinctive routes and via different interlocutors. Convergences displays such lines of connection and how they spill over from the academy into the interests of the church, including Roman Catholic understandings of the place of Scripture since the mid-twentieth century. Seitz studies the emergence of the lectionary conception, the ressourcement movement, and non-Catholic interest in the prior history of interpretation and figural reading. Convergences maintains that much of what was accomplished in a hopeful coalescence around the canonical form of Scripture remains relevant for biblical interpretation in our present period. Here, we find a form of catholicity that offers hope and promise for our day in spite of cultural, ecclesial, and academic distinctives. --Harry P. Nasuti, Professor of Theology, Fordham University

By pairing essays with other kinds of compositions — a TV show, a news report, a photo, an ad, a cast-off grocery list — Convergences asks students to respond to all kinds of visual and verbal texts. Its organization into six broad thematic chapters — each of which is broken out into six clusters — presents the materials in a way that is compelling and teachable. Convergences urges students to ask: Why did that author write that essay? Where was it published, and for what audience? What is the message of that poem? Why is that image on that Web site? Who thinks that joke is funny? How is that ad getting me to buy things I don’t need? And, most importantly — how do I make meaning of it all? With its full-color design, varied themes and texts, and helpful reading and writing support, Convergences inspires students to read the world in new ways — and to respond thoughtfully in their own compositions.

With a unique focus on message, method, and medium, Convergences asks students to think about what, why, and how we communicate. What's the best way to tell the story of your life, through words or pictures? How would the Gettysburg Address be received if Lincoln had delivered it on PowerPoint? Why did Benetton design a marketing campaign around death row inmates? Convergences asks these questions, among others. Convergences has been put together to help students explore the many different kinds of compositions that surround them. Clusters bring together texts from multiple media and genres -- essays, advertisements, the Web, news, comics, television, and film, among others -- with a methodology to read them. And the new edition does even more to suggest a vocabulary students can use to talk about all kinds of texts, both in the book and in ix -- a ground-breaking CD-ROM exploring fundamental concepts of visual rhetoric -- that comes with every copy of Convergences.