This book provides a concise introduction to the intellectual trends in contemporary Chinese literature from the 1950s to the 1990s and the influence of overseas Sinology. The turbulent period of the second half of the 20th century in China witnessed a significant societal shift from a revolutionary to an economic focus. This transformation introduced and stimulated various ideas, reshaping public thought and reconstructing the historical landscape of contemporary Chinese literature. This book explores the response and self-exploration of domestic literary studies of the period, which were heavily influenced by the Western academic tradition and overseas Sinology studies. It examines critical phenomena, figures, and events in this context. The author's narrative vividly illustrates the interplay and dialogue of factors such as revolution, reform and opening up, and the rise of literature in the 1980s and 1990s. Combining the methodologies of literary and social history, and integrating personal historical experience with rigorous academic methods, this book provides a unique research framework for revisiting the cultural scene of the period. The title will appeal to scholars and students of contemporary Chinese literature and history. It will also attract general readers interested in Chinese culture and society in the 1980s and 1990s.

Do we live in basically orderly societies that occasionally erupt into violent conflict, or do we fail to perceive the constancy of violence and disorder in our societies? In this classic book, originally published in 1980, Cedric J. Robinson contends that our perception of political order is an illusion, maintained in part by Western political and social theorists who depend on the idea of leadership as a basis for describing and prescribing social order. Using a variety of critical approaches in his analysis, Robinson synthesizes elements of psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, classical and neoclassical political philosophy, and cultural anthropology in order to argue that Western thought on leadership is mythological rather than rational. He then presents examples of historically developed "stateless" societies with social organizations that suggest conceptual alternatives to the ways political order has been conceived in the West. Examining Western thought from the vantage point of a people only marginally integrated into Western institutions and intellectual traditions, Robinson's perspective radically critiques fundamental ideas of leadership and order.

Most studies of the history of interpretation of Song of Songs focus on its interpretation from late antiquity to modernity. In My Perfect One, Jonathan Kaplan examines earlier rabbinic interpretation of this work by investigating an underappreciated collection of works of rabbinic literature from the first few centuries of the Common Era, known as the tannaitic midrashim. In a departure from earlier scholarship that too quickly classified rabbinic interpretation of Song of Songs as allegorical, Kaplan advocates a more nuanced reading of the approach of the early sages, who read Song of Songs through a mode of typological interpretation concerned with the correspondence between Scripture and ideal events in Israel's history. Throughout the book Kaplan explores ways in which this portrayal helped shape a model vision of rabbinic piety as well as of an idealized vision of their beloved, God, in the wake of the destruction, dislocation, and loss the Jewish community experienced in the first two centuries of the Common Era. The archetypal and idealized language of Song of Songs provided, as Kaplan argues, a textual landscape in which to imagine an idyllic construction of Israel's relationship to her beloved, marked by mutual devotion and fidelity. Through this approach to Song of Songs, the Tannaim helped lay the foundations for later Jewish thought of a robust theology of intimacy in God's relationship with the Jewish people.

A microcosm of the history of American slavery in a collection of the most important primary and secondary readings on slavery at Georgetown University and among the Maryland Jesuits

How History Works assesses the social function of academic knowledge in the humanities, exemplified by history, and offers a critique of the validity of historical knowledge. The book focusses on history’s academic, disciplinary ethos to offer a reconception of the discipline of history, arguing that it is an existential liability: if critical analysis reveals the sense that history offers to the world to be illusory, what stops historical scholarship from becoming a disguise for pessimism or nihilism? History is routinely invoked in all kinds of cultural, political, economic, psychological situations to provide a reliable account or justification of what is happening. Moreover, it addresses a world already receptive to comprehensive historical explanations: since everyone has some knowledge of history, everyone can be manipulated by it. This book analyses the relationship between specialized knowledge and everyday experience, taking phenomenology (Husserl) and pragmatism (James) as methodological guides. It is informed by a wide literature sceptical of the sense academic historical expertise produces and of the work history does, represented by thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Valéry, Anders and Cioran. How History Works discusses how history makes sense of the world even if what happens is senseless, arguing that behind the smoke-screen of historical scholarship looms a chaotic world-dynamic indifferent to human existence. It is valuable reading for anyone interested in historiography and historical theory.

This book is the first sustained inquiry into the ways in which postmodern thinkers have grappled with the historical bases, implications, and methodological problems of the Holocaust. The book examines the thinking of Arendt, Levinas, Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida, all of whom have recognized the centrality of the Nazi genocide to the epoch in which we live. The essays written for this volume constitute a wide-ranging study of the efforts of postmodernism to articulate the Holocaust.

This volume aims to revitalize the exchange between sociological differentiation theory and the sociology of religion, which previously held center stage among the sociological classics. It brings together contributions from different disciplines, as well as various forms of regional and historical expertise, which are indispensable in forming a globally oriented sociological perspective today. Secularization is understood as a process of boundary demarcation, that is, as the enactment of semantic, practical, and institutional distinctions between religion and other spheres of activity and knowledge. These distinctions may emerge from within the religious field itself, or may be absorbed into the field having originally emerged elsewhere. They may even be directly imposed upon religion by external forces. The volume is therefore based on the premise that societal differentiation – and secularity as a specific expression of it – is a widespread structural feature that nonetheless takes on various forms, depending on its historical and cultural context. In order to make this diversity visible, the volume adopts a global comparative perspective, and examines historical distinctions and differentiations in the West and beyond. By examining different forms and modes of secularity in statu nascendi, the volume contributes to developing a better understanding of the diversity of secularities, even of those found in the present day, in terms of their historicity and their specific path dependencies. With this shift in perspective, this special volume initiates a global and historical turn in the theory of differentiation, as well as in the study of secularity.