Arthur Bradley

Watchman

Road Home

The first major examination of the New Atheism as a literary phenomenon.

Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic After 9/11

The New Atheist Novel

Andrew Tate

The New Atheist Novel is the first study of a major new genre of contemporary fiction. It examines how Richard Dawkins's so-called 'New Atheism' movement has caught the imagination of four eminent modern novelists: Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Philip Pullman. For McEwan and his contemporaries, the contemporary novel represents a new front in the ideological war against religion, religious fundamentalism and, after 9/11, religious terror: the novel apparently stands for everything - freedom, individuality, rationality and even a secular experience of the transcendental - that religion seeks to overthrow. In this book, Bradley and Tate offer a genealogy of the New Atheist Novel: where it comes from, what needs it serves and, most importantly, where it may go in the future. What is it? How does it dramatise the war between belief and non-belief? To what extent does it represent a genuine ideological alternative to the religious imaginary or does it merely repeat it in secularised form? This fascinating study offers an incisive critique of this contemporary testament of literary belief and unbelief.

Philosophy, Fiction and Polemic after 9/11

Everything you need to know about Derrida's Of Grammatology in one volume.Jacques Derrida was one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the later twentieth century. First published in 1967, Of Grammatology is his best known text, introducing many fundamental concepts relating to linguistics and writing which he would develop in his later work. This book provides a commentary on Of Grammatology that can be read alongside--rather than instead of--the text itself by students encountering Derrida for the first time.&quote;

An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide

Derrida's Of Grammatology

Romantic biography lives. Despite the so-called 'death of the author', popular interest in the lives of the major Romantic writers has reached a new peak. Romantic Biography brings together Romantic biographers and critics to consider some of the key questions surrounding this publishing phenomenon. What precisely is Romantic biography? What is the relationship between it and Romantic writings more generally? And to what extent is Romantic biography itself the product of Romantic ideas about the self, time and creativity? Romantic Biography examines a range of canonical and non-canonical biographical subjects from a variety of practical and theoretical standpoints. Michael O'Neill opens the collection with an analysis of the relationship between Romantic biography and Romantic poetry. Jonathan Bate, Mark Storey and Kenneth R. Johnston reassess Clare, Southey and Wordsworth from their position as authors of recent/forthcoming biographies of the poets. Joe Bray and Alan Rawes explore the Romantic assumptions at work within contemporary biographies of Austen and Byron. Gerard Carruthers, Julian North, Jennifer Wallace and Arthur Bradley put biographies of Burns, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley into the context of contemporary historicist and theoretical ideas about national and gender identity, the body and difference. Ralph Pite brings the collection to a close with a further examination of the vexed question of Romantic biography's relation to Romanticism itself. Romantic Biography is a major new survey of Romantic life-writing and an important contribution to biographical studies more generally.

Romantic Biography

Paul Fletcher

The Politics to Come brings together an international collection of thinkers to consider the meaning of liberal democratic modernity at a moment when its future has never been less certain. It examines the explosive threats the liberal order confronts today: financial meltdown, religious extremism, environmental catastrophe. Yet, it also seeks to place these - singularly modern - crises within a much longer history. For the contributors to this collection, it is the ancient religious tradition called 'the messianic' that provides the critical lens through which modernity may be interrogated. In its ongoing struggles with the messianic, liberal modernity confronts the promise and threat of a radically new Politics to Come. So what are the Politics to Come? How do they manifest themselves throughout history? Why does the possibility of a messianic judgement continue to haunt the western political imaginary? This collection offers a series of political, philosophical and theological perspectives from which the future of liberal modernity - if it has one - can be imagined.

Power, Modernity and the Messianic

The Politics to Come

In ancient Rome, any citizen who had brought disgrace upon the state could be subject to a judgment believed to be worse than death: damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory. The Senate would decree that every trace of the citizen’s existence be removed from the city as if they had never existed in the first place. Once reserved for individuals, damnatio memoriae in different forms now extends to social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and even entire peoples. In modern times, the condemned go by different names—“enemies of the people;” the “missing,” the “disappeared,” “ghost” detainees in “black sites”—but they are subject to the same fate of political erasure. Arthur Bradley explores the power to render life unlived from ancient Rome through the War on Terror. He argues that sovereignty is the power to decide what counts as being alive and what does not: to make life “unbearable,” unrecognized as having lived or died. In readings of Augustine, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Robespierre, Schmitt, and Benjamin, Bradley asks: What is the “life” of this unbearable life? How does it change and endure across sovereign time and space, from empires to republics, from kings to presidents? To what extent can it be resisted or lived otherwise? A profoundly interdisciplinary and ambitious work, Unbearable Life rethinks sovereignty, biopolitics, and political theology to find the radical potential of a life that neither lives or dies.

A Genealogy of Political Erasure

Unbearable Life

These lively, informative essays, all related to music, are as accessible as a chatty bedside reader. A central theme is listener response, and the techniques and structures that mold it. The story starts with sound waves, the ear, and the brain. Did song come before speech? Was it a factor in evolution? Some think singing helps complete the wiring of that organic work-in-progress, the infant brain. Check out the frequency doubling that built our familiar scale. Learn where the word organizing came from. Follow development of the instruments as they achieved volume, accurate intonation, range, and consistent timbre. There is criticism, but little disparagement. Any willing audience deserves respect. Musical examples come from Tin Pan Alley as often as the opera. Whether at a jazz club or the concert hall, the writer cannot hide his impatience with artists seeking to educate or intimidate. Music can be recreation or vocation. Does your instrument match your personality or some physical attribute? We instantly distinguish a bell, a piano, and a guitar; why not a clarinet, flute, or violin? What does the conductor do? A Language of Emotion embraces such matters. The relatively imprecise science of Psychology examines music working its magic. We all have favorites. Is it hype and marketing and peer influence, or do our choices make personal statements? Music, politics, religion, and social forces are twisted threads in the fabric of civilization. Nothing reflects the spirit of an era better than the works of its most creative individuals. In most cases, they blend smoothly in sequence. Monteverdi, Beethoven, and Stravinsky, to name just three, clearly got ahead of the curve and helped define the world around them.

Arthur Bradley

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