Photography
Death Drive
Author: Stephen Bayley
Publisher: Circa
ISBN: 1911422227
Category: Photography
Page: 232
View: 991
Cars have a talismanic quality. No other manufactured object has the same disturbing allure. More emotions are involved in cars than any other product: vanity, cupidity, greed, social competitiveness, cultural modelling. But when all this perverse promise ends in catastrophe, these same talismanic qualities acquire an extra dimension. The car crash is a defining phenomenon of popular culture. Death Drive is both an appreciative essay about the historic place of the automobile in the modern imagination and an exploration of the circumstances surrounding multiple celebrity denouements, including Isadora Duncan, Jane Mansfield, James Dean, Jackson Pollack, Princess Grace, and Helmut Newton, among many others. En route the narrative traces one very big arc - the role of the car in extending or creating the personality of a celebrity - and concludes by confronting the imminent death of the car itself. AUTHOR: Stephen Bayley recounts delightfully grotesque tales about celebrities done in by trees, by lampposts, or by nonentities in ancient Chevys. A design masterpiece, this book combines exquisite prose with stylish presentation - the cars are described more lovingly than the people who perished in them. Like a Bugatti, Death Drive recalls a time when books and cars were beautiful. SELLING POINTS: * Albert Camus once remarked that there's "nothing more absurd than to die in a car accident". That was before his car hit a tree at 80mph. Death Drive - a compendium of stories about famous people killed stupidly in cars - oozes absurdity * A Times Book of the Year, 2016 * Big names like James Dean, Jackson Pollack, and Princess Grace are among the victims 72 colour photographs
Technology & Engineering
The Car
Author: Bryan Appleyard
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 9781474615426
Category: Technology & Engineering
Page: 320
View: 291
More than any other technology, cars have transformed our culture. Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their limitless power and their complex systems of meanings. This book celebrates the immense drama and beauty of the car, of the genius embodied in the Ford Model T, of the glory of the brilliant-red Mercedes Benz S-Class made by workers for Nelson Mandela on his release from prison, of Kanye West's 'chopped' Maybach, of the salvation of the Volkswagen Beetle by Major Ivan Hirst, of Elvis Presley's 100 Cadillacs, of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and the BMC Mini and even of that harbinger of the end - the Tesla Model S and its creator Elon Musk. As the age of the car as we know it comes to an end, Bryan Appleyard's brilliantly insightful book tells the story of the rise and fall of the incredible machine that made the modern world what it is today.
Fiction
The Art of Living
Author: Stephen Bayley
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 9781473566255
Category: Fiction
Page: 400
View: 948
With all the wit, knowledge and wisdom of one of the UK's foremost cultural commentators, Stephen Bayley takes the reader on a satirical roller-coaster ride through the world of art and design in the late 20th century. 'Brilliantly drawn ..the pages are full of Wildean paradoxes' The Spectator ______________________________ Someone once said you can find beauty anywhere. But all Eustace Dunne can see is ugliness. The buildings are grey, the people are tired and unimaginative, the food is inedible and life is drab, drab, drab. Growing up in an England ravaged by the Second World War, Eustace resolves to make things beautiful again. A mercurial stint in art school gives him a springboard into a world that is changing so fast you have to hold on tight to keep up. And in that world, ambition, timing and a modicum of talent can transform you into anything you want to be. Before long he's an artist, a designer, a restaurateur, an entrepreneur, a genius. But becoming a bastion of perfect taste can be a grubby business. Eustace's charm may have secured his influence on the homes and hearts of a nation, but there are still people out there who know where the bodies are buried...
Photography
Photography and the Contemporary Cultural Condition
Author: Peter D. Osborne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781317817277
Category: Photography
Page: 194
View: 768
In this book, Osborne demonstrates why and how photography as photography has survived and flourished since the rise of digital processes, when many anticipated its dissolution into a generalised system of audio-visual representations or its collapse under the relentless overload of digital imagery. He examines how photography embodies, contributes to, and even in effect critiques how the contemporary social world is now imagined, how it is made present and how the concept and the experience of the Present itself is produced. Osborne bases his discussions primarily in cultural studies and visual cultural studies. Through an analysis of different kinds of photographic work in distinct contexts, he demonstrates how aspects of photography that once appeared to make it vulnerable to redundancy turn out to be the basis of its survival and have been utilised by much important photographic work of the last three decades.
Death
The Death Drive
Author: Rob Weatherill
Publisher: Rob Weatherill
ISBN: 1900877147
Category: Death
Page: 276
View: 606
The third book in the new 'Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis' series. This book will be of interest to all those students and professionals alike who might have come to question consoling notions of therapy as leaving something important and central to Freud's thinking, his often neglected second reference point, the death drive.
Philosophy
Capitalism and the Death Drive
Author: Byung-Chul Han
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9781509545025
Category: Philosophy
Page: 180
View: 143
What we call growth today is in fact a tumorous growth, a cancerous proliferation which is disrupting the social organism. These tumours endlessly metastasize and grow with an inexplicable, deadly vitality. At a certain point this growth is no longer productive, but rather destructive. Capitalism passed this point long ago. Its destructive forces cause not only ecological and social catastrophes but also mental collapse. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self. The devastating consequences of capitalism suggest that a death drive is at work. Freud initially introduced the death drive hesitantly, but later admitted that he ‘couldn’t think beyond it’ as the idea of the death drive became increasingly central to his thought. Today, it is impossible to think about capitalism without considering the death drive.
Art
Death-Drive
Author: Robert Rowland Smith
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 9780748641710
Category: Art
Page: 256
View: 371
Robert Rowland Smith takes Freud's work on the death-drive and compares it with other philosophies of death - Pascal, Heidegger and Derrida in particular. He also applies it in a new way to literature and art - to Shakespeare, Rothko and Katharina Fritsch, among others. He asks whether artworks are dead or alive, if artistic creativity isn't actually a form of destruction, and whether our ability to be seduced by fine words means we don't put our selves at risk of death. In doing so, he proposes a new theory of aesthetics in which artworks and literary texts have a death-drive of their own, not least by their defining ability to turn away from all that is real, and where the effects of the death-drive mean that we are constantly living in imaginary, rhetorical or 'artistic' worlds. The book also provides a valuable introduction to the rich tradition of work on the death-drive since Freud.Key Features* Includes a general introduction to the death-drive* Presents an original theory of aesthetics* Analyses both theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis* Offers in-depth treatment of Freud* Provides an overview of philosophies of death
Literary Criticism
The Saving Lie
Author: Agata Bielik-Robson
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810127289
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 416
View: 707
Hailed as our era's most profound theorist of literary influence, Harold Bloom's own influence on the landscape of literary criticism has been decisive. His wide-ranging critical writings have plumbed the depths of Romanticism, explored the anxiety caused by the influence of one generation of poets on another, wrestled with the idea of a literary canon, and examined the relationship between religion and literature. In this unprecedented full-length study on Harold Bloom, Agata Bielik-Robson explores the many facets of Bloom's critical writings and career. In his work, she argues, Bloom draws on a variety of disparate traditions-Judaism, Gnosis, romanticism, American pragmatism, and Freudianism, but also, especially recently, Victorian Aestheticism-that constitute a dialectical, difficult whole in constant quarrel with itself. The Saving Lie brings all these aspects of Bloom's thought together, revealing the organizing thread of "antithetical vitalism" that animates his work. Tracing the development of Bloom's vision of "life-in-antithesis" through a series of highly original and compelling readings, Bielik-Robson offers a much-needed reevaluation of a deeply complex and controversial figure. This pioneering study of Bloom and his contributions will not soon be surpassed.
Juvenile Nonfiction
William Shakespeare
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 9781438129426
Category: Juvenile Nonfiction
Page: 224
View: 315
Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of William Shakespeare.
Psychology
Psychoanalytic Reflections on The Freudian Death Drive
Author: Rossella Valdrè
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780429756252
Category: Psychology
Page: 188
View: 514
Psychoanalytic Reflections on The Freudian Death Drive is a highly accessible book that investigates the relevance, complexity and originality of a hugely controversial Freudian concept which, the author argues, continues to exert enormous influence on modernity and plays an often-imperceptible role in the violence and so-called "sad passions" of contemporary society. With examples from cinema, literature and the consulting room, the book’s four chapters – theory, the clinic, art and contemporaneity – investigate every angle, usually little explored, of the death drive: its "positive" functions, such as its contribution to subjectification; its ambiguous relationship with sublimation; the clues it provides about transgenerational matters; and its effects on the feminine. This is not a book about aggression, a type of extroflection of the death drive made visible, studied and striking; rather, it is about the derivatives of the pulsion that changes in the clinic, in life, in society, in artistic forms. With bold and innovative concepts and by making connections to film and books, Rossella Valdrè unequivocally argues that the contemporary clinic is a clinic of the death drive. Psychoanalytic Reflections on The Freudian Death Drive seeks to relaunch the debate on a controversial and neglected concept and will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Today’s renewed interest in the Freudian death drive attests to its extraordinary ability to explain both "new" pathologies and socio-economic phenomena.
Body, Mind & Spirit
Going on Being
Author: Mark Epstein
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780861715695
Category: Body, Mind & Spirit
Page: 186
View: 663
Before Mark Epstein became a medical student at Harvard and began training as a psychiatrist, he immersed himself in Buddhism through experiences with such influential Buddhist teachers as Ram Dass, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield. The positive outlook of Buddhism and the meditative principle of living in the moment came to influence his study and practice of psychotherapy profoundly. This is Mark Epstein's memoir of his early years as a student of Buddhism and of how the teachings and practice of Buddhism shaped his approach to therapy, as well as a practical guide to how a Buddhist understanding of psychological problems makes change for the better possible. Going on Being is an intimate chronicle of the evolution of spirit and psyche, and a highly inviting guide for anyone seeking a new path and a new outlook on life. "Mark Epstein gets better and better with each book; Going on Being is his most brilliant yet. He weaves a mindful cartography of the human heart, tying together insights from Buddhism and psychoanalytic thought into an elegant, captivating tapestry. Epstein shares the spiritual and emotional insights garnered from his own life journey in a fascinating account of what it can mean to us all to go on being." -Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence
Philosophy
Passion And Social Constraint
Author: Ernest Van Den Haag
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9780202367781
Category: Philosophy
Page: 368
View: 322
In intellectual and academic circles, Ernest van den Haag is respected for his brilliant mind, his outspoken and often highly controversial assertions, and a very unacademic, sharp, biting style. Passion and Social Constraint, before its adaptation into a book for the general reader, was part of an enormous textbook, which Dr. van den Haag wrote with Professor Ralph Ross called The Fabric of Society. It received an (unprecedented) rave review in the New Yorker: "this book is everything a text book should not be--cynical, witty, up-to-date, and shamelessly opinionated Altogether a rare treat." It attracted the attention of the experts in psychology and sociology and the devotion of students and will now have enormous appeal to the layman who wants insight into who he is: sexually, psychologically, and individually. In Passion and Social Constraint, Ernest van den Haag is deeply concerned with the necessity and difficulty of being an individual in a society which tends more and more to standardize every facet of life. Be deals with anxiety; sex, and the problem of-who is normal; the status of women; the authority of parents; the family as an industry in present-day America conflict and power, and who gets what; the "furnished souls" of popular culture; arid why it is that science cannot give us a measure for happiness or for despair. Van den Haag' s style will delight you (some of his phrases are destined for Bartlett), though his judgments will, sometimes stir you to anger. Ernest van den Haag taught at New York University and the New School for Social Research, and the New York Law School, he was also a practicing psychoanalyst. He was born in The Hague and was educated In France, Germany, Italy, Iowa, and New York. He was an associate of the National Review for forty-five years. Ralph Ross, his collaborator on the original The Fabric of Society, was professor of philosophy and chairman of the Humanities Program at the University of Minnesota.