A Tangle of Dreams


Book Description




The Anatomy of Dreams


Book Description

Discover the award-winning debut novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists, a “majestic collision of sci-fi thriller and love story” (Bustle) about a young woman struggling with questions of love, trust, and ethics as the line between dreams and reality dangerously blurs. When Sylvie Patterson, a bookish student at a Northern California boarding school, falls in love with a spirited, elusive classmate named Gabe, they embark on an experiment that changes their lives. Their headmaster, Dr. Adrian Keller, is a charismatic medical researcher who has staked his career on the therapeutic potential of lucid dreaming: by teaching his patients to become conscious during sleep, he believes he can relieve stress and trauma. Over the next six years, Sylvie and Gabe become consumed by Keller’s work, following him across the country. But when an opportunity brings the trio to the Midwest, Sylvie and Gabe stumble into a tangled relationship with their mysterious neighbors—and Sylvie begins to doubt the ethics of Keller’s research. As she navigates the hazy, permeable boundaries between what is real and what isn’t, who can be trusted and who cannot, Sylvie also faces surprising developments in herself—an unexpected infatuation, growing paranoia, and a new sense of rebellion. With stirring, elegant prose, “Chloe Benjamin has crafted an eerie, compelling first novel which, like the lingering effects of a vivid dream, resonates long past its finish” (Karen Brown, The Longings of Wayward Girls).




Sex, machines and navels


Book Description

Available again in paperback, this study offers a rigorous critical re-reading of fictions of humanity, history, technology and postmodern culture. Taking psychoanalysis into cyberspace, the book develops an innovative theoretical perspective on the relationship between bodies and machines to offer a focused re-examination of notions of desire, metaphor, sexed identity and difference and the process of technological transformation. The book unravels one figure in a detailed, lucid and extensive revision of Lacanian psychoanalysis in association with postmodern theory, feminism and deconstruction. Problematising the easy conjunction of human bodies and inhuman technology, the navel opens into networks of desire, history, culture and machines. Linked to the unconscious, to jokes and dreams, navels appear on the bodies of replicants and in the technological matrix, a strange excess in a future imagined in terms of corporeal ‘meat’ or posthuman machine. Exploring the significance of this omphalic excess, the book closely examines postmodern and cyberpunk texts (by Thomas Pynchon, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker) alongside detailed readings of contemporary cultural critics and theorists.




The Girl Who Could Not Dream


Book Description

"A perfect combination of adventure, humor, and pure imagination!" —Jessica Day George, New York Times best-selling author of Tuesdays at the Castle "Funny, scary, and endlessly inventive.” —Bruce Coville, author of Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher Sophie loves the hidden shop below her parents' bookstore, where dreams are secretly bought and sold. When the dream shop is robbed and her parents go missing, Sophie must unravel the truth to save them. Together with her best friend—a wisecracking and fanatically loyal monster named Monster—she must decide whom to trust with her family’s carefully guarded secrets. Who will help them, and who will betray them?




Of Grammatology


Book Description

Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty years later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable.




The Dreams of Interpretation


Book Description

Rethinking the importance of Sigmund Freud’s landmark book The Interpretation of Dreams a century after its publication in 1900, this work brings together psychoanalysts, philosophers, cultural theorists, film and visual theorists, and literary critics from several continents in a compilation of the best clinical and theoretical work being done in psychoanalysis today. It is unique in convening both theory and practice in productive dialogue, reflecting on the encounter between psychoanalysis and the tradition of hermeneutics. Collectively the essays argue that Freud’s legacy has shaped the way we think about not only psychology and the nature of the self but also our understanding of politics, culture, and even thought itself. Contributors: Willy Apollon, Gifric; Karyn Ball, U of Alberta, Edmonton; Raymond Bellour, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Patricia Gherovici, Philadelphia Lacan Study Group and Seminar; Judith Feher-Gurewich, New York U; Jonathan Kahana, New York U; A. Kiarina Kordela, Macalester College; Pablo Kovalovsky, Clinica de Borde; Jean Laplanche, U of Lausanne; Laura Marcus, U of Sussex; Andrew McNamara, Queensland U of Technology; Claire Nahon; Yun Peng, U of Minnesota; Gerard Pommier, Nantes U; Jean-Michel Rabat, Princeton U; Laurence A. Rickels, U of California, Santa Barbara; Avital Ronell, New York U; Elke Siegel, Yale U; Rei Terada, U of California, Irvine; Klaus Theweleit, U of Freiburg-im-Breisgau; Paul Verhaege, U of Ghent, Belgium; Silke-Maria Weineck, U of Michigan. Catherine Liu is associate professor of comparative literature and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. John Mowitt is professor and chair of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Thomas Pepper is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Jakki Spicer received her Ph.D. in cultural studies and comparative literature from the University of Minnesota.




The Reinvention of Social Practices


Book Description

The Reinvention of Social Practices shows the relevance of Félix Guattari's thought for the analysis of contemporary social and cultural encounters, ranging across an alternative ‘skateboard’ school, informatic subjugations, urban ecological dilemmas, drug subcultures, and countercultures. Gary Genosko, the leading English interpreter of Guattari, expands upon Guattari’s conception of schizoanalysis as a transformative process of critical self-modelling that leads to the creation of new maps of existence, highlighting an interpretive dream pragmatics, a peripatetic psychiatric practice, a rethinking of epilepsy, and a post-media vision of digital interfaces beyond the keyboard. The folds of Guattari’s collaborations with Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri are explored, and his philosophical friendship with Franco Bifo Berardi is brought into focus.




The Sunday List of Dreams


Book Description

In an effort to shake up her life, a woman impulsively hops on a plane to New York in order to track down her estranged daughter.




Traces of War


Book Description

Traces of War examines how the trauma of the Second World War influenced the work of the brilliant generation of writers and intellectuals who lived through it.




Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond


Book Description

Although the actual dreaming experience of the Byzantines lies beyond our reach, the remarkable number of dream narratives in the surviving sources of the period attests to the cardinal function of dreams as vehicles of meaning, and thus affords modern scholars access to the wider cultural fabric of symbolic representations of the Byzantine world. Whether recounting real or invented dreams, the narratives serve various purposes, such as political and religious agendas, personal aspirations or simply an author’s display of literary skill. It is only in recent years that Byzantine dreaming has attracted scholarly attention, and important publications have suggested the way in which Byzantines reshaped ancient interpretative models and applied new perceptions to the functions of dreams. This book - the first collection of studies on Byzantine dreams to be published - aims to demonstrate further the importance of closely examining dreams in Byzantium in their wider historical and cultural, as well as narrative, context. Linked by this common thread, the essays offer insights into the function of dreams in hagiography, historiography, rhetoric, epistolography, and romance. They explore gender and erotic aspects of dreams; they examine cross-cultural facets of dreaming, provide new readings, and contextualize specific cases; they also look at the Greco-Roman background and Islamic influences of Byzantine dreams and their Christianization. The volume provides a broad variety of perspectives, including those of psychoanalysis and anthropology.