Love and Other Technologies


Book Description

Can love really be considered another form of technology? Dominic Pettman says it can--although not before carefully redefining technology as a cultural challenge to what we mean by the "human" in the information age. Using the writings of such important thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Bernard Stiegler as a springboard, Pettman explores the "techtonic" movements of contemporary culture, specifically in relation to the language of eros. Highly ritualized expressions of desire--love, in other words--always reveal an era's attitude toward what it means to exist as a self among others. For Pettman, the articulation of love is a technique of belonging: a way of responding to the basic plurality of everyone's identity, a process that becomes increasingly complex as the forms of mediated communication, from cell phone and text messaging to the mass media, multiply and mesh together. Wresting the idea of love from the arthritic hands of Romanticism, Pettman demonstrates the ways in which this dynamic assemblage--"the stirrings of the soul"--have always been a matter of tools, devices, prosthetics, and media. Love is, after all, something we make. And, love, this book argues, is not eternal, but external.




The Desiring Modes of Being Black


Book Description

A critique of theory through literature that celebrates the diversity of black being, The Desiring Modes of Being Black explores how literature unearths theoretical blind spots while reasserting the legitimacy of emotional turbulence in the controlled realm of reason that rationality claims to establish. This approach operates a critical shift by examining psychoanalytical texts from the literary perspective of black desiring subjectivities and experiences. This combination of psychoanalysis and the politics of literary interpretation of black texts helps determine how contemporary African American and black literature and queer texts come to defy and challenge the racial and sexual postulates of psychoanalysis or indeed any theoretical system that intends to define race, gender and sexualities. The Desiring Modes of Being Black includes essays on James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Rozena Maart. The metacritical reading they unfold interweaves African American culture, Fanonian and Caribbean thought, South African black consciousness, French theory, psychoanalysis, and gender and queer studies.




Postcoloniality - Decoloniality - Black Critique


Book Description

How can Western Modernity be analyzed and critiqued through the lens of enslavement and colonial history? The volume maps out answers to this question from the fields of Postcolonial, Decolonial, and Black Studies, delineating converging and diverging positions, approaches, and trajectories. It assembles contributions by renowned scholars of the respective fields, intervening in History, Sociology, Political Sciences, Gender Studies, Cultural and Literary Studies, and Philosophy."







The Journal of Commonwealth Literature


Book Description

One number each year includes Annual bibliography of Commonwealth literature.




Before We Were Strangers


Book Description

From the USA TODAY bestselling author of Sweet Thing and Nowhere But Here comes a love story about a Craigslist “missed connection” post that gives two people a second chance at love fifteen years after they were separated in New York City. To the Green-eyed Lovebird: We met fifteen years ago, almost to the day, when I moved my stuff into the NYU dorm room next to yours at Senior House. You called us fast friends. I like to think it was more. We lived on nothing but the excitement of finding ourselves through music (you were obsessed with Jeff Buckley), photography (I couldn’t stop taking pictures of you), hanging out in Washington Square Park, and all the weird things we did to make money. I learned more about myself that year than any other. Yet, somehow, it all fell apart. We lost touch the summer after graduation when I went to South America to work for National Geographic. When I came back, you were gone. A part of me still wonders if I pushed you too hard after the wedding… I didn’t see you again until a month ago. It was a Wednesday. You were rocking back on your heels, balancing on that thick yellow line that runs along the subway platform, waiting for the F train. I didn’t know it was you until it was too late, and then you were gone. Again. You said my name; I saw it on your lips. I tried to will the train to stop, just so I could say hello. After seeing you, all of the youthful feelings and memories came flooding back to me, and now I’ve spent the better part of a month wondering what your life is like. I might be totally out of my mind, but would you like to get a drink with me and catch up on the last decade and a half? M




Love and Longing


Book Description

There is nothing romantic about the war, only pain of separation and losing someone you hold close to your heart. They have been married for years, but Jim Fisher and his wife, Jen, are blessed with the kind of love that only grows stronger with time. Their perfect life, however, is punctuated by periods of dread whenever Jim flies to the most dangerous places in the Middle East to resume his military duties. Smack dab in the middle of war in Iraq, Major Jim Fisher bravely faces the hostile threat posed by the terrorist while Jen is in a different kind of battle faced by every military wife back in the United States. Both hold on to the promise that they will soon be together and things will be as if Jim has never left. When an unforeseen tragedy occurs and causes Jim to disappear, Jen finds herself clinging on to the last shred of hope that Jim is alive and remembers that, somewhere back home, she will always be waiting and longing for her love to return. --Page 4 of cover.




This Longing


Book Description

This Rumi collection features selections from one of the world's great spiritual masterpieces, the Mathnawi. The Mathnawi consists of six volumes of poetry in rhyme—over fifty-one thousand verses—inspired by folklore, the Qur'an, stories of saints and teachers, and sayings of Muhammed. Rendered by Rumi's premier English translators, these excerpts from the Mathnawi are presented in American free-verse style.




Love & Longing


Book Description

This true love story and mystery, involves three people; an upper class Canadian girl, a young writer and a wealthy stockbroker. The woman was Penny Elizabeth Peace, only daughter of T. Eaton Co. executive, Gordon H. Peace, and what makes the story unusual, is that she fell in love with, and married, the one while acting as the mistress of the other. Few would believe it possible, except that scores of letters from Penny still exist. They prove her love and longing for the writer, who happened to be me. The fact she married me, resumed her role as Hugh Lawson's mistress, then divorced me and married him, is what makes this story so compelling. When you read the letters, and see the pictures, you'll ask yourself how was this possible. You won't be alone. I've lived with this mystery for more than 50 years. It's time the story was told.