Differing Visions


Book Description

The first serious attempt to analyze the careers of converts who later left the Mormon church, this book contains selections about 18 Mormon dissenters--David Whitmer, Fawn Brody, and Sonia Johnson, among them--contributed by Richard N. Holzapfel, John S. McCormick, Kenneth M. Godfrey, William D. Russell, Dan Vogel, Jessie L. Embry, and many others.




A Conflict of Visions


Book Description

Thomas Sowell’s “extraordinary” explication of the competing visions of human nature lie at the heart of our political conflicts (New York Times) Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the "constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the "unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.




Differing Visions of a Learning Society Vol 1


Book Description

This volume provides an examination of what is meant by the learning society and how it can contribute to the development of knowledge and skills for employment and other areas of adult life.




Differing Visions of a Learning Society Vol 2


Book Description

This volume provides an examination of what is meant by the learning society and how it can contribute to the development of knowledge and skills for employment and other areas of adult life.




Defining Travel


Book Description

With essays by Gloria Anzaldúa, Jean Baudrillard, William Bevis, Homi Bhabha, Michel Butor, Hélène Cixous, Erik Cohen, Michel de Certeau, Wayne Franklin, Paul Fussell, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Caren Kaplan, Eric Leed, Dean MacCannell, Doreen Massey, Carl Pedersen, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, Mary Louise Pratt, R. Radhakrishnan, Edward W. Said, and Thayer Scudder Travel, movement, mobility--these are some of the essential activities in human life. Whether we travel to foreign lands or just across the city, we all journey, and from our journeying we shape ourselves, our history, and the stories we tell. In essays written by some of the most respected contemporary scholars, this anthology brings together some of the best informed convictions about travel. Travel, so essential to human life, is a complex matter that encompasses a variety of travel experiences--family vacation, political exile, exploration of distant lands, immigration, mundane shopping trips. Likewise, as the essays in the collection demonstrate, discussion of travel crosses a range of personal and theoretical perspectives--from the postmodern sensibility of Jean Baudrillard to R. Radhakrishnan's explanation to his son of what it means for Indians to live in the United States. As the field of travel itself "travels" across academic and theoretical boundaries, it brings together sociology, anthropology, geography, history, psychology, and literary criticism. Recognizing that multidimensional quality of travel, this book gathers essays that represent various travel experiences and approaches to discussing them. Mapping out definitions of travel, the collection includes essays on tourism and travel writing, on modern globalization and the diaspora, on immigration, migration, and forced relocation. Defining Travel also highlights American experiences of mobility by including essays on Native Americans and early contact with the New World, as well as the massive migration of African Americans to northern cities. Running throughout the essays are sometimes conflicting discussions about what constitutes travel and the homesite, the role of travel, knowledge, and power, especially when travel is accompanied by imperialistic motives. Here readers truly will discover that the essence of human life is wayfaring. Susan L. Roberson, an assistant professor of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, is the editor of Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation and author of Emerson in His Sermons: A Man-Made Self.




Differing Visions


Book Description

"This book tells the story of how residential schooling for Indian children has been administered in Prince Albert for more than a century. In some ways, our experience of residential schooling has been similar to that of other Aboriginal peoples throughout Canada and other countries. In other ways, however, our story is quite different. At a time when Indian residential schools were closing elsewhere in Canada, the people of the Prince Albert Grant Council saw a need to take over and completely remake an institution that had previously been used to direct and control our people. Recognizing the positive role that a completely different kind of Indian-controlled child education centre might play, we have created and pursued our own vision of how to care for and educate those of our children who require special treatment. The courage and commitment that our leaders and staff have shown in working to make this vision a reality deserves to be celebrated. The tactics that federal officials have employed to frustrate and undermine our efforts also need to be recorded." -Grand Chief Alphonse Bird




Visions of Glory


Book Description

Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child's hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the front. The essays in this collection reveal how wartime women and men created both written accounts and a visual register to make sense of this pivotal period. The collection proceeds chronologically, providing a nuanced history by highlighting the multiple meanings an assorted group of writers and readers discerned from the same set of circumstances. In so doing, this volume assembles contingent and fractured visions of the Civil War, but its differing perspectives also reveal a set of overlapping concerns. A number of essays focus in particular on African American engagements with visual culture. The collection also emphasizes the role that women played in making, disseminating, or interpreting wartime images. While every essay explores the relationship between image and word, several contributions focus on the ways in which Civil War images complicate an understanding of canonical writers such as Emerson, Melville, and Whitman.




The Xenotext


Book Description

"Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."—The Guardian Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization. Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term. Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.




Visions of Alterity


Book Description

Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville offers detailed and original readings of the work of the Irish author John Banville, one of the foremost figures in contemporary European literature. It investigates one of the fundamental concerns of Banville's novels: mediating the gap between subject and object or self and world in representation. By drawing on the rich history of the problem of representation in literature, philosophy and literary theory, this study provides a thorough insight into the rich philosophical and intertextual dimension of Banville's fiction. In close textual analyses of Banville's most important novels, it maps out a thematic development that moves from an interest in the epistemological and aesthetic representation of the world in scientific theories, over a concern with the ethical dimension of representations, to an exploration of self-representation and identity. What remains constant throughout these different perspectives is the disruption of representations by brief but haunting glimpses of otherness. In tracing these different visions of alterity in Banville's solipsistic literary world, this study offers a better understanding of his insistent and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.




Public Finance and Public Choice


Book Description

In this volume, based on a week-long symposium at the University of Munich's Center for Economic Studies, two leading scholars of governmental economics debate their divergent perspectives on the role of government and its fiscal functions. James M. Buchanan, who was influential in developing the research program in public choice, concentrates on the imperfections of the political process and stresses the need for rules to restrain governmental interference. Richard A. Musgrave, a founder of modern public finance, points to market failures and inequities that call for corrective public policies. They apply their differing economic and political philosophies to a variety of key issues. Each presentation is followed by a response and general discussion.