My Life Among the Deathworks


Book Description

Rieff articulates a comprehensive, typological theory of Western culture. Using visual illustrations, he contrasts the changing modes of spiritual and social thought that have struggled for dominance throughout Western history.




Sociology and the Sacred


Book Description

The acclaimed American sociologist and cultural philosopher Philip Rieff gained great academic prestige with his thesis on the emergence of ‘Psychological Man’ in western culture and with his classic book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, published in 1959. In this work and the later The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) he not only offered a highly original interpretation of the work of Sigmund Freud, but critically evaluated the enormous influence of psychotherapeutic thinking on Western culture. However, Rieff’s later work on the theory of culture did not garner the same attention, and his most recent writings have received very little critical engagement. In Sociology and the Sacred, Antonius A.W. Zondervan sets out to remedy this neglect, arguing that Rieff’s work is ripe for intellectual reconsideration. Zondervan begins by presenting an outline of Rieff’s entire body of work, focusing on his theory of culture, and explaining how the sacred is a key notion, pivotal to the overall understanding of Rieff’s work. The author argues that the present upsurge in religion, in many varieties throughout the world, cannot be explained by the classical secularization thesis, making Rieff's theory of sacred order in culture an essential contribution to a new social theory of religion. Including material from personal interviews with Rieff that enabled Zondervan to clarify important aspects of his work, Sociology and the Sacred is an essential contribution to the understanding of contemporary culture’s maintenance of its ties to religion.




The Jew of Culture


Book Description

"The purpose of this collection of Rieff's writings ... is to trace the evolution of the 'Jews of culture' over the course of his work." --introd.




The Crisis of the Officer Class


Book Description

"In this volume, Rieff advances his thesis that the third culture of disenchantment, which is now more widely and deeply entrenched than ever before as 'our' culture, is distinguished by its rejection of any and all visions of sacred order inherited from either first world cultures of fate or second world culture of faith." --introd.




Freud


Book Description

Now a classic, this book was hailed upon its original publication in 1959 as "An event to be acclaimed . . . a book of genuine brilliance on Freud's cultural importance . . . a permanently valuable contribution to the human sciences."—Alastair MacIntyre, Manchester Guardian "This remarkably subtle and substantial book, with its nicely ordered sequences of skilled dissections and refined appraisals, is one of those rare products of profound analytic thought. . . . The author weighs each major article of the psychoanalytic canon in the scales of his sensitive understanding, then gives a superbly balanced judgement."—Henry A. Murray, American Sociological Review "Rieff's tremendous scholarship and rich reflections fill his pages with memorable treasures."—Robert W. White, Scientific American "Philip Rieff's book is a brilliant and beautifully reasoned example of what Freud's influence has really been: an increasing intellectual vigilance about human nature. . . . What the analyst does for the patient—present the terms for his new choices as a human being—Mr. Rieff does in respect to the cultural significance of Freudianism. His style has the same closeness, the same undertone of hypertense alertness. Again and again he makes brilliant points."—Alfred Kazin, The Reporter




Disaster Resilience


Book Description

No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.




Fallen Forests


Book Description

In 1844, Lydia Sigourney asserted, "Man's warfare on the trees is terrible." Like Sigourney many American women of her day engaged with such issues as sustainability, resource wars, globalization, voluntary simplicity, Christian ecology, and environmental justice. Illuminating the foundations for contemporary women's environmental writing, Fallen Forests shows how their nineteenth-century predecessors marshaled powerful affective, ethical, and spiritual resources to chastise, educate, and motivate readers to engage in positive social change. Fallen Forests contributes to scholarship in American women's writing, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and feminist rhetoric, expanding the literary, historical, and theoretical grounds for some of today's most pressing environmental debates. Karen L. Kilcup rejects prior critical emphases on sentimentalism to show how women writers have drawn on their literary emotional intelligence to raise readers' consciousness about social and environmental issues. She also critiques ecocriticism's idealizing tendency, which has elided women's complicity in agendas that depart from today's environmental orthodoxies. Unlike previous ecocritical works, Fallen Forests includes marginalized texts by African American, Native American, Mexican American, working-class, and non-Protestant women. Kilcup also enlarges ecocriticism's genre foundations, showing how Cherokee oratory, travel writing, slave narrative, diary, polemic, sketches, novels, poetry, and expos intervene in important environmental debates.




The Triumph of the Therapeutic


Book Description

"Philip Rieff has become out most learned and provocative critic of psychoanalytic thinking and of the compelling mind and character of its first proponent. Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist remains the sharpest exegesis yet to be done on the moral and intellectual implications of Freud's work. It was a critical masterpiece, worthy of the man who inspired it; and it is now followed by a work that suffers not at all in comparison. No review can do justice to the richness of The Triumph of the Therapeutic."—Robert Coles, New York Times Book Review "A triumphantly successful exploration of certain key themes in cultural life. Rieff's incidental remarks are not only illuminating in themselves; they suggest whole new areas of inquiry."—Alasdair MacIntyre, Guardian




Truth Needs No Ally


Book Description

7. Developing Your Portfolio




Afterworks


Book Description

"This anthology features the best of the best in the animation industry, spending their time after working full days at their day jobs, producing some of the freshest stories around. A who's who of animation talent, all of whom have worked on some of the top grossing movies of the last decade, bring you a variety of stories from the fantastic to the extremely personal"--V. 1. p. [4] of cover.