Literature in Art Books

This book presents exercises that must be performed in the library. These exercises teach the student to learn the available sources in the library.

Twenty-three contributors explore the questions: How exactly do technologies produce bodies (and subjects) that are recognizably raced, gendered and sexualized? How can technology be used to transform cultural conceptions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment? And less explicitly: What do cyberfeminist engagements with technoscientific discourses look like? Volume includes examples (and analysis)of work by female techno-artists creatively interpreting the intersections between desire, the body, science and machines. Notable essays by Margaret Morse and Sara Diamond on virtual gender, and by Lisa Cartwright and Evelynn Hammonds on imaging technologies and the production of racial and gendered norms. Together these artists and theorists consider "the complex territory" between pleasure/desire and fear/suspicion of technoscience and cyberculture from a number of feminist perspectives.

The subject of patent medicines and quack medical cures has always been a facinating one for me. I was hesitant at first to order this book, considering it had no reviews and I couldn't find much information about what exactly was in it online. Once I got the book, I was pleased to find that it is full of advertising for quack doctors and medications ranging from the 17th century to the early 20th century.

While most of the prints are black and white, there are a few color ones scattered through the pages. Each print is accompanied by write up explaining its origin, and a bit of additional information about the medication or doctor being advertised. Also included is information about the print, such as the title, year it was published, artist or author, and other details.

Many of the advertisers used very small print for things like testimonials. All of the images in the book are very large, and it is possible to see the detail of elaborate lithographs and read all but the very smallest text (though you may need a magnifying glass for some of it).

There is a lengthy introduction on the history of quackery and its relationship to legitimate medicine (at one time, they were one and the same after all), and how the methods of these patent cure-alls are still with us today.

The chapters are arranged loosely according to the type of service being offered, though in some cases certain especially influential products/quacks have their own chapters. Everything from medical museums that were little better than carnival freak shows to electric belts to vibrating chairs to colored glass windows to cures for opium or alcohol addiction laced with stronger dosages of cocaine or morphine. Sprinkled throughout these chapters are contemporary commentary and criticism on specific products by sceptical (and often humorous) journalists.

The final chapter is devoted entirely to political cartoons and images from articles against the evils of quackery in general, everything from how the advertisments were distributed to comparisons in the amount of alcohol in patent medicines to hard liqour.

The only major beef I have with this book is that a few of the images are marked as 'color lithograph' but are not actually printed in color in the book. I think that the author may not have had access to the color originals in these cases, considering that there are images that are printed in color.

If, like me, you find the history of medicine and its dark side to be a subject of interest, I wholeheartedly endorse this book. It's well worth the price of admission.

Mary Bly, an Oxford-educated professor of Reniassance drama at New York's Fordham University, has produced in "Queer Virgins and Virgin Queens on the Early Modern Stage" a fantastic piece of scholarly investigation. This is not to say that the work is dry or unexciting at any point, though. She does a fascinating job of delving into the use of (bawdy) puns on the Reniassance stage. Her style of writing is vibrant and keeps the reader's attention throughout, and yet is endlessly informative. In the process of examining the puns, and the language of the time, she manages to give the reader a very clear sense of sixteenth/seventeenth century society. It is a brilliant piece of criticism and surely deserves a spot on the shelf right along with other literary critics of high standing. Absolutely indispensible for those interested in the subject matter.

This is a wonderful book--a collection of art made by Navajo children along with pictures and quotes from the kids who made them. There is also a bit of narrative to give "food for thought" for that picture AND questions to pose to a child. For example, one artwork is of a snake. The girl artist talks about how she saw a snake down through the metal grate of her porch and it inspired this piece. The narrative talks about Navajo beliefs about the powers that animals possess. The questions at the bottom ask the child viewer/artist: what wild animals live in your backyard? If it had a special power in nature, what would it be? Draw the animal and pattern it with a design you find around your home. Write a story about that animal...etc. Very creative book...

My son loves to draw and these step by step books on topics/pics he loves like bugs, ocean creatures, dino's, and the new one coming in June-Dragons are just what he needed to keep his attention for hours on end. Make sure you invest in a box of paper....you'll need it!!!

About the Book :
The present book in two volumes is a monumental work on the Rama theme. The life of Rama, his great courage and qualities and his ideal rule based on truth and justice has exercised a profound influence not only on the life and thought of the Indian people but also of many neighbouring countries. The author discusses in Chapter I, the origin and growth of the Rama legend, its endless variations and ramifications, the nature, extent and poetic excellence of the Ramayana of Valmiki, who is looked upon in India as the Adi or Prathama Kavi (the first poet) and its deep and abiding impact on the cultural history of India. The Ramakatha is a story of men and women of superior value and being a noble theme became the common property of all the Indian people. In Chapter 2, the author narrates the Rama story based on Valmiki`s Ramayana. The Buddha, Jaina and Persian Ramakathas have been described in brief in the Appendix.

About the Author :
Dr. P. Banerjee, born in 1920, obtained a First Class in the M.A. Examination in Sanskrit with Epigraphy and Numismatics a special group in 1941 and Ph.D. Degree in History in 1950 from the Patna University, Patna.
He joined a curatorial post in the Archaeological Section, Indian Museum, Calcutta, in 1949; was appointed Officer on Special Duty in the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Govt. of India in 1955 and Superintendent, in the Archaeological Survey of India, in charge of the Central Asian Antiquities Museum (containing Sir Anuel Stein Collection of Central Asian objects.), New Delhi (now a part of the National Museum, New Delhi) in 1957.
Dr. Banerjee joined the National Museum, New Delhi in 1960, and had served this Institution for twenty years in various capacities as Editor, Assistant Director, Director, Member Secretary, Art Purchase Committee, and lastly as consultant, Central Asian Antiquities.
Dr. Banerjee has visited almost all the important Museums in India and outside (in the U.S.S.R., Europe, and the U.S.A.) for the study of Indian, Central Asian and Far Eastern objects.
He is a leading exponent of Indian Art and Religion as well as Central Asian Buddhist Art and Iconography.
He is the author of a large number of research articles and several important books including (i) The Way of the Buddha(publications Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, New Delhi), (ii) Early Indian Religions(vikas Publishing House, New Delhi), (iii) The Life of Krishna in Indian Art (National Museum, New Delhi), (iv) The Blue God (Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi) which have earned him international reputations as a scholar.
He is a Vice-President of the All India Art Historians Association and acts as an expert in various committees of the National Museum and the Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi.

Contents :
Volume I

Preface
List of Illustrations

Chapter 1. The Ramayana, Its Importance, Influence and Popularity

Chapter 2. Rama Story in Valmiki`s Ramayana
(i) Bala Kanda(pp.37ff);
(ii) Ayodhya Kanda (pp.54ff);
(iii) Aranya Kanda (pp.71ff);
(iv) Kishkindha Kanda (pp.90ff);
(v) Sundara Kanda (pp.105ff);
(vi) Yuddha Kanda (pp.116ff); and
(vii) Uttara Kanda (pp.146ff)

Chapter 3. Ramayana Tradition in Different Regions of India
A. Uttar Pradesh
B. Eastern India, (Bihar,Bengal, Assam, Manipur and Orissa)
c. Central and Southern India (Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka)
D. Western India (Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan)
E. Northern India (Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal and Jammu and Kashmir)

Appendix A. Ramakatha in Buddhist Literature
Appendix B. Jaina Ramakatha
Appendix C. Persian Ramayana
Bibliography
Index

Volume II

Illustrations

This is such an important study that it may be safely said to be a must for every reader interested in how the Western idea of sexual morality came to center on a more or less continued sort of mythical conceptualizing of violence against female virginity. Donaldson's scope and insight are certainly crucial in capturing the link between the mythic prototype and its three literary modifications he successfully tries to show in St. Augustine's "City of God," Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece," and the longest English novel "Clarissa" by the eighteenth-century British writer Samuel Richardson. Donaldson's own words attest to the significance of the beginning and extension of the rape story. "The story of the rape of Lucretia is one of the most familiar of all stories from the ancient world. It tells of events which supposedly occurred more than two and a half thousand years ago, leading to the expulsion of the last of the Roman kings and the establishment of the Roman Republic. To the Romans, it was a story of great political and moral importance, which helped to keep alive certain crucial ideas about the nature of kingly rule, wifely conduct, and personal and political liberty."(v) According to the author, the myth reaches its first turning point as it faces a serious criticism from Augustine regarding the moral validity of "Self-Murder" Lucretia chooses after the rape. The heroine's last monologue is quite symbolic of what people of the old Roman world lived with: "My body only has been violated, my heart is innocent: death will be my witness." Augustine tries to Christianize the story, sensing "that Roman and Christian ideas of moral conduct may be founded upon radically different and irreconcilable principles...." Shakespeare takes over this Christianizing project only to reveal his unique ambiguity and ambivalence by settling for the old narrative course after having incomplete critical reflections on the logic and wisdom of ancient heroism. Although Richardson's fiction, shrouded in its Puritan worldview, shows an acute awareness of "one morally questionable aspect of the Lucretia story (Lucretia's suicide)," it also fails to challenge other aspects "which today may seem too equally objectionable." Donaldson says Richardson seems to believe that the rape of Clarissa is still "a fate that in some sense necessitates death." In this story of "Another Lucretia," the female heroine doesn't kill herself but eventually dies of "wasting grief."

The transformation of the myth doesn't seem to reach an ending point with "Clarissa." As Donaldson wraps up the epistemic process of mythic metamorphosis before the great social upheavals around the French Revolution, its further continuation in the age of Romanticism fails to be included. Critiquing of the myth seems to gain its true depth in the English Romantic spirit.

St. Clair's voluminous book is important in the inter-related fields of publishing history, history of the book, and history of reading on two grounds--its methodology and its detailed data. St. Clair's commentaries are informative, and his deductions will likely be regarded as bases for further studies. But it is the methodology and the unprecedented details on book publishing and many individual titles contained in 13 appendices of more than 250 pages which will especially draw the attention of many readers, historians, professors, and others in this area. For the appendices somewhat schematically indicate the methodology and present the data for the deductions. The author's painstaking efforts and publisher's equally meticulous efforts to accurately record, classify, and arrange the novel data in smaller type with footnotes account for the high price of the book.
Focusing on publishing and reading--the sociology of reading it might be called--of the Romantic period in England, St. Clair at first exposes the errors of presumptions and perspectives that are commonly taken for granted in understandings and in other studies of his subject. Rather than the historian's or literary critic's approach, St. Clair adopts basically that of the statistician determined to get at the truth about the presence, distribution, and effects of books in society as far as this can be found. An example of the effects on print runs of the 1774 decisions [as to number of copies printing]; The main old-canon poets printed in the tiniest of formats, the cheapest achievably at the limits of manufacturing technology; Novels published at author's expense, are but three of the hundreds of specialized categories of the volume of data in the appendices. As St. Clair rightly notes, the common presumptions and perspectives are not founded on empirical evidence such as numbers of copies printed, subsequent printings, the timing of publication, etc.; nor are they capable of uncovering and properly weighing such empirical evidence. The old presumptions and perspectives reflected the literary temperaments and sentiments about literature of such historians and others.
St. Clair uncompromisingly brings an economist's and statistician's requirements of evidence and conservative assessments of it to his magisterial study of publishing, books, readers, and the society and economy they were a part of. "How to assess influence is among the most difficult of all the methodological challenges that historians face in attempting to understand the diffusionary rise and fall of ideas" is but one of the author's remarks exemplifying his questioning of the accepted knowledge in the field and setting out his own clear, though not dogmatic, premises. A former high official in the British Treasury, St. Clair is now a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge University. The author, with his great respect for simple logic and plain facts along with his innate conservativism in putting forth his new views, has not cast a rock against the house of embedded ideas about publishing, books, and readers. Rather, he has put out a lodestone which is likely to reformulate the study of books and related subjects.

In this exquisitely legible foray into the poetics of illegibility, Dworkin
takes on such forms of confusion.text, and effacement.text, and complex.text
as overwritten poetry, overprinted poetry, lined-out passages in poem, and
entirely censored poem by Man Ray, and then moving into land art by Smithson
and others in order to finally explore the poetics of illegibility more
broadly. Dworkin is unflaggingly obsessed with the avant-garde, and in talking about such only marginally
comprehensible texts, Dworkin summons his full tool box of
critical.linguistic.textual.analytic tools to do the job. Each lengthly
passage of analysis signifies new ways to read easily dismissable texts. He
has no one reductive argument, no simple insistence that "this stuff represents
our postmodern, muddled lives" or anything so cheap as that. Instead,
Dworkin moves through the various texts he looks at finding them variably meaningful, as
clearly their mechanics are quite different. In the middle of the book lives
what I suspect is one of Dworkin's favorite forms, the diastic poetry of
Cage and Jackson Mac Low. In those poems, the poets "write through" the
cantos of Pound (and others) to produce mechanistic, rule-governed
renderings of the larger text. I say that I think Dworkin likes this
strategy more than others because it works with the available, the flood of
existing text (Humumanent works this way too, of course, as Hayles has
discussed) while doing so within rule-governed methods for creation. He
likes it too, because of the Wakean jingles that result, the random playful
bits of language that result.

This is a book, then, about how to read graffiti on passing trains, about
how to read half-effaced ancient signage, about reading overwritten graffiti
and notes and all of the text that hangs on the bulletin boards of our
lives. It is a text, too, about not overlooking the illegible, the opaque,
the odd and apparently unsignifying. By employing poetics, what does not
clearly produce semantic meaning suddenly does, as the activity of social
and political artists (see the later discussion of Smithson, for instance)
is the activity of such opaque and hard to parse texts. This is poetry as
social, political, engaged, and pushing the envelop of meaning. In a
constellation of relation, there is Drucker, Pound, Joyce, Cage, Smithson,
all the other overwriting and illegible.fetishizing poets, and then there is
Dworkin pulling it all together, keeping it all separate, and ultimately
currating a fiasco of textual innovation.

This
is a map of the innovative, the poetic, the academic, and the original. So,
this is the map.