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Title: Gadamer's repercussions: reconsidering philosophical hermeneutics 
Author: Krajewski, Bruce 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Certainly one of the key German philosophers of the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer also influenced the study of literature, art, music, sacred and legal texts, and medicine. Indeed, while much attention has been focused on Gadamer's writings about ancient Greek and modern German philosophy, the relevance of his work for other disciplines is only now beginning to be properly considered and understood. In an effort to address this slant, this volume brings together many prominent scholars to assess, re-evaluate, and question Hans-Georg Gadamer's works, as well as his place in intellectual history. The book includes a recent essay by Gadamer on "the task of hermeneutics," as well as essays by distinguished contributors including Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Gerald Bruns, Georgia Warnke, and many others. The contributors situate Gadamer's views in surprising ways and show that his writings speak to a range of contemporary debates - from constitutional questions to issues of modern art. A controversial final section attempts to uncover and clarify Gadamer's history in relation to National Socialism. More an investigation and questioning than a celebration of this venerable and profoundly influential philosopher, this collection will become a catalyst for any future rethinking of philosophical hermeneutics, as well as a significant starting place for rereading and reviewing Hans-Georg Gadamer.   [brief]
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Title: Musical meaning: toward a critical history
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Music | Musicology
Publisher's Description: Lawrence Kramer has been a pivotal figure in the development of the controversial new musicology, integrating the study of music with social and cultural issues. This accessible and eloquently written book continues and deepens the trajectory of Kramer's thinking as it boldly argues that humanistic, not just technical, meaning is a basic force in music history and an indispensable factor in how, where, and when music is heard. Kramer draws on a broad range of music and theory to show that the problem of musical meaning is not just an intellectual puzzle, but a musical phenomenon in its own right. How have romantic narratives involving Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata affected how we hear this famous piece, and what do they reveal about its music? How does John Coltrane's African American identity affect the way we hear him perform a relatively "white" pop standard like "My Favorite Things"? Why does music requiring great virtuosity have different cultural meanings than music that is not particularly virtuosic? Focusing on the classical repertoire from Beethoven to Shostakovich and also discussing jazz, popular music, and film and television music, Musical Meaning uncovers the historical importance of asking about meaning in the lived experience of musical works, styles, and performances. Kramer's writing, clear and full of memorable formulations, demonstrates that thinking about music can become a vital means of thinking about general questions of meaning, subjectivity, and value. In addition to providing theoretical advances and insights on particular pieces and repertoires, Musical Meaning will be provocative reading for those interested in issues of identity, gender, and cultural theory. This book includes a CD of Kramer's own composition, Revenants: 32 Variations in C Minor, which he discusses in his final chapter.   [brief]
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Title: After the lovedeath: sexual violence and the making of culture
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Literature | Music
Publisher's Description: This elegantly written book is a bold attempt to reinterpret the nature of sexual violence and to imagine the possibility of overcoming it. Lawrence Kramer traces today's sexual identities to their nineteenth-century sources, drawing on the music, literature, and thought of the period to show how normal identity both promotes and rationalizes violence against women.To make his case, Kramer uses operatic lovedeaths, Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" and the Tolstoy novella named after it; the writings of Walt Whitman and Alfred Lord Tennyson, psychoanalysis, and the logic of dreams. In formal and informal reflections, he explores the self-contradictions of masculinity, the shifting alignments of femininity, authority, and desire, and the interdependency of hetero- and homosexuality. At the same time, he imagines alternatives that could allow gender to be freed from the existing system of polarities that inevitably promote sexual violence.Kramer's writing avoids the conventional dress of intellectual authority and moves between music and literature in a style that is both intimate and effective. He combines informed scholarship with candid personal utterance and makes clear what is at stake in this crucial debate. After the Lovedeath will have a profound impact on anyone interested in new ways to think about gender.   [brief]
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Title: Classical music and postmodern knowledge
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Music | Musicology
Publisher's Description: A leading cultural theorist and musicologist opens up new possibilities for understanding mainstream Western art music - the "classical" music composed between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries that is, for many, losing both its prestige and its appeal. When this music is regarded esoterically, removed from real-world interests, it increasingly sounds more evasive than transcendent. Now Lawrence Kramer shows how classical music can take on new meaning and new life when approached from postmodernist standpoints.Kramer draws out the musical implications of contemporary efforts to understand reason, language, and subjectivity in relation to concrete human activities rather than to universal principles. Extending the rethinking of musical expression begun in his earlier Music as Cultural Practice , he regards music not only as an object that invites aesthetic reception but also as an activity that vitally shapes the personal, social, and cultural identities of its listeners.In language accessible to nonspecialists but informative to specialists, Kramer provides an original account of the postmodernist ethos, explains its relationship to music, and explores that relationship in a series of case studies ranging from Haydn and Mendelssohn to Ives and Ravel.   [brief]
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Title: Music as cultural practice, 1800-1900 
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Music | Musicology | European History | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: In Music as Cultural Practice , Lawrence Kramer adapts the resources of contemporary literary theory to forge a genuinely new discourse about music. Rethinking fundamental questions of meaning and expression, he demonstrates how European music of the nineteenth century collaborates on equal terms with textual and sociocultural practices in the constitution of self and society.In Kramer's analysis, compositional processes usually understood in formal or emotive terms reappear as active forces in the work of cultural formation. Thus Beethoven's last piano sonata, Op. 111, forms both a realization and a critique of Romantic utopianism; Liszt's Faust Symphony takes bourgeois gender ideology into a troubled embrace; Wagner's Tristan und Isolde articulates a basic change in the cultural construction of sexuality. Through such readings, Kramer works toward the larger conclusion that nineteenth-century European music is concerned as much to challenge as to exemplify an ideology of organic unity and subjective wholeness. Anyone interested in music, literary criticism, or nineteenth-century culture will find this book pertinent and provocative.   [brief]
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Title: The ones that are wanted: communication and the politics of representation in a photographic exhibition
Author: Kratz, Corinne Ann 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | African Studies | Photography | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: The Okiek people of Kenya's forested highlands have a long history of hunting, honey gathering, and trading with their Maasai and Kipsigis neighbors; several decades ago, they also began farming and herding. This book follows a traveling exhibition of anthropologist Corinne Kratz's photographs of the Okiek through showings at seven venues, including the National Museum in Nairobi and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Kratz tells the story of the exhibition--the stereotypes it sought to challenge, how commentaries by Okiek people were incorporated, and different ways that viewers in Kenya and the United States understood it. In addition to presenting wonderful images of a little-known people, this inviting book explores the exhibition medium itself, focusing on the complexities and possibilities of cultural representation. Walking a fine line between the photographic intimacy of a family album and the ethnographic distance of documentary photography, The Ones That Are Wanted reproduces the exhibition in full, with its vibrant color photographs, multilingual captions, and lively commentary. Throughout, Kratz incorporates insightful reflections on her changing involvement with the exhibition as anthropologist, photographer, and curator, and she provides perceptive discussions of such topics as photography in Kenya, stereotypes, and the post-1970s proliferation of the politics of representation.   [brief]
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Title: Brushes with power: modern politics and the Chinese art of calligraphy
Author: Kraus, Richard Curt
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | China | Art
Publisher's Description: Chinese calligraphy has traditionally been an emblem of the ruling class and its authority. After a century of mass revolution, what is the fate of this elite art? Richard Kraus explores the relationship beween politics and the art of writing in China today to explicate the complex relationship between tradition and modernity in Chinese culture. His study draws upon a wide range of sources, from political documents, memoirs, and interviews with Chinese intellectuals to art exhibitions and television melodramas.Mao Zedong and other Communist leaders gave calligraphy a revolutionary role, believing that their beloved art reflected the luster of authoritative words and deeds. Calligraphy was joined with new propagandistic mass media to become less a private art and more a public performance. It provided politically engaged citizens with subtle cues to changing power relationships in the People's Republic.Claiming neither that the Communists obliterated traditional culture nor that revolution failed to relieve the burden of China's past, this study subtly examines the changing uses of tradition in a modernizing society.   [brief]
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Title: Liberalization in the process of economic development 
Author: Krause, Lawrence B
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Economic growth in all developing countries is guided, and often accelerated, by generally intrusive policies implemented by governments intent on playing an active role in furthering development. As economies have grown and become more complex, however, even small market distortions are magnified, and the tendency is to rely more heavily on the market for continued growth. In this volume, leading experts in economic development examine the variety of issues that arise as governments in some of the newly industrializing countries of Southeast Asia, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, grapple with this difficult process of liberalization.   [brief]
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Title: The family silver: essays on relationships among women 
Author: Krieger, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Sociology | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: In an inventive and controversial collection of essays, sociologist Susan Krieger considers the many forms of wealth, both material and emotional, that women pass on to each other. This domestic heritage - the "family silver" - is the keystone for a discussion of mother-daughter relationships, intimate relationships between lesbians, ties between students and feminist teachers, the dilemmas of women in academia as well as in the broader work world, and the importance of female separatism. Drawing on her experiences as a lesbian, a feminist, and a teacher, Krieger presents a stunning critique of higher education. She argues for acknowledging gender in all areas of women's lives and for valuing women's inner realities and outer forms of expression.Krieger has developed a distinctly feminist approach to understanding and scholarship. Her style is self-revelatory, emotional, and at the same time deeply analytical. Her essays pioneer a new method of locating, defining, and honoring female values. The Family Silver includes a thought-provoking discussion of gender roles among women, including the author's experience of being mistaken for a man; an exploration of teaching in a feminist classroom; and a description of the controversy that resulted when the author refused to allow a hostile male student to take one of her courses. Beautifully written, The Family Silver addresses issues of central concern to feminists, postmodernists, and queer theorists and encourages new insights into how gender profoundly affects us all.   [brief]
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Title: Politics and theater: the crisis of legitimacy in restoration France, 1815-1830
Author: Kroen, Sheryl 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Moliére's anticlerical comedy Tartuffe is the unique prism through which Sheryl Kroen views postrevolutionary France in the years of the Restoration. Following the lead of the French men and women who turned to this play in the 1820s to make sense of their world, Kroen exposes the crisis of legitimacy defining the regime in these years and demonstrates how the people of the time made steps toward a democratic resolution to this crisis. Moving from the town squares, where state and ecclesiastical officials orchestrated their public spectacles in favor of the monarchy, to the theaters, where the French used Tartuffe to mock the restored monarch and the church, this cultural history of the Restoration offers a rich and colorful portrait of a period in which critical legacies of the revolutionary period were played out and cemented. While most historians have characterized the Restoration as a period of reaction and reversal, Kroen offers convincing evidence that the Restoration was a critical bridge between the emerging practices of the Old Regime, the Revolution, and the post-1830 politics of protest. She re-creates the atmosphere of Restoration France and at the same time brings major nineteenth-century themes into focus: memory and commemoration, public and private spheres, politics and religion, anticlericalism, and the formation of democratic ideologies and practices.   [brief]
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Title: On the margins of modernism: decentering literary dynamics 
Author: Kronfeld, Chana
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Comparative Literature | Language and Linguistics | Literary Theory and Criticism | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: Modernism valorizes the marginal, the exile, the "other" - yet we tend to use writing from the most commonly read European languages (English, French, German) as examples of this marginality. Chana Kronfeld counters these dominant models of marginality by looking instead at modernist poetry written in two decentered languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. What results is a bold new model of literary dynamics, one less tied to canonical norms, less limited geographically, and less in danger of universalizing the experience of minority writers.Kronfeld examines the interpenetrations of modernist groupings through examples of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry in Europe, the U.S., and Israel. Her discussions of Amichai, Fogel, Raab, Halpern, Markish, Hofshteyn, and Sutskever will be welcomed by students of modernism in general and Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in particular.   [brief]
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Title: Symeon the holy fool: Leontius's Life and the late antique city 
Author: Krueger, Derek
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Religion | Literature | Christianity | Classics | Classical Religions
Publisher's Description: This first English translation of Leontius of Neapolis's Life of Symeon the Fool brings to life one of the most colorful of early Christian saints. In this study of a major hagiographer at work, Krueger fleshes out a broad picture of the religious, intellectual, and social environment in which the Life was created and opens a window onto the Christian religious imagination at the end of Late Antiquity. He explores the concept of holy folly by relating Symeon's life to the gospels, to earlier hagiography, and to anecdotes about Diogenes the Cynic.The Life is one of the strangest works of the Late Antique hagiography. Symeon seemed a bizarre choice for sanctification, since it was through very peculiar antics that he converted heretics and reformed sinners. Symeon acted like a fool, walked about naked, ate enormous quantities of beans, and defecated in the streets. When he arrived in Emesa, Symeon tied a dead dog he found on a dunghill to his belt and entered the city gate, dragging the dog behind him. Krueger presents a provocative interpretation of how these bizarre antics came to be instructive examples to everyday Christians.   [brief]
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Title: Ethnocriticism: ethnography, history, literature 
Author: Krupat, Arnold
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Anthropology | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Native American Studies
Publisher's Description: Ethnocriticism moves cultural critique to the boundaries that exist between cultures. The boundary traversed in Krupat's dexterous new book is the contested line between native and mainstream American literatures and cultures.For over a century the discourses of ethnography, history, and literature have sought to represent the Indian in America. Krupat considers all these discourses and the ways in which Indians have attempted to "write back," producing an oppositional - or at least a parallel - discourse.   [brief]
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Title: For those who come after: a study of Native American autobiography 
Author: Krupat, Arnold
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Native American Studies | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: Drawing on the life stories of Native Americans solicited by historians during the 19th century and, later, by anthropologists concerned with amplifying the cultural record, Arnold Krupat examines the Indian autobiography as a specific genre of American writing.
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Title: The voice in the margin: Native American literature and the canon 
Author: Krupat, Arnold
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Native American Studies | American Literature
Publisher's Description: In its consideration of American Indian literature as a rich and exciting body of work, The Voice in the Margin invites us to broaden our notion of what a truly inclusive American literature might be, and of how it might be placed in relation to an international - a "cosmopolitan" - literary canon. The book comes at a time when the most influential national media have focused attention on the subject of the literary canon. They have made it an issue not merely of academic but of general public concern, expressing strong opinions on the subject of what the American student should or should not read as essential or core texts. Is the literary canon simply a given of tradition and history, or is it, and must it be, constantly under construction? The question remains hotly contested to the present moment.Arnold Krupat argues that the literary expression of the indigenous peoples of the United States has claims on us to more than marginal attention. Demonstrating a firm grasp of both literary history and contemporary critical theory, he situates Indian literature, traditional and modern, in a variety of contexts and categories. His extensive knowledge of the history and current theory of ethnography recommends the book to anthropologists and folklorists as well as to students and teachers of literature, both canonical and noncanonical. The materials covered, the perspectives considered, and the learning displayed all make The Voice in the Margin a major contribution to the exciting field of contemporary cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: The persistence of memory: organism, myth, text 
Author: Kuberski, Philip
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: While memory is one of the most fascinating faculties of consciousness, it is also one of the most mysterious. Is it memory - our own marvelous personal computer or data base - that brings us the intense feelings prompted by a certain object or situation?Drawing on an expansive array of sources, from microbiology to cosmology, Ovid to Proust, Egyptology to the cinema, Philip Kuberski leads us on a brave and beguiling exploration of memory. He enables us to see it as a worldly process in which individuals both remember and are remembered, all in a network of associations that join our bodies, personal and cultural myths, and aesthetic and literary experiences. His essays will provide a tantalizing and thoughtful read for those interested in literature, psychology, biology, anthropology, and philosophy.   [brief]
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Title: The three-piece suit and modern masculinity: England, 1550-1850
Author: Kuchta, David 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | European History | Men and Masculinity
Publisher's Description: In 1666, King Charles II felt it necessary to reform Englishmen's dress by introducing a fashion that developed into the three-piece suit. We learn what inspired this royal revolution in masculine attire--and the reasons for its remarkable longevity--in David Kuchta's engaging and handsomely illustrated account. Between 1550 and 1850, Kuchta says, English upper- and middle-class men understood their authority to be based in part upon the display of masculine character: how they presented themselves in public and demonstrated their masculinity helped define their political legitimacy, moral authority, and economic utility. Much has been written about the ways political culture, religion, and economic theory helped shape ideals and practices of masculinity. Kuchta allows us to see the process working in reverse, in that masculine manners and habits of consumption in a patriarchal society contributed actively to people's understanding of what held England together. Kuchta shows not only how the ideology of modern English masculinity was a self-consciously political and public creation but also how such explicitly political decisions and values became internalized, personalized, and naturalized into everyday manners and habits.   [brief]
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Title: Cholera in post-revolutionary Paris: a cultural history
Author: Kudlick, Catherine Jean
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | European History | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Cholera terrified and fascinated nineteenth-century Europeans more than any other modern disease. Its symptoms were gruesome, its sources were mysterious, and it tended to strike poor neighborhoods hardest. In this insightful cultural history, Catherine Kudlick explores the dynamics of class relations through an investigation of the responses to two cholera epidemics in Paris.While Paris climbed toward the height of its urban and industrial growth, two outbreaks of the disease ravaged the capital, one in 1832, the other in 1849. Despite the similarity of the epidemics, the first outbreak was met with general frenzy and far greater attention in the press, popular literature and personal accounts, while the second was greeted with relative silence. Finding no compelling evidence for improved medical knowledge, changes in the Paris environment, or desensitization of Parisians, Kudlick looks to the evolution of the French revolutionary tradition and the emergence of the Parisian bourgeoisie for answers.   [brief]
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Title: Sea cliffs, beaches, and coastal valleys of San Diego County: some amazing histories and some horrifying implications 
Author: Kuhn, Gerald G
Published: University of California Press,  1984
Subjects: Geography | California and the West | Marine and Freshwater Sciences | Geology | Ecology
Publisher's Description: California's coastal zones are areas of extreme vulnerability, subject to the vicissitudes of weather and prone to erosion, landslides, and flooding. Gerald Kuhn and Francis Shepard examine and analyze these threats to coastal stability in a thought-provoking and detailed study of the coastal area of San Diego County from the nineteenth century to the present. An invaluable resource for oceanographers, geologists, meteorologists, coastal engineers, property owners, developers, and planning and regulatory agencies.   [brief]
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Title: Lives at risk: public health in nineteenth-century Egypt 
Author: Kuhnke, LaVerne
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Lives at Risk describes the introduction of Western medicine into Egypt. The two major innovations undertaken by Muhammad Ali in the mid-nineteenth century were a Western-style school of medicine and an international Quarantine Board. The ways in which these institutions succeeded and failed will greatly interest historians of medicine and of modern Egypt. And because the author relates her narrative to twentieth-century health issues in developing countries, Lives at Risk will also interest medical and social anthropologists.The presence of the quarantine establishment and the medical school in Egypt resulted in a rudimentary public health service. Paramedical personnel were trained to provide primary health care for the peasant population. A vaccination program effectively freed the nation from smallpox. But the disease-oriented, individual-care practice of medicine derived from the urban hospital model of industrializing Europe was totally incompatible with the health care requirements of a largely rural, agrarian population.   [brief]
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