This book is the first case study on Wenda Gu that systematically investigates the cultural and artistic context of his life and works, examining selected images of his artwork spanning from the late 1970s to the early 21st century. It is the first monograph to provide a comprehensive and profound study of a Chinese contemporary artist. In the 1980s, the School of Hermeneutics attempted to launch a discursive revolution. Vanguard artists believed that the visual art revolution was an integral part of the critique of culture because it tended to subvert and rebuild the cultural tradition at a discursive level. This book, using a case study on Wenda Gu as representative of Chinese avant-garde, investigates the centrality of culture in art, providing readers with insights on the origin, rationale and methodology of Chinese contemporary art.

"L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza has changed the way we understand human genetics and culture. Drawing links between genetic and cultural development, Cavalli-Storza has made groundbreaking discoveries in the evolution of Homo sapiens, prehistoric migration, and the origins of human differentiation. Based on interviews with his colleagues and analyses of his work, Stone and Lurquin's biography, the first on the scientist, offers a portrait of Cavalli-Sforza's life and ideas."--BOOK JACKET.

This path-breaking and eloquent analysis of The Odyssey, and the way it has been interpreted by political philosophers throughout the centuries, has dramatic implications for the current state of political thought. This important book offers readers original insights into The Odyssey and it provides a new understanding of the classic works of Plato, Rousseau, Vico, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Through his analysis Patrick J. Deneen requires readers to rethink the issues that are truly at the heart of our contemporary 'Culture Wars,' and he encourages us to reassess our assumptions about the Western canon's virtues or viciousness. Deneen's penetrating exploration of Odysseus's and our own enduring battles between the dual temptations of homecoming and exploration, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, and relativism and universality provides an original perspective on contentious debates at the center of modern political theory and philosophy.

Presents Homer's epic in which Greek hero Odysseus makes his long and treacherous journey home from the Trojan War while his wife and son are forced to scheme to protect his throne; and includes an introduction, time line, outline of key themes, explanatory notes, critical analyses, and discussion questions.

In 1933, famed anthropologist Morris Opler met a Mescalero Apache he called Chris and worked with him to record the man's life story, from the bloody Apache Wars into the reservation years of the mid-twentieth century. Chris's vivid recollections are enriched at strategic moments with crucial background information on Apache history and culture, supplied by Opler. Chris was born around 1880, the son of a Chiricahua man and a Mescalero woman. At the age of six, he and his family and other Chiricahua Apaches became prisoners of war and were relocated by the U.S. government to Florida and Alabama. Eventually settling on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico, Chris grew up expecting to become a shaman like his parents. Although Chris apprenticed as a shaman, his confidence in his healing ability waned after he was forced at the age of seventeen to attend federal government schools. Nonetheless, his interest in Mescalero religion, healing, and other traditional customs and beliefs remained, and that intimate knowledge of his people's world underscores and deepens the story of his own life.

For more than half of the twentieth century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two hostile and competitive nation-states, each claiming to be the sole legitimate expression of the Korean nation. The division remains an unsolved problem dating to the beginnings of the Cold War and now projects the politics of that period into the twenty-first century. Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910. Robinson breaks new ground with his analysis of the colonial period, tracing the ideological division of contemporary Korea to the struggle of different actors to mobilize a national independence movement at the time. More importantly, he locates the reason for successful Japanese hegemony in policies that included—and thus implicated—Koreans within the colonial system. He concludes with a discussion of the political and economic evolution of South and North Korea after 1948 that accounts for the valid legitimacy claims of both nation-states on the peninsula.

Humanity and the Global Odyssey: Cosmopolitanism in Postcolonial Fiction explores the diverse ingredients of cosmopolitanism as the need of the hour in the globalised era. It is a qualitative study that includes sociological (socio-cultural and socio-political), philosophical (moral and existential), and diasporic perspectives. It addresses the key questions of inequality, justice, belonging, freedom, and democracy in the postcolonial world. The book is positioned in postcolonial literature as it paves the way to analyse the set of issues that shape our socio-cultural and political environment of the present day. This book holds an introduction to the various literatures and the epistemology of the sister concepts associated with cosmopolitanism. It also contains an exclusive chapter on cosmopolitanism by first delving into human reasoning, cosmopolitanism —its origin, its practice in different societies, as a literary theory, its application in literature, postcolonial literature, fiction, and its positioning in other disciplines from various theorists, its types, implementation, cosmopolitan life, various personalities’ views, and its relevance in contemporary society. The three core chapters examine the selected postcolonial novels of Aravind Adiga, M.G. Vassanji, Chinua Achebe, Hanif Kureishi, and Arun Joshi, thrusting on the different types of moral, existential, political, diasporic, and cultural cosmopolitanism as the theoretical framework to bring to the fore various social issues, including casteism, familial determinism, politics, hegemony of power, cultural convergence, diasporic exclusions, and its brunt to engender a cosmopolitan future.

A study in poetic interaction, The "Odyssey" in Athens explores the ways in which narrative structure and parallels within and between the epic poet (aka Homer's) texts create or disclose meaning. Erwin F. Cook also broadens the scope of this intertextual approach to include the relationship of Homeric epic to ritual. Specifically he argues that the Odyssey achieved its form as a written text within the context of Athenian civic cults during the reign of Peisistratos. Focusing on the prologue and the Apologoi (Books 9-12), Cook shows how the traditional Greek polarity between force and intelligence (or bie and metis/noos) informs the Odyssean narrative at all levels of composition. He then uses this polarity to explain instances of Odyssean self-reference, allusions to other epic traditions - in particular the Iliadand interaction between the poem and its performance context in Athenian civic ritual. This detailed structural analysis, with its insights into the circumstances and meaning of the Odyssey's composition, will lead to a new understanding of the Homeric epics and the tradition they evoked.

Tolle Lege, take up and read! These words from St. Augustine perfectly describe the human condition. Reading is the universal pilgrimage of the soul. In reading we journey to find ourselves and to save ourselves. The ultimate journey is reading the Great Books. In the Great Books we find the struggle of the human soul, its aspirations, desires, and failures. Through reading, we find faces and souls familiar to us even if they lived a thousand years ago. The unread life is not worth living, and in reading we may well discover what life is truly about and prepare ourselves for the pilgrimage of life.

The emergence of the hominids, more than five million years ago, marked the start of the human odyssey through space and time. This book deals with the last stage of this fascinating journey: the exploration of cyberspace and cybertime. Through the rapid global implementation of information and communication technologies, a new realm for human experience and imagination has been disclosed. Reversely, these postgeographical and posthistorical technologies have started to colonize our bodies and minds. Taking Homer’s Odyssey and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as his starting point, the author investigates the ‘informatization of the worldview’, focusing on its implications for our culture–arts, religion, and science–and, ultimately, our form of life. Moving across a wide range of disciplines, varying from philosophical anthropology and palaeontology to information theory, and from astrophysics to literary, film and new media studies, the author discusses our ‘cyberspace odyssey’ from a reflective position beyond euphoria and nostalgia. His analysis is as profound as nuanced and deals with issues that will be high on the agenda for many decades to come. In 2003 a Dutch Edition of Cyberspace Odyssey received the Socrates Prize for the best philosophy book published in Dutch.