Theme (narrative)

About: Theme (narrative) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 13050 publications have been published within this topic receiving 159511 citations. The topic is also known as: narrative theme.

Bones, bodies, behavior : essays on biological anthropology

Abstract: "History of Anthropology" is a series of annual volumes, inaugurated in 1983, each broadly unified around a theme of major importance to both the history and the present practice of anthropological inquiry. "Bones, Bodies, Behavior," the fifth in the series, treats a number of issues relating to the history of biological or physical anthropology: the application of the "race" idea to humankind, the comparison of animals minds to those of humans, the evolution of humans from primate forms, and the relation of science to racial ideology. Following an introductory overview of biological anthropology in Western tradition, the seven essays focus on a series of particular historical episodes from 1830 to 1980: the emergence of the race idea in restoration France, the comparative psychological thought of the American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, the archeological background of the forgery of the remains "discovered" at Piltdown in 1912, their impact on paleoanthropology in the interwar period, the background and development of physical anthropology in Nazi Germany, and the attempts of Franx Boas and others to organize a consensus against racialism among British and American scientists in the late 1930s. The volume concludes with a provocative essay on physical anthropology and primate studies in the United States in the years since such a consensus was established by the UNESCO "Statements on Race" of 1950 and 1951. Bringing together the contributions of a physical anthropologist (Frank Spencer), a historical sociologist (Michael Hammond), and a number of historians of science (Elazar Barkan, Claude Blanckaert, Donna Haraway, Robert Proctor, and Marc Swetlitz), this volume will appeal to a wide range of students, scholars, and general readers interested in the place of biological assumptions in the modern anthropological tradition, in the biological bases of human behavior, in racial ideologies, and in the development of the modern human sciences.

The situationists and the city

Abstract: The French radicals at the forefront of the revolts in Paris in 1968 were re-imagining the city as a revolutionary utopia. The Situationist International (SI), led by Guy Debord and central to the Paris uprising in May 1968, published many incendiary texts on politics and art in the journal "Internationale Situationniste". One central theme to their work was rethinking the city: from a site for routine consumption and work to a utopia that breaks down barriers between function and play. In this essential volume, Tom McDonough collects together all of the SI's key essays on urbanism and the city. The book will be strikingly illustrated by images that were core to the SI project. It will include such key texts as "The Theory of Derive", "Formulary for a New Urbanism", and many previously untranslated texts, including those that came out of the Situationists' collaboration with Henri Lefebvre.

Looking Once Again at Human Service Bureaucracy

Abstract: 1 N ONGOING THEME in the literature on bureaucratic behavior is alleged inhumane, incompetent, apathetic, and abusive treatment of individual clients.' Two subthemes that recur are: (1) the contention that the "street-level bureaucrat" exercises extensive and unwarranted discretion in making decisions regardless of the effects of hierarchy and rules,2 and (2) acceptance of an "underclass hypothesis" according to which clients who are perceived by bureaucrats as less worthy or desirable (e.g., the minorities and poor) are discriminated against in delivery manner and output.3

Inscribing the other

Abstract: "Inscribing the Other is breathtaking in its scope and detail. It will become many readers' favorite book." (Stanley Corngold, author of The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory). "Steeped in erudition and discernment." (Avital Ronell, author of The Telephone Book: Technology - Schizophrenia - Electric Speech). Inscribing the Other focuses on great authors who have by birth or choice (or both) found themselves outside the mainstream of their culture but who have still wished to address it: Goethe, Freud, Wilde, Heine, Nietzsche, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others. In thirteen probing, provocative essays Sander L. Gilman reinterprets their writing as it reveals their efforts to come to terms with their real or imagined sense of difference. The chapters treat many themes and problems, ranging widely from the romantic notion of the transcendent artist to the twentieth-century artists-in-exile, and employing the perspectives of psychiatry, aesthetics, photography, politics, and the history of mentalities. The fate of Jewish writers in modern Germany, or of Yiddish writers whose language is devalued in European culture, is explored. The theme of difference and its artistic and intellectual manifestations runs throughout the book, which includes discussions of Goethe's and Wilde's homosexuality, Nietzsche's madness, Heine's refusal to be photographed, and Primo Levi's internment at Auschwitz, as well as an interview with Singer. In a frank autobiographical introduction, Gilman attempts to understand his own writing as an exercise in "inscribing the Other," in dealing with is own sense of difference through artistic creation. Sander L. Gilman, Goldwin Smith Professor of Human Studies at Cornell University, is the author of such books as Conversations with Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde's London, and Disease and Representation, all published in 1988, and Sexuality: An Illustrated History (1989).

Tender Accents of Sound: Spanish in the Chicano Novel in English

Abstract: Tender Accents of Sound: Spanish in the Chicano Novel in English. Ernst Rudin. Tempe: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1996. xiii + 285 pages. $20.00. The analysis of bilingual strategies is nothing new to Chicano/a social and literary studies. After all, language constructs personal, social, and literary identity, so the studies of Chicano/a poetry and theater inevitably examine code-switching between English and Spanish as an interlingual literary technique that registers the liminal social position of Chicano/a identity between Anglo and Mexican culture. However, despite the linguistic richness of Chicano/a literary production, Ernst Rudin is correct in asserting that "neither in the field of the Chicano novel nor in the more spectacularly bilingual ones of poetry and theater has there been a book-length analysis on the subject to date." Rudin's project, then, is quite unique and also quite daunting: he examines the use of Spanish in nineteen Chicano/a prose narratives written in English and concludes, among other things, that "[t]he Chicano novels published between the late sixties and the mid-eighties offsprings of the Chicano movement, ... and often marked as `revolutionary literature,' are--on the level of language--very reluctant to use experimental techniques and to be subversive." In the first of his three-part study, Rudin judiciously clarifies his project: he is not analyzing bilingual texts--texts written in both English and Spanish. Rather, he embarks to examine the "bilingual strategies" of Chicano/a narratives in English written between 1967 and 1985 to show that they "are, generally speaking, as `monolingual' or `bilingual' as Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls." Except for The House on Mango Street and Victuum, the literary corpus Rudin examines are by men, and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, from which Rudin's study takes it title, seems to be the master narrative informing Rudin's reading of other Chicano/a narratives, since the structuring theme of his text selection is the assimilation of the Chicano (author-narrator-) protagonists [who] cease at the end of the text to belong to the world, the society, and the value system that surrounded them at its beginning, and try reconstruct their former cultural self for an Anglo American audience whose culture has now become theirs. Along these lines, the first section culminates with Rudin's lucid discussion of the levels of linguistic and cultural translation in Chicano texts, which he demonstrates with an effective analysis of Rolando Hinojosa's English translation of his own Spanish narrative Estampas del valle y otras obras. Unfortunately, parts two and three of the study only show glimpses of the detailed literary analysis with which the first part concludes. Generally concerned with the types of Spanish-language entries in Chicano/a texts, the second part does not offer significant textual analysis until it specifically examines the works of Estela Portillo Trambley, Alma Luz Villanueva, Mary Helen Ponce, and Ana Castillo, all of whom are not included in the primary corpus of the study. And the final section offers a series of lists categorizing the number of times specific words or phrases appear in a text. Granted, Rudin implores that the "statistics tables have to be taken with a grain of salt," but the section highlights the study's tendency to point out Spanish-language entries without fully developing an analysis of how and why they function as competing forms of social discourses. …