Description “A fractured meditation on the incompleteness and inadequacy of each possible response to collective atrocities,” is how the author of this work describes what she has written, and it is an apt description. It […]
“The Past is Evil/Evil is Past: On Retrospective Politics, Philosophy of History, and Temporal Manichaeism,”
Description Bevernage turns to the Enlightenment in order to explain why so much of contemporary politics is focused on rectifying past wrongs. He argues that the 18th century saw the emergence of a modern philosophy […]
Alimut Elohit: Shnei Hiburim al Elohim ve Asson[Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster]
Description Ophir, an Israeli philosopher, examines the connection between God and disasters. From the bible and through much of western history, disasters were seen as caused in some manner by God’s will. Ophir examines this […]
Death and the Maiden
Description A play written by the Argentine-Chilean playwrite and activist, Ariel Dorfman. It tells the story of a woman confronting the man who allegedly took part in her torture under the previous, dictatorial regime. The […]
Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: the Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror
Description Crawford offers a new take on the rise of the Gothic in the late 18th century. Most interpretations see the gothic as a reaction to the upheavals of the revolutionary era. The new realities […]
Man and Society in Calamity: the Effects of War, Revolution, Famine, and Pestilence upon the Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization, and Cultural Life
Description This is a new edition of a book published originally in 1942 by one of the founders of American sociology, Pitrim Sorokin. At the time the book fell under the radar and it remains […]
“Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: The Regime of the Sister in Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne.”
Description Discusses 18th-century author Françoise de Graffigny’s important novel (Lettres d’une Péruvienne), focusing on the form of the letters in the novel, which are constructed first in quipos (a peruvian form of communication involving knotted […]
The Great Cat Massacre
Description Translated into 18 languages to date, this work is delightful read and also gets one thinking about the many ways in which we impose our own cultural assumptions, inaccurately, on previous eras; very useful […]
Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France
Description Vila’s study is now a classic, not only for its revealing interdisciplinary treatment of sensibility but also for its precise methodology and the clarity of its prose. Creator Vila, Anne Publisher Johns Hopkins, 1997 […]
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
Description A landmark text critiquing the universalizing project of the European enlightenment. It argues the so-called promises of the intellectual movement remain unfulfilled, as does the forward-moving, developmental picture of history as a progressive continuum […]