Columbia University Press: 2355 books
by Richard Eldridge
Language: English
Release Date: September 4, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: September 4, 2008
Richard Eldridge explores the ability of dense and formally interesting literature to respond to the complexities of modern life. Beyond simple entertainment, difficult modern works cultivate reflective depth and help their readers order and interpret their lives as subjects in relation to complex...
The Fate of Wonder
Wittgenstein's Critique of Metaphysics and Modernity
Language: English
Release Date: October 18, 2011
Kevin M. Cahill reclaims one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's most passionately pursued endeavors: to reawaken a sense of wonder around human life and language and its mysterious place in the world. Following the philosopher's spiritual and cultural criticism and tying it more tightly to the overall evolution...
Beyond Pure Reason
Ferdinand de Saussure's Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents
Language: English
Release Date: September 18, 2012
The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) revolutionized the study of language, signs, and discourse in the twentieth century. He successfully reconstructed the proto-Indo-European vowel system, advanced a conception of language as a system of arbitrary signs made meaningful through kinetic...
Gay Directors, Gay Films?
Pedro Almodóvar, Terence Davies, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, John Waters
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2015
Through intimate encounters with the life and work of five contemporary gay male directors, this book develops a framework for interpreting what it means to make a gay film or adopt a gay point of view. For most of the twentieth century, gay characters and gay themes were both underrepresented and...
Modern Humans
Their African Origin and Global Dispersal
Language: English
Release Date: October 31, 2017
Modern Humans is a vivid account of the most recent—and perhaps the most important—phase of human evolution: the appearance of anatomically modern people (Homo sapiens) in Africa less than half a million years ago and their later spread throughout the world. Leaving no stone unturned, John F....
How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories
Evolutionary Enigmas
Language: English
Release Date: April 28, 2009
So how did women get their curves? Why do they have breasts, while other mammals only develop breast tissue while lactating, and why do women menstruate, when virtually no other beings do so? What are the reasons for female orgasm? Why are human females kept in the dark about their own time of ovulation...
Metapatterns
Across Space, Time, and Mind
Language: English
Release Date: June 29, 1996
A Communion of Subjects
Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics
Language: English
Release Date: December 19, 2006
A Communion of Subjects is the first comparative and interdisciplinary study of the conceptualization of animals in world religions. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including Thomas Berry (cultural history), Wendy Doniger (study of myth), Elizabeth Lawrence (veterinary medicine, ritual...
Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran
A Moment in World History
Language: English
Release Date: June 26, 2009
A boom in the production and export of cotton made Iran the richest region of the Islamic caliphate in the ninth and tenth centuries. Yet in the eleventh century, Iran's impressive agricultural economy entered a steep decline, bringing the country's primacy to an end.
Richard W. Bulliet advances...
by Richard Bulliet
Language: English
Release Date: July 28, 2004
Language: English
Release Date: July 28, 2004
Conventional wisdom maintains that the differences between Islam and Christianity are irreconcilable. Pre-eminent Middle East scholar Richard W. Bulliet disagrees, and in this fresh, provocative book he looks beneath the rhetoric of hatred and misunderstanding to challenge prevailing—and misleading—views...
by Yoshihiro Ishikawa
Language: English
Release Date: November 13, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: November 13, 2012
Official Chinese narratives recounting the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tend to minimize the movement's international associations. Conducting careful readings and translations of recently released documents in Russian, Japanese, and Chinese, Ishikawa Yoshihiro builds a portrait of the...
by Ernest Renan, M. F. N. Giglioli
Language: English
Release Date: August 28, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: August 28, 2018
Ernest Renan was one of the leading lights of the Parisian intellectual scene in the second half of the nineteenth century. A philologist, historian, and biblical scholar, he was a prominent voice of French liberalism and secularism. Today most familiar in the English-speaking world for his 1882 lecture...
The Severed Head
Capital Visions
Language: English
Release Date: December 20, 2011
Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head...
Hideous Progeny
Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema
Language: English
Release Date: January 24, 2012
Twisted bodies, deformed faces, aberrant behavior, and abnormal desires characterized the hideous creatures of classic Hollywood horror, which thrilled audiences with their sheer grotesqueness. Most critics have interpreted these traits as symptoms of sexual repression or as metaphors for other kinds...