Category: Faculty Bookshelf

Fictions of Legibility: The Human Face and Body in Modern German Novels from Sophie von La Roche to Alfred Döblin. Transcript (2020)

Reviewed in  German Studies Review
Reviewed in The German Quarterly

Gabriela Stoicea examines how the incidence and role of physical descriptions in German novels changed between 1771 and 1929 in response to developments in the study of the human face and body. As well as engaging the tools and methods of literary analysis, the study uses a cultural studies approach to offer a constellation of ideas and polemics surrounding the readability of the human body. By including discussions from the medical sciences, epistemology, semiotics, and aesthetics, the book draws out the multifaceted permutations of corporeal legibility, as well as its relevance for the development of the novel and for facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue.

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Eva Piirimäe, Liina Lukas, and Johannes Schmidt (eds.). Herder on Empathy and Sympathy. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, Volume: 311 (2020).

The English-German collection  Herder on Empathy and Sympathy:  Einfühlung und Sympathie im Denken Herders considers the meaning and role of the concepts of empathy and sympathy in Herder’s thought. Herder invokes sympathy in a number of disciplinary domains ranging from metaphysics, biology, anthropology, epistemology, psychology, morality, politics, history, aesthetics to homiletics. While Herder is shown as belonging to a long line of thinkers who view sympathy as a metaphysical principle contributing to the interconnectedness of all parts of nature, he also offers new insights about intra-/inter-species sympathetic communication and distinctively human varieties of sympathy for which he reserves the term “sich einfühlen”. Acknowledging the limits of the natural capacity for “sich einfühlen”, Herder nonetheless calls for its reflective cultivation in various domains.

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Society for American Sign Language Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 2020.

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The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia. Ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Paperback 2019.

Richard Wagner is one of the most controversial figures in Western cultural history. He revolutionized not only opera but the very concept of art, and his works and ideas have had an immeasurable impact on both the cultural and political landscapes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From ‘absolute music’ to ‘Zurich’ and from ‘Theodor Adorno’ to ‘Hermann Zumpe’, the vividly-written entries of The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia have been contributed by recognized authorities and cover a comprehensive range of topics. More than eighty scholars from around the world, representing disciplines from history and philosophy to film studies and medicine, provide fascinating insights into Wagner’s life, career and influence. Multiple appendices include listings of Wagner’s works, historic productions, recordings and addresses where he lived, to round out a volume that will be an essential and reliable resource for enthusiasts and academics alike.

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Society for American Sign Language Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 2019.

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Simone de Beauvoir: le combat au féminin.   Collection Que Sais-Je ? Paris: Presses Universitaires de France/Humensis, 2019.

Situating his arguments vis-à-vis major critics like Michel Onfray and Julia Kristeva, Touya de Marenne explores the repercussions of Beauvoir’s philosophical and political complex thought, but also the oppositions that she inspired during the twentieth century, and to the present day in France, the United States, and the world. In a groundbreaking study, Touya demonstrates how Beauvoir deepens and sheds new light like none of her contemporaries on the great questions of our time: the freedom and responsibility of the human being, the condition of women in an androcentric world, the dialogue between peoples, and the fight for justice, through an ethical thought that is contemporary to us.

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New Life for Old Ideas: Chinese Philosophy in the Contemporary World: A Festschrift in Honour of Donald J. Munro. Edited by Yanming An and Brian J. Bruya. The Chinese University Press, 2019

Over five decades, Donald J. Munro has been one of the most important voices in sinological philosophy. Among other accomplishments, his seminal book The Concept of Man in Early China influenced a generation of scholars. His rapprochement with contemporary cognitive and evolutionary science helped bolster the insights of Chinese philosophers, and set the standard for similar explorations today. In this festschrift volume, students of Munro and scholars influenced by him celebrate Munro’s body of work in essays that extend his legacy, exploring their topics as varied as the ethics of Zhuangzi’s autotelicity, the teleology of nature in Zhu Xi, and family love in Confucianism and Christianity. Essays also reflect on Munro’s mentorship and his direct intellectual influence. Through their breadth, analytical excellence, and philosophical insight, the essays in this volume exemplify the spirit of intellectual inquiry that marked Donald Munro’s career as scholar and teacher.

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Iozzia, Alberto and Roberto Risso (eds.) Italian Quarterly, Year LV, Nos. 215-218, Fall 2018.

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Society for American Sign Language Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall/Winter, 2018.

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«La penna è chiacchierona» Edmondo De Amicis e l’arte del narrare. Franco Cesati Editore, 2018

This monograph examines and analyzes the whole literary production of an author, Edmondo De Amicis (1846-1908) who is well known only for a very limited number of works, especially his best and long seller Cuore (The Heart of a Boy). But his journalist, traveller, narrator, patriot, novelist and educator produced a body of many thousand pages of works so different and so various that no scholar had tried to analyze them in full. This book, resulting from a decade of archival research, readings and travels and above all from a years-long historical researches on the journals and magazines of the times of the authors, gives an in depth study of the major and minor themes of this author, encouraging to face the least known of his works, giving a first hand analysis of his relevance in the past and in the present of Italian and European literature.

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