Robert Porter

This book examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics based on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Pierre-Felix Guattari (1930-1992), most famous for their collaborative works "Anti-Oedipus" (1972) and "A Thousand Plateaus" (1980). Porter analyses the relationship between art and social-political life and considers in what ways the aesthetic and political connect to each other. Deleuze and Guattari believed that political theory can have aesthetic form and that vice versa, the arts can be thought to be forms of political theory. Deleuze and Guattari force us to confront the idea that 'art', the things we call language, literature, painting and architecture, always has the potential to be political because naming, or language-use, implies a shaping or ordering of the 'political' as such, rather than its re-presentation.

Ideology draws on the social, political and cultural theory of Jurgen Habermas, Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj i ek in order to explore the possibility of developing a 'critical conception of ideology'. The book is concerned with two main themes: the relationship of ideology to the 'real' and the relationship between ideology and the 'ethical'. Although these three writers are often assumed to have little in common, Porter demonstrates a formal homology between them by showing that they all offer an idea of critique that pivots around two central intuitions. Firstly, they insist that a substantive critical distinction can be drawn between the ideological and the real. And, secondly, Habermas, Deleuze and i ek all offer an image of ideology critique that is importantly grounded on ethical terms. By engaging, among other things, with Habermas's sociological work on the public sphere, i ek's forays into popular culture, and Deleuze's analysis of political cinema, Ideology strives to concretely animate how each of these figures provide the critical tools necessary to challenge the kinds of ideological practice that pervade the contemporary social world.

A lucid and balanced appraisal of some of the best Czech fiction of the twentieth century.

A lucid and balanced appraisal of some of the best Czech fiction of the twentieth century.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an unknown author until the publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in 1962, the book that was to win him the Nobel Prize in 1970. It is an account of a barely literate Russian peasant's surviving a single day in one of Stalin's labour camps. It depicted the intricacies and resilience of the human spirit in a style comparable with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. This study gauges the political and literary impact that the book has made in Russia and abroad, and examines its more universal, intrinsic qualities.

This is an authoritative and comprehensive account of the regions of the brain which control the performance of skilled voluntary movements, especially the accurate and precise control of the use of the fingers and the hand by monkeys and humans. The significance of recent and clinical observations concerning the details of the cortico-cortical connections which contribute to the determination of these functions is discussed.

This book is an up-to-date examination of the major works of some of the Russian writers who have come to prominence since 1985 when Gorbachev rose to power and effectively abolished all literary controls. The title of the book is taken from articles in the Soviet/Russian literary press that sought to address this new and often outrageous type of literature. The author contends that 'alternative prose' in Russia deserves serious critical attention, and that in discarding the 'civic mindedness' of a former era, it is aligning itself more with Western literature and is re-discovering pre-Stalinist literary trends.

This book examines the work of Rasputin, Aitmatov, Voynovich and Vladimov - four major writers who represent meny aspects of recent political and cultural developments in the USSR and demonstrate the diversity and richness of contemporary Russian writing. A full introductory chapter considers the most important trends in Russian literature today and places the four writers firmly in the context of the most recent developments, including glasnost. Many of the works discussed have been translated into English so that this excellent and fully up-to-date survey will be most welcome to students as well as the general reader.