Fragments Of Hell

Jean Baudrillard is one of the most revered philosophers of the past century, and his work has helped define how we think about the post-modern. In this fascinating book of interviews conducted with Francois L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard is on sparkling form and explores his life in terms of his educational, political and literary experiences, as well as reflecting on his intellectual genesis and his position as outsider in the field of great French thinkers. Perhaps most interestingly, Baudrillard discusses his life's work in relationship to his contemporaries: thinkers such as Bataille and the Situationists, Barthes, Lyotard, and Deleuze, amongst others. Fragments: Interviews with Jean Baudrillard will be essential reading for any scholar of Baudrillard, but will also prove an attractive and informative starting point for any student trying to get to grips with his work for the first time.

This book takes a radical approach to the study of traditional songs. Folk song scholarship was originally obsessed with notions of completeness and narrative coherence; even now long narratives hold a privileged place in most folk song canons. Yet field notebooks and recordings (and, increasingly, publications) overwhelmingly suggest that apparently 'broken' and drastically shortened versions are not perceived as incomplete by those who sing them. Dealing with a wide range of traditions and languages, this study turns the focus on these 'dog-ends' of oral tradition, and looks closely at how very short texts convey meaning in performance by working the audience's knowledge of a highly allusive idiom. What emerges is the tenacity of meaning in the connotative and metaphorical language of traditional song, and the extraordinary adaptability of songs in different cultural contexts. Such pieces have a strong metonymic force: they should not be seen as residual 'last leaves' of a once-complete tradition, but as dynamic elements in the process of oral transmission. Not all song fragments remain in their natural environment, and this book also explores relocations and dislocations as songs are adapted to new contexts: a ballad of love and death is used to count pins in lace-making, song-snippets trail subversive meanings in the novels of Charles Dickens. Because they are variable and elusive to dating, songs have had little attention from the literary establishment: the authors show both how certain critical approaches can be fruitfully applied to song texts, and how concepts from studies in oral traditions prefigure aspects of contemporary critical theory. Like the songs themselves, this book crosses and recrosses the perceived divide between the literary and the oral. Coverage includes English, Welsh, Breton, American, and Finnish songs.

This book illuminates the authoritative voice of Solon of Athens by an integrated literary, historical, and philological approach and the use of a range of hermeneutic frameworks, from literary theory to oral poetics.

The memory of the Holocaust is naturally fragmented because its violent and traumatic history prohibits a comprehensive and unified understanding, and this is why museums and other sites of memory remain so important. David Duindam examines how the Hollandsche Schouwburg-a former theatre in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of nearly 50,000 Jews-became a memorial museum, and how it will continue to be a meaningful site for future generations. In the immediate postwar years, this building stood as a reminder of a painful past, but by the 1960s it became the first Holocaust memorial of national importance, and in the 1990s, an educational exhibition was added, further allowing visitors to invest and immerse themselves in this site of memory. This books argues how the Hollandsche Schouwburg, and other comparable sites, will remain important in the future as indexical fragments where new generations can engage with the Holocaust on a personal and truly concrete level.

Walt Dierks illuminates the everyday lives and adventures of young kids coming of age in Brooklyn during World War II. The main goal of most of them: get out of the house. The street was where the action was. It could be a stickball game featuring a pink Spaldeen and a broomstick or hooking a ride on a passing trolley car. There were other diversions, some perfectly legal, some bordering or stepping over into forbidden territory. The war years offered an environment of added responsibility alo

An edition and translation of a collection of fragments of Roman poetry composed between 60 BC and AD 20, when Latin literature was at its height. Study of these fragmentary texts enables us better to appreciate surviving great poets such as Catullus and Virgil.