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Juvenescence : A Cultural History of Our Age - Thryft
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Robert Pogue Harrison | University Of Chicago Press

Juvenescence : A Cultural History of Our Age

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Goodreads rating: 3.93

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How old are you?  The more thought you bring to bear on the question, the harder it is to answer.  For we age simultaneously in different ways: biologically, psychologically, socially. And we age within the larger framework of a culture, in the midst of a history that predates us and will outlast us. Looked at through that lens, many aspects of late modernity would suggest that we are older than ever, but Robert Pogue Harrison argues that we are also getting startlingly younger―in looks, mentality, and behavior. We live, he says, in an age of juvenescence. Like all of Robert Pogue Harrison's books, Juvenescence ranges brilliantly across cultures and history, tracing the ways that the spirits of youth and age have inflected each other from antiquity to the present. Drawing on the scientific concept of neotony, or the retention of juvenile characteristics through adulthood, and extending it into the cultural realm, Harrison argues that youth is essential for culture’s innovative drive and flashes of genius. At the same time, however, youth―which Harrison sees as more protracted than ever―is a luxury that requires the stability and wisdom of our elders and the institutions. “While genius liberates the novelties of the future,” Harrison writes, “wisdom inherits the legacies of the past, renewing them in the process of handing them down.” A heady, deeply learned excursion, rich with ideas and insights, Juvenescence could only have been written by Robert Pogue Harrison. No reader who has wondered at our culture's obsession with youth should miss it.
Think : A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy - Thryft
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RM35.00 MYR

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Here at last is a coherent, unintimidating introduction to the challenging and fascinating landscape of Western philosophy. Written expressly for "anyone who believes there are big questions out there, but does not know how to approach them," Think provides a sound framework for exploring the most basic themes of philosophy, and for understanding how major philosophers have tackled the questions that have pressed themselves most forcefully on human consciousness.
The Great Derangement - Climate Change And The Unthinkable - Thryft
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RM44.00 MYR

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Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.
Untimely Meditations - Thryft
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本书是尼采中晚期作品,收录了尼采四篇“沉思”:《《施特劳斯――表白者和作家》《历史学对于生活的利与弊》《作为教育者的叔本华》和《瓦格纳在拜雷特》,前两篇探讨消极的,令人忧虑的现象:“知识庸人”施特劳斯和历史学,后两篇是对神圣的救世主形象叔本华和瓦格纳的颂歌。尼采在本书中完成了一种彻底的重新评价,他将“不合时宜”等同于单纯性和真诚性的高贵品质,认为被敬仰和喜爱的哲学家在其关于生活价值的问题中想到的从来不是合乎时宜的德性,而是一种应当追求的更高和更纯洁的品质。
Untimely Meditations - Thryft
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RM30.00 MYR

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本书是尼采中晚期作品,收录了尼采四篇“沉思”:《《施特劳斯――表白者和作家》《历史学对于生活的利与弊》《作为教育者的叔本华》和《瓦格纳在拜雷特》,前两篇探讨消极的,令人忧虑的现象:“知识庸人”施特劳斯和历史学,后两篇是对神圣的救世主形象叔本华和瓦格纳的颂歌。尼采在本书中完成了一种彻底的重新评价,他将“不合时宜”等同于单纯性和真诚性的高贵品质,认为被敬仰和喜爱的哲学家在其关于生活价值的问题中想到的从来不是合乎时宜的德性,而是一种应当追求的更高和更纯洁的品质。
Italo Calvino : Letters, 1941-1985 - Updated Edition - Thryft
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Plus de trois cents lettres choisies d'Italo Calvino dessinent le portrait complexe et attachant, inattendu et captivant de cet écrivain si bien connu et si secret. Les premières missives de la jeunesse, adressées aux parents et aux amis, laissent progressivement la place aux lettres consacrées au métier d'écrire. C'est que Calvino, par son activité d'écrivain, comme à travers sa profession d'éditeur, n'a cessé de s'adresser aux auteurs et artistes de son temps qu'il lisait et qui le lisaient : Pavese, Vittorini, Morante, Ortese, Pasolini, Antonioni, Sciascia, Moravia, Eco, Magris, et bien d'autres. La vie culturelle et littéraire italienne du siècle dernier nous est ainsi offerte dans ses tensions, ses constructions, ses réalisations. Au fil de ces pages, tout en retrouvant l'intelligence aiguisée de Calvino, sa franchise et son humour, on découvre une existence faite de difficultés et de tentatives, mais aussi de réussites et d'acclamations. On suit encore la vie d'un intellectuel engagé, militant du Parti communiste, enthousiaste d'abord, malheureux ensuite, dissident enfin, dont la vie fut portée par une conviction : la littérature compte, intimement, culturellement, politiquement. La littérature, affirmait-il, "c'est la chose en laquelle je crois encore le plus".
A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics.A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis , publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours.For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, Mimesis is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written.
The Idea of a University - Thryft
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RM64.00 MYR

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Since its publication almost 150 years ago, The Idea of a University has had an extraordinary influence on the shaping and goals of higher education. The issues that John Henry Newman raised―the place of religion and moral values in the university setting, the competing claims of liberal and professional education, the character of the academic community, the cultural role of literature, the relation of religion and science―have provoked discussion from Newman's time to our own. This edition of The Idea of a University includes the full text of "University Teaching" and four selections from "University Subjects," together with five essays by leading scholars that explore the background and the present day relevance of Newman's themes.In the essays Martha Garland discusses the character and organization of the early nineteenth-century English universities upon which Newman based much of his vision; Frank M. Turner traces the impact of Newman's influence during the vast expansion of higher education since World War II; George Marsden investigates how the decreasing emphasis on religion has affected higher education; Sara Castro Klaren examines the implications of Newman's views on education and literature for current debates between proponents of a curriculum based on western civilization and one based on multiculturalism; and George Landow considers what the advent of electronic communication will mean to university teaching, research, and community. To aid accessibility, the edition also includes an analytical table of contents, a chronology and biographical sketch of Newman's life, questions for discussion, expanded notes, and a glossary of names, all of which will help make this the standard teaching text for Newman's work.
Starry Island: New Writing from Singapore
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"Starry Island" might be just the cultural tapestry you're looking for. As Singapore commemorates its independence anthology-style, you'll traverse through myriad voices—each presenting a unique facet of this vibrant society. This book unravels the paradoxes and harmonies of Singaporean identity, through an engaging mix of essays, fiction, and poetry. It's a chance to witness the literary heartbeat of a country at a pivotal moment, all curated within one enriching volume.
White Writing : On the Culture of Letters in South Africa - Thryft
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RM13.00 MYR

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Essays discuss the white literature of South Africa, explain how white writings attempt to justify colonization, and look at the novels of van den Heever and Millin
Albert Einstein, The Human Side - New Glimpses From His Archives - Thryft
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Modesty, humor, compassion, and wisdom are the traits most evident in these personal papers, most of them never before published, from the Einstein archives. The illustrious physicist wrote as thoughtfully to an Ohio fifth-grader, distressed by her discovery that scientists classify humans as animals, as to a Colorado banker, who asked whether he believed in a personal God. Witty rhymes, and exchange about fine music with Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, and expressions of his devotion to Zionism are but some of the highlights found in this rare, warm enriching book.
The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing - Thryft
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RM26.00 MYR

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Boasting almost one hundred articles and book excerpts, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is a breathtaking celebration of the finest writing by scientists--the best such collection in print--packed with scintillating essays on everything from "The Discovery of Lucy" to "The Terror and Vastness of the Universe."Edited by best-selling author and renowned scientist Richard Dawkins, this sterling collection brings together exhilarating pieces by a who's who of scientists and science writers, including Stephen Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Gardner, Albert Einstein, Julian Huxley, and many dozens more. Readers will find excerpts from bestsellers such as Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach , Francis Crick's Life Itself , Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey , Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea , and Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us . There are classic essays ranging from J.B.S. Haldane's "On Being the Right Size" and Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" to Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and Albert Einstein's famed New York Times article on "Relativity." And readers will also discover lesser-known but engaging pieces such as Lewis Thomas's "Seven Wonders of Science," J. Robert Oppenheimer on "War and Physicists," and Freeman Dyson's memoir of studyingunder Hans Bethe.A must-read volume for all science buffs, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is a rich and vibrant anthology that captures the poetry and excitement of scientific thought and discovery.
The Mass Ornament : Weimar Essays - Thryft
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RM15.00 MYR

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Siegfried Kracauer was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant cultural critics, a daring and prolific scholar, and an incisive theorist of film. In this volume his finest writings on modern society make their long-awaited appearance in English.This book is a celebration of the masses―their tastes, amusements, and everyday lives. Taking up themes of modernity, such as isolation and alienation, urban culture, and the relation between the group and the individual, Kracauer explores a kaleidoscope of shopping arcades, the cinema, bestsellers and their readers, photography, dance, hotel lobbies, Kafka, the Bible, and boredom. For Kracauer, the most revelatory facets of modern life in the West lie on the surface, in the ephemeral and the marginal. Of special fascination to him is the United States, where he eventually settled after fleeing Germany and whose culture he sees as defined almost exclusively by “the ostentatious display of surface.”With these essays, written in the 1920s and early 1930s and edited by the author in 1963, Kracauer was the first to demonstrate that studying the everyday world of the masses can bring great rewards. The Mass Ornament today remains a refreshing tribute to popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary essays continue to shed light not only on Kracauer’s later work but also on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, Weimar cultural politics, and, not least, the exigencies of intellectual exile.In his introduction, Thomas Levin situates Kracauer in a turbulent age, illuminates the forces that influenced him―including his friendships with Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other Weimar intellectuals―and provides the context necessary for understanding his ideas. Until now, Kracauer has been known primarily for his writings on the cinema. This volume brings us the full scope of his gifts as one of the most wide-ranging and penetrating interpreters of modern life.
In the Fascist Bathroom : Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992 - Thryft
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RM59.00 MYR

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Was punk just another moment in music history, a flash in time when a group of young rebels exploded in a fury of raw sound, outrageous styles, and in-your-face attitude? Greil Marcus, author of the renowned "Lipstick Traces," delves into the after-life of punk as a much richer phenomenon a form of artistic and social rebellion that continually erupts into popular culture.In more than seventy short pieces written over fifteen years, he traces the uncompromising strands of punk from Johnny Rotten to Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, even Bruce Springsteen. Marcus's unparalleled insight into present-day culture and brilliant ear for music bring punk's searing half-life into deep focus. Originally published in the U.S. as "Ranters and Crowd Pleasers.""
On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays
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RM26.00 MYR

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53% off est. retail
If you're looking to understand the bedrock principles shaping modern political thought, Mill's collection is pivotal. Not only does it delve into fundamental issues like liberty, ethics, and gender equality, but also it's essential for anyone intrigued by the underpinnings of Western political systems. Reading these essays might feel like you're in conversation with the very ideas that support contemporary debates about individual and societal values.