Political Fictions

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375718907
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In these coolly observant essays, the iconic bestselling writer looks at the American political process and at "that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.

American Political Fictions

Author: Peter Swirski
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113751471X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description
Through a discussion of diverse art and media such as apocalyptic thrillers, rap, and television, Swirski debunks the American political system, sieving out fact from a sea of bipartisan untruths. Engaging with close analysis and multiple case studies, this book forges a more accurate picture of contemporary American culture and of America itself.

Imagined Democracies

Author: Yaron Ezrahi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139577069
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
This book proposes a revisionist approach to democratic politics. Yaron Ezrahi focuses on the creative unconscious collective imagination that generates ever-changing visions of legitimate power and authority, which compete for enactment and institutionalization in the political arena. If, in the past, political authority was grounded in fictions such as the divine right of kings, the laws of nature, historical determinism and scientism, today the space of democratic politics is filled with multiple alternative social imaginaries of the desirable political order. Exposure to electronic mass media has made contemporary democratic publics more aware that credible popular fictions have greater impact on shaping our political realities than do rational social choices or moral arguments. The pressing political question in contemporary democracy is, therefore, how to select and enact political fictions that promote peace and how to found the political order on checks and balances between alternative political imaginaries of freedom and justice.

Imperium

Author: Robert Harris
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743293878
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
From the bestselling author of Fatherland and Pompeii, comes the first novel of a trilogy about the struggle for power in ancient Rome. In his “most accomplished work to date” (Los Angeles Times), master of historical fiction Robert Harris lures readers back in time to the compelling life of Roman Senator Marcus Cicero. The re-creation of a vanished biography written by his household slave and righthand man, Tiro, Imperium follows Cicero’s extraordinary struggle to attain supreme power in Rome. On a cold November morning, Tiro opens the door to find a terrified, bedraggled stranger begging for help. Once a Sicilian aristocrat, the man was robbed by the corrupt Roman governor, Verres, who is now trying to convict him under false pretenses and sentence him to a violent death. The man claims that only the great senator Marcus Cicero, one of Rome’s most ambitious lawyers and spellbinding orators, can bring him justice in a crooked society manipulated by the villainous governor. But for Cicero, it is a chance to prove himself worthy of absolute power. What follows is one of the most gripping courtroom dramas in history, and the beginning of a quest for political glory by a man who fought his way to the top using only his voice—defeating the most daunting figures in Roman history.

Political Fictions

Author: Michael Wilding
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003853129
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Book Description
First published in 1980, Political Fictions is a work of literary criticism with emphasis on the specific handling of literary forms. The author examines the way in which writers exploring radical politics simultaneously explore radical literary possibilities and look at the various sorts of fictional modes they use-romance, utopian fable, discovered manuscript, imaginary book. He shows how all the writers under discussion experiment with non-realistic forms- sometimes in dialectical combination with realism as one of the poles of the novel’s structure, sometimes in rejection of realism. Wilding has selected six such writers and examines some of their work in detail: Mark Twain, William Morris, Jack London, D.H. Lawrence, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell. He has chosen works which he believes have been misunderstood and ignored by Left as well as Right. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of English literature and critical theory.

Land Fictions

Author: D. Asher Ghertner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753746
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular. Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside

Science Fiction and Political Philosophy

Author: Timothy McCranor
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498586449
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
Sometimes called the “literature of ideas,” science fiction is a natural medium for normative political philosophy. Science fiction’s focus on technology, space and time travel, non-human lifeforms, and parallel universes cannot help but invoke the perennial questions of political life, including the nature of a just social order and who should rule; freedom, free will, and autonomy; and the advantages and disadvantages of progress. Rather than offering a reading of a work inspired by a particular thinker or tradition, each chapter presents a careful reading of a classic or contemporary work in the genre (a novel, short story, film, or television series) to illustrate and explore the themes and concepts of political philosophy.

Founding Fictions

Author: Jennifer R. Mercieca
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817316906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
An extended analysis of how Americans imagined themselves as citizens between 1764 and 1845 Founding Fictions develops the concept of a “political fiction,” or a narrative that people tell about their own political theories, and analyzes how republican and democratic fictions positioned American citizens as either romantic heroes, tragic victims, or ironic partisans. By re-telling the stories that Americans have told themselves about citizenship, Mercieca highlights an important contradiction in American political theory and practice: that national stability and active citizen participation are perceived as fundamentally at odds.

The Corporate Commonwealth

Author: Henry S. Turner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022636335X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
At a time when the standing and status of corporations is much in the news, this study of the early modern history of the concept of the corporation is particularly timely. Henry S. Turner provides a new account of early modern political institutions and political concepts by turning to the history of the corporation as a type of notional person and as a way of organizing collective life. Universities, guilds, towns and cities, religious confraternities, joint-stock companies: all were legal corporations, and all enjoyed rights and freedoms that sometimes exceeded the authority of the State. Drawing on the resources of economic and colonial history, literary criticism, law, political philosophy, and the history of science, Turner reads works by Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes, among many others, to find the resources for a new account of corporations as fictional bodies and persons endowed with identities, rights, and the capacity for action. Turner tackles a number of fascinating questions: How did early modern writers make sense of the paradoxical essence of the corporationa collectivity at once imaginary and material, coherent but unbounded, many and at the same time one? And what can the history of the corporation tell us about the history of our own moment, when public goods are increasingly privatized and citizens seek new models of association and meaningful political action? His answers will be of compelling interest to historians, political theorists, literary scholars, and others."

Fictions of Embassy

Author: Timothy Hampton
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457475
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
Historians of early modern Europe have long stressed how new practices of diplomacy that emerged during the period transformed European politics. Fictions of Embassy is the first book to examine the cultural implications of the rise of modern diplomacy. Ranging across two and a half centuries and half a dozen languages, Timothy Hampton opens a new perspective on the intersection of literature and politics at the dawn of modernity. Hampton argues that literary texts-tragedies, epics, essays-use scenes of diplomatic negotiation to explore the relationship between politics and aesthetics, between the world of political rhetoric and the dynamics of literary form. The diplomatic encounter is a scene of cultural exchange and linguistic negotiation. Literary depictions of diplomacy offer occasions for reflection on the definition of genre, on the power of representation, on the limits of rhetoric, on the nature of fiction making itself. Conversely, discussions of diplomacy by jurists, political philosophers, and ambassadors deploy the tools of literary tradition to articulate new theories of political action.Hampton addresses these topics through a discussion of the major diplomatic writers between 1450 and 1700-Machiavelli, Grotius, Gentili, Guicciardini-and through detailed readings of literary works that address the same topics-works by Shakespeare, More, Rabelais, Montaigne, Tasso, Corneille, Racine, and Camoens. He demonstrates that the issues raised by diplomatic theorists helped shape the emergence of new literary forms, and that literature provides a lens through which we can learn to read the languages of diplomacy.