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Oscar Wilde's famous quip 'All art is quite useless' might not be as outrageous or demonstrably false as is often supposed. No-one denies that much art begins life with practical aims in mind: religious, moral, political, propagandistic, or the aggrandising of its subjects. But those works that survive the test of time will move into contexts where for new audiences any initial instrumental values recede and the works come to be valued for their own sake. The book explores this idea and its ramifications. The glorious Palaeolithic paintings on the walls of the Chauvet Cave present a stark example. In spite of total ignorance of their original purposes, we irresistibly describe the paintings ...
The commitment to participate in ecological protection has grown considerably and, in the academic world, it has been tackled primarily by the Social Sciences. The Humanities has followed suit and several books have dealt with the reasons why such commitment is essential and morally imperative. What has been crucially lacking, however, are books that propose concrete pedagogical approaches to the study of environmental issues and aim at inspiring and motivating both educators and students to become actively engaged in the pursuit of ecological preservation. It is here that this book comes into play. Faced with the polluting of the earth, the devastating effect of climate change, and the inequalities of North/South resources to counter the throes of environmental degradation, our responsibility as educators and in particular as eco-pedagogues is to engage in theoretical discourses on the subject matter but also to begin to provide practitioners in all fields with essential tools to shape an ecological sense of consciousness among future leaders of the earth: our students.
Balik-Tanaw: The Road Taken is the memoir of the distinguished Filipino critic, Soledad S. Reyes. This book is a record of Reyess journey of more than seven decades where personal narrative intertwines with people and events, with social and political movements with which the country sought to negotiate the treacherous shoals in the postwar years. The account carries a fair amount of biographical data (as lodged in the critics memory in the absence of diaries), from her childhood into her college years. But as the context becomes wider and more complex, the narrative takes on a more analytical frame as she tries to make sense of disparate experiences whirling about her in the tumult of the 1970s and beyond, and in the startling changes in the political landscape, local and global, that now grip the Filipino nation. This account, according to the author, is a story of an individual constructing a narrative that seeks to impose order upon chaos by retrieving aspects of the past and weaving a series of recalcitrant experiences into a coherent whole. Published in association with De La Salle University Publishing House
This book introduces readers to modern Thai literature through the themes of modernity, nationalism, identity and gender. In the cultural, political and social transformations that occurred in Thailand during the first half of the twentieth century, Thai literature was one of the vehicles that moved the changes. Taking seriously ‘read till it shatters’, a Thai phrase that instructs readers to take apart the text, to break it down, to deconstruct it, Thak Chaloemtiarana challenges the Thai literary canon from the margins and suggests ways of expanding and enriching it. Thai literature is scarce in translation and requires the skills of a scholar fluent in Thai to comprehend it. Thak is a ...
This book examines the different means through which Spain has revisited its ex-colony - the Philippines - since 2000. Focusing on several major exhibitions organised in the period 1998-2017, the ‘poetics’ (narratives and meaning) and ‘politics’ (institutional power) of Spanish representations of the Philippines are critically examined. Even though Spain’s intention was to offer a fresh and updated look at the Philippines through the events organised, there was also a tendency to refer to and recreate a colonial past, posing important questions about the continuity of conceptions concerning the old Spanish Empire in the 21st Century. Díaz Rodríguez further analyses Spanish cultur...
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