Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing by Yahia Lababidi is now available from The Humanities imprint.
There are at least three aspects of this collection of essays which are both singular and superb. First, not surprisingly, the prose is incisive and yet evocative; Lababidi moves from the aphoristic and the epigrammatic to the suggestive, the lightly hinted, the nuanced, with impressive ease. This is a rare gift, more associated with European writers than with American. This striation of tone, of register, of mood, gives a sense of surprise to his sentences; they spring back to the touch. Sometimes they even seem surprised at themselves.
Secondly, Lababidi covers a huge range of subjects. From Nietzsche to belly-dancing, indeed! What is impressive, however, is not so much the range itself as the aplomb with which he disports himself there. Kafka, Kierkegaard, Montaigne, et al., rub shoulders with Michael Jackson and “Ramadan TV.” But I like the fact that he don’t blur distinctions either. These writers or entertainers are treated on their own terms. I’m not a fan of Michael Jackson, or of Susan Sontag, for that matter, but Lababidi persuades me to an unexpected sympathy with them, at least while I’m reading his essays. The ability to reveal or to create affinities is the secret gift of the greatest essayists, in my view, and Lababidi does this impressively often in Trial by Ink. There is also a finely calibrated sense of the absurd, the whimsical, the slyly surrealistic throughout. And this has the unexpected but quite genuine effect of strengthening and emphasizing not only the literary but the moral seriousness of the essays.
Finally, there is something which is difficult to express: this book has a distinctive flavour, the unmistakable flavour of a sensibility. This unites the essays, however disparate in topic. But this “taste” is what draws the reader into the book and entices him from one essay to the next. The book becomes an exploration on which the reader embarks. This is one of the elements in collections of essays I most appreciate–this secret invitation au voyage which the author holds out–and Lababidi does this extremely well–with courtesy as well as cunning. The reader is like Bartleby (in my favourite of these essays) who prefers not to but here is persuaded otherwise.”
—Eric Ormsby, author of Ghazali (Makers of the Muslim World)
Harry Lewis was a Plenary Speaker at the 2009 Conference.
Harry Lewis is the author of several influential computer science texts, including “Elements of the Theory of Computation,” with Christos Papadimitriou. His 2007 book about higher education, “Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?,” is a provocative challenge to institutions of higher learning to help students develop a philosophy of life and to value enduring wisdom. It has been translated into Chinese (in both Taiwanese and mainland editions) and Korean. Lewis is coauthor with Hal Abelson and Ken Ledeen of “Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion” (2008), a guide for the general reader to the origins and public consequences of the explosion of digital information worldwide.
Harry Lewis’ paper Digital Books has been published as part of The International Journal of the Humanities.
Abstract: Digital books are potentially the realization of a grand dream–that all the world’s learning might be accessible to anyone on earth at virtually no cost. The Internet and mass magnetic storage devices have in a very short time period made the dream both technologically and economically feasible. Of course, its feasibility as a world-wide social reality remains very much in doubt. Political censorship in repressive societies has become, if anything, more aggressive with the rise of electronic communication, and even democratic societies are fighting the electronic spread of sexual material in ways that threaten open communication of other unpopular ideas. But there is another threat to knowledge ubiquity, unexpected and little-noticed: the potential creation of a de facto corporate monopoly on digital books. That would be the practical effect of the settlement, now pending judicial approval, of a copyright infringement suit against Google precipitated by its program of book scanning. The reading public of the entire world has a very large and long-term stake in the terms of this deal, which has been worked out between private parties and needs only the signature of a single federal judge to take effect.
Reclaim Your Self: The Complexity of Identity by Andrew Malionek is now available from The Humanities imprint.
Socrates once asked the simple question - “Who am I?” For thousands of years, philosophers, theologians, scientists and psychologists have contemplated the answer to this question. In a modern world filled with distractions, an individual is more prone to disillusionment. Self-knowledge, the foundation for physical, spiritual, and mental growth, nurtures confidence and builds a defense system against despair. Awareness and knowledge of the self is crucial to proper overall development.
The author examines definitions of the self given by physicalists, scientific realists and the cognitive method of Bernard Lonergan, S.J. who defines the self as a rational and spiritual being. Examples of near-death experiences and temporal lobe epilepsy will be used to help explain the different theories.
The author thoroughly discusses the importance of self-knowledge in every dimension of human growth and encourages the reader to reclaim the desire to know the self.
Congratulations to Jodie Parys, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of new directions in the humanities for her paper Confronting HIV/AIDS through an Erotic Rewriting of the Classic Fairy Tale Rapunzel in Andrea Blanqué’s “Adiós, Ten Ying”
Abstract: Fiction has often served as a space in which to confront, record and archive the AIDS epidemic in diverse manners. Writers frequently use the pages of their texts to challenge societal expectations and perceptions about the disease. Andrea Blanqué’s short story, “Adiós, Ten-Ying” is one such approach. Through a post-modern, feminist reworking of the classic fairytale, Rapunzel, Blanqué subverts reader expectations about AIDS and sexuality by presenting a protagonist who initially evokes the familiar storyline of Rapunzel, but ultimately becomes an icon of sexual liberation in the face of a patriarchal society that would prefer to negate her existence as an AIDS-infected prostitute. Blanqué achieves this subversion and ultimate celebration of sexuality by using a narrative structure that is reminiscent of the well-known tale, but is manipulated at key moments to challenge taboos about sexuality and AIDS. This presentation will examine this reworking to illustrate how Blanqué produces a novel approach to the classic fairy tale and ultimately provides an enlightened perspective on HIV/AIDS vis-a-vis her feminist interpretation of coming of age in the face of HIV/AIDS.
If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.
Only A God Can Save Us: Heidegger, Poetic Imagination and the Modern Malaise by Henk J. Van Leeuwen is now available from The Humanities imprint.
In the shadow of a looming global environmental catastrophe humanity is at an unprecedented crossroad where crucial and difficult decisions must be made about how we are to live. This book questions where the desire for certainty and mastery is taking us and argues that reliance on technology and information alone cannot avoid an ecological catastrophe. It attends to an existential poverty of spirit that, it suggests, is at the root of contemporary problems. It tackles the association between a metaphysical void, with its growing sense of meaninglessness, and the ecological predicament.
While many find the consolations of traditional religion increasingly untenable, a hunger for a spiritual dimension in life persists. In a rare excursion, yet one which continues the uniquely human search for a transcendent ground of being, the book explores an unfamiliar kind of thinking which shelters and liberates the poetic imagination that counters the modern malaise. In a scholarly yet accessible account van Leeuwen uncovers from Martin Heidegger’s middle/late philosophy an extraordinary pathway of transformative thinking where this imagination is nurtured.
Continue reading ‘Only A God Can Save Us’
Common Ground Publishing have relaunched The Humanities imprint.
You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:
Books should be between 30,000 words and 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.
Congratulations to Dr Judy Lattas, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of the area of new directions in the humanities for her paper Dear Learner: Shame and the Dialectics of Enquiry
Paper abstract: In this paper I contemplate the potential of Enquiry Based Learning (EBL) to lead the teaching of humanities in Australian universities. Are there internal constraints on its happy unfolding for a future of the humanities, true to its intellectual and political projects? In its favour, the proponents of EBL cite an Enlightenment ideal of ‘enquiry’ that puts the highest value on creative, open ended and self-determined thought – a pursuit of knowledge that is not limited by the interests of any professional or economic class. These same proponents of EBL, however, are often in university positions assigned the task of bringing a more instrumentalist approach to the pursuit of knowledge. Is it all just a case of Orwellian double-speak? Probyn (2005) writes about shame as a powerful and productive state that enables us to reappraise our actions and our values. In my paper I call up two moments of shame in the recent pursuit of learning and teaching excellence at my university, in order to explore the politics of an emerging rhetoric in this arena: that of ‘learning without teaching.’
Some papers of interest which were published in The International Journal of the Humanities include papers by plenary presenters at the conference:
World Strangers: Expatriation, Global Society, and the Humanities by A. Pablo Iannone.
What Obstacle does the Scientific Account of Consciousness Face? Can they be overcome? by Norehan Zulkiply, Mohamad Raduan Kabit and Kartini Abd Ghani.
The most recent issue, 
