The book is exhaustively researched and documented, and yet very readable. It brings alive an industry that has almost vanished from the collective memory of America.
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Despite the outdatedness, as the editors lecture on how to set your typewriter in order to produce clear manuscripts, using the short stories is a great idea. Even the stories' authors admit their work is flawed. Throw in a great bibliography and reading list, and some very funny observations from the editors about submissions (they are rejecting papers you typed on, not you personally) and this is a quick read and very informative. I highly recommend it if you can find it!
is as well suited for all who care about books and do not just simply want to consume them.
Instead of reading tons of boring theoretical papers on literature, those people should rather
consider reading this book. Besides a theoretical introduction, it contains commented short-stories.
A very good mixture.
This book did a wonderful job of showing me the other side of the desk, of what editors are looking for when they look at manuscripts and how to ensure the story you tell is the one that they absolutely must have. (It's not a formula book; it's showing how to shape your story so it fits the -story's- needs, rather than a preconceived notion of what the editor wants.)
Highly recommended.
The overall course of cultural development, since the emergence of the ancient slave-based civilizations, has been driven by the motor of class conflict. Throughout history, each class can be characterized by its own distinctive features of social psychology, morality and outlook, although they are modified in different social contexts. The dominant class of modern society, the capitalist class, is no different. It has its own fundamental moral and social outlook, which is best revealed in the philosophy of pragmatism.
The philosophy of pragmatism was best explained by John Dewey, an early twentieth-century thinker who developed keen insights into the outlook of the ruling class of the United States. He pinpointed and formalized the essential elements of the outlook of the average capitalist and developed these into the principles of a philosophy he called pragmatism. These include an individualistic and optimistic approach to life, a practical, "can do" attitude, a disregard of history and its lessons ("History is bunk," said Henry Ford) and a disdain for any "theory" that does not produce practical results in short order.
Marxism, with its deep concern for the facts of history and its rigorous analysis of the inner logic of social development and change, can explain the development of classes and social modes of production. As part of this, George Novack demonstrates, Marxism can also explain how the guiding ideas of a class are linked to its historical role and needs. And this helps workers to understand the class with which they are forced to do battle, and provides them with valuable lessons they can use in winning the battle.
If he began this work in his small book the Origins of Empiricism, he felt this work was completed with this work. He could have published a simpler critique of Dewey much earlier, but his goal was to get to the roots of American Pragmatism and expose its strengths and weaknesses, and to indicate the answers dialectical thought in general, and Marxism in particular had for it.
When the smoke clears, when the struggles of working people push away the confusion that the Stalinoid Moscow and Peking hacks have anything to do with Marxist Philosophy, or that petit bourgeois opponents of Marxism who masquerade as Marxist from university chairs can help fighting working people, farmers, youth, and real revolutionary intellectuals, this book by a life-long revolutionary fighter will be known as one of the classics of Marxist Philosophy.
Russon shows that the body that animates the forms of experience that Hegel studies in his text cannot be adequately conceived as reducible to the merely physical organism. In an important early chapter, Russon gives an account of the systematic way in which Hegel's philosophy challenges and overcomes the dualism of immaterial mind and physical body that stands at the heart of early modern philosophy and science. He argues that the body as we experience it is not merely a natural entity (physis), but is a construct of habit and institutions; our experience of the body is not one merely of nature, but of second nature, as Aristotle described the habitual formation of social dispositions (hexis). The final chapters of the text aim to show, moreover, that this "habit-body" should be conceived ultimately as emerging through communicative activity (logos), and that the ongoing process whereby we (non-arbitrarily) constitute ourselves and our world along with others is precisely what is thematized in Hegel's dialectical phenomenology.
Considering the difficulty of the topic, and the vast resources that the argument draws upon, the text is remarkably clear (and concise, at just 137 pages). You need not have spent several years poring over the details of Hegel's challenging and dense text in order to gain much benefit from reading Russon's book. In addition, the book has the merit of demonstrating (against a number of prejudices from a number of sources) that Hegel's philosophy can be a rich resource for thinking through a number of topics of contemporary concern. Russon's conclusions in fact converge nicely with recent efforts in a number of disciplines to draw attention to the embodied character of experience, cognition, and culture.
Among the book's strengths is a startlingly lucid and original reading of Hegel's text, a reading that illuminates many familiar passages and arguments in striking fashion. Russon's account of the master and slave, and his account of Sittlichkeit, re-animate texts often thought to have been exhaustively understood, revealing both the richness of Hegel's text and the power of a serious reader like Russon. But Russon is also adept at uncovering new insights in passages under-represented in the literature, and it is perhaps here that this book makes one of its strongest contributions. Russon on the reason chapter, and on the unhappy consciousness (the analysis of which is one of his central arguments), provides original and compelling arguments for the centrality of embodiment to the Hegelian understanding of self-consciousness.
But arguably the most significant contribution made by this book is that it reminds us that a Hegelian argument can and should be a philosophical argument. Rather than limiting himself to contributing to ongoing debates within Hegel circles, Russon has engaged philosophical inquiry itself, and shown how Hegel's text, at the hands of a keen reader, can speak, indeed argue successfully, to the broader philosophical community. This book is an argument for the complete understanding of phases of embodiment as conditions of self-consciousness, and thereby an argument that brings phenomenology and Hegel into the centre of important contemporary discussions.
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I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to start their child down the path of enjoying history.
My name is Scott Neely and I liked the spot illustrations that I drew for this book. It has an X-Files feel to it and is a great supplement to the role-playing game. Enjoy!
Scott