"Provides a fulfilling and imaginative traversal of the many landscapes of touch. Constance Classen's deft introductions provide both context for, and commentary on, a constellation of texts - academic and literary, historical and contemporary - whose appearance makes a major contribution to the burgeoning study of the senses."--Tim Barringer, Yale University
"Get your hands on The Book of Touch. Constance Classen has put together a wonderfully varied anthology on the cultural formations of tactility across vast expanses of time and place. Standing as a sourcebook on everything from kissing to healing to wrestling to scratching, it is without rival."--Leigh E. Schmidt, Princeton University
Product Description
From the tortures of the Inquisition to the corporeal comforts of modernity and from the tactile therapies of Asian medicine to the virtual tactility of cyberspace, The Book of Touch offers excursions into a sensory territory both foreign and familiar. How are masculine and feminine identities shaped by touch? What are the tactile experiences of the blind, or the autistic? How is touch developed differently across cultures? What are the boundaries of pain and pleasure? Is there a politics of touch? Bringing together classic writings and new work, this is an essential guide for anyone interested in the body, the senses and the experiential world.

Discourse analysis considers how language, both spoken and written, enacts social and cultural perspectives and identities. In this book, James Paul Gee introduces the field and presents his unique integrated approach to it. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, the author presents both a theory of language-in-use and a method of research. Clearly structured and written in a highly accessible style, "An Introduction to Discourse Analysis" incorporates perspectives from a variety of approaches and disciplines, including applied linguistics, education, psychology, anthropology and communication to help students and scholars from a range of backgrounds to formulate their own views on discourse and engage in their own discourse analysis. The second edition has been completely revised and updated and contains substantial new material and examples of oral and written language, ranging from group discussions with children, adults, students and teachers to conversations, interviews, academic texts and policy documents.

Bhabha, in his preface, writes 'Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully encounter their horizons in the mind's eye'. From this seemingly impossibly metaphorical beginning, this volume confronts the realities of the concept of nationhood as it is lived and the profound ambivalence of language as it is written. From Gillian Beer's reading of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Bowlby's cultural history of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Francis Mulhern's study of Leaviste's 'English ethics'; to Doris Sommer's study of the 'magical realism' of Latin American fiction and Sneja Gunew's analysis of Australian writing, Nation and Narration is a celebration of the fact that English is no longer an English national consciousness, which is not nationalist, but is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.

"An important and quite beautiful book". ("Library Journal"). "[Eliade] throws a searching and humbling light on our modern fragmented existence". ([London] "Times Literary Supplement"). "Treatment of such subjects as the meaning of the sacred, sun and moon worship, water symbolism, sacred stones, fertility cults, the earth mother, symbols of regeneration and the myth of eternal renewal, will interest the general reader as well as the scholar". ("New York Times"). "It is doubtful that one could encounter a more impressive work of scholarship and insight...All serious students of religion would derive enormous profit from the reading of this work". ("Kirkus"). In this era of increased knowledge the essence of religious phenomena eludes the psychologists, sociologists, linguists, and other specialists because they do not study it as religious. According to Mircea Eliade, they miss the one irreducible element in religious phenomena - the element of the sacred. Eliade abundantly demonstrates universal religious experience and shows how humanity's effort to live within a sacred sphere has manifested itself in myriad cultures from ancient to modern times; how certain beliefs, rituals, symbols, and myths have, with interesting variations, persisted. Mircea Eliade's works include the multivolume "History of Religious Ideas". John C. Holt is a professor of religion at Bowdoin College and the author of "The Religious World of Kirti Sri: Buddhism, Art, and Politics of Late Medieval Sri Lanka".