S ren Kierkegaard is one of the prophets of the contemporary age, a man whose acute observations on modern European life might have been written yesterday, whose work anticipated fundamental developments in psychoanalysis, philosophy, theology, and the critique of mass culture by more than a century. John D. Caputo offers a compelling account of Kierkegaard as a thinker of particular relevance in our postmodern times, who set off a revolution that counts Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida among its heirs. His conceptions of truth as a self-transforming deed and his haunting account of the single individual seem to have been written especially with us in mind. Extracts include Kierkegaard s classic reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac, the revolutionary theory that truth is subjectivity, and his groundbreaking analysis of modern bourgeois life.

Michel Foucault was a philosopher of extraordinary talent, political activist, social theorist, cultural critic, and creative historian. He irreversibly shaped the way we think today about such controversial issues as power, sexuality, madness, and criminality. Johanna Oksala explores the conceptual tools that Foucault gave us for constructing new forms of thinking as well as for smashing old certainties. She offers a lucid account of him as a thinker whose persistent aim was to challenge the self-evidence and necessity of our current experiences, practices, and institutions by showing their historical development and, therefore, contingency. Extracts are taken from the whole range of Foucault s writings his books, essays, lectures, and interviews including the major works History of Madness, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality.

《梅森与迪克逊》出版于1997年，背景是独立战争前的美洲殖民地，以英国天文学家查尔斯·梅森(Charles Mason)和勘探员杰罗米·迪克逊(Jeremiah Dixon)勘察并划定梅森-迪克逊线(宾夕法尼亚州与马里兰州分界线和美国革命前南北分界线)的经历为线索，探讨立国前后在国民性问题上种族、阶级和派系纷争的历史根源及其在共和国发展历程中的流变，揭示革命理想与社会现实之间的巨大差距。梅森-迪克逊线的勘察与划定不仅构成了小说情节的主线，还成为具有伦理和政治寓意的隐喻，为作者切人帝国的文化逻辑提供了一条具有稳定所指又富有弹性的符号链，连接了美国历史各个重要时期，显示出贯古通今的历史感。繁复众多的人物、事件以及纵横交错的线条构成了巨大的迷宫，展现主人公梅森与迪克逊在这片神秘国土上对勘察的意义和新世界理想产生的困惑和迷茫，由此引出关于美国民族国家的立国基础及其意义的思考。
梅森-迪克逊线(Mason-Dixon Line)最初指梅森与迪克逊于1763年至1767年间奉英国皇家学会之命前往美洲勘察并划定的宾夕法尼亚州与马里兰州之间233英里长的边界线，它还包括宾州、马里兰州与西弗吉尼亚州的共同分界线以及马里兰州与德拉威尔州的分界线。梅森和迪克逊受命前往，目的是协助英国政府调停宾西家族与巴尔的摩家族之间的地界纠纷。美国内战前，宾州南部边界通常被看作南方与北方、自由州与奴隶州的分界线，在奴隶问题异常敏感的共和时期乃至后来美国历史中，梅森一迪克逊线所具有的象征意义是不言自明的，而两位勘探员的名字也具有了复杂的含义。
纵横交错的“线”构成了这部长达773页的小说的主要隐喻。小说的第一部分(1—253页)“经纬度”(Latitudes and Departures)以1760年梅森与迪克逊前往开普敦观测太阳视差，确定地月系质心到太阳的平均距离为起点。在雷达天文学问世以前，地月系质心到太阳的距离是通过测定太阳视差来推算的。由于天文单位是量度太阳系内天体之间距离的基本单位，又是测定恒星三角视差的基线，几个世纪以来，测定太阳视差一直是天体测量学中的重要问题。梅森与迪克逊测定太阳视差的方法主要是观测太阳系的行星：当行星最接近地球时，先测定行星的周日赤道地平视差，从而确定行星对地球的距离，然后再根据天体力学的理论所求得的行星对地球的距离与日地平均距离之比，推求出太阳视差值。第一部分以梅森与迪克逊回到伦敦而结束。在第二部分(257—714页)“美国”(America)，梅森与迪克逊奉英国皇家学会之命前往美洲执行勘察任务，确定宾州南部富有争议的边界线。第三部分(715—773页)“最后的中转”(The LastTransit)以梅森定居美国结束。小说的叙述人维克·切里考克主要讲述的就是这次划定边界线的经历。
在这部以独立战争前美国社会为背景的小说中，梅森一迪克逊线有着多重意义，除了指南北方自由州和奴隶制州的地理分界外，还指维纳斯星球越过太阳表面的轨迹、梅森与迪克逊的生活轨迹、小说的情节以及众多人物之间神秘莫测的关系。作为小说的主要隐喻，梅森一迪克逊线象征着美利坚共和国的岔路口，标志着共和国误入歧途的时刻。梅森和迪克逊所发现的美利坚远非伊甸园式的理想国，在费城、安那不勒斯和纽约的咖啡屋里，充满着各种力量的角逐、诡计和阴谋、盘根错节的宗教势力、党派纷争以及包括皇家学会和耶稣教派在内的各种幕后势力之间的相互倾轧。一方面，梅森一迪克逊线昭示在即将诞生的共和国国土上的疆界划分、极度理性化和权力统治的过程。另一方面，它还彰显了美国的原罪：对黑人的奴役和对印第安人的种族灭绝。梅森与迪克逊穿过丛林进入印第安人领土的行程预演了后来的西进运动，而“自由州”和“奴隶制州”的区域划分本身已经孕育着后来的种族危机。在梅森-迪克逊分界线的勘察和界定过程中，形形色色的人物粉墨登场，上演了一幕幕离奇古怪的闹剧，其中有法国厨师与机械鸭荒诞不经的爱情故事、逃避耶稣教会追捕的中国地卜者、被迫在街头卖艺的妇女和装扮成樵夫的密探等，这些芸芸众生及其生活百态与梅森和迪克逊理想中的新世界大相径庭。而且，当梅森和迪克逊由东向西挺进时，又目睹了人类历史上惨绝人寰的种族灭绝。无意间，梅森和迪克逊成了美利坚共和国早期历史的见证者。
《梅森和迪克逊》历来被认为是托马斯·品钦最伟大的作品之一。《法国中尉的女人》作者英国杰出小说家约翰·福尔斯说：“作为小说同行，我对他的作品充满羡慕，直到现在他都能一起充沛的精力创造出《梅森和迪克逊》这样的伟大作品来，不得不说是一个奇迹！”耶鲁学派著名文学评论家哈罗德·布鲁姆说：“品钦总试图超越自我，一直以来都如此富有天才的创造力和华丽的幽默感，这本书的奇迹是汪洋恣肆的，非常出人意料……如果要从上个世纪（20世纪）末选择一部最具雄心的美国小说，我可能会选择《梅森和迪克逊》。”美国当代著名作家约书亚·弗里斯说： “ 1997 年唐·德里罗的《地下》在国家图书奖评选中输给了讲浪漫内战故事的《冷山》，接下来是菲利普·罗斯的《美国牧歌》拿了普利策。但我认为碾压所有这些奖项的，都应该是托马斯·品钦的杰作《梅森和迪克逊》。千万别被它的大部头和晦涩语言给吓住了……我在它身上找不到任何瑕疵。它谈论思想，和莎士比亚一样神圣；聊人道主义，和蒙田一样接近灵魂；还有文风，文风也绝不输纳博科夫。读完它你不会说：‘哎又被你们人类写废了’，而是会觉得：‘天，这东西是上帝写的吗？’ ”

Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humor, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oedipa in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting the Crying of Lot 49.

One of the twentieth century's great undisputed masterpieces, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano includes an introduction by Michael Schmidt in Penguin Modern Classics. It is the fiesta 'Day of the Dead' in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac. In the shadow of the volcano, ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate, ugly pariah dogs roam the streets and Geoffrey Firmin - ex-consul, ex-husband, an alcoholic and a ruined man - is living out the last day of his life. Drowning himself in mescal while his former wife and half-brother look on, powerless to help him, the consul has become an enduring tragic figure. As the day wears on, it becomes apparent that Geoffrey must die. It is his only escape from a world he cannot understand. His story, the image of one man's agonised journey towards Calvary, became a prophetic book for a whole generation.

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.
As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.
--Thomas Pynchon

A rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including LOLITA, PNIN, DESPAIR, THE GIFT and others.

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections , a darkly comedic novel about family

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paulthe gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walterenvironmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family manshe was doing her small part to build a better world.
But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katzoutré rocker and Walter’s college best friend and rivalstill doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street’s attentive eyes?
In his first novel since The Corrections , Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom ’s intensely realized characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

It was George Eliot's ambition to create a world and portray a whole community--tradespeople, middle classes, country gentry--in the rising fictional provincial town of Middlemarch, circa 1830. Vast and crowded, rich in narrative irony and suspense, Middlemarch is richer still in character and in its sense of how individual destinies are shaped by and shape the community.
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Rosemary Ashton

One of Time magazine's 100 all-time best English-language novels.
Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison—a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age.

In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous…you’ll recognize it immediately.

This accessible and lively introduction considers the main problems and debates in contemporary philosophy of mind. The central theme of the book is that intentionality, or the mind's direction upon its objects - sometimes described as the mind's power to represent or be 'about' things - is the essential feature of all mental phenomena. Crane engages in a subsidiary theme, the mind-body problem, asking to what extent a physicalist reductive account of mental phenomena is possible, or even necessary. Proposing an original and unified theory of all the phenomena of mind, Crane opposes those currently popular conceptions of the mind which divide mental phenomena into two very different kinds, the intentional and the qualitative. In the light of his theory, Crane gives an account of the main problems of the philosophy of mind: the mind-body problem, the problem of intentionality (or mental representation), the problem of consciousness, and the problem of perception. He also attempts to give solutions to these problems. This book provides an fresh and engaging exploration of those questions at the centre of the philosophy of mind in an accessible and lucid style which will appeal to all students, including those new to the subject.

In this new book, Bruno Latour offers answers to questions raised in "We Have Never Been Modern, "a work that interrogated the connections between nature and culture. If not modern, he asked, what "have" we been, and what values should we inherit? Over the past twenty-five years, Latour has developed a research protocol different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated--a research protocol that follows the different types of connectors that provide specific truth conditions. These are the connectors that prompt a climate scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the "institution" of science, with its army of researchers and mountains of data, rather than to "capital-S Science" as a higher authority. Such modes of extension--or modes of existence, Latour argues here--account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and other domains of knowledge. Though scientific knowledge corresponds to only one of the many possible modes of existence Latour describes, an unrealistic vision of science has become the arbiter of reality and truth, seducing us into judging all values by a single standard. Latour implores us to recover other modes of existence in order to do justice to the plurality of truth conditions that Moderns have discovered throughout their history. This systematic effort of building a new philosophical anthropology presents a completely different view of what Moderns have been, and provides a new basis for opening diplomatic encounters with other societies at a time when all societies are coping with ecological crisis.

'I am not a man, I am dynamite.' Ecce Homo is an autobiography like no other. Deliberately provocative, Nietzsche subverts the conventions of the genre and pushes his philosophical positions to combative extremes, constructing a genius-hero whose life is a chronicle of incessant self-overcoming. Written in 1888, a few weeks before his descent into madness, the book sub-titled 'How To Become What You Are' passes under review all Nietzsche's previous works so that we, his 'posthumous' readers, can finally understand him aright, on his own terms. He reaches final reckonings with his many enemies - Richard Wagner, German nationalism, 'modern men' in general - and above all Christianity, proclaiming himself the Antichrist. Ecce Homo is the summation of an extraordinary philosophical career, a last great testament to Nietzsche's will.

The Fourth Edition is again based on Robert Kimbrough's meticulously re-edited text. Missing words have been restored and the entire novel has been repunctuated in accordance with Conrad's style. The result is the first published version of Heart of Darkness that allows readers to hear Marlow's voice as Conrad heard it when he wrote the story.
" Backgrounds and Contexts " provides readers with a generous collection of maps and photographs that bring the Belgian Congo to life. Textual materials, topically arranged, address nineteenth-century views of imperialism and racism and include autobiographical writings by Conrad on his life in the Congo. New to the Fourth Edition is an excerpt from Adam Hochschild's recent book, King Leopold's Ghost , as well as writings on race by Hegel, Darwin, and Galton.
" Criticism " includes a wealth of new materials, including nine contemporary reviews and assessments of Conrad and Heart of Darkness and twelve recent essays by Chinua Achebe, Peter Brooks, Daphne Erdinast-Vulcan, Edward Said, and Paul B. Armstrong, among others. Also new to this edition is a section of writings on the connections between Heart of Darkness and the film Apocalypse Now by Louis K. Greiff, Margot Norris, and Lynda J. Dryden.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
About the Series : No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions . Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.

This is a study of Michel Foucault's life in philosophy. Foucault was probably the most influential Western philosopher since Sartre. Hailed as an original thinker, he has also been criticized as a dangerous and irresponsible nihilist. Drawing on extensive research, this book focuses on the philosopher's obsession with death and his taste for sado-masochistic sex. By the author of "Democracy in the Streets".
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Based on extensive new research and a bold interpretation of the man and his texts, The Passion of Michel Foucault is a startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers. It chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

This book grew out of a sense that contemporary philosophy lacks a self-image that does it justice. Of the self-images that philosophy inherited from the twentieth century, the most prominent – natural-ism, the linguistic turn, postmodern irony, and so on – seemed obviously inadequate to most of the most interesting work in contemporary philosophy: as descriptions, false when bold, uninformative when cautious. Less prominent alternatives too seemed implausible or ill-
developed. Although an adequate self-image is not a recondition of all virtue, it helps. If philosophy misconceives what it is doing, it is likely to do it worse. In any case, an adequate self-image is worth having for its own sake; we are not supposed to be leading the unexamined life. This is my attempt to do better.

Knowledge and its Limits presents a systematic new conception of knowledge as a fundamental kind of mental state sensitive to the knower's environment. It makes a major contribution to the debate between externalist and internalist philosophies of mind, and breaks radically with the epistemological tradition of analysing knowledge in terms of true belief. The theory casts light on a wide variety of philosophical issues: the problem of scepticism, the nature of evidence, probability and assertion, the dispute between realism and anti-realism and the paradox of the surprise examination. Williamson relates the new conception to structural limits on knowledge which imply that what can be known never exhausts what is true. The arguments are illustrated by rigorous models based on epistemic logic and probability theory. The result is a new way of doing epistemology for the twenty-first century.