This study analyzes the biblical Tower of Babel story, a cautionary tale that accounts for the diversity of languages and peoples, in Russian literature and other topographies. The author pursues its linking of language, architecture, and society as well as its relevance in art and literature over centuries. To come to terms with a perceived disorder in the realm of language, alternative explanations and projects for remediation abound. The disorder and diversity themselves find expression...

This interdisciplinary book honors Columbia professor and New York intellectual Carl Woodring. Chapters on Romantic and Victorian literary culture written by leading scholars in the field join in conversation with Woodring’s teachings on literature and visual art and his commentaries on American culture. A multiple-authored chapter of postscripts on the aesthetic range of Woodring’s intellectual interests across cultural disciplines, his contributions to English studies and his informing i...

The stories we tell in our attempt to make sense of the world—our myths and religion, literature and philosophy, science and art—are the comforting vehicles we use to transmit ideas of order. But beneath the quest for order lies the uneasy dread of fundamental disorder. True chaos is hard to imagine and even harder to represent. In this book, Martin Meisel considers the long effort to conjure, depict, and rationalize extreme disorder, with all the passion, excitement, and compromises the a...

The New York Times Editor's ChoiceThe Economist Best Book of 2010A Financial Times Best Book of 2010A Library Journal Best Book of 2010“An informative, pleasurable read… A gifted writer, Deutscher picks his way nimbly past overblown arguments to a sensible compromise.”—The Boston GlobeFrom Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Am...

The Gutenberg Galaxy catapulted Marshall McLuhan to fame as a media theorist and, in time, a new media prognosticator. Fifty years after its initial publication, this landmark text is more significant than ever before.Readers will be amazed by McLuhan’s prescience, unmatched by anyone since, predicting as he did the dramatic technological innovations that have fundamentally changed how we communicate. The Gutenberg Galaxy foresaw the networked, compressed ‘global ...

The enduring and engaging guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition.Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven’t because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise.Newly expanded and updated to include standout works from the twenty-first century as well as ...

Following the huge success of THE MEANING OF THINGS and THE REASON OF THINGS, a third collection of bestselling essays from Britain's top philosopher.'Human genius has done much, and promises much, in the way of removing the mystery from many things in our world; at the same time it recognises and honours the mystery in things too.'In this collection A.C. Grayling extends the range of his previous two books to show how much understanding people can gain abo...

Frank Kermode is one of our most distinguished critics of English literature. Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach of the millennium, he revisits the book which brings his highly concentrated insights to bear on some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of writers from Plato to William Burrows, Kermode s...

From the distinguished polymath George Steiner comes a profound and illuminating vision of the inseparability of Western philosophy and its living language.With his hallmark forceful discernment, George Steiner presents in The Poetry of Thought his magnum opus: an examination of more than two millennia of Western culture, staking out his claim for the essential oneness of great thought and great style. Sweeping yet precise, moving from essential detail to bracing illustrat...

Communication plays a vital and unique role in society-often blamed for problems when it breaks down and at the same time heralded as a panacea for human relations. A sweeping history of communication, Speaking Into the Air illuminates our expectations of communication as both historically specific and a fundamental knot in Western thought."This is a most interesting and thought-provoking book. . . . Peters maintains that communication is ultimately unthinkable apart from ...

The Religious Sense, the fruit of many years of dialogue with students, is an exploration of the search for meaning in life. Luigi Giussani shows that the nature of reason expresses itself in the ultimate need for truth, goodness, and beauty. These needs constitute the fabric of the religious sense, which is evident in every human being everywhere and in all times. So strong is this sense that it leads one to desire that the answer to life’s mystery might reveal itself in some way...