"An expansive and detailed reconsideration of what counts as an opinion in the age of social media"--

A groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance. Finalist for the Outstanding Book Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Honorable Mention for the Balakian Prize by the International Comparative Literature Association, Winner of the Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award by the American Comparative Literature Association, Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association Baroque style—with its emphasis on ostentation, adornment, and spectacle—might seem incompatible with the dominant forms of art since the Industrial Revolution, but between 1875 and 1935, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with it. In Baroque Modernity, Joseph Cermatori argues that the memory of seventeenth-century baroque stages helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century. In response, modern theater helped give rise to the development of the baroque as a modern philosophical idea. The book focuses on avant-gardists whose writing takes place between theory and performance: philosophical theater-makers and theatrical philosophers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, and Gertrude Stein. Moving between page and stage, this study tracks the remnants of seventeenth-century theater through modernist aesthetics across an array of otherwise disparate materials, including modern opera, Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theater, poetic tragedies, and miracle plays. By reexamining the twentieth century's engagements with Gianlorenzo Bernini, William Shakespeare, Claudio Monteverdi, Calderón de la Barca, and other seventeenth-century predecessors, the book delineates an enduring tradition of baroque performance. Along the way, Cermatori expands our familiar narratives of "the modern" and traces a history of theatricality that reverberates into the twenty-first century. Baroque Modernity will appeal to readers in a wide array of disciplines, including comparative literature, theater and performance, art and music history, intellectual history, and aesthetic theory.

This extraordinary, poetic portrait of two peregrine falcons is one of the most beloved works of nature writing ever published. From fall to spring, J.A. Baker set out to track the daily comings and goings of a pair of peregrine falcons across the flat fen lands of eastern England. He followed the birds obsessively, observing them in the air and on the ground, in pursuit of their prey, making a kill, eating, and at rest, activities he describes with an extraordinary fusion of precision and poetry. And as he continued his mysterious private quest, his sense of human self slowly dissolved, to be replaced with the alien and implacable consciousness of a hawk. It is this extraordinary metamorphosis, magical and terrifying, that these beautifully written pages record.

Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh's garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens. With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur'an; Plato's Academy and Epicurus's Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt - all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison's earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility - and its enduring importance to humanity.

An urgent exploration of men’s entitlement and how it serves to police and punish women, from the acclaimed author of Down Girl “Kate Manne is a thrilling and provocative feminist thinker. Her work is indispensable.”—Rebecca Traister NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ATLANTIC In this bold and stylish critique, Cornell philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny. Ranging widely across the culture, from Harvey Weinstein and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to “Cat Person” and the political misfortunes of Elizabeth Warren, Manne’s book shows how privileged men’s sense of entitlement—to sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, care, bodily autonomy, knowledge, and power—is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences. In clear, lucid prose, Manne argues that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women’s pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are “unelectable.” Moreover, Manne implicates each of us in toxic masculinity: It’s not just a product of a few bad actors; it’s something we all perpetuate, conditioned as we are by the social and cultural mores of our time. The only way to combat it, she says, is to expose the flaws in our default modes of thought while enabling women to take up space, say their piece, and muster resistance to the entitled attitudes of the men around them. With wit and intellectual fierceness, Manne sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to our collective care and concern.

In this wide-ranging exploration of the role of forests in Western thought, Robert Pogue Harrison enriches our understanding not only of the forest's place in the cultural imagination of the West, but also of the ecological dilemmas that now confront us so urgently. Consistently insightful and beautifully written, this work is especially compelling at a time when the forest, as a source of wonder, respect, and meaning, disappears daily from the earth. "Forests is one of the most remarkable essays on the human place in nature I have ever read, and belongs on the small shelf that includes Raymond Williams' masterpiece, The Country and the City. Elegantly conceived, beautifully written, and powerfully argued, [Forests] is a model of scholarship at its passionate best. No one who cares about cultural history, about the human place in nature, or about the future of our earthly home, should miss it.—William Cronon, Yale Review "Forests is, among other things, a work of scholarship, and one of immense value . . . one that we have needed. It can be read and reread, added to and commented on for some time to come."—John Haines, The New York Times Book Review

'As the primary liberatory project, anarchism - the project which aims at the abolition of all forms of power, control, and coercion - remains entitled to appropriate the work of one of the greatest iconoclasts of all time. And although Nietzsche was rather harsh on his anarchist contemporaries - or more precisely on a type of contemporary anarchist - he nevertheless in some respects shared with them a vision of total transformation. The notion of a transvaluation of all values clearly remains not merely compatible with, but an integral component of the anarchist project, and the idea of philosophy with a hammer underlies the anarchist commitment to radical social transformation.'- John Moore, in "Attentat Art"This collection of essays is intended to examine various dimensions of the interactions between anarchism and Nietzsche. The aim of this volume is twofold: first, to provide instances of the historical appropriation of Nietzsche by anarchists, and second, to provide instances of appropriations and readings of Nietzsche by contemporary anarchist thinkers and commentators.The volume is thus divided into two sections, the historical and the contemporary, or in other words the periods of modernity and postmodernity. The historical section comprises four essays which consider historical appropriations of Nietzsche from a variety of ideological perspectives from the early twentieth century. Daniel Colson provides an overview of Nietzsche and the libertarian tradition and focusses on the appropriation of Nietzsche by French anarcho-syndicalists. Leigh Starcross reconstructs the ideas of Emma Goldman on Nietzsche and thus investigates an important intersection between anarchism, individualism and feminism. Allan Antliff considers the synthesis between anarchism, Eastern traditions and Nietzschean thought effected by Ananda Coomaraswamy, providing an important post-colonialist perspective to the topic. Finally, the modernity section includes the neglected but historically significant 1902 essay by the British anarchist Guy Aldred who provides an early and brief but very sophisticated anarchist reading of Nietzsche. The book's second section explores the relevance of Nietzsche to contemporary anarchism. At the core of this section are five essays-by Andrew Koch, Franco Riccio, Salvo Vaccaro, Saul Newman and Max Cafard-which from different perspectives deal with post-structuralist and post-modern readings of Nietzsche, and consider their appropriateness or otherwise for anarchists. These specific engagements with contemporary interpretations of Nietzsche are complemented by two essays focusing on specific aspects of Nietzsche's work from anarchist perspectives: John Moore provides an anarchist, post-situationist interpretation of Nietzsche's aesthetics, and Peter Lamborn Wilson considers the Islamic dimensions of Nietzsche's philosophy.