Books by "Robert Stuart Mclean"
6 books found
The Blind Man: A Phantasmography examines the complicated forces of perception, imagination, and phantasms of encounter in the contemporary world. In considering photographs he took while he was traveling in France, anthropologist and writer Robert Desjarlais reflects on a few pictures that show the features of a man, apparently blind, who begs for money at a religious site in Paris, frequented by tourists. In perceiving this stranger and the images his appearance projects, he begins to imagine what this man’s life is like and how he perceives the world around him. Written in journal form, the book narrates Desjarlais’s pursuit of the man portrayed in the photographs. He travels to Paris and tries to meet with him. Eventually, Desjarlais becomes unsure as to what he sees, hears, or remembers. Through these interpretive dilemmas he senses the complexities of perception, where all is multiple, shifting, spectral, a surge of phantasms in which the actual and the imagined are endlessly blurred and intertwined. His mind shifts from thinking about photographs and images to being fixed on the visceral force of apparitions. His own vision is affected in a troubling way. Composed of an intricate weave of text and image, The Blind Man attends to pressing issues in contemporary life: the fraught dimensions of photographic capture; encounters with others and alterity; the politics of looking; media images of violence and abjection; and the nature of fantasy and imaginative construal. Through a wide-ranging inquiry into histories of imagination, Desjarlais inscribes the need for a “phantasmography”—a writing of phantasms, a graphic inscription of the flows and currents of fantasy and fabulation.
"I do not think there are any issues on the theological and human scene more important than the ones liberation theologians are raising," says Robert McAfee Brown. In this book Brown explores how we can respond to liberation theology without condescension, arrogance, or co-optation. He surveys in detail the kind of challenges to North American Christians issued by South American theologians. He then calls upon the church to work to make itself what it ought to be and to take sides politically in support of human rights.
"I taught undergraduates for forty-five years (the last thirty at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee), and for most of those years I spent as much time as possible outside. I hunted as much as I could, and I fished some. I also spent time in the woods of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi just walking around looking at things that caught my eye and trying to understand. Outdoor life and academic life for me have been intimately connected, and this collection of essays explores that connection. The essays in Wedding the Wild Particular make plain the sheer delight I have taken in the primary world and the degree to which that delight has enriched my academic vocation. They make what I believe is a coherent argument for the importance of natural literacy in the intellectual life." --Robert Benson
Mimesis and Theory brings together twenty previously uncollected essays on literature and literary theory by one of the most important thinkers of the past thirty years.
A subtly powerful collection of poetry which celebrates the shape and details of a full life - from youth through middle age to old age - and begins to face the prospect of its loss. With the sure hand of a veteran poet, Robert Currie has created a book of commemoration, of reading into the permanent record, his life, its events, and the beloved people in it - parents, partners and children, writers, teachers, and students. And the people who have begun to leave it. His sweep is all encompassing, from his own imagined conception to - vicariously through his parents demise - his own imagined end. The poems are full of fondness, humour and no little irony, as he looks back at his younger self, and the sometimes, but not always, painful loss of innocence. The final section, deals with the loss of his parents, and the illnesses and untimely death of friends. This life, so full of emotion and event, is drawing near its close. Technique is not the subject here, is not the point. It stands quietly in service of the story being told. Each poem is a small step through this life, but they keep coming, they pick up speed, and you suddenly realize they are walking on your heart. And after the bursts of laughter, bursts of tears, bursts of love, and bursts of years, Robert Currie delivers us a warning with his own startled realization - It goes so fast.