The Possessed

2010-02-16 Literary Criticism

Author : Elif Batuman
Release : 2010-02-16
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 41X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Possessed by : Elif Batuman

Download or read book The Possessed written by Elif Batuman. This book was released on 2010-02-16. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year From the author of Either/Or and The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed presents the true but unlikely stories of lives devoted—Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully!—to the Russian Classics. No one who read Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman's subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.

Possessed

2021-05-15 Literary Criticism

Author : Rebecca R. Falkoff
Release : 2021-05-15
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 820/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Possessed by : Rebecca R. Falkoff

Download or read book Possessed written by Rebecca R. Falkoff. This book was released on 2021-05-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding—once a paradigm of economic rationality—came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing perspectives about the meaning or value of objects. The 2000s have seen a surge of cultural interest in hoarding and those whose possessions overwhelm their living spaces. Unlike traditional economic elaborations of hoarding, which focus on stockpiles of bullion or grain, contemporary hoarding results in accumulations of objects that have little or no value or utility. Analyzing themes and structures of hoarding across a range of literary and visual texts—including works by Nikolai Gogol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luigi Malerba, Song Dong and E. L. Doctorow—Falkoff traces the fraught materialities of the present to cluttered spaces of modernity: bibliomaniacs' libraries, flea markets, crime scenes, dust-heaps, and digital archives. Possessed shows how the figure of the hoarder has come to personify the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity. Thanks to generous funding from New York University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Possessed

2013-11-11 Body, Mind & Spirit

Author : Thomas B. Allen
Release : 2013-11-11
Genre : Body, Mind & Spirit
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 676/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Possessed by : Thomas B. Allen

Download or read book Possessed written by Thomas B. Allen. This book was released on 2013-11-11. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Exorcist", a 1973 movie about a twelve-year-old girl possessed by the Devil, frightened people more than any horror film ever did. Many moviegoers sought therapy to rid themselves of fears they could not explain. Psychiatrists coined the term "cinematic neurosis" for patients who left the movie feeling a terrifying presence of demons. At the Washington premiere, a young woman stood outside the theater, trembling. "I come out here in the sunlight," she said, "and I see people's eyes, and they frighten me." Among the few moviegoers unmoved by the horror were two priests, Father William S. Bowdern and Father Walter Halloran, members of the Jesuit community at St. Louis University. "Billy came out shaking his head about the little girl bouncing on the bed and urinating on the crucifix," Halloran remembers. "He was kind of angry. 'There is a good message that can be given by this thing,' he said. The message was the fact that evil spirits operate in our world." Bowdern and Halloran knew that the movie was fictional veneer masking a terrible reality. Night after night in March and April 1949, Bowdern had been an exorcist, with Halloran assisting. Bowdern fervently believed that he had driven a demon from a tormented soul. The victim had been a thirteen-year-old boy strangely lured to St. Louis from a Maryland suburb of Washington. Bowdern's exorcism had been the inspiration for the movie. The true story of this possession, told in Possessed, is based on a diary kept by a Jesuit priest assisting Father Bowdern. The diary, the most complete account of an exorcism since the Middle Ages, is published for the first time in this revised edition of Possessed.

The Self Possessed

2006 Literary Criticism

Author : Frederick M. Smith
Release : 2006
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 486/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Self Possessed by : Frederick M. Smith

Download or read book The Self Possessed written by Frederick M. Smith. This book was released on 2006. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Self Possessed is a multifaceted, diachronic study reconsidering the very nature of religion in South Asia, the culmination of years of intensive research. Frederick M. Smith proposes that positive oracular or ecstatic possession is the most common form of spiritual expression in India, and that it has been linguistically distinguished from negative, disease-producing possession for thousands of years. In South Asia possession has always been broader and more diverse than in the West, where it has been almost entirely characterized as "demonic." At best, spirit possession has been regarded as a medically treatable psychological ailment and at worst, as a condition that requires exorcism or punishment. In South (and East) Asia, ecstatic or oracular possession has been widely practiced throughout history, occupying a position of respect in early and recent Hinduism and in certain forms of Buddhism. Smith analyzes Indic literature from all ages-the earliest Vedic texts; the Mahabharata; Buddhist, Jain, Yogic, Ayurvedic, and Tantric texts; Hindu devotional literature; Sanskrit drama and narrative literature; and more than a hundred ethnographies. He identifies several forms of possession, including festival, initiatory, oracular, and devotional, and demonstrates their multivocality within a wide range of sects and religious identities. Possession is common among both men and women and is practiced by members of all social and caste strata. Smith theorizes on notions of embodiment, disembodiment, selfhood, personal identity, and other key issues through the prism of possession, redefining the relationship between Sanskritic and vernacular culture and between elite and popular religion. Smith's study is also comparative, introducing considerable material from Tibet, classical China, modern America, and elsewhere. Brilliant and persuasive, The Self Possessed provides careful new translations of rare material and is the most comprehensive study in any language on this subject.

Possessed

2020-10-08

Author : Tana Stone
Release : 2020-10-08
Genre :
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 352/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Possessed by : Tana Stone

Download or read book Possessed written by Tana Stone. This book was released on 2020-10-08. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I sacrificed myself to save my sister's ship. Now the raider warlord owns me. It was my own fault. I was the navigator of our ship, and I'm the one who led us straight into Vandar territory. We'd heard rumors about the Vandar raiders-everyone in the galaxy had. Terrifying and ruthless, they were a scourge on the Zagrath empire and destroyed everything in their path. Few had actually laid eyes on the Vandar or the notorious warlords who led their fleets of warships-and survived to talk about it. So, when the ruthless aliens board our ship intent on destroying it and killing the crew, I did the only thing I could do. I gave myself to the dark and menacing warlord. In exchange for allowing my sister's ship passage out of the Vandar territory, I must share his bed and travel with his crew of deadly raiders. Even though the sight of the huge, battle-scarred alien terrifies me. But as I adjust to my new life on a savage warship, I discover that the dominant alien warrior wants more than just my body. He wants to possess my soul. And he'll make a new deal with me to get it. Possessed is a full-length sci fi romance novel with an HEA and no cheating. It features steamy scenes on a raider warship, alien horde space battles, and some serious enemies-to-lovers heat. If you like dominant and dangerous alien warriors, alien abduction to seduction romance, and hot scenes with a happily ever after, you'll love Possessed, the first book in Tana Stone's sci-fi romance Raider Warlords of the Vandar series. Each book can be read as a standalone.

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