Global Values 101: A Short Course

Global Values 101 grew out of one of the most popular courses ever offered at Harvard University, in which some of the most original thinkers of our day sat down with students and explored how ideas have made them-and can make us-more engaged, involved, and compassionate citizens. In these engrossing, essay-length interviews, which address the topics of war, religion, the global economy, and social change, Amy Goodman, host of the popular radio program Democracy Now, speaks about the role of the independent media as gatekeeper and witness; Lani Guinier, author of Tyranny of the Majority, reveals that students' SAT scores more accurately describe the kind of car their parents drive than the grades they will earn in college and shows the way to a more equitable college admissions system; Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, explores the American Dream and exposes the myth of the "good war"; economist Juliet Schor, author of Born to Buy and The Overspent American, explains why Americans are willing to sacrifice quality of life to attain financial success; former "mall rat" Naomi Klein, author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, urges readers to go global while fighting global conglomerates; and Katha Pollitt, author of Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, employs her incisive wit to explore what it really means to be a feminist in the Twenty First century.

For anyone who has been moved by idealism and longed to become a more proactive citizen, this collection offers a range of stories on how progressive ethics can inform, inspire, and ultimately transform lives.

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No Logo

NO LOGO was an international bestseller and "a movement bible" (The New York Times).  Naomi Klein's second book, The Shock Doctrine, was hailed as a "master narrative of our time," and has over a million copies in print worldwide.

In the last decade, No Logo has become an international phenomenon and a cultural manifesto for the critics of unfettered capitalism worldwide.  As America faces a second economic depression, Klein's analysis of our corporate and branded world is as timely and powerful as ever.

Equal parts cultural analysis, political manifesto, mall-rat memoir, and journalistic exposé, No Logo is the first book to put the new resistance into pop-historical and clear economic perspective.  Naomi Klein tells a story of rebellion and self-determination in the face of our new branded world.

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Roland Barthes (Routledge Critical Thinkers)

Roland Barthes is a central figure in the study of language, literature, culture and the media, both as innovator and guide. This book prepares readers for their first encounter with his crucial writings on some of the most important theoretical debates of the twentieth century, including:
*existentialism and Marxism
*Semiology, or the 'language of signs'
*Structuralism and narrative analysis
*Post-structuralism, deconstruction and 'the death of the author'
*Theories of the text and intertextuality
Tracing his engagement with other key thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, this volume offers a clear picture of Barthes work in context. Having explained in detail Barthes's most influential ideas and their impact, Graham Allen concludes with a guide to easily available translations of his work and to useful further reading.
The in-depth understanding of Barthes offered by this guide is essential to anyone reading contemporary critical theory.

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The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre

Webber argues for a new interpretation of Sartrean existentialism. On this reading, Sartre is arguing that each person’s character consists in the projects they choose to pursue and that we are all already aware of this but prefer not to face it. Careful consideration of his existentialist writings shows this to be the unifying theme of his theories of consciousness, freedom, the self, bad faith, personal relationships, existential psychoanalysis, and the possibility of authenticity. Developing this account affords many insights into various aspects of his philosophy, not least concerning the origins, structure, and effects of bad faith and the resulting ethic of authenticity. This discussion makes clear the contributions that Sartre’s work can make to current debates over the objectivity of ethics and the psychology of agency, character, and selfhood. Written in an accessible style and illustrated with reference to Sartre’s fiction, this book should appeal to general readers and students as well as to specialists.

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Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts - Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre

In the same spirit as his most recent book, Living With Nietzsche, and his earlier study In the Spirit of Hegel, Robert Solomon turns to the existential thinkers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, in an attempt to get past the academic and political debates and focus on what is truly interesting and valuable about their philosophies. Solomon makes the case that--despite their very different responses to the political questions of their day--Camus and Sartre were both fundamentally moralists, and their philosophies cannot be understood apart from their deep ethical commitments. He focuses on Sartre's early, pre-1950 work, and on Camus's best known novels The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall. Throughout Solomon makes the important point that their shared interest in phenomenology was much more important than their supposed affiliation with "existentialism." Solomon's reappraisal will be of interest to anyone who is still or ever has been fascinated by these eccentric but monumental figures.

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Camus (Haus Publishing - Life &Times)

Camus's works keep being rediscovered and set against a contemporary backdrop. While he is often said to be a writer of allegories and moral abstractions, his fiction and philosophical essays are, as this book aims to highlight, autobiographical in their origins and incidents. The Stranger is usually regarded as a classic, one of the few novels taught in schools and universities and found on most lists of the best modern novels. Born into a poor, uneducated family in Algeria, raised by an illiterate mother and tyrannized by his grandmother, he was expected to quit school at 14 and join the working class like his brother. Instead he went on to become one of the greatest French writers and a Nobel laureate. As a journalist he was an early defender of the rights of Muslims, a position which led him into conflict with the Communist Party, of which he was for a time a member. He felt himself neither entirely French nor solely Algerian, and believed that the Muslim and French communities should be able to live together. Less than three years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, at the age of 44, he died in an automobile accident.

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The Cambridge Companion to Camus

 Albert Camus is one of the iconic figures of twentieth-century French literature, one of France's most widely read modern literary authors and one of the youngest winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. As the author of L'Etranger and the architect of the notion of 'the Absurd' in the 1940s, he shot to prominence in France and beyond. His work nevertheless attracted hostility as well as acclaim and he was increasingly drawn into bitter political controversies, especially the issue of France's place and role in the country of his birth, Algeria. Most recently, postcolonial studies have identified in his writings a set of preoccupations ripe for revisitation. Situating Camus in his cultural and historical context, this 2007 Companion explores his best-selling novels, his ambiguous engagement with philosophy, his theatre, his increasingly high-profile work as a journalist and his reflection on ethical and political questions that continue to concern readers today.

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