First published in 1992, The Inward Gaze looks at men’s fantasies and self-images from a wide range of texts (notably boy’s superhero comics, modernist literary classics, and a Freudian case-study) to discuss the theories of subjectivity, masculinity, and emotion. The author explores the split between the experience-based claims of the men’s movement and the discourse theories of postmodernism. Does this division reveal a continuing refusal of masculine self-awareness? Why does postmodernist theory investigate desire and ignore emotion? This is a ground-breaking and controversial book which seeks to reformulate the way we think about men’s subjectivity. Its interdisciplinary approach weaves together material from many different sources and will be of vital interest to students of literature, cultural studies, gender studies, and psychoanalysis.

First published in 1992, The Inward Gaze looks at men's fantasies and self-images from a wide range of texts (notably boy's superhero comics, modernist literary classics, and a Freudian case-study) to discuss the theories of subjectivity, masculinity, and emotion. The author explores the split between the experience-based claims of the men's movement and the discourse theories of postmodernism. Does this division reveal a continuing refusal of masculine self-awareness? Why does postmodernist theory investigate desire and ignore emotion? This is a ground-breaking and controversial book which seeks to reformulate the way we think about men's subjectivity. Its interdisciplinary approach weaves together material from many different sources and will be of vital interest to students of literature, cultural studies, gender studies, and psychoanalysis.

Western society has never been more interested in interiority. Indeed, it seems more and more people are deliberately looking inward—toward the mind, the body, or both. Michal Pagis’s Inward focuses on one increasingly popular channel for the introverted gaze: vipassana meditation, which has spread from Burma to more than forty countries and counting. Lacing her account with vivid anecdotes and personal stories, Pagis turns our attention not only to the practice of vipassana but to the communities that have sprung up around it. Inward is also a social history of the westward diffusion of Eastern religious practices spurred on by the lingering effects of the British colonial presence in India. At the same time Pagis asks knotty questions about what happens when we continually turn inward, as she investigates the complex relations between physical selves, emotional selves, and our larger social worlds. Her book sheds new light on evergreen topics such as globalization, social psychology, and the place of the human body in the enduring process of self-awareness.

Where do we look when we look inward? In what sort of space does our inner life take place? Augustine said that to turn inward is to find oneself in a library of memories, while the Indian Buddhist tradition holds that we are self-illuminating beings casting light onto a world of shadows. And a disquieting set of dissenters has claimed that inwardness is merely an illusion—or, worse, a deceit. Jonardon Ganeri explores philosophical reflections from many of the world’s intellectual cultures, ancient and modern, on how each of us inhabits an inner world. In brief and lively chapters, he ranges across an unexpected assortment of diverse thinkers: Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Chinese, and Western philosophy and literature from the Upaniṣads, Socrates, and Avicenna to Borges, Simone Weil, and Rashōmon. Ganeri examines the various metaphors that have been employed to explain interiority—shadows and mirrors, masks and disguises, rooms and enclosed spaces—as well as the interfaces and boundaries between inner and outer worlds. Written in a cosmopolitan spirit, this book is a thought-provoking consideration of the value—or peril—of turning one’s gaze inward for all readers who have sought to map the geography of the mind.

Through the examination of a range of literary and cinematic texts, from William Wyler's classic The Best Years of Our Lives to the novels of Henry James, Silverman offers a bold new look at masculinities which deviate from the social norm.

Fiction. LGBT Studies. In his second novel, Alfred Corn tells the story of Mark Shreve, a well-heeled fiction writer now in his sixties and living in Brooklyn, New York. Shreve has a favourite niece, Marguerite Weise, who is in prison and has asked him to reveal her story to the world disguised as fiction. Shreve's narration is multi- layered, full of suspense, and weaves its threads from New York to the mid-west, Canada and Mexico. The novel also unfolds with a backdrop of the contemporary art world and its politics. Readers may sense an affinity with Doris Lessing and Calvino as they respond to the doubled narratives of both Shreve and author Corn.

Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Autobiography & Memoir! “A beautiful book… an instant classic of the genre.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times • A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 by Kirkus MIT psychologist and bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together, Sherry Turkle's intimate memoir of love and work For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of uncharted challenges. Turkle has spent a career composing an intimate ethnography of our digital world; now, marked by insight, humility, and compassion, we have her own. In this vivid and poignant narrative, Turkle ties together her coming-of-age and her pathbreaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn,Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother's secretive life. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father--and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival. Turkle's intellect and curiosity brought her to worlds on the threshold of change. She learned friendship at a Harvard-Radcliffe on the cusp of coeducation during the antiwar movement, she mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and she followed her ambition while fighting for her place as a woman and a humanist at MIT. There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections. The Empathy Diaries captures all this in rich detail--and offers a master class in finding meaning through a life's work.

The book consists of nine chapters devoted to representations of melancholia in 19th-century art and literature. The book not only provides a survey of images and modes of behaviour of 19th-century individuals, but also discusses the meanings of melancholia as they appeared in European culture over time.