This is by no means an easy text to read. For those unfamiliar with postmodern tropes-and especially those who have never read Baudrillard before-this text may seem especially daunting. I recommend that these people start with the essay entitled 'Simulacra and Science Fiction'. In this essay, Baudrillard details the three orders of simulacra: the first, natural simulacra, are operatic, founded on images, and aim at the restoration of "the ideal institution of nature made in God's image"; the second order are both productive and operative, based on energy, and work toward "a continuous globalization and expansion [and] an indefinite liberation of energy"; the third order, the simulacra of simulation, are "founded on information [and] total operationality, hyperreality, [and the] aim of total control" (121)......
A Drifting Boat - An Anthology of Chinese Zen Poetry
Added by: huelgas | Karma: 1208.98 | Fiction literature | 19 December 2008
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Scholar translators of holy Sanskrit texts, ragged mountain wild-men, nuns and monks, retired civil servants, scholar-officials of the Emperor of China, residents of humble mountain monasteries, Buddhist prelates whose prestige and moral force often made them rivals in secular power to those officials themselves: poets of every century from the sixth to the twentieth are to be found here, clarifying in bright and vibrant poetic lines the transmission of a single ideal.
THE AGE OF EXTREMES is eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm's personal vision of the twentieth century. Remarkable in its scope, and breathtaking in its depth of knowledge, this immensely rewarding book reviews the uniquely destructive and creative nature of the troubled twentieth century and makes challenging predicitions for the future.
