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Sincerity and Authenticity (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
"Now and then," writes Lionel Triling "it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself." In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life--and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic..
Price: $16.32
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Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity
This pioneering, interdisciplinary work shows how rituals allow us to live in a perennially imperfect world. Drawing on a variety of cultural settings, the authors utilize psychoanalytic and anthropological perspectives to describe how ritual -- like play -- creates "as if" worlds, rooted in the imaginative capacity of the human mind to create a subjunctive universe. The ability to cross between imagined worlds is central to the human capacity for empathy. Ritual, they claim, defines the boundaries of these imagined worlds, including those of empathy and other realms of human creativity, such as music, architecture, and literature. The authors juxtapose this ritual orientation to a "sincere" search for unity and wholeness. The sincere world sees fragmentation and incoherence as signs of inauthenticity that must be overcome. Our modern world has accepted the sincere viewpoint at the expense of ritual,dismissing ritual as mere convention. In response, the authors show how the conventions of ritual allow us to live together in a broken world. Ritual is work, endless work. But it is among the most important things that we humans do..
Price: $15.43
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The Church of 80% Sincerity
The Church of 80% Sincerity shares the inspiring, poignant, wickedly funny, and sometimes heartbreaking story of motivational speaker David Roche's journey from shame to self-acceptance Born with a severe facial deformity, David's life has been anything but easy. Still, over time, he's learned to accept his gifts as well as his flaws, and to see that, sometimes, they are one and the same. In this compelling book, he shares his hard-earned lessons, providing an irresistible and unforgettable glimpse of his (and everyone's) inner beauty and offering profound encouragement in dealing with whatever life brings..
Price: $2.99
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The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Cultural Memory in the Present)
In times of intercultural tensions and conflicts, sincerity matters. Traditionally, sincerity concerns a performance of authenticity and truth, a performance that in intercultural situations is easily misunderstood. Sincerity plays a major role in law, the arts - literature, but especially the visual and performing arts - and religion. Sincerity enters the English language in the sixteenth century, when theatre emerged as the dominant idiom of secular representation, during a time of major religious changes. The present historical moment has much in common with that era; with its religious and cultural conflicts and major transformations in representational idioms and media. "The Rhetoric of Sincerity" is concerned with the ways in which the performance of sincerity is culturally specific and is enacted in different media and disciplines. The book focuses on the theatricality of sincerity, its bodily, linguistic, and social performances, and the success or failure of such performances..
Price: $24.95
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Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity
New York's urban neighborhoods are full of young would-be emcees who aspire to "keep it real" and restaurants like Sylvia's famous soul food eatery that offer a taste of "authentic" black culture In these and other venues, authenticity is considered the best way to distinguish the real from the phony, the genuine from the fake. But in Real Black, John L. Jackson Jr. proposes a new model for thinking about these issues— racial sincerity.
Jackson argues that authenticity caricatures identity as something imposed on people, imprisoning them within stereotypes: an African American high school student who excels in the classroom, for instance, might be dismissed as "acting white." On the other hand, sincerity, as Jackson defines it, imagines authenticity as an incomplete measuring stick, an analytical model that attempts to deny people agency in their search for identity. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in and around New York City, Jackson offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that directly and indirectly address how race is negotiated in today's world—including tales of book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost. Jackson records and retells their interconnected sagas, all the while attempting to reconcile these stories with his own crisis of identity and authority as an anthropologist terrified by fieldwork. Finding ethnographic significance where mere mortals see only bricks and mortar, his invented alter ego Anthroman takes to the streets, showing how race is defined and debated, imposed and confounded every single day. .
Price: $12.41
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The Idea of Cheng (Sincerity/Reality) in the History of Chinese Philosophy
Yanming An combines a mastery of detail with a complex and humane philosophical vision. He articulates the role of cheng as a central concept of Chinese thought, discusses the extension of cheng from moral psychology to philosophy of nature, metaphysics and philosophy of language and examines its contrasting roles in explaining change and transformation. In doing so, he places and justifies the varying Western translations of cheng in terms of sincerity, integrity, reality and truth. He also assesses the importance of cheng in Chinese intellectual history and in current debates about using the resources of Chinese intellectual history in shaping modern Chinese society. His illuminating discussion is accomplished with great clarity and sophistication, and his method and conclusions will have impact as a paradigm of scholarly method and philosophical insight. Nicholas Bunnin, Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Oxford..
Price: $30.00
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Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels: The Code of Sincerity in the Public Sphere
In Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels, Pam Morris traces a dramatic transformation of British public consciousness that occurred between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867. This brief period saw a shift from a naturalized acceptance of social hierarchy to a general imagining of a modern mass culture. Central to this collective revisioning of social relations was the pressure to restyle political leadership in terms of popular legitimacy, to develop a more inclusive mode of discourse within an increasingly heterogeneous public sphere and to find new ways of inscribing social distinctions and exclusions. Morris argues that in the transformed public sphere of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the urbane code of civility collapsed under the strain of the conflicting interests that constitute mass society. It was replaced by a "code of sincerity," often manipulative and always ideological in that its inclusiveness was based upon a formally egalitarian assumption of mutual interiorities. The irresistible movement toward mass politics shifted the location of power into the public domain. Increasingly, national leaders sought to gain legitimacy by projecting a performance of charismatic "sincerity" as a flattering and insinuating mode of address to mass audiences. Yet, by the latter decades of the century, while the code of sincerity continued to dominate popular and political culture, traditional political and intellectual elites were reinscribing social distinctions and exclusions. They did so both culturally—by articulating sensibility as skepticism, irony, and aestheticism—and scientifically—by introducing evolutionist notions of sensibility and attaching these to a rigorous disciplinary code of bodily visuality. Through an intensive, intertextual reading of six key novels (Bronte's Shirley, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Dickens's Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, Gaskell's North and South, and Eliot's Romola) and an array of Victorian periodicals and political essays, Morris analyzes just how actively novelists engaged in these social transformations. Drawing on a wide range of literary, cultural, and historical thinkers—Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Benedict Anderson, Mary Poovey, and Charles Tilly—Morris makes an original and highly sophisticated contribution to our understanding of the complex and always contested processes of imagining social inclusiveness..
Price: $29.36
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All the Sincerity in Hollywood: Selections from the Writings of Fred Allen
Fred Allen was the king of humor during radio's Golden Age. As a satirist and wordsmith, his telling phrases and takes on the foibles of daily life, as well as the events of his time, were as quotable then as they are now. Allen transformed popular comedy by lampooning news events, commercials, and big business. He set a direction followed by a number of entertainers, including Bob & Ray, David Frost, Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Garrison Keillor, Chevy Chase, Dennis Miller, and even Saturday Night Live. In place of situation comedies, slapstick, stock characters, or standard joke forms, Allen offered a thinking person's humor, delivered every week to 30 million Americans in his 17-year-long radio show (1932-1949). All the Sincerity in Hollywood showcases many of Fred Allen's previously published and unpublished letters, essays, radio scripts, and quips to create the best refresher course in laughs that survive the test of time..
Price: $14.88
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Fangs Of Malice: Hypocrisy, Sincerity, and Acting (Studies Theatre Hist & Culture)
The idea that actors were hypocrites and fakes and therefore dangerous to society was widespread in the 17th and 18th centuries This work examines the equation between the vice of hypocrisy and the craft of acting, as it appears in anti-theatrical tracts, in popular and high culture, and especially in plays of the period. Rousseau and others argue that actors pose a threat to society; yet dissembling seems also to be an inevitable consequence of human social intercourse. The "anti-theatrical prejudice" offers a perspective on the high value that modern western culture places on sincerity, on being true to one's own self. The book is structured in acts and scenes, each based on a particular slander against actors. A prologue introduces his main issues. Act One deals with the proposition "They Dress Up": foppish slavery to fashion, cross-dressing, and dressing as clergy. Act Two treats the proposition "They Lie" by focusing on social dissembling and the phenomenon of the self-deceiving hypocrite and on the public, princely hypocrite. Act Three, "They Drink", examines a wide range of antisocial behaviour ascribed to actors, such as drinking, gambling, and whoring. An epilogue ties the ancient ideas of possession and the panic that actors inspire to contemporary anxieties about representation not only in theatre but also in visual and literary arts..
Price: $34.00
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Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading
Sincerity -- the claim that the voice, figure, and experience of a first-person speaker is that of the author -- has dominated both the reading and the writing of Anglo-American poetry since the romantic era. Most critical studies have upheld an opposition between sincerity and the literary marketplace, contributing to the widespread understanding of the lyric poem as a moral refuge from the taint of commercial culture. Guided by the question of why we expect poetry to be sincere, Susan Rosenbaum reveals in Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading that, in fact, sincerity in the modern lyric was in many ways a product of commercial culture. As she demonstrates, poets who made a living from their writing both sold the moral promise that their lyrics were sincere and commented on this conflict in their work. Juxtaposing the poetry of Wordsworth and Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Smith and Sylvia Plath, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Elizabeth Bishop, Rosenbaum shows how on the one hand, through textual claims to sincerity poets addressed moral anxieties about the authenticity, autonomy, and transparency of literature written in and for a market. On the other hand, by performing their "private" lives and feelings in public, she argues, poets marketed the self, cultivated celebrity, and advanced professional careers. Not only a moral practice, professing sincerity was also good business. The author focuses on the history of this conflict in both British romantic and American post-1945 poetry. Professing Sincerity will appeal to students and scholars of Anglo-American lyric poetry, of the history of authorship, and of gender studies and commercial culture..
Price: $27.65
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