Gilberto Freyre was arguably the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Latin America. He was active as a sociologist, a historian, a journalist, a deputy in the Brazilian Assembly, a novelist, poet and artist. He was a cultural critic, with a good deal to say about architecture, past and present, and a public intellectual, whose pronouncements on race, region and empire - not to mention sex - made him famous in some quarters and notorious in others. The Masters and the Slaves, his most famous work, went through forty editions and has been translated into nine languages,...
Gilberto Freyre was arguably the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Latin America. He was active as a sociologist, a historian, a journalis...
In the essays assembled in Clearing a Space, Chaudhuri draws on his own experiences to offer an acute exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to history. Often beginning with the personal, he inquires into the nature of the secular in India, into the history of such categories as the West, the foreign, the global and the exotic, and into the frequently torn and self-divided nature of modern Indian identity. With the same elegance and intelligence for which he has become known, Chaudhuri writes in these essays about Indian popular culture and high culture, travel...
In the essays assembled in Clearing a Space, Chaudhuri draws on his own experiences to offer an acute exploration of what it means to be a mode...
When educated men in the seventeenth century thought about the Earth on which they stood, they might ask themselves the following questions. When was the world created? Why? How? Out of what? Where did people come from? Do we all share the same origin? How were other living things generated? Can species vary at all? What are fossils? The common answers to these questions were rooted in the Bible. The world was made around the year 4000 BC by the direct command of God; people all come from Adam and Eve; species do not vary and fossils are inorganic in origin. Most people assumed that the...
When educated men in the seventeenth century thought about the Earth on which they stood, they might ask themselves the following questions. When w...
When educated men in the seventeenth century thought about the Earth on which they stood, they might ask themselves the following questions. When was the world created? Why? How? Out of what? Where did people come from? Do we all share the same origin? How were other living things generated? Can species vary at all? What are fossils? The common answers to these questions were rooted in the Bible. The world was made around the year 4000 BC by the direct command of God; people all come from Adam and Eve; species do not vary and fossils are inorganic in origin. Most people assumed that the...
When educated men in the seventeenth century thought about the Earth on which they stood, they might ask themselves the following questions. When was ...
Why read Montaigne today? Richard Scholar argues that Montaigne, whose essays were read by Shakespeare and remain a landmark of European culture, is above all a masterful exponent of the art of free-thinking. Montaigne invites his readers to follow the twists and turns of his mind, and challenges them to embark on an inner adventure of their own. Free-thinking is an art every bit as difficult to practice today as it was in sixteenth-century France, but it remains equally crucial to a fulfilled life and to a healthy body politic, and Montaigne offers his readers a master-class in that art.
Why read Montaigne today? Richard Scholar argues that Montaigne, whose essays were read by Shakespeare and remain a landmark of European culture, is a...
We know a great deal of what Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), Shakespeare s near-contemporary and fellow literary mastermind, thinks. We know, because he tells us on page after page of his Essais, which have marked literature and thought since the European Renaissance and remain to this day compelling reading. It might seem surprising, with this wealth of evidence at hand, that Montaigne could prove so elusive in his thinking. Yet elusive he proves, as volatile as he is voluble. What, we are left wondering, does all that thinking amount to? How is it to be understood? And what value...
We know a great deal of what Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), Shakespeare s near-contemporary and fellow literary mastermind, thinks. We know, because h...