Although the celebrations surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) highlighted some remarkable achievements in the human rights movement, the international community must remain cognizant of a whole new array of unprecedented challenges. These challenges relate to the relevance of the conceptual framework within which the human rights movement has been operating as well as to the need for effective strategies of promotion and protection.

'Puccini the Thinker' traces Puccini's development as an opera composer and thinker. The subject is the composer's ideas as they appear in his operas. The book, written for the operagoer and the admirer of Puccini's operas in addition to the musicologist, has chapters on all of Puccini's operas and divides them into three general categories: myth and vision; God, religion, and the Roman Catholic Church; and economics, politics, and society. Within these three subdivisions, this study explores the growth of Puccini's thought and dramatic skill.
In this book John DiGaetani analyzes the...

This study of the vampire in literature from the early nineteenth century to the present analyzes its metaphorical characteristics. The vampire is the perfect figure of disorder and entropy, and its dominance as a literary figure/monster, an instigator of chaos of all kinds, makes it worthy of study for readers interested in an emerging theory of literary disorder as well as horror literature. Entropy, the most intriguing root metaphor of our time, and the vampire, figure of decadence, degeneration, and perverse physics, illuminate each other as Michael J. Dennison examines such famous works...

Twenty-first century engineering education must meet radically revised national accreditation standards, known colloquially as EC2000. This book shows paths forward for all faculty involved in the -liberal education- of engineering undergraduates. Beginning with an exhortation for liberal education, it includes the EC2000 criteria and its historical origin, as well as example institutional and individual responses to these criteria which include topics in communication, ethics and professional responsibility, contemporary issues, art and aesthetics, and the integration of engineering and the...

Destroying the Other's Collective Memory addresses education as the violence that constitutes the passions, conceptual apparatuses, consciousnesses, possibilities, limitations, and aims of subjects and collectives. The mutual quests for control, productivization, and destruction of the Israeli and Palestinian passions, concepts, identities, and potentials are reconstructed. This reconstruction serves as a test case for counter-education, addressing the challenges of the era of meaninglessness. Referring in detail to the Israeli/Palestinian context, it confronts the wrecking of the...

By embracing a rapidly changing digital world, the so-called millennial adolescent is proving quite adept at breaking down age-old distinctions among disciplines, between high- and low-brow media culture, and within print and digitized text types. Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World explores the significance of digital technologies and media in youth s negotiated approaches to making meaning within a broad array of self-defined literacy practices. Organized around a series of case studies, this book blends theories of an attention economy, generational differences,...

This book identifies a recurrent structural pattern in Tennessee Williams plays that lends organic integrity to their evocations of memory, myth, and symbol. Judith J. Thompson examines the evolution of a pattern of mythic recollection and existential reenactment in seventeen Williams plays from its most successful realization in The Glass Menagerie through The Night of the Iguana to its parody in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur and explores the significance of the pattern to Williams larger-than-life-size characters, his nostalgic ambience, and his tragicomic vision. By...

In 1937 the Supreme Court revolutionized American constitutionalism, sharply restricting the states powers and expanding those of the national government. In following years the civil rights movement caused further change, challenging American life with its demands for equal rights under the Constitution and protection by the federal government. The Vietnam War expanded and then contracted presidential power. In 2001, attacks organized by followers of Osama bin Laden on American cities revived presidential power, leading to new challenges to America s constitutional heritage. This volume...

In this book, Dane S. Claussen argues that the news media have fed vocationalism and self-doubt in higher education, and anti-intellectualism throughout American culture. Analyzing articles in popular national magazines since the G.I. Bill of 1944, Claussen finds that media have overwhelmingly portrayed college as a time and place for students to play sports, date and marry, drink and take drugs, protest, join fraternities and sororities, go on vacations, avoid the draft, escape their parents, and, perhaps most of all, network and find jobs in short, do almost anything except research, study,...

This volume, a general history of the church in the Middle Ages, pays close attention to the spiritual, intellectual, and institutional aspects of medieval Christianity. From its beginnings, the church has existed in a state of tension between two forces: the spirit of order and the spirit of prophecy. The spirit of order attempts to reform humanity and human institutions; the spirit of prophecy attempts to transform them into the world of God. This tension created a balance within the church that kept it from forgetting the nature of basic religious experience while continuing to remain...