Böcker utgivna av Northwestern University Press

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsNote on TranslationsIntroduction1. Origins2. Augustine3. The Scriptorium of the Heart4. Lovers5. Saints6. Everyman7. Picturing the Metaphor8. After Gutenberg9. Codex or Computer?List of AbbreviationsNotesWorks CitedIndex

Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World: Micro-Estimation represents the second stage of an ongoing research project studying the relationship between social security and labor supply. In the first volume, Jonathan Gruber and David A. Wise revealed enormous disincentives to continued work at older ages in developed countries. Provisions in many social security programs were shown to encourage retirement by reducing total compensation for work, thereby inducing older employees to leave the labor force early, magnifying the financial burden caused by population aging. At a certain age there simply is little financial benefit to continued work in many countries. In this volume, Jonathan Gruber and David A. Wise turn to a country-by-country analysis of retirement behavior based on micro-data. The result of research compiled by teams in twelve countries, the papers in this volume show a strong relationship between levels of social security incentives and retirement behavior in each country. Further, the estimates show that the effect is strikingly uniform in countries with very different cultural histories, labor market institutions, and other social characteristics. The key advantage of the micro-estimation approach of this volume is that in each country the effects on retirement of changes in social security provisions can be predicted. To demonstrate the effects of such changes, each of the papers here includes simulations of the effects of two illustrative reforms. One illustrative reform delays the benefit eligibility ages in each of the countries. A second illustrative reform assumes common provisions in each of the countries-reducing retirement incentives in some countries and increasing incentives in others. Utilizing the best methods, the conclusions to be drawn from Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World: Micro-Estimation will provide economists with the freshest and most provoking research yet in the ongoing debate regarding social security.

Studies in the Economics of Aging is the fourth book in a series from the National Bureau of Economic Research that addresses economic issues of aging and retirement. Building on the research in The Economics of Aging (1989), Issues in the Economics of Aging (1990), and Topics in the Economics of Aging (1992), this volume examines issues related to population aging and the health and well-being of the elderly. Chapters cover population aging and government spending, life expectancy and health, saving for retirement and the role of 401(k) plans, demographic transition and housing values, aging in Germany and Taiwan, and the utilization of nursing homes and other long-term care. Economists, policymakers, and professionals in gerontology will find this book a useful reference for understanding the demographic and economic trends that affect the elderly.

The contributors to this volume analyze the growth experiences of Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan in light of the recently developed endogenous growth theory to provide an understanding of the economic boom in East Asia. The theory explored in this volume attributes the phenomenal economic success of these countries to, among other factors, the role of an outward orientation - a focus on exporting rather than on protecting home markets. In addition, the importance of exchange rate behavior, of the supportive role of government policy, and of the accumulation and promotion of physical and human capital are explored in detail. This collection also makes significant contributions to recent work examining the extent to which growth in each country became self-sustaining once it began. This fourth volume in the NBER-East Asia Seminar on Economics series demonstrates the relevance of endogenous growth theory for studying this important region and will be invaluable for economists and for those interested in East Asian affairs.

During the first three decades following the Second World War, an increasingly open international trading system contributed to unprecedented economic growth throughout the world. But in recent years, that openness has been threatened by increased protectionism, regional trading arrangements - Europe 1992 and the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement - and setbacks in negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. In Trade and Protectionism, American and East Asian scholars consider the dangers of this trend for East Asian countries in particular and the world economy in general. The first two papers in the volume look at the context in which East Asian trading relations with the United States take place. The papers focus on the role of GATT, the importance of an open multilateral trading system, and the current threats to it. An analysis of the United States' regional trading arrangements is also included. The second set of papers addresses sensitive sectoral issues that have led to frictions in Japanese-American semiconductor trade and agricultural protection among Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong. In the third group of studies, the authors examine U.S.-Japanese trade issues, the impact of U.S.-administered protection on Korean exports, and the openness of the Japanese market to exports from other Asian countries. Next, aspects of international economic relations among Asian countries are considered. Two studies explore foreign direct investment relations between Japan and other Asian countries, and the relationship between Japanese foreign direct investment and trade flows among Asian countries. The final five papers analyze how political-economic interaction affects levels ofprotection, focusing on the political economy of protection in Korea and Taiwan. This is the second volume in the series to come from the National Bureau of Economic Research-East Asia Seminar on Economics. The first volume, The Political Economy of Tax Reform, addresses tax reform in the global economy.

In this radical critique of contemporary social theory, Eugene Halton argues that both modernism and postmodernism are damaged philosophies whose acceptance of the myths of the mind/body dichotomy make them incapable of solving our social dilemmas. Claiming that human beings should be understood as far more than simply a form of knowledge, social construction, or contingent difference, Halton argues that contemporary thought has lost touch with the spontaneous passions - or enchantment - of life. Exploring neglected works in twentieth-century social thought and philosophy - particularly the writings of Lewis Mumford and Charles Peirce - as well as the work of contemporary writers such as Vaclav Havel, Maya Angelou, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, and Victor Turner, Halton argues that reason is dependent upon nonrational forces - including sentiment, instinct, conjecture, imagination, and experience. We must, he argues, frame our questions in a way which encompasses both enchantment and critical reason, and he offers an outline here for doing so. A passionate plea for a fundamental reexamination of the entrenched assumptions of the modern era, this book deals with issues of vital concern to modern societies and should be read by scholars across disciplines.

Richard A. Etlin demonstrates how the conceptual basis of the modern house and the physical layout of the modern city emerged from debates among theoretically innovative French architects of the eighteenth century. Examining a broad range of topics from architecture and urbanism to gardening and funerary monuments, he reconsiders eighteenth-century French architecture with regard to the ways in which it was informed by symbolic space. This book provides an accessible introduction to a century of architecture that transformed the classical forms of the Renaissance and Baroque periods into building types still familiar today.

Ever since William Dean Howells declared his "realism war" in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of "realism" and "naturalism" as the great development in American post-Civil War fiction. Yet there are many problems with this generalization. It is virtually impossible, for example, to extract from the novels and manifestoes of American writers of this period any consistent definitions of realism or naturalism as modes of literary representation. Rather than seek common traits in widely divergent "realist" and "naturalist" literary works, Michael Davitt Bell focuses here on the role that these terms played in the social and literary discourse of the 1880s and 1890s. Bell argues that in America, "realism" and "naturalism" never achieved the sort of theoretical rigor that they did in European literary debate. Instead, the function of these ideas in America was less aesthetic than ideological, promoting as "reality" a version of social normalcy based on radically anti-"literary" and heavily gendered assumptions. What effects, Bell asks, did ideas about realism and naturalism have on writers who embraced and resisted them? To answer this question, he devotes separate chapters to the work of Howells and Frank Norris (the principal American advocates of realism and naturalism in the 1880s and 1890s), Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Bell reveals that a chief function of claiming to be a realist or a naturalist was to provide assurance that one was a "real" man rather than an "effeminate" artist. Since the 1880s, Bell asserts, all serious American fiction writers have had to contend with this problematic conception of literaryrealism. The true story of the transformation of American fiction after the Civil War is the history of this contention - a history of individual accommodations, evasions, holding actions, and occasional triumphs.

In this engaging and provocative book, S. Craig Watkins examines two of the most important developments in the recent history of black cinema -- the ascendancy of Spike Lee and the proliferation of "ghettocentric films" like Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society. Representing explores a distinct contradiction in American society: at the same time that black youth have become the targets of a fierce racial backlash against crime, drugs, affirmative action, and rap music, their popular expressive cultures have become highly visible and commercially viable.Further, Watkins considers the imprint of black youth on the landscape of black filmmaking. He asks: after decades of neglect, why did the film industry suddenly develop a heightened interest in black cinema? Watkins shows how the black film wave was driven by several factors -- the transformation of the popular film industry; a reinvigorated independent filmmaking niche; the cross-marketing of music, video, and film; a burgeoning hip hop consumer culture; and historically specific struggles over the meanings and representations of "blackness" in American culture. He contends that despite social and economic marginalization, black youth have gained unprecedented access to the popular media and continue to influence not only black popular culture but the broader U.S. popular culture scene as well.Representing offers a fascinating look at commercial culture and shows how and why it has become a crucial site for black American youth as they struggle to make their everyday lives more empowering, rewarding, and pleasurable in the face of formidable disadvantages.

Bertrand Russell was fond of recounting the following story about Wittgenstein's student days at Cambridge: "He used to come to my rooms at midnight and, for hours, he would walk backwards and forwards like a caged tiger. ...On one such evening, after an hour or two of dead silence, I said to him, 'Wittgenstein, are you thinking about logic or about your sins?' 'Both, ' he said, and then reverted to silence". This is the first study to argue that Wittgenstein's philosophical writings are religious just as they stand. Although Wittgenstein often framed his writings on logic and philosophy in ethical and religious terms, the writings rarely discuss ethics and religion directly. This has led many scholars to dismiss Wittgenstein's remarks on such matters as isolated and eccentric personal views, while other scholars have attempted to reconstruct a plausible religious position from his cryptic religious comments and a selective use of his philosophy. Philip R. Shields shows that a matrix of ethical and religious concerns informs even the most technical writings on logic and language, and that, for Wittgenstein, the need to establish clear limitations is simultaneously a logical and an ethical demand. Rather than merely saying specific things about theology and religion, major texts from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations express their fundamentally religious nature by showing that there are powers which bear down upon and sustain us. These powers manifest themselves in the structures that make significant use of language possible. Shields finds a religious view of the world at the very heart of Wittgenstein's philosophy. This perspective illuminates the distinctiveness andpeculiarity of Wittgenstein's philosophy and reveals more continuity between the "early" and the "later" thought than is usually supposed.

Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the spectre of an intense nineteenth-century debate about the very nature -- and ownership -- of childhood. In the engagingly written Ventures into Childland, U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up", Knoepflmacher probes deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and between the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales".As Knoepflmacher shows, male and female constructions of childhood in these fairy tales differed radically. Male writers -- John Ruskin, William Makepeace Thackeray, George MacDonald, and Lewis Carroll -- often displayed an uneasy relation to adult gender roles. By privileging a special girl reader, they attempted to blur sexual differences and sentimentalize and arrested childhood. Female authors, on the other hand -- Jean Ingelow, Christina Rossetti, and Juliana Ewing -- tried to wrest fairy tales away from the male authors who had appropriated the genre. These women's tales relate fables of growth that are more grounded in actuality than the men's, and that more often allow their girl characters to mature.These disputes are poignant at a time when our inherited notion of childhood as a precious preserve seems seriously threatened. Ventures into Childland will delight and instruct all readers of children's classics, and will be essential reading for students of Victorian culture and gender studies.