David Weir

"Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) was released at a critical moment in cinema history, just after the advent of synchronized sound technology and just before the full implementation of the production code. By the time of its release, Lubitsch had already directed more than 50 films, but it was unlike anything he had done before. Aside from being his first non-musical talking picture, the film introduced a level of sophistication and visual subtlety that established the benchmark for classic Hollywood cinema for years to come. In his study of the film, David Weir explores its significance within Lubitsch's career, but also its larger cultural significance within the history of cinema, and the social context of its release during the Great Depression. Paying careful attention to the film itself, Weir discusses its source material, its mise-en-scn̈e and art deco production design, and its inventive use of post-synchronized sound. Drawing on original archival research, Weir traces Trouble in Paradise 's reception history, including its critical reception, and the effect of the Motion Picture Production Code, which led to the film being denied approval for re-release in 1935."--

Trouble in Paradise

Argues that the myths and ideals of William Blake's poetry were heavily influenced by the Oriental Renaissance—the British discovery of Hindu literature. Examining William Blake’s poetry in relation to the mythographic tradition of the eighteenth century and emphasizing the British discovery of Hindu literature, David Weir argues that Blake’s mythic system springs from the same rich historical context that produced the Oriental Renaissance. That context includes republican politics and dissenting theology—two interrelated developments that help elucidate many of the obscurities of Blake’s poetry and explain much of its intellectual energy. Weir shows how Blake’s poetic career underwent a profound development as a result of his exposure to Hindu mythology. By combining mythographic insight with republican politics and Protestant dissent, Blake devised a poetic system that opposed the powers of Church and King. David Weir is Associate Professor on the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He is the author of Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism; James Joyce and the Art of Mediation; and Decadence and the Making of Modernism.

William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance

Brahma in the West

David Weir was born without the use of his legs, and not only learned from an early age to cope with his disability, but defied his limitations to become a great wheelchair racer and national hero. Here he sheds light on his journey from frustrated schoolboy to Paralympic athlete and champion, and reveals how instrumental the 2012 Paralympics were in transforming attitudes towards disability - not only in Britain but around the world. Weirwolf is the extraordinary inside story of the man who won a total of six gold medals at the 2008 and 2012 Paralympic Games, and who is six-time winner of the London Marathon. It is an inspirational tale of the fight against discrimination and the desire to change the face of sport.

My Story

Weirwolf

How the image of the Orient has changed in American culture over the course of three centuries

Imagining the East from the Colonial Era Through the Twentieth Century

American Orient

The son of Miguel Almereyda, an anarchist activist who died in prison, Jean Vigo kept faith with the politics of his father through his art. One of the most influential filmmakers in cinema history, Vigo gave aesthetic expression to anarchist ideology in four films: the city symphony À propos de Nice (1930), the sports documentary Taris ou la natation (1931), the medium-length Zéro de conduite (1933), and the feature-length L'Atalante (1934), currently ranked by the British Film Institute as the twelfth greatest film of all time. Although his career was cut short by tuberculosis at the age of 29, Jean Vigo continues to be one of the most commanding figures in the history of cinema. In this book, David Weir examines Vigo's cinematic career in both the political and the cultural context of the interwar period in European history, taking stock of the ideological upheavals of the 1930s that plunged the continent into the horrors of fascism and war. Weir also explores Vigo's relationship to other filmmakers of the period, such as Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, and Marcel Carné--all of whom, like Vigo, range across the leftist spectrum of the interwar years. In the end, Weir argues that, whereas L'Atalante and the other films have been mostly restored to something like their original condition, more work needs to be done to restore the original ideological meaning of those films.

Jean Vigo and the Anarchist Eye

Jane Desmarais

The Oxford Handbook of Decadence

In 1929, T. S. Eliot claimed that "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third." Ulysses Explained argues that James Joyce may now be numbered along with Dante and Shakespeare among the giants of Western literature whose stature and status as an artist of the modern world has been confirmed by tradition. But there is another who walks beside them, closer to Dante and Joyce, certainly, though he occasionally brushes up against Shakespeare as well: the ancient poet Homer. These three figures command attention in any reading of James Joyce's Ulysses: Homer because he provides the narrative, Shakespeare because he supplies the plot, and Dante because he inspires the structure. This book shows how Joyce adapts classical, medieval, and renaissance traditions in Ulysses to advance his own modernist agenda of fragmented narrative, experimental structure, and psychosexual complexity.

How Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare Inform Joyce's Modernist Vision

Ulysses Explained

David Weir's career is a tale of triumph on the pitch but also of victory over the assumption all top-level footballers are finished in their mid-30s. Weir, who turned 41 in May 2011, is the oldest outfield player to represent Rangers since 1945, passing the mark set by their famous full-back, Jock 'Tiger' Shaw. In this revealing autobiography, Weir gives an insight into the high of playing in the 1998 World Cup finals for his country to the low of the chaotic 2-2 draw in the Faroes four years later which led to his decision to stop playing for Scotland. For the first time, he gives his side of the story. How he felt Berti Vogts, Scotland's boss, used him as a scapegoat. Many felt Weir's international career would end on that sour note and that his club career was approaching its conclusion, too. He was 32 and David Moyes, his manager at Everton, made no secret he was on the lookout for new, younger defenders. Like thousands of footballers before him, Weir could just have accepted his time was up. He had a young family and a father who was suffering from Alzheimer's to help care for and self-doubt gnawed at him. Could he cut it any more? Instead, he moved to Rangers in January 2007, making his debut for his childhood favourites at a mere 36 years and 236 days and has helped them to eight trophies since and a European final in 2008. Weir's is a story of battling against the odds to keep playing at the top level and proving he could, despite the doubts of others and indeed himself.

Extra Time - My Autobiography

Daniel Clarke

Vaughan Ellis

Holly Patrick-Thomson

Researching Craft Beer offers insights for aspiring and present owners of breweries, those looking to open a craft beer bar as well as other beer researchers. The volume offers a prescient assessment of historic, present, and likely future developments within the sector.

Understanding Production, Community and Culture in an Evolving Sector

Researching Craft Beer

Paul Avrich Collection (Library of Congress)

Yet as other late nineteenth-century writers and artists began to sympathize with anarchism, the prospect of a common culture became increasingly remote. In Weir's view, the affinity for anarchism that developed among members of the artistic avant-garde lies behind much of fin de siecle culture. Indeed, the emergence of modernism itself can be understood as the aesthetic realization of anarchist politics.

The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism

Anarchy & Culture

Gerald Mars

First published in 2000, Risk Management is a two volume set, comprised of the most significant and influential articles by the leading authorities in the studies of risk management. The volumes includes a full-length introduction from the editor, an internationally recognized expert, and provides an authoritative guide to the selection of essays chosen, and to the wider field itself. The collections of essays are both international and interdisciplinary in scope and provide an entry point for investigating the myriad of study within the discipline.

Risk Management, 2 Volume Set

Julie Wolfram Cox

Tony G. LeTrent-Jones

Maxim Voronov

This is an excellent text. It covers an impressive range of salient topics. Moreover, it provides a nuanced, considered and balanced treatment of both conceptual and practical aspects of critical management studies. Cliff Oswick, Queen Mary, University of London, UK This book is the first of its kind to reflect on what it means to actually perform critical management studies (CMS): how consultants, researchers, teachers and managers negotiate the tensions they experience in their everyday practice. Critical management studies seeks to expose the hidden workings of power, as well as to identify and reform the mundane and frequently unnoticed practices that privilege some groups and individuals at the expense of others, creating injustices in organizations and in the society at large. The authors show how CMS draws on a variety of approaches to translate its insights into practice. Combining rich theoretical and empirical contributions with reflections on CMS practice in various forms, this unique book is essential reading for critical researchers, educators and graduate students in business and management fields.

Negotiating Tensions Between Theory and Practice

Critical Management Studies at Work

Decadence and Literature explains how the concept of decadence developed since Roman times into a major cultural trope with broad explanatory power. No longer just a term of opprobrium for mannered art or immoral behaviour, decadence today describes complex cultural and social responses to modernity in all its forms. From the Roman emperor's indulgence in luxurious excess as both personal vice and political control, to the Enlightenment libertine's rational pursuit of hedonism, to the nineteenth-century dandy's simultaneous delight and distaste with modern urban life, decadence has emerged as a way of taking cultural stock of major social changes. These changes include the role of women in forms of artistic expression and social participation formerly reserved for men, as well as the increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ relationships, a development with a direct relationship to decadence. Today, decadence seems more important than ever to an informed understanding of contemporary anxieties and uncertainties.

Decadence and Literature

The cultural phenomenon known as "decadence" has often been viewed as an ephemeral artistic vogue that fluorished briefly in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. This study makes the case for decadence as a literary movement in its own right, based on a set of aesthetic principles that formed a transitional link between romanticism and modernism. Understood in this developmental context, decadence represents the aesthetic substratum of a wide range of fin-de-siecle literary schools, including naturalism, realism, Parnassianism, aestheticism, and symbolism. As an impulse toward modernism, it prefigures the thematic, structural, and stylistic concerns of later literature. David Weir demonstrates his thesis by analyzing a number of French, English, Italian, and American novels, each associated with some specific decadent literary tendency. The book concludes by arguing that the decadent sensibility persists in popular culture and contemporary theory, with multiculturalism and postmodernism representing its most current manifestations.

Decadence and the Making of Modernism

The history of decadent culture runs from ancient Rome to nineteenth-century Paris, Victorian London, fin de siecle Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and beyond. The decline of Rome provides the pattern for both aesthetic and social decadence, a pattern that artists and writers in the nineteenth century imitated, emulated, parodied, and otherwise manipulated for aesthetic gain. What begins as the moral condemnation of modernity in mid-nineteenth century France on the part of decadent authors such as Charles Baudelaire ends up as the perverse celebration of the pessimism that accompanies imperial decline. This delight in decline informs the rich canon of decadence that runs from Joris-Karl Huysmans's A Rebours to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aubrey Beardsley's drawings, Gustav Klimt's paintings, and numerous other works. In this Very Short Introduction, David Weir explores the conflicting attitudes towards modernity present in decadent culture by examining the difference between aesthetic decadence--the excess of artifice--and social decadence, which involves excess in a variety of forms, whether perversely pleasurable or gratuitously cruel. Such contrariness between aesthetic and social decadence led some of its practitioners to substitute art for life and to stress the importance of taste over morality, a maneuver with far-reaching consequences, especially as decadence enters the realm of popular culture today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Decadence: a Very Short Introduction

When it comes to James Joyce's landmark work, Ulysses , the influence of three literary giants, Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante, cannot be overlooked. Examining Joyce in terms of Homeric narrative, Dantesque structure, and Shakespearean plot, Weir rediscovers Joyce's novel through the lens of his renowned predecessors.

David Weir

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