Jazzy D's Soul Notes

Sandpiper Books have some new remaindered philosophy books arrived recently. Trouble is, there are too many of them. I would like to get all but on a strict budget curtails me to do that.

However, I did succumb to buying three of them, well actually two as one is about the poet Shelley by leftie comrade Paul Foot. As one reviewer noted -

(frommAmazon's website)This incisive analysis of Shelley's political work was a truly inspirational read! The driving force is the idea that Shelley has been misinterpreted since his work was first published, by conservative and reactionary scholars who refuted Shelley's strong, often radical political messages - atheism, feminism, republicanism (each examined in detail) - because they offended, or opposed the idea of Shelley as the "ineffectual angel" of Romantic lyricism. It presents a far more exciting aspect of Shelley's poetry, who was more philosopher than perhaps all of his popular contemporaries.

Having just started A Level English Literature, i had a limited experience of literary criticism aside from the recommended Leavis (who is held to account by Foot for his savage attack on Shelley in his "Revaluation") However, this book opened my mind to different viewpoints in literary criticism, and how a critic's political viewpoints can seriously skew their views of writer's works.

The analysis is backed up with plenty of relevant historical context (ie. reactions to the French Revolution), and is written in an extremely readable style - so i would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in Shelley, be they a student, or a poetry fan. "


The other two books are, once again, another Slavoj Zizek book, “Live Theory” and  “Pierre Bourdieu, Agent Provocateur” by Michael Grenfell (Continuum).



The French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu is now recognized as a leading intellectual of the late twentieth-century, and one whose ideas are very much relevant for the twenty-first. This comprehensive account of Bourdieu's life and work locates both in their social and political context, thereby tracing the origins of his ideas and theories. It explains and explores just what Bourdieu argued for and why. It also illustrates the social, political and philosophical strands that run through his work. Michael Grenfell's broad scope takes in Bourdieu's response to The Algerian Crisis, his ideas for the reform of state education, and his views on aesthetics and the mass media. Detailed attention is also paid to Bourdieu's overtly political stance, including his critique of capitalism and his opposition to recent Western military action in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. This book offers a reading of Bourdieu's work as a coherent and valuable response to those key social and political issues, events and trends that combined to shape contemporary society. The implications and consequences of his work are laid out and assessed, along with suggestions for where his ideas might be taken from here.




Both these are available from Sandpiper at half price or less amongst other titles concerning the philosophies of Derrida, Baudrillard and Adorno. These are, along with Lacan, Marx, Engels and Hegel,  the type of intellectual stimulation I crave after. I would rather read a good book than read a trashy magazine seeping out dumbed down celebrity confection such as BB or any of the other tat that television and magazines constantly seem to salivate, and as in the words of Roland Barthes  and harking back to the previous blog, create their own vapid modern mythologies.