Free Download Contemporary Logistics in China: 20 Years of Progress and Achievement by Xiang Li, Xiaofan Wu, Binglian Liu, Ling Wang, Jun Liu
English | PDF EPUB (True) | 2024 | 279 Pages | ISBN : 9819962471 | 7.8 MB
As with the previous volumes, this book aims to present a timely portrait of the rapid growth of China's logistics market and the status quo of its logistics industry. It provides an in-depth analysis of critical issues involved in the ongoing dynamic and multi-faceted development and serves as a valuable reference resource for interested readers in the academic and professional fields.

Free Download Aesthetics of Improvisation (Contemporary Perspectives in European Philosophy)
by Alessandro Bertinetto, Robert T. Valgenti
English | 2022 | ISBN: 3770567072 | 180 Pages | True PDF | 9.1 MB

Free Download Tim Lihoreau, "Modern Phobias: A Litany of Contemporary Fears"
English | 2006 | ISBN: 0747583986 | EPUB | pages: 194 | 3.0 mb
Drawing from the hugely popular weekly Daily Telegraph column, the ultimate book of modern phobias! Did you leave work yesterday and have a stab of fear that you€™d forgotten to press save before switching off your computer? Did you then go to the pub, get very drunk, then wake this morning unable to remember what awful things you might have said or done? You€™re not paranoid (most of the time) but suffering from modern phobias. Such as antefamaphobia€"the fear that people were talking about you, but stopped just before you entered the room. Or agmenophobia€"the fear that the line you join will end up being slower than the other one. The Book of Phobias will confirm every sneaking suspicion you have of a suffering from a weird and wonderful phobia, and highlight some you never knew you had!

Free Download Bibek Chand, "Reframing the Buffer State in Contemporary International Relations "
English | ISBN: 1032014172 | 2023 | 164 pages | PDF | 9 MB
This book explores buffer states' agency beyond being highly interactive spaces for the competing strategic and security interests of larger powers. Analyzing 21 political events, the author offers a new conceptual framework for the buffer state, which emphasizes strategic utility and agency. Applying this to the case study of Nepal as a buffer state between India and China, he offers a systematic analysis of Sino-Indian interests in the wider region, and Nepal's interactions with and reactions to them, and argues that the buffer state in contemporary international relations is characterized by intense competitive overtures from its contending neighboring states. However, the buffer state is not just a spectator but an active participant that consistently assesses and reassesses its geopolitical position in between much larger competing powers. This reading offers a new understanding of the buffer state as a highly dynamic political space wherein the levels of influence and strategies of bigger powers can be examined.

Free Download Daniel Cojocaru, "Violence and Dystopia: Mimesis and Sacrifice in Contemporary Western Dystopian Narratives "
English | ISBN: 1443876135 | 2015 | 335 pages | PDF | 1348 KB
Violence and Dystopia is a critical examination of imitative desire, scapegoating and sacrifice in selected contemporary Western dystopian narratives through the lens of René Girard s mimetic theory. The first chapter offers an overview of the history of Western utopia/dystopia with a special emphasis on the problem of conflictive mimesis and scapegoating violence, and a critical introduction to Girard's theory. The second chapter is devoted to J.G. Ballard's seminal novel Crash (1973), Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) and Rant (2007), and Brad Anderson's film The Machinist (2004). It is argued that the car crash functions as a metaphor for conflictive mimetic desire and leads to a quasi-sacrificial crisis as defined by Girard for archaic religion. The third chapter focuses on the psychogeographical writings of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. Walking the streets of London the pedestrian represents the excluded underside of the world of Ballardian speed. The walking subject is portrayed in terms of the expelled victim of Girardian theory. The fourth chapter considers violent crowds as portrayed by Ballard's late fiction, the writings of Stewart Home, and David Peace's GB84 (2004). In accordance with Girard's hypothesis, the discussed narratives reveal the failure of scapegoat expulsion to restore peace to the potentially self-destructive violent crowds. The fifth chapter examines the post-apocalyptic environments resulting from failed scapegoat expulsion and mimetic conflict out of control, as portrayed in Sinclair's Radon Daughters (1994), Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003), and Will Self's The Book of Dave (2006).

Free Download Karen J. Head, "Teaching as a Human Experience: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems "
English | ISBN: 1443876550 | 2015 | 210 pages | PDF | 464 KB
The poems in this collection deal with the real life-worlds of professors, instructors, lecturers, teachers, and others working in education. This volume covers contemporary teaching experiences in education, including the many roles that teachers play such as instructing, lecturing, mentoring, facilitating, coaching, guiding, and leading. This volume covers the manifold life experiences and perspectives of being and working as a teacher in education and the epiphanies experienced in that role. This volume gives creative voice to the full range of experiences by teachers, students, and others, and empowers readers with inspiration and personal agency as they evolve as self-creating, self-determining authors of their own lives, both personally and professionally. The poems in this volume are largely based on teachers meaningful experiences in and out of the classroom, and will provide artistic inspiration and creative insight to others who currently work as teachers or those students who are preparing to be professors, instructors, and teachers or those students who simply enjoy the creative voice of others.

Free Download Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction: Who Writes Iran? By Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami
2014 | 262 Pages | ISBN: 2014009244 | PDF | 4 MB
The main focus of Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction is to identify components and elements which define Persian modernist fiction, placing an emphasis on literary concepts and devices which provide the dynamics of the evolutionary trajectory of this modernism. 　The question of 'who writes Iran' refers to a contested area which goes beyond the discipline of literary criticism. Non-literary discourses have made every effort to impose their "committed" readings on literary texts; they have even managed to exert influence on the process of literary creation. In this process, inevitably, many works, or segments of them, and many concepts which do not lend themselves to such readings have been ignored; at the same time, many of them have been appropriated by these discourses. Yet components and elements of Persian literary tradition have persistently engaged in this discursive confrontation, mainly by insisting on literature's relative autonomy, so that at least concepts such as conformity and subterfuge, essential in terms of defining modern and modernist Persian fiction, could be defined in a literary manner.Proffering an alternative in terms of literary historiography; this book supports a methodological approach that considers literary narratives which occur in the margins of dominant discourses, and indeed promote non-discursivity, as the main writers of Persian modernist fiction. It is an essential resource for scholars and researchers interested in Persian and comparative literature, as well as Middle Eastern Studies more broadly.

Free Download Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative By Patrick O'Donnell
2000 | 208 Pages | ISBN: 0822325586 | PDF | 2 MB
Latent Destinies examines the formation of postmodern sensibilities and their relationship to varieties of paranoia that have been seen as widespread in this century. Despite the fact that the Cold War has ended and the threat of nuclear annihilation has been dramatically lessened by most estimates, the paranoia that has characterized the period has not gone away. Indeed, it is as if-as O'Donnell suggests-this paranoia has been internalized, scattered, and reiterated at a multitude of sites: Oklahoma City, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Bosnia, the White House, the United Nations, and numerous other places.O'Donnell argues that paranoia on the broadly cultural level is essentially a narrative process in which history and postmodern identity are negotiated simultaneously. The result is an erasure of historical temporality-the past and future become the all-consuming, self-aware present. To explain and exemplify this, O'Donnell looks at such books and films as Libra, JFK, The Crying of Lot 49, The Truman Show, Reservoir Dogs, Empire of the Senseless, Oswald's Tale, The Executioner's Song, Underworld, The Killer Inside Me, and Groundhog Day. Organized around the topics of nationalism, gender, criminality, and construction of history, Latent Destinies establishes cultural paranoia as consonant with our contradictory need for multiplicity and certainty, for openness and secrecy, and for mobility and historical stability.Demonstrating how imaginative works of novels and films can be used to understand the postmodern historical condition, this book will interest students and scholars of American literature and cultural studies, postmodern theory, and film studies.

Free Download Zhen Troy Chen, "Identity, Space, and Everyday Life in Contemporary Northeast China"
English | ISBN: 9819945291 | 2024 | 313 pages | EPUB, PDF | 11 MB + 11 MB
This edited volume is first of its kind to document and critically analyse the changes took place snice China's opening-up and reform and its impact on Dongbei, China's North-East region, known for its remote and vast landscape, unique and othered culture, rich resources, mighty infrastructures and industries, geopolitical significance. Through presenting up-to-date and multidimensional case studies, the book covers three major aspects of Dongbei, which put people at the heart of our scholarly focus, namely people's mediated life through traditional and new media; people's social, cultural, and living spaces; artistic and fictional representations of people's everyday life.

Free Download High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Films By Sharon Willis
1997 | 280 Pages | ISBN: 0822320290 | PDF | 19 MB
In High Contrast, Sharon Willis examines the dynamic relationships between racial and sexual difference in Hollywood film from the 1980s and 1990s. Seizing on the way these differences are accentuated, sensationalized, and eroticized on screen-most often with little apparent regard for the political context in which they operate-Willis restores that context through close readings of a range of movies from cinematic blockbusters to the work of the new auteurs, Spike Lee, David Lynch, and Quentin Tarantino.Capturing the political complexity of these films, Willis argues that race, gender, and sexuality, as they are figured in the fantasy of popular film, do not function separately, but rather inform and determine each other's meaning. She demonstrates how collective anxieties regarding social difference are mapped onto big budget movies like the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon series, Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, Thelma and Louise, Terminator 2, and others. Analyzing the artistic styles of directors Lynch, Tarantino, and Lee, in such films as Wild at Heart, Pulp Fiction, and Do the Right Thing, she investigates how these interactions of difference are linked to the production of specific authorial styles, and how race functions for each of these directors, particularly in relation to gender identity, erotics, and fantasy.