Germinal (Penguin Classics)

Book Description

The thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity's capacity for compassion and hope.

Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, and in debt, unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all.

Customer Reviews:

Accurate: Captured the Spirit!.......2007-05-10

This was my first read of Zola, an author who is FAR too unknown in the US. He captured, fully, the essence of a labor dispute. I've been around an industrial area my whole life, and have been through many strikes, plus have been the target of those who don't like you crossing their lines. Zola brought all this to life; he told it just as it really is. Incredible!

Germinal is a work of genius by Zola the master of literary naturalism.......2006-09-27

Germinal was the name of a new month (Feb.-March) created by the leaders of the French Revolution. Zola's novel is given this title. The novel is set in the 1860s dealing with the brutal, harsh, amoral, poverty stricken, violent and cruel world of a French mining town whose name is
"240.
The main character of the novel is Etienne Lantier who is a member of a family featuring in several of Zola's novels in his Roquet-Macquart series dealing with two families charted by the brilliant novelist.
During the novel the reader will become engrossed by the families who toil deep under the surface of the earth. The mine is a symbol of Moloch the rapacious idol who gorges itself on human flesh, lives and love.
The novel is not for the prudish. In its many pages you will be exposed to sex in all its varieties; scatological language; several murders; genital mutilation; several horrible deaths and a strike. You will even see cruelty to animals written with such heartbreaking realism that you will cry over the deaths of the horses Trumpet and Battle and the rabbit
Poland.
You will meet various political and social theories from Marxism to nihilism expressed through the eloquent voices of the characters. You will be invited into the tragic home of the Maheu family and discover there the unforgettable character of La Maheu the indomitable earth mother and her suffering and prepubescent daughter who falls in love with the stranger Etienne. Catherine and her two lovers Chaval and Etienne are indelibly printed in the mind's eye of this reviewer. Miners trapped deep within the earth in a disaster instigated by the anarchist Souvarine lead to scenes which are horrific in their impact.
Emile Zola was a reformer whose novel is a classic which is also a page turner. Each page bristles with his rage at injustice, cruelty and the clash between the classes in France.
What would Zola have thought of the bloody twentieth century of revolution in Russia, two horrible world wars and now in our own century the hell of Middle Eastern warfare and terrorism.?
Germinal reads as if it was written last week since it is alive with all the human emotions. It is one of the best books ever written and will always live. Vive la France! Vive Emile Zola!

Readers of the world, unite!.......2006-09-11

Germinal is a damned good book. A page-turner. Engrossing. Illuminating, too. The proletariat/capitalist conflict is better portrayed here than in any other work of fiction I've come across. One gets a sense of the conditions--granting Zola a degree of literary embellishment--that led to trade unionism, socialism, communism, and anarchism. Zola sides with the workers, as you'd expect, but he is honest about his characters' motivations. They are presented as three-dimensional, not didactic dummies for Zola to ventriloquize through. Zola's characters are so fleshed-out, in fact, that the reader develops a rapport, an emotional investment, with them. Not all make it through the book alive and well, and this is another refreshing bit of truth from Zola. Life is full of calamity, pain, and senseless suffering, but it continues nevertheless. Zola presents this without typical Gallic pretension...a worthy achievement in and of itself. A definite classic.

From the Mines to Revolution-A Masterpiece.......2006-06-21

As an aspiring author of regional fiction ("Suomalaiset: People of the Marsh" ISBN 0972005064)who was raised on liberal politics amidst the boom and bust of Minnesota's iron mines and timber industry, "Germinal's" featured protagonist, Etienne Lantier, strikes a chord with me. There is much about the American labor movement and the plight of American workers to be found in Etienne's story. Though conditions in our factories, mines, and in our forests have markedly improved since the days of children working the coal fields of West Virginia and the iron mines of the Mesabi Iron Range, Zola's prose and his social observations about wealth, capital, and the exploitation of the common man by those in power rings true in 21st century America. A beautifully translated work, succinctly direct, wonderfully cast, with prose that makes you sigh. One of my ten all time favorite novels.

The best novel of the 19th Century.......2006-05-02

This is ?mile Zola's undisputed masterpiece in the Rougon-Macquart novel series. In each of the novels of this series Zola sketches in honest, human detail the life of the working class of 19th Century France; in Germinal, the center of attention is the mining industry of the far north.

The story describes the experience of an ex-machinist, Etienne Lantier (who appears as such in one of the other novels) in the Voreux and other mines around the town of Montsou, situated somewhat near Valenciennes. Starving and looking for a job in a period of industrial crisis, he is introduced to the reader as he arrives at the mine. Etienne soon manages to get a job there, and gets to know the great variety of characters that make up the local mining town. But his deep-felt social activism, combined with his somewhat higher education than the local miners, sets in motion a chain of events that changes both his life and that of the reader forever.

Zola's brilliant description of the reality of the struggle between classes and the effects, positive and negative, that zealous struggle for the improvement of the world can have on individual humans in dire straits is sure to haunt the reader for a long time. The author manages to describe both the miners, in their jealousy, pride, poverty and despair, as well as the local bourgeoisie in their misguidedness, personal issues and the pressures of capitalism with a deep understanding of the human psyche. The interactions between humans under pressure is described in powerful, terse dialogues and evocative passages.

The political and social background of the miners' desperate struggle for a decent living is the general theme of the book, but Zola avoids stereotypes and never clearly takes sides for any particular political position, deftly avoiding preachiness or sentimentalism. The incredible hardship and difficulty of the miners' lives and the degree to which the main characters manage to maintain a sense of dignity is sure to move even the coldest-hearted person, but Germinal is not a Dickens work and tear-jerking is more an effect of the book's quality than the goal of the writer.

Above all, however, Zola's best work is simply an incredibly riveting, exciting, deeply moving and tremendously powerful work of fiction. Read the rise and fall of Lantier, Maheu, Bonnemort, Deneulin, Catherine, Souvarin and the other comrades, and weep.

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Germinal
Emile Zola
Manufacturer: BiblioBazaar
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Germinal (Penguin Classics)

ASIN: 1426419708
Release Date: 2006-10-07

Book Description

Dans la plaine rase, sous la nuit sans étoiles, d’une obscurité et d’une épaisseur d’encre, un homme suivait seul la grande route de Marchiennes à Montsou, dix kilomètres de pavé coupant tout droit, à travers les champs de betteraves.

Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze

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Toward a new biophilosophy
A Renewed Philosophy of Nature
An Excellent book on Deleuze, Bergson and Biophilosophy
A compelling reason for setting the Academy alight.

Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze
Ansell-Pearson
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415183510

Book Description

Germinal Life embarks on a fascinating tour of ethology, biology, ethics, literature and cyborgs. Opening with a linking of Richard Dawkin's theory of the extended phenotype and Deleuzian thought, Ansell Pearson introduces the idea of germinal life to challenge traditional notions of ethology and philosophy.

By revisiting nineteenth century Darwinism and the origins of germ science, Keith Ansell Pearson develops a stunning reading of Deleuze's key texts. He also introduces highly original interpretations of classic modern literature, including Thomas Hardy's Tess and D.H.Lawrence's Kangaroo before connecting these themes with cyborgism and the work of the performance artist Stelarc.

As a companion to Ansell Pearson's Viroid Life, which explored Nietzsche's philosophy of the human, Germinal Life provides a highly original study of the biophilosophical aspects of Deleuze's thought.

Download Description

The companion volume to Keith Ansell Pearson's hugely successful Viroid Life.Taking its orientation from the though of Gilles Deleuze, Germinal Life embarks on a fascinating tour of ethology, biology, ethics, literature and cyborgs.

Customer Reviews:

Toward a new biophilosophy.......2001-05-26

This is a collection of challenging and insightful essays bringing the still as yet relatively overlooked philosophical work of Deleuze & Guattari to bear on questions raised by contemporary biology, especially as it intersects so-called complexity theory. Besides a focus on population rather than individual (one of the meanings of their notorious call for "pop" philosophy), D/G also propose a "machinic" biology, one not centered on the organism as a whole in its putative connection to a similarly static environment, but one that follows multiple flows of energy and matter through the "rhizome" or interactive field that traverses what used to be seen as the whole organism, now inscribed as a mere node in that heterogenous field. Following these leads, Ansell Pearson's concern with "life" also includes questions of art, literature, and politics, endeavors which, to speak Aristotelian for a moment, were always considered the artificial from which the natural could be safely distinguished.

As itself a heterogenous "assemblage" of the type it investigates, Germinal Life sparkles with new connections and fresh insights. Few have read as widely and as well as KAP, and it shows. The author demonstrates, in addition to an easy familiarity with Deleuze and Deleuze/Guattari, a firm grasp of the classic work of Darwin and Bergson, as well as wide reading in the voluminous recent University Press literature documenting the contemporary life sciences and so-called complexity theory. For a reader with some familiarity with the basic themes of its components, plugging into the machine of Germinal Life will be a productive experience indeed.

A Renewed Philosophy of Nature.......2001-05-06

Keith Ansell-Pearson's "Germinal Life" situates itself at the nexus of three sets of concerns: Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of "difference," Bergson's philosophy of "life," and contemporary neo-evolutionary theories. Between these three themes, Ansell-Pearson weaves an intruiging web of interrelated questions and problems. Deleuze is partly responsible for the revival of interest in Bergson's writings, which had fallen into semi-obscurity in the early part of the twentieth-century. (Lévi-Strauss once commented that Bergson reduced everything to a state of mush in order to bring out its inherent ineffability.) But what is the nature of Deleuze's own "Bergsonism"? How and why does he appropriate the three primary concepts of Bergson's thought, intuition, memory, and élan vital? Most difficultly, how and in what sense can Bergson's "vitalism" be taken seriously given the developments in modern biology? Ansell-Pearson brings a wide range of resources to bear on these complex issues, all of which lie at the intersection of philosophy and biology. The book investigates the relation of Deleuze's thought to Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche, and along the way provides helpful discussions of figures in the history of biology (Weismann, Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire), contemporary writers in the field (Gould, Dawkins, Goodwin, Margulis), as well as a number of lesser-known known figures that Deleuze himself championed (Simondon, Uexküll).

The thread that guides Ansell-Pearson throughout his research is the idea of a contemporary "bio-philosophy" or philosophy of life. This idea has far-reaching relevance. Kant is often said to have inaugurated modern philosophy with his "Copernican revolution": the conditions of the objects of knowledge must be the _same_ as the subjective conditions of knowledge itself. Against the ancient conception of wisdom, which defined the wise man by his submission to and accord with Nature, Kant set up an entirely new image of thought: humans are now the legislators of Nature. The subject, in other words, became constitutive. Ansell-Pearson's work is situated within a broader contemporary reaction against this Kantian heritage. His aim, he states, is to examine the possibility and implications of "thinking _beyond_ the human condition" (p. 2). "Germinal Life" thus continues the project of Ansell-Pearson's earlier book, "Viroid life." The latter analyzed Nietzsche's attempt to think the "transhuman" condition; the former pursues the same theme in the context of the "life sciences" (the subhuman and the superhuman). Both books, however, are framed by a fundamental ethical question: Does a biophilosophy entail a simple "disavowal" of the finitude and historicity of the human condition (p. 214)? Or on the contrary, as Ansell-Pearson argues, is it possible that a radically _ethical_ philosophy "must necessarily think trans- or overhumanly" (p. 3)? This question is all the more urgent given current developments in of informational and genetic technologies, which have already transformed our concept of the "human." In this sense, Ansell-Pearson's has opened a line of philosophical inquiry that will no doubt be of increasing importance in the future. It points to the possibility, and indeed the need, for something that largely disappeared from philosophy after Schelling, namely, a renewed philosophy of Nature.

Highly recommended.

An Excellent book on Deleuze, Bergson and Biophilosophy.......2001-05-01

Germinal Life is the sequel to Keith Ansell Pearson's well-received book on Nietzsche and biophilosophy, Viroid Life, which appeared in 1997. It is also the middle-entry in what is unfolding as a series of three books examining the work of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Bergson, the third of which will focus on the ontological concept of the `virtual' commonly found in both Bergson and Deleuze. Like any middle-child, one might expect such a volume as this to be somewhat troublesome, possessing neither the seniority of the first in the series (and the respect that goes with that) nor the relative youth and indulgence enjoyed by the latest arrival. To switch the analogy to one with literature, the novelty of the first book in any trilogy is seldom surpassed by what follows it, while the kudos of being the final entry where everything is brought to a climax is likewise unparalleled. This usually leaves the second book an intermediary role in the most anodyne sense, that of pushing the plot forward (normally by complication) and deepening the characterisation. What is uniquely philosophical about a trilogy of philosophy books may well thwart such a structural characterisation as this (especially if it is a trilogy in name only), but there is, nonetheless, evidence for this homology in Ansell Pearson's latest work: it builds on the main them of Viroid Life, namely contemporary biophilosophy and its significance for the `transhuman condition', by intensifying its interpretation of Deleuze's vitalist metaphysics (through reading Bergson in particular), while also anticipating future research into the various political implications of such a philosophy. In other words, the characterisation of Deleuze's philosophy (already a central component in Viroid Life) is deepened and the philosophical problematic of what going beyond `the human condition' truly entails is complicated. However, where Viroid Life played with themes that are fairly intoxicating (techno-theory, nihilism, viruses), used theorists who have always had a wide appeal (Nietzsche, Lyotard, Baudrillard), and did all this in a politically engaged manner, Germinal Life is temperate and measured in its progress: it provides more of the arguments necessary to support the points introduced so spectacularly in the earlier book. This is not to say that Germinal Life is dull by comparison, but rather that it is eminently philosophical (in this sense, all genuine philosophy would have to be called dull). Indeed, what is true of Ansell Pearson's work in general is also the hallmark of Deleuze's own oeuvre: beneath the apparently `flashy' surface (as Foucault once put it) there is a well thought-out metaphysics at work (for Ansell Pearson, the end of philosophy, which is to say, the end of metaphysics, is far from being upon us). It is only that the balance has shifted in this latest work: names like Baudrillard are still there (no less than Bergson and Deleuze were present in Viroid Life), only more as a background to the hard task of philosophising. Consequently, while Germinal Life may have less appeal amongst non-philosophers in cultural studies and sociology, it cannot fail to impress philosophers interested in biology, the history of Twentieth-century French thought, and the fundamentals of Deleuze's philosophy of immanence. This type of serious, philosophical engagement with Deleuze is all the more necessary now that the reception of his work in the English-speaking world is entering its second phase and moving away from basic introductions and commentaries to the appraisal of its actual value for contemporary debates. What Germinal Life admirably demonstrates is that, firstly, Deleuze's vitalist philosophy belongs to a tradition of non-mechanistic, non-teleological, and non-reductionist thought about evolution running from Bergson to Gilbert Simonden through Jacob Von Uexküll and Raymond Ruyer: but Ansell Pearson also argues for the tenability of this oft-derided approach by examining in great detail the latest research in favour of the creativity of evolution, evidence that shows us the non-hierarchical, relatively chaotic, and molecular phenomenon which is life, far removed from the unilinear, organicist, and perfectionist model normally drawn. These ideas are articulated through three chapters (bordered by an introduction and conclusion), on the theoretical relationship between Bergson and Deleuze (Chapter One), Deleuze and Darwin(ism) (Chapter Two), and creative evolution and Deleuze's `creative ethology' (Chapter Three). Clearly, the presence of Bergson looms large in these pages, and Ansell Pearson is as scholarly and expert as ever in his exposition of his thought and its influence on Deleuze. But this book is not only about the history of thought. As the title would suggest, its primary text is Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (1968), which is both the most biological and ontological of his works: as such, it is the text that constitutes - if any one book can - the bedrock of the Deleuzian philosophy. The method of transcendental empiricism was announced in Difference and Repetition and its delineation of this method brings together most of Deleuze's central ideas, be they ontological (the univocity of being, difference as the groundless ground of repetition, etc.) empirical (Deleuze's biophilosophy itself) or metaphilosophical (the shock of the new, the image of thought, and so on). Other texts from the Deleuzian corpus are invoked by Ansell Pearson when necessary, of course, especially the Logic of Sense (1969) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) (the latter is particularly important for the third chapter). Overall, however, this focus on one text and one theme (biophilosophy) gives Germinal Life a continuous organisation: where Viroid Life was composed of a loosely integrated set of articles that, quite fittingly, dispersed its argument through the space of its chapters, Germinal Life, no less appropriately, fosters a continuity of argument over time, a germ-line of thought rather than a zig-zag line-of-escape (to recycle some of the most popular Deleuzian jargon). I recommend it wholeheartly to all those seriously interested in Deleuze, Bergson and the Philosophy of biology.

A compelling reason for setting the Academy alight........2000-08-07

The wonderful thing about Sokal's original spoof was its demonstration that anything can be published regardless of content providing it undertakes to rehearse a series of recognisable scholastic gestures. This would appear born out in its lukewarm reception among the more conservative circles of academia -- one can only assume the precepts of caution that inform academic life could be revealed in their cynicism by similar means.

Of course, spoofs needn't be witting, which brings me to `Germinal Life'. The prodigious awfulness of Ansell Pearson's writing can't be underestimated, such as those times when its mode of presentation becomes insanely imperious, every other word is forced into scare-quotes, and paragraphs (even sentences!) follow one another without apparent connection.

I would urge you to buy it; passages such as

Deleuze himself incisively notes that as a new thinking of the living body ethology offers "a new conception of the embodied individual, of species, and of genera" (1968: 236; 1992: 257). He argues that we should not neglect the "biological significance" of this new conception. Its chief importance, however, is said to be "juridical and ethical". He suggests that once we pose the problem of rights at the level of heterogeneous bodies then we necessarily transform the whole philosophy of right(s). (p.199)

would be worth anyone's $75. The same could be said for the book's final paragraph:

We must perform our critical engagement with Deleuze not in terms of a simple condemnation or a mere repudiation, but in terms of the on-going battle we have with the problems, predicaments and pretensions of philosophy. It cannot simply be, however, a question of being for or against Deleuze; rather, the task should be one of implicating him in the critical and clinical questions that constitute the very fold of our being and our becoming those who we are. (p.224)

That Spinozan ethology is of consequence to rights and jurisprudence only to the extent that it serves to abolish them should be obvious to anyone, and if there's a programme beneath these truisms, tautologies, non sequiturs and patent misunderstandings (the final paragraph inexplicably alludes to Heidegger: `[Nietzsche,] in whose light and shadow everyone today thinks and reflects with his "for him" or "against him", heard a command which demands a preparation of man for taking over a world domination', `The Question of Being' p.107) it's to forestall the replacement of ethics by ethology, albeit solely on the strength of a pained display of bogus scholarly deliberation and diligence. For only thus will the world be made safe for those factories of statist ideology known as universities and therefore for this sort of ponderous garbage.

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Germinal
Emile Zola
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0451513312

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3 Titles By Emile Zola : Germinal Nana Therese Raquin
Emile Zola
Manufacturer: various
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000PBG5GW

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3 Titles By Emile Zola : Germinal Nana Therese Raquin. three mmpb books.

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90 poemas (Coleccion Germinal)
Rafael Alberti
Manufacturer: Ediciones de la Torre
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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Antologia comentada: Poesia (Coleccion Germinal)

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Antologia comentada: Poesia (Coleccion Germinal)
Rafael Alberti
Manufacturer: Ediciones de La Torre
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The Biology of Germinal Centers in Lymphoid Tissue: Biotechnology Intelligence Unit (Ecological Studies / Analysis and Synthesis,)

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The Biology of Germinal Centers in Lymphoid Tissue: Biotechnology Intelligence Unit (Ecological Studies / Analysis and Synthesis,)
G. Jeanette Thorbecke , and V. K. Tsaigbe
Manufacturer: Springer-Verlag Telos
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Binding: Hardcover

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This book meets the demand of a recent surge of interest in germinal centers, the foci of antigen-induced, rapidly proliferating B lymphocytes, representing sites in mammalian lymphoid tissue where memory B cells are generated. Various aspects of the generation of germinal centers, the somatic hypermutation process and the cellular interactions involved in the selection process are discussed in detail. A chapter on germinal center-derived lymphomas completes the treatment.

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Buenos Aires, ciudad secreta
Germinal Nogues
Manufacturer: Sudamericana
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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Diccionario Politicos Argentinos
Germinal Nogues
Manufacturer: Grupo Editorial Planeta
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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