Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books
University Press of Mississippi The Velveteen Rabbit at 100
Book SynopsisContributions by Kelly Blewett, Claudia Camicia, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Lisa Rowe Fraustino, Elisabeth Graves, Karlie Herndon, KaaVonia Hinton, Holly Blackford Humes, Melanie Hurley, Kara K. Keeling, Maleeha Malik, Claudia Mills, Elena Paruolo, Scott T. Pollard, Jiwon Rim, Paige Sammartino, Adrianna Zabrzewska, and Wenduo Zhang First published in 1922 to immediate popularity, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams has never been out of print. The story has been adapted for film, television, and theater across a range of mediums including animation, claymation, live action, musical, and dance. Frequently, the story inspires a sentimental, nostalgic response--as well as a corresponding dismissive response from critics. It is surprising that, despite its longevity and popularity, The Velveteen Rabbit has inspired a relatively thin dossier of serious literary scholarship, a gap that this volume seeks to correct. While each essay can stand alone, the chapters in Th
£23.70
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Intersecting Aesthetics Literary Adaptations and
Book SynopsisIlluminates cultural and material trends that shaped Black film adaptations during the twentieth century. Contributors to this collection reveal how Black literary and filmic texts are sites of negotiation between dominant and resistant perspectives, exploring how race-inflected cultural norms have influenced studio and independent film depictions.Trade ReviewIntersecting Aesthetics is a pivotal work from leading scholars in African American film studies. The influence of this collection will reach long into the future." - Gerald Butters, coeditor of Beyond Blaxploitation
£81.75
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Intersecting Aesthetics Literary Adaptations and
Book SynopsisIlluminates cultural and material trends that shaped Black film adaptations during the twentieth century. Contributors to this collection reveal how Black literary and filmic texts are sites of negotiation between dominant and resistant perspectives, exploring how race-inflected cultural norms have influenced studio and independent film depictions.Trade ReviewIntersecting Aesthetics is a pivotal work from leading scholars in African American film studies. The influence of this collection will reach long into the future." - Gerald Butters, coeditor of Beyond Blaxploitation
£23.70
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Inventing Benjy
Book SynopsisA groundbreaking work at the intersection of Faulkner studies and disability studies. Originally published in 2009 by Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle as L’Idiotie dans l’ouvre de Faulkner, this translation brings the book to English-language readers for the first time.Trade ReviewWith great authority and lucidity, Inventing Benjy shows brilliantly how Faulkner adopted the conceit of ‘idiocy’ for his innovative, contrarian, and revolutionary modernist project." - John T. Matthews, editor of William Faulkner in Context
£23.70
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Orhan Pamuk
Book SynopsisIn over thirty interviews ranging from 1982 until 2022, Conversations with Orhan Pamuk reveals a writer of intense literary and political engagement. This volume presents an alternative literary history that traces the dominant themes of the author's oeuvre.
£77.35
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Orhan Pamuk
Book SynopsisIn over thirty interviews ranging from 1982 until 2022, Conversations with Orhan Pamuk reveals a writer of intense literary and political engagement. This volume presents an alternative literary history that traces the dominant themes of the author’s oeuvre.
£19.90
Cornell University Press If God Meant to Interfere
Book SynopsisThe rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields.Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaTrade ReviewIf God Meant to Interfere is full of surprises. Douglas is conversant with the field of Biblical studies, for instance, and offers up detailed accounts of how archeological findings like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts have reshaped our understanding of early Christianity, particularly underappreciated strains of apocalyptic and gnostic thinking. He is a skilled and reliable interpreter of discourses outside his own field of literary studies. One thing I admire about the book is that Douglas takes time to explore his materials fully, so that forays into the controversy surrounding Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, say, or an excursus into the scholarship on lived religion, or an entire section devoted to the nuances of intelligent design, come to seem less diversionary and very much to the point. Above all, Douglas takes time to tell stories, which is all too rare in literary scholarship.... A compelling and consistently surprising book for anyone interested in the relationship between literature and religion. * Modern Fiction Studies *If God Meant to Interfere is effectively two essay collections with a powerful argument uniting its halves in critical conversation. * American Literary History *Douglas traces a surprisingly broad and complex network of linkages between the Christian Right, postmodernism, and literary multiculturalism.... If God Meant to Interfere is a rich and complex treatment of three sociocultural movements that are rarely examined in combination, but should and will be, thanks largely to this book. * Religion & Literature *Douglas' If God Were to Interfere amounts to one of the best historical studies of recent American fiction by a scholar immersed in issues of religious debate and historical context. It is an impressive achievement... * Christianity and Literature *If God Meant to Interfere demands that literary critics pay attention to a form of religiosity... It represents a vital and necessary intervention into American literary studies. * American Literature *Timely and helpful in unpacking the confusion around contemporary American politics.... It is refreshing that rather than simply point fingers at the Christian Right as a reactionary movement, Douglas is willing to consider the culpability of the modern academy and the embrace of postmodern linguistic theories in the rise of contemporary right-wing movements.... An important contribution to understandings of the Christian Right and to understanding how postmodern authors engage with religion. -- Andrew Crome * English Studies in Canada *With superior research, wide-ranging reading among conservative believers themselves, and a panache and sympathy that allows readers of religious commitment themselves to feel as though they are in good company with a fellow traveler... If God Meant to Interfere amounts to one of the best historical studies of recent American fiction by a scholar immersed in issues of religious debate and historical context. It is an impressive achievement that will become a model for all workers in the vineyard of [the study of] religion and literature within a contemporary American literary focus. * Christianity & Literature *Table of ContentsPart One: Multicultural Entanglements 1. Multiculturalism, Secularization, Resurgence 2. The Poisonwood Bible's Multicultural Graft 3. Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead 4. Recapitulation and Religious Indifference in The Plot Against America Part Two: Postmodern Entanglements 5. Thomas Pynchon’s Prophecy 6. Science and Religion in Carl Sagan’s Contact 7. Evolution and Theodicy in Blood Meridian 8. The Postmodern Gospel According to Dan Conclusion: Politics, Literature, Method
£33.25
Cornell University Press Mixed Feelings
Book SynopsisSince the late eighteenth century, writers and thinkers have used the idea of loveoften unrequited or impossible loveto comment on the changing cultural, social, and political position of Jews in the German-speaking countries. In Mixed Feelings, Katja Garloff asks what it means for literature (and philosophy) to use love between individuals as a metaphor for group relations. This question is of renewed interest today, when theorists of multiculturalism turn toward love in their search for new models of particularity and universality. Mixed Feelings is structured around two transformative moments in German Jewish culture and history that produced particularly rich clusters of interfaith love stories. Around 1800, literature promoted the rise of the Romantic love ideal and the shift from prearranged to love-based marriages. In the German-speaking countries, this change in the theory and practice of love coincided with the beginnings of Jewish emancipation, anTrade ReviewGarloff's main insight, and one that bears productive and fascinating analytic fruit, is that tracing the rhetoric of "love" can lead scholars toward a more nuanced understanding of the intricacies and difficulties of Jewish assimilation in modern German culture.... This book should be an essential read for anyone interested in Jewish-Gentile relations in modern German literature. * German Studies Review *
£25.64
Cornell University Press Fictions of Dignity
Book SynopsisOver the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the novel to explore both the possibilities and challenges of enacting and protecting human rights, particularly in the Global South. In Fictions of Dignity, Elizabeth S. Anker shows how the dual enabling fictions of human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. In the process, Anker examines the vital work performed by a particular kind of narrative imagination in fostering respect for human rights. Drawing on phenomenology, Anker suggests how an embodied politics of reading might restore a vital fleshiness to the overly abTrade ReviewFictions of Dignity is a distinctive contribution to the growing body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between human rights and novels. -- Emily Hogg * New Formations *In her analysis of 'the vocabulary of human rights,' Anker... interrogates the liberal/Enlightenment tradition that values the intellect over the body. She regards this preference, one that stretches from Plato to Descartes, as dismissive of corporeal and indigenous factors. Hence, imperialism emphasizes the 'barbarism' of the global south, patriarchy stresses the weakness of women's bodies to justify their suppression, society categorizes animals as unconscious ‘carnal being[s],’ and large political bodies ignore smaller interests in implementing justice. Anker discusses four works that engage these stances.... [Readers] will be intrigued and challenged by Anker's critique. Summing Up: Highly recommended. * Choice *The passion and commitment Anker shows in taking liberalism to task for its complicity in perpetrating the very atrocities its own human rights programmes seek to end is a vital one. * Interventions: Intl Jrnl of Postcol. Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Constructs by Which We Live1. Bodily Integrity and Its Exclusions2. Embodying Human Rights: Toward a Phenomenology of Social Justice3. Constituting the Liberal Subject of Rights: Salman Rushdie's Midnight’s Children4. Women’s Rights and the Lure of Self-Determination in Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero5. J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: The Rights of Desire and the Embodied Lives of Animals6. Arundhati Roy’s "Return to the Things Themselves": Phenomenology and the Challenge of JusticeCoda: Small Places, Close to HomeNotes Works Cited Index
£23.74
Cornell University Press Spirit Matters
Book SynopsisSpirit Matters explores the heterodox and unorthodox religions and spiritualities that arose in Victorian Britain as a result of the faltering of Christian faith in the face of modernity, the rise of the truth-telling authority of science, and the first full exposure of the West to non-Christian religions. J. Jeffrey Franklin investigates the diversity of ways that spiritual seekers struggled to maintain faith or to create new faiths by reconciling elements of the Judeo-Christian heritage with Spiritualism, Buddhism, occultism, and scientific naturalism. Spirit Matters covers a range of scenarios from the Victorian hearth and the state-Church altar to the frontiers of empire in Buddhist countries and Egyptian crypts. Franklin reveals how this diversity of elements provided the materials for the formation of new hybrid religions and the emergence in the 20th century of New Age spiritualities.Franklin investigates a broad spectrum of experiences through a series oTrade ReviewFranklin's study, well researched and grounded in primary documents, makes an important contribution to the study of 19th-century Christianity, alternative religions, and the predecessors of 20th-century New Age religion. * Choice *Spirit Matters is persuasive and engaging, deserving of the attention of anyone interested in English literature or in the development of modern Western occultism. * Fortean Times *A generous overview of a large topic.... Franklin's contribution to this established research works powerfully to both collect and to expand upon these core concepts of heterodox faiths and belief systems and, in particular, to better globalize them. The result is a text that avoids broad conclusions and injects a series of much-needed nuances to the overall tapestry of the study of heterodox religions and occult philosophies. * The Wilkie Collins Journal *Spirit Matters presents a critical exploration of these various alternative spiritual discourses...[W]orthy contributions to this field of study. * British Association for Victorian Studies *Overall, the book is excellent: a very close reading of a set of sources for historical data where many would not think to perform such a reading. * Nova Religio *Fascinating and compelling. * The Journal of Religion *The originality of Spirit Matters undoubtedly comes from Franklin's keen analysis of the intertwined religious, cultural, and national discourses on orthodox Christianity in relation to the formulation of alternative religions fostered by the scientific skepticism about Christian Spirit. * Supernatural Studies *Much recommended. * Religious Studies Review *
£42.30
Cornell University Press Photographic Literacy
Book SynopsisPhotography, introduced to Russia in 1839, was nothing short of a sensation. Its rapid proliferation challenged the other arts, including painting and literature, as well as the very integrity of the self. If Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky greeted the camera with skepticism in the nineteenth century, numerous twentieth-century authors welcomed it with a warm embrace. As Katherine M. H. Reischl shows in Photographic Literacy, authors as varied as Leonid Andreev, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn picked up the camera and reshaped not only their writing practices but also the sphere of literacy itself.For these authors, a single photograph or a photograph as illustration is never an endpoint; their authorial practices continually transform and animate the frozen moment. But just as authors used images to shape the reception of their work and selves, Russian photographersincluding Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky and Alexander Rodchenkoused text to shape the reception ofTrade ReviewA superb, erudite account, which will be of value to literary scholars, cultural historians, and anyone interested in the intricate relationship between text and image. * The Russian Review *The monograph is incredibly well-written and meticulously researched. * Canadian-American Slavic Studies *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Translation Introduction: Chasing Pushkin's Photograph 1. Tolstoy in the Age of His Technological Reproducibility 2. The Diffusion of Domesticated Photography 3. Microgeography, Macroworld 4. Look Left, Young Man! The International Exchangeof Photo-Narratives Conclusion: Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and the Anxiety of Photographic Authorship Notes Index
£42.30
Cornell University Press Feminizing the Fetish
Book SynopsisShoes, gloves, umbrellas, cigars that are not just objectsthe topic of fetishism seems both bizarre and inevitable. In this venturesome and provocative book, Emily Apter offers a fresh account of the complex relationship between representation and sexual obsession in turn-of-the-century French culture. Analyzing works by authors in the naturalist and realist traditions as well as making use of documents from a contemporary medical archive, she considers fetishism as a cultural artifact and as a subgenre of realist fiction. Apter traces the web of connections among fin-de-siècle representations of perversion, the fiction of pathology, and the literary case history. She explores in particular the theme of female fetishism in the context of the feminine culture of mourning, collecting, and dressing.Trade ReviewIn light of recent critical debate, one might say that of the perversions fetishism is the most widely shared. Its subjects and objects are ubiquitous, and include male and female writers, patients, and literary characters and critics. The publication of such an in-depth analysis of fetishism in turn-of-the-century French literature seemed necessary in such a climate, and Apter's insightful book fulfills the perverse reader's expectations. -- Marie Lathers * French Review *
£15.99
Cornell University Press Franz Kafka
Book SynopsisIn Stanley Corngold's view, the themes and strategies of Kafka's fiction are generated by a tension between his concern for writing and his growing sense of its arbitrary character. Analyzing Kafka's work in light of the necessity of form, which is also a merely formal necessity, Corngold uncovers the fundamental paradox of Kafka's art and life. The first section of the book shows how Kafka's rhetoric may be understood as the daring project of a man compelled to live his life as literature. In the central part of the book, Corngold reflects on the place of Kafka within the modern tradition, discussing such influential precursors of Cervantes, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, whose works display a comparable narrative disruption. Kafka's distinctive narrative strategies, Corngold points out, demand interpretation at the same time they resist it. Critics of Kafka, he says, must be aware that their approaches are guided by the principles that Kafka's fiction identifies, dramatizes, and rejectsTrade ReviewThe remarkable convergence of form and content in this book brings it close to a work of art. -- Steven Taubeneck * German Quarterly *For those readers who have admired Stanley Corngold’s essays on Kafka this volume will be particularly welcome. It collects his work on Kafka written over the past two decades. Corngold is at all times concerned with the issue of writing and often with figures (metaphor, chiasmus) at work in Kafka’s prose. This single-mindedness of purpose produces a coherence in the volume and enables Corngold to do what he does best: rhetorical and philosophical analysis of specific words and passages and their implications for Kafka’s fictional logic. -- Robert C. Holub * Comparative Literature *
£15.99
Cornell University Press Joyce
Book SynopsisDid James Joyce, that icon of modernity, spearhead the dismantling of the Cartesian subject? Or was he a supreme example of a modern man forever divided and never fully known to himself? This volume reads the dialogue of contradictory cultural voices in Joyce's worksrevolutionary and reactionary, critical and subject to critique, marginal and central. It includes ten essays that identify repressed elements in Joyce's writings and examine how psychic and cultural repressions persistently surface in his texts. Contributors include Joseph A. Boone, Marilyn L. Brownstein, Jay Clayton, Laura Doyle, Susan Stanford Friedman, Christine Froula, Ellen Carol Jones, Alberto Moreirias, Richard Pearce, and Robert Spoo.Trade ReviewThe collected essays in Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, Susan Stanford Friedman tells us in her introduction, explore the various ways that Joyce’s work can be read as textual scenes of ‘repression, disguised expression, and fragmentary return.’ In the course of tracing the forms of these ongoing processes throughout the Joycean canon, the contributors cover a range of diverse topics, including the representations of the artist, Joyce’s Irishness as it relates to discourses of race and racialism, subjectivity and desire, and the figurations of the maternal. The essays are united by a shared interest in psychoanalytic and/or poststructuralist arguments about the intriguing dynamics and variable relationships between interacting texts. -- Kimberly J. Devlin * James Joyce Quarterly *
£16.13
Cornell University Press The Cosmic Web
Book SynopsisFrom the central concept of the fieldwhich depicts the world as a mutually interactive whole, with each part connected to every other part by an underlying field have come models as diverse as quantum mathematics and Saussure's theory of language. In The Cosmic Web, N. Katherine Hayles seeks to establish the scope of the field concept and to assess its importance for contemporary thought. She then explores the literary strategies that are attributable directly or indirectly to the new paradigm; among the texts at which she looks closely are Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Nabokov's Ada, D. H. Lawrence's early novels and essays, Borges's fiction, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.Trade ReviewScientists have been invoking the ‘field model’ concept for decades. But literary critics, who are usually resistant to the application of scientific concepts in literary criticism, have rarely related imaginative literature to the field model. N. Katherine Hayles, a trained chemist and literary critic, has now done so in a fine book that will pave the way for many others interested in this nexus. Hayles’s procedure is exemplary. -- G. S. Rousseau * Isis *
£15.99
Cornell University Press The Other Side of the Story
Book SynopsisAccording to Molly Hite, a number of influential contemporary women novelistsnotably Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwoodattempt innovations in narrative form that are more radical in their implications than the dominant modes of fictional experimentation characterized as postmodernist. In The Other Side of the Story, Hite makes the point that these innovations, which distinguish the genre she calls contemporary feminist narrative, are more radical precisely because their context is the critique of a culture and a literary tradition apprehended as profoundly masculinist.Trade ReviewHite’s inclusion of a chapter on Alice Walker (which addresses Walker’s intertextual relation to Zora Neale Hurston) multiplies and complicates the category of other insofar as it assumes female characters of color as the subject of postmodern fictions. Hite does an excellent job of making readers aware of the fact that postmodern feminist critics are not always white, or even always women. -- Frances Bartkowski * SubStance *
£16.13
Cornell University Press Exotic Nations
Book SynopsisIn this highly original and critically informed book, Renata R. Mautner Wasserman looks at how, during the first decades following political independence, writers in the United States and Brazil assimilated and subverted European images of an exotic New World to create new literatures that asserted cultural independence and defined national identity. Exotic Nations demonstrates that the language of exoticism thus became part of the New World's interpretation of its own history and natural environment.Trade ReviewExotic Nations is a well-documented, analytical, and yet readable account. Its original arguments and historical analyses, which dispel the myth of exoticism as a superficial by-product of romanticism and shows its importance as a discourse of identity, apply to other national literatures of the Americas. -- Erik Camayd-Freixas * Canadian Review of Comparative Literature *Brazilian literature is slowly beginning to gain the respect and attention it so richly deserves. Interestingly, this long-overdue discovery of Brazil has largely come about as a function of Brazil’s presence as an ‘American,’ or ‘New World,’ culture. This, in fact, provides precisely the context for Renata Wasserman’s very enlightening and critically informed study, Exotic Nations. Taking a major step toward drawing Brazilian literature out of the isolation that has long plagued its recognition as a major national literature, Wasserman argues convincingly that in the crucial first decades following political independence, writers in both Brazil and the United States simultaneously assimilated and challenged European notions of the ‘exotic’ New World in a conscious effort to forge new national identities. -- Earl E. Fitz * Comparative Literature Studies *
£15.99
Cornell University Press Precarious Times
Book SynopsisIn Precarious Times, Anne Fuchs explores how works of German literature, film, and photography reflect on the profound temporal anxieties precipitated by contemporary experiences of atomization, displacement, and fragmentation that bring about a loss of history and of time itself and that is peculiar to our current moment.The digital age places premiums on just-in-time deliveries, continual innovation, instantaneous connectivity, and around-the-clock availability. While some celebrate this 24/7 culture, others see it as profoundly destructive to the natural rhythm of day and nightand to human happiness. Have we entered an era of a perpetual present that depletes the future and erodes our grasp of the past?Beginning its examination around 1900, when rapid modernization was accompanied by comparably intense reflection on changing temporal experience, Precarious Times provides historical depth and perspective to current debates on the digital now. Expanding Trade ReviewFuchs first documents the effect of speed on society and looks at how the rapid pace of change suppresses the past and clouds the future...In the final chapters, she rightly recognizes that in the last 30 years the most profound effect on German culture was the "overnight" fall of the Berlin Wall. Fuchs's treatment of German unification is the book's most important contribution. -- R.C. Conard, University of Dayton * Choice *Anne Fuchs brilliant analysis shifts between careful close readings of texts and images and insightful linkages to key thinkers. The result is a highly readable and fiercely intelligent book. * Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies *Masterfully achieved, this work instills in the reader the contingent precarity of existing in the present. Reading it, one is transported to a time before the global pandemic when the issue emanated more of a theoretical than literal nature. Located on the other side of the tipping point, scholars from cultural, media, and literary studies, along with their general reader counterparts, encounter the uncanniness and become flâneurs of the past. * Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature *Anne Fuchs provides a meticulous account of existential temporality in her study of post-modern pictorial and text artists, utilising sensitive readings of a wide range of literary works, films and photography reflecting on the profound cultural anxieties precipitated by experiences of atomisation, displacement and fragmentation which, she argues, 'brings about a loss of history and of time itself. * Journal of Contemporary European Studies *Fuchs's study engages with a magnificent range of theoretical and cultural engagements with time to explore fundamental questions raised by the temporal shifts of the twenty-first century. The book stands out for its far-reaching and careful exploration of a diverse range of theory and art[.] * Modern Language Review *Stuck in an expanding present, we paradoxically seem never to manage to fit everything in. While this might feel particular to our current moment, there is a longer history of precarious times, which Anne Fuchs revealingly traces in a German cultural context. Her book offers a broad perspective on current debates in our digitalised present with added historical depth. Analysing works of fiction, photography and film from the modernist period to now, Fuchs shows how their subjective experiences of time overturn the imperative to be always connected. * Journal of Contemporary European Studies *In this extraordinary and timely book, Anne Fuchs examines the contingent precarity of living in the present, offering a clear and comprehensive analysis that interrupts prevalent deterministic interpretations of modern temporality. Fuchs delivers a rigorous, extensive, and elaborate re-examination of the modern discourse on time that includes works of literature, film, and photograpy. * Monatshefte *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. Theoretical Perspectives: Temporal Anxieties in the Digital Age Timeless Time Acceleration Resonance Atomization Immediacy The Extended Present Time-Space Compression Network Time Precarious Times 2. Historical Perspectives: Modernism and Speed Politics Temporality and the Modern Imagination Two Visions of Late Culture: Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Mann Attention, Distraction, and the Modern Conditions of Perception: Georg Simmel and Franz Kafka Modern Man and the Trouble with Time: Franz Kafka's Der Proceß Speed Politics in Robert Walser's Short Prose From Lateness to Latency: Sigmund Freud Conclusion 3. Contemporary Perspectives: Precarious Time(s) in Photography and Film Slow Art The Disruption of Linear Time: Michael Wesely's Time Photography The Disruption of Historical Time: Ulrich Wüst's Photobook Später Sommer/Letzter Herbst In the Acoustic Space of the GDR: Christian Petzold's Barbara The Longing for Transcendence: Ulrich Seidl's Paradies: Glaube Disruptive Performances: Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann Conclusion 4. Narrating Precariousness Dis/connectedness in Contemporary German Literature Acceleration and Point Time: Clemens Meyer's Als wir träumten Empty Time and the Extended Present: Julia Schoch's Mit der Geschwindigkeit des Sommers and Karen Duve's Taxi The Cult of Immediacy and the Search for Resonance: Wilhelm Genazino's Das Glück in glücksfernen Zeiten The Search for Transcendence: Arnold Stadler's Sehnsucht: Versuch über das erste Mal and Salvatore Precarious Times, Precarious Lives: Jenny Erpenbeck's Gehen, ging, gegangen Conclusion Epilogue: Presentist Dystopias or the Case for Environmental Humanities Bibliography Index
£24.69
Cornell University Press Thomas Manns War
Book SynopsisIn Thomas Mann''s War, Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America''s most prominent anti-fascists and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted.Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature and author of such world-renowned novels as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, began his self-imposed exile in the United States in 1938, having fled his native Germany in the wake of Nazi persecution and public burnings of his books. Mann embraced his role as a public intellectual, deftly using his literary reputation and his connections in an increasingly global publishing industry to refute Nazi propaganda. As Boes shows, Mann undertook successful lecture tours of the country and penned widely-read articles that alerted US audiences and readers to the dangers of complacency in the face of Nazism''s existential threat. Spanning four decades, from the eve of World WaTrade ReviewBoes's exhaustive, meticulous survey should come to represent an exemplar for scholarship seeking to document the lasting significance of an author's work. * Publishers Weekly *Boes's superb account is based on extensive archival research, including Mann's personal letters, as well as keen assessments of his novels. * The National Interest *Thomas Mann's War is important and timely. It is a reminder that literature is one of the first things to come under attack when authoritarianism takes hold, something for which there is ample evidence in our present moment, from China to Russia, from Turkey to Saudi Arabia. * The Wall Street Journal *Table of ContentsIntroduction: For the Sake of Survival 1. Luddism 2. Communion 3. Cyberculture 4. Distortion 5. Revolutionary Suicide 6. Liberation Technology 7. Thanatopography Conclusion: American Carnage and Technologies of Tomorrow Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Permissions Index
£25.19
Cornell University Press Dismantlings
Book SynopsisFor the master''s tools, the poet Audre Lorde wrote, will never dismantle the master''s house. Dismantlings is a study of literary, political, and philosophical critiques of the utopian claims about technology in the Long Seventies, the decade and a half before 1980. Following Alice Hilton''s 1963 admonition that the coming years would bring humanity to a crossroadsmachines for HUMAN BEINGS or human beings for THE MACHINEMatt Tierney explores wide-ranging ideas from science fiction, avant-garde literatures, feminist and anti-racist activism, and indigenous eco-philosophy that may yet challenge machines of war, control, and oppression.Dismantlings opposes the language of technological idealism with radical thought of the Long Seventies, from Lorde and Hilton to Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin to Huey P. Newton, John Mohawk, and many others. This counter-lexicon retrieves seven terms for the contemporary critique of technology: Luddism, a verbal and Trade ReviewDismantlings is a remarkable book. It is also a difficult book. Difficult not because of impenetrable theoretical prose (the writing is clear and crisp), but because it is always challenging to go back and confront the warnings that were ignored... The lessons from the long seventies are those that we are still struggling to reckon with today, including the recognition that in order to fully make sense of the machines around us it may be necessary to dismantle many of them. * boundary 2 *Unable to do justice to this magnificent mongraph, it will have to suffice to say that Tierney's Dismantlings is one of the most important books of the year as it offers up a number of thinkers and artists that provide language and strategies for working through urgent issues impacting the globe today and for inspiring ways to use words against machines to act towards more equitable futures. -- Mary Foltz * The Year's Work in English Studies *Matt Tierney['s] excellent and impassioned new book, Dismantlings, reminds us that some of the most powerful critiques of technology throughout the period drew on rhetorics steeped in Luddite ideologies that were cannier than we think. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: For the Sake of Survival 1. Luddism 2. Communion 3. Cyberculture 4. Distortion 5. Revolutionary Suicide 6. Liberation Technology 7. Thanatopography Conclusion: American Carnage and Technologies of Tomorrow Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Permissions Index
£30.40
Cornell University Press One Hundred Autobiographies
Book SynopsisIn One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.This fake memoir, as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke''s Letters to a Young Poet.Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. DostoTrade ReviewPoet and critic Lehman...brilliantly captures the despair, uncertainty, and anger he felt in these 100 short reflections on life, death, and writing. Lehman's exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain. -- Starred Review * Publisher's Weekly *Lehman's memoir pulses with life and memory. * The New York Jewish Week *While in throes of fighting cancer, David Lehman wrote every day he could, as a way of imaginatively affirming his existence and escaping the terrible ordeals of pain, dread, and emotional chaos. First of all figuring out a formal strategy, as expert poets do, Lehman then crafts a brilliant, inventive portrait of a mind, in language in which everything counts. The book's moral seriousness and theological and ancestral powers provide extreme aesthetic pleasure—Lehman's forms of language are forms of life, always life. One Hundred Autobiographies teaches and instructs its fortunate readers, like all great literature, which it is. * Literary Hub *Table of ContentsPreface 1. Execution Poem Expert 2. Spots of Time 3. Café Loup 4. No Big Deal 5. Cancer Alley 6. The Crisis 7. The Aftermath 8. The Procedure 9. The Protocol 10. The Good Kind 11. The Diarist 12. None But the Strong 13. Tropic of Cancer 14. Hospitals and Airports 15. Back to the Waiting Room 16. "Hurry up, please, it's time" 17. Why 1963? 18. Good Friday 19. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate! 20. The Weekend Before 21. "Bladder cancer: Isn't that what Sinatra died of?" 22. In a Technical Sense 23. Five O'Clock Rush 24. A Heart Event 25. Good Show 26. Metaport 27. If You Were an English Poet 28. The Regimen 29. A Few Beacons in the Quicksand 30. What's the Story? 31. Time Is on My Side 32. Rush Job 33. Final Call 34. And Then You Crash 35. Chemo 36. Roid Rage 37. Under the Garden 38. The End 39. Falling in Love Again 40. Nothingness 41. Syllabus 42. Commencement Speech 43. The Exquisite Corpse 44. The Editorial "We" 45. Oblivion 46. Dostoyevsky 47. The Spiritual Connection 48. "Myself, When Stoned" 49. Bloomsday 50. Tom Collins 51. The Admissions Officer 52. Columbia 53. Classic Koch 54. The Poem Team 55. Shakespeare's Birthday 56. Recovery Room 57. The Rebbe 58. Life Beings at Forty 59133. Search for Meaning 60. The Old Religion 61. The Problem of Evil 62. Dean Martin's Hat 63. 740 Francs 64. Shalom Aleichem Rides to the Rescue 65. The Arrival of the Messiah 66. Sabbath Services 67. A Complicated Guy 68. The Patient Next to You 69. Cambridge 70. Armistice Day, 1970 71. The Sublime Pain of Being 72. The Glass Skeleton 73. Why Does the Bridge Not Progress? 74. Q & A 75. Ludlowville, 1981 76. Bio Note (Alt.) 77. Wedding Ceremony 78. Moscow, 2007 79. Group Therapy 80. Fort Tryon Park 81. Fine Invention 82. Identity Theft 83. A Routine Visit 84. Doctor Jew 85. "Except for the cancer..." 86. The Heart Knows 87. A Black Dress 88. Heisenberg as Hero 89. Cheers! 90. Walter Lehmann 91. Rowing in Eden 92. I Remember Mama 93. No Regrets 94. If I Could 95. The Scar 96. The Secret 97. Like a Hurricane 98. In the Eyes of the Beholder 99. Champagne Cocktails 100. In the Swim
£17.09
Cornell University Press If God Meant to Interfere
Book SynopsisThe rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields.Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaTrade ReviewIf God Meant to Interfere is full of surprises. Douglas is conversant with the field of Biblical studies, for instance, and offers up detailed accounts of how archeological findings like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts have reshaped our understanding of early Christianity, particularly underappreciated strains of apocalyptic and gnostic thinking. He is a skilled and reliable interpreter of discourses outside his own field of literary studies. One thing I admire about the book is that Douglas takes time to explore his materials fully, so that forays into the controversy surrounding Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, say, or an excursus into the scholarship on lived religion, or an entire section devoted to the nuances of intelligent design, come to seem less diversionary and very much to the point. Above all, Douglas takes time to tell stories, which is all too rare in literary scholarship.... A compelling and consistently surprising book for anyone interested in the relationship between literature and religion. * Modern Fiction Studies *If God Meant to Interfere is effectively two essay collections with a powerful argument uniting its halves in critical conversation. * American Literary History *Douglas traces a surprisingly broad and complex network of linkages between the Christian Right, postmodernism, and literary multiculturalism.... If God Meant to Interfere is a rich and complex treatment of three sociocultural movements that are rarely examined in combination, but should and will be, thanks largely to this book. * Religion & Literature *Douglas' If God Were to Interfere amounts to one of the best historical studies of recent American fiction by a scholar immersed in issues of religious debate and historical context. It is an impressive achievement... * Christianity and Literature *If God Meant to Interfere demands that literary critics pay attention to a form of religiosity... It represents a vital and necessary intervention into American literary studies. * American Literature *Timely and helpful in unpacking the confusion around contemporary American politics.... It is refreshing that rather than simply point fingers at the Christian Right as a reactionary movement, Douglas is willing to consider the culpability of the modern academy and the embrace of postmodern linguistic theories in the rise of contemporary right-wing movements.... An important contribution to understandings of the Christian Right and to understanding how postmodern authors engage with religion. -- Andrew Crome * English Studies in Canada *With superior research, wide-ranging reading among conservative believers themselves, and a panache and sympathy that allows readers of religious commitment themselves to feel as though they are in good company with a fellow traveler... If God Meant to Interfere amounts to one of the best historical studies of recent American fiction by a scholar immersed in issues of religious debate and historical context. It is an impressive achievement that will become a model for all workers in the vineyard of [the study of] religion and literature within a contemporary American literary focus. * Christianity & Literature *Table of ContentsPart One: Multicultural Entanglements 1. Multiculturalism, Secularization, Resurgence 2. The Poisonwood Bible's Multicultural Graft 3. Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead 4. Recapitulation and Religious Indifference in The Plot Against America Part Two: Postmodern Entanglements 5. Thomas Pynchon’s Prophecy 6. Science and Religion in Carl Sagan’s Contact 7. Evolution and Theodicy in Blood Meridian 8. The Postmodern Gospel According to Dan Conclusion: Politics, Literature, Method
£23.74
Cornell University Press Life Is Elsewhere
Book SynopsisIn Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called the provincesa place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature''s representation of the nation''s space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficultTrade ReviewThis is another excellent release in the NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies... a nuanced and enlightening book written in clear, jargon-free prose. * Choice *This highly important book provides a new understanding of what the author calls the provincial trope in Russian literature.The book has significant implications for history as well as literary criticism. * The Russian Review *The book's scope is one of its strongest qualities: Lounsbery goes beyond Gogol' and Chekhov and includes a range of other writers' uses of the provincial trope. The result is a fascinating and exhaustive analysis of the symbolic geography of Russian nineteenth-century literature. * Slavonic and East European Review *This book does a rare thing: it takes a topic that all readers of nineteenth-century Russian literature think they understand, provintsiia, and demonstrates that this apparently selfevident construct, associated with boredom and meaninglessness, is multifaceted, vibrant, and significant. In so doing, Life is Elsewhere genuinely transforms our understanding of nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture. * Canadian Slavonic Papers *Life Is Elsewhere is a striking example of a successful thematic approach to literary analysis. At the same time, it is a bold re-evaluation of overlooked themes and texts in Russian literature, lending itself both to classroom discussion and to the rediscovery of individual writers in new contexts. * Modern Language Review *This is a magisterial book, generous in its wealth of information and citations, theoretically informed, thorough, and beautifully written.Lounsbery has proven that the Russian provinces are in fact deeply interesting, both as a foil and as a broader vehicle for helping us grapple with challenges of Russian identity and Russia's place both in the canon of world literature and geopolitically in the world. * Slavic Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Translation 1. Geography, History, Trope: Facts on the Ground 2. Before the Provinces: Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral in Pushkin's Countryside 3. Inventing Provincial Backwardness, or "Everything is Barbarous and Horrid" (Herzen, Sollogub, and Others) 4. "This is Paris itself!": Gogol in the Town of N 5. "I Do Beg of You, Wait, and Compare!": Goncharov, Belinsky, and Provincial Taste 6. Back Home: The Provincial Lives of Turgenev's Cosmopolitans 7. Transcendence Deferred: Women Writers in the Provinces 8. Melnikov and Leskov, or What is Regionalism in Russia? 9. Centering and Decentering in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy 10. "Everything Here is Accidental": Chekhov's Geography of Meaninglessness 11. In the End: Shchedrin, Sologub, and Terminal Provinciality 12. Conclusion: The Provinces in the Twentieth Century List of Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index
£97.20
Cornell University Press Paradox and Representation
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Paradox of Representation 2. The Voice of a Transgressive Young Man 3. The Voice of an Illegitimate Son 4. The Voice of an Incestuous Sister 5. The Voices of Aged Buraku Women Conclusion
£37.05
Cornell University Press Snapshots of the Soul
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThe book includes a bountiful selection of photographs closely related to the text. Highly recommended. * Choice *Blasing's work demonstrates an amazing knowledge of an array of archival evidence, from photographs to literary manuscripts, spread across the United States, Europe, and the Russian Federation. * The Russian Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Poetry and Photography: Encounters, Connections, and Change 1. Illuminating Consciousness: Pasternak's Poetics of Photography 2. Through the Lens of Loss: Tsvetaeva's Elegiac Photo-Poetics 3. Framing Memory: Brodskyand Photographic Time 4. Poetic Mothers in the Photo Frame: Akhmadulina's Lyric Dialogue with Silver Age Snapshots 5. Darkroom of Dreams: Poetry, Photography, and the Optical Unconscious Coda. Digital Denied: Poetry and Photography after 1999
£43.20
Cornell University Press All Future Plunges to the Past
Book SynopsisAll Future Plunges to the Past explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce''s work. Through contextually rich close readings, José Vergara uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce''s texts, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to address the volatile questions of lineages in their respective Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet contexts. Interviews with contemporary Russian writers, critics, and readers of Joyce extend the conversation to the present day, showing how the debates regarding the Irish writer''s place in the Russian pantheon are no less settled one hundred years after Ulysses.The creative reworkings, or translations, of Joycean themes, ideas, characters, plots, and styles made by the five writers Vergara examines speak to shifting culturaTrade ReviewI heartily recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in the topic. This is a book I'll be returning to for years to come. * Languagehat *José Vergara's important new book presents an illuminating account of the reception of a major figure of Western modernism. Vergara is the first to explore in detail how Joyce's texts served as a source of inspiration and a polemical tool for major Russian authors of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. * Los Angeles Review of Books *The homeopathic capacity of a book to have a transformative effect in trace quantities is central to All Future Plunges to the Past, Jose Vergara's nuanced study of Russian responses to James Joynce. Vergara gathers a wealth of seemingly slight snippets of evidence in five chronologically organized case studies, which taken together demonstrate a productive and illuminating engagement with Joyce. * Times Literary Supplement *All Future concludes with excerpts from interviews with contemporary Russians[that] serve as a foil to make Vergara's own learned and imaginative meditation on Joyce sparkle all the more brightly. * Russian Review *José Vergara's study makes a compelling case for persistent attention to the legacy of James Joyce within Russian literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What Vergara convincingly shows is that for Russian writers in the twentieth century, Joyce figured as the pre-eminent modernist writer of prose the standard to emulate adapt or rebel against. * Slavic Review *All Future Plunges to the Past will be of interest to those studying the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian novel and, more broadly, the spaces of Western European cultures in Russian literary representation. The clearly composed text and the precise documentation will assuredly facilitate further research. * Slavonic and East European Review *Vergara's examples of intertextual connections between Russian texts and Joyce's œuvre collectively provide valuable insight into the evolution of intertextuality in Russia over the course of the long twentieth century. All Future Plunges to the Past demonstrates how each of these five important Russian writers adapted Joyce's stylistic and philosophical methods as they attempted to bridge the time and space between Russia and European (post)modernism. * Modern Language Review *José Vergara's book attentively traces Joyce's influence on Russian literature, which still remains to a large extent terra incognita. All Future Plunges to the Past is useful and topical, highlighting important trends in the Russian literary history through the Joycean prism. Having made a few observations above, below I would like to offer some further remarks. * Canadian American Slavic Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction: How Joyce Was Read in Russia 1. Yury Olesha: An Envy for World Culture 2. Vladimir Nabokov: Translating the Ghosts of the Past 3. Andrei Bitov: In Search of Lost Fathers 4. Sasha Sokolov: "Here Comes Everybody" Meets "Those Who Came" 5. Mikhail Shishkin: Border Crossings Conclusion: How Joyce Is Read in Russia
£43.20
Cornell University Press Unfinished Spirit
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewUnfinished Spirit is a bracing work of scholarly devotion. Alongside plenty of original readings and fresh interpretation, Kennedy-Epstein manages the uncanny trick of presenting us with Rukeyser at work, thinking and feeling her way through the catastrophes of her epoch. The reader comes away from the book enlivened and encouraged and enraged. * Women: A Cultural Review *Adventurous, painstaking, and thought-provoking, Unfinished Spirit will draw students of Rukeyser and twentieth-century American culture to think outside familiar literary historical boxes. * Modern Philology *Rukeyser's intervention in modernism with this avant-garde novel—and the obstruction of her career by misogynist expectations for women writers—are increasingly the focus of scholars eager to work on something new about the modernist novel and/or the Spanish Civil War. * Feminist Modernist Studies *A work of bold originality and personal, passionate scholarship Rukeyser's archival writing provides an invaluable perspective on our times and a guide to moving forward (particularly in our era of revived book banning) with her characteristic belief in possibility, in process and potential. * The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Waste/Archives/Feminism Part I: Novel Proliferations: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1974 1. Costa Brava 2. Her Symbol Was Civil War: Recovering Savage Coast 3. Mother of Exiles: Spanish Civil War Writing Part II: Being Process Itself: Feminism, Collaboration, and Influence 4. Bad Influence and Willful Subjects: The Life of Poetry, "Many Keys," and Sunday at Nine 5. So Easy to See: The Unfinished Collaboration with Berenice Abbott 6. Pillars of Process: Franz Boas, Birth, and Indigenous Thought Conclusion: The Rukeyser Era
£23.39
Cornell University Press Ideal Minds
Book SynopsisFollowing the 1960s, that decade''s focus on consciousness-raising transformed into an array of intellectual projects far afield of movement politics. The mind''s powers came to preoccupy a range of thinkers and writers: ethicists pursuing contractual theories of justice, radical ecologists interested in the paleolithic brain, seventies cultists, and the devout of both evangelical and New Age persuasions. In Ideal Minds, Michael Trask presents a boldly revisionist argument about the revival of subjectivity in postmodern American culture, connecting familiar figures within the seventies intellectual landscape who share a commitment to what he calls neo-idealism as a weapon in the struggle against discredited materialist and behaviorist worldviews.In a heterodox intellectual and literary history of the 1970s, Ideal Minds mixes ideas from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, deep ecology, political theory, science fiction, neoclassical ecTrade Review[H]is reevaluation of the 1970s' intellectual and cultural currents is remarkable. * Choice *A convincing portrait of the zeitgeist. Trask's reevaluation of the 1970's intellectual and cultural currents is remarkable—Highly recommended. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: From Consciousness-Raising to Neo-idealism 1. Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of the Meritocracy 2. Radical Ecology's Mindfulness 3. That Seventies Cult 4. Millennial America and the World to Come Afterword: The Marketization of Everything
£20.89
Cornell University Press To the Collector Belong the Spoils
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsIntroduction: Dangerous Passions Part One: Possessing the Old World: Henry James and the Spoils of Europe 1. James's Human Bibelots 2. Sardanapalus's Hoard Part Two: Between Salvation and Revolution: Walter Benjamin's Conflicted Collector 3. The Collector in a Collectivist State 4. Trash-Talking in The Arcades Project Part Three: Collecting Africa: Carl Einstein's Ethnographic Surrealism 5. The Collector and His Circle 6. Einstein's "Critical Dictionary" Afterword: Hoarding in a Digital Age
£50.40
Cornell University Press Making No Compromise
Book SynopsisMaking No Compromise is the first book-length account of the lives and editorial careers of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the women who founded the avant-garde journal the Little Review in Chicago in 1914. Born in the nineteenth-century Midwest, Anderson and Heap grew up to be iconoclastic rebels, living openly as lesbians, and advocating causes from anarchy to feminism and free love. Their lives and work shattered cultural, social, and sexual norms. As their paths crisscrossed Chicago, New York, Paris, and Europe; two World Wars; and a parade of the most celebrated artists of their time, they transformed themselves and their journal into major forces for shifting perspectives on literature and art. Imagism, Dada, surrealism, and Machine Age aesthetics were among the radical trends the Little Review promoted and introduced to US audiences. Anderson and Heap published the early work of the "men of 1914"Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and T. S. Eliotand promoted women writers such as Djuna Barnes, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Mary Butts, and the inimitable Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. In the mid-1920s Anderson and Heap became adherents of George I. Gurdjieff, a Russian mystic, and in 1929 ceased publication of the Little Review. Holly A. Baggett examines the roles of radical politics, sexuality, modernism, and spirituality and suggests that Anderson and Heap's interest in esoteric questions was evident from the early days of the Little Review. Making No Compromise tells the story of two women who played an important role in shaping modernism.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Buzz and the Sting 2. Temples of Tomorrow: Anderson and the Little Review, 1914–1916 3. Political and Literary Radicals 4. Interregnum: Chicago, San Francisco, New York 5. Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce 6. Lesbian Literature, Women Writers, and Modernist Mysticism 7. George Ivanovich Gurdjieff: A Messenger BetweenTwo Worlds 8. The Heap Era Epilogue: Post–Little Review Years
£26.09
Cornell University Press Shapes of Time
Book SynopsisShapes of Time explores how concepts of time and history were spatialized in early twentieth-century German thought. Michael McGillen locates efforts in German modernism to conceive of alternative shapes of timebeyond those of historicism and nineteenth-century philosophies of historyat the boundary between secular and theological discourses. By analyzing canonical works of German modernismthose of Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musilhe identifies the ways in which spatial imagery and metaphors were employed to both separate the end of history from a narrative framework and to map the liminal relation between history and eschatology.Drawing on theories and practices as disparate as constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, photography, and urban architecture, Shapes of Time presents original connections between modernism, theology, and mathematics as played out within the canon of twentieth-century German letters. Concep
£97.20
Cornell University Press Shapes of Time
Book SynopsisShapes of Time explores how concepts of time and history were spatialized in early twentieth-century German thought. Michael McGillen locates efforts in German modernism to conceive of alternative shapes of timebeyond those of historicism and nineteenth-century philosophies of historyat the boundary between secular and theological discourses. By analyzing canonical works of German modernismthose of Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musilhe identifies the ways in which spatial imagery and metaphors were employed to both separate the end of history from a narrative framework and to map the liminal relation between history and eschatology.Drawing on theories and practices as disparate as constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, photography, and urban architecture, Shapes of Time presents original connections between modernism, theology, and mathematics as played out within the canon of twentieth-century German letters. Concep
£23.39
Stanford University Press Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and
Book SynopsisThe first sustained study of the relations between literary celebrity and queer sexuality, Categorically Famous looks at the careers of three celebrity writers—James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal—in relation to the gay and lesbian liberation movement of the 1960s. While none of these writers "came out" in our current sense, all contributed, through their public images and their writing, to a greater openness toward homosexuality that was an important precondition of liberation. Their fame was crucial, for instance, to the growing conception of homosexuals as an oppressed minority rather than as individuals with a psychological problem. Challenging scholarly orthodoxies, Guy Davidson urges us to rethink the usual opposition to liberation and to gay and lesbian visibility within queer studies as well as standard definitions of celebrity. The conventional ban on openly discussing the homosexuality of public figures meant that media reporting at the time did not focus on his protagonists' private lives. At the same time, the careers of these "semi-visible" gay celebrities should be understood as a crucial halfway point between the era of the open secret and the present-day post-liberation era in which queer people, celebrities very much included, are enjoined to come out. Trade Review"In his incisive account of lesbian and gay identity in the first heyday of our media and celebrity culture, Davidson finds genuinely new and important things to say not only about such iconic figures as Baldwin, Sontag, and Vidal but about making and unmaking queer politics in a time of turmoil not unlike our own." -- Michael Moon * Emory University *"A remarkably detailed star map of pre- and post-Stonewall America, Categorically Famous breaks fresh ground in queer celebrity studies. With exceptional readings of lesbian and gay VIPs, Davidson generates new buzz about how the twinned themes of liberation and luminaries advanced our unstoppable homosexual revolutions." -- Scott Herring * Indiana University *"Davidson's book is engagingly written, deftly blending historical anecdotes with close readings and theoretical analysis....[His] readings of Baldwin, Sontag, and Vidal are invariably spot-on." -- Jordan S. Carroll * Journal of the History of Sexuality *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractWhile recognizing the historical contingency of sexual identity categories, the Introduction argues against the standard queer theoretical view that these categories operate as forms of social coercion. It is proposed that an examination of the 1960s careers of three celebrity writers—James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal—puts in doubt the reflexive valorization of instability, indeterminacy, and opacity that has come to dominate queer studies. Though each of these writers had complicated relations to sexual liberation generally and homosexual liberation specifically, their work contributed importantly to the increasing publicization of gay life that characterized the 1960s and that was an important precondition of gay and lesbian liberation. Close attention to their careers necessitates a rethinking of queer theory's critique of gay and lesbian openness. 1James Baldwin and Celebrity Shame chapter abstractThis chapter argues that Baldwin transmuted the matter of homosexuality—defined as shameful by American culture—into literary success. Drawing on recent scholarship on the theoretical and political implications of shame, and examining a wide range of Baldwin's writings, the chapter suggests that shame was at the heart of both Baldwin's celebrity performance and his representation of homosexuality and that consideration of the operation of this affect helps in understanding Baldwin's complicated relation to gay identity and the liberatory politics that formed around it. The chapter concludes with a close analysis of Baldwin's 1954 essay on André Gide, "The Male Prison," which, it is suggested, presents an image of queer solidarity that anticipates the sense of community that was crucial for gay liberation and that is also played out in audience relations with Baldwin—despite his own overt opposition to gay identity and his distance from the gay subculture. 2Baldwin and the Celebrity Novel chapter abstractThis chapter continues the investigation of relations between Baldwin's celebrity embodiment of queerness and the formation of a recognizably contemporary form of politicized gay identity, homing in on Another Country (1962) and addressing in a less sustained fashion Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968). The chapter proposes that the novels are an apt focus for Baldwin's considerations of celebrity and sexuality in the public sphere because the novel is a mode in which the relations between public and private are in particularly charged tension. The two novels are viewed as "celebrity novels," not only because they feature celebrity or proto-celebrity protagonists but also because they are extensions of Baldwin's celebrity persona, in which what he insisted is the private matter of homosexuality is paradoxically bodied forth. 3Susan Sontag's Impersonal Stardom chapter abstractThis chapter discusses Susan Sontag's 1960s work and media image in relation to the discourse of stardom. Referring to her photographed image, her essays of the 1960s, and her novel The Benefactor (1963), the chapter works with and against film-star studies to develop an account of Sontag's queer iconicity. The chapter argues that Sontag's star effect solicits eroticized audience attention in the very act of seeming to repel it through her vaunted "impersonality." The effect is produced by the overlap between the general operations of star construction and the impersonal aloofness of her prose. Through the queer allure of her image and her groundbreaking 1960s essays, Sontag helped promote unorthodox sexual identities and attitudes, even as she avoided association with lesbianism. 4From Camp to Counterculture chapter abstractThis chapter argues against long-standing queer arguments that Sontag saw camp and the gay subculture as apolitical and that her views were homophobically tinged. Concentrating on her famous essay "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), other key Sontag essays from the 1960s, and their contemporaneous reception, the chapter argues that Sontag contradictorily elaborates a view of gay subcultural expression as apolitical and aestheticized and discloses an investment in sexuality itself—and arguably queer sexuality above all—as a form of freedom. Picking up on the liberatory hints within "Camp" and other essays, the chapter considers how Sontag as a celebrity intellectual helped disseminate ideas about the sexual revolution and consequently set the coordinates of what came to be known as the "counterculture." 5The Moment of Myra Breckinridge chapter abstractThis chapter discusses how Gore Vidal's satirical best-selling novel Myra Breckinridge (1968) helped usher in gay liberation, even while manifesting aspects of antiliberationist critique. It argues that the novel's ambivalent perspective toward the emergent gay-liberation discourse is inextricably related to the category of celebrity with which Vidal also had a complicated relationship. While Vidal reveled in his fame, he was also critical of celebrity culture, and Myra Breckinridge is one of his most trenchant and extended critiques, even as it is animated by his own fannish relation to 1940s Hollywood and its stars. Yet Myra became a media event, and the eponymous narrator-heroine, like Vidal, became a kind of celebrity, albeit a virtual one. The chapter argues that Myra the novel and Myra the virtual celebrity enabled Vidal both to acknowledge his investment in same-sexuality and deflect his connection to gay identity. 6Gore Vidal's Sexuality in the Public Sphere chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on a heated moment in a live TV debate of 1968, in which the right-wing pundit William Buckley called Gore Vidal a "queer." I argue that this moment is a staging post in both the development of open media talk about the homosexuality of celebrities and in the unfolding of gay liberation. The moment was widely described by contemporaneous commentators as "embarrassing," and this chapter argues that thinking about the social and political implications of embarrassment is helpful in understanding how 1960s American culture positioned homosexuality and how queer theory responds to the overt representation of gay identity. The chapter argues that queer theory, because of its "knowingness" about sexuality, is unable to adequately register the revelatory, political force of openness demonstrated by Buckley's embarrassing outburst. Afterword: Visibility, Revisited; or, Delete the Closet? chapter abstractThe Afterword focuses on the relations between celebrity and queer sexual liberation in contemporary culture to demonstrate the continuities and changes in the publicization of queerness since the 1960s. It argues that the hypervisibility of culture-industry celebrities has become an important arena for the exercise of sexual visibility. While the dispensation of the open secret that pertained during the pre–gay liberation period has largely been displaced by the injunction to decloset oneself, the seemingly hard-to-shake logic of sexual identity persists, despite ubiquitous arguments that the hetero/homo binary has lost its hegemonic power to organize people's relations to their sexualities. Arguing against the queer theoretical position that visibility is a ruse of power, the Afterword contends that the persistence and popularity of acts of celebrity coming-out indicates the ongoing urgency and vibrancy of the project of sexual liberation.
£100.00
Stanford University Press A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and
Book SynopsisA Violent Peace offers a radical account of the United States' transformation into a total-war state. As the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between U.S. police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home. Writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois discerned in domestic strategies to quell racial protests the same counterintelligence logic structuring America's devastating wars in Asia. Examining U.S. militarism's centrality to the Cold War cultural imagination, Christine Hong assembles a transpacific archive—placing war writings, visual renderings of the American concentration camp, Japanese accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, black radical human rights petitions, Korean War–era G.I. photographs, Filipino novels on guerrilla resistance, and Marshallese critiques of U.S. human radiation experiments alongside government documents. By making visible the way the U.S. war machine waged informal wars abroad and at home, this archive reveals how the so-called Pax Americana laid the grounds for solidarity—imagining collective futures beyond the stranglehold of U.S. militarism.Trade Review"A Violent Peace is a tour de force, a brilliant rebuttal to the myth of America as defender of human rights abroad and racial justice at home. Christine Hong demonstrates how radical black and Asian intellectuals' penetrating critiques represent the real democratizing project. Beautifully written and persuasively argued, this book is a seismic shift in Cold War cultural history and our geopolitical imagination."—Robin D. G. Kelley, University of California, Los Angeles"Bursting with brilliance, clarity, and insight, this stunningly original and expansive work excavates the cross-racial, transnational origins of today's militarized modernity. Christine Hong unearths the hidden linkages between race, capital, and occupation in making our postwar global order and points us to alternative conceptions of community and solidarity that defy the borders of modern sovereignty. This book is a game-changer."—Chandan Reddy, University of Washington"Though grounded in Asian American studies, A Violent Peace makes powerful contributions to several other fields such as Cold War studies, African American literature and politics, discourses of militarization and securitization, global theories of race as well as literary and cultural studies broadly."—Bhakti Shringarpure, American Literary History"Hong's work is honest, necessary, and generative in its political vision.A Violent Peaceoffers a crucial set of arguments that will help us to navigate the ruins of the world that US hegemony built and work toward collectively creating a new one." A. J. Yumi Lee, Contemporary Literature"A Violent Peaceprovides a crucial connection between US foreign wars in East Asia and harsh domestic suppression working in tandem to gain total control."—Xiaobing Li, Journal of Asian Studies"Hong's work as a whole is an important contribution to the history of post-war US that recenters racialized humanity to illustrate the military-imperial violence that minimized the structures in which race was targeted, captured, and mobilized."—Annie Hui, Lateral"Viewing the culture of democratization in the post-1945 world order through the lens of US militarism, Christine Hong'sA Violent Peaceoffers the opportunity to survey some of the intellectual currents behind the revival of scholarly interest in the Korean War among literary and cultural critics."—Jeehyun Lim, Journal of American Studies"With great eloquence, [Hong] draws insightful connections between race, class, and power, while vividly demonstrating how the expansion of U.S. power into the Asia-Pacific in the postwar era has led to the world we live in today. Deeply considered and thought-provoking,A Violent Peaceis essential to understanding our current predicament.—Gregory Erlich, CounterPunch"Christine Hong's... shattering, academic analysis,A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, provides a people's perspective on the traumas wrought by the U.S. geosecurity structure that has lorded over the region since World War II."—Koohan Paik, The Hawaii Independent"In encouraging scholars to consider the co-constitution of postwar racial liberalism and Cold War imperialism, [A Violent Peace marks] a timely intervention in an urgent political context."—Mark Tseng-Putterman, American QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. "Democracy within the Teeth of Fascism": The Black POW and the Invisible War at Home in Ralph Ellison's War Writings 2. Revolution from Above: Ōe Kenzaburō, the Black Airman, and Occupied Japan 3. A Blueprint for Occupied Japan: Miné Okubo and the American Concentration Camp 4. Possessive Investment in Ruin: The Target, the Proving Ground, and the U.S. War Machine in the Nuclear Pacific 5. People's War, People's Democracy, People's Epic: Carlos Bulosan, U.S. Counterintelligence, and Cold War Unreliable Narration 6. The Enemy at Home: Urban Warfare and the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam 7. Militarized Queerness: Racial Masking and the Korean War Mascot
£100.00
Stanford University Press Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End
Book SynopsisA literary history of the Great Acceleration, Remainders examines an archive of postwar American poetry that reflects on new dimensions of ecological crisis. These poems portray various forms of remainders—from obsolescent goods and waste products to atmospheric pollution and melting glaciers—that convey the ecological consequences of global economic development. While North American ecocriticism has tended to focus on narrative forms in its investigations of environmental consciousness and ethics, Margaret Ronda highlights the ways that poetry explores other dimensions of ecological relationships. The poems she considers engage in more ambivalent ways with the problem of human agency and the limits of individual perception, and they are attuned to the melancholic and damaging aspects of environmental existence in a time of generalized crisis. Her method, which emphasizes the material histories and uneven effects of capitalist development, models a unique critical approach to understanding the causes and conditions of ongoing biospheric catastrophe.Trade Review"This haunting and deftly executed book tracks the traces and effects of postwar consumption-driven capitalism in American poetry in unexpected ways. Margaret Ronda proves to be an ecocritical scholar of keen poetic insight, originality, and range." -- Rob Wilson * University of California, Santa Cruz *"With precise and unsparing attention, Remainders shows us how the very things that make poetry 'untimely'—bearing old forms into the present, making present the discarded or lost, investing in barely conceivable futures—can make it the timeliest of arts, best attuned to the ecological calamity of our era." -- Oren Izenberg * University of California, Irvine *"Margaret Ronda makes a persuasive case for poetry's continued relevance as a response to the ecological outrages of late capitalist development. Remainders sheds light on a literary tradition whose exegetical, affective, and political intractability reflects the planetary crisis that surrounds us, while rejecting any facile narrative of repair. This is a timely book about the radical possibilities of untimeliness." -- Jennifer Scappettone * University of Chicago *"Ronda's expansive rubric of the remainder has the advantage of accentuating the ecological resonance of poems by figures not traditionally situated within ecological circles...Ronda's precise interpretations, above all else, dazzle." -- Jean-Thomas Tremblay * Los Angeles Review of Books *"Twentieth-century and contemporary US poets, Ronda shows, have a vivid sense of the human predicament and the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, which they register and route through the remainders of poetic traditions....[She leads] readers through extended, difficult, and detailed readings of literary texts, but[attaches] these readings to intuitive research questions about poetry's place in the world." -- Walt Hunter * American Literary History *"Ronda lucidly articulates and examines...changing paradigms, and the histories which provoked them, under the heading 'the Great Acceleration', which encompasses the huge raft of changes to the post-1945 world....Moreover, she forcefully conceptualizes the specifics of this history as part of late capitalism's seemingly inexorable spread." -- Stephen Grace * The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *"Ronda's book is an important contribution to ecocriticism and poetry studies in these grim times, and most likely it will remain so for years to come." -- Scott Knickerbocker * ISLE *"Ronda's contribution forges a conceptual tool for tracking what Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin collaboratively theorize as natural history.[Her] book offers literary history and environmentalism each a new path for considering what remains." -- Brent Ryan Bellamy * American Literature *"[T]he source of this book's real value [is] a reinvention of the radical register of thought and action for our historical present – because nothing less will be sufficient if we are to survive the storms to come." -- Mark Steven * Journal of American Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Great Acceleration Poetics chapter abstractThe Introduction lays out the historical framework of the Great Acceleration. Rather than aligning the Great Acceleration with the discourse of the Anthropocene, this introduction argues that the particular historical model of the Great Acceleration is more attentive to the explosive economic growth in this period and its ecological ramifications. Postwar American poetry's interest in leftovers, residual matter and life, and unredeemable goods makes it a particularly keen chronicler of the larger ecohistorical changes of this era. At the same time, this interest in remainders rather than natural externality becomes a measure of the increasing inaccessibility of the master-concept of nature as an imaginative resource and a cultural concept in this time. It also reveals the changing self-conceptions of the cultural work and status of poetry after modernism. 1North Central, South Side: Postwar Ecologies in Niedecker and Brooks chapter abstractThe opening chapter reads two mid-century poets, Lorine Niedecker and Gwendolyn Brooks, as chroniclers of socioecological transition in the immediate postwar period. While environmental historians have recently turned attention to the suburbs as the key site of inquiry into changing postwar conditions, the chapter emphasizes the rural and urban peripheries as locales that reveal many of the emerging characteristics of the Great Acceleration. Turning first to Lorine Niedecker, the chapter describes her development of a poetics attentive to uneven development, residual forms of life, and ecosystemic degradation in the mixed economy of rural Wisconsin. The second half of the chapter moves from Niedecker's rural Wisconsin to Brooks's urban Chicago. Brooks explores the production of space in relation to the forms of environmental racism emerging in South Side housing and neighborhood conditions after 1945. 2"The Advancing Signs of the Air": Ashbery's Atmospheres chapter abstractThis chapter begins with a discussion of the new forms of environmental consciousness emerging in the 1960s and early 1970s around pollution and systemic toxicity. It focuses specifically on Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, discussing their approaches to ecological interconnection under the sign of crisis but also the ways in which this interconnection is difficult to perceive or understand. The chapter then turns from their reflections on the scarcely perceptible intimacies of ecological interconnection to an examination of John Ashbery's poetry, which explores these thresholds. Exploring Ashbery's portrayals of waste and air as phenomena undergoing change, this chapter argues that Ashbery's work depicts various forms of environmental consciousness. His poetry unfolds an affirmative embrace of ecological uncertainty that involves neither critique nor attempt to repair damage, nor even an attempt to understand the causes of emergent crisis. Instead, he traces the way crisis can be sensed in his poetic surrounds. 3"NOT PEOPLE'S PARK / PEOPLE'S PLANET": 1970s Revolutionary Pastoral chapter abstractThis chapter engages with two poetic works of the early 1970s, Gary Snyder's Turtle Island (1974) and Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters (1st ed. 1971), which were essential reading for the countercultural left. These books envisage an ecological commons that is grounded in nonmodern or "primitive" ways of living but is also figured as not yet existent, requiring revolutionary change in order to come into being. Holding images of ecological catastrophe alongside visions of living lightly on the earth, these poems create a distinctive friction between tumult and ease that this chapter calls "revolutionary pastoral." These books repurpose the pastoral's opposition to acquisitive logics and the concept of property for an era confronting new forms of capital expansion and environmental enclosure. The chapter closes by examining the historical conditions that led to the decline of radical ecological politics by the late 1970s and the corporatization of the environmental movement. 4Mourning and Melancholia at the End of Nature chapter abstractThis chapter begins with a consideration of the development of the discourse of the "end of nature" and its implications for understanding ecological relations. Pointing to the elegiac dimensions of this discourse, the chapter turns to Juliana Spahr's long poem "Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache" as an example of a literary exploration of the consequences of this conceptual absence. The chapter draws on the Romantic philosophy of Schiller as well as more recent psychoanalytic accounts of elegy and mourning to argue that the operations of elegy become the subject of investigation in Spahr's work. "Gentle Now" serves as a representative eco-elegy that dwells in melancholia rather than moving toward the completion of the mourning process. The chapter closes with a consideration of a more recent poem by Spahr, co-written with Joshua Clover, that investigates the affective and political limits of melancholy as a response to present conditions. 5"A Rescue That Comes Too Late": Figure and Disfiguration in Contemporary Ecopoetics chapter abstractThis chapter turns to the contemporary mode of ecopoetics as an exploration of the problems of poiesis in a time of accelerating ecological destruction. Ecopoetics as a distinctive mode emerges in the post-Kyoto Protocol era, when the problem of how to respond to planetary environmental degradation has become increasingly urgent. The ecopoetics texts of the chapter present an extended redescription of human capacities and aesthetic making in light of anthropogenic crisis. Discussing works by Brenda Hillman, Hoa Nguyen, Brenda Coultas, and Allison Cobb, the chapter highlights how their use of prosopopoeia and apostrophe dramatizes uncanny and defamiliarized dimensions of relationality. These portrayals raise questions regarding the culpability for environmental destruction and the limits of anthropogenic ingenuity to fix, remake, or salvage. Coda: On Storms to Come chapter abstractThe Coda argues that storms are one key way to register the unfathomable earth-systemic changes characteristic of the Great Acceleration. It points to the intensifying weather patterns of this time and offers examples of some recent cultural works—poetry, film, photography—that represent these storms. In these representations, the spectator confronts the bewildering sense of change without any narrative arc that might point to recovery or renewal. One documentary text by Cheena Marie Lo on Hurricane Katrina offers a powerful investigation of these conditions of aftermath. The coda explores Lo's orientation toward the nonredemptive and the lost as a model of approaching the larger ethos of this study's poetry. The Coda ends with a turn toward the forms of connectivity that these works have charted, despite their larger historical pessimisms, and points to the ways these connections are materializing in contemporary struggles for the ecological commons.
£49.30
Stanford University Press Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Conditions of
Book SynopsisAt the turn of the twentieth century, tuberculosis was a leading cause of death across America, Europe, and the Russian Empire. The incurable disease gave rise to a culture of convalescence, creating new opportunities for travel and literary reflection. Tubercular Capital tells the story of Yiddish and Hebrew writers whose lives and work were transformed by a tubercular diagnosis. Moving from eastern Europe to the Italian Peninsula, and from Mandate Palestine to the Rocky Mountains, Sunny S. Yudkoff follows writers including Sholem Aleichem, Raḥel Bluvshtein, David Vogel, and others as they sought "the cure" and drew on their experiences of illness to hone their literary craft. Combining archival research with literary analysis, Yudkoff uncovers how tuberculosis came to function as an agent of modern Jewish literature. The illness would provide the means for these suffering writers to grow their reputations and find financial backing. It served a central role in the public fashioning of their literary personas and ushered Jewish writers into a variety of intersecting English, German, and Russian literary traditions. Tracing the paths of these writers, Tubercular Capital reconsiders the foundational relationship between disease, biography, and literature.Trade Review"This brilliant study combines thorough historical research with a fine-grained analysis of texts produced under the shadow of the 'White Death,' all framed by a powerful account of the cultural and economic matrix within which both the career of the individual poet and the tradition of tubercular writing are most fruitfully articulated." -- Ernest B. Gilman * New York University *"Resisting the sentimental transformation of illness into metaphor described by Susan Sontag, while attending to the persistently romanticized 'consumptive artist,' Sunny Yudkoff's brilliant study provides a new model for understanding the relationship between literary creativity and tuberculosis. Tubercular Capital argues that writers strategically mobilized their tuberculosis, both for their careers and in their work, even as they were laid low by disease. From Sholem Aleichem's 'tubercular Jubilee' to the sickrooms and sanatoria of other Hebrew and Yiddish writers, tuberculosis was inextricable from the burgeoning of early twentieth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literary culture." -- Naomi Seidman * University of Toronto *"Yudkoff's exploration seamlessly merges speculation with concrete history....Tempting as it may be to imbue illness with its own transcendental power, she chooses to depict its force with a more material and pragmatic truth, warning of the dangerous contortions of pain that come with romanticization." -- Arshy Azizi * Los Angeles Review of Books *"This research on the role that tuberculosis played in the lives and creative output of modern Jewish writers is original and fascinating....Highly recommended for academic libraries collecting in the area of Jewish culture and literature." -- Yaffa Weisman * Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter *"A major asset of [Tubercular Capital] is the fact that it retains an unromanticized view of suffering artists, which is even more important when examining their treasured poetic work." -- Heidi Stern * The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Jewish Literature and Tubercular Capital chapter abstractThe Introduction sets the stage for a larger investigation into the intersection of tuberculosis, biography, and literary output. To do so, the Introduction offers an account of the state of Yiddish and Hebrew literature at the turn of the twentieth century as well as an overview of various cultural-historical connotations of tuberculosis among Jewish and non-Jewish readers. This includes an examination of Romantic notions about consumption, anti-Semitic discourses surrounding tuberculosis, and the reputation of the disease among Zionists, communists, and Jewish public health officials across the globe. The Introduction further introduces the methodological intervention of the study—tubercular capital—by bringing together sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "cultural capital" with anthropologist Didier Fassin's investigations into the "politics of life." 1In the Hands of Every Reader: Sholem Aleichem's Tubercular Jubilee chapter abstractThis chapter examines the role played by disease in the life and career of the classic Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (né Sholem Rabinovitsh). After being diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1908, a global campaign known as "The Jubilee" was initiated to help the destitute author recuperate in Nervi, Italy. Drawing on archival sources, newspaper articles, and multiple memoirs, this chapter plots how the campaign promoted the author's reputation, stabilized his finances, and inaugurated the first formal stage of literary-critical assessments of his work. It further analyzes the importance of tuberculosis in Sholem Aleichem's literary output, in the development of his literary persona, and in the establishment of a mutually-effective relationship with his readership. 2In a Sickroom of Her Own: Raḥel Bluvshtein's Tubercular Poetry chapter abstractThis chapter examines the role of tuberculosis in the life and writing of the Hebrew poet known as Raḥel. To do so, the chapter draws on the comparative model of the Victorian sickroom to examine how Raḥel transformed the space of her recuperation into a veritable salon of literary exchange and creativity. Reading Raḥel's correspondence and poetry and drawing on the memoiristic accounts published by her visitors, this chapter reveals that Raḥel's Tel Aviv sickroom became the center of her public self-fashioning as an ailing female poet. The sickroom further serves as the key for interpreting the link between Raḥel's poetics of space, simplicity (pashtut), and the spread (hitpashtut) of disease. This chapter also sharpens scholarly understanding of Raḥel's literary biography by situating her work within an Eastern European Romantic tradition of writing about consumption that stands in tension with contemporaneous Zionist ideas concerning illness. 3In the Kingdom of Fever: The Writers of the Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the literary scene of the Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society (JCRS), a Coloradan sanatorium for indigent Jews. There, a cohort of Yiddish tubercular writers engaged in a reciprocal relationship with the institution, becoming the public faces of the sanatorium and, in turn, being offered new venues to see their work published and translated. These writers include the lyric poet and Bible translator Yehoash, the epic poet H. Leivick, and the prose stylist Shea Tenenbaum. Drawing on archival records, newspaper reports, and memoirs, the chapter further explores how the JCRS supported the establishment of a tubercular American Yiddish literary tradition. 4In the Sanatorium: David Vogel Between Hebrew and German chapter abstractThis chapter examines the role played by tuberculosis in the life and writing of the Hebrew modernist David Vogel. After taking the cure in Merano, Italy in the winters of 1925 and 1926, he published his first novella, Be-vet ha-marpe (In the Sanatorium) in 1927. The text draws heavily on the tropes and concerns of German-language sanatorium fiction, including works by Arthur Schnitzler, Klabund, and Thomas Mann. Specifically, this chapter argues that Vogel writes his account of the sanatorium in a tense intertextual exchange with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). Vogel challenges the possibility of a Hebrew-German literary conversation through a series of interlingual puns, wordplays, and jokes about tuberculosis. Illness emerges in this chapter as the hermeneutic key to Vogel's modernism. Epilogue: After the Cure chapter abstractThis chapter explores post-Holocaust iterations of tuberculosis and sanatoria in the work of the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld. Although he did not suffer from tuberculosis, Appelfeld frequently turns to the disease and its institutions, such as in his 1975 novella, Badenheim, 'ir nofesh (English: Badenheim 1939). Bringing his work into dialogue with the texts of the tubercular writers of the pre-WWII period, this chapter demonstrates the continued relevance of tubercular capital as a methodological prism and analytic category, even after a diagnosis of tuberculosis was no longer commonplace among modern Jewish writers.
£53.60
Stanford University Press The Border and the Line: Race, Literature, and
Book SynopsisLos Angeles is a city of borders and lines, from the freeways that transect its neighborhoods to streets like Pico Boulevard that slash across the city from the ocean to the heart of downtown, creating both ethnic enclaves and pathways for interracial connection. Examining neighborhoods in east, south central, and west L.A.—and their imaginative representation by Chicana, African American, and Jewish American writers—this book investigates the moral and political implications of negotiating space. The Border and the Line takes up the central conceit of "the neighbor" to consider how the geography of racial identification and interracial encounters are represented and even made possible by literary language. Dean J. Franco probes how race is formed and transformed in literature and in everyday life, in the works of Helena María Viramontes, Paul Beatty, James Baldwin, and the writers of the Watts Writers Workshop. Exploring metaphor and metonymy, as well as economic and political circumstance, Franco identifies the potential for reconciliation in the figure of the neighbor, an identity that is grounded by geographical boundaries and which invites their crossing.Trade Review"Dean Franco's vibrant prose and dexterous analysis make The Border and the Line a significant contribution to the study of U.S. ethnic literatures. So much more than a regional case study, this book gifts us a comparative imaginary as far-reaching as it is urgently needed." -- Keith Feldman * University of California, Berkeley *"The Border and the Line is a must-read for anyone concerned with the resurgence of ethically informed reading in ethnic studies, Jewish studies, and literary criticism. Few scholars today read texts as astutely as Dean Franco. He does so here to demonstrate how we all live in relational proximity to our neighbors, even as constructed barriers seek to keep us separate. Superbly written." -- Michael Hames-García * University of Oregon *"[Franco is] both analytically astute and attentive to the interlocking lived realities of the communities on whom his book focuses, thus elegantly breathing new life into the practice of comparative ethnic studies....The Border and the Line is a model for those of us aiming to connect cultural representations to the political-economic realities of communities coexisting in Los Angeles's historical past and present." -- Richard T. Rodríguez * Western American Literature *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Borders and Lines of Social Identities chapter abstractThe chapter posits a theory of how race materializes through the production of space. With reference to Ernesto Laclau's rhetorical theory, the introduction examines how metaphor and metonymy correspond to the social and political significance of racial identification. Thus the Introduction aligns the contingent formation of racial and religious identities with metonymy, or the material experience of being-in-place, and aligns static racial names with metaphor. The Introduction theorizes the terms border and line as interrelated figures of spatial constraint and access. Each term has a normative and a transgressive meaning, and the Introduction explores how and when the normative meaning of one term is in play, the transgressive meaning of the other term likewise emerges. 1Redlining and Realigning in East L.A.: The Neighborhoods of Helena María Viramontes and Union de Vecinos chapter abstractThis chapter takes on a fundamental question for literature scholars: How can readers bear responsibility for the literature they read and love? The chapter argues that the reader becomes the neighbor to the literature, and follows with an exploration of the philosophical and material implications of that neighboring. The chapter examines Helena María Viramontes's novel Their Dogs Came with Them, set in Boyle Heights at the peak of its gang wars in the 1970s, and explores the real neighborhood, including the activist project Union de Vecinos, a socialist organizing collective inspired by liberation theology to reclaim the neighborhood, from both the gangs and reactionary policing, in the name of social justice. In both examples, the chapter posits the concept of the miracle as something worldly and material, capable of transformation. 2The Matter of the Neighbor and the Property of "Unmitigated Blackness" chapter abstractThe first half of this chapter explores the Watts Writers Workshop, founded in the heart of Watts by Budd Schulberg after the Watts Riots in 1965. Schulberg created Frederick Douglass House, a charitable foundation and a physical building for black creative arts, and the chapter argues that Schulberg's personal and financial investment in Watts relocated his political standing as the "neighbor" to the Watts writers with whom he worked. The chapter examines a conversation between Schulberg and his friend James Baldwin, about the meaning of "race." Both writers hit upon "love" as the only way to cut through the Gordian knot of racism binding the nation. The chapter closes with a study of Paul Beatty's Los Angeles novel, The Sellout (2015), in which love is ironized and black Angelenos assert an atavistic claim on property, with segregation, plantations, and the return of slavery. 3My Neighborhood: Private Claims, Public Space, and Jewish Los Angeles chapter abstractThis chapter argues for the emergence of privately held ethics in the formation of neighborhood publics. The chapter primarily focuses on Jewish neighborhoods, including the L.A. Eruv, the largest in the West. An eruv is an area with boundaries designated by a rabbinical authority to constitute domestic rather than public space for Jews living within. Eruv is Hebrew for "mixture," and it involves mixing public and private spaces into one large "courtyard" or domestic enclosure. The chapter argues that the eruv is a "counter-public" for the Orthodox space it circumscribes, but that the public alignment of "Jewish" with "Orthodox" eclipses other kinds of Jewish publics in Los Angeles. The chapter compares the idea of the neighborhood in the eruv with Jewish concepts of the neighborhood in a recent short documentary, My Neighbourhood, about secular Israeli Jews who partner with Muslim Palestinians to protest Orthodox Jewish appropriation of Palestinians' homes. Conclusion: Love, Space, and the Grounds of Comparative Ethnic Literature Study chapter abstractThis chapter argues for the value of comparative analysis in studies of race and ethnicity, and makes the case for the inclusion of Jewish studies in the ethnic studies matrix. The Conclusion reviews the parallel but distinct histories of ethnic studies and Jewish studies, and explains the basis of their mutual exclusion. The Conclusion posits the book's critical motif of "the neighborhood" as the apt figure for reconciling different academic accounts of race and ethnicity, and for seeking understanding through unexpected comparisons across racial groups.
£79.20
Stanford University Press The Border and the Line: Race, Literature, and
Book SynopsisLos Angeles is a city of borders and lines, from the freeways that transect its neighborhoods to streets like Pico Boulevard that slash across the city from the ocean to the heart of downtown, creating both ethnic enclaves and pathways for interracial connection. Examining neighborhoods in east, south central, and west L.A.—and their imaginative representation by Chicana, African American, and Jewish American writers—this book investigates the moral and political implications of negotiating space. The Border and the Line takes up the central conceit of "the neighbor" to consider how the geography of racial identification and interracial encounters are represented and even made possible by literary language. Dean J. Franco probes how race is formed and transformed in literature and in everyday life, in the works of Helena María Viramontes, Paul Beatty, James Baldwin, and the writers of the Watts Writers Workshop. Exploring metaphor and metonymy, as well as economic and political circumstance, Franco identifies the potential for reconciliation in the figure of the neighbor, an identity that is grounded by geographical boundaries and which invites their crossing.Trade Review"Dean Franco's vibrant prose and dexterous analysis make The Border and the Line a significant contribution to the study of U.S. ethnic literatures. So much more than a regional case study, this book gifts us a comparative imaginary as far-reaching as it is urgently needed." -- Keith Feldman * University of California, Berkeley *"The Border and the Line is a must-read for anyone concerned with the resurgence of ethically informed reading in ethnic studies, Jewish studies, and literary criticism. Few scholars today read texts as astutely as Dean Franco. He does so here to demonstrate how we all live in relational proximity to our neighbors, even as constructed barriers seek to keep us separate. Superbly written." -- Michael Hames-García * University of Oregon *"[Franco is] both analytically astute and attentive to the interlocking lived realities of the communities on whom his book focuses, thus elegantly breathing new life into the practice of comparative ethnic studies....The Border and the Line is a model for those of us aiming to connect cultural representations to the political-economic realities of communities coexisting in Los Angeles's historical past and present." -- Richard T. Rodríguez * Western American Literature *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Borders and Lines of Social Identities chapter abstractThe chapter posits a theory of how race materializes through the production of space. With reference to Ernesto Laclau's rhetorical theory, the introduction examines how metaphor and metonymy correspond to the social and political significance of racial identification. Thus the Introduction aligns the contingent formation of racial and religious identities with metonymy, or the material experience of being-in-place, and aligns static racial names with metaphor. The Introduction theorizes the terms border and line as interrelated figures of spatial constraint and access. Each term has a normative and a transgressive meaning, and the Introduction explores how and when the normative meaning of one term is in play, the transgressive meaning of the other term likewise emerges. 1Redlining and Realigning in East L.A.: The Neighborhoods of Helena María Viramontes and Union de Vecinos chapter abstractThis chapter takes on a fundamental question for literature scholars: How can readers bear responsibility for the literature they read and love? The chapter argues that the reader becomes the neighbor to the literature, and follows with an exploration of the philosophical and material implications of that neighboring. The chapter examines Helena María Viramontes's novel Their Dogs Came with Them, set in Boyle Heights at the peak of its gang wars in the 1970s, and explores the real neighborhood, including the activist project Union de Vecinos, a socialist organizing collective inspired by liberation theology to reclaim the neighborhood, from both the gangs and reactionary policing, in the name of social justice. In both examples, the chapter posits the concept of the miracle as something worldly and material, capable of transformation. 2The Matter of the Neighbor and the Property of "Unmitigated Blackness" chapter abstractThe first half of this chapter explores the Watts Writers Workshop, founded in the heart of Watts by Budd Schulberg after the Watts Riots in 1965. Schulberg created Frederick Douglass House, a charitable foundation and a physical building for black creative arts, and the chapter argues that Schulberg's personal and financial investment in Watts relocated his political standing as the "neighbor" to the Watts writers with whom he worked. The chapter examines a conversation between Schulberg and his friend James Baldwin, about the meaning of "race." Both writers hit upon "love" as the only way to cut through the Gordian knot of racism binding the nation. The chapter closes with a study of Paul Beatty's Los Angeles novel, The Sellout (2015), in which love is ironized and black Angelenos assert an atavistic claim on property, with segregation, plantations, and the return of slavery. 3My Neighborhood: Private Claims, Public Space, and Jewish Los Angeles chapter abstractThis chapter argues for the emergence of privately held ethics in the formation of neighborhood publics. The chapter primarily focuses on Jewish neighborhoods, including the L.A. Eruv, the largest in the West. An eruv is an area with boundaries designated by a rabbinical authority to constitute domestic rather than public space for Jews living within. Eruv is Hebrew for "mixture," and it involves mixing public and private spaces into one large "courtyard" or domestic enclosure. The chapter argues that the eruv is a "counter-public" for the Orthodox space it circumscribes, but that the public alignment of "Jewish" with "Orthodox" eclipses other kinds of Jewish publics in Los Angeles. The chapter compares the idea of the neighborhood in the eruv with Jewish concepts of the neighborhood in a recent short documentary, My Neighbourhood, about secular Israeli Jews who partner with Muslim Palestinians to protest Orthodox Jewish appropriation of Palestinians' homes. Conclusion: Love, Space, and the Grounds of Comparative Ethnic Literature Study chapter abstractThis chapter argues for the value of comparative analysis in studies of race and ethnicity, and makes the case for the inclusion of Jewish studies in the ethnic studies matrix. The Conclusion reviews the parallel but distinct histories of ethnic studies and Jewish studies, and explains the basis of their mutual exclusion. The Conclusion posits the book's critical motif of "the neighborhood" as the apt figure for reconciling different academic accounts of race and ethnicity, and for seeking understanding through unexpected comparisons across racial groups.
£21.59
Stanford University Press Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of
Book SynopsisIn recent years, the American fiction writer David Foster Wallace has been treated as a symbol, as an icon, and even a film character. Ordinary Unhappiness returns us to the reason we all know about him in the first place: his fiction. By closely examining Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and The Pale King, Jon Baskin points readers to the work at the center of Wallace's oeuvre and places that writing in conversation with a philosophical tradition that includes Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Cavell, among others. What emerges is a Wallace who not only speaks to our postmodern addictions in the age of mass entertainment and McDonald's but who seeks to address a quiet desperation at the heart of our modern lives. Freud said that the job of the therapeutic process was to turn "hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness." This book makes a case for how Wallace achieved this in his fiction. Trade Review"This is an original, fearless reading of Wallace that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to my students. Even if they disagreed with it, it would get them thinking—and I bet they'd learn something, as I did. Baskin's readings are persuasive, bold, enterprising, and unafraid of disrupting conventional academic hermeneutics. We need books like this." -- James Wood * Harvard University *"Since his death a decade ago, a lot of smart writing on David Foster Wallace has appeared in print. This insightful new book is among the smartest. Ordinary Unhappiness is a luminous model of how philosophers and literary critics might together help us see ourselves and our situation more clearly." -- Lee Konstantinou * University of Maryland, College Park *"Baskin's book isrelevant and insightful to all readers of Wallace, both literary critics and laypeople, but the book is also relevant for students of philosophy with an interest in philosophical or literary therapy as something other than psychological therapy. I highly recommend this book." -- Finn Janning * Metapsychology *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Habits of Mind chapter abstractThis chapter begins by briefly recounting the substance of the "ancient quarrel" between poetry and philosophy, before laying out the central convictions of Wallace's "philosophical" fiction, partly through reading a central passage in Wittgenstein's Investigations. Some of the main features of Wallace's project are addressed through an interpretation of his early short story "The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing," about a boy battling clinical depression. The next section discusses the current state of "Wallace Studies," particularly through Adam Kelly's essay on Wallace and sincerity. It concludes with a case for how recent discussions about Wallace's biography and character should lead us to reexamine his books. 1Narrative Morality: On Philosophically Therapeutic Criticism chapter abstractThis chapter explores and attempts to justify a philosophically therapeutic approach to imaginative literature. It does so by tracing attempts both in literary studies and moral philosophy to move beyond disciplinary binaries and show how philosophy and literature can interact. Particularly, it focuses on the approaches to literature of three philosophers—Iris Murdoch, Robert Pippin, and Stanley Cavell—and one literary critic: Toril Moi. Through these figures it lays out criteria for successful therapeutic criticism, including how the therapeutic critic should relate to past critics of the same work. It argues that one role of the therapeutic critic is to understand why previous critics have not seen what is "obvious" in the work of art under discussion. 2Playing Games: Infinite Jest as Philosophical Therapy chapter abstractThis chapter offers a reading of Wallace's mid-career masterpiece, Infinite Jest. Central to the reading is the juxtaposition of the novel's opening scene—of Hal Incandenza sitting unable to communicate in a college admissions meeting—and its closing scene—of the Alcoholics Anonymous orderly Don Gately lying on a hospital bed with a tube down his throat. Bookended by these scenes, the chapter argues that Wallace's book is structured as a therapeutic intervention into the way we think about communication and self-expression. Central to this argument is the ability to see the sections on Alcoholics Anonymous as the book's moral and philosophical center. It posits the goal of the book as being to bring its readers back from the "hysteria" of metaphysical theory to the "everyday" problems of ordinary unhappiness. 3So Decide: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as Philosophical Criticism chapter abstractWallace's most controversial collection of short stories has been accused since its inception of being misogynistic or self-indulgent—a charge that has only gotten more severe as a result of recent indications about Wallace's own treatment of women. The chapter argues, through one of the few readings that accounts for how the collection of stories work together, that misunderstandings of the book rest on a failure to appreciate its strategy of therapeutic "aggravation." The book seeks to exhaust the reader with its characters' various justifications for their misogyny and self-indulgence—which is what truly marks them, rather than their (fairly common) misogynistic behavior, as "hideous." The collection is philosophical in the sense that it exposes hideousness as the function of a certain way of speaking and therefore of a certain form of life. 4Untrendy Problems: The Pale King's Philosophical Inspirations chapter abstractThis chapter interprets Wallace's final, unfinished novel, The Pale King, as a dialogue between two forms of philosophical procedure: Wittgenstein's therapeutic philosophy and Stanley Cavell's perfectionism. The book represents a new stage in Wallace's project insofar as it endeavors to go beyond negative therapy to positive inspiration. Wallace is on shakier ground here, and perhaps his attempt to portray "maturity" positively in fiction was responsible for his difficulty finishing the book. It is also indicative of a moralism that he mostly holds at bay in his earlier writing. Still, detractors who point to the novel as like "self-help" reinforce the hard distinction between philosophy and self-help or therapy that Wallace takes aim at throughout his fiction. If aspects of The Pale King can be usefully compared to self-help or "books of affirmations," the novel also seeks to demonstrate why its readers are in need of such help. Conclusion: In Heaven and Earth chapter abstractThis chapter explains why Wallace's fiction was a promising candidate for the philosophically therapeutic approach, while also drawing a distinction between art that has a philosophical ambition and art that wants something else. This "something else"—or, as Hamlet calls it, "more"—that art does is the reason that Plato had banished artists from his Republic. Cavell's perfectionism was an attempt to show that Plato had been wrong and that philosophy and art can be united in a common project. But Cavell's reading of Hamlet unwittingly shows the limitations of this commonality. The chapter thus seeks both to state the ultimate aspiration of the therapeutic project and to show where and how its boundaries lie. Not all differences between art and philosophy can or should be bridged.
£72.00
Stanford University Press Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine
Book SynopsisWhat would it mean to be avant-garde today? Arguing against the notion that the avant-garde is dead or confined to historically "failed" movements, this book offers a more dynamic and inclusive theory of avant-gardes that accounts for how they work in our present. Innovative in approach, Provisional Avant-Gardes focuses on the medium of the little magazine—from early Dada experiments to feminist, queer, and digital publishing networks—to understand avant-gardes as provisional and heterogeneous communities. Paying particular attention to neglected women writers, artists, and editors alongside more canonical figures, it shows how the study of little magazines can change our views of literary and art history while shedding new light on individual careers. By focusing on the avant-garde's publishing history and group dynamics, Sophie Seita also demonstrates a new methodology for writing about avant-garde practice across time, one that is applicable to other artistic and non-artistic communities and that speaks to contemporary practitioners as much as scholars. In the process, she addresses fundamental questions about the intersections of aesthetic form and politics and about what we consider to be literature and art.Trade Review"Investigating modernist and contemporary American little magazine communities, Seita persuasively challenges conventional notions of the avant-garde as oppositional, militant, and closed. Her deeply informed readings of these periodicals and her astute theorizing complicate those narratives through a richly textured assessment of the form's importance to avant-garde poetics." -- Linda A. Kinnahan * Duquesne University *"Sophie Seita's marvelously detailed examination of avant-garde and contemporary little magazines lays bare the infrastructures of innovative poetry. Her case studies are as exemplary as they are illuminating." -- Charles Bernstein * author of Pitch of Poetry *"In this extraordinary book, Sophie Seita has mapped the postwar poetry avant-garde with all its complexities and contradictions. It's extraordinarily well laid out and true to the experiences of those of us who found a space there. As she recounts it, genres blend and schools contend as needed, and the result is a world of poets and artists arguing with the inherited past and drawing from a newly awakened past and present. I remain in awe at what she has accomplished: it's closer to the truth of our times than I would ever have expected." -- Jerome Rothenberg * author of Eye of Witness *"Seita challenges the notion that there exists a formula for what can be called avant-garde. Instead, she presents the category as fluid, broad-minded, and sometimes contradictory. Provisional Avant-Gardes is important as a study of the impact of little magazines on art, literature, and politics, on their changing aesthetics, and on how print communities are created, then and now."––Deepa Bhasthi, Hyperallergic"A much-needed study of US-based little magazines between the 1910s and 2010s.[Provisional Avant-Gardes is] an aspirational appeal for a practice of generous and capacious criticism, offering up the book as a model, and I am swayed to work in its orbit." -- Stephanie Anderson * Critical Inquiry *"A brilliant interpreter of experimental forms, Seita makes you want to get your hands on the magazines in order to imaginatively join the avant-garde communities they represent....Seita has a knack for selecting and illuminating avant-garde texts, exposing the serious implications of linguistic play, and transforming a baffling experiment into an intelligible, engaging commentary on contemporary culture." -- Suzanne W. Churchill * Journal of Modern Periodical Studies *
£100.00
Stanford University Press Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and
Book SynopsisThe first sustained study of the relations between literary celebrity and queer sexuality, Categorically Famous looks at the careers of three celebrity writers—James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal—in relation to the gay and lesbian liberation movement of the 1960s. While none of these writers "came out" in our current sense, all contributed, through their public images and their writing, to a greater openness toward homosexuality that was an important precondition of liberation. Their fame was crucial, for instance, to the growing conception of homosexuals as an oppressed minority rather than as individuals with a psychological problem. Challenging scholarly orthodoxies, Guy Davidson urges us to rethink the usual opposition to liberation and to gay and lesbian visibility within queer studies as well as standard definitions of celebrity. The conventional ban on openly discussing the homosexuality of public figures meant that media reporting at the time did not focus on his protagonists' private lives. At the same time, the careers of these "semi-visible" gay celebrities should be understood as a crucial halfway point between the era of the open secret and the present-day post-liberation era in which queer people, celebrities very much included, are enjoined to come out. Trade Review"In his incisive account of lesbian and gay identity in the first heyday of our media and celebrity culture, Davidson finds genuinely new and important things to say not only about such iconic figures as Baldwin, Sontag, and Vidal but about making and unmaking queer politics in a time of turmoil not unlike our own." -- Michael Moon * Emory University *"A remarkably detailed star map of pre- and post-Stonewall America, Categorically Famous breaks fresh ground in queer celebrity studies. With exceptional readings of lesbian and gay VIPs, Davidson generates new buzz about how the twinned themes of liberation and luminaries advanced our unstoppable homosexual revolutions." -- Scott Herring * Indiana University *"Davidson's book is engagingly written, deftly blending historical anecdotes with close readings and theoretical analysis....[His] readings of Baldwin, Sontag, and Vidal are invariably spot-on." -- Jordan S. Carroll * Journal of the History of Sexuality *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractWhile recognizing the historical contingency of sexual identity categories, the Introduction argues against the standard queer theoretical view that these categories operate as forms of social coercion. It is proposed that an examination of the 1960s careers of three celebrity writers—James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal—puts in doubt the reflexive valorization of instability, indeterminacy, and opacity that has come to dominate queer studies. Though each of these writers had complicated relations to sexual liberation generally and homosexual liberation specifically, their work contributed importantly to the increasing publicization of gay life that characterized the 1960s and that was an important precondition of gay and lesbian liberation. Close attention to their careers necessitates a rethinking of queer theory's critique of gay and lesbian openness. 1James Baldwin and Celebrity Shame chapter abstractThis chapter argues that Baldwin transmuted the matter of homosexuality—defined as shameful by American culture—into literary success. Drawing on recent scholarship on the theoretical and political implications of shame, and examining a wide range of Baldwin's writings, the chapter suggests that shame was at the heart of both Baldwin's celebrity performance and his representation of homosexuality and that consideration of the operation of this affect helps in understanding Baldwin's complicated relation to gay identity and the liberatory politics that formed around it. The chapter concludes with a close analysis of Baldwin's 1954 essay on André Gide, "The Male Prison," which, it is suggested, presents an image of queer solidarity that anticipates the sense of community that was crucial for gay liberation and that is also played out in audience relations with Baldwin—despite his own overt opposition to gay identity and his distance from the gay subculture. 2Baldwin and the Celebrity Novel chapter abstractThis chapter continues the investigation of relations between Baldwin's celebrity embodiment of queerness and the formation of a recognizably contemporary form of politicized gay identity, homing in on Another Country (1962) and addressing in a less sustained fashion Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968). The chapter proposes that the novels are an apt focus for Baldwin's considerations of celebrity and sexuality in the public sphere because the novel is a mode in which the relations between public and private are in particularly charged tension. The two novels are viewed as "celebrity novels," not only because they feature celebrity or proto-celebrity protagonists but also because they are extensions of Baldwin's celebrity persona, in which what he insisted is the private matter of homosexuality is paradoxically bodied forth. 3Susan Sontag's Impersonal Stardom chapter abstractThis chapter discusses Susan Sontag's 1960s work and media image in relation to the discourse of stardom. Referring to her photographed image, her essays of the 1960s, and her novel The Benefactor (1963), the chapter works with and against film-star studies to develop an account of Sontag's queer iconicity. The chapter argues that Sontag's star effect solicits eroticized audience attention in the very act of seeming to repel it through her vaunted "impersonality." The effect is produced by the overlap between the general operations of star construction and the impersonal aloofness of her prose. Through the queer allure of her image and her groundbreaking 1960s essays, Sontag helped promote unorthodox sexual identities and attitudes, even as she avoided association with lesbianism. 4From Camp to Counterculture chapter abstractThis chapter argues against long-standing queer arguments that Sontag saw camp and the gay subculture as apolitical and that her views were homophobically tinged. Concentrating on her famous essay "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), other key Sontag essays from the 1960s, and their contemporaneous reception, the chapter argues that Sontag contradictorily elaborates a view of gay subcultural expression as apolitical and aestheticized and discloses an investment in sexuality itself—and arguably queer sexuality above all—as a form of freedom. Picking up on the liberatory hints within "Camp" and other essays, the chapter considers how Sontag as a celebrity intellectual helped disseminate ideas about the sexual revolution and consequently set the coordinates of what came to be known as the "counterculture." 5The Moment of Myra Breckinridge chapter abstractThis chapter discusses how Gore Vidal's satirical best-selling novel Myra Breckinridge (1968) helped usher in gay liberation, even while manifesting aspects of antiliberationist critique. It argues that the novel's ambivalent perspective toward the emergent gay-liberation discourse is inextricably related to the category of celebrity with which Vidal also had a complicated relationship. While Vidal reveled in his fame, he was also critical of celebrity culture, and Myra Breckinridge is one of his most trenchant and extended critiques, even as it is animated by his own fannish relation to 1940s Hollywood and its stars. Yet Myra became a media event, and the eponymous narrator-heroine, like Vidal, became a kind of celebrity, albeit a virtual one. The chapter argues that Myra the novel and Myra the virtual celebrity enabled Vidal both to acknowledge his investment in same-sexuality and deflect his connection to gay identity. 6Gore Vidal's Sexuality in the Public Sphere chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on a heated moment in a live TV debate of 1968, in which the right-wing pundit William Buckley called Gore Vidal a "queer." I argue that this moment is a staging post in both the development of open media talk about the homosexuality of celebrities and in the unfolding of gay liberation. The moment was widely described by contemporaneous commentators as "embarrassing," and this chapter argues that thinking about the social and political implications of embarrassment is helpful in understanding how 1960s American culture positioned homosexuality and how queer theory responds to the overt representation of gay identity. The chapter argues that queer theory, because of its "knowingness" about sexuality, is unable to adequately register the revelatory, political force of openness demonstrated by Buckley's embarrassing outburst. Afterword: Visibility, Revisited; or, Delete the Closet? chapter abstractThe Afterword focuses on the relations between celebrity and queer sexual liberation in contemporary culture to demonstrate the continuities and changes in the publicization of queerness since the 1960s. It argues that the hypervisibility of culture-industry celebrities has become an important arena for the exercise of sexual visibility. While the dispensation of the open secret that pertained during the pre–gay liberation period has largely been displaced by the injunction to decloset oneself, the seemingly hard-to-shake logic of sexual identity persists, despite ubiquitous arguments that the hetero/homo binary has lost its hegemonic power to organize people's relations to their sexualities. Arguing against the queer theoretical position that visibility is a ruse of power, the Afterword contends that the persistence and popularity of acts of celebrity coming-out indicates the ongoing urgency and vibrancy of the project of sexual liberation.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of
Book SynopsisIn recent years, the American fiction writer David Foster Wallace has been treated as a symbol, as an icon, and even a film character. Ordinary Unhappiness returns us to the reason we all know about him in the first place: his fiction. By closely examining Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and The Pale King, Jon Baskin points readers to the work at the center of Wallace's oeuvre and places that writing in conversation with a philosophical tradition that includes Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Cavell, among others. What emerges is a Wallace who not only speaks to our postmodern addictions in the age of mass entertainment and McDonald's but who seeks to address a quiet desperation at the heart of our modern lives. Freud said that the job of the therapeutic process was to turn "hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness." This book makes a case for how Wallace achieved this in his fiction. Trade Review"This is an original, fearless reading of Wallace that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to my students. Even if they disagreed with it, it would get them thinking—and I bet they'd learn something, as I did. Baskin's readings are persuasive, bold, enterprising, and unafraid of disrupting conventional academic hermeneutics. We need books like this." -- James Wood * Harvard University *"Since his death a decade ago, a lot of smart writing on David Foster Wallace has appeared in print. This insightful new book is among the smartest. Ordinary Unhappiness is a luminous model of how philosophers and literary critics might together help us see ourselves and our situation more clearly." -- Lee Konstantinou * University of Maryland, College Park *"Baskin's book isrelevant and insightful to all readers of Wallace, both literary critics and laypeople, but the book is also relevant for students of philosophy with an interest in philosophical or literary therapy as something other than psychological therapy. I highly recommend this book." -- Finn Janning * Metapsychology *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Habits of Mind chapter abstractThis chapter begins by briefly recounting the substance of the "ancient quarrel" between poetry and philosophy, before laying out the central convictions of Wallace's "philosophical" fiction, partly through reading a central passage in Wittgenstein's Investigations. Some of the main features of Wallace's project are addressed through an interpretation of his early short story "The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing," about a boy battling clinical depression. The next section discusses the current state of "Wallace Studies," particularly through Adam Kelly's essay on Wallace and sincerity. It concludes with a case for how recent discussions about Wallace's biography and character should lead us to reexamine his books. 1Narrative Morality: On Philosophically Therapeutic Criticism chapter abstractThis chapter explores and attempts to justify a philosophically therapeutic approach to imaginative literature. It does so by tracing attempts both in literary studies and moral philosophy to move beyond disciplinary binaries and show how philosophy and literature can interact. Particularly, it focuses on the approaches to literature of three philosophers—Iris Murdoch, Robert Pippin, and Stanley Cavell—and one literary critic: Toril Moi. Through these figures it lays out criteria for successful therapeutic criticism, including how the therapeutic critic should relate to past critics of the same work. It argues that one role of the therapeutic critic is to understand why previous critics have not seen what is "obvious" in the work of art under discussion. 2Playing Games: Infinite Jest as Philosophical Therapy chapter abstractThis chapter offers a reading of Wallace's mid-career masterpiece, Infinite Jest. Central to the reading is the juxtaposition of the novel's opening scene—of Hal Incandenza sitting unable to communicate in a college admissions meeting—and its closing scene—of the Alcoholics Anonymous orderly Don Gately lying on a hospital bed with a tube down his throat. Bookended by these scenes, the chapter argues that Wallace's book is structured as a therapeutic intervention into the way we think about communication and self-expression. Central to this argument is the ability to see the sections on Alcoholics Anonymous as the book's moral and philosophical center. It posits the goal of the book as being to bring its readers back from the "hysteria" of metaphysical theory to the "everyday" problems of ordinary unhappiness. 3So Decide: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as Philosophical Criticism chapter abstractWallace's most controversial collection of short stories has been accused since its inception of being misogynistic or self-indulgent—a charge that has only gotten more severe as a result of recent indications about Wallace's own treatment of women. The chapter argues, through one of the few readings that accounts for how the collection of stories work together, that misunderstandings of the book rest on a failure to appreciate its strategy of therapeutic "aggravation." The book seeks to exhaust the reader with its characters' various justifications for their misogyny and self-indulgence—which is what truly marks them, rather than their (fairly common) misogynistic behavior, as "hideous." The collection is philosophical in the sense that it exposes hideousness as the function of a certain way of speaking and therefore of a certain form of life. 4Untrendy Problems: The Pale King's Philosophical Inspirations chapter abstractThis chapter interprets Wallace's final, unfinished novel, The Pale King, as a dialogue between two forms of philosophical procedure: Wittgenstein's therapeutic philosophy and Stanley Cavell's perfectionism. The book represents a new stage in Wallace's project insofar as it endeavors to go beyond negative therapy to positive inspiration. Wallace is on shakier ground here, and perhaps his attempt to portray "maturity" positively in fiction was responsible for his difficulty finishing the book. It is also indicative of a moralism that he mostly holds at bay in his earlier writing. Still, detractors who point to the novel as like "self-help" reinforce the hard distinction between philosophy and self-help or therapy that Wallace takes aim at throughout his fiction. If aspects of The Pale King can be usefully compared to self-help or "books of affirmations," the novel also seeks to demonstrate why its readers are in need of such help. Conclusion: In Heaven and Earth chapter abstractThis chapter explains why Wallace's fiction was a promising candidate for the philosophically therapeutic approach, while also drawing a distinction between art that has a philosophical ambition and art that wants something else. This "something else"—or, as Hamlet calls it, "more"—that art does is the reason that Plato had banished artists from his Republic. Cavell's perfectionism was an attempt to show that Plato had been wrong and that philosophy and art can be united in a common project. But Cavell's reading of Hamlet unwittingly shows the limitations of this commonality. The chapter thus seeks both to state the ultimate aspiration of the therapeutic project and to show where and how its boundaries lie. Not all differences between art and philosophy can or should be bridged.
£19.79
Stanford University Press Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine
Book SynopsisWhat would it mean to be avant-garde today? Arguing against the notion that the avant-garde is dead or confined to historically "failed" movements, this book offers a more dynamic and inclusive theory of avant-gardes that accounts for how they work in our present. Innovative in approach, Provisional Avant-Gardes focuses on the medium of the little magazine—from early Dada experiments to feminist, queer, and digital publishing networks—to understand avant-gardes as provisional and heterogeneous communities. Paying particular attention to neglected women writers, artists, and editors alongside more canonical figures, it shows how the study of little magazines can change our views of literary and art history while shedding new light on individual careers. By focusing on the avant-garde's publishing history and group dynamics, Sophie Seita also demonstrates a new methodology for writing about avant-garde practice across time, one that is applicable to other artistic and non-artistic communities and that speaks to contemporary practitioners as much as scholars. In the process, she addresses fundamental questions about the intersections of aesthetic form and politics and about what we consider to be literature and art.Trade Review"Investigating modernist and contemporary American little magazine communities, Seita persuasively challenges conventional notions of the avant-garde as oppositional, militant, and closed. Her deeply informed readings of these periodicals and her astute theorizing complicate those narratives through a richly textured assessment of the form's importance to avant-garde poetics." -- Linda A. Kinnahan * Duquesne University *"Sophie Seita's marvelously detailed examination of avant-garde and contemporary little magazines lays bare the infrastructures of innovative poetry. Her case studies are as exemplary as they are illuminating." -- Charles Bernstein * author of Pitch of Poetry *"In this extraordinary book, Sophie Seita has mapped the postwar poetry avant-garde with all its complexities and contradictions. It's extraordinarily well laid out and true to the experiences of those of us who found a space there. As she recounts it, genres blend and schools contend as needed, and the result is a world of poets and artists arguing with the inherited past and drawing from a newly awakened past and present. I remain in awe at what she has accomplished: it's closer to the truth of our times than I would ever have expected." -- Jerome Rothenberg * author of Eye of Witness *"Seita challenges the notion that there exists a formula for what can be called avant-garde. Instead, she presents the category as fluid, broad-minded, and sometimes contradictory. Provisional Avant-Gardes is important as a study of the impact of little magazines on art, literature, and politics, on their changing aesthetics, and on how print communities are created, then and now."––Deepa Bhasthi, Hyperallergic"A much-needed study of US-based little magazines between the 1910s and 2010s.[Provisional Avant-Gardes is] an aspirational appeal for a practice of generous and capacious criticism, offering up the book as a model, and I am swayed to work in its orbit." -- Stephanie Anderson * Critical Inquiry *"A brilliant interpreter of experimental forms, Seita makes you want to get your hands on the magazines in order to imaginatively join the avant-garde communities they represent....Seita has a knack for selecting and illuminating avant-garde texts, exposing the serious implications of linguistic play, and transforming a baffling experiment into an intelligible, engaging commentary on contemporary culture." -- Suzanne W. Churchill * Journal of Modern Periodical Studies *
£26.99
Stanford University Press A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and
Book SynopsisA Violent Peace offers a radical account of the United States' transformation into a total-war state. As the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between U.S. police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home. Writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois discerned in domestic strategies to quell racial protests the same counterintelligence logic structuring America's devastating wars in Asia. Examining U.S. militarism's centrality to the Cold War cultural imagination, Christine Hong assembles a transpacific archive—placing war writings, visual renderings of the American concentration camp, Japanese accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, black radical human rights petitions, Korean War–era G.I. photographs, Filipino novels on guerrilla resistance, and Marshallese critiques of U.S. human radiation experiments alongside government documents. By making visible the way the U.S. war machine waged informal wars abroad and at home, this archive reveals how the so-called Pax Americana laid the grounds for solidarity—imagining collective futures beyond the stranglehold of U.S. militarism.Trade Review"A Violent Peace is a tour de force, a brilliant rebuttal to the myth of America as defender of human rights abroad and racial justice at home. Christine Hong demonstrates how radical black and Asian intellectuals' penetrating critiques represent the real democratizing project. Beautifully written and persuasively argued, this book is a seismic shift in Cold War cultural history and our geopolitical imagination."—Robin D. G. Kelley, University of California, Los Angeles"Bursting with brilliance, clarity, and insight, this stunningly original and expansive work excavates the cross-racial, transnational origins of today's militarized modernity. Christine Hong unearths the hidden linkages between race, capital, and occupation in making our postwar global order and points us to alternative conceptions of community and solidarity that defy the borders of modern sovereignty. This book is a game-changer."—Chandan Reddy, University of Washington"Though grounded in Asian American studies, A Violent Peace makes powerful contributions to several other fields such as Cold War studies, African American literature and politics, discourses of militarization and securitization, global theories of race as well as literary and cultural studies broadly."—Bhakti Shringarpure, American Literary History"Hong's work is honest, necessary, and generative in its political vision.A Violent Peaceoffers a crucial set of arguments that will help us to navigate the ruins of the world that US hegemony built and work toward collectively creating a new one." A. J. Yumi Lee, Contemporary Literature"A Violent Peaceprovides a crucial connection between US foreign wars in East Asia and harsh domestic suppression working in tandem to gain total control."—Xiaobing Li, Journal of Asian Studies"Hong's work as a whole is an important contribution to the history of post-war US that recenters racialized humanity to illustrate the military-imperial violence that minimized the structures in which race was targeted, captured, and mobilized."—Annie Hui, Lateral"Viewing the culture of democratization in the post-1945 world order through the lens of US militarism, Christine Hong'sA Violent Peaceoffers the opportunity to survey some of the intellectual currents behind the revival of scholarly interest in the Korean War among literary and cultural critics."—Jeehyun Lim, Journal of American Studies"With great eloquence, [Hong] draws insightful connections between race, class, and power, while vividly demonstrating how the expansion of U.S. power into the Asia-Pacific in the postwar era has led to the world we live in today. Deeply considered and thought-provoking,A Violent Peaceis essential to understanding our current predicament.—Gregory Erlich, CounterPunch"Christine Hong's... shattering, academic analysis,A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, provides a people's perspective on the traumas wrought by the U.S. geosecurity structure that has lorded over the region since World War II."—Koohan Paik, The Hawaii Independent"In encouraging scholars to consider the co-constitution of postwar racial liberalism and Cold War imperialism, [A Violent Peace marks] a timely intervention in an urgent political context."—Mark Tseng-Putterman, American QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. "Democracy within the Teeth of Fascism": The Black POW and the Invisible War at Home in Ralph Ellison's War Writings 2. Revolution from Above: Ōe Kenzaburō, the Black Airman, and Occupied Japan 3. A Blueprint for Occupied Japan: Miné Okubo and the American Concentration Camp 4. Possessive Investment in Ruin: The Target, the Proving Ground, and the U.S. War Machine in the Nuclear Pacific 5. People's War, People's Democracy, People's Epic: Carlos Bulosan, U.S. Counterintelligence, and Cold War Unreliable Narration 6. The Enemy at Home: Urban Warfare and the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam 7. Militarized Queerness: Racial Masking and the Korean War Mascot
£26.99
Stanford University Press The Dangers of Poetry: Culture, Politics, and
Book SynopsisPoetry has long dominated the cultural landscape of modern Iraq, simultaneously representing the literary pinnacle of high culture and giving voice to the popular discourses of mass culture. As the favored genre of culture expression for religious clerics, nationalist politicians, leftist dissidents, and avant-garde intellectuals, poetry critically shaped the social, political, and cultural debates that consumed the Iraqi public sphere in the twentieth century. The popularity of poetry in modern Iraq, however, made it a dangerous practice that carried serious political consequences and grave risks to dissident poets. The Dangers of Poetry is the first book to narrate the social history of poetry in the modern Middle East. Moving beyond the analysis of poems as literary and intellectual texts, Kevin M. Jones shows how poems functioned as social acts that critically shaped the cultural politics of revolutionary Iraq. He narrates the history of three generations of Iraqi poets who navigated the fraught relationship between culture and politics in pursuit of their own ambitions and agendas. Through this historical analysis of thousands of poems published in newspapers, recited in popular demonstrations, and disseminated in secret whispers, this book reveals the overlooked contribution of these poets to the spirit of rebellion in modern Iraq.Trade Review"Public life in twentieth-century Iraq was thoroughly colored by the contexts, conventions, and critiques of poetic performances. Kevin Jones offers for the first time in English a cogent account of the modern literary giants—such as Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri and Muhammad Salih Bahr al-'Ulum—whose compositions and performances electrified publics and created a unique language for a range of political movements and situations. The Dangers of Poetry is a valuable contribution to our understandings of the social and cultural history of modern Iraq." -- Elliott Colla * Georgetown University *"Through beautiful translations and insightful commentary, The Dangers of Poetry demonstrates how poetic works expressed the hopes, desires, and anxieties of colonized subjects, from tribal landscapes to prison cells. This perceptive book is a welcome addition to recent scholarship on cultures and poetics in Ottoman, Arab, and Persian societies, and will interest all those concerned with non-Western modernities and anticolonial resistance." -- Orit Bashkin * University of Chicago *
£50.40
Stanford University Press Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and
Book SynopsisWith Reading the Obscene, Jordan Carroll reveals new insights about the editors who fought the most famous anti-censorship battles of the twentieth century. While many critics have interpreted obscenity as a form of populist protest, Reading the Obscene shows that the editors who worked to dismantle censorship often catered to elite audiences composed primarily of white men in the professional-managerial class. As Carroll argues, transgressive editors, such as H. L. Mencken at the Smart Set and the American Mercury, William Gaines and Al Feldstein at EC Comics, Hugh Hefner at Playboy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books, and Barney Rosset at Grove Press, taught their readers to approach even the most scandalizing texts with the same cold calculation and professional reserve they employed in their occupations. Along the way, these editors kicked off a middle-class sexual revolution in which white-collar professionals imagined they could control sexuality through management science. Obscenity is often presented as self-shattering and subversive, but with this provocative work Carroll calls into question some of the most sensational claims about obscenity, suggesting that when transgression becomes a sign of class distinction, we must abandon the idea that obscenity always overturns hierarchies and disrupts social order. Winner of the 2022 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, sponsored by the Modern Language AssociationTrade Review"In Carroll's hands, the question of obscenity in midcentury literature has a whole new conceptual frame and in the figure of theeditor, a whole new protagonist. Going where few critical works before it have dared to tread, this is a highly persuasive and lucidly readable contribution to twentieth-century American cultural studies."—Mark McGurl, Stanford University"A thoroughly enjoyable examination of the role that literary obscenity played in forging the professional-managerial white male commitment to 'free speech.' Jordan Carroll shows that defending obscene literature enshrined modes of dispassion that served liberals' professional climbing."—Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University"What draws us to the obscene? It's a question scholars rarely ask because the allure of the forbidden seems so obvious. What if, though, for the white male professional-managerial class of the mid-to-late twentieth century, the enticement of the obscene was not so hot but rather cool? What if the point of reading smut was not to indulge in prurient interest but to show oneself capable of overcoming such base impulses? Not to masturbate, but to master? Such is the gambit of Jordan S. Carroll's Reading the Obscene, which charts a bildungsroman of boomer hermeneutics."—Whitney Strub, The Baffler"[I]n his Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature, Jordan S. Carroll is interested in a different, subtler aspect of the era's creeping corporatization. Rather than examining how the economics of publishing affected culture, Carroll considers how its class politics drove the industry's challenges to censorship, asserting that the 'values and training of the professional-managerial class (PMC)' were the driving force behind publishing's challenges to obscenity laws."—Greg Barnhisel, American Literary History"Carroll's surprising argument is that editors trained PMC men in the exigent art of cool detachment through obscenity.... Reading the Obscene teems with telling details and relishes double-entendres."—Dan Sinykin, ASAP/JournalTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Naked Editor 1. Shocking the Middle Class 2. An Aristocracy of Smut 3. Decrypting EC Comics 4. Reading Playboy for the Science Fiction 5. Mad Ones, Mad Men 6. White-Collar Masochism Conclusion: Transgression in the Post-pornographic Era
£100.00
Stanford University Press Religion: Rereading What Is Bound Together
Book SynopsisWith this profound final work, completed in the days leading up to his death, Michel Serres presents a vivid picture of his thinking about religion—a constant preoccupation since childhood—thereby completing Le Grand Récit, the comprehensive explanation of the world and of humanity to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life. Themes from Serres's earlier writings—energy and information, the role of the media in modern society, the anthropological function of sacrifice, the role of scientific knowledge, the problem of evil—are reinterpreted here in the light of the Old Testament accounts of Isaac and Jonah and a variety of Gospel episodes, including the Three Wise Men of the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Peter's denying Christ, the Crucifixion, Emmaus, and the Pentecost. Monotheistic religion, Serres argues, resembles mathematical abstraction in its dazzling power to bring together the real and the virtual, the natural and the transcendent; but only in its Christian embodiment is it capable of binding together human beings in such a way that partisan attachments are dissolved and a new era of history, free for once of the lethal repetition of collective violence, can be entered into.Trade Review"A stunning book by one of the most profound and original philosophers of science of the twentieth century, written in the final moments that separate life from death. Michel Serres realized that the whole of his thought over the course of an astonishingly prolific career would be incomplete if it did not take into account the indispensable role played by religion in every aspect of human life, and he tells us why in his own inimitable way."—Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, École Polytechnique, Paris
£86.40
Stanford University Press Genres of Privacy in Postwar America
Book SynopsisWith this incisive work, Palmer Rampell reveals the surprising role genre fiction played in redefining the category of the private person in the postwar period. Especially after the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to privacy in 1965, legal scholars, judges, and the public scrambled to understand the scope of that right. Before and after the Court's ruling, authors of genre fiction and film reformulated their aliens, androids, and monsters to engage in debates about personal privacy as it pertained to issues like abortion, police surveillance, and euthanasia. Triangulating novels and films with original archival discoveries and historical and legal research, Rampell provides new readings of Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy B. Hughes, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, and others. The book pairs the right of privacy for heterosexual sex with queer and proto-feminist crime fiction; racialized police surveillance at midcentury with Black crime fiction; Roe v. Wade (1973) with 1960s and 1970s science fiction; the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (1974) with horror; and the right to die with westerns. While we are accustomed to defenses of fiction for its capacity to represent fully rendered private life, Rampell suggests that we might value a certain strand of genre fiction for its capacity to theorize the meaning of the protean concept of privacy.Trade Review"In crisp and lucid prose, Palmer Rampell gives us new and compelling views of the ambitious genre writers who explored the rough edges of the postwar liberal consensus. Bolstered with rare finds from Rampell's original archival research, this book brilliantly shows the unnoted power of genre fiction."—Sean McCann, author of A Pinnacle of Feeling"This richly interdisciplinary book transforms our understanding of the relationship between privacy and literature, and Rampell's provocative readings of genre fiction mount a compelling case against literary and liberal truisms about the bourgeois private self."—Annie McClanahan, author of Dead Pledges"Genres of Privacyis a brainy and painstaking literature review of a variety of postwar genre works and their relationship to contemporary privacy-related issues... Rampell's expansive definition of the right to privacy gives his book a wide sweep and provides a view into several different issues and genres, lending it an immediate relevance."—Harrison Blackman, Los Angeles Review of Books"Recommended."—G. Grieve-Carlson, CHOICE
£100.00
