Literary theory Books
Northwestern University Press The Wound of the Name
Book Synopsis
£22.79
University of Pennsylvania Press A Rationale of Textual Criticism
Book SynopsisA philosophic grounding for textual criticism that shows how textual criticism is an integral part of the activity of reading.Trade ReviewNo one writes more knowledgeably or brilliantly about textual criticism than Tanselle. * Washington Post *Of course, nobody with any previous interest in the subject needs to hear encouraging praise about the author or the quality of the Rosenbach Lecture Series. * American Literature *A strangely evocative, even a moving book, a rara avis in textual circles. . . . A calm, beautifully articulated peroration that should be required reading for all critics, literary or textual. . . . Tansell's Rationale is one further demonstration of the attempts to 'step outside,' for in its call to all the citizens of the great republic of arts and letters it allows us to overcome the narrow prejudices which we may have inherited and to put our scholarship and our criticism at the service of human communication in all its manifestations. This is the final polemic of the book, and it is an heroic one indeed. That it has succeeded so well, not least in its artfully modulated language, is a tribute to the comprehensiveness and liberality of the mind of its author. * Review *These short, lucid, well-written, humane lectures are essential reading for graduate and undergraduate students concerned with texts of any kind requiring critical attention-and for their teachers. * Review of English Studies *
£15.19
University of Pennsylvania Press Literary Criticism
Book SynopsisAs the study of literature has extended to cultural contexts, critics have developed a language all their own. Yet, argues Mark Bauerlein, scholars of literature today are so unskilled in pertinent sociohistorical methods that they compensate by adopting cliches and catchphrases that serve as substitutes for information and logic. Thus by labeling a set of ideas an ideology they avoid specifying those ideas, or by saying that someone essentializes a concept they convey the air of decisive refutation. As long as a paper is generously sprinkled with the right words, clarification is deemed superfluous. Bauerlein contends that such usages only serve to signal political commitments, prove membership in subgroups, or appeal to editors and tenure committees, and that current textual practices are inadequate to the study of culture and politics they presume to undertake. His book discusses 23 commonly encountered terms-from deconstruction and gender to problematize and rethink-and offers a Trade Review"There isn't another book like this: a primer and a polemic on the jargon of literary study, impressive in its range of examples and uncompromising in its critique. Bauerlein describes the motives of several prospering forms of contemporary obscurantism, analyzes the conditions in which they arose, and maps the terrain in which they continue to flourish. His account is written with nerve, wit, and a tough-minded intelligence." * David Bromwich, Yale University *"A thesis I both understand and endorse. . . . I agree with him when he writes that the critical terms currently fashionable have very little to do with literature." * Philip Thody, Journal of European Studies *"This slim volume with its seemingly innocuous title takes the buzz words of contemporary critical theory to task for their pseudostatus as methodological tools…The items under the knife-cultural studies, discourse, gender theory, to pluck out a few-highlight how little real cutting edge there is in current literary criticism." * Forum for Modern Language Studies *"A shrewd demonstration, amusing and saddening at once, of what has gone wrong with so much academic writing in the field that used to be literature. It is in its way a pointed and revealing piece of cultural criticism, but of the sort which that fashionable pursuit cannot-and for reasons Bauerlein's excellent little book implies-perform." * John Hollander, Yale University *
£21.59
MP-FLO Uni Press of Florida Hemingway and Italy
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£56.95
Rutgers University Press Transforming Contagion Risky Contacts among
Book SynopsisMoving from viruses, vaccines, and copycat murder to gay panics, xenophobia, and psychopaths, Transforming Contagion energetically fuses critical humanities and social science perspectives into a boundary-smashing interdisciplinary collection on contagion.Trade Review“This is an extraordinary book that radically rethinks and expands our understanding of contagion. Crossing historical, geographical and disciplinary boundaries, Transforming Contagion brings a feminist, queer and new materialist perspective that insists on the possibilities as well as the risks and anxieties of contagion.” -- Rosalind Gill * author of New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity *“Traversing the humanities and social sciences, the essays in Transforming Contagion offer a fertile prism for exploring how contagion--the spread of beliefs, emotions, texts, practices, people, and pathogens across communities and culture--has been represented, experienced, addressed, and theorized across disciplines and historical periods. This volume establishes contagion as a central keyword for studying not only biomedical but also cultural, psychological, and political forms of connection, communication, and collective action.” -- David Zimmerman * author of Panic!: Markets,Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction *"Chronicle of Higher Education 'New Scholarly Books' Weekly Book List, August 31, 2018," compiled by Nina C. Ayoub * Chronicle of Higher Education *"This edited collection of essays examines the forms, meanings, and processes of contagion across modes and sites of transmission, historical periods, and methods of scholarly analysis. This broadly referenced text is an excellent example of scholarship in the critical humanities and social science disciplines. Highly recommended." * Choice *Table of ContentsContents Introduction: Contagion as Unruly SubjectBreanne Fahs, Annika Mann, Eric Swank, and Sarah Stage Part I – Quarantine/Exposure “A Proper Contagion”: The Inoculation Narrative and the Immunological TurnC.C WharramBefore the Cell, There Was Virus: Rethinking the Concept of Parasite and Contagion Through Contemporary Research in Evolutionary VirologyAnnu DahiyaSocial (Ir)Responsibility: Vaccine Exemption and the Ethics of ImmunityRachel Conrad Bracken “Radiophobia” and the Politics of Social ContagionMajia Nadesan Part II – Flesh/Spirit Isn’t Contagion Just a Metaphor?Reading Contagion in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year Annika MannContagious Accumulation and Racial Capitalism in Late Nineteenth Century American FictionJustin Rogers - CooperPerformance and the Contagious Swirl of Dramatic Tradition: Performative Revision and SubversionPatrick Maley Part III – Madness/Reason Viral Murder: Contagious Killings and Epidemic BeliefsMarlene TrompAm I a Psychopath?Sadie MohlerCult of the Penis: Male Fragility and Phallic FrenzyMichelle Ashley Gohr Part IV – Revolution/Bureaucracy Fear of the Diseased Immigrant: Contagion, Xenophobia, and BelongingLouis MendozaProphylactic Policing and the Epidemiology of Dissent in the Soviet-Era Baltic StatesEdward CohnSexual Politics and Contagious Social MovementsEric SwankWords on Fire: Radical Pedagogies of the Feminist ManifestoBreanne Fahs Index Acknowledgments About the Contributors
£29.70
MP-VIR Uni of Virginia Unsettling Nature Ecology Phenomenology and the
Book SynopsisNowhere has a longing for home flourished more than in contemporary environmental thinking, and particularly in eco-phenomenology. Unsettling Nature opens with a meditation on the trouble with such ecological homecoming narratives, which bear a close resemblance to narratives of settler colonial homemaking.Trade ReviewThoughtful, deeply researched, balanced, and substantive. Eggan’s analysis of the settler colonialist myths of home develops into a profoundly consequential critique of Western humanist culture and European colonial history that should reorient our thinking about our place among other creatures on a threatened planet. The most impressive book of ecocriticism I have read in many years." - Louise Westling, University of Oregon, author of The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language
£28.86
Wayne State University Press Walter Benjamin An Intellectual Biography Kritik German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies Series
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£19.16
New York University Press Three Satires Nilakantha Kshemendra and Bhallata
Book SynopsisThe Dark Age Ridiculed, by Nílakantha, Beguiling Artistry, by Ksheméndra, The Hundred Allegories, by BhállataWritten over a period of nearly a thousand years, these works show three very different approaches to satire. Nílakantha gets straight to the point: swindlers prey on stupidity.The artistry that beguiles Ksheméndra is as varied as human nature and just as fallible. We are off to a gentle start Sanctimonious?really no more than a warm-up among vicesbut soon graduate to Greed and Lust. From there it''s downhill all the way, as unfaithfulness leads on to fraud, and drunkenness to depravity; deception and quackery bring up the rear. What''s this at the very end? Virtue? A late arrival, pale and unconvincing.This volume presents three Indian satirists with three different strategies: in the ninth century C.E., Bhállata sought vengeance on his boorish new king by producing vicious sarcastic verse, The Hundred Allegories; in the eleventh century, Ksheméndra presents himself as a social reformer out to shame the complacent into compliance with Vedic morality; and in the seventeenth century little can redeem the fallen characters Nílakantha portrays, so his duty is simply to warn about the corruption of every social type.Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC FoundationFor more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.orgTrade Review"The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance." -- Willis G. Regier * The Chronicle Review *"Very few collections of Sanskrit deep enough for research are housed anywhere in North America. Now, twenty-five hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library may remedy this state of affairs." * Tricycle *"No effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists can only thank them for an initiative intended to make the classics of an ancient Indian language accessible to a modern international audience." * The Times Higher Education Supplement *"The Clay Sanskrit Library represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot. . . . Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes." * New Criterion *"Published in the geek-chic format." * BookForum *
£18.89
John Wiley & Sons Flann OBrien Bakhtin and Menippean Satire
Book SynopsisThis work applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of literary discourse and the concept of ""carnivalisation"" to the work of Flann O'Brien. The author emphasises the political and social implications of the writings, arguing that O'Brien maintained a reflexive focus on language throughout his career.
£30.56
The University of Arizona Press Writing the Goodlife Mexican American Literature and the Environment
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£26.36
University of Minnesota Press Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics
Book Synopsis
£19.79
University of Minnesota Press Blindness and Insight
Book SynopsisFirst published in 1983. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
£19.79
University of Minnesota Press The Heretical Archive
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Inspired by other scholars who have brought the phenomenological method to cinema, Domietta Torlasco writes beautifully of her own encounters with films and images, drawing the reader into her own vision as she elucidates its implication in a constellation of deep thought. The book’s insights are as fresh and profound as its writing, in other words: at its best moments, it is a real tour de force that is an extended reflection rather than a series of discrete observations." —Amy Villarejo, author of Film Studies: The Basics "Digital technology allows once quiescent cinemagoers to dismantle and refashion previously inviolable products of the film industry. Torlasco sees the potential for politically transformative thinking in such acts. She argues that our capacity to imagine alternative futures may depend on our ability to reconfigure the virtual archive of filmic memory. Part philosophical reflection, part manifesto, Torlasco's book is essential reading for anyone wishing to steer a critical theory of audiovisual art between the Scylla and Charybdis of technophilia and artworldspeak. " —Victor Burgin, author of The Remembered FilmTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Against House Arrest: Antigone and the Impurity of the Death Drive2. Digital Impressions: Writing Memory after Agnès Varda3. Folding Time: Toward a New Theory of Montage4. Archiving Disappearance: From Michelangelo Antonioni to New MediaNotesIndex
£17.99
University of Minnesota Press Speech Begins after Death
Book SynopsisSpeech Begins after Death is a transcript of critic Claude Bonnefoy's interview with Michel Foucault in which he reflects on his approach to the written word throughout his life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing. Never before published in English, this is one of Foucault's most personal statements about his life and writing.Table of ContentsContentsEditor’s NoteIntroduction: Foucault and Audiography Philippe ArtièresInterview between Michel Foucault and Claude Bonnefoy, 1968Chronologies of Michel Foucault and Claude Bonnefoy
£11.39
University of Minnesota Press Quotational Practices
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Patrick Greaney’s argument that we might understand history as a sort of utopian subjunctive is provocative and perfectly pitched. This is the kind of book the most ambitious critic aspires to write." —Craig Dworkin, author of No Medium"In this groundbreaking and provocative study of the practice of quotation at the heart of contemporary conceptual writing and art, Patrick Greaney challenges the view that the use of quotation spells the end of authorship, of the individual voice. On the contrary, he argues, quotation must be understood in its historical function, its questioning of the past’s unrealized possibilities—possibilities for the present and even the future. Laying to rest once and for all the notion that citing the texts of others is little more than inspired plagiarism, Greaney provides a fascinating study of a philosophical practice that he calls, after Foucault, ‘the frugal lyricism of quotation.’" —Marjorie Perloff, author of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New CenturyTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: A History of the Present1. The Transformation of Authorship2. Insinuation: Détournement and Gender in Guy Debord3. Marcel Broodthaers, an Artist in Quotation Marks4. The Aesthetics of Administration: Heimrad Bäcker's transcript5. Making History: Sharon Hayes, Vanessa Place, and Glenn LigonAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£19.79
The University of Alabama Press Finding the Weight of Things
Book SynopsisOffers the first full-length study of Larry Eigner's poetry, covering his entire career from the beginning of his mature work in the 1950s to his last poems of the 1990s. George Hart charts where Eigner's two central interests intersect, and how their interaction fueled his work as a poet-critic.Trade Review“George Hart’s Finding the Weight of Things stresses the poet Larry Eigner’s longstanding interest in ecology and environmental politics, not only as subject matter for his poems but as coextensive with his particular embodiment. Not only did Eigner live as a differently abled person, he wrote from within an awareness of a threatened and vulnerable globe. Hart’s masterful application of ecocriticism and disability theory makes this a vital and important contribution to Eigner’s work, specifically, and postwar poetics generally.”—Michael Davidson, author of Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic
£26.96
The University of Alabama Press Writing into the Future
Book SynopsisCollects Alan Golding’s essays on the futures (past and present) of poetry and poetics. Throughout the 13 essays gathered in this collection, Golding skillfully joins literary critique with a concern for history and a sociological inquiry into the creation of poetry.Trade Review“Writing into the Future contains excellent, clearly written criticism by an acknowledged authority. Its explanatory power and the cogency of its arguments make it a valuable text for undergraduate and graduate students, and for anyone who wants to understand the major contributions of some of the key poets associated with Language writing.” —Stephen Fredman, author of American Poetry as Transactional Art
£35.06
Duke University Press Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsPreface vii New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions in to the Canon / Donald E. Pease 1 The Res Publica of Letters / Michael Warner 38 The Rationale for "The American Romance" / John McWilliams 71 Scarcity, Subjectivity, and Emerson / Wai-chee Dimock 83 Hearing Narrative Voices in Melville's Pierre / Priscilla Wald 100 The Rhetorical Use and Abuse of Fiction: Eating Books in Late Nineteenth-Century American / Steven Mailloux 133 Maternal Discourse and the Romance of Self-Possession in Kate Chopin's The Awakening / Ivy Schweitzer 158 Realism, Ideology, and the Novel in American (1886-1896): Changing Perspectives in the Work of Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Henry James / Robert Weimann 189 American Literature and the New Historicism: The Example of Frederick Douglass / Gregory S. Jay 211 "Ours by the Law of Naure": Romance and Independents on Mark Twain's River / Howard Horwitz 243 Cataloging the Creatures of the Deep: "Billy Budd, Sailor" and the Rise of Sociology / Susan Misruchi 272 Violence, Revolution and the Cost of Freedom: John Brown and W. E. B. DuBois / WIlliam E. Cain 305 Contributors 331 Index 333
£80.10
Duke University Press Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsPreface vii New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions in to the Canon / Donald E. Pease 1 The Res Publica of Letters / Michael Warner 38 The Rationale for "The American Romance" / John McWilliams 71 Scarcity, Subjectivity, and Emerson / Wai-chee Dimock 83 Hearing Narrative Voices in Melville's Pierre / Priscilla Wald 100 The Rhetorical Use and Abuse of Fiction: Eating Books in Late Nineteenth-Century American / Steven Mailloux 133 Maternal Discourse and the Romance of Self-Possession in Kate Chopin's The Awakening / Ivy Schweitzer 158 Realism, Ideology, and the Novel in American (1886-1896): Changing Perspectives in the Work of Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Henry James / Robert Weimann 189 American Literature and the New Historicism: The Example of Frederick Douglass / Gregory S. Jay 211 "Ours by the Law of Naure": Romance and Independents on Mark Twain's River / Howard Horwitz 243 Cataloging the Creatures of the Deep: "Billy Budd, Sailor" and the Rise of Sociology / Susan Misruchi 272 Violence, Revolution and the Cost of Freedom: John Brown and W. E. B. DuBois / WIlliam E. Cain 305 Contributors 331 Index 333
£27.90
Duke University Press Phantasmatic Indochina
Book SynopsisAnalyzing the first Exposition Coloniale Internationale, held in Paris in 1931, this title shows how the exhibition's display of architecture gave a vision to the colonies that justified France's cultural prejudices, while stimulating the desire for further expansionism.Trade ReviewNorindr’s radical revaluation of Indochina as a fictive and mythic structure expands the scope of geographic and political concerns into the broader speculative sphere of cultural identity. Indochina becomes for him a repository of images, a space whose commemorative and iconographic character brings together literary, filmic and architectural forms of cultural evidence. Remarkable for its lucidity and finesse, Phantasmatic Indochina constitutes one of the finest contributions to the field of post-colonial and cultural studies.”—Dalia Judovitz, Emory UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Indochina as FIction 1 1. Representing Indochina: The French Colonial Phantasmatic and the Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris 14 2. Unruly Natives: The Indochinese Problem 34 3. The "Surrealist" Counter-Exposition: La Vérité sur les Colonies 52 4. Indochina as "Rêves-Diurnes" and Male Fantasies: Re-Mapping André Malraux's La Voie royale 72 5. Geographic Romance: "Errances" and Memories in Marguerite Duras's Colonial Cities 107 6. Filmic Memorials and Colonial Blues: Indochina in Contemporary French CInema 13 Conclusion: Retracing the Legacy of "Indochina Adventures" 155 Notes 159 Works Cited 181 Index 199
£22.79
Duke University Press Unsettled Subjects
Book SynopsisTrade Review“Unsettled Subjects will establish Susan Lurie as a central figure within feminist and postcolonialist theory as she intervenes courageously within perhaps the most heated and long-lasting of feminist debates.”—Kaja Silverman, University of California, Berkeley“The critical project of Unsettled Subjects is both necessary and daring. It articulates the postmodern impasse for white feminism that deconstruction’s destabilizing of the category ‘woman’ has generated and, through very thorough readings of modern American women writers, demonstrates how this impasse may be overcome.”—Lora Romero, Stanford University
£22.79
Duke University Press Strange Gourmets
Book SynopsisTheoretically sophisticated: How often has this term been used to distinguish a work of contemporary criticism and what, exactly, does it mean? This book shows how the politics of sophistication pervades contemporary culture both in the mainstream and at the academic margins.Trade Review“Litvak has taken taste out of the closet and shows us why so many—especially those who consider themselves to be centered in cultural studies—do not like the taste of taste. This book is as smart as it is strangely delicious.”—Carol Mavor, author of Pleasures Taken"One can hardly call Strange Gourmets a sophisticated book, since on the embarrassing subject of itself sophistication has always been too cool for words. No, one must call it a wildly sophisticated book, uncultivated enough, for all its fine intelligence, to speak whereof it knows. Like some brilliant chef who incorporates weeds into highly composed salads, the author means not to disown, but to parade the intimacy between sophistication (his own included) and rawer forms of taste, disgust, perversity. If his richly inventive cookery is more satisfying than sociological unmaskings that are as endless as they are futile, this is not least because, unlike them, it accords sophistication the respect owed to an appetite."—D. A. Miller
£22.79
Duke University Press The Story of All Things
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The Story of All Things makes a major contribution to the literary history of the English Renaissance and to the theory of modernity and the modern subject. Grossman takes up what are surely the most compelling and widely discussed questions in literary studies today. . . with an elegance that makes the book as beautiful as it is important, as pleasurable to read as it is necessary to be read."—David Lee Miller, University of Kentucky"Compelling, provocative, original, and often brilliant."—Laura Lunger Knoppers, Pennsylvania State University
£20.69
Duke University Press Tropicopolitans
Book SynopsisPresents an analysis of texts that accompanied European commercial and imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution through the French Revolution. This book considers such texts as Behn's "Oroonoko", Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" and "Captain Singleton", and Swift's "Gulliver's Travels". It is suitable for scholars engaged in post colonial studies.Trade Review“Tropicopolitans might initiate a school of “tropicalization” studies. In the emerging field of what we have learned to name Black Atlantic writing, Aravamudan has made substantial contributions in his chapters on Equiano and Toussaint Louverture, in which each figure is richly, contextually read. The wrenching from a Euro-Christian framework into a tropicalizing one opens up these figures to new critical investigations instead of merely freezing their heroic status for all time. Aravamudan’s book should go some way toward helping us maintain our vigil against premature orthodoxies.”—Donna Landry, author of The Muses of Resistance: Laboring Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796“Tropicopolitans is the most theoretically sophisticated study yet of colonialist texts in the eighteenth century.”—James Thompson, author of Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the NovelTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Virtualizations 1. Petting Oroonoko 2. Piratical Accounts 3. The Stoic's Voice Levantinizations 4. Lady Mary in the Hamman 5. The Despotic Eye and the Oriental Sublime Nationalizations 6. Equiano and the Politics of Literacy 7. Tropicalizing the Englightenment Conclusion Notes Index
£112.20
Duke University Press The Gothic Family Romance
Book SynopsisTales of child sacrifice, demon lovers, incestual relations, and returns from the dead are part of English and Irish gothic literature. This book shows how Anglo-Irish gothic works written from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries reflect the destructive effects of imperialism on the children.Trade Review“A compelling history of the Anglo-Irish gothic tradition that is ambitious, convincing, and valuable.”—Mary Favret, Indiana University“Backus’s fresh and unexpected insights into Irish Gothic texts along with the sophisticated and contemporary theoretical base of her argument should ensure this book an important place in Irish studies.”—Ann Owens Weekes, University of Arizona“With extraordinary analytic clarity, Margot Backus sifts the troubling evidence of three centuries and offers valuable commentary on writings from Swift to Jennifer Johnston, from Edmund Burke to Frank McGuinness. This book resonates with grand ideas.”—Declan Kiberd, University College DublinTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1 The Other Half of the Story: English and Irish Social Formations, 1550-1700 2 "Does she not deserve to Pay for All This?" Compulsory Romance in the Constricting Family Cell 3 "Something Valuable of Their Own": Children, Reporduction, and Irony in Swift, Burke, and Edgeworth 4 "A Very Strange Agony": Parables of Sexual Subject Formation in Melmoth the Wanderer, Carmilla, and Dracula 5 Irish Gothic Realism and the Great War: The Devil's bargain and the Demon Lover 6 Somebody Else's Troubles: Post-treaty Retrenchment and the (Burning) Big House Novel 7 "Perhaps I may Come Live": Mother Ireland and the Unfinished Revolution Conclusion Notes BIbliography Index
£25.19
Duke University Press Morocco Bound
Book SynopsisAn examination of American Orientalist representations of North Africa from 1942 to 1973Trade Review“Morocco Bound is a powerful meditation on the question of why the circulation of cultural representations matters…. Given its important critical interventions, Morocco Bound should be a required text for a broad range of readers and scholars in the fields of American studies, postcolonialism, comparative literature, and Middle Eastern Studies.” - Ali Behdad, Comparative Literature"Throughout this book it is clear that Edwards views dialogue as a modest corrective to Orientalist tendencies, often pointing out moments when opportunities for exchange were missed. Edwards’s own work is consciously collaborative and dialogic; he acknowledges his debt to Moroccan colleagues. His own experiences in Morocco, the ground on which this book is built, constitutes yet another chapter in the American-Moroccan encounter at an historical moment when the need for dialogue and conversation across the gaping chasm separating the United States and the Arab world is as dire as ever." - Allen Hibbard, Comparative Literature Studies"Not only does Edwards’s book propose a methodology that importantly indicates the material differences between text and context, but it also breaks new scholarly ground in presenting a new area of study for transnational American studies: the orientalist construction of the Maghreb. In doing so, Morocco Bound represents a timely intervention into the epistemological and material violence of the present moment and promises to be a study that will be returned to long after the present conflict (hopefully) has passed." - Christopher Breu, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East"Morocco Bound is an exemplary work of postcolonial American studies scholarship, one acutely sensitive to the importance of the specificities of colonial and imperial relations in the Maghreb. Yet Morocco Bound is no predictable ideological study. Edwards constantly foregrounds the historical complexities of encounter in each text he analyzes while simultaneously presenting nuanced close readings. In the process, he challenges familiar theoretical paradigms and presents us with new possibilities." - Malini Johar Schueller, American Quarterly“Morocco Bound announces a radical departure from contemporary debates on orientalism through an interesting deployment of the concept of circulation in its study of the U.S. encounter with North Africa and through an astute consideration of the ways that American texts translate the North African Arab and Berber other. With this book, postcolonialism, cultural studies, African studies, and American studies will be refreshed and can begin some of the most exciting debates anew.”—Taieb Belghazi, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco“By his commitment to working across languages, treating several disciplines and diverse cultural levels (official, mass, avant-garde), and by his disruptive practice of reading Arabic voices together with Anglophones, Brian Edwards has produced an exemplary performance of what American Studies must become in the twenty-first century.”—Jonathan Arac, author of The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–1860"As literary studies in the United States founder between America globalizing and the globe Americanizing, Brian T. Edwards's brilliant analysis of how America becomes worldly for others is a model for future work. Here language-based close readings bring literary criticism and the study of cultural politics together as the author guides us with a sure hand from cold war ideology, through 'hippie orientalism' and postcoloniality, onto the threshold of the consequences of globalization seen in a new perspective."—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak“Morocco Bound is a fascinating and insightful account of the multiple ways that Americans engaged Morocco from the 1940s to the 1970s. . . . [A] sophisticated and fascinating work of first-class scholarship that will be of great interest to scholars and students of history, cultural and literary studies, and area studies.” -- Melani McAlister * Journal of American History *"Morocco Bound offers a compelling account both of the Maghreb as an important contact zone in the formation of the United States as a global power and of American orientalism as a formative component in American foreign relations. . . . [T]he power here lies in detailed cultural historiography, and some of the text’s most compelling moments reside in the connective tissue of Edwards’s historicist argumentation." -- Margaux Cowden * GLQ *“Morocco Bound is a powerful meditation on the question of why the circulation of cultural representations matters…. Given its important critical interventions, Morocco Bound should be a required text for a broad range of readers and scholars in the fields of American studies, postcolonialism, comparative literature, and Middle Eastern Studies.” -- Ali Behdad * Comparative Literature *"Morocco Bound is an exemplary work of postcolonial American studies scholarship, one acutely sensitive to the importance of the specificities of colonial and imperial relations in the Maghreb. Yet Morocco Bound is no predictable ideological study. Edwards constantly foregrounds the historical complexities of encounter in each text he analyzes while simultaneously presenting nuanced close readings. In the process, he challenges familiar theoretical paradigms and presents us with new possibilities." -- Malini Johar Schueller * American Quarterly *"Not only does Edwards’s book propose a methodology that importantly indicates the material differences between text and context, but it also breaks new scholarly ground in presenting a new area of study for transnational American studies: the orientalist construction of the Maghreb. In doing so, Morocco Bound represents a timely intervention into the epistemological and material violence of the present moment and promises to be a study that will be returned to long after the present conflict (hopefully) has passed." -- Christopher Breu * Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East *"Throughout this book it is clear that Edwards views dialogue as a modest corrective to Orientalist tendencies, often pointing out moments when opportunities for exchange were missed. Edwards’s own work is consciously collaborative and dialogic; he acknowledges his debt to Moroccan colleagues. His own experiences in Morocco, the ground on which this book is built, constitutes yet another chapter in the American-Moroccan encounter at an historical moment when the need for dialogue and conversation across the gaping chasm separating the United States and the Arab world is as dire as ever." -- Allen Hibbard * Comparative Literature Studies *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Morocco Bound, 1942–1973 1 Part I: Taking Casablanca 1. American Orientalism: Taking Casablanca 29 2. Sheltering Screens: Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations 78 II. Queer Tangier 3. Tangier(s): The Multiple Cold War Contexts of the International Zone 121 4. Disorienting the National Subject: Burroughs's Tangier, Hitchcock's Marrakech 158 5. Three Serious Writers Two Serious Authors: Jane Bowles, Mohammed Mrabet, and the Erotics of Collaboration Politics of Translation 198 III. Marrackech Express 6. Hippie Orientalism: The Interpretation of Countercultures 247 Notes 303 Works Cited 335 Index 351
£27.90
Duke University Press Rebels
Book SynopsisA cultural history of the political legitimization of youth rebellion during the Cold War eraTrade Review“Rebels is a great book about bad boys and girls, melodrama and rock ‘n’ roll, and the emergence of ‘identity’ as a site of social concern and capitalist fantasy: a focused, engaging revision of white Cold War pop culture aesthetics in the United States.”—Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship“This is a bold and original study of Cold War masculinity, one that will force scholars to reconsider many of their assumptions about the gender and sexual politics of Cold War culture. In showing how the ‘bad boy’ functioned as a sign of democratic possibility, Leerom Medovoi opens up new ways of thinking about the relation between the 1950s and 1960s.”—Robert J. Corber, author of Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of MasculinityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii 1. Identitarian Thought and the Cold War World 1 2. Cold War Literature and the National Allegory: The Identity Canon of Holden Caulfield 53 3. Transcommodification: Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Suburban Counterimaginary 91 4. Identity Hits the Screen: Teenpics and the Boying of Rebellion 135 5. Oedipus in Suburbia: Bad Boy and the Fordist Family Drama 167 6. Beat Fraternity and the Generation of Identity 215 7. Where the Girls Were: Figuring the Female Rebel 317 Conclusion: The Rise and Fall of Identity 331 Notes 359 Works Cited 377 Index
£27.90
Duke University Press Modernism and Colonialism
Book SynopsisThe essays in Modernism and Colonialism offer revisionary accounts of major British and Irish literary modernists relation to colonialism.Trade Review“Modernism and Colonialism is a terrific book—timely, intelligent, capacious, and a pleasure to read.”—Douglas Mao, coeditor of Bad Modernisms“Modernism and Colonialism will have a real impact on the fields of postcolonial studies and British modernism. It succeeds in treating colonialism as a condition of possibility for a vibrant British-transnational modernism.”—Simon During, author of Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic“The subject of this collection—the relation between modernism, understood especially in terms of formal innovation and self-reflexivity, and the historical phenomenon of British colonialism and of resistance to colonialism—is an important and timely one that has received remarkably little attention.”—Derek Attridge, author of The Singularity of Literature“The editors are to be commended not only for persuading such an exciting and well-regarded group of scholars to contribute to this collection but also for structuring the collection so wisely. The essays range widely enough among topics of study to underscore the diverse ways in which modernists and modernist texts engaged with colonial questions, but a genuine, seemingly effortless dialogue unfolds among the essays.” -- Paige Reynolds * Journal of British Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction / Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses 1 Part 1: Victorian Backgrounds 1. Colonialism and Popular Literature at the Fin de Siecle / Nicholas Daly 19 Part 2: Modern British Literature 2. Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics / Michael Valdez Moses 43 3. Virginia Woolf’s Colony and the Adolescence of Modernist Fiction / Jed Esty 70 4. War, “Primitivism,” and the Future of “the West”: Reflections on D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis / Andrzej Agsiorek 91 5. T.S. Eliot, Late Empire, and Decadence / Vincent Sherry 111 6. Romancing the Stump: Modernism and Colonialism to Forster’s A Passage to India / Brian May 136 7. “A tangle of modernism and barbarity”: Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief / Rita Barnard 162 Part 3: Ireland and Scotland 8. Joyce’s Trojan Horse: Ulysses and the Aesthetics of Decolonization / Richard Begam 185 9. Yeats, Spengler, and A Vision after Empire / Nicholas Allen 209 10. Elizabeth Bowen’s Troubled Modernism / Maria DiBattista 226 11. “Upon the thistle they’re impaled”: Hugh MacDiarmid’s Modernist Nationalism / Ian Duncan 246 Part 4: Toward the Postcolonial 12. Postcolonial Modernism? / Declan Kiberd 269 13. Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity / Jahan Ramazani 288 Contributors 315 Index 319
£25.19
Duke University Press Punctuation
Book SynopsisPunctuation offers playful interpretations of punctuation in relation to aesthetics, performance, and experimental art.Trade Review“[Brody’s] sophisticated and diverting links in Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play opens up writing not only as both performance and notation (as an instructional element concerning the dramaturgical aspects of a text) but also the political effects of the use of hyphenation as an element of arts. The surprising and promising aspect of the study makes readers aware of the very fact that politics are found exactly inside the l’art pour l’art conception of punctuation marks. . . . Punctuation is a valuable contribution to the repoliticisation of art through performance.” - Margarete Jahrmann, Leonardo“Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play is a good book, a clever book, and an exciting book. The singularity of Brody’s approach, the verve and creativity of her readings, and the work’s interdisciplinarity—particularly its much-needed liaisons among textual, queer, and performance studies—are significant strengths.” - Kevin Bourque, GLQ“[D]azzling in its inter-disciplinarity and most delightful to read. Jennifer DeVere Brody has produced a study on performance art which is itself a performance, a play on punctuation which defamiliarizes the mundane accompaniment to communication, which is punctuation, and reinvents its components as significant cultural markers.” - Kathryn Southworth, English“This is the book that puts the ‘pun’, not to mention the ‘punk’, in ‘punctuation.’ Jennifer DeVere Brody focuses on punctuation as performance, highlighting its role in novels, poetry, art, dance and racial and gender politics. She plays with full stops, semicolons and apostrophes all the while, including a chapter in the form of a dialogue during which one character talks largely in smileys. The result is a book of spirited cultural criticism, not a monograph on linguistics.” - Raphael Salkie, Times Higher Education Supplement“DeVere Brody’s work is undeniably vanguard in a subject that has long ceased to be edgy and new. She should be applauded for her vigor and bravery. It’s a hefty dose of insight and perspective for the prescriptivist in all of us.” - Jo Ristow, Feminist Review blog”A puncturing of semantic space, Jennifer DeVere Brody’s Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play performs at every turn a subversive politics that celebrates the margins as places where the real deal goes down. . . . Hats off to Brody for taking us someplace new.” - Gregory Kirk Murray, Rain Taxi“Here is a book that earns the right to the spaces between its sumptuously smart words. Here is a book that pays attention to the ‘minor’ detail of punctuation in ways that percolate with questions pertaining to history, subject formation, ethnicity, racialization, technology, authorship, physiology, philosophy, aesthetic value, the social, the political, and more (to pile up the commas). Lacing her arguments with humor as well as insight, Jennifer DeVere Brody here tracks punctuation’s contradictory performances across a number of times and places. She offers close readings of artists and authors who deploy punctuation pointedly in a variety of mediums, amplifying the mark of the mark, the score of the score, the thrust or lean of the emphaticals that prop our points. Here is a book that doubles as a stage upon which the understudied finally gets to strut and fret with an embodied wit, critical grace, and socially relevant verve.”—Rebecca Schneider, Brown University“In Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play, Jennifer DeVere Brody productively bridges both performance criticism and literary analysis through a consideration of punctuation. To be certain, this is a bold and innovative move that compels us to consider what is too often taken for granted: how punctuation performs. Brody’s book is decidedly interdisciplinary, as she analyzes a diverse array of performance texts always mindful of the intersections of art, politics, and play. As a result, Brody brings important insight to issues of race, gender, and performance through this examination of punctuation. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play is a most ambitious and significant work that will certainly have a cross-disciplinary impact.”—Harry J. Elam Jr., Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University“Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play is a good book, a clever book, and an exciting book. The singularity of Brody’s approach, the verve and creativity of her readings, and the work’s interdisciplinarity—particularly its much-needed liaisons among textual, queer, and performance studies—are significant strengths.” -- Kevin Bourque * GLQ *“[Brody’s] sophisticated and diverting links in Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play opens up writing not only as both performance and notation (as an instructional element concerning the dramaturgical aspects of a text) but also the political effects of the use of hyphenation as an element of arts. The surprising and promising aspect of the study makes readers aware of the very fact that politics are found exactly inside the l’art pour l’art conception of punctuation marks. . . . Punctuation is a valuable contribution to the repoliticisation of art through performance.” -- Margarete Jahrmann * Leonardo Reviews *“[D]azzling in its inter-disciplinarity and most delightful to read. Jennifer DeVere Brody has produced a study on performance art which is itself a performance, a play on punctuation which defamiliarizes the mundane accompaniment to communication, which is punctuation, and reinvents its components as significant cultural markers.” -- Kathryn Southworth * English *“DeVere Brody’s work is undeniably vanguard in a subject that has long ceased to be edgy and new. She should be applauded for her vigor and bravery. It’s a hefty dose of insight and perspective for the prescriptivist in all of us.” -- Jo Ristow * Feminist Review blog *“This is the book that puts the ‘pun’, not to mention the ‘punk’, in ‘punctuation.’ Jennifer DeVere Brody focuses on punctuation as performance, highlighting its role in novels, poetry, art, dance and racial and gender politics. She plays with full stops, semicolons and apostrophes all the while, including a chapter in the form of a dialogue during which one character talks largely in smileys. The result is a book of spirited cultural criticism, not a monograph on linguistics.” -- Raphael Salkie * Times Higher Education *”A puncturing of semantic space, Jennifer DeVere Brody’s Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play performs at every turn a subversive politics that celebrates the margins as places where the real deal goes down. . . . Hats off to Brody for taking us someplace new.” -- Gregory Kirk Murray * Rain Taxi *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix For(e)thought: Pre/Script: gesturestyluspunctum 1 1. Smutty Daubings 27 2. Belaboring the Point . . . 62 3. Hyphen-Nations 85 4. "Queer" Quotation Marks 108 5. Sem;erot;cs ; Colon:zat:ons : Exclamat!ons ! 134 Post\Script: Cyberpunktuations? 156 Notes 169 Bibliography 191 Index 207
£76.50
Duke University Press Punctuation
Book SynopsisPunctuation offers playful interpretations of punctuation in relation to aesthetics, performance, and experimental art.Trade Review“[Brody’s] sophisticated and diverting links in Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play opens up writing not only as both performance and notation (as an instructional element concerning the dramaturgical aspects of a text) but also the political effects of the use of hyphenation as an element of arts. The surprising and promising aspect of the study makes readers aware of the very fact that politics are found exactly inside the l’art pour l’art conception of punctuation marks. . . . Punctuation is a valuable contribution to the repoliticisation of art through performance.” - Margarete Jahrmann, Leonardo“Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play is a good book, a clever book, and an exciting book. The singularity of Brody’s approach, the verve and creativity of her readings, and the work’s interdisciplinarity—particularly its much-needed liaisons among textual, queer, and performance studies—are significant strengths.” - Kevin Bourque, GLQ“[D]azzling in its inter-disciplinarity and most delightful to read. Jennifer DeVere Brody has produced a study on performance art which is itself a performance, a play on punctuation which defamiliarizes the mundane accompaniment to communication, which is punctuation, and reinvents its components as significant cultural markers.” - Kathryn Southworth, English“This is the book that puts the ‘pun’, not to mention the ‘punk’, in ‘punctuation.’ Jennifer DeVere Brody focuses on punctuation as performance, highlighting its role in novels, poetry, art, dance and racial and gender politics. She plays with full stops, semicolons and apostrophes all the while, including a chapter in the form of a dialogue during which one character talks largely in smileys. The result is a book of spirited cultural criticism, not a monograph on linguistics.” - Raphael Salkie, Times Higher Education Supplement“DeVere Brody’s work is undeniably vanguard in a subject that has long ceased to be edgy and new. She should be applauded for her vigor and bravery. It’s a hefty dose of insight and perspective for the prescriptivist in all of us.” - Jo Ristow, Feminist Review blog”A puncturing of semantic space, Jennifer DeVere Brody’s Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play performs at every turn a subversive politics that celebrates the margins as places where the real deal goes down. . . . Hats off to Brody for taking us someplace new.” - Gregory Kirk Murray, Rain Taxi“Here is a book that earns the right to the spaces between its sumptuously smart words. Here is a book that pays attention to the ‘minor’ detail of punctuation in ways that percolate with questions pertaining to history, subject formation, ethnicity, racialization, technology, authorship, physiology, philosophy, aesthetic value, the social, the political, and more (to pile up the commas). Lacing her arguments with humor as well as insight, Jennifer DeVere Brody here tracks punctuation’s contradictory performances across a number of times and places. She offers close readings of artists and authors who deploy punctuation pointedly in a variety of mediums, amplifying the mark of the mark, the score of the score, the thrust or lean of the emphaticals that prop our points. Here is a book that doubles as a stage upon which the understudied finally gets to strut and fret with an embodied wit, critical grace, and socially relevant verve.”—Rebecca Schneider, Brown University“In Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play, Jennifer DeVere Brody productively bridges both performance criticism and literary analysis through a consideration of punctuation. To be certain, this is a bold and innovative move that compels us to consider what is too often taken for granted: how punctuation performs. Brody’s book is decidedly interdisciplinary, as she analyzes a diverse array of performance texts always mindful of the intersections of art, politics, and play. As a result, Brody brings important insight to issues of race, gender, and performance through this examination of punctuation. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play is a most ambitious and significant work that will certainly have a cross-disciplinary impact.”—Harry J. Elam Jr., Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University“Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play is a good book, a clever book, and an exciting book. The singularity of Brody’s approach, the verve and creativity of her readings, and the work’s interdisciplinarity—particularly its much-needed liaisons among textual, queer, and performance studies—are significant strengths.” -- Kevin Bourque * GLQ *“[Brody’s] sophisticated and diverting links in Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play opens up writing not only as both performance and notation (as an instructional element concerning the dramaturgical aspects of a text) but also the political effects of the use of hyphenation as an element of arts. The surprising and promising aspect of the study makes readers aware of the very fact that politics are found exactly inside the l’art pour l’art conception of punctuation marks. . . . Punctuation is a valuable contribution to the repoliticisation of art through performance.” -- Margarete Jahrmann * Leonardo Reviews *“[D]azzling in its inter-disciplinarity and most delightful to read. Jennifer DeVere Brody has produced a study on performance art which is itself a performance, a play on punctuation which defamiliarizes the mundane accompaniment to communication, which is punctuation, and reinvents its components as significant cultural markers.” -- Kathryn Southworth * English *“DeVere Brody’s work is undeniably vanguard in a subject that has long ceased to be edgy and new. She should be applauded for her vigor and bravery. It’s a hefty dose of insight and perspective for the prescriptivist in all of us.” -- Jo Ristow * Feminist Review blog *“This is the book that puts the ‘pun’, not to mention the ‘punk’, in ‘punctuation.’ Jennifer DeVere Brody focuses on punctuation as performance, highlighting its role in novels, poetry, art, dance and racial and gender politics. She plays with full stops, semicolons and apostrophes all the while, including a chapter in the form of a dialogue during which one character talks largely in smileys. The result is a book of spirited cultural criticism, not a monograph on linguistics.” -- Raphael Salkie * Times Higher Education *”A puncturing of semantic space, Jennifer DeVere Brody’s Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play performs at every turn a subversive politics that celebrates the margins as places where the real deal goes down. . . . Hats off to Brody for taking us someplace new.” -- Gregory Kirk Murray * Rain Taxi *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix For(e)thought: Pre/Script: gesturestyluspunctum 1 1. Smutty Daubings 27 2. Belaboring the Point . . . 62 3. Hyphen-Nations 85 4. "Queer" Quotation Marks 108 5. Sem;erot;cs ; Colon:zat:ons : Exclamat!ons ! 134 Post\Script: Cyberpunktuations? 156 Notes 169 Bibliography 191 Index 207
£22.49
Duke University Press Interior States
Book SynopsisFocuses on US citizens' democratic impulse: their ability to imagine and to work with others to create democratic publics while taking divergent views into account. This book contends that citizens of the early US were encouraged to locate this social impulse not in associations with others but in the turbulent interiors of their own bodies.Trade Review“Interior States rethinks the relation of identity and democracy in a dazzling exercise of literary criticism, social history, and political theory. Christopher Castiglia shows how the federal practice of democracy, in combination with developing institutions, did not squash so much as misplace democracy, relocating its performance from the sociality of exchange between citizens into the personal, bodily interior. Our nervous management of our own discordant identities sidetracks us from a richer, more inventively dissensual democratic practice. Castiglia explores a rich, interdisciplinary nineteenth-century archive that imagines alternative democracies and challenges readers to unfetter their imaginations in the service of more pleasurable, ‘post-interior’ democratic association.”—Dana D. Nelson, co-editor of Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics“This book combines scope and depth in a way that will remind readers of some of the classics—F. O. Matthiessen, Leo Marx, Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins. In a book propelled by wonderful writing, Christopher Castiglia illuminates the extent to which the self-declared greatest democracy of world history has struggled to be democratic institutionally. His call for a ‘post-interior humanism’ gains real urgency from an account of a centuries-old impasse in American life that readers will remember long after they have finished the book.”—Christopher Newfield, author of The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in AmericaTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Interiority and the Problem of Misplaced Democracy 1 1. "Matters of Internal Concern": Federal Affect and the Melancholy Citizen 17 2. Bad Associations: Sociality, Interiority, Institutionalism 60 3. Abolition's Racial Interiors and White Civic Depth 101 4. Ardent Spirits: Intemperate Sociality and the Inner Life of Capital 136 5. Anxiety, Desire, and the Nervous State 168 6. Between Consciousness and Revolution: Romanticism and Racial Interiority 216 7. "I Want My Happiness!": Alienated Affections, Queer Sociality, and the Marvelous Interiors of the American Romance 256 Epilogue. Humanism without Humans: The Possibilities of Post-Interior Democracy 294 Notes 305 References 351 Index 363
£27.90
Duke University Press Statistical Panic
Book SynopsisReflections on how Americans are constrained by cultural scripts for age-, race-, and gender-proper emotional behavior and how our increasingly media-saturated culture impoverishes our interior lives.Trade Review“. . .Woodward makes a valuable contribution to the study of popular culture. She exhaustively contextualizes her work in that of the technology and media scholars (in addition to the affective scholars) who have come before her, while still managing to add a new narrative all her own that clarifies her paradoxical approach.” - Caroline Hagood, Journal of Popular Culture“The recent surge in interest in emotions from every imaginable discipline is richly explored in Kathleen Woodward’s lively new book, Statistical Panic.” - Maura Spiegel, American Literature“Woodward herself writes clearly in an almost ‘good-neighborly’ mode, and one can easily enough imagine talking with her over the backyard fence about life's difficulties. . . . The virtue of the book is clear: sociologists do not ‘own’ the ills of contemporary life in advanced societies, and when an English professor examines the same phenomena as do social scientists, but without the hindrances of methodological apparatus, genuinely useful notions become apparent that seldom make themselves known in conventional sociological research reports.” - Contemporary Sociology“Statistical Panic offers a critical exploration of emotions, how they are used for political gain, how they normatively reinforce social inequality, and how their subversion can combat the same inequalities. Woodward offers emotions as a source of political and social mobility, and her writing challenges us to be critical of the way statistical panic is used. She urges us complicate our understanding of our own emotional responses to everything from personal relationships to Twitter feeds.” - Lizzy Shramko, Feminist Review blog“If this reviewer were to recommend one current book to those in the emotion-science community, it would be this marvelous, wise collection of essays. Although nominally a work of literary and cultural criticism, the volume provides those interested in emotion in any discipline with a fresh exploration of the intersection of culture, emotions, and technology. . . . A deeply humane, gracefully written work of keen intelligence, this book is a critical resource for those interested in understanding emotions as represented in literature and as lived in daily life and in investigating what emotions reveal about human nature. Essential.” - R. R. Cornelius, Choice“Feelings have political consequences. Statistical Panic offers complexly layered readings of writers whose works have exposed the intimate connections between private sorrows and contemporary social realities, memoir and public policy, autobiography and theory: Joan Didion’s portrait of grief, Freud’s and Woolf’s anatomies of anger, Paul Monette’s affecting narrative of lives lost to AIDS, Morrison’s searing exposure of racial injustice. Kathleen Woodward has created a compassionate criticism for our post-September 11 world.”—Nancy K. Miller, author of But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives“Kathleen Woodward has written a clear, impassioned, and theoretically sophisticated argument that bridges the conceptual gulf separating psychoanalytical explanations for emotion from other models—most notably, Raymond Williams’s ‘structures of feeling’—that assume emotion is cultural in origin and susceptible to historical change. In a sequence of compelling examples—beginning with the anger characterizing first-wave feminists and peaking in what she calls ‘bureaucratic rage’—this book sets opposing concepts of emotion in a dialectic that reveals their interdependence. Woodward makes a powerful case, on the one hand, that the emotional intensities held responsible for a perceived ‘waning of affect’ during the twentieth century may also provide a basis for new affective communities. On the other hand, by looking at emotion through the lens of contemporary culture, she persuades me to see the emotions we come to share through the intimacy of literary autobiography as translations of the intensities generated by an intricately bureaucratized, mass-mediated society.”—Nancy Armstrong, Duke University“[W]oodward makes a valuable contribution to the study of popular culture. She exhaustively contextualizes her work in that of the technology and media scholars (in addition to the affective scholars) who have come before her, while still managing to add a new narrative all her own that clarifies her paradoxical approach.” -- Caroline Hagood * Journal of Popular Culture *“Statistical Panic offers a critical exploration of emotions, how they are used for political gain, how they normatively reinforce social inequality, and how their subversion can combat the same inequalities. Woodward offers emotions as a source of political and social mobility, and her writing challenges us to be critical of the way statistical panic is used. She urges us complicate our understanding of our own emotional responses to everything from personal relationships to Twitter feeds.” -- Lizzy Shramko * Feminist Review blog *“If this reviewer were to recommend one current book to those in the emotion-science community, it would be this marvelous, wise collection of essays. Although nominally a work of literary and cultural criticism, the volume provides those interested in emotion in any discipline with a fresh exploration of the intersection of culture, emotions, and technology. . . . A deeply humane, gracefully written work of keen intelligence, this book is a critical resource for those interested in understanding emotions as represented in literature and as lived in daily life and in investigating what emotions reveal about human nature. Essential.” -- R. R. Cornelius * Choice *“The recent surge in interest in emotions from every imaginable discipline is richly explored in Kathleen Woodward’s lively new book, Statistical Panic.” -- Maura Spiegel * American Literature *“Woodward herself writes clearly in an almost ‘good-neighborly’ mode, and one can easily enough imagine talking with her over the backyard fence about life's difficulties. . . . The virtue of the book is clear: sociologists do not ‘own’ the ills of contemporary life in advanced societies, and when an English professor examines the same phenomena as do social scientists, but without the hindrances of methodological apparatus, genuinely useful notions become apparent that seldom make themselves known in conventional sociological research reports.” * Contemporary Sociology *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 1 Part One: Cultural Politics, Communities of Feeling 29 1. Containing Anger, Advocating Anger: Freud and Feminism 35 2. Against Wisdom: Anger and Aging 58 3. Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 79 4. Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 109 Part Two: Structures of Feeling, "New" Feelings 135 5. Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 139 6. Bureaucratic Rage 165 7. Statistical Panic 195 Coda: Inexhaustible Grief 219 Notes 235 Bibliography 275 Index 297
£25.19
MD - Duke University Press Things Fall Away
Book SynopsisAn argument that subaltern experiences that are devalued and overlooked in progressive late-twentieth-century Philippine literature have been essential to the social and economic changes wrought by globalization.Trade Review“Things Fall Away is a major theoretical statement about contemporary forms of world making. In this brilliant and poetic book, Neferti Tadiar works through the dilemmas of our time—transnational labor flows, urban disorder, lost hopes for progressive change, new hopes for self-expression—to return feminist theory to center stage in our understanding of the global political economy.”—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection“Things Fall Away is a remarkable achievement. It is a work of considerable scope, full of penetrating insights and urgent critiques. It brings to the surface an entire literary history that very few know about in the West: a literary history that speaks volumes about the conditions of modernity in various parts of the world.”—Vicente L. Rafael, author of The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines“The study of the Philippines, one of Europe’s earliest and the US’s first colonies, obliges the rethinking of colonial histories. In the growing body of crucial work on the Philippines, Neferti X. M. Tadiar’s Things Fall Away is indispensable reading, a compelling rethinking of both postcolonial theory and transnational feminism. A richly poetic lament for the things that fall away, it dares still to descry in cast-aside affect and in occluded practices resources for the difficult labor of living otherwise.”—David Lloyd, author of Irish Times: Temporalities of ModernityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Loosed Upon the World 1 Part I. Feminization 1. Prostituted Filipinas and the Crisis of Philippine Culture 25 2. Women Alone 59 3. Poetics of Filipina Export 103 Part II. Urbanization 4. Modern Refuse in the "City of Man" 143 5. Petty Adventures in (the Nation's) Capital 183 6. Metropolitan Debris 217 Part III. Revolution 7. Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses 265 8. Guerilla Passion and the Unfinished Cultural Revolution 299 9. The Sorrows of People 333 Notes 379 Bibliography 445 Index 469
£89.10
Duke University Press Things Fall Away
Book SynopsisAn argument that subaltern experiences that are devalued and overlooked in progressive late-twentieth-century Philippine literature have been essential to the social and economic changes wrought by globalization.Trade Review“Things Fall Away is a major theoretical statement about contemporary forms of world making. In this brilliant and poetic book, Neferti Tadiar works through the dilemmas of our time—transnational labor flows, urban disorder, lost hopes for progressive change, new hopes for self-expression—to return feminist theory to center stage in our understanding of the global political economy.”—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection“Things Fall Away is a remarkable achievement. It is a work of considerable scope, full of penetrating insights and urgent critiques. It brings to the surface an entire literary history that very few know about in the West: a literary history that speaks volumes about the conditions of modernity in various parts of the world.”—Vicente L. Rafael, author of The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines“The study of the Philippines, one of Europe’s earliest and the US’s first colonies, obliges the rethinking of colonial histories. In the growing body of crucial work on the Philippines, Neferti X. M. Tadiar’s Things Fall Away is indispensable reading, a compelling rethinking of both postcolonial theory and transnational feminism. A richly poetic lament for the things that fall away, it dares still to descry in cast-aside affect and in occluded practices resources for the difficult labor of living otherwise.”—David Lloyd, author of Irish Times: Temporalities of ModernityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Loosed Upon the World 1 Part I. Feminization 1. Prostituted Filipinas and the Crisis of Philippine Culture 25 2. Women Alone 59 3. Poetics of Filipina Export 103 Part II. Urbanization 4. Modern Refuse in the "City of Man" 143 5. Petty Adventures in (the Nation's) Capital 183 6. Metropolitan Debris 217 Part III. Revolution 7. Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses 265 8. Guerilla Passion and the Unfinished Cultural Revolution 299 9. The Sorrows of People 333 Notes 379 Bibliography 445 Index 469
£27.90
Duke University Press Monstrous Intimacies
Book SynopsisArguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head&rsquTrade Review“Through compelling and intricate readings of visual and written texts, Sharpe is concerned with unpacking the intersection between violence, sex, and subjectivity in post-slavery subjects. Sharpe’s work is a poignant reflection on historical time and convincingly deals with the ways that the horrors of the past continue to structure the present. . . . Sharpe’s book is an eloquent and at times challenging analysis of the construction of post-slavery subjects as subjects who are by no means ‘post’ but continue to be structured by the past that is not quite past.” - Sam McBean, Elevate Difference“This is a bold, challenging book which is unrelenting in its interpretation of slavery and the effects it has had on subsequent generations, black and white. In effect, the monstrous intimacies continue.” - Danielle Mulholland, M/C Reviews“Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies succeeds in illuminating the complex entanglements of desire and horror at the heart of Black and White subjectification ‘after’ slavery. More profoundly, this text powerfully balances the fact of history’s monstrous persistence and the desire for what she identifies, after Dionne Brand, as a modality of Black life unhinged to historical narrative (129).” - Sarah Cervenak, Women’s Studies“The materials in Monstrous Intimacies register as being profoundly relevant not only for African American literature, but also for studies of the history of slavery in relation to the U.S. South. Moreover, her second chapter, focusing on the literature and culture of South Africa, addresses histories of racism, colonialism, and imperialism and speaks to discourses on the global South.” - Riché Richardson, Southern Literary Journal"Overall…Sharpe successfully demonstrates the presence of "monstrous intimacies" in each chapter. Most importantly, she creates a methodology for understanding the psychological development of post-slavery subjects and the seductive story-telling that represents his or her experience." - Denia Fraser, Kritikon Litterarum“Monstrous Intimacies is a remarkable study, lucid, engaging, and thoroughly engrossing.”—Sharon Patricia Holland, author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity“Monstrous Intimacies is an original, enriching look at the variety of artistic forms and practices that interrogate the illness of the post-slavery subject. It is international in its scope, interdisciplinary in its approach, and consistently intelligent in its execution.”—Ashraf Rushdy, author of Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction“Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies succeeds in illuminating the complex entanglements of desire and horror at the heart of Black and White subjectification ‘after’ slavery. More profoundly, this text powerfully balances the fact of history’s monstrous persistence and the desire for what she identifies, after Dionne Brand, as a modality of Black life unhinged to historical narrative (129).” -- Sarah Cervenak * Women's Studies *“This is a bold, challenging book which is unrelenting in its interpretation of slavery and the effects it has had on subsequent generations, black and white. In effect, the monstrous intimacies continue.” -- Danielle Mulholland * M/C Reviews *“Through compelling and intricate readings of visual and written texts, Sharpe is concerned with unpacking the intersection between violence, sex, and subjectivity in post-slavery subjects. Sharpe’s work is a poignant reflection on historical time and convincingly deals with the ways that the horrors of the past continue to structure the present. . . . Sharpe’s book is an eloquent and at times challenging analysis of the construction of post-slavery subjects as subjects who are by no means ‘post’ but continue to be structured by the past that is not quite past.” -- Sam McBean * Elevate Difference *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Making Monstrous Intimacies: Surviving Slavery, Bearing Freedom 1 1. Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Reading the "Days That Were Pages of Hysteria" 27 2. Bessie Head, Saartje Baartman, and Maru Redemption, Subjectification, and the Problem of Liberation 67 3. Isaac Julien's The Attendant and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Black Life 111 4. Kara Walker's Monstrous Intimacies 153 Notes 189 Bibliography 223 Index 243
£73.95
Duke University Press Crash
Book SynopsisArgues that representations of the car crash in film genres from slapstick comedies to industrial-safety movies parallels the collision of film and other media.Trade Review“[A] fascinating study of the place of the car crash in cinema. . . . Although the book is written as a contribution to ongoing academic debates within film studies, the author’s observations and arguments should nonetheless be interesting to film lovers.” - Victor P. Corona, PopMatters“Beckman does a thorough job depicting the history of the car crash throughout the years of cinema. Her passion for mobility and stasis is engaging through her timeline of the evolution of the automobile. Crash will appeal to those in film and media studies, as well as to lovers of cinema. By combining literature, film, history, and art, she provides not only a good read, but also room to think.” - Stephanie Koury, International Journal of Communication“Beckman’s treatments are unfailingly interesting, and her arguments are provocative. . . . This important book will cause a stir in the field. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” - W. A. Vincent, Choice“Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis is exhaustively researched and argued with clarity. Blending cinema and media studies with a hard-edged critique of the capitalist machine, this book is both entertaining and enlightening.” - Simon Sellars, Media International Australia“Crash represents a major intervention in the field of film and media studies, and provides a model of thoughtful, nuanced scholarship…[Beckman’s] persuasive and finely wrought argument challenges film and media scholars to develop new ways of thinking about the relationships among movement, stasis and mediated vision.” - Allan Cameron, Screen“Crash is an extraordinarily original intervention in contemporary ‘technophilic’ discourses (even critical ones) focused on speed and mobility. As it resonates through a variety of cinematic and literary texts, Karen Beckman views the ‘car crash’ vividly (and viscerally) as a startling visual image, narrative thematic, and critical metaphor for what drives our contradictory desires for ‘automobility,’ inertia, feeling, and community on a collision course both productive and destructive. As she moves across theories and disciplines, Beckman’s textual and cultural analyses come together in a work that is passionate, illuminating, and politically engaged. Crash is a major contribution to film and media studies, comparative literature, art history, and cultural studies and, indeed, is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.”—Vivian Sobchack, author of Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture“In this inventive exploration of the car crash in the history of film, critical theory, and art practice, Karen Beckman invokes the crash as a way of working through questions of mobility and stasis, security and transgression, medium hybridity, and technology, spectatorship, and the body in new and exciting ways. Moving fluidly from the comic and reflexive moments of the car crash in early and silent cinema, to concerns with accident and trauma, especially in non-theatrical films from the 1930s to the 1960s, and then to more contemporary work, Beckman exhibits an impressive range of historical, artistic, and theoretical interests. She shows how the trope of the car crash weaves its way into the cultural life of the twentieth century in ways that parallel Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s pioneering work on the train accident in the nineteenth century.”—D. N. Rodowick, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University“Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis is exhaustively researched and argued with clarity. Blending cinema and media studies with a hard-edged critique of the capitalist machine, this book is both entertaining and enlightening.” -- Simon Sellars * Media International Australia *“Crash represents a major intervention in the field of film and media studies, and provides a model of thoughtful, nuanced scholarship…[Beckman’s] persuasive and finely wrought argument challenges film and media scholars to develop new ways of thinking about the relationships among movement, stasis and mediated vision.” -- Allan Cameron * Screen *“[A] fascinating study of the place of the car crash in cinema. . . . Although the book is written as a contribution to ongoing academic debates within film studies, the author’s observations and arguments should nonetheless be interesting to film lovers.” -- Victor P. Corona * PopMatters *“Beckman does a thorough job depicting the history of the car crash throughout the years of cinema. Her passion for mobility and stasis is engaging through her timeline of the evolution of the automobile. Crash will appeal to those in film and media studies, as well as to lovers of cinema. By combining literature, film, history, and art, she provides not only a good read, but also room to think.” -- Stephanie Koury * International Journal of Communication *“Beckman’s treatments are unfailingly interesting, and her arguments are provocative. . . . This important book will cause a stir in the field. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” -- W. A. Vincent * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. "Jerky Nearness": Spectatorship, Mobility, and Collision in Early Cinema 25 2. Car Wreckers and Home Lovers: The Automobile in Silent Slapstick 55 3. Doing Death Over: Industrial-Safety Films, Accidental-Motion Studies, and the Involuntary Crash Test Dummy 105 4. Disaster Time, the Kennedy Assassination, and Andy Warhol's Since (1966/2002) 137 5. Film Falls Apart: Crash, Semen, and Pop 161 6. Crash Aesthetics: Amores perros and the Dream of Cinematic Mobility 179 7. The Afterlife of Weekend: Or, The University Found on a Scrapheap 205 Notes 235 Bibliography 275 Index 289
£80.10
Duke University Press Crash
Book SynopsisArgues that representations of the car crash in film genres from slapstick comedies to industrial-safety movies parallels the collision of film and other media.Trade Review“[A] fascinating study of the place of the car crash in cinema. . . . Although the book is written as a contribution to ongoing academic debates within film studies, the author’s observations and arguments should nonetheless be interesting to film lovers.” - Victor P. Corona, PopMatters“Beckman does a thorough job depicting the history of the car crash throughout the years of cinema. Her passion for mobility and stasis is engaging through her timeline of the evolution of the automobile. Crash will appeal to those in film and media studies, as well as to lovers of cinema. By combining literature, film, history, and art, she provides not only a good read, but also room to think.” - Stephanie Koury, International Journal of Communication“Beckman’s treatments are unfailingly interesting, and her arguments are provocative. . . . This important book will cause a stir in the field. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” - W. A. Vincent, Choice“Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis is exhaustively researched and argued with clarity. Blending cinema and media studies with a hard-edged critique of the capitalist machine, this book is both entertaining and enlightening.” - Simon Sellars, Media International Australia“Crash represents a major intervention in the field of film and media studies, and provides a model of thoughtful, nuanced scholarship…[Beckman’s] persuasive and finely wrought argument challenges film and media scholars to develop new ways of thinking about the relationships among movement, stasis and mediated vision.” - Allan Cameron, Screen“Crash is an extraordinarily original intervention in contemporary ‘technophilic’ discourses (even critical ones) focused on speed and mobility. As it resonates through a variety of cinematic and literary texts, Karen Beckman views the ‘car crash’ vividly (and viscerally) as a startling visual image, narrative thematic, and critical metaphor for what drives our contradictory desires for ‘automobility,’ inertia, feeling, and community on a collision course both productive and destructive. As she moves across theories and disciplines, Beckman’s textual and cultural analyses come together in a work that is passionate, illuminating, and politically engaged. Crash is a major contribution to film and media studies, comparative literature, art history, and cultural studies and, indeed, is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.”—Vivian Sobchack, author of Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture“In this inventive exploration of the car crash in the history of film, critical theory, and art practice, Karen Beckman invokes the crash as a way of working through questions of mobility and stasis, security and transgression, medium hybridity, and technology, spectatorship, and the body in new and exciting ways. Moving fluidly from the comic and reflexive moments of the car crash in early and silent cinema, to concerns with accident and trauma, especially in non-theatrical films from the 1930s to the 1960s, and then to more contemporary work, Beckman exhibits an impressive range of historical, artistic, and theoretical interests. She shows how the trope of the car crash weaves its way into the cultural life of the twentieth century in ways that parallel Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s pioneering work on the train accident in the nineteenth century.”—D. N. Rodowick, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University“Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis is exhaustively researched and argued with clarity. Blending cinema and media studies with a hard-edged critique of the capitalist machine, this book is both entertaining and enlightening.” -- Simon Sellars * Media International Australia *“Crash represents a major intervention in the field of film and media studies, and provides a model of thoughtful, nuanced scholarship…[Beckman’s] persuasive and finely wrought argument challenges film and media scholars to develop new ways of thinking about the relationships among movement, stasis and mediated vision.” -- Allan Cameron * Screen *“[A] fascinating study of the place of the car crash in cinema. . . . Although the book is written as a contribution to ongoing academic debates within film studies, the author’s observations and arguments should nonetheless be interesting to film lovers.” -- Victor P. Corona * PopMatters *“Beckman does a thorough job depicting the history of the car crash throughout the years of cinema. Her passion for mobility and stasis is engaging through her timeline of the evolution of the automobile. Crash will appeal to those in film and media studies, as well as to lovers of cinema. By combining literature, film, history, and art, she provides not only a good read, but also room to think.” -- Stephanie Koury * International Journal of Communication *“Beckman’s treatments are unfailingly interesting, and her arguments are provocative. . . . This important book will cause a stir in the field. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” -- W. A. Vincent * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. "Jerky Nearness": Spectatorship, Mobility, and Collision in Early Cinema 25 2. Car Wreckers and Home Lovers: The Automobile in Silent Slapstick 55 3. Doing Death Over: Industrial-Safety Films, Accidental-Motion Studies, and the Involuntary Crash Test Dummy 105 4. Disaster Time, the Kennedy Assassination, and Andy Warhol's Since (1966/2002) 137 5. Film Falls Apart: Crash, Semen, and Pop 161 6. Crash Aesthetics: Amores perros and the Dream of Cinematic Mobility 179 7. The Afterlife of Weekend: Or, The University Found on a Scrapheap 205 Notes 235 Bibliography 275 Index 289
£25.19
Duke University Press Thiefing Sugar
Book SynopsisThis exploration of the poetry and prose of Caribbean women writers reveals in their imagery a rich tradition of erotic relations between women.Trade Review“Luscious, abundant and rich—those are apt words for Thiefing Sugar, this captivating and lyrical exploration of what it meant in the twentieth century to be a Caribbean woman who loves women. Based on a well-chosen corpus of texts and lucid, in-depth analyses, the book is altogether a feast for the senses, a gift to us all!”—Gloria Wekker, Utrecht University, Netherlands“Through writing that is as lyrical as the poetry and fiction she analyzes, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley makes connections between sugar production in the Caribbean, the paradoxical ‘ungendering’ of black female slaves that makes their sexual self-hood possible, and the landscape of the ‘Global South’ to argue that the history of the black woman’s body in the African Diaspora is shrouded not just in metaphor but in the materiality of their own world-making.”—E. Patrick Johnson, author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity“Thiefing Sugar by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley is a beautifully written, refreshing and innovative book. Tinsley examines the sophisticated ways in which gender and sexuality have historically and culturally articulated unique and revealing expressions of love and sex between women in the Caribbean region of the Americas.” -- Gloria Gonzalez Lopez * Bulletin of Latin American Research *“Thiefing Sugar certainly deserves praise for giving voice to so many women and issues that have long remained silenced in each of these respective fields. Moreover, Tinsley’s manner of conversing with women, her mirroring of their poetics, underscores how she is a woman who loves women, a woman committed to mapping ‘imaginative imagination’ that decolonizes theory and ‘hegemonic definitions of same-sex desire.’” -- Olivia Donaldson * Journal of Lesbian Studies *“Thiefing Sugar is full of deliciously rich metaphors. . . . In this highly engaging and insightful book, Tinsley discusses the foremost tropes and metaphors in Caribbean women’s writing about desire between women. The syrup of language to be enjoyed here is not only that which abounds in the texts she discusses, but also in the suggestiveness of Tinsley’s own writing, which is sometimes dense but always rich and allusive.” -- Ronald Cummings * Caribbean Review of Books *“Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s book is a brilliant, highly readable, and at times dense foundational study on twentieth-century Caribbean and diasporic women’s literary conceptualizations of living and loving in the Caribbean, specifically in Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Suriname, and Trinidad.” -- Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes * GLQ *“This is an important book for anyone interested in the Caribbean, the African diaspora, women and gender, or LGBTQ culture and literature. . . . . What stands out more than anything else is the overwhelming evidence Tinsley offers of a long history of Caribbean women's stated desire for other women, of (mostly) working-class black female eroticism that is intrinsically tied to rebellion against oppression by the dominant white-identified, colonialist, masculine, land-owning, and hetero-normative ruling class. This is a subversive, lyrical piece of scholarship. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.” -- S. E. Cooper * Choice *“Tinsely’s fascinating study is noteworthy for its originality in scope and its depth. The author deftly demonstrates that the secret of Caribbean lesbian writing -- visible and invisible, white and of color, Francophone and Anglophone --is determined by constantly unfolding spaces that are impossible to define by the canonical -colonial tropes of the past.” -- Tarik A. Smith * Palimpsest *A remarkable book that delights in sounding out the depths of the texts that it foregrounds, Thiefing Sugaris an elegant analysis of (potentially ambiguous) eroticism between women in the Caribbean. . . . [H]er contribution to and intervention in postcolonial and queer studies are most welcome.” -- Vinay Swamy * MLQ *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: The Spring of Her Look 1 1. "Rose is my mama, stanfaste is my papa": Hybrid Landscapes and Sexualities in Surinamese Women's Oral Poetry 29 2. Darkening the Lily: The Erotics of Self-Making in Eliot Bliss's Luminous Isle 68 3. Blue Countries, Dark Beauty: Opaque Desires in the Poetry of Ida Faubert 102 4. At the River of Washerwomen: Work, Water, and Sexual Fluidity in Mayotte Capécia's I Am a Martinican Woman 136 5. Transforming Sugar, Transitioning Revolution: Male Womanhood and Lesbian Eroticism in Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven 169 6. Breaking Hard against Things: Crossing between Sexual and Revolutionary Politics in Dionne Brand's No Language in Neutral 201 Notes 233 Bibliography 257 Index 269
£25.19
Duke University Press The Jacqueline Rose Reader
Book SynopsisAn anthology of writing by Jacqueline Rose, a singular, provocative critic renowned for her commitment to psychoanalytic theory as a uniquely productive way of analyzing literature, culture, politics, and society.Trade Review“Jacqueline Rose is one of our most trenchant, politically engaged intellectuals. It will be important for a wide range of readers to have this collection of her essays, along with the introduction—which will help readers unfamiliar with the full range of her work—and the splendid interview that concludes the volume.”—Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, University of California, Berkeley“Jacqueline Rose, friend and ally, achieves what many of us attempt: to preserve the delicacy of a training in literary reading in the tough realities of the political. She made psychoanalysis possible for a whole generation. This book gives a sense of the range: analysis, text, war—from South Africa to Palestine.”—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor, Columbia University“Google's motto is ‘Don't Be Evil,’ but is there something near to evil in writing itself? So suggests a superb essay here, ‘The Body of Evil,’ which brings together Hannah Arendt, JM Coetzee, and the aftermath of 9/11. ‘People using the term “evil” all sound the same,’ comments Rose, in a piece that shows off her discursively probing style to best effect... The rest of the collection sees a psychoanalytic reading of Peter Pan, an intriguing defence of Sylvia Plath's notorious poem ‘Daddy,’ and interesting interventions on Eliot-on-Hamlet, Virginia Woolf, Freud, Melanie Klein, and Israel-Palestine (with Amos Oz a key reference). The editors do a fine job of introducing the work.” -- Steven Poole * The Guardian *“Rose brings courage, insight and compassion to every topic in this book, and gives the readers a taste of her uniquely feminine way of looking at the world: at injustice, identity, nationality, language, literature, and more through a psychoanalytic lens. A writer, literary critic, lecturer, and teacher, Rose’s oeuvre is impressively diverse.” -- Michal Adiv-Ginach * American Journal of Psychoanalysis *“The Jacqueline Rose Reader offers an insightful and informative overview of the output (so far) of a provocative and influential writer. It will be an important resource for teachers and students of psychoanalytic theory, of literary studies, and of cultural studies, and, hopefully, will introduce new readers to Rose’s wide-ranging and valuable work.” -- Hannah Priest * Feminism and Psychology *Table of ContentsReading Jacqueline Rose: An Introduction / Ben Naparstek and Justin Clemens 1 Part I. Analysis Introduction to Part I 27 1. Femininity and Its Discontents 31 2. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne 48 3. Negativity in the Work of Melanie Kline 61 4. Mass Psychology 86 Part II. Nation Introduction to Part II 117 5. States of Fantasy 123 6. Just, Lasting, Comprehensive 138 7. Apathy and Accountability: The Challenge of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the Intellectual in the Modern World 156 8. The Body of Evil: Arendt, Coetzee, and 9/11 170 9. "Imponderables in Thin Air": Zionism as Psychoanalysis (Critique) 188 Part III. Representations Introduction to Part III 215 10. Sexuality in the Field of Vision 221 11. Hamlet: The "Mona Lisa" of Literature 228 12. Virginia Woolf and the Death of Modernism 242 13. "Daddy" 257 14. Peter Pan and Freud: Who Is Talking and to Whom? 274 15. Excerpts from Albertine: A Novel 300 Part IV. Interventions Introduction to Part IV 315 16. "Infinite Justice" 319 17. We Are All Afraid, But of What, Exactly? 320 18. Why Zionism Today Is the Real Enemy of the Jews 322 19. Reflections on Israel's 2008 Incursion into Gaza 326 20. Why Howard Jacobson Is Wrong 328 21. Holocaust Premises: Political Implications of the Traumatic Frame 332 22. A Conversation with Jacqueline Rose 341 Notes 361 Jacqueline Rose: A Select Bibliography, 1974–2010 413 Index 419
£22.79
Duke University Press The Deaths of the Author
Book SynopsisThrough close readings of Barthes, Derrida, Sedgwick, and Spivak, Jane Gallop connects the theoretical death of the author to the writers literal death, as well as other authorial deaths, such as obsolescence.Trade Review“. . . Gallop has provided us with a profound look at what it means to read and write in the face of human mortality. Highly recommended for students of literature and literary theory.” - Emily Manuel, Global Comment“Jane Gallop is no doubt one of the best readers of her generation, but with The Deaths of the Author she proves that her writing is unprecedented: sharp, brisk, with a great sense of rhythm, utterly sophisticated and yet perfectly clear, from the very first till the very last sentence.” - Jan Baeten, Leonardo“Jane Gallop revitalises debates on the ‘death of the author’ theory by examining the effect the theory has on the author of a landmark work. She uses readings of influential literary theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to connect an author’s theoretical, literal and metaphoric deaths to discuss the idea.” - Times Higher Education“Gallop meticulously yet gracefully analyzes the complicated relationship between a devoted reader and the author that inspires them. . . . Gallop’s impressive close reading breathes new life into these dead authors and fittingly pays tribute to the man who killed the author and liberated the reader by practicing what he preached at a level of insight and clarity on par with Barthes himself.” - Chase Dimock, Lambda Literary Review“Gallop’s close readings in and around queer lives, the “fragments” that the “dead-but-still-going” author leaves behind, elegantly invite us into the traces, ghostings and shadows that viscerally render the imbrication between the theoretical and the personal — a dynamic often disregarded in many academic circles. By writing Barthes (then Derrida, then Sedgwick, then Owens, then Lynch, and then Spivak), [she] breathes life into the future-perfect corpses that are never really dead as such in the first place.The Deaths of the Author conjures a corps de ballet in which Gallop cinematically choreographs shadows and bodies so that in their performance they commingle. I am thankful for the invitation to dance.” - David A. Gerstner, Reviews in Cultural Theory“Always lively and lucid, Jane Gallop has produced another remarkable book. Taken literally, the familiar notion of ‘the death of the author’ acquires a wholly different resonance in these essays on major contemporary theorists, who reflect on the temporality of writing and the effects of deaths of authors.”—Jonathan Culler, Cornell University“Jane Gallop is one of the small handful of critics who are keeping close reading alive. With this volume, she illuminates the stakes in paying such careful and loving attention to the words by which writers are turned, and turn themselves, into authors: stakes made visible on the relational field joining reader and author in an intimate bond that’s desirous, companionate, aggressive, indecent, sustaining, disturbing, unstable, and, when elaborated by a critic and thinker as gifted and incisive as Jane Gallop, also endlessly productive.”—Lee Edelman, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive“Gallop has provided us with a profound look at what it means to read and write in the face of human mortality. Highly recommended for students of literature and literary theory.” -- Emily Manuel * Global Comment *“Gallop meticulously yet gracefully analyzes the complicated relationship between a devoted reader and the author that inspires them. . . . Gallop’s impressive close reading breathes new life into these dead authors and fittingly pays tribute to the man who killed the author and liberated the reader by practicing what he preached at a level of insight and clarity on par with Barthes himself.” -- Chase Dimock * Lambda Literary Review *“Gallop’s close readings in and around queer lives, the 'fragments' that the 'dead-but-still-going' author leaves behind, elegantly invite us into the traces, ghostings and shadows that viscerally render the imbrication between the theoretical and the personal — a dynamic often disregarded in many academic circles. By writing Barthes (then Derrida, then Sedgwick, then Owens, then Lynch, and then Spivak), [she] breathes life into the future-perfect corpses that are never really dead as such in the first place. The Deaths of the Author conjures a corps de ballet in which Gallop cinematically choreographs shadows and bodies so that in their performance they commingle. I am thankful for the invitation to dance.” -- David A. Gerstner * Reviews in Cultural Theory *“Jane Gallop is no doubt one of the best readers of her generation, but with The Deaths of the Author she proves that her writing is unprecedented: sharp, brisk, with a great sense of rhythm, utterly sophisticated and yet perfectly clear, from the very first till the very last sentence.” -- Jan Baeten * Leonardo Reviews *“Jane Gallop revitalises debates on the ‘death of the author’ theory by examining the effect the theory has on the author of a landmark work. She uses readings of influential literary theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to connect an author’s theoretical, literal and metaphoric deaths to discuss the idea.” * Times Higher Education *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I. The Friendly Return of the Author 27 1. The Author Is Dead but I Desire the Author 29 2. The Ethics of Indecency 55 Part II. If I Were a Writer and Dead 85 3. The Queer Temporality of Writing 87 4. The Persistent and Vanishing Present 115 Notes 145 Works Cited 163 Index 167
£74.70
Duke University Press Against the Closet
Book SynopsisAliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman argues that from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers used depictions of transgressive sexuality to express African Americans' longings for individual and collective freedom.Trade Review"Against the Closet is an important and much-needed book, a significant contribution to African American literature, cultural studies, sexuality studies, and critical race theory. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman's close readings of fictional representations of race and sex are nuanced and illuminating, and the history of racial thought and sexual science that she presents is indispensable."—Maurice O. Wallace, author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995"In this significant and timely text, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman complicates and expands our understanding of the queerness of blackness, making a welcome contribution to black cultural studies, black queer studies, literary studies, and work on lynching and the making of post-slavery whiteness."—Christina Sharpe, author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects“Against the Closet will benefit professors and ambitious undergraduate and graduate students of African American literature. With consistent theoretical acumen, Abdur-Rahman’s last three chapters likewise undermine dominant notions of modernity, normalcy, and belonging.” -- Regis Mann * Journal of American Studies *"Against the Closet offers a bold and timely exploration of black sexuality across the ages that is as firmly rooted in the history of African Americans as it is deft and innovative with close readings. . . . Speaking through and with the traditions of black feminist theory and queer theory, Against the Closet makes an indelible mark in its fields.” -- Emily A. Owens * Palimpsest *“Against the Closet is a story worth reading and retelling, as it weaves a lively, original, and complex narrative about the progressions of race and sexuality in African American literature, unencumbered by one way of reading or thinking about the material. It is both an informative and instructive critique of its subject matter, one that should be essential reading for scholars of black sexuality in African American literature.” -- Timothy M. Griffiths * Callaloo *“Against the Closet is no traditional literary study. But the ride it takes us on is bumpy only in the sense that it boggles the brain with fresh insights and inspired interpretations at every turn of the page. From an introduction that is even more a tour de force of cutting-edge critical theory than the Michael Jackson conclusion, through four chapters of deeply probing, richly textured, finely nuanced readings, Against the Closet challenges much of what has been thought and theorized about how sex and race mean not only in African American literature but also in American history.” -- Ann DuCille * Novel *“By adeptly using local and national newspapers, Mckiernan-González provides captivating accounts of local residents’ perspectives on and resistance to enforced measures. Fevered Measures joins Natalia Molina’s Fit to Be Citizens and Alexandra Stern’s Eugenic Nation as essential studies of public health campaigns among Latinos. It deserves to be widely read by scholars of U.S. history, Latino studies, public health, and border studies.” -- Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez * New Mexico Historical Review *“The critical frame offered in Against the Closet clearly has far ranging applications for the most current African American literary authors. As such, this important book may very well inspire further consideration of how sexual non-normativity can create a space for new modes of liberation and self-definition.” -- Stephanie Li * Modern Fiction Studies *"Against the Closet is an important book that theorizes African American literature as a historiography of racialized sexuality, and it will inspire elaborations in the most generative directions." -- Roderick A. Ferguson * GLQ *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Against the Closet: Racial Identity and the Bodily Basis/Biases of Sexual Identity 1 1. "The Strangest Freaks of Despotism": Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives 25 2. Iconographies of Gang-Rape: Or, Black Enfranchisement, White Disavowel, and the (Homo)erotics of Lynching 51 3. Desire and Treason in Mid-Twentieth-Century Political Protest Fiction 82 4. Recovering the Little Black Girl: Incest and Black American Textuality 114 Conclusion. In Memorium: Michael Jackson, 1958–2009 151 Notes 157 Works Cited 181 Index 193
£22.79
Duke University Press The Deliverance of Others
Book SynopsisThe distinguished literary critic David Palumbo-Liu posits reading literature as an ethical act, a way of thinking through our relations to others in the age of globalization.Trade Review"Certain to be an important and influential book, The Deliverance of Others examines the profound challenges that the 'contemporary' historical moment poses to literary novel-writing in the early twenty-first century, when the fine line between a 'sufficient' and an 'excessive' measure of otherness seems to have been trespassed, when, as David Palumbo-Liu puts it in his extraordinary reading of J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, readers of the novel are asked to imagine themselves confronting a 'tidal wave of difference' that exceeds the specific capacities of realist form and the more general compact that literary writing offers to strike between historical conditions and the liberal, sympathetic imagination."—Ian Baucom, author of Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History"In The Deliverance of Others, the distinguished critic David Palumbo-Liu tackles broad questions of aesthetics and ethics in this 'age of otherness and virtual proximity.' By contrasting utilitarian notions of political economy with those of a system based on interdependent and ethically connected communities, he goes to the essential: How do we define truth in relation to reason and ethics and how do we understand the ways that literature and literary composition resonate differently in different global spaces, each with varying notions of rationality and choice?"—Françoise Lionnet, coeditor of The Creolization of Theory“Palumbo-Liu makes a persuasive case that the novel — as a self-conscious delivery system in its own right — offers a critical means for registering both the effects and the ‘affects’ of the new global delivery systems that connect us. In posing this ethical power as a problem for the global age, The Deliverance of Others renews our sense of literature’s profound importance for how we come to know others and ourselves.” -- Casey Shoop * Los Angeles Review of Books *“Literature offers us a thick description of experience; certainly, a realistic literature makes no apology for this, and Palumbo-Liu pushes his formidable inquiry and sensitivity into this bramble patch. . . . The Deliverance of Others delves into the relationship amongst individual, society, cultures, economies, and civilizations. In its ambassadorial role, literature brings both self and ‘other’ before the eyes — and self encompasses both protagonist (as a nuanced, yet complex figure) and reader (as a representative of a given cultural sensibility).” -- Lewis Fried * Key Reporter *“Palumbo-Liu precisely uses his ethical obligation in literary readings to bring to us The Deliverance of Others. This is an influential book which belongs on every shelf that wrestles with understanding the politics of difference, marginality and Otherness." -- Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt * Rocky Mountain Review *“Palumbo-Liu’s remarkable book goes some way toward answering a question we must take seriously and debate vigorously in the very specific conditions of the twenty-first-century attack on the humanities that also forms part of our current global age: that of why we should read literature at all.” -- Kerry Bystrom * College Literature *“[A] fine new book. . . . expertly done, and the range of material covered—from cloning to Facebook, from mass media to close textual reading—is highly impressive.” -- Paul Giles * Cultural Studies Review *"In an era when discussions of the role of the humanities are invariably accompanied by a sense of crisis, The Deliverance of Others is a timely reminder and bold defense of the value of literature, brimming with the conviction that an ethical globalism is indeed possible and that the path to it winds through the contemporary novel." -- Yogita Goyal * Novel *Table of ContentsPreface vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 1. When Otherness Overcomes Reason 27 2. Whose Story Is It? 67 3. Art: A Foreign Exchange 96 4. Pacific Ocean Feeling: Affect, Otherness, Mediation 133 Conclusion 179 Notes 197 Bibliography 207 Index 215
£22.49
Duke University Press The Barbara Johnson Reader
Book SynopsisOffers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.Trade Review“Johnson’s real gift was to tackle the ‘dead white males’ of the canon and re-read them, looking for the women, ever alert to what she called ‘muteness envy’ in canonical poetry. She directed her attention to popular works, too, to films such as Thelma and Louise and The Piano, happy to bring Keats into the discussion as she did so. Such essays stress critical and creative vitality in the midst of death, and are still life-giving today, still radical, angry and passionate, yet always disciplined. Johnson asks acute questions, inserts the personal into her academic essays, and gives us new ideas about ‘how to read.’” -- Lesley McDowell * TLS *“Reading these essays, one finds them as sprightly, brilliant, and revelatory as ever. Johnson’s style—famous for the clarity that paradoxically masks and illuminates the argumentative complexity of the writing—is brisk, orderly, and economical. … Perhaps this is the moment to return to the intellectual upheaval of deconstruction, that almost forgotten art of reading and rereading. There is no better place to begin rereading than right here, with Barbara Johnson’s own startling and writerly prose.” -- Judith Brown * Modernism/modernity *“Essays on abortion, corporate personhood, and many other still contemporary issues show that, for Johnson, deconstruction was always deeply intertwined with lived political reality, and many of the best essays in the collection bridge the gap between readings of poems and analysis of life in various forms of political relation, often in the context of the surprising strangeness of the textual or human encounter. For Johnson, ‘the undecidable is the political. There is politics precisely because there is undecidability. And there is also poetry’ (p.227). The forms of her own essays, intriguing in the turns they take, the conclusions they draw, and the interpretations they bring forth from the texts they examine, highlight and perform this causal relationship in consistently insightful and surprising ways.” * Forum for Modern Language Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Editors' Preface xi Personhood and Other Objects: The Figural Dispute with Philosophy / Judith Butler xvii Barbara Johnson by Barbara Johnson xxvii Part I. Reading Theory as Literature, Literature as Theory 1. The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac 3 2. Translator's Introduction to Dissemination (abridged) 14 3. Poetry and Syntax: What the Gypsy Knew 26 4. A Hound, a Bay Horse, and a Turtle Dove: Obscurity in Walden 36 5. Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic Language 44 6. The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida 57 Part II. Race, Sexuality, Gender 7. Euphemism, Understatement, and the Passive Voice: A Geneaology of Afro-American Poetry 101 8. Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God 108 9. Moses and Intertextuality: Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Bible 126 10. Lesbian Spectacles: Reading Sula,
£84.15
Duke University Press The Forms of the Affects
Book SynopsisWhat is the relationship between a cinematic grid of color and that most visceral of negative affects, disgust? How might anxiety be a matter of an interrupted horizontal line, or grief a figure of blazing light? This title deals with these questions.Trade Review"Eugenie Brinkema’s The Forms of the Affects is overflowing with words that splice subjects together in numerous, thrilling combinations. . . .Brinkema’s use of language... brilliantly materialises the book’s central thesis." -- Tom Hastings * Review 31 *“[Brinkema’s] first book restores affect as a theoretical site of limitless possibility rather than the term of interpretive foreclosure it has largely become. The Forms of the Affects is a tantalizingly ambitious contribution to affect theory that may even prove sui generis as affective film studies turns over a new leaf of close reading.” -- Stephanie Amon * Afterimage *“Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, researchers.” -- R. B. Wise * Choice *"[A] bold corrective to affect scholarship in film studies . . . as challenging theoretically as it is delightful and useful formally. It models freedom and ingenuity in its extraction of form out of intellectual history on emotions, etymology, and even culinary knowledge, and in its patient and playful reading of film." -- Alina Haliliuc * Film Criticism *"Eugenie Brinkema’s The Forms of the Affects is an innovative book that will surely be of great interest to scholars of affect and film studies in particular, but the possibilities for her method will also be useful to those in visual studies, literary, feminist, and queer theory, philosophy, and cultural studies more broadly." -- Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst * Reviews in Cultural Theory *"To anyone interested in questions of form and affect, this important book is sure to generate discussion for some time to come.... Reading this book is, dare I say it, an exhilaratingly affective experience." -- Jennifer Peterson * Film Quarterly *"The Forms of the Affects is a beautifully written, complex text that weaves together visual and temporal forms drawn from film and literature with the affects grief, disgust, anxiety and joy." -- Dylann M. McLean * Emotion, Space and Society *Table of ContentsPreface. Ten Points to Begin xi 1. A Tear That Does Not Drop, But Folds 2. Film Theory's Absent Center Interval. Solitude 3. The Illumination of Light 4. Grief and the Undialectical Image 5. Aesthetic Exclusions and the Worse than the Worst 6. Disgust and the Cinema of Haut Goût Interlude. Formalism and Affectivity 7. Intermittency, Embarrassment, Dismay 8. Nothing/Will Have Taken Place/But the Place: Open Water Anxiety 9. To Begin Again: The Ingression of Joyful Forms Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
£75.65
Duke University Press The Intimacies of Four Continents
Book SynopsisReading across archives, canons, and continents, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries. She argues that Western liberal ideology, African slavery, Asian indentured labor, colonialism and trade must be understood as being mutually constitutive.Trade Review"This is a challenging book, which should be read by all those interested in the history of capitalism and the formation of the social sciences. ...There is much to enjoy in each of these chapters, especially, the dialectical interweaving of liberal conceptions and their negation, and the careful delineation of context and claim. Ultimately, however, the book is a dissection of liberalism and its fractured and fracturing presence in the modern world." -- John Holmwood * Theory, Culture & Society *"Lisa Lowe’s ambitious new book is a reminder of the deft footwork now required of anyone attempting to negotiate this tricky terrain. In The Intimacies of Four Continents she aligns herself with postcolonial scholars like Ann Laura Stoler, Antoinette Burton, or Nayan Shah who have each provided a distinctive take on how ‘the “intimate” sphere of sexual, reproductive, or household relations’ served as ‘a site of empire’.” -- David Glover * New Formations *"[An] important asset to anyone interested in not just themes of colonialism, labour, trade, and slavery, and of Chinese Canadian prairie history respectively, but also critical methodologies—of how to read intimately for relations between people and communities and in relation across time and space—in order to grasp the possibilities of knowing that lie among what has been assumed unknowable, erased, or forgotten." -- Stephanie Fung * Canadian Literature *"Among the many fascinating contributions of the book, I found one of the most arresting to be Lowe’s suggestion in her voluminous discursive footnotes that contemporary neoliberalism, with its emphasis on 'human capital' around the world, needs to be linked with its prehistory of racialized commodification of people. For that insight alone, Lowe’s panoramic study is more than worth reading." -- Samuel Moyn * Canadian Journal of History *"Reading The Intimacies of Four Continents will change the way we look at global (and national) histories forever." -- Etsuko Taketani * Journal of American History *"The Intimacies of Four Continents will undoubtedly remain a touchstone text for those working...and struggling against those operations that continue to pronounce colonial divisions of humanity at once globally and in their local, regional, and differential instantiations." -- Hossein Ayazi * Qui Parle *"[A] work crucial for thinking not only about the history of modernity and empire but also about our enduring and decisive enterprise as readers." -- Harrod J Suarez * MELUS *Table of Contents1. The Intimacies of Four Continents 1 2. Autobiography Out of Empire 43 3. A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities 73 4. The Ruses of Liberty 101 5. Freedoms Yet to Come 135 Acknowledgments 177 Notes 181 References 269 Index 305
£75.65
Duke University Press What Is a World
Book SynopsisIn What Is a World? Pheng Cheah draws on accounts of the world as a temporal process from Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida, and analyzes several postcolonial novels to articulate a normative theory of world literature's capacity to open up new possibilities for remaking the world.Trade Review"Drawing from four critical philosophies–idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction–theorist Pheng Cheah invites the reader to reconsider the presuppositions that underpin contemporary theories about world literature. Works from luminaries Amitav Ghosh, Michelle Cliff, and Timothy Mo, among others, providethe reader with concrete examples of Cheah’s theories in action." * World Literature Today *"[T]hrow[s] an intriguing new light on why and how 'world literature' succeeds in generating plurality and disruption rather than falling back into a flattening familiarity." -- Caroline Levine * Public Books *"Cheah strategically broadens the notion of world literature beyond its most common reference points, which too often constrain literatures and the worlds they offer to their spatial geographies and global circulations." -- David W. Hart * Postcolonial Text *"Pheng Cheah has contribued an eloquent volume that stands out in the crowd and belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the field." -- Thomas O. Beebee * Comparative Literature Studies *"As with Cheah’s earlier work, it is a magisterial study, written in his characteristically scrupulous and teacherly prose. There is much to learn from What Is a World? at the levels of its intervention into the field of world literature, its case for postcolonial literature as an exemplary modality of world literature, and Cheah’s own interpretive style as a reader and critic." -- Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan * Qui Parle *"Beautifully written and eloquently constructed, What Is a World? will transform the landscape of world literature studies in the coming years by posing new questions about how the world is and should be conceived." -- César Domínguez * Recherche Littéraire *"Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature makes a powerful intervention in current debates on world literature, arguing for the literary text to be seen as an ethico-political force in the world rather than just a commodity whose global trajectory is best understood in terms of existing networks of influence and exchange." -- Ira Raja and Roanna Gonsalves * New Literatures *"What is a World? challenges scholars of world literature and postcolonial literature to reconsider and possibly to expand the definition of their fields. It is a thoughtful, theoretical work that further challenges all of us to reconsider the role literature plays in the world(s) around us and to assess our inclusion of literature beyond the Western tradition. Undoubtedly, this book will play an important role in the ongoing dialogue over what world literature really is." -- Gregory R. Jackson * Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature *"Cheah’s compelling and acute study ultimately proposes a radical and complex reassessment of the notion of world itself as temporal object, to better explore some of the long-ignored intersections—or what he calls “missed encounters”—between cosmopolitanism, world literature, and postcoloniality. In doing so, the book makes a significant intervention in the ongoing scholarly debates dedicated to these topics. . . . The book [also] constitutes a critical response to the pressing questions raised today by the uneven process of (capitalist) globalization." -- Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François * Comparative Literature *"In bridging the postcolonial and the world, Cheah offers a powerfully refreshing account of the category of the 'world,' which arbiters in the world-literary field tend to take for granted." -- Kelly Yin Nga Tse * Interventions *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Missed Encounters: Cosmopolitanism, World Literature, and Postcoloniality 1 Part I. The World of World in Literature in Question 1. The New World Literature: Literary Studies Discovers Globalization 23 2. The World According to Hegel: Culture and Power in World History 46 3. The World as Market: The Materialist Inversion of Spiritualist Models of the World 60 Part II. Worlding and Unworlding: Worldliness, Narrative, and "Literature" in Phenomenology and Deconstruction 4. Worlding: The Phenomenological Concept of Worldliness and the Loss of World in Modernity 95 5. The In-Between World: Anthropologizing the Force of Worlding 131 6. The Arriving World: The Inhuman Otherness of Time as Real Messianic Hope 161 Part III. Of Other Worlds to Come 7. Postcolonial Openings: How Postcolonial Literature Becomes World Literature 191 8. Projecting a Future World from the Memory of Precolonial Time 216 9. World Heritage Preservation and the Expropriation of Subaltern Worlds 246 10. Resisting Humanitarianization 278 Epilogue. Without Conclusion: Stories without End(s) 310 Notes 333 Select Bibliography 369 Index 383
£80.75
Duke University Press Obstruction
Book SynopsisDrawing on an eclectic range of texts and figures, from the Greek Cynics to Tori Amos, Nick Salvato finds that embarrassment, laziness, slowness, cynicism, and digressiveness can paradoxically enable alternative modes of intellectual production.Trade Review"Through an often breathtaking range of cultural readings, Salvato (performing and media arts, Cornell) offers new ways to think about traits that are normally seen as obstructions or impediments to creative or scholarly projects. . . . here is little doubt that graduate students and early-career academics, especially those in the humanities, will find this book a source of affirmation, encouragement, and transformation. Essential. All readers." -- M. Uebel * Choice *"Whether identifying as academics or intellectuals, yoga instructors or closet fans of Tori Amos, readers of Obstruction are certain to discover that there is immense pleasure and great value to be gained from an absorptive encounter with Nick Salvato’s embarrassing, lazy, slow, cynical, digressive act of scholarly labour. As Obstruction reminds us: if it’s broke, don’t fix it." -- Amy Holzapfel * Modern Drama *"Whether laziness or cynicism, it seems there is a way to utilize such obstructions for creativity and productivity, but only by embracing them as offering valuable constraints, and not by treating them as presenting obstacles to dissolve or overcome. Obstruction makes a clear argument for the use value of affect for cognitive activity, especially, creativity in thinking." -- Karen Simecek * Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Trafficking in Five Obstructions 1 1. Embarrassment 33 2. Laziness 63 3. Slowness 95 4. Cynicism 127 5. Digressiveness 157 Conclusion. Sober Futurity 193 Notes 205 Bibliography 233 Index 251
£98.60
Duke University Press This Thing Called the World
Book SynopsisDebjani Ganguly theorizes the contemporary global novel and the social and historical conditions that shaped it, showing how in 1989 the consolidation of the information age, the perpetual state of war, and the focus on humanitarianism transformed the novel into a form that addresses contemporary social, technological, and political upheavals.Trade Review"A dense, learned, and important study of the emergence of “this thing called the world” as its inhabitants pass from spectatorship to witnessing of trauma under the prevailing conditions of intensified mediation, remediation, and hypermediation. . . . A rich resource that will be mined by many. . . . Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." -- K. Tölölyan * Choice *"This is a brave book, a valiant and valuable book, that seeks to characterize post-1989 fiction as ekphrastically humanitarian." -- Eugene Eoyang * World Literature Today *"This Thing Called the World both models and theorizes a grounded approach to modern world literature, urging its critics, despite our habit to look beyond the horizon, not to forget the dirt beneath our own feet." -- Christopher McVey * Studies in the Novel *"Against the grain of much contemporary criticism, which has jettisoned the notion of imaginative sympathy from literary discourse, Ganguly seizes on exactly this as critical to the post-1989 experience: 'the information technology revolution has radically transformed our threshold of responsibility to our distant others and has perforce brought worlds of untold suffering into our intimate spaces.'" -- Michael LaPointe * TLS *"Ganguly’s disentangling of the terms 'postcolonial,' 'global,' and 'world' in the introduction is much needed and persuasive. . . . A brave and important book." -- Claire Chambers * Modern Fiction Studies *"Beautifully connects the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century to their contemporary equivalent . . . Ganguly remains true to the real-world voices of the novelists throughout her work, marrying aesthetics and ethics. . . . She also maintains a refreshing level of detail within the texts themselves, sweeping readers into the heart-wrenching and critical foci of the novels’ collectivity while maintaining a thorough, accessible argument outlining specific interventions into our global understanding." -- Beth Miller * Comparatist *"The strength of this monograph is undoubtedly the rich, largely unpretentious description of so many contemporary works, which many would aspire to read and few actually do. . . . The book is a truly remarkable first attempt at capturing the complexity of our times through novels. . . . Those readers interested in both the form and content of the contemporary novel, especially colleagues in English and Comparative Literature, will find much to think about as they pore over Ganguly’s book." -- Evan Torner * Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Real Virtualities and the Undead Genre 39 Part I. World 2. World-Making and Possible Worlds 69 3. Spectral Worlds, Networked Novel 87 4. From Midnight's Child to Clown Assassin 110 Part II. War 5. Visualizing Wartime: A Literary Genealogy 135 6. The Sky Is Falling: The Narrative Screen of Terror 157 Part III. Witness 7. This I Saw: Graphic Suffering 175 8. Forensic Witnessing: The (Non)Evidence of Bones 192 9. Affective Witnessing: Orphic Netherworlds 219 Coda 249 Notes 261 Bibliography 279 Index 293
£98.60
