Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisIn The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary musicians-Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix, and Houston-based hip-hop musician DJ Screw-Boon outlines how music constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation. Contributing to a new interdisciplinary field of vibration studies, he understands vibration as a mathematical and a physical concept, as a religious or ontological force, and as a psychological determinant of subjectivity. Boon contends that music, as a shaping of vibration, needs to be recognized as a cosmopolitical practice-in the sense introduced by Isabelle Stengers-in which what music is within a society depends on what kinds of access to vibration are permitted, and to whom. This politics of vibration constitutes the hidden ontology of contemporary music because the organization of vibration shapes individual music scenes as well as the ethical choices that participants in these scenes make about how they want to live in the world.Trade Review"The boldest aspect of Boon's argument . . . is his move to the level of ontology—to the nature of being or reality itself. For him music's social and racial significance operates not at the level of social codes or experience, but as an intervention in how reality itself is organised: 'music does tell us something about being.' His framework certainly allows a place for aspects of music-making that usually get screened out of modern criticism: its religious power, its role in many cultures' sense of the world's structure. . . ." -- Dan Barrow * The Wire *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice 1 1. Lord’s House, Nobody’s House: Pandit Pran Nath and Music as Sadhana 29 2. The Drone of the Real: The Sound-Works of Catherine Christer Hennix 75 3. Music and the Continuum 125 4. Slowed and Throwed: DJ Screw and the Decolonization of Time 179 Coda. July 2, 2020 227 Acknowledgments 231 Notes 235 Bibliography 255 Index 269

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Book SynopsisLong awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman's Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity-a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of the queer, the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education's response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan's ab-sens and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, AlmodÓvar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory's engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing.Trade Review"This intervention is provocative in its paradoxes. . . . Bad Education thus poses a stunning criticism of all that ‘is’ by commanding a radical (re)turn to a deeply radical Lacan." -- Dylan Lackey * Invisible Culture *"Bad Education expands on Edelman’s widely influential claims in No Future, clarifying his framework and answering his critics. . . . Edelman doubles down on abstraction while engaging deeply with the work of recent Afro-pessimist critics. Refusing the charge that by pitching his argument at the level of structure rather than social reality he has disregarded race, Edelman instead argues that Blackness, like queerness, should be apprehended primarily as structure." -- Heather Love * Critical Inquiry *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xxi Introduction. Nothing Ventured: Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and Afropessimism 1 1. Learning Nothing: Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education 45 2. Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint 93 3. Funny/Peculiar/Queer: Michael Haneke’s Aesthetic Education 123 4. There Is No Freedom to Enjoy: Harriet Jacobs’s Negativity 162 Coda: Nothing Gained: Irony, Incest, Indiscernibility 207 Notes 261 Bibliography 317 Index 333

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Book SynopsisFocusing on his personal day to day experiences of the shelter-in-place period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life and the nature of thought under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation.Table of ContentsPreface ix March 20, 2020 3 Remark 1: The Path of the Goddess March 27, 2020 7 March 29, 2020 7 April 1, 2020 A.M. 8 Remark 2: The Pandemic and the Event April 1, 2020 P.M. 15 April 3, 2020 17 April 4, 2020 18 April 9, 2020 21 April 12, 2020 23 Remark 3: Self-precursion April 15, 2020 26 April 16, 2020 30 April 18, 2020 32 April 24, 2020 35 April 25, 2020 38 April 28, 2020 39 May 2, 2020 39 May 5, 2020 41 May 6, 2020 43 May 7, 2020 47 May 9, 2020 48 May 10, 2020 50 Remark 4: Fools and Free Spirits May 11, 2020 57 May 12, 2020 A.M. 59 May 12, 2020 P.M. 61 May 13, 2020 A.M. 62 May 13, 2020 P.M. 64 May 14, 2020 68 May 15, 2020 72 May 16, 2020 A.M. 73 May 16, 2020 P.M. 78 May 17, 2020 84 May 18, 2020 88 May 19, 2020 88 Remark 5: The Fourth Position May 20, 2020 A.M. 98 Remark 6: An Invitation to Social Death May 20, 2020 P.M. 106 Remark 7: Infracendence: Unpublished Fragments from Fernando Pessoa’s (Posthumous?) Milieu Notebook of Alberto Moreira, Heteronym Appendix 1. More Questions for Jorge Alemán: A Presentation for 17 Instituto de Estudios Críticos, Ciudad de México, May 25, 2020 123 Appendix 2. From a Conversation with Jaime 127 Appendix 3. From a Conversation with Gerardo 131 Appendix 4. Alain Badiou's Age of the Poets 139 Notes 165 Bibliography 183 Index 189

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Book SynopsisThe contributors to Siting Postcoloniality reevaluate the notion of the postcolonial by focusing on the Sinosphere—the region of East and Southeast Asia that has been significantly shaped by relations with China throughout history. Pointing out that the history of imperialism in China and Southeast Asia is longer and more complex than Euro-American imperialism, the contributors complicate the traditional postcolonial binaries of center-periphery, colonizer-colonized, and developed-developing. Among other topics, they examine socialist China’s attempts to break with Soviet cultural hegemony; the postcoloniality of Taiwan as it negotiates the legacy of Japanese colonial rule; Southeast Asian and South Asian diasporic experiences of colonialism; and Hong Kong’s complex colonial experiences under the British, the Japanese, and mainland China. The contributors show how postcolonial theory’s central concepts cannot adequately explain colonialism in the SinospheTable of ContentsSeries Editor’s Preface / Carlos Rojas vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Situations and Limits of Postcolonial Theory / Pheng Cheah 1 Part I. Framing the Postcolonial 1. Mythmaking: The Nomos of Postcoloniality / Robert J. C. Young 33 2. On Twenty-First-Century Postcolonialism / Dai Jinhua, translated by Erebus Wong and Lisa Rofel 53 Part II. Chinese Socialist Postcoloniality 3. Who Owns Social Justice? Permanent Revolution, the Chinese Gorky, and the Postcolonial / Wendy Larson 71 4. De-Sovietization and Internationalism: The People’s Republic of China’s Alternative Modernity Project / Pang Laikwan 90 Part III. Hong Kong Postcoloniality among the British, Japanese, and Chinese Empires 5. From Manchukuo to Hong Kong: Postcolonizing Asian Colonial Experiences / Lo Kwai-Cheung 109 6. Decolonization? What Decolonization? Hong Kong’s Political Transition / Lui Tai-lok 127 7. Locating Anglophone Writing in Sinophone Hong Kong / Elaine Yee Lin Ho 148 Part IV. Taiwan Postcoloniality between Japanese and Chinese Colonialisms 8. The Slippage between Empires: The Production of the Colonized Subject in Taiwan / Lin Pei-yin 171 9. Questions of Postcolonial Agency: Two Film Examples from Taiwan / Liao Ping-hui 191 Part V. Diasporas in East and Southeast Asian Postcoloniality 10. Sinophone Geopoetics: From Postcolonialism to Postloyalism / David Der-wei Wang 213 11. Multiple Colonialisms and Their Philippine Legacies / Caroline S. Hau 232 12. Diasporic Worldliness in Postcolonial Globalization / Pheng Cheah 250 References 277 Contributors 313 Index 315

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Book SynopsisIn recent years, queer theory appears to have made a materialist turn away from questions of representation and performativity to those of dispossession, precarity, and the differential distribution of life chances. Despite this shift, queer theory finds itself constantly reabsorbed into the liberal project of diversity management. This theoretical and political weakness, Petrus Liu argues, stems from an incomplete understanding of capitalism's contemporary transformations, of which China has been at the center. In The Specter of Materialism Liu challenges key premises of classic queer theory and Marxism, turning to an analysis of the Beijing Consensus-global capitalism's latest mutation-to develop a new theory of the political economy of sexuality. Liu explores how relations of gender and sexuality get reconfigured to meet the needs of capital in new regimes of accumulation and dispossession, demonstrating that evolving US-Asian economic relations shape the emergence of new queer identities and academic theories. In so doing, he offers a new history of collective struggles that provides a transnational framework for understanding the nexus between queerness and material life.Trade Review"Petrus Liu’s The Specter of Materialism is intellectually courageous and theoretically sophisticated, advancing both queer theory and Marxist thought. This review has only scratched the surface of this paradigm-shifting work. Scholars of queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, Marxism, and China Studies will all find this book indispensable for their fields." -- Wenqing Kang * Modern Chinese Literature And Culture *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Periodizing the Post-1989 World Order 1 Part I: Theory 1. Alterity in Queer Theory and the Political Economy of the Beijing Consensus 21 2. The Specter of Materialism 52 Part II: History 3. The Subsumption of Literature: Lu Xun’s Queer Modernism in the Chinese Revolution 81 4. The Subsumption of the Cold War: The Material Unconscious of Queer Asia 104 5. The Subsumption of Sexuality: Translating Gender from the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women to the Beijing Consensus 135 Conclusion: Toward a Transnational Queer Marxism 161 Notes 165 Bibliography 195 Index

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Book SynopsisBuilding on the foundational Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect’s resonances with today’s most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future pTrade Review“The Affect Theory Reader 2 surveys the burgeoning field whose development its predecessor did so much to catalyze. In the intervening thirteen years, the study of affect has spread its capillaries across an ever-growing spectrum of disciplines, while at the same time expanding the scope of its own problematics. This new anthology skillfully presents a much-needed digest of the state of the field today. The essays it brings together address a wide range of topics, opening new perspectives on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including, in a reckoning that is long overdue for the field, an emphasis on issues of race. This is an excellent and timely volume that readers interested in affect studies and allied areas will find indispensable.” -- Brian Massumi, author of * Couplets: Travels in Speculative Pragmatism *“The essays in The Affect Theory Reader 2 offer galvanizing, clarifying experiments with thought and form. Wholly reimagined from its previous incarnation, this ‘cluster of attunings’ showcases the maturity of this line of inquiry and so many of its emergent conversations, while at the same time finding the mettle to rethink the origins and legacies of ‘affect theory’ as such. An exciting offering for anyone who imagines the minor registers of experience deserves an unmistakably major volume.” -- Jordan Alexander Stein, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Fordham UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments xi Introduction: A Shimmer of Inventories / Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell 1 Part One. Tensions, In Solution 1. The Elements of Affect Theories / Derek P. McCormack 63 2. Ambiguous Affect: Excitements That Make the Self / Susanna Paasonen 85 3. Tomkins in Tension / Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson 103 4. Affect and Affirmation / Tyrone S. Palmer 122 5. Unfuckology: Affectability, Temporality, and Unleashing the Sex/Gender Binary / Kyla Schuller 141 Part Two. Minor Feelings and the Sensorial Possibilities of Form 6. Minor Feelings and the Affective Life of Race / Ann Cvetkovich 161 7. Resisting the Enclosure of Trans Affective Commons / Hil Malatino 179 8. Too Thick Love, or Bearing the Unbearable / Rizvana Bradley 191 9. Migration: An Intimacy / Omar Kasmani 214 Part Three. Unlearning and the Conditions of Arrival 10. Unlearning Affect / M. Gail Hamner 233 11. Why This? Affective Pedagogy in the Wake / Nathan Snaza 255 12. The Feeling of Knowing Music / Dylan Robinson and Patrick Nickleson 273 Part Four. The Matter of Experience, or, Reminding Consciousness of Its Necessary Modesty 13. Nonconscious Affect: Cognitive, Embodied, or Nonbifurcated Experience? / Tony D. Sampson 295 14. Catch an Incline: The Impersonality of the Minor / Erin Manning 315 15. Emotions and Affects of Convolution / Lisa Blackman 326 16. Haunting Voices: Affective Atmospheres as Transtemporal Contact / Cecilia Macón 347 Part Five. A Living Laboratory: Glitching the Affective Reproduction of the Social 17. The Affective Reproduction of Capital: Two Returns to Spinoza / Jason Read 367 18. Algorithmic Governance and Racializing Affect / Ezekiel Dixon-Román 384 19. Dividual Economies, of Data, of Flesh / Jasbir K. Puar 406 20. Algorithmic Trauma / Michael Richardson 423 Coda 447 A Note / Kathleen Stewart 449 Poisonality / Lauren Berlant 451 Contributors 465 Index 471

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Book SynopsisIn Fugitive Time, Matthew Omelsky theorizes the embodied experience of time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century black artforms from across the world. Through the lens of time, he charts the sensations and coursing thoughts that accompany desires for freedom as they appear in the work of artists as varied as Toni Morrison, Yvonne Vera, Aimé Césaire, and Issa Samb. “Fugitive time” names a distinct utopian desire directed at the anticipated moment when the body and mind have been unburdened of the violence that has consumed black life globally for centuries, bringing with it a new form of being. Omelsky shows how fugitive time is not about attaining this transcendent release but is instead about sustaining the idea of it as an ecstatic social gathering. From the desire for ethereal queer worlds in the Black Audio Film Collective’s Twilight City to Sun Ra’s transformation of nineteenth-century scientific racism into an insurgent fugitiTrade Review“Fugitive Time represents the strength of diasporic thinking around a range of black aesthetic production that disrupts the Afro-pessimist/Afro-optimist binary through visions and understanding of time beyond the historical. By positing black aesthetics as the site of black theory and political thought, Matthew Omelsky demonstrates that alternate temporalities are the key to understanding blackness, embodied experience, aesthetics, and history.” -- Samantha Pinto, author of * Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights *“Bold and nimble, Fugitive Time follows the fugitive dreams and utopian urges that animate our black radical tradition. This pursuit brings Matthew Omelsky across a sprawling archive of fiction, photography, painting, poetry, plastic arts, music, cinema, and the quotidian—spanning the United States, Martinique, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Britain, Saturn, and uncharted worlds to come. In the process, this book builds its own mighty momentum that will move readers to vivid revelations about the space-times of black life. Full of beauty and urgency, Fugitive Time is a remarkable contribution to the study and cultivation of black radical imagination.” -- La Marr Jurelle Bruce, author of * How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Black Beyondness 1 1. Toni Morrison’s Anachronic Ease 33 2. Aimé Césaire, Wifredo Lam, and the Aesthetics of Surging Life 62 3. Black Audio’s Archival Flight 99 4. Sun Ra, Issa Samb, and the Drapetomaniacal Avant-Garde 132 5. Yvonne Vera, NoViolet Bulawayo, and the Imminence of Dreaming Air 172 Coda. Fugitive Ether 205 Notes 209 Bibliography 239 Index 259

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Book SynopsisBuilding on the foundational Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect’s resonances with today’s most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future pTrade Review“The Affect Theory Reader 2 surveys the burgeoning field whose development its predecessor did so much to catalyze. In the intervening thirteen years, the study of affect has spread its capillaries across an ever-growing spectrum of disciplines, while at the same time expanding the scope of its own problematics. This new anthology skillfully presents a much-needed digest of the state of the field today. The essays it brings together address a wide range of topics, opening new perspectives on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including, in a reckoning that is long overdue for the field, an emphasis on issues of race. This is an excellent and timely volume that readers interested in affect studies and allied areas will find indispensable.” -- Brian Massumi, author of * Couplets: Travels in Speculative Pragmatism *“The essays in The Affect Theory Reader 2 offer galvanizing, clarifying experiments with thought and form. Wholly reimagined from its previous incarnation, this ‘cluster of attunings’ showcases the maturity of this line of inquiry and so many of its emergent conversations, while at the same time finding the mettle to rethink the origins and legacies of ‘affect theory’ as such. An exciting offering for anyone who imagines the minor registers of experience deserves an unmistakably major volume.” -- Jordan Alexander Stein, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Fordham UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments xi Introduction: A Shimmer of Inventories / Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell 1 Part One. Tensions, In Solution 1. The Elements of Affect Theories / Derek P. McCormack 63 2. Ambiguous Affect: Excitements That Make the Self / Susanna Paasonen 85 3. Tomkins in Tension / Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson 103 4. Affect and Affirmation / Tyrone S. Palmer 122 5. Unfuckology: Affectability, Temporality, and Unleashing the Sex/Gender Binary / Kyla Schuller 141 Part Two. Minor Feelings and the Sensorial Possibilities of Form 6. Minor Feelings and the Affective Life of Race / Ann Cvetkovich 161 7. Resisting the Enclosure of Trans Affective Commons / Hil Malatino 179 8. Too Thick Love, or Bearing the Unbearable / Rizvana Bradley 191 9. Migration: An Intimacy / Omar Kasmani 214 Part Three. Unlearning and the Conditions of Arrival 10. Unlearning Affect / M. Gail Hamner 233 11. Why This? Affective Pedagogy in the Wake / Nathan Snaza 255 12. The Feeling of Knowing Music / Dylan Robinson and Patrick Nickleson 273 Part Four. The Matter of Experience, or, Reminding Consciousness of Its Necessary Modesty 13. Nonconscious Affect: Cognitive, Embodied, or Nonbifurcated Experience? / Tony D. Sampson 295 14. Catch an Incline: The Impersonality of the Minor / Erin Manning 315 15. Emotions and Affects of Convolution / Lisa Blackman 326 16. Haunting Voices: Affective Atmospheres as Transtemporal Contact / Cecilia Macón 347 Part Five. A Living Laboratory: Glitching the Affective Reproduction of the Social 17. The Affective Reproduction of Capital: Two Returns to Spinoza / Jason Read 367 18. Algorithmic Governance and Racializing Affect / Ezekiel Dixon-Román 384 19. Dividual Economies, of Data, of Flesh / Jasbir K. Puar 406 20. Algorithmic Trauma / Michael Richardson 423 Coda 447 A Note / Kathleen Stewart 449 Poisonality / Lauren Berlant 451 Contributors 465 Index 471

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Book SynopsisIn How We Write Now Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field’s central object and preoccupation: loss. She demonstrates how contemporary Black feminist writers and theorists such as Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Alexander, Christina Sharpe, and Natasha Trethewey mobilize their prose to ask readers to feel, undo, and reassemble themselves. These intimate invitations are more than a set of tools for decoding the social world; Black feminist prose becomes a mode of living and feeling, dreaming and being, and a distinctly affective project that treats loss as not only paradigmatic of Black life but also an aesthetic question. Through her own beautiful writing, Nash shows how Black feminism offers itself as a companion to readers to chart their own lives with and in loss, from devastating personal losses to organizing around the movement for Black lives. Charting her own losses, Nash reminds us that eve

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Book SynopsisIn How We Write Now Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field’s central object and preoccupation: loss. She demonstrates how contemporary Black feminist writers and theorists such as Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Alexander, Christina Sharpe, and Natasha Trethewey mobilize their prose to ask readers to feel, undo, and reassemble themselves. These intimate invitations are more than a set of tools for decoding the social world; Black feminist prose becomes a mode of living and feeling, dreaming and being, and a distinctly affective project that treats loss as not only paradigmatic of Black life but also an aesthetic question. Through her own beautiful writing, Nash shows how Black feminism offers itself as a companion to readers to chart their own lives with and in loss, from devastating personal losses to organizing around the movement for Black lives. Charting her own losses, Nash reminds us that eve

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Book SynopsisTheory offered us a way of understanding the world that, like so many youthful exuberances, was both vital and ridiculous.As an avowed theory head, Jordan Alexander Stein confronts a contradiction: that the abstract, and often frustrating rigors of theory also produced a sense of pride and identity for him and his friends: an idea of how to be and a way to live. Although Stein explains what theory is, this is not an introduction or a how-to. Organized around five ways that theory makes us feelsilly, stupid, sexy, seething and stuckStein travels back to the late nineties to tell a story of coming of age at a particular moment and to measure how that moment lives on now. Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidlyan online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Booksspecializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring boTrade Review"Jordan Alexander Stein's Theory, one of the excellent little books in the relatively new series Avidly Reads, from New York University Press. Avidly Reads has been a column in the Los Angeles Review of Books for a while, and the popularity of it entirely justifies the book series." * Popmatters *

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Book Synopsis2017 Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award presented by the Caribbean Philosophical AssociationAs the first successful revolution emanating from a slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution remains an inspired site of investigation for a remarkable range of artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora.In The Black Radical Tragic, Jeremy Matthew Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Black Radical Tragic explores work from Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, EdouardTrade ReviewJeremy Matthew GlicksThe Black Radical Tragicis a book we were all waiting for without knowing it. Only now, after finding it, do we know what we were waiting for. * Los Angeles Review of Books *Jeremy Matthew Glick'sThe Black Radical Tragic is a book we were all waiting for without knowing it....[Glick] combines here a sober and ruthless insight into the necessary tragic twists of the revolutionary process with the unconditional fidelity to this process. He stands as far as possible from the standard 'anti-totalitarian' claim that, since every revolutionary process is destined to degenerate, its better to abstain from it. This readiness to take the risk and engage in the battle, although we know that we will probably be sacrificed in the course of the struggle, is the most precious insight for us who live in new dark times. -- Slavoj Žižek * Los Angeles Review of Books *The Black Radical Tragicis infused with questions of memory, revolution, and how these concepts interact with one another across history. With rigorous attunement to the various registers in which revolt is recalled and recited, Jeremy Matthew Glick charts the Haitian revolution as an extended, ongoing historical moment of fugitive insurgency, the open culmination of the terrible and beautiful interplay of enlightenment and darkness. A brilliant and necessary book. -- Fred Moten,author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical TraditionGrappling with the continuing reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in our present, Jeremy Matthew GlicksTheBlack Radical Tragicdefines the notion of the tragic within the black radical tradition with remarkable insights and impressive breadth. An engagingly written text that will shape not only how we think about the centrality of the Haitian Revolution but also questions of the modern in political thought. -- Anthony Bogues,Brown UniversityGlicks book...stands as an indispensable contribution to the field. Staging an essentialand all too rareconversation between dramatic literature and black radicalism, Glicks work itself stands as part of what Errol Hill called 'the revolutionary tradition in black drama.' * TDR: The Drama Review *

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural StudiesThe Exquisite Corpse ofAsian Americaaddresses this central question: if race has been settled as a legal or socialconstruction and not as biological fact, why do Asian American artists,authors, and performers continue to scrutinize their body parts? Engagingnovels, poetry, theater, and new media from both the U.S. andinternationallysuch as Kazuo Ishiguro's science fiction novel Never Let MeGo or Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats and exhibits like that of BodyWorlds in which many of the bodies on display originated from Chinese prisonsRachelC. Lee teases out the preoccupation with human fragments and posthumanecologies in the context of Asian American cultural production and theory. Sheunpacks how the designation of Asian American itself is a mental constructthat is paradoxically linked to the biologicaTrade ReviewLee convincingly shows that Asian Americanist critique in science and technology studies and analytic that takes seriously the biological in critical race and ethnic studies is not far-fetched. * Catalyst *[T]he study is provocative and evocative, raising such issues and questions as why Asian American artists (in fiction, theater, poetry, and comedy) are so preoccupied with fragments of 'self.' * Choice *Lees propositional and performative writing style will prod readers in (Asian) American studies, performative studies, and critical race theory to reexamine their scholarly assumptions... * Theatre Journal *Ambitious, original, and immensely generative,The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America challenges us to move outside the paradigms of the racialized body weve relied on in Asian American studies.Lee pushes our thinking in productive new ways to consider more broadly how critical race studies might incorporate new concepts and technologies related to the biological body. -- Josephine Lee,author of Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary StageRachel Lees stunning new book explores contemporary Asian American performance, comedy, written word, and a body exhibit that concern racialized, gendered, militarized body parts. Drawing upon Science and Technology Studies and Asian American Studies, with the aid of transnational femiqueer, critical race, and disability studies, Lee eviscerates what we thought we knew about biopolitics and biosociality. -- Charis Thompson,author of Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell ResearchTable of ContentsContents Corpse Blood Introduction: Parts/Parturition 1 Kidney Lymphocytes 1. How a Critical Biopolitical Studies Lens Alters the Questions We Ask vis-a-vis Race 39 Teeth 2. The Asiatic, Acrobatic, and Aleatory Biologies Feet of Cheng-Chieh Yu's Dance Theater 66 Gamete Vagina 3. Pussy Ballistics and Peristaltic Feminism 97 GI Tract Parasite 4. Everybody's Novel Protist: Chimeracological Chromosome Entanglements in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction 126 Head 5. A Sideways Approach to Mental Disabilities: Incarceration, Kinesthetics, Affect, and Ethics 161 Breasts 6. Allotropic Conclusions: Propositions on Skin Race and the Exquisite Corpse 210 Tissue culture Tail Piece 245 Notes 259 Bibliography 295 Index 313 About the Author 325 An insert of color images follows page 138.

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Book SynopsisRadical alternatives to consent and traumaArguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience. Saketopoulou thereby shows why sexualities beyond consent may be worth risking-and how risk can solicit the future.Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to chart how trauma and sexuality join forces to surge through the aesthetic domain. Putting the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and phTrade ReviewLavishly brilliant. Rarely has a book so daringly startled me. Clarity, nuance, pain, even tenderness here braid uniquely, keyed to sexual collisions with race. A series of showstopping claims result, glistening with seduction. Never have I felt so welcomed into trauma as a mode of doing, a mode of expanding, a mode of greeting what is foreign in oneself. Take this invitation laced with surprise. * Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of Gender(s) *Making a vibrant argument for psychoanalysis’s importance in grappling with our modern racial dramas, Sexuality Beyond Consent weaves together insights from queer theory, performance studies, and critical race theory to explore overwhelm. Saketopoulou’s clear and compelling prose brings together clinical case studies, Laplanche, and Slave Play to arrive at an ethics for dealing with power and difference now—the result is a dazzling, brilliant read. * Amber Jamilla Musser, author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance *Offers nothing less than a theory of sexuality, one that refuses contemporary pieties. In a series of profound and sometimes personal reflections, Saketopoulou subjects our reigning models of consent to close scrutiny, and asks what happens when fantasy—intractable, recalcitrant, but also protean and surprising—belies our most dearly held political and ethical commitments. The result is a work that excavates the complex enmeshments of the sexed body, race, and history, and demonstrates the ongoing salience of psychoanalytic concepts to feminist and anti-racist cultural analysis. Saketopoulou’s critique of the liberal sexual subject is politically necessary and intellectually thrilling. * Damon Ross Young, University of California, Berkeley *This brilliant, often counter-intuitive examination of sexuality, race, and consent explores how we might yield to the opacity in ourselves. Saketopoulou unpacks with startling insight moments beyond the politics of identity and trauma to imagine how the surrendering of consent might lead to an ethical expansion rather than diminishment of the self. * David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania *

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Book SynopsisTheory offered us a way of understanding the world that, like so many youthful exuberances, was both vital and ridiculous.As an avowed theory head, Jordan Alexander Stein confronts a contradiction: that the abstract, and often frustrating rigors of theory also produced a sense of pride and identity for him and his friends: an idea of how to be and a way to live. Although Stein explains what theory is, this is not an introduction or a how-to. Organized around five ways that theory makes us feelsilly, stupid, sexy, seething and stuckStein travels back to the late nineties to tell a story of coming of age at a particular moment and to measure how that moment lives on now.Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidlyan online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Booksspecializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly RTrade Review"Jordan Alexander Stein's Theory, one of the excellent little books in the relatively new series Avidly Reads, from New York University Press. Avidly Reads has been a column in the Los Angeles Review of Books for a while, and the popularity of it entirely justifies the book series." * Popmatters *

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Book Synopsis2017 Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award presented by the Caribbean Philosophical AssociationAs the first successful revolution emanating from a slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution remains an inspired site of investigation for a remarkable range of artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora.In The Black Radical Tragic, Jeremy Matthew Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Black Radical Tragic explores work from Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, EdouardTrade ReviewJeremy Matthew GlicksThe Black Radical Tragicis a book we were all waiting for without knowing it. Only now, after finding it, do we know what we were waiting for. * Los Angeles Review of Books *Jeremy Matthew Glick'sThe Black Radical Tragic is a book we were all waiting for without knowing it....[Glick] combines here a sober and ruthless insight into the necessary tragic twists of the revolutionary process with the unconditional fidelity to this process. He stands as far as possible from the standard 'anti-totalitarian' claim that, since every revolutionary process is destined to degenerate, its better to abstain from it. This readiness to take the risk and engage in the battle, although we know that we will probably be sacrificed in the course of the struggle, is the most precious insight for us who live in new dark times. -- Slavoj Žižek * Los Angeles Review of Books *The Black Radical Tragicis infused with questions of memory, revolution, and how these concepts interact with one another across history. With rigorous attunement to the various registers in which revolt is recalled and recited, Jeremy Matthew Glick charts the Haitian revolution as an extended, ongoing historical moment of fugitive insurgency, the open culmination of the terrible and beautiful interplay of enlightenment and darkness. A brilliant and necessary book. -- Fred Moten,author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical TraditionGrappling with the continuing reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in our present, Jeremy Matthew GlicksTheBlack Radical Tragicdefines the notion of the tragic within the black radical tradition with remarkable insights and impressive breadth. An engagingly written text that will shape not only how we think about the centrality of the Haitian Revolution but also questions of the modern in political thought. -- Anthony Bogues,Brown UniversityGlicks book...stands as an indispensable contribution to the field. Staging an essentialand all too rareconversation between dramatic literature and black radicalism, Glicks work itself stands as part of what Errol Hill called 'the revolutionary tradition in black drama.' * TDR: The Drama Review *

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Book SynopsisCovering a period from the late-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth century, Aileen A. Feng’s engagingly written work identifies and analyzes a Latin humanist precursor to the poetic movement known as Renaissance Petrarchism. Though Petrachism is usually read solely as a vernacular poetic tradition, in Writing Beloveds, Feng recovers the initial political purposes in Latin prose and traces how poetry set the terms for gender, agency, and power in early modern Italy. By revealing the literary motifs in men’s and women’s writing about gender she maps how certain figures in Petrarch’s writing transmitted gendered ideas of power and reflected a growing anxiety about women as public figures. This work includes nuanced analyses of poetry, linguistic treatises, debates on imitation, representations of gender and epistolary correspondence in Latin and Italian. Writing Beloveds is a landmark study that highlights the new social reality of women writeTrade Review"In this deeply researched, carefully analyzed, and engagingly written book, Aileen A. Feng explores Petrach’s influence upon Latin humanist prose in Italy’s early Renaissance and upon vernacular poetry and prose in its later Renaissance. " -- William J. Kennedy * Renaissance Quarterly *"Deeply researched, tightly argued, and elegantly written, Feng’s book makes an intriguing and compelling argument for revising the conventional chronology of Renaissance Petrarchism. This version is bound to exert influence over the field of Renaissance studies." -- Danila Sokolov, University of Iceland * Early Modern Women *Table of ContentsAbbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: Intellectual Masculinity and the Female Intellect in Humanist Petrarchism Chapter 1 - Women of Stone: Gender and Politics in the Petrarchan World Chapter 2 - In Laura's Shadow: Gendered Dialogues and Humanist Petrarchis in the Fifteenth Century Chapter 3 - Laura Speaks: Sisterhood, Amicitia, and Marital Love in the Female Latin Petrarchist Writings of the Fifteenth Century PART II: Pietro Bembo and the Legacy of Humanist Petrarchism Chapter 4 - Theorizing Gender: Nation Building and Female Mythology in the Ciceronian Quarrels Chapter 5 - Politicizing Gender: Bembo's Private and Public Petrarchism Afterword Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThrough careful analyses of notable cases from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greig Henderson analyses how the rhetoric of storytelling often carries as much argumentative weight within a judgement as the logic of legal distinctions.Trade Review‘Creating Legal Worlds provides valuable insights into the role narrative takes in judgement writing… this book provides a reminder that the best story does not always match the law.’ -- Allison Graham * Saskatchewan Law Review vol 79:2016 *‘Creating Legal Worlds provides valuable insight into the role narrative takes in judgement writing… Litigators will receive insight as to how to frame their arguments but this book provides a reminder that the best story does not always match the law.’ -- Allison Graham * Saskatchewan Law Review vol 79:2016 *‘I recommend Henderson’s book to legal historians as a salutary perspective-shift in which they will find much that is new and much that is “familiar, yet somehow strange” – and worth thinking about.’ -- Angela Fernandez * Jotwell: The Journal of Things we Like (LOTS) March2016 *‘This intriguing book provides an important understanding of legal writing—whether on the part of lawyers, judges, or police officers who are writing reports—and how to conceptualize and analyze it.’ -- G.C. David * Choice Magazine vol 53:07:2016 *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Cost of Persuasion: Figure, Story, and Eloquence in the Rhetoric of Judicial Discourse 2. Pure and Impure Styles: Formalism and Pragmatism in the Language of Decision Writing 3. The Perils of Analogy: Legal World-Making and Judicial Self Fashioning in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad 4. Murder, They Wrote: The Rhetoric of Causation in the Language of the Law 5. Narrative Theory and the Art of Judgment: The Anatomy of a Supreme Court Decision 6. The Look in his Eyes: Rusk v. State, State v. Rusk 7. Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Law Postscript: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and Scepticism

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Book SynopsisIn the four decades between 1920 and 1960, William Deacon, Canada's first full-time literary journalist, devoted his career to the twin goals of fostering a Canadian readership for Canadian writers and creating a sense of community among those writers. His reviews in Saturday Night, The Mail and Empire, and Globe and Mail were the most widely read literary commentary of his day. His vast correspondence with a wide range of writers, politicians, historians, cultural nationalists and a select number of eccentrics created a forty-year dialogue in which is ideas about writing, publishing culture, and politics were shared, formulated, and debated with a formidable array of personal and literary friends, among them E.J. Pratt, Laura Goodman Salverson, Duncan Campbell Scott, A.R.M. Lower, J.S. Woodsworth, Thomas Raddall, Hugh MacLennan, and Mazo de la Roche. The exchanges trade the ebullient cultural nationalism of the 1920s and Deacon's enthusiastic immersion i

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Book SynopsisThis volume contains an edited selection of the papers read at the International Colloquium on Interpretation of Narrative held at the University of Toronto, 24 to 27 March 1976 by the Graduate Programme in Comparative Literature. The papers in the first part all deal with the methodology of text-oriented criticism; the papers in the second brng to the discussion a fundamental agreement and acceptance of the hermeneutic method and reception theory. It is most fitting that these proceedings should end with an attempt to find the holistic identity of interpretation of narrative. The papers in the third part were prepared for the colloquium and were published in part afterwards in Critical Inquiry and each assisted in the inquiry.

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Book SynopsisNarratives are everywhere - and since a significant part of contemporary media culture is defined by narrative forms, media studies need a genuinely transmedial narratology. Against this background, Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture focuses on the intersubjective construction of storyworlds as well as on prototypical forms of narratorial and subjective representation.Trade Review"Thorough, well-grounded in prominent theory, and useful for scholars of contemporary media and narrative theory."—Erica McCrystal, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics"An excellent contribution to transmedial narratology."—Hans-Joachim Backe, Diegesis: Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research“A cutting-edge contribution to transmedial narratology. . . . A highly recommended book and a solid foundation for further development in its field/s.”—Jan Horstmann, Style“Thon successfully fills the gap of a foundation for transmedial narratology that is remarkable as much for its precise critical re-examination of established narratological terms and concepts as for its own clear terminology and conceptualizations that provide fertile ground for future research.”—Michelle Herte, European Comic Art"An extremely valuable contribution to the efforts of achieving a truly transmedial perspective without losing sight of the media-specific aspects of texts."—Sarah E. Beyvers, KULT Online“The work is a meticulous survey of media and narratological scholarship, and one which seems a strong foundation upon which to establish future ‘building blocks’ of the transmedial narratology project.”—Fiona Farnsworth, ImageTexT“This book is a sustained and utterly convincing demonstration of transmedial narrative theory’s ability to address the construction of twenty-first-century storyworlds in films, comics, and video games.”—Jared Gardner, author of Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling“The adage that ‘narrative is everywhere’ has always been in need of a theoretical frame and method for analysis, and Thon’s carefully argued and well-researched book takes an important step toward such a genuinely transmedial narratology.”—Karin Kukkonen, author of Contemporary Comics Storytelling“This is a unique feat of narratology, deployed upon an impressive repertoire of contemporary media culture. There simply is no other book that so thoroughly and precisely develops the concept of transmediality.”—Susana P. Tosca, coauthor of Understanding Video Games: The Essential IntroductionTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Toward a Transmedial NarratologyPart 1. Storyworlds across Media2. The Storyworld as a Transmedial Concept3. Narrative Representation across MediaPart 2. Narrators across Media4. The Narrator as a Transmedial Concept5. Narratorial Representation across MediaPart 3. Subjectivity across Media6. Subjectivity as a Transmedial Concept7. Subjective Representation across MediaConclusionNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisStories are everywhere, from fiction across media to politics and personal identity. Handbook of Narrative Analysis sorts out both traditional and recent narrative theories, providing the necessary skills to interpret any story. In addition to discussing classical theorists, such as Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, and Seymour Chatman, Handbook of Narrative Analysispresents precursors (such as E. M. Forster), related theorists (Franz Stanzel, Dorrit Cohn), and a large variety of postclassical critics. Among the latter particular attention is paid to rhetorical, cognitive, and cultural approaches; intermediality; storyworlds; gender theory; and natural and unnatural narratology. Not content to consider theory as an end in itself, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck use two short stories and a graphic narrative by contemporary authors as touchstones to illustrate each approach to narrative. In doing so they illuminate the practical implications of theoretical preTrade Review“A comprehensive and coherent account of narratology, [Handbook of Narrative Analysis] is engaging and readable and explicitly oriented toward the reader’s experience.”—Sabine Gross, Monatshefte "This handbook is successful in its efforts to distill complex concepts of narratology for a beginner in the field without over-simplifying or misrepresenting the information. . . . It would make a useful tool in a classroom for upper-level undergraduates or graduate students who are in the early stages of exploring narratology. Similarly, it is an excellent touchstone for researchers more comfortable with narratological thought and who simply need a reference book at hand. It certainly holds value in the field of narratological research and for academics at varying levels of their career."—Sarah N. Lawson, Journal of Folklore ResearchTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Traditional Questions 2. New Questions Chapter 1. Before and Surrounding Structuralism 1. Story and Plot 2. Telling and Showing 3. Author and Narrator 4. Narrator and Reader 5. Consciousness and Speech 6. Perception and Speech Chapter 2. Structuralism 1. Story 1.1. Events 1.2. Actants 1.3. Setting 2. Narrative 2.1. Time 2.2. Character 2.3. Focalization 3. Narration 3.1. Narrating 3.2. Consciousness Representation Chapter 3. Postclassical Narratology 1. Broadening Conceptions of the Narrative Text 1.1. Broadening the Medium: Intermedial Narratology 1.2. Broadening in Time: Diachronic Narratology 1.3. Broadening the Fictional World 2. Communicative Approaches 2.1. Rhetorical Narratology 2.2. Cognitive Narratology 3. Narratology and Ideology 3.1. Narrative Ethics 3.2. Feminist and Queer Narratology 3.3. Postcolonial Narratology 3.4. Cultural Narratology and Socio-narratology 3.4.1. Socio-narratology 3.4.2. Cultural Narratology 4. Everyday Life as a Narrative Process 4.1. Postmodern Narratology 4.2. Natural Narratology 4.3. Unnatural Narratology Appendix A: “Pegasian” Charlotte Mutsaers Appendix B: “The Map” Gerrit Krol Appendix C: “City” Wasco Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTison Pugh examines the intersection of narratology, ludology, and queer studies, pointing to the ways in which the blurred boundaries between game and narrative provide both a textual and a metatextual space of queer narrative potential. By focusing on these three distinct yet complementary areas, Pugh shifts understandings of the way their play, pleasure, and narrative potential are interlinked. Through illustrative readings of an eclectic collection of cultural artifacts—from Chaucer’sCanterbury Talesto Nintendo’sLegend of Zeldafranchise, from Edward Albee’s dramaticmasterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy novels—Pugh offers perspectives of blissful ludonarratology, sadomasochistic ludonarratology, the queerness of rules, the queerness of godgames, and the queerness of children’s questing video games. Collectively, these analyses present a range of interpretive Trade Review“Pugh does an impressive job as he addresses one of the major gaps in narrative theory: the lack of adequate study of play and game theory. He also provides a bracing intervention into queer narratology. The book is nuanced, insightful, provocative, and important; I recommend it highly.”—Brian Richardson, professor of English at the University of Maryland Table of ContentsIntroduction: David Sedaris’s Queer Poker Game Part 1. Theorizing Queer Ludonarratology 1. Theorizing Ludonarratology 2. Queering Ludonarratology Part 2. Structures and Readings in Queer Ludonarrativity 3. Win/Loss Pregame: The Thrill of Defeat Geoffrey Chaucer’s Queer Losers and Blissful Ludonarrativity 4. Players Pregame: Whose Side Are You On? Edward Albee’s Queer Players and Sadomasochistic Ludonarrativity 5. Godgames Pregame: Fun and Games with Sociopaths David Fincher’s Films and Ludonarrativity’s Queer Godgames 6. Rules Pregame: May the Better Player Lose! J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels, Muggle Quidditch, and Ludonarrativity’s Queer Rules 7. Children Pregame: Of Preschoolers and Prodigies Nintendo’s Queer Children and Questing Ludonarrativity in The Legend of Zelda Video Games Conclusion: Gone Home and the Ludonarrative Limits of Queer Representation Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Author Katharine N. Harrington examines contemporary writers from the French-speaking world who can be classified as literary nomads. The concept of nomadism, based on the experience of traditionally mobile peoples lacking any fixed home, reflects a postmodern way of thinking that encourages individuals to reconsider rigid definitions of borders, classifications, and identities. Nomadic identities reflect shifting landscapes that defy taking on fully the limits of any one fixed national or cultural identity. In conceiving of identities beyond the boundaries of national or cultural origin, this book opens up the space for nomadic subjects whose identity is based just as much on their geographical displacement and deterritorialization as on a relationship to any one fixed place, community, or culture. This study explores the experience of an existence between borders and its translation into writing that. While nomadism is frequently associated with post-colonial authors, tTrade ReviewLiterary nomadism stems from nomadism as sociological phenomenon and existential category. Like other contemporary critics, Harrington (Plymouth State Univ.) points out that cultural nomadism is a postmodern phenomenon that forms new identities that test "the limits of any one fixed national or cultural identity." To illustrate nomadic identities as a cultural phenomenon and a literary aesthetic, the author provides close readings of work by four contemporary Francophone writers. Each represents a different facet of being deterritorialized in relation to national belonging, and each reflects on experience and translate it creatively. J.-M. G. Le Clézio is an "engaged travel" who "gives ... voice to marginalized people around the world." Western Canadian by origin, Nancy Houston writes in French, expressing the anguish that she cannot feel un vrai bilingue. Nina Bouraouri, daughter of a French mother and an Algerian father, articulates the violence of the nomadic experience, which leads her to a "preference for short simple sentences and significant amount of repletion." Polish Jewish Régine Robin left Paris for the villa nomade Montreal. Written in both French and English, her work reflects a "patchwork style" in reaching out to the virtual nomadic communities. Insightful and well organized, this study concludes with useful bibliographic information. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. * CHOICE *This compelling analysis of the nomadic experience in the lives and the literary works of four key contemporary Francophone writers examines the work of J.M.G. Le Clézio, Nancy Huston, Nina Bouraoui, and Régine Robin. ... Engaging and well-written, Writing the Nomadic Experience in Contemporary Francophone Literature achieves its proposed aims of attempting to widen the scope of the study of nomadism in contemporary French and Francophone literature, and to expose the wide range of nomadic subjects and experiences that are present in literature today through the study of four key authors. ... Timely in its anticipation of the current proliferation of nomadic identities and cultural expressions of hybrid identities, and innovative in its selection of four highly diverse and significant Francophone writers today, this book is an important contribution to its field, and will be of interest to scholars of contemporary French and Francophone literatures, transnational writing, and nomadic identities. * Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies *This original and highly rewarding study explores the complex evolution of nomadism in addition to the myriad of implications that this way of thinking entails for the modern world. Through the lens of the diverse writings of four contemporary authors (J.M.G. Le Clézio, Nancy Huston, Nina Bouraoui, and Régine Robin) whose works and cultural origins defy simplistic categorization or appropriation, Harrington presents a compelling and cogent argument as to why the multifaceted phenomenon of nomadism is more relevant than ever. Harrington successfully underscores that cultural, linguistic, literary, and digital nomads are all endeavoring to carve out a space for a rich hybrid identity in an effort to resist integration into a monolithic global environment increasingly characterized by homogeneity and monoculturalism. Seamlessly blending close textual analyses of numerous narratives with the works of major literary theorists, Harrington also compels the reader to ponder what divergent forms that nomadism will adopt in the future. Harrington notes that given recent inventions, such as the Internet, nomads will undoubtedly continue to play an important role in resisting rigid boundaries and hegemonic domination. -- Keith MoserThis book explores the nomadic experience from a vantage point that entails a new perspective, dismantling familiar borders, linguistic and cultural constructions regarding the self and the others. The first chapter focuses on J.M.G. Le Clézio cultural and philosophical nomadism in his fictional and non-fictional works, which enhance our awareness toward other societies and cultures. In chapter two, Nancy Huston’s novels and essays reveal that if displacement can have destabilizing effects for the deterritorialized individual as a linguistic nomad, it can also be a constructive necessity for survival. Nina Bouraoui’s nomadic condition, studied in chapter three, allows criticizing societal practices and beliefs free from any constraint, while the content and the writer’s style and language recall always violence. Regine Robin explored in chapter four, offers a unique nomadic experience through experimental writing, oscillating between traditional book format and web site exploration, and continually pushing the limits of writing. This book is an important contribution to the field of Francophone Literature with its focus on nomadic experience and its ramifications in Migration Studies, within a cultural perspective. -- Névine El Nossery, University of Wisconsin-MadisonWriting the Nomadic Experience in Contemporary Francophone Literature is a fascinating study of authors who inhabit an 'inbetween' space, between nations, languages and cultures. The issue of nomadism is timely, since the cultural, political and social changes wrought by globalization and the legacies of colonialism create new subject positions and identity formations. Harrington's choice of J.M.G. Le Clézio, Nancy Huston, Nina Bouraoui and Régine Robin provides an illuminating comparison of the literary nomad, who inhabits a position that is at once privileged and painful. Harrington deftly combines close reading with theoretical analysis to tease out the differences between these four writers' representation of nomadism in their work and takes the unique approach of charting the changing effects of their nomadism across their oeuvre. The result is a very readable study that combines questions of exile, diaspora, autofiction, multilingualism, and the inflections of sexuality and religion upon the writing self. -- Natalie Edwards, University of AdelaideThe introduction, which explores the changing significance over time of such terms as nomadism, diaspora, and exile, sets the stage for a thought-provoking discussion of several well-known contemporary Francophone writers and the narrative conceptualizations of place and identity in their respective oeuvres. As Harrington posits, a primary aim of the volume is to ‘widen the scope of the study of nomadism in contemporary French and Francophone literature’ through her selection of four authors with complex bicultural and/or bilingual backgrounds who ‘envision writing as a way to anchor themselves in their uncertain position between nations, cultures, languages, and even between the past and the present’. Each of the book’s four chapters provides biographical information on the authors, references to significant theoretical texts, and a critical analysis of the literary works that best exemplify the evolution of the concept of nomadism in a particular writer’s work. . . .This useful study should be of great interest to scholars of Francophone literature and culture. * The French Review *Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION: The Evolution of the Notion of Nomadism and its Implications for Contemporary Literature CHAPTER 1: Writing from the Margins: Cultural Nomadism in the Life and Work of J.M.G. Le Clézio CHAPTER 2: Nancy Huston and the Art of Negotiating Strangeness CHAPTER 3: Writing as “Seeing” Between Categories in the Novels of Nina Bouraoui CHAPTER 4: From the Page and Beyond: Régine Robin and Transcribing Deterritorialization CONCLUSION: Mapping Out Territories Now and Into the Future

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Book SynopsisThe relationship of philosophy with Kafka's oeuvre is complex. It has been argued that Kafka's novels and stories defy philosophic extrapolation; conversely, it has also been suggested that precisely the tendency of Kafka's writings to elude discursive solution is itself a philosophical tendency, one that is somehow contributing to a wiser relationship of human beings with language. These matters are the focus of the proposed volume on Philosophy and Kafka. The proposed collection brings together essays that interrogate the relationship of philosophy and Kafka, and offer new and original interpretations. The volume obviously cannot claim completeness, but it partially does justice to the multiplicity of philosophical issues and philosophical interpretations at stake. This variety informs the composition of the volume itself. A number of essays focus on specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka's work, from Adorno's to Agamben's, from Arendt's to Benjamin's, from Deleuze and GuatTrade ReviewSeveral readings are illuminating. ... Philosophy and Kafka contains many valuable insights. ... The illuminating moments of Philosophy and Kafka will reward curious fans of Kafka's work. * Jewish Review of Books *These illuminating essays explore some of the ways in which the ideas of philosophers such as Socrates, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, and Kant are at play in Kafka's writing, and the ways in which more recent philosophers such as Adorno, Agamben, Arendt, and Benjamin have considered Kafka's work. What is more, many of the essays collected here shed light on the ways in which Kafka's own thinking can contribute to on-going philosophical debates about issues such as the conditions for identity, the nature of animality, the requirements of justice, and the moral implications and promise of certain forms of writing. Philosophy and Kafka is an important and long overdue contribution to Kafka scholarship as well as to philosophical reflection on a range of pressing issues. -- Marc LuchtThis essay collection – the first of its kind – explores a rich variety of ways in which Kafka’s writings are bound to philosophical concerns. It bridges the gap between the philosophical and the literary, highlighting how the two coexist and illuminate one another. From Socrates to Agamben, from Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein, ethics and aesthetics, logic and literature, Kafka’s prose resonates, reflects and provokes. By bringing together scholars from different disciplines, "Philosophy and Kafka" establishes fascinating new paths of enquiry into Kafka’s thinking and philosophers’ engagement with it. It allows us to understand why we continue to be captured by Kafka’s writing, standing as a testament to its relevance, and attesting to the vitality of the research it inspires. -- Uta Degner, University of SalzburgTable of ContentsIntroduction Part 1: Philosophical Investigations Chapter 1: I Don’t Want to Know that I Know: The Inversion of Socratic Ignorance in the Knowledge of the Dogs Chapter 2: Kafka’s Empty Law: Laughter and Freedom in The Trial Chapter 3: A Kafkan Sublime: Dark Poetics on the Kantian Philosophy Chapter 4: The Everyday’s Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein Chapter 5: You’re nobody ‘til somebody loves you: Communication and the Social Destruction of Subjectivity in Kafka’s Metamorphosis Chapter 6: Kafka’s Insomnia Part 2: Philosophical Topics Chapter 7: Animal Bachelors and Animal Brides: Fabulous Metamorphosis in Kafka and Garnett Chapter 8: Kafka’s Political Animals Chapter 9: The Calamity of the Rightless: Hannah Arendt and Franz Kafka on Monsters and Members Chapter 10: Knowing Life Before the Law: Kafka, Kelsen, Derrida Part 3: Philosophical Readings Chapter 11: Anxiety and Attention: Benjamin and Others Chapter 12: On the Mimesis of Reification: Adorno’s Critical Theoretical Interpretation of Kafka Chapter 13: “In the Penal Colony” in the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze Chapter 14: In a Messianic Gesture: Agamben’s Kafka Index About the Contributors

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Book SynopsisStealing Things traces the representations of thieves and thievery in nineteenth-century French novels. Re-reading canonical texts by Balzac, the Comtesse de Ségur, and Zola through the lens of crime, Peters highlights bourgeois anxiety about ownership and objects while considering the impact of literature on popular attitudes about crime and its legislation and punishment. A detailed analysis of the role of objects, this work chronicles nineteenth-century changes in legal attitudes, popular mentalities, and individual and social identity, focusing particularly on the resulting transformations in representations of gender, class, and (criminal) subjectivity.Trade ReviewProvocative and fresh, this wide-ranging study offers a unique perspective on the anxieties and pressures of an increasingly commercial 19th-century French culture. Juxtaposing memoirs, moral codes, specialized dictionaries, and a children's novel with more conventional newspapers, literary texts, and theories, Peters (Louisiana State Univ.) explores a weary and suspicious century caught up in the throes of exchange and reinvention. Thoughtful and diverse early chapters on Balzac's Code des gens honnêtes, Vidocq's contemporaneous Mémoirs and Les voleurs, and Ségur's Les Malheurs de Sophie give way to an analysis of pocket watches—symbol of the emergence of a new social order and the upheaval of commodification—in Zola and Balzac. Final chapters on urban spaces and socioeconomic transformation detail questions of intellectual property theft and the tensions of literary kleptomania. The thoroughness and originality of the introduction alone, with its presentation of the philosophical, legal, and literary conditions of the late 18th century, truly distinguish this volume. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *Stealing Things constitutes a fine performance and will be of interest to students of crime fiction and the nineteenth century. * French Review *While cultural studies of crime in nineteenth-century France have generally focused on lurid murders, Stealing Things thoughtfully redirects our attention to theft—a crime that Peters reveals as definitive of the key social issues at stake in an age of industrialization and commodification. This book deftly weaves readings of memoirs, sociological treatises, penal codes, copyright law, and literature for adults and children into a sustained reflection on the era's shifting attitudes toward property—both material and conceptual. Ribbons, pocket watches, and poems, purloined, make their appearance (and disappearance) in this lively account. -- Andrea Goulet, University of PennsylvaniaThis new volume traces the evolving notions of property, ownership, and theft from pre-revolutionary France to the early 20th century by expertly exploring the vicissitudes and ramifications of this cultural nexus in fiction and nonfiction. Peters’ thoughtful and probing consideration takes in and even focuses on the rarely explored yet crucial areas of authorial plagiarism and, most significantly, the phenomenon of increased feminine involvement in theft by the end of the 19th century. -- Anna Gural-Migdal, University of AlbertaOriginal and insightful, this book provides a complex view of the nature of crime and the criminal in nineteenth-century French literature and society. Socio-political discourse and peculiarly literary issues interact seamlessly in a well thought-out analysis of the works of some of the century’s most central authors (Balzac and Zola first of all) within the background the birth of contemporary material culture. There is stimulating reading material here for both the specialist and the curious generalist reader. -- Vittorio Frigerio, Dalhousie University, HalifaxTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Codes for Honest People 2. Objects of Fiction, Affairs of State 3. Time Bandits: Purloining the Pocket Watch 4. Identify Theft in the Second Empire 5. Out of the Shadows, Into the Shops: Theft, Gender, and Object Relations Conclusion Bibliography Index About the Author

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Book SynopsisIn Dialogue with Godot: Waiting and Other Thoughts, Ranjan Ghosh puts together thirteen new essays on Beckett's most popular and widely read play, Waiting for Godot. Chapters are envisaged as dialogues with Godot, keeping in mind the event of waiting and other issues related to this Godot-Waiting phenomenon. The merit of this book lies in exploring this play from thirteen fresh perspectives introducing some important themes that have not been dealt previously. Contributors explore the play in reference to topics as varied as Hindu philosophy, Agamben, Kristeva, Derrida, the absence of women in the play, Aristotleanism in structural reading, and anti-existentialism. Essays ask, can we make claims to read this play outside the absurd tradition? Is it an anti-existential play? Can Beckett possibly be Indianized? How can the dialectic between waiting and delay be problematized? If Beckett was up to de-structure conventional modes of drama-writing, what connection could he possibly have witTrade ReviewGhosh has assembled 13 outstanding essays that review Beckett's most popular drama. The volume's contributors engage the play in meaningful contexts that have important implications for performance, production, and scholarship. Standout essays explore the political contexts of site-specific productions in Sarajevo and post-Katrina New Orleans; the affinities and contrasts of Godot to classical Greek tragedy; Beckett and allegory; and the psychodynamics of friendship and coupling. Beckett's attempt to redefine theater in postwar Europe is also explored, as are the ways in which Beckett's experiences in the French resistance suffuse this play and his other postwar writing. The essays contemplate the drama within a range of political and philosophical contexts, including issues of torture and human rights, Marxist and psychoanalytic thought, philosophical reflections on the eternal return, Aristotle's Poetics, poststructuralism, and Hindu philosophy. Taken together they shed contemporary light on this drama in ways that are suggestive for actors, directors, and scholars, and provide valuable insights into the criticism and practices of this most popular of Beckett's plays. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. * CHOICE *Godot’s 'Underground Ancestry,' 'Vladimir’s Tragic Recognition,' 'The Feminine' in play, motifs of 'Speculation' and 'Infantile Politics,' editor’s Ghosh’s own placing the theme of work and play within what he has called elsewhere 'the wordling of the drama'—what a rich collection of approaches to Waiting for Godot! And as someone who works in the theatre, I also find this commentary wonderfully suggestive for both actors and directors. -- Sidney Homan, University of FloridaThis varied and provocative collection of essays on Beckett's most famous play animates new and productive dialogues with an extraordinary array of thinkers. Situating the writing and performance of Godot in a range of historical contexts, the essays involve Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Hindu philosophy, Adorno, Gramsci, Brecht, Derrida, Sontag, Foucauld, Aristotle and Agamben in intertextual engagement with this profoundly though perversely allusive drama. -- Robert Gordon, Goldsmith College, University of LondonTable of ContentsIntroduction: Dialogic-Godotic Ranjan Ghosh The Politics of Identification in Waiting for Godot Graley Herren “What have I said?” Vladimir’s Tragic Recognition Mark S. Byron Alone and Together: The Psychic Structure of the Couple in Waiting for Godot Mary Catanzaro Beckett contra Aristotle: A Choral Reading of Waiting for Godot Tom Cousineau Waiting upon each other: work and play in waiting for Godot Ranjan Ghosh Rien à faire: The Para-Messianics of Delay in Godot Stephen Barker Waiting For Nothing: Commitment, Resistance, and Godot’s Underground Ancestry Paul Sheehan Scrutinizing the feminine in Waiting for Godot: Vladimir and Estragon await their couples counsellor Art Horowitz Beckett’s Lucky Chance: Speculation in Waiting for Godot Eyal Amiran Samuel Beckett’s Playland: The Profane and Infantile Politics of Waiting for Godot Maria Margaroni ‘Who is Godot?’ Beckett and Allegory Shane Weller Culture, Politics and Human Rights in Waiting for Godot Wanda Balzano Index About the Authors

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Book SynopsisThe essays in this volume provide a theorization of what we might call the denatured wild, in other words a notion of environmental restoration or reinhabitation that recognizes and reconfigures the human factor as an interdependent entity. Acknowledging the contributions of Marco Armerio, Serenella Iovino, Giovanna Ricoveri, Patrick Barron and Anna Re among others, Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild negotiates the ground within the historicizing, theoretical perspectives, and surveying spirit of these writers. Despite the central role that nature has played in Italian culture and literature, there has been an evident lack of critical approaches free of the bridles of the socio-political manipulations of nationalism. The authors in this collection, by recognizing the groundbreaking work of many non-Italian ecocritics, challenge the narrowly defined conventions of Italian Studies and illuminates the complexities of an Italian ecocriticism that rTrade ReviewThis collection of eight essays is a welcome and important addition to the growing body of ecocritical scholarship on Italian land and literature. -- Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts, BostonFrom TV series to Italo Calvino, from children literature to toxic contamination Pasquale Verdicchio has gathered an astonishing collection of essays which contributes magisterially to both Italian ecocriticism and the discipline at large. Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild is the essential companion to any exploration into the Italian material and intellectual landscape. -- Marco Armiero, Royal Institute of TechnologyIf ecocriticism is the attempt to shape new vocabularies for an age of environmental crises, this collection, masterfully conceived and edited by Pasquale Verdicchio, invites us to think Italy as a mobile reality beyond ecological clichés, whether of “Great Beauty” or irredeemable decadence. Encompassing a rich array of subjects, genres, and voices, Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Literature and Culture: The Denatured Wild tells us of a country that, in spite of its cultural ambivalences and political contradictions, teems with ecological creativity and visions of future. If there is a book with which anyone studying Italian ecocriticism should start, this is the one. -- Serenella Iovino, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Turin, ItalyTable of ContentsIntroduction. Pasquale Verdicchio Ch. 1 The Wisdom Of The Hand And The Memory Of A Mediterranean More Than Human Humanism. Massimo Lollini Ch. 2 The Hybrid “Biocitizen” In Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo Or The Seasons In The City. Adele Sanna Ch. 3 Italian Woods Between Environmentalism And Children’s Literature In Dino Buzzati’s Il Segreto Del Bosco Vecchio. Viola Ardeni Ch. 4 The Cervi Family: A Peasant Story. Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan Ch. 5 A House In Flames: Environmental Ethics In The Writing Of Sebastiano Vassalli. Meriel Tulante Ch. 6 Il Bosco Degli Urogalli. A Lieu De Mémoire. Stefania Nedderman Ch. 7 The Environmental Aesthetics Of Sabina Guzzanti’s Le Ragione Dell’aragosta. Marguerite Waller Ch. 8 Toxic Disorder And Civic Possibility: Viewing The Land Of Fires From The Phlegraean Fields. Pasquale Verdicchio

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Book SynopsisNeoliberal Rhetorics and Body Politics: Plastinate Exhibits as Infiltration uses transnational feminist rhetorical analyses to understand how the global force of neoliberalism infiltrates all parts of life from nation-state relationships to individual subject formation. Focusing on the hugely popular and profitable exhibits of preserved, dissected, and posed human bodies and body parts showcased in Body Worlds and BODIESThe Exhibitionplastinate shows offered by the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens and the US company Premier Exhibitionsthe book analyzes how these exhibits offer examples of neoliberalism's ideological reach as they also present a pop-cultural lens through which to understand the scope of that reach. By rhetorically analyzing the details of the exhibits themselves, their political and cultural contexts, their marketing literature and showcased artifacts, and their connection to historical displays of bodies, the book articulates how neoliberalism creates a grand narratTrade ReviewPauliny’s book is an excellent addition to a growing spate of rhetorical scholarship on neoliberal economics and culture. Her focus on literal bodies furthers the conversations rhetoricians are having about economics, policy, migration, and immigration by materially situating those conversations “on the body.” Throughout the book, Pauliny demonstrates how the bisecting and presentation of actual cadavers in the BODIES exhibit enacts a type of bodily literacy that adheres to dominant and normalizing discourses, and thus she shows the BODIES exhibit to be an important site for neoliberal rhetorical analysis. -- Jennifer Wingard, University of HoustonTara Pauliny's book compellingly shows readers how insidious and pervasive neoliberal logic can be, especially when there are state-sponsored values, such as constituting a "healthy" or "ideal citizen's" body, at stake. Neoliberal Rhetorics and Body Politics is a disturbing case study in how globalized capitalism exerts shame and control over both the bodies on display and those that encounter plastinate body exhibits." -- Rebecca S. Richards, St. Olaf CollegeTable of ContentsTable of Contents Acknowledgments Preface Introduction Chapter 1: Plastination and a History of Bodily Display Chapter 2: Neoliberal Necropolitics: Rhetorics of the Living Dead Chapter 3: For-Profit Pedagogies: Neoliberalism and the Plastinate Marketplace Chapter 4: Rhetorics of Affect and Intimacy: Plastinate Exhibits and the Construction of the Neoliberal Citizen-Subject Conclusion Bibliography Index About the Author

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Book SynopsisEcoambiguity, Community, and Development takes stock of cultural and environmental contexts in many different regions of the world by exploring literature and film. Artists and scholars working in the social ecology, environmental justice, and postcolonial arenas have long recognized that as soon as we tug on a thread of ecodegradation, we generally find it linked to some form of cultural oppression. The reverse is also often true. In the spirit of postcolonial ecocriticism, the studies collected by Scott Slovic, R. Swarnalatha, and Vidya Sarveswaran emphasize the impossibility of disentangling environmental and cultural problems. While not all the authors explicitly invoke Karen Thornber's term ecoambiguity or the concepts and terminology of postcolonial ecocriticism, their articles frequently bring to light various ironies. For example, the fact that Ukrainian environmental experience in the twenty-first century is defined by one of the world's most infamous industrial disasters, theTrade ReviewA new critical formation, sometimes called environmental humanities, has been successfully interrogating the assumptions about nature, history, and culture made by an earlier generation of largely European and North American writers, scholars, and activists. This collection of thoughtful and stimulating essays, arranged and introduced superbly by the editors, continues with this essential task of building a properly worldly analysis and interpretation of our current environmental crises—a task on which, quite literally, our lives might depend. -- Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Warwick UniversityThis intriguing collection is like an odyssey into the hermeneutics of “ecoambiguity.” It sheds light on the problematic entanglements of ecodegradation and social repression with vivid local examples from the Global South. The essays here explore how ecoambiguity emerges from the contested intersectional sites of environmental and social justice. They reveal the contingencies of nature-culture interactions when pressing environmental problems are materially bound up with social distress and cultural oppression. Zeroing in on a particular local narrative, each essay unravels the spectral lines that disclose ecoambiguity as a historical and political process of inadvertent collisions between people and the environment. The co-extensivity of ecological devastation with poverty, pollution, domestic colonialism, and industrial development is so well expressed that the ambivalences of eco-deterioration immediately make sense. -- Serpil Oppermann, Professor of English, Hacettepe University, and President of EASLCEThis is a dynamic, wide-ranging collection. It offers powerful testimony to the entanglement between cultural and environmental challenges. It also reminds us of the power of literature and film as imaginative resources for deepening our understanding of those challenges. The book’s geographical reach is unusual and impressive. -- Rob Nixon, Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in the Humanities and the Environment, Princeton UniversityThis innovative collection decisively outlines why environmental justice and postcolonial theories are taking hold among the ecocritics at work in China, Japan, India, Ukraine, Mexico, and Brazil, and other indigenous or first nations—such as the Mohawk. Distinguished established scholars, and important new voices in the field, many from the cultures about which they write, confront the paradoxical tendencies of selective cultural appreciation and destruction found in some of the globe’s most talked-about ‘developing’ nations. The result is a powerful and highly engaging new contribution to the field that will challenge conventional assumptions about the environmentalism(s), literatures, and films of the nations, regions, and communities under analysis. -- Joni Adamson, co-editor, American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global CommonsAn excellent and timely collection, consolidating recent advances in postcolonial ecocriticism but pushing it in new directions and applying its theories and methods to under-represented parts of an increasingly connected but unevenly developed and culturally differentiated world. The early chapters on China, Tibet, and Japan are especially useful insofar as these complex regions rarely feature in more conventional accounts of postcolonial ecocriticism; but all the essays here make significant contributions to a densely political field which, in lead author Karen Thornber’s words, ‘further ambiguates [rather than resolves] the ecological conundrums it describes.’ -- Graham Huggan, Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures, School of English, University of LeedsTable of ContentsTable of Contents Introduction Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran Chapter 1: Plundering Borderlands North and South Karen Thornber Chapter 2: Tibet, a Topos in Ecopolitics of the Global South Gang Yue Chapter 3: Red China, Green Amnesia: Locating Environmental Justice in Contemporary Chinese Literature Cheng Li and Yanjun Liu Chapter 4: Minamata and the Symbolic Discourse of the South Tsutomu Takahashi Chapter 5: Indian Environmentalism and Its Fragments Jyotirmaya Tripathy Chapter 6: From Bhopal to Biometrics: Biological Citizenship in the Age of Globalization Pamod Nayar Chapter 7: Beyond the Eco-flaneur’s Footsteps: Perambulatory Narration in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying Laura A. White Chapter 8: Reconsidering the Eco-Imperatives of Ukrainian Consciousness: An Introduction to Ukrainian Environmental Literature Inna Sukhenko Chapter 9: Kissed by Lightning and Fourth Cinema’s Natureculture Continuum Salma Monani Chapter 10: Under all the laws, natural, human, and divine: Reinterpreting La Leyenda Negra’s Colonial Purpose Dora Ramirez-Dhoore Chapter 11: Mapmaking, Rubbertapping: Cartography and Social Ecology in Euclides da Cunha’s The Amazon: Land Without History Aarti Madan Chapter 12: Down Under: New World Literatures and Ecocriticism George B. Handley Index Contributors

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Book SynopsisArchetypes of Transition in Diaspora Art and Ritual examines residually oral conventions that shape the black diaspora imaginary in the Caribbean and America. Colonial humanist violations and inverse issues of black cultural and psychological affirmation are indexed in terms of a visionary gestalt according to which inner and outer realities unify creatively in natural and metaphysical orders. Paul Griffith's central focus is hermeneutical, examining the way in which religious and secular symbols inherent in rite and word as in vodun, limbo, the spirituals, puttin' on ole massa, and dramatic and narrative structures, for example, are made basic to the liberating post-colonial struggle. This evident interpenetration of political and religious visions looks back to death-rebirth traditions through which African groups made sense of the intervention of evil into social order. Herein, moreover, the explanatory, epistemic, and therapeutic structures of art and ritual share correspondences wTrade ReviewGriffith’s book offers readers testimony of his deep intellectual immersion in Caribbean, African American, and African oral and performative art forms, with persistent meditations on the central constitutive work of the word in informing the divine order and creating the human realm. The author’s work here reminds us that the subject forms hold the power to endow matter and dailiness with the numinous and the magical, that there persists for all the ethical obligation to redeem the world from the chaos of hegemonic ideologies, to make the world comprehensible by creating a sustainable balance out of the “extreme antitheses” of matter and spirit. -- Keith Sandiford, Louisiana State UniversityPaul A. Griffith’s groundbreaking monograph Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora: Archetypes of Transition, is as richly informed by such myth theorists as Jung, Campbell, Ricoeur, and Eliade as it is by Caribbean literature and ethnography; it expands on Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics to examine its structuring principles and common symbolisms, not only as they appear in Brathwaite’s poetry, but also in texts by such diverse writers as Ralph Ellison, Derek Walcott, and Toni Morrison, chronicling the process whereby the traumas of the Middle Passage are rearticulated and reshaped into “recognizable and livable cultural spheres.” -- Michael Zeitler, Texas Southern UniversityTable of ContentsContents Acknowledgments Chapter One—Introduction: Journeys in Space and Spirit Chapter Two—The Spirituals: The Nonduality of the Sacred Chapter Three—Animate Authority of Word and Rite Chapter Four—Plots and Counterplots Chapter Five—The Quest for Divine Fullness Chapter Six—Ritual Relocation of Self Chapter Seven— Alchemy as Transformational Magic Conclusion Bibliography About the Author

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Book SynopsisIn New France and early Canada, young men who ventured into the forest to hunt and trade with Amerindians (coureurs de bois, runners of the woods), later traveling in big teams of canoes (voyageurs), were known for their independence. Often described as half-wild themselves, they linked the European and Indian societies, eventually helping to form a new culture with elements of both. From an ecocritical perspective they represent both negative and positive aspects of the human historical trajectory because, in addition to participating in the environmentally abusive fur trade, they also symbolize the way forward through intercultural connections and business relationships. The four novels analyzed hereJoseph-Charles Taché's Forestiers et voyageurs: Moeurs et légendes canadiennes (1863); Louis Hémon'sMaria Chapdelaine (1916); Léo-Paul Desrosiers' Les Engagés du Grand Portage (1938); and Antonine Maillet's Pélagie-la-Charrette (1979)portray the backwoodsmen operating in a collaborative mTrade ReviewAny good book should raise more questions in the reader’s mind than it can hope to answer. Rehill’s selection of texts, her historical and literary analyses and her thinking with and against current ecocritical work raise important questions about the value and the viability of ‘cross-cultural reflection and collaboration’ (p. 185). * Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies *This argument serves as an important illustration of the contribution that the study of literatures in languages other than English can bring to ecocriticism as a whole. Scholars of French-Canadian literature will no doubt appreciate this study for the historical and literary background of the coureur de bois, and the focus on the links between wilderness and human establishments should be of interest to ecocritical scholars of all stripes. * The French Review *Annie Rehill’s analysis of literary portrayals of coureurs de bois and voyageurs offers an environmentally motivated view that is complicated and deepened by a historical foundation​ that increases awareness of the complexities involved in the human journey on Earth. It will be of interest to scholars and students in Québec studies, Francophone studies, and ecocriticism, as well as to general readers concerned with the environment. The book could be useful in Québec literature and Francophone cultural studies at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, and it could be used for courses in literary criticism and environmental studies. -- Denis M. Provencher, University of ArizonaBackwoodsmen as Ecocritical Motif in French Canadian Literature focuses on one ​established figure​ to offer an innovative perspective ​informed by ecocritical and postcolonial theories. Inspired by​ intercultural intersections and environmental concerns, the study reinvigorates approaches such as those of Said, Serres, and Glissant, ​to reach pragmatic conclusions that ​will provid​e fertile material for discussion and debate​ in courses centered on issues of relevance to both the Francophone world and the planet as a whole. -- Cécile Accilien, Kansas UniversityTable of ContentsChapter 1: Introduction and Historical Context: Coureurs de Bois and Voyageurs Chapter 2: Theoretical Approach: Movements through Time and Place on Earth Chapter 3: Construction of and Constructions in Taché’s Forestiers et voyageurs Chapter 4: Controlling and Exploiting Wildness in Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine and Léo-Paul Desrosiers’ Les Engagés du Grand Portage Chapter 5: Coureuses and Coureurs de Bois: A People’s Becoming in Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-la-charrette Chapter 6: Conclusions: Motifs of Capitalist Expansion, Socialist Cooperation, and Intercultural Connections

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Book SynopsisWhile there are differences between cultures in different places and times, colonial representations of indigenous peoples generally suggest they are not capable of literature nor are they worthy of being represented as nations. Colonial representations of indigenous people continue on into the independence era and can still be detected in our time. The thesis of this book is that there are various ways to decolonize the representation of Amerindian peoples. Each chapter has its own decolonial thesis which it then resolves. Chapter 1 proves that there is coloniality in contemporary scholarship and argues that word choices can be improved to decolonize the way we describe the first Americans. Chapter 2 argues that literature in Latin American begins before 1492 and shows the long arc of Mayan expression, taking the Popol Wuj as a case study. Chapter 3 demonstrates how colonialist discourse is reinforced by a dualist rhetorical ploy of ignorance and arrogance in a Renaissance historical Trade ReviewWritten in the best tradition of the essay, Decolonizing Indigeneity is an informed, engaging analysis of a necessary subject that encompasses five centuries of the complex and diverse cultural histories in Latin America. -- Juan J. Daneri, East Carolina UniversityIn Decolonizing Indigeneity: New Approaches to Latin American Literature, Thomas Ward, working with deep erudition and sharp analysis, questions the paradigm we have inherited for the teaching of Latin American literature. He argues that both the canon and methods in use privilege a Eurocentric approach that not only leaves out the indigenous past and present civilizations of Mexico, Peru and Guatemala but foments the massive erasing and forgetting starting with and by the Conquest. In trenchant chapters that push to the fore Indigenous thought past and present, Ward restores indispensable representations of Indigenous cultures and inverts the standing paradigm. He outlines a new intellectual organization that pulls the rug from under the hegemonic organization of knowledge of Spanish departments as well as departments of Modern Languages. Required reading for all scholars interested in deep historical cultural formations and curricular reorganization, globalization and the future of knowledge relative to the world’s demographies. -- Sara Castro-Klaren, Johns Hopkins UniversityIn Decolonizing Indigeneity, Thomas Ward both engages with and puts into practice a compelling decolonial methodology regarding colonial and contemporary writings by and about Amerindians. Understood in terms of the colonists’ historiography, religion, and science, portrayals of indigeneity are in great need of correction. Ward’s book decolonizes such depictions of indigeneity by viewing Mayan and Andean peoples in their own terms, identifying colonizing mechanisms, and countering present-day readers’ colonized classification of knowledge that conditions their critical analysis of texts. Chapter 1 outlines three varieties of the colonial force (outright colonialism, intracolonialism, and neo-colonialism), which provides the theoretical backbone of the book. These varieties can also be understood as the successive stages of colonization in Latin America: the Spanish invasion, domination and exploitation; the internalization of colonizing mechanisms by original colonists’ descendants; and the current economic dependency on the United States and other world powers. Ward contends that the enduring effects of colonialism can be approached through an analysis of the coloniality of the mind. Intra-colonialists, neo-colonialists, and the colonized reveal their coloniality of mind by (un)consciously repeating outright colonialists’ cultural paradigms. These cultural paradigms can be observed in the ways Amerindians were and are still denied nationness and coevalness. Spanish chroniclers not only referred to diverse Amerindian ethnic communities with the nationnes-negating term “Indian” but also assigned them a time different than their own. In chapter 2, Ward’s decolonial analysis of the Popol Wuj both foregrounds its Mayan epistemology related to space and time and recounts its sociopolitical and literary meanings in many post-Independence settings. Popol Wuj views society as temporally unified and uses a numerical base and a geometric conceptualization of space. Its worldview has a binary formulation. For instance, dualities organize people into moieties, and the pairs of moieties turn into quadriccentric forms of social organization. Also, in the late twentieth century Popol Wuj served as the foundation of a sociopolitical movement by Guatemalan Mayans who embraced it in their claim for a political space and rights to live according to their native culture in Guatemala. Chapter 3 focuses on the mind-set of Agustín de Zárate, author of Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Perú (1555). Ward contends that Zárate’s psychological coloniality— grounded in a specific philosophy of his time—blocked out indigenous information and shaped a conceptual vindication of the Spanish empire. Zárate manipulated information mainly by analogy. For instance, the chronicler interpreted and explained the origin and culture of the Inkas by comparing the Tawantinsuyo with the Atlantis from Plato’s Critias. Zárate could not view the Andeans as his contemporaries; he pushed them back in time and considered them primitive people. Ward states that not only Zárate but other letrados dismissed the notion of Andean non-alphabetic historiography, such as the khipu. However, the critic’s affirmation is not completely accurate because by the mid-1550s Andean leaders were allowed to use khipus as evidence in their claims before Spanish judges. As Kathryn Burns and Carmen Loza have pointed out, Andean leaders, aided by lettered Andeans, became adept at the use of legal petitions to defend their communities’ resources. In chapter 4, Ward both foregrounds the civilization status of the Acolhua-Chichimeca nation as portrayed by Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and regards the defense of his people as colonial Indigenism. Ward’s method uses Bartolomé de las Casas’s inversion of the Sepulvedan paradigm of justifications to wage war against barbarians. Las Casas’s six traits indicative of civil life are prudence, virtuousness, learnedness, nobleness, respect for the law, and spirituality. These traits constitute a model for evaluating society in Historia de la nación chichimeca (ca. 1625). Alva’s decoloniality resides indeed in the depiction of pre- and post-contact Nahua peoples as societies who highly valued the same attributes of civilization that the Spaniards did. One civil trait analyzed in an enlightening way is spirituality, which Ward breaks down into cosmogony, sedentary religiosity, and monotheism. Like the Popol Wuj, Historia coincides with standard Mesoamerican abstractions in which the number four configures space and time. However, unlike the Popol Wuj, Historia ignores a multitude of the elements typical of Mesoamerican cosmogonic formation and creates a confusing mix of entities and periods (123). Alva’s Indigenist and pro-Catholic depiction of his Chichimeca civilization reveals his mestizo identity. Chapter 5 compares Manuel González Prada’s Indigenist essay “Nuestros indios” (1904) with Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s Indigenous expressional testimony “Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia” (1985). Both texts share a main concern regarding the subordinating mechanisms of the hacienda in their respective Andean and Mayan communities. Ward delineates the four thematic issues related to the coloniality of the hacienda criticized in both texts: (i.) the ethnic subordination of people by means of the role of the caporal, (ii.) the damaging effects of alcohol, (iii.) the status of the Spanish language in the education system, and (iv.) the continuation of acts of violence against the descendants of Amerindian peoples and their reaction to such acts. In addition to a careful evaluation of each Indigenist writer’s insightful depictions of and prescribed antidotes to the hacienda system, there is a suggestive critique of González Prada’s stance on indigenous education. Ward decolonizes the Peruvian essayist’s idealized conception of modernity as an end to be reached by a Western-style—although non-Catholic—system of education. Ward finds his posture a “culturally insensitive pedagogical position” (160). Unlike González Prada, Menchú Tum was not interested in modernity. She believed in a type of education that would not only be conducted in Amerindian languages but also have as its main goal the preservation of traditions. Decolonizing Indigeneity derives from, and further develops, the decolonial methodologies carried out especially by Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo. Its adaptation of Quijano’s theory of “coloniality of power” and its application of Mignolo’s concept of “coevalness” in the analysis of foundational texts provide an enlightening contribution to decolonial and postcolonial studies. Indeed, it allows us to resist the colonial force that has distorted our understanding and appreciation of Amerindian civilizations in all their complexity since the colonial period. This book is a required reading for students and scholars of Latin American literature. Hispania, Volume 101, Number 3, September 2018, pp. 466-468 (Review) -- Alexander M. Cárdenas, University of Colorado, BoulderTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Coloniality of Literary Practice Chapter 1: Colonial Force: Word Choices, the Denial of Nationness, and the Coloniality of Mind Chapter 2: The Popol Wuj and the Birth of Mayan Literature Chapter 3: Coloniality of mind in Zárate’s Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Perú Chapter 4: Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Civilization, and the Quest for Coevalness Chapter 5: González Prada and Menchú: Indigenism and Indigenous Expression Final Thoughts: Overcoming Coloniality in Literature and History

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Book SynopsisDrawing links between the Francophone literatures of Canada, the French Caribbean, and North Africa, Spaces of Creation demonstrates that problematic issues of dynamic, postcolonial societies can and do fuel creative acts on the part of women. The trying experiences of displaced mothers and their daughters, including isolation, domestic violence, and single parenthood, often serve to inspire introspection and creative action. In effect, their painful, frustrating existence provides the opportunitythe space of creationnecessary to weave and transmit stories. Organized around different manifestations of culturally diverse or transcultural spaces depicted in postcolonial literaturerural villages, domestic spaces, city centers, and spaces of othernessthe monograph uncovers the complexities of mothering and daughtering in contemporary Francophone contexts. Through discussion of these spaces, the book attests to a specifically feminine transculturality. This vision of diversity acknowlTrade ReviewAllison Connolly’s well crafted study is the first comprehensive exploration of literary transculturality as a potential space of resistance in Francophone Canada, the French Caribbean, and North Africa. It opens new windows and an ingenious framework to rethink and re-frame the debates in Francophone studies in the last two decades. -- Martine Antle, University of SydneySpaces of Creation unveils the many facets and challenges of mother-daughter relationships and the power of mother’s voices beyond silence and death in various Francophone regions of the world beyond colonial times and in today’s world. -- Dominique Fisher, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hillthe study provides an excellent springboard from which to reflect upon the questions raised. * Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies *

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Book SynopsisZoopoetics assumes Aristotle was right. The general origin of poetry resides, in part, in the instinct to imitate. But it is an innovative imitation. An exploration of the oeuvres of Walt Whitman, E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, and Brenda Hillman reveals the many places where an imitation of another species' poiesis (Greek, makings) contributes to breakthroughs in poetic form. However, humans are not the only imitators in the animal kingdom. Other species, too, achieve breakthroughs in their makings through an attentiveness to the ways-of-being of other animals. For this reason, mimic octopi, elephants, beluga whales, and many other species join the exploration of what zoopoetics encompasses. Zoopoetics provides further traction for people interested in the possibilities when and where species meet. Gestures are paramount to zoopoetics. Through the interplay of gestures, the human/animal/textual spheres merge making it possible to recognize how actual, biological animals impact the mateTrade ReviewThe critical study of ecopoetics demands innovative methodological approaches to reading and thinking about the relationship between poetry, form, and ecology. Moe's book models precisely this type of approach, by bringing critical animal studies to the study of poetry and poetics in a rigorous and sustained way. In this sense, Zoopoetics is an important and timely contribution to a developing field. * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *The virtuosity and knowingness of this reading does justice to persistent demands within ecocriticism for rejuvenated critical attention to the natural world. . . .Moe’s . . . wide-ranging interest in animal behavior is showcased in the interludes between chapters, brief vignettes that recount engaged encounters between humans and other animals. Ultimately, if there’s a critical imperative hidden in Zoopoetics, it’s the insistence that we allow poetry and animal bodies to overlay one another in translucent palimpsests of meaning—we can’t read poems without reading animals first. . . .[This] book will best suit those interested in the pleasures and possibilities of reading poetry. * Humanimalia *[This is a] wonderfully instructive and challenging book. . . .Moe is an erudite and adept scholar of poetry and the poetic tradition. . . .Zoopoetics ought to attract the interest of literary scholars, poets, and avid readers of poetry alike. . . .Moe’s extraordinarily exquisite attentiveness to the textual dynamics of the poetry of Whitman, Cummings, Merwin, and Hillman—and, by imaginative implication, the extra-human world, particularly the lives of animals—is exemplary and timely. * Terrain.org *Zoopoetics is an original, lucid examination of how animals shape the human art of poetry. Drawing upon the foundational work of such scholars as Paul Shepard, Donna Haraway, and David Abram, Aaron Moe uses the Derridian concept of ‘zoopoetics’ to deepen our understanding of language and our understanding of what animals mean to humans. Without other species, we might be essentially voiceless. This is a significant study of ‘animality,’ one of the central paradigms in the field of ecocriticism. -- Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental CommunicationAaron Moe’s Zoopoetics lucidly demonstrates that poetry is a shared space in which human and other animals may ‘stretch toward’ each other, a space in which many of our best poets in English attend to nonhuman poiesis. This is a timely and important contribution to ecocriticism and animal studies. -- Helena Feder, author of Ecocriticism and the Idea of CultureTable of ContentsContents Abbreviations Preface Part 1: Foundations Prelude: The Coat of a Horse 1 Zoopoetics: An Introduction Interlude: Mimic Octopi 2 Walt Whitman & the Origin of Poetry Interlude: Cats 3 “Whose poem is this?”: E. E. Cummings’ Zoopoetics Part 2: Implications Interlude: Beluga Whales 4 “learning my steps”: Zoopoetics and Mass Extinction in W. S. Merwin’s Poetry Interlude: Elephants 5 The Zoopoetics of a Multispecies Polis: Brenda Hillman’s Practical Water Postlude: Owls Bibliography Index About the Author

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Book SynopsisOccupying Memory investigates the forces of trauma and mourning as deeply rhetorical in order to account for their capacity to seize one's life. Rather than viewing memory as granting direct access to the past and being readily accessible or pliant to human will, Trevor Hoag exposes how the past is a rhetorical production and that trauma and mourning shatter delusions of sovereignty. By granting memory the posthuman power to persuade without an accompanying rhetorician, and contending the past cannot become a reality without being written, this book highlights rhetoric's indispensability while transforming its relationship to memorialization, trauma, narrative, death, mourning, haunting, and survival. Analyzing and deploying the rhetorical trope of occupatio, Occupying Memory inhabits the conceptual place of memory by reinscribing it in ways that challenge hegemonic power while holding open that same space to keep memory in question and receptive to alternative futures to come. Hoag liTrade ReviewThis book is a valuable contribution to an under-studied aspect of the rhetorical canon: 'memory.' The theorization and case studies are very useful, and scholars of rhetoric and composition, as well as those interested in trauma theory, memory, and mourning, will find this book useful to their own thinking. -- Matthew B. Morris, Texas State UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Seize the Fire 1. Memorials: The Living and the Dead 2. Trauma: Starless Night, Blinding Sun 3. Writing: Inscribing the Impossible 4. Death: Rioting Finitude 5. Mourning: The Maelstrom of Sorrow 6. Haunting: Ghosts of Memory Afterword: Into Darkness Appendix: Declaration of the Occupation of Memory Bibliography About the Author

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Book SynopsisOccupying Memory investigates the forces of trauma and mourning as deeply rhetorical in order to account for their capacity to seize one's life. Rather than viewing memory as granting direct access to the past and being readily accessible or pliant to human will, Trevor Hoag exposes how the past is a rhetorical production and that trauma and mourning shatter delusions of sovereignty. By granting memory the posthuman power to persuade without an accompanying rhetorician, and contending the past cannot become a reality without being written, this book highlights rhetoric's indispensability while transforming its relationship to memorialization, trauma, narrative, death, mourning, haunting, and survival. Analyzing and deploying the rhetorical trope of occupatio, Occupying Memory inhabits the conceptual place of memory by reinscribing it in ways that challenge hegemonic power while holding open that same space to keep memory in question and receptive to alternative Trade ReviewThis book is a valuable contribution to an under-studied aspect of the rhetorical canon: 'memory.' The theorization and case studies are very useful, and scholars of rhetoric and composition, as well as those interested in trauma theory, memory, and mourning, will find this book useful to their own thinking. -- Matthew B. Morris, Texas State UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Seize the Fire1. Memorials: The Living and the Dead2. Trauma: Starless Night, Blinding Sun3. Writing: Inscribing the Impossible4. Death: Rioting Finitude5. Mourning: The Maelstrom of Sorrow6. Haunting: Ghosts of MemoryAfterword: Into DarknessAppendix: Declaration of the Occupation of MemoryBibliographyAbout the Author

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Book SynopsisRelevance is one of the most widely used buzz words in academic and other socio-political discourses and institutions today, which constantly ask us to be relevant. To date, there is no profound scholarly conceptualization of the term, however, which is widely accepted in the humanities. Relevance and Narrative Research closes this gap by initiating a discussion which turns the vaguely defined evaluative tool relevance into an object of study. The contributors to this volume do so by firmly situating questions of relevance in the context of narrative theory. Briefly put, they ask either What can relevance' do for narrative research? or What can narrative research do for better understanding relevance?' or both. The basic assumption is that relevance is a relational term. Further assuming that most (if not all) relations which human beings encounter within their cultures are narratively constructed, the contributors to this volume suggest that reflections on narrative and narrative reseTrade ReviewBased on the premise that relevance—as a relational concept—is intrinsically embedded in narrative, this poignant, in-depth inquiry examines social, cultural, and institutional constructions of relevance using the tools of narrative theory. In a complementary meta-theoretical gesture, contributors to the volume apply, challengingly, the notion of relevance to narratology itself. A most timely and, dare I say, relevant study. -- Ondřej Pilný, Charles UniversityReflecting critically upon the established sociological and linguistic theories of relevance and at the same time overcoming their limitations, this book is a rigorous and enlightening examination of how narration and narrative procedures determine the conceptual conventions of the reader on the creation and success of the accepted notions of relevance. In addition to an extensive and lucid introduction on the current state of relevance studies by the book's editors, the volume features an outstanding selection of essays by a host of international scholars from Europe, and the United States. The scope of the volume is conceptually and thematically wide-ranging and its essays focus on a plethora of diverse and complementary texts that span from the Romantic novel to Naturalism, contemporary short fiction, and French Minimalist narratives. This book convincingly demonstrates that the dialogue and mutual interchange between narratology and the theories of relevance can be an effective tool to reinforce the transformative power of narratives and to assert the epistemological and ethical goals of humanistic studies in an age dominated by the constraints and insufficiencies of the technological discourse and worldview. -- Gonzalo Navajas, University of California, IrvineThis is an excellent collection on a timely topic, edited by two leaders in the field, and gathering an impressive number of original contributions from leading researchers. -- Edward Kanterian, University of KentTalk of relevance is ubiquitous in the humanities these days, but rarely is there a reflection on what it means to be relevant. This volume therefore answers a real need. Its interdisciplinary contributions make a compelling case for the close connection between narrative (research) and relevance (theory). -- Michael Butter, University of TübingenTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: The Dialectics of Relevance and Narrative Research Matei Chihaia and Katharina Rennhak Part 1. The Politics of Narrative Relevance Chapter 1. The (Ir)Relevance of Narratology Susan S. Lanser Chapter 2. Disciplining Relevance: On Manifest and Latent Functions of Narratives Andreas Mahler Part 2. The Logic of Narrative Relevance Chapter 3. Relevant Logics, Counterfactual Worlds, and the Understanding of Narrative Luis Galván Chapter 4. Relevance Theory and Literary Studies—and Some Thoughts on Paul Torday’s The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce Carsten Breul Chapter 5. Communication, Life, and Dangerous Things: On Relevance and Tellability in Pictures Michael Ranta Part 3. The Relativity of Relevance Chapter 6. The Relevance of Irrelevance in Mimetic Narratives: Guess What… Raphaël Baroni Chapter 7. Narrating Random Probes: The Ideal of “Slice-of-Life” Sebastian Domsch Part 4. (Ir)Relevance and Narrative Genres Chapter 8. Relevance Theory in Contemporary Narratology: Processing Meaning from Narrative Texts Sonja Klimek Chapter 9. “Less is More”: Narrative Strategies of Reduction and the Construct of (Ir)Relevance in the Works of Three French Minimalist Authors Susanne Schlünder Chapter 10. The Relevance of Narrative Theory for the Study of Short Fiction: The Case of First-Person Present-Tense Narration Elke D’hoker Index About the Editors About the Contributors

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewPraise for Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air: "A masterfully perceptive reading of this seductive play's endless wonders."—Kirkus Review “Bloom draws upon his extensive reading to place the characters and the story in context alongside the histories from which the plot was adapted…those who have read the play or seen it performed will find Bloom’s passion to be infectious. Recommended for Shakespeare enthusiasts and readers seeking a deeper understanding of one of his greatest creations.” —Library Journal “Bloom brings considerable expertise and his own unique voice to this book.”—Publishers WeeklyPraise for Falstaff: Give me Life "Famed literary critic and Yale professor Bloom showcases his favorite Shakespearian character in this poignant work... He has created a larger-than-life portrait of a character who is 'at his best a giant image of human freedom.'"—Publishers Weekly"In this first of five books about Shakespearean personalities, Bloom brings erudition and boundless enthusiasm."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review“[Bloom’s] last love letter to the shaping spirit of his imagination… An explanation and reiteration of why Falstaff matters to Bloom, and why Falstaff is one of literature’s vital forces… A pleasure to read.”—Jeanette Winterson, New York Times Book ReviewPraise for Hamlet: Poem Unlimited "To read this book is to hear a powerful call to fall in love again with Shakespeare and his plays... I can think of no more engaging and nourishing pair of literary works: a drama of towering, perhaps unmatched, genius joining an exquisite work of literary criticism by a scholar of genuine greatness." —Baltimore Sun"A deeply felt reverie on Hamlet, a latter-day example of the genial impressionist criticism practiced by Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and Oscar Wilde." —Washington Post Book World"Brilliant... Will give you a night of full joy and make you forget current events." —NewsdayPraise for Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human "Not perhaps since Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century has a critic explained to a general audience as ably as Mr. Bloom does how much Shakespeare matters to our sense of who we are." —The New York Times"Should this be the one book you read if you're going to read a book about Shakespeare? Yes." —New York Observer"Enraptured, incantatory... You could hardly ask for a more capacious, beneficent work." —The New Yorker"Should this be the one book you read if you're going to read a book about Shakespeare? Yes." —New York Observer

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Book SynopsisChristopher Schaberg is Associate Professor of English & Environment at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2011, reprinted in paperback, 2013).Trade Review...[a] well-fuelled study of air travel’s fading profile in our digitally transported age. -- Nathan Heller * The New Yorker *Schaberg, an associate professor of English and Environment at Loyola University New Orleans, waxes philosophical as he contemplates the role airports play in today’s society. His short essays and anecdotes draw on his years as an airport employee as well as other personal experiences. In his eyes, airports have gone from magical to mundane, enjoyable to tedious, joyful to grim. And yet his stories of working at them have traces of humor and fascination, revealing the type of behind-the-scenes knowledge that always feels a little bit exotic to the uninformed. * Publishers Weekly *The romance of flying has all but gone, replaced by convenience and an oddly whorish aesthetic, involving fusion food, kitsch art, massage chairs and, at every turn, screens that play with the relation between inside and outside, here and there. Is the modern airport a venue like a shopping mall or an out-of-town chicken ranch, Christopher Schaberg wonders in The End of Airports, or a wormhole between states? … [Schaberg is] a very good writer, with a delicate eye for detail. … His previous book, The Textual Life of Airports (2011), was a work of literary analysis. This one goes deeper, its tone somewhere between elegiac and apocalyptic. …. Just as Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ is easily overstated or misunderstood, so is Schaberg’s thoughtful sense of the banality of modern flight. But ‘end’ also means purpose and, as Schaberg knows, we will still spend countless hours waiting for transport. -- Brian Morton * Times Literary Supplement *The End of Airports is an energetic meditation, replete with ethnography and metaphor. The writing is not only illuminating, it’s also fun, allowing travelers the opportunity to glimpse behind the scenes at those parts of the airport—the tarmac, the break room, the luggage hold—where access is strictly forbidden. […] I can think of no better place to read it than at an airport, waiting to board, while the dramas within pages unfold around you. -- Anya Groner * Terrain *A strong and innovative book. Tracing speculative paths around and through airports and commercial flight, The End of Airports finds new ways to think about, among other things, drones, airport/aircraft seating, weather, jet bridges, viral stories about flight, tensions with new media expectations and technologies, and seatback pockets. A fascinating read for anyone interested in airports and airplanes, but also for readers of cultural studies, media studies, and creative nonfiction. * Kathleen C. Stewart, Professor of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin, USA *The golden age of air travel is over, but thanks to Schaberg the airport may become the new figure with which to think place, time, labor, leisure, organization, and communication, as well as hope, fatigue, loneliness, and desire—in other words, the most fundamental problems of life in late capitalism. In the tradition of Benjamin, Barthes, and Baudrillard, this book is theoretically incisive, intimate, pleasurable, and on time. Air travel in all of its multidimensionality, as idea and experience, but also as mood, may finally assume its rightful place in the modern psychic infrastructure. * Margret Grebowicz, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Goucher College, USA, and author of The National Park to Come *Schaberg's provocative theme implies the end of our ability to appreciate airports as bustling and forward-looking spaces....A prescient requiem for contemporary airports as abetting agents and reflectors of America’s declining cultural standards. Recommended for specialists in the fields of aviation and transportation, social and intellectual history, sociological studies, media, and libraries. * Library Journal *Christopher Schaberg’s The End of Airports is part memoir, part history, and part speculation. Schaberg’s past as a part-time airport worker intersects with his present as a frequently flying academic researcher of airport cultures, and his experience and research inform his thoughts on the future of airports in an age of drones and instant communication. […] The airport is both a terminal and a threshold, and Schaberg’s work reminds us that travel must include pauses as well as movement. -- Rebecca Mills * Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Points of Departure Part I: Work Part II Travel Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisDavid Rudrum is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Huddersfield, UK. He is the author of Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature (2013) and the editor of Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates (2006).Nicholas Stavris is a PhD student at the University of Huddersfield, UK, where he is writing a thesis on the legacy of postmodernism in contemporary fiction.Trade ReviewI'm more than happy to see the postmodern supplanted. It's time! * Linda Hutcheon, University Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Canada *Rudrum and Stavris have put together a fascinating collection of speculations, arguments, and manifestos that engage in very different ways with the question of postmodernism's demise. That this question is shown to involve asking whether there actually is or was a single cultural tendency that can be labelled "postmodernism", or whether its aftermath can be similarly labelled by a single term, is a sign of the editors' own open-minded (postmodern?) approach. * Derek Attridge, Professor of English, University of York, UK *It may well be, as the editors suggest, that postmodernism was the last time we looked coherent enough to oppose ourselves. If so, then Supplanting the Postmodern provides the dual service of recalling, as postmodernism becomes forgettable, its inescapability, while doing away with all efforts to prolong it. I have difficulty imagining serious aesthetic discussion apart from the background this book provides. * R. M. Berry, Professor of English, Florida State University, USA *A useful collection of writings, helpfully designed to make students think about contemporary cultural dynamics. * Ian Patterson, University of Cambridge, UK *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part One: The Sense of an Ending “Epilogue: The Postmodern – In Retrospect” “Gone Forever But Here To Stay: The Legacy of the Postmodern” Linda Hutcheon “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust” Ihab Hassan “Postmodernism Grown Old” Steven Connor “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond” Alan Kirby “They Might Have Been Giants” John McGowan From Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism Jeffrey Nealon Part Two: Coming to Terms with the New Remodernism Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, “The Stuckist Manifesto” Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, “Remodernism” Performatism Raoul Eshelman, “Introduction” Raoul Eshelman, “Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (American Beauty)” Hypermodernism Gilles Lipovetsky, from “Time Against Time, or The Hypermodern Society” Automodernism Robert Samuels, “Auto-modernity after Postmodernism: Autonomy and Automation in Culture, Technology, and Education” Renewalism Neil Brooks and Josh Toth, “Introduction: A Wake and Renewed?” Josh Toth, from The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary Altermodernism Nicolas Bourriaud, The Altermodern Manifesto Nicolas Bourriaud, “Altermodern” Digimodernism Alan Kirby, from Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture Metamodernism Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism” Conclusions “Note on the Supplanting of ‘Post-’” David Rudrum “The Anxieties of the Present” Nicholas Stavris Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Smokers, survivalists, teenagers, collectors. The cigarette lighter is a charged, complex, yet often entirely disposable object that moves across these various groups of people, acquiring and emitting different meanings while always supplying its primary function, that of ignition. While the lighter may seem at first a niche objectonly for old fashioned cigarette smokersin this book Jack Pendarvis explodes the lighter as something with deep history, as something with quirky episodes in cultural contexts, and as something that dances with wide ranging taboos and traditions. Pendarvis shows how the lighter tarries with the cheapest ends of consumer culture as much as it displays more profound dramas of human survival, technological advances, and aesthetics.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewI didn’t realize how much I needed this book. It brought back terrible memories of an uncle dead in Vietnam, nothing but his Zippos to imagine him by, and the beautiful boy who broke my heart, leaving me with a carpenter pencil and a tiny lighter I could hang from my keychain (though I never did; that would have been much too painful). And that’s just the start! Cigarette Lighter is worth it for the index alone, but there's so much more. Like this gem: 'Your cigarette lighter represents your soul, so you get drunk and give it away to your pal, or your pal steals it without compunction. Either way, you can’t hang onto it forever.' Ah, such is life. * Mary Miller, author of The Last Days of California *This book is a Zippo fueled by the remarkable mind of Jack Pendarvis. A blend of histories—movies and TV, war and cars—Cigarette Lighter is so good I took up smoking. * Chris Offutt, author of My Father, the Pornographer *Cleverly disguising itself as a Rabelaisian account of the cigarette lighter in our films and in our lives, this raucous object lesson takes as its real subject, the indefatigable Ted Ballard—octogenarian, curator of the former National Lighter Museum in Guthrie, Oklahoma, collector, misanthrope, raconteur, and consummate charmer—and becomes, in the end, a sly meditation on impermanence, wherein, in the words of Jack Pendarvis, the lighter finds out what the match already knows. * Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted *Table of ContentsPrologue 1. Taming Fire 2. Age of the Lighter 3. Lighter vs. Match 4. Cars 5. The Lighter in Literature and Popular Culture 6. Romance and Death: Cigarette Lighters Today Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Desert nomads tested their vision by distinguishing a pair of stars. But we have since created more disquieting ways to test the strength of the eyes.Reading the eye chart is an exercise in failure, since it only gets interesting when you cannot read any further. It is the opposite of interpretative reading, like one does with literature. When you have finished reading an eye chart, what exactly have you even read? From a Spanish cleric's Renaissance guide to testing vision, to a Dutch ophthalmologist's innovation in optical tech, to the witty subversion of the eye chart in advertising and popular culture, William Germano's Eye Chart lets people see the eye chart at last.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewGermano’s style is conversational yet also deeply informative. He manages to turn font design and typography into a fascinating history about the diagnosis of vision. * Times Higher Education *I can see people in the ocular industry finding much that's new on these pages, and as for the average reader ... they have a veritable bijou box of delights ... It's a great little read about something you wouldn't expect to find fun in the exploration of. * The Bookbag *William Germano’s Eye Chart is a surprisingly compelling and at times quite poetic examination of this now ubiquitous technological innovation … Germano begins his exploration of the eye chart with a simple question: “What can you see?” Soon, though, the reader understands that things are more complex than simply providing a concrete response to a clear question. It’s not just about identifying objects near and far. It’s also about why we see, when we see, how clearly we see, and what we understand about the things we see … If this medical innovation has ever been intimidating, or a measure of increasing failure as you slip into your final years, Germano’s Eye Chart should be a graceful reminder that the art of vision has many levels. * PopMatters *As one who has failed countless eye tests, I had no idea that my condition was metaphysical. Then I read William Germano’s comprehensive and witty history of this amazing object. There it is, at the crossroads of vision and blindness, clarity and obscurity, scientific objectivity and subjectivity. Germano shows that the humble eye chart is everywhere, a central object, image, and text in the world of visual culture. His book is a feast of learning, precision, and humor. * W. J. T. Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History, University of Chicago, USA, and author of What Do Pictures Want? *Table of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgments 1. What can you see? 2. Reading stars, reading stones 3. How to choose eyeglasses (circa 1623) 4. The persistence of memory 5. Eleven lines, nine letters 6. Reading close up 7. Looking for trouble 8. Eye terror 9. Eye poetry 10. Optical allusions 11. The bottom line Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out at doctors' offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to find love and to kill time. But where did they come from, and why have they proliferated? Evan Kindley's Questionnaire investigates the history of the form as form, from the Victorian confession album to the BuzzFeed quiz. By asking questions about the questions we ask ourselves, Kindley uncovers surprising connections between literature and science, psychology and business, and journalism and surveillance.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewA marvelous book that gathers an unexpected array of materials under the heading of the questionnaire: from IQ tests to the early days of marriage counseling, from data-mining Facebook quizzes to Scientology's rigged personality tests. Playful, smart and rich with dizzying connections, Evan Kindley’s Questionnaire is no less than a secret history of how we became a nation of oversharers. * Hua Hsu, author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016); Contributor, The New Yorker; Associate Professor of English, Vassar College, USA *Evan Kindley's crisp and fleet Questionnaire travels with extraordinary speed from the quaint and idle to the flat-out alarming, with huge implications for our digital culture now and in the future. * Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris *Be vigilant, friend, for we live in the age of the BuzzFeed Quiz. … Beneath every expression of preference is a rat’s nest of prejudices, insecurities, and empty assertions of selfhood. Fortunately, there’s Evan Kindley’s Questionnaire, one in a new crop from Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series—it offers a rich primer on humankind’s submission to inane paperwork. In the questionnaire, Kindley demonstrates, bureaucrats found a ridiculously simple solution to a long-standing problem: How do you get people to open up about themselves to total strangers? Turns out that just asking, ideally with some veneer of officialdom, is a great way to start. As Kindley writes in his introduction, ‘The decision to provide information about oneself, as irresistible as it sometimes seems, is neither a natural human instinct nor an automatic social good’; it takes a finely tuned questionnaire to coax us out of our shells, and there are dubious intentions behind just about every form. Eugenics, managerial power-plays, electoral politics, Christian matchmaking, latent fascism, female desire—you name it, some questionnaire has interrogated it. Kindley’s book provides a lucid, distressing look at the backbone of demography. -- Dan Piepenbring * The Paris Review *The story of Francis Galton begins the story of Questionnaire, Evan Kindley’s new entry into 'Object Lessons,' a series from Bloomsbury 'about the hidden lives of ordinary things.' … Kindley’s approach keeps with the spirit and method of the series, tracking the evolution of this particular thing—in this case, standardized sets of questions designed to elicit self-report, and the question of whether or not self-reported answers, no matter how well-designed, no matter how robust their sample, can ever be entirely honest or accurate—over the history of its existence. … Kindley does an admirable job of presenting that history, especially given that Object Lesson entries are, as a rule, very short. … [T]he pervasive, vaguely Orwellian character of Big Data is among is the first world’s most pronounced animating anxieties. It is a worry I share, but in reading Questionnaire, I was put in mind of another—not explicitly named, but more remarkable and more troubling: the possibility, already somewhat realized, of a world where the collection of facts is not a means to some nefarious end, but the empty end itself. -- Emmett Rensin * Bookforum *People with a paranoid streak will feel vindicated by Evan Kindley's Questionnaire, a thoughtful exploration of the subject from the Proust questionnaire through Buzzfeed quizzes. As Kindley documents, nearly everyone who puts a quiz in front of you is trying to mine something from you, often (though not always) for profit or to influence your behavior ... Kindley's final chapters on computer dating questionnaires and Buzzfeed quizzes illustrate how powerful and potentially dangerous data science has become, even when personal responses are anonymized. * Milwaukee Journal Sentinel *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Form as Form 1. Private Publicity 2. The Rise and Fall of Testing 3. Your Opinion of You 4. The Art of Asking 5. Pandora’s Checklist 6. Dating and Data 7. Quiz Mania Acknowledgments Endnotes Index

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Book SynopsisThis book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The open-access edition of this text was made possible by a Philip Leverhulme Prize from The Leverhulme Trust.Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Where does a password end and an identity begin? A person might be more than his chosen ten-character combination, but does a bank know that? Or an email provider? What's an identity theft' in the digital age if not the unauthorized use of a password? In untangling the histories, cultural contexts and philosophies of the password, Martin Paul Eve explores how what we know' became who we are', revealing how the modern notion of identity has been shaped by the password. Ranging from ancient Rome and the watchwords' of military encampments, through the three-factor authentication systems of Harry PotteTrade ReviewAn erudite and interesting amble through the history, philosophy, and psychology of passwords. * Bruce Schneier, Security Technologist and New York Times-Bestselling Author of Data and Goliath The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World *Conjuring our passwords has become a daily act of our computer-saturated existence. By no means sequestered to our digital present, Martin Paul Eve's excellent account of the password covers its long and lively history. Weaving literary references with lucid technical explanations, Eve skillfully traces the evolution of password to probe its fundamental connections to issues of human identity, trust, and ownership. * Gabriella Coleman, Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, McGill University, Canada *Table of Contents1. Introduction 2. “Who goes there?”: Military, Mortality and Passwords 3. Special Characters: Passwords in Literature and Film 4. P455w0rd5 and the Digital Era 5. Identity List of Illustrations Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a blue marble, a blue pale dot, or, as Chaucer described it, this litel spot of erthe, the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the Earth turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its vast interior an inferno of incandescent and yet solid rock and a reservoir of water vaster than the ocean, a world within the world. Viewing the Earth from space invites a dive into the abyss of scale: how can humans apprehend the distances, the temperatures, and the time scale on which planets are born, evolve, and die?Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade Review[An] alchemy of unlikely ideas ... [The authors] reflect on the geological history of the earth and humanity's understanding of it over the millennia. * Sydney Morning Herald *Earth is a magical, unusual, curious book … Cohen and Elkins-Tanton describe it as a “little book about an impossibly large subject.” This subject is made even larger by Cohen and Elkins-Tanton’s forays into discussions of beauty, creativity, and imagination (including my favorite question in the book: “Can you die from an overactive imagination?”) and how they connect to science and ultimately this planet. This makes Earth a book that is, ultimately, a testament to what can be discovered if we are brave enough to combine the unexpected. * PopMatters *Learning from this volume as a reader means … not only to participate in a conversation between specialists from two disciplines, but also to do so across different modes of expression, and experimenting together with the two authors in an innovative and completely unique creative space. Different readers (and reviewers) will learn different things from this handsome (it just about fits in an adult’s hand) and beautifully designed volume … What surprised me was how ‘realistic’ the object lesson became for me as a scholar because of the multiple narrative modes and tones in which it is written. The fragmentary mix of subjective impressions and scientific factoids all of us sedulously collect before we force them into linear narratives are all discernible as patterns in a rich and open ended fabric. * Medievally Speaking *Earth is ambitious, thought-provoking and inspirational, conversationally written between two dissimilar but very complementary viewpoints. In this great age of exoplanetary discovery, it makes me wonder how unique our wonderful home planet really is. * Scott Parazynski, MD, University Explorer and Professor at Arizona State University, USA, and NASA Astronaut (retired) *As much as the mindsets of a distinguished planetary scientist and a medieval studies professor differ, it is what they share in common when thinking about that object so dear to all of us, the Earth, that is so fascinating. What this delightful and informative book ultimately demonstrates is that the humanity of science itself offers untold fuel for the humanities to ponder our existence. The Object of this book, the Earth, is at once more interesting and better off because both of these scholars chose to write about it. * Lawrence M. Krauss, theoretical physicist and author of A Universe from Nothing and The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far *Gorgeous … The book’s words and images can’t quite banish scale’s disorienting shifts, but interweaving planet-sized ideas with human words and emotions opens doors … I’m struck not so much by the disparity of [the authors’] fields as their shared curiosity and commitment to generative and generous thinking. * The Bookfish *Table of Contents1. Prologue: Genesis 2. Orbit 3. Ground (Why Earth?) 4. Scale (Barriers to Understanding) 5. Radiance (Earth's beauty) 6. Gravity (Earth's Pull) 7. Interlude: A Hike Around Piestewa Peak 8. Imagination List of Illustrations Notes Index

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