Search results for ""The University of Chicago Press""

How old are you? The more thought you bring to bear on the question, the harder it is to answer. For we age simultaneously in different ways: biologically, psychologically, socially. This book ranges across cultures and history, tracing the ways that the spirits of youth and age have inflected each other from antiquity to the present.

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George Herbert Mead is a foundational figure in sociology, best known for his book Mind, Self, and Society, which was put together after his death from course notes taken by stenographers and students and from unpublished manuscripts. Mead, however, never taught a course primarily housed in a sociology department, and he wrote about a wide variety of topics far outside of the concerns for which he is predominantly remembered-including experimental and comparative psychology, the history of science, and relativity theory. In short, he is known in a discipline in which he did not teach for a book he did not write. In Becoming Mead, Daniel R. Huebner traces the ways in which knowledge has been produced by and about the famed American philosopher. Instead of treating Mead's problematic reputation as a separate topic of study from his intellectual biography, Huebner considers both biography and reputation as social processes of knowledge production. He uses Mead as a case study and provides fresh new answers to critical questions in the social sciences, such as how authors come to be considered canonical in particular disciplines, how academics understand and use others' works in their research, and how claims to authority and knowledge are made in scholarship. Becoming Mead provides a novel take on the history of sociology, placing it in critical dialogue with cultural sociology and the sociology of knowledge and intellectuals.

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For decades now, the story of art in America has been dominated by New York. It gets the majority of attention, the stories of its schools and movements and masterpieces the stuff of pop culture legend. Chicago, on the other hand . . . well, people here just get on with the work of making art. Now that art is getting its due. Art in Chicago is a magisterial account of the long history of Chicago art, from the rupture of the Great Fire in 1871 to the present, Manierre Dawson, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Ivan Albright to Chris Ware, Anne Wilson, and Theaster Gates. The first single-volume history of art and artists in Chicago, the book-in recognition of the complexity of the story it tells-doesn't follow a single continuous trajectory. Rather, it presents an overlapping sequence of interrelated narratives that together tell a full and nuanced, yet wholly accessible history of visual art in the city. From the temptingly blank canvas left by the Fire, we loop back to the 1830s and on up through the 1860s, tracing the beginnings of the city's institutional and professional art world and community. From there, we travel in chronological order through the decades to the present. Familiar developments-such as the founding of the Art Institute, the Armory Show, and the arrival of the Bauhaus-are given a fresh look, while less well-known aspects of the story, like the contributions of African American artists dating back to the 1860s or the long history of activist art, finally get suitable rcognition. The six chapters, each written by an expert in the period, brilliantly mix narrative and image, weaving in oral histories from artists and critics reflecting on their work in the city, and setting new movements and key works in historical context. The final chapter, comprised of interviews and conversations with contemporary artists, brings the story up to the present, offering a look at the vibrant art being created in the city now and addressing ongoing debates about what it means to identify as-or resist identifying as-a Chicago artist today. The result is an unprecedentedly inclusive and rich tapestry, one that reveals Chicago art in all its variety and vigor-and one that will surprise and enlighten even the most dedicated fan of the city's artistic heritage. Part of the Terra Foundation for American Art's year-long Art Design Chicago initiative, which will bring major arts events to venues throughout Chicago in 2018, Art in Chicago is a landmark publication, a book that will be the standard account of Chicago art for decades to come. No art fan-regardless of their city-will want to miss it.

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When we think about young people dealing drugs, we tend to picture it happening on urban streets, in disadvantaged, crime-ridden neighborhoods. But drugs are used everywhere - even in upscale suburbs and top-tier high schools - and teenage users in the suburbs tend to buy drugs from their peers, dealers who have their own culture and code, distinct from their urban counterparts. In Code of the Suburb, Scott Jacques and Richard Wright offer a fascinating ethnography of the culture of suburban drug dealers. Drawing on fieldwork among teens in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, they carefully parse the complicated code that governs relationships among buyers, sellers, police, and other suburbanites. That code differs from the one followed by urban drug dealers in one crucial respect: whereas urban drug dealers see violent vengeance as crucial to status and security, the opposite is true for their suburban counterparts. As Jacques and Wright show, suburban drug dealers accord status to deliberate avoidance of conflict, which helps keep their drug markets more peaceful - and, consequently, less likely to be noticed by law enforcement. Offering new insight into both the little-studied area of suburban drug dealing, and, by extension, the more familiar urban variety, Code of the Suburb will be of interest to scholars and policy makers alike.

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Fresh empirical evidence of pornography's negative effects and the resurgence of feminist and conservative critiques have caused local, state, and federal officials to reassess the pornography issue. In The New Politics of Pornography, Donald Alexander Downs explores the contemporary antipornography movement and addresses difficult questions about the limits of free speech. Drawing on official transcripts and extensive interviews, Downs recreates and analyzes landmark cases in Minneapolis and Indianapolis. He argues persuasively that both conservative and liberal camps are often characterized by extreme intolerance which hampers open policy debate and may ultimately threaten our modern doctrine of free speech. Downs concludes with a balanced and nuanced discussion of what First Amendment protections pornography should be afforded. This provocative and interdisciplinary work will interest students of political science, women's studies, civil liberties, and constitutional law.

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The 18th-century comic novelist Tobias Smollett has often been criticized for the extreme physicality of his writing, which is full of scatological images and graphic depictions of bodily injury and disintegration. The author draws on feminist and other theoretical perspectives to reassess Smollett's body of fiction as well as his classic "Travels through France and Italy". Like many writers of his time, Douglas argues, Smollett was interested in the body and in how accurately it reflects internal disposition. But Smollett's special contribution to the 18th-century novel is his emphasis on sentience, or the sensations of the physical body. Looking at such works as "The Adventures of Roderick Random", "The Expedition of Humphry Clinker", "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle", and "The History and Adventures of an Atom", Douglas explores the ways Smollett uses representations of sentience - especially torment and pain - in his critique of the social and political order. Trained in medicine, Smollett was especially alert to the ways in which the discourses of medicine, philosophy, and law construct the body as an object of knowledge, and yet his work always returns to the importance of the physical world of the body and its feelings.

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In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials - to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism - have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In "Memorial Mania", Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express - and claim - those issues in visibly public contexts. Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites, Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration. Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of representation, Memorial Mania is a testament to the fevered pitch of public feelings in America today.

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All the selections in Richard M. Dorson's Folktales Told around the World were recorded by expert collectors, and the majority of them are published here for the first time. The tales presented are told in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North and South America, and Oceania. Unlike other collections derived in large part from literary texts, this volume meets the criteria of professional folklorists in assembling only authentic examples of folktales as they were orally told. Background information, notes on the narrators, and scholarly commentaries are provided to establish the folkloric character of the tales.

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"This introduction to the study of folklore and folklife contains an inspiring and spirited mixture of essays, theoretical contributions, practical instructions, and pure encyclopedia articles. It is a very well put together book, written by eighteen researchers who have something to say. One can see here that it is competent educators who have come forward and are narrating. . . . All in all it is a very use-oriented handbook with attractive typography and layout."—Iorn Pio, Journal of American Folklore

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In essays that survey the burgeoning field of tropical herpetology, former students and associates pay tribute to Jay Savage's four decades of mentoring. The result is a book unlike any other available in tropical herpetology. Covering a wide array of subjects, this is the first book in more than two decades to broadly review research on tropical amphibians and reptiles. A tribute to Savage and an invaluable addition to herpetological literature, it will be cited for years to come.

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Providing an accessible introduction to the people who lived along the Nile for almost 35 centuries, this collection of essays presents studies of ancient Egyptians arranged by social type - slaves, craftsmen, priests, bureaucrats, pharaohs, peasants and women. From the text the reader learns, for example, that Egyptian peasants could not afford burial (their corpses were abandoned on the desert fringe), and that it wwas the bureaucrats who made the Egyptian system work (the pyramids could not have been built without them). The portraits of individuals merge to create a larger picture of Egyptian culture, state and society. The framework of the Egyptian state, in particular, is touched upon in each essay, describing the meticulous administration and well-organized hierarchical system which fostered centuries of stability and prosperity.

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A cruise along the streets of Chennai - or Silicon Valley - filled with professional young Indian men and women, reveals the new face of India. In the twenty-first century, Indians have acquired a new kind of global visibility, one of rapid economic advancement and, in the information technology industry, spectacular prowess. In this book, C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan examine one particularly striking group who have taken part in this development: Tamil Brahmans - a formerly traditional, rural, high-caste elite who have transformed themselves into a new middle-class caste in India, the United States, and elsewhere. Fuller and Narasimhan offer one of the most comprehensive looks at Tamil Brahmans around the world to date. They examine Brahman migration from rural to urban areas, more recent transnational migration, and how the Brahman way of life has translated to both Indian cities and American suburbs. They look at modern education and the new employment opportunities afforded by engineering and IT. They examine how Sanskritic Hinduism and traditional music and dance have shaped Tamil Brahmans' particular middle-class sensibilities and how middle-class status is related to the changing position of women. Above all, they explore the complex relationship between class and caste systems and the ways in which hierarchy has persisted in modernized India.

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Mozambique has been hailed as a success story by the international community, which has watched it evolve through a series of violent political upheavals: from colonialism, through socialism, to its current democracy. As Juan Obarrio shows, however, this view neglects a crucial element in Mozambique's transition to the rule of law: the reestablishment of traditional chief-tanship and customs entangled within a history of colonial violence and civil war. Drawing on extensive historical records and ethnographic fieldwork, he examines the role of customary law in Mozambique to ask a larger question: what is the place of law in the neoliberal era, in which the juridical and the economic are deeply intertwined in an ongoing state of structural adjustment? Having made the transition from a people's republic to democratic rule in the 1990s, Mozambique offers a fascinating case of postwar reconstruction, economic opening, and transitional justice, one in which the customary has played a central role. Obarrio shows how its sovereignty has met countless ambiguities within the entanglements of local community, nation-state, and international structures. Ultimately, he looks toward local rituals and relations as producing an emergent kind of citizenship in Africa, which he dubs "customary citizenship," forming not a vestige of the past but a yet ill-defined political future.

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Arising out of a devotional and enthusiastic religious movement that swept across most of northern and eastern India in the period from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the powerful and moving lyrics collected and elegantly translated here depict the love of Radha for the god Krishna—a love whose intensity and range of emotions trace the course of all true love between man and woman and between man and God. Intermingling physical and metaphysical imagery, the spiritual yearning for the divine is articulated in the passionate language of intense sensual desire for an irresistible but ultimately unpossessable lover, thus touching a resonant chord in our humanity.

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A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas that are a support for the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created the city. In City Water, City Life, celebrated historian Carl Smith explores this concept through an insightful examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s. By examining the place of water in the nineteenth-century consciousness, Smith illuminates how city dwellers perceived themselves during the great age of American urbanization. But City Water, City Life is more than a history of urbanization. It is also a refreshing meditation on water as a necessity, as a resource for commerce and industry, and as an essential-and central-part of how we define our civilization.

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In this rugged account of a rugged profession, Matthew Desmond explores the heart and soul of the wildland firefighter. Having joined a firecrew in northern Arizona as a young man, Desmond relates his experiences with intimate knowledge and native ease, adroitly balancing emotion with analysis and action with insight. "On the Fireline" shows that these firefighters aren't adrenaline junkies or romantic heroes, as they're so often portrayed. An immersion into a dangerous world, "On the Fireline" is also a sophisticated analysis of a high-risk profession - and a captivating read.

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Ridiculed for her Saturday salon, her long romance novels, and her protofeminist ideas, Madeleine de Scudery (1607-1701) has not been treated kindly by the literary establishment. Yet her multivolume novels were popular best-sellers in her time, translated almost immediately into English, German, Italian, Spanish and even Arabic. "The Story of Sapho" makes available for the first time in modern English a self-contained section from Scudery's novel "Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus", best known today as the favoured reading material of the would-be "salonnieres" that Moliere satirized in "Les precieuses ridicules". The "Story" tells of Sapho, a woman writer modeled on the Greek Sappho, who deems marriage slavery. Interspersed in the love story of Sapho and Phaon are a series of conversations, like those that took place in Scudery's own salon, in which Sapho and her circle discuss the nature of love, the education of women, writing and right conduct. This edition also includes a translation of an oration, or "harangue" of Scudery's in which Sapho extols the talents and abilities of women in order to persuade them to write.

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This edition brings Dewey's educational theory into sharp focus, framing his two classic works by frank assessments, past and present, of the practical applications of Dewey's ideas. In addition to a substantial introduction in which Philip W. Jackson explains why more of Dewey's ideas haven't been put into practice, this edition restores a "lost" chapter, dropped from the book by Dewey in 1915.

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In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of the veritable army of homeless men that swept across America after the Civil War and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.

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Ana de San Bartolome (1549-1626), a contemporary and close associate of St. Teresa of Avila, typifies the curious blend of religious activism and spiritual forcefulness that characterized the first generation of Discalced, or reformed Carmelites. Known for their austerity and ethics, their convents quickly spread throughout Spain and, under Ana's guidance, also to France and the Low Countries. Constantly embroiled in disputes with her male superiors, Ana quickly became the most vocal and visible of these mystical women and the most fearless of the guardians of the Carmelite Constitution, especially after Teresa's death.Her autobiography, clearly inseparable from her religious vocation, expresses the tensions and conflicts that often accompanied the lives of women whose relationship to the divine endowed them with an authority at odds with the temporary powers of church and state. Translated into English for the first time since 1916, Ana's writings give modern readers fascinating insights into the nature of monastic life during the highly charged religious and political climate of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Spain.

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With US soldiers stationed around the world and engaged in multiple conflicts, Americans will be forced for the foreseeable future to come to terms with those permanently disabled in battle. At the moment, we accept rehabilitation as the proper social and cultural response to the wounded, swiftly returning injured combatants to their civilian lives. But this was not always the case, as Beth Linker reveals in War's Waste. Linker explains how, before entering World War I, the United States sought a way to avoid the enormous cost of providing injured soldiers with pensions, which it had done since the Revolutionary War. Emboldened by their faith in the new social and medical sciences, reformers pushed rehabilitation as a means to "rebuild" disabled soldiers, relieving the nation of a monetary burden and easing the decision to enter the Great War. Linker's narrative moves from the professional development of orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists to the curative workshops, or hospital spaces where disabled soldiers learned how to repair automobiles as well as their own artificial limbs. The story culminates in the postwar establishment of the Veterans Administration, one of the greatest legacies to come out of the First World War.

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Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus is a gripping account of the developmental dynamics involved in the collapse of Soviet socialism. Fusing a narrative of human agency to his critical discussion of structural forces, Georgi M. Derluguian reconstructs from first-hand accounts the life story of Musa Shanib - who from a small town in the Caucasus grew to be a prominent leader in the Chechen revolution. In his examination of Shanib and his keen interest in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Derluguian discerns how and why this dissident intellectual became a nationalist warlord. Exploring globalization, democratization, ethnic identity, and international terrorism, Derluguian contextualizes Shanib's personal trajectory from de-Stalinization through the nationalist rebellions of the 1990s to the recent rise in Islamic militancy. He masterfully reveals not only how external economic and political forces affect the former Soviet republics but also how those forces are in turn shaped by the individuals, institutions, ethnicities, and social networks that make up those societies. Drawing on the work of Charles Tilly, Immanuel Wallerstein, and, of course, Bourdieu, Derluguian's explanation of the recent ethnic wars and terrorist acts in Russia succeeds in illuminating the role of human agency in shaping history.

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From our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. In The Music between Us, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins investigates this role, examining the features of human perception that enable music's uncanny ability to provoke, despite its myriad forms across continents and throughout centuries, the sense of a shared human experience. Drawing on disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, musicology, linguistics, and anthropology, Higgins' richly researched study showcases the ways music is used in rituals, education, work, healing, and as a source of security and - perhaps most importantly - joy. By participating so integrally in such meaningful facets of society, Higgins argues, music situates itself as one of the most fundamental bridges between people, a truly cross-cultural form of communication that can create solidarity across political divides. Moving beyond the well-worn takes on music's universality, The Music between Us provides a new understanding of what it means to be musical and, in turn, human.

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With thorough documentation of the oppression of homosexuals and biographical sketches of the lesbian and gay heroes who helped the contemporary gay culture to emerge, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities supplies the definitive analysis of the homophile movement in the U.S. from 1940 to 1970. John D'Emilio's new preface and afterword examine the conditions that shaped the book and the growth of gay and lesbian historical literature. "How many students of American political culture know that during the McCarthy era more people lost their jobs for being alleged homosexuals than for being Communists? ...These facts are part of the heretofore obscure history of homosexuality in America--a history that John D'Emilio thoroughly documents in this important book."--George DeStefano, Nation "John D'Emilio provides homosexual political struggles with something that every movement requires--a sympathetic history rendered in a dispassionate voice."--New York Times Book Review "A milestone in the history of the American gay movement."--Rudy Kikel, Boston Globe

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Middle- and upper-middle-class students continue to outpace those from less privileged backgrounds. Most attempts to redress this inequality focus on the issue of access to financial resources, but, as "Producing Success" makes clear, the problem goes beyond mere economics. In this eye-opening study, Peter Demerath examines a typical suburban American high school to explain how some students get ahead. Demerath undertook four years of research at a midwestern high school to examine the mercilessly competitive culture that drives students to advance. "Producing Success" reveals the many ways the community's ideology of achievement plays out: students hone their work ethic and employ various strategies to succeed, from negotiating with teachers to cheating; parents relentlessly push their children while manipulating school policies to help them get ahead; and, administrators aid high performers in myriad ways, even naming over forty students 'valedictorians'. Yet, as Demerath shows, this unswerving commitment to individual advancement takes its toll, leading to student stress and fatigue, incivility and vandalism, and the alienation of the less successful. Insightful and candid, "Producing Success" is an often troubling account of the educationally and morally questionable results of the American culture of success.

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Middle- and upper-middle-class students continue to outpace those from less privileged backgrounds. Most attempts to redress this inequality focus on the issue of access to financial resources, but, as "Producing Success" makes clear, the problem goes beyond mere economics. In this eye-opening study, Peter Demerath examines a typical suburban American high school to explain how some students get ahead. Demerath undertook four years of research at a midwestern high school to examine the mercilessly competitive culture that drives students to advance. "Producing Success" reveals the many ways the community's ideology of achievement plays out: students hone their work ethic and employ various strategies to succeed, from negotiating with teachers to cheating; parents relentlessly push their children while manipulating school policies to help them get ahead; and, administrators aid high performers in myriad ways, even naming over forty students 'valedictorians'. Yet, as Demerath shows, this unswerving commitment to individual advancement takes its toll, leading to student stress and fatigue, incivility and vandalism, and the alienation of the less successful. Insightful and candid, "Producing Success" is an often troubling account of the educationally and morally questionable results of the American culture of success.

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The alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Mesopotamia are widely known as the "cradle of civilization," owing to the scale of the processes of urbanization that took place in the area by the second half of the fourth millennium BCE. In Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, Guillermo Algaze draws on the work of modern economic geographers to explore how the unique river-based ecology and geography of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvium affected the development of urban civilization in southern Mesopotamia. He argues that these natural conditions granted southern polities significant competitive advantages over their landlocked rivals elsewhere in Southwest Asia, most importantly the ability to easily transport commodities. In due course, this resulted in increased trade and economic activity and higher population densities in the south than were possible elsewhere. As southern polities grew in scale and complexity throughout the fourth millennium, revolutionary new forms of labor organization and record keeping were created, and it is these socially created innovations, Algaze argues, that ultimately account for why fully developed city-states emerged earlier in southern Mesopotamia than elsewhere in Southwest Asia or the world.

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Late-20th-century critical and historical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. These popular terms include categories such as homo/hetero, patriarchal/feminist, and masculine/effeminate. This collection exploits this framework - while refining and resisting it in places - to show how certain Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge in the late 1990s. One essay, for example, traces the remarkable feminist appropriation of male-identified fields of study, such as classical philology. Others address the validation of male bodies as objects of desire in writing, painting, and emergent modernist choreography. The writings shed light on the diverse interests served by a range of cultural practitioners and on the complex ways in which the late Victorians invented themselves as modern subjects.

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Garcilaso de la Vega (ca. 1501-36), a Castilian nobleman and soldier at the court of Charles V, lived a short but glamorous life. As the first poet to make the Italian Renaissance lyric style at home in Spanish, he is credited with beginning the golden age of Spanish poetry. Known for his sonnets and pastorals, gracefully depicting beauty and love while soberly accepting their passing, he is shown here also as a calm student of love's psychology and a critic of the savagery of war. This bilingual volume is the first in nearly two hundred years to fully represent Garcilaso for an Anglophone readership. In facing-page translations that capture the music and skill of Garcilaso's verse, John-Dent Young presents the sonnets, songs, elegies, and eclogues that came to influence generations of poets, including San Juan de la Cruz, Luis de Leon, Cervantes, and Gongora. "The Selected Poems of Garcilaso de la Vega" will help to explain to the English-speaking public this poet's preeminence in the pantheon of Spanish letters.

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First published in German in 1804, under the nom de plume "Bonaventura," The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is a dark, twisted, and comic novel, one part Poe and one part Beckett. The narrator and anti-hero is not Bonaventura, but a night watchman named Kreuzgang, a failed poet, actor, and puppeteer who claims to be the spawn of the devil himself. As a night watchman, Kreuzgang takes voyeuristic pleasure in spying on the follies of his fellow citizens, and every night he makes his rounds and stops to peer into a window or door, where he observes framed scenes of murder, despair, theft, romance, and other private activities. In his responses, Kreuzgang is cynical, pessimistic, yet not without humor. For him, life is a grotesque, macabre, and base joke played by a mechanical and heartless force. Since its publication, fans have speculated on the novel's authorship, and it is now believed to be by theater director August Klingemann, who first staged Goethe's Faust. Organized into sixteen separate night watches, the sordid scenes glimpsed through parted curtains, framed by door chinks, and lit by candles and shadows anticipate the cinematic. A cross between the gothic and romantic, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is brilliant in its perverse intensity, presenting an inventory of human despair and disgust through the eyes of a bitter, sardonic watcher who draws laughter from tragedy. Translated with a fresh introduction by Gerald Gillespie, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura will be welcomed by a new generation of English-language fans, eager to sample the night's dark offerings.

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The concept of obscenity is an ancient one. But as Joan DeJean suggests, its modern form, the same version that today's politicians decry and savvy artists exploit, was invented in seventeenth-century France. The Reinvention of Obscenity casts a fresh light on the mythical link between sexual impropriety and things French. Exploring the complicity between censorship, print culture, and obscenity, DeJean argues that mass market printing and the first modern censorial machinery came into being at the very moment that obscenity was being reinvented - that is, transformed from a minor literary phenomenon into a threat to society. DeJean's principal case in this study is the career of Moliere, who cannily exploited the new link between indecency and female genitalia to found his career as a print author; the enormous scandal which followed his play L'ecole des femmes made him the first modern writer to have his sex life disected in the press. Keenly alert to parallels with the currency of obscenity in contemporary America, The Reinvention of Obscenity will concern not only scholars of French history, but anyone interested in the intertwined histories of sex, publishing, and censorship.

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Considering Sappho as a creature of translation and interpretation, a figment whose features have changed with social mores and aesthetics, Joan DeJean constructs a fascinating history of the sexual politics of literary reception. The association of Sappho with female homosexuality has made her a particularly compelling and yet problematic subject of literary speculation; and in the responses of different cultures to the challenge the poet presents, DeJean finds evidence of the standards imposed on female sexuality through the ages. She focuses largely though not exclusively on the French tradition, where the Sapphic presence is especially pervasive. Tracing re-creations of Sappho through translation and fiction from the mid-sixteenth century to the period just prior to World War II, DeJean shows how these renderings reflect the fantasies and anxieties of each writer as well as the mentalité of his or her day.

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Nestled between Santa Monica and Marina del Rey, Venice is a Los Angeles community filled with apparent contradictions. There, people of various races and classes live side by side, a population of astounding diversity bound together by geographic proximity. From street to street, and from block to block, million-dollar homes stand near housing projects and homeless encampments; and upscale boutiques are just a short walk from the infamous Venice Beach, where artists and carnival performers practice their crafts opposite cafes and ragtag tourist shops. In "Venice: A Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles", Andrew Deener invites the reader on an ethnographic tour of this legendary California beach community and the people who live there. In writing this book, the ethnographer became an insider; Deener lived as a resident of Venice for close to six years. Here, he brings a scholarly eye to bear on the effects of gentrification, homelessness, segregation, and immigration on this community. Through stories from five different parts of Venice-Oakwood, Rose Avenue, the Boardwalk, the Canals, and Abbot Kinney Boulevard-Deener identifies why Venice maintained its diversity for so long and the social and political factors that now threaten it. Drenched in the details of Venice's transformation, the themes and explanations in this book will resonate far beyond this one city. Deener reveals that Venice is not a single locale, but a collection of neighborhoods, each with its own identity and conflicts-and he provides a cultural map infinitely more useful than one that merely shows streets and intersections. Deener's Venice appears on these pages fully fleshed out and populated with a stunning array of people. Though the character of any neighborhood is transient, Deener's work is indelible, and this book will be studied for years to come by scholars across the social sciences.

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Why has homosexuality always fascinated and vexed psychoanalysis? This groundbreaking collection of original essays reconsiders the troubled relationship between same-sex desire and psychoanalysis, assessing homosexuality's status in psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as the value of psychoanalytic ideas for queer theory. The contributors, each distinguished clinicians and specialists, reexamine works by Freud, Klein, Reich, Lacan, Laplanche, and their feminist and queer revisionists. Sharing a commitment to conscious and unconscious forms of homosexual desire, they offer new perspectives on pleasure, perversion, fetishism, disgust, psychosis, homophobia, AIDS, otherness, and love. Including two previously untranslated essays by Michel Foucault, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis will interest cultural theorists, psychoanalysts, and anyone concerned with the fate of sexuality in our time.Contributors:Lauren BerlantLeo BersaniDaniel L. BuccinoArnold I. DavidsonTim DeanJonathan DollimoreBrad EppsMichel FoucaultLynda HartJason B. JonesChristopher LaneH. N. LukesCatherine MillotElizabeth A. PovinelliEllie RaglandPaul RobinsonJudith RoofJoanna RyanRamón E. Soto-CrespoSuzanne Yang

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Combining psychoanalytic emphasis on the unconscious with a respect for the historical variability of sexual identities, this work of queer theory makes the case for vewing erotic desire as fundamentally impersonal. Dean develops a reading of Jacques Lacan that - rather than straightening out this notoriously difficult French psychoanalyst - brings out the queer tensions and productive incoherencies in his account of desire. Dean shows that Lacanian unconscious "deheterosexualizes" desire, and along the way he reveals how psychoanalytic thinkers as well as queer theorists have failed to exploit the full potential of this conception of desire. The book elaborates this by investigating social fantasies about homosexuality and AIDS, including gay men's own fantasies about sex and promiscuity, in an attempt to illuminate the challenges facing safe-sex education.

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One-third of America's adult population has passed through the criminal justice system and now has a criminal record. Many more have never been convicted, but are still subject to surveillance by the state. Never before has the government maintained so vast a network of institutions dedicated solely to the control and confinement of its citizens. A provocative assessment of the contemporary carceral state, Arresting Citizenship argues that the broad reach of the criminal justice system has recast the relation between citizen and state, resulting in a sizable - and growing-group of second-class citizens. From police stops to court cases and incarceration, at each stage of the criminal justice system, disempowered individuals belonging to this group experience a state-within-a-state that reflects few of the country's core democratic values. The authors show how this contact with police, courts, and prisons decreases faith in the capacity of American political institutions to respond to citizens' concerns and diminishes the sense of equal citizenship-even for those not found guilty of any crime. They go on to offer concrete proposals for reforms to reincorporate this large group of citizens as active participants in American political life.

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Being human while trying to scientifically study human nature confronts us with our most vexing problem. Efforts to explicate the human mind are thwarted by our cultural biases and entrenched infirmities; our first-person experiences as practical agents convince us that we have capacities beyond the reach of scientific explanation. What we need to move forward in our understanding of human agency, Paul Sheldon Davies argues, is a reform in the way we study ourselves and a long overdue break with traditional humanist thinking. Davies locates a model for change in the rhetorical strategies employed by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. Darwin worked hard to anticipate and diminish the anxieties and biases that his radically historical view of life was bound to provoke. Likewise, Davies draws from the history of science and contemporary psychology and neuroscience to build a framework for the study of human agency that identifies and diminishes outdated and limiting biases. The result is a heady, philosophically wide-ranging argument in favor of recognizing that humans are, like everything else, subjects of the natural world - an acknowledgement that may free us to see the world the way it actually is.

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Like big black umbrellas, they rain down on the fields across the way, and then disappear behind the black line of the hedges. Silent parachutes dotting the night sky - that's how one woman in Normandy in June of 1944 learned that the D-Day invasion was under way. Though they yearned for liberation, the French in Normandy nonetheless had to steel themselves for war, knowing that their homes and land and fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of the attack. Already battered by years of Nazi occupation, they knew they had one more trial to undergo even as freedom beckoned. With D-Day through French Eyes, Mary Louise Roberts turns the usual stories of D-Day around, taking readers across the Channel to view the invasion anew. Roberts builds her history from an impressive range of gripping first-person accounts of the invasion as seen by French citizens throughout the region. A farm family notices that cabbage is missing from their garden - then discovers that the guilty culprits are American paratroopers hiding in the cowshed. Fishermen rescue pilots from the wreck of their B-17, only to struggle to find clothes big enough to disguise them as civilians. A young man learns how to estimate the altitude of bombers and to determine whether a bomb was whistling overhead or silently headed straight for them. In small towns across Normandy, civilians hid wounded paratroopers, often at the risk of their own lives. When the allied infantry arrived, they guided soldiers to hidden paths and little-known bridges, giving them crucial advantages over the German occupiers. Through story after story, Roberts builds up an unprecedented picture of the face of battle as seen by grateful, if worried, civilians. As she did in her acclaimed account of GIs in postwar France, What Soldiers Do, Roberts here reinvigorates and reinvents a story we thought we knew. The result is a fresh perspective on the heroism, sacrifice, and achievement of D-Day.

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For thousands of years, people have used nature to justify their political, moral, and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today, as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify.The Moral Authority of Nature offers a wide-ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good, beautiful, just, or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics, including the connection of cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece, medieval notions of sexual disorder, early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature," race and the origin of humans, ecological economics, and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place, from archaic Greece to early twentieth-century China, medieval Europe to contemporary America.Scholars from a wide variety of fields will welcome The Moral Authority of Nature, which provides the first sustained historical survey of its topic.Contributors:Danielle Allen, Joan Cadden, Lorraine Daston, Fa-ti Fan, Eckhardt Fuchs, Valentin Groebner, Abigail J. Lustig, Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, Katharine Park, Matt Price, Robert N. Proctor, Helmut Puff, Robert J. Richards, Londa Schiebinger, Laura Slatkin, Julia Adeney Thomas, Fernando Vidal

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Why does an object or phenomenon become the subject of scientific inquiry? Why do some of these objects remain provocative, while others fade from centre stage? And why do objects sometimes return as the focus of research long after they were once abandoned? Addressing such questions, this book is about how whole domains of phenomena - dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, society, mortality, centers of gravity, value, cytoplasmic particles, the self and tuberculosis - come into being and sometimes pass away as objects of scientific study. With examples drawn from both the natural and social sciences, and ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries, this book explores the ways in which scientific objects are both real and historical. Whether discovered or invented, these objects of inquiry broaden and deepen in meaning - growing more "real" - as they become entangled in webs of cultural significance, material practices and theoretical derivations. Thus their biographies should matter to anyone concerned with the formation of scientific knowledge.

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A classic oral history of the American Revolution, The Revolution Remembered uses 79 first-hand accounts from veterans of the war to provide the reader with the feel of what it must have been like to fight and live through America's bloody battle for independence. "In a book fairly bursting with feats of daring, perhaps the most spectacular accomplishment of them all is this volume's transformation of its readers into the grandchildren of Revolutionary War soldiers...An amazing gathering of 79 surrogate Yankee grandparents who tell us in their own words what they saw with their own eyes."--Elaine F. Weiss, Christian Science Monitor "Fascinating...[The soldiers'] details fill in significant shadows of history."--Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times "It's still good fun two centuries later, overhearing these experiences of the tumult of everyday life and seeing a front-lines view of one of the most unusual armies ever to fight, let alone win."--Richard Martin, Wall Street Journal "One of the most important primary source discoveries from the era. A unique and fresh perspective."--Paul G. Levine, Los Angeles Times

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Forty years in, the War on Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a little-known surveillance state in America's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Arrest quotas and high-tech surveillance techniques criminalize entire blocks, and transform the very associations that should stabilize young lives-family, relationships, jobs - into liabilities, as the police use such relationships to track down suspects, demand information, and threaten consequences. Alice Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood in Philadelphia, and her close observations and often harrowing stories reveal the pernicious effects of this pervasive policing. Goffman introduces us to an unforgettable cast of young African American men who are caught up in this web of warrants and surveillance - some of them small-time drug dealers, others just ordinary guys dealing with limited choices. All find the web of presumed criminality, built as it is on the very associations and friendships that make up a life, nearly impossible to escape. We watch as the pleasures of summer - evening stoop-sitting are shattered by the arrival of a car full of cops looking to serve a warrant; we watch - and can't help but be shocked - as teenagers teach their younger siblings and cousins how to run from the police (and, crucially, to keep away from friends and family so they can stay hidden); and we see, over and over, the relentless toll that the presumption of criminality takes on families-and futures. While not denying the problems of the drug trade, and the violence that often accompanies it, through her gripping accounts of daily life in the forgotten neighborhoods of America's cities, Goffman makes it impossible for us to ignore the very real human costs of our failed response-the blighting of entire neighborhoods and the needless sacrifice of whole generations.

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Darwin's work of 1872 still provides the point of departure for research in the theory of emotion and expression. Although he lacked the modern research tool of cybernetics, his basic methods have not been improved upon: the study of infants, of the insane, of paintings and sculpture, of some of the commoner animals; the use of photographs of expression submitted to different judges; and the comparative study of expression among different peoples. This new edition will be warmly welcomed by those behavioral scientists who have recently shown an intense interest in the scientific study of expression. Lay readers, too, will be struck by the freshness and directness of this book, which includes, among other data, Darwin's delightfully objective analysis of his own baby's smiles and pouts.

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At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries in the national government placed the rest in children's homes elsewhere in Greece. A point of contention during the Cold War, this controversial episode continues to fuel tensions between Greeks and Macedonians and within Greek society itself. Loring M. Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten present here for the first time a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they forever transformed. Marshaling archival records, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, the authors analyze the evacuation process, the political conflict surrounding it, the children's upbringing, and their fates as adults cut off from their parents and their homeland. They also give voice to seven refugee children who poignantly recount their childhood experiences and heroic efforts to construct new lives in diaspora communities throughout the world. A much-needed corrective to previous historical accounts, "Children of the Greek Civil War" is also a searching examination of the enduring effects of displacement on the lives of refugee children.

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Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory-Hegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Cole's The Birth of Theory presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel's dialectic as theory. Cole explains how Hegel boldly broke from modern philosophy when he adopted medieval dialectical habits of thought to fashion his own dialectic. While his contemporaries rejected premodern dialectic as outdated dogma, Hegel embraced both its emphasis on language as thought and its fascination with the categories of identity and difference, creating what we now recognize as theory, distinct from systematic philosophy. Hegel also used this dialectic to expose the persistent archaism of modern life itself, Cole shows, establishing a method of social analysis that has influenced everyone from Marx and the nineteenth-century Hegelians, to Nietzsche and Bakhtin, all the way to Deleuze and Jameson. By uncovering these theoretical filiations across time, The Birth of Theory will not only change the way we read Hegel, but also the way we think about the histories of theory. With chapters that powerfully reanimate the overly familiar topics of ideology, commodity fetishism, and political economy, along with a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Hegel's famous master/slave dialectic, The Birth of Theory places the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history in conversation with one another in an unprecedented way.

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Robert Dahl’s Preface helped launch democratic theory fifty years ago as a new area of study in political science, and it remains the standard introduction to the field. Exploring problems that had been left unsolved by traditional thought on democracy, Dahl here examines two influential models—the Madisonian, which represents prevailing American doctrine, and its recurring challenger, populist theory—arguing that they do not accurately portray how modern democracies operate. He then constructs a model more consistent with how contemporary democracies actually function, and, in doing so, develops some original views of popular sovereignty and the American constitutional system. For this fiftieth-anniversary edition, Dahl has written an extensive new afterword that reevaluates Madisonian theory in light of recent research. And in a new foreword, he reflects back on his influential volume and the ways his views have evolved since he wrote it. For any student or scholar of political science, this new material is an essential update on a gold standard in the evolving field of democratic theory. “A Preface to Democratic Theory is well worth the devoted attention of anyone who cares about democracy.”—Political Science Quarterly

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Since its publication in 2007, A Brief History of the Spanish Language has become the leading introduction to the history of one of the world's most widely spoken languages. Moving from the language's Latin roots to its present-day forms, this concise book offers readers insights into the origin and evolution of Spanish, the historical and cultural changes that shaped it, and its spread around the world. A Brief History of the Spanish Language focuses on the most important aspects of the development of the Spanish language, eschewing technical jargon in favor of straightforward explanations. Along the way, it answers many of the common questions that puzzle native speakers and non-native speakers alike, such as: Why do some regions use tu while others use vos? How did the th sound develop in Castilian? And why is it la mesa but el agua? David A. Pharies, a world-renowned expert on the history and development of Spanish, has updated this edition with new research on all aspects of the evolution of Spanish and current demographic information. This book is perfect for anyone with a basic understanding of Spanish and a desire to further explore its roots. It also provides an ideal foundation for further study in any area of historical Spanish linguistics and early Spanish literature. A Brief History of the Spanish Language is a grand journey of discovery, revealing in a beautifully compact format the fascinating story of the language in both Spain and Spanish America.

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