Search results for ""fordham university press""

How do communities consent to difference? How do they recognize and create the space and time necessary for the differences and disabilities of those who constitute them? Christian congregations often make assumptions about the shared abilities, practices, and experiences that are necessary for communal worship. The author of this provocative new book takes a hard look at these assumptions through a detailed ethnographic study of an unusual religious community where more than half the congregants live with diagnoses of mental illness, many coming to the church from personal care homes or independent living facilities. Here, people’s participation in worship disrupts and extends the formal orders of worship. Whenever one worships God at Sacred Family Church, there is someone who is doing it differently. Here, the author argues, the central elements and the participation in the symbols of Christian worship raise questions rather than supply clear markers of unity, prompting the question, What do you need in order to have a church that assumes difference at its heart? Based on three years of ethnographic research, The Disabled Church describes how the Sacred Family community, comprising people with very different mental abilities, backgrounds, and resources, sustains and embodies a common religious identity. It explores how an ethic of difference is both helped and hindered by a church’s embodied theology. Paying careful attention to how these congregants improvise forms of access to a common liturgy, this book offers a groundbreaking theology of worship that engages both the fragility and beauty revealed by difference within the church. As liturgy requires consent to difference rather than coercion, an aesthetic approach to differences within Christian liturgy provides a frame for congregations and Christian liturgists to pay attention to the differences and disabilities of worshippers. This book creates a distinctive conversation between critical disability studies, liturgical aesthetics, and ethnographic theology, offering an original perspective on the relationship between beauty and disability within Christian communities. Here is a transformational theological aesthetics of Christian liturgy that prioritizes human difference and argues for the importance of the Disabled Church.

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Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned “mother tongue” about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu).

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Named 'Top 6' South Asia studies publications of 2016 by the British Association for South Asian Studies The Alchemy of Empire unravels the non-European origins of Enlightenment science. Focusing on the abject materials of empire-building, this study traces the genealogies of substances like mud, mortar, ice, and paper, as well as forms of knowledge like inoculation. Showing how East India Company employees deployed the paradigm of alchemy in order to make sense of the new worlds they confronted, Rajani Sudan argues that the Enlightenment was born largely out of Europe’s (and Britain’s) sense of insecurity and inferiority in the early modern world. Plumbing the depths of the imperial archive, Sudan uncovers the history of the British Enlightenment in the literary artifacts of the long eighteenth century, from the correspondence of the East India Company and the papers of the Royal Society to the poetry of Alexander Pope and the novels of Jane Austen.

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Heidegger is the only thinker of his generation whose philosophy of technology is still widely read today. In it, he made three basic claims. First, he asserted that the essence of technology is not technological--that technology is not a neutral instrumentality. Second, he claimed that there is a qualitative difference between modern and traditional technologies. Third and most interestingly, he claimed that technology is a metaphysical perspective, a paradigmatic view of the whole of nature. Although Martin Heidegger remains recognized as a founder of the philosophy of technology, in the last sixty years a whole new world of technologies has appeared—bio-, nano-, info-, and imaging. With technology, time moves fast. Does philosophical time move, too? How adequate is Heidegger’s thinking now for understanding today’s technological advances? After an extensive Introduction that places Heidegger within the thinking about technology typical of his time, the author, a prominent philosopher of technology, reexamines Heidegger’s positions from multiple perspectives—historical, pragmatic, anti-Romantic and postphenomenological. His critiques invert Heidegger’s essentialism and phenomenologically analyze Heidegger’s favored and disfavored technologies. In conclusion, he undertakes a concrete analysis of the technologies Heidegger used to produce his writing and discovers heretofore undiscussed and ironic results. Overall, the book not only serves as an excellent introduction Heidegger’s philosophy of technology and a corrective in outlining its limitations, it indicates a postphenomenological counter-strategy for technological analysis, one that would look at the production of technology in practice, based on observing its forms of embodied activity.

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ON MY MODERN MET'S TOP TEN LIST OF BEST CREATIVE BOOKS TO CELEBRATE THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF MOON LANDING The moon—its face, color, and power—threads through the tapestry of American landscape painting, holding timeless allure for artists and beloved by viewers of paintings everywhere. The Hudson River Museum has organized The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art—the first major museum examination of the moon in American visual arts from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries for a 2019 exhibition. This timely presentation also celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission when, in 1969, American astronauts first stepped onto the surface of the moon. From the romantic silvery moonscapes of nineteenth-century artists to the abstractions by artists of the twentieth century who explored the moon, the perfect orb, and tapped into its spiritual possibilities, this celestial body, closest to Earth, remains constant in our sky, though our relationship to it and our home planet changes, as technology extends our reach toward space. The Hudson River Museum, Fordham University Press, and the James A. Michener Art Museum are joint publishers of the lavishly illustrated catalog The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art. In engaging essays, author Stella Paul maps the colors of the moon; catalog co-editors Bartholomew F. Bland and Laura Vookles explore Hudson River School and Modernist moonscapes and their cultural resonance; and curators Melissa Martens Yaverbaum and Ted Barrow sight the moon’s passage in art of both the Gilded and Space ages. The exhibition and catalog have been made possible by a generous grant by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc. The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY | February 8 - May 12, 2019 James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA | June 1 – September 8, 2019

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Written from a communication perspective, Interfaith Dialogue in Practice provides useful strategies for increasing understanding among the three Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism. Authentic dialogue is as concerned about communication as it is theology. Contributors to this volume write from their experience as communication experts personally engaged in the challenges of interfaith dialogue

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An illuminating story of a Sufi community that sought the revelation of God. In the Afghan highlands of the sixteenth century, the messianic community known as the Roshaniyya not only desired to find God’s word and to abide by it but also attempted to practice God’s word and to develop techniques of language intended to render their own tongues as the organs of continuous revelation. As their critics would contend, however, the Roshaniyya attempted to make language do something that language should not do—infuse the semiotic with the divine. Their story thus ends in a tower of skulls, the proliferation of heresiographies that detailed the sins of the Roshaniyya, and new formations of “Afghan” identity. In Singing with the Mountains, William E. B. Sherman finds something extraordinary about the Roshaniyya, not least because the first known literary use of vernacular Pashto occurs in an eclectic, Roshani imitation of the Qur’an. The story of the Roshaniyya exemplifies a religious culture of linguistic experimentation. In the example of the Roshaniyya, we discover a set of questions and anxieties about the capacities of language that pervaded Sufi orders, imperial courts, groups of wandering ascetics, and scholastic networks throughout Central and South Asia. In telling this tale, Sherman asks the following questions: How can we make language shimmer with divine truth? How can letters grant sovereign power and form new “ethnic” identities and ways of belonging? How can rhyme bend our conceptions of time so that the prophetic past comes to inhabit the now of our collective moment? By analyzing the ways in which the Roshaniyya answered these types of questions—and the ways in which their answers were eventually rejected as heresies—this book offers new insight into the imaginations of religious actors in the late medieval and early modern Persianate worlds.

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An exciting new reflection on the role of artistic collaboration, collectivism, and the politics of group formation in the neoliberal era. The artist and author Ethan Philbrick’s Group Works re-imagines the group by undertaking an historiographic archaeology of group aesthetics and politics. Written against both phobic and romantic accounts of collectivity, Group Works contends that the group emerges as a medium for artists when established forms of collective life break down. Philbrick pairs group pieces in dance, literature, film, and music from the 1960s and 1970s downtown Manhattan scene alongside a series of recent group experiments: Simone Forti’s dance construction, Huddle (1961), is put into relation with contemporary re-performances of Forti’s score and huddling as a feminist political tactic; Samuel Delany’s memoir of communal living, Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (1969/78), speaks to performance artist Morgan Bassichis’s 2017 communal musical adaptation of Larry Mitchell’s 1977 text, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions; Lizzie Borden’s experimental documentary of feminist collectivity, Regrouping (1976), sits alongside visual artist Sharon Hayes’s 2014 piece on Manhattan’s Pier 54, Women of the World Unite! they said; and Julius Eastman’s insurgent piece of chamber music for four pianos, Gay Guerrilla (1979), resonates alongside contemporary projects that take up Eastman’s legacy by artists such as Tiona Nekkia McClodden. By analyzing works that articulate the politics of race, gender, and sexuality as questions of group formation, Philbrick approaches the group not as a stable, idealizable entity but as an ambivalent way to negotiate and contest shifting terms of associational life. Group Works presents an engaging exploration of what happens when small groups become a material and medium for artistic and political experimentation.

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On its surface, I Am Elijah Thrush is the story of Millicent De Frayne and her sensational half century campaign to win the love of Elijah Thrush. Elijah, after ruining the lives of countless men and women, is finally in love “incorrectly, if not indecently,” with his great-grandson, Bird of Heaven. To support an unusual habit, a young Black man, Albert Peggs, reluctantly agrees to tell their remarkable story. It is in this telling the ambitions, desires, and true natures of Elijah, Millicent, and Albert come to light. With a delicately controlled balance of whimsy and pathos, James Purdy gives us this comedy of the heroic, the tragic, and the truly bizarre. Met with critical bewilderment upon its initial publication fifty years ago, this new edition offers a foreword by Robert J. Corber illuminating Purdy’s “complicated allegory” of objectification, desire, and race in the immediate post-Civil Rights moment.

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Why have generations of philosophers failed or refused to articulate a rigorous challenge to the death penalty, when literature has been rife with death penalty abolitionism for centuries? In this book, Peggy Kamuf explores why any properly philosophical critique of capital punishment in the West must confront the literary as that which exceeds the logical demands of philosophy. Jacques Derrida has written that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.” How, Kamuf asks, does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind in a Western nation that professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty? Following a lucid account of Derrida’s approach to the death penalty, Kamuf pursues this question across several literary texts. In reading Orwell’s story “A Hanging,” Kamuf explores the relation between literary narration and the role of the witness, concluding that such a witness needs the seal of literary language in order to account for the secret of the death penalty. The next chapter turns to the American scene with Robert Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning, which restages the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as an outlandish public spectacle in Times Square. Because this fictional device reverses the drive toward secrecy that, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, put an end to public executions in the West, Kamuf reads the novel in a tension with the current tendency in the U.S. to shore up and protect remaining death penalty practices through increasingly pervasive secrecy measures. A reading of Norman Mailer’s 1979 novel The Executioner’s Song, shows the breakdown of any firm distinction between suicide and capital execution and explores the essential affinity between traditional narrative structure, which is plotted from the end, and the “plot” of a death penalty. Final readings of Kafka, Derrida, and Baudelaire consider the relation between literature and law, showing how performative literary language can “play the law. “A brief conclusion, titled “Postmortem,” reflects on the condition of literature as that which survives the death penalty. A major contribution to the field of law and society, this book makes the case for literature as a space for contesting the death penalty, a case that scholars and activists working across a range of traditions will need to confront.

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In the late 1980s, a handful of artists priced out of Manhattan and desperately needing affordable studio space discovered 111 1st Street, a former P. Lorillard Tobacco Company warehouse. Over the next two decades, an eclectic collection of painters, sculptors, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and writers dreamt and toiled within the building’s labyrinthine halls. The local arts scene flourished, igniting hope that Jersey City would emerge as the next grassroots center of the art world. However, a rising real estate market coupled with a provincial political establishment threatened the community at 111 1st Street. The artists found themselves entangled in a long, complicated, and vicious fight for their place in the building and for the physical survival of 111 1st Street itself, a site that held so much potential, so much promise for Jersey City. Left Bank of the Hudson offers a window into the demographic, political, and socio-economic changes experienced by Jersey City during the last thirty years. Documenting the narrative of 111 1st Street as an act of cultural preservation, author David J. Goodwin’s well-researched and significant contribution addresses the question of the role of artists in economically improving cities. As a Jersey City resident, Goodwin applies his knowledge of the city’s rich history of political malfeasance and corruption, including how auspicious plans for a waterfront arts enclave were repeatedly bungled by a provincial-minded city administration. In writing this story, Goodwin interviewed thirteen artists and residents, two businesses, three government officials, and five non-profits, civic organizations, and community activists. The book chronologically explores the history and business of the P. Lorillard Tobacco Company, its evolution into a bustling arts community, the battle to preserve the warehouse as a historic structure, and the lessons to be drawn from the loss and ultimate demolition of the building in 2007, as well as the present state of the neighborhood. Setting the facts straight for future generations, Left Bank of the Hudson provides an illustrative lesson to government officials, scholars, students, activists, and everyday citizens attempting to navigate the “rediscovery” of American cities.

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In the late 1980s, a handful of artists priced out of Manhattan and desperately needing affordable studio space discovered 111 1st Street, a former P. Lorillard Tobacco Company warehouse. Over the next two decades, an eclectic collection of painters, sculptors, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and writers dreamt and toiled within the building’s labyrinthine halls. The local arts scene flourished, igniting hope that Jersey City would emerge as the next grassroots center of the art world. However, a rising real estate market coupled with a provincial political establishment threatened the community at 111 1st Street. The artists found themselves entangled in a long, complicated, and vicious fight for their place in the building and for the physical survival of 111 1st Street itself, a site that held so much potential, so much promise for Jersey City. Left Bank of the Hudson offers a window into the demographic, political, and socio-economic changes experienced by Jersey City during the last thirty years. Documenting the narrative of 111 1st Street as an act of cultural preservation, author David J. Goodwin’s well-researched and significant contribution addresses the question of the role of artists in economically improving cities. As a Jersey City resident, Goodwin applies his knowledge of the city’s rich history of political malfeasance and corruption, including how auspicious plans for a waterfront arts enclave were repeatedly bungled by a provincial-minded city administration. In writing this story, Goodwin interviewed thirteen artists and residents, two businesses, three government officials, and five non-profits, civic organizations, and community activists. The book chronologically explores the history and business of the P. Lorillard Tobacco Company, its evolution into a bustling arts community, the battle to preserve the warehouse as a historic structure, and the lessons to be drawn from the loss and ultimate demolition of the building in 2007, as well as the present state of the neighborhood. Setting the facts straight for future generations, Left Bank of the Hudson provides an illustrative lesson to government officials, scholars, students, activists, and everyday citizens attempting to navigate the “rediscovery” of American cities.

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This book represents the distinguished Sonnett lecture series sponsored by Fordham’s Law School that has taken place for the last 45 years. In this collection, U.S. Supreme Court Justices, a Lord Chancellor of England, three Chief Justices of Ireland, a Chief Justice of South Africa, a President of the Supreme Court of Israel, and other leading judges and lawyers examine common law–based legal systems and underlying principles. The lectures encourage attorneys and society to improve the training of lawyers, respect the independence of the judiciary, place ethics at the forefront, question the efficacy of the criminal justice system, and explore the complex philosophical issues facing the judiciary. Taken as a whole, these lectures are a prescription for improvements and innovations throughout the legal system. The lectures were delivered by judges and lawyers who were involved in many of the most significant cases of the last half-century that strengthened individual rights and promoted access to justice. Each finds its deepest meaning in advancing the theme of Fordham Law School: “In the Service of Others.”

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The Hawthorn Archive, named after the richly fabled tree, has long welcomed the participants in the various Euro-American social struggles against slavery, racial capitalism, imperialism, and authoritarian forms of order. The Archive is not a library or a research collection in the conventional sense but rather a disorganized and fugitive space for the development of a political consciousness of being indifferent to the deadly forms of power that characterize our society. Housed by the Archive are autonomous radicals, runaways, abolitionists, commoners, and dreamers who no longer live as obedient or merely resistant subjects. In this innovative, genre- and format-bending publication, Avery F. Gordon, the “keeper” of the Archive, presents a selection of its documents—original and compelling essays, letters, cultural analyses, images, photographs, conversations, friendship exchanges, and collaborations with various artists. Gordon creatively uses the imaginary of the Archive to explore the utopian elements found in a variety of resistive and defiant activity in the past and in the present, zeroing in on Marxist critical theory and the black radical tradition. Fusing critical theory with creative writing in a historical context, The Hawthorn Archive represents voices from the utopian margins, where fact, fiction, theory, and image converge. Reminiscent of the later fictions of Italo Calvino or Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, The Hawthorn Archive is a groundbreaking work that defies strict disciplinary, methodological, and aesthetic boundaries. And like Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, which established Gordon as one of the most influential interdisciplinary scholars of the humanities and social sciences in recent years, it provides a kaleidoscopic analysis of power and effect. The Hawthorn Archive’s experimental format and inventive synthesis of critical theory and creative writing make way for a powerful reconception of what counts as social change and political action, offering creative inspiration and critical tools to artists, activists, scholars across various disciplines, and general readers alike.

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Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments—the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action—undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading works by Godwin, Austen, Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Dickens alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, Daniel Stout argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism’s ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, Corporate Romanticism reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.

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More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin’s work and life. The route retraces the full arc of Baldwin’s passage across the pages and stages of his career according to his constant interactions with black musical styles, recordings, and musicians. Presented in three books — or movements — the first listens to Baldwin, in the initial months of his most intense visibility in May 1963 and the publication of The Fire Next Time. It introduces the key terms of his lyrical aesthetic and identifies the shifting contours of Baldwin’s career from his early work as a reviewer for left-leaning journals in the 1940s to his last published and unpublished works from the mid-1980s. Book II listens with Baldwin and ruminates on the recorded performances of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, singers whose message and methods were closely related to his developing world view. It concludes with the first detailed account of “The Hallelujah Chorus,” a performance from July 1, 1973, in which Baldwin shared the stage at Carnegie Hall with Ray Charles. Finally, in Book III, Pavlić reverses our musically inflected reconsideration of Baldwin’s voice, projecting it into the contemporary moment and reading its impact on everything from the music of Amy Winehouse, to the street performances of Turf Feinz, and the fire of racial oppression and militarization against black Americans in the 21st century. Always with an ear close to the music, and avoiding the safe box of celebration, Who Can Afford to Improvise? enables a new kind of “lyrical travel” with the instructive clarity and the open-ended mystery Baldwin’s work invokes into the world.

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In Brownsville’s twenty-one housing projects, the young cops and the teenagers who stand solemnly on the street corners are bitter and familiar enemies. The Ville, as the Brownsville–East New York section of Brooklyn is called by the locals, is one of the most dangerous places on earth—a place where homicide is a daily occurrence. Now, Greg Donaldson, a veteran urban reporter and a longtime teacher in Brooklyn’s toughest schools, evokes this landscape with stunning and frightening accuracy. The Ville follows a year in the life of two urban black males from opposite sides of the street. Gary Lemite, an enthusiastic young Housing police officer, charges recklessly into gunfire in pursuit of respect and promotion. Sharron Corley, a member of a gang called the LoLifes and the star of the Thomas Jefferson High School play, is also looking for respect as he tries to survive these streets. Brilliantly capturing the firestorm of violence that is destroying a generation, waged by teenagers who know at thirty yards the difference between a MAC-10 machine pistol and a .357 Magnum, The Ville is the story of our inner cities and the lives of the young men who remain trapped there. In the tradition of There Are No Children Here, Clockers, and Random Family, The Ville is a vivid and unforgettable contribution to our understanding of race and violence in America today.

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What happens to poetic beauty when history turns the poet from one who contemplates natural beauty and the sublime to one who attempts to reconcile the practice of art with the hustle and noise of the city? An Atmospherics of the City traces Charles Baudelaire’s evolution from a writer who practices a form of fetishizing aesthetics in which poetry works to beautify the ordinary to one who perceives background noise and disorder—the city’s version of a transcendent atmosphere—as evidence of the malign work of a transcendent god of time, history, and ultimate destruction. Analyzing this shift, particularly as evidenced in Tableaux parisiens and Le Spleen de Paris, Ross Chambers shows how Baudelaire’s disenchantment with the politics of his day and the coincident rise of overpopulation, poverty, and Haussmann’s modernization of Paris influenced the poet’s work to conceive a poetry of allegory, one with the power to alert and disalienate its otherwise inattentive reader whose senses have long been dulled by the din of his environment. Providing a completely new and original understanding of both Baudelaire’s ethics and his aesthetics, Chambers reveals how the shift from themes of the supernatural in Baudelaire to ones of alienation allowed a new way for him to articulate and for his fellow Parisians to comprehend the rapidly changing conditions of the city and, in the process, to invent a “modern beauty” from the realm of suffering and the abject as they embodied forms of urban experience.

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This book brings together a group of Judith Butler’s philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power. Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler’s embodied account of ethical relations.

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In a stunning cycle of persona poems, Daneen Wardrop offers us a panoramic view of the inner lives of those forgotten among the violence and strife of the American Civil War: the nurse and the woman soldier, the child and the draftee, the prostitute, the black slave, and the Native American soldier. Each one speaks out to be seen and heard, bearing witness to the mundanity of suffering experienced by those whose presence was ubiquitous yet erased in the official histories of the War Between the States. Cyclorama takes its name from the theater-sized, in-the-round oil paintings popular in the late nineteenth century, and with each poem, Wardrop adds a panel to her expansive, engrossing portrait of the bloodshed and tears, the tedium and fear experienced by the Civil War living and the dying. With pathos and lyric force, she brings sharply into focus perspectives on an unfathomable experience we thought we already knew and understood. from "Women's Sanitary Corps" Sister, I link arms with you as we enter this log-steepled tent, white on the outside, but on the inside the deep maroon of thick-spackled, internal things. How can it be so simple here? Bed, man-- bed, man-- where the pain leaves no room for anything else. My mouth is dry. No, stay with me, these sheet-smoothed boys need us with their nocturnal eyes, not predatory but grieving, as good animals the body, not ready, not able to be ready. La, where did they put their good body?

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Highlighting recent and new directions in contemporary research in the field, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers a complete and updated picture of intellectual life in the Civil War–era Union. Compiling essays from both established and young historians, this volume addresses the role intellectuals played in framing the conflict and implementing their vision of a victorious Union. Broadly defining “intellectuals” to encompass doctors, lawyers, sketch artists, college professors, health reformers, and religious leaders, the essays address how these thinkers disseminated their ideas, sometimes using commercial or popular venues and organizations to implement what they believed. Offering a vast range of perspectives on how northerners thought about,experienced, and responded to the Civil War, So Conceived and So Dedicated is organized around three questions: To what extent did educated Americans believe that the Civil War exposed the failure of old ideas? Did the Civil War promote new strains of authoritarianism in northern intellectual life or did the war reinforce democratic individualism? How did the Civil War affect northerners’ conception of nationalism and their understanding of their relationship to the state? Essays explore myriad topics, including: how antebellum ideas about the environment and the body influenced conceptions of democratic health; how leaders of the Irish American community reconciled their support of the United States and the Republican Party with their allegiances to Ireland and their fellow Irish immigrants; how intellectual leaders of the northern African American community explained secession, civil war, and emancipation; the influence of southern ideals on northern intellectuals; wartime and postwar views from college and university campuses; the ideological acrobatics that professors at midwestern universities had to perform in order to keep their students from leaving the classroom; and how northern sketch artists helped influence the changing perceptions of African American soldiers over the course of the war. Collectively, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers relevant and fruitful answers to the nation’s intellectual history and suggests that antebellum modes of thinking remained vital and tenacious well after the Civil War.

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Hidden—Richard Giannone’s searingly honest, richly insightful memoir—eloquently captures the author’s transformation from a solitary gay academic to a dedicated caregiver as well as a sexually and spiritually committed man. Always alone, always fearful, he initially resisted the duty to look after his dying female relatives. But his mother’s fall into dementia changed all that. Her vulnerability opened this middle-aged man to the love of another man, a former priest and Jersey boy like himself. Together the two men saw the old woman to her death and did the same for Giannone’s sister. In Hidden Giannone uncovers how, ultimately, these experiences moved him closer to participating in the vitality he believed pulsed in the world but had always eluded him. The mothering life of this gay partnership evolved alongside the AIDS crisis and within and against Italian American culture that reflected the Catholic Church’s discountenancing of homosexual love. Giannone vividly weaves his reflections on gay life in Greenwich Village and his spiritual journey as a gay man and Catholic into his experience of caring for the women of his family. In Hidden Giannone recounts a gripping religious conversion, drawing on the wisdom of the ancient desert mothers and fathers of Egypt and Palestine. Because he was raised a Catholic, the shift is not from nothing to something. Rather, it is away from the modeling power of institutional Christianity to the tempering influence of homosexuality on the Gospel. Gay or straight, so long as we remain hidden from ourselves, the true God remains hidden from us.

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This book considers melancholy as an “assemblage,” as a network of dynamic, interpretive relationships between persons, bodies, texts, spaces, structures, and things. In doing so, it parts ways with past interpretations of melancholy. Tilting the English Renaissance against the present moment, Daniel argues that the basic disciplinary tension between medicine and philosophy persists within contemporary debates about emotional embodiment. To make this case, the book binds together the paintings of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, the drama of Shakespeare, the prose of Burton, and the poetry of Milton. Crossing borders and periods, Daniel combines recent theories that have—until now—been regarded as incongruous by their respective advocates. Asking fundamental questions about how the experience of emotion produces community, the book will be of interest to scholars of early modern literature, psychoanalysis, the affective turn, and continental philosophy.

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The Accidental Playground explores the remarkable landscape created by individuals and small groups who occupied and rebuilt an abandoned Brooklyn waterfront. While local residents, activists, garbage haulers, real estate developers, speculators, and two city administrations fought over the fate of the former Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal (BEDT), others simply took to this decaying edge, transforming it into a unique venue for leisure, creative, and everyday practices. These occupiers and do-it-yourself builders created their own waterfront parks and civic spaces absent every resource needed for successful urban development, including plans, designs, capital, professional assistance, consensus, and permission from the waterfront’s owners. Amid trash, ruins, weeds, homeless encampments, and the operation of an active garbage transfer station, they inadvertently created the “Brooklyn Riviera” and made this waterfront a destination that offered much more than its panoramic vistas of the Manhattan skyline. The terminal evolved into the home turf for unusual and sometimes spectacular recreational, social, and creative subcultures, including the skateboarders who built a short-lived but nationally renowned skatepark, a twenty-five-piece “public” marching band, fire performance troupes, artists, photographers, and filmmakers. At the same time it served the basic recreational needs of local residents. Collapsing piers became great places to catch fish, sunbathe, or take in the views; the foundation of a demolished warehouse became an ideal place to picnic, practice music, or do an art project; rubble-strewn earth became a compelling setting for film and fashion shoots; a broken bulkhead became a beach; and thick patches of weeds dotted by ailanthus trees became a jungle. These reclamations, all but ignored by city and state governments and property interests that were set to transform this waterfront, momentarily added to the distinctive cultural landscape of the city’s most bohemian and rapidly changing neighborhood. Drawing on a rich mix of documentary strategies, including observation, ethnography, photography, and first-person narrative, Daniel Campo probes this accidental playground, allowing those who created it to share and examine their own narratives, perspectives, and conflicts. The multiple constituencies of this waterfront were surprisingly diverse, their stories colorful and provocative. When taken together, Campo argues, they suggest a radical reimagining of urban parks and public spaces, and the practices by which they are created and maintained. The Accidental Playground, which treats readers to an utterly compelling story, is an exciting and distinctive contribution to the growing literature on unplanned spaces and practices in cities today.

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On February 18th, 2009, Sean Delonas published a controversial cartoon in the New York Post depicting two policemen shooting and killing a monkey with the caption: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” On the adjoining page was a photo of President Barack Obama signing this very piece of legislation into law. Although public debate over the cartoon has centered entirely on its potentially racist overtones, we might ask from a Darwinian perspective how the stereotype of the black ape works to disavow a universally shared human apehood. How might we comprehend animality in non-pejorative terms? Whereas in contemporary race and sexuality studies the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible, Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians such as Senator Rick Santorum equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J.M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. Insofar as humanizing the abject only vacates the structurally empty and infinitely transposable position of “the animal,” he argues that all forms of belonging—no matter how open and hospitable they are toward others—inevitably produce “beasts” whose exclusion contradicts our apparent desire for nonviolence. While one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable—even if ultimately unattainable—ideals, Bestial Traces shows that by maintaining such principles we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence precisely by failing to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.

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The Hello Delay asks what happens around the saying of a thing and the receiving. Inside and outside of our daily communications, there are events, there are silences, déjà-vus, and intentions. These poems question the determined nature of our relationships to one another: What if this territory isn’t familiar after all? I Will Whisper it to you so that someone else may hear it. whether or not it’s heard by you, whether or not I hear it myself—that it is heard by a stranger. stranger and stranger. get out the fires and fire hoses, put away the stars. daybreak breaks into noon breaks into after, and after is a song, and singing makes you calmer. that’s okay but what are they saying down the street and lost on you, lost on you, lost on you. In this human ecology, language is king. In this book, familiarity resides in memory or song, but perhaps nothing is so familiar as the experience of the present. What is it then to be present, when meaning persists among us? We are more than what we say and what we think, but these words are the lucite passages we travel to that aggregate. In this place where understanding means being wrong together or just pretending to be right, Choffel’s poems honor the grandeur, the danger, and the mediocrity in manifesting what we make up as we go along. The Hello Delay might be experimental, but it is mostly experiential. It calls us out not to see how we will answer but to linger in the gaps of our refrain.

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Natural and human-made disasters are increasing around the world. Hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, and resultant famine, floods, and armed conflicts are constant reminders of the frailty of our human race. Global warming may cause whole island states to be submerged as the oceans rise. In the past these acute and recurring crises have been met by the international community responding to UN and media appeals. The economic collapse of nations is now a reality; some of those most affected had been traditional, generous donors to disaster relief operations. It is unlikely—probably impossible—that they will be able to continue to contribute overseas when their own domestic needs are unmet. A recent New York Times front page report suggested that one of the few domestic issues to have bipartisan support was to cut the foreign aid budget. This book analyzes the global economic forecast and the United Nations pattern of philanthropy, provides a case study of how one nation with a tradition of giving will cope in the face of a marked reduction in flexible funds and then provides thoughtful chapters on new approaches to disaster preparedness and disaster response.

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Materialist, feminist, queer, hybrid—channeling the sensibilities of Gloria Anzaldúa, Rosario Castellanos, Mary Kelly, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cecilia Vicuña, Patssi Valdez, Bernadette Mayer—Carroll’s second collection of prose poems and wordimages contemplates the cost of living in an era of “cruel optimism.” Procedurally formalizing self-editing and indecision, Carroll undocuments the quotidian’s shades of gray/grey, the contingencies of post-Fordist relationality in the pre-Occupy window of time between September 11, 2001, and the 2008 recession. “Cognative dissonance” meets “the rite to be a citizen.” “What is the difference between neoliberalism and globalization?” tempers the countercultural question “And, me?” In Fannie + Freddie / The Sentimentality of Post–9/11 Pornography, Carroll muses, “Like Sammy and Rosie, Fannie and Freddie got laid.” Off-grid, she mixes metaphors, criss-crossing the borders erected between the lyric and the conceptual “I.” She crosses out the dividing lines elected to maintain performance art, visual culture, and poetry as discrete, clairvoyant media of social engagement. She layers jokes, puns, riddles, platitudes, hackneyed phrases, adages, boilerplate, buzzwords, mottos, proverbs, rubber-stamp rhetoric, slogans, threadbare phrases, trite remarks, and truisms over one another to provide a portrait of the contemporary American landscape as experienced by working- and middle-class Americans. Carroll offers an elaborate palimpsest of text and images—text that is often shaded, crossed out, or printed over other text or images. Claudia Rankine, who chose the volume for Fordham University’s 2011–12 Poets Out Loud Prize, succinctly sings its praises: “The intelligence, compassion, and dimensionality of this collection place it in a category all its own—it belongs to and is crafted out of the psychic anxieties of the twenty-first century. I, for one, was both exhilarated and humbled by Fannie + Freddie / The Sentimentality of Post–9/11 Pornography.”

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Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? In A Common Strangeness, Jacob Edmond exemplifies a new, multilingual and multilateral approach to literary and cultural studies. He begins with the entrance of China into multinational capitalism and the appearance of the Parisian flâneur in the writings of a Chinese poet exiled in Auckland, New Zealand. Moving among poetic examples in Russian, Chinese, and English, he then traces a series of encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, Edmond tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms.

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Do we have to conceive of ourselves as isolated individuals, inevitably distanced from other people and from whatever we might mean when we use the word God? On Becoming God offers an innovative approach to the history of the modern Western self by looking at human identity as something people do together rather than on their own. Ben Morgan argues that the shared practices of human identity can be understood as ways of managing and keeping at bay the impulses and experiences associated with the word God. The “self” is a way of doing things, or of not doing things, with “God.” The book draws on phenomenology (Heidegger), gender studies (Beauvoir, Butler) and contemporary neuroscience to present a new approach to the history of modern identity. It surveys existing approaches to modern selfhood (Foucault, Charles Taylor) and proposes an alternative account by investigating late medieval mysticism, in particular texts written in Germany by Meister Eckhart and others in the same milieu. Reactions to the condemnation of Meister Eckhart’s teaching for heresy in 1329 offer a microcosm of the circumstances in which something like the modern self arises as people change their behavior toward others, toward themselves, and toward what they call “God.” The book makes Meister Eckhart and his contemporaries appear as our contemporaries by changing the assumptions with which we approach our own identity. To make this change requires a revision of current vocabularies for approaching ourselves, and in particular the vocabulary and habits inherited from psychoanalysis. The book finishes by exploring the parallel between late medieval confessors and their spiritual charges, and late-nineteenth-century psychoanalysts and their patients. The result is a renewed vision of the Freud’s project of finding a vocabulary for acknowledging and nurturing our everyday commitments to others and to our spiritual longings.

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Françoise Dastur is well respected in France and Europe for her mastery of phenomenology as a movement and her clear and cogent explications of phenomenology in movement. These qualities are on display in this remarkable volume. Dastur guides the reader through a series of phenomenological questions—language and logic, self and other, temporality and history, finitude and mortality—that also call phenomenology itself into question, testing its limits and pushing it in new directions. Like Merleau-Ponty, Dastur sees phenomenology not as a doctrine, a catalogue of concepts and catchphrases authored by a single thinker, but as a movement in which several thinkers participate, each inflecting the movement in unique ways. In this regard, Dastur is both one of the clearest guides to phenomenology and one of its ablest practitioners.

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In dialogue with afro-caribbean philosophy, this book seeks in Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms a new vocabulary for approaching central intellectual and political issues of our time. For Cassirer, what makes humans unique is that we are symbolizing creatures destined to come into a world through varied symbolic forms; we pluralistically work with and develop these forms as we struggle to come to terms with who we are and our place in the universe. This approach can be used as a powerful challenge to hegemonic modes of study that mistakenly place the Western world at the center of intellectual and political life. Indeed, the authors argue that the symbolic dimension of Cassirer’s thinking of possibility can be linked to a symbolic dimension in revolution via the ideas of Frantz Fanon, who argued that revolution must be a thoroughgoing cultural process, in which what is at stake is nothing less than how we symbolize a new humanity and bring into being a new set of social institutions worthy of that new humanity.

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Where in Manhattan did Washington sleep? Where was Teddy Roosevelt born? Where did James Monroe die? Where is the birthplace of the “Twist”? Where was Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff's multi-million dollar penthouse? Where is the site of the country’s first traffic fatality? These tidbits are among the more than 2,000 fascinating entries comprising All Around the Town: Amazing Manhattan Facts and Curiosities, the definitive guide to historic New York. All Around the Town brings the city’s history to life, street by street, building by building, in all its diversity. The entries, organized in an easy-to-use format by street address, were culled from a number of sources—histories, biographies, newspapers, guidebooks, and maps. They range from amusing anecdotes to familiar and not-so-familiar historical events, from the Dutch New Amsterdam period to the present day. It is a truly unique guidebook for its historical viewpoint, and will delight those looking for a glimpse of New York City beyond Madison Avenue and Broadway. The second edition is revised and updated for a new millennium, reflecting a constantly changing city, and is supplemented with additional anecdotes, and over a hundred new pictures and illustrations. It is even easier to use, with cross-street information, a more portable trim size, and 300 new and updated places of interest.

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Christian parables have retained their force well beyond the sphere of religion; indeed, they share with much of modern literature their status as a form of address: “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.” There is no message without there first being—or, more subtly, without there also being in the message itself—an address to a capacity or an aptitude for listening. This is not an exhortation of the kind “Pay attention!” Rather, it is a warning: if you do not understand, the message will go away. The scene in the Gospel of John in which the newly risen Christ enjoins the Magdalene, “Noli me tangere,” a key moment in the general parable made up of his life, is a particularly good example of this sudden appearance in which a vanishing plays itself out. Resurrected, he speaks, makes an appeal, and leaves. “Do not touch me.” Beyond the Christ story, this everyday phrase says something important about touching in general. It points to the place where touching must not touch in order to carry out its touch (its art, its tact, its grace). The title essay of this volume is both a contribution to Nancy’s project of a “deconstruction of Christianity” and an exemplum of his remarkable writings on art, in analyses of “Noli me tangere” paintings by such painters as Rembrandt, Dürer, Titian, Pontormo, Bronzino, and Correggio. It is also in tacit dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s monumental tribute to Nancy’s work in Le toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy. For the English-language edition, Nancy has added an unpublished essay on the Magdalene and the English translation of “In Heaven and on the Earth,” a remarkable lecture he gave in a series designed to address children between six and twelve years of age. Closely aligned with his entire project of “the deconstruction of Christianity,’” this lecture may give the most accesible account of his ideas about God.

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Footdreams and Treetales is a collection of ninety-two poems spanning several decades. Like paintings that attempt to render visible the invisible, the poems reflect Wolfson’s interests in philosophy, the history of religions, and, in particular, the mystical dimensions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Although explicit references to the divine are rarely found in the poems, they issue from an encounter with the mystery of transcendence, performatively embodying the dialectic of concealment and disclosure. Seeking to articulate the unsaying that makes possible all saying, a response always on the way, a word as yet unspoken, these poems can be imagined in liturgical terms. They do not utter words of conventional prayer but are a contemplative gaze at what eludes contemplation—a present that comes to be in the future awaiting its past. For Wolfson, the poem is an opening to time, which is, at once, an embrace of life and a preparation for death. friday’s hymn pour oil on my head, before the burning ends, let us rise to count the minutes, to dot the hours, let us rise to wake the children who must bury the dead. night approaches day, neither black nor white, her sun is my moon.

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Understanding the complex nature of international humanitarian action—particularly following natural disasters or armed conflicts—has been the mission of this unique series. This book explores the cutting-edge concerns that will affect how assistance is offered in the future. Featuring twelve original essays by leading practitioners, policymakers, and scholars, the book is a state of the field report on problems, threats, and opportunities facing relief efforts in today’s world. With contributions from such authorities as Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Borders, Charles McCormick, CEO of Save the Children, and physicians, military leaders, field workers, and others, the essays confront the most critical issues facing the delivery of effective relief. The issues include military and civilian cooperation in large-scale disasters, with special attention to the growth of private armies. How traditional nongovernmental organizations and faith-based agencies adapt to new challenges is also explored. Ways to strengthen security for humanitarian workers, refugees, and internally displaced persons and those in transition after wars are also considered. Bringing together diplomatic, military, medical, legal, political, religious, and ethical perspectives from experiences in Darfur, West Africa, Iraq, Pakistan, and other areas, the essays offer an authoritative inventory of where humanitarian relief has been, and how it must change to save lives and communities in peril.

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This important book is a primer on the basics of humanitarian action. The ten chapters—each written by a leading professional—introduce the essential issues facing humanitarian workers as they confront both natural and man-made crises. Designed for students, teachers, practitioners, policy-makers, journalists, and other professionals, Basics of Humanitarian Missions covers fundamental concepts, contexts, and problems, in settings that range from floods and earthquakes to medical emergencies, civil strife, and forced migration. Contents Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-First Century: The Danger of a Setback Paul Grossrieder Scope of International Humanitarian Crises Ibrahim Osman The Language of Disasters: A Brief Terminology of Disaster Management and Humanitarian Action S.W.A. Gunn, M.D. Training for Humanitarian Assistance Kevin M. Cahill, M.D. Teamwork in Humanitarian Assistance Pamela Lupton-Bowers Humanitarian Ethical and Legal Standards Michel Veuthey Rules of Engagement: An Exmination of Relationships and Expectations in the Delivery of Humanitarian Assistance H. Roy Williams Humanitarians and the Press Joshua Friedman The Sinews of Humanitrian Assistance: Funding Policies, Practices, and Pitfalls Joelle Tanguy From the Other Side of the Fence: The Problems Behind the Solution Abdulrahim Abby Farah

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Brian Cudahy offers a fascinating tribute to the world the subway created. Taking a fresh look at one of the marvels of the 20th century, Cudahy creates a vivid sense of this extraordinary achievement—how the city was transformed once New Yorkers started riding in a hole in the ground.

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This book presents the life stories of twelve extraordinary women who lived passionately and recorded in poetry their happiness and heartbreaks. Our English translations of their poetry are intended to make their poems seem to speak their thoughts, and we have included a CD with sixty-eight of their poems recorded in Italian literature, so that we do in fact hear their thoughts. In addition, several chapters take up some controversial art-historical problems centered on one or another of the women, suggesting possible solutions. This copiously illustrated, interdisciplinary book of 239 poems—“poetry-in-context”--- is not an anthology; together with the CD of readings, and the challenging art-historical discussions of several paintings, it is unique. There is no other similar book.

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It All Comes Back to Me Now features profiles and touching vignettes about contemporary figures like Jeanine and Al Pirro, Andrew Cuomo, Archbishop Edward Egan, the late John Cardinal O'Connor, the late Monsignor Terry Attridge, and George W. Bush. Also included is a special tribute to former Governor Malcolm Wilson, which was cited as 'The Outstanding Radio or Television Editorial in New York State' by the New York State Broadcasters Association. It All Comes Back to Me Now also incorporates transcripts of the author's 'Interview with William O'Shaughnessy' cable television program, such as brilliant one-on-one interviews with hostage-journalist Terry Anderson, actor-activist Ossie Davis, president of the Council of American Ambassadors Ogden Reid, editor-in-chief of the New York Post Ken Chandler, former Westchester County Executive Andy O'Rourke, New York State power broker William Plunkett, Gannett's star feature columnist Phil Reisman and national president of the Urban League Hugh Price.

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The Union Preserved: A Guide to the Civil War Records in the New York State Archives is a comprehensive reference work that, for the first time, makes available to a wide public one of the most important and extensive Civil War resources in the nation: the collections of the New York State Archives and Records Administration. The guide also seeks to make readers aware of the vast collections of wartime manuscripts, newspapers, maps, rare books, ephemera, and artifacts held by the New York State Museum, The New York State Library, and The New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs. Collectively, the holdings of these four institutions constitute one of the largest and most significant collections of Civil War materials available to the public. Unlike similar guides that have been published by other archival institutions, The Union Preserved contains eleven appendices that are intended to facilitate and further the research of those interested in New York’s role in the Civil War. Much of the information contained in these appendices either has been long out of print or has never been published and should prove to be an invaluable source to researchers.

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The first comprehensive guide to the Hudson since the works of Ernest Ingersoll were published in the early 1900s, this guidebook arrives to fill the need for a detailed, point-by-point guide to the river from its intersection with the Atlantic to its source in the Adirondacks. Adams offers his reader five routes by which to tour the region. The traveler can venture directly up the main steamboat channel, or choose road and rail routes on the east and west shores of the river. Maps for each route are included, together with suggestions for excursions to many points of local and historical interest along the way. Over 250 photographs and paintings, and excerpts from American authors pepper the book, giving multiple perspectives of the region’s long history. For the armchair as well as the actual traveler, from the Abyssal Plain to Doodletown and Chevaux de-Frise, past Anthony’s nose, Burden’s ironworks, and the Saratoga Battle Field to the Hudson’s source at Lake Tear of the Clouds – this is the perfect traveling guide to the Hudson River region, rich in its history and culture, and ever-plentiful in its breathtaking sights.

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Like a magic potion, Italianita has seeped through the stream of American aesthetic consciousness ever since Benjamin West stepped onto Italian soil in 1760. The first period of this artistic phenomenon was investigated in The Italian Presence in American Art, 1760-1860 and the book at hand thus continues this intellectual exploration in its development during the following sixty years. Those decades between the Civil War and World War I brought to a climax the growing sense of American continental nationhood, and this strengthened perception of national identity was reflected in American art. A synthesis was achieved in which American values and images were fused with the great tradition flowing from its Italian source. Among the themes that arise from this examination of the role that Italy played in shaping American art is first and foremost the struggle to resolve the issue of what American art ought to express: our European heritage or our cultural independence. This question penetrates to the heart of the most widely debated topic in present-day American culture - multiculturalism. The reader may well find previously unconsidered relationships between our past and present, and may be led to reconsider problems posed by the conflicting needs of unity and diversity in our nation. Other themes that appear in these essays deal with the development of American wealth and its role in influencing the taste of the period, and with feminism. In these pages it will be noticed how very closely American art mirrors the American Experience. While all art reflects the cultural context in which it is created, the nature of American art, predominantly Romantic-Realism, makes the link between idea and image particularly visible. What becomes evident is that "the Italian presence" was almost never a simple matter of direct influence; rather it was an experience for American artists that afforded them, above all, insight and inspiration. Italy was America's muse.

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This new translation is annotated with the comments of Yuri Zavadski, one of Russia's most acclaimed and decorated stage directors. Drawing fro his extensive experience directing under the aegis of both Stanislovski and Vakhtagnov, Zavadski illumi-nates the text of Chekhov's dramatic masterpiece.

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Exploring the ever-changing philosophy of city life with Jean-Luc NancyIn The City in the Distance, Jean-Luc Nancy embarks on nothing less than a philosophy of the city. Drawing on his widely discussed accounts of sense and of the fraught question of community, Nancy views the city as the site of a disposition that is constantly undergoing metamorphoses.Far from an abstract account, Nancy attends in the most concrete way possible to the workings of a city not typically taken as paradigmatic, Los Angeles. As Jean-Christophe Bailly suggests in his foreword, Nancy joins Walter Benjamin in thinking the city not from an external vantage point, but on its own terms.

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Exploring the ever-changing philosophy of city life with Jean-Luc NancyIn The City in the Distance, Jean-Luc Nancy embarks on nothing less than a philosophy of the city. Drawing on his widely discussed accounts of sense and of the fraught question of community, Nancy views the city as the site of a disposition that is constantly undergoing metamorphoses.Far from an abstract account, Nancy attends in the most concrete way possible to the workings of a city not typically taken as paradigmatic, Los Angeles. As Jean-Christophe Bailly suggests in his foreword, Nancy joins Walter Benjamin in thinking the city not from an external vantage point, but on its own terms.

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A moving journey through the shadows of queer suicide and a tribute to lives marked by struggle and beautyThe Lamentations explores the struggles and resilience within the queer community, offering a unique blend of historical analysis and emotional tribute to those affected. Author Patrick Anderson examines the phenomenon of queer suicide across various art forms such as film, theatre, and literature, tracing its evolution from the twentieth century to today.Anderson brings to light the personal stories of individuals in the queer community who have ended their lives, compiling narratives from sources like newspaper articles, obituaries, and case studies. The book confronts the harsh realities of loneliness, shame, and oppression faced by many LGBTQ+ individuals, providing a poignant reflection on the societal challenges they face.The Lamentations is more than a meditation on death; it's a narrative of survival, mourning, and healing. Sharing

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The tale of New York's Young Redsa riveting journey through the YPA's rise and influenceYoung Reds in the Big Apple: The New York YPA, 19231934 by Jack Hodgson is a compelling historical account that delves into the heart of American communism through the lens of New York City's Young Pioneers of America (YPA). This meticulously researched book sheds light on a neglected aspect of American history, revealing the intricate details of the YPA's formation, ideologies, and activities from 1923 to 1934.Hodgson illustrates the YPA's journey, from its early days as a branch of the Communist Party USA, intended for youth aged 816, to its eventual disbandment. The book explores the organization's unique structure, ethos, and activities, showcasing how it became a formidable force in New York's political landscape. He vividly portrays the YPA members' involvement in public protests, education reform, and their bold stance against prevailing social norms, inclu

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