Search results for ""university of chicago press""

The U.S. Congress is typically seen as an institution filled with career politicians who have been seasoned by experience in lower levels of political office. In fact, political amateurs have comprised roughly one quarter of the House of Representatives since 1930. The effect of amateurs' inexperience on their political careers, roles in Congress, and impact on the political system has never been analyzed in detail. Written in a lucid style accessible to the nonspecialist, David T. Canon's Actors, Athletes, and Astronauts is a definitive study of political amateurs in elections and in Congress. Canon examines the political conditions that prompt amateurs to run for office, why they win or lose, and whether elected amateurs behave differently from their experienced counterparts. Challenging previous work which presumed stable career structures and progressively ambitious candidates, his study reveals that amateurs are disproportionately elected in periods of high political opportunity, such as the 1930s for Democrats and 1980s for Republicans. Canon's detailed findings call for significant revision of our prevailing understanding of ambition theory and disarm monolithic interpretations of political amateurs. His unique typology of amateurism differentiates among policy-oriented, "hopeless," or ambitious amateurs. The latter resemble their professional counterparts; "hopeless" amateurs are swept into office by strong partisan motivations and decision-making styles of each type vary, affecting their degree of success, but each type of amateur provides a necessary electoral balance by defeating entrenched incumbents rarely challenged by more experienced politicians.

Read more less

Arguing that the presidency is not defined by the Constitution - which doesn't use the term - but by what presidents say and how they say it, "Deeds Done in Words" has been the definitive book on presidential rhetoric for more than a decade. "Presidents Creating the Presidency" expands and recasts this classic work for the YouTube era, revealing how our media-saturated age has transformed the rhetorical strategies presidents use to increase and sustain the executive branch's powers.Identifying the primary genres of presidential oratory, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson add new analyses of signing statements and national eulogies to their explorations of inaugural addresses, veto messages, and war rhetoric, among other types. They explain that in some genres, the president acts alone, while in others, such as speeches that urge a legislative agenda, the executive solicits reaction from the other branches. Many of these rhetorical acts, the authors contend, extend over time: George W. Bush's post - September 11 statements, for example, culminated in a speech at the National Cathedral and became a touchstone for his subsequent address to Congress.For two centuries, presidential discourse has both succeeded brilliantly and failed miserably at satisfying the demands of audience, occasion, and institution - and in the process, it has increased and depleted political capital by enhancing authority or ceding it to the other branches. Illuminating the reasons behind each outcome, Campbell and Jamieson draw an authoritative picture of how presidents have used rhetoric to shape the presidency - and how they continue to recreate it.

Read more less

Over the past quarter century, researchers have successfully explored the inner workings of the physical and biological sciences using a variety of social and historical lenses. Inspired by these advances, the contributors to "Social Knowledge in the Making" turn their attention to the social sciences, broadly construed. The result is the first comprehensive effort to study and understand the day-to-day activities involved in the creation of social-scientific and related forms of knowledge about the social world. The essays collected here tackle a range of previously unexplored questions about the practices involved in the production, assessment, and use of diverse forms of social knowledge. A stellar cast of multidisciplinary scholars addresses topics such as the changing practices of historical research, anthropological data collection, library usage, peer review, and institutional review boards. Turning to the world beyond the academy, other essays focus on global banks, survey research organizations, and national security and economic policy makers. "Social Knowledge in the Making" is a landmark volume for a new field of inquiry, and the bold new research agenda it proposes will be welcomed in the social sciences, the humanities, and a broad range of non-academic settings.

Read more less

Friedrich A. Hayek is regarded as one of the preeminent social theorists of the twentieth century as much for his work outside of economics as for his work within it. During a career spanning several decades, he made contributions in fields as diverse as psychology, political philosophy, the history of ideas, and the methodology of the social sciences. Bruce Caldwell - editor of "The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek" - understands Hayek's thought like few others, and with this book he offers us the first full intellectual biography of this pivotal economic theorist. As Hayek's ideas matured, he became increasingly critical of developments within mainstream economics; his works evolved in striking - and sometimes seemingly contradictory - ways. Caldwell is ideally suited to explain the complex evolution of Hayek's thought, and his analysis here is nothing short of brilliant, impressively situating Hayek in a broader intellectual context, unpacking the often difficult turns in his thinking, and showing how his economic ideas came to inform his ideas on the other social sciences.

Read more less

Fifteen years in the making, "Hyperpolitics" is an interactive dictionary offering a wholly original approach for understanding and working with the most central concepts in political science. Designed and authored by two of the discipline's most distinguished scholars, its purpose is to provide its readers with fresh critical insights about what informs these political concepts, as well as a method by which readers - and especially students - can unpack and reconstruct them on their own. International in scope, "Hyperpolitics" draws upon a global vocabulary in order to turn complex ideas into an innovative teaching aid. Its companion open access website has already been widely acknowledged in the fields of education and political science and will continue to serve as a formidable hub for the book's audience. Much more than a dictionary and enhanced by dynamic graphics, "Hyperpolitics" introduces an ingenious means of understanding complicated concepts that will be an invaluable tool for scholars and students alike.

Read more less

Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism—writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In essays on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, Cameron examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one’s voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous. “To consent to being anonymous,” Weil wrote, “is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?” Throughout these essays Cameron examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility—from a “truth” that has no social foundation. Impersonality investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.

Read more less

Originally published in 1949, An Introduction to Legal Reasoning is widely acknowledged as a classic text. As its opening sentence states, "This is an attempt to describe generally the process of legal reasoning in the field of case law and in the interpretation of statutes and of the Constitution." In elegant and lucid prose, Edward H. Levi does just that in a concise manner, providing an intellectual foundation for generations of students as well as general readers. For this edition, the book includes a substantial new foreword by leading contemporary legal scholar Frederick Schauer that helpfully places this foundational book into its historical and legal contents, explaining its continuing value and relevance to understanding the role of analogical reasoning in the law. This volume will continue to be of great value to students of logic, ethics, and political philosophy, as well as to members of the legal profession and everyone concerned with problems of government and jurisprudence.

Read more less

The story of the rise of radicalism in the early nineteenth century has often been simplified into a fable about progressive social change. The diverse social movements of the era - religious, political, regional, national, antislavery, and protemperance - are presented as mere strands in a unified tapestry of labor and democratic mobilization. Taking aim at this flawed view of radicalism as simply the extreme end of a single dimension of progress, Craig Calhoun emphasizes the coexistence of different kinds of radicalism, their tensions, and their implications. "The Roots of Radicalism" reveals the importance of radicalism's links to pre-industrial culture and attachments to place and local communities, as well as the ways in which journalists who had been pushed out of "respectable" politics connected to artisans and other workers. Calhoun shows how much public recognition mattered to radical movements and how religious, cultural, and directly political - as well as economic - concerns motivated people to join up. Reflecting two decades of research into social movement theory and the history of protest, "The Roots of Radicalism" offers compelling insights into the past that can tell us much about the present, from American right-wing populism to democratic upheavals in North Africa.

Read more less

Eight of the last twelve presidents were millionaires when they took office. The figure is above fifty percent among current Supreme Court justices, all nine of whom graduated from either Harvard or Yale. Millionaires also control Congress, where a background in business or law is the norm and the average member of the House or Senate has spent less than two percent of his or her adult life in a working-class job. Why is it that most politicians in America are so much better off than the people who elect them - and does the social class divide between citizens and their representatives matter? With White-Collar Government, Nicholas Carnes answers this question with a resounding - and disturbing - yes. Legislators' socioeconomic backgrounds, he shows, have a profound impact not only on how they view the issues but also on the choices they make in office. Scant representation from among the working class almost guarantees that the policymaking process will be skewed toward outcomes that favor the upper class. It matters that the wealthiest Americans set the tax rates for the wealthy, that white-collar professionals choose the minimum wage for blue-collar workers, and that people who have always had health insurance decide whether to help those without. And while there is no one cause for this crisis of representation, Carnes shows that the problem does not stem from a lack of qualified candidates from among the working class. The solution, he argues, must involve a variety of changes, from the equalization of campaign funding to a shift in the types of candidates the parties support. If we want a government for the people, we have to start working toward a government that is truly by the people. White-Collar Government challenges long-held notions about the causes of political inequality in the United States and speaks to enduring questions about representation and political accountability.

Read more less

Markets are artifacts of language - so Douglas R. Holmes argues in this deeply researched look at central banks and the people who run them. Working at the intersection of anthropology, linguistics, and economics, he shows how central bankers have been engaging in communicative experiments that predate the financial crisis and continue to be refined amid its unfolding turmoil - experiments that do not merely describe the economy, but actually create its distinctive features. Holmes examines the New York District Branch of the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, and the Bank of England, among others, and shows how bank officials have created a new monetary regime that relies on collaboration with the public to achieve the ends of monetary policy. Central bankers, Holmes argues, have shifted the conceptual anchor of monetary affairs away from standards such as gold or fixed exchange rates and toward an evolving relationship with the public, one rooted in sentiments and expectations. Going behind closed doors to reveal the intellectual world of central banks, Economy of Words offers provocative new insights into the way our economic circumstances are conceptualized and ultimately managed.

Read more less

The collapse of socialism at the end of the twentieth century brought devastating changes to Mongolia. Economic shock therapy - an immediate liberalization of trade and privatization of publicly owned assets - quickly led to impoverishment, especially in rural parts of the country, where Tragic Spirits takes place. Following the travels of the nomadic Buryats, Manduhai Buyandelger tells a story not only of economic devastation but also a remarkable Buryat response to it - the revival of shamanic practices after decades of socialist suppression. Attributing their current misfortunes to returning ancestral spirits who are vengeful over being abandoned under socialism, the Buryats are now at once trying to appease their ancestors and recover the history of their people through shamanic practice. Thoroughly documenting this process, Buyandelger situates it as part of a global phenomenon, comparing the rise of shamanism in liberalized Mongolia to its similar rise in Africa and Indonesia. In doing so, she offers a sophisticated analysis of the way economics, politics, gender, and other factors influence the spirit world and the crucial workings of cultural memory.

Read more less

Human genomes are 99.9 percent identical - with one prominent exception. Instead of a matching pair of X chromosomes, men carry a single X, coupled with a tiny chromosome called the Y. Tracking the emergence of a new and distinctive way of thinking about sex represented by the unalterable, simple, and visually compelling binary of the X and Y chromosomes, Sex Itself examines the interaction between cultural gender norms and genetic theories of sex from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, postgenomic age. Using methods from history, philosophy, and gender studies of science, Sarah S. Richardson uncovers how gender has helped to shape the research practices, questions asked, theories and models, and descriptive language used in sex chromosome research. From the earliest theories of chromosomal sex determination, to the mid-century hypothesis of the aggressive XYY supermale, to the debate about Y chromosome degeneration, to the recent claim that male and female genomes are more different than those of humans and chimpanzees, Richardson shows how cultural gender conceptions influence the genetic science of sex. Richardson shows how sexual science of the past continues to resonate, in ways both subtle and explicit, in contemporary research on the genetics of sex and gender. With the completion of the Human Genome Project, genes and chromosomes are moving to the center of the biology of sex. Sex Itself offers a compelling argument for the importance of ongoing critical dialogue on how cultural conceptions of gender operate within the science of sex.

Read more less

What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system - "suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse," in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But in Poetry and Its Others, Jahan Ramazani reveals modern and contemporary poetry's animated dialogue with other genres and discourses. Poetry generates rich new possibilities, he argues, by absorbing and contending with its near verbal relatives. Exploring poetry's vibrant exchanges with other forms of writing, Ramazani shows how poetry assimilates features of prose fiction but differentiates itself from novelistic realism; metabolizes aspects of theory and philosophy but refuses their abstract procedures; and recognizes itself in the verbal precision of the law even as it separates itself from the law's rationalism. But poetry's most frequent interlocutors, he demonstrates, are news, prayer, and song. Poets such as William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden refashioned poetry to absorb the news while expanding its contexts; T. S. Eliot and Charles Wright drew on the intimacy of prayer though resisting its limits; and Paul Muldoon, Rae Armantrout, and Patience Agbabi have played with and against song lyrics and techniques. Encompassing a cultural and stylistic range of writing unsurpassed by other studies of poetry, Poetry and Its Others shows that we understand what poetry is by examining its interplay with what it is not.

Read more less

Rangelands are vast, making up one quarter of the United States and forty percent of the Earth's ice-free land. And while contemporary science has revealed a great deal about the environmental impacts associated with intensive livestock production from greenhouse gas emissions to land and water degradation far less is known about the historic role science has played in rangeland management and politics. Steeped in US soil, this first history of rangeland science looks to the origins of rangeland ecology in the late nineteenth-century American west, exploring the larger political and economic forces that together with scientific study produced legacies focused on immediate economic success rather than long-term ecological well being. During the late 1880s and early 1890s, a variety of forces from the Homestead Act of 1862 to the extermination of bison, foreign investment, and lack of government regulation promoted free-for-all access to and development of the western range, with disastrous environmental consequences. To address the crisis, government agencies turned to scientists, but as Nathan F. Sayre shows, range science grew in a politically fraught landscape. Neither the scientists nor the public agencies could escape the influences of bureaucrats and ranchers who demanded results, and the ideas that became scientific orthodoxy from fire suppression and predator control to fencing and carrying capacities contained flaws and blind spots that plague public debates about rangelands to this day. Looking at the global history of rangeland science through the Cold War and beyond, The Politics of Scale identifies the sources of past conflicts and mistakes and helps us to see a more promising path forward, one in which rangeland science is guided less by capital and the state and more by communities working in collaboration with scientists.

Read more less

It is hard to imagine, by their very name, the life sciences not involving the study of living things, but until the twentieth century much of what was known in the field was based primarily on specimens that had long before taken their last breaths. Only in the last century has ethology—the study of animal behavior—emerged as a major field of the life sciences.In Patterns of Behavior, Richard W. Burkhardt Jr. traces the scientific theories, practices, subjects, and settings integral to the construction of a discipline pivotal to our understanding of the diversity of life. Central to this tale are Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, 1973 Nobel laureates whose research helped legitimize the field of ethology and bring international attention to the culture of behavioral research. Demonstrating how matters of practice, politics, and place all shaped "ethology's ecologies," Burkhardt's book offers a sensitive reading of the complex interplay of the field's celebrated pioneers and a richly textured reconstruction of ethology's transformation from a quiet backwater of natural history to the forefront of the biological sciences. Winner of the 2006 Pfizer Awad from the History of Science Society

Read more less

Patent law encourages technological innovation. But as the patent system currently stands, diverse industries, from pharmaceuticals to software to semiconductors, are all governed by the same rules even though they innovate very differently. The result is a crisis in the patent system, where patents calibrated to the needs of prescription drugs wreak havoc on information technologies and vice versa. In "The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It", Dan L. Burk and Mark A. Lemley illustrate the barriers to innovation created by such catchall standards, and argue that courts should use legal tools already present in the patent statute to suit the needs of various industries.

Read more less

What is the good life for a human being? Aristotle's exploration of this question in the "Nicomachean Ethics" has established it as a founding work of Western philosophy, though its teachings have long puzzled readers and provoked spirited discussion. Adopting a radically new point of view, Ronna Burger deciphers some of the most perplexing conundrums of this influential treatise by approaching it as Aristotle's dialogue with the Platonic Socrates. Tracing the argument of the Ethics as it emerges through that approach, Burger's careful reading shows how Aristotle represents ethical virtue from the perspective of those devoted to it while standing back to examine its assumptions and implications.

Read more less

Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, a coterie of fire ants came ashore from South American ships docked in Mobile, Alabama. They invaded the South, damaging crops, harassing game animals and hindering harvesting methods. The US Dept of Agriculture developed a campaign that failed to eradicate the ants ..

Read more less

Long celebrated as one of "the Three Crowns" of Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) experimented widely with the forms of literature. His prolific and innovative writings - which range beyond the novella, from lyric to epic, from biography to mythography and geography, from pastoral and romance to invective - became powerful models for authors in Italy and across the Continent. This collection of essays presents Boccaccio's life and creative output in its encyclopedic diversity. Exploring a variety of genres, Latin as well as Italian, it provides short descriptions of all his works, situates them in his oeuvre, and features critical expositions of their most salient features and innovations. Designed for readers at all levels, it will appeal to scholars of literature, medieval and Renaissance studies, humanism and the classical tradition, as well as European historians, art historians, and students of material culture and the history of the book. Anchored by an introduction and chronology, this volume contains contributions by prominent Boccaccio scholars in the United States, as well as essays by contributors from France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The year 2013, Boccaccio's seven-hundredth birthday, will be an important one for the study of his work and will see an increase in academic interest in reassessing his legacy.

Read more less

In "Exterior Differential Systems", the authors present the results of their ongoing development of a theory of the geometry of differential equations, focusing especially on Lagrangians and Poincare-Cartan forms. They also cover certain aspects of the theory of exterior differential systems, which provides the language and techniques for the entire study, because it plays a central role in uncovering geometric properties of differential equations, the method of equivalence is particularly emphasized. In addition, the authors discuss conformally invariant systems at length, including results on the classification and application of symmetries and conservation laws. The book also covers the Second Variation, Euler-Lagrange PDE systems, and higher-order conservation laws. This synthesis of partial differential equations and differential geometry should be of fundamental importance to both students and experienced researchers working in geometric analysis - a subject that has been central in mathematics worldwide for the last 30 years.

Read more less

If art and science have one thing in common, it's a hunger for the new - new ideas and innovations, new ways of seeing and depicting the world. But that desire for novelty carries with it a fundamental philosophical problem: If everything has to come from something, how can anything truly new emerge? Is novelty even possible? In Novelty, Michael North takes us on a dazzling tour of more than two millennia of thinking about the problem of the new, from the puzzles of the pre-Socratics all the way up to the art world of the 1960s and '70s. The terms of the debate, North shows, were established before Plato, and have changed very little since: novelty, philosophers argued, could only arise from either recurrence or recombination. The former, found in nature's cycles of renewal, and the latter, seen most clearly in the workings of language - between them we have accounted for nearly all the ways in which novelty has been conceived of in Western history, including reformation, renaissance, invention, revolution, and even evolution. As he pursues this idea through centuries and across disciplines, North exhibits astonishing range, drawing on figures as diverse as Charles Darwin and Robert Smithson, Thomas Kuhn and Ezra Pound, Norbert Wiener and Andy Warhol, all of whom offer different ways of grappling with the idea of originality. Novelty, North demonstrates, remains a central problem of contemporary science and literature - an ever-receding target that, in its complexity and evasiveness, continues to inspire and propel the modern. A heady, ambitious intellectual feast, Novelty is rich with insight, a masterpiece of perceptive synthesis.

Read more less

Newcomers to older neighborhoods are usually perceived as destructive, tearing down everything that made the place special and attractive. But as "A Neighborhood That Never Changes" demonstrates, many gentrifiers seek to preserve the authentic local flavor of their new homes, rather than ruthlessly remake them. Drawing on ethnographic research in four distinct communities - the Chicago neighborhoods of Andersonville and Argyle and the New England towns of Provincetown and Dresden - Japonica Brown-Saracino paints a colorful portrait of how residents new and old, from wealthy gay homeowners to Portuguese fishermen, think about gentrification. The new breed of gentrifiers, Brown-Saracino finds, exhibits an acute self-consciousness about their role in the process and works to minimize gentrification's risks for certain longtime residents. In an era of rapid change, they cherish the unique and fragile, whether a dilapidated house, a two-hundred-year-old landscape, or the presence of people deeply rooted in the place they live. Contesting many long-standing assumptions about gentrification, Brown-Saracino's absorbing study reveals the unexpected ways beliefs about authenticity, place, and change play out in the social, political, and economic lives of very different neighborhoods.

Read more less

This study offers an interpretation of the political battles that paved the way for reform in Iran. The author argues that these conflicts did not result from a sudden ideological shift; nor did the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997 really defy the core principles of the Islamic Revolution. To the contrary, the struggle for a more democratic Iran can be traced back to the revolution itself, and to the contradictory agendas of the revolution's founding father, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Read more less

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that emotion plays a central role in global politics. For example, people readily care about acts of terrorism and humanitarian crises because they appeal to our compassion for human suffering. These struggles also command attention where social interactions have the power to produce or intensify the emotional responses of those who participate in them. From passionate protests to poignant speeches, Andrew A. G. Ross analyzes high-emotion events with an eye to how they shape public perception and finds that there is no single answer. The politically powerful play to the public's emotions to advance their political aims, and such appeals to emotion often serve to sustain existing values and institutions. But the affective dimension can also produce profound change, particularly when a struggle in the present can be shown to line up with emotionally resonant events from the past. Extending his findings to well-studied conflicts, including the "war on terror" and the violence in Rwanda and the Balkans, Ross identifies important sites of emotional impact missed by earlier research focused on identities and institutional interests.

Read more less

In 2011, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1973, authorizing its member states to take measures to protect Libyan civilians from Muammar Gadhafi's forces. In invoking the "responsibility to protect," the resolution draws on the principle that sovereign states are responsible and accountable to the international community for the protection of their populations and specifies that the international community can act to protect populations when national authorities fail to do so. The idea that sovereignty includes the responsibility to protect is often seen as a departure from the classic definition, but it actually has deep historical roots. In Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect, Luke Glanville argues that this responsibility extends back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that states have since been accountable to God, the people, and the international community. Over time, the right to national self-governance came to take priority over the protection of individual liberties, but the noninterventionist understanding of sovereignty was only firmly established in the twentieth century, and it remained for only a few decades before it was challenged by renewed claims that sovereigns are responsible for protection. Glanville traces the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility from the early modern period to the present day, and offers a new history with profound implications for the present.

Read more less

What is a weed," opined Emerson, "but a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered?" While that may be a worthy notion in theory, these plants of undiscovered virtue cause endless hours of toil for backyard gardeners. Wherever they take root, weeds compete for resources, and most often win. They also wreak havoc on industry-from agriculture to golf courses to civic landscape projects, vast amounts of money are spent to eradicate these virile and versatile invaders. With so much at stake, reliable information on weeds and their characteristics is crucial. Richard Dickinson and France Royer shed light on this complex world with Weeds of North America, the essential reference for all who wish to understand the science of the all-powerful weed. Encyclopedic in scope, the book is the first to cover North American weeds at every stage of growth. The book is organized by plant family, and more than five hundred species are featured. Each receives a two-page spread with images and text identification keys. Species are arranged within family alphabetically by scientific name, and entries include vital information on seed viability and germination requirements. Whether you believe, like Donald Culross Peattie, that "a weed is a plant out of place," or align with Elizabeth Wheeler Wilcox's "weeds are but unloved flowers," Dickinson and Royer provide much-needed background on these intrusive organisms. In the battle with weeds, knowledge truly is power. Weeds of North America is the perfect tool for gardeners, as well as anyone working in the business of weed ecology and control.

Read more less

Although we know him as one of the greatest English poets, William Wordsworth might not have become a poet at all without the experience of personal and historical catastrophe in his youth. In Disowned by Memory, David Bromwich connects the accidents of Wordsworth's life with the originality of his writing, showing how the poet's strong sympathy with the political idealism of the age and with the lives of the outcast and the dispossessed formed the deepest motive of his writings of the 1790s."This very Wordsworthian combination of apparently low subjects with extraordinary 'high argument' makes for very rewarding, though often challenging reading."—Kenneth R. Johnston, Washington Times"Wordsworth emerges from this short and finely written book as even stranger than we had thought, and even more urgently our contemporary."—Grevel Lindop, Times Literary Supplement"[Bromwich's] critical interpretations of the poetry itself offer readers unusual insights into Wordworth's life and work."—Library Journal"An added benefit of this book is that it restores our faith that criticism can actually speak to our needs. Bromwich is a rigorous critic, but he is a general one whose insights are broadly applicable. It's an intellectual pleasure to rise to his complexities."—Vijay Seshadri, New York Times Book Review

Read more less

The spread of industrialism, the emergence of professionalism and the challenge to slavery fueled an anxious debate about the meaning and value of work in 19th-century America. In chapters examining authors such as Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, this work argues that American writers generally sensed a deep affinity between the mental labour of writing and such physical labours as blacksmithing, house building, housework, mothering and farming. Combining literary and social history, canonical and non-canonical texts, primary source material and contemporary theory, the author seeks to establish work as an important subject of cultural criticism.

Read more less

We think of a myth as a fictional story, and Plato was the first to use the term "muthos" in that sense. But Plato also used "muthos" to describe the practice of making and telling myths, the oral transmission of all that a community keeps in its collective memory. In the first part of this text, Luc Brisson reconstructs Plato's multifaceted and not uncritical description of "muthos" in light of the latter's famous Atlantis story. The second part of the book contrasts this sense of myth, as Plato does, with another form of speech which he believed was far superior: the "logos" of philosophy. Brisson's work is part lexical, part philosophical, and part ethnological, and Gerard Naddaf's substantial introduction shows the originality and importance both of Brisson's method and of Plato's analysis in the context of contemporary debates over the origin and evolution of the oral tradition.

Read more less

Nobody's Nation offers an illuminating look at the St. Lucian, Nobel-Prize-winning writer, Derek Walcott, and grounds his work firmly in the context of West Indian history. Paul Breslin argues that Walcott's poems and plays are bound up with an effort to re-imagine West Indian society since its emergence from colonial rule, its ill-fated attempt at political unity, and its subsequent dispersal into tiny nation-states. According to Breslin, Walcott's work is centrally concerned with the West Indies' imputed absence from history and lack of cohesive national identity or cultural tradition. Walcott sees this lack not as impoverishment but as an open space for creation. In his poems and plays, West Indian history becomes a realm of necessity, something to be confronted, contested, and remade through literature. What is most vexed and inspired in Walcott's work can be traced to this quixotic struggle. Linking extensive archival research and new interviews with Walcott himself to detailed critical readings of major works, Nobody's Nation will take its place as the definitive study of the poet.

Read more less

Human-induced climate change is emerging as one of the gravest threats to biodiversity in history, and while a vast amount of literature on the ecological impact of climate change exists, very little has been dedicated to the management of wildlife populations and communities in the wake of unprecedented habitat changes. "Wildlife Conservation in a Changing Climate" is an essential resource, bringing together leaders in the fields of climate change ecology, wildlife population dynamics, and environmental policy to examine the impacts of climate change on populations of terrestrial vertebrates. Chapters assess the details of climate change ecology, including demographic implications for individual populations, evolutionary responses, impacts on movement patterns, alterations of species interactions, and predicting impacts across regions. The contributors also present a number of strategies by which conservationists and wildlife managers can counter or mitigate the impacts of climate change as well as increase the resilience of wildlife populations to such changes. A seminal contribution to the fields of ecology and conservation biology, "Wildlife Conservation in a Changing Climate" will serve as the spark that ignites a new direction of discussions about and action on the ecology and conservation of wildlife in a changing climate.

Read more less

The role of the housing market in the recent recession raised questions about similar episodes in economic history. Were the underlying causes of housing and mortgage crises the same in earlier episodes? How have previous policy interventions either damaged or improved long-run market performance and stability? This volume provides context for understanding recent events by examining how historical housing and mortgage markets worked - and how they sometimes failed. The editors survey the research on housing crises, comparing that of the 1930s to that of the 2000s in order to identify what contributed to each crisis.

Read more less

In this powerful memoir, philosopher Karyn L. Freedman travels back to a Paris night in 1990 when she was twenty-two and, in one violent hour, her life was changed forever by a brutal rape. One Hour in Paris takes the reader on a harrowing yet inspirational journey through suffering and recovery both personal and global. We follow Freedman from an apartment in Paris to a French courtroom, then from a trauma center in Toronto to a rape clinic in Africa. At a time when as many as one in three women in the world have been victims of sexual assault and when many women are still ashamed to come forward, Freedman's book is a moving and essential look at how survivors cope and persevere. At once deeply intimate and terrifyingly universal, One Hour in Paris weaves together Freedman's personal experience with the latest philosophical, neuroscientific, and psychological insights on what it means to live in a body that has been traumatized. Using her background as a philosopher, she looks at the history of psychological trauma and draws on recent theories of post-traumatic stress disorder and neuroplasticity to show how recovery from horrific experiences is possible. Through frank discussions of sex and intimacy, she explores the consequence of sexual violence on love and relationships, and she illustrates the steep personal cost of sexual violence and the obstacles faced by individual survivors in its aftermath. Freedman's book is an urgent call to face this fundamental social problem head-on, arguing that we cannot continue to ignore the fact that sexual violence against women is rooted in gender inequalities that exist worldwide - and must be addressed. One Hour in Paris is essential reading for survivors of sexual violence as well as an invaluable resource for therapists, mental health professionals, and family members and friends of victims.

Read more less

"Castles, Battles, and Bombs" reconsiders key episodes of military history from the point of view of economics - with dramatically insightful results. For example, when looked at as a question of sheer cost, the building of castles in the High Middle Ages seems almost inevitable: though stunningly expensive, a strong castle was far cheaper to maintain than a standing army. The authors also reexamine the strategic bombing of Germany in World War II and provide new insights into France's decision to develop nuclear weapons. Drawing on these examples and more, Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll suggest lessons for today's military, from counter terrorist strategy and military manpower planning to the use of private military companies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Read more less

During the Enlightenment, Western scholars racialized ideas, deeming knowledge based on reality superior to that based on ideality. Scholars labeled inquiries into ideality, such as animism and soul migration, "savage philosophy," a clear indicator of the racism motivating the distinction between the real and the ideal. In their view, savage philosophers mistake connections between signs for connections between real objects and believe that discourse can have physical effects - in other words, they believe in magic. Christopher Bracken's "Magical Criticism" brings the unacknowledged history of this racialization to light and shows how, even as we have rejected ethnocentric notions of "the savage," they remain active today in everything from attacks on postmodernism to Native American land disputes. Here Bracken reveals that many of the most influential Western thinkers dabbled in savage philosophy, from Marx, Nietzsche, and Proust to Freud, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Walter Benjamin. For Bracken, this recourse to savage philosophy presents an opportunity to reclaim a magical criticism that can explain the very real effects created by the discourse of historians, anthropologists, philosophers, the media, and governments.

Read more less

Through a penetrating interview and sixteen essays, this volume explores key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy. With characteristic erudition and insight, Remi Brague focuses less on individual Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers than on their relationships with one another. Their disparate philosophical worlds, Brague shows, were grounded in different models of revelation that engendered divergent interpretations of the ancient Greek sources they held in common. So, despite striking similarities in their solutions to the philosophical problems they all faced, intellectuals in each theological tradition often viewed the others' ideas with skepticism, if not disdain. Brague's portrayal of this misunderstood age brings to life not only its philosophical and theological nuances, but also its true lessons for our own time.

Read more less

Calls for closer connections among disciplines can be heard throughout the world of scholarly research, from major universities to the National Institutes of Health. In Defense of Disciplines presents a fresh and daring analysis of the argument surrounding interdisciplinarity. Challenging the belief that blurring the boundaries between traditional academic fields promotes more integrated research and effective teaching, Jerry Jacobs contends that the promise of interdisciplinarity is illusory and that critiques of established disciplines are often overstated and misplaced. Drawing on diverse sources of data, Jacobs offers a new theory of liberal arts disciplines such as biology, economics, and history that identifies the organizational sources of their dynamism and breadth. Illustrating his thesis with a wide range of case studies, including the diffusion of ideas between fields, the creation of interdisciplinary scholarly journals, and the rise of new fields that spin off from existing ones, Jacobs upends many of the existing criticisms to mount a powerful defense of the enduring value of liberal arts disciplines. This will become one of the anchors of the case against interdisciplinarity for years to come.

Read more less

Forty years ago, viewers who wanted to watch the news could only choose from among the major broadcast networks, all of which presented the same news without any particular point of view. Today we have a much broader array of choices, including cable channels offering a partisan take. With partisan programs gaining in popularity, some argue that they are polarizing American politics, while others counter that only a tiny portion of the population watches such programs and that their viewers tend to already hold similar beliefs. In How Partisan Media Polarize America, Matthew Levendusky confirms - but also qualifies - both of these claims. Drawing on experiments and survey data, he shows that Americans who watch partisan programming do become more certain of their beliefs and less willing to weigh the merits of opposing views or to compromise. And while only a small segment of the American population watches partisan media programs, those who do tend to be more politically engaged, and their effects on national politics are therefore far-reaching. In a time when politics seem doomed to partisan discord, How Partisan Media Polarize America offers a much-needed clarification of the role partisan media might play.

Read more less

Law school can be a joyous, soul-transforming challenge that leads to a rewarding career. It can also be an exhausting, self-limiting trap. It all depends on making smart decisions. When every advantage counts, A Student's Guide to Law School is like having a personal mentor available at every turn. As a recent graduate and an appellate lawyer, Andrew B. Ayers knows how high the stakes are - he's been there, and not only did he survive the experience, he graduated first in his class. In A Student's Guide to Law School he shares critical insights about how to make a law school journey successful. Originating in notes Ayers jotted down while commuting to his first clerkship with then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor, and refined throughout his first years as a lawyer, A Student's Guide offers a unique balance of insider's knowledge and professional advice. Organized into four parts, the book begins with a section on tests and grades, explaining what's expected and exploring the choices students must make on exam day. The second part discusses the skills needed to be a successful law student, giving the reader easy-to-use tools to analyze legal materials and construct clear arguments. The third part contains advice on studying, classwork, and note-taking. Ayers closes with a look beyond the classroom, showing students how the choices they make in law school will affect their career-and even determine the kind of lawyer they become. The first law school guide written by a recent top-ranked graduate, A Student's Guide to Law School is relentlessly practical and thoroughly relevant to the law school experience of today's students. With the tools and advice Ayers shares here, students can mke the most of their investment in law school, and turn their valuable learning experiences into a meaningful career.

Read more less

Much of the evolutionary debate since Darwin has focused on the level at which natural selection occurs. Most biologists acknowledge multiple levels of selection - from the gene to the species. The debate about group selection, however, is the focus of Mark E. Borrello's "Evolutionary Restraints". Tracing the history of biological attempts to determine whether selection leads to the evolution of fitter groups, Borrello takes as his focus the British naturalist V. C. Wynne-Edwards, who proposed that animals could regulate their own populations and thus avoid overexploitation of their resources. By the mid-twentieth century, Wynne-Edwards became an advocate for group selection theory and led a debate that engaged the most significant evolutionary biologists of his time, including Ernst Mayr, G. C. Williams, and Richard Dawkins. This important dialogue bled out into broader conversations about population regulation, environmental crises, and the evolution of human social behavior. By examining a single facet of the long debate about evolution, Borrello provides powerful insight into an intellectual quandary that remains relevant and alive to this day.

Read more less

The idea for Philosophy in a Time of Terror was born hours after the attacks on 9/11 and was realized just weeks later when Giovanna Borradori sat down with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in New York City, in separate interviews, to evaluate the significance of the most destructive terrorist act ever perpetrated. This book marks an unprecedented encounter between two of the most influential thinkers of our age as here, for the first time, Habermas and Derrida overcome their mutual antagonism and agree to appear side by side. As the two philosophers disassemble and reassemble what we think we know about terrorism, they break from the familiar social and political rhetoric increasingly polarized between good and evil. In this process, we watch two of the greatest intellects of the century at work.

Read more less

Between the 12th and the 16th centuries, women assumed public roles of unprecedented prominence in Italian religious culture. Legally subordinated, politically excluded, socially limited and ideologically disdained, women's active participation in religious life offered them access to power in all its forms. These essays explore the involvement of women in religious life throughout northern and central Italy and trace the evolution of communities of pious women as they tried to achieve their devotional goals despite the strictures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The contributors examine relations between holy women, their devout followers and society at large. This book shows how women were able to carve out broad areas of influence by carefully exploiting the institutional church and by astutely manipulating religious precepts.

Read more less

In the late-1990s people hear constantly about the "information revolution". The 24-hour news channels and dizzying Internet technologies bombard people with facts and pictures from around the globe. But what kind of a "revolution" is this? How has information really changed from what it was ten years or ten centuries ago? This work offers some answers to these questions. Albert Borgmann has written a history of information, from its inception in the natural world to its role in the transformation of culture - in writing and printing, in music and architecture - to the late-1990s Internet mania and its attendant assets and liabilities. Drawing on the history of ideas, the details of information technology, and the boundaries of the human condition, Borgmann explains the relationship between things and signs, between reality and information. His history ranges from Plato to Boeing and from the alphabet to virtual reality, all the while being conscious of the enthusiasm, apprehension, and uncertainty that have greeted every stage of the development of information. The book is underscored by the humanist's fundamental belief in human excellence and by the conviction that excellence is jeopardized unless we achieve a balance of information and "the things and practices that have served us well and we continue to depend on for our material and spiritual well-being - the grandeur of nature, the splendour of cities, competence of work, fidelity to loved ones, and devotion to art or religion".

Read more less

More people than ever are going to graduate school to seek a PhD these days. When they get there, they discover a bewildering environment: a rapid immersion in their discipline, keen competition for resources, and uncertain options for their future, whether inside or outside of academia. Life with a PhD can begin to resemble an unsolvable puzzle. In Behind the Academic Curtain, Frank F. Furstenberg offers a clear and user-friendly map to this maze. Drawing on decades of experience in academia, he provides a comprehensive, empirically grounded, and, most important of all, practical guide to academic life. While the greatest anxieties for PhD candidates and postgrads are often centered on getting that tenure-track dream job, each stage of an academic career poses a series of distinctive problems. Furstenberg divides these stages into five chapters that cover the entire trajectory of an academic life, including how to make use of a PhD outside of academia. From finding the right job to earning tenure, from managing teaching loads to conducting research, from working on committees to easing into retirement, he illuminates all the challenges and opportunities an academic can expect to encounter. Each chapter is designed for easy consultation, with copious signposts, helpful suggestions, and a bevy of questions that all academics should ask themselves throughout their career, whether at a major university, junior college, or a nonacademic organization. An honest and up-to-date portrayal of how this life really works, Behind the Academic Curtain is an essential companion for any scholar, at any stage of his or her career.

Read more less

This critically acclaimed collection is both a passionate celebration of teaching as a vocation and an argument for rhetoric as the center of liberal education. While Booth provides an eloquent personal account of the pleasures of teaching, he also vigorously exposes the political and economic scandals that frustrate even the most dedicated educators. "[Booth] is unusually adept at addressing a wide variety of audiences. From deep in the heart of this academic jungle, he shows a clear eye and a firm step."—Alison Friesinger Hill, New York Times Book Review"A cause for celebration. . . . What an uncommon man is Wayne Booth. What an uncommon book he has provided for our reflection."—James Squire, Educational Leadership"This book stands as a vigorous reminder of the traditional virtues of the scholar-teacher."—Brian Cox, Times Literary Supplement

Read more less

Violent urban schools loom large in our culture: for decades they have served as the centerpieces of political campaigns and as window dressing for brutal television shows and movies. Yet unequal access to quality schools remains the single greatest failing of our society-and one of the most hotly debated issues of our time. Of all the usual words used to describe nonselective city schools-segregated, unequal, violent-none comes close to characterizing their systemic dysfunction in high-poverty neighborhoods. The most accurate word is toxic. When Bowen Paulle speaks of toxicity, he speaks of educational worlds dominated by intimidation and anxiety, by ambivalence, degradation, and shame. Based on six years of teaching and research in the South Bronx and in Southeast Amsterdam, Toxic Schools is the first fully participatory ethnographic study of its kind and a searing examination of daily life in two radically different settings. What these schools have in common, however, are not the predictable ideas about race and educational achievement but the tragically similar habituated stress responses of students forced to endure the experience of constant vulnerability. From both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, Paulle paints an intimate portrait of how students and teachers actually cope, in real time, with the chronic stress, peer group dynamics, and subtle power politics of urban educational spaces in the perpetual shadow of aggression.

Read more less