Search results for ""stanford university press""
Stanford University Press Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning
Mental image, dream, fantasy, hallucination—all these are comprised in the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasm. Perhaps only such a multifarious concept is adequate to the range of visual elements involved in the experience of reading fiction, or of writing it. Soon after the birth of the novel, doctors expressed concern that readers might be possessed by what they were reading, haunted by textual fantasms. Contemporary writers like John Gardner, Maurice Blanchot, and John Banville figure this possession as a kind of textual dreaming: fiction, like dream, draws from a fantasmal unconscious. For the reader's images to become conscious, however, they must be cued by a material text through framing strategies and evocative gaps. This book analyzes the complex relationship between the fantasmal experience and the material text, reading a wide range of works—such as Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, and Rimbaud's "The Vowels"—that treat explicitly what is implicit in reading. Although the specific images of individual readers cannot be predicted, one can speculate on the modes of these images: are they focused or fogged, schematic or emotive, fleeting or enduring? These are questions not only for theorists but for artists who make textual visualization visible. Drawing on artists' books, marginal drawings by authors, and films such as Prospero's Books, Fantasm and Fiction illuminates the process of textual visualization. The author develops, in addition, "A Politics of Visualization" through analyses of the photographs of David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman's film Blue, and Nicole Brossard's novel Picture Theory. In this richly suggestive study, the fantasm emerges as a crucial aspect not only of reading but of any kind of envisioning.
£24.99
Stanford University Press The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia
Current cultural theory makes much of the role of the imagination of the "primitive" and the "indigenous" in the making of modern empires. In this study of Russian and Soviet governance of the Evenki hunters and reindeer herders of Northern Siberia, the author explores the reverse side of this social imaginary, exploring what he calls "cultures of statehood" among the very people whom the state consistently rendered stateless. He examines the political uses of state institutions and the practices of identification with the state by indigenous Siberians who are traditionally described as stateless kin-based peoples whose cultures are determined by long-term adaptation to the harsh northern environment and for whom the proximity of state institutions is solely a cause of suffering. Ssorin-Chaikov's goal is not merely to undo the displacement of indigenous lifestyles and identities to the imagined landscape beyond and before the Russian/Soviet state. It is, rather, to chart forms of government that expand alongside displacement, to examine the social life of the state in everyday contexts extending well beyond formal institutions, and to theorize statehood from a unique vantage point.
£55.80
Stanford University Press Up in Flames: The Ephemeral Art of Pasted-Paper Sculpture in Taiwan
Up in Flames is the first comprehensive study of the traditional Chinese craft of paper sculpture: the construction in bamboo and paper of human figures, figures of gods, buildings, and other objects—all intended to be ritually burned. The book documents this ancient craft as it exists today in Taiwan. The fascinating fundamentals of the craft, the tools and materials, as well as the techniques used to construct houses and human figures, never investigated before, are described and illustrated in detail. The written material is augmented by many color photographs showing the objects and the men and women who make them. Although the tradition of burning objects as a part of religious ceremonies is still strong, the traditional paper and bamboo objects are being more and more often replaced by plastic components and whole preprinted cardboard counterparts. The resulting changes in the personal, business, and especially the creative and artistic side of the craft are therefore also addressed.
£63.00
Stanford University Press Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier
This book argues that the invention of Asian American identities serves as an index to the historical formation of modern America. By tracing constructions of "Asian American" to an interpenetrating dynamic between Asia and America, the author obtains a deeper understanding of key issues in American culture, history, and society. The formation of America in the twentieth century has had everything to do with "westward expansion" across the "Pacific frontier" and the movement of Asians onto American soil. After the passage of the last piece of anti-Asian legislation in the 1930's, the United States found it had to grapple with both the presence of Asians already in America and the imperative to develop its neocolonial interests in East Asia. The author argues that, under these double imperatives, a great wall between "Asian" and "American" is constructed precisely when the two threatened to merge. Yet the very incompleteness of American identity has allowed specific and contingent fusion of "Asian" and "American" at particular historical junctures. From the importation of Asian labor in the mid-nineteenth century, the territorialization of Hawaii and the Philippines in the late-nineteenth century, through wars with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam and the Cold War with China, to today's Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation group, the United States in the modern age has seen its national identity as strongly attached to the Pacific. As this has taken place, so has the formation of a variety of Asian American identities. Each contains a specific notion of America and reveals a particular conception of "Asian" and "American." Complicating the usual notion of "identity politics" and drawing on a wide range of writings—sociological, historical, cultural, medical, anthropological, geographic, economic, journalistic, and political—the author studies both how the formation of these identifications discloses the response of America to the presence of Asians and how Asian Americans themselves have inhabited these roles and resisted such categorizations, inventing their own particular subjectivities as Americans.
£39.00
Stanford University Press An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880
"An American Bible is an extremely compelling piece of cultural history that succeeds in making rich rather than schematic sense of the major dramas that lay behind the production of over 1,700 different American editions of the Bible in the century after the American Revolution. Gutjahr's book is especially powerful in demonstrating how nineteenth-century efforts to purge the Bible of textual and translational impurities in search of an 'authentic' text led ironically to the emergence of entirely new gospels like the Book of Mormon and the massive fictionalized literature dealing with the life of Christ." —Jay Fliegelman, Stanford University During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, American publishing experienced unprecedented, exponential growth. An emerging market economy, widespread religious revival, educational reforms, and innovations in print technology worked together to create a culture increasingly formed and framed by the power of print. At the center of this new culture was the Bible, the book that has been called "the best seller" in American publishing history. Yet it is important to realize that the Bible in America was not a simple, uniform entity. First printed in the United States during the American Revolution, the Bible underwent many revisions, translations, and changes in format as different editors and publishers appropriated it to meet a wide range of changing ideological and economic demands. This book examines how many different constituencies (both secular and religious) fought to keep the Bible the preeminent text in the United States as the country's print marketplace experienced explosive growth. The author shows how these heated battles had profound consequences for many American cultural practices and forms of printed material. By exploring how publishers, clergymen, politicians, educators, and lay persons met the threat that new printed material posed to the dominance of the Bible by changing both its form and its contents, the author reveals the causes and consequences of mutating God's supposedly immutable Word.
£104.40
Stanford University Press Problems of Form
Sociology has long sought to find out how acting in a situation and observing that situation may differ and nevertheless belong to a single kind of social operation. George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form (1969) provides one way to conceive of such an operation. The present book is the first to make sociological use of his mathematical calculus of form, which has been extensively applied to cybernetics, systems theory, cognitive science, and mathematics. Spencer-Brown's theory states that any action or communication is always an operation that makes a distinction. Not only does this operation take place, but it can be observed as indicating what it is interested in, and as leaving unmarked what it is not. Distinctions thereby entail a logic of inclusion and exclusion that is subject to social debate and conflict. In social situations there is no action that does not at the same time execute, maintain, or cross a distinction. Thus the observer is part of the situation he or she observes. The essays in this volume use this idea to describe different social "forms" as consisting of action observed by further action. A "form" here is understood to be the two sides of a distinction and its dividing line, taken together. All social action, therefore, consists of three values: marked side, unmarked side, and an operation separating the two. If one watches the third value, one ends up observing the observer drawing the distinction—an observer who, of course, may be oneself. In this collection, more general essays study the consequences of such an understanding of form for our conceptions of literature, paradox, sign, play, and language. Other essays focus on the observations necessary to construct such forms as money, the university, the state, a career, or sickness. All the essays share an interest in problems ensuing from the fact that though one can observe the form of a distinction and become aware of its arbitrary, contingent, and discriminatory nature, one nevertheless, when trying to act or communicate, must choose a distinction. The essays show how social situations deftly veil the arbitrariness of the distinctions that constitute their forms.
£27.99
Stanford University Press European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History
This ambitious book explores challenges to male hegemony throughout continental Europe. It focuses especially on France, but it also offers comparative material on developments in the German-speaking countries and in the smaller European nations and aspiring nation-states. Spanning 250 years, the sweeping coverage extends from Portugal to Poland, Greece to Finland, Ireland to Ukraine, and Spain to Scandinavia—as well as international and transnational feminist organizations. The study has several objectives. For general readers and those interested primarily in the historical record, it provides a comprehensive, comparative account of feminist developments in European societies, as well as a rereading of European history from a feminist perspective. By placing gender, or relations between women and men, at the center of European politics, where the author argues that it belongs but from which it has long been marginalized, the book aims to reconfigure our understanding of the European past and to make visible a long but neglected tradition of feminist thought and politics. On another level, by providing a broad and accurate historical analysis, the book seeks to disentangle some misperceptions and to demystify some confusing contemporary debates about the Enlightenment, reason, nature, equality vs. difference, and public vs. private, among others. The author argues that historical feminisms offer us far more than logical paradoxes and contradictions; feminisms are about sexual politics, not philosophy. Feminist victories are not, strictly speaking, about getting the argument right, nor is gender merely “a useful category of analysis”; sexual difference lies at the heart of human thought and politics.
£32.00
Stanford University Press Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code
This is a detailed history of one of the most important and dramatic episodes in modern science, recounted from the novel vantage point of the dawn of the information age and its impact on representations of nature, heredity, and society. Drawing on archives, published sources, and interviews, the author situates work on the genetic code (1953-70) within the history of life science, the rise of communication technosciences (cybernetics, information theory, and computers), the intersection of molecular biology with cryptanalysis and linguistics, and the social history of postwar Europe and the United States. Kay draws out the historical specificity in the process by which the central biological problem of DNA-based protein synthesis came to be metaphorically represented as an information code and a writing technology—and consequently as a “book of life.” This molecular writing and reading is part of the cultural production of the Nuclear Age, its power amplified by the centuries-old theistic resonance of the “book of life” metaphor. Yet, as the author points out, these are just metaphors: analogies, not ontologies. Necessary and productive as they have been, they have their epistemological limitations. Deploying analyses of language, cryptology, and information theory, the author persuasively argues that, technically speaking, the genetic code is not a code, DNA is not a language, and the genome is not an information system (objections voiced by experts as early as the 1950s). Thus her historical reconstruction and analyses also serve as a critique of the new genomic biopower. Genomic textuality has become a fact of life, a metaphor literalized, she claims, as human genome projects promise new levels of control over life through the meta-level of information: control of the word (the DNA sequences) and its editing and rewriting. But the author shows how the humbling limits of these scriptural metaphors also pose a challenge to the textual and material mastery of the genomic “book of life.”
£32.00
Stanford University Press Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism
How can a movement like Surrealism be transferred, transplanted, or transported from one culture to another, one language to another? This book traces the creative dialogue between France and Japan in the early twentieth century, focusing on Surrealist and avant-garde writings. It opens a theoretical treatment of cultural memory, influence, visuality, writing, nostalgia, and nation to suggest a new perspective for the reading of modern Japanese culture and cross-cultural interactions. The author argues that the problem of literary influences should be recast as a problem of cultural memory, where analysis of causes and effects gives way to a deeper analysis of displacements and aftershocks, which she calls cultural “fault lines.” The book analyzes the writings of Takiguchi Shuzo, Nishiwaki Junzaburo, Kitasono Katsue, and others whose work was associated explicitly with the Surrealist movement in Japan. It also incorporates readings of other experimental works and postwar performances that reflect the wider impact of these avant-garde ideas. The author argues that a vision of alterity, a foreign space located somewhere beyond, plays a crucial role in formulations of avant-garde praxis in both the Japanese and French contexts. Here exploration of Japanese notions of the Surreal, calling for a rereading of received notions about French avant-gardes, leads to a reconfiguration of this period, written less as a narrative history of literature than as the nonlinear route of a multivalent dialogue. Japanese Surrealism is important both for the specific questions it raises and for its exemplary place as an encounter between cultures, literary movements, and languages. As a movement that challenges and breaks apart clear and bounded conceptions of language, poetry, and the transmissibility of meaning, Japanese Surrealism reframes the relation between content and consciousness and is thus a particularly strong and revealing case of cultural interaction. What this avant-garde encounter makes apparent is that inherent discontinuities and fragmentations within individual cultures can also become crucial opportunities for productive intersections between distant realities and distant cultures.
£97.20
Stanford University Press Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness
Along with Husserl's Ideas and Heidegger's Being and Time, Being Given is one of the classic works of phenomenology in the twentieth century. Through readings of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and twentieth-century French phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Henry), it ventures a bold and decisive reappraisal of phenomenology and its possibilities. Its author's most original work to date, the book pushes phenomenology to its limits in an attempt to redefine and recover the phenomenological ideal, which the author argues has never been realized in any of the historical phenomenologies. Against Husserl's reduction to consciousness and Heidegger's reduction to Dasein, the author proposes a third reduction to givenness, wherein phenomena appear unconditionally and show themselves from themselves at their own initiative. Being Given is the clearest, most systematic response to questions that have occupied its author for the better part of two decades. The book articulates a powerful set of concepts that should provoke new research in philosophy, religion, and art, as well as at the intersection of these disciplines. Some of the significant issues it treats include the phenomenological definition of the phenomenon, the redefinition of the gift in terms not of economy but of givenness, the nature of saturated phenomena, and the question "Who comes after the subject?" Throughout his consideration of these issues, the author carefully notes their significance for the increasingly popular fields of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Being Given is therefore indispensable reading for anyone interested in the question of the relation between the phenomenological and the theological in Marion and emergent French phenomenology.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish
In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotions. It is a rarity among scholarly books, for it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation. The author analyzes the many kinds of Yiddish "psycho-ostensives"—ranging from blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. To a person who mentions something horrible you can say: Zalts dir in di oygn, fefer dir in noz! ("Salt into your eyes, and pepper into your nose!"). Or to a child you might tenderly murmur: A gezúnt dir in yeder éyverl! ("A health to all your little body-parts!"). The author illustrates how these formulas can be used to fulfill social conventions, to keep away evil, to show off—or even to deceive the listener. Comments [1999] "I have known and profited from this book for many years, and its interest for linguistics and Yiddish studies has grown steadily. The book will have three audiences: specialists in Yiddish; linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists who are interested in the emotional side of language; and general linguists familiar with Matisoff's outstanding contributions, both witty and insightful, in other linguistic fields." —William Labov, University of Pennsylvania "Matisoff's book was pathbreaking, innovative, and crucially important when it was first published and remains so today. It is as relevant as it was then, if not more so. Matisoff is a consummate scholar and also an excellent writer: clear and weighty but also whimsical and witty." —Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University
£19.99
Stanford University Press Images of the Medieval Peasant
The medieval clergy, aristocracy, and commercial classes tended to regard peasants as objects of contempt and derision. In religious writings, satires, sermons, chronicles, and artistic representations peasants often appeared as dirty, foolish, dishonest, even as subhuman or bestial. Their lowliness was commonly regarded as a natural corollary of the drudgery of their agricultural toil. Yet, at the same time, the peasantry was not viewed as “other” in the manner of other condemned groups, such as Jews, lepers, Muslims, or the imagined “monstrous races” of the East. Several crucial characteristics of the peasantry rendered it less clearly alien from the elite perspective: peasants were not a minority, their work in the fields nourished all other social orders, and, most important, they were Christians. In other respects, peasants could be regarded as meritorious by virtue of their simple life, productive work, and unjust suffering at the hands of their exploitive social superiors. Their unrewarded sacrifice and piety were also sometimes thought to place them closest to God and more likely to win salvation. This book examines these conflicting images of peasants from the post-Carolingian period to the German Peasants’ War. It relates the representation of peasants to debates about how society should be organized (specifically, to how human equality at Creation led to subordination), how slavery and serfdom could be assailed or defended, and how peasants themselves structured and justified their demands. Though it was argued that peasants were legitimately subjugated by reason of nature or some primordial curse (such as that of Noah against his son Ham), there was also considerable unease about how the exploitation of those who were not completely alien—who were, after all, Christians—could be explained. Laments over peasant suffering as expressed in the literature might have a stylized quality, but this book shows how they were appropriated and shaped by peasants themselves, especially in the large-scale rebellions that characterized the late Middle Ages.
£32.00
Stanford University Press Lacan and the Matter of Origins
Lacan and the Matter of Origins traces the development of Lacan's thinking about the role of the mother in psychical formation. It examines the conceptual struggle throughout his work over issues of maternal agency in relation to the constitution of human subjectivity, and the theoretical, historical, and autobiographical reasons for this struggle. Lacan is widely held to emphasize the paternal dimension of human subjectivity and the phallic signifier. This book demonstrates that the mother occupies a crucial position in the Lacanian project, even if the maternal relation is not systematically theorized. The maternal figure appears as a Cheshire Cat who fades away and reappears at different times. The book traces the major shifts in Lacan's understanding of the maternal within an intertextual framework that includes Augustine, Klein, Kojève, and Rank. Pursuing in Lacan's writings the sometimes contradictory or unassimilable functions of the mother, the book closely tracks his variations on and departures from the Freudian definition of such concepts as primary identification, narcissism, castration, deferred action, and the death drive. Lacan's major contribution to twentieth-century thought emerges here in the context of his ostensibly loyal yet revisionist stance toward Freud as his major precursor in the psychoanalytic field. For those reading Lacan's often recondite work for the first time, Lacan and the Matter of Origins provides an accessible point of entry, with its clear explication of key terms together with their historical and conceptual background. For readers familiar with Lacanian theory, the book offers a reconceptualization of the evolution of his teachings from literary-critical, cultural, and biographical perspectives; it also presents a new approach to Lacan through the interplay of influences integral to the formation of his revisionary thought.
£29.99
Stanford University Press Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550-1755
This book examines how the early modern Portuguese state used convicts and orphans to populate its global empire over a period of two hundred years. In a country with as small a population base and the global labor requirements of Portugal, no one was expendable, not even such marginal figures as criminals, gypsies, orphans, and prostitutes. The author examines how the Portuguese judicial system, Overseas Council, Courts of the Inquisition, and charities coordinated their efforts to populate border cities in Portugal during the Middle Ages, and then turned to various sites in the empire as places of exile for these elements of society. In addition, he addresses the issue of gender in the state’s use of two distinct groups of single women as colonizers, orphan girls and reformed prostitutes, each given state-awarded dowries if they agreed to relocate overseas. We are well acquainted with this system as it was used by the British in Australia in the nineteenth century, and much work has been done on similar efforts by other imperial powers, such as France, Spain, Russia, and China, to populate remote regions of their empires. However, this is the first study of the much earlier Portuguese case, and it provides a significant link between the medieval and modern applications of penal exile. The Portuguese state, with a population in 1600 one-sixth that of Great Britain and one-tenth that of France, exiled around 50,000 people, the same number as each of these larger powers. The punishment of exile was thus far more pervasive in Portuguese society. This work represents a new chapter in the study of exile as a punishment and the use of criminals as colonizers. It helps to explain the longevity of the Portuguese global empire as well as the growth of informal Portuguese-related communities around the world.
£71.10
Stanford University Press Asian Security Practice: Material and Ideational Influences
Despite the end of the Cold War, security continues to be a critical concern of Asian states. Allocations of state revenues to the security sector continue to be substantial and have, in fact, increased in several countries. As Asian nations construct a new security architecture for the Asia-Pacific region, Asian security has received increased attention by the scholarly community. But most of that scholarship has focused on specific issues or selected countries. This book aims to lay the groundwork for a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of Asian security by investigating conceptions of security in sixteen Asian countries. The book undertakes an ethnographic, country-by-country study of how Asian states conceive of their security. For each country, it identifies and explains the security concerns and behavior of central decision makers, asking who or what is to be protected, against what potential threats, and how security policies have changed over time. This inside-out or bottom-up approach facilitates both identification of similarities and differences in the security thinking and practice of Asian countries and exploration of their consequences. The crucial insights into the dynamics of international security in the region provided by this approach can form the basis for further inquiry, including debates about the future of the region. The book is in three parts. Part I critically reviews and appraises the debate over defining security and provides a historical overview of international politics in Asia. Part II investigates security practices in sixteen Asian countries, the countries selected and grouped on the basis of security independence. Based on the findings of the country studies and drawing on other published works, Part III compares the national practices with a view to identifying and explaining key characteristics of Asian security practice and conceptualization on the basis of the Asian experiences.
£50.00
Stanford University Press Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution
This innovative work is the first to approach the awakening of China as a historical problem in its own right, and to locate this problem within the broader history of the rise of modern China. It analyzes the link between the awakening of China as a historical narrative and the awakening of the Chinese people as a political technique for building a sovereign and independent state. In sum, it asks what we mean when we say that China “woke up” in this century. The book follows the legend of China’s awakening from its origins in the European imagination, to its transmission to China and its encounters with a lyrical Chinese tradition of ethical awakening, to its incorporation and mobilization in a mass movement designed to wake up everyone. Fiction and fashion, architecture and autobiography, take their places alongside politics and history, and the reader is asked to move about among writers, philosophers, ethnographers, revolutionaries, and soldiers who would seem to have little in common. The book focuses on the Nationalist movement in south China, highlighting the role of Sun Yat-sen as director of awakenings in the Nationalist Revolution and the place of Mao Zedong as his successor in the politics of mass awakening. Of special interest is the previously untold story of Mao’s role in the Nationalist Propaganda Bureau, showing Mao as a master of propaganda and discipline, rather than as peasant movement activist.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant ‘Other’ in Modern Chinese Literature
The division between the scholar-gentry class and the “people” was an enduring theme of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic state. Twentieth-century elites recast this as a division between intellectuals and peasants and made the confrontation between the writing/intellectual self and the peasant “other” a central concern of literature. The author argues that, in the process, they created the “peasantry,” the downtrodden rural masses represented as proper objects of political action and shifting ideological agendas. Throughout this transition, language or discourse has been not only a weapon of struggle but the center of controversy and contention. Because of this primacy of language, the author’s main approach is the close reading or, rather, re-reading of significant narrative fictions from four literary generations to demonstrate how historical, ideological, and cultural issues are absorbed, articulated, and debated within the text. Three chapters each focus on one representative author. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881-1936), which initiated the literary preoccupation with the victimized peasant, is also about the identity crisis of the intellectual. Zhao Shuli (1906-1970), upheld by the Communist Party as a model “peasant writer,” tragically exemplifies in his career the inherent contradictions of such an assigned role. In the post-Mao era, Gao Xiaosheng (1928—) uses the ironic play of language to present a more ambiguous peasant while deflating intellectual pretensions. The chapter on the last of the four “generations” examines several texts by Mo Yan (1956—), Han Shaogong (1952—), and Wang Anyi (1954—) as examples of “root-searching” fiction from the mid-1980’s. While reaching back into the past, this fiction is paradoxically also experimental in technique: the encounter with the peasant leads to questions about the self-construction of the intellectual and the nature of narrative representation itself. Throughout, the focus is on texts in which some sort of representation or stand-in of the writer/intellectual self is present—as character, as witness, as center of consciousness, or as first-person or obtrusive narrator. Each story catches the writer in a self-reflective mode, the confrontation with the peasant “other” providing a theater for acting out varying dramas of identity, power, ideology, political engagement, and self-representation.
£67.00
Stanford University Press Contingent Countryside: Settlement, Economy, and Land Use in the Southern Argolid Since 1700
The essays in this volume are united by their attention to the many ways in which residents of Greece’s southern Argolid peninsula have attempted to shelter, feed, and advance the economic situation of their families over the last three centuries. This work juxtaposes a series of research projects undertaken in various communities, projects that, taken together, have made the southern Argolid the focus of more ethnographic and ethnohistorical study than any other comparable region of Greece. Ethnographic, geographic, historical, and archaeological methodologies are integrated to yield an image of the southern Argolid as a contingent countryside whose boundaries, character, people, and external connections have been reconfigured time and again. Such notions strengthen general reformulations occurring within Greek ethnography and speak directly to archaeological attempts to connect the Greek past and present. This volume, the fourth in a series of books deriving from the Argolid Exploration Project conducted by Stanford University, sets forth the material conditions of rural Greek life as mutable and negotiated in ways that complement archaeological interest in the repeated settlement fluctuations of the Greek past. It also exemplifies recent ethnographic shifts in conceiving other aspects of modern Greek life. The volume replaces assumptions of village longevity with inquiry into what causes settlements to form and grow or to decline. It places idealized inheritance patterns alongside records of actual land transactions. Houses expand, contract, and change over time. The social boundaries among shepherds, farmers, and sailors blur through an exploration of personal occupation histories. In short, the book reexamines and questions many of the categories and concepts by which rural Greece has long been represented.
£78.30
Stanford University Press Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings
This book writes itself off the guide map of familiar literary forms and melts down conceptual barriers, offering a new kind of reading and thinking experience as it tells the life and travel stories of fascinating women and examines women’s physical mobility in a culture of gendered, postcolonial space that restricts their movement. Straddling the divide between fiction and scholarship, it combines fictional narrative, contemplation, theoretical thinking, scholarly discussion, and interviews. The book examines and crosses boundaries on various ontological levels—between genders, languages, historical epochs, and literary genres—as it questions reality, identity, knowledge, culture, truth, and mind. While openly confronting the author’s location in Israel, the book looks at women’s ability to take themselves from place to place, viewing space and spatial freedom as deeply gendered in modern Western cultures. From this perspective, “home” is imagined as a protective holding space for one gender, and girls are systematically deskilled for spatial competence. The author tells of women whose lives embody a powerful project of travel, realizing exceptional degrees of independence, and also tells of women who refrain from driving, a major contemporary tool of autonomous movement. The book imagines a movement-nurturing space that subverts the confining construct of home. From this nonexistent yet tangibly welcoming home space, the “glass corridors” of home—analogous to the “glass ceiling” of professional life—can be brought into full view and denaturalized. This cannot be accomplished, however, without a compelling, painful look at the patriarchal, colonial, and militarized structures underpinning all Western travel, women’s emancipatory journeys included—a look influenced by the still-colonial structure of the author’s Israeli placement.
£32.00
Stanford University Press Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism
In arguing that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism—that is, of the possibility of radical cultural change through the creation of new values—the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy. Nietzsche takes up the problem of modernism by inventing Zarathustra, a self-styled cultural innovator who aspires to subvert the culture of modernity (the repressive culture of the "last man") by creating new values. By showing how Zarathustra can become a creator of new values, notwithstanding the forces that hinder his will to innovate, Nietzsche answers the skeptic who proclaims that new-values creation is impossible. Zarathustra is a story of repeated clashes between Zarathustra's avant-garde, modernist intentions and figures of doubt who condemn those intentions. Through a close reading of Zarathustra, the author reconstructs Nietzsche's explanation of the possibility of modernism. Showing how parody, irony, and plot organization frame that explanation, he also demonstrates the central significance of Zarathustra's speeches on the body and the will to power. The author argues that Nietzsche's critique of the modern philosophy of the subject revises Kant's concept of the dynamical sublime and makes allegorical use of the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Dionysus. He also proposes an original interpretation of the thought of eternal recurrence (according to Nietzsche, the "fundamental conception" of Zarathustra). Breaking with conventional Nietzsche scholarship, the author conceptualizes the thought not as a theoretical or a practical doctrine that Nietzsche endorses, but as a developing drama that Zarathustra performs.
£29.99
Stanford University Press Song in an Age of Discord: The Journal of Socho and Poetic Life in Late Medieval Japan
Song in an Age of Discord is a companion volume to the author's translation of The Journal of Socho, the travel diary and poetic memoir of Saiokuken Socho (1448-1532), the preeminent linked-verse (renga) poet of his generation. The Journal—which records several journeys that Socho made between Kyoto and Suruga Province during the tumultuous Age of the Country at War—is unparalleled in the literature of the period for its range of commentary and freshness of detail, and for its impressive array of literary genres, including more than 600 poems. The present volume opens with an overview of the author's life and times, and explores the relationships between politics, patronage, and the creative process in late medieval Japan. Raised in the service of a feudal lord in Suruga Province, Socho subsequently became the devoted student of the renga master Sogi and the iconoclastic Zen monk Ikkyu, a variety of influences clearly visible in his journal. Socho lived in an era in which established values and hierarchies were being questioned, and his journal reflects his own testing of traditional literary boundaries. Subsequent chapters read the journal in terms of the standard norms of genres that Socho appropriated and reinterpreted in fashioning his own literary persona. The norms of medieval eremitic literature are presented via works by two other noted linked-verse poets, Shinkei and Shohaku, and those of travel literature are set forth in travel diaries by Socho's teacher Sogi, who also supplied the template for Socho's orthodox (ushin) poetry. The comic and unorthodox haikai verse of Yamazaki Sokan serves as a point of comparison for Socho's frequent excursions into that genre. Unlike other orthodox renga masters, Socho maintained parallel interests in composing and preserving haikai poetry, and he contributed much to that evolving art form. Throughout, Song in an Age of Discord illustrates the dialogue Socho pursued with his literary and cultural heritage.
£66.60
Stanford University Press Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy
This book collects fifteen major philosophical essays written over a period of more than twenty years by acclaimed Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The volume opens with an introduction in which the editor situates Agamben's work with respect to both the history of philosophy and contemporary European thought. The essays that follow articulate a series of theoretical confrontations with privileged figures in the history of philosophy, politics, and criticism, from Plato to Spinoza, Aristotle to Deleuze, Carl Schmitt to Benjamin, Hegel to Aby Warburg, and Heidegger to Derrida. Three fundamental concepts organize the collection as a whole: language, in the sense not of particular statements but rather the very taking place of speech, the pure fact of language's existence; history, as it appears from a perspective in which tradition, transmission, and memory reach their messianic fulfillment; and potentiality, understood as a fundamental problem of metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. All these topics converge in the final part of the book, in which Agamben offers an extensive reading of Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a work that puts potentiality and actuality, possibility and reality, in an altogether new light.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China
This book transcends the boundaries of Chinese studies and scholarship on Western literature and critical theory, bringing together the two fields in a way that questions both the application of Western theory to Chinese materials and the resistance to theory in sinological scholarship. Recognizing that social and historical reality is external to discourse and that knowledge has an inevitable ethical import, the author argues for the importance of reality and lived experience in understanding a culture as well as the moral responsibility of such understanding. The book examines the discrepancies between various Western representations of China and the reality of China; inquires into the cultural, historical, and political contexts within which such discrepancies arise; and points out the distortion of reality in the tendency toward cultural dichotomies, the tendency to view China as the conceptual opposite of the West. From a comparison of biblical exegesis and commentaries on the Confucian classics to the contemporary assimilation of Western critical theories in China, this book discusses a wide range of topics that situates the understanding of China and Chinese literature and culture in the broad perspective of East-West comparative studies. It studies not only the Confucian tradition, modern Chinese literature, and the students' movement for democracy in China, but also such Western topics as Origen and biblical interpretation, Montaigne and cultural critique, Jameson and postmodern theory, and the reception of Said's Orientalism in China.
£97.20
Stanford University Press Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation—all data had to pass through the needle's eye of the written signifier—but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers. Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media—including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators—Gramophone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author's Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler's discourse analysis of the 1980's and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990's.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism
This anthology of Chinese women’s poetry in translation brings together representative selections from the work of some 130 poets from the Han dynasty to the early twentieth century. To measure the development of Chinese women’s poetry, one must take into account not only the poems but also the prose writings—prefaces, biographies, theoretical tracts—that framed them and attempted to shape women’s writing as a distinct category of literature. To this end, the anthology contains an extended section of criticism by and about women writers. These poets include empresses, imperial concubines, courtesans, grandmothers, recluses, Buddhist nuns, widows, painters, farm wives, revolutionaries, and adolescent girls thought to be incarnate immortals. Some women wrote out of isolation and despair, finding in words a mastery that otherwise eluded them. Others were recruited into poetry by family members, friends, or sympathetic male advocates. Some dwelt on intimate family matters and cast their poems as addresses to husbands and sons at large in the wide world of men’s affairs. Each woman had her own reasons for poetry and her own ways of appropriating, and often changing, the conventions of both men’s and women’s verse. The primary purpose of this anthology is to put before the English-speaking reader evidence of the poetic talent that flourished, against all odds, among women in premodern China. It is also designed to spur reflection among specialists in Chinese poetry, inspiring new perspectives on both the Chinese poetic tradition and the canon of female poets within that tradition. This partial history both connects with and departs from the established patterns for women’s writing in the West, thus complementing current discussions of “feminine writing.”
£50.00
Stanford University Press Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature
Web of Life weaves its suggestive interpretation of Jewish culture in the Palestine of late antiquity on the warp of a singular, breathtakingly tragic, and sublime rabbinic text, Lamentations Rabbah. The textual analyses that form the core of the book are informed by a range of theoretical paradigms rarely brought to bear on rabbinic literature: structural analysis of mythologies and folktales, performative approaches to textual production, feminist theory, psychoanalytical analysis of culture, cultural criticism, and folk narrative genre analysis. The concept of context as the hermeneutic basis for literary interpretation reactivates the written text and subverts the hierarchical structures with which it has been traditionally identified. This book reinterprets rabbinic culture as an arena of multiple dialogues that traverse traditional concepts of identity regarding gender, nation, religion, and territory. The author's approach is permeated by the idea that scholarly writing about ancient texts is invigorated by an existential hermeneutic rooted in the universality of human experience. She thus resorts to personal experience as an idiom of communication between author and reader and between human beings of our time and of the past. This research acknowledges the overlap of poetic and analytical language as well as the language of analysis and everyday life. In eliciting folk narrative discourses inside the rabbinic text, the book challenges traditional views about the social basis that engendered these texts. It suggests the subversive potential of the constitutive texts of Jewish culture from late antiquity to the present by pointing out the inherent multi-vocality of the text, adding to the conventionally acknowledged synagogue and academy the home, the marketplace, and other private and public socializing institutions.
£104.40
Stanford University Press A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40-66
This book examines the use of older biblical texts in Isaiah 40-66, notably the writings attributed to Deutero-Isaiah. Its discussion of allusions, influence, and intertextuality generates significant questions for both biblicists and literary critics: Why do authors allude? How does the presence of older material in a text affect readers? How can critics identify genuine cases of allusion? Are contemporary theories of intertextuality applicable to ancient texts? The author defends the controversial historical questions asked by scholars of inner-biblical exegesis, modifying some of the dominant (and, in some ways, misleading) categories other biblical scholars have created. In sum, the book aims to refine the study of inner-biblical exegesis through an extensive examination of the use of older texts in one corpus. The redactional complexity of the Book of Isaiah has rendered it central to discussions of canon formation and the final shaping of biblical material. The author demonstrates that Deutero-Isaiah situated himself in a wide stream of tradition by no means limited to an Isaianic school, and that his most important literary precursor was not First Isaiah but Jeremiah. This finding necessitates a trenchant reappraisal of recent work on the unity of the Book of Isaiah. Further, the author shows that the strikingly consistent poetics of allusion running throughout all of Isaiah 40-66 testifies to the coherence of those chapters as a single corpus, arguing against multiple authorship. Close readings of the use of borrowed material in Isaiah 40-66 sharpen our appreciation of Deutero-Isaiah’s originality and artistry, highlighting his attempts to convince Judean exiles that God had neither abandoned nor failed them. The prophet’s heavy dependence on earlier prophets illuminates the changes classical Israelite prophecy underwent in the Babylonian exile. These changes led to the disappearance of prophecy and the rise of exegetical forms of religious expression known from Qumran, early Christianity, and rabbinic Judaism.
£63.00
Stanford University Press Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe
From the first successful Jesuit mission in 1583 until the disastrous failure of the British trade embassy in 1816, China’s cultural practices transfixed the attention of Western philosophers, theologians, architects, artists, entrepreneurs, and social critics. The direct influences on European culture were many and profound, ranging from Chinese teahouses in European palace gardens to adaptations of Chinese plays for the popular stage, from calls for the restructuring of the civil service on the model of Chinese meritocracy to the espousal of Confucian precepts in the moral education of children. More significant than even such readily visible gestures of imitation and appropriation, however, were the interpretive strategies that accompanied them: the processes by which Europeans translated the unfamiliar and often enigmatic artifacts of Chinese culture into familiar forms of meaning, thus engaging them in the emergent discourses of European modernity. This book traces recurrent patterns in the European imaginative constructions of China through four illuminating spheres of encounter: linguistic, theological, aesthetic, and economic. How might we compare the perplexity of Europeans before the Chinese writing system with their experience of Chinese religious practice, trade policy, or porcelain design? The author shows how the remarkably consistent interpretive paradigms revealed through such comparisons suggest not only how historical circumstances condition and constrain responses to the foreign but also how an active engagement with the cipher of foreignness shapes the way a society comes to understand itself.
£55.80
Stanford University Press Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era
What is the process by which literature might provide us with access to knowledge, and what sort of knowledge might this be? The question is not simply whether literature thinks, but whether literature thinks theoretically—whether it has a capacity, without the external aid of analytical methods that have determined Western philosophy and science since the Enlightenment, to theorize the conditions of the world from which it emerges and to which it addresses itself. Suspicion about literature's access to knowledge is ancient, at least as old as Plato's notorious expulsion of the poets from the city in the Republic. With full awareness of this classical background and in dialogue with a broad range of twentieth-century thinkers, Gourgouris examines a range of literary texts, from Sophocles' Antigone to Don DeLillo's The Names, as he traces out his argument that literature possesses an intrinsic theoretical capacity to make sense of the nonpropositional.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890-1939
Despite its importance, the twentieth-century Latin American right has received little scholarly attention. This is the first book to explicitly compare extreme rightist organizations, ideas, and actions in different national settings in Latin America. Hardly an undifferentiated whole, the right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile has changed over time and has contained moderate and extreme factions; the book's title, Las Derechas, emphasizes this diversity. The author focuses on extreme right-wing movements, showing how their class and gender composition, motives, programs, and activities varied over time and between countries. To demonstrate the variety of thought and fluidity of positions within the far right, the author brings to life the many voices it contained: its highbrow and lowbrow figures, its male and female exponents, and its mass-circulation periodicals and more erudite literature. The depiction of rallies, social welfare projects, and brutal clashes with opponents also reveals the flavor of the radical right and the rich texture of its history. Although extreme right-wing movements defined themselves as masculine, some nevertheless recruited women; this is only one of the many contradictions between their ideology and actions. Concentrating on domestic roots, the study shows how radical rightists incorporated local concerns, not simply European dogma, into their agendas. It explores their relations with the military, Catholic Church, government, labor, and other groups throughout the political spectrum. The ties of radical rightists to moderate rightists are of particular interest, for the ideological and tactical differences between the two factions tended to diminish during periods of crisis. The book concludes with an epilogue that traces radical rightist movements up to the present, demonstrating the importance of the analysis for understanding current conditions as well as the past.
£118.80
Stanford University Press Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia
This book focuses on the cultural processes by which the idea of a Yugoslav nation was developed and on the reasons that this idea ultimately failed to bind the South Slavs into a viable nation and state. The author argues that the collapse of multinational Yugoslavia and the establishment of separate uninational states did not result from the breakdown of the political or economic fabric of the Yugoslav state; rather, that breakdown itself sprang from the destruction of the concept of a Yugoslav nation. Had such a concept been retained, a collapse of political authority would have been followed by the eventual reconstitution of a Yugoslav state, as happened after World War II, rather than the creation of separate nation-states. Because the author emphasizes nation building rather than state building, the causes and evidence he cites for Yugoslavia’s collapse differ markedly from those that have previously been put forward. He concentrates on culture and cultural politics in the South Slavic lands from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in order to delineate those ideological mechanisms that helped lay the foundation for the formation of a Yugoslav nation in the first place, sustained the nation during its approximately seventy-year existence, and led to its dissolution. The book describes the evolution of the idea of Yugoslav national unity in four major areas: linguistic policies geared to creating a shared national language, the promulgation of a Yugoslav literary and artistic canon, an educational policy that emphasized the teaching of literature and history in schools, and the production of new literary and artistic works incorporating a Yugoslav view. In the book’s conclusion, the author discusses the relevance of the Yugoslav case for other parts of the world, considering whether the triumph of particularist nationalism is inevitable in multinational states.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Deepening Democracy?: The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru
As a wave of transitions from authoritarian rule swept across Latin America in the 1980's, the idea of "deepening democracy" emerged as a guiding principle of the political Left and social movements in much of the region. With its emphasis on grass-roots participation and popular empowerment, this idea gained force among social and political actors who sought to reconcile the Left's traditional commitment to radical change with its newfound respect for representative democracy. The vision of progressive democratic reform helped revive leftist parties whose revolutionary dreams had been crushed by military repression and whose traditional political and economic models had lost appeal with the world-wide crisis of communism. Through a comparative analysis of two very different cases, this book shows why the deepening of democracy proved so difficult to achieve in practice. Although the Chilean Left helped defeat a military dictator and form a new democratic regime in 1990, it faced great odds in promoting reforms because of the structural and institutional constraints bequeathed by the dictatorship. In Peru, a powerful leftist coalition with close links to social movements failed to build upon its success in municipal elections, and was ultimately undermined by political and economic crises that tore apart the Left's social networks. Deepening Democracy? suggests that the new project of the Left is heavily contingent on the organization of collective actors in civil society, a process that has been disrupted by the effects of economic crises, market liberalization, and electoral competition. The book sheds new theoretical light on the structural and institutional forces that have not only hampered the political success of the Left, but also limited the scope and quality of democratic practices in contemporary Latin America. Thus, it shifts scholarly attention from the conditions for democratic transition and consolidation in Latin America to the character and consequences of democratic rule.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia
This book focuses on the cultural processes by which the idea of a Yugoslav nation was developed and on the reasons that this idea ultimately failed to bind the South Slavs into a viable nation and state. The author argues that the collapse of multinational Yugoslavia and the establishment of separate uninational states did not result from the breakdown of the political or economic fabric of the Yugoslav state; rather, that breakdown itself sprang from the destruction of the concept of a Yugoslav nation. Had such a concept been retained, a collapse of political authority would have been followed by the eventual reconstitution of a Yugoslav state, as happened after World War II, rather than the creation of separate nation-states. Because the author emphasizes nation building rather than state building, the causes and evidence he cites for Yugoslavia’s collapse differ markedly from those that have previously been put forward. He concentrates on culture and cultural politics in the South Slavic lands from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in order to delineate those ideological mechanisms that helped lay the foundation for the formation of a Yugoslav nation in the first place, sustained the nation during its approximately seventy-year existence, and led to its dissolution. The book describes the evolution of the idea of Yugoslav national unity in four major areas: linguistic policies geared to creating a shared national language, the promulgation of a Yugoslav literary and artistic canon, an educational policy that emphasized the teaching of literature and history in schools, and the production of new literary and artistic works incorporating a Yugoslav view. In the book’s conclusion, the author discusses the relevance of the Yugoslav case for other parts of the world, considering whether the triumph of particularist nationalism is inevitable in multinational states.
£104.40
Stanford University Press A Waka Anthology: Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup
The Gem-Glistening Cup is the second volume of Edwin Cranston's monumental Waka Anthology which carries the story of waka, the classical tradition of Japanese poetry, from its beginnings in ancient song to the sixteenth century. The present volume, which contains almost 1,600 songs and poems, covers the period from the earliest times to 784, and includes many of the finest works in the literatures as well as providing evocative glimpses of the spirit and folkways of early Japanese civilization. The texts drawn upon for the poems are the ancient chronicles Kojiki, Nihonshoki, and Shoku Nihongi; the fudoki, a set of eighth-century local gazetteers; Man'yoshu, the massive eighth-century compendium of early poetry (about one fourth of that work is included); and the Bussokuseki poems carved on a stone tablet at a temple in Nara. All poems are presented in facing romanization and translation.
£54.00
Stanford University Press Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change
Until recently, Chinese children ate what their parents fed them and were not permitted to influence, much less dictate, their own diet. The situation today is radically different, especially in cities and prosperous villages, as a result of a notable increase in people’s income and a fast-growing consumer culture. Chinese children, with spending money in their pockets, arguably have become the most determined consumers—usually of snack foods, soft drinks, and fast foods from such Western outlets as McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken. With many children, especially pampered only children, now controlling not only their own but also their family’s choice of staples, snacks, and restaurants, a major reformation in the concept of childhood is occurring in China. This book focuses on how the transformation of children’s food habits, the result of China’s transition to a market economy and its integration into the global economic arena, has changed the intimate relationship of childhood, parenthood, and family life. Since the early 1980s, a drastic decline in fertility and a steady rise in family income have been accompanied by a profusion of new products successfully advertised on television and in other media as “children’s food.” This commercialization of children’s diet has become so pervasive that even children in remote villages surprise their parents with demands for particular trendy foods and soft drinks. Many Chinese parents, reared very differently, anxiously question whether their children are eating well and growing up healthy. The contributors to this book, drawn from the fields of anthropology, sociology, political economy, and nutrition, examine a wide variety of topics: the effects of new foods on children’s health; the consumption of “prestige” foods; the social implications of commercialized children’s food on a Chinese Islamic community; the adaptations of Kentucky Fried Chicken in response to indigenous fast-food companies; the generation gap in attitudes toward food consumption; the significance of religion and nutrition in feeding and healing children; the creation of baby-friendly hospitals to promote breastfeeding and scientific childcare methods; the special role of nationalism and traditional Chinese medicine in children’s food production; and the business promotion of having fun as an aspect of eating well.
£21.99
Stanford University Press The Legend of Freud: Expanded Edition
"Psychoanalysis is dead!" Again and again this obituary is pronounced, with ever-increasing conviction in newspapers and scholarly journals alike. But the ghost of Freud and his thought continues to haunt those who would seal the grave. The Legend of Freud shows why psychoanalysis has remained uncanny, not just for its enemies but for its advocates and practitioners as well—and why it continues to fascinate us. For psychoanalysis is not just a theory of psychic conflict: it is a thought in conflict with itself. Often violent, the conflicts of psychoanalysis are most productive where they remain unresolved, thus producing a text that must be read: deciphered, interpreted, rewritten. Psychoanalysis: legenda est. Review "The Legend of Freud is a fine example of what can be done with Freud's texts when philosophical and literary approaches converge, and you leave the couch in the other room. . . . Like Lacan and Derrida, Weber doesn't so much explain or interpret Freud as engage him, performing what Freud would have called an Auseinandersetzung, a discussion or argument that's also a taking apart, a deconstruction. . . . Deconstruction has picked up a bad name, especially in the minds of those who don't understand it; but this wouldn't be the case if there were more books like Weber's. The Legend of Freud is the best deconstructive work I've seen lately, and the best response to Freud; it merits close attention from anyone who wants a challenge, not merely a guide to what's right and wrong. . . . Weber is brilliantly imaginative, respectful of his subject and his readers, and productive of new ideas." —Village Voice Literary Supplement
£89.10
Stanford University Press Institution and Interpretation: Expanded Edition
Institution and Interpretation investigates the forces that shape and limit interpretive practices. Whereas the prevailing use of the term institutions tends to reduce their role to that of maintaining the status quo, Weber suggests that institutions are never entirely free of the need to consolidate their authority through an ambivalent process of reinstituting themselves, a process in which interpretation plays a crucial role. Interpretation thus emerges not only as an activity made possible by institutions but as an essential component of their operation. To the book's original nine essays—addressing such topics as professionalism in criticism, the relation between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics, and the contemporary situation of the humanities—this new edition adds six essays, one of them previously unpublished. Topics discussed include the future of the university and of the humanities, Kierkegaard's notion of "repetition," Josiah Royce's conception of a "community" of interpretation, and the problematic place of reading in reader-response theory. Reviews of the First Edition "One of the primary proposals of Samuel Weber's important new book is that we must look at what institutions exclude and delimit as well as what they include and enable." —Critical Texts "A text of major importance and remarkable originality. For the first time, the antecedents and the complexities of the question are clearly defined and understood." —Paul de Man, 1983 "Institution and Interpretation recommends itself here for its rigorous appraisal of the process through which oppositions come to be instituted. . . . It provokes a rethinking of gender in all of its 'contingent essentiality.'" —Genders
£27.99
Stanford University Press Suzhou: Where the Goods of All the Provinces Converge
Before Shanghai, there was Suzhou: a city of canals and commerce, gardens and scholars, the largest noncapital city on earth between 1400 and 1850. This book shows how, though Suzhou entered the Ming dynasty defeated and suspect, interactions between the imperial state and local elites gave rise to a network of markets that fostered high-quality local specialization. Population growth and economic expansion followed, as did the acceptance of conspicuous consumption, critical distance from the imperial state, and the dissolution of traditional barriers between scholar-officials and merchants. These developments shaped Suzhou’s artistic and literary creativity, and made possible the continued success of its sons in the imperial examinations. Thus political success, cultural creativity, and economic centrality, the author argues, enabled Suzhou not just to influence the region, but to reshape the empire.
£59.40
Stanford University Press Cinematograph of Words: Literature, Technique, and Modernization in Brazil
This is an extraordinarily imaginative attempt to analyze the relations between literature and technique in Brazil from the 1880's to the 1920's. The author suggests that in these relations we can see more clearly the shape of a period that is otherwise usually defined from a literary perspective as "pre-" or "post-" something or other, rather than in terms of its own characteristics. One such characteristic is the intense interaction with the new technologies then arising in Brazil, the beginning of the professionalization of writers, and a revision of the concept of literature, redefined as technique. The author's chief concern is to determine what is distinctive about the literary production of the period. Rather than focusing on literature's relations with visual art, with a rising social class, or with the sociopolitical divisions within the educated classes of Brazilian society, the author examines the crônica (a kind of journalistic essay), poetry, and fiction of these decades in terms of their encounter with a burgeoning technological and industrial landscape. This encounter is examined from two perspectives. The first is explicit representation: the portrayal in Brazilian literature of modern artifacts, new means of transformation and communication, and the newborn industries of advertising and commercial publication. The second perspective examines how these close contacts with the technological world came to shape cultural production—that is, not how literature represents technique, but how literary technique changed as it incorporated procedures characteristic of photography, film, and poster art. This transformation was consistent and concurrent with significant changes taking place in the perceptions and sensibilities of the population of major Brazilian cities, a population increasingly attuned to images, the instant, and technology as all-powerful mediators of the urban landscape, time, and a subjectivity constantly under the threat of extinction.
£23.99
Stanford University Press Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City
As economic crises struck the Third World in the 1970s and 1980s, large segments of the population turned to the informal economy to survive. Though this phenomenon has previously been analyzed from a strictly economic point of view, this book looks at street vending in the largest city in the world, Mexico City, as a political process. Employing a street-level analysis based on intensive participant observation, with interviews, archival research, and surveys, the author presents a view of political processes that provides new theoretical insights into social movements, state institutions, and politics at the fringe of society, where legality blurs into illegality and the informal economy intersects with its political counterpoint—informal politics. By studying political processes at the street level and then tracing them up the political structure, the author also reveals the basic processes by which the Mexican state operates. Street vendors have been successful in defending their interests in Mexico City, the author argues, because they are able to take advantage of certain structural features of the Mexican state, notably the weak integration of interests between policy-makers and policy-implementers. The author shows that when well-organized, street vendors can collude with state policy-implementers even when state policy-makers are influenced by powerful interest groups, such as large national and multinational corporations. The book develops a systematic theory of the “political economy of economic informality” while raising new questions and theories about the state and social movements. Though the direct research is confined to the Mexican case study, the author suggests ways in which his conclusions can be applied to other developing areas in the Third World.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil
Among the many countries that underwent transitions to democracy in recent decades, only Russia is as important to the United States and the world as Brazil. The fifth-largest country and population in the world, with nearly one-half the inhabitants of Latin America, Brazil has the world’s ninth-richest economy. Given the nation’s size and influence, its capacity to achieve stable democracy and economic growth will have global impact. Understanding democracy in Brazil is therefore a crucial task, one which this book undertakes. Theoretically, the author argues that most party systems in the third wave of democratization, after 1974, have distinctive features that require us to reformulate theories about party systems generally; previous works have paid scant attention to the importance of variance in the degree of institutionalization of party systems. The author also argues that many third-wave cases underscore the need to focus on the capacity of the state and political elites to structure and restructure party systems from below. Empirically, the author studies the Brazilian party system and democratization, with particular reference to the 1979-96 period. He underscores the weakness of the party system and the resulting problems of democratization. He argues that the party system is poorly institutionalized, explores the reasons for the difficulties of party building, and addresses the consequences of weak institutionalization, which leads him to reaffirm the central significance of parties in the face of widespread skepticism about their importance.
£32.00
Stanford University Press Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City
As economic crises struck the Third World in the 1970s and 1980s, large segments of the population turned to the informal economy to survive. Though this phenomenon has previously been analyzed from a strictly economic point of view, this book looks at street vending in the largest city in the world, Mexico City, as a political process. Employing a street-level analysis based on intensive participant observation, with interviews, archival research, and surveys, the author presents a view of political processes that provides new theoretical insights into social movements, state institutions, and politics at the fringe of society, where legality blurs into illegality and the informal economy intersects with its political counterpoint—informal politics. By studying political processes at the street level and then tracing them up the political structure, the author also reveals the basic processes by which the Mexican state operates. Street vendors have been successful in defending their interests in Mexico City, the author argues, because they are able to take advantage of certain structural features of the Mexican state, notably the weak integration of interests between policy-makers and policy-implementers. The author shows that when well-organized, street vendors can collude with state policy-implementers even when state policy-makers are influenced by powerful interest groups, such as large national and multinational corporations. The book develops a systematic theory of the “political economy of economic informality” while raising new questions and theories about the state and social movements. Though the direct research is confined to the Mexican case study, the author suggests ways in which his conclusions can be applied to other developing areas in the Third World.
£104.40
Stanford University Press Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War
On December 25, 1978, the armed forces of Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia. That event marked a turning point in the first and only extended war fought between two communist regimes. The Vietnamese forced out Pol Pot’s Khmers Rouge regime from its seat of power in Phnom Penh, but the ensuing war was a major source of international tension throughout the last decade of the Cold War. This book is the first comprehensive, scholarly analysis of the causes of the Vietnamese invasion. At its core are two separate but related histories covering the years 1930 to 1978. The first concerns the continuing difficult relations between the Vietnamese communist party and the Cambodian communist movement. The second records the fluctuating and often conflicted relations between the Vietnamese communist party and the two most powerful communist states, the Soviet Union and China. These two histories are encased by a theoretical introduction and a conclusion that make clear the need for a “political culture” perspective on international relations. The author argues that key events leading up to the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia present a historical puzzle. Many important decisions made by both the Vietnamese and Cambodian leaders are inexplicable in terms of the “rational actor” assumptions that dominate contemporary international relations theory. Instead, the author argues, these decisions can be explained only if we understand the political cultures of the rival states. This book is the only study of Southeast Asian affairs by a Western scholar who has used the rich archives of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The key sources drawn on constitute confidential records of the former sponsor and ally of Vietnamese communism; they also provide fresh light on Chinese and Soviet foreign policy, as well as recent events in Cambodia. They are supplemented by extensive materials from French and American archives, as well as interviews with some of the main political decisionmakers.
£23.99
Stanford University Press A Sense for the Other: The Timeliness and Relevance of Anthropology
If the end of exoticism is one of the characteristics of our time, and if classical anthropology based its study of alterity on this exotic distance from the other, is anthropology still possible, and if so, to what end? The author uses these questions as a point of departure for a probing interrogation of ethnological practice, starting with Lévi-Strauss. For several years, the author has advocated an anthropology of “proximity” in place of the usual anthropology of distance. He has studied such emblematic places of Western modernity as the Parisian Metro, or such emblematic “non-places” as airports or freeways, treating as valid anthropological objects phenomena that others might judge less “pure” or “significant” than systems of filiation or matrimonial alliance. The proper place of the ethnographer, he argues, is sufficiently distanced to comprehend a system as a system, yet participatory enough to live it as an individual. How can one best arrive at such a place? This book answers by outlining an approach to anthropology that focuses on negotiating the social meanings we and others use in making sense of the world, and on the processes of identification that create the difference between same and other. Why trace a line of demarcation between societies thought to warrant and require anthropological observation and others (namely, our own) thought to demand a different type of study? Once anthropology, through its study of rites, takes social meaning as its principal object, the necessity for a “generalized anthropology” that includes the entire planet seems obvious, especially in view of the rapid proliferation of new networks of communication and the integration of individuals into those networks.
£16.99
Stanford University Press One Industry, Two Chinas: Silk Filatures and Peasant-Family Production in Wuxi County, 1865-1937
This book reopens and restructures the grand debate on the nature of economic development in China prior to the Communist revolution. It rejects the debate’s old contours in which quantitative data were used to argue that the trajectory of Chinese development was either “positive” or “negative.” Instead, the author combines quantitative analysis with a detailed study of local politics, culture, and gender to explain the shaping of the modern Chinese economy. Focusing on silk production in Wuxi county in the Yangzi Delta, the author argues that local elites used social dominance to build a silk industry continuum—“one industry”—fusing modern factory production with older patterns of peasant-family farming. The resulting social configuration was “two Chinas”—one populated by wealthy urban elites transformed into a new, silk-industry bourgeoisie, and the other by peasant families whose women became the workforce for cocoon production. The author describes the roles of merchant guilds and other elite organizations established to protect the silk industry from outside competition and excessive taxation; the methods and styles of elite networking and investment in building modern silk filatures; and the roles of women—elite women in sericulture reform and peasant women in silkworm raising. She also reveals the cooperation between silk-industry elites and Nationalist government officials in the 1920’s and 1930’s, which resulted in an industry that was virtually state-directed and designed to pass downward to the peasants the costs of building more competitive silk filatures. This discovery challenges the prevailing tendency to think in terms of radical ruptures between Nationalist and Communist rule.
£59.40
Stanford University Press Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples
In a set of readings ranging from early-sixteenth- through late-seventeenth-century texts, this book aims to resituate women's writing in the English Renaissance by studying the possibilities available to these writers by virtue of their positions in their culture and by their articulation of a variety of desires (including the desire to write) not bound by the usual prescriptions that limited women. The book is in three parts. The first part begins by pursuing linkages between feminine virtue and the canonical status of texts written by women of the period. It then confronts some received opinions and opens up new possibilities of evaluation through readings of Aemelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and poems, plays, and fiction by Aphra Behn. The second part studies translation as an allowed (and therefore potentially devalued) sphere for women's writing, and offers accounts of Margaret Roper's translation of Erasmus and Mary Sidney's of Petrarch to show ways in which such work makes a central claim in Renaissance culture. In the third part, the author explores the thematics and practices of writing as exemplified in the women's hands in an early Tudor manuscript and through the character of Graphina in Elizabeth Cary's Mariam. Throughout, possibilities for these writers are seen to arise from the conjunction of their gender with their status as aristocrats or from their proximity to centers of power, even if this involves the "debasement" of prostitution for Lanyer or the perils of the marketplace for Behn. The author argues that moves outside the restriction of domesticity opened up opportunities for affirming female sexuality and for a range of desires not confined to marriage and procreation—desires that move across race in Oroonoko; that imagine female same-gender relations, often in proximity to male desires directed at other men; that implicate incestuous desires, even inflecting them anally, as in Roper's Devout Treatise.
£23.99
Stanford University Press The Annotated Baseball Stories of Ring W. Lardner, 1914-1919
This is an annotated and copiously illustrated edition of 24 baseball stories by Ring W. Lardner, including the six classic stories later collected as You Know Me Al. Two-thirds of the stories describe real teams, real players, and real situations, and the annotation and illustrations serve to identify the references of early twentieth-century major league baseball that Lardner covered as a reporter.
£35.00
Stanford University Press The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere
In a sweeping reassessment of early American literature, The Gender of Freedom explores the workings of the literary public sphere—from its colonial emergence through the antebellum flourishing of sentimentalism. Placing representations of and by women at the center rather than the margin of the public sphere, this book links modern forms of political identity to the seemingly private images of gender displayed prominently in the developing public sphere. The "fictions of liberalism" explored in this book are those of marriage and motherhood, sentimental domesticity, and heterosexual desire—narratives that structure the private realm upon which liberalism depends for its meaning and value. In a series of bold theoretical arguments and nuanced readings of literary texts, the author explores the political force of these private narratives with chapters on the Antinomian crisis in Puritan Massachusetts, early national models of gender and marriage in the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Hannah Webster Foster, infanticide narratives and nineteenth-century accounts of motherhood in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child, and "re-arranging" marriage in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
£89.10
