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D. H. Lawrence
The Failure and the Triumph of Art
Eliseo Vivas
Northwestern University Press, 1960
In D. H. Lawrence, Eliseo Vivas examines the aesthetic triumphs and failures of Lawrence’s major works through a literary device that he coins “the constitutive symbol.” Understanding how Lawrence uses the constitutive symbol provides new insight into his world views. Vivas covers a wide range of Lawrence's work, including Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love.  Vivas was one of the first scholars to use psychological criticism to read Lawrence’s works; Vivas's and his particularly fresh reading of Lawrence’s novels continue to make this a significant literary-critical study.
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The Dacha Husband
A Novel
Ivan Shcheglov
Northwestern University Press, 2009
In addition to offering fresh editions of well-known works, Northwestern World Classics will also reintroduce to a new generation "lost classics," such as Ivan Shcheglov’s 1896 The Dacha Husband (Dachnyi muzh). Despite being considered the most interesting writer of the late 1800s by no less a writer than his onetime collaborator Anton Chekhov, Ivan Shcheglov is largely forgotten in the West. In the able hands of Michael Katz, acclaimed translator of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, Shcheglov’s strikingly modern style and biting satire come alive for today’s readers.

The Dacha Husband (a term created by Shcheglov) satirizes a type of man who came to prominence in the later part of the nineteenth century in Russia; he was typically upper middle class, was married to a materialistic woman, and commuted to work in St. Petersburg during the summer while his wife and children vacationed at the family’s dacha in Pavlovsk.

Among the novel’s highlights is a "Convention of Dacha Husbands," in which a "small group of insulted and injured husbands gathered together, in secret from their wives, . . . for a general discussion of contemporary marital misfortunes and a search for some means to protect their human rights." The convention is unexpectedly interrupted by the wives, who arrive to retrieve their rebellious spouses. A coda informs the reader that at least one of the proposals offered during the meeting survived: the construction of a "shelter for the care of deserted husbands."
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Dahomean Narrative
A Cross-Cultural Analysis
Melville J. Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits
Northwestern University Press, 1998
This new edition brings back into print one of the classics in scholarly analysis and translation, written by one of the luminaries of American cultural anthropology. Melville Herskovits and his wife and collaborator Frances spent over twenty years studying the social networks, religion, music, and oral traditions of the peoples of West Africa and their descendants in the New World. Dahomey, the site of their major African work, is in the country now known as Benin.

Published as a companion piece to Northwestern University Press's West African Folktales, Dahomean Narrative provides the basic texts of material collected in the field, and shows how they were collected, analyzed, and theorized in the anthropological and folklore disciplinary traditions of Herskovits's day. The result is a wide-ranging collection, culled from an entire narrative tradition, that remains unique among anthropological publications.
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DAI (enough)
A Play
Iris Bahr
Northwestern University Press, 2009

Set in a Tel Aviv café in the moments before a suicide bomber enters, Iris Bahr’s 2008 Lucille Lortel Award–winning DAI (enough) courageously speaks to tragic current events. Bahr plays eleven different characters who span the ideological and class spectrum of Israeli society, including a Zionist kibbutznik, an evangelical from America funding an Armageddon fantasy, a West Bank settler, a snooty expat living in Long Island, and a Palestinian professor trying to keep her son from taking the path of extremism. Thanks to the emotional depth and honesty with which Bahr endows these characters and their individual stories, a complex portrait of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict emerges. Alternately very funny and tragic, DAI (enough) is a brave attempt to humanize the headlines.

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The Dance of the Intellect
Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition
Marjorie Perloff
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Must poetic form be, as Yeats demanded, "full, sphere-like, single," or can it accommodate the impurities Yeats and his Modernist generation found so problematic? Sixty years later, these are still open questions, questions Marjorie Perloff addresses in these essays.
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Dancing on Violent Ground
Utopia as Dispossession in Euro-American Theater Dance
Arabella Stanger
Northwestern University Press, 2021
The politics of theater dance is commonly theorized in relation to bodily freedom, resistance, agitation, or repair. This book questions those utopian imaginaries, arguing that the visions and sensations of canonical Euro-American choreographies carry hidden forms of racial violence, not in the sense of the physical or psychological traumas arising in the practice of these arts but through the histories of social domination that materially underwrite them.

Developing a new theory of choreographic space, Arabella Stanger shows how embodied forms of hope promised in ballet and progressive dance modernisms conceal and depend on spatial operations of imperial, colonial, and racial subjection. Stanger unearths dance’s violent ground by interrogating the expansionist fantasies of Marius Petipa’s imperial ballet, settler colonial and corporate land practices in the modern dance of Martha Graham and George Balanchine, reactionary discourses of the human in Rudolf von Laban’s and Oskar Schlemmer’s movement geometries; Merce Cunningham’s experimentalism as a white settler fantasy of the land of the free, and the imperial amnesia of Boris Charmatz’s interventions into metropolitan museums. Drawing on materialist thought, critical race theory, and indigenous studies, Stanger ultimately advocates for dance studies to adopt a position of “critical negativity,” an analytical attitude attuned to how dance’s exuberant modeling of certain forms of life might provide cover for life-negating practices. Bold in its arguments and rigorous in its critique, Dancing on Violent Ground asks how performance scholars can develop a practice of thinking hopefully, without expunging history from their site of analysis.
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Daniil Kharms
Writing and the Event
By Branislav Jakovljevic
Northwestern University Press, 2009
The "texts" of Russian artist and thinker Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) were so many and varied and often unique (narrative, dramatic, philosophical, poetic, mathematical, pictographic, diagrammatic, musical, biographical) that they defied categorization—and, thus, thorough study or appreciation—through much of the twentieth century. This book, the first in English to view Kharms’s oeuvre in its entirety, is also the first to offer a complete, inclusive, and coherent understanding of the overall project of this artist and writer now considered a major figure in the modernist canon of Europe.
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The Danton Case and Thermidor
Two Plays
Stanislawa Przybyszewska
Northwestern University Press, 1989
Stanislawa Przybyszewski is recognized as a major twentieth-century playwright on the basis of her trilogy about the French Revolution, of which The Danton Case and Thermidor are the principal parts. The Danton Case depicts the battle for power between two exceptional individuals: the corrupt sentimental idealist, Danton, and the incorruptible genius of the Revolution, Robespierre. Thermidor shows the final playing out of this drama, as Robespierre, left alone with the heroic absolutist Saint-Just, foresees the ruin of himself and his cause, and in his despair predicts that hatred, war, and capitalism will steal the Revolution and corrupt nineteenth-century man.
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Dare the Sea
Stories
Ali Hosseini
Northwestern University Press, 2023
Debut short-story collection in English from acclaimed fiction writer Ali Hosseini, named a Favorite Short Story Collection of 2023 by the Chicago Review of Books

The stories in Dare the Sea explore Iran’s landscape, culture, and the undercurrent of change affecting its people—both in Iran and the United States. The stories in the first half of the collection are set in Iran in the time before and just after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Each tale discloses the obstacles rural Iranians lived with on a daily basis and the exigencies of survival: petty theft, corruption, drug trafficking, religion, and love. Stories in the second half take place in exile, where characters are seemingly dropped into American locales like the Midwest or Hawaii, taking in their situation with only the survival skills they’ve learned in their own land and enduring the hardships of being strangers in a new country.

Loosely interconnected by reappearing characters, the stories in Dare the Sea are strongly linked by the country of Iran, its landscape, its history, and its hold on its people.
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Dark Conceit
The Making of Allegory
Edwin Honig
Northwestern University Press, 1959
Dark Conceit is the first book in English to treat allegory seriously in terms of literary creation and criticism. The study explores the methods and ideas that go into the making of allegory, discusses the misconceptions that have obscured the subject, and surveys the changing concept of allegory. The greater part of the book concerns the typical features of allegorical fiction, focusing on a group of Romantic and contemporary writers, including Melville, Hawthorne, and Kafka, who continue the allegorical tradition in literature. Such writers, along with Lawrence, James, and Joyce, are taken to be the modern counterparts to an earlier group of pastoral, evangelical, and satirical writers represented by Spenser, Bunyan, and Swift. Honig’s thesis is that literary allegory, while symbolic in method, is realistic in aim. Its very power lies in its giving proof to the physical and ethical realities of life objectively conceived.
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Dark Legs and Silk Kisses
The Beatitudes of the Spinners
Angela Jackson
Northwestern University Press, 1993
Winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry

Angela Jackson brings her remarkable linguistic and poetic gifts to the articulation of African-American experience. The recurrent motif of the spider, which she presents as both creator and predator, demonstrates her deliberate reshaping of myth in the context of contemporary human experience. Informed by African-American speech and poetic traditions, yet uniquely her own, these poems display Jackson's stylistic grace, her exuberance and vitality of spirit, and her emotional sensitivity and psychological insight.
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Data from the Decade of the Sixties
A Novel
Thanassis Valtinos
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Winner of Greece’s National Book Award for Best Novel in 1990 and short-listed for the Aristeion European Literature Prize in 1991, Data from the Decade of the Sixties is a masterpiece by Greek author Thanassis Valtinos.

Just as Greece today struggles to adapt to a shifting political landscape, so Greece in the 1960s was convulsed by the collision of tradition and cultural transformation. In Data from the Decade of the Sixties, Valtinos assembles voices, stories, and news clips that capture the transformation of Greece, the monarchy giving way to a republic via dictatorship, the industrialization of its agricultural society, and the replacement of arranged marriages with love matches.

The many voices in this tour de force coalesce in a bricolage of documents: personal letters between friends and family, news reports, advertisements, and other written ephemera. As governments fall, sexologists, fortune-tellers, garage owners, and lonely matrons advertise their specialties and fantasies in want ads, while the young and lonely find escape within the cheap novels, movies, and gossip columns that enliven their barren existence.

Together these testimonies illuminate the tumult of 1960s Greece, where generations and values clash and Greek society struggles to adapt. Valtinos captures the pulse of a decade, portraying the spirit of the century in Greece and throughout the world.
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Dawn Clark Netsch
A Political Life
Cynthia Grant Bowman
Northwestern University Press, 2010

Illinois Democratic politics has recently produced the most skilled and inspirational politician in memory . . . and has also reminded us of the need for further reform. It is fitting, then, that the latest installment of the Chicago Lives series turns to Dawn Clark Netsch, a leading reformer of Illinois politics since the 1950s and the first woman major party nominee for governor of Illinois.

Netsch was a pioneer, or the first of her gender, in almost every endeavor she undertook. From the very beginning of her career, when she led the move to desegregate Northwestern University's undergraduate dorms, her passion for social justice extended beyond the rights of women to rights for racial minorities and those of all sexual orientations. Bowman charts Dawn Clark Netsch's remarkable political career, from her work behind the scenes as assistant to Governor Otto Kerner and as a participant in the 1970 Constitutional Convention to her later service in elected office, first as Illinois state senator for eighteen years and later as Illinois comptroller, and culminating in her historic run for governor in 1994. Throughout, Netsch lost neither her genteel yet unpretentious demeanor, nor her passion for progressive politics as exemplified by her early mentor, Governor Adlai E. Stevenson.

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A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer
Stories
Christine Schutt
Northwestern University Press, 2005
The title of Christine Schutt's second collection strikes the theme of swiftly passing time that runs through each of the stories. In "The Life of the Palm and the Breast" a woman watches her half-grown children running through the house and wonders: Whose boys are these? Whose life is this? The title story tells of a grandfather who has lived long enough to see his daughter's struggles echoed in his granddaughter and how her unhappiness leads him to unexpectedly feel the weight of his years. In "Darkest of All" a mother's relationship with her sons is wreaked by a repeated cycle of drugs and abusive relationships, the years pass and the pain-and its chosen remedy-remains the same. The narrator in "Winterreise" evokes Thoreau and strives to be heroic in the face of her longtime friend's imminent death, a harsh reminder of the time that is allotted to each of us.

Schutt's indomitable, original talent is once again on full display in each of these deeply informed, intensely realized stories. Many of the narratives take place in a space as small as a house, where the doors are many and what is hidden behind these thin domestic barriers tends towards violence, abusive sex, and mental anguish. Schutt opens these doors in sudden, bold moments that also reveal how the characters are often hopeful, even optimistic. With a style that is at once sensual and spare, dreamlike and deliberate, she exposes the terrible intimacy of the rooms and corridors of our innermost lives.
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The Day I Wasn't There
Helene Cixous
Northwestern University Press, 2006
In this memoir-novel, a narrator who resembles Hélène Cixous obsessively recounts an incident--the premature death of her first-born child, a Down Syndrome baby left in the care of the clinic in Algeria where her midwife mother works. She uses this event to probe her family history and her relationship with her mother, a refugee from Nazi Germany; her dead father, after whom the baby is named; and her medical-student brother, who takes on some of the duties of a father figure.

Cixous's elusive writing bears all the trademarks of her poetic, provocative style, vivid with word play, intense feeling and a stream-of-consciousness that moves freely over time and place. The narrator's mother claims not to remember what happened, and the brother tries to fill in some gaps in the story. By the end of the book we understand the significance of the title: one day Cixous's mother returned to the clinic to find the baby on the brink of death. Rather than attempt to save him she chose to end his suffering.

By closing the door to the imaginary clinic at the end, the narrator at last resolves the feelings of guilt and realizes that each human being has a fate they must endure. Informed by psychoanalytical theory, and always brutally honest, The Day I Wasn't There is above all an intimate study of a woman's inner landscape.
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The Day Underneath the Day
C. Dale Young
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Winner of 2002 Norma Farber First Book Award Finalist

Gifted with a vivid and exact skill, C. Dale Young's writing resembles an intricate anatomy lesson. His powers of observation probe the small energies of the natural world. Again and again the ordinary details of life transform themselves under the delicate pressure of his words--the movement of birds' wings, the color and texture of tropical flowers, the study of the ocean waves, the "scalpel of light" cutting through the beginning of the day. The language of Young's poems evokes an ultimate sense of place through a gorgeous marriage of tone and diction that echoes James Merrill and Amy Clampitt. As he meticulously maps out human passions and emotions, he explores both the surfaces and depths of everything that he surveys. His confident and polished verse unfolds intricate layers of landscape, seeking the order that lies beneath the unruly patterns of our lives.
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Daybook 1918
Early Fragments
J. V. Foix, Edited and translated by Lawrence Venuti
Northwestern University Press, 2019

Daybook 1918: Early Fragments is the first substantial selection in English from the prose poetry of the major Catalan writer J. V. Foix. The core of Lawrence Venuti’s edition is forty-five prose poems from the beginning of Foix’s career, supplemented by additional poems in prose and verse, prose fictions, and essays that immerse the reader in the heady cultural ferment of early twentieth-century Catalonia.

Deeply committed to the European avant-gardes, Foix explored experimental poetics in the service of Catalan nationalism as Catalonia itself carried out its notable experiments with autonomous government on the eve of Franco’s dictatorship. Foix was particularly attracted to the revolutionary energy of French surrealism, and he endows Catalan life and landscapes with a dreamlike quality while staging a series of unsettling encounters with the femme fatale Gertrudis. 

In translations praised as both fluid and resonant, Venuti plumbs the expressive capabilities of English to evoke the profound impact that the Catalan texts had on their first readers. Daybook 1918: Early Fragments establishes Foix as a key figure in international modernism.

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Days and Memory
Charlotte Delbo
Northwestern University Press, 2001
In Auschwitz, memory meant life: remembering the humanity extinguished by the death camps and hoping to survive to tell what had been endured. Charlotte Delbo, a non-Jew sent to Auschwitz for being a member of the French resistance movement, recalls the poems, vignettes, and meditations that fed her companions' spirits, interweaving her experiences with the sufferings of others and depicting dignity and decency in the face of inhumanity.

This definitive translation is by Delbo's close friend, the author and theater critic Rosette Lamont, an expert on the works of Ionesco and Beckett. Lamont wrote that Delbo was, like Beckett, "a minimalist of infinite pain, a voice of conscience."
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The Day's Hard Edge
Poems
Jose A. Rodriguez
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A radically open interrogation of queer Chicano identity
 
In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day's Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker’s world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker’s initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one’s very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.
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Dead Weight
A Memoir in Essays
Randall Horton
Northwestern University Press, 2022
Dead Weight chronicles the improbable turnaround of a drug smuggler who, after being sentenced to eight years in state prison, returned to society to earn a PhD in creative writing and become the only tenured professor in the United States with seven felony convictions. Horton’s visceral essays highlight the difficulties of trying to change one’s life for the better, how the weight of felony convictions never dissipates.
 
The memoir begins with a conversation between Horton and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man statue in New York City. Their imagined dialogue examines the psychological impact of racism on Black men and boys, including Horton’s separation from his mother, immediately after his birth, in a segregated Alabama hospital. From his current life as a professor and prison reformer, Horton looks back on his experiences as a drug smuggler and trafficker during the 1980s–1990s as well as the many obstacles he faced after his release. He also examines the lasting impact of his drug activity on those around him, reflecting on the allure of economic freedom and the mental escapism that cocaine provided, an allure so strong that both sellers and users were willing to risk prison. Horton shares historical context and vivid details about people caught in the war on drugs who became unsuspecting protagonists in somebody else’s melodrama.
 
Lyrical and gripping, Dead Weight reveals the lifelong effects of one man’s incarceration on his psyche, his memories, and his daily experience of American society.
 
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Dear Friend
Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker
Eric Torgersen
Northwestern University Press, 2000
In 1908, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote "Requiem for a Friend" in memory of Paula Modersohn-Becker, the German painter who had profoundly affected him and who had died a year earlier. Although a great modern painter, Modersohn-Becker is remembered primarily as she is portrayed in Rilke's poem. Dear Friend looks at the relationship of two great artists whose often-strained friendship was extraordinary for both.
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Death and the Dervish
Mesa Selimovic
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Death and the Dervish is an acclaimed novel by Bosnian writer Mesa Selimovic. It recounts the story of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish residing in an Islamic monastery in Sarajevo in the eighteenth century during the Ottoman Turk hegemony over the Balkans. When his brother is arrested, he must descend into the Kafkaesque world of the Ottoman authorities in his search to discover what happened to him. He narrates his story in the form of an elaborate suicide note, regularly misquoting the Koran. In time, he begins to question his relations with society as a whole and, eventually, his life choices in general.

Hugely successful when published in the 1960s, Death and the Dervish is an enduring classic made into a feature length film in 1974.
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A Death in Harlem
A Novel
Karla FC Holloway
Northwestern University Press, 2019

In A Death in Harlem, famed scholar Karla FC Holloway weaves a mystery in the bon vivant world of the Harlem Renaissance. Taking as her point of departure the tantalizingly ambiguous “death by misadventure” at the climax of Nella Larsen’s Passing, Holloway accompanies readers to the sunlit boulevards and shaded sidestreets of Jazz Age New York. A murder there will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem’s first “colored” policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas.

Clear glass towers rising in Manhattan belie a city where people are often not what they seem. For some here, identity is a performance of passing—passing for another race, for another class, for someone safe to trust. Thomas’s  investigation illuminates the societies and secret societies, the intricate code of manners, the world of letters, and the broad social currents of 1920s Harlem.

A Death in Harlem is an exquisitely crafted, briskly paced, and impeccably stylish journey back to a time still remembered as a peak of American glamour. It introduces Holloway as a fresh voice in storytelling, and Weldon Haynie Thomas as an endearing and unforgettable detective.

 
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The Death of Mr. Baltisberger
Bohumil Hrabal
Northwestern University Press, 2010
Originally published as The Death of Mr. Baltisberger, the fourteen stories in Romance showcase the breadth of Bohumil Hrabal’s considerable gifts: his humor of the grotesque, his often surprising warmth, and his hard-edged, fast-paced style. In the story "Romance," a plumber’s apprentice and a gypsy girl reach toward a tentative connection across the chasm that separates their worlds. Another unlikely love story, "World Cafeteria," features a romance between a young man whose girlfriend has just committed suicide and a bride whose husband lands in jail on their wedding night. The tone turns to the absurd in "The Death of Mr. Baltisberger," where a crippled ex-motorcyclist and three people he meets at the track exchange wildly improbably reminiscences, while a fatal Grand Prix motorcycle race rages around them. Hrabal’s psychological insight into quotidian interactions saturates stories such as "A Dull Afternoon," where a mysterious, self-absorbed stranger disrupts the psychic calm of a neighborhood tavern and becomes the silent catalyst for an unwanted truth. Throughout the collection, noted translator Michael Henry Heim captures the quirky speech patterns and idiosyncratic takes on life that have made Hrabal’s characters an indispensable part of world literature.
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A Death of One's Own
Literature, Law, and the Right to Die
Jared Stark
Northwestern University Press, 2018
To be or not to be—who asks this question today, and how? What does it mean to issue, or respond to, an appeal for the right to die? In A Death of One’s Own, the first sustained literary study of the right to die, Jared Stark takes up these timely questions by testing predominant legal understandings of assisted suicide and euthanasia against literary reflections on modern death from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rigorously interdisciplinary and lucidly argued, Stark’s wide-ranging discussion sheds critical light on the disquieting bioethical and biopolitical dilemmas raised by contemporary forms of medical technology and legal agency.
 
More than a survey or work of advocacy, A Death of One’s Own examines the consequences and limits of the three reasons most often cited for supporting a person’s right to die: that it is justified as an expression of personal autonomy or self-ownership; that it constitutes an act of self-authorship, of “choosing a final chapter” in one’s life; and that it enables what has come to be called “death with dignity.” Probing the intersections of law and literature, Stark interweaves close discussion of major legal, political, and philosophical arguments with revealing readings of literary and testimonial texts by writers including Balzac, Melville, Benjamin, and Améry.
 
A thought-provoking work that will be of interest to those concerned with law and humanities, biomedical ethics, cultural history, and human rights, A Death of One’s Own opens new and suggestive paths for thinking about the history of modern death as well as the unsettled future of the right to die.
 
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Death of Somoza
Claribel Alegría & Darwin Flakoll
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Death of Somoza reveals the inside story of the assassination of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in Asuncion, Paraguay in 1980. Alegria and Flakoll, on the recommendation of Julio Cortazar, met "Ramon," a leader in the Argentinian Revolutionary Workers' Party (PRT) and with his help were able to interview all the survivors of the commando team that carried out the "bringing to justice" of Somoza. Alegria and Flakoll rewove these testimonies into a narrative that reads like a thriller and gives a vivid picture of the political and social climate of the time. Enlivened by its colorful cast of characters, Death of Somoza is the definitive account of how Anastasio Somoza Debayle was brought to justice. This story is not an apology for terrorism, but rather the chronicle of a tyrannicide.
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The Death of the Detective
A Novel
Mark Smith
Northwestern University Press, 2007
A madman is on the loose in the city. Alone and on the verge of psychic collapse, detective Arnold Magnuson follows clues in murder's wake--through the Chicago of society clubs and nightclubs and the city of small-time hoods and big-time Mafia, the slums smelling of machine oil and riverside tanneries and pristine lakeside villages--through subtle interrogations, split-second lies, and improvised stories, moving ever closer to a culprit who begins to feel alarmingly like himself.

The Death of the Detective is a quest novel in the tradition of Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, and Dead Souls. During his frenetic and blood-soaked odyssey, Mark Smith's detective moves through the city on highways, boulevards, side streets, and alleys. He tracks "the death-maker" from a mansion in Lake Forest to the underbelly of the South Side, from a glass high-rise on the Gold Coast to a run-down tavern in the northwestern suburbs, and everywhere in between. In this New York Times best seller and finalist for the 1974 National Book Award, Smith takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go until the last page of his relentless journey into the dark recesses of the American soul.
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Death's Homeland
Dragan Dragojlovic
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Dragan Dragojlović's poetry captures the horror of the civil war and acts of genocide that ravaged his native Yugoslavia. He tells the truth in startling images and expresses the resilience of the human spirit even in the midst of despair. As he asks in one poem, "What are we to do with so much grief?"
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The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
Jon Stewart
Northwestern University Press, 1998
The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty provides a balanced portrait of the intellectual relationship between these two men. Essays by leading scholars as well as selections from the primary texts of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir address the numerous points of contact and cover the major themes of the debate from the different periods in their shared history. A biographical overview introduces the work and provides a context for the theoretical issues taken up in the articles, and an extensive bibliography suggests further readings to supplement the selections included in the volume.
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Deciding What's News
A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time
Herbert J. Gans
Northwestern University Press, 2005
For ten years, Herbert J. Gans spent considerable time in four major television and magazine newsrooms, observing and talking to the journalists who choose the national news stories that inform America about itself. Writing during the golden age of journalism, Gans included such headline events as the War on Poverty, the Vietnam War and the protests against it, urban ghetto disorders, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Watergate. He was interested in the values, professional standards, and the external pressures that shaped journalists' judgments.

Deciding What's News has become a classic. A new preface outlines the major changes that have taken place in the news media since Gans first wrote the book, but it also suggests that the basics of news judgment and the structures of news organizations have changed little. Gans's book is still the most comprehensive sociological account of some of the country's most prominent national news media. The book received the 1979 Theatre Library Association Award and the 1980 Book Award of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. This is the first work to be published under the Medill School of Journalism's "Visions of the American Press" imprint, a new journalism history series featuring both original volumes and reprints of important classics.
 
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Decolonizing Diasporas
Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature
Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez
Northwestern University Press, 2021

Winner, MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies 

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another.

Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention. Figueroa-Vásquez contends that these diasporic literatures reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities.

This study centers the cultural productions of peoples of African descent as Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and offer new ways to approach questions of home, location, belonging, and justice.

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Deep Blue Almost Black
Selected Fiction
Thanassis Valtinos
Northwestern University Press, 2000
With vivid language and powerful imagery, Thanassis Valtinos addresses the dislocation of three generations of Greeks facing profound political, social, and cultural change.
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Deering Library
An Illustrated History
Nina Barrett
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Published to commemorate the Deering Library’s 75th anniversary, this book explores the Deering and McCormick families, who funded the project; the building’s distinctive Collegiate Gothic architecture; its lore as a campus institution; and its role in the evolution of Northwestern University Library into one of the country’s most prominent research libraries. Richly illustrated, it is both an authoritative account of a landmark library and a rich keepsake for Northwestern alumni.

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Delinquent Palaces
Poems
Danielle Chapman
Northwestern University Press, 2015
What does it mean to pray or praise in the twenty-first century? What does it mean to lament, to attend? In this volatile, visionary debut collection, Danielle Chapman seeks “to be known / in one’s own person as crocuses are known / by sun, conceiving green to breathe it / for ravishment by light.” Driven toward stark landscapes and “nowheres” of the spirit, these poems steadfastly seek the lyrical and spiritual promise implicit in difficulty—where “spring sing[s] slime / through snail stones” and “the river’s cashmere roiled.” Chapman’s work testifies to the revelation and the anguish of love, and to the possibility of finding grace in the “interstices of pain / where God’s green / meets man’s limestone.” These hard-edged, wry, and intricately musical poems deliver a life that has been felt to its limits, and transformed into singular art.
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Deliver Us
Luigi Meneghello, Translated from the Russian by Frederika Randall
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Originally published in 1963, and today considered a landmark in twentieth century Italian literature, Luigi Meneghello’s Deliver Us is the memoir, not of an extraordinary childhood, but of the very ordinary one the author shared with most of his generation, when Italy was a rural country under the twin authorities of Church and Fascism. His boyhood begins in 1922, the year of Mussolini’s March on Rome, and ends when Meneghello, 21, goes up into the hills to join the partisans. Called a romanzo—a story, although not a novel, as that term usually suggests—the book is a genre all of its own that mixes personal and collective memory, amateur ethnography, and reflections on language. Meneghello’s sharp insights and narrative skill come together in an original meditation on how words, people, places, and things shape thought itself. 

Only loosely chronological, Deliver Us proceeds by themes—childhood games, Fascist symbols, religious precepts, and the rites of poverty, of death, of eros, and of love. Meneghello’s ironic musings and profoundly honest recollections make an utterly unsentimental human comedy of that was the whole world to his dawning consciousness.
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Demonic History
From Goethe to the Present
Kirk Wetters
Northwestern University Press, 2014

In this ambitious book, Kirk Wetters traces the genealogy of the demonic in German literature from its imbrications in Goethe to its varying legacies in the work of essential authors, both canonical and less well known, such as Gundolf, Spengler, Benjamin, Lukács, and Doderer. Wetters focuses especially on the philological and metaphorological resonances of the demonic from its core formations through its appropriations in the tumultuous twentieth century.

Propelled by equal parts theoretical and historical acumen, Wetters explores the ways in which the question of the demonic has been employed to multiple theoretical, literary, and historico-political ends. He thereby produces an intellectual history that will be consequential both to scholars of German literature and to comparatists.

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Derrida and Differance
David Wood and Robert Bernasconi
Northwestern University Press, 1988
A collection of six essays by British and American philosophers, Derrida and Différance represents recent appropriations of Derrida's thought at the Warwick Workshops on Continental Philosophy. With an introductory letter by and interview with Derrida, Derrida and Différance focuses on the celebrated term "différance," a neologism devised by Derrida to denote the influence of differentiation in the structuring of all signification.
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Design in the Age of Darwin
From William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright
Stephen F Eisenman
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Charles Darwin’s monumental The Origin of Species, published in 1859, forever changed the landscape of natural science. The scientific world of the time had already established the principle of the “intelligent design” of a Creator; the art world had spent centuries devoting itself to the celebration of such a Designer’s creation. But the language of the book, and its implications, were stunning, and the ripples Darwin made when he rocked the boat spread outward: if he could question the Designer, what effect might there be on the art world, and on mortal designers’ renderings of Creation. 

Published in partnership with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art to accompany its exhibit, this catalog of essays and more than fifty color exhibition plates invokes these two senses of “intelligent design”—one from the debates between science and theology and the other from the world of art, particularly architecture and the decorative arts. The extensive exhibition includes furniture, metalware, glassware, textiles, and designs on loan from public and private collections in the United States and England. Among the artwork included are items from William Morris, C. R. Ashbee, Christopher Dresser, C. F. A. Voysey, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Sullivan. Through these pieces and the accompanying examinations, the book explores how popular conceptions of the theory of evolution were used or rejected by British and American artists in the years that followed Darwin’s publication.


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Designed for Flight
Poems
Gregory Fraser
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Designed for Flight both continues and enlarges the exploration of the rhythms of our emotional lives undertaken in Gregory Fraser’s first two collections. A master of metaphor, Fraser works magic within tightly controlled forms, loading lines with surprising juxtapositions and changes of direction. Taken together, the poems trace the sometimes instant, sometimes decades-long movement from incomprehensible loss and grief to rueful reflection and, if we’re lucky, uneasy accommodation. Casting a sharply observant eye on past selves, always steering clear of simple sentiment, the speaker in this collection looks back with bitter irony and forgiveness in equal measure. Against the fears and frustrations of childhood, the dissolution of a doomed relationship, and the distance between the hoped for and the actual, Fraser’s poems offer the imagination’s capacity for endless invention and the compensatory pleasures of art.

[more]

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The Desire of Psychoanalysis
Exercises in Lacanian Thinking
Gabriel Tupinambá; With a foreword by Slavoj Žižek
Northwestern University Press, 2021

The Desire of Psychoanalysis proposes that recognizing how certain theoretical and institutional problems in Lacanian psychoanalysis are grounded in the historical conditions of Lacan’s own thinking might allow us to overcome these impasses. In order to accomplish this, Gabriel Tupinambá analyzes the socioeconomic practices that underlie the current institutional existence of the Lacanian community—its political position as well as its institutional history—in relation to theoretical production.

By focusing on the underlying dynamic that binds clinical practice, theoretical work, and institutional security in Lacanian psychoanalysis today, Tupinambá is able to locate sites for conceptual innovation that have been ignored by the discipline, such as the understanding of the role of money in clinical practice, the place of analysands in the transformation of psychoanalytic theory, and ideological dead-ends that have become common sense in the Lacanian field. The Desire of Psychoanalysis thus suggests ways of opening up psychoanalysis to new concepts and clinical practices and calls for a transformation of how psychoanalysis is understood as an institution.

[more]

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A Devil's Vaudeville
The Demonic in Dostoevsky's Major Fiction
William Leatherbarrow
Northwestern University Press, 2005
"Real" demons do rear their heads in Dostoevsky's writing; but what of the demonic more broadly interpreted such as the unclean forces—so diffuse, ugly, and ubiquitous—found throughout Russian folklore, in Christian demonology, and in the demon-figure of European Romanticism? These are the "demonic markers" that William J. Leatherbarrow traces through Dostoevsky's fiction, with a view to discovering the cultural genealogy, nature, and significance of these inscriptions. Whether found in the voices of particular characters or those of the narrator and implied author, these demonic markers contaminate much of the narrative terrain of Dostoevsky's major fiction. They also, as Dostoevsky scholar Leatherbarrow clearly demonstrates, function as a coherent semiotic system and serve as a rhetoric through which that fiction mediates its most pressing ideological and artistic concerns.

In fresh, often surprising readings of Dostoevsky's individual works, Leatherbarrow shows how such a "language" articulates a series of concerns linked to views expressed elsewhere—in Dostoevsky's journalism and letters—on the question of Russia's relationship to Western Europe. His study also explores the narrative and generic implications of the way Dostoevsky inscribes the demonic in his fictional works—implications that point to a new understanding of familiar concepts in the work of this Russian master. Highly original, deftly argued and written, Leatherbarrow's work offers Dostoevsky specialists and general readers alike an opportunity to rediscover and reassess the rich complexities of some of the world's greatest literature.
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Dialectic and Dialogue
Plato's Practice of Philosophical Inquiry
Francisco J. Gonzalez
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Dialectic and Dialogue seeks to define the method and the aims of Plato's dialectic in both the "inconclusive" dialogues and the dialogues that describe and practice a method of hypothesis. Departing from most treatments of Plato, Gonzalez argues that the philosophical knowledge at which dialectic aims is nonpropositional, practical, and reflexive. The result is a reassessment of how Plato understood the nature of philosophy.
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Dialogues in Paradise
Can Xue
Northwestern University Press, 1989
The thirteen stories of Dialogues in Paradise are eloquent in a way the West associates with both the modern and the ancient: the dark oracles of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the paranoid mystery of Kafka, the moving stream of Woolf. The work of Can Xue (a pseudonym of Changsa writer Deng Xiao-hua) renews our consciousness of the long tradition of the irrational in our literature, where dreams and reality constitute one territory, its borders open, the passage back and forth barely discernible. She fuses lyrical purity with the darkest visions of the grotesque and the result is a unique literary experience.
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Diary 1954
Leopold Tyrmand
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish Jew who survived World War II by working in Germany under a false identity, would go on to live and write under Poland’s Communist regime for twenty years before emigrating to the West, where he continued to express his deeply felt anti-Communist views. Diary 1954—written after the independent weekly paper that employed him was closed for refusing to mourn Stalin’s death—is an account of daily life in Communist Poland. Like Czesław Miłosz, Václav Havel, and other dissidents who described the absurdities of Soviet-backed regimes, Tyrmand exposes the lies—big and small—that the regimes employed to stay in power. Witty and insightful, Tyrmand’s diary is the chronicle of a man who uses seemingly minor modes of resistance—as a provocative journalist, a Warsaw intellectual, the "spiritual father" of Polish hipsters, and a promoter of jazz in Poland—to maintain his freedom of thought.
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Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz
Kaethe Kollwitz
Northwestern University Press, 1988
One of the great German Expressionist artists, Kaethe Kollwitz wrote little of herself. But her diary, kept from 1900 to her death in 1945, and her brief essays and letters express, as well as explain, much of the spirit, wisdom, and internal struggle which was eventually transmuted into her art.
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Diary Volume 1
Witold Gombrowicz
Northwestern University Press, 1988
This is the first English translation of Witold Gombrowicz's Diary, the most Polish and the most universal of his works. Gombrowicz (1904-1969), who left Poland at age thirty-five and never returned, whose writings were banned in his own country, has had an impact on Polish literature unlike any of his contemporaries. But he changed more than the image of Polish letters. If literature cannot influence national character, it can at least influence the national image, its understanding and evaluation of itself. That is what Gombrowicz changed: the image and stereotype of the Pole.
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Diary Volume 2
Witold Gombrowicz
Northwestern University Press, 1989
This is the first English translation of Witold Gombrowicz's Diary, the most Polish and the most universal of his works. Volume Two explores a more personal and intimate side of Gombrowicz in his adopted country of Argentina. Gombrowicz takes the readers into salons, homes, encounters in restaurants and theaters, dramatizing and self-dramatizing, turning the Diary into a work blending techniques of fiction and theater.
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Diary Volume 3
Witold Gombrowicz
Northwestern University Press, 1993
This is the first English translation of Witold Gombrowicz's <i>Diary,</i> the most Polish and the most universal of his works. Volume Three records Gombrowicz's departure from Argentina for Europe, where he spends a year in Berlin and settles on the French Riviera. It details his friendship with Bruno Schulz, his reflections on Dante's "monstrous work," and his responses to the work of contemporaries, and in so doing reveals the core of a great writer's sensibility.
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Diasporic Intimacies
Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries
Edited by Robert Diaz, Marissa Largo, and Fritz Pino
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries is the first edited volume of its kind, featuring the works of leading scholars, artists, and activists who reflect on the contributions of queer Filipinos to Canadian culture and society.

Addressing a wide range of issues beyond the academy, the authors present a rich and under-studied archive of personal reflections, in-depth interviews, creative works, and scholarly essays. Their trandsdisciplinary approach highlights the need for queer, transgressive, and utopian practices that render visible histories of migration, empire building, settler colonialism, and globalization.

Timely, urgent, and fascinating, Diasporic Intimacies offers an accessible entry point for readers who seek to pursue critically engaged community work, arts education, curatorial practice, and socially inflected research on sexuality, gender, and race in this ever-changing world.
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The Dictator Novel
Writers and Politics in the Global South
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Where there are dictators, there are novels about dictators. But “dictator novels” do not simply respond to the reality of dictatorship. As this genre has developed and cohered, it has acquired a self-generating force distinct from its historical referents. The dictator novel has become a space in which writers consider the difficulties of national consolidation, explore the role of external and global forces in sustaining dictatorship, and even interrogate the political functions of writing itself. Literary representations of the dictator, therefore, provide ground for a self-conscious and self-critical theorization of the relationship between writing and politics itself.

The Dictator Novel positions novels about dictators as a vital genre in the literatures of the Global South. Primarily identified with Latin America, the dictator novel also has underacknowledged importance in the postcolonial literatures of francophone and anglophone Africa. Although scholars have noted similarities, this book is the first extensive comparative analysis of these traditions; it includes discussions of authors including Gabriel García Márquez, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Mármol, Esteban Echeverría, Ousmane Sembène , Chinua Achebe, Aminata Sow Fall, Henri Lopès, Sony Labou Tansi, and Ahmadou Kourouma. This juxtaposition illuminates the internal dynamics of the dictator novel as a literary genre. In so doing, Armillas-Tiseyra puts forward a comparative model relevant to scholars working across the Global South.
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Dictionary of Music
Theodore Karp
Northwestern University Press, 1983
This concise, clear reference gets straight to the important points in the history of music. With extended articles on major figures, movements, technical concepts, and explanations of standard symbols, abbreviations, and notations, Karp's text has been praised for its ease of use and unfailing accuracy. This edition features new illustrations and covers all musical periods: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern.
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Difference and Givenness
Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence
Levi R Bryant
Northwestern University Press, 2008

From one end of his philosophical work to the other, Gilles Deleuze consistently described his position as a transcendental empiricism. But just what is transcendental about Deleuze's transcendental empiricism? And how does his position fit with the traditional empiricism articulated by Hume? In Difference and Givenness, Levi Bryant addresses these long-neglected questions so critical to an understanding of Deleuze's thinking. Through a close examination of Deleuze's independent work--focusing especially on Difference and Repetition--as well as his engagement with thinkers such as Kant, Maimon, Bergson, and Simondon, Bryant sets out to unearth Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and to show how it differs from transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, and traditional empiricism.  What emerges from these efforts is a metaphysics that strives to articulate the conditions for real existence, capable of accounting for the individual itself without falling into conceptual or essentialist abstraction. In Bryant's analysis, Deleuze's metaphysics articulates an account of being as process or creative individuation based on difference, as well as a challenging critique--and explanation--of essentialist substance ontologies. A clear and powerful discussion of how Deleuze's project relates to two of the most influential strains in the history of philosophy, this book will prove essential to anyone seeking to understand Deleuze's thought and its specific contribution to metaphysics and epistemology. 

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Dimensions of the Holocaust
Elie Wiesel
Northwestern University Press, 1990
Elie Wiesel, Lucy Dawidowicz, Dorothy Rabinowitz, and Robert McAfee Brown explore society's inability to comprehend the horrors of the Holocaust, and its unwillingness to remember. Annotated by Elliot Lefkovitz, educational consultant for the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, this edition contains extensive documentation of ideas and facts that have surfaced since the book's first appearance in 1977.
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Dimitry's Shade
A Reading of Alexander Pushkin's Boris Godunov
J. Douglas Clayton
Northwestern University Press, 2004
In an ambitious reinterpretation of the premier work of Russia's national poet, J. Douglas Clayton reads Boris Godunov as the expression of Alexander Pushkin's thinking about the Russian state, especially the Russian state of his own time (some two hundred years distant from the events of the play), and even his own place within that state. Here we see how the play marks a sharp break with the Decembrists and Pushkin's own youthful liberalism, signaling its author's emergence as a Russian conservative. Boris Godunov, Clayton argues, can be best understood as an ideologically conservative defense of autocracy.

Sure to shock readers even as it persuades them, Dimitry's Shade reveals, incarnated in Boris Godunov, those three elements that were to become the slogan of Nicholas's Russia in the 1830s: autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality.
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Direct Sunlight
Stories
Christine Sneed
Northwestern University Press, 2023
A collection of twelve stories by award-winning author Christine Sneed
 
The stories in Direct Sunlight, award-winning author Christine Sneed’s latest, are inspired by the memorable strangeness of everyday life. The characters in these topically diverse tales experience events that bring the terms of their day-to-day lives and their relationships into focus in a way hitherto foreign to them.
 
The title story features two adult children learning of their father’s second family long after his death in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “Mega Millions” explores the aftermath of a small-town midwestern factory employee’s enormous lottery win. In “Dear Kelly Bloom,” a young journalist takes on the role of advice columnist at a faltering Chicago newspaper around the time of the 2008 financial meltdown and soon finds himself tasked with replying to his own mother’s letter requesting guidance on family matters. In “The Monkey’s Uncle Louis,” a contentedly childless man tries to make sense of his sister’s decision to adopt a capuchin monkey after she and her husband find themselves unable to conceive a baby of their own.
 
The stories in Direct Sunlight rely on humor but are balanced by Sneed’s clear-eyed sobriety about the sorrows inherent in the human condition.
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The Director's Prism
E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde
Dassia N. Posner
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Finalist, 2017 Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Award
Shortlist, 2019 Prague Quadrennial Best Scenography and Design Publication Award


The Director's Prism investigates how and why three of Russia's most innovative directors— Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein—used the fantastical tales of German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann to reinvent the rules of theatrical practice. Because the rise of the director and the Russian cult of Hoffmann closely coincided, Posner argues, many characteristics we associate with avant-garde theater—subjective perspective, breaking through the fourth wall, activating the spectator as a co-creator—become uniquely legible in the context of this engagement. Posner examines the artistic poetics of Meyerhold's grotesque, Tairov's mime-drama, and Eisenstein's theatrical attraction through production analyses, based on extensive archival research, that challenge the notion of theater as a mirror to life, instead viewing the director as a prism through whom life is refracted. A resource for scholars and practitioners alike, this groundbreaking study provides a fresh, provocative perspective on experimental theater, intercultural borrowings, and the nature of the creative process.
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Dirt Road Home
Cheryl Savageau
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Cheryl Savageau writes of poverty, mixed ancestry, nature, and family in poems that are simultaneously tough and tender, and salted with a rich folk humor from her Abenaki and French Canadian ancestry.
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The Disappearance
A Novella and Stories
Ilan Stavans
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Hailed as one of the most important Hispanic writers of his generation, Ilan Stavans is a celebrated storyteller whose work has been translated into a dozen languages and has garnered numerous international awards. The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories contains three masterful gems. The novella, “Morirse está en hebreo,” is a thought-provoking meditation on continuity and tradition among Mexican Jews; “Xerox Man” is an intriguing story about a book thief with a bizarre theological obsession; and the title story, “The Disappearance,” is the resonant tale of a Belgian actor who kidnaps himself in an attempt to respond to neo-Nazi groups. Together, these three pieces offer an unforeseen vista of Jewish-Hispanic relations and confirm Stavans’ reputation as an original literary voice.
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The Discourse of Domination
From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism
Ben Agger
Northwestern University Press, 1992
The Discourse of Domination tackles nothing less than the challenge of giving critical theory a new grip on current problems, and restoring the left's faith in the possibility of enlightened social change. Agger steers a course between orthodox Marxism and orthodox anti-Marxism, bringing the concepts of ideology, dialectic, and domination out of the academy and making them into "a living medium of political self-expression."
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Discovering Existence with Husserl
Emmanuel Levinas
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Contemporary philosophers are increasingly turning to the work of Emmanuel Levinas to bring a consideration of ethics into their own thinking. As an exponent of the phenomenological tradition, Levinas ranks with Heidegger and Sartre; as a disciple of Husserl, he was one of the most independent and original interpreters, testifying to the fruitfulness of Husserl's phenomenology.

In collecting almost all of Levinas's articles on Husserlian phenomenology, this volume gathers together a wealth of thoughtful exposition and interpretation by one of the most important European philosophers of the twentieth century. Levinas's thought is relevant to a broad variety of disciplines and concerns. This volume serves as a reliable introduction for the beginning student, as well as satisfying the expert's more demanding and critical desire for insight into the complexities of Levinas's thought.
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Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky
Susanne Fusso
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Most discussions of sexuality in the work of Dostoevsky have been framed in Freudian terms. But Dostoevsky himself wrote about sexuality from a decidedly pre-Freudian perspective. By looking at the views of human sexual development that were available in Dostoevsky's time and that he, an avid reader and observer of his own social context, absorbed and reacted to, Susanne Fusso gives us a new way of understanding a critical element in the writing of one of Russia's literary masters. Beyond discovering Dostoevsky's own views and representations of sexuality as a reflection of his culture and his time, Fusso also explores his artistic treatment of how children and adolescents discover sexuality as part of their growth.

Some of the topics Fusso considers are Dostoevsky's search for an appropriate artistic language for sexuality, a young narrator's experimentation with homoerotic desire and unconventional narrative in A Raw Youth; and Dostoevsky's approach to a young man's sexual development in A Raw Youth and The Brothers Karamazov. She also explores his complex treatment of a child's secret sexuality in his account of the Kroneberg child abuse case in A Writer's Diary; and his conception of the ideal family, a type of family that appears in his works mainly by negative example. Focusing mainly on sexual practices considered "deviant" in Dostoevsky's time--both because these are the practices that his young characters confront and because they offer the most intriguing interpretive problems--Fusso decodes the author's texts and their social contexts. In doing so, she highlights one thread in the intricate thematic weave of Dostoevsky's novels and newly illuminates his artistic process.
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The Disinterested Witness
A Fragment of Advaita Vedanta Phenomenology
Bina Gupta
Northwestern University Press, 1998
The Disinterested Witness is a detailed, contextual, and interpretive study of the concept of saksin (or that which directly or immediately perceives) in Advaita Vedanta, and a fascinating and significant comparison of the philosophies of the East and West. Addressing a wide range of epistemological dilemmas, as well as perceived commonalities and differences between Eastern and Western philosophy, it is a major contribution to comparative philosophy and forms a vantage point for cross-cultural comparison.
[more]

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Disoriented Disciplines
China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature
Rosario Hubert
Northwestern University Press, 2024
An urgent call to think on the edges, surfaces, and turns of the literary artifact when it crosses cultural boundaries

In the absence of specialized programs of study, abstract discussions of China in Latin America took shape in contingent critical infrastructures built at the crossroads of the literary market, cultural diplomacy, and commerce. As Rosario Hubert reveals, modernism flourishes comparatively, in contexts where cultural criticism is a creative and cosmopolitan practice.

Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature understands translation as a material act of transfer, decentering the authority of the text and connecting seemingly untranslatable cultural traditions. In this book, chinoiserie, “coolie” testimonies, Maoist prints, visual poetry, and Cold War memoirs compose a massive archive of primary sources that cannot be read or deciphered with the conventional tools of literary criticism. As Hubert demonstrates, even canonical Latin American authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Haroldo de Campos, write about China from the edges of philology, mediating the concrete as well as the sensorial.

Advocating for indiscipline as a core method of comparative literary studies, Disoriented Disciplines challenges us to interrogate the traditional contours of the archives and approaches that define the geopolitics of knowledge.

 

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A Displaced Person
The Later Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
Vladimir Voinovich
Northwestern University Press, 2012

In A Displaced Person—the third book in a trilogy that began with the modern classic The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and continued with Pretender to the Throne—author Vladimir Voinovich turns his satirical eye to the difficult last days of the Soviet Communism he so lampooned. Often absurd, A Displaced Person follows a series of random events that brings Chonkin to the United States, where he becomes a farmer and, eventually, a member of a congressional delegation sent to the Soviet Union in 1989, during perestroika, to discuss agriculture with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. A Displaced Person carries on the rich Russian tradition of an essentially comic response to the absurdities inherent in totalitarian regimes.

[more]

front cover of The Disposition of the Subject
The Disposition of the Subject
Reading Adorno's Dialectic of Technology
Eric L. Krakauer
Northwestern University Press, 1998
The unprecedented mass manipulation, mass death, and trauma of World War II created a heightened interest in technology and totalitarianism among European and American intellectuals. The Disposition of the Subject explores Theodor Adorno's attempt to hinder further atrocity through philosophical analysis of technology and of its contribution to totalitarianisms of various kinds: political, aesthetic, epistemological.
[more]

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Dissensual Subjects
Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay
Andrew C. Rajca
Northwestern University Press, 2018
In Dissensual Subjects, Andrew C. Rajca combines cultural studies and critical theory to explore how the aftereffects of dictatorship have been used to formulate dominant notions of human rights in the present. In so doing, he critiques the exclusionary nature of these processes and highlights who and what count (and do not count) as subjects of human rights as a result.

Through an engaging exploration of the concept of “never again” (nunca más/nunca mais) and close analysis of photography exhibits, audiovisual installations, and other art forms in spaces of cultural memory, the book explores how aesthetic interventions can suggest alternative ways of framing human rights subjectivity beyond the rhetoric of liberal humanitarianism. The book visits sites of memory, two of which functioned as detention and torture centers during dictatorships, to highlight the tensions between the testimonial tenor of permanent exhibits and the aesthetic interventions of temporary installations there. Rajca thus introduces perspectives that both undo common understandings of authoritarian violence and its effects as well as reconfigure who or what are made visible as subjects of memory and human rights in postdictatorship countries.

Dissensual Subjects offers much to those concerned with numerous interlocking fields: memory, human rights, political subjectivity, aesthetics, cultural studies, visual culture, Southern Cone studies, postdictatorship studies, and sites of memory.
 
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The Distance Between Us
A Novel
Valerie Sayers
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Franny Starkey has been breaking men’s hears since she was a teenager in Due East, South Carolina. Now a married mother of three, she no longer turns heads the way she used to. Michael, her drug-dependent playwright husband, cannot forget the excitement of their gun-running honeymoon in Ireland. Sayers creates an engaging novel that follows Franny’s path from her early, poverty-ridden days to her hedonistic college life to her longings for an artistic career while changing diapers in a Brooklyn apartment. The constant in her life is Steward Morehouse, a well-to-do nerd from Due East, who loves Franny. When Stewart and Michael collaborate on a play, the lives of these three become more complicated than Franny could have imagined. Sayers gracefully weaves all of this into a cohesive and compelling tale.
 
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Distance Manipulation
The Russian Modernist Search for a New Drama
Joanna Kot
Northwestern University Press, 1999
At the turn of the century, there appeared in the Western world a stream of literary and dramatic works that confused their audiences to an unprecedented degree. Many of these works continue to confuse to this day and are avoided by theatre managers wishing to fill seats. Choosing for analysis a selection of five early-twentieth-century Russian plays, this book examines in detail the techniques, devices, and elements that the playwrights applied in order to undercut the traditional dramatic and theatrical expectations of their audiences.

Kot studies experimental dramas by Gippius, Sologub, Blok, and Ivanov, but the centerpiece of the book is Chekhov's Cherry Orchard his last and greatest play. Kot argues that it presents a subtle balance of distancing and emotive techniques.

An invaluable guide to the often bewildering nature of so-called "innovative" twentieth-century works, this book will appeal to anyone interested in modern theater.
[more]

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Distributions of the Sensible
Rancière, between Aesthetics and Politics
Edited by Scott Durham and Dilip Gaonkar With an afterword by Jacques Rancière
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Jacques Rancière’s work is increasingly central to several debates across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a question at the heart of his thought: How should we conceive the relationship between the “politics of aesthetics” and the “aesthetics of politics”? Specifically, the book explores the implications of Rancière’s rethinking of the relationship of aesthetic to political democracy from a wide range of critical perspectives.

Distributions of the Sensible contains original essays by leading scholars on topics such as Rancière’s relation to political theory, critical theory, philosophical aesthetics, and film. The book concludes with a new essay by Rancière himself that reconsiders the practice of theory between aesthetics and politics.
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Dita Saxova
Arnost Lustig
Northwestern University Press, 1993
Dita Saxova is an eighteen-year-old concentration camp survivor trying to start a new life in postwar Prague. Living in a special hostel for orphans from the camps, too old to be cared for parentally, too young to be fully adult, too soaked in reality to harbor many illusions, Dita struggles to reconcile struggles to reconcile her unfathomable past with her enigmatic future. First published in Czech in 1962, then in English in 1979, Dita Saxova confirms Arnost Lustig's place as one of the masterful storytellers of the Holocaust period.
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The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri; Translated from the Italian by Burton Raffel with an Introduction by Paul J. Contino and notes by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.
Northwestern University Press, 2010

At the midpoint of his life, during Holy Week in 1300, Dante awakes to himself in the middle of a forest so dark that the sun’s light cannot penetrate its gloom. of the wildness and brutality of the woods, Dante cries out for help, and thus begins one of Western literature’s greatest epic journeys.

The Divine Comedy follows Dante the pilgrim—guided by the great Roman poet Virgil, then by the love of his life, Beatrice—as he travels downward through Hell, then upward through Purgatory in order to reach Paradise and witness the love that moves the sun and the stars. Raffel’s translation vividly captures the divine contrapasso, the ultimate case of the punishment the crime, in the Inferno, while fathoming the complexity of the Purgatorio and the ecstasy of the Paradiso.

One of the world’s greatest works of literature, Dante’s Commedia revolutionized poetry and the Italian language. This epic poem was the to be written in the vernacular of the Italian people rather than in Latin. In it, Dante weaves the best of classical literature from Virgil, Statius, Aristotle, and Ovid with staples from the Christian tradition (including the Scriptures, Augustine, and Aquinas), into a colorful medieval tapestry that depicts at once the vividly checkered history of church and empire.

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Divine Days
A Novel
Leon Forrest; Foreword by Kenneth W. Warren, Preface by Zachary Price
Northwestern University Press, 2023
A virtuosic epic applauded by Stanley Crouch as “an adventurous masterwork that provides our literature with a signal moment,” back in print in a definitive new edition

“I have an awful memory for faces, but an excellent one for voices,” muses Joubert Jones, the aspiring playwright at the center of Divine Days. A kaleidoscopic whorl of characters, language, music, and Black experience, this saga follows Jones for one week in 1966 as he pursues the lore and legends of fictional Forest County, a place resembling Chicago’s South Side. Joubert is a veteran, recently returned to the city, who works for his aunt Eloise’s newspaper and pours drinks at her Night Light Lounge. He wants to write a play about Sugar-Groove, a drifter, “eternal wunderkind,” and local folk hero who seems to have passed away. Sugar-Groove’s disappearance recalls the subject of one of Joubert’s earlier writing attempts—W. A. D. Ford, a protean, diabolical preacher who led a religious sect known as “Divine Days.” Joubert takes notes as he learns about both tricksters, trying to understand their significance.

Divine Days introduces readers to a score of indelible characters: Imani, Joubert’s girlfriend, an artist and social worker searching for her lost siblings and struggling to reconcile middle class life with her values and Black identity; Eloise, who raised Joubert and whose influence is at odds with his writerly ambitions; (Oscar) Williemain, a local barber, storyteller, and founder of the Royal Rites and Righteous Ramblings Club; and the Night Light’s many patrons. With a structure inspired by James Joyce and jazz, Leon Forrest folds references to African American literature and cinema, Shakespeare, the Bible, and classical mythology into a heady quest that embraces life in all its tumult and adventure.

This edition brings Forrest’s masterpiece back into print, incorporating hundreds of editorial changes that the author had requested from W. W. Norton, but were not made for their editions in 1993 and 1994. Much of the inventory from the original printing of the book by Another Chicago Press in 1992 had been destroyed in a disastrous warehouse fire.

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Dollhouse
A Play
Rebecca Gilman
Northwestern University Press, 2010

Nora seems to have it all: a successful husband, three adorable children, and a beautiful home in the tony Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. But what looks like the perfect life is woefully incomplete, propped up by dark secrets and bitter betrayals. While her husband, Terry, singlemindedly climbs the career ladder, Nora’s compulsive shopping and scheming pushes her ever further from freedom and self-fulfillment. As the lies on which their life is built gradually emerge, Nora comes to realize the true cost of what she thinks she has always wanted. From Ibsen’s masterpiece A Doll’s House, award-winning playwright Rebecca Gilman crafts a bold and insightful update. This contemporary adaptation brings Ibsen’s classic into our century with a sharp eye for social satire and moments of dark comedy coupled with powerful human drama.

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Domestications
American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens
Hosam Aboul-Ela
Northwestern University Press, 2018

Domestications traces a genealogy of American global engagement with the Global South since World War II. Hosam Aboul-Ela reads American writers contrapuntally against intellectuals from the Global South in their common—yet ideologically divergent—concerns with hegemony, world domination, and uneven development. Using Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism as a model, Aboul-Ela explores the nature of U.S. imperialism’s relationship to literary culture through an exploration of five key terms from the postcolonial bibliography: novel, idea, perspective, gender, and space.

Within this framework the book examines juxtapositions including that of Paul Bowles’s Morocco with North African intellectuals’ critique of Orientalism, the global treatment of Vietnamese liberation movements with the American narrative of personal trauma in the novels of Tim O’Brien and Hollywood film, and the war on terror’s philosophical idealism with Korean and post-Arab nationalist materialist archival fiction.

Domestications departs from other recent studies of world literature in its emphases not only on U.S. imperialism but also on intellectuals working in the Global South and writing in languages other than English and French. Although rooted in comparative literature, its readings address issues of key concern to scholars in American studies, postcolonial studies, literary theory, and Middle Eastern studies.

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Dominoes and Other Stories from the Puerto Rican
Jack Agüeros
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Dominoes and Other Stories from the Puerto Rican, the only book of fiction by playwright and poet Jack Agüeros, affirms the triumphs and ordinary struggles of the Puerto Rican experience in New York. In stories that span the 1940s through the 1990s, Agüeros re-creates the barrio in all its multifaceted immensity, with its candy stores, plaster saints, fruit vendors, sidewalk games of dominoes, knife fights, and stories of successful craftspeople and entrepreneurs.

These stories convey hard, sometimes brutal, often bittersweet, experiences, but throughout Agüeros writes with artistry and unyielding compassion. Richly detailed, wry, and matter-of-fact, Dominoes and Other Stories from the Puerto Rican is an important achievement by an accomplished American writer.
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Dos Passos
A Life
Virginia Spencer Carr
Northwestern University Press, 2004
A New York Times Notable Book

An intimate biography of a great American writer.

He rose from a childhood as the illegitimate son of a financial titan to become the man Sartre called "the greatest writer of our time." A progressive writer who turned his passions into the groundbreaking U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos later embraced conservative causes. At the height of his career he was considered a peer of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, yet he died in obscurity in 1970.

Award-winning biographer Virginia Spencer Carr examines the contradictions of Dos Passos's life with an in-depth study of the man. Using the writer's letters and journals, and with assistance from the Dos Passos family, Carr reconstructs an epic life, one of literary acclaim and bitter obscurity, restless wandering and happy marriage, friendship with Edmund Wilson and feuds with Hemingway. First published to acclaim in 1984, Dos Passos remains the definitive personal portrait of the author.
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Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism
A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol
Donald Fanger
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism is Donald Fanger's groundbreaking study of the art of Dostoevsky and the literary and historical context in which it was created. Through detailed analyses of the work of Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, Fanger identifies romantic realism, the transformative fusion of two generic categories, as a powerful imaginary response to the great modern city. This fusion reaches its aesthetic and metaphysical climax in Dostoevsky, whose vision culminating in Crime and Punishment is seen by Fanger as the final synthesis of romantic realism.
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Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground
Elizabeth A. Blake
Northwestern University Press, 2014

While Dostoevsky’s relation to religion is well-trod ground, there exists no comprehensive study of Dostoevsky and Catholicism. Elizabeth Blake’s ambitious and learned Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground fills this glaring omission in the scholarship. Previous commentators have traced a wide-ranging hostility in Dostoevsky’s understanding of Catholicism to his Slavophilism. Blake depicts a far more nuanced picture. Her close reading demonstrates that he is repelled and fascinated by Catholicism in all its medieval, Reformation, and modern manifestations. Dostoevsky saw in Catholicism not just an inspirational source for the Grand Inquisitor but a political force, an ideological wellspring, a unique mode of intellectual inquiry, and a source of cultural production. Blake’s insightful textual analysis is accompanied by an equally penetrating analysis of nineteenth-century European revolutionary history, from Paris to Siberia, that undoubtedly influenced the evolution of Dostoevsky’s thought.

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Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form
Suspense, Closure, Minor Characters
Greta Matzner-Gore
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Three questions of novelistic form preoccupied Fyodor Dostoevsky throughout his career: how to build suspense, how to end a narrative effectively, and how to distribute attention among major and minor characters. For Dostoevsky, these were much more than practical questions about novelistic craft; they were ethical questions as well. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form traces Dostoevsky’s indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that Dostoevsky wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels: Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov. In so doing, he anticipated some of the most pressing debates taking place in the study of narrative ethics today.
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Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self
Yuri Corrigan
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Dostoevsky was hostile to the notion of individual autonomy, and yet, throughout his life and work, he vigorously advocated the freedom and inviolability of the self. This ambivalence has animated his diverse and often self-contradictory legacy: as precursor of psychoanalysis, forefather of existentialism, postmodernist avant la lettre, religious traditionalist, and Romantic mystic. 

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self charts a unifying path through Dostoevsky's artistic journey to solve the “mystery” of the human being. Starting from the unusual forms of intimacy shown by characters seeking to lose themselves within larger collective selves, Yuri Corrigan approaches the fictional works as a continuous experimental canvas on which Dostoevsky explored the problem of selfhood through recurring symbolic and narrative paradigms. Presenting new readings of such works as The IdiotDemons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Corrigan tells the story of Dostoevsky’s career-long journey to overcome the pathology of collectivism by discovering a passage into the wounded, embattled, forbidding, revelatory landscape of the psyche.

Corrigan’s argument offers a fundamental shift in theories about Dostoevsky's work and will be of great interest to scholars of Russian literature, as well as to readers interested in the prehistory of psychoanalysis and trauma studies and in theories of selfhood and their cultural sources.
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Dostoevsky's Dialectics and the Problem of Sin
Ksana Blank
Northwestern University Press, 2010

In Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin, Ksana Blank borrows from ancient Greek, Chinese, and Christian dialectical traditions to formulate a dynamic image of Dostoevsky’s dialectics—distinct from Hegelian dialectics—as a philosophy of “compatible contradictions.” Expanding on the classical triad of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, Blank guides us through Dostoevsky’s most difficult paradoxes: goodness that begets evil, beautiful personalities that bring about grief, and criminality that brings about salvation.

Dostoevsky’s philosophy of contradictions, this book demonstrates, contributes to the development of antinomian thought in the writings of early twentieth-century Russian religious thinkers and to the development of Bakhtin’s dialogism. Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin marks an important and original intervention into the enduring debate over Dostoevsky’s spiritual philosophy.


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Dostoevsky's Idiot
Dialogue and the Spiritually Good Life
Bruce A. French
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Prince Myshkin is one of Dostoevsky's most perplexing creations. In this study, Bruce A. French presents a provocative interpretation of the religious dimension of Myshkin's goodness from a Bakhtinian perspective.

In three chapters, French takes up in turn the narrator and narrative points of view, the author’s use of inserted narratives, and three modes of interaction French calls Monologue, Dialogue, and Dialogical Living.
 
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Dostoevsky's Occasional Writings
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Northwestern University Press, 1997
This classic collection of articles, sketches, and letters spans thirty-three years in Fyodor Dostoevsky's writing career: from 1847, just after the publication of his first novel, until 1880, a year before his death. The writings show the scope of his artistic development and the changes that occurred as a result of such cataclysmic events as his arrest and trial for treason, and his subsequent imprisonment and exile in Siberia.
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Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs
Lynn Ellen Patyk
Northwestern University Press, 2023

Confronting Bakhtin’s formative reading of Dostoevsky to recover the ways the novelist stokes conflict and engages readers—and to explore the reasons behind his adversarial approach
 
Like so many other elements of his work, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s deliberate deployment of provocation was both prescient and precocious. In this book, Lynn Ellen Patyk singles out these forms of incitement as a communicative strategy that drives his paradoxical art. Challenging, revising, and expanding on Mikhail Bakhtin’s foundational analysis in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Patyk demonstrates that provocation is the moving mover of Dostoevsky’s poetics of conflict, and she identifies the literary devices he uses to propel plot conflict and capture our attention. Yet the full scope of Dostoevsky’s provocative authorial activity can only be grasped alongside an understanding of his key themes, which both probed and exploited the most divisive conflicts of his era. The ultimate stakes of such friction are, for him, nothing less than moral responsibility and the truth of identity.
 
Sober and strikingly original, compassionate but not uncritical, Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs exposes the charged current in the wiring of our modern selves. In an economy of attention and its spoils, provocation is an inexhaustibly renewable and often toxic resource.

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Dostoevsky's Secrets
Reading Against the Grain
Carol Apollonio
Northwestern University Press, 2009
When Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that he is a "realist in a higher sense," it is because the facts are irrelevant to his truth. And it is in this spirit that Apollonio approaches Dostoevsky’s work, reading through the facts--the text--of his canonical novels for the deeper truth that they distort, mask, and, ultimately, disclose. This sort of reading against the grain is, Apollonio suggests, precisely what these works, with their emphasis on the hidden and the private and their narrative reliance on secrecy and slander, demand.
In each work Apollonio focuses on one character or theme caught in the compromising, self-serving, or distorting narrative lens. Who, she asks, really exploits whom in <i>Poor Folk</i>? Does "White Nights" ever escape the dream state? What is actually lost--and what is won--in <i>The Gambler</i>? Is Svidrigailov, of such ill repute in <i>Crime and Punishment</i>, in fact an exemplar of generosity and truth? Who, in <i>Demons</i>, is truly demonic? Here we see how Dostoevsky has crafted his novels to help us see these distorting filters and develop the critical skills to resist their anaesthetic effect. Apollonio's readings show how Dostoevsky's paradoxes counter and usurp our comfortable assumptions about the way the world is and offer access to a deeper, immanent essence. His works gain power when we read beyond the primitive logic of external appearances and recognize the deeper life of the text.
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Dostoevsky's "The Devils"
A Critical Companion
William Leatherbarrow
Northwestern University Press, 1999
The Devils is one of Dostoevsky's four major novels--and the most openly political of his works. Known by several names, including The Demons and The Possessed, this novel often anchors courses of Dostoevsky's works. This critical companion contains essays that shed light on both the tricky literary structure of the novel and its social and political components. In addition, editor W.J. Leatherbarrow provides a detailed introduction, extracts from Dostoevsky's correspondence about The Devils, and an annotated bibliography.
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Dostoevsky's "The Idiot"
A Critical Companion
Liza Knapp
Northwestern University Press, 1998
This book, part of the acclaimed AATSEEL Critical Companions series, is designed to guide readers through Dostoevsky's most mysterious and confusing work. It begins with introductory essays looking at where, when, and how The Idiot was written and at the novel's major characters. Other essays guide the reader through the author's plans and notebooks; use contemporary feminist criticism to shed light on how this novel explores alternatives to traditional roles; examine the ways in which the novel reflects Dostoevsky's concern with apocalypse, modernity, and time; and address the ways the novel's hero, Prince Myshkin, can be compared to Christ. A final section offers a rich collection of primary sources, including Dostoevsky's letters concerning The Idiot, and an annotated bibliography.
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Double Lives, Second Chances
The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski
Annette Insdorf
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Krzysztof Kieslowski (1941 – 1996) is widely recognized as one of the greatest filmmakers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Beginning as a documentarian who took on controversial subjects in communist Poland in the 1960’s and 70’s, Kieslowski gained an international reputation with his later narrative films The Double Life of Veronique and the Three Colors trilogy (Blue, White, and Red). He also made the Decalogue, a celebrated series for Polish television. The first comprehensive analysis of Kieslowski’s entire body of work to be published in English, Annette Insdorf’s book still stands as the best introduction to a uniquely gifted artist.
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Drain
A Novel
Davis Schneiderman
Northwestern University Press, 2010
It’s the year 2039, and Lake Michigan is mysteriously emptied of water. The planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field are failing, and fires burn ominously throughout the empty lake bed. In this seemingly endless desert east of Chicago, three factions are locked in conflict: the original end-of-times cultist settlers who follow religious visionary Fulcrum Maneuvers and worship a giant World Worm they deem responsible for the drained lake; the megacorporation Quadrilateral, a mega-consumerist, planned-community combine of bourgeois city planners developing what is now called the Wildland-Urban Interface; and the Blackout Angels, landlocked punk pirates raised in Quadrilateral cities, who oppose everything and everyone.

In Davis Schneiderman’s shocking novel, Drain, freedom, creativity, and transgression wage war with forces of control, censorship, and conformity. The wordscapes of William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, the dystopic nightmares of Philip K. Dick, and the transgressive punch of Chuck Palahniuk and Georges Bataille together convene in this stunning and thrilling work.
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Drawing the Future
Chicago Architecture on the International Stage, 1900-1925
David Van Zanten
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Drawing the Future: Chicago Architecture on the International Stage, 1900–1925 is an illustrated catalog with companion essays for an exhibition of the same name at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. Drawing the Future explores the creative ferment among Chicago architects in the early twentieth century, coinciding with similar visions around the world. The essays focus on the highlights of the exhibition. David Van Zanten profiles Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, Chicago architects who created an influential, prize-winning plan for Canberra, the new capital of Australia. Ashley Dunn looks at the two exhibits at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, one devoted to the Griffins in 1914 and the other to the French architect Tony Garnier in 1925, demonstrating the impact of World War I on city planning and architecture. Leslie Coburn examines Chicago’s Neighborhood Center Competition of 1914–15, which sought to redress gaps in Daniel Burnham’s plan of 1909. The ambition and reach of Chicago architecture in this epoch would have lasting influence on cities of the future.

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Drop Dead
Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York
Hillary Miller
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Winner, 2017 American Theater and Drama Society John W. Frick Book Award
Winner, 2017 ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History 

Hillary Miller’s Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York offers a fascinating and comprehensive exploration of how the city’s financial crisis shaped theater and performance practices in this turbulent decade and beyond.

New York City’s performing arts community suffered greatly from a severe reduction in grants in the mid-1970s. A scholar and playwright, Miller skillfully synthesizes economics, urban planning, tourism, and immigration to create a map of the interconnected urban landscape and to contextualize the struggle for resources. She reviews how numerous theater professionals, including Ellen Stewart of La MaMa E.T.C. and Julie Bovasso, Vinnette Carroll, and Joseph Papp of The Public Theater, developed innovative responses to survive the crisis.

Combining theater history and close readings of productions, each of Miller’s chapters is a case study focusing on a company, a production, or an element of New York’s theater infrastructure. Her expansive survey visits Broadway, Off-, Off-Off-, Coney Island, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, community theater, and other locations to bring into focus the large-scale changes wrought by the financial realignments of the day.

Nuanced, multifaceted, and engaging, Miller’s lively account of the financial crisis and resulting transformation of the performing arts community offers an essential chronicle of the decade and demonstrates its importance in understanding our present moment.

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Due East
A Novel
Valerie Sayers
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Mary Faith Rapple is smart, pretty in a rangy, gray-eyed sort of way—and very definitely pregnant. Not an unusual occurrence in the sleepy town of Due East, South Carolina. But when Mary faith announces that she will have a virgin birth and her father, Jesse Rapple, owner of the Plaid King filling station, vows to uncover the truth, the sparks begin to fly. Spirited, evocative, and utterly delightful, this brilliant novel by Valerie Sayers explores the love and loneliness, the hopes and fears, the unspoken yearnings of the human heart. Due East is a sweet and tender novel. Like Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, Sayers writers with compassion of lonely characters whose lives are slightly off center, and her best scenes have a fine sense, sharp edge of irony. Her chosen territory is the human heart.
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Duino Elegies
A Bilingual Edition
Rainer Maria Rilke
Northwestern University Press, 1998
The Duino Elegies are the culmination of the development of Rilke's poetry. A summary of his spiritual troubles, perhaps no volume of poems in a European language has made so dramatic and sustained an impact on English-speaking readers in this century.
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The Duke's Man
A Novel
David R. Slavitt
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Historical fiction has long ranked somewhere just above romance novels and mysteries in the great chain of literary respectability, yet as David Slavitt points out in his humorous yet loving send-up of the genre, riches might be found in the most unlikely sources. The Duke’s Man is, in a way, old and new—a condensation and commentary and a literary mash-up. The eponymous character is Louis de Clermont, Comte de Bussy d’Amboise, a gentleman of the court of King Henri III of France, and the hero of Dumas’ three-volume historical novel La Dame de Monsoreau (1846). Dumas’ novel serves here as inspiration, pre-text, and pretext for a commentary that veers off into numerous historical and biographical digressions, musings on narrative and the novel, and parody. 

Focusing on one aspect of Dumas’ novel—the doomed love story of Bussy d’Amboise and Diana de Monsoreau—Slavitt excerpts key passages, which are extended and undercut by the narrator’s comments. The result is a radically abridged book with its own life and verve. The first of the quoted scenes, in which the names of Bussy’s assailants are replaced with those of French cheeses, sets the irreverent tone for all that follows. The book pokes fun at Dumas’ exclamatory style and flamboyant archaisms (“morbleu!” “pardieu!”), the implausibility of the swordfights, the unnecessary contortions of the political plot, the conventional passivity of the heroine, and the coyness of his love scenes. Residing somewhere between Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Quirk Books’ mash-ups (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, etc.), The Duke’s Man’s blend of quotation, commentary, and fiction raises searching questions about realism and truth.
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Dulce
Poems
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Northwestern University Press, 2018

The poems in Dulce are at once confession and elegy that admit the speaker’s attempt and possible failure to reconcile intimacy toward another and toward the self. The collection asks: what’s the point in any of this?—meaning, what’s the use of longing beyond pleasure; what’s the use of looking for an origin if we already know the ending?

Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and negates such divisions. He allows for the possibility of an and in a world of either/or.

These poems enact a prescient anxiety of what is to come, “I want to say all of this is true / but we both know it isn’t.  . . .  We already know what’s at the other end of this.” Dulce is truly a lyrical force rife with the rich language of longing and regret that disturbs even the most serene quiet.

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Dwelling in Fiction
Poetics of Place and the Experimental Novel in Latin America
Ashley R. Brock
Northwestern University Press, 2023
Explores the affective, ethical, and political demands that difficult reading places on readers of midcentury Latin American literature

The radical formal experiments undertaken by writers across Latin America in the mid-twentieth century introduced friction, opacity, and self-reflexivity to the very act of reading. Dwelling in Fiction: Poetics of Place and the Experimental Novel in Latin America explores the limitations and the possibilities of literature for conveying place-specific forms of life. Focusing on authors such as José María Arguedas, João Guimarães Rosa, and Juan José Saer, who are often celebrated for universalizing regional themes, Ashley R. Brock brings a new critical lens to Latin American writers who were ambivalent toward their era’s “boom.”
 
Beyond mere resistance to or critique of the commodification and political instrumentalization of rural topics and types, this countertrend of critical regionalism positions readers themselves as outsiders, pushing them to engage their senses, to train their attention, and to learn to dwell in unknown textual landscapes. Dwelling in Fiction draws on a transnational community of thinkers and writers to show how their midcentury aesthetic practices of sensorial pedagogy anticipate contemporary turns toward affect, embodiment, decoloniality, and ecological thought.
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