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OBERIU
An Anthology of Russian Absurdism
Eugene Ostashevsky
Northwestern University Press, 2006
OBERIU is an anthology of short works by three leading Russian absurdists: Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and Nikolai Zabolotsky. Between 1927 and 1930, the three made up the core of an avant-garde literary group called OBERIU (from an acronym standing for The Union of Real Art). It was a movement so artfully anarchic, and so quickly suppressed, that readers only began to discover its strange and singular brilliance three decades after it was extinguished—and then only in samizdat and émigré publications.

Some called it the last of the Russian avant-garde, and others called it the first (and last) instance of Absurdism in Russia. Though difficulty to pigeon-hole, OBERIU and the pleasures of its poetry and prose are, with this volume, at long last fully open to English-speaking readers. Skillfully translated to preserve the weird charm of the originals, these poems and prose pieces display all the hilarity and tragedy, the illogical action and puppetlike violence and eroticism, and the hallucinatory intensity that brought down the wrath of the Soviet censors. Today they offer an uncanny reflection of the distorted reality they reject.
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The Object of the Atlantic
Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968
Rachel Price
Northwestern University Press, 2014

The Object of the Atlantic is a wide-ranging study of the transition from a concern with sovereignty to a concern with things in Iberian Atlantic literature and art produced between 1868 and 1968. Rachel Price uncovers the surprising ways that concrete aesthetics from Cuba, Brazil, and Spain drew not only on global forms of constructivism but also on a history of empire, slavery, and media technologies from the Atlantic world. Analyzing Jose Marti’s notebooks, Joaquim de Sousandrade’s poetry, Ramiro de Maeztu’s essays on things and on slavery, 1920s Cuban literature on economic restructuring, Ferreira Gullar’s theory of the “non-object,” and neoconcrete art, Price shows that the turn to objects—and from these to new media networks—was rooted in the very philosophies of history that helped form the Atlantic world itself.

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Occupying the Stage
The Theater of May '68
Kate Bredeson
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Occupying the Stage: the Theater of May '68 tells the story of student and worker uprisings in France through the lens of theater history, and the story of French theater through the lens of May '68. Based on detailed archival research and original translations, close readings of plays and historical documents, and a rigorous assessment of avant-garde theater history and theory, Occupying the Stage proposes that the French theater of 1959–71 forms a standalone paradigm called "The Theater of May '68." 

The book shows how French theater artists during this period used a strategy of occupation-occupying buildings, streets, language, words, traditions, and artistic processes-as their central tactic of protest and transformation. It further proposes that the Theater of May '68 has left imprints on contemporary artists and activists, and that this theater offers a scaffolding on which to build a meaningful analysis of contemporary protest and performance in France, North America, and beyond.

At the book's heart is an inquiry into how artists of the period used theater as a way to engage in political work and, concurrently, questioned and overhauled traditional theater practices so their art would better reflect the way they wanted the world to be. Occupying the Stage embraces the utopic vision of May '68 while probing the period's many contradictions. It thus affirms the vital role theater can play in the ongoing work of social change.
 
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The Odyssey
A Play
Mary Zimmerman
Northwestern University Press, 2003
This dramatic adaptation of Homer's myth begins with a modern young woman who is struggling to understand Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey. A classical muse appears, and the young woman becomes the goddess Athena--a tireless advocate for Odysseus in his struggle to get home. With her trademark irreverent and witty twist on classic works, Zimmerman brings to life the story of Odysseus's ten-year journey, depicting his encounters with characters such as Circe, the Cyclops, Poseidon, Calypso, the Sirens, and others.
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Of Death and Dominion
The Existential Foundations of Governance
Mohammed Bamyeh
Northwestern University Press, 2007

Death is the opposite not of life, but of power. And as such, Mohammed Bamyeh argues in this original work, death has had a great and largely unexplored impact on the thinking of governance throughout history, right down to our day. In Of Death and Dominion Bamyeh pursues the idea that a deep concern with death is, in fact, the basis of the ideological foundations of all political systems.

            Concentrating on four types of political systems—polis, empire, theocracy, and modern mass society systems—Bamyeh shows how each follows a specific strategy designed to pit power against the equalizing specter of death. Each of these strategies—consolation, expansion, preparation, and repression—produces a certain style of political behavior, as well as particular psychic traumas. In making his argument, Bamyeh revisits a wide range of empirical and theoretical discussions in existentialist philosophy, psychoanalysis, comparative historical sociology, literary studies, and anthropology. By demonstrating how schemes of power are by definition also schemes for defying death—despite their claims to the contrary—his book encourages us to think of a new style of politics, one oriented toward life.

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Of Derrida Heidegger and Spirit
David Wood
Northwestern University Press, 1993
Jacques Derrida's De l'espirit: Heidegger et la question is one of his most interesting and accessible later works. In it, Derrida attempts to come to terms with Heidegger's Nazi connections by way of an extended reflection on Heidegger's use of the term "Geist." In Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, David Wood presents a variety of powerful and distinctive responses to Derrida's book.
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Of Forgotten Times
Marisela Rizik
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Of Forgotten Times is at once about romance, about mothers and daughters, and about a dictatorship. Set in a fictional Caribbean island, it begins at the time of the conquistadors and ends in relatively modern times. The novel focuses on the stories of the women of two different families whose only point in common is the dictator who rules their island nation. One set of women, the Parduz family, is descendant of green-eyed slaves who practice voodoo-like rituals even through modern times in a village so distant from the major cities that ancient practices continue to have relevance in the present. The other set of women, the Valverde family, is a mother and daughter who seek to find a way out of the endemic conditions of poverty. Of Forgotten Times describes life in a country ruled by a ruthless, power-hungry, machista tyrant who is married to Herminia Parduz and whose lover, among others, is Mercedes Valverde.
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oh, you thought this was a date?!
Apocalypse Poems
C. Russell Price
Northwestern University Press, 2022
Appalachian genderqueer punk writer C. Russell Price’s first full-length poetry collection is a somatic grimoire exploring desire, gender, and sexuality in multiverse littered with flowers and product placement. Part pop culture bubblegum lip smack, part battle cry, this collection asks, What is radical vengeance, and does true survivorship from sexual trauma exist only in fantasy, or is it an attainable reality?
 
Price’s cinematic approach to language and scene is on full display, as well as their dark humor and resilience. Within these pages, the surreal is familiar and grief is a national pastime. If the end is near, who among us would not put on Fleetwood Mac? Who would not clean up their eyeliner just a smidge? This collection pulses with the beat that follows destruction (whether human or natural), the moment the jaw unhinges. These poems are not for pearl clutchers. They are for those who have already felt their private apocalypse.
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Old Calabria
Norman Douglas
Northwestern University Press, 1996
First published in 1915, Old Calabria is a comprehensive and exciting account of adventure travel. Captivated by the pagan quality of the mezzogiorno, Norman Douglas plunged into Calabria, the southernmost and most backward part of Italy (a province that was still largely devoid of any form of modern amenity). He endured extremes of climate, scaled mountains, rode in carriages driven by villainous coachmen, and traversed remote stretches of country where murderous groups of banditti were known to roam. As Jon Manchip White points out in his introduction, it "makes good reading, but it must have constituted a protracted and frightening ordeal--frightening, that is, to anyone except someone like Douglas, possessed of a more than normal share of guts and fortitude."
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Old Floating Cloud
Two Novellas
Can Xue
Northwestern University Press, 1991
Can Xue draws the reader into a world of the grotesque and the surreal, of uncertain spaces and indeterminate identities, of sexual menace and psychological disorientation. These novellas are about life in post-Mao China, but not the China of social realism or of Western fantasy. At the forefront of China's new literary trends, these two novellas--"Yellow Mud Street" and "Old Floating Cloud"--explore Chinese reality through images of the absurd, sudden and illogical juxtapositions, and the limitless transformations induced by a unique imagination.
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The Old Man
Yuri Trifonov
Northwestern University Press, 1999
The Old Man veers between a contemporary effort to buy a dacha and the memories of an incident in the Civil War. A questionable action in the past haunts the present and throws into relief the materialism that has come to replace revolutionary idealism; suggesting this idealism may have been tainted in the first place. While the setting and situation are very Soviet, the quandary Trifonov describes has universal significance.
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Old Wine
Phyllis Bottome
Northwestern University Press, 1998

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Olesha's "Envy"
A Critical Companion
Rimgaila Salys
Northwestern University Press, 1999
This book, part of the acclaimed AATSEEL Critical Companions series, is designed to guide readers through Envy, Yury Olesha's humorous look at the individual's struggle with an increasingly industrialized society. This companion acquaints the reader with the history, biographical context, critical reception, and interpretation problems related to the novel. It also helps the reader decipher the book's difficult features, including its shifting narrators and fluid boundaries between dream and reality.

In addition, this critical companion presents documents from the period pertaining to the novel, excerpts from Olesha's memoirs, and a listing of important criticism.
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Olives
Poems
A.E. Stallings
Northwestern University Press, 2012

Finalist, 2012 NBCC Award in the Poetry category
Recipient, 2011 MacArthur Fellowship and Guggenheim Fellowship

A. E. Stallings has established herself as one of the best American poets of her generation. In addition to a lively dialogue with both the contemporary and ancient culture of her adopted homeland, Greece, this new collection features poems that, in her inimitable voice, address the joys and anxieties of marriage and motherhood. This collection builds on previous accomplishments with some longer poems and sequences of greater philosophical scope, such as “On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia.” Stallings possesses the rare ability to craft precise poems that pulsate with deeply felt emotion. Like the olives of the title, the book embraces the bitter but savory fruits of the ancient tree, and the tears and sweetness we harvest in our temporary lives. These poems show Stallings in complete command of her talent, able to suggest the world in a word.

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Olympic Butter Gold
Poems
Jonathan Moody
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Jonathan Moody grew up during the Golden Ages of hip-hop and listened to rap that was as adventurous and diverse as his military upbringing. When rap’s Golden Ages expired, the music’s innovativeness and variety diminished. Moody’s second book, Olympic Butter Gold, winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, responds to Chuck D’s claim that "if there was a HIP-HOP or Rap Olympics, I really don’t think the United States would get Gold, Silver or Brass." From the poem "Opening Ceremony," in the voice of a heroin addict struggling to use Lady Liberty’s torch to cook "The American Dream," to "Dear 2Pac," an autobiographical account of teaching Tupac Shakur’s poetry to engage high school students indifferent to literature, Moody shares a worldview that is simultaneously apocalyptic and promising.

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Omoo
A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, Volume Two
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Melville's second book, Omoo, begins where his first book, Typee, left off. As the author said, "It embraces adventures in the South Seas (of a totally different character from 'Typee') and includes an eventful cruise in an English Colonial Whaleman (a Sydney Ship) and a comical residence on the island of Tahiti." The popular success of his first novel encouraged Melville to write a sequel, hoping it would be "a fitting successor." Typee describes Polynesian life in its "primitive" state, while Omoo represents it as affected by non-native influences.

Whitman praised its "good-natured style." But many reviewers doubted Melville's veracity, and some objected to his "raciness" and "indecencies." Some also denounced his criticism of missionary endeavors, for his attacks on missionaries were more polemical than those undertaken in the earlier book. Omoo, however, influenced later visitors to Tahiti such as Pierre Loti, Henry Adams, John La Farge, and Jack London; it was the book that sent Robert Louis Stevenson to the South Seas.
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Omoo
A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, Volume Two, Scholarly Edition
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1968
Melville's second book, Omoo, begins where his first book, Typee, left off. As the author said, "It embraces adventures in the South Seas (of a totally different character from 'Typee') and includes an eventful cruise in an English Colonial Whaleman (a Sydney Ship) and a comical residence on the island of Tahiti." The popular success of his first novel encouraged Melville to write a sequel, hoping it would be "a fitting successor." Typee describes Polynesian life in its "primitive" state, while Omoo represents it as affected by non-native influences.

This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as surviving evidence permits. Based on collations of all editions publishing during Melville's lifetime, it incorporates author corrections and many emendations made by the present editors. This edition of Omoo is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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On Emotional Presentation
Alexius Meinong, translated from the German by Marie-Luise Schubert Kalsi and with a new foreword by John J. Drummond
Northwestern University Press, 2020
On Emotional Presentation, first published in German in 1917, contains the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong’s clearest and most developed account of the emotions and their relation to values. In this work, written toward the end of his life, Meinong argues that values are given in and through emotions but are also ontologically independent of these emotions or any subjective attitude.

Available again in English, with a new foreword by John J. Drummond that situates Meinong’s account within contemporary discussions of the emotions, this translation will be welcome to those interested in Meinong and his theory of objects as well as those interested in the philosophy of the emotions and values.
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On Heidegger and Language
Edited and Translated by Joseph J. Kockelmans
Northwestern University Press, 1980
This collection contains original translations of essays, discussions, and papers including six previously unpublished works from the International Colloquium on Heidegger’s Conception of Language, held at The Pennsylvania State University in 1969. This volume endeavors to place Martin Heidegger’s ideas within a wide range of philosophical thought. It contains critical reflections on his conception of speech in Being and Time, linguistic meditations on Heidegger’s use of language, and analysis of his view on the relationship between thought and the language in which it is expressed. In this book, Heidegger scholars will find additional insights into his conception of language and his philosophy as a whole.
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On Life
A Critical Edition
Leo Tolstoy, Edited by Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Translated from the Russian by Michael Denner and Inessa Medzhibovskaya
Northwestern University Press, 2019
In the summer of 1886, shortly before his fifty-eighth birthday, Leo Tolstoy was seriously injured while working in the fields of his estate. Bedridden for over two months, Tolstoy began writing a meditation on death and dying that soon developed into a philosophical treatise on life, death, love, and the overcoming of pessimism. Although begun as an account of how one man encounters and laments his death and makes this death his own, the final work, On Life, describes the optimal life in which we can all be happy despite our mortality. 

After its completion, On Life was suppressed by the tsars, attacked by the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church, and then censored by the Stalinist regime. This critical edition is the first accurate translation of this unsung classic of Russian thought into English, based on a study of manuscript pages of Tolstoy's drafts, and the first scholarly edition of this work in any language. It includes a detailed introduction and annotations, as well as historical material, such as early drafts, documents related to the presentation of an early version at the Moscow Psychological Society, and responses to the work by philosophers, religious leaders, journalists, and ordinary readers of Tolstoy's day.
 
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On Robert Antelme's The Human Race
Essays and Commentary
Robert Antelme
Northwestern University Press, 2003
Rescued in 1945 from Dachau—where François Mitterand, his onetime comrade in the resistance, recognized him among the thousands of quarantined prisoners—Robert Antelme set out to do what seemed "unimaginable," to describe not only his experience but the humanity of his captors. The result, The Human Race, was called by George Perec "the finest example in contemporary French writing of what literature can be."

In this volume, the extraordinary nature and extent of Robert Antelme's accomplishment, and of the reverberations he set in motion in French life and literature, finds eloquent expression. The pieces Antelme wrote for journals—including essays on "principles put to the test," man as the "basis of right," and the question of revenge—appear here alongside appreciations of The Human Race by authors from Perec to Maurice Blanchot to Sarah Kofman. Also included are Antelme's personal recollections and interviews with, among others, Dionys Mascolo (who brought Antelme back from Dachau), Marguerite Duras (Antelme's wife, who tells of his return from Germany), and Mitterand.

Also available: Antelme's The Human Race
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On The Front Line
Guerilla Poems of El Salvador
Claribel Alegria & Darwin J. Flakoll
Northwestern University Press, 1995
More than poetry of combat, this bilingual edition is a record of the struggles, hopes and dreams of a war-torn country, providing a vivid description of the recent struggles in El Salvador.
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On the True Sense of Art
A Critical Companion to the Transfigurements of John Sallis
Edited by Jason M. Wirth, Michael Schwartz, and David Jones
Northwestern University Press, 2016

On the True Sense of Art collects essays by philosophers responding to John Sallis’s Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art as well as his other works on the philosophy of art, including Force of Imagination and Logic of Imagination.

Each of the chapters, by some of the leading thinkers in Continental philosophy, engages Sallis’s work on both ancient and new senses of aesthetics—a transfiguration of aesthetics—as a beginning that is always beginning again. With a responsive essay by Sallis himself, On the True Sense of Art forms a critical introduction to the thought of this generation’s most important aesthetician.

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Once I Was Cool
Personal Essays
Megan Stielstra
Northwestern University Press, 2021
Once I Was Cool contrasts past aspirations with the mess and magic of the present. In her younger days, essayist Megan Stielstra saw Jane’s Addiction at the Aragon Ballroom and fantasized about living on the same block, right in the thick of music and revelry. As an adult, she lives in a turreted condo across the street, with her husband, a child, and an onerous mortgage. It’s just the home her young, cool self imagined. And it isn’t what she expected, either.
 
With conversational flourishes and on-the-mark descriptions, Stielstra’s essays evoke the richness of her everyday life and the memories that are never far away. She remembers learning how to shoot a gun, a cancer scare, and—in a piece that was anthologized in The Best American Essays 2013—the time she eavesdropped on another new mother using her son’s baby monitor. “I shouldn’t have listened,” she writes. “But it was the first time since my son was born that I didn’t feel alone.” Combining footnotes, electric sentences, and uproariously funny anecdotes (have you ever run into an ex while rolling on ecstasy?), Stielstra shows us that maturity is demanding, but its rewards are a gift.
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Once Upon a Cuento
Edited by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Northwestern University Press, 2003
Once Upon a Cuento is an anthology of short stories by contemporary Latinx authors. The stories, written for young people, grade five and up, explore heritage and history, identity, language, and relationships from the perspective of Mexican-American, Cuban-American, Dominican-American, and Puerto Rican writers. In all, the collection features seventeen stories by well-known and emerging writers, most of which are original to this collection. Contributors include acclaimed Puerto Rican children's authors Nicholasa Mohr and Carmen T. Bernier-Grand; Cuban-American novelist, essayist, and poet Virgil Suárez; and Mexican-American short story writers and teachers Lorraine López and Sergio Troncoso.

The stories are grouped by theme—heritage, holidays, and contemporary culture; family life; friends and other relationships; and dealing with differences. Individual stories explore additional themes such as the challenge of making do with little money, the process of moving to a new country and learning English, and young people's relationships to animals and to the natural world. Each story contains an introduction that offers historical, cultural, and biographical information. A general introduction and list of works by the thirteen contributors offer further avenues for research and discussion.

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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
A Critical Companion
Alexis Klimoff
Northwestern University Press, 1996
This companion to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's enduring classic about a day in the life of a Soviet gulag work camp includes a general introduction discussing the work in the context of the author's oeuvre as well as its place within the Russian literary tradition. Also included are fascinating primary sources and background materials, an annotated bibliography, and discussions of the work by leading scholars Robert Louis Jackson, Richard Tempest, and Dariusz Tolczyk. Combining scholarship with accessibility, this critical companion--part of the acclaimed AATSEEL series--illuminates a great work of literature and will enhance its appreciation by students and teachers.
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One Foot in the Finite
Melville's Realism Reclaimed
K. L. Evans
Northwestern University Press, 2018
One Foot in the Finite inspires a radical shift in our view of Melville’s project in Moby-Dick, for its guiding notion is that Melville uses his book to call into question the naturalism that distinguishes the early modern period in Europe. Naturalism is not only the idea that reality is exhausted by nature, or that there exists a domain of physical entities subject to autonomous laws and unaffected by human ingenuity; it also implies a counterpart, a world of pretense and deception, a domain of mental entities ontologically distinct from physical entities and therefore constituting a different realm. To naturalists, whales are part of the background of existing objects against which man assembles his various, subjective, rather arbitrary interpretations. But in Moby-Dick Melville casts upon the world a more ingenious eye, one free of the dualist veil. He confronts a basic misconception: that the contents of consciousness comprise a different order from physical life. He rubs out the dividing line modernity has drawn between the human world of names or concepts and the nonhuman world of plants, creatures, geological features, and natural forces. Melville’s philosophizing, carried by fiction, has dramatic consequence. It overturns our view of language as a system of mental representations that might turn out to represent falsely.
 
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One Word
Marc Straus
Northwestern University Press, 1994
One Word is the first collection of poems by physician Marc J. Straus. Its unusual combination of poetic craft and medical expertise produces striking, uncommon work--work informed by a keen sense of human vulnerability. These remarkable poems fill a void in the body of imaginative work relating to illness.
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The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories
Ilan Stavans
Northwestern University Press, 2007

The One-Handed Pianist was published to acclaim in the early 1990’s, with the two-part Spanish edition winning the Latino Literature Prize in 1989 and the Gamma Literature Prize in 1992. Its tales look at what it means to be Jewish in the Hispanic world—a world in which spirituality is often exercised outside the realm of orthodoxy.

            Stavans constructs fables that raise questions about ethnicity and community; even Stavans’ person raises questions about ethnicity and community: what does it mean that a Jew of Eastern European lineage can call himself Latino and speak for that group?

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Only a Joke Can Save Us
A Theory of Comedy
Todd McGowan
Northwestern University Press, 2017

Only a Joke Can Save Us presents an innovative and comprehensive theory of comedy. Using a wealth of examples from high and popular culture and with careful attention to the treatment of humor in philosophy, Todd McGowan locates the universal source of comedy in the interplay of the opposing concepts lack and excess.

After reviewing the treatment of comedy in the work of philosophers as varied as Aristotle, G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alenka Zupancic, McGowan, working in a psychoanalytic framework, demonstrates that comedy results from the deployment of lack and excess, whether in contrast, juxtaposition, or interplay.

Illustrating the power and flexibility of this framework with analyses of films ranging from Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers classics to Dr. Strangelove and Groundhog Day, McGowan shows how humor can reveal gaps in being and gaps in social order. Scholarly yet lively and readable, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a groundbreaking examination of the enigmatic yet endlessly fascinating experience of humor and comedy.

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Only Among Women
Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940
Anne Eakin Moss
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Only Among Women reveals how the idea of a community of women as a social sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex, or self-interest originated in the classic Russian novel, fueled mystical notions of unity in turn-of-the-century modernism, and finally assumed a privileged place in Stalinist culture, especially cinema.
 
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Open Gate
An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry
Edited by Paul Laraque and Jack Hirschman
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Open Gate is the first bilingual volume of Haitian Creole poetry published in English. Seven years in the making, this anthology is the result of the dedication of its editors and translators, Paul Laraque, Jack Hirschman and the Haitian poet Boadiba, as well as Max Manigat, one of the first teachers of Creole on the university level who was an invaluable advisor.

The editors focus on contemporary Creole poetry that reflects the struggle for human rights in Haiti. The book is divided into three sections: Pioneers of Modern Haitian Creole poetry, beginning with the founder of modern Haitian Creole literature, Felix Morisseu-Leroy (19131998); the flowering of Haitian poetry as represented by the literary movement, "Society of Butterflies," some of whose members were jailed or exiled by the bloody Duvalier dictatorship; and the New Generation featuring primarily those poets in the Diaspora whose work has been published in the last 15 years.

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Operatic Lives
Alberto Savinio
Northwestern University Press, 1988
Writing under the pen name Alberto Savinio, Andrea de Chirico (brother of painter Giorgio) penned fourteen short portraits of such luminaries as the painter Arnold Böcklin, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Verdi, Stradivarius, Nostradamus, Paracelsus, Jules Verne, the bullfighter Bienvenido, Isadora Duncan, and Carlo Collodi, the creator of Pinocchio. In these biographies, Savinio's complex tone is at times warm and cordial -and, at other times, ironic to the point of malignancy.
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Opposing Poetries
Part One: Issues and Institutions
Hank Lazer
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Opposing Poetries presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry.

Volume One examines the shift in the governing assumptions of contemporary poetic practice. Lazer inspects the key critical works addressing poetries in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the political and aesthetic impact of modern critics, poetry reading programs, and of the publishing industry and libraries on contemporary poetic practice.
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Opposing Poetries
Part Two: Readings
Hank Lazer
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Opposing Poetries presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry.

In Volume Two, Lazer presents a series of sustained readings of important experimental texts. Included are the poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and James Sherry. Lazer places these poets in the context of contemporary literary theory, and inspects both the successes and failures of said theory to interpret these works.
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Optical Play
Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture
Julia Bekman Chadaga
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Longlist finalist, 2015 Historia Nova Prize for Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History 

Julia Bekman Chadaga’s ambitious study posits that glass—in its uses as a material and as captured in culture—is a key to understanding the evolution of Russian identity from the eighteenth century onward. From the contemporary perspective, it is easy to overlook how glass has profoundly transformed vision. Chadaga shows the far-reaching effects of this phenomenon.

Her book examines the similarities between glass and language, the ideological uses of glass, and the material’s associations with modernity, while illuminating the work of Lomonosov, Dostoevsky, Zamyatin, and Eisenstein, among others. In particular, Chadaga explores the prominent role of glass in the discourse around Russia’s contentious relationship with the West—by turns admiring and antagonistic—as the nation crafted a vision for its own future. Chadaga returns throughout to the spectacular aspect of glass and shows how both the tendentious capacity and the playfulness of this material have shaped Russian culture.

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Ordinary Language Criticism
Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein
Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost
Northwestern University Press, 2003
Marking a return of literary study from the remote reaches of abstraction to the realm of the immediate, the particular, and the real in which language and literature truly live, the essays in this volume articulate a productive, new critical approach: ordinary language criticism. With roots in the ordinary language philosophy derived especially from Wittgenstein in the early twentieth century, and in the ideas of American pragmatic philosophy propounded and extended by Stanley Cavell, this approach seeks to return criticism to its grounds in the natural language we all speak; to expose the terms of our engagement with narratives, arguments, and concepts-what Wittgenstein and Cavell call the "criteria" of our writing and reading.

Resisting master formulations and overarching theories, Ordinary Language Criticism does not so much dismiss the excitement of the last two decades of literary theorizing as it reminds us of the excitement of the shared common enterprises to which theory may still contribute. In this, the volume and the model it offers have wide implications for the academy, in which a widespread ersatz-sophistication has shorted the circuit between literary works and the real lives of those reading and teaching them.

With a definitive introduction by editors Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost, and elaborations and practical examples by major figures such as Cavell himself, Martha Nussbaum, Marjorie Perloff, Anthony Cascardi, and Charles Altieri, among others, this volume clearly shows and explains how ordinary language criticism differs from current trends and what it exactly it can accomplish in theory and practice. These essays prove that by attending more faithfully to what we actually do when we read, we can make reading more productive--can reveal how extraordinary and rich, how really sophisticated, the ordinary actually is.
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Organic Worldview of Nikolai Leskov
Irmhild Christina Sperrle
Northwestern University Press, 2002

Although little studied in the West, Nikolai Semenovich Leskov (1831-95) is accorded a place among major nineteenth-century writers in his native Russia. Irmhild Christina Sperrle's The Organic Worldview of Nikolai Leskov draws on previously unavailable archival and primary sources to offer English-speaking readers the opportunity to appreciate the work of this neglected author.

Leskov remarked to his contemporary Anatolii Faresov, "People talk about my 'language,' about its colorfulness and its national traits; about the richness of my plots, about my condensed way of writing, about 'similarity' and so on, but they do not notice the most important thing." It is this "most important thing," Leskov's consistent thematic adherence to an "organic" philosophical model, that Sperrle traces and elaborates here. Focusing on movement and transformation in "an organic manner"—a manner in which death and rebirth alternate and condition each other—Sperrle develops Leskov's notion of organicity and explores his relationship to the organic tradition in philosophy and literature. Her reading of key texts among his more than five hundred works entails a close look at Leskov's ideas about the Divine as freedom of belief, about truth as a continual renewal of previously held theories, and about death in both a physical and a spiritual sense. She examines Leskov's vexed relation to Tolstoyan ideas and shows how the notion of heresy—as a questioning rather than rejection of authority-is a crucial element in his worldview and his work.

 
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Original Forgiveness
Nicolas de Warren
Northwestern University Press, 2021

In Original Forgiveness, Nicolas de Warren challenges the widespread assumption that forgiveness is always a response to something that has incited it. Rather than considering forgiveness exclusively in terms of an encounter between individuals or groups after injury, he argues that availability for the possibility of forgiveness represents an original forgiveness, an essential condition for the prospect of human relations. De Warren develops this notion of original forgiveness through a reflection on the indispensability of trust for human existence, as well as an examination of the refusal or unavailability to forgive in the aftermath of moral harms.

De Warren engages in a critical discussion of philosophical figures, including Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakhtin, Edmund Husserl, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean Améry, and of literary works by William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Heinrich von Kleist, Simon Wiesenthal, Herman Melville, and Maurice Sendak. He uses this discussion to show that in trusting another person, we must trust in ourselves to remain available to the possibility of forgiveness for those occasions when the other person betrays a trust, without thereby forgiving anything in advance. Original forgiveness is to remain the other person’s keeper—even when the other has caused harm. Likewise, being another’s keeper calls upon an original beseeching for forgiveness, given the inevitable possibility of blemish or betrayal.

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The Origins of Russian Literary Theory
Folklore, Philology, Form
Jessica Merrill
Northwestern University Press, 2022
Russian Formalism is widely considered the foundation of modern literary theory. This book reevaluates the movement in light of the current commitment to rethink the concept of literary form in cultural-historical terms. Jessica Merrill provides a novel reconstruction of the intellectual historical context that enabled the emergence of Formalism in the 1910s. Formalists adopted a mode of thought Merrill calls the philological paradigm, a framework for thinking about language, literature, and folklore that lumped them together as verbal tradition. For those who thought in these terms, verbal tradition was understood to be inseparable from cultural history. Merrill situates early literary theories within this paradigm to reveal abandoned paths in the history of the discipline—ideas that were discounted by the structuralist and post-structuralist accounts that would emerge after World War II.

The Origins of Russian Literary Theory reconstructs lost Formalist theories of authorship, of the psychology of narrative structure, and of the social spread of poetic innovations. According to these theories, literary form is always a product of human psychology and cultural history. By recontextualizing Russian Formalism within this philological paradigm, the book highlights the aspects of Formalism’s legacy that speak to the priorities of twenty-first-century literary studies.
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The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer
Donald Phillip Verene
Northwestern University Press, 2012
The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms marks the culmination of Donald Phillip Verene’s work on Ernst Cassirer and heralds a major step forward in the critical work on the twentieth-century philosopher. Verene argues that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms cannot be understood apart from a dialectic between the Kantian and Hegelian philosophy that lies within it. 

Verene takes as his departure point that Cassirer never wishes to argue Kant over Hegel. Instead he takes from each what he needs, realizing that philosophical idealism itself did not stop with Kant but developed to Hegel, and that much of what remains problematic in Kantian philosophy finds particular solutions in Hegel’s philosophy. Cassirer never replaces transcendental reflection with dialectical speculation, but he does transfer dialectic from a logic of illusion, that is, the form of thinking beyond experience as Kant conceives it in the Critique of Pure Reason, to a logic of consciousness as Hegel employs it in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cassirer rejects Kant’s thing-in-itself but he also rejects Hegel’s Absolute as well as Hegel’s conception of Aufhebung. Kant and Hegel remain the two main characters on his stage, but they are accompanied by a large secondary cast, with Goethe in the foreground. Cassirer not only contributes to Goethe scholarship, but in Goethe he finds crucial language to communicate his assertions. Verene introduces us to the originality of Cassirer’s philosophy so that we may find access to the riches it contains.
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Ornament as Crisis
Architecture, Design, and Modernity in Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers"
Sarah McGaughey
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Ornament as Crisis explores the ways in which the novels of Hermann Broch’s Sleepwalkers (Schlafwandler) trilogy participate in and employ the history of architecture and architectural theory.

Beginning with the visual and architectural experiences of the figures in each novel, Sarah McGaughey analyzes the role of architecture in the trilogy as a whole, while discussing work by Broch’s contemporaries on architecture. She argues that The Sleepwalkers allows us to better understand how literature responds and contributes to social, theoretical, and spatial concepts of architecture. Ornament as Crisis guides readers through the spaces of Broch’s mdernist masterpiece and the architectural debates of his time.

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Other Men's Daughters
Richard Stern
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Written by one of America's finest contemporary novelists, Other Men's Daughters is the story of an intense love affair between a middle-aged professor and a young woman, wise and worldly beyond her years.

One reviewer writes, "I...was struck not simply by its psychological depth but particularly by the combination of toughness and tenderness through which romantic love was represented and discussed. The lack of sentimentality (in a novel about the refusal to live a life without love) was immensely important to me...and is likely ...to be immensely important ...today."
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The Other Side of Heaven
Post-War Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers
Edited by Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue, and Truong Vu
Northwestern University Press, 1995
These stories represent the "second wave" of fiction—works about the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict as it moved into both countries, touching and forever changing not only the veterans, but also their families and their societies. Contributors include John Edgar Wideman, Larry Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Philip Caputo, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ngo Tu Lap, Tim O'Brien, and others.
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Other Worlds Here
Honoring Native Women’s Writing in Contemporary Anarchist Movements
Theresa Warburton
Northwestern University Press, 2021
Other Worlds Here: Honoring Native Women’s Writing in Contemporary Anarchist Movements examines the interaction of literature and radical social movement, exploring the limitations of contemporary anarchist politics through attentive engagement with Native women’s literatures. Tracing the rise of New Anarchism in the United States following protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999, interdisciplinary scholar Theresa Warburton argues that contemporary anarchist politics have not adequately accounted for the particularities of radical social movement in a settler colonial society. As a result, activists have replicated the structure of settlement within anarchist spaces.
 
All is not lost, however. Rather than centering a critical indictment of contemporary anarchist politics, Other Worlds Here maintains that a defining characteristic of New Anarchism is its ability to adapt and transform. Through close readings of texts by Native women authors, Warburton argues that anarchists must shift the paradigm that another world is possible to one that recognizes other worlds already here: stories, networks, and histories that lay out methods of building reciprocal relationships with the land and its people. Analyzing memoirs, poetry, and novels by writers including Deborah Miranda, Elissa Washuta, Heid E. Erdrich, Janet Rogers, and Leslie Marmon Silko, Other Worlds Here extends the study of Native women’s literatures beyond ethnographic analysis of Native experience to advance a widely applicable, contemporary political critique.
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Out of Chaos
Hidden Children Remember the Holocaust
Elaine Saphier Fox
Northwestern University Press, 2013
The stories in Out of Chaos forms a profound testament to lost and found lives that are translated into compelling reading. The collection illuminates brief or elongated moments, fragments of memory and experience, what the great Holocaust writer Ida Fink called “a scrap of time.”  In all, the anthology expresses survivors’ memories and reactions to a wide range of experiences as they survived in so many European settings, from Holland, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland, and France.

The writers recall being on the run between different countries, escaping over mountains, hiding and even sometimes forgetting their Jewish identities in convents and rescuers’ homes and hovels, basements and attics. Some were left on their own; others found themselves embroiled in rescuer family conflicts.  Some writers chose to write story clusters, each one capturing a moment or incident and often disconnected by memory or temporal and spatial divides. 
 
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Out of Russia
Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora
Adrian Wanner
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Out of Russia is the first scholarly work to focus on a group of writers who, over the past decade, have formed a distinct phenomenon: immigrants with cultural and linguistic roots in Russia who have chosen to write in the language of their adopted countries. The best known among these are Andreï Makine, who writes in French, Wladimir Kaminer, who writes in German, and Gary Shteyngart, who writes in English. Wanner also addresses the work of emerging immigrant writers active in North America, Germany, and Israel. He argues that it is in part by writing in a language other than their native Russian that these writers have made something of a commodity of their “Russianness.” That many of them also happen to be Jewish adds yet another layer to the questions of identity raised by their work. In situating these writers within broader contexts, Wanner explores such topics as migration, cultural hybrids, and the construction and perception of ethnicity.
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Out of Silence
Selected Poems
Muriel Rukeyser
Northwestern University Press, 1992
Out of Silence is a poetry book encompassing the contradictions of twentieth-century America. 
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Oyvind Fahlstrom
The Art of Writing
Sergio Bessa
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Oyvind Fahltstrom: The Art of Writing serves as both an informative and entertaining introduction to the Brazilian-born Swedish poet-artist, one of the mid-twentieth century's most intriguing cultural figures, and as a valuable critical analysis of some of his most important works.

Fahlstrom (1928-76) created a body of work as profoundly political as it is aesthetic, spanning two tumultuous decades in the avant-garde and comprising concrete poetry, manifestos, plays, performance, filmmaking, paintings, multiple prints, sculpture, and installations. Bessa focuses on how Fahlstrom's early experiments with concrete poetry influenced his later works in the visual arts and offers close readings of his seminal work Bord, his painting series Ade-Ledic-Nander, his interactive painting The Planetarium, and his radio play Birds in Sweden.
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