logo for The Ohio State University Press
The Early American Novel
Henri Petter
The Ohio State University Press, 1900

front cover of The Ears of Hermes
The Ears of Hermes
Communication, Images, and Identity in the Classical World
Maurizio Bettini. Translated by William Michael Short
The Ohio State University Press, 2011
Though in many respects similar to us moderns, the Greeks and Romans often conceived things differently than we do. The cultural inheritance we have received from them can therefore open our eyes to many “manners of life” we might otherwise overlook. The ancients told fascinating—but different—stories; they elaborated profound—but different—symbols. Above all, they confronted many of the problems we still face today—memory and forgetfulness; identity and its strategies; absolutist moralism and behavioral relativity—only in profoundly different ways, since their own cultural forms and resources were different. In The Ears of Hermes: Communication, Images, and Identity in the Classical World, renowned scholar and author Maurizio Bettini explores these different cultural experiences, choosing paths through this territory that are diverse and sometimes unexpected: a little-known variant of a myth or legend, such as that of Brutus pretending, like Hamlet, to be a Fool; a proverb, like lupus in fabula (the wolf in the tale), that expresses the sense of foreboding aroused by the sudden arrival of someone who was just the subject of conversation; or great works, like Plautus’ Amphitruo and Vergil’s Aeneid, where we encounter the mysteries of the Doppelgänger and of “doubles” fabricated to ease the pain of nostalgia. Or the etymology of a word—its own “story”—leads us down some unforeseen avenue of discovery. While scholarly in presentation, this book, in an elegant English translation by William Michael Short, will appeal not only to classicists but also students, as well as to anthropologists and historians of art and literature beyond classics.
 
[more]

front cover of THE EARTH ABIDETH
THE EARTH ABIDETH
GEORGE DELL
The Ohio State University Press, 1999

front cover of Eating Lightbulbs and Other Essays
Eating Lightbulbs and Other Essays
Steve Fellner
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
In Eating Lightbulbs and Other Essays, Steve Fellner traces the seriocomic absurdities of his own mind and its obsessions with family, mental illness, film, poetry, and gay sex. His search for love finds its outlets and objects wherever it can: in an imaginary 1970s Cineplex movie theatre, at a baby shower, or in a co-ed sexual abuse support group; via a letter penned to the ghost of an environmental activist who killed himself; or in the form of the AIDS quilt, lava lamps, amoebas, and a famous queer poet who didn’t know he existed. As he charts the inherently flawed ways he—and we—live and love, Fellner is always ready to subvert victim narratives even if he has to commit a few (or more than a few) acts of betrayal along the way. Unflinching and sidelong, laugh-out-loud funny, and as sharp and unpredictable as shards of fine glass, these essays look straight at the moments in life most of us would rather forget. 

 
[more]

front cover of Echo's Fugue
Echo's Fugue
Desirae Matherly
The Ohio State University Press, 2019

Through a series of variations on the theme of love—unrequited, polyamorous, monogomous, scandalous, adulterous—Desirae Matherly’s Echo’s Fugue explores love in all its failures and delusions. Patterned on the unfinished The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach which has been a mystery for centuries, Echo’s Fugue undertakes Bach’s project in prose—the tantalizing numerical correspondences throughout, the repetition of a single theme, the unfinished final piece.
 
Matherly’s essays appear as letters, indexes, narrative, or sentence diagrams, each defying the rules of the blank page. Song lyrics, obsession, Greek mythology, psychology, game theory, and human sexuality form a fragmented narrative about loss and unhealthy attachments. Mimicry of Bach’s fugues leads the author to questions about love, sex, desire, the “Bach or Stravinsky” paradigm in game theory, and relationships considered taboo by mainstream standards.
What authority speaks clearest with regard to love, sex, and desire—and is objectivity even possible? The final essay attempts to resolve this question while echoing the puzzle of Bach’s final unfinished fugue.
 
[more]

front cover of Ecologies of Harm
Ecologies of Harm
Rhetorics of Violence in the United States
Megan Eatman
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
A Choice Reviews highly recommended title
Ecologies of Harm: Rhetorics of Violence in the United States examines violent spectacles and their quotidian manifestations in order to better understand violence’s cultural work and persistence. Starting with the supposition that violence is communicative andmeant to “send a message”—be it to deter, to scare, or to threaten—Megan Eatman goes one step further to argue that violence needs to be understood on a deeper level: as direct, structural, cultural, and constitutive across modes, a formulation that requires rethinking its rhetorical aims as less about conscious persuasion and more about the gradual shaping of public identity.
 
While Eatman looks to examples of violent spectacles to make her case (lynching, capital punishment, and torture in the War on Terror), it is in her analysis of more mundane responses to these forms of violence (congressional debates, court documents, visual art, and memorial performance) where the key to her argument lies—as she shows how circulating violence in these ways produces violent rhetorical ecologies that facilitate some modes of being while foreclosing others. Through this ecological approach, Ecologies of Harm offers a new understanding of the debates surrounding legacies of violence, examines how rhetoric and violence function together, and explores implications of their entanglement for antiviolence work.
 
[more]

front cover of Economic Women
Economic Women
Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture
Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, edited by Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport, showcases the wide-ranging economic activities and relationships of real and fictional women in nineteenth-century British culture. This volume’s essays chronicle the triumphs and setbacks of women who developed, described, contested, and exploited new approaches to economic thought and action. In their various roles as domestic employees, activists fighting for free trade, theorists developing statistical models, and individuals considering the cost of marriage and its dissolution, the women discussed here were givers and takers, producers and consumers.
Bringing together leading and emerging voices in the field, this collection builds on the wealth of interdisciplinary economic criticism published in the last twenty years, but it also challenges traditional understandings of economic subjectivity by emphasizing both private and public records and refusing to identify a single female corollary to Economic Man. The scholars presented here recover game-changing stories of women’s economic engagement from diaries, letters, ledgers, fiction, periodicals, and travel writing to reveal a nuanced portrait of Economic Women. Offering new readings of works by George Eliot, Bram Stoker, Willkie Collins, Charlotte Riddell, and Ellen Wood, and addressing political economy, consumerism, and business developments alongside the ethics of exchange and family finances, Economic Women tells a story of ambivalence as well as achievement, failure as well as forward motion.
[more]

front cover of THE ECONOMICS OF FANTASY
THE ECONOMICS OF FANTASY
RAPE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE
SHARON STOCKTON
The Ohio State University Press, 2006
In The Economics of Fantasy: Rape in Twentieth-Century Literature, Sharon Stockton examines the persistence and the evolution of the rape narrative in twentieth-century literature—the old story of male power and violence; female passivity and penetrability. What accounts for its persistence? How has the story changed over the course of the twentieth century? In this provocative book, Stockton investigates the manner in which the female body—or to be more precise, the violation of the female body—serves as a metaphor for a complex synthesis of masculinity and political economy. From high modernism to cyberpunk, Pound to Pynchon, Stockton argues that the compulsive return to the rape story, articulates—among other things—the gradual and relentless removal of Western man from the fantastical capitalist role of venturesome, industrious agency. The metamorphosis of the twentieth-century rape narrative registers a desperate attempt to preserve traditional patterns of robust, entrepreneurial masculinity in the face of economic forms that increasingly disallow illusions of individual authority.

It is important to make clear that the genre of rape story studied here presumes a white masculine subject and a white feminine object. Stockton makes the case that the aestheticized rape narrative reveals particular things about the way white masculinity represents itself. Plotting violent sexual fantasy on the grid of economic concerns locates masculine agency in relation to an explicitly contingent material system of power, value, and order. It is in this way that The Economics of Fantasy discloses the increased desperation with which the body has been made to carry ideology under systems of advanced capitalism.
 
[more]

front cover of Educating Seeta
Educating Seeta
The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule
Shuchi Kapila
The Ohio State University Press, 2010
Even though Edward Said’s Orientalism inspired several generations of scholars to study the English novel’s close involvement with colonialism, they have not considered how English novels themselves were radically altered by colonialism. In Educating Seeta, Shuchi Kapila argues that the paradoxes of indirect rule in British India were negotiated in “family romances” which encoded political struggle in the language of domestic and familial civility. A mixture of domestic ideology and liberal politics, these are Anglo-Indian romances, written by British colonials who lived in India during a period of indirect colonial rule. Instead of providing neat conclusions and smooth narratives, they become a record of the limits of liberal colonialism. They thus offer an important supplement to Victorian novels, extend the study of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and offer a new perspective on colonial culture. Kapila demonstrates that popular writing about India and, by implication, other colonies is an important supplement to the high Victorian novel and indispensable to our understanding of nineteenth-century English literature and culture. Her nuanced study of British writing about indirect rule in India will reshape our understanding of Victorian domestic ideologies, class formation, and gender politics.
[more]

front cover of EDUCATING THE PROPER WOMAN READER
EDUCATING THE PROPER WOMAN READER
VICTORIAN FAMILY LITERARY MAGAZINES & CULTURAL HEALTH OF THE NATION
JENNIFER PHEGLEY
The Ohio State University Press, 2004

Jennifer Phegley presents an examination of four mid-Victorian magazines that middle-class women read widely. Educating the Proper Woman Reader reevaluates prevailing assumptions about the vexed relationship between nineteenth-century women readers and literary critics.

While many scholars have explored the ways nineteenth-century critics expressed their anxiety about the dangers of women’s unregulated and implicitly uncritical reading practices, which were believed to threaten the sanctity of the home and the cultural status of the nation, Phegley argues that family literary magazines revolutionized the position of women as consumers of print by characterizing them as educated readers and able critics. Her analysis of images of influential women readers (in Harper’s), intellectual women readers (in The Cornhill), independent women readers (in Belgravia), and proto-feminist women readers/critics (in Victoria) indicates that women played a significant role in determining the boundaries of literary culture within these magazines. She argues that these publications supported women’s reading choices, inviting them to define literary culture rather than to consume it passively.

Not only does this book revise our understanding of nineteenth-century attitudes toward women readers, but it also takes a fresh look at the transatlantic context of literary production. Further, Phegley demonstrates the role these publications played in improving cultural literacy among women of the middle classes as well as the interplay between fiction and essays of the time by writers such as Mary Braddon, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. H. Lewes, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, George Sala, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope.

[more]

front cover of ELECTORAL REFORM AND MINORITY REPRESENTATION
ELECTORAL REFORM AND MINORITY REPRESENTATION
LOCAL EXPERIMENTS WITH ALTERNATIVE ELECTIONS
SHAUN BOWLER
The Ohio State University Press, 2003

Questions of minority representation have long plagued the U.S. voting systems. The standard election often leaves political, racial, or ethnic minorities with little chance of being represented. Race-conscious districting remains the primary policy tool used for providing representation of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States—and it continues to generate tremendous conflict. Can alternatives to race-conscious, single-member districts offer benefits that extend beyond simply providing descriptive representations of minorities?

This study examines one such “semi-proportional” representation election system: Cumulative Voting (CV). For over a decade, scores of local U.S. governments have been elected by Cumulative Voting. This provides us with the ability to examine the effects of CV elections over time. Moreover, the use of CV in the United States allows us to compare politics in places that adopted CV to highly similar places that did not. Electoral Reform and Minority Representation shares evidence that CV elections can produce minority representation that matches levels generated with the drawing of race-conscious “majority-minority” districting. It also offers evidence that the quality of democratic processes in CV communities is in several ways higher that those under districts.

Given America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity, and given successful legal challenges that limit the use of race-conscious districting Electoral Reform and Minority Representation suggests that Cumulative Voting may be a better way to achieve minority representation in U.S. politics.

[more]

front cover of ELEGIAC CITYSCAPE
ELEGIAC CITYSCAPE
PROPERTIUS & THE MEANING OF ROMAN MONUMENTS
TARA S WELCH
The Ohio State University Press, 2005
Throughout its history, the city of Rome has inspired writers to describe its majesty, to situate themselves within its sweeping landscape, and to comment upon its contribution to their own identity. The Roman elegiac poet Propertius was one such author. This final published collection, issued in 16 BCE, has been traditionally read as an abandonment by Propertius of his earlier flippant love poems for a more mature engagement with Roman public life or else a comical send-up of imperial policies as embodied in Rome’s public buildings. The relationship between poet and city is complicated at every turn with the presence in the background of the emperor Augustus, whose sustained artistic patronage of Roman monuments brought about the most pervasive transformation that the cityscape had yet seen.

The Elegiac Cityscape explores Propertius’ Rome and the various ways his poetry about the city illuminates the dynamic relationship between one individual and his environment. Combining the approaches of archaeology and literary criticism, Tara S. Welch examines how Propertius’ poems on Roman places scrutinize the monumentalization of various ideological positions in Rome, as they poke and prod Rome’s monuments to see what further meanings they might admit. The result is a poetic book rife with different perspectives on the eternal city, perspectives that often call into question any sleepy or complacent adherence to Rome’s traditional values.
[more]

front cover of ELUSIVE CHILDHOOD
ELUSIVE CHILDHOOD
IMPOSSIBLE REPRESENTATIONS IN MODERN FICTION
SUSAN HONEYMAN
The Ohio State University Press, 2005

front cover of EMPIRE REVOLUTION
EMPIRE REVOLUTION
THE UNITED STATES AND THE THIRD WORLD SI
PETER L. & MARY ANN HAHN & HEISS
The Ohio State University Press, 2000

logo for The Ohio State University Press
The Endless Fountain
Essays on Classical Humanism
Mark Morford
The Ohio State University Press, 1900

front cover of Enemy Within
Enemy Within
Culture Wars and Political Identity in Novels of the French Third Republic
Gilbert D. Chaitin
The Ohio State University Press, 2008
            In The Enemy Within, Gilbert D. Chaitin deepens our understanding of the nature and sources of culture wars during the French Third Republic. The psychological trauma caused by the Ferry educational reform laws of 1880-1882, which strove to create a new national identity based on secular morality rather than God-given commandments, pitted Catholics against proponents of lay education and gave rise to novels by Bourget, Barrès, A. France, and Zola.
            By deploying Lacanian concepts to understand the “erotics of politics” revealed in these novels, Chaitin examines the formation of national identity, offering a new intellectual history of the period and shedding light on the intimate relations among literature, education, philosophy, morality, and political order. The mechanisms described in The Enemy Within provide fresh insight into the affective structure of culture wars not only in the French Third Republic but elsewhere in the world today.
           
[more]

front cover of Engine Running
Engine Running
Essays
Cade Mason
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Runner Up, 2021 Gournay Prize

Engine Running explores debut author Cade Mason’s gradual distancing from home and old selves alongside an increasingly fractured family doing the same. Starting at the beginning of his parents’ love and working past its end, he combs through memory to piece together a portrait of a family then and now: of a father, reeling after a blindsiding divorce; of a mother, anxious to move on; of a sister, caught in the crossfire; and of a son, learning to embrace his sexuality even as he fears that his own loves may have deepened the rift between his parents. 
 
Lush and innovative, these essays contemplate childhood memories and family secrets, religion and queerness in the rural South, and the ways rituals and contours of manhood are passed through generations. Most of all, we feel with Mason what it is to grapple with and love a place even as you yearn to leave.
 
[more]

front cover of ENGLISH COMMON READER
ENGLISH COMMON READER
A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE MASS READING PUB
RICHARD D. ALTICK
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

front cover of Enlightened Individualism
Enlightened Individualism
Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature from the Beats to the Present
Kyle Garton-Gundling
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Buddhism and Hinduism have spread in the US largely through texts and are now recognizable facets of American literature and culture. But the US has defined itself through goal-oriented individualism, whereas Buddhism and Hinduism teach that individuality is a delusion and thus worldly desires are misguided. Given this apparent contradiction, what can Buddhist and Hindu influences offer American identities? Enlightened Individualism explores how post-1945 American writers, including Jack Kerouac, Alice Walker, and Maxine Hong Kingston, have tried to answer this question. Playing on enlightenment as both Anglo-American liberalism and Asian mysticism, this book argues that recent American literature seeks to reconcile seemingly incompatible liberal models of individual autonomy with Buddhist and Hindu ideals of transcending selfhood.
 
This “enlightened individualism” uses Buddhist and Hindu philosophy to reframe American freedom in terms of spiritual liberation, and it also reinterprets Asian teachings through Western traditions of political activism and countercultural provocation. Garton-Gundling argues that even though works by Kerouac, Walker, Kingston, and others wrestle with issues of exoticism and appropriation, their characters are also meaningfully challenged and changed by Asian faiths. These literary adaptations, then, can help Americans reenvision individualism in a more transcendent and cosmopolitan context.
 
[more]

front cover of Enlistment
Enlistment
Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
Edited by Eva von Contzen and James Simpson
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Bestiaries. Lapidaries. Lunaries. Inventories and household vocabularies. Lists are everywhere in medieval and early modern texts––evidence of the need to manage and order knowledge and experience. Yet until now, listing as a formal practice has received scant scholarly attention. In Enlistment, foremost medievalists and early modernists from both the Anglo-American and German traditions investigate the humble list as a platform for better understanding how and why lists captivated period audiences. From epic catalogues of trees in Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to genealogies and the names of the divine, the lists in question come from a variety of periods, languages, and genres. Throughout, contributors demonstrate how lists have the curious capacity to challenge our categories of thinking and ordering of the world. The lists we encounter in medieval and early modern literature can thus be seen as seismographs of cultural knowledge and also as testing grounds for defining the ineffable, or unfathomable, or that which would be dangerous if otherwise expressed.

Contributors: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Ingo Berensmeyer, Eva von Contzen, Alex Davis, Andrew James Johnston, Wolfram R. Keller, Alexis Kellner Becker, Kathryn Mogk Wagner, Martha Rust, James Simpson
[more]

front cover of Environment and Narrative
Environment and Narrative
New Directions in Econarratology
Edited by Erin James and Eric Morel
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
Never before has a collection of original essays strived to create such constructive, shared discourse between ecocritical, narrative scholars and environmental humanities scholars interested in narrative. Erin James and Eric Morel’s volume Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology explores the complexity of pairing material environments and their representations with narrative forms of understanding.
To explore the methodological possibilities within “econarratology,” the contributors evaluate the mechanics of how narratives convey environmental understanding via building blocks such as the organization of time and space, characterization, focalization, description, and narration. They also query how readers emotionally and cognitively engage with such representations and how the process of encountering different environments in narratives stands to affect real-world attitudes and behaviors. By positioning narratives as important repositories of values, political and ethical ideas, and behaviors that determine how we engage with our ecological homes, the authors in this volume suggest that to change the way that we interact with the environment requires not only new stories but also a better understanding of the ones that have long been in circulation.
 
[more]

logo for The Ohio State University Press
The Erotic as Rhetorical Power
Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers
Pamela VanHaitsma
The Ohio State University Press, 2024

The Erotic as Rhetorical Power offers a queer feminist history of rhetoric that recovers the civic contributions of women teachers in same-sex romantic friendships. Extending perspectives from ancient rhetoric to nineteenth-century progressivism, from Audre Lorde’s Black lesbian feminist theory to its present-day uptakes, Pamela VanHaitsma conceives of the erotic as an interanimation of desires that, in being passionately shared, becomes imbued with the power to forge connection and foment change.

VanHaitsma’s theory of the erotic as rhetorical power emerges from both historiographic and imaginative engagements with more than twenty archives of romantic friendships between women: Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam, Irene Leache and Anna Wood, Gertrude Buck and Laura Wylie, and Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown. VanHaitsma considers how even as the erotic in these romantic friendships fueled the women’s rhetorical activities toward transformational ends—whether working toward the abolition of slavery, greater educational access, or voting rights—it also energized rhetorical activities that sometimes challenged but also reinforced troubling power dynamics. The Erotic as Rhetorical Power uncovers the erotic’s significance as a conflicted site of power that is central to rhetorical theory and history as well as feminist and LGBTQ+ studies. 

[more]

front cover of Eschatological Subjects
Eschatological Subjects
Divine and Literary Judgment in Fourteenth-Century French Poetry
J. M. Moreau
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
Eschatological Subjects: Divine and Literary Judgment in Fourteenth-Century French Poetry takes an innovative approach to medieval eschatology by examining how poets cast themselves in the scene of judgment as defendants summoned to answer to the Almighty for the sins of their writing. Since medieval Europeans lived in perpetual anxiety of divine judgment, constantly surrounded by reminders in art and literature, author J. M. Moreau shows that this is a natural extension of medieval life.
 
But Eschatological Subjects goes even further to demonstrate the largely unrecognized duality of this judge figure: not just God, the judge is also the imperious and imperfect human reader. The simultaneous divine and human judgments in (and of) French poetry reveal much about the ethical stakes of writing vernacular poetry in the later Middle Ages and, most importantly, about the relationships between authors and audiences.
 
Focusing on Guillaume de Deguileville, Guillaume de Machaut, and Jean Froissart (each of whom composed scenes in which they appear on trial before God), Moreau contributes important new insights on the complex “trial process” of later medieval literature, in which poetic authority and fame depended on the poet’s ability to defend himself before a fearful court of reader opinion.
 

 
[more]

front cover of Eternalized Fragments
Eternalized Fragments
Reclaiming Aesthetics in Contemporary World Fiction
W. Michelle Wang
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
Eternalized Fragments explores the implications of treating literature as art—examining the evolving nature of aesthetic inquiry in literary studies, with an eye to how twentieth- and twenty-first-century world fiction challenges our understandings of form, pleasure, ethics, and other critical concepts traditionally associated with the study of aesthetics.
 
Since postmodern and contemporary fiction tend to be dominated by disjunctures, paradoxes, and incongruities, this book offers an account of how and why readers choose to engage regardless, articulating the cognitive rewards such difficulties offer. By putting narrative and philosophical approaches in conversation with evolutionary psychology and contemporary neuroscience, W. Michelle Wang examines the value of attending to aesthetic experiences when we read literature and effectively demonstrates that despite the aesthetic’s stumble in time, our ongoing love affair with fiction is grounded in our cognitive engagements with the text’s aesthetic dimensions.
 
Drawing on a diverse range of works by Gabriel García Márquez, Kazuo Ishiguro, Arundhati Roy,Cormac McCarthy, Jeanette Winterson, Jennifer Egan, Italo Calvino, Flann O’Brien, and Alasdair Gray, Eternalized Fragments lucidly renders the aesthetic energies at work in the novels’ rich potentialities of play, the sublime’s invitation to affective renegotiations, and beauty’s polysemy in shaping readerly capacities for nuance.
 
[more]

front cover of Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator
Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator
Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature
Katra A. Byram
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
In Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator: Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature, Katra A. Byram proposes a new category—the dynamic observer form—to describe a narrative situation that emerges when stories about others become an avenue to negotiate a narrator’s own identity across past and present. Focusing on German-language fiction from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Byram demonstrates how the dynamic observer form highlights historical tensions and explores the nexus of history, identity, narrative, and ethics in the modern moment.
Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator contributes to scholarship on both narrative theory and the historical and cultural context of German and Austrian literary studies. Narrative theory, according to Byram, should understand this form to register complex interactions between history and narrative form. Byram also juxtaposes new readings of works by Textor, Storm, and Raabe from the nineteenth century with analyses of twentieth-century works by Grass, Handke, and Sebald, ultimately reframing our understanding of literary Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or the struggle to come to terms with the past. Overall, Byram shows that neither the problem of reckoning with the past nor the dynamic observer form is unique to Germany’s post-WWII era. Both are products of the dynamics of modern identity, surfacing whenever critical change separates what was from what is.
[more]

front cover of Ethics in the Gutter
Ethics in the Gutter
Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics
Kate Polak
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics explores an often-overlooked genre of graphic narratives: those that fictionalize historical realities. While autographics, particularly those that place the memoirist in the context of larger cultural conversations, have been the objects of sustained study, fictional graphic narratives that—as Linda Hutcheon has put it—both “enshrine and question” history are also an important area of study. By bringing narratology and psychological theory to bear on a range of graphic narratives, Kate Polak seeks to question how the form utilizes point of view and the gutter as ethical tools that shape the reader’s empathetic reactions to the content. 

This book’s most important questions surround how we receive and interpret representations of history, considering the ways in which what we think we know about historical atrocities can be at odds with the convoluted circumstances surrounding violence. Beginning with a new look at Watchmen, and including examinations of such popular series as Scalped and Hellblazer as well as Bayou and Deogratias, the book questions how graphic narratives create an alternative route by which to understand large-scale violence. Ethics in the Gutter explores how graphic narrative representations of violence can teach readers about the possibilities and limitations of empathy and ethics.
[more]

front cover of The Ethics of Persuasion
The Ethics of Persuasion
Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies
Brooke Rollins
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
In The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida’s Rhetorical Legacies, Brooke Rollins argues that some of the most forceful and utilitarian examples of persuasion involve significant ethical dimensions. Using the work of Jacques Derrida, she draws this ethical imperative out from a series of canonical rhetorical texts that have traditionally been understood as insistent or even guileful instances of persuasion. Her reconsideration of highly determined pieces by Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato encourages readers to inherit the rhetorical tradition differently, and it pinpoints the important rhetorical dimensions of Derrida’s own work.
 
Drawing on Derrida’s (non)definition of ethics and his pointed accounts of performativity, Rollins argues that this vital ethical component of many ancient theories, practices, and pedagogies of persuasion has been undertheorized for more than two millennia. Through deconstructive readings of some of these texts, she shows us that we are not simply sovereign beings who both wield and guard against linguistic techniques of rule. Our persuasive endeavors, rather, are made possible by an ethics—an always prior encounter with otherness that interrupts self-presence.
 
[more]

front cover of The Ethics of Swagger
The Ethics of Swagger
Prizewinning African American Novels, 1977–1993
Michael DeRell Hill
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
After World War II and well beyond the Black Arts Movement, African American novelists struggled with white literary expectations imposed upon them. Aesthetics as varied as New Criticism and Deconstruction fueled these struggles, and black writers—facing these struggles— experienced an ethical crisis. Analyzing prizewinning, creative fellowship, and artistic style, this book considers what factors ended that crisis.
 
The Ethics of Swagger explores how novelists who won major prizes between 1977 and 1993 helped move authors of black fiction through insecurity toward autonomy. Identifying these prizewinners—David Bradley, Ernest Gaines, Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman—as a literary class, this book focuses on how they achieved imaginative freedom, recovered black literary traditions, and advanced the academic study of African American writing.
 
The post–Civil Rights era produced the most accomplished group of novelists in black literary history. As these authors worked in an integrating society, they subjected white narrative techniques to the golden mean of black cultural mores. This exposure compelled the mainstream to acknowledge fresh talent and prodded American society to honor its democratic convictions. Shaping national dialogues about merit, award-winning novelists from 1977 to 1993, the Black Archivists, used swagger to alter the options for black art and citizenship.
[more]

front cover of Every Species of Hope
Every Species of Hope
Georgics, Haiku, and Other Poems
Michael J. Rosen
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
In his first book of poetry in twenty years, Michael J. Rosen captures life in the foothills of the Appalachians. Every Species of Hope: Georgics, Haiku, and Other Poems uses a variety of poetic forms, as well as Rosen’s own pen-and-ink drawings, to give voice to the predicaments of living among other creatures who share a plot of land we think we claim as home. The poems are an attempt at homeostasis: that balancing act every creature works at every hour of every day—a way of living peacefully, expending the right energy in the most productive ways, avoiding or deflecting trouble, gravitating toward sources of fulfillment and contentment.
 
At the center of this book is a suite of poems inspired by Virgil’s Georgics, or “poems of pastoral instruction.” In Rosen’s case, he is more the student than the teacher. Likewise, five short sections of haiku continue his meditation on—or mediation of—art and nature. As he has written, “Haiku provides a brief and mirror-like calm in the choppy waters—in the undertow—of current events: a stillness in time where more than our singular lives can be reflected.”
 
 
Illustrated with two dozen pages from the author’s own journal, Every Species of Hope is the consummation of decades of observation, humility, and awe. 
 
[more]

front cover of Everyday Dirty Work
Everyday Dirty Work
Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor
Wilfredo Alvarez
The Ohio State University Press, 2022

Winner, 2023 NCA Ethnography Division Best Book Award

Wilfredo Alvarez’s Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor is an exploration into co-cultural communication practices within the workplace. Specifically, Alvarez investigates how Latin American immigrant janitors communicate from their marginalized standpoints in a predominantly White academic organization. He examines how custodial workers perceive, interpret, and thematize routine messages regarding race, ethnicity, social class, immigrant status, and occupation, and how those messages and overall communicative experiences affect both their work and personal lives.

A Latin American immigrant himself, Alvarez relates his own experiences to those of the research participants. His positionality informs and enhances his research as he demonstrates how everyday interpersonal encounters create discursive spaces that welcome or disqualify people based on symbolic and social capital. Alvarez offers valuable insights into the lived experiences of critical––but often undervalued and invisible––organizational members. Through theoretical insights and research data, he provides practical recommendations for organizational leaders to improve how they can relate to and support all stakeholders.


 
[more]

front cover of Everything I Never Wanted to Know
Everything I Never Wanted to Know
Christine Hume
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
“A dauntless and harrowing indictment of patriarchal violence.” —Publishers Weekly

In Everything I Never Wanted to Know, Christine Hume confronts the stigma and vulnerability of women’s bodies in the US. She explores bodily autonomy and sexual assault alongside the National Sex Offender Registry in order to invoke not solutions but a willingness to complicate our ideas of justice and defend every human’s right to be treated like a member of the community. Feminist autobiography threads into historical narrative and cultural criticism about the Victorian-era Frozen Charlotte doll; the Nylon Riots of the 1940s; the movie Halloween; Larry Nassar, who practiced in Hume’s home state of Michigan; and other material. In these reflections on sexuality, gender, criminality, and violence, Hume asks readers to reconsider what we have collectively normalized and how we are each complicit, writing through the darkness of what we don’t want to see, what we’d rather not believe, and what some of us have long tried to forget.
[more]

front cover of Everything Lost
Everything Lost
The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs, Revised Edition
William S. Burroughs Edited by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Oliver H
The Ohio State University Press, 2017

In late summer 1953, as he returned to Mexico City after a seven-month expedition through the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, William Burroughs began a notebook of final reflections on his four years in Latin America. His first novel, Junkie, had just been published and he would soon be back in New York to meet Allen Ginsberg and together complete the manuscripts of what became The Yage Letters and Queer. Yet this notebook, the sole survivor from that period, reveals Burroughs not as a writer on the verge of success, but as a man staring down personal catastrophe and visions of looming cultural disaster.

Losses that will not let go of him haunt Burroughs throughout the notebook: “Bits of it keep floating back to me like memories of a daytime nightmare.” However, out of these dark reflections we see emerge vivid fragments of Burroughs’ fiction and, even more tellingly, unique, primary evidence for the remarkable ways in which his early manuscripts evolved. Assembled in facsimile and transcribed by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, the notebook forces us to change the way we see both Burroughs and his writing at a turning point in his literary biography.

[more]

front cover of EXILE
EXILE
A MEMOIR OF 1939
Bronka Schneider. Edited with Forewords by Erika Bourguignon and Barbara Hill Rigney.
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

Bronka Schneider and her husband, Joseph, were two of the thirty thousand Austrian Jews admitted as refugees to Great Britain between March 1938 and 2 September 1939. It was not until 1960, however, that Schneider wrote her memoir about the year she spent as a housekeeper, with Joseph as a butler, in a Scottish castle.

Schneider tells of daily encounters—with her employers, the English lady and her husband, a retired British civil servant who had spent many years in India; the village locals; other refugees; and a family of evacuees from the slums of Glasgow.

The editors have divided this memoir into chapters, adding headlines from the London Times as epigraphs. These headlines, reporting the escalating events of World War II, are in stark contrast to daily activities of the residents of this isolated region of Scotland. A commentary by Erika Bourguignon provides historical, political, and cultural background of this period.

[more]

front cover of Exiles in the City
Exiles in the City
Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint
William V. Spanos
The Ohio State University Press, 2012
Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint, by William V. Spanos, explores the affiliative relationship between Arendt’s and Said’s thought, not simply their mutual emphasis on the importance of the exilic consciousness in an age characterized by the decline of the nation-state and the rise of globalization, but also on the oppositional politics that a displaced consciousness enables. The pairing of these two extraordinary intellectuals is unusual and controversial because of their ethnic identities. In radically secularizing their comportment towards being, their exilic condition enabled them to undertake inaugural critiques of the culture of the nation-state system of Western modernity.
 
As variations on the theme of exile, the five chapters of this book constitute reflections on what is foundational and abiding in both Arendt’s and Said’s work. They not only document the heretofore unnoticed affiliation between the two thinkers. They also shed light on Arendt’s and Said’s proleptic activist explorations of the urgent “question of Palestine,” especially on the fraught present situation, which bears increasing witness to the irony that the Israeli nation-state’s “solution” has, from the beginning, systematically repeated the degradations the Jewish people suffered at the hands of German nationalism.
 
[more]

front cover of Experiencing Fiction
Experiencing Fiction
Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative
James Phelan
The Ohio State University Press, 2007

front cover of Experiencing Visual Storyworlds
Experiencing Visual Storyworlds
Focalization in Comics
Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Experiencing Visual Storyworlds illuminates how comics express what characters and narrators see, think, and feel. Drawing on the narratological concept of focalization, which describes the filtering of a story through the minds of characters and narrators, Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri analyze comics from a range of genres, including graphic memoir, graphic historiography, silent comics, and metafictional comics. Through a series of close readings—including Jason Lutes’s Berlin, Charles Burns’s Black Hole, Ellen Forney’s Marbles, Eric Drooker’s Flood!, and Craig Thompson’s Habibi—Horstkotte and Pedri argue that the visual form of comics storytelling is uniquely suited to invite readers into storyworld experiences. The authors break down the ways focalization in comics is cued by features such as color, style, panel size and positioning, and genre—showing how these features regulate how readers access the experiences of characters and narrators.
[more]

front cover of EXPRESSIVE POLITICS
EXPRESSIVE POLITICS
ISSUE STRATEGIES OF CONGRESSIONAL CHALLENGERS
ROBERT G. BOATRIGHT
The Ohio State University Press, 2004
The advantage incumbent members of Congress hold over their opponents in campaigns for office has steadily grown over the past five decades. While students of congressional politics have analyzed the effect of this advantage on members' behavior in office, little is known of its effect on their opponents. Sitting members of the House frequently face underfinanced and obscure challengers. Conventional theories of electoral competition assume that the only hope those candidates have of even coming close to making such an election competitive is to align their policy positions as closely as possible to those of the median voter. Yet challengers to incumbents often run on quite extreme position platforms. In the majority of these uncompetitive races, Robert G. Boatright explains, a new type of politics is emerging—a politics of expressive campaigning, where challengers seek to use their campaigns as a platform for their own views and as a means of helping their party achieve goals other than winning the election at hand.

This research makes two types of contributions to existing political science literature. On a theoretical level, it argues for a reconceptualization of the motives of candidates and parties in rational choice analysis. On a practical level, it seeks to enrich our understanding of the role that challengers play in American elections and of the reason why different types of challengers emerge in different types of elections. Boatright argues that the role of challengers in the American electoral process can be understood only if we broaden our theories about rational candidate behavior.
[more]

logo for The Ohio State University Press
EYESIGHT OF WASPS
OSIP MANDELSHTAM
The Ohio State University Press, 1989


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter