A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY107 start with M start with M
The human presence that animates the personal essay is surely one of the most beguiling of literary phenomena, for it comes across in so familiar a voice that it’s easy to believe we are listening to the author rather than a textual stand-in. But the “person” in a personal essay is always a written construct, a fabricated character, its confessions and reminiscences as rehearsed as those of any novelist. In this first book-length study of the personal essay, Carl Klaus unpacks this made-up self and the manifold ways in which a wide range of essayists and essays have brought it to life.
By reconceiving the most fundamental aspect of the personal essay—the I of the essayist—Klaus demonstrates that this seemingly uncontrived form of writing is inherently problematic, not willfully devious but bordering upon the world of fiction. He develops this key idea by explaining how structure, style, and voice determine the nature of a persona and our perception of it in the works of such essayists as Michel de Montaigne, Charles Lamb, E. B. White, and Virginia Woolf. Realizing that this persona is shaped by the force of culture and the impress of personal experience, he explores the effects of both upon the point of view, content, and voice of such essayists as George Orwell, Nancy Mairs, Richard Rodriguez, and Alice Walker. Throughout, in full command of the history of the essay, he calls up numerous passages in which essayists themselves acknowledge the element of impersonation in their work, drawing upon the perspectives of Joan Didion, Edward Hoagland, Joyce Carol Oates, Leslie Marmon Silko, Scott Russell Sanders, Annie Dillard, Vivian Gornick, Loren Eiseley, James Baldwin, and a host of other literary guides.
Finally, adding yet another layer to the made-up self, Klaus succumbs to his addiction to the personal essay by placing some of the different selves that various essayists have called forth in him within the essays that he has crafted so carefully for this book. Making his way from one essay to the next with a persona variously learned, whimsical, and poignant, he enacts the palimpsest of ways in which the made-up self comes to life in the work of a single essayist. Thus over the course of this highly original, beautifully structured study, the personal essay is revealed to be more complex than many readers have supposed. With its lively analyses and illuminating examples, The Made-Up Self will speak to anyone who wishes to understand—or to write—personal essays.
Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s The Madness of Vision is one of the most influential studies in phenomenological aesthetics of the baroque. Integrating the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics, the author asserts the materiality of the body and world in her aesthetic theory. All vision is embodied vision, with the body and the emotions continually at play on the visual field. Thus vision, once considered a clear, uniform, and totalizing way of understanding the material world, actually dazzles and distorts the perception of reality.
In each of the nine essays that form The Madness of Vision Buci-Glucksmann develops her theoretical argument via a study of a major painting, sculpture, or influential visual image—Arabic script, Bettini’s “The Eye of Cardinal Colonna,” Bernini’s Saint Teresa and his 1661 fireworks display to celebrate the birth of the French dauphin, Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, the Paris arcades, and Arnulf Rainer’s self-portrait, among others—and deftly crosses historical, national, and artistic boundaries to address Gracián’s El Criticón; Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo; the poetry of Hafiz, John Donne, and Baudelaire; as well as baroque architecture and Anselm Kiefer’s Holocaust paintings. In doing so, Buci-Glucksmann makes the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque throughout history and the continuing importance of the baroque in contemporary arts.
In this collection of essays, written by K. G. Subramanyan over twenty-five years, this artist delves into the evolving aesthetic sensibilities in a globalized world, offering profound reflections on art, aesthetics, tradition, and societal challenges. As one of India's most celebrated artists, Subramanyan provides invaluable insights into contemporary art and cultural dynamics
Covering a broad spectrum of topics including art, visual perception, creativity, craft practice, tradition, and societal issues, Subramanyan's essays offer a comprehensive exploration of the complexities shaping modern civilization. He critically examines the impact of globalization, industrialization, environmental degradation, and societal disparities on art, education, and society, urging readers to negotiate these challenges with insight and vigilance.
Subramanyan played a pivotal role in shaping India’s artistic identity after Independence. Mani-da, as he was fondly called, seamlessly blended elements of modernism with folk expression in his works, spanning paintings, murals, sculptures, prints, set designs, and toys. Beyond his visual artistry, his writings have laid a solid foundation for understanding the demands of art on the individual. In the year of his centenary, Seagull is proud to publish his writings in special new editions.
Moses Maimonides was the most significant Jewish thinker, jurist, and doctor of the Middle Ages. Author of both a monumental code of Jewish law and the most influential and controversial work of Jewish philosophy, Maimonides looms larger than any other figure in the Jewish Middle Ages.
The essays in this volume were written to mark the 800th anniversary of Maimonides’s death in 1204. Written by the leading scholars in the field, they cover all aspects of Maimonides’s work and infuence. From his work on Jewish law to his unique understanding of God; from his view of the soul to his understanding of other religions; from his influence on Jewish scholars in the eastern Mediterranean to his impact on the emergence of modern Judaism—the essays in this volume cover all this and more. It is an indispensable collection for all those interested in the history of Judaism over the last 800 years.
“Michael Collier’s book is refreshing in its refusal to push for one particular aesthetic. He regards his own preference for realism over abstraction as more a matter of temperament than of considered judgment, and respects poets more skeptical than he is about the ability of poetry to connect with the world. The result is an engaging record of his influences and enthusiasms, which are wide enough to include both Whitman and Larkin, both Jorge Borges and William Maxwell.”
—Carl Dennis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Unknown Friends and Practical Gods
“Michael Collier combines pietas and wildness in these essays on poetry as inheritance, and poetry as struggle. One feels the young man in his ‘rampage of literature,’ and the older writer reflecting on an art that is at once personal and impersonal, deeply matured in the imagination. This is a wise and well-lived book.”
—Rosanna Warren, author of Departure and Stained Glass
“The essays and remembrances in Make Us Wave Back radiate Michael Collier’s characteristic insight and sagacity on every page. Clear-minded, ardent, brightly illuminating the art of poetry, this is as lucid as writing about writing gets.”
—Campbell McGrath, author of Pax Atomica and Florida Poems
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Michael Collier explores the influences that have made him one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Make Us Wave Back includes essays on an expansive list of subjects, among them the literary correspondence of William Maxwell; the meaning of the author’s own role as poet laureate of the state of Maryland; the journals of Louise Bogan and how they reveal Bogan’s struggle with her own personal fears as well as the reconstruction of herself as a writer; and many more.
Michael Collier is Professor of English and Codirector of the creative writing program at the University of Maryland. He is also director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is the author of several books of poems, including The Clasp and Other Poems, The Folded Heart, and The Ledge.
A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world
The novel Jonny Appleseed established Joshua Whitehead as one of the most exciting and important new literary voices on Turtle Island, winning both a Lambda Literary Award and Canada Reads 2021. In Making Love with the Land, his first nonfiction book, Whitehead explores the relationships between body, language, and land through creative essay, memoir, and confession.
In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls “biostory”—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land.
Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly—even joyfully—maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.
Stories pervade our daily lives, from human interest news items, to a business strategy described to a colleague, to daydreams between chores. Stories are what we use to make sense of the world. But how does this work?
In Making Stories, the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner examines this pervasive human habit and suggests new and deeper ways to think about how we use stories to make sense of lives and the great moral and psychological problems that animate them. Looking at legal cases and autobiography as well as literature, Bruner warns us not to be seduced by overly tidy stories and shows how doubt and double meaning can lie beneath the most seemingly simple case.
Amid these disadvantages, what is a Mama, PhD to do? This literary anthology brings together a selection of deeply felt personal narratives by smart, interesting women who explore the continued inequality of the sexes in higher education and suggest changes that could make universities more family-friendly workplaces.
The contributors hail from a wide array of disciplines and bring with them a variety of perspectives, including those of single and adoptive parents. They address topics that range from the level of policy to practical day-to-day concerns, including caring for a child with special needs, breastfeeding on campus, negotiating viable maternity and family leave policies, job-sharing and telecommuting options, and fitting into desk/chair combinations while eight months pregnant.
Candid, provocative, and sometimes with a wry sense of humor, the thirty-five essays in this anthology speak to and offer support for any woman attempting to combine work and family, as well as anyone who is interested in improving the university's ability to live up to its reputation to be among the most progressive of American institutions.
"Science claims it will one day be able to eliminate fathers from the equation by mating bone marrow with ovum. When that day comes, I imagine this book, along with a handful of other works (King Lear, Fun Home) will become even more necessary. Herein find the blueprints for the mystery, the maps for the uncharted, the keys to the archetype."
—Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
"At this moment, I find myself at loose ends, lost in the various vacuums left by my father's dying and my sons' departures out into the voids. Yet this stunning constellation of essays centered me, became for me fine instruments of reckoning of where to stand in the ceaseless entropic dynamic of kin, of paternal keening. These waxing meditations demonstrate the inflationary universe, the heft and velocity of that big ol' nothing. They elegantly fill, with sober hope and the balm of joy, the terrifying, infinite spaces between those waning stars."
—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter
"What an unreachable mystery the father is, preoccupied, unknowable, pervasive. In these fascinating essays, a shared portrait emerges as writers articulate the perpetual puzzle of the father and, with grace and candor, explore what it means to not know him, to never know him. As one voice, these essays investigate the man—his inventories, his myths, his mere traces—who makes up our horizons, who forever shimmers there beyond our collective grasp."
—Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships
Selected from the country's leading literary journals and publications—Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Creative Nonfiction, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, The Normal School, and others—Man in the Moon brings together essays in which sons, daughters, and fathers explore the elusive nature of this intimate relationship and find unique ways to frame and understand it: through astronomy, arachnology, storytelling, map-reading, television, puzzles, DNA, and so on. In the collection's title essay, Bill Capossere considers the inextricable link between his love of astronomy and memories of his father: "The man in the moon is no stranger to me,” he writes. "I have seen his face before, and it is my father's, and his father's, and my own.” Other essays include Dinty Moore's "Son of Mr. Green Jeans: A Meditation on Missing Fathers,” in which Moore lays out an alphabetic investigation of fathers from popular culture—Ward Cleaver, Jim Anderson, Ozzie Nelson—while ruminating on his own absent father and hesitation to become a father himself. In "Plot Variations,” Robin Black attempts to understand, through the lens of teaching fiction to creative writing students, her inability to attend her father's funeral. Deborah Thompson tries to reconcile her pride in her father's pioneering research in plastics and her concerns about their toxic environmental consequences in "When the Future Was Plastic.” At turns painfully familiar, comic, and heartbreaking, the essays in this collection also deliver moments of seari
Gene Logsdon’s The Man Who Created Paradise is a message of hope at a time when the very concept of earth stewardship is under attack. The fable, inspired by a true story, tells how Wally Spero looked at one of the bleakest places in America—a raw and barren strip-mined landscape—and saw in it his escape from the drudgery of his factory job. He bought an old bulldozer and used the machine to carve patiently, acre by acre, a beautiful little farm out of a seemingly worthless wasteland.
Wally’s story is a charming distillation of the themes that the late, beloved Gene Logsdon returned to again and again in his many books and hundreds of articles. Environmental restoration is the task of our time. The work of healing our land begins in our own backyards and farms, in our neighborhoods and our regions. Humans can turn the earth into a veritable paradise—if they really want to.
Noted photographer Gregory Spaid retraced the trail that Logsdon traveled when he was inspired to write The Man Who Created Paradise. His photographs evoke the same yearning for wholeness, for ties to land and community, that infuses the fable’s poetic prose.
The Mangle in Practice opens with a fresh introduction to the mangle by Pickering. Several contributors then present empirical studies that demonstrate the mangle’s applicability to topics as diverse as pig farming, Chinese medicine, economic theory, and domestic-violence policing. Other contributors offer examples of the mangle in action: real-world practices that implement a self-consciously “mangle-ish” stance in environmental management and software development. Further essays discuss the mangle as philosophy and social theory. As Pickering argues in the preface, the mangle points to a shift in interpretive sensibilities that makes visible a world of de-centered becoming. This volume demonstrates the viability, coherence, and promise of such a shift, not only in science and technology studies, but in the social sciences and humanities more generally.
Contributors: Lisa Asplen, Dawn Coppin, Adrian Franklin, Keith Guzik, Casper Bruun Jensen,Yiannis Koutalos, Brian Marick, Randi Markussen, Andrew Pickering, Volker Scheid, Esther-Mirjam Sent, Carol Steiner, Maxim Waldstein
These essays by one of America's most distinguished experts in business management and human relations were written between 1928 and 1968. Some are published here for the first time. They are addressed primarily to business practitioners, but are also of considerable interest to social scientists concerned with matters of organization, administration, motivation, and communication. The essays might be said to constitute the author's adventure over a period of forty years with an idea that he felt had important implications for administrative practices.
The early pieces begin with the exposition of a new way of thinking about the behavior of people in organizations, and the research from which it arose. Some of the recent essays express concern with the way in which the area of human relations has been developing—namely, as a fad, a cult, and the way to salvation instead of as a road toward competence. Among the topics discussed are: the relation of theory to practice in administrative matters; the training and education of the generalist as opposed to the specialist; training in human relations; efficiency and cooperative behavior; the administration of change; and technical change and social organization.
To begin, Hansen presents two essays, the first centering on his work with Ronald Larson in the mid-1970s on the history of Doho, a Japanese and English dual-language newspaper, and the second an article with David Hacker on revisionist ethnic perspectives of the Manzanar “riot.” A second section is composed of five oral history interviews of selected camp personalities—a female Nisei journalist, a male Nisei historical documentarian, a male Kibei Communist block manager, the Caucasian wife and comrade of the block manager, and the male Kibei who was the central figure in the Manzanar Riot/Revolt—that offer powerful insight into the controversial content of the two essays that precede them.
Manzanar can be understood only by being considered within the much wider context of Japanese American community formation and contestation before, during, and after World War II. A varied collection of scholarly articles and interviews, Manzanar Mosaic engages diverse voices and considers multiple perspectives to illuminate aspects of the Japanese American community, the ethnic press, the Manzanar concentration camp, and the movement for redress and reparations.
Observers have been predicting the demise of China’s political system since Mao Zedong’s death over thirty years ago. The Chinese Communist state, however, seems to have become increasingly adept at responding to challenges ranging from leadership succession and popular unrest to administrative reorganization, legal institutionalization, and global economic integration. What political techniques and procedures have Chinese policymakers employed to manage the unsettling impact of the fastest sustained economic expansion in world history?
As the authors of these essays demonstrate, China’s political system allows for more diverse and flexible input than would be predicted from its formal structures. Many contemporary methods of governance have their roots in techniques of policy generation and implementation dating to the revolution and early PRC—techniques that emphasize continual experimentation. China’s long revolution had given rise to this guerrilla-style decisionmaking as a way of dealing creatively with pervasive uncertainty. Thus, even in a post-revolutionary PRC, the invisible hand of Chairman Mao—tamed, tweaked, and transformed—plays an important role in China’s adaptive governance.
When István Hont died in 2013, the world lost a giant of intellectual history. A leader of the Cambridge School of Political Thought, Hont argued passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of liberalism, he looked not only to the works of great thinkers but also to their reception and use amid revolution and interstate competition. His innovative program of study culminated in the landmark 2005 book Jealousy of Trade, which explores the birth of economic nationalism and other social effects of expanding eighteenth-century markets. Markets, Morals, Politics brings together a celebrated cast of Hont’s contemporaries to assess his influence, ideas, and methods.
Richard Tuck, John Pocock, John Dunn, Raymond Geuss, Gareth Stedman Jones, Michael Sonenscher, John Robertson, Keith Tribe, Pasquale Pasquino, and Peter N. Miller contribute original essays on themes Hont treated with penetrating insight: the politics of commerce, debt, and luxury; the morality of markets; and economic limits on state power. The authors delve into questions about the relationship between states and markets, politics and economics, through examinations of key Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment figures in context—Hobbes, Rousseau, Spinoza, and many others. The contributors also add depth to Hont’s lifelong, if sometimes veiled, engagement with Marx.
The result is a work of interpretation that does justice to Hont’s influence while developing its own provocative and illuminating arguments. Markets, Morals, Politics will be a valuable companion to readers of Hont and anyone concerned with political economy and the history of ideas.
Composed over several decades, the essays here are remarkably fresh and relevant. They offer instruction for the student just beginning the study of folklore as well as repeated value for the many established scholars who continue to wrestle with issues that Wilson has addressed. As his work has long offered insight on critical matters—nationalism, genre, belief, the relationship of folklore to other disciplines in the humanities and arts, the currency of legend, the significance of humor as a cultural expression, and so forth—so his recent writing, in its reflexive approach to narrative and storytelling, illuminates today’s paradigms. Its notable autobiographical dimension, long an element of Wilson’s work, employs family and local lore to draw conclusions of more universal significance. Another way to think of it is that newer folklorists are catching up with Wilson and what he has been about for some time.
As a body, Wilson’s essays develop related topics and connected themes. This collection organizes them in three coherent parts. The first examines the importance of folklore—what it is and its value in various contexts. Part two, drawing especially on the experience of Finland, considers the role of folklore in national identity, including both how it helps define and sustain identity and the less savory ways it may be used for the sake of nationalistic ideology. Part three, based in large part on Wilson’s extensive work in Mormon folklore, which is the most important in that area since that of Austin and Alta Fife, looks at religious cultural expressions and outsider perceptions of them and, again, at how identity is shaped, by religious belief, experience, and participation; by the stories about them; and by the many other expressive parts of life encountered daily in a culture.
Each essay is introduced by a well-known folklorist who discusses the influence of Wilson’s scholarship. These include Richard Bauman, Margaret Brady, Simon Bronner, Elliott Oring, Henry Glassie, David Hufford, Michael Owen Jones, and Beverly Stoeltje.
"What matters about a play is not the extent to which it is like any other play, but the way in which it is different," writes Thomas G. Rosenmeyer. "This is, I suggest, how the ancient audiences received the performances.... My purpose, then, in writing these essays is twofold: ... to devote enough space to the discussion of each play to allow its special tone and texture to emerge without hindrance and at leisure ... and to include in one collection analyses of plays so different from one another that the accent will come to rest on the variety of the tragic experience rather than on any one narrowly defined norm."
Greek tragedy is a vehicle for many different ideas and many different intentions. From the wealth of material that has come down to us the author has chosen six plays for analysis. He reminds us that the plays were written to be seen and heard, and only secondarily to be studied. The listeners expected each play to have a specific objective, and to exhibit its own mood. These the author attempts to recover for us, by listening to what each play, in its own right, has to say. His principal concern is with the tragic diction and the tragic ideas, designed to release certain massive responses in the large theater-going group of ancient Athens. In exploring the characters and the situations of the plays he has chosen, the author transports his reader to the world of fifth-century B.C. Greece, and establishes the relevance of that world to our own experience.
The essays are not introductory in nature. No space is given, for instance, to basic information about the playwrights, the history of Greek drama, or the special features of the Attic stage. Yet the book addresses itself to classicists and nonclassicists alike. The outgrowth of a series of lectures to nonspecialists, its particular appeal is to students of literature and the history of Western thought. Parallels are drawn between the writings of the philosophers and the tragedies, and attention is paid to certain popular Greek beliefs that colored the tragic formulations. Ultimately, however, the approach is not historical but critical; it is the author's intention to demonstrate the beauty and the craftsmanship of the plays under discussion.
Ancient and medieval literary texts often call attention to their existence as physical objects. Shane Butler helps us to understand why. Arguing that writing has always been as much a material struggle as an intellectual one, The Matter of the Page offers timely lessons for the digital age about how creativity works and why literature moves us.
Butler begins with some considerations about the materiality of the literary text, both as a process (the draft) and a product (the book), and he traces the curious history of “the page” from scroll to manuscript codex to printed book and beyond. He then offers a series of unforgettable portraits of authors at work: Thucydides struggling to describe his own diseased body; Vergil ready to burn an epic poem he could not finish; Lucretius wrestling with words even as he fights the madness that will drive him to suicide; Cicero mesmerized by the thought of erasing his entire career; Seneca plumbing the depths of the soul in the wax of his tablets; and Dhuoda, who sees the book she writes as a door, a tunnel, a womb. Butler reveals how the work of writing transformed each of these authors into his or her own first reader, and he explains what this metamorphosis teaches us about how we too should read.
All Greek and Latin quotations are translated into English and technical matters are carefully explained for general readers, with scholarly details in the notes.
This collection spans forty years and brings together forty-one of Johnston's most important writings, including many rare and several previously unpublished selections. They include position papers, theoretical treatises, program notes, historical reflections, lectures, excerpts from interviews, and letters, and they cover a broad spectrum of concerns--from the technical exegesis of microtonality to the personal and the broadly humanistic. A discography of commercially available recordings of Johnston's music closes out the collection.
Yet, through canoe trips and intimate explorations of the river, Metzger discovers glints of resiliency: a beaver trolling through a slough, native fish in quiet backwaters, and strong currents that carry undertones of the wild Willamette. Together with tales from farmers and scientists alike, these experiences lead Metzger to ask whether something scarred can fully heal, and whether a disjointed river can be whole again.
A story of re-discovery as told by a learner, Meander Scars will appeal to readers of literary nonfiction, river advocates, naturalists, and outdoor enthusiasts interested in sustaining healthy river systems for themselves, their children, and beyond.
The authors of the eleven papers here expound their versions of this position and go on to critique Burge's version. Together with Burge's replies, this volume offers a major contribution to contemporary philosophy.
This volume is not a collection of artifacts from past decades of philosophy. Instead, it is a collection of essays that each make a significant contribution to contemporary work in philosophy. This reflects the fact that Gibbard’s work has not only had a massive influence on past discussion in philosophy but also continues to influence new directions of philosophical research.
With contributions from:
Sara Aronowitz, Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, David Braddon-Mitchell, Nate Charlow, Stephen Darwall, Jamie Dreier, Billy Dunaway, Melissa Fusco, Sona Ghosh, Allan Gibbard, Bill Harper, Paul Horwich, Zoë Johnson King, Tristram McPherson, Howard Nye, Lauren Olin, Caleb Perl, David Plunkett, Peter Railton, Connie Rosati, Mark Schroeder, Alex Silk, Daniel J. Singer, Brian Skyrms, and Seth Yalcin.
Runner-up, the Wayland Hand Award for Folklore and History, 2009
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
The memoir is the most popular and expressive literary form of our time. Writers embrace the memoir and readers devour it, propelling many memoirs by relative unknowns to the top of the best-seller list. Writing programs challenge authors to disclose themselves in personal narrative. Memoir and personal narrative urge writers to face the intimacies of the self and ask what is true.
In The Memoir and the Memoirist, critic and memoirist Thomas Larson explores the craft and purpose of writing this new form. Larson guides the reader from the autobiography and the personal essay to the memoir—a genre focused on a particularly emotional relationship in the author’s past, an intimate story concerned more with who is remembering, and why, than with what is remembered.
The Memoir and the Memoirist touches on the nuances of memory, of finding and telling the truth, and of disclosing one’s deepest self. It explores the craft and purpose of personal narrative by looking in detail at more than a dozen examples by writers such as Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Dave Eggers, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Mark Doty, Nuala O’Faolain, Rick Bragg, and Joseph Lelyveld to show what they reveal about themselves. Larson also opens up his own writing and that of his students to demonstrate the hidden mechanics of the writing process.
For both the interested reader of memoir and the writer wrestling with the craft, The Memoir and the Memoirist provides guidance and insight into the many facets of this provocative and popular art form.
As her mother loses her grasp on their shared history, Elizabeth Kadetsky sifts through boxes of the snapshots, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and notebooks that remain, hoping to uncover the memories that her mother is actively losing as her dementia progresses. These remnants offer the false yet beguiling suggestion that the past is easy to reconstruct—easy to hold.
At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, The Memory Eaters tells the story of a family's cyclical and intergenerational incidents of trauma, secret-keeping, and forgetting in the context of 1970s and 1980s New York City. Moving from her parents' divorce to her mother's career as a Seventh Avenue fashion model and from her sister's addiction and homelessness to her own experiences with therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, Kadetsky takes readers on a spiraling trip through memory, consciousness fractured by addiction and dementia, and a compulsion for the past salved by nostalgia.
Through 29 storylike essays, Gonzalez takes readers into the heart of the desert and the soul of a developing poet. He introduces us to the people who shaped his life. We learn of his father's difficulties with running a pool hall and of his grandmother's steadfast religious faith. We meet sinister Texas Rangers, hallucinatory poets, illegal aliens, and racist high school jocks. His vivid recollections embrace lizard hunts and rattlesnake dreams, rock music and menudo making—all in stories that convey the pains and joys of growing up on the border. As Gonzalez leads us through his desert of hope and vision, we come to recognize the humor and sadness that permeate this special place.
Long famous as a political, social, and cultural gadfly, journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken was unafraid to speak his mind on controversial topics and to express his views in a deliberately provocative manner.
Mencken was prolific; much of his best work lies buried in the newspapers and magazines in which it originally appeared. Mencken’s America is a sampling of this uncollected work, arranged to present the wide-ranging treatise on American culture that Mencken himself never wrote.
The core of the book is a series of six articles on “The American” published in the Smart Set in 1913-14. Never before reprinted, they embody the essence of Mencken’s views on the deficiencies of his countrymen.
What was the problem with America? For Mencken, it could be summed up in one word: Puritanism. Puritanism accounted for much that was wrong with American culture: the prevalence of “militant morality” represented by Prohibition, by campaigns against prostitution, and by religious fundamentalism. American hostility toward the fine arts led to furious attempts to suppress any work of art that was thought to contravene conventional morality-attempts that Mencken chronicles with impressive scholarship in the essay “Puritanism as a Literary Force.”
Mencken reserved his greatest scorn for American political institutions. Opposed to the very principle of democracy and universal suffrage, he maintained that, in the absence of an educated electorate, all politicians are compelled to become demagogues.
Bracing, infuriating, and pungent, H. L. Mencken’s writings retain their relevance even after the passage of nearly a hundred years, cogently discussing issues with which Americans of the twenty-first century are still wrestling. Sagaciously edited by S. T. Joshi, one of the country’s foremost Mencken scholars, Mencken’s America is a superb example of America’s turning the looking glass on itself.
In Mentor and Muse, a collection of twenty-nine insightful essays by some of today’s leading poetic minds, editors Blas Falconer, Beth Martinelli, and Helena Mesa have brought together an illuminating anthology that draws upon both established and emerging poets to create a one-of-a-kind resource and unlock the secrets of writing and revising poetry.
Gathered here are numerous experts eager to share their wisdom with other writers. Each author examines in detail a particular poetic element, shedding new light on the endless possibilities of poetic forms. Addressed within are such topics as the fluid possibilities of imagery in poetry; the duality of myth and the personal, and the power of one to unlock the other; the surprising versatility of traditional poetic forms; and the pleasure of collaboration with other poets. Also explored in depth are the formative roles of cultural identity and expectations, and their effect on composition; advice on how to develop one’s personal poetic style and approach; the importance of setting in reading and meaning; and the value of indirection in the lyric poem. Challenges to conventional concepts of beauty are examined through Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the ghost of Longfellow is called upon to guide students through the rewards and roadblocks of writing popular poetry. Poetic persona is demystified through Newton’s law of gravity, while the countless permutations of punctuation are revealed with analysis of e. e. cummings and W. S. Merwin.
The essays include the full text of the poems discussed, and detailed, relevant writing exercises that allow students the opportunity to directly implement the strategies they have learned. While many advanced topics such as authenticity, discordant music, and prosody are covered, this highly readable volume is as user-friendly as it is informative. Offering a variety of aesthetics and approaches to tackling the issues of composition, Mentor and Muse takes poets beyond the simple stages of poetic terms and strategies. These authorsinvite students to explore more advanced concepts, enabling them to draw on the traditions of the past while at the same time forging their own creative paths into the future.
Chosen as one of the "Best Books for Writers" by Poets & Writers magazine
Seeking a closer connection with nature than the manicured lawns of suburbia, naturalist Fred Gehlbach and his family built a house on the edge of a wooded ravine in Central Texas in the mid-1960s. On daily walks over the hills, creek hollows, and fields of the ravine, Gehlbach has observed the cycles of weather and seasons, the annual migrations of birds, and the life cycles of animals and plants that also live in the ravine.
In this book, Gehlbach draws on thirty-five years of journal entries to present a composite, day-by-day almanac of the life cycles of this semiwild natural island in the midst of urban Texas. Recording such events as the hatching of Eastern screech owl chicks, the emergence of June bugs, and the first freeze of November, he reminds us of nature's daily, monthly, and annual cycles, from which humans are becoming ever more detached in our unnatural urban environments. The long span of the almanac also allows Gehlbach to track how local and even global developments have affected the ravine, from scars left by sewer construction to an increase in frost-free days probably linked to global warming.
This long-term record of natural cycles provides one of only two such baseline data sets for North America. At the same time, the book is an eloquent account of one keen observer's daily interactions with his wild and human neighbors and of the lessons in connectedness and the "play of life" that they teach.
Includes the complete text of The School and Society and The Educational Situation.
Volume 11 brings together all of Dewey’s writings for 1918 and 1919. A Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.
Dewey’s dominant theme in these pages is war and its aftermath. In the Introduction, Oscar and Lilian Handlin discuss his philosophy within the historical context: “The First World War slowly ground to its costly conclusion; and the immensely more difficult task of making peace got painfully under way. The armistice that some expected would permit a return to normalcy opened instead upon a period of turbulence that agitated further a society already unsettled by preparations for battle and by debilitating conflict overseas.”
After spending the first half of 1918–19 on sabbatical from Columbia at the University of California, Dewey traveled to Japan and China, where he lectured, toured, and assessed in his essays the relationship between the two nations. From Peking he reported the student revolt known as the May Fourth Movement. The forty items in this volume also include an analysis of Thomas Hobbe’s philosophy; an affectionate commemorative tribute to Theodore Roosevelt, “our Teddy”; the syllabus for Dewey’s lectures at the Imperial University in Tokyo, which were later revised and published as Reconstruction in Philosophy; an exchange with former disciple Randolph Bourne about F. Matthias Alexander’s Man’sSupreme Inheritance; and, central to Dewey’s creed, “Philosophy and Democracy.” His involvement in a study of the Polish-American community in Philadelphia—resulting in an article, two memoranda, and a lengthy report—is discussed in detail in the Introduction and in the Note on the “Confidential Report of Conditions among the Poles in the United States.”
A collection of all of Dewey’s writings for 1920 with the exception of Letters from China and Japan. A Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.
The nineteen items collected here, including his major work, Reconstruction in Philosophy, evolved in the main from Dewey’s travel, touring, lecturing, and teaching in Japan and China. Ralph Ross notes in his Introduction to this volume that Reconstruction in Philosophy is “a radical book . . . a pugnacious book by a gentle man.” It is in this book that Dewey summarizes his version of pragmatism, then called Instrumentalism. For Dewey, the pragmatist, it was people acting on the strength of intelligence modeled on science who could find true ideas, ones “we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify.” Optimism pervades Reconstruction of Philosophy; in keeping with Dewey’s world of open possibilities, the book recognizes that the observation and thought of human striving can make the difference between despair and affirmation of life.
The seven essays on Chinese politics and social tradition that Dewey sent back from the Orient exhibit both the liveliness and the sensitive power of an insightful mind. Set against a backdrop of Japanese hegemony in China, the last days of Manchu imperialism, Europe’s carving of China into concessions, and China’s subsequent refusal to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the essays were startlingly relevant in this time of Eastern turbulence and change.
At the National University of Peking, Dewey delivered a series of lectures on “Three Contemporary Philosophers: William James, Henri Bergson, and Bertrand Russell.” The James and Bergson lectures are published for the first time in this volume. Dewey chose these philosophers, according to Ralph Ross, because he was trying to show “his oriental audience what he believed and hoped about man and society and was talking about those fellow philosophers who shared the same beliefs and hopes.”
Volume 15 in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, series brings together Dewey’s writings for the period 1923–1924. A Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.
Volume 15 completes the republication of Dewey’s extensive writings for the 25-year period included in the Middle Works series. Many facets of Dewey’s interests—politics, philosophy, education, and social concerns—are illuminated by the 40 items from 1923 and 1924.
Inspired by his own convictions and those of his friend Salmon O. Levinson, founder of the American Committee for the Outlawry of War, Dewey’s articles became the keystone of the committee’s campaign to outlaw war. His essay, “Logical Method and Law,” is perhaps the most enduring of Dewey’s writings in this volume. Dewey’s philosophical discussions with Daniel Sommer Robinson, David Wight Prall, Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, and Sterling Power Lamprecht are represented here, as is Dewey’s assessment of the Turkish educational system.
Includes the complete text of Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory and The Child and the Curriculum.
William James, remarking in 1909 on the differences among the three leading spokesmen for pragmatism—himself, F. C. S. Schiller, and John Dewey—said that Schiller’s views were essentially “psychological,” his own, “epistemological,” whereas Dewey’s “panorama is the widest of the three.”
The two main subjects of Dewey’s essays at this time are also two of the most fundamental and persistent philosophical questions: the nature of knowledge and the meaning of truth. Dewey’s distinctive analysis is concentrated chiefly in seven essays, in a long, significant, and previously almost unknown work entitled “The Problem of Truth,” and in his book How We Think. As a whole, the 1910–11 writings illustrate especially well that which the Thayers identify in their Introduction as Dewey’s “deepening concentration on questions of logic and epistemology as contrasted with the more pronounced psychological and pedagogical treatment in earlier writings.”
During the three years embraced by Volume 7, Dewey published twenty articles and reviews, one of the articles of monograph-length, “The Psychology of Social Behavior,” one small book, Interest and Effort in Education, and seventy encyclopedia articles.
A salient and arresting feature of the essays is the continuing polemic between Dewey and some of his critics. Ralph Ross, whose perceptive Introduction to the volume provides a broad perspective of the various philosophical controversies in which Dewey was engaged, comments that “when Dewey was pitting himself against important adversaries, his talents as a critic were fully evident.”
Volume 8 comprises all Dewey’s published writings for the year 1915—and only for 1915, a year of typically elevated productivity, which saw publication of fifteen articles and miscellaneous pieces and three books, two of which are reprinted here: German Philosophy and Politics and Schools of Tomorrow.
Professor Hook says that the publications in this volume reveal John Dewey at the height of his philosophical powers. Even though his greatest works were still to come—Democracy and Education, Experience and Nature, The Quest for Certainty, and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry—“the themes elaborated therein were already sounded and developed with incisive brevity in the articles and books of this banner year.”
In this expanded edition, an accomplished physician and teacher of medicine discusses the importance of being a caring doctor, especially now that the focus of medicine is increasingly on technological innovation and health care costs.
With wisdom and compassion, Dr. Jerome Lowenstein tells stories about relationships between medical students and their teachers, physicians and their patients. He reflects on what doctors learn from treating chronic illness; how they respond to patients' needs for reassurance; how they bear the burden of treating patients with life-threatening or degenerative disease; whether the distinction between traditional and "alternative" medical treatment is ultimately beneficial or destructive; and many other issues. Dr. Lowenstein's ruminations on humanistic approaches to learning and practicing medicine will be treasured by physicians, medical students, and patients alike.
“I need not tell you that a mighty change has taken place within the last half century, a change for the better,” Alphonso Johnson, the president of the Empire State Association of Deaf-Mutes, signed to hundreds of assembled deaf people in 1869. Johnson pointed to an important truth: the first half of the 19th century was a period of transformation for deaf Americans, a time that saw the rise of deaf education and the coalescence of the nation’s deaf community.
This volume contains original writing by deaf people that both directed and reflected this remarkable period of change. It begins with works by Laurent Clerc, the deaf Frenchman who came to the United Sates in 1816 to help found the first permanent school for deaf students in the nation. Partially through is writing, Clerc impressed hearing Americans–most of whom had never met an educated deaf person before–with his intelligence and humanity.
Other deaf writers shared their views with society through the democratic power of print. Included here are selections by James Nack, a deaf poet who surprised readers with his mellifluous verse; John Burnet, who published a book of original essays, fiction, and poetry; Edmund Booth, a frontiersman and journalist; John Carlin, who galvanized the drive for a national college for deaf people; Laura Redden, a high-achieving student who would go on to become an accomplished reporter; and Adele Jewel, a homeless deaf woman living in Michigan.
The final sections contain documents related to deaf events and issues at mid-century: the grand reunion of alumni of the American Asylum for the Deaf in 1850; the dedication of the Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet monument in Hartford; the debate over the viability of a deaf state; and the triumphant inauguration of the National Deaf-Mute College (now Gallaudet University) in 1864, which in many ways culminated this period of change. Taken together, the individual texts in this remarkable collection provide a valuable historical record and a direct glimpse of the experiences, attitudes, and rhetoric of deaf Americans during this time of change.
Though finding its occasion in the life of Millay— the centennial of the writer’ s birth— this volume refocuses attention on Millay’ s art by asking questions central to our present concerns: What in the varied body of Millay’ s work speaks to us most forcefully today? Which critical perspectives most illuminate her texts? How might those approaches be challenged, extended, or reoriented? In seeking the answers to such questions, the volume’ s contributors illuminate the means by which Millay’ s early success has been slighted and misunderstood and examine issues of personality, personae, critical stature, and formal experimentation in Millay’ s various genres: lyric poetry, the sonnet, verse drama, fiction, and the personal letter.
In 1920, following the publication of A Few Figs from Thistles, Millay was the "It girl" of American poetry. But by the late 1930s, her popularity waned as her critical reputation declined under the reign of high modernism and its critics. In fact, Millay, like others of her generation, had rejected modernist elitism in favor of public engagement, using her powerful public voice to plead for an end to the Sacco-Vanzetti trials as well as for U.S. entry into World War II. Condemned for both her politicizing and her political poetry, she was the first to admit that she and her poetry suffered in the service of public causes.
Grouped into four parts, these essays focus on Millay’ s relation to modernism, her revisionary perspectives on love, her treatment of time and of the female body, and her use of masquerade and impersonation in life and in art. Throughout, the essayists pose such questions as: Where is Millay’ s place in the literary histories of modern writing and in our hearts? How are we to value, interpret, and characterize the various forms and genres in which she wrote? What is the cultural work Millay achieves and reflects? How does she help us redefine modernism? What do Millay’ s great gifts enable us to see about genre, the social construction of gender, the definition of modernism, and the role of the poet?
Millay’ s considerable productivity, the range and virtues of her forms, and her experimentation clearly argue for a wide-ranging reappraisal of her work.
With decades of combined teaching experience, McDermott and Benner Dixon share practical craft-of-writing advice with the reader, including over fifty engaging writing prompts to spark the creative process. These prompts guide readers toward the freedom and joy that comes with finding one’s authentic voice. Embracing both the painful and the playful, Millions of Suns is an ideal text for classrooms, professional development, or daily writing practice. Through humor, lyricism, and poignancy, the fundamental message of the book remains the same for newcomers and career authors. Let Millions of Suns open a door for you into your creative work, inviting imagination, memory, and inspiration into your writing life.
A unique approach to the subject of mimesis, Storey's book goes beyond the politicizing of literature grounded in literary theory to develop a scientific basis for the creation of literature and art.
Mind, Matter, and Method was first published in 1966. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This volume of twenty-six essays by as many contributors is published in honor of Herbert Feigl, professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science. Though the majority of the contributors are philosophers, there are also -- as benefits Mr. Feigl's varied intellectual interests -- representatives of psychology, psychoanalysis, and physics.
The first group of ten essays deals with the philosophy of mind, particularly with the mind-body problem, to which Mr. Feigl has devoted much attention. The eleven essays in the second part are concerned with problems of philosophical method, especially with induction and confirmation. The third part is comprised of five essays on the philosophy of the physical sciences. A biographical sketch of Mr. Feigl and a bibliography of his writings are also provided.
In the autobiographical essay, Thomas reveals his passion for his homeland and his ever-present hunger for spiritual and natural exploration:
those rocks, I certainly was reminded of the transience of human existence,
and my own in particular. As Pindar put it: “A dream about a
shadow is man.” I began to ponder more the being and nature of God
and his relation to the late twentieth-century situation, which science and
technology had created in the western world. Where did the ancient
world of rock and ocean fit into an environment in which nuclear physics
and the computer were playing an increasingly prominent part? . . .
The Mirror Diary tracks the emergence of an original poetic voice and a learned consciousness amid multiple and sometimes competing influences of complex literary traditions and regional and ethnic histories. Beginning with a literary inquiry into the history of Japanese Americans in Hawai`i and California, Garrett Hongo draws on his own history to consider the mosaic of American identities—personal, cultural, and poetic—in the context of a postmodern diaspora.
Hongo’s essays attest to the breadth of what he considers his cultural inheritance and literary antecedents, ranging from the poets of China’s T’ang Dynasty to American poets such as Walt Whitman and Charles Olson. He explains free-verse prosody by way of John Coltrane’s jazz; praises his contemporaries, poets David Mura, Edward Hirsch, and Mark Jarman; and acknowledges his mentors, Bert Meyers and Charles Wright. In other pieces he engages with controversies and contestations in contemporary Asian American literature, confronts the politics of race and the legacy of Japanese American internment during World War II, offers paeans to the Hawaiian landscape, and addresses immigrants newly arrived in America with a warm welcome. The Mirror Diary is the work of a poet fully engaged with contemporary politics and poetics and committed to the study and celebration of diverse traditions.
Born in postcolonial Philippines into a family—and country—with a complicated history, Christine Imperial learns from a lifetime of experiences that there is no easy path to understanding or belonging. Setting out to renew her relationship to Tagalog, the language she had previously distanced herself from, she contends with the meaning of her dual Philippine/US citizenship along with the conditions surrounding it, reflecting on imperialist and class systems and the history of her birth country. Beginning with an attempt to translate into Tagalog Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”—Kipling’s ode to American imperialism after the US takeover of the Philippines—Imperial reflects on and writes against Kipling’s poem as she unspools her fractured family’s story.
Reckoning with both the anguish and promise of hybridity, Mistaken for an Empire expands into an exploration of the author’s relationship to English and Tagalog, history, family and state, origin and belonging. By interrogating the many intricacies of individual and national identity and the legacies that shape them, Imperial grapples with the tangled nature of allegiance, whether it be to family, to country, or to self.
narrative and broad appeal to a sense of justice, little has been done to examine the modern classic through the lens of Lee’s controversial “lost” novel Go Set a Watchman, published unexpectedly a year before the author’s death. In Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-Reading Harper Lee since Watchman, Cheli Reutter and Jonathan S. Cullick assemble a team of scholars to take on the task of interpreting, contextualizing, and deconstructing To Kill a Mockingbird in the wake of Go Set a Watchman. The essays contained in this groundbreaking volume cover a range of literary topics, such as race, sexuality, language, and reading contexts. Critically, the volume revisits the question of African American characterization in Lee’s work and reexamines the development of Atticus Finch, a character long believed to be an exemplar of justice and virtue in Lee’s fiction. And perhaps most imperative, the editors take on questions regarding the publication of Go Set a Watchman, and Holly Blackford contributes an essay that places Go Set a Watchman within the pantheon of American literature.
Literary scholars, educators, and those interested in southern literature will appreciate the new light this publication sheds on a classic American novel. Mockingbird Grows Up offers a deeper understanding of a canonical American work and prepares a new generation to engage with Harper Lee’s appealing prose, complex characters, and influential metaphors.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Structured operatically into overture, acts, and postlude, The Monster I Am Today guides the reader through associative shifts from arias like “weather events” and Price’s forty-two-minute final ovation to memories of Simmonds’s coming of age in New Orleans. As he melds lyric forms with the biography of one of classical music’s greatest virtuosos, Simmonds composes a duet that spotlights Price’s profound influence on him as a person and an artist: “That’s how I hear: Her.”
Educated in the humanities and trained in psychiatry, Jean Starobinski is a central figure in the Geneva School of criticism. His classic work, Montaigne in Motion, is a subtly conceived and elegantly written study of the Essais of Montaigne, whose deceptively plainspoken meditations have entranced readers and stimulated philosophers since their first publication in 1580 and 1595.
Here Starobinski offers a decidedly postmodern reading of Montaigne. In chapters dealing with the themes of public and private life, friendship, death, the body, and love, Starobinski reveals much that will remind us that Montaigne’s thought is as apropos to our time as it was to his own.
“The most important contribution to Montaigne studies since Friedrich’s work . . . . [It] will be the critical framework in which scholars will discuss Montaigne in the years to come.”—Choice
“Starobinski brings Montaigne to life by treating him as our contemporary and asking him modern questions.”—Hudson Review
Montana has been the "last best place" for so many people. A century ago, Native Americans gathered here to perform the Ghost Dance—a last, doomed attempt to make white settlers vanish and bring back the old ways of life. Today, people are still pouring into Montana, looking for the pristine wilderness they saw in A River Runs through It.
The reality of Montana—indeed, of all the West—has never matched the myths, but this book eloquently explores how the search for a perfect place is driving growth, development, and resource exploitation in Big Sky country. In ten personal essays, John Wright looks at such things as Montana myths; old-timers; immigrants; elk; ways of seeing the landscape; land conservation and land trusts; the fate of the Blackfoot, Bitterroot, and Paradise valleys; and some means of preserving the last, best places.
These reflections offer a way of understanding Montana that goes far beyond the headlines about militia groups and celebrities' ranches. Montana never was or will be a pristine wilderness, but Wright believes that much can be saved if natives and newcomers alike see what stands to be lost. His book is a wake-up call, not a ghost dance.
Formed in 1964, the year of independence, the University of Malawi promised more than the distant University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland—founded 1952—ever could. A decade and a half later, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, by then Life President of the Republic of Malawi, let it be known to the University that a Department of Classics was to be established—teaching the history and languages of the ancient Mediterranean world at Zomba, on the edge of the African Rift Valley.
A Monument More Lasting than Bronze analyzes President Banda’s motives for this surreal intervention and the political goals it served, and also sketches out the shape the enterprise he called into being has taken—all in the context of worldwide transformations of Classics. A balanced team of authors, some Malawian, some foreign with Malawian connections, brings varied perspectives to this reflection.
Bringing together the thoughts of one of American literature’s sharpest cultural critics, this compendium will open the eyes of a whole new audience to the work of Lionel Trilling. Trilling was a strenuous thinker who was proud to think “too much.” As an intellectual he did not spare his own kind, and though he did not consider himself a rationalist, he was grounded in the world.
This collection features 32 of Trilling’s essays on a range of topics, from Jane Austen to George Orwell and from the Kinsey Report to Lolita. Also included are Trilling’s seminal essays “Art and Neurosis” and “Manners, Morals, and the Novel.” Many of the pieces made their initial appearances in periodicals such as The Partisan Review and Commentary; most were later reprinted in essay collections. This new gathering of his writings demonstrates again Trilling’s patient, thorough style. Considering “the problems of life”—in art, literature, culture, and intellectual life—was, to him, a vital occupation, even if he did not expect to get anything as simple or encouraging as “answers.” The intellectual journey was the true goal.
No matter the subject, Trilling’s arguments come together easily, as if constructing complicated defenses and attacks were singularly simple for his well-honed mind. The more he wrote on a subject and the more intricate his reasoning, the more clear that subject became; his elaboration is all function and no filler. Wrestling with Trilling’s challenging work still yields rewards today, his ideas speaking to issues that transcend decades and even centuries.
2022 Art in Service to the Environment Award, Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter
Honorable Mention, 2022 Nonfiction Prize, Writers' League of Texas
Writers explore a city’s relationship with chronic catastrophic flooding.
Shortly after Hurricane Harvey dumped a record 61 inches of rain on Houston in 2017, celebrated writer and Bayou City resident Lacy M. Johnson began collecting flood stories. Although these stories attested to the infinite variety of experience in America’s most diverse city, they also pointed to a consistent question: What does catastrophic flooding reveal about this city, and what does it obscure?
More City than Water brings together essays, conversations, and personal narratives from climate scientists, marine ecologists, housing activists, urban planners, artists, poets, and historians as they reflect on the human geography of a region increasingly defined by flooding. Both a literary and a cartographic anthology, More City than Water features striking maps of Houston’s floodplains, waterways, drainage systems, reservoirs, and inundated neighborhoods. Designed by University of Houston seniors from the Graphic Design program, each map, imaginative and precise, shifts our understanding of the flooding, the public’s relationship to it, and the fraught reality of rebuilding. Evocative and unique, this is an atlas that uncovers the changing nature of living where the waters rise.
Although he spent 43 years at the same job, Alf Van Hoose was not a man limited by the boundaries of his profession. As Birmingham News sports editor for 21 years and a columnist for a decade before that, Van Hoose helped define a city, a state, and a region largely known for sports. He was the writer of record for some of the biggest sporting events and personalities in the state of Alabama in the last half of the 20th Century. Wayne Hester, Van Hoose's successor as sports editor of The News, in 1990, said, "To many sports fans over the years, Alf Van Hoose has been The Birmingham News." But he was also much more than the "sports guy," as older generations of Alabama sports fans who read this book will remember and younger ones will learn. He was a man for all seasons, not just those where balls get kicked, hit, or thrown around.
A native of Cuba, Alabama, and a veteran of the Third Army campaigns in WWII (where he won both the Bronze and Silver Stars), Van Hoose became a sportswriter on The News in 1947. He remained in that role until retirement in 1990, with only short breaks to serve as a Vietnam war correspondent, and to reflect on the lessons learned while serving with George Patton. Van Hoose died in 1997 at the age of 76.
This volume contains 90 of Van Hoose's best columns, selected not only to showcase his characteristic style, but also because of the enduring importance and interest of the topics--football and baseball, of course, but also golf, high school heroics, auto racing, and Van Hoose's special favorites: Rickwood Field and its various tenants, especially the Birmingham Black Barons.
Published with the College of Communication and Information Science, The University of Alabama.
Mormon Mavericks summarizes a few famous flashpoints in Mormon history; more importantly, it provides a telling study in human nature. Each contributor is an expert in his or her discipline, and all approach their topic with equal doses of sympathy and objectivity.
The following mavericks are featured in this collection of biographical essays:
Fawn McKay BrodieJuanita Brooks
Thomas Stuart Ferguson
Amasa Mason Lyman
Sterling M. McMurrin
John E. Page
Sarah M. Pratt D. Michael Quinn
William Smith
Fanny Stenhouse
T. B. H. Stenhouse
James Strang
Samuel Woolley Taylor
Moses Thatcher
Barbara Drake articulates the lessons she’s learned from her long stint of country living in her new book, Morning Light. Replete with records of native wildflowers, an encounter with an elderly man who lived on her farm eighty years ago, and an old family recipe for wild blackberry pudding, Morning Light is an appreciation and exploration of the landscape of western Oregon, and readers will come to know it better through the book.
As entertaining and instructive as it is personal and reflective, Drake’s writing will resonate with anyone who has experienced a convergence of family history with natural history, considered their place in the historical continuum, or wondered if their lifestyle can be sustained with age. In a world where even “the country” is becoming increasingly citified, Morning Light reminds us why we should care for our rural landscapes—while we still can.
Celebrate a trailblazer in the areas of women and re
Celebrate a trailblazer in the areas of women and religion, Jews and Judaism, and earliest Christianity in the ancient Mediterranean
Ross Kraemer is Professor Emerita in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University. This volume of essays, conceived and produced by students, colleagues, and friends bears witness to the breadth of her own scholarly interests. Contributors include Theodore A. Bergren, Debra Bucher, Lynn Cohick, Mary Rose D’Angelo, Nathaniel P. DesRosiers, Robert Doran, Jennifer Eyl, Paula Fredriksen, John G. Gager, Maxine Grossman, Kim Haines-Eitzen, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Jordan Kraemer, Robert A. Kraft, Shira L. Lander, Amy-Jill Levine, Susan Marks, E. Ann Matter, Renee Levine Melammed, Susan Niditch, Elaine Pagels, Adele Reinhartz, Jordan Rosenblum, Sarah Schwarz, Karen B. Stern, Stanley K. Stowers, Daniel Ullucci, Arthur Urbano, Heidi Wendt, and Benjamin G. Wright.Features:
- Articles that examine both ancient and modern texts in cross-cultural and trans-historical perspective
- Twenty-eight original essays on ancient Judaism, Christianity, and women in the Greco-Roman world
“Mysticism is peculiar to the mountainbred,” Frank Waters once told an interviewer for Psychology Today. And in Mountain Dialogues, available for the first time in paperback, the mountainbred Waters proves it true. Ranging over such diverse subjects as silence, spirits, time, change, and the sacred mountains of the world, Waters sounds again and again the radiant, mystic theme of man’s inherent wholeness and his oneness with the cosmos.
Writing in Western American Literature, Charles L. Adams said, “In Mountain Dialogues, we see Frank Waters acknowledging his sources—major influences on a great American thinker and writer. Waters weaves together threads of these influences, adds his own thought, and presents us with a truly cosmic overview. This overview is thoroughly that of an American ‘Westerner’; it also is one that merits international consideration.”
And as the Bloomsbury Review wrote: “Mountain Dialogues is more than just a collection of personal essays. It is an ‘evolutionist’s handbook’ for the sons and daughters of the new West, a guide for those who would transcend the limitations of Western civilization.”
"I watched the seasons march through the canyons," writes Bowers, "followed the wildflower parade from February through November, and throughout it all realized that I could travel in the Rincon Mountains forever and never learn all they contained." It is also a book of meditations, as Bowers reflects upon the meaning of nature, the similarities between the scientific and creative processes, the value of wilderness in the face of urban encroachment, and other ideas. Participating in the long tradition of reflective natural history writing, she has produced a memorable book that depicts the delights and dilemmas of field botany as it explores the perennial struggle between science and mysticism that tugs at every naturalist's heart.
In long years of mountaineering Oates fought the self-loathing that had infused him as the gay kid in the Baptist pew. And in The Mountains of Paris, he ascends to a place of wonder. In luminous prose, Oates invites readers to share a sense of awe—whether awakened by a Vermeer painting or a wilderness sojourn, by the night sky, a loved one, or echoing strains of music—lifting the curtain on a cosmos filled with a terrifying yet beautiful rightness.
Mountains Piled upon Mountains features nearly fifty writers from across Appalachia sharing their place-based fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. Moving beyond the tradition of transcendental nature writing, much of the work collected here engages current issues facing the region and the planet (such as hydraulic fracturing, water contamination, mountaintop removal, and deforestation), and provides readers with insights on the human-nature relationship in an era of rapid environmental change.
This book includes a mix of new and recent creative work by established and emerging authors. The contributors write about experiences from northern Georgia to upstate New York, invite parallels between a watershed in West Virginia and one in North Carolina, and often emphasize connections between Appalachia and more distant locations. In the pages of Mountains Piled upon Mountains are celebration, mourning, confusion, loneliness, admiration, and other emotions and experiences rooted in place but transcending Appalachia’s boundaries.
Written between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s, the articles and lectures collected in Moving Focus reflect on some of the major concerns of the practicing artist and scholar of modern Indian art: tradition and modernism, the question of the image, and the use of art criticism. The collection also includes essays on the work of Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Binodebehari Mukherjee, Ramkinker Baij, and Amrita Sher-Gil. Together, they deal with the focal changes taking place in the contemporary art situation—a period of great significance in terms of cultural development, just about a decade and a half after India’s hard-won Independence—and seek to put them in perspective. The analytical essays of K. G. Subramanyan, one of India's most celebrated artists, remain as relevant and useful today as they were when this collection first appeared decades ago, and are perfectly suited to introducing the non-specialist to Indian modernism and its global concerns.
Subramanyan played a pivotal role in shaping India’s artistic identity after Independence. Mani-da, as he was fondly called, seamlessly blended elements of modernism with folk expression in his works, spanning paintings, murals, sculptures, prints, set designs, and toys. Beyond his visual artistry, his writings have laid a solid foundation for understanding the demands of art on the individual. In the year of his centenary, Seagull is proud to publish his writings in special new editions.
Cape Cod is known for its beaches, throngs of summer visitors, and the activities that accompany seaside living, but it is also home to many kettle ponds, which offer a more tranquil setting. Formed from glaciers breaking apart and so named due to a rounded shape that appears like a kettle, these waterways are home to a diverse array of wildlife, while remaining peaceful and even a bit hidden.
Big enough for a canoeist to feel solitude and serenity, small enough to not appear on large-scale maps, Centerville’s Long Pond (one of seven on the Cape that share this name), consists of fifty-one acres of crystal clear waters, fresh air, and the fish, turtles, waterfowl, ospreys, and otters that call this special place home. In A Moving Meditation, Stephen G. Waller offers an intimate look at the pond’s intriguing natural and human history; its abundant animal life, across the seasons; and the encroaching effects of climate change.
The essays in Murder and Its Consequences span several periods in the history of capital punishment in America and the professional career of Leigh Bienen, a leading researcher on the death penalty. “A Good Murder” describes the subtle relationship between high-profile murders and the death penalty, while “The Proportionality Review of Capital Cases” places the well-known study of proportionality in New Jersey within a nationwide context.
“Anomalies” suggests that the arcane protocols written for lethal injection have little to do with insuring humane executions, but rather are concerned with protecting the sensibilities of witnesses and the liability of corrections officials. Other essays address the groundbreaking developments surrounding the death penalty in Illinois, and take a retrospective look at the evolution of her own and the country’s thinking about this complex, divisive topic.
Offering a radically new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, this volume redresses anthropology’s frequent oversight of music as a topic of study. By positioning music as an expansive subject for digital anthropology, Georgina Born demonstrates how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media includes five original ethnographies spanning pop, folk, and crossover musical genres throughout Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada, and the UK. A further three chapters engage experimentally with the platforms of music-making and distribution, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max MSP.
Music Grooves ranges from jazz, blues, polka, soul, rock, world beat, rap, karaoke, and other familiar genres to major scholarly debates in music theory, ethnomusicology, and popular culture studies. The authors develop and create links between the fields of ethnomusicology and popular culture studies and relate the contents of musics from America, Greece, Cuba, Africa, and Papua New Guinea to artists as diverse as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, L'il Wally Jagiello, Bo Diddley, Walt Solek, Madonna, Paul Simon, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Billie Holiday.
Keil and Feld offer a fascinating view of the shaping of central ideas and terms in ethnomusicology such as "engendered feeling," "interpretive moves," "participatory discrepancies," "iconicity of style," "people's music," "schizophonia," and "lift-up-over sounding." From Keil's critique of Leonard Meyer's musicological approach to Feld's recent work on world beat, this volume covers an array of vital issues in media studies, musicology and ethnomusicology, popular culture, anthropology, and sociology. It will interest anyone concerned with the nature and meaning of music in the modern world.
Eclectic and essential, Music in Black American Life, 1600–1945 offers specialists and students alike a gateway to the history and impact of Black music in the United States.
Contributors: R. Reid Badger, Rae Linda Brown, Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Sandra Jean Graham, Jeffrey Magee, Robert M. Marovich, Harriet Ottenheimer, Eileen Southern, Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Stephen Wade, and Charles Wolfe
Part sourcebook and part survey of historic music scholarship, Music in Black American Life, 1945–2020 collects groundbreaking work that redefines our view of Black music and its place in American music history.
Contributors: Nelson George, Wayne Everett Goins, Claudrena N. Harold, Eileen M. Hayes, Loren Kajikawa, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tammy L. Kernodle, Cheryl L. Keyes, Gwendolyn Pough, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Mark Tucker, and Sherrie Tucker
Making music offers enormous possibilities--and faces significant limitations--in its power to generate belonging and advance social justice. Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol edit essays focused on the forms of interplay between music-making and community-making as mutually creative processes. Contributors in the first section look at cases where music arrived in settings with little or no sense of community and formed social bonds that lasted beyond its departure. In the sections that follow, the essayists turn to stable communities that used musical forms to address social needs and both forged new social groups and, in some cases, splintered established communities. By centering the value of difference in productive feedback dynamics of music and community while asserting the need for mutual moral indebtedness, they foreground music’s potential to transform community for the better.
Contributors: Stephen Blum, Joanna Bosse, Sylvia Bruinders, Donna A. Buchanan, Rick Deja, Veit Erlmann, Stefan Fiol, Eduardo Herrera, David A. McDonald, Tony Perman, Thomas Solomon, and Ioannis Tsekouras
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