Best of
Criticism

2001

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories


Arthur Conan Doyle - 2001
    Klinger's brilliant new annotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic Holmes short storiesReaders will find all the short stories from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, with a cornucopia of insights: beginners will benefit from Klinger's insightful biographies of Holmes, Watson, and Conan Doyle; history lovers will revel in the wealth of Victorian literary and cultural details; Sherlockian fanatics will puzzle over tantalizing new theories; art lovers will thrill to the 450-plus illustrations, which make this the most lavishly illustrated edition of the Holmes tales ever produced. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes illuminates the timeless genius of Arthur Conan Doyle for an entirely new generation of readers.

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism


Vincent B. Leitch - 2001
    + XXXVIII) ranges from Gorgias and Plato to Sigmund Freud and Mikhail Bakhtin. Each of the 147 contributions has a headnote introducing the writer and making connections to other critics, theorists and movements. An introduction surveys the history of theory and criticism.

The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000


Martin Amis - 2001
    But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches–not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart. In The War Against Cliché, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.

The Shape of a Pocket


John Berger - 2001
    A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the New World Economic Order. The people coming together are the reader, me, and those the essays are about–Rembrandt, Paleolithic cave painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient Egyptians, an expert in the loneliness of a certain hotel bedroom, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening in the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie. I’ve never written a book with a greater sense of urgency.–John Berger

Joyce's Ulysses


James A.W. Heffernan - 2001
    T. S. Eliot, bowled over by Joyce's brilliant manipulation of a continuous parallel between ancient myth and modern life, called it "the most important expression which the present age has found ... [one] to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."Ulysses depicts a world that is as fully conceived and vibrant as anything in Homer or Shakespeare. It has been delighting and puzzling readers since it was first published on Joyce's 40th birthday, February 2, 1922.It is, perhaps, a book whose pleasures you've always wanted to learn to savor but never quite worked yourself up to reading. And who can blame you? After all, Joyce himself famously boasted that "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant!"This is where Professor Heffernan's lectures help. Whether or not you have read this book, you'll find that his lectures, the fruit of decades of distinguished teaching, make an excellent guide to the many-layered pleasures of this modern epic.Illuminating the dramatic and artistic integrity behind the novel's most notoriously challenging passages, he explains why this frank, pathbreaking novel was praised as a landmark and damned as obscene—even banned—as soon as it first appeared.

Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations


Adrienne Rich - 2001
    They call on the fluidity of the imagination, from poetic vision to social justice, from the badlands of political demoralization to an art that might wound, that may open scars when engaged in its work, but will finally suture and not tear apart.This volume collects Rich's essays from the last decade of the twentieth century, including four earlier essays, as well as several conversations that go further than the usual interview. Also included is her essay explaining her reasons for declining the National Medal for the Arts.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and Selected Critical Prose


Oscar Wilde - 2001
    This selection of critical writings reveals a different side of the great writer--the deep and serious reader of literature and philosophy, and the eloquent and original thinker about society and art. This illuminating collection includes "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.," "In Defense of Dorian Gray," reviews, and the writings from Intentions (1891), including "The Decay of Lying," "Pen, Pencil, Poison," and "The Critic as Artist."For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Gazer Within


Larry Levis - 2001
    Refreshingly candid, laugh-out-loud funny, and, at the same time, intimate, the pieces trace Larry Levis's early years growing up on his father's farm, his decision at sixteen to become a poet, and his undergraduate experience in the days of the Vietnam War. In addition to memoir, there are critical reviews, including his seminal essay on the poet Philip Levine, and reviews of poets as diverse as W. D. Snodgrass and Zbigniew Herbert.David St. John's foreword speaks eloquently of Levis's enduring legacy: "Of the poets of his generation, Larry Levis spoke most powerfully of what it means to be a poet at this historical moment. With the same majesty he brought to his poetry, Larry Levis engaged his readers with the most subtle and disturbing questions of the self to be found in the prose--essays, reviews or interviews--of any contemporary American poet. Broadly international in his scope and deeply personal in his reflections, Levis addressed poetic concerns that are both immediate and timeless. For many of us who struggle with these issues, Larry Levis's prose on poetry stands as some of the most capacious to be found since Randell Jarrell's."The late Larry Levis was the author of six volumes of poetry. He was Director of the Creative Writing Program, University of Utah; Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University; and also taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

A Jacques Barzun Reader


Jacques Barzun - 2001
    With subjects ranging from history to baseball to crime novels, A Jacques Barzun Reader is a feast for any reader.

Grammars of Creation


George Steiner - 2001
    A far-reaching exploration of the idea of creation in Western thought, literature, religion, and history, this volume can fairly be called a magnum opus. He reflects on the different ways we have of talking about beginnings, on the "coretiredness" that pervades our end-of-the-millennium spirit, and on the changing grammar of our discussions about the end of Western art and culture. With his well-known elegance of style and intellectual range, Steiner probes deeply into the driving forces of the human spirit and our perception of Western civilization's lengthening afternoon shadows.Roaming across topics as diverse as the Hebrew Bible, the history of science and mathematics, the ontology of Heidegger, and the poetry of Paul Celan, Steiner examines how the twentieth century has placed in doubt the rationale and credibility of a future tense -- the existence of hope. Acknowledging that technology and science may have replaced art and literature as the driving forces in our culture, Steiner warns that this has not happened without a significant loss. The forces of technology and science alone fail to illuminate inevitable human questions regarding value, faith, and meaning. And yet it is difficult to believe that the story out of Genesis has ended, Steiner observes, and he concludes this masterful volume of reflections with an eloquent evocation of the endlessness of beginnings.

In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today


Aleks Sierz - 2001
    The book argues that, for example, Trainspotting, Blasted, Mojo and Shopping and F**king are much more than a collection of shock tactics - taken together, they represent a consistent critique of modern life, one which focuses on the problem of violence, the crisis of masculinity and the futility of consumerism. The book contains extensive interviews with playwrights, including Sarah Kane (Blasted), Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and F**king), Philip Ridley (The Pitchfork Disney), Patrick Marber (Closer) and Martin McDonagh (The Beauty Queen of Leenane).

Reading the Vampire Slayer: The Complete, Unofficial Guide to 'Buffy' and 'Angel'


Roz Kaveney - 2001
    This second edition is hugely revised and expanded to cover the sixth and seventh seasons of Buffy and the third and fourth seasons of Angel. It contains chapters on the relationship between Buffy and the lovelorn vampire Spike and on the thematic structure of Angel, as well as interviews on the writing of Buffy with scriptwriters Jane Espenson and Steven DeKnight. Individual chapters have been updated and the useful episode guide is expanded to cover all seven seasons of Buffy and the four seasons of Angel, as is Roz Kaveney's general introduction to the scenes and structures of each season.

Harlem Renaissance


Nathan Irvin Huggins - 2001
    Now this classic history is being reissued, with a new foreword byacclaimed biographer Arnold Rampersad.As Rampersad notes, Harlem Renaissance remains an indispensable guide to the facts and features, the puzzles and mysteries, of one of the most provocative episodes in African-American and American history. Indeed, Huggins offers a brilliant account of the creative explosion in Harlem during thesepivotal years. Blending the fields of history, literature, music, psychology, and folklore, he illuminates the thought and writing of such key figures as Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. DuBois and provides sharp-eyed analyses of the poetry of Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and LangstonHughes. But the main objective for Huggins, throughout the book, is always to achieve a better understanding of America as a whole. As Huggins himself noted, he didn't want Harlem in the 1920s to be the focus of the book so much as a lens through which readers might see how this one moment in timesheds light on the American character and culture, not just in Harlem but across the nation. He strives throughout to link the work of poets and novelists not only to artists working in other genres and media but also to economic, historical, and cultural forces in the culture at large.This superb reissue of Harlem Renaissance brings to a new generation of readers one of the great works in African-American history and indeed a landmark work in the field of American Studies.

Vow to Poetry


Anne Waldman - 2001
    This stimulating mix of autobiography, interviews, and essays reveals a life possessed by the muse. You've seen the "safe" versions, now comes this unconventional, irreverent, transgressive volume.Anne Waldman ran the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York for over a decade. She is the co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she teaches and directs the Master of Fine Arts program in Writing and Poetics.Contents>/B>Author's Note, 13 Prelude: "My Long & Only Afterlife", 15 Feminafesto, 19 My Life a List, 23 Oppositional Poetics, 48 That Light Is Sandino, 49 Managua Sketches, 51 Seeing What Happens (Interview with Joyce Jenkins) , 54 Kali Yuga Poetics: A Manifesto, 60 "Take Me to Your Poets!", 74 Loom Down the Thorough Narrow, 81 Hermeneutical (Light to Read By), 91 Vow to Poetry (Conversation with Randy Roark), 96 Sikelianos's Delphic Idea: Site & Poetic Legacy, 123 Hags, Nuns, & Magpie Scholars, 135 The Outrider Legacy (Interview with Mark DuCharme), 142 Poetry as Siddhi, 155 Noösphere & the Six Realms, 167 I Is Another: Dissipative Structures, 173 The Talisman Interview (Interview with Edward Foster), 192 Warring God Charnel Ground, 205 Deviant Identities, 213 Minstrel Bard, 228 Last Days, Hours, 230 Burroughs: Hurry Up. It's Time, 235 Go-Between Between, 238 Grasping the Broom More Tightly Now (Interview with Eric Lorberer), 247 Creative Writing Life [Reading/Writing/Performance] Experiments, 247 Alphabetic Tesserae, 262 Epic & Performance, 266 "Surprise Each Other": The Art of Collaboration (Interview with Lisa Birman), 272 Spare Us Your Epiphanies, 280 Marriage Marriage: A Sentence Sentence, 283 Muse, 286 My Life a Book, 289Acknowledgements, 292 Selected Bibliography, 295Oppositional Poetics"wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?"-Hölderlin from "Bread & Wine"How do we

Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body


Iain Borden - 2001
    We are all aware of their often extraordinary talent and manoeuvres on the city streets. This book is the first detailed study of the urban phenomenon of skateboarding. It looks at skateboarding history from the surf-beaches of California in the 1950s, through the purpose-built skateparks of the 1970s, to the street-skating of the present day and shows how skateboarders experience and understand the city through their sport. Dismissive of authority and convention, skateboarders suggest that the city is not just a place for working and shopping but a true pleasure-ground, a place where the human body, emotions and energy can be expressed to the full.The huge skateboarding subculture that revolves around graphically-designed clothes and boards, music, slang and moves provides a rich resource for exploring issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and the family. As the author demonstrates, street-style skateboarding, especially characteristic of recent decades, conducts a performative critique of architecture, the city and capitalism. Anyone interested in the history and sociology of sport, urban geography or architecture will find this book riveting.

The Art of Richard Powers


Jane Frank - 2001
    His superior aesthetics...still overshadow most rivals....I am delighted his talent is again on splendid display!”—Michael Moorcock. “I am happy to see this collection of outstanding work.”—Sir Arthur C. Clarke. “Enlightening....Valuable.... Capable of evoking that fabled sense of wonder.”—SFRA Review.

On Stories


Richard Kearney - 2001
    The author also considers the stories of nations and how these may affect the way a national identity can emerge from stories. He looks at the stories of Romulus and Remus in the founding of Rome, the hidden agenda of stories in the antagonism between Britain and Ireland and how stories of alienation in film such as Aliens and Men in Black reveal often disturbing narratives at work in projections of North American national identity. Throughout, On Stories stresses that far from heralding the demise of the story, the digital and supposedly postmodern era opens up powerful new ways of thinking about narrative.

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare


Michael Dobson - 2001
    Illustrated with more than 100 photographs and boasting contributions from a team of internationally renowned scholars (including such noted Shakespeare authorities as Helen Vendler, Park Honan, and Jonathan Bate), the Companion has more than 3,000 entries that offer succinct, stimulating, and authoritative commentary on Shakespeare's life and times, his plays and poems, and their interpretation around the world over the last four centuries. All Shakespeare's plays--from As You Like It and All's Well that Ends Well to King Lear and Hamlet--are covered in major articles. There are concise descriptions of allusions in Shakespeare (Ajax, Agamemnon), well-known critics (Samuel Johnson, John Dryden), great Shakespearian actors (Richard Burbage, Lawrence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh), characters in the plays (Mercutio, Ophelia), figures of speech (metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron), and much more. Longer articles explore topics such as Shakespeare's birthplace, censorship, the Chamberlain's Men, film, and Shakespeare's reception in such countries as China, Italy, and the United States. Bringing its readers up to date not only with the latest in Shakespearian scholarship and controversy but with the plays' most recent incarnations on stage, film, and in international popular culture, this is the perfect companion to Shakespeare's works, covering everything from Aaron to Zeffirelli, and from Shakespeare in schools to Shakespeare in Love.

A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan


Gayden Wren - 2001
    With this detailed examination of all fourteen operas, Gayden Wren fills the void. His bold thesis finds the key to the operas' longevity, not in the clever lyrics, witty dialogue, or catchy music, but in the central themes underlying the characters and stories themselves. Like Shakespeare's comedies, Wren shows, the operas of Gilbert & Sullivan endure because of their timeless themes, which speak to audiences as powerfully now as they did the first time they were performed.Written out of an abiding love for the Savoy operas, this volume is essential reading for any devotee of these enchanting works, or indeed for anyone who loves musical theater.

An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking


Hamid Naficy - 2001
    How their personal experiences of exile or diaspora translate into cinema is a key focus of Naficy's work. Although the experience of expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, the films themselves exhibit stylistic similarities, from their open- and closed-form aesthetics to their nostalgic and memory-driven multilingual narratives, and from their emphasis on political agency to their concern with identity and transgression of identity. The author explores such features while considering the specific histories of individuals and groups that engender divergent experiences, institutions, and modes of cultural production and consumption. Treating creativity as a social practice, he demonstrates that the films are in dialogue not only with the home and host societies but also with audiences, many of whom are also situated astride cultures and whose desires and fears the filmmakers wish to express.Comparing these films to Hollywood films, Naficy calls them accented. Their accent results from the displacement of the filmmakers, their alternative production modes, and their style. Accented cinema is an emerging genre, one that requires new sets of viewing skills on the part of audiences. Its significance continues to grow in terms of output, stylistic variety, cultural diversity, and social impact. This book offers the first comprehensive and global coverage of this genre while presenting a framework in which to understand its intricacies.

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy


Peter J. Leithart - 2001
    In this guide, Peter J. Leithart brings his rich biblical-typological insight to bear in opening up the Comedy for students, high school and up, mainly the sort of kids who keep looking for the jokes in the "comedy." After examining the meaning and place of the courtly love tradition leading up to Dante, the heart of the guide walks us carefully through the craft and symbolisms of each progressive stage-Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Each section contains helpful study questions. Peter J. Leithart (Ph.D. Cambridge) is a Senior Fellow of Theology and Literature at St. Andrews College, as well as senior pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho. In his spare time, Leithart sleeps.

The Objectivism Research CD ROM: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand


Ayn Rand - 2001
    A collection of Ayn Rand's works in a compact electronic searchable form.

The West Wing: The Official Companion


Ian Jackman - 2001
    As if to spite the pollsters and talking heads, the frank and brilliant former governor, Jed Bartlet, captures the White House to become President of the United States. Surrounding himself with the best and the brightest, the president chooses his staff from the team responsible for putting him in the White House. Leo McGarry, the president's oldest friend -- and the man who convinces Bartlet to run -- is named chief of staff. One of the most powerful men in his party, Leo presides over the West Wing of the White House with a firm hand and a fatherly tone. With uncanny prescience, Leo puts his faith in Toby Ziegler, the only original staff member to make it through the campaign. Despite six previous failures, Toby's work along with a new team of friends and strangers, helps get Bartlet nominated and elected. Now, as the communications director for the White House, Toby holds an important role in crafting the president's word.Using the power instilled in him as an old family friend, Leo McGarry brings Josh Lyman to the campaign with a simple request to come hear Jed Bartlet speak. In a VFW hall in Nashua, New Hampshire, the skeptical Josh does come and is amazed to finally find a candidate to believe in. Convinced that the man should be president, Lyman gets his friend Sam Seaborn to quit his job at a major law firm where he is about to become a partner and join Bartlet's campaign. Gladly serving at the pleasure of President Bartlet, Sam is now the White House deputy communications director and his friend Josh is the deputy chief of staff. Two men from different backgrounds from opposite ends of thecountry are united not just by friendship but by their devotion to the president."Is Jed Bartlet a good man?" is all that C.J. Cregg wants to know before she agrees to work for him. Toby Ziegler's assurance is all she needs to hear. In an age where the news cycle can last mere seconds, C.J. is the press secretary to the most demanding pool of reporters in the world, the White House Press Corps.With a staff of more than 1,100 people, the West Wing overflows with offices and personnel. Although the upper echelon provides the very public face of the White House, a support staff of hundreds regularly carries out the duties of the executive branch of the government. Filling these desks are numerous aides and assistants, like Donna Moss, who started working for Josh Lyman during the nomination campaign and is now "deputy-deputy chief of staff." Among her many responsibilities is to make sure that her boss is on time for meetings and fully prepared -- which sometimes means making sure that he is dressed.While the White House is very much a public institution, there is one man in particular whose job requires him to be either an imposing figure or totally invisible, often at the same time. Charlie Young, personal aide to the president, truly determines who has access. Among the many tasks laid out before this brilliant young man, he is first and foremost the keeper of the schedule.These people, and a staff of hundreds more, lead America from the most privileged office in the world, from insideTHE WEST WINGStep inside the Bartlet Administration in this richly detailed, perfectly imagined official companion to television's most sophisticated dramatic series, "TheWest Wing. Created by Aaron Sorkin, "The West Wing won nine Emmy(R) Awards, the Humanitas Prize, the Peabody Award, and three Television Critics Association Awards in its first season alone -- and is acclaimed for its superb writing, marvelous portrayals by a stellar cast, and an intelligent, authentic depiction of White House life. Now, the show that has set television's new standard brings you this insider's guide -- which not only presents fascinating details into how groundbreaking television is made, but captures the colorful world of "The West Wing and the nation's capital under the Bartlet Administration.The prestigious Peabody Award cited "The West Wing as "a magnificent episodic series that depicts the tension and back-room drama of presidential politics with an unusual mixture of maturity and humanity." Now, experience the excitement and authenticity of "The West Wing as never before, with this unique, in-depth tribute.

The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett


John Calder - 2001
    Beckett is a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare's in the late Renaissance.John Calder has examined the work of Beckett principally for what it has to say about our time in terms of philosophy, theology and ethics, and he points to aspects of his subject's thinking that others have ignored or preferred not to see.Samuel Beckett's acute mind pulled apart with courage and much humour the basic assumptions and beliefs by which most people live. His satire can be biting and his wit devastating. He found no escape from human tragedy in the comforts we build to shield ourselves from reality – even in art, which for most intellectuals has replaced religion. However, he did develop a moral message – one which is in direct contradiction to the values of ambition, success, acquisition and security which is normally held up for admiration, and he looks at the greed, God-worship, and cruelty to others which we increasingly take for granted, in a way that is both unconventional and revolutionary.If this study shocks many readers it is because the honesty, the integrity and the depth of Beckett's thinking- expressed through his novels, plays and poetry, but also through his other writings and correspondence- is itself shocking, to conventional thinking. Yet what he has to say is also comforting. He offers a different ethic and prescription for living – a message based on stoic courage, compassion and an ability to understand and forgive.

A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Reader's Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs


Arthur Krystal - 2001
    H. Auden, and Lionel Trilling joined together to form the editorial board of the Readers' Subscription Book Club. Thus began a venture unique in the annals of American culture. Never before or since have three such eminent intellectuals collaborated to bring books to the attention of the general public. Now, a half century later, "A Company of Readers" tells the story of this extraordinary partnership and presents for the first time a selection of essays from the publications of the Readers' Subscription Book Club and its successor, the Mid-Century Book Society.As they composed their comments to club members, these distinguished editors freely shared with each other their notes and drafts. The result is criticism of the highest order: smart, humane, learned -- in short, stuff that makes for damn good reading. And because these pieces were written for the general public by men who knew that books still mattered, perhaps no other collection of essays gives so natural and vivid a picture of the cultural landscape at midcentury.Together, Auden, Barzun, and Trilling would plunge into a pile of books and pick out what they liked, what they thought would instruct and delight. What they chose may surprise you. Here is Auden on J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring, " Barzun on Virginia Woolf's "Writer's Diary, " and Trilling on Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows." Each book, whether weighty or light, summoned from the editors a spirited appraisal, in language that welcomed any kind of reader.The Mid-Century club disbanded in 1963, but its legacy lives on in these pages. "A Company of Readers" is essential to admirers of thisillustrious trio, and it offers a window on an America in which books took center stage.

HARLAN ELLISON: THE EDGE OF FOREVER


Ellen Weil - 2001
    Although Ellison has published over 1,100 short stories and several volumes of criticism and commentary since his career began in the 1950s, and is among the most widely anthologized of living writers (including Best American Short Stories), critical attention to his work has been surprisingly sparse. This study explores all aspects of Ellison's career, examining his various stories and screenplays in the context or their times and of the genres in which he worked, from his early crime stories and gang fiction, to his much honored work in science fiction and television (including Star Trek, The Outer Limits, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour), to his later mature fantasies and narrative experiments. The authors also examine Ellison's relationship to the science fiction genre, which both gave him his widest fame and entrapped him in many ways as both a writer and a public figure. Gary K. Wolfe is professor of Humanities and English and director of the Bachelor of General Studies at Roosevelt University, Chicago. Prior to becoming a successful consultant specializing in the development of corporate retiree volunteer programs, Ellen Weil taught humanities and Holocaust Studies courses at Roosevelt University and the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Rebels with Applause: Broadway's Groundbreaking Musicals


Scott Miller - 2001
    These are musicals that broke all the old rules and created new ones, and changed the way we looked at musical theatre forever: the savage political satire of The Cradle Will Rock in 1937the surprisingly dark sexuality of Pal Joey in 1940the profound innovations of Oklahoma! in 1943the absurdist social satire of Anyone Can Whistle in 1964the convention-shattering experiment that was Hair in 1967the intimacy and emotional power of Jacques Brel in 1968the provocative honesty of the gay-themed Ballad of Little Mikey in 1994the abstract sophistication of the jazz/pop/R&B-flavored Songs for a New World in 1995the emotional immensity of the "anti-spectacle" Floyd Collins in 1995the overwhelming influence of the 1996 rock musical Rent.Offering insightful, provocative opinions on character, plot, musical and textual themes, lyrics, subtext, motivation, backstory, and historical context, Miller reveals astonishing new details about what makes each one of these musicals great. He'll get you thinking and talking about these shows like you never have before. Visit Scott's website at http: //www.geocities.com/Broadway/3164/.

Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Paintings and Drawings


Jos Koldeweij - 2001
    His fantastical scenes of grotesque creatures, devils, and monsters have prompted a wide range of interpretation, keeping his art endlessly fascinating over the centuries. Art lovers and historians have speculated about the artist himself, too, in particular about his religous - and perhaps occult - beliefs." "This volume, published to coincide with a major exhibition in Bosch's native Netherlands, examines his art in the context of his times. Reproducing every Bosch painting and drawing in superb full color, and including Bosch's triptychs (many shown both open and closed), this book finally penetrates the mystery that has always surrounded the artist. Jos Koldeweij sketches a lively picture of urban culture in the late-medieval city of 's-Hertogenbosch, where the artist lived his entire life. Paul Vandenbroeck explores Bosch's social attitudes; the painter offered an unprecedented critique of society - money and property, sin and pleasure - from the perspective of the wealthy upper-middle class to which he himself belonged, and in so doing drew on the same themes and imagery found in the popular literature of the period. Bernard Vermet draws on the latest research to offer a new chronology for Bosch's work. Together, these scholars and Bosch's brilliant art itself demonstrate that Bosch was not only a highly inventive and technically brilliant painter, but that his beliefs and imagery were in keeping with many of the prevailing attitudes of his day." Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Paintings and Drawings is essential for anyone interested in the most fully rounded picture ever offered of the life and work of one of the world's most enigmatic artists.

Shakespeare and the Arts of Language


Russ McDonald - 2001
    Subsequent chapters define Shakespeare's main artistic tools and illustrate their poetic and theatrical contributions: Renaissance rhetoric, imagery and metaphor, blank verse, prose speech, and wordplay. The conclusion surveys Shakespeare's multiple and often conflicting ideas about language, encompassing both his enthusiasm at what words can do for us and his suspicion of what words can do to us.

The Poets' Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses


Peter S. Hawkins - 2001
    S. EliotThe great fourteenth-century poet has been an unequaled influence on many writers in the twentieth century, whose "confessions" may well foster a deeper appreciation of Dante. Previously published essays by some of this century's most renowned poets-Pound, Eliot, Mandelstam, Robert Fitzgerald, Borges, Merrill, Montale, Lowell, Duncan, Auden, Yeats, Charles Williams, Nemerov, Heaney-join new essays commissioned by the editors. Contemporary poets Mary Campbell, W. S. Di Piero, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Rosanna Warren, Alan Williamson, and Charles Wright reflect on Dante as well as on their own complex (and often contentious) relationship to his legacy. Their engagement with his work offers a fresh perspective on the Commedia and its author that more academic writing does not provide.As the editors write, a new consideration of Dante "should generate insights not only about his work but also about poetry written in our own language and time.

The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture


Franco Moretti - 2001
    A translated selection from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo (2001-2003), The Novel's two volumes are a unified multiauthored reference work, containing more than one hundred specially commissioned essays by leading contemporary critics from around the world. Providing the first international comparative reassessment of the novel, these essential volumes reveal the form in unprecedented depth and breadth--as a great cultural, social, and human phenomenon that stretches from the ancient Greeks to today, where modernity itself is unimaginable without the genre.By viewing the novel as much more than an aesthetic form, this landmark collection demonstrates how the genre has transformed human emotions and behavior, and the very perception of reality. Historical, statistical, and formal analyses show the novel as a complex literary system, in which new forms proliferate in every period and place.Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, looks at the novel mostly from the outside, treating the transition from oral to written storytelling and the rise of narrative and fictionality, and covering the ancient Greek novel, the novel in premodern China, the early Spanish novel, and much else, including readings of novels from around the world.These books will be essential reading for all students and scholars of literature.

Van Day Truex: The Man Who Defined Twentieth-Century Taste and Style


Adam Lewis - 2001
    Under his leadership, Parsons School of Design became the foremost school for interior design and fashion in the United States and he influenced generations of students entering these fields. But his greatest legacy -- beautifully chronicled in Van Day Truex -- is his long reign as design director at Tiffany & Co., which he transformed into a model for unprecedented style and grace. Interior designers, architects, fashion devotees, and furniture designers will treasure this first-ever portrait of Truex. This magnificent volume -- illustrated throughout with color and black-and-white photographs -- is a glorious tribute to one of America's foremost designers and a fascinating biography of the man Brooke Astor called "one of the most charming men I ever knew".

Come in Alone


Warren Ellis - 2001
    Part social commentary, part sitting at-the-feet-of-Socrates, part kick in the ass, COME IN ALONE was the column that would zig when you thought it would zag. This collection of all fifty-two columns includes Ellis' unique take on the comic book industry, features first-class interviews with top-flight comic book professionals, and even includes the legendary Old Bastard's Manifesto. Wrap this all up in an evocative and spooky cover by Brian Wood, and you've got a collection of commentary that midwifed the birth of the comic book industry into the 21st century.

Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946-1980


Caroline S. Hau - 2001
    Through close readings of the works of a number of writers, it argues that the long-standing affinity between Philippine literature and nationalism is based, in part, on the power of literature to formulate and work through a set of questions central to nationalist debates on the possibility and necessity of social change. It asks: What is the relationship between knowledge and action? Between the personal and political? Between the foreign and Filipino? Between culture and history, culture and politics, culture and economics?

Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation


Glenn C. Arbery - 2001
    Through an examination of the work of poets and novelists who have managed to garner honor -- including Shakespeare, Homer, and Emily Dickinson -- and those whose reputations are of more recent vintage and therefore more difficult to evaluate such as Tom Wolfe, Seamus Heaney, and Toni Morrison -- Glenn Arbery explores the title question with elegant prose and subtle criticism.

In Search of Opera


Carolyn Abbate - 2001
    Paying tribute to music's realization by musicians and singers, she argues that operatic works are indelibly bound to the contingency of live singing, playing, and staging. She seeks a middle ground between operas as abstractions and performance as the phenomenon that brings opera into being.Weaving between opera's facts of life and a series of works including The Magic Flute, Parsifal, and Pell�as, Abbate explores a spectrum of attitudes towards musical performance, which range from euphoric visions of singers as creators to uncanny images of musicians as lifeless objects that have been resuscitated by scripts. In doing so, she touches upon several critical issues: the Wagner problem; coloratura, virtuosity, and their critics; the implications of disembodied voice in opera and film; mechanical music; the mortality of musical sound; and opera's predilection for scenes positing mysterious unheard music. An intersection between transcendence and intense physical grounding, she asserts, is a quintessential element of the genre, one source of the rapture that operas and their singers can engender in listeners. In Search of Opera mediates between an experience of opera that can be passionate and intuitive, and an intellectual engagement with opera as a complicated aesthetic phenomenon. Marrying philosophical speculation to historical detail, Abbate contemplates a central dilemma: the ineffability of music and the diverse means by which a fugitive art is best expressed in words. All serious devotees of opera will want to read this imaginative book by s music-critical virtuoso.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2001


Harold M. Evans - 2001
    The Awards are the magazine equivalents to the Pulitzer Prizes of the newspaper industry. Each year, hundreds of editors-in-chief, journalism professors, and art directors winnow more than a thousand submissions to about seventy-five nominees in categories such as Reporting, Feature Writing, Profiles, Public Interest, Essays, Reviews and Criticism. Interest in the nominees is keen, and this collection will allow people both in the magazine world and beyond to find in one place, read, and admire the year's best. It is a wonderful, browsable volume of interest to writers and readers who appreciate magazine writing and journalism at its highest level.

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann


Ritchie Robertson - 2001
    In addition to introductory chapters on all the main works of fiction and the essays and diaries, there are four chapters examining Mann's oeuvre in relation to major themes. A final chapter looks at the pitfalls of translating Mann into English. The essays are well supported by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading.

Strange Good Fortune: Essays on Contemporary Poetry


David Wojahn - 2001
    Passionate in his engagement with both the practice of poetry and in the observation of verse as it exists within an increasingly professionalized and sometimes perplexing scene, Wojahn follows in the tradition of poet-critics such as Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz, offering provocative and insightful observations about such topics as the persistence of autobiographical poetry, poetry and politics, the creative writing industry, American poets and travel, recent literary hoaxes, and the poetry of depression and invective. The essays discuss not only familiar figures such as Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, and Robert Lowell but also under-appreciated poets such as Weldon Kees, Frederick Seidel, and Armand Schwerner, as well as younger poets such as Mark Doty, Susan Mitchell, and Denis Johnson. Wojahn's is a humanistic and practical criticism, devoid of theoretical cant, and capable of both acute analysis of individual poems and larger generalizations about poetic method. Forceful, readable, and unflappable, Strange Good Fortune is the work of a poet writing about what he cares about; it is not hobbled by jargon or addled by theory.

Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry


Linda Gregerson - 2001
    This lyric is distinguished, she argues, not only by its unprecedented variety and abundance, but by its persistent and supple engagement with form. In detailed examinations of work by John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Louis Glück, James Schuyler, Muriel Rukeyser, C. K. Williams, Rita Dove, Philip Levine, Heather McHugh, William Meredith, John Hollander, and a host of other recent and contemporary poets, Gregerson documents the depth and richness of American lyric production at the turn of the twenty-first century.In its scruples and reservations as in its discriminating explanations, Negative Capability unearths the contours of a distinctive American poetic tradition. This book is a rich symbiosis of critical and poetic intelligence. It is also a work of passionate advocacy.The book will appeal to those interested in the current state of American poetry: practicing poets, readers and students of literature and literary criticism, professional critics.Linda Gregerson is an acclaimed poet and literary critic. She is author of The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic and two poetry collections, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep and Fire in the Conservatory. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, where she heads the Visiting Writers Program.

The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume F: The Twentieth Century


Sarah N. Lawall - 2001
    W. Norton changed the way world literature is taught by introducing The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition. Leading the field once again, Norton is proud to publish the anthology for the new century, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Second Edition. Now published in six paperback volumes (packaged in two attractive slipcases), the new anthology boasts slimmer volumes, thicker paper, a bolder typeface, and dozens of newly included or newly translated works from around the world. The Norton Anthology of World Literature represents continuity as well as change. Like its predecessor, the anthology is a compact library of world literature, offering an astounding forty-three complete longer works, more than fifty prose works, over one hundred lyric poems, and twenty-three plays. More portable, more suitable for period courses, more pleasant to read, and more attuned to current teaching and research trends, The Norton Anthology of World Literature remains the most authoritative, comprehensive, and teachable anthology for the world literature survey.

Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s)


Takashi Fujitani - 2001
    Arguing that much is lost or erased when the Asia-Pacific War(s) are reduced to the 1941–1945 war between Japan and the United States, this collection challenges mainstream memories of the Second World War in favor of what were actually multiple, widespread conflicts. The contributors recuperate marginalized or silenced memories of wars throughout the region—not only in Japan and the United States but also in China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea. Firmly based on the insight that memory is always mediated and that the past is not a stable object, the volume demonstrates that we can intervene positively yet critically in the recovery and reinterpretation of events and experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of the past. The contributors—an international list of anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, literary scholars, and activists—show how both dominant and subjugated memories have emerged out of entanglements with such forces as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism. They consider both how the past is remembered and also what the consequences may be of privileging one set of memories over others. Specific objects of study range from photographs, animation, songs, and films to military occupations and attacks, minorities in wartime, “comfort women,” commemorative events, and postwar activism in pursuing redress and reparations. Perilous Memories is a model for war memory intervention and will be of interest to historians and other scholars and activists engaged with collective memory, colonial studies, U.S. and Asian history, and cultural studies.Contributors. Chen Yingzhen, Chungmoo Choi, Vicente M. Diaz, Arif Dirlik, T. Fujitani, Ishihara Masaie, Lamont Lindstrom, George Lipsitz, Marita Sturken, Toyonaga Keisaburo, Utsumi Aiko, Morio Watanabe, Geoffrey M. White, Diana Wong, Daqing Yang, Lisa Yoneyama

Poetry as Persuasion


Carl Dennis - 2001
    Dennis identifies the qualities of passion, discrimination, and inclusiveness as essential in creating a compelling speaker. This emphasis on character leads to fresh discussions of point of view, irony, myth, and genre. Each subject is developed through careful readings of a wide variety of poets--from Whitman and Dickinson to contemporaries. Lucidly written, Poetry as Persuasion offers both inspiration and important advice for practicing poets, and at the same time provides anyone with an interest in poetry a fresh understanding of its appeal.

Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance


Jill Dolan - 2001
    As teacher, administrator, author, and performer, Dolan places her professional labor in relation to issues of community, pedagogy, public culture, administration, university missions, and citizenship. She works from the assumption that the production and dissemination of knowledge can be forms of activism, extending conversations on radical politics in the academy by other writers, such as Cary Nelson, Michael Berube, Gerald Graff, and Richard Ohmann. The five interconnected essays in Geographies of Learning map the divisions and dissensions that stall the production of progressive knowledge in theatre and performance studies, LGQ studies, and women's studies, while at the same time exploring some of the theoretical and pedagogical tools these fields have to offer one another.

How Milton Works


Stanley Fish - 2001
    For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an aesthetic of testimony: every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama - anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value.

Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America


Deborah Nelson - 2001
    While the public declarations of the Supreme Court and the private declamations of the lyric poet may seem unrelated, both express the upheavals in American notions of privacy that marked the Cold War era. Nelson situates the poetry and legal decisions as part of a far wider anxiety about privacy that erupted across the social, cultural, and political spectrum during this period. She explores the panic over the "death of privacy" aroused by broad changes in postwar culture: the growth of suburbia, the advent of television, the popularity of psychoanalysis, the arrival of computer databases, and the spectacles of confession associated with McCarthyism.Examining this interchange between poetry and law at its most intense moments of reflection in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Deborah Nelson produces a rhetorical analysis of a privacy concept integral to postwar America's self-definition and to bedrock contradictions in Cold War ideology. Nelson argues that the desire to stabilize privacy in a constitutional right and the movement toward confession in postwar American poetry were not simply manifestations of the anxiety about privacy. Supreme Court justices and confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Sylvia Plath were redefining the nature of privacy itself. Close reading of the poetry alongside the Supreme Court's shifting definitions of privacy in landmark decisions reveals a broader and deeper cultural metaphor at work.

Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James


Clive James - 2001
    Including classic pieces such as Postcard from Rome, and his observations on Margaret Thatcher, it contains funny examinations of characters like Barry Humphries, while elsewhere showcasing James's more reflective and analytical style.

Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn


Lafcadio Hearn - 2001
    Hearn's influence on our perceptions of New Orleans, however, has unjustly remained unknown.In ten years of serving as a correspondent and selling his writing in such periodicals as the New Orleans Daily Item, Times-Democrat, Harper's Weekly, and Scribner's Magazine he crystallized the way Americans view New Orleans and its south Louisiana environs. Hearn was prolific, producing colorful and vivid sketches, vignettes, news articles, essays, translations of French and Spanish literature, book reviews, short stories, and woodblock prints.He haunted the French Quarter to cover such events as the death of Marie Laveau. His descriptions of the seamy side of New Orleans, tainted with voodoo, debauchery, and mystery made a lasting impression on the nation. Denizens of the Crescent City and devotees who flock there for escapades and pleasures will recognize these original tales of corruption, of decay and benign frivolity, and of endless partying. With his writing, Hearn virtually invented the national image of New Orleans as a kind of alternative reality to the United States as a whole.S. Frederick Starr, a leading authority on New Orleans and Louisiana culture, edits the volume, adding an introduction that places Hearn in a social, historical, and literary context.Hearn was sensitive to the unique cultural milieu of New Orleans and Louisiana. During the decade that he spent in New Orleans, Hearn collected songs for the well-known New York music critic Henry Edward Krehbiel and extensively studied Creole French, making valuable and lasting contributions to ethnomusicology and linguistics.Hearn's writings on Japan are famous and have long been available. But Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn brings together a selection of Hearn's nonfiction on New Orleans and Louisiana, creating a previously unavailable sampling. In these pieces Hearn, an Anglo-Greek immigrant who came to America by way of Ireland, is alternately playful, lyrical, and morbid. This gathering also features ten newly discovered sketches. Using his broad stylistic palette, Hearn conjures up a lost New Orleans which later writers such as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams used to evoke the city as both reality and symbol.Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was a prolific writer, critic, amateur engraver, and journalist. His many books-on a diverse range of subjects-include La Cuisine Creole: A Collection of Culinary Recipes (1885), Gombo Zhebes (1885), Chita (1889), and Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894).

The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg


William Beard - 2001
    His provocative work has stimulated debate and received major retrospectives in museums, galleries, and cinematheques around the world. William Beard's The Artist as Monster was the first book-length scholarly work in English on Cronenberg's films, analyzing all of his features from Stereo (1969) to Crash (1996). In this paperback edition, Beard includes new chapters on eXistenZ (1999) and Spider (2002).Through close readings and visual analyses, Beard argues that the structure of Cronenberg's cinema is based on a dichotomy between, on the one hand, order, reason, repression, and control, and on the other, liberation, sexuality, disease, and the disintegration of self and of the boundaries that define society. The instigating figure in the films is a scientist character who, as Cronenberg evolves as a filmmaker, gradually metamorphoses into an artist, with the ground of liberation and catastrophe shifting from experimental subject to the self.Bringing a wealth of analytical observation and insight into Cronenberg's films, Beard's sweeping, comprehensive work has established the benchmark for the study of one of Canada's best-known filmmakers.

The Poetry Blues: Essays and Interviews


William Matthews - 2001
    Throughout, Matthews writes about his love of music, language, poetry, and art while illuminating the subtle and important ways in which the things about which he feels passionately help to define and shape him.The book begins with a candid autobiographical essay, followed by an interview on the influence of jazz music on the poet's early work. Further into the collection, Matthews delves into the nature of the epigram and the work of jazz great Charles Mingus. Along the way, this revered poet offers insight into the work of this contemporaries, including W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Hayden Carruth, and Richard Hugo.the book is as much autobiography and cultural criticism as it is literary nonfiction. It will be of interest to writers and teachers of writing, as well as to lovers of literature, language and music.Sebastian Matthews teaches writing at Warren Wilson College. Stanley Plumly is Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland.

Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature


Leslie Bow - 2001
    Images of their disloyalty pervade American culture, from the daughter who is branded a traitor to family for adopting American ways, to the war bride who immigrates in defiance of her countrymen, to a figure such as Yoko Ono, accused of breaking up the Beatles with her seduction of John Lennon. Leslie Bow here explores how representations of females transgressing the social order play out in literature by Asian American women. Questions of ethnic belonging, sexuality, identification, and political allegiance are among the issues raised by such writers as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Bharati Mukherjee, Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Sky Lee, Le Ly Hayslip, Wendy Law-Yone, Fiona Cheong, and Nellie Wong. Beginning with the notion that feminist and Asian American identity are mutually exclusive, Bow analyzes how women serve as boundary markers between ethnic or national collectives in order to reveal the male-based nature of social cohesion.In exploring the relationship between femininity and citizenship, liberal feminism and American racial discourse, and women's domestic abuse and human rights, the author suggests that Asian American women not only mediate sexuality's construction as a determiner of loyalty but also manipulate that construction as a tool of political persuasion in their writing. The language of betrayal, she argues, offers a potent rhetorical means of signaling how belonging is policed by individuals and by the state. Bow's bold analysis exposes the stakes behind maintaining ethnic, feminist, and national alliances, particularly for women who claim multiple loyalties.

The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence


Anne Fernihough - 2001
    H. Lawrence offers a series of new perspectives on one of the most important and controversial writers of the twentieth century. These specially commissioned essays offer diverse and stimulating readings of Lawrence's major novels, short stories, poetry and plays, and place Lawrence's writing in a variety of literary, cultural, and political contexts, such as modernism, sexual and ethnic identity, and psychoanalysis. The volume, which will be of interest to scholars and students alike, features a detailed chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches


Christian R. Weisser - 2001
    Never before have the intersections between ecotheory and composition studies in theory and pedagogy been addressed in this much depth or detail. As universities become increasingly concerned with issues of the environment within academic disciplines across the spectrum, this book brings together a diverse group of prominent voices to discuss the development of ecocomposition and its possibilities, and to argue for a greening of composition studies through which to engage the world in which we live.

Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde


Allan Antliff - 2001
    In Anarchist Modernism—the first in-depth exploration of the role of anarchism in the formation of early American modernism—Allan Antliff reveals that modernists participated in a wide-ranging movement that encompassed lifestyles, literature, and art, as well as politics. Drawing on a wealth of hitherto unknown information, including interviews and reproductions of lost works, he examines anarchism's influence on a telling cross-section of artists such as Robert Henri, Elie Nadelman, Man Ray, and Rockwell Kent. He also traces the interactions between cultural figures and thinkers including Emma Goldman, Alfred Stieglitz, Ezra Pound, and Ananda Coomaraswamy.By situating American art's evolution in the progressive politics of the time, Antliff offers a richly illustrated chronicle of the anarchist movement and also revives the creative agency of those who shaped and implemented modernism for radical ends.

Joseph Heller's Catch-22


Harold Bloom - 2001
    Collects twelve critical essays on Heller's classic novel of World War II, commenting on its structure and recurring themes, as well as the author's use of flashbacks.

Plato's "Laws": The Discovery of Being


Seth Benardete - 2001
    In contrast to the Republic, which presents an abstract ideal not intended for any actual community, the Laws seems to provide practical guidelines for the establishment and maintenance of political order in the real world. With this book, the distinguished classicist Seth Benardete offers an insightful analysis and commentary on this rich and complex dialogue. Each of the chapters corresponds to one of the twelve books of the Laws, illuminating the major themes and arguments, which have to do with theology, the soul, justice, and education.The Greek word for law, "nomos," also means musical tune. Bernardete shows how music—in the broadest sense, including drama, epic poetry, and even puppetry—mediates between reason and the city in Plato's philosophy of law. Most broadly, however, Benardete here uncovers the concealed ontological dimension of the Laws, explaining why it is concealed and how it comes to light. In establishing the coherence and underlying organization of Plato's last dialogue, Benardete makes a significant contribution to Platonic studies.

Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism


Shannon Sullivan - 2001
    Early in the 20th century, John Dewey elaborated human existence as a set of patterns of behavior or actions shaped by the environment. Underscoring the continued relevance of his thought, Sullivan brings Dewey into conversation with Continental philosophers--Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty--and feminist philosophers--Butler and Harding--to expand thinking about the body. Emphasizing topics such as the role of habit, the discursivity of bodies, communication and meaning, personal and cultural structures of gender, the improvement of bodily experience, and understandings of truth and objectivity, Living Across and Through Skins acknowledges the importance of the body's experience without placing it in opposition to psychological, cultural, and social aspects of human life. By focusing on what bodies do, rather than what they are, Sullivan prompts a closer look at concrete, physical transactions that might be changed to improve human experiences of the world.

Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the "Death of the Subject"


Rei Terada - 2001
    This revolutionary work transforms the burgeoning interdisciplinary debate on emotion by suggesting, instead, a positive relation between the death of the subject and the very existence of emotion.Reading the writings of Derrida and de Man--theorists often seen as emotionally contradictory and cold--Terada finds grounds for construing emotion as nonsubjective. This project offers fresh interpretations of deconstruction's most important texts, and of Continental and Anglo-American philosophers from Descartes to Deleuze and Dennett. At the same time, it revitalizes poststructuralist theory by deploying its methodologies in a new field, the philosophy of emotion, to reach a startling conclusion: if we really were subjects, we would have no emotions at all.Engaging debates in philosophy, literary criticism, psychology, and cognitive science from a poststructuralist and deconstructive perspective, Terada's work is essential for the renewal of critical thought in our day.

The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place


Scott MacDonald - 2001
    Scott MacDonald contextualizes his discussion with a wide-ranging and deeply informed analysis of the depiction of place in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, painting, and photography. Accessible and engaging, this book examines the manner in which these films represent nature and landscape in particular, and location in general. It offers us both new readings of the films under consideration and an expanded sense of modern film history. Among the many antecedents to the films and videos discussed here are Thomas Cole's landscape painting, Thoreau's Walden, Olmsted and Vaux's Central Park, and Eadweard Muybridge's panoramic photographs of San Francisco. MacDonald analyzes the work of many accomplished avant-garde filmmakers: Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie, James Benning, Stan Brakhage, Nathaniel Dorsky, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Larry Gottheim, Robert Huot, Peter Hutton, Marjorie Keller, Rose Lowder, Marie Menken, J.J. Murphy, Andrew Noren, Pat O'Neill, Leighton Pierce, Carolee Schneemann, and Chick Strand. He also examines a variety of recent commercial feature films, as well as independent experiments in documentary and such contributions to independent video history as George Kuchar's Weather Diaries and Ellen Spiro's Roam Sweet Home. MacDonald reveals the spiritual underpinnings of these works and shows how issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and class are conveyed as filmmakers attempt to discover forms of Edenic serenity within the Machine of modern society. Both personal and scholarly, The Garden in the Machine will be an invaluable resource for those interested in investigating and experiencing a broader spectrum of cinema in their teaching, in their research, and in their lives.

Kimota! The Miracleman Companion


George KhouryMark Buckingham - 2001
    Along with acclaimed writer Neil Gaiman and a host of excellent artists, Moore produced what is widely considered to be the best superhero story ever written.Kimota!: The Miracleman Companion tells all the behind-the-scenes stories during its short run at Eclipse Comics and why the final Neil Gaiman-scripted issue was never released, including interviews with Alan Moore, John Totleben, Neil Gaiman, Mark Buckingham, Barry Windsor-Smith, Beau Smith, Cat Yronwode, Rick Veitch, and others along with unpublished art, uninked pencils, sketches, & concept drawings (including unseen art from the never-published issue #25) by Totleben, Windsor-Smith, Buckingham, Mike Deodato, Jim Lee, as well as a never-published 8-page Moore/Totleben story and an unused Moore script!

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook


John F. Callahan - 2001
    A number of the latter are from letters never before published; also published here for the first time is Part II of Ellison's Working Notes on Invisible Man, an undated exposition of his authorial intentions, probably written in 1946 or 1947.The ten essays are a selection of the most perceptive and comprehensive essays written on Invisible Man during the last thirty-five years, including an essay by Kenneth Burke, which began as a letter to Ellison about the novel, written before its publication in 1952. Also among the essays is LarryNeal's Ellison's Zoot Suit, in which he finds the novel an exemplary enactment in fiction of the black aesthetic.The essays explore topics of narrative form, classical and vernacular points of reference, and the relationship between the themes of love and politics. Taken together with Ellison's Working Notes and later commentary on the novel, these essays account for the continuing appeal of Invisible Manmore than fifty years after its publication. An editor's introduction and a full bibliography accompany the essays, selections from Ellison's writings, and informal statements on his novel. The volume offers a rich variety of interpretations of Invisible Man for students and scholars of Ellison.