Best of
Criticism

2010

Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries


Helen Vendler - 2010
    Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson's work as a poet, "from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath." Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler's selection reveals Emily Dickinson's development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called "the history and science of feeling."In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, "the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes." All of Dickinson's preoccupations--death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought--are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet's startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as "a master" of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

The Great Movies III


Roger Ebert - 2010
    As Ebert noted in the introduction to the first collection of those pieces, “They are not the greatest films of all time, because all lists of great movies are a foolish attempt to codify works which must stand alone. But it’s fair to say: If you want to take a tour of the landmarks of the first century of cinema, start here.Enter The Great Movies III, Ebert’s third collection of essays on the crème de la crème of the silver screen, each one a model of critical appreciation and a blend of love and analysis that will send readers back to the films with a fresh set of eyes and renewed enthusiasm—or maybe even lead to a first-time viewing. From The Godfather: Part II to Groundhog Day, from The Last Picture Show to Last Tango in Paris, the hundred pieces gathered here display a welcome balance between the familiar and the esoteric, spanning Hollywood blockbusters and hidden gems, independent works and foreign language films alike. Each essay draws on Ebert’s vast knowledge of the cinema, its fascinating history, and its breadth of techniques, introducing newcomers to some of the most exceptional movies ever made, while revealing new insights to connoisseurs as well.Named the most powerful pundit in America by Forbes magazine, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Roger Ebert is inarguably the most prominent and influential authority on the cinema today. The Great Movies III is sure to please his many fans and further enhance his reputation as America’s most respected—and trusted—film critic.

Novels by Barbara Kingsolver: The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, the Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, Prodigal Summer


Books LLC - 2010
    Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, the Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, Prodigal Summer. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The Bean Trees, first published in 1988, is the first book written by Barbara Kingsolver, followed by a sequel Pigs in Heaven. The protagonist of the novel, Taylor Greer, a native of Kentucky, finds herself in Oklahoma near Cherokee territory. The novel begins with a woman leaving a Cherokee infant with Taylor. The remainder of the novel traces the experiences of Taylor and the child, whom Taylor has named Turtle. Covering Turtle's early childhood, the story includes a colorful cast of characters, including a Guatemalan couple and Mattie, the owner of Jesus Is Lord Used Tires. The novel also makes reference to the issue of Native American parental rights. The Bean Trees opens in rural Kentucky. Taylor goes on to tell the story of how she is scared of tires. Taylor was the one to escape small-town life. She did so by avoiding pregnancy, getting a job working at the hospital, and saving up enough money to buy herself an old Volkswagen bug. About five years after high school graduation, she decides to go on a journey to see what life has to offer her. Her car breaks down in the middle of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. As she sits in her car, getting ready to leave, a woman approaches and puts a baby in the front seat of Taylors car, telling her to take it. She tells Taylor she is the sister of the childs mother and that the baby was born in a Plymouth car. The woman leaves with no further explanation. Taylor is bewildered, but drives off with the child. They go to a hotel, and while bathing the baby, Taylor discovers that the baby, a girl, has been abused and sexually molested. She names the baby Tur...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=138820

Running Through Corridors, Volume 1: The 60s - Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who


Robert Shearman - 2010
    In Running Through Corridors, two Doctor Who lovers of old - Robert Shearman and Toby Hadoke - embark on an epic quest of friendship: spend the gap year of 2009 (when Doctor Who consisted of a handful of specials rather than a full season) re-watching the whole of Who two episodes a day, every day, from the show's start in 1963 and ending with David Tennant's swan song on New Year's, 2010.This three-volume series contains Shearman and Hadoke's diary of that experience - a grand opus of their wry observations about the show, their desire to see the good in every story, and their chronicle of the real-life changes to Who in that year.With this book, Who fans will feel that they're watching along with Shearman (World Fantasy Award winner, Hugo Award nominee and writer on the new Doctor Who) and Hadoke (renowned stage performer for his one-man comedy show, Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf) as they make their grand journey through the world's most wonderful and longest-running drama series.

Poetry is Not a Project


Dorothea Lasky - 2010
    Calling poets away from civilization, back towards the wilderness, Lasky brazenly urges artists away from conceptual programs, resurrecting imagination and faith-in-the-uncertain as saviors from mediocrity.

Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light


Valerie Tarico - 2010
    But a belief that the Bible is literally perfect puts them in the odd position of defending falsehood, bigotry, and even violence. What do Evangelicals believe? And how do these beliefs subvert humanity’s shared moral values, including the compassionate ministry of Jesus in the New Testament? Trusting Doubt provides a clear picture of this variant of Christianity, which has risen to political prominence and now threatens individual rights and collective stability. Raised in a staunch fundamentalist family and educated at Wheaton College—home of the Billy Graham Center for Evangelicalism—Valerie Tarico speaks as a former “insider.” Trusting Doubt offers alternative biblical explanations that are compatible with contemporary Christianity. Gratefully, Tarico’s unique voice as a former Evangelical provides a scholarly yet accessible path away from faulty fundamentalism and toward Christian clarity—a path based on logic, love, and the quest for spiritual truth.

Fifty Orwell Essays


George Orwell - 2010
    As well as extracts from well-known books such as 'Down and out in Paris and London' and 'The Road to Wigan Pier', this volume includes classic articles such as 'Killing an Elephant' and 'Good Bad Books, ' as well as lesser known pieces. Whether or not readers are familiar with his work or sympathatic to his views, they are sure to be seduced by Orwell's logical mind and lucid prose in this handsome new edition of his wide-ranging and stimulating essays. Contents: The Spike; A Hanging (1931); Bookshop Memories (1936); Shooting an Elephant (1936); Down the Mine (1937) (from "The Road to Wigan Pier"); North and South (from "The Road to Wigan Pier") (1937); Spilling the Spanish Beans (1937); Marrakech (1939); Boys' Weeklies and Frank Richards's Reply (1940); Charles Dickens (1940); Charles Reade (1940); Inside The Whale (1940); The Art of Donald Mcgill (1941); The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941); Wells, Hitler And The World State (1941); Looking Back On The Spanish War (1942); Rudyard Kipling (1942); Mark Twain - the Licensed Jester (1943); Poetry and the Microphone (1943); W. B. Yeats (1943); Arthur Koestler (1944); Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944); Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944); Antisemitism in Britain (1945); Freedom of the Park (1945); Future of a Ruined Germany (1945); Good Bad Books; In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse (1945); Nonsense Poetry; Notes on Nationalism (1945); Revenge is Sour (1945); The Sporting Spirit; You and the Atomic Bomb (1945); A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray; A Nice Cup of Tea (1946); Books vs. Cigarettes; Confessions of a Book Reviewer; Decline of the English Murder; How the Poor Die; James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution; Pleasure Spots; Politics and the English Language; Politics vs. Literature: an Examination of Gulliver's Travels; Riding Down from Bangor; Some Thoughts on the Common Toad; The Prevention of Literature; Why I Write (1946); Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool; Such, Such Were the Joys (1947); Writers and Leviathan (1948); Reflections on Gandhi.

Letters


Saul Bellow - 2010
     Saul Bellow was a dedicated correspondent until a couple of years before his death, and his letters, spanning eight decades, show us a twentieth-century life in all its richness and complexity. Friends, lovers, wives, colleagues, and fans all cross these pages. Some of the finest letters are to Bellow's fellow writers-William Faulkner, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Ralph Ellison, Cynthia Ozick, and Wright Morris. Intimate, ironical, richly observant, and funny, these letters reveal the influcences at work in the man, and illuminate his enduring legacy-the novels that earned him a Nobel Prize and the admiration of the world over. Saul Bellow: Letters is a major literary event and an important edition to Bellow's incomparable body of work.

Spinoza's Ethics


Beth Lord - 2010
    Upon its release, Spinoza's Ethics was banned; today it is the quintessential example of philosophical method. Although acknowledged as difficult, the book is widely taught in philosophy, literature, history, and politics. This introduction is designed to be read side by side with Spinoza's work. As a guide to the style, vocabulary, and arguments of the Ethics, it offers a range of interpretive possibilities to prepare students to become conversant with Spinoza's philosophical method and his challenge to conventional thinking.

Graphic Women


Hillary L. Chute - 2010
    Aline Kominsky-Crumb is a pioneer of the autobiographical form, showing women's everyday lives, especially through the lens of the body. Phoebe Gloeckner places teenage sexuality at the center of her work, while Lynda Barry uses collage and the empty spaces between frames to capture the process of memory. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis experiments with visual witness to frame her personal and historical narrative, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home meticulously incorporates family documents by hand to re-present the author's past.These five cartoonists move the art of autobiography and graphic storytelling in new directions, particularly through the depiction of sex, gender, and lived experience. Hillary L. Chute explores their verbal and visual techniques, which have transformed autobiographical narrative and contemporary comics. Through the interplay of words and images, and the counterpoint of presence and absence, they express difficult, even traumatic stories while engaging with the workings of memory. Intertwining aesthetics and politics, these women both rewrite and redesign the parameters of acceptable discourse.

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice


Gary McDowell - 2010
    With its pioneering introduction, this collection provides a comprehensive history of the development of the prose poem up to its current widespread appeal. Half critical study and half anthology, The Field Guide to Prose Poetry is a not-to-be-missed companion for readers and writers of poetry, as well as students and teachers of creative writing.

The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600


Steven Moore - 2010
    Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, "The Novel: An Alternative History" is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the premodern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these premodern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining - "The Novel: An Alternative History" is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.

Feminaissance


Christine WertheimMeiling Cheng - 2010
    Fiction. Essays. Women's Studies. FEMINAISSANCE = collectivity; feminine ecriture; the politics of writing; text and voice; the body as a site of contestation, insurgence and pleasure; race and writing; gender as performance; writing about other women writers; economic inequities; Helene Cixous; monstrosity; madness; and aesthetics.FEMINAISSANCE = Dodie Bellamy, Caroline Bergvall, Meiling Cheng, Wanda Coleman, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Kraus, Susan McCabe, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Vanessa Place, Juliana Spahr, Christine Wertheim, Stephanie Young, Lidia Yuknavitch.FEMINAISSANCE = "If the fact that women do not say 'We' was one of the constitutive problems for 20th century feminism, the fact that women do and still clearly feel the need to say 'We' is just as rich and interesting a topic for feminism today. The writings gathered here prove feminism to be alive and more relevant to all genders than ever: not just because feminist discourse remains a political necessity, but because of its artistic and intellectual pleasures." Sianne Ngai"

The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read!


Jim Trombetta - 2010
    These outrageous comic book images, censored by Congress in an infamous televised U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating juvenile delinquency in 1954, have rarely been seen since they were first published—and are revealed once again in all of their eye-popping glory. Jim Trombetta, in his commentary and informative text, provides a detailed history and context for these stories and their creators, spinning a tale of horror and government censorship as scary as the stories themselves.Bonus DVD--Confidential File, a rare 25-minute TV show that first aired on October 9, 1955, about the "evils" of comic books and their effect on juvenile delinquency is included with the book.  Please note that the enclosed DVD begins with a 58-second test pattern, followed by the tv show.  Praise for The Horror! The Horror!:"In addition to offering a generous helping of controversial comics . . . Trombetta's book provides insightful history." -New York Times Book Review

The Collected Prose, 1948-1998


Zbigniew Herbert - 2010
    Though Herbert is very much an Eastern European writer, the urgency, vitality, and relevance of his work extend far beyond the borders of his particular region and his particular time. His fascination with other subjects--from painting to all things Dutch--enriched the scope and depth of his poetry, and made for compelling explorations in his essays and short prose pieces.The first collected English edition of his prose work, this outstanding volume consists of four books--Labryinth on the Sea, Still Life with a Bridle, King of the Ants, and Barbarian in the Garden. Brilliant and erudite, dazzling and witty, these essays survey the geography of humanity, its achievements and its foibles. From Western civilization's past, as witnessed through the Greek and Roman landscape, to musings on the artistic that celebrate the author's discriminating eye, poetic sensibility, and gift for irony, humor, and the absurd; from a sage retelling of myths and tales that became twentieth-century philosophical parables of human behavior to thoughts on art, culture, and history inspired by journeys in France, Italy, and the Netherlands, Collected Prose is a rich compendium that celebrates the mastery and wisdom of a remarkable artist.

One Fine Potion: The Literary Magic of Harry Potter


Greg Garrett - 2010
    K. Rowling's Harry Potter series topped the best-seller charts, inspired the highest-grossing film series of all time, and has now become a $250 million Universal Studio theme park. What is it about this story that has ignited such fandom and struck such a chord with people around the world? As English professor, culture critic, and Potter devotee Greg Garrett explains, these novels not only entertain but teach deeply held truths about ourselves, others, and the world around us. Unlocking the textual intricacies behind the Harry Potter narrative, Garrett reveals Rowling's magical formula--one that, he contends, earns her a place right next to the literary giants of old.--Craig Detwiler, Director, Center for Entertainment, Media, and Culture, Pepperdine University

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper


Alexandra Harris - 2010
    They showed that “the modern”need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest.A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen,and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

Disability Aesthetics


Tobin Anthony Siebers - 2010
    Along the way, Tobin Siebers revisits the beautiful and the sublime, 'degenerate' art and 'disqualified' bodies, culture wars and condemned neighborhoods, the art of Marc Quinn and the fiction of Junot Díaz---and much, much more. Disability Aesthetics is a stunning achievement, a must-read for anyone interested in how to understand the world we half create and half perceive."---Michael Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor in Literature, Pennsylvania State University"Rich with examples of the disabled body in both historical and modern art, Tobin Siebers's new book explores how disability problematizes commonly accepted ideas about aesthetics and beauty. For Siebers, disability is not a pejorative condition as much as it is a form of embodied difference. He is as comfortable discussing the Venus de Milo as he is discussing Andy Warhol. Disability Aesthetics is a prescient and much-needed contribution to visual & critical studies."---Joseph Grigely, Professor of Visual and Critical Studies, The School of the Art Institute of ChicagoDisability Aesthetics is the first attempt to theorize the representation of disability in modern art and visual culture. It claims that the modern in art is perceived as disability, and that disability is evolving into an aesthetic value in itself. It argues that the essential arguments at the heart of the American culture wars in the late twentieth century involved the rejection of disability both by targeting certain artworks as "sick" and by characterizing these artworks as representative of a sick culture. The book also tracks the seminal role of National Socialism in perceiving the powerful connection between modern art and disability. It probes a variety of central aesthetic questions, producing a new understanding of art vandalism, an argument about the centrality of wounded bodies to global communication, and a systematic reading of the use put to aesthetics to justify the oppression of disabled people. In this richly illustrated and accessibly written book, Tobin Siebers masterfully demonstrates the crucial roles that the disabled mind and disabled body have played in the evolution of modern aesthetics, unveiling disability as a unique resource discovered by modern art and then embraced by it as a defining concept.Tobin Siebers is V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature and Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His many books include Disability Theory and The Subject and Other Subjects: On Ethical, Aesthetic, and Political Identity.A volume in the series Corporealities: Discourses of Disability

Handbook of Research on Children's and Young Adult Literature


Shelby Wolf - 2010
    Distinguished by its multidisciplinary approach, it describes and analyzes the different aspects of literary reading, texts, and contexts to illuminate how the book is transformed within and across different academic figurations of reading and interpreting children's literature.Part one considers perspectives on readers and reading literature in home, school, library, and community settings.Part two introduces analytic frames for studying young adult novels, picturebooks, indigenous literature, graphic novels, and other genres. Chapters include commentary on literary experiences and creative production from renowned authors and illustrators.Part three focuses on the social contexts of literary study, with chapters on censorship, awards, marketing, and literary museums. The singular contribution of this Handbook is to lay the groundwork for colleagues across disciplines to redraw the map of their separately figured worlds, thus to enlarge the scope of scholarship and dialogue as well as push ahead into uncharted territory.

What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus?: An Irreverent History of Christianity


Thomas Quinn - 2010
    It finds humor, irony, and occasional insight amid the inconsistencies, absurdities, hypocrisies, and flat out weirdness that too often passes for eternal truth. Think of it as a history of religion as done by The Daily Show. Pitting actual Scripture against pious propaganda, Thomas Quinn treks through chapter and verse of the New Testament, explores the sordid saga of medieval beliefs (including End-of-the-World panics and fights about what kind of stuff Jesus was made of), and reveals some of the shocking attitudes of America’s founders toward religion. It isn’t always pretty, but it’s usually good for a laugh. If war is too important to leave to the generals, religion is too important to leave to the preachers. Skeptics need evangelists, too.

On Whitman


C.K. Williams - 2010
    K. Williams's personal reflection on the art of Walt WhitmanIn this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around Walt Whitman and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it--to explore why Whitman's epic continues to inspire and sometimes daunt him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction to Whitman. Beautifully written and rich with insight, this is a book that refreshes our ability to see Whitman in all his power.

Eco Language Reader


Brenda Iijima - 2010
    How can poetry engage with a global ecosystem under duress? How do poetic languages, forms, structures, syntaxes, and grammars contend or comply with the forces of environmental disaster? Can innovating languages forward the cause of living sustainably in a world of radical interconnectedness? In what ways do vectors of geography, race, gender, class, and culture intersect with the development of individual or collective ecopoetic projects?Contributors include: Karen Leona Anderson, Jack Collom, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Laura Elrick, Brenda Iijima, Peter Larkin, Jill Magi, Tracie Morris, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Julie Patton, Jed Rasula, Evelyn Reilly, Leslie Scalapino, James Sherry, Jonathan Skinner, and Tyrone Williams.Co-published with Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs

The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs


Frances McCue - 2010
    He wrote about towns: White Center and La Push in Washington; Wallace and Cataldo in Idaho; Milltown, Philipsburg, and Butte in Montana. Often his visits lasted little more than an afternoon, and his knowledge of the towns was confined to what he heard in bars and diners. From these snippets, he crafted poems. His attention to the actual places could be scant, but Hugo's poems resonate more deeply than travelogues or feature stories; they capture the torque between temperament and terrain that is so vital in any consideration of place. The poems bring alive some hidden aspect to each town and play off the traditional myths that an easterner might have of the West: that it is a place of restoration and healing, a spa where people from the East come to recover from ailments; that it is a place to reinvent oneself, a region of wide open, unpolluted country still to settle. Hugo steers us, as readers, to eye level. How we settle into and take on qualities of the tracts of earth that we occupy -- this is Hugo's inquiry.Part travelogue, part memoir, part literary scholarship, The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs traces the journey of Frances McCue and photographer Mary Randlett to the towns that inspired many of Richard Hugo's poems. Returning forty years after Hugo visited these places, and bringing with her a deep knowledge of Hugo and her own poetic sensibility, McCue maps Hugo's poems back onto the places that triggered them. Together with twenty-three poems by Hugo, McCue's essays and Randlett's photographs offer a fresh view of Hugo's Northwest.Watch the book trailer: https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8_W1FZn06w

The Giants of French literature : Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, and Camus


Katherine L. Elkins - 2010
    With keen insight into her subject material, Professor Elkins discusses the attributes that made classics of such works as Balzac's Human Comedy, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and Camus' The Stranger. Literary immortals all, these four French authors produced works that reflected their times and exerted a continuing and lasting influence on all the generations that followed.

Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible


Robert Alter - 2010
    In this book, acclaimed biblical translator and literary critic Robert Alter traces some of the fascinating ways that American novelists-from Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner to Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy-have drawn on the rich stylistic resources of the canonical English Bible to fashion their own strongly resonant styles and distinctive visions of reality. Showing the radically different manners in which the words, idioms, syntax, and cadences of this Bible are woven into Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sun Also Rises, Seize the Day, Gilead, and The Road, Alter reveals the wide variety of stylistic and imaginative possibilities that American novelists have found in Scripture. At the same time, Alter demonstrates the importance of looking closely at the style of literary works, making the case that style is not merely an aesthetic phenomenon but is the very medium through which writers conceive their worlds.

Darwin's Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong


Conor Cunningham - 2010
    In "Darwin's Pious Idea," Cunningham puts forth a compelling, cutting-edge case for both creation and evolution, drawing skillfully on an array of philosophical, theological, historical, and scientific sources to buttress his arguments.

Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years


Ilan Stavans - 2010
    Based on nearly a decade of research, this biographical study sheds new light on the life and works of the Nobel Laureate, father of magical realism, and bestselling author in the history of the Spanish language. As García Márquez's impact endures on well into his ninth decade, Stavans's keen insights constitute the definitive re-appraisal of the literary giant's life and corpus. The later part of his life will be covered in a second book.

Ibn Taymiyya and His Times


Yossef Rapoport - 2010
    Today, he is revered by the Wahhabi movement and championed by Salafi groups who call for a return to the pristine golden age of the Prophet. His writings have also been used by radical groups, such as al-Qaeda, to justify acts of terrorism and armed struggle. In order to explain this modern influence, this volume offers a fresh perspective on Ibn Taymiyya's life, thought and legacy. The articles in this volume, written by leading authorities in the field, study Ibn Taymiyya's highly original contributions to Islamic theology, law, Qur'anic exegesis and political thought. Contrary to his current image as an anti-rationalist puritan, this volume shows Ibn Taymiyya to be one of the most intellectually rigorous, complex and interesting figures in Islamic intellectual history. This is the first comprehensive academic treatment of Ibn Taymiyya to appear in a Western language in over half a century. It is of major importance to scholars of Islamic intellectual history, as well as to the students of modern Islamic movements and ideologies.

Perpetual Inventory


Rosalind E. Krauss - 2010
    In these essays, which span three decades of assessment and reassessment, Rosalind Krauss considers what she has come to call the "post-medium condition" -- the abandonment by contemporary art of the modernist emphasis on the medium as the source of artistic significance. Jean-Francois Lyotard argued that the "postmodern" condition is characterized by the end of a "master narrative," and Krauss sees in the "post-medium" condition of contemporary art a similar farewell to coherence. The master narrative of contemporary art ended when conceptual art and other contemporary practices jettisoned the specific medium in order to juxtapose image and written text in the same work. For Krauss, this spells the end of serious art, and she devotes much of "Perpetual Inventory" to "wrest[ling] new media to the mat of specificity." Krauss also writes about artists who are reinventing the medium, artists who persevere in the service of a nontraditional medium ("strange new apparatuses" often adopted from commercial culture), among them Ed Ruscha, Christian Marclay, William Kentridge, and James Coleman.

Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust


Sonja M. Hedgepeth - 2010
    The book goes beyond previous studies, and challenges claims that Jewish women were not sexually violated during the Holocaust. This anthology by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars addresses topics such as rape, forced prostitution, assaults on childbearing, artistic representations of sexual violence, and psychological insights into survivor trauma. These subjects have been relegated to the edges or completely left out of Holocaust history, and this book aims to shift perceptions and promote new discourse.

The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire


David Bindman - 2010
    Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector's items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.The new edition of "From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire" offers a comprehensive look at the fascinating and controversial subject of the representation of black people in the ancient world. Classic essays by distinguished scholars are aptly contextualized by Jeremy Tanner's new introduction, which guides the reader through enormous changes in the field in the wake of the "Black Athena" story.

The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive: Essays and Commentaries


Martín Espada - 2010
    He celebrates the poets of Puerto Rico, imprisoned for espousing the cause of independence, and the poets of the Bronx, writing bilingual poems in the voices of the dead.Espada writes of forgotten places and reminds us of the poet's responsibility to remember, as Pablo Neruda remembers the anonymous builders of Machu Picchu or Sterling Brown remembers the slave uprising of Nat Turner. He argues that poets should embrace the role of Shelley's "unacknowledged legislator" in their work as writers and in their lives as citizens. He challenges the conventional wisdom that poetry and politics are mutually exclusive, and rejects the poetics of self-marginalization, in keeping with Adrian Mitchell's dictum that, "most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."Martín Espada has published seventeen books as a poet, editor, and translator. The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems, received a Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Imagine the Angels of Bread won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award. Espada is a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

The Soul of C.S. Lewis: A Meditative Journey Through Twenty-Six of His Best-Loved Writings


Wayne Martindale - 2010
    S. Lewis is a devotional-style book that encourages reflection and thought. It includes 240 meditations designed for the reader’s personal growth.C. S. Lewis opened up more than just wardrobe doors—he opened the doors to human experience, new worlds of ideas, and imaginative discoveries. His honest observations about life highlight the interconnectedness of Scripture to real life and encourage a worldview that is integrated and harmonized.

Words of Seduction


Dara Girard - 2010
    The frumpy-housewife-turned-superstar-author has come home to North Carolina to sell the family house—then hightail it back out of town.But there's an unfinished chapter in her life: bad-boy-turned-successful-businessman Rick Gordon. Suzanne's been burned before and can't let the roving playboy play fast and loose with her heart again…even if he is the sexiest thing on two legs. And once passion reignites in Rick's arms, she has no idea where this story's going….Rick could write the book on how not to get hooked. But he's never forgotten Suzanne, and now's his chance to pick up where they left off. That's why he's plotting a course of seduction she'll never be able to resist. But will their rekindled passion lead to love…and the happy ending they both crave?

The Multilingual Subject


Claire Kramsch - 2010
    It analyzes data gathered from published testimonies and language memoirs of former language learners, spoken and written data from American college language learners, and online data from language learners in electronic chatrooms and text messaging exchanges. The author encourages readers to consider foreign language learning from new, diverse, and unique perspectives.

Conversations with Ian McEwan


Ryan Roberts - 2010
    McEwan (b. 1948) discusses his views on authorship, the writing process, and major themes found in his fiction, but he also expands upon his interests in music, film, global politics, the sciences, and the state of literature in contemporary society.McEwan's candid and forthcoming discussions with notable contemporary writers---Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Ian Hamilton, David Remnick, and Stephen Pinker---provide readers with the most in-depth portrait available of the author and his works.Readers will find McEwan to be just as engaging, humorous, and intelligent as his writings suggest. The volume includes interviews from British, Spanish, French, and American sources, two interviews previously available only in audio format, and a new interview conducted with the book's editor.

The Rey Chow Reader


Rey Chow - 2010
    Characteristically confronting both entrenched and emergent issues in the interlocking fields of literature, film and visual studies, sexuality and gender, postcolonialism, ethnicity, and cross-cultural politics, her works produce surprising connections among divergent topics at the same time as they compel us to think through the ethical and political ramifications of our academic, epistemic, and cultural practices. This anthology - the first to collect key moments in Chow's engaging thought - provides readers with an ideal introduction to some of her most forceful theoretical explorations. Organized into two sections, each of which begins with a brief statement designed to establish linkages among various discursive fields through Chow's writings, the anthology also contains an extensive Editor's Introduction, which situates Chow's work in the context of contemporary critical debates. For all those pursuing transnational cultural theory and cultural studies, this book is an essential resource.Praise for Rey Chow"[Rey Chow is] methodologically situated in the contentious spaces between critical theory and cultural studies, and always attending to the implications of ethnicity."--Social Semiotics"Rich and powerful work that provides both a dazzling synthesis of contemporary cultural theory and at the same time an exemplary critique of Chinese cinema."--China Information"Should be read by all who are concerned with the future of human rights, liberalism, multiculturalism, identity politics, and feminism."--Dorothy Ko"Wide-ranging, theoretically rich, and provocative... completely restructures the problem of ethnicity."--Fredric Jameson

Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation


Adel Iskandar - 2010
    Said (1935–2003) ranks as one of the most preeminent public intellectuals of our time. Through his literary criticism, his advocacy for the Palestinian cause, and his groundbreaking book Orientalism, Said elegantly enriched public discourse by unsettling the status quo. This indispensable volume, the most comprehensive and wide-ranging resource on Edward Said’s life and work, spans his broad legacy both within and beyond the academy. The book brings together contributions from thirty-one luminaries—leading scholars, critics, writers, and activists—to engage Said’s provocative ideas. Their essays and interviews explore the key themes of emancipation and representation through the prisms of postcolonial theory, literature, music, philosophy, and cultural studies.Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, Ben Conisbee Baer, Daniel Barenboim, Timothy Brennan, Noam Chomsky, Denise DeCaires-Narain, Nicholas Dirks, Marc H. Ellis, Rokus de Groot, Sabry Hafez, Abdirahman A. Hussein, Ardi Imseis, Adel Iskandar, Ghada Karmi, Katherine Callen King, Joseph Massad, W. J. T. Mitchell, Laura Nader, Ilan Pappe, Benita Parry, Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, Jahan Ramazani, Jacqueline Rose, Lecia Rosenthal, Hakem Rustom, Avi Shlaim, Ella Habiba Shohat, Robert Spencer, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Anastasia Valassopoulos, Asha Varadharajan, Michael Wood

Torture of Women


Nancy Spero - 2010
    This unique volume zooms in, translating the work into nearly 100 pages of detailed, legible reproductions.

Tragodia 1: Statement of Facts


Vanessa Place - 2010
    Many lawyers may make implicit arguments in a statement of facts, to paint someone in a favorable light, or to dismiss their reliability. Tragodia is composed of the 3 parts of an appellate brief: Statement of Facts, which sets forth, in narrative form, the evidence of the crime as presented at trial; Statement of the Case, which sets forth the procedural history of the case; and Argument, which are the claims of error and (for the defense) the arguments for reversing the judgment. Place's Statement of Facts project involves reproducing Statements of Facts from her appellate briefs as poetry, eliminating specific information as necessary to protect people's identities. By copying her briefs, Place does not violate ethical standards or codes of conduct: appellate briefs are matters of public record and can be read by anyone, as are the transcripts of the trials themselves.

To Be At Music: Essays Talks


Norma Cole - 2010
    These 21 prose pieces reflect her inimitable ability to make the critical essay an art form that engages both the sensual and the cerebral, the aural and the visual, the analytic and the intuitive nature of her readers. Many of these are essays or talks written in response to invitations to discuss the works of writers and artists such as Hans Christian Andersen, Robin Blaser, Edmond Jabès, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Stanley Whitney, and Christa Wolf. Each offers Cole's unique appreciation of what it means to read, to interact with a work of art, to write, or to translate, and to perceive each activity as a way to attune oneself anew to the world that is both within and beyond our expected methods of understanding.

Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts


Tim Gillespie - 2010
    We know how rewarding it can be to engage students in complex works of thought provoking literature but we know how demanding the job can be, too. Tim Gillespie, who has taught in public schools for almost four decades, has found the lenses of literacy criticism a powerful tool for helping studnets tackle challenging literacy texts. TIm breaks down the dense language of critical theory into clear, lively, and thorough explanations of many schools of critical thought&Mdash;reader response, biographical, historical, psychologival, archetypal, genre based, moral, philosophical, feminist, political, fromalist postmodern.

Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer: Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema and Other Important Topics


Vern - 2010
    Now he’s back, and this time he’s got all of ‘the films of badass cinema’ in his sights... From Die Hard to The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Transformers to Mary Poppins, Vern has an opinion on everything, and he’s not shy about sharing them...

The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature


David Rudd - 2010
    It features a series of essays written by expert contributors who provide an illuminating examination of why children's literature is the way it is. Topics covered include:the history and development of children's literature various theoretical approaches used to explore the texts, including narratological methods questions of gender and sexuality along with issues of race and ethnicity realism and fantasy as two prevailing modes of story-telling picture books, comics and graphic novels as well as 'young adult' fiction and the 'crossover' novel media adaptations and neglected areas of children's literature.The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature contains suggestions for further reading throughout plus a helpful timeline and a substantial glossary of key terms and names, both established and more cutting-edge. This is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to an increasingly complex and popular discipline.

Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God


Ralph C. Wood - 2010
    K. Chesterton is often praised as the "Great Optimist"--God's rotund jester. In this fresh and daring endeavor, Ralph Wood turns a critical eye on Chesterton's corpus to reveal the beef-and-ale believer's darker vision of the world and those who live in it. During an age when the words grace, love, and gospel, sound more hackneyed than genuine, Wood argues for a recovery of Chesterton's primary contentions: First, that the incarnation of Jesus was necessary reveals a world full not of a righteous creation but of tragedy, terror, and nightmare, and second, that the problem of evil is only compounded by a Christianity that seeks progress, political control, and cultural triumph.Wood's sharp literary critique moves beyond formulaic or overly pious readings to show that, rather than fleeing from the ghoulish horrors of his time, Chesterton located God's mysterious goodness within the existence of evil. Chesterton seeks to reclaim the keen theological voice of this literary authority who wrestled often with the counterclaims of paganism. In doing so, it argues that Christians may have more to learn from the unbelieving world than is often supposed.

Arty Party


Sara Drake - 2010
    Includes a polemical essay about humor in the arts. Available to view for free here: http://issuu.com/jamesdavidpayne/docs...

Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy


Anis S. Bawarshi - 2010
    The book presents an historical overview of genre; describes key issues and theories that have led to the reconceptualization of genre over the last thirty years; examines current research and lines of development in the study of genre; provides examples of various methodologies for conducting genre research; and explores the possibilities and implications for using genre to teach writing at various levels and within different disciplines. While the book examines various traditions that have shaped the field's understanding of and approaches to genre, what connects these various approaches is a commitment to the idea that genres reflect and coordinate social ways of knowing and acting in the world and thus provide valuable means of researching how texts function in various contexts and teaching students how to act meaningfully in multiple contexts. REFERENCE GUIDES TO RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION SERIES EDITOR, CHARLES BAZERMAN ABOUT THE AUTHORS ANIS BAWARSHI is Associate professor of English and Director of the Expository Writing Program at the University of Washington and author of Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition (2003); Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres (2004; with Amy Devitt and Mary Jo Reiff); A Closer Look: A Writer's Reader (2003; with Sidney I. Dobrin). MARY JO REIFF is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and author of Approaches to Audience: An Overview of the Major Perspectives (2004), co-author (with Amy Devitt and Anis Bawarshi) of Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres (2004), and co-editor (with Kirsten Benson) of Rhetoric of Inquiry (2009)."

Doctor Who: the Pandorica Opens: Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor


Frank Collins - 2010
    In 2010, the regeneration of Tenth Doctor David Tennant into Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith saw the keys to the Doctor Who kingdom handed over from Russell T. Davies to new showrunner Steven Moffat. His first series was a highly anticipated moment of change in the production regime of this long-running show. Matt Smith, joined by Karen Gillan as new companion Amy Pond, was an immediate critical success as the new Doctor as was Moffat's new take on the show. Cult television and film blogger Frank Collins has significantly expanded upon the original reviews from his popular Cathode Ray Tube website to examine Matt Smith's first series of adventures. He provides an in-depth analysis of episodes, characters, themes and ideas, and places Doctor Who within the wider cultural context of contemporary social, political, historical and psychological debates. A unique view of a television icon, providing much food for thought, this book is essential reading for fans of the new series. This book is illustrated with many exclusive behind-the-scenes production shots.

Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11


Richard Grusin - 2010
    In response to the shock of 9/11, socially networked US and global media work to premediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear.

Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling': A Reader's Guide


Clare Carlisle - 2010
    Fear and Trembling is a classic text in the history of both philosophical and religious thought that still challenges readers with its original philosophical perspective and idiosyncratic literary style.Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling': A Reader's Guide offers a concise and accessible introduction to this hugely important and notoriously demanding work. Written specifically to meet the needs of students coming to Kierkegaard for the first time, the book offers guidance on:- Philosophical and historical context - Key themes - Reading the text - Reception and influence - Further reading

Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia


Raymond Williams - 2010
    He was a central inspiration for the early British New Left and a close intellectual supporter of Plaid Cymru. He is widely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of cultural studies, who established cultural materialism as a new paradigm for work in both literary and cultural studies. There is a substantial secondary literature on Williams, which treats his life and work in each of these respects. But none of it makes much of his enduring contribution to utopian studies and science fiction studies. This volume brings together a complete collection of Williams's critical essays on science fiction and futurology, utopia, and dystopia, in literature, film, television, and politics, and with extracts from his two future novels, The Volunteers (1978) and The Fight for Manod (1979). Both the collection as a whole and the individual readings are accompanied by introductory essays written by Andrew Milner.

Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry


Vittorio Montemaggi - 2010
    Examining Dante's treatment of questions of language, personhood, and the body; his engagement with the theological tradition he inherited; and the implications of his work for contemporary theology, the contributors argue for the close intersection of theology and poetry in the text as well as the importance of theology for Dante studies. Through discussion of issues ranging from Dante's use of imagery of the Church to the significance of the smile for his poetic project, the essayists offer convincing evidence that his theology is not what underlies his narrative poem, nor what is contained within it: it is instead fully integrated with its poetic and narrative texture.As the essays demonstrate, the Commedia is firmly rooted in the medieval tradition of reflection on the nature of theological language, while simultaneously presenting its readers with unprecedented, sustained poetic experimentation. Understood in this way, Dante emerges as one of the most original theological voices of the Middle Ages."Long taken for granted in Dante studies, the nexus between theology and poetry in Dante's work, especially in the Commedia, has only really been subjected to searching critical analysis in the last few decades. The scholars represented in this interdisciplinary collection explore the poem's claims to function as a text embodying theological truth and, more particularly, as a poetic representation of the experience of the mystical. Their efforts comprise a landmark in modern Dante studies." --Steven Botterill, University of California, Berkeley"Moved by both intellectual curiosity and a palpable love of their subject, a group of both young and established scholars, both theologians and Dante specialists, from both sides of the Atlantic, collaborate in this book to search through the poet's volume and pose fresh questions about the relation of poetry and theology in Dante's work." --Ronald L. Martinez, Brown University

Against Epistemic Apartheid: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology


Reiland Rabaka - 2010
    E. B. Du Bois scholar Reiland Rabaka offers the first book-length treatment of Du Bois's seminal sociological discourse: from Du Bois as inventor of the sociology of race to Du Bois as the first sociologist of American religion; from Du Bois as a pioneer of urban and rural sociology to Du Bois as innovator of the sociology of gender and inaugurator of intersectional sociology; and, finally, from Du Bois as groundbreaking sociologist of education and critical criminologist to Du Bois as dialectical critic of the disciplinary decadence of sociology and the American academy. Against Epistemic Apartheid brings new and intensive archival research into critical dialogue with the watershed work of classical and contemporary, male and female, black and white, national and international sociologists and critical social theorists' Du Bois studies. Against Epistemic Apartheid offers an accessible introduction to Du Bois's major contributions to sociology and, therefore, will be of interest to scholars and students not only in sociology, but also African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as scholars and students in 'traditional' disciplines such as history, philosophy, political science, economics, education, and religion.

The Edinburgh Companion to Irvine Welsh


Berthold Schoene - 2010
    The unprecedented worldwide success of "Trainspotting," magnified by Danny Boyle's iconic film, revolutionized Scottish culture and radically remade the country's image from dreamy romantic hinterland to agitated metropolitan hotbed. Although Welsh's career is still taking shape, his influence on contemporary Scottish literary history is indisputable. This volume covers all of Welsh's fiction, as well as his dramatic work for the stage and for television, and features a detailed analysis of Danny Boyle's film. It tracks the author's critical and popular reception at home, abroad, and overseas, and questions the popular cult and mainstream hype surrounding his work. Issues of class, subculture, nationhood, gender, and narrative experimentation are tied to broader developments, such as devolution and globalization, within contemporary Scottish, British, and world culture. The book also examines Welsh's relationships to other writers, both Scottish and non-Scottish, and his contentious position within the Scottish literary canon. All in all, this guide merges a critical assessment of Walsh's work with an analysis of the writer and his phenomenon.

Women's Comics Anthology


Anne Elizabeth Moore - 2010
    Includes illustrations by Sara Drake, Ingrid Olson, Chelsea Dirck, Candace Corbin, Alma Vescovi, Karla Hewitt-Black, Krystal DiFronzo and more.Free for download through Pressing Concern Books: http://pressingconcern.wordpress.com/

Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos Of Murray N. Rothbard


Murray N. Rothbard - 2010
    Libertarian, a great genius of the 20th century and one of the most innovative intellectuals in human history, still has more to say, especially from his private papers.These memos by Murray Rothbard, written in the 1950s and early 1960s for the William Volker Fund, were kept under wraps for 50 years. Rothbard’s writing is deeply insightful, brazenly honest, and penetrating in every way, as he treats every subject from strategy to historical scholarship.Never published before, these memos provide a different perspective on the mind of a great and pioneering thinker. The first book to bring some to light was Roberta Modugno’s Rothbard Versus the Philosophers.The Volker Fund provided much needed support for libertarian scholars, such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. It commissioned Rothbard to read and evaluate books, journal articles, and other materials. It also asked him to submit reports on particular questions, such as how to rank sundry economists in terms of friendliness to the free market, surveys of the literature on monopoly, Soviet wage structures, etc. Through his memos, Rothbard provided guidance for the publishing and philanthropic efforts of the fund.Strictly Confidential heats up the legacy of these writings with pages sometimes marked "Strictly Confidential." And you can see why. Rothbard is merciless toward the enemies of liberty and relentless against those who are unwilling to follow through on the full logic of what liberty demands. Edited (but never censored) by David Gordon, and with an introduction by Brian Doherty, Strictly Confidential presents 40 full memos by Rothbard.Some of the thinkers evaluated: Willmoore Kendall, Charles Beard, Jackson Turner Main, George B. DeHuszar, Douglass C. North, William Appleman Williams, Alexander Gray, T.S. Ashton, Ronald Coase, John Chamberlain, Lionel Robbins, Benjamin Anderson, Alan S. Whiting, Frank S. Meyer, Walter Millis, George F. Kennan, Ayn Rand, Edmund Fuller, among many others.

Shakespeare and the Medieval World


Helen Cooper - 2010
    Medieval culture pervaded his life and work, from his childhood, spent within reach of the last performances of the Coventry Corpus Christi plays, to his dramatisation of Chaucer in The Two Noble Kinsmen three years before his death. The world he lived in was still largely a medieval one, in its topography and its institutions. The language he spoke had been forged over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. The genres in which he wrote, not least historical tragedy, love-comedy and romance, were medieval inventions. A high proportion of his plays have medieval origins and he kept returning to Chaucer, acknowledged as the greatest poet in the English language. Above all, he grew up with an English tradition of drama developed during the Middle Ages that assumed that it was possible to stage anything - all time, all space. Shakespeare and the Medieval World provides a panoramic overview that opens up new vistas within his work and uncovers the richness of his inheritance.

Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea


Suk-Young Kim - 2010
    This book gets us closer to understanding North Korea beyond the usual headlines, and does so in a richly detailed, well-researched, and theoretically contextualized way." ---Charles K. Armstrong, Director, Center for Korean Research, Columbia University"One of this book's strengths is how it deals at the same time with historical, geographical, political, artistic, and cultural materials. Film and theatre are not the only arts Kim studies---she also offers an excellent analysis of paintings, fashion, and what she calls 'everyday performance.' Her analysis is brilliant, her insights amazing, and her discoveries and conclusions always illuminating."---Patrice Pavis, University of Kent, CanterburyNo nation stages massive parades and collective performances on the scale of North Korea. Even amid a series of intense political/economic crises and international conflicts, the financially troubled country continues to invest massive amounts of resources to sponsor unflinching displays of patriotism, glorifying its leaders and revolutionary history through state rituals that can involve hundreds of thousands of performers. Author Suk-Young Kim explores how sixty years of state-sponsored propaganda performances---including public spectacles, theater, film, and other visual media such as posters---shape everyday practice such as education, the mobilization of labor, the gendering of social interactions, the organization of national space, tourism, and transnational human rights. Equal parts fascinating and disturbing, Illusive Utopia shows how the country's visual culture and performing arts set the course for the illusionary formation of a distinctive national identity and state legitimacy, illuminating deep-rooted cultural explanations as to why socialism has survived in North Korea despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and China's continuing march toward economic prosperity. With over fifty striking color illustrations, Illusive Utopia captures the spectacular illusion within a country where the arts are not only a means of entertainment but also a forceful institution used to regulate, educate, and mobilize the population.Suk-Young Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coauthor with Kim Yong of Long Road Home: A Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor.

A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism


Arshin Adib-Moghaddam - 2010
    He revisits the Crusades, colonialism, the Enlightenment, and our contemporary war on terror, and he engages with both eastern and western thinkers, such as Adorno, Derrida, Farabi, Foucault, Hegel, Khayyam, Marcuse, Marx, Said, Ibn Sina, and Weber. His investigation explains the conceptual genesis of a clash of civilizations and the influence of western and Islamic representations of the other. He highlights the discontinuities between Islamism and the canon of Islamic philosophy, which distinguishes between Avicennian and Qutbian discourses of Islam, and he reveals how violence became inscribed in ideas of the West, especially during the Enlightenment. Expanding critical theory to include Islamic philosophy and poetry, this metahistory refuses to treat Muslims and Europeans, Americans and Arabs, and the Orient and the Occident as separate entities.

Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire


Sandra K. Soto - 2010
    The author demonstrates that representations of racialization actually depend on the sexual and that a racialized sexuality is an unrecognized organizing principle of Chican@ literature.

Failure


Lisa Le Feuvre - 2010
    Celebrating failed promises and myths of the avant-garde, or setting out to realize seemingly impossible tasks, artists have actively claimed the space of failure to propose a resistant view of the world. Here success is deemed overrated, doubt embraced, experimentation encouraged, and risk considered a viable strategy. The abstract possibilities opened up by failure are further reinforced by the problems of physically realizing artworks--wrestling with ideas, representation, and object-making. By amplifying both theoretical and practical failure, artists have sought new, unexpected ways of opening up endgame situations, ranging from the ideological shadow of the white cube to unfulfilled promises of political emancipation. Between the two subjective poles of success and failure lies a space of potentially productive operations where paradox rules and dogma is refused. This collection of writings, statements, mediations, fictions, polemics, and discussions identifies failure as a core concern in cultural production. Failure identifies moments of thought that have eschewed consensus, choosing to address questions rather than answers.Artists surveyed include Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alys, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Phil Collins, Martin Creed, David Critchley, Fischli & Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Isa Genzken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Wade Guyton, International Necronautical Society, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Michael Krebber, Bruce Nauman, Simon Patterson, Janette Parris, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth, Allen Ruppersberg, Roman Signer, Annika Strom, Paul Thek, William WegmanWriters include Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Beckett, Daniel Birnbaum, Bazon Brock, Johanna Burton, Emma Cocker, Gilles Deleuze, Russell Ferguson, Ann Goldstein, Jorg Heiser, Jennifer Higgie, Richard Hylton, Jean-Yves Jouannais, Lisa Lee, Stuart Morgan, Hans-Joachim Muller, Karl Popper, Edgar Schmitz, Coosje van Bruggen "

Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years


Annette R. Federico - 2010
    Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar’s approach. It includes work by established and up-and-coming scholars, as well as retrospective accounts of the ways in which The Madwoman in the Attic has influenced teaching, feminist activism, and the lives of women in academia.These contributions represent both the diversity of today’s feminist criticism and the tremendous expansion of the nineteenth-century canon. The authors take as their subjects specific nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, the state of feminist theory and pedagogy, genre studies, film, race, and postcolonialism, with approaches ranging from ecofeminism to psychoanalysis. And although each essay opens Madwoman to a different page, all provocatively circle back—with admiration and respect, objections and challenges, questions and arguments—to Gilbert and Gubar's groundbreaking work.The essays are as diverse as they are provocative. Susan Fraiman describes how Madwoman opened the canon, politicized critical practice, and challenged compulsory heterosexuality, while Marlene Tromp tells how it elegantly embodied many concerns central to second-wave feminism. Other chapters consider Madwoman’s impact on Milton studies, on cinematic adaptations of Wuthering Heights, and on reassessments of Ann Radcliffe as one of the book’s suppressed foremothers.In the thirty years since its publication, The Madwoman in the Attic has potently informed literary criticism of women’s writing: its strategic analyses of canonical works and its insights into the interconnections between social environment and human creativity have been absorbed by contemporary critical practices. These essays constitute substantive interventions into established debates and ongoing questions among scholars concerned with defining third-wave feminism, showing that, as a feminist symbol, the raging madwoman still has the power to disrupt conventional ideas about gender, myth, sexuality, and the literary imagination.

Interpretation and Literature in Early Medieval China


Alan K.L. Chan - 2010
    In addition to profound political changes, the fall of the Han dynasty allowed new currents in aesthetics, literature, interpretation, ethics, and religion to emerge during the Wei-Jin Nanbeichao period. The contributors to this volume present developments in literature and interpretation during this era from a variety of methodological perspectives, frequently highlighting issues hitherto unremarked in Western or even Chinese and Japanese scholarship. These include the rise of new literary and artistic values as the Han declined, changing patterns of patronage that helped reshape literary tastes and genres, and new developments in literary criticism. The religious changes of the period are revealed in the literary self-presentation of spiritual seekers, the influence of Daoism on motifs in poetry, and Buddhist influences on both poetry and historiography. Traditional Chinese literary figures, such as the fox and the ghost, receive fresh analysis about their particular representation during this period.

Keys to the Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov's Novel


Yuri Leving - 2010
    From notes in Nabokov's private correspondence to scholarly articles accumulated during the seventy years since the novel's first appearance in print, the work draws from a broad spectrum of existing material in a succinct and coherent way, as well as providing innovative analyses. The first part of the monograph, "The Novel," outlines the basic properties of The Gift ( plot, characters, style, and motifs) and reconstructs its internal chronology. The second part, "The Text," describes the creation of the novel and the history of its publication, public and critical reaction, challenges of the English translation, and post-Soviet reception. Along with annotations to all five chapters of The Gift, the commentary provides insight into problems of paleography, featuring unique textological analysis of the novel based on the author's study of the archival copy of the manuscript.

Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas


Martin Munro - 2010
    Martin Munro’s groundbreaking work traces the central—and contested—role of music in shaping identities, politics, social history, and artistic expression. Starting with enslaved African musicians, Munro takes us to Haiti, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, and to the civil rights era in the United States. Along the way, he highlights such figures as Toussaint Louverture, Jacques Roumain, Jean Price-Mars, The Mighty Sparrow, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Joseph Zobel, Daniel Maximin, James Brown, and Amiri Baraka. Bringing to light new connections among black cultures, Munro shows how rhythm has been both a persistent marker of race as well as a dynamic force for change at virtually every major turning point in black New World history.

Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems


Brenda Hillman - 2010
    She is also remembered for her generosity in support of actions, world wide, to safeguard and to further Human Rights. This series of lectures on teaching poetry by distinguished poets was conceived of by her family as a contribution to the role poetry plays at Berkeley in occasions that bring the public and academic communities together.

Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan


Charlotte Eubanks - 2010
    For most of East Asia, Buddhist sutras were written in classical Chinese and inaccessible to many devotees. How, then, did such devotees access these texts? Charlotte D. Eubanks argues that the medieval genre of “explanatory tales” illuminates the link between human body (devotee) and sacred text (sutra). Her highly original approach to understanding Buddhist textuality focuses on the sensual aspects of religious experience and also looks beyond Japan to explore pre-modern book history, practices of preaching, miracles of reading, and the Mahayana Buddhist “cult of the book.”

The Event of Postcolonial Shame


Timothy Bewes - 2010
    In this book, Timothy Bewes argues that shame is a dominant temperament in twentieth-century literature, and the key to understanding the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary world.Drawing on thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze, Bewes argues that in literature there is an event of shame that brings together these ethical and aesthetic tensions. Reading works by J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zo� Wicomb, Bewes presents a startling theory: the practices of postcolonial literature depend upon and repeat the same structures of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As long as those structures remain in place, literature and critical thinking will remain steeped in shame.Offering a new mode of postcolonial reading, The Event of Postcolonial Shame demands a literature and a criticism that acknowledge their own ethical deficiency without seeking absolution from it.

The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies


Michael C. Legaspi - 2010
    Beginning with the fragmentation of biblical interpretation in the centuries after the Reformation, Michael Legaspi shows how the weakening of scriptural authority in the Western churches altered the role of biblical interpretation. Focusing on renowned German scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791), Legaspi explores the ways in which critics reconceived the role of the Bible. This book offers a new account of the origins of biblical studies, illuminating the relation of the Bible to churchly readers, theological interpreters, academic critics, and people in between. It explains why, in an age of religious resurgence, modern biblical criticism may no longer be in a position to serve as the Bible's disciplinary gatekeeper.

Ralph Ellison in Progress: From "Invisible Man" to "Three Days Before the Shooting . . . "


Adam Bradley - 2010
    He enjoyed a highly successful career in American letters, publishing two collections of essays, teaching at several colleges and universities, and writing dozens of pieces for newspapers and magazines, yet Ellison never published the second novel he had been composing for more than forty years. A 1967 fire that destroyed some of his work accounts for only a small part of the novel’s fate; the rest is revealed in the thousands of pages he left behind after his death in 1994, many of them collected for the first time in the recently published Three Days Before the Shooting . . . .Ralph Ellison in Progress is the first book to survey the expansive geography of Ellison’s unfinished novel while re-imaging the more familiar, but often misunderstood, territory of Invisible Man. It works from the premise that understanding Ellison’s process of composition imparts important truths not only about the author himself but about race, writing, and American identity. Drawing on thousands of pages of Ellison’s journals, typescripts, computer drafts, and handwritten notes, many never before studied, Adam Bradley argues for a shift in scholarly emphasis that moves a greater share of the weight of Ellison’s literary legacy to the last forty years of his life and to the novel he left forever in progress.

Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master


Takako Lento - 2010
    East Asia Studies. Literary History & Criticism. After the end of World War II, Japanese poet Tamura Ryuichi began publishing Arechi (The Wasteland), a literary magazine charting a new course for Japanese poetry. Over the next fifty years, Tamura produced innovative and haunting poems inspired by an extraordinary range of poets from all over the world, including T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. Though Tamura is little known in the U. S., he is considered to be among the very most important Japanese poets of the 20th century. In this second volume of the Unsung Masters Series, editors Takako Lento and Wayne Miller present more than forty pages of Tamura's poetry, as well as essays on Tamura's work by both Japanese and American writers.

The View From The Masthead: Journey Through Dystopia Towards An Open Ended Utopia


Bülent Somay - 2010
    According to him, Utopia an not be limited to literature. Utopian fiction is not merely philosophical speculation, nor is it a actual history. It carries the intentions of the former in most cases, but it goes deeper than that: utopian fiction lies at the midpoint of a triangle whose corners are philosophy, politics and literature. Every utopia is a political proposition, philosophical speculation and literary creation at the same time. In utopian fiction it is not only the persons or the plot that fictive, it is a whole universe. The reality, as we know it, disappears to make room for an alternative possible universe which stands for the actual negation of the existing order of things.

Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody


Carolyn Williams - 2010
    S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were the hottest send-ups of the day's political and cultural obsessions. Gilbert and Sullivan's productions always rose to the level of social commentary, despite being impertinent, absurd, or inane. Some viewers may take them straight, but what looks like sexism or stereotype was actually a clever strategy of critique. Parody was a powerful weapon in the culture wars of late-nineteenth-century England, and with defiantly in-your-face sophistication, Gilbert and Sullivan proved that popular culture can be intellectually as well as politically challenging.Carolyn Williams underscores Gilbert and Sullivan's creative and acute understanding of cultural formations. Her unique perspective shows how anxiety drives the troubled mind in the Lord Chancellor's "Nightmare Song" in Iolanthe and is vividly realized in the sexual and economic phrasing of the song's patter lyrics. The modern body appears automated and performative in the "Junction Song" in Thespis, anticipating Charlie Chaplin's factory worker in Modern Times. Williams also illuminates the use of magic in The Sorcerer, the parody of nautical melodrama in H.M.S. Pinafore, the ridicule of Victorian aesthetic and idyllic poetry in Patience, the autoethnography of The Mikado, the role of gender in Trial by Jury, and the theme of illegitimacy in The Pirates of Penzance. With her provocative reinterpretation of these artists and their work, Williams recasts our understanding of creativity in the late nineteenth century.

Let Freedom Swing: Collected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Gospel


Howard Reich - 2010
    Whether playing the standards or the most experimental piece, it is how a musician handles these notes—fearlessly or safely—that determines the fate of the performance. Howard Reich’s critical writing is similarly unexpected and fearless, and Let Freedom Swing is a collection of the articles from the past three decades that best capture this spirit.Each section of Let Freedom Swing composes a suite, focusing on either a person, place, or scene. Reich gives new life to the standards with his profiles and elegies for such giants as Gershwin, Ellington, and Sinatra. A profile of Louis Armstrong brings out the often angry side of Satchmo but also reveals a more remarkable musician and human being.His open-mindedness makes Reich a particularly astute observer of the experimental and new, from Ornette Coleman to Chicago experimentalist Ken Vandermark. And his observations about street music open our ears to the songs of everyday life. Reich’s fearlessness is evident in his writing about daunting subjects, such as the New Orleans music scene after Katrina, the lost legacy of jazz in Panama, and the complicated legacy of "race music" in America.Howard Reich combines a deep enthusiasm for music, a breadth of knowledge, and an ability to share his world with his readers, and Let Freedom Swing is essential reading for anyone interested in the continuing vitality of jazz, gospel, blues, and American music in general.

Reading Law as Narrative: A Study in the Casuistic Laws of the Pentateuch


Assnat Bartor - 2010
    This book is the first to present an interpretive method integrating biblical law, jurisprudence, and literary theory, reflecting the current “law and literature” school within legal studies. It identifies the narrative elements that exist in the laws of the Pentateuch, exposes the narrative techniques employed by the authors, and discovers the poetics of biblical law, thus revealing new or previously unconsidered aspects of the relationship between law and narrative in the Bible.

The Cambridge Companion to Rilke


Karen Leeder - 2010
    In this Companion, leading scholars offer informative and thought-provoking essays on his life and social context, his correspondence, all his major collections of poetry including most famously the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and his seminal novel of Modernist anxiety, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke's critical contexts are explored in detail: his relationship with philosophy and the visual arts, his place within modernism and his relationship to European literature, and his reception in Europe and beyond. With its invaluable guide to further reading and a chronology of Rilke's life and work, this Companion will provide an accessible, engaging account of this extraordinary poet whose legacy looms so large today.

Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations of the Late Republic


Peter White - 2010
    The more than eight hundred letters of Cicero that are its core provided literary models for subsequent letter writers from Pliny to Petrarch to Samuel Johnson and beyond. Thecollection also includes some one hundred letters by Cicero's contemporaries. The letters they exchanged provide unique insight into the experience of the Roman political class at the turning point between Republican and imperial rule.The first part of this study analyzes effects of the milieu in which the letters were written. The lack of an organized postal system limited the correspondence that Cicero and his contemporaries could conduct and influenced what they were willing to write about. Their chief motive for exchangingletters was to protect political relationships until they could resume their customary, face-to-face association in Rome. Romans did not normally sign letters, much less write them in their own hand. Their correspondence was handled by agents who drafted, expedited, and interpreted it. Yet everyletter advertised the level of intimacy that bound the writer and the addressee. Finally, the published letters were not drawn at random from the archives that Cicero left. An editor selected and arranged them in order to impress on readers a particular view of Cicero as a public personality. Thesecond half of the book explores the significance of leading themes in the letters. It shows how, in a time of deepening crisis, Cicero and his correspondents drew on their knowledge of literature, the habit of consultation, and the rhetoric of government in an effort to improve cooperation and tomaintain the political culture which they shared. The result is a revealing look at Cicero's epistolary practices and also the world of elite social intercourse in the late Republic.

Christian Literary Criticism: from John Milton to Herman Melville


Skylar Hamilton Burris - 2010
    This collection of seven essays employs a Christian lens to examine works by John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Blake, Lord Byron, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Herman Melville, and William Golding.

English Literature From The Old English Period Through The Renaissance (The Britannica Guide To World Literature)


J.E. Luebering - 2010
    Beginning in the Old English period and continuing through the Medieval and Renaissance periods, writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare began to elevate the place of literature in society. This volume details the evolution of early English literature and the enduring works that have withstood centuries of linguistic and cultural change.

Re-reading Poets: The Life of the Author


Paul Kameen - 2010
    Through his historical, philosophical, scholarly, and personal commentary on select poems, Kameen reveals how these works have helped him form a personal connection to each individual poet. He relates their profound impact not only on his own life spent reading, teaching, and writing poetry, but also their potential to influence the lives of readers at every level.In an examination of works by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and others, Kameen seeks to sense each author’s way of seeing, so that author and reader may meet in a middle ground outside of their own entities where life and art merge in deeply intimate ways. Kameen counters ideologies such as New Criticism and poststructuralism that marginalize the author, and instead focuses on the author as a vital presence in the interpretive process. He analyzes how readers look to the past via “tradition,” conceptualizing history in ways that pre-process texts and make it difficult to connect directly to authors. In this vein, Kameen employs examples from T. S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger, and Mikhail Bakhtin.Kameen examines how people become poets and how that relates to the process of actually writing poems. He tells of his own evolution as a poet and argues for poetry as a means to an end beyond the poetic, rather than an end in itself. In Re-reading Poets, Kameen’s goal is not to create a new dictum for teaching poetry, but rather to extend poetry’s appeal to an audience far beyond academic walls.

The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times


Charles T. Mathewes - 2010
    He asks such questions as How should our Christian convictions lead us to see the world differently than those who do not share them? What are the categories that believers should use to act on the challenges of the world?Mathewes uses theological virtues best loved by Augustine — faith, hope, and love — to provide an analogical mirror for Christian citizenship in a post–9/11 American world. He examines not how religion has shaped our politics but rather how politics has shaped and mis-shaped our religious life and how we can begin to correct that shape.The Republic of Grace will help reignite and inform a fierce commitment to the common good of our society, caring concern for the least and most vulnerable, and the use of each person’s gifts, power, and wealth as a force for good and justice in the world. In short, this book will enable readers to realize the sacramental possibilities of political life.

Inside the Voyage of the Dawn Treader: A Guide to Exploring the Journey Beyond Narnia


Devin Brown - 2010
    Anticipating the December 2010 Walden Media/20th Century Fox release of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, this book guides readers through the third novel of C. S. Lewis's classic series.As he did in the successful Inside Narnia and Inside Prince Caspian, Devin Brown takes readers through The Voyage of the Dawn Treader chapter by chapter, illuminating the features of C. S. Lewis's writing, providing supplemental information on Lewis's life and other books, offering comments and opinions from other Lewis scholars, and uncovering the work's rich meanings. Longtime fans of C. S. Lewis and those who have met him through the movies will want to read this book.