Questing Fictions was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Questing Fictions analyzes twentieth-century Latin American fiction in the light of contemporary literary theory. Djelal Kadir examines key works by several writers—including Jorges Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes—and demonstrates how these writers are obliged to invent their own reality and how their successors inevitably must continue that inventive tradition. In a larger sense, Kadir describes how works of literature originate and, in turn, generate other literary works.
Aiming at the specific nature of discourse written from the perspective of non-European cultures, Questing Fictions identifies and focuses on the predicament of writers caught between the cultural domination of Europe and the need to strive for cultural autonomy. Kadir explains that this predicament is shared by all Latin American authors and may well characterize all recently emergent literatures. He traces the problems of continuity and rupture within the Latin American tradition and addresses, as well, deeper questions of narrative and narration. In the process, Kadir reveals the interrelatedness of the continent's principal fables and shows their relationship to the larger Western tradition. Finally, Questing Fictions posits that Latin American narratives cannot escape the the quest for an identity that they can never fully attain.Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the first Latin American to win theNobel Prize for Literature, was a poetic idol for generations of Latin Americans who viewed her as Womanhood incarnate, the national schoolteacher-mother. How this distinctly masculine woman who never gave birth came to occupy this role, and what Mistral’s image, poetry, and life have to say about the relations-and realities-of race, gender, and sexual politics in her time, are the questions Licia Fiol-Matta pursues in this book, recreating the story of a woman whose misrepresentation is at least as intriguing, and as instructive, as her fame.
A Queer Mother for the Nation weaves a nuanced understanding of how Mistral cooperated with authority and fashioned herself as the figure of Motherhood in collaboration with the state. Drawing on Mistral’s little-known political and social essays, her correspondence and photographs, Fiol-Matta reconstructs Mistral’s relationship to state politics. Her work questions the notion of queer bodies as outlaws, and insists on the many ways in which queer subjects have participated in and sustained the normative discourses they seem to rebel against
Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship
With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the natural world—birds, lilies, horses—up against that from the world of humans—oppression, slavery, and violence—ties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations.
In Alexander’s world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl in a café and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood. When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girl’s sari, the material of a woman’s life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly present—sometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive.
The subjects treated in this symposium have one major characteristic in common, that they have recently, or relatively recently, enjoyed high popularity among readers. Also, they have received from substantial to torrents of comment.
A new paradigm for queer theory
Michael Snediker offers a much-needed counterpoint to queer theoretical discourse, which has long privileged melancholy, self-shattering, incoherence, shame, and the death drive. Recovering the forms of positive affect that queer theory has jettisoned, Snediker insists that optimism must itself be taken beyond conventional tropes of hope and futurity and reimagined as necessary for critical engagement.
Through fresh, perceptive, and sensitive readings of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Bishop, Snediker reveals that each of these poets demonstrated an interest in the durability of positive affects. Dickinson, Snediker argues, expresses joy and grace as much as pain and loss, and the myriad cryptic smiles in Hart Crane’s White Building contradict prevailing narratives of Crane’s apocryphal literary failures and eventual suicide. Snediker’s ambitious and sophisticated study, informed by thinkers such as Winnicott, Deleuze, and de Man, both supplements and challenges the work of queer theory’s leading figures, including Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman. Queer Optimism revises our understanding of queer love and affiliation, examining Spicer’s serial collusion with matinee idol Billy the Kid as well as the critically neglected force of Bishop’s epistolary and poetic reparations of the drowned figure of Hart Crane. In doing so, Snediker persuasively reconceives a theoretical field of optimism that was previously unavailable to scrupulous critical inquiry and provides a groundbreaking approach to modern American poetry and poetics.Boeckmann links character, literary genre, and science, revealing how major literary works both contributed to and disrupted the construction of race in turn-of-the-century America.
In A Question of Character, Cathy Boeckmann establishes a strong link between racial questions and the development of literary traditions at the end of the 19th century in America. This period saw the rise of "scientific racism," which claimed that the races were distinguished not solely by exterior appearance but also by a set of inherited character traits. As Boeckmann explains, this emphasis on character meant that race was not only a thematic concern in the literature of the period but also a generic or formal one as well.
Boeckmann explores the intersections between race and literary history by tracing the language of character through both scientific and literary writing. Nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences such as phrenology and physiognomy had a vocabulary for discussing racial character that overlapped conceptually with the conventions for portraying race in literature. Through close readings of novels by Thomas Dixon, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and James Weldon Johnson—each of which deals with a black character "passing" as white—Boeckmann shows how this emphasis on character relates to the shift from romantic and sentimental fiction to realism. Because each of these genres had very specific conventions regarding the representation of character, genres often dictated how races could be depicted.
"Quicksand and Passing are novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable." —Alice Walker
"A tantalizing mix of moral fable and sensuous colorful narrative, exploring female sexuality and racial solidarity."—Women's Studies International Forum
Rutgers' all-time bestselling book, Nella Larsen's novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novels' greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor's comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.
Passing is now a major motion picture written, produced, and directed by Rebecca Hall. It premiered at Sundance in 2021 and is available on Netflix.
In lines electrified with lyricism and wit, Donald Finkel carves a clearing out of the backyard brush and the intellectual brambles of existence.
Whether he writes a short lyric or a long experimental series, Finkel relies on concrete images—a breeze through grass, a cigarette in a piano player’s hand—to ground his central questions about the clash of order and chaos in our everyday lives.
He delights in naming weeds and towering trees, cars and streets. Yet, in each poem, there is a constant tension between the actual wind and the words we must use to convey the wind’s force.
Working fluently in formal lines and in free verse, he can write with equal authority of butchers or great painters, aged bookkeepers or schizophrenics, Greek gods or house cats. In this new collection, Finkel has given us the priceless keepsakes, the best gifts from the clearing his words have won.
Rachel Hadas reaches the peak of her poetic prowess in Questions in the Vestibule. A deeply personal and meditative collection in three sections, Questions moves through the liminal space of solitude and the coded landscape of dreams toward the startling power of a life-changing love.
Hadas’s voice and her formal elegance, as distinctive and distinguished as ever, endow this new work with a precise and thoughtful beauty. Questions in the Vestibule takes readers into a new territory of unapologetic bliss.
In these stories of magic and memory, clustered around a resort hotel in a small Virginia community, Cary Holladay takes the reader on an excursion through the changes wrought by time on the community and its visitors. From the quiet of a rural forest to the rhythms of rock and roll, The Quick-Change Artist is at once whimsical and hard-edged, dizzying in its matter-of-fact delivery of the fantastic.
Romance, a sense of place and belonging, and the supernatural—especially in the lives of children coming of age—offer windows into worlds beyond the ordinary throughout The Quick-Change Artist. In the title story, a young chambermaid is in love with a foreign magician who performs at the hotel where she works. In “Heaven,” set during the 1918 flu epidemic, a struggling mother and son rely on the support of their fortune-telling plow horse. The narrator of “Jane’s Hat” recalls a childhood enlivened by an unusual school principal and a friend who starts finding beauty everywhere.
Horses and the people who love them, wanderers and those who feed them, creatures that disappear and those who search for them: these are stories with a constant heart.
Once or twice in a generation a poet comes along who captures the essential spirit of the American Midwest and gives name to the peculiar nature that persists there. Like James Wright, Robert Bly, Ted Kooser, and Jared Carter before him, Dan Lechay reshapes our imagination to include his distinct and profound vision of this undersung region.
The poetry of Dan Lechay, collected in The Quarry, constructs a myth of the Midwest that is at once embodied in the permanence of the landscape, the fleeting nature of the seasons, and the eternal flow of the river. Lechay writes of memory and the mutability of memory, of the change brought on a person by the years lived and lost, and of the stoic attempts made by those around him to elicit an order and rationale to their lives.
The Quarry is the first full-length collection from this seasoned poet. Final judge Alan Shapiro in writing about The Quarry said: “If Dan Lechay’s poems often begin with the ordinary details and circumstances of life in a small Midwestern town or city, they always end by reminding us that no moment of life is ever ordinary, that ‘Nothing is more mysterious than the way things are.’
The Quarry is a marvelous, disquieting, extraordinarily beautiful book that meditates on fundamental questions of time and change in and through a clear-eyed yet loving evocation of everyday existence. Under Lechay’s soulful gaze, the backyards, neighborhoods, animals, and landscapes he describes dramatize the often wrenching connection between beauty and loss, evanescence and memory. The Quarry is a thoroughly mature and accomplished book.”
A brilliantly savage story, Queer People is, according to Budd Schulberg, “a racy testament to an era as totally vanished as the civilization of the Aztecs,” and if not the Hollywood novel is “at least a truly seminal work.”
Today’s readers will recognize in this long-forgotten Hollywood novel the seeds of three longer-lived ones, The Day of the Locust, What Makes Sammy Run?,and The Last Tycoon. They may also recognize Whitey, the hero of the Grahams’ novel, as a forerunner of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby.
The central figure in the novel is an archetypal newspaper reporter who drifts to Hollywood. Whitey discovers the social microcosm of the studio-people, and finds himself in his element. He penetrates strange places and encounters queer people—the story conference, the three-day party, the titans and the moguls. When a murder ends his interlude he leaves Hollywood as casually as he discovered it.
Originally published in 1930 Queer People was a scandalous roman à clef, irreverent to the “industry,” and totally amoral—qualities lacking in later Hollywood fiction. Hence itis at once an important social document and an exciting original work.
Rejecting the artificial dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative research strategies in the social and behavioral sciences, Isadore Newman and Carolyn R. Benz argue that the two approaches are neither mutually exclusive nor interchangeable; rather, the actual relationship between the two paradigms is one of isolated events on a continuum of scientific inquiry.
Through graphic and narrative descriptions, Newman and Benz show research to be a holistic endeavor in the world of inquiry. To clarify their argument, they provide a diagram of the "qualitative-quantitative interactive continuum" showing that qualitative analysis with its feedback loops can easily modify the types of research questions asked in quantitative research and that the quantitative results and its feedback can change what will be asked qualitatively.
In their model for research—an "interactive continuum"—Newman and Benz emphasize four major points: the research question dictates the selection of research methods; consistency between question and design can lead to a method of critiquing research studies in professional journals; the interactive continuum model is built around the place of theory; and the assurance of "validity" of research is central to all studies.
As 21st-century citizens of developed countries, we are constantly bombarded by numbers in every aspect of our lives. Almost automatically, we learn to interpret how numbers are used in our language, what magnitude of numbers we expect to hear in particular contexts, how people in our community express degrees of confidence in the reliability of any particular number, etc. Context of this kind is lacking when we read a historical narrative composed in an ancient language, from a world vastly different from ours. In Quantifying Mentalities, Catherine Rubincam helps overcome this barrier to our accurate understanding of the numbers in the works of five major ancient Greek historians by providing a standard against which their credibility can be more accurately judged.
This systematic, quantified study is based on the compilation of statistics concerning a standard constellation of aspects of all the numbers in the historical works of the five earliest wholly or at least substantially surviving ancient Greek historians: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon (Anabasis and Hellenica), Polybius, and Diodorus Siculus. Such a comprehensive study has not been attempted before. For scholars reading and writing about the history of ancient Greece the volume offers a tool for interpreting the numbers in these ancient texts with more sensitivity to the world in which they were written. Standard aspects of number use captured by the coding system are: the different types of number (cardinals, ordinals, compounds, and non-explicit but definite numbers); the subject category to which each number belongs (Time, Distance-Size, Military, Population, Money, and Miscellaneous); and the types of any qualifications attached to it (Approximating, Comparative, Alternative, and Emphatic). The statistics also facilitate comparisons of every aspect of number use between authors and texts, enabling the delineation of a numeric profile for each one. This allows us to read these texts with a greater sensitivity to how they might have sounded to the author and his original readers, thus providing a firmer foundation for reconstructing or interpreting ancient Greek history.
In this modern era of mathematical modeling, applications have become increasingly complicated. As the complexity grows, it becomes more and more difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about the behavior of theoretical models and their relations to reality. Alongside methods that emphasize quantitative properties and the testing of scientific details, there is a need for approaches that are more qualitative. These techniques attempt to cover whole families of models in one bold stroke, in a manner that allows robust conclusions to be drawn about them.
Loop analysis and time averaging provide a means of interpreting the properties of systems from the network of interactions within the system. The authors' methodology concentrates on graphical representation to guide experimental design, to identify sources of external variability from the statistical pattern of variables, and to make management decisions.
Although most of the examples are drawn from ecology, the methods are relevant to all of the pure and applied sciences. This relevance is enhanced by case studies from such diverse areas as physiology, resource management, the behavioral sciences, and social epidemiology. The book will be useful to a broad readership from the biological and social sciences as well as the physical sciences and technology. It will interest undergraduate and graduate students along with researchers active in these disciplines. Here the reader will find a strong rationale for maintaining a holistic approach, revealing what insights and advantages are retained by the broader perspective and, more explicitly, by the synergistic effects that cannot be discerned by reducing systems to their smallest parts.
The more science tells us about the world, the stranger it looks. Ever since physics first penetrated the atom, early in this century, what it found there has stood as a radical and unanswered challenge to many of our most cherished conceptions of nature. It has literally been called into question since then whether or not there are always objective matters of fact about the whereabouts of subatomic particles, or about the locations of tables and chairs, or even about the very contents of our thoughts. A new kind of uncertainty has become a principle of science.
This book is an original and provocative investigation of that challenge, as well as a novel attempt at writing about science in a style that is simultaneously elementary and deep. It is a lucid and self-contained introduction to the foundations of quantum mechanics, accessible to anyone with a high school mathematics education, and at the same time a rigorous discussion of the most important recent advances in our understanding of that subject, some of which are due to the author himself.
As Kenneth W. Ford shows us in The Quantum World, the laws governing the very small and the very swift defy common sense and stretch our minds to the limit. Drawing on a deep familiarity with the discoveries of the twentieth century, Ford gives an appealing account of quantum physics that will help the serious reader make sense of a science that, for all its successes, remains mysterious. In order to make the book even more suitable for classroom use, the author, assisted by Diane Goldstein, has included a new section of Quantum Questions at the back of the book. A separate answer manual to these 300+ questions is available; visit The Quantum World website for ordering information.
There is also a cloth edition of this book, which does not include the "Quantum Questions" included in this paperback edition.
In 1953, reflecting on early ventures in quantum theory, J. Robert Oppenheimer spoke of terror and exaltation, of history happening in a realm so remote from common experience that it was “unlikely to be known to any poet or historian.” Yet now, anyone can Google “quantum theory” and find more than 34 million entries—from poets and historians, certainly, as well as film critics and Buddhist monks. How—and how pervasively—quantum mechanics has entered the general culture is the subject of this book, an engaging, eclectic, and thought-provoking look at the curious, boundlessly fertile intersection of scientific thought and everyday life.
Including recollections of encounters with the theory and the people responsible for it, Jeremy Bernstein’s account ranges from the cross-pollination of quantum mechanics with Marxist ideology and Christian and Buddhist mysticism to its influence on theater, film, and fiction. Along the way, Bernstein focuses on those—such as Niels Bohr, the Dalai Lama, W. H. Auden, and Tom Stoppard—who have made quantum physics; who have argued over it, pondered it, or taken literary inspiration from it, and who have misunderstood, misconstrued, or misapplied it. One person in particular supplies a narrative thread: John Bell, a notable yet underappreciated physicist who did groundbreaking research in quantum physics. In Bell’s story, Bernstein provides a uniquely readable account of what physicists call the “measurement problem.”
Quantum Leaps is a lively, erudite book on a subject that Bernstein has lived with for most of its history. His experience and deep understanding are apparent on every page.
Measured by the accuracy of its predictions and the scope of its technological applications, quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in science—as well as one of the most misunderstood. The deeper meaning of quantum mechanics remains controversial almost a century after its invention. Providing a way past quantum theory’s paradoxes and puzzles, QBism offers a strikingly new interpretation that opens up for the nonspecialist reader the profound implications of quantum mechanics for how we understand and interact with the world.
Short for Quantum Bayesianism, QBism adapts many of the conventional features of quantum mechanics in light of a revised understanding of probability. Bayesian probability, unlike the standard “frequentist probability,” is defined as a numerical measure of the degree of an observer’s belief that a future event will occur or that a particular proposition is true. Bayesianism’s advantages over frequentist probability are that it is applicable to singular events, its probability estimates can be updated based on acquisition of new information, and it can effortlessly include frequentist results. But perhaps most important, much of the weirdness associated with quantum theory—the idea that an atom can be in two places at once, or that signals can travel faster than the speed of light, or that Schrödinger’s cat can be simultaneously dead and alive—dissolves under the lens of QBism.
Using straightforward language without equations, Hans Christian von Baeyer clarifies the meaning of quantum mechanics in a commonsense way that suggests a new approach to physics in general.
Presenting a fascinating overview of medicine in Missouri from the early days of epidemics to present-day technological advances, Quinine and Quarantine approaches the history of medicine as an integral part of the state's development.
Examining the changing environmental risks and diseases that threatened Missouri over the years and the role of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers as prime routes for the spread of diseases and innovations, Loren Humphrey discusses the efforts of citizens, legislators, and health officials confronting various medical challenges. He offers intriguing medical details of the past two centuries interspersed with the stories of significant historical figures and Missourians' personal accounts. He tells of the pioneers' struggles to use natural remedies acquired from Native Americans, the gory and unsanitary attempts to treat early gunshot wounds, and the common afflictions and diseases such as "swamp fever," measles, mumps, consumption, dysentery, smallpox, and typhoid that seemed beyond medicine's effects. Humphrey also discusses the significance of the discovery and reluctant acceptance of the "antifever" breakthrough now famous as quinine, as well as the lessons learned as a result of Civil War medical techniques.
Quinine and Quarantine takes readers on a remarkable journey that concludes in the present, arguably the most exciting and controversial era for medical advances. Humphrey explores new imaging techniques, laparoscopic surgery, and research on ways to overcome bacterial resistance to antibiotics. He challenges the reader to consider such compelling issues as the escalating cost of health care and the threats posed by environmental hazards. He also identifies topics over which Missourians will likely struggle well into the next century, such as transplants, managed care, abortion, and assisted suicide.
Organized chronologically in fifty-year segments and written in language free of jargon, Quinine and Quarantine offers readers a broad historical view of the medical problems and solutions faced by the people of Missouri, preparing them to cope with medical issues of the new millennium.
In 1948, when “Mrs. G.,” hospitalized with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, became the first person to receive a mysterious new compound—cortisone—her physicians were awestruck by her transformation from enervated to energized. After eighteen years of biochemical research, the most intensively hunted biological agent of all time had finally been isolated, identified, synthesized, and put to the test. And it worked. But the discovery of a long-sought “magic bullet” came at an unanticipated cost in the form of strange side effects. This fascinating history recounts the discovery of cortisone and pulls the curtain back on the peculiar cast of characters responsible for its advent, including two enigmatic scientists, Edward Kendall and Philip Hench, who went on to receive the Nobel Prize. The book also explores the key role the Mayo Clinic played in fostering cortisone’s development, and looks at drugs that owe their heritage to the so-called “King of Steroids.”
The untold story behind the popular health food, Quinoa illuminates how Indigenous communities have engaged with the politics and policies surrounding their production of a traditional and minor crop that became a global foodstuff.
Quality Maintenance in Stored Grains and Seeds was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Storage molds are a major cause of quality loss in grains and seeds held in farm bins and tanks, in commercial elevators and warehouses, and in barge and ship transport. The damage done by these storage molds is at first invisible, but later shows up as caking, mustiness, total spoilage of part or all of the grain, and heating - sometimes to the temperature of ignition. The authors, both of whom have had extensive first-hand field and laboratory experience with these grain storage fungi and the problems they cause, summarize in readable and readily understandable form the basic principles and specific practices to be followed in order to minimize such losses.
Chapters are devoted to grain grades and quality; storage fungi; conditions that promote or prevent loss in quality; spoilage in barge and ship transport; mycotoxins (toxic compounds produced by fungi growing in grains and feeds) and mycotoxicoses (the diseases caused in animals that consume such toxic products); insects, mites, and storage fungi, quality control; and identification of storage fungi as an aid in evaluation of grain condition and storability.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press