A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Dr. Shaheen, studying over 100 different popular entertainment programs, cartoons and major documentaries telecast on network, independent and public channels, totaling nearly 200 episodes that relate to Arabs, has thrown new and revealing light on the stereotypes of people from the Middle East.
Whereas most histories of television focus on the way older forms of entertainment were recycled for the new medium, Lynn Spigel shows how TV was instrumental in introducing the public to the latest trends in art and design. Abstract expressionism, pop art, art cinema, modern architecture, and cutting-edge graphic design were all mined for staging techniques, scenic designs, and an ever-growing number of commercials. As a result, TV helped fuel the public craze for trendy modern products, such as tailfin cars and boomerang coffee tables, that was vital to the burgeoning postwar economy. And along with influencing the look of television, many artists—including Eero Saarinen, Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, William Golden, and Richard Avedon—also participated in its creation as the networks put them to work designing everything from their corporate headquarters to their company cufflinks.
Since the late 1990s, when broadcasters began adapting such television shows as Big Brother, Survivor, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? for markets around the world, the global television industry has been struggling to come to grips with the prevalence of program franchising across international borders. In TV Format Mogul, Albert Moran traces the history of this phenomenon through the lens of Australian producer Reg Grundy’s transnational career.
Program copycatting, Moran shows, began long before its most recent rise to prominence. Indeed, he reveals that the practice of cultural and commercial cloning from one place to another, and one time to another, has occurred since the early days of broadcasting. Beginning in the late 1950s, Grundy brought non-Australian shows to Australian audiences, becoming the first person to take local productions to an overseas market. By following Grundy’s career, Moran shows how adaptation and remaking became the billion-dollar business they are today. An exciting new contribution from Australia’s foremost scholar of television, TV Format Mogul will be a definitive history of program franchising.
Beginning around 2003, the growth of interest in the genre of reality shows has dominated the field of television studies. However, concentrating on this genre has tended to sideline the even more significant emergence of the program format as a central mode of business and culture in the new television landscape. TV Formats Worldwide redresses this balance and heralds the emergence of an important, exciting, and challenging area of television studies. Topics explored include reality TV, makeover programs, sitcoms, talent shows, and fiction serials, as well as broadcaster management policies, production decision chains, and audience participation processes. This seminal work will be of considerable interest to media scholars worldwide.
Long before cable, prepackaged syndication, infomercials, do-it-yourselfers, and reality shows cluttered the television dial, there was a brand of entertainment that has today nearly vanished from the airwaves: local TV. And with its colorful and quirky cast of characters, Detroit TV arguably offered some of the best of the best of local programming anywhere in the nation-a smorgasbord of exuberant, one-of-a-kind television shows.
Based on actual interviews with the people who made Detroit TV, Gordon Castelnero's TV Land-Detroit awakens the emotional attachment and nostalgia our community has for these shows, bringing the beloved characters and memorable programs back to life.
From the glamorous Rita Bell to the insanity of the Ghoul, the zany Jingles in Boofland to the opinionated and often confrontational Lou Gordon and the gruff-voiced and somnolent George Pierrot, Castelnero reacquaints us with the talent and behind-the-scenes people, of the creative spirit in Detroit, and the intimacy they shared with the community both on and off the air.
Gordon Castelnero was a producer at WNIC radio for four years. He produced the acclaimed documentaries for WDIV and WTVS, Michigan, It Started Here! Michigan and the American Dream, and Titanic: The Final Chapter. He currently lives in Livonia, Michigan, and works at Technicolor in DVD and game media distribution. He can be contacted by e-mail at tvlanddetroit@yahoo.com
Lavishly illustrated and with in-depth discussion of over fifty canonical and contemporary artworks, TV Museum offers a new approach to the analysis of television’s place within contemporary art and culture.
Half a century later, RCA’s dreams have become a reality, and liquid crystals are the basis of a multibillion-dollar global industry. Yet the company responsible for producing the first LCDs was unable to capitalize upon its invention. In The TVs of Tomorrow, Benjamin Gross explains this contradiction by examining the history of flat-panel display research at RCA from the perspective of the chemists, physicists, electrical engineers, and technicians at the company’s central laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey.
Drawing upon laboratory notebooks, internal reports, and interviews with key participants, Gross reconstructs the development of the LCD and situates it alongside other efforts to create a thin, lightweight replacement for the television picture tube. He shows how RCA researchers mobilized their technical expertise to secure support for their projects. He also highlights the challenges associated with the commercialization of liquid crystals at RCA and Optel—the RCA spin-off that ultimately manufactured the first LCD wristwatch. The TVs of Tomorrow is a detailed portrait of American innovation during the Cold War, which confirms that success in the electronics industry hinges upon input from both the laboratory and the boardroom.
Scholars traditionally distinguish Mark Twain from Louisa May Alcott based on gender differences, but Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that there are enough similarities between the two authors’ intellectual lives that their novels share interconnected social agendas. Trites does not imply that Twain and Alcott influenced each other—indeed, they had little effect on each other—but, paradoxically, they wrote on similar topics because they were so deeply affected by the Civil War, by cataclysmic emotional and ?nancial losses in their families, by their cultural immersion in the tenets of Protestant philosophy, and by sexual tensions that may have stimulated their interest in writing for adolescents.
Trites demonstrates how the authors participated in a cultural dynamic that marked the changing nature of adolescence in America, provoking a literary sentiment that continues to inform young adult literature. Both intuited that the transitory nature of adolescence makes it ripe for expressions about human potential for change and reform. Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel explores the effects these authors’ extraordinary popularity had in solidifying what could be called the adolescent reform novel. The factors that led Twain and Alcott to write for youth, and the effects of their decisions about how and what to write for that audience, involve the literary and intellectual history of two people—and the nation in which they lived.
Never one to suffer fools gladly, especially if they wore crinolines, Mark Twain lost as many friends as he made, and he targeted them all indiscriminately. The first major American writer born west of the Mississippi River, he enjoys a reputation unrivaled in American literary history, and from the beginning of his career he tried to control that reputation by fiercely protecting his public persona. Not a debunking account of Twain’s life but refreshingly immune from his relentless image making, Gary Scharnhorst’s Twain in His Own Time offers an anecdotal version of Twain’s life over which the master spin-doctor had virtually no control.
The ninety-four recollections gathered in Twain in His Own Time form an unsanitized, collaborative biography designed to provide a multitude of perspectives on the iconic author. Opening with an interview with his mother that has never been reprinted, it includes memoirs by his daughters and by men who knew him when he was roughing it in Nevada and California, an interview with the pilot who taught him to navigate the Mississippi River, reminiscences from his illustrators E. M. Kemble and Dan Beard and two of his so-called adolescent angelfish, contributions from politicians and from such literary figures as Dan De Quille and George Bernard Shaw, and one of the most damning assessments of his character—by the author Frank Harris—ever published.
Each entry is introduced by a brief explanation of its historical and cultural context; explanatory notes provide further information about people and places; and Scharnhorst’s introduction and chronology of Twain’s eventful life are comprehensive and detailed. Dozens of lively primary sources published incrementally over more than eighty years, most recorded after his death, illustrate the complexities of this flamboyant, outspoken personality in a way that no single biographer could.
Over time, the image of the Irish in the United States changed from that of hard-drinking Paddies to genial working-class citizens.
In 'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream, William H. A. Williams traces the change in this image through more than seven hundred pieces of sheet music--popular songs from the stage and for the parlor--to show how Americans' opinions of Ireland and the Irish swung from one extreme to the other.
As Williams shows, sheet music's place as a commercial item meant it had to be acceptable to the broadest possible song-buying public. Negotiations about the image of the Irish and Irish Americans involved Irish songwriters, performers, and pressured groups on one side, and non-Irish writers, publishers, and audiences on the other. Williams ties the contents of song lyrics to the history of the Irish diaspora, revealing how societies create ethnic stereotypes and how such stereotypes evolve, and even disappear, from mainstream popular culture.
Brown provides general distributional information, time of flowering, and habitat requirements for each species as well as a complete list of hybrids and the many different growth and color forms that can make identifying orchids so intriguing. For the twayblades and adder’s-mouths he includes information on 21 species, 1 additional variety, and 2 hybrids.
Most twayblades and adder’s-mouths are relatively small plants with tiny green flowers, but a few have richly colored blooms or particularly interesting habits that attract the native orchid enthusiast. Most of these species are easy to identify based upon their general appearance, range, and time of flowering. Answering three simple questions—when, where, and how does it grow?—and comparing the living plant with the striking photos in the backpack-friendly laminated guide should enable both professional and amateur naturalists to achieve the satisfaction of identifying a specific orchid.
Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the 'indignados' protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest.
Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a 'cyberspace' detached from physical reality. Instead, social media is used as part of a project of re-appropriation of public space, which involves the assembling of different groups around 'occupied' places such as Cairo’s Tahrir Square or New York’s Zuccotti Park.
An exciting and invigorating journey through the new politics of dissent, Tweets and the Streets points both to the creative possibilities and to the risks of political evanescence which new media brings to the contemporary protest experience.
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night centers on power and love. One of the most perennially produced of Shakespeare’s comedies, it talks about shipwrecked twins, gender-bending romance, and a bumper crop of fools, from the wise to the ridiculous. Modernizing the language of the play, Alison Carey’s translation revives the joy of this comedy, taking the archaic humor and renewing it for a contemporary audience.
This translation of Twelfth Night was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.
The Twelve Best Books by African Women is a collection of critical essays on eleven works of fiction and one play. The titles by African women that were included in the list of “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century” are: Anowa, Ama Ata Aidoo (1970); A Question of Power, Bessie Head (1974); Woman at Point Zero, Nawal El Saadawi (1975); The Beggars’ Strike, Aminata Sow Fall (1979); Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer (1979); The Joys of Motherhood, Buchi Emesheta (1979); So Long a Letter, Mariama Bâ (1980); Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Assia Djebar (1983); Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988); Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night, Sindiwe Magona (1991); Butterfly Burning, Yvonne Vera (1998); Riwan ou le chemin de sable, Ken Bugul (1999).
This collection of original essays recognizes the gesture of inclusion as an important shift in consciousness and creates a fresh awareness of the literary works by African women writers. Each essay offers a penetrating analysis of individual texts and opens up a fresh perspective that allows scholars and students alike to explore new dimensions of these writers’ work.
Winner, 2012 Northern California Book Award for Fiction in Translation
More faithful to the original text and its deeply resonant humor, this new translation of The Twelve Chairs brings Ilf and Petrov’s Russian classic fully to life. The novel’s iconic hero, Ostap Bender, an unemployed con artist living by his wits, joins forces with Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, a former nobleman who has returned to his hometown to look for a cache of missing jewels hidden in chairs that have been appropriated by the Soviet authorities. The search for the chairs takes them from the provinces of Moscow to the wilds of the Transcaucasus mountains. On their quest they encounter a variety of characters, from opportunistic Soviet bureaucrats to aging survivors of the old propertied classes, each one more selfish, venal, and bungling than the last. A brilliant satire of the early years of the Soviet Union, as well as the inspiration for a Mel Brooks film, The Twelve Chairs retains its universal appeal.
As the reader is transported from Las Vegas to Argentina to the landscapes of Ancient Greek epic poetry, Twelve Clocks explores the connections between song, ancestry, family, loss, and time. If the imagery of the collection hints Troy might be an image of the wrecked Argentine economy under neoliberal economics, the poems eschew the abstractions of politics in favor of a vivid and sensuous lyricism.
The interconnectivity of the poems in Twelve Clocks is mirrored by different elements’ transcendence throughout the collection. The clock that goes missing in one poem turns up in another, characters vanish and reappear, matter destroyed in one poem reoccurs as energy in another, and then matter and energy both go missing. Taken together, the poems confront the literary legacy of Western poetic tradition and our shared future.
This volume is designed to correct that fault in a dozen of those unjustifiably neglected British authors: Wilkie Collins, A.E.W. Mason, G.K. Chesterton, H.C. Bailey, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Nicholas Blake, Michael Gilbert, Julian Symons, Dick Francis, Edmund Crispin, H.R.F. Keating, and Simon Brett.
As it turns out, the trek was Ligon's first job with the US Biological Survey, and it did not go entirely undocumented. The breeding bird population report that eventually resulted from the journey, photographs from glass plate negatives, and—perhaps most enticingly—Ligon's own personal diary from these travels are presented here. Not just a compelling account of the expedition itself, the materials and insights found in this volume also reveal aspects of Ligon's family history, his early interest in wildlife, and the development of the wilderness skills needed to undertake such a survey.
Using his original itinerary and handwritten report, the authors of this book revisited many of the places that Ligon surveyed and in a few cases were even able to locate and repeat Ligon's early photographs. Combined with a discussion of the conditions of birds and other wildlife then and now, this volume serves as a useful tool for understanding how wildlife numbers, distribution, and habitats changed in New Mexico over the course of the twentieth century.
Birding enthusiasts, historians, naturalists, and even armchair adventurers will all find something to love in this chronicle of a young man from a West Texas ranching family with a driving ambition to be a professional naturalist and writer.
A millennium ago, Baghdad was the capital of one of history’s greatest civilizations. A new Islamic era was under way. Yet despite the profound cultural achievements, many Muslims felt their society had gone astray. Shiˀa Muslims challenged the dominant narrative of Islamic success with stories of loss. Faithful Muslims have long debated whether Sunni caliphs or Shiˀa imams were the true heirs of the Prophet Muhammad. More influential has been the way Muslim communities remembered those disputes through stories that influenced how to think and feel about them, Matthew Pierce argues.
Twelve Infallible Men focuses on the role of narratives of the imams in the development of a distinct Shiˀa identity. During the tenth century, at a critical juncture in Islamic history, a group of scholars began assembling definitive works containing accounts of the twelve imams’ lives. These collective biographies constructed a sacred history, portraying the imams as strong, beautiful, learned, and pious. Miracles surrounded their birth, and they became miracle workers in turn, but were nevertheless betrayed and martyred by enemies.
These biographies inspired and entertained, but more importantly they offered a meaningful narrative of history for Muslims who revered the imams. The accounts invoked shared memories and shaped communal responses and ritual practices of grieving. Mourning the imams’ tragic fates helped nascent Shiˀa communities resist the pressure to forget their story. The biographies of the imams became a focal point of cultural memory, inspiring Shiˀa religious imagination for centuries to come.
The people of Taquile Island on the Peruvian side of beautiful Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the Americas, are renowned for the hand-woven textiles that they both wear and sell to outsiders. One thousand seven hundred Quechua-speaking peasant farmers, who depend on potatoes and the fish from the lake, host the forty thousand tourists who visit their island each year. Yet only twenty-five years ago, few tourists had even heard of Taquile. In Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island, Elayne Zorn documents the remarkable transformation of the isolated rocky island into a community-controlled enterprise that now provides a model for indigenous communities worldwide.
Over the course of three decades and nearly two years living on Taquile Island, Zorn, who is trained in both the arts and anthropology, learned to weave from Taquilean women. She also learned how gender structures both the traditional lifestyles and the changes that tourism and transnationalism have brought. In her comprehensive and accessible study, she reveals how Taquileans used their isolation, landownership, and communal organizations to negotiate the pitfalls of globalization and modernization and even to benefit from tourism. This multi-sited ethnography set in Peru, Washington, D.C., and New York City shows why and how cloth remains central to Andean society and how the marketing of textiles provided the experience and money for Taquilean initiatives in controlling tourism.
The first book about tourism in South America that centers on traditional arts as well as community control, Weaving a Future will be of great interest to anthropologists and scholars and practitioners of tourism, grassroots development, and the fiber arts.
They stand on a hilltop in the mountains of Minas Gerais in Brazil—twelve dramatic figures, twelve Old Testament prophets soundlessly crying their warnings to mankind. There they have stood for over two centuries, masterpieces by that strange, unhappy sculptor, Antonio Francisco Lisboa—or, as he is better known, Aleijadinho, "The Little Cripple."
These figures, some mirroring in their faces the calm certainty of their prophesies and some reflecting the desperation of their warnings, have an impact upon the mind and the emotions of the modern viewer fully as great as their effect must have been upon those for whom they were originally carved—the adventurers of the lusty goldmining region which was eighteenth-century Minas Gerais. Their impact draws added depth from the realization that they bear also the mark of the anguish of their creator.
Aleijadinho, the mulatto son of a local builder, grew up untutored amid the building fever of the mining centers, grew up to endure throughout the last half of his long life the physical torment and the mental suffering of a painful and mutilating disease. Yet, developing his self-schooled talent, he stamped the hallmark of his creativity upon the religious art of the whole region.
In this volume the late artist photographer Hans Mann provides a sensitive pictorial study of the Twelve Prophets, of the six scenes of the Crucifixion which stand just below the Prophets on that windy hillside at Congonhas do Campo, and of other representative examples of the sculpture of Aleijadinho. A brief text by the photographer's wife, Graciela Mann, provides the information and background needed for the fullest enjoyment of the pictures.
The prose poem "When the Statues Speak," by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, sets the dramatic mood for the photographs of the Prophets themselves.
Pere Marquette 1225 was built in 1941 at the peak of steam locomotive development. The narrative traces the 1225’s regular freight service in Michigan, its unlikely salvation from the scrapyard for preservation at Michigan State University, and the subsequent work to bring it back to steam, first by a student club and later by a railroad museum. Milestones along the way include 1225’s retirement in 1951, its donation to MSU in 1957, its return to steam in 1988, a successful career hauling tens of thousands of excursion riders, and its starring role in the 2004 movie The Polar Express. The massive infrastructure that supported American steam locomotives in their heyday disappeared long ago, forcing 1225’s faithful to make their own spare parts, learn ancient railroad skills, and interpret the entire effort for the public. As such, the continuing career of 1225 is a triumph of historic preservation.
From tightening campaign finance laws and banning gerrymandering to rooting out structural racism and moving toward economic equality, each chapter focuses on one of the dozen reforms that are required to heal democracy within the state. Rothschild provides an in-depth rationale for each, dismantling the counterarguments against them and exploring the complexities involved in implementing them. He offers concrete proposals and action items for grassroots organizers and concerned community advocates to restore constituent control of state politics. This pocket-sized handbook is essential for politically aware citizens as well as journalists and watchdogs who see Wisconsin as a crucial battleground state and political bellwether for the nation.
"A wonderfully evocative memoir. . . . Agee evoked for me the atmosphere of postwar Berlin more vividly than the actual experience of it—and I was there." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
"One of those rare personal memoirs that brings to life a whole country and an epoch." —Christopher Isherwood
"Twelve Years consists of a series of finely honed anecdotes written in a precise, supple prose rich with sensual detail." —David Ghitelman, Newsday
"By turns poetic and picturesque, Agee energetically catalogues his expatriate passage to manhood with a pinpoint eye and a healthy American distaste for pretension. . . . Huckleberry Finn would have . . . welcomed [him] as a soulmate on the raft." —J. D. Reed, Time
"A triumph. . . . Unfettered by petty analysis or quick explanations, a story that is timeless and ageless and vital." —Robert Michael Green, Baltimore Sun
Twelve-Cent Archie is not only the first scholarly study of the Archie comic, it is an innovative creative work in its own right. Inspired by Archie’s own concise storytelling format, renowned comics scholar Bart Beaty divides the book into a hundred short chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of the Archie comics. Fans of the comics will be thrilled to read in-depth examinations of their favorite characters and motifs, including individual chapters devoted to Jughead’s hat and Archie’s sweater-vest. But the book also has plenty to interest newcomers to Riverdale, as it recounts the behind-the-scenes history of the comics and analyzes how Archie helped shape our images of the American teenager.
As he employs a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, Beaty reveals that the Archie comics themselves were far more eclectic, creative, and self-aware than most critics recognize. Equally comfortable considering everything from the representation of racial diversity to the semiotics of Veronica’s haircut, Twelve-Cent Archie gives a fresh appreciation for America’s most endearing group of teenagers.
Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins is the first biography of this legendary country music artist and NASCAR driver who scored sixteen number-one hits and two Grammy awards. Yet even with fame and fortune, Marty Robbins always yearned for more.
Drawing from personal interviews and in-depth research, biographer Diane Diekman explains how Robbins saw himself as a drifter, a man always searching for self-fulfillment and inner peace. Born Martin David Robinson to a hardworking mother and an abusive alcoholic father, he never fully escaped the insecurities burned into him by a poverty-stricken nomadic childhood in the Arizona desert. In 1947 he got his first gig as a singer and guitar player. Too nervous to talk, the shy young man walked onstage singing. Soon he changed his name to Marty Robbins, cultivated his magnetic stage presence, and established himself as an entertainer, songwriter, and successful NASCAR driver.
For fans of Robbins, NASCAR, and classic country music, Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins is a revealing portrait of this well-loved, restless entertainer, a private man who kept those who loved him at a distance.
Commercial artists who answered the call of business -- Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, and Raymond Loewy the best known among them -- were pioneers who envisioned a coherent machine-age environment in which life would be clean, efficient, and harmonious. Working with new materials -- chrome, stainless steel, Bakelite plastic -- they created a streamlined expressionist style which reflected the desire of the Depression-era public for a frictionless, static society.
Appliances such as Loewy's Coldspot refrigerator "set a new standard" (according to the advertisements), and its usefulness extended to the way it improved the middle-class consumer's taste for sleek new products.
Profusely illustrated with 150 photographs, Twentieth Century Limited pays tribute to the industrial designers and the way they transformed American culture; a generation after its initial publication, this book remains the best introduction to the subject. The new edition will fascinate anyone interested in art, architecture, technology, and American culture of the 1930's.
When the Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935, the company posed little threat to industry juggernauts such as Paramount and MGM. In the years that followed however, guided by executives Darryl F. Zanuck and Spyros Skouras, it soon emerged as one of the most important studios. Though working from separate offices in New York and Los Angeles and often of two different minds, the two men navigated Twentieth Century-Fox through the trials of the World War II boom, the birth of television, the Hollywood Blacklist, and more to an era of exceptional success, which included what was then the highest grossing movie of all time, The Sound of Music.
Twentieth Century-Fox is a comprehensive examination of the studio’s transformation during the Zanuck-Skouras era. Instead of limiting his scope to the Hollywood production studio, Lev also delves into the corporate strategies, distribution models, government relations, and technological innovations that were the responsibilities of the New York headquarters. Moving chronologically, he examines the corporate history before analyzing individual films produced by Twentieth Century-Fox during that period. Drawn largely from original archival research, Twentieth Century-Fox offers not only enlightening analyses and new insights into the films and the history of the company, but also affords the reader a unique perspective from which to view the evolution of the entire film industry.
Scorned by critics since birth, decreed dead by many, naturalism, according to Donald Pizer, is “one of the most persistent and vital strains in American fiction, perhaps the only modern literary form in America that has been both popular and significant.”
To define naturalism and explain its tenacious hold throughout the twentieth century on the American creative imagination, Pizer explores six novels: James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March.
Pizer’s approach to these novels is empirical; he does not wrench each novel awkwardly until it fits his framework of generalizations and principles; rather, he approaches the novels as fiction and arrives at his definition through his close reading of the works.
Establishing the background of naturalism, Pizer explains that it comes under attack because it is “sordid and sensational in subject matter,” it challenges “man’s faith in his innate moral sense and thus his responsibility for his actions,” and it is so full of “social documentation” that it is often dismissed as little more than a photographic record of a life or an era; thus the “aesthetic validity of the naturalistic novel has often been questioned.”
Pizer posits the 1890s, the 1930s,and the late 1940s as the decades when naturalism flourished in America. He concentrates on literary criticism, not on the philosophy ofnaturalism, to show that literary criticism can make a contribution to a particularly muddled area of literary history—a naturalism that is alive and changing, thus resisting the neat definitions reserved for the dead.
Self-help authors like Tom Peters and Stephen Covey, who have dominated best-seller lists over the last two decades, have exercised increasing influence on political, governmental, and educational organizations. By contrast, the topic of American success books— texts that promise to help readers succeed by retrofitting their identity to meet workplace demands—has been ignored by scholars since the 1980s. John Ramage challenges the neglect of this hugely popular literature and revives a once-lively conversation among eminent critics about the social phenomenon represented in the work of Bruce Barton, Dale Carnegie, and Norman Vincent Peale, among others.
Using literary texts from Don Quixote to Catch-22 to gloss the discussion, Ramage utilizes Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory to understand symbolic acts and social issues and brings together earlier commentaries within a new critical framework. He considers the problematic and paradoxical nature of success and examines its meaning in terms of its traditional dialectic partner, happiness. A synopsis of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century forerunners prefaces this analysis in which Ramage links literary code heroes with the activities of twentieth-century business leaders to determine whether, in the search for authenticity, the heroic individual or the corporation is ultimately served.
This comprehensive study chronicles the legitimation of the success book genre, enumerates rhetorical strategies used to win over readers, and supplies the historical context that renders each book’s message timely. After considering some of the dangers of crossing disciplinary borders, as exemplified by Deborah Tannen’s work, Ramage critiques Stanley Fish’s theoretical strictures against this practice, finally summoning academic critics to action with a strong call to exert greater influence within the popular marketplace.
The first comprehensive history of the Vatican’s agenda to defeat the forces of secular liberalism and communism through international law, cultural diplomacy, and a marriage of convenience with authoritarian and right-wing rulers.
After the United States entered World War I and the Russian Revolution exploded, the Vatican felt threatened by forces eager to reorganize the European international order and cast the Church out of the public sphere. In response, the papacy partnered with fascist and right-wing states as part of a broader crusade that made use of international law and cultural diplomacy to protect European countries from both liberal and socialist taint.
A Twentieth-Century Crusade reveals that papal officials opposed Woodrow Wilson’s international liberal agenda by pressing governments to sign concordats assuring state protection of the Church in exchange for support from the masses of Catholic citizens. These agreements were implemented in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, as well as in countries like Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. In tandem, the papacy forged a Catholic International—a political and diplomatic foil to the Communist International—which spread a militant anticommunist message through grassroots organizations and new media outlets. It also suppressed Catholic antifascist tendencies, even within the Holy See itself.
Following World War II, the Church attempted to mute its role in strengthening fascist states, as it worked to advance its agenda in partnership with Christian Democratic parties and a generation of Cold War warriors. The papal mission came under fire after Vatican II, as Church-state ties weakened and antiliberalism and anticommunism lost their appeal. But—as Giuliana Chamedes shows in her groundbreaking exploration—by this point, the Vatican had already made a lasting mark on Eastern and Western European law, culture, and society.
The essays in this book investigate the reasons for present-day neglect of popular culture materials and chart the various routes by which conscientious and insightful librarians and museum directors can correct this disastrous oversight.
This celebrated anthology, first published in 1978 as Russian Poetry: The Modern Period, provides a much-needed panoramic overview of Russian poetry since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Major features of this collection include a new and expanded introduction, a substantial new section of glasnost-era poetry, a generous sampling of postrevolutionary poetry in Russia, full representation of poets of the first and second post-World War II generations, and poetry of the successive emigrations, flights, or expulsions from Russia.
Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry makes an important contribution to our continuing understanding of a changing world order. This anthology should be read by all those who wish to know more about the poetry of Russia, those interested in international cultural and literary history, and all Slavicists.
Today’s critical establishment assumes that sentimentalism is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode that all but disappeared by the twentieth century. In this book, Jennifer Williamson argues that sentimentalism is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, she explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals.
Williamson covers new ground by examining authors who are not generally read for their sentimental narrative practices, considering the proletarian novels of Grace Lumpkin, Josephine Johnson, and John Steinbeck alongside neo-slave narratives written by Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison. Through careful close readings, Williamson argues that the appropriation of sentimental modes enables both sympathetic thought and systemic action in the proletarian and neo-slave novels under discussion. She contrasts appropriations that facilitate such cultural work with those that do not, including Kathryn Stockett’s novel and film The Help. The book outlines how sentimentalism remains a viable and important means of promoting social justice while simultaneously recognizing and exploring how sentimentality can further white privilege.
Sentimentalism is not only alive in the twentieth century. It is a flourishing rhetorical practice among a range of twentieth-century authors who use sentimental tactics in order to appeal to their readers about a range of social justice issues. This book demonstrates that at stake in their appeals is who is inside and outside of the American family and nation.
Spanish American fiction became a world phenomenon in the twentieth century through multilanguage translations of such novels as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude, and Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits. Yet these "blockbusters" are only a tiny fraction of the total, rich outpouring of Spanish-language literature from Latin America.
In this book, Naomi Lindstrom offers English-language readers a comprehensive survey of the century's literary production in Latin America (excluding Brazil). Discussing movements and trends, she places the famous masterworks in historical perspective and highlights authors and works that deserve a wider readership. Her study begins with Rodó's famous essay Ariel and ends with Rigoberta Menchú's 1992 achievement of the Nobel Prize. Her selection of works is designed to draw attention, whenever possible, to works that are available in good English translations.
A special feature of the book is its treatment of the "postboom" period. In this important concluding section, Lindstrom discusses documentary narratives, the new interrelations between popular culture and literary writing, and underrepresented groups such as youth cultures, slum dwellers, gays and lesbians, and ethnic enclaves. Written in accessible, nonspecialized language, Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction will be equally useful for general readers as a broad overview of this vibrant literature and for scholars as a reliable reference work.
A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book
Spanish American novels of the Boom period (1962-1967) attracted a world readership to Latin American literature, but Latin American writers had already been engaging in the modernist experiments of their North American and European counterparts since the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the desire to be "modern" is a constant preoccupation in twentieth-century Spanish American literature and thus a very useful lens through which to view the century's novels.
In this pathfinding study, Raymond L. Williams offers the first complete analytical and critical overview of the Spanish American novel throughout the entire twentieth century. Using the desire to be modern as his organizing principle, he divides the century's novels into five periods and discusses the differing forms that "the modern" took in each era. For each period, Williams begins with a broad overview of many novels, literary contexts, and some cultural debates, followed by new readings of both canonical and significant non-canonical novels. A special feature of this book is its emphasis on women writers and other previously ignored and/or marginalized authors, including experimental and gay writers. Williams also clarifies the legacy of the Boom, the Postboom, and the Postmodern as he introduces new writers and new novelistic trends of the 1990s.
"A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry."
—Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature
In this vivid memoir Neidhardt explores her childhood in wider familial and social contexts. Drawing upon a trove of family letters and other archival material, she follows her parents’ journey from privilege to food stamps—from their formative youths, to their embrace of pioneer homemaking and rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society—and explores the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s as it was, and as she lived it.
A story of strangers in a strange land, of class, marriage, and family in a changing world, Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods is part childhood idyll, part cautionary tale. Sarah Neidhardt reveals the treasures and tolls of unconventional, pastoral lives, and her insightful reflections offer a fresh perspective on what it means to aspire to pre-industrial lifestyles in a modern world.
Death, fame, art, and religion become comic subjects in Twenty First Century Blues, the fourth collection from Richard Cecil.Whether elegizing his predecessors, predicting his own end, channeling Dickinson’s “corpse-eye-view of stony death,” or imagining Yeats living in Indiana and dealing with English department politics, Cecil tempers his morbidity with a straightforward, tender brand of humor and a refreshing honesty about the shelf life of contemporary poetry. Deadpan and dark, yet pulsing with the spirit of life, these poems speak of historic France, Italy, and Switzerland, where religious persecutions, ancient catastrophes, and other, less personal, failures overshadow the disappointments and shortcomings of the poet’s modern life in the Midwest. Grimly cheered by these revelations, Cecil shows that poets, like cicadas screaming in the summer air, “won’t shut up until we’re skeletons.”
The walk from my apartment in Greenwich Village to my studio in Tribeca takes about twenty minutes, depending upon the route and whether I stop for a coffee and the Times. Invariably, though, it begins with a trip down the stairs.
And so sets out architecture critic Michael Sorkin on his daily walk from his home in a Manhattan old-law-style tenement building. Sorkin has followed the same path for over fifteen years, a route that has allowed him to observe the startling transformations in New York during this period of great change. Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is his personal, anecdotal account of his casual encounters with the physical space and social dimensions of this unparalleled city.
From the social gathering place of the city stoop to Washington Square Park, Sorkin’s walk takes the reader on a wry, humorous journey past local characters, neighborhood stores and bodegas, landmark buildings, and overlooked streets. His perambulations offer him—and the reader—opportunities to not only engage with his surroundings but to consider a wide range of issues that fascinate Sorkin as an architect, urbanist, and New Yorker. Whether he is despairing at street garbage or marveling at elevator etiquette, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan offers a testing ground for his ideas of how the city can be newly imagined and designed, addressing such issues as the crisis of the environment, free expression and public space, historic preservation, and the future of the neighborhood as a concept.
Inspired by Sorkin’s close, attentive relationship to his beloved city, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is in the end a valentine to the idea of the city that ultimately offers a practical set of solutions that are relevant to not only the preservation and improvement of New York but to urban environments everywhere.
The essays in Twenty Square Feet of Skin tell their stories through the body—encased as it is in “that greatest of organs, that membrane that protects the individual from the universe”—as Megan Baxter’s entrée to and home within the larger world that surrounds her. What does a tattoo mean? How can plastic surgery transform? What is the history of pedicures? Where does the mind wander on a long run? Through every example, Baxter writes toward a greater understanding of how self-knowledge is forged through physical experiences.
With the input of Prince, Walt Whitman, Don Johnson, Andrew Wyeth, Meriwether Lewis, and others, Baxter reflects on love, identity, and belonging by looking closely at her skin, toenails, and DNA. Playful, wandering, and deeply felt, Twenty Square Feet of Skin weaves a strange, rich tapestry of flesh and bones, art and body, skin and scar. In embracing the beauty and peril of physicality in crystalline detail, Baxter asks us all to ponder what makes us human within these frail, flawed, powerful, and wonderful bodies of ours.
Twenty Theses on Politics is inspired by recent political transformations in Latin America. As Dussel writes in Thesis 15, regarding the liberation praxis of social and political movements, “The winds that arrive from the South—from Nestor Kirchner, Tabaré Vásquez, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and so many others—show us that things can be changed. The people must reclaim sovereignty!” Throughout the twenty theses Dussel engages with Latin American thinkers and activists and with radical political projects such as the World Social Forum. He is also in dialogue with the ideas of Marx, Hegel, Habermas, Rawls, and Negri, offering insights into the applications and limits of their thinking in light of recent Latin American political thought and practice.
Bohan chronicles a bold experiment to challenge this inequity. The California Endowment, one of the nation’s largest health foundations, is upending the old-school, top-down charity model and investing $1 billion over ten years to help distressed communities advocate for their own interests. This new approach to community change draws on the latent political power of residents and is driving reform both locally and in the state’s legislative chambers. If it can work in fourteen of California’s most challenging and diverse communities, it has the potential to work anywhere in the country.
Bohan introduces us to former street shooters with official government jobs; kids who convinced their city council members to build skate parks; students and parents who demanded fairer school discipline policies to keep kids in the classroom; urban farmers who pushed for permits to produce and sell their food; and a Native American tribe that revived its traditional forest management practices. Told with compassion and insight, their stories will fundamentally change how we think about the root causes of disease and the prospects for healing.
The Twenty-First Ballot was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This account of a bitter struggle with in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party in Minnesota is an interesting story in its own right, and, viewed from a wider perspective, is a valuable documentary on the American political process.
The author recounts the events leading up to and climaxing in the party's deep split over the nomination of a candidate for the 1966 gubernatorial election. The nomination was accomplished only after twenty ballots were taken at the party's convention. The twenty first ballot of the book's title derives from a campaign slogan which urged that the voters, not the party, would make the final decision.
The intraparty battle was waged between a faction which backed the nomination of the incumbent governor, Karl F. Rolvaag, for a second term and a group favoring the nomination of the incumbent lieutenant governor, A. M. "Sandy" Keith, as the gubernatorial candidate. Basic to the struggle was the conviction among supporters of Mr. Keith that a new "image' was needed to win the election of a party's obligation to an incumbent. Mr. Keith was nominated. However, Mr. Rolvaag challenged the nomination by entering the primary election. He defeated the party nominee and won a place on the general election ballot, only to be defeated, in the end, by his Republican opponent.
The book is illustrated with eight pages of news photographs of the principals and events of the story.
The details of this unusual sequence of events reveal much about the workings of party politics at the important state level. The book will, therefore, be of interest not only to the general readers but to students and teachers in political science courses.
The result of work initiated by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, this collection provides an excellent overview of the contemporary racial and ethnic terrain in the United States. The well-respected contributors to Twenty-First Century Color Lines combine theoretical and empirical perspectives, answering fundamental questions about the present and future of multiracialism in the United States: How are racial and ethnic identities promoted and defended across a spectrum of social, geopolitical and cultural contexts? What do two generations of demographic and social shifts around issues of race look like “on the ground?” What are the socio-cultural implications of changing demographics in the U.S.? And what do the answers to these questions portend for our multiracial future?
This illuminating book addresses issues of work, education, family life and nationality for different ethnic groups, including Asians and Latinos as well as African Americans and whites. Such diversity, gathered here in one volume, provides new perspectives on ethnicity in a society marked by profound racial transformations.
Contributors: Luis A. Avilés, Juan Carlos Martínez-Cruzado, Nilanjana Dasgupta, Christina Gómez, Gerald Gurin, Patricia Gurin, Anthony Kwame Harrison, Maria-Rosario Jackson, John Matlock, Nancy McArdle, John Mollenkopf, john a. powell, Doris Ramírez, David Roediger, Anayra Santory-Jorge, Jiannbin Lee Shiao, Mia H. Tuan, Katrina Wade-Golden and the editors.
Contemporary war is as much a quest for decisive technological, organizational, and doctrinal superiority before the fighting starts as it is an effort to destroy enemy militaries during battle. Armed forces that are not actively fighting are instead actively reengineering themselves for success in the next fight and imagining what that next fight may look like. Twenty-First Century Military Innovation outlines the most theoretically important themes in contemporary warfare, especially as these appear in distinctive innovations that signal changes in states’ warfighting capacities and their political goals.
Marcus Schulzke examines eight case studies that illustrate the overall direction of military innovation and important underlying themes. He devotes three chapters to new weapons technologies (drones, cyberweapons, and nonlethal weapons), two chapters to changes in the composition of state military forces (private military contractors and special operations forces), and three chapters to strategic and tactical changes (targeted killing, population-centric counterinsurgency, and degradation). Each case study includes an accessible introduction to the topic area, an overview of the ongoing scholarly debates surrounding that topic, and the most important theoretical implications. This book can be read as an overview of the themes that run throughout innovations of varying types or it can be used by readers who are interested in particular topic areas.
This thoroughly revised edition of 2013’s seminal Twenty-First-Century Access Services highlights the expanded duties of these departments; the roles these services continue to play in the success of the library, students, and faculty; and the knowledge, skills, and abilities these library workers need. In four parts it explores:
- Facilitating Access
- Leading Access Services
- Assessing Access Services
- Developing Access Services Professionals
Twenty-First-Century Access Services demonstrates access services’ value, defines their responsibilities and necessary skills, and explores how access services departments are evolving new and traditional services to support the academic mission of their institutions. It is geared toward both access services practitioners and library and information science graduate students and faculty.
The bar code is now at the core of commerce, transportation, warehousing, manufacturing, and retailing, and its influence has spread to virtually every industry in the industrialized world. When this voluntary product code was first introduced in 1974, it led to the worldwide revolution in supply chain efficiency.
To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of this now universally embraced technology, the Smithsonian Institution sponsored a symposium. Gathered together in this volume are the thoughts of eight speakers with hands-on experience concerning the development, diffusion, adoption, and applications of a truly groundbreaking technology. The volume concludes with papers from a panel discussion among those involved in creating the Universal Product Code, the foundation of the bar code.
Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt is a memoir written by Edwards in 1918, when the school was 25 years old. It not only provided a fascinating portrait of the conditions of black people and the state of race relations in Alabama at the time, but also tells of one person's determination to uplift his race, particularly through eductation, in the years following Reconstruction.
Kant declared that philosophy began in 1781 with his Critique of Pure Reason. In 1806 Hegel announced that philosophy had now been completed. Eckart Förster examines the reasons behind these claims and assesses the steps that led in such a short time from Kant’s “beginning” to Hegel’s “end.” He concludes that, in an unexpected yet significant sense, both Kant and Hegel were indeed right.
“Presents a novel interpretation of the development of German idealism that is rich in both historical depth and philosophical insight…Förster sets forth a historically nuanced and philosophically discerning interpretation of the central debates of the era.”
—Peter Yong, Philosophy in Review
“[Förster’s] book does not disappoint…The amount of material covered by Förster is impressive…Förster’s book is rich in specificity…Wherever the discussion goes, it is going to have to go on by taking Förster’s big picture and all his detailed accounts into account.”
—Terry Pinkard, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
“Förster’s command of the historical sources is most impressive. Moreover, this book is clearly written, and Bowman’s translation is commendable. Scholars and graduate students will welcome this masterpiece.”
—J. M. Fritzman, Choice
In the first section, Dethier efficiently presents each genre, providing models; a description of the genres’ purpose, context, and discourse; and suggestions for writing activities or “moves” that writers can use to get words on the page and accomplish their writing tasks. The second section explains these moves, over two hundred of them, in chapters ranging from “Solve Your Process Problems” and “Discover” to “Revise” and “Present.” Applicable to any writing task or genre, these moves help students overcome writing blocks and develop a piece of writing from the first glimmers of an idea to its presentation.
This approach to managing the complexity and challenge of writing in college strives to be useful, flexible, eclectic, and brief—a valuable resource for students learning to negotiate unfamiliar writing situations.
This is a splendid collection of stories about Texas by Texans—stories that appeared in leading magazines in the first half of the twentieth century.
Authors in this volume:
- Dillon Anderson
- Barry Benefield
- Charles Carver
- Margaret Cousins
- Chester T. Crowell
- Eugene Cunningham
- J. Frank Dobie
- Fred Gipson
- William Goyen
- O. Henry
- Sylvan Karchmer
- Harry Kidd, Jr.
- Mary King O’Donnell
- George Pattullo
- George Sessions Perry
- Katherine Anne Porter
- Winifred Sanford
- John W. Thomason, Jr.
- Thomas Thompson
- John Watson
- John W. Wilson
Twenty-Two Years presents the results of a unique longitudinal study of the first 22 years in the lives of more than 200 young people with varying degrees of mental retardation. By following their paths through available services, job histories, leisure activities, friendships, and marriages, the authors provide objective information about the quality of life of young people with mental retardation.
The book makes a unique contribution by determining what factors in childhood predict who will and who will not require mental retardation services and, for those who disappear from services, why some fare better than others. Most important, the results help answer a question that haunts parents: "What will happen when my child grows up?"
This study expands on an internationally acclaimed clinical and epidemiological study of children with mental retardation published in 1970. It provides prevalence rates by severity of mental retardation, gender, social class, and family stability, and shows how these change over time.
The authors confirm the central role of biomedical factors in the etiology of severe mental retardation. For the etiology of mild mental retardation, the book examines the relative contributions of biomedical and intergenerational genetic factors as well as psychosocial adversity. The book should be of interest to a broad range of clinicians, researchers, and students, as well as the families of people with mental retardation, and it will serve as a model for future epidemiological and follow-up research.
In the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, nearly two million citizens in Turkey and Greece were expelled from homelands. The Lausanne treaty resulted in the deportation of Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims from Greece to Turkey. The transfer was hailed as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not coexist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies of a single culture. The opinions and feelings of those uprooted from their native soil were never solicited.
In an evocative book, Bruce Clark draws on new archival research in Turkey and Greece as well as interviews with surviving participants to examine this unprecedented exercise in ethnic engineering. He examines how the exchange was negotiated and how people on both sides came to terms with new lands and identities.
Politically, the population exchange achieved its planners' goals, but the enormous human suffering left shattered legacies. It colored relations between Turkey and Greece, and has been invoked as a solution by advocates of ethnic separation from the Balkans to South Asia to the Middle East. This thoughtful book is a timely reminder of the effects of grand policy on ordinary people and of the difficulties for modern nations in contested regions where people still identify strongly with their ethnic or religious community.
Colombian-born Santiago Martinez starts his adult life as a young gay writer living in Spain. Years later, as a university professor in New York City, Santiago is called back to his native Colombia upon the suicide of his sister. There he learns some shocking secrets about his childhood and adolescence and comes to the realization that cherished memories of the past are only illusion.
Italian political thinker Mario Tronti is most famous for being the author of Workers and Capital, which became the central theoretical formulation of Italian operaismo or workerism, a current of political thought emerging in the 1960s that revolutionized the institutional and extra-parliamentary Left in Italy and beyond. In The Twilight of Politics, written originally in 1998, Tronti argues that modern politics, which reached its apogee in the twentieth century, has ended.
Realism and Utopia, Tronti explains, were the foundational qualities of modern politics, which it always tried to clasp together. But behind this highwater mark of politics was a history over the longue durée, encompassing the wars of religion, Hobbes’ Leviathan, revolution, great individuals, and popular movements, as well as innovations such as the nation-state and the party-form. Historically, the modern period is also a coming together of the categories of the political and the laws of political economy. At the heart of this book is Tronti’s attempt to hold together a view of the course of political history with a critique of the “dictatorship of the present” to help us escape being “chained to the bars of an eternal present . . . which deprives us both of the freedom to look back and to see ahead.”
The sudden emergence of the Trump nation surprised nearly everyone, including journalists, pundits, political consultants, and academics. When Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke. Yet time showed it was instead the rise of a movement—angry, militant, revanchist, and unabashedly authoritarian.
How did this happen? Twilight of the American State offers a sweeping exploration of how law and legal institutions helped prepare the grounds for this rebellious movement. The controversial argument is that, viewed as a legal matter, the American state is not just a liberal democracy, as most Americans believe. Rather, the American state is composed of an uneasy and unstable combination of different versions of the state—liberal democratic, administered, neoliberal, and dissociative. Each of these versions arose through its own law and legal institutions. Each emerged at different times historically. Each was prompted by deficits in the prior versions. Each has survived displacement by succeeding versions. All remain active in the contemporary moment—creating the political-legal dysfunction America confronts today.
Pierre Schlag maps out a big picture view of the tribulations of the American state. The book abjures conventional academic frameworks, sets aside prescriptions for quick fixes, dispenses with lamentations about polarization, and bypasses historical celebrations of the American Spirit.
In Western thought, the modern period signals a break with stagnant social formations, the advent of a new rationalism, and the emergence of a truly secular order, all in the context of an overarching globalization. In The Twilight of the Literary, Terry Cochran links these developments with the rise of the book as the dominant medium for recording, preserving, and disseminating thought. Consequently, his book explores the role that language plays in elaborating modern self-understanding. It delves into what Cochran calls the "figures of thought" that have been an essential component of modern consciousness in the age of print technology--and questions the relevance of this "print-bound" thinking in a world where print no longer dominates.
Cochran begins by examining major efforts of the eighteenth century that proved decisive for modern conceptions of history, knowledge, and print. After tracing late medieval formulations of vernacular language that proved crucial to print, he analyzes the figures of thought in print culture as they proceed from the idea of the collective spirit (the "people"), an elaboration of modern history. Cochran reconsiders basic texts that, in his analysis, reveal the underpinnings of modernity's formation--from Dante and Machiavelli to Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin. Moving from premodern models for collective language to competing theories of history, his work offers unprecedented insight into the means by which modern consciousness has come to know itself.
This study of the Portuguese commercial empire in India during the Hapsburg years is the most serious attempt yet made to analyze the old Portuguese pepper trade--from the planting of orchards in the foothills of Malabar and Kanara to the unloading of spice-laden carracks in Lisbon. Equally significant, it is the first book to explain how and why the Portuguese were not able to modernize their trade system when faced with crisis conditions.
The distress that confronted the Portuguese following the arrival of the Dutch and English, seen here as partly military but fundamentally economic and organizational, reached its decisive stage in the 1620s and early 1630s. The Portuguese attempted to combat the crisis by creating their own India Company. The story of that company and the reasons for its failure are thoroughly investigated as Disney looks at its antecedents, composition, activities, and weaknesses. The author has unearthed much new statistical material from widely scattered manuscript sources and in doing so sheds new light on related problems and issues, such as institutional relations between Spain and Portugal, the careers of individual merchants, and the nature and difficulties of viceregal government in Portuguese India.
After beating his girlfriend and leaving her for dead on the street, Amok retraces his steps. Frightened by his act, which reproduces the violence of his father, he hopes to save the woman. But it is too late when he arrives at the scene; two women are already carrying the injured woman. Overwhelmed and not daring to reveal himself, he decides to find his father in order to learn how to rid himself of the dark force that he believes runs through the men of his lineage. He embarks on a journey that will be, more than anything, an inner one, forcing him to understand his story and choose a healthier way of being in the world. This second volume of Twilight of Torment is both intimate and political. Through the story of a man and his family, we discover an African bourgeoisie and its many social wanderings in a contemporary Africa whose future seems nebulous.
Four women speak. They speak to the same man, who is not there. He is the son of the first, the great-yet-impossible love of the second, the platonic companion of the third, the older brother of the last. Speaking to him in his absence, it is to themselves that these women turn, examining their own stories to make sense of their journey, from twilight to twilight, through a mysterious stormy night in the middle of the dry season.
Together, the voices in Twilight of Torment: Melancholy, the first volume of a two-volume novel, perform a powerful and sometimes discordant jazz-inspired chorus about issues such as femininity, sexuality, self-love, and the intrusion of history into the intimate lives of people of African descent. Blackness confronts African-ness, love is sometimes discovered in the arms of another woman, the African renaissance tries to establish itself on the rubble of self-esteem damaged by history. Each of these women, with her own language and rhythm, ultimately represents a specific aspect of the tormented history of Africans in today’s world, and at the end of the night, they will each arrive at a dawn of hope.
Billie Timmons was fourteen when he met Charles Goodnight—over a wagonload of manure that had been jammed on a gatepost—and he went to work on the Goodnight Cross J Ranch shortly thereafter. The spirit of helpfulness that led Mr. Goodnight to strip off his coat and lift the wagon free for a lad in need sets the tone of this book, in which the author unwinds a spool of recollections of range-riding in Texas and North Dakota over an eighteen-year period.
When Billie Timmons went to work for Mr. Goodnight in 1892, Texas was undergoing a rapid transition from open range to fences. But around Texas campfires he heard tales about the northern range, told by cowboys who had ridden there and who had seen the northern lights, the tall free grass, swollen streams, and stampeding cattle. A longing to see that exciting country took hold of young Timmons.
His chance came when four buffaloes from the Goodnight ranch needed a nursemaid for their freight car trip to Yellowstone Park. Once in the northern country, Timmons stayed, casting his lot with the cowmen of North Dakota. He became the protégé of an extraordinary man, William Ray; he was foreman, friend, and confidant of banker-rancher Wilse Richards, a member of the Cowboy Hall of Fame. But even during his days in North Dakota he never lost touch with Charles Goodnight, a lifelong friend, and his portrayal of Goodnight provides much insight into the character of the man whose name belongs to the West.
In this book you experience the terror of being lost in the dead-white expanse of a North Dakota snowstorm; the gaiety of cowboy dances, for which there were never enough women available; the excitement of a near-riot in a Hebron, North Dakota, saloon, where cowboys from the 75 Ranch drank up or poured out all the liquor, then smashed all the glasses and bottles—one day before the state became bone-dry; and the loneliness of work on the range, where a flickering lantern on the side of a chuck wagon on a stormy night meant home for many a cowboy. Running like a bright thread through the narrative is Billie Timmons’s love of horses, from whom he learned the wisdom that some horses and some men are to be handled with great care and others are not to be handled at all. His chapter on Buck, his best-loved horse, is memorable.
In North Dakota, as in Texas, fences brought the end of the big herds and the end of cowboying for a man who enjoyed it to the hilt.
Each short chapter dives into a single episode and concludes with helpful cross-references to other episodes that explore similar philosophical problems and subjects. For example, a reader may be interested in questions about the nature of the mind and whether machines can think. By referencing this book, they could easily discover the thematic connections between episodes like “I Sing the Body Electric” or “The Lateness of the Hour,” and learn how both episodes introduce the viewer to possible worlds that challenge us to consider whether our idea of the mind, and even our very personhood, extends beyond the human to robots and other artificial intelligences. Each chapter introduces fundamental philosophical questions such as these through the lens of The Twilight Zone and inspires additional exploration. Further readings are suggested for all episodes, making this volume indispensable to academics, students, and fans of the show. Each chapter is short and accessible, ensuring that this book is the perfect resource to accompany a complete series re-watch.
The Twilight Zone considered questions that strike at the heart of philosophical inquiry, such as the nature of self, the existence of god, the possibility of an afterlife, the relationship between knowledge and mental illness, the nature of possibility, even the nature of imagination itself, and so much more. Traiger argues that each episode can serve as an entry point for philosophical reflection. Twilight Zone Reflections is a valuable reference for anyone interested in exploring a well-known slice of popular culture history that doubles as a vast store of philosophical ideas.
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