front cover of Reading, Writing, and Revolution
Reading, Writing, and Revolution
Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas
By Philis M. Barragán Goetz
University of Texas Press, 2020

2022 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award
Tejas Foco Non-fiction Book Award, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
2021 Tejano Book Prize, Tejano Genealogy Society of Austin
2021 Jim Parish Award for Documentation and Publication of Local and Regional History, Webb County Heritage Foundation
2021 Runner-up, Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book

The first book on the history of escuelitas, Reading, Writing, and Revolution examines the integral role these grassroots community schools played in shaping Mexican American identity.

Language has long functioned as a signifier of power in the United States. In Texas, as elsewhere in the Southwest, ethnic Mexicans’ relationship to education—including their enrollment in the Spanish-language community schools called escuelitas—served as a vehicle to negotiate that power. Situating the history of escuelitas within the contexts of modernization, progressivism, public education, the Mexican Revolution, and immigration, Reading, Writing, and Revolution traces how the proliferation and decline of these community schools helped shape Mexican American identity.

Philis M. Barragán Goetz argues that the history of escuelitas is not only a story of resistance in the face of Anglo hegemony but also a complex and nuanced chronicle of ethnic Mexican cultural negotiation. She shows how escuelitas emerged and thrived to meet a diverse set of unfulfilled needs, then dwindled as later generations of Mexican Americans campaigned for educational integration. Drawing on extensive archival, genealogical, and oral history research, Barragán Goetz unravels a forgotten narrative at the crossroads of language and education as well as race and identity.

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Reading Zen in the Rocks
The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden
François Berthier
University of Chicago Press, 2000
The Japanese dry landscape garden has long attracted—and long baffled—viewers from the West. While museums across the United States are replicating these "Zen rock gardens" in their courtyards and miniature versions of the gardens are now office decorations, they remain enigmatic, their philosophical and aesthetic significance obscured. Reading Zen in the Rocks, the classic essay on the karesansui garden by French art historian François Berthier, has now been translated by Graham Parkes, giving English-speaking readers a concise, thorough, and beautifully illustrated history of these gardens.

Berthier's guided tour of the famous garden of Ryoanji (Temple) in Kyoto leads him into an exposition of the genre, focusing on its Chinese antecedents and affiliations with Taoist ideas and Chinese landscape painting. He traces the roles of Shinto and Zen Buddhism in the evolution of the garden and also considers how manual laborers from the lowest classes in Japan had a hand in creating some of its highest examples. Parkes contributes an equally original and substantive essay which delves into the philosophical importance of rocks and their "language of stone," delineating the difference between Chinese and Japanese rock gardens and their relationship to Buddhism. Together, the two essays compose one of the most comprehensive and elegantly written studies of this haunting garden form.

Reading Zen in the Rocks is fully illustrated with photographs of all the major gardens discussed, making it a handsome addition to the library of anyone interested in gardening, Eastern philosophy, and the combination of the two that the karesansui so superbly represents.

Praise for the French edition:

"A small book of rare depth, remarkably illustrated, on one of the most celebrated and beautiful rock gardens of the monasteries of Kyoto."—L'Humanité

"Through Le Jardin de Ryoanji, Berthier teaches us to read the zen in the rocks, to discover the language offered by the garden at Ryoanji. Enigmatic, poetic, and disconcerting, an enriching journey through a work of art of surprising modernity, Le Jardin de Ryoanji is a work that will interest all the amateurs of Japanese art and Eastern philosophy."—Lien Horticole

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Readings
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Seagull Books, 2014
Throughout her distinguished career, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has sought to locate and confront shifting forms of social and cultural oppression. As her work shows, the best method for doing so is through extended practice in the ethics of reading.  

In Readings, Spivak elaborates a utopian vision for the kind of deep and investigative reading that can develop a will for peaceful social justice in coming generations. Through her own analysis of specific works, Spivak demonstrates modes in which such a vision might be achieved. In the examples here, she pays close attention to signposts of character, action, and place in J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. She also offers rereads of two of her own essays, addressing changes in her own thinking and practice over the course of her career. Now in her fifth decade of teaching, Spivak passes on her lessons through anecdote, interpretation, warning, and instruction to students and teachers of literature. She writes, “I urge students of English to understand that utopia does not happen, and yet to understand, also, their importance to the nation and the world. Indeed, I know how hard it is to sustain such a spirit in the midst of a hostile polity, but I urge the students to consider the challenge.”
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Readings at the Edge of Literature
Myra Jehlen
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Myra Jehlen's aim in these essays is to read for what she calls the edge of literature: the point at which writing seems unable to say more, which is also, for Jehlen, the threshold of the real. It is here, she argues, that the central paradoxes of the American project become clear—self-reliance and responsibility, universal equality and the pursuit of empire, writing from the heart and representing shared values and ideas. Developing these paradoxes to their utmost tension, American writers often produce penetrating critiques of American society without puncturing its basic myths. For instance, Mark Twain's Puddn'head Wilson begins as a slashing satire of racism, only to conclude by demonstrating that even an invisible portion of black blood can make a man a murderer.

Throughout these essays Jehlen demonstrates the crucial role that the process of writing itself plays in unfolding these paradoxes, whether in the form of novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Virginia Woolf; the histories of Captain John Smith; or even a work of architecture, such as the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.
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Readings from Classical Rhetoric
Edited by Patricia P. Matsen, Philip Rollinson, and Marion Sousa
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Here, for the first time in one volume, are all the extant writings focusing on rhetoric that were composed before the fall of Rome.

This unique anthology of primary texts in classical rhetoric contains the work of 24 ancient writers from Homer through St. Augustine, including Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Longinus.

Along with many widely recognized translations, special features include the first English translations of works by Theon and Nicolaus, as well as new translations of two works by important sophists, Gorgias’ encomium on Helen and Alcidamas’ essay on composition.

The writers are grouped chronologically into historical periods, allowing the reader to understand the scope and significance of rhetoric in antiquity. Introductions are included to each period, as well as to each writer, with writers’ biographies, major works, and salient features of excerpts.

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Readings In American Health Care
Current Issues In Socio-Historical Perspective
William G. Rothstein
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
Readings in American Health Care is an introduction to the historical development and current status of a wide variety of health care topics. The readings, written by historians, sociologists, economists, physicians, nurses, and public health researchers, are organized in sections:
•    Basic Concepts: mortality trends, concepts of disease, changes in medical therapy
•    Public Health: AIDS, cigarette smoking, preventive medicine, fluoridation
•    Health Care Professions: cardiology, pathology, women in medicine, nursing, podiatry, midwives
•    Health Care Organizations: hospitals, HMOs
•    Mental Illness
•    Financing Health Care
•    Medical Education
•    Issues: abortion, ethical issues, cancer control, prenatal care, home care, the pharmaceutical industry
•    Background Readings: American medicine from 1920 to midcentury.

    The readings were chosen especially for course use in history, sociology, public health, and related fields, but can also provide useful background reading for anyone interested or involved in American health care. Each selection includes an introduction, questions for the reader, and a bibliography. Scholars and students alike will find the book an invaluable resource.
[more]

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Readings In American Indian Law
Jo Carrillo
Temple University Press, 1998
This selection of works -- many by Native American scholars -- introduces selected topics in federal Indian law. Readings in American Indian Law covers contemporary issues of identity and tribal recognition; reparations for historic harms; the valuation of land in land claims; the return to tribal owners of human remains, sacred items, and cultural property; tribal governance and issues of gender, democracy informed by cultural awareness, and religious freedom.

Courses in federal Indian law are often aimed at understanding rules, not cultural conflicts. This book expands doctrinal discussions into understandings of culture, strategy, history, identity, and hopes for the future. Contributions from law, history, anthropology, ethnohistory, biography, sociology, socio-legal studies, and fiction offer an array of alternative paradigms as strong antidotes to our usual conceptions of federal Indian law.

Each selection reveals an aspect of how federal Indian law is made, interpreted, implemented, or experienced. Throughout, the book centers on the ever present and contentious issue of identity. At the point where identity and law intersect lies an important new way to contextualize the legal concerns of Native Americans.
[more]

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Readings in Arkansas Politics and Government
Kim U. Hoffman
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
This second edition of the authoritative Readings in Arkansas Politics and Government brings together in one volume some of the best available scholarly research on a wide range of issues of interest to students of Arkansas politics and government. The twenty-one chapters are arranged in three sections covering both historical and contemporary issues—ranging from the state’s socioeconomic and political context to the workings of its policymaking institutions and key policy concerns in the modern political landscape. Topics covered include racial tension and integration, social values, political corruption, public education, obstacles facing the state’s effort to reform welfare, and others. Ideal for use in introductory and advanced undergraduate courses, the book will also appeal to lawmakers, public administrators, journalists, and others interested in how politics and government work in Arkansas.
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Readings in Arkansas Politics and Government
Janine A. Parry
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
Readings in Arkansas Politics and Government brings together in one volume some of the best available scholarly research, both new and not so new, on a wide range of topics and issues of interest to students of politics and government in the Natural State. The twenty-one articles are arranged in four sections, ranging from the state’s socioeconomic and political context to the workings of its policymaking institutions and the key policy puzzles facing the state in the early twenty-first century. Some of the topics covered include demographics, legislation, issues of church and state, the role of African Americans in the legislature, term limits, constitutional reform, civil rights, and education reform. Ideal for use in introductory and advanced undergraduate courses, the book will also appeal to lawmakers, administrators, journalists, and those interested in how politics and government work in the state.
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Readings in Chinese Literary Thought
Stephen Owen
Harvard University Press
This dual-language compilation of seven complete major works and many shorter pieces from the Confucian period through the Ch’ing dynasty will be indispensable to students of Chinese literature. Stephen Owen’s masterful translations and commentaries have opened up Chinese literary thought to theorists and scholars of other languages.
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Readings in Evaluation Research, 2ed
Francis G. Caro
Russell Sage Foundation, 1977
Affords a comprehensive overview of evaluative research, answering questions regarding the adequacy of organized programs in health, justice, education, employment, and welfare. Included are general statements about evaluative research, discussing the nature of the evaluative task, the role of evaluative research in programs for change, and appropriate methodological strategies. In this revised and expanded collection of readings, which includes more case materials and more illustrations of completed evaluations than the first edition, the editor presents a variety of viewpoints and a broad range of materials for the social planner, administrator, and social scientist.
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Readings in Interpretation
Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger
Andrzej WarminskiIntroduction by Rodolphe Gasche
University of Minnesota Press, 1987

Readings in Interpretation was first published in 1987. 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.

Readings in Interpretation — a volume primarily on the texts of Holderlin, Hegel, and their interpreter Heidegger—locates itself strategically between literature and philosophy. In keeping with this juxtaposition, it treats the question of self-consciousness and reflection on the levels of "theme" and "text." For both Hegel and Holderlin, selfconsciousness and its relation to knowing are explicit themes, but Waminski's readings show that a more disruptive reflection is operative on the level of text.

In an argument that centers on the textual aspects of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit,Warminski demonstrates that the negative moment—which is often interpreted as a prelude to a unified self-consciousness—cannot be accounted for by interpretive models drawn from outside the text—by concepts like the self, consciousness, or the subject. Instead, a completely different practice and theory is necessary. The author's "Prefatory Postscript" at the beginning of the book therefore serves as an introduction to sketch the theoretical basis of the readings that follow and as a "postscript" that explains the difference between "reading" and "interpretation" which those readings make necessary.

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Readings in Japanese Natural Language Processing
Edited by Francis Bond, et al.
CSLI, 2014
Readings in Japanese Natural Language Processing surveys a wide range of texts that explore Japanese morphology and syntactic analysis, discourse, and natural language process applications. Presenting such techniques in a manner accessible to those with little or no familiarity with Japanese, these carefully selected papers will broaden the scope of our study of Japanese linguistic phenomena, making this collection indispensable in the field.
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Readings in Linguistics I & II
Edited by Eric P. Hamp, Martin Joos, Fred W. Householder, and Robert Austerlitz
University of Chicago Press, 1995
This volume, consisting of nineteen articles from Readings in Linguistics I and twenty articles from Readings in Linguistics II, constitutes an invaluable collection of papers in English, German, and French on subjects of continuing interest to linguists of all schools. Complete with a new preface explaining the editors' principles of selection and bibliographical citations, Readings in Linguistics I & II includes the influential work of Bloomfield, Trubetzkoy, Firth, Harris, and Kurylowicz, as well as important but less accessible articles by Vachek, Bazell, Chao, Fischer-Jorgensen, and Tesniere.
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Readings in Managerial Psychology
Edited by Harold J. Leavitt, Louis R. Pondy, and David M. Boje
University of Chicago Press, 1988
With more than half the papers new to this book, the fourth edition of Readings in Managerial Psychology represents a substantial revision of this popular text. This edition focuses more than ever on the managing process, both within and between organizations, and such "soft" issues as managing creativity and imagination, managers' values and beliefs, and organizational culture play a larger role than they have before.

Readings in Managerial Psychology is designed for managers in business and industry, students of management, public and university administrators, and executives in other organizations. The collection can be used independently or as a companion volume to Harold J. Leavitt and Homa Bahrami's Managerial Psychology: Managing Behavior in Organizations (5th edition, 1988), also published by the University of Chicago Press.
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Readings in Philosophy of Psychology
Ned Block
Harvard University Press, 1980

In this introduction to the philosophical problems underlying the modern study of mind and behavior, Ned Block has collected the most important papers by the major figures in the field. He provides the only central reference work now available for scholars and students in this growing area of inquiry.

Volume I covers general approaches to the study of the mind: behaviorism, reductionism, and functionalism. Volume II addresses the central topics in modern cognitive science: mental representation, imagery, grammar and innate ideas.

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Readings in Philosophy of Psychology
Ned Block
Harvard University Press, 1980
This book of readings provides a complete introduction to the philosophical problems underlying the modern study of mind and behavior. The first volume covered general approaches to the study of mind. This second volume addresses the central topics in modern cognitive science: mental representation, imagery, grammar and innate ideas.
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Readings in Primary Art Education
Edited by Steve Herne, Sue Cox, and Robert Watts
Intellect Books, 2009

Readings in Primary Art Education focuses on the challenges of and approaches to teaching art to primary-school students. Drawn from articles originally published in the International Journal of Art and Design, this volume gathers the work of the best scholars in the field and provides a critical framework for developing methods of teaching art to young students. Capturing the key issues and debates that are shaping both curricula and practice, Readings in Primary Art Education is an essential starting point for anyone involved in art education. This collection of essays will be a welcome addition to art and design education and will be of interest to those active in primary art and design education, including practicing teachers and scholars.

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Readings in Public Choice Economics
Jac C. Heckelman, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2004
The first classroom book for undergraduate courses in public choice analysis, covering both political economy and social choice issues

Public choice analysis applies the methodology of economics to issues in political science and the policy process. The readings in this anthology cover topics in both institutional political economy and social choice theory and are comprehensible to nonspecialists and advanced undergraduates with a background in basic economic theory. Readings are taken from academic journals and book chapters and are reproduced in their entirety. They are selected to ensure they contain a minimal amount of notation and are free of advanced econometrics.

The anthology contains two to three readings each to explore the areas of rent seeking, collective action, bureaucracy, elections and the economy, choosing decision rules, majority rule, alternative voting procedures, and the calculus of voting. Each part contains a brief introduction to the general theme, and questions are presented as a guide to each reading. Additional suggested readings are provided to develop these concepts further.

Jac C. Heckelman is Associate Professor of Economics, Wake Forest University.
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Readings in Russian Civilization Volume I
Russia before Peter the Great, 900-1700
Edited by Thomas Riha
University of Chicago Press, 1969
"This new and enlarged version of Readings in Russian Civilization is the result of fairly extensive revisions. There are now 72 instead of 64 items; 20 of the selections are new. The first volume has undergone the least change with 3 new items, of which 2 appear in English for the first time. In the second volume there are 6 new items; all of them appear in English for the first time. The third volume has undergone the greatest revision, with 11 new items, of which 6 are newly translated from the Russian. It is the editor's hope that items left out in the new edition will not be sorely missed, and that the new selections will turn out to be useful and illuminating. The aim, throughout, has been to cover areas of knowledge and periods which had been neglected in the first edition, and to include topics which are important in the study of the Russian past and present.

"The bibliographical headnotes have been enlarged, with the result that there are now approximately twice as many entries as in the old edition. New citations include not only works which have appeared since 1963, but also older books and articles which have come to the editor's attention."—From the Editor's Preface

". . . a judicious combination of seminal works and more recent commentaries that achieves the editor's purpose of stimulating curiosity and developing a point of view."—C. Bickford O'Brien, The Russian Review

"These three volumes cover quite well the main periods of Russian civilization. The choice of the articles and other material is made by a competent and unbiased scholar."—Ivan A. Lopatin, Professor of Asian and Slavic Studies, University of Southern California
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Readings in Russian Civilization Volume II
Imperial Russia, 1700-1917
Edited by Thomas Riha
University of Chicago Press, 1969
"This new and enlarged version of Readings in Russian Civilization is the result of fairly extensive revisions. There are now 72 instead of 64 items; 20 of the selections are new. The first volume has undergone the least change with 3 new items, of which 2 appear in English for the first time. In the second volume there are 6 new items; all of them appear in English for the first time. The third volume has undergone the greatest revision, with 11 new items, of which 6 are newly translated from the Russian. It is the editor's hope that items left out in the new edition will not be sorely missed, and that the new selections will turn out to be useful and illuminating. The aim, throughout, has been to cover areas of knowledge and periods which had been neglected in the first edition, and to include topics which are important in the study of the Russian past and present.

"The bibliographical headnotes have been enlarged, with the result that there are now approximately twice as many entries as in the old edition. New citations include not only works which have appeared since 1963, but also older books and articles which have come to the editor's attention."—From the Editor's Preface

". . . a judicious combination of seminal works and more recent commentaries that achieves the editor's purpose of stimulating curiosity and developing a point of view."—C. Bickford O'Brien, The Russian Review

"These three volumes cover quite well the main periods of Russian civilization. The choice of the articles and other material is made by a competent and unbiased scholar."—Ivan A. Lopatin, Professor of Asian and Slavic Studies, University of Southern California
[more]

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Readings in Russian Civilization Volume III
Soviet Russia, 1917-1963
Edited by Thomas Riha
University of Chicago Press, 1969
"This new and enlarged version of Readings in Russian Civilization is the result of fairly extensive revisions. There are now 72 instead of 64 items; 20 of the selections are new. The first volume has undergone the least change with 3 new items, of which 2 appear in English for the first time. In the second volume there are 6 new items; all of them appear in English for the first time. The third volume has undergone the greatest revision, with 11 new items, of which 6 are newly translated from the Russian. It is the editor's hope that items left out in the new edition will not be sorely missed, and that the new selections will turn out to be useful and illuminating. The aim, throughout, has been to cover areas of knowledge and periods which had been neglected in the first edition, and to include topics which are important in the study of the Russian past and present.

"The bibliographical headnotes have been enlarged, with the result that there are now approximately twice as many entries as in the old edition. New citations include not only works which have appeared since 1963, but also older books and articles which have come to the editor's attention."—From the Editor's Preface

". . . a judicious combination of seminal works and more recent commentaries that achieves the editor's purpose of stimulating curiosity and developing a point of view."—C. Bickford O'Brien, The Russian Review

"These three volumes cover quite well the main periods of Russian civilization. The choice of the articles and other material is made by a competent and unbiased scholar."—Ivan A. Lopatin, Professor of Asian and Slavic Studies, University of Southern California
[more]

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Readings on Fascism and National Socialism
University of Colorado, Dept. of Philosophy
Ohio University Press, 1952

The catastrophe and holocaust brought about by the two powerful movements of fascism and national socialism will mark human life always. Now, as we feel our hatred for them, we find it difficult to understand how they could have been so powerful, how they could have appealed so strongly to millions of people of a modern age.

To understand our own times, it is necessary to understand these movements. And to understand them, we must read the basic philosophical and political documents which show the force of the ideas which moved a world to the brink of disaster.

This collection of readings has been selected to encourage students to clarify their thinking on social philosophy. They will accordingly need to determine whether the readings contain more or less coherent body of ideas which constitutes a social philosophy. They will also need to raise the more far-reaching question of whether the ideas are acceptable. To arrive at any satisfactory answer to this latter question, they will necessarily have to compare the ideas of fascism and their practical meanings with the alternatives, real and ideal, that are the substance of live philosophical issues.

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Readings On Laws Of Nature
John W. Carroll
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

As a subject of inquiry, laws of nature exist in the overlap between metaphysics and the philosophy of science. Over the past three decades, this area of study has become increasingly central to the philosophy of science. It also has relevance to a variety of topics in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology.

Readings on Laws of Nature is the first anthology to offer a contemporary history of the problem of laws. The book is organized around three key issues: the matter of distinguishing laws from mere correlations, questions concerning inductive reasoning and laws, and the consideration of whether there are any true laws in science.

Designed for class use, the anthology covers a remarkably broad range of views and concerns, and consists exclusively of articles that have proved highly influential in the field. Readings on Laws of Nature will also serve as a valuable research and reference tool for philosophers who do not specialize in the subject, but who have occasion to examine concepts relating to the laws of nature in their own work.

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Readings
The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kakfa, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva
Helene Cixous
University of Minnesota Press, 1991
A leader in the feminist intellectual movement, Cixous presents this highly informative meditation on ethics and poetics which draws on philosophy and psychoanalysis
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The Reading-Writing Connection
Edited by Nancy Nelson and Robert C. Calfee
University of Chicago Press, 1998
This volume shows that the separation of the teaching of reading and writing has been a dominant feature of educational practice at the elementary and secondary levels since colonial times. The editors identify current movements in education that have fostered connections between reading and writing as well as those that tend to push them apart.

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Ready for Fall? Near-Term Effects of Voluntary Summer Learning Programs on Low-Income Students' Learning Opportunities and Outcomes
Jennifer Sloan McCombs
RAND Corporation, 2014
The Wallace Foundation’s National Summer Learning Study, conducted by RAND and launched in 2011, offers the first assessment of district-run voluntary summer programs over the short and long run. This report, the second of five that will result from the study, looks at how summer programs affected student performance on math, reading, and social and emotional assessments in fall 2013.
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Ready Player Juan
Latinx Masculinities and Stereotypes in Video Games
Carlos Gabriel Kelly González
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Written for all gaming enthusiasts, this book fuses Latinx studies and video game studies to document how Latinx masculinities are portrayed in high-budget action-adventure video games, inviting Latinxs and others to insert their experiences into games made by an industry that fails to see them.

The book employs an intersectional approach through performance theory, border studies, and lived experience to analyze the designed identity “Player Juan.” Player Juan manifests in video game representations through a discourse of criminality that sets expectations of who and what Latinxs can be and do. Developing an original approach to video game experiences, the author theorizes video games as border crossings, and defines a new concept—digital mestizaje—that pushes players, readers, and scholars to deploy a Latinx way of seeing and that calls on researchers to consider a digital object’s constructive as well as destructive qualities.
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Ready Player Two
Women Gamers and Designed Identity
Shira Chess
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Cultural stereotypes to the contrary, approximately half of all video game players are now women. A subculture once dominated by men, video games have become a form of entertainment composed of gender binaries. Supported by games such as Diner Dash, Mystery Case Files, Wii Fit, and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood—which are all specifically marketed toward women—the gamer industry is now a major part of imagining what femininity should look like. 

In Ready Player Two, media critic Shira Chess uses the concept of “Player Two”—the industry idealization of the female gamer—to examine the assumptions implicit in video games designed for women and how they have impacted gaming culture and the larger society. With Player Two, the video game industry has designed specifically for the feminine ideal: she is white, middle class, heterosexual, cis-gendered, and abled. Drawing on categories from time management and caregiving to social networking, consumption, and bodies, Chess examines how games have been engineered to shape normative ideas about women and leisure.

Ready Player Two presents important arguments about how gamers and game developers must change their thinking about both women and games to produce better games, better audiences, and better industry practices. Ultimately, this book offers vital prescriptions for how one of our most powerful entertainment industries must evolve its ideas of women.

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Ready Set Library! Card Art
ALA Graphics
ALA Digital Products, 2024

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Ready Set Library! Mini Poster File
ALA Graphics
ALA Digital Products, 2024

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Ready Set READ! Poster File
ALA Graphics
ALA Digital Products, 2023

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Readying the Revolution
African American Theater and Performance from Post-World War II to the Black Arts Movement
Jonathan Shandell
University of Michigan Press, 2025
Starting in 1966, African American activist Stokely Carmichael and other political leaders adopted the phrase "Black Power!" The slogan captured a militant, revolutionary spirit that was already emerging in the work of playwrights, poets, musicians, and visual artists throughout the Black Arts movement of the mid-1960s. But the story of those theater artists and performers whose work helped bring about the Black Arts revolution has not fully been told. Readying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance from Post-World War II to the Black Arts Movement explores the dynamic era of Black culture between the end of World War II and the start of the Black Arts Movement (1946-1964) by illuminating how artists and innovators such as Jackie Robinson, Lorraine Hansberry, Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, and others helped radicalize Black culture and Black political thought. In doing so, these artists defied white cultural hegemony in the United States, and built the foundation for the revolutionary movement in Black theater that followed in the mid 1960s.  

Through archival research, close textual reading, and an analysis of visual and aural performance artifacts, author Jonathan Shandell demonstrates how these artists negotiated a space on the public stage of the United States for cultivating radical Black aesthetic exploration and a spirit of courageous antiracist resistance. Readying the Revolution provides new insights into the activism and accomplishments of African American artists whose work helped lay the groundwork for a Black Nationalist cultural revolution, but whose influence has yet to receive its due recognition.
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Ready-Made Democracy
A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860
Michael Zakim
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Ready-Made Democracy explores the history of men's dress in America to consider how capitalism and democracy emerged at the center of American life during the century between the Revolution and the Civil War. Michael Zakim demonstrates how clothing initially attained a significant place in the American political imagination on the eve of Independence. At a time when household production was a popular expression of civic virtue, homespun clothing was widely regarded as a reflection of America's most cherished republican values: simplicity, industriousness, frugality, and independence.

By the early nineteenth century, homespun began to disappear from the American material landscape. Exhortations of industry and modesty, however, remained a common fixture of public life. In fact, they found expression in the form of the business suit. Here, Zakim traces the evolution of homespun clothing into its ostensible opposite—the woolen coats, vests, and pantaloons that were "ready-made" for sale and wear across the country. In doing so, he demonstrates how traditional notions of work and property actually helped give birth to the modern industrial order. For Zakim, the history of men's dress in America mirrored this transformation of the nation's social and material landscape: profit-seeking in newly expanded markets, organizing a waged labor system in the city, shopping at "single-prices," and standardizing a business persona.

In illuminating the critical links between politics, economics, and fashion in antebellum America, Ready-Made Democracy will prove essential to anyone interested in the history of the United States and in the creation of modern culture in general.
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Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work
A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York
Nancy L. Green
Duke University Press, 1997
Nancy L. Green offers a critical and lively look at New York’s Seventh Avenue and the Parisian Sentier in this first comparative study of the two historical centers of the women’s garment industry. Torn between mass production and "art," this industry is one of the few manufactauring sectors left in the service-centered cities of today. Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work tells the story of urban growth, the politics of labor, and the relationships among the many immigrant groups who have come to work the sewing machines over the last century.
Green focuses on issues of fashion and fabrication as they involve both the production and consumption of clothing. Traditionally, much of the urban garment industry has been organized around small workshops and flexible homework, and Green emphasizes the effect this labor organization had on the men and mostly women who have sewn the garments. Whether considering the immigrant Jews, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Chinese in New York or the Chinese-Cambodians, Turks, Armenians, and Russian, Polish, and Tunisian Jews in Paris, she outlines similarities of social experience in the shops and the unions, while allowing the voices of the workers, in all their diversity to be heard.
A provocative examination of gender and ethnicity, historical conflict and consensus, and notions of class and cultural difference, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work breaks new ground in the methodology of comparative history.
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Reagan and Public Discourse in America
Michael Weiler
University of Alabama Press, 1992
A critical assessment of the impact of the administration of President Ronald Reagan on public discourse in the United States

The authors show that more than any president since John F. Kennedy, Reagan’s influence flowed from his rhetorical practices. And he is remembered as having reversed certain trends and cast the U.S. on a new course. The contributors to this insightful collection of essays show that Reagan’s rhetorical tactics were matters of primary concern to his administration’s chief political strategists.
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The Reagan Range
The Nostalgic Myth in American Politics
James Combs
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

This book is an attempt to make sense out of Ronald Reagan by linking him to various grassroots dimensions of American popular mythology and mind. It attempts to utilize a variety of sources from American and popular culture studies, works on Reagan, and popular materials such as movies to offer an interpretation of reagan as an exemplar of the political relevance and power of popular culture.

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The Reagan Reversal
Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War
Beth A. Fischer
University of Missouri Press, 2000

It is often assumed that Ronald Reagan's administration was reactive in bringing about the end of the cold war, that it was Mikhail Gorbachev's "new thinking" and congenial personality that led the administration to abandon its hard- line approach toward Moscow. In The Reagan Reversal, now available in paperback, Beth A. Fischer convincingly demonstrates that President Reagan actually began seeking a rapprochement with the Kremlin fifteen months before Gorbachev took office. She shows that Reagan, known for his long-standing antipathy toward communism, suddenly began calling for "dialogue, cooperation, and understanding" between the superpowers. This well-written and concise study challenges the conventional wisdom about the president himself and reveals that Reagan was, at times, the driving force behind United States-Soviet policy.

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Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy
Walter Williams
Georgetown University Press, 2003

This is a reasoned but passionate look at how Reaganism—the political philosophy of Ronald Reagan—has severely damaged representative democracy as created by the nation's founders. According to Williams, Reagan and his foremost disciple George W. Bush have created a plutocracy where the United States is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people but is ruled by the wealthiest individuals and corporate America. Refreshingly unafraid to point out that Reaganism's anti-government fundamentalism stands on feet of clay, Walter Williams asks that Americans move from their political apathy to pay attention to the politicians and the corporations lurking behind the power curtain to see the dangers they represent to the true essential of the American way of life.

Williams' most important contribution is his extended analysis of the central role the key institutions—the presidency, Congress, the federal agencies—must play for the U.S. government to be capable in both sustaining representative democracy and protecting the safety and economic security of the American people. A clear result of the weakened institutions has been the grossly inadequate homeland security effort following September 11, and the massive corporate fraud revealed by Enron and other large firms that robbed the nation of hundreds of billions of dollars in stock values and depleted the pension savings of millions of people. The initial destructive blow that damaged the institutions of governance can be traced to Ronald Reagan and his simplistic antigovernment philosophy that fostered rapacious business practices and personal greed. The book also takes the media to task, criticizing the dismal record of failing to investigate the political and corporate chicanery that has brought us to this pass.

Keenly argued and scrupulously documented, Walter Williams has written a stinging wake-up call to the dangers of the demise of representative democracy and the rise of plutocracy that American citizens can ignore only at their peril.

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Reagan's Legacy in a World Transformed
Jeffrey L. Chidester
Harvard University Press, 2015

Since Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, the global community has witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the integration of Europe, the War on Terror and the Arab Spring, a hot Chinese economy and a major international recession. Reagan’s Legacy in a World Transformed brings together scholars from diverse disciplines and persuasions to assess the fortieth president’s policies and their ongoing impact today, and to offer a timely retrospective on his complex legacy.

The authors consider the influence of Reagan’s free-market ideas on economic globalization, showing how deregulation succeeded in spurring economic expansion. In foreign policy, Reagan favored significant increases in military spending (“peace through strength”) and an assertive agenda abroad. His break with détente in dealing with the Soviet Union, notably expressed in his 1982 March of Freedom speech, effectively restored the early Cold War strategy of rolling back communism. More than twenty years later, President George W. Bush invoked this speech in describing his goals in the Middle East—a striking example of how Reagan’s ideas affected the post-9/11 world.

In contrast with his hawkish stance on defense, Reagan’s efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals, negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev, constitute one of his enduring contributions to stability. Although Reagan’s policies soared on rhetoric rooted in ideological conviction, the president engaged in pragmatic internationalism when a multilateral approach served America’s interests. He believed that America had a special mission as a moral leader and beacon of freedom, a view that continues to inform U.S. foreign policy.

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The Real American Dream
A Meditation on Hope
Andrew Delbanco
Harvard University Press, 1999

Since we discovered that, in Tocqueville’s words, “the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the heart,” how have we Americans made do? In The Real American Dream one of the nation’s premier literary scholars searches out the symbols and stories by which Americans have reached for something beyond worldly desire. A spiritual history ranging from the first English settlements to the present day, the book is also a lively, deeply learned meditation on hope.

Andrew Delbanco tells of the stringent God of Protestant Christianity, who exerted immense force over the language, institutions, and customs of the culture for nearly 200 years. He describes the falling away of this God and the rise of the idea of a sacred nation-state. And, finally, he speaks of our own moment, when symbols of nationalism are in decline, leaving us with nothing to satisfy the longing for transcendence once sustained by God and nation.

From the Christian story that expressed the earliest Puritan yearnings to New Age spirituality, apocalyptic environmentalism, and the multicultural search for ancestral roots that divert our own, The Real American Dream evokes the tidal rhythm of American history. It shows how Americans have organized their days and ordered their lives—and ultimately created a culture—to make sense of the pain, desire, pleasure, and fear that are the stuff of human experience. In a time of cultural crisis, when the old stories seem to be faltering, this book offers a lesson in the painstaking remaking of the American dream.

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Real American Ethics
Taking Responsibility for Our Country
Albert Borgmann
University of Chicago Press, 2006

America is a wonderful and magnificent country that affords its citizens the broadest freedoms and the greatest prosperity in the world. But it also has its share of warts. It is embroiled in a war that many of its citizens consider unjust and even illegal. It continues to ravage the natural environment and ignore poverty both at home and abroad, and its culture is increasingly driven by materialism and consumerism. But America, for better or for worse, is still a nation that we have built. So why then, asks Albert Borgmann in this most timely and urgent work, are we failing to take responsibility for it? 

In Real American Ethics, Borgmann asks us to reevaluate our role in the making of American values. Taking his cue from Winston Churchill—who once observed that we shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us—Borgmann considers the power of our most enduring institutions and the condition of our present moral makeup to propose inspired new ways in which we, as ordinary citizens, can act to improve our country. This, he shows, includes everything from where we choose to live and what we spend our money on to daunting tasks like the reshaping of our cities—habits and actions that can guide us to more accomplished and virtuous lives. Using prose that is easy and direct throughout, Borgmann’s position is grounded neither by conservative nor liberal ideology, but in his understanding that he is a devoted citizen among many. 

In an age in which the blame game is the only game in town, this patriotic book is an eloquent reminder of the political strength we all wield when we work together.

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Real and Imagined
The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan
Heather Blair
Harvard University Press
During the Heian period (794–1185), the sacred mountain Kinpusen, literally the “Peak of Gold,” came to cultural prominence as a pilgrimage destination for the most powerful men in Japan—the Fujiwara regents and the retired emperors. Real and Imagined depicts their one-hundred-kilometer trek from the capital to the rocky summit as well as the imaginative landscape they navigated. Kinpusen was believed to be a realm of immortals, the domain of an unconventional bodhisattva, and the home of an indigenous pantheon of kami. These nominally private journeys to Kinpusen had political implications for both the pilgrims and the mountain. While members of the aristocracy and royalty used pilgrimage to legitimate themselves and compete with one another, their patronage fed rivalry among religious institutions. Thus, after flourishing under the Fujiwara regents, Kinpusen’s cult and community were rent by violent altercations with the great Nara temple Kōfukuji. The resulting institutional reconfigurations laid the groundwork for Shugendō, a new movement focused on religious mountain practice that emerged around 1300. Using archival sources, archaeological materials, noblemen’s journals, sutras, official histories, and vernacular narratives, this original study sheds new light on Kinpusen, positioning it within the broader religious and political history of the Heian period.
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Real and Imagined Worlds
The Novel and Social Science
Morroe Berger
Harvard University Press, 1977

To show how the imagined world of the storyteller informs us about the real world of experience, a distinguished social scientist brings the perspective of his discipline to bear on two and a half centuries of fiction. Under his scrutiny, the novel reveals a wealth of insight into sociological, historical, and political phenomena. Morroe Berger illustrates his points with an extraordinary range of novels in Europe and America, from Defoe to Forster and Golding.

The interaction between the novel and social science started in the eighteenth century, when these two ways of examining human behavior and social life achieved their modern form. Writers of fiction broadened their outlook to take in social class and touched upon other issues that are still very much alive, such as individualism, marriage, and the status of women. The novelist, Berger makes clear, is no intruder among historians and social scientists, but rather has been focusing on the same landscape through a different lens. Berger demonstrates that the novel has enriched our understanding of political power, class, law, cultural conflict, and interpersonal relations. He compares Fielding's fiction with Mandeville's essays in the eighteenth century, and Silone's novels of power and bureaucracy with social scientists' treatments of these themes in the twentieth. He points out how such novels as Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies amplify the theory of the social contract. And he examines the clash of cultures as portrayed in the novel of colonial life. Having affirmed the novel's contribution to social science, Berger explodes its claims to offering a higher scientific truth—Balzac's zoology and Zola's experimental novel are cases in point—and reviews the long-standing dispute between science and literature exemplified in the writings of C. P. Snow.

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The Real and the Sacred
Picturing Jesus in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Jefferson J. A. Gatrall
University of Michigan Press, 2014
The figure of Jesus appears as a character in dozens of nineteenth-century novels, including works by Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and others. The Real and the Sacred focuses in particular on two fiction genres: the Jesus redivivus tale and the Jesus novel. In the former, Christ makes surprise visits to earth, from rural Flanders (Balzac) and Muscovy (Turgenev) to the bustling streets of Paris (Flaubert), Seville (Dostoevsky), Berlin, and Boston. In the latter, the historical Jesus wanders through the picturesque towns and plains of first-century Galilee and Judea, attracting followers and enemies. In short, authors subjected Christ, the second person of the Christian trinity, to the realist norms of secular fiction. Thus the Jesus of nineteenth-century fiction was both situated within a specific time and place, whether ancient or modern, and positioned before the gaze of increasingly daring literary portraitists. The highest artistic challenge for authors was to paint, using mere words, a faithful picture of Jesus in all his humanity. The incongruity of a sacred figure inhabiting secular literary forms nevertheless tested the limits of modern realist style no less than the doctrine of Christ’s divinity.

The international “quest of the historical Jesus” has been amply documented within the context of nineteenth-century biblical scholarship. Yet there has been no broad-based comparative study devoted to the depiction of Jesus in prose fiction over the same time period. The Real and the Sacred offers a comprehensive survey of this body of fiction, examining both the range of its Christ types and the varying formal means through which these types were represented. The nineteenth century—despite forecasts of God's death at the time—not only revived older Christ types but also witnessed the rise of new ones, including le Christ proletaire, the Mormon Christ, the Buddhist Christ, and the Tolstoyan Christ. Novelists played a crucial role in the invention and popularization of the historical Jesus in particular, one of modernity's major figures.

These pioneering works of fiction, written by authors of diverse religious and national backgrounds, laid the formal groundwork for an enduring fascination with the historical Jesus in later fiction and film, from Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. The book is enhanced by a gallery of illustrations of the historical Jesus as depicted by nineteenth-century artists.
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Real Black
Adventures in Racial Sincerity
John L. Jackson Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2005
New York's urban neighborhoods are full of young would-be emcees who aspire to "keep it real" and restaurants like Sylvia's famous soul food eatery that offer a taste of "authentic" black culture. In these and other venues, authenticity is considered the best way to distinguish the real from the phony, the genuine from the fake. But in Real Black, John L. Jackson Jr. proposes a new model for thinking about these issues—racial sincerity.

Jackson argues that authenticity caricatures identity as something imposed on people, imprisoning them within stereotypes: an African American high school student who excels in the classroom, for instance, might be dismissed as "acting white." On the other hand, sincerity, as Jackson defines it, imagines authenticity as an incomplete measuring stick, an analytical model that attempts to deny people agency in their search for identity. 

Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in and around New York City, Jackson offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that directly  and indirectly address how race is negotiated in today's world—including tales of book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost. Jackson records and retells their interconnected sagas, all the while attempting to reconcile these stories with his own crisis of identity and authority as an anthropologist terrified by fieldwork. Finding ethnographic significance where mere mortals see only bricks and mortar, his invented alter ego Anthroman takes to the streets, showing how race is defined and debated, imposed and confounded every single day.
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Real Country
Music and Language in Working-Class Culture
Aaron A. Fox
Duke University Press, 2004
In Lockhart, Texas, a rural working-class town just south of Austin, country music is a way of life. Conversation slips easily into song, and the songs are full of conversation. Anthropologist and musician Aaron A. Fox spent years in Lockhart making research notes, music, and friends. In Real Country, he provides an intimate, in-depth ethnography of the community and its music. Showing that country music is deeply embedded in the textures of working-class life, Fox argues that it is the cultural and intellectual property of working-class people and not only of the Nashville-based music industry or the stars whose lives figure so prominently in popular and scholarly writing about the genre.

Fox spent hundreds of hours observing, recording, and participating in talk and music-making in homes, beer joints, and garage jam sessions. He renders the everyday life of Lockhart’s working-class community in detail, right down to the ice cold beer, the battered guitars, and the technical skills of such local musical legends as Randy Meyer and Larry “Hoppy” Hopkins. Throughout, Fox focuses on the human voice. His analyses of conversations, interviews, songs, and vocal techniques show how feeling and experience are expressed, and how local understandings of place, memory, musical aesthetics, working-class social history, race, and gender are shared. In Real Country, working-class Texans re-imagine their past and give voice to the struggles and satisfactions of their lives in the present through music.

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The Real Cyber War
The Political Economy of Internet Freedom
Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Contemporary discussion surrounding the role of the internet in society is dominated by words like: internet freedom, surveillance, cybersecurity, Edward Snowden and, most prolifically, cyber war. Behind the rhetoric of cyber war is an on-going state-centered battle for control of information resources. Shawn Powers and Michael Jablonski conceptualize this real cyber war as the utilization of digital networks for geopolitical purposes, including covert attacks against another state's electronic systems, but also, and more importantly, the variety of ways the internet is used to further a state’s economic and military agendas.
 
Moving beyond debates on the democratic value of new and emerging information technologies, The Real Cyber War focuses on political, economic, and geopolitical factors driving internet freedom policies, in particular the U.S. State Department's emerging doctrine in support of a universal freedom to connect. They argue that efforts to create a universal internet built upon Western legal, political, and social preferences is driven by economic and geopolitical motivations rather than the humanitarian and democratic ideals that typically accompany related policy discourse. In fact, the freedom-to-connect movement is intertwined with broader efforts to structure global society in ways that favor American and Western cultures, economies, and governments.
 
Thought-provoking and far-seeing, The Real Cyber War reveals how internet policies and governance have emerged as critical sites of geopolitical contestation, with results certain to shape statecraft, diplomacy, and conflict in the twenty-first century.
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Real del Monte
A British Silver Mining Venture in Mexico
By Robert W. Randall
University of Texas Press, 1972

To speak of mining in newly independent Mexico is to speak of silver. And silver, historically abundant in the Real del Monte–Pachuca district, was the object of the Company of Adventurers in the Mines of Real del Monte. Organized in response to a plea by Pedro Romero de Terreros for help in rehabilitating his famous family’s once-rich properties, the English Real del Monte was led by men convinced that the application of English capital, management practices, and technology to those ruined mines and mills would reap them a profit and would revitalize the new nation’s most promising industry.

The adventurers were to be disappointed. The story of the English company is one of financial disaster: the loss of more than $5 million between its beginning in 1824 and its dissolution in 1849. Yet this failure was ironic, for upon the foundations of the English company was built a modern concern that yielded great rewards to Mexican and American successors to the hapless Englishmen.

A full account of a single risky venture, this inquiry is a microcosm of early foreign economic penetration into the Mexican mining industry. It offers specific solutions to poorly understood historical problems concerning the wave of capital that flowed from Great Britain into Latin America upon the disruption of the Spanish Empire, problems hitherto treated only in generalizations.

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Real Democracy
The New England Town Meeting and How It Works
Frank M. Bryan
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Relying on an astounding collection of more than three decades of firsthand research, Frank M. Bryan examines one of the purest forms of American democracy, the New England town meeting. At these meetings, usually held once a year, all eligible citizens of the town may become legislators; they meet in face-to-face assemblies, debate the issues on the agenda, and vote on them. And although these meetings are natural laboratories for democracy, very few scholars have systematically investigated them.

A nationally recognized expert on this topic, Bryan has now done just that. Studying 1,500 town meetings in his home state of Vermont, he and his students recorded a staggering amount of data about them—238,603 acts of participation by 63,140 citizens in 210 different towns. Drawing on this evidence as well as on evocative "witness" accounts—from casual observers to no lesser a light than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Bryan paints a vivid picture of how real democracy works. Among the many fascinating questions he explores: why attendance varies sharply with town size, how citizens resolve conflicts in open forums, and how men and women behave differently in town meetings. In the end, Bryan interprets this brand of local government to find evidence for its considerable staying power as the most authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy.

Giving us a rare glimpse into how democracy works in the real world, Bryan presents here an unorthodox and definitive book on this most cherished of American institutions.
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The Real Economy
Essays in Ethnographic Theory
Edited by Federico Neiburg and Jane I. Guyer
HAU, 2019
This collection highlights a key metaphor in contemporary discourse about economy and society. The contributors explore how references to reality and the real economy are linked both to the utopias of collective well-being, supported by real monies and good economies, and the dystopias of financial bubbles and busts, in which people’s own lives “crash” along with the reality of their economies.
 
An ambitious anthropology of economy, this volume questions how assemblages of vernacular and scientific realizations and enactments of the economy are linked to ideas of truth and moral value; how these multiple and shifting realities become present and entangle with historically and socially situated lives; and how the formal realizations of the concept of the “real” in the governance of economies engage with the experiential lives of ordinary people. Featuring essays from some of the world’s most prominent economic anthropologists, The Real Economy is a milestone collection in economic anthropology that crosses disciplinary boundaries and adds new life to social studies of the economy.
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Real Emotional Logic
Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice
Steven N. Lipkin
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Analyzing docudrama as a mode of argument, Steven N. Lipkin explores the ethical, historical, and ideological functions of docudrama to discover why these films based on true stories offer such appealing story lines. That appeal, Lipkin discovers, is rooted in docudrama’s representation of actual people and events by means of melodramatic narrative structures that play on the emotions of the viewer.

The dual nature of docudramas—blending narrative and documentary style— argues for a moral view of reality-based subject matter. The ethics, the ideology, the very presence of docudrama on television and the range of topics and problems that appear in contemporary feature film docudramas indicate how this form of presentation appeals to its audience. Docudrama offers a warranted, rational view of what the story material might suggest initially to be an irrational world. Through its moral agenda, docudrama ultimately allows the possibilities of understanding, optimism, and hope to emerge from “real stories.”

Real Emotional Logic traces the development of docudramas into contemporary movies of the week and feature films, including Schindler’s List, Amistad, JFK, The Killing Fields, Quiz Show, A League of Their Own, In the Name of the Father, Call Northside 777, 13 Rue Madeleine, Cheerleader Mom, Shine, Rosewood, A Civil Action, and October Sky.

Lipkin provides further insight into the genre by identifying and describing the commonalities connecting ostensibly different docudramas through their shared themes and narrative techniques. In doing so, he exposes the persuasive rhetorical strategies at the heart of docudramas and reveals the constructed emotional appeal inherent in films “based on a true story.”

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Real Folks
Race and Genre in the Great Depression
Sonnet H. Retman
Duke University Press, 2011
During the Great Depression, people from across the political spectrum sought to ground American identity in the rural know-how of “the folk.” At the same time, certain writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals combined documentary and satire into a hybrid genre that revealed the folk as an anxious product of corporate capitalism, rather than an antidote to commercial culture. In Real Folks, Sonnet Retman analyzes the invention of the folk as figures of authenticity in the political culture of the 1930s, as well as the critiques that emerged in response. Diverse artists and intellectuals—including the novelists George Schuyler and Nathanael West, the filmmaker Preston Sturges, and the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston—illuminated the fabrication and exploitation of folk authenticity in New Deal and commercial narratives. They skewered the racist populisms that prevented interracial working-class solidarity, prophesized the patriotic function of the folk for the nation-state in crisis, and made their readers and viewers feel self-conscious about the desire for authenticity. By illuminating the subversive satirical energy of the 1930s, Retman identifies a rich cultural tradition overshadowed until now by the scholarly focus on Depression-era social realism.
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Real Gangstas
Legitimacy, Reputation, and Violence in the Intergang Environment
Lauger, Timothy R
Rutgers University Press, 2012

Street gangs are a major concern for residents in many inner-city communities. However, gangs’ secretive and, at times, delinquent tendencies limit most people’s exposure to the realities of gang life. Based on eighteen months of qualitative research on the streets of Indianapolis, Real Gangstas provides a unique and intimate look at the lives of street gang members as they negotiate a dangerous peer environment in a major midwestern city.

Timothy R. Lauger interviewed and observed a mix of fifty-five gang members, former gang members, and non-gang street offenders. He spent much of his fieldwork time in the company of a particular gang, the “Down for Whatever Boyz,” who allowed him to watch and record many of their day-to-day activities and conversations. Through this extensive research, Lauger is able to understand and explain the reasons for gang membership, including a chaotic family life, poverty, and the need for violent self-assertion in order to foster the creation of a personal identity.

Although the book exposes many troubling aspects of gang life, it is not a simple descriptive or a sensationalistic account of urban despair and violence. Steeped in the tradition of analytical ethnography, the study develops a central theoretical argument: combinations of street gangs within cities shape individual gang member behavior within those urban settings. Within Indianapolis, members of rival gangs interact on a routine basis within an ambiguous and unstable environment. Participants believe that many of their contemporaries claiming gang affiliations are not actually “real” gang members, but instead are imposters who gain access to the advantages of gang membership through fraud and pretense. Consequently, the ability to discern “real” gang members—or to present oneself successfully as a real gang member—is a critical part of gangland Indianapolis.

Real Gangstas offers an objective and fair characterization of active gang members,  successfully balancing the seemingly conflicting idea that they generally seem like normal teenagers, yet are abnormally concerned with—and too often involved in—violence. Lauger takes readers to the edge of an actual gang conflict, providing a rare and up-close look at the troubling processes that facilitate hostility and violence.

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Real Heat
Gender and Race in the Urban Fire Service
Chetkovich, Carol
Rutgers University Press, 1997

In the struggle over affirmative action, no employment setting has seen more friction than urban fire departments. Thirty years of legal and political efforts have opened the doors of this historically white male preserve, but men of color have yet to consolidate their gains, and women's progress has been even more tenuous. In this unique and compelling account of affirmative action at the "street level," Carol Chetkovich explores the ways in which this program has succeeded and failed.

Chetkovich follows the men and women of the Oakland Fire Department Class 1-91 through their academy training and eighteen-month probation. In vivid and sometimes surprising narratives, newcomers tell of their first battle with a full-fledged fire, their reactions to hazing rituals, and their relationships with veterans and fellow trainees. Real Heat explores how the process of becoming a firefighter interacts with the dimensions of race and gender to support some and discourage others. The book examines the implications of these interactions for public policy and social justice.

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The Real Hiphop
Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground
Marcyliena Morgan
Duke University Press, 2009
Project Blowed is a legendary hiphop workshop based in Los Angeles. It began in 1994 when a group of youths moved their already renowned open-mic nights from the Good Life, a Crenshaw district health food store, to the KAOS Network, an arts center in Leimert Park. The local freestyle of articulate, rapid-fire, extemporaneous delivery, the juxtaposition of meaningful words and sounds, and the way that MCs followed one another without missing a beat, quickly became known throughout the LA underground. Leimert Park has long been a center of African American culture and arts in Los Angeles, and Project Blowed inspired youth throughout the city to consider the neighborhood the epicenter of their own cultural movement. The Real Hiphop is an in-depth account of the language and culture of Project Blowed, based on the seven years Marcyliena Morgan spent observing the workshop and the KAOS Network. Morgan is a leading scholar of hiphop, and throughout the volume her ethnographic analysis of the LA underground opens up into a broader examination of the artistic and cultural value of hiphop.

Morgan intersperses her observations with excerpts from interviews and transcripts of freestyle lyrics. Providing a thorough linguistic interpretation of the music, she teases out the cultural antecedents and ideologies embedded in the language, emphases, and wordplay. She discusses the artistic skills and cultural knowledge MCs must acquire to rock the mic, the socialization of hiphop culture’s core and long-term members, and the persistent focus on skills, competition, and evaluation. She brings attention to adults who provided material and moral support to sustain underground hiphop, identifies the ways that women choose to participate in Project Blowed, and vividly renders the dynamics of the workshop’s famous lyrical battles.

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The Real Horse
Poems
Farid Matuk
University of Arizona Press, 2018
A sustained address to the poet’s daughter, The Real Horse takes its cues from the child’s unapologetic disregard for things as they are, calling forth the adult world as accountable for its flaws and as an occasion for imagining otherwise.
 
Offering a handbook on the possibilities of the verse line, this collection is precise in its figuring, searching in its intellect, and alert in its music. Here lyric energy levitates into constellations that hold their analytic composure, inviting readers into a shared practice of thinking and feeling that interrogates the confounding intersections of gender, race, class, and national status not as abstract concepts but as foundational intimacies.
 
Matuk’s interrogations of form cut a path through the tangle of a daughter’s position as a natural-born female citizen of the “First World” and of the poet’s position as a once-undocumented immigrant of mixed ethnicity whose paternity is unavoidably implicated in patriarchy. Rejecting nostalgia for homelands, notions of embodied value (self-made or otherwise), and specious ideas of freedom, these luminously multifaceted poem sequences cast their lot with the lyric voice, trusting it to hold a space where we might follow the child’s ongoing revolution against the patrimony of selfhood and citizenship.
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Real Influencers
Fourteen Disappearing Acts that Left Fingerprints on History
Kenneth Weisbrode
St. Augustine's Press, 2022
What is influence and why might real influencers be those whose names we no longer remember? Ken Weisbrode embarks on an exploration to trace the most powerful strands of cultural and intellectual influence, and demonstrates it might not be what we think it is.

"The influencer is a person who made an art of absence in the trade of cultural and sometimes political capital. The ones in this book represent a range of vocations, from politics to diplomacy to novel-writing, but almost all were cultural entrepreneurs. They were not puppet masters, gray eminences, unsung heroes, or Svengalis––although one or two have been portrayed thus. Rather, their influence is spread by virtue of their willful disappearance, of its perpetuation of a new language and cultural standard, and of their many conscious and unconscious imitators. The reason they had such influence was precisely because a part of their method was to be less visible in order to watch their ideas, habits, and styles proliferate without their names necessarily being affixed. […] Yet, to understand such a modus operandi is necessary today when the proliferation of social media influencers are squandering cultural capital so quickly by the simultaneous promotion of their products, above all, themselves." 
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Real Kids
Creating Meaning in Everyday Life
Susan L. Engel
Harvard University Press, 2005

Decades of work in psychology labs have vastly enhanced our knowledge about how children perceive, think, and reason. But it has also encouraged a distorted view of children, argues psychologist Susan Engel in this provocative and passionate book--a view that has affected every parent who has tried to debate with a six-year-old. By focusing on the thinking processes prized by adults, too many expert opinions have rendered children as little adults. What has been lost is what is truly unique and mysterious--the childlike quality of a child's mind.

Engel draws on keen observations and descriptive research to take us into the nearly forgotten, untidy, phantasmagorical world of children's inner lives. She reminds us that children fuse thought and emotion, play and reality; they swing wildly between different ways of interpreting and acting in the world. But just as a gawky child may grow into a beauty, illogical and sometimes maddening childishness can foreshadow great adult ability.

Engel argues that the "scientist in a crib" view encourages parents and teachers to expect more logical reasoning and emotional self-control from children than they possess. She provides a concise and valuable overview of what modern developmental psychologists have learned about children's developing powers of perception and capacity for reasoning, but also suggests new ways of studying children that better capture the truth about their young minds.

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Real Legal Certainty and its Relevance
Essays in honor of Jan Michiel Otto
Edited by Adriaan Bedner and Barbara Oomen
Leiden University Press, 2018
The concept of “real legal certainty” provides a much-needed corrective to the general attention legal certainty currently receives, emphasizing relations between citizens, adding socio-legal insight, and providing a “view from below” Real legal certainty thus leads to more realistic insights on how to build state institutions. The concept was introduced by Leiden University’s professor of law and governance in developing countries Jan Michiel Otto, and can be considered a central pillar of his work.
In this volume, friends and colleagues of Otto engage with the concept of real legal certainty against the backdrop of an ever-increasing interest in legal certainty in policy-making and academia, providing a wide variety of examples of its relevance. Drawing on case material from all over the world, they show how real legal certainty can be understood in a bottom-up manner and how it is relevant for building state institutions. They also show how the concept can gain in relevance by taking non-state actors into account. In all, the volume is important reading for all whom share Otto’s interest in translating law in the books and into law in action.
 
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Real Life
An Installation
Julie Carr
Omnidawn, 2018
In a book rich with formal variety and lyric intensity, Carr takes up economic inequality, gendered violence, losses both personal and national, and the crisis of the body within all of these forces. Real Life: An Installation is a terrifying book, but one that keeps us close as it moves through the disruptions and eruptions of the real.
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Real Life Cryptology
Ciphers and Secrets in Early Modern Hungary
Benedek Láng
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
A large number of enciphered documents survived from early modern Hungary. This area was a particularly fertile territory where cryptographic methods proliferated, because a large portion of the population was living in the frontier zone, and participated (or was forced to participate) in the network of the information flow. A quantitative analysis of sixteenth-century to seventeenth-century Hungarian ciphers (300 cipher keys and 1,600 partly or entirely enciphered letters) reveals that besides the dominance of diplomatic use of cryptography, there were many examples of ŸprivateŒ applications too. This book reconstructs the main reasons and goals why historical actors chose to use ciphers in a diplomatic letter, a military order, a diary or a private letter, what they decided to encrypt, and how they perceived the dangers threatening their messages.
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The Real Life of the Parthenon
Patricia Vigderman
The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Ownership battles over the marbles removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin have been rumbling into invective, pleading, and counterclaims for two centuries. The emotional temperature around them is high, and steering across the vast past to safe anchor in a brilliant heritage is tricky. The stories around antiquities become distorted by the pull of ownership, and it is these stories that urge Patricia Vigderman into her own exploration of their inspiring legacy in her compelling extended essay, The Real Life of the Parthenon.
 
Vigderman’s own journey began at the Parthenon, but curiosity edged her further onto the sea between antiquity and the present. She set out to seek the broken temples and amphorae, the mysterious smiles of archaic sculpture, and the finely hammered gold of a funeral wreath among the jumbled streets of modern Athens, the fertile fields of Sicily, the mozzarella buffalo of Paestum. Guided along the way toward the enduring landscapes and fractured history by archeologists, classicists, historians, and artists—and by the desire they inspire—she was caught by ongoing, contemporary local life among the ruins. Gathering present meaning and resonance for the once and future remains of vanished glory, The Real Life of the Parthenon illuminates an important but shadowy element of our common cultural life: the living dynamic between loss and delight.
 
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Real Love, No Drama
The Music of Mary J. Blige
By Danny Alexander
University of Texas Press, 2016

Mary J. Blige is an icon who represents the political consciousness of hip hop and the historical promise of soul. She is an everywoman, celebrated by Oprah Winfrey and beloved by pop music fans of all ages and races. Blige has sold over fifty million albums, won numerous Grammys, and even played at multiple White House events, as well as the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Displaying astonishing range and versatility, she has recorded everything from Broadway standards to Led Zeppelin anthems and worked with some of popular music’s greatest artists—Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Whitney Houston, Sting, U2, and Beyoncé, among them.

Real Love, No Drama: The Music of Mary J. Blige tells the story of one of the most important artists in pop music history. Danny Alexander follows the whole arc of Blige’s career, from her first album, which heralded the birth of “hip hop soul,” to her critically praised 2014 album, The London Sessions. He highlights the fact that Blige was part of the historically unprecedented movement of black women onto pop radio and explores how she and other women took control of their careers and used their music to give voice to women’s (and men’s) everyday struggles and dreams. This book adds immensely to the story of both black women artists and artists rooted in hip hop and pays tribute to a musician who, by expanding her reach and asking tough questions about how music can and should evolve, has proven herself an artistic visionary.

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Real Magic
Edited by Susanne Witzgall
Diaphanes, 2018
In Western societies a newly discovered and very lively interest in magical practices and occult knowledge can be witnessed. The magical seems to be evolving into a popular phenomenon that affects society as a whole and is also becoming the subject of intense debate in artistic and academic-scientific contexts. The book Real Magic investigates the current realities of the magical in the contemporary arts, sciences and everyday culture. It explores the present Western residues and forms of magical practices, the current potentials of magical perception and thinking in a world largely determined by financialised instrumental reason, and also the drawbacks of occultism. The publication is the result of the fourth annual programme of the cx centre of interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
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The Real McCoy
And 149 Other Eponyms
Claire Cock-Starkey
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2018
From diesel to gerrymandering, the English language is rich with eponyms—words that are named after an individual. The many histories behind these words are often mesmerizing—a word named, incidentally, after the German physician Franz Mesmer, who developed the practice of hypnotism as a form of therapy.

Deriving from numerous sources, eponyms are full of intrigue. This book features one hundred and fifty of the most interesting and enlightening specimens, delving into the origins of the words and describing the fascinating people after whom they were named. Some honor a style icon, inventor, or explorer, such as pompadour, Kalashnikov, and Cadillac. Others have roots in Greek or Roman mythology, such as panic and tantalize. Still others are far from celebratory and were created to brand the negative association of their origins—into this category can be filed boycott, Molotov cocktail, and sadist.

Encompassing words from medicine, botany, invention, science, fashion, food, and literature, this book uncovers the curious tales of discovery, mythology, innovation, and infamy behind the eponyms we use every day. The Real McCoy is the perfect addition to any wordsmith’s bookshelf.
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Real Men Don't Sing
Crooning in American Culture
Allison McCracken
Duke University Press, 2015
The crooner Rudy Vallée's soft, intimate, and sensual vocal delivery simultaneously captivated millions of adoring fans and drew harsh criticism from those threatened by his sensitive masculinity. Although Vallée and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners’ rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallée with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallée, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop stars: their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.
 
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The Real Modern
Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea
Christopher P. Hanscom
Harvard University Press, 2013

The contentious relationship between modernism and realism has powerfully influenced literary history throughout the twentieth century and into the present. In 1930s Korea, at a formative moment in these debates, a “crisis of representation” stemming from the loss of faith in language as a vehicle of meaningful reference to the world became a central concern of literary modernists as they operated under Japanese colonial rule.

Christopher P. Hanscom examines the critical and literary production of three prose authors central to 1930s literary circles—Pak T’aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi T’aejun—whose works confront this crisis by critiquing the concept of transparent or “empiricist” language that formed the basis for both a nationalist literary movement and the legitimizing discourse of assimilatory colonization. Bridging literary and colonial studies, this re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context illuminates links between literary practice and colonial discourse and questions anew the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

The Real Modern challenges Eurocentric and nativist perspectives on the derivative particularity of non-Western literatures, opens global modernist studies to the similarities and differences of the colonial Korean case, and argues for decolonization of the ways in which non-Western literatures are read in both local and global contexts.

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Real Mysteries
Narrative and the Unknowable
H. Porter Abbott
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
The influential and widely respected narrative theorist, H. Porter Abbott, breaks new ground in Real Mysteries:Narrative and the Unknowable. In it, he revisits the ancient theme of what we cannot know about ourselves and others. But in a sharp departure, he shifts the focus from the representation of this theme to the ways narrative can be manipulated to immerse “the willing reader” in the actual experience of unknowing.
As he shows, this difficult and risky art, which was practiced so inventively by Samuel Beckett, was also practiced by other modern writers. Abbott demonstrates their surprising diversity in texts by Beckett, Gabriel García Márquez, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, J. M. Coetzee, Tim O’Brien, Kathryn Harrison, and Jeanette Winterson, together with supporting roles by J. G. Ballard, Gertrude Stein, Michael Haneke, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.
The demands of this art bear directly on key issues of narrative inquiry, including the nature and limits of reader-resistant texts, the function of permanent narrative gaps, the relation between experiencing a text and its interpretation, the fraught issue of aligning grammatical and narrative syntax, the mixed blessing of our mind-reading capability, and the ethics of reading. Despite its challenges, this book has also been written with an eye to the general reader. In accessible language, Abbott shows how narrative fiction may create spaces in which our ignorance, when it is by its nature absolute, can be not only acknowledged but felt, and why this is important.
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The Real Nick and Nora
Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Writers of Stage and Screen Classics
David L. Goodrich
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett wrote the screenplays for some of America’s most treasured movies, including It’s a Wonderful Life, The Thin Man, Easter Parade, Father of the Bride, Naughty Marietta, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Legendary films, indeed, but writing both the play and screenplay for The Diary of Anne Frank was their crowning achievement.

Controlled chaos best describes their writing method. They discussed a scene at length, sometimes acting it out. Afterwards, they each wrote a draft, which they exchanged. “Then,” Frances said, “began ‘free criticism’—which sometimes erupted into screaming matches.” Noisy and contentious, the method worked splendidly.

Enormously successful and remarkably prolific, Goodrich and Hackett began their thirty-four-year collaboration in 1928. Married after the first of their five plays became a hit, they were in many ways an unlikely pair. Frances, the privileged daughter of well-to-do parents, graduated from Vassar, then played minor parts on Broadway. Albert’s mother put him on stage at age five, when his father died, to help pay the bills, and he became a highly paid comedian.

The Hacketts were known for their wit and high spirits and the pleasure of their Bel Air dinner parties. They waged memorable battles with their powerful bosses and were key activists in the stressful creation of the Screen Writers Guild. Once they had created Nick and Nora Charles, The Thin Man’s bright, charming, sophisticated lead couple, played memorably by William Powell and Myrna Loy, many people saw a strong resemblance, and the Hacketts acknowledged that they “put themselves into” Nick and Nora.

The Real Nick and Nora is a dazzling assemblage of anecdotes featuring some of the most talented writers and the brightest lights of American stage and screen. The work was arduous, the parties luminous. On any given night the guests singing and acting out scripts at a party might include F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham, S. J. Perelman, Oscar Levant, Ogden Nash, Judy Garland, Abe Burrows, Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Pat O’Brien, Dick Powell and June Allyson, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, James Cagney, and Dorothy Parker.

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Real Objects in Unreal Situations
Modern Art in Fiction Films
Susan Felleman
Intellect Books, 2014
Real Objects in Unreal Situations is a lucid account of a much neglected subject in art and cinema studies: the material significance of the art object incorporated into the fiction film. By examining the historical, political, and personal realities that situate the art works, Susan Felleman offers an incisive account of how they operate not as objects but as powerful players within the films, thereby exceeding the narrative function of mere props, copies, pastiches, or reproductions. The book consists of a series of interconnected case studies of movies, including Pride & Prejudice, The Trouble with Harry, and The Player, ultimately showing that when real art works enter into fiction films, they embody themes and discourses in a way that other objects often cannot. 
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The Real Philadelphia Book
Jazz Bridge
Temple University Press, 2022

The Real Philadelphia Book, compiled by Jazz Bridge and editors David Dzubinski and Suzanne Cloud, is a collection of more than 200 original jazz and blues compositions. Arranged alphabetically by song title, the sheet music showcases work by generations of Philadelphia musicians. This volume, which is “what every aspiring jazz musician needs to know,” features tunes from Grammy Award-winners Jimmy Heath, Grover Washington, Jr., and Christian McBride, as well as legends such as Joey DeFrancesco, Ray Bryant, and Robin and Duane Eubanks. Also included are rare compositions by jazz greats Bobby Timmons, Hank Mobley, and Lee Morgan, in addition to music by local luminaries, Rhenda Fearrington, Monnette Sudler, and Kaylé Brecher.

The aim of The Real Philadelphia Book is to help the jazz community make deeper, stronger connections while also formally documenting much of the important music created in the Philadelphia metro area by both well- and lesser-known musicians.

Including an index of composers, The Real Philadelphia Bookwill enhance and add to the rich Philadelphia jazz and blues tradition and make the Philly jazz catalogue more easily available to musicians, jazz students and educators around the world.

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Real Philly History, Real Fast
Fascinating Facts and Interesting Oddities about the City's Heroes and Historic Sites
Jim Murphy
Temple University Press, 2021

Philadelphia is known as the home of vibrant colonial history: the Liberty Bell, the Betsy Ross House, and Independence Hall. But the City of Brotherly Love is also home to—and less well known for—its quirky history. The country’s first quarantine station was located here. One of Philly’s clocks has a face larger than Big Ben’s in London. And a unique skill of Black abolitionist James Forten saved him from a life of West Indian servitude (and “Forten” was not even his real name).  

In Real Philly History, Real Fast, Jim Murphy provides an original tour of the city. He highlights artistic gems including the Dream Garden Tiffany mosaic and Isaiah Zagar’s glittering Magic Gardens. He profiles intriguing historical figures from military leader Commodore Barry to civil rights heroes like Lucretia Mott. Murphy also explores neighborhoods from Chinatown to the Italian Market and the unique architectural details of Carpenters’ Hall and the PSFS building.  

Each chapter provides a pithy story about a historical person or site, along with bullet points featuring interesting oddities, and nearby attractions along with fun facts such as: Why there are so many churches? What is the Philadelphia Eagles’ connection to the U.S. Custom House? Which famous artist may have been Philadelphia’s first nude model? And where was the Liberty Bell secretly damaged? (We didn’t do it!)   

This is Philly history in bites that are as digestible as a soft pretzel with mustard.

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Real Pigs
Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork
Brad Weiss
Duke University Press, 2016
In addition to being one of the United States' largest pork producers, North Carolina is home to a developing niche market of pasture-raised pork. In Real Pigs Brad Weiss traces the desire for "authentic" local foods in the Piedmont region of central North Carolina as he follows farmers, butchers, and chefs through the process of breeding, raising, butchering, selling, and preparing pigs raised on pasture for consumption. Drawing on his experience working on Piedmont pig farms and at farmers’ markets, Weiss explores the history, values, social relations, and practices that drive the pasture-raised pork market. He shows how pigs in the Piedmont become imbued with notions of authenticity, illuminating the ways the region's residents understand local notions of place and culture. Full of anecdotes and interviews with the market's primary figures, Real Pigs reminds us that what we eat and why have implications that resonate throughout the wider social, cultural, and historical world.
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Real Places
An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape
Grady Clay
University of Chicago Press, 1994
In Real Places, Grady Clay presents the American landscape in a completely fresh and untypical way. Rather than look at locations, he studies constructed, imaginative sites. Clay explores the fascination of "Fall Color Country," or "Lover's Lane." What draws people to these "generic" landscapes and keeps them coming back literally and figuratively time and time again? Real Places catalogs and describes a unique cross-section of America, emphasizing the beauty and intrigue of these hidden gems. Heavily illustrated with maps and photographs depicting the everyday as well as the bizarre, Clay's entertaining Baedeker allows us to see in a new way what has always been "right before our eyes."

"This book provides a language for the architecture of everyday life."—Ross Miller, Chicago Tribune

"Spirited observations and capsule histories."—Suzanne Stephens, New York Times Book Review

"Compelling. . . . Included here are many nuggets of insight and illumination."—Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor

"An amusing and touching book about the reality we Americans have captured in our language."—Boston Sunday Globe
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Real Presences
George Steiner
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God? Or, is God always a real presence in the arts? Steiner passionately argues that a transcendent reality grounds all genuine art and human communication.

"A real tour de force. . . . All the virtues of the author's astounding intelligence and compelling rhetoric are evident from the first sentence onward."—Anthony C. Yu, Journal of Religion
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Real Rape
Susan Estrich
Harvard University Press
Many men believe that they can force women to have sex against their will and that it isn’t rape—at least, not if the man knows the women and doesn’t beat her up or wield a weapon. The law’s casual treatment of such rape cases is the subject of this pioneering book, which is both a powerful exposé of the often shocking facts and a trenchantly written call for reform.
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The Real Real Thing
The Model in the Mirror of Art
Wendy Steiner
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Our era is defined by the model. From Victoria’s Secret and America’s Next Top Model to the snapshots we post on Facebook and Twitter, our culture is fixated on the pose, the state of existing simultaneously as artifice and the real thing.

In this bold view of contemporary culture, Wendy Steiner shows us the very meaning of the arts in the process of transformation. Her story begins at the turn of the last century, as the arts abandoned the representation of the world for a heady embrace of the abstract, the surreal, and the self-referential. Today though, this “separate sphere of the aesthetic” is indistinguishable from normal life. Media and images overwhelm us: we gingerly negotiate a real-virtual divide that we suspect no longer exists, craving contact with what J. M. Coetzee has called “the real real thing.” As the World Wide Web renders the lower-case world in ever-higher definition, the reality-based genres of memoir and documentary are displacing fiction, and novels and films are depicting the contemporary condition through model-protagonists who are half-human, half-image. Steiner shows the arts searching out a new ethical potential through this figure: by stressing the independent existence of the model, they welcome in the audience in all its unpredictability, redefining aesthetic experience as a real-world interaction with the promise of empathy, reciprocity, and egalitarian connection.

A masterly performance by a penetrating, inquisitive mind, The Real Real Thing is that rarest of books, one whose provocations and inspirations will inspire readers to take a new—and nuanced—look at the world around them.

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Real, Recent, or Replica
Precolumbian Caribbean Heritage as Art, Commodity, and Inspiration
Edited by Joanna Ostapkowicz and Jonathan A. Hanna
University of Alabama Press, 2021
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2022

Examines the largely unexplored topics in Caribbean archaeology of looting of heritage sites, fraudulent artifacts, and illicit trade of archaeological materials

Real, Recent, or Replica: Precolumbian Caribbean Heritage as Art, Commodity, and Inspiration is the first book-length study of its kind to highlight the increasing commodification of Caribbean Precolumbian heritage. Amerindian art, including “Taíno” art, has become highly coveted by collectors, spurring a prolific and increasingly sophisticated black market of forgeries, but also contemporary artistic engagement, openly appreciated as modern artworks taking inspiration from the past. The contributors to this volume contend with difficult subject matter including the continued looting of archaeological sites in the region, the seismic increase of forgeries, and the imbalance of power and economic relations between the producers and consumers of neo-Amerindian art.
 
The case studies document the considerable time depth of forgeries in the region (since the late nineteenth century), address the policies put in place by Caribbean governments and institutions to safeguard national patrimony, and explore the impact looted and forged artifacts have on how museums and institutions collect and ultimately represent the Caribbean past to their audiences. Overall, the volume emphasizes the continued desire for the “authentic” Precolumbian artifact, no matter the cost. It provides insights for archaeologists, museum professionals, art historians, and collectors to combat illegal trade and support communities in creating sustainable heritage industries.

 
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Real Role Models
Successful African Americans Beyond Pop Culture
By Joah Spearman and Louis Harrison, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 2010

All young people need good role models, and black youth especially need positive and real examples beyond the famous and wealthy people they see on SportsCenter highlights and MTV Cribs. While success as a celebrity athlete or entertainer may seem like an achievable dream, the reality is that young African Americans have a much greater chance of succeeding in the professions through education and hard work—and a mentor to show them the path. Real Role Models introduces high school and college-age African Americans to twenty-three black professionals who have achieved a high level of success in their chosen fields and who tell their stories to inspire young people to pursue a professional career and do the work necessary to achieve their dreams.

Some of the individuals profiled by Joah Spearman and Louis Harrison, Jr., include Leonard Pitts, Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the Miami Herald; Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council; Danyel Smith, editor-in-chief of Vibe; and Dr. Tim George, Chief of Pediatric Neuroscience at Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas. They and other interviewees describe their backgrounds, career paths, and desire to give back by helping others reach their goals. Representing a wide range of occupations, these real role models prove to African American youths that a whole world of successful, rewarding careers awaits them.

The Real Role Models

  • Rufus Cormier, JD, Partner at the Baker Botts Law Firm, Houston, Texas
  • Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Washington, D.C.
  • Eric Motley, PhD, Managing Director of the Aspen Institute's Henry Crown Fellowship Program, Aspen, Colorado
  • James McIntyre, Spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, D.C.
  • Tracie Hall, Assistant Dean and Librarian at Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois
  • Kimberlydawn Wisdom, MD, Surgeon General of the State of Michigan, Lansing, Michigan
  • Timothy George, MD, Chief of Pediatric Neuroscience at Dell Children's Medical Center, Austin, Texas
  • Victoria Holloway Barbosa, MD, Ethnic Dermatologist and Former Executive for L'Oreal, Chicago, Illinois
  • Bill Douglas, White House Correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, Washington, D.C.
  • Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for the Miami Herald, Miami, Florida
  • Danyel Smith, Editor of Vibe Magazine, New York, New York
  • Ed Stewart, Managing Director of External Communications for Delta Airlines, Atlanta, Georgia
  • Lynn Tyson, Vice President of Investor Relations for Dell, Austin, Texas
  • Willie Miles, Jr., Founder and CEO of Miles Wealth Management, Houston, Texas
  • Horace Allen, Founder and CEO of TeamPact, Atlanta, Georgia
  • Deavra Daughtry, President and CEO of Excellent Care Management, Houston, Texas
  • Je'Caryous Johnson, Founder and CEO of I'm Ready Productions, Houston, Texas
  • Steve Jones, Cofounder of a graphic design company, Oakland, California
  • Isiah Warner, PhD, Chemistry Professor at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
  • Gloria Ladson-Billings, PhD, Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
  • Bernard Muir, Athletic Director at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
  • Craig Littlepage, Athletic Director at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
  • Beverly Kearney, Women's Track Coach at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
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Real Sister
Stereotypes, Respectability, and Black Women in Reality TV
Ward, Jervette R
Rutgers University Press, 2015
From The Real Housewives of Atlanta to Flavor of Love, reality shows with predominantly black casts have often been criticized for their negative representation of African American women as loud, angry, and violent. Yet even as these programs appear to be rehashing old stereotypes of black women, the critiques of them are arguably problematic in their own way, as the notion of “respectability” has historically been used to police black women’s behaviors.
 
The first book of scholarship devoted to the issue of how black women are depicted on reality television, Real Sister offers an even-handed consideration of the genre. The book’s ten contributors—black female scholars from a variety of disciplines—provide a wide range of perspectives, while considering everything from Basketball Wives to Say Yes to the Dress. As regular viewers of reality television, these scholars are able to note ways in which the genre presents positive images of black womanhood, even as they catalog a litany of stereotypes about race, class, and gender that it tends to reinforce.
 
Rather than simply dismissing reality television as “trash,” this collection takes the genre seriously, as an important touchstone in ongoing cultural debates about what constitutes “trashiness” and “respectability.” Written in an accessible style that will appeal to reality TV fans both inside and outside of academia, Real Sister thus seeks to inspire a more nuanced, thoughtful conversation about the genre’s representations and their effects on the black community. 
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Real Sports, Volume 95
James T. Fisher
Duke University Press
The contributors to this volume were recruited by editor James T. Fisher on the basis of writing talent and a passion for sports equal to his own. These scholars and critics from such disciplines as history, English, comparative literature, and theology look to the sidelines of their academic lives to break new ground in sportswriting. But they are neither competing for turf in sports journalism nor aiming to establish an academic area such as “sports studies”—the prospect of which, says Fisher, “is not pleasant to behold.” Instead, they write about boxing, for example, in terms of living and working (out) in the college town where Larry Holmes grew up and now owns a gym; about how the religious implications of Sunday-afternoon sports in seventeenth-century England became the key to a Cambridge theology student’s understanding of the fall of Archbishop Laud and Charles I; about baseball as Cuba’s national pastime—and what that means to a Cuban professor of literature at Yale.
Indeed, questions of meaning, mediation, and the mediation of the media are repeatedly raised here as contributors explore the historical, social, cultural, and personal experience of sports as an index of identity. Real Sports features a historian’s analysis of sports as a nexus between Indian and Euro-American cultures; a critique of sports talk radio and the ethic of the fan; and a literary critic’s celebration of the Midwest, complete with swamps, shopping centers, and “the Spartan green of the Big Ten.” Also explored is today’s father-son generation gap, between fathers who root for their home teams and sons whose place is six feet from the TV set, “where every team is the home team.”

Contributors. Patrick Allitt, Philip Deloria, Ann Fabian, James T. Fisher, Roberto González Echevarría, Pamela Haag, Michael Oriard, Kenneth Parker, Stephen Rachman, Carlo Rotella

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The Real, the True, and the Told
Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation
Eric L. Berlatsky
The Ohio State University Press, 2011
The Real, The True, and The Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation, by Eric L. Berlatsky, intervenes in contemporary debates over the problems of historical reference in a postmodern age. It does so through an examination of postmodern literary practices and their engagement with the theorization of history. The book looks at the major figures of constructivist historiography and at postmodern fiction (and memoir) that explicitly presents and/or theorizes “history.” It does so in order to suggest that reading such fiction can intervene substantially in debates over historical reference and the parallel discussion of redefining contemporary ethics.
 
Much theorization in the wake of Hayden White suggests that history is little better than fiction in its professed goal of representing the “truth” of the past, particularly because of its reliance on the narrative form.While postmodern fiction is often read as reflecting and/or repeating such theories, this book argues that, in fact, such fiction proposes alternative models of accurate historical reference, based on models of nonnarrativity. Through a combination of high theory andnarrative theory, the book illustrates how the texts examined insist upon the possibility of accessing the real by rejecting narrative as their primary mode of articulation. Among the authors examined closely in The Real, The True, and The Told are Virginia Woolf, Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman, and Milan Kundera.
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The Real Thing
Testimonial Discourse and Latin America
Georg M. Gugelberger, ed.
Duke University Press, 1996
Presented as the authentic testimony of the disenfranchised, the colonized, and the oppressed, testimonio has in the last two decades emerged as one of the most significant genres of Latin America’s post-boom literature. In the political battles that have taken place around the formation of the canon, the testimonio holds a special place: no other single genre of literature has taken up such a large part of current debate. Initially hailed in the 1970s as a genuine form of resistance literature, testimonio has since undergone a significant change in its critical reception. The essays in The Real Thing analyze the testimonio, its history, and its place in contemporary consciousness.
Although the literature of testimony arose on the margins of institutional power and its ends were in large part political change, the canonization of testimonio by the academic Left has moved it from margin to center, ironically bringing about the institutionalization of its transgressive and counter-hegemonic qualities. Discussing Latin American works ranging from Salvadorian writer Roque Dalton’s Miguel Marmol to I . . . Rigoberta Menchu, a work that earned its author a Nobel Prize, this collection explores how critical writing about testimonio has turned into discourse about the institution of academia, the canon, postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of Latin American studies generally.

Contributors. John Beverley, Santiago Colás, Georg M. Gugelberger, Barbara Harlow, Fredric Jameson, Alberto Moreiras, Margaret Randall, Javier Sanjines, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Doris Sommer, Gareth Williams, George Yúdice, Marc Zimmerman

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Real Time
Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola
David F. Bell
University of Illinois Press, 2003
In Real Time David F. Bell explores the decisive impact the accelerated movement of people and information had on the fictions of four giants of French realism--Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, and Zola.
 
Nineteenth-century technological advances radically altered the infrastructure of France, changing the ways ordinary citizens–-and literary characters--viewed time, space, distance, and speed. The most influential of these advances included the improvement of the stagecoach, the growth of road and canal networks leading to the advent of the railway, and the increasing use of mail, and of the optical telegraph. Citing examples from a wide range of novels and stories, Bell demonstrates the numerous ways in which these trends of acceleration became not just literary devices and themes but also structuring principles of the novels themselves.
 
Beginning with both the provincial and the Parisian communications networks of Balzac, Bell proceeds to discuss the roles of horses and optical telegraphs in Stendhal and the importance of domination of communication channels to the characters of Dumas, whose Count of Monte-Cristo might be seen as the ultimate fictional master of this accelerated culture. Finally, Bell analyzes the cinematic vision created by the arrival of the railroad, as depicted by Zola in La Bète Humaine.
 
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Real Time Convex Optimisation for 5G Networks and Beyond
Long D. Nguyen
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
There is no doubt that we are facing a wireless data explosion. Modern wireless networks need to satisfy increasing demand, but are faced with challenges such as limited spectrum, expensive resources, green communication requirements and security issues. In the age of internet of things (IoT) with massive data transfers and huge numbers of connected devices, including high-demand QoS (4G, 5G networks and beyond), signal processing is producing data sets at the gigabyte and terabyte scales.
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Real to Reel
Lidia Yuknavitch
University of Alabama Press, 2003
With an intelligence that scalds every pretense and surface, Lidia Yuknavitch's camera pans across subjects as varied as Keanu Reeves and Siberian prison laborers. She zooms in on drug addiction, crime, sex of all flavors, trauma, torture, rock and roll, and art, all the while revealing untried angles and alien shapes. She traces the inner lives of characters teetering on edges-death, birth, love, understanding-but never flinching at the spectacle of their violent descent. This collection represents a verbal cinematographer at her best as she captivates the reader with a prose style that is mesmerizing and fluid, deep and dangerous.
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A Real Van Gogh
How the Art World Struggles with Truth
Henk Tromp
Amsterdam University Press, 2010

In 1928, after eleven years of extensive research and editing, Dr. Jacob Baart de la Faille finally finished the first catalogue raisonné of Vincent van Gogh’s work. Soon after, however, de la Faille discovered that he had mistakenly listed dozens of forged works as genuine in the catalog. He quickly set out to set the record straight but was met with strong resistance from art dealers, collectors, critics, politicians, amongst others—all of whom had self-interested reasons to oppose his corrections.

            
To this day, the international art world struggles to separate the real Van Goghs from the fake. A Real Van Gogh begins with the story of de la Faille and moves into the late decades of the twentieth century, outlining the numerous clashes over the authenticity of Van Gogh’s works while simultaneously exposing the often bewildering ramifications for art critics and scholars when they bring unwelcome news.

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The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice
Alex N. Sabo
Harvard University Press, 2000
“All of us who have long done this work can look back at those happy times when the patient’s gain has also been, in part, our own. Thereby an extraordinary joy enters the work, for both parties, through this making of lives. Can there be better work to do in the world?”—from the Epilogue by Leston HavensManaged care has radically reshaped health care in the United States, and private long-term psychotherapy is increasingly a thing of the past. The corporatization of mental health care often puts therapists in professional quandaries. How can they do the therapeutic work they were trained to do with clients whom they may barely know, whose care is intruded upon by managed care administrators? With unrelenting pressure to substitute medications for therapy and standardized behavior protocols for individualized approaches, what becomes of the therapist–client relationship?Unflinchingly honest, The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice offers both compelling stories and practical advice on maintaining one’s therapeutic integrity in the managed care era. Resisting a one-size-fits-all approach, the authors focus on the principles of forming relationships with patients, and especially patients likely to be under-served (e.g., the uninsured poor) or difficult to treat.The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice gives voice to therapists’ frustrations with the administrative constraints under which they work. But it accepts the reality and offers guidance and inspiration to committed therapists everywhere.
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Realer Than Reel
Global Directions in Documentary
By David Hogarth
University of Texas Press, 2006

Television and globalization have transformed the traditional documentary almost beyond recognition, converting what was once a film genre devoted to public service and education into a popular televisual commodity with productions ranging from serious public affairs programming to TV "reality" shows and "docusoaps." Realer Than Reel offers a state-of-the-art overview of international documentary programming that investigates the possibilities documentary offers for local and public representation in a global age, as well as what actually constitutes documentary in a time of increasing digitalization and manipulation of visual media.

David Hogarth focuses on public affairs, nature, and reality shows from around the world, drawing upon industry data, producer interviews, analyses of selected documentary programs, and firsthand observations of market sites. He looks at how documentary has become a transnational product through exports, co-ventures, and festival contacts; how local and regional "place" is represented in global documentary, especially by producers such as Discovery Networks International and the National Geographic Channel; how documentary addresses the needs of its viewers as citizens through public service broadcasting; and how documentary is challenging accepted conventions of factuality, sense, and taste. The concluding chapter considers the future of both documentary as a genre and television as a global factual medium, asking whether TV will continue to "document" the world in any meaningful sense of the term.

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Realignment in American Politics
Toward a Theory
Edited by Bruce A. Campbell and Richard J. Trilling
University of Texas Press, 1980
To have a voice in shaping government policy has been a goal of the American people since the nation's founding. Yet, government seems even less accessible now than in the past. An increasing rate of incumbency in Congress, the unwieldy committee system that controls legislation, and the decline of political parties have all weakened representation and alienated Americans from the seat of power. The one remaining way to produce major and coherent change in national policy is through partisan realignment—a sharp, enduring shift in voter support of the two major parties. This book is about the phenomenon of realignment in American politics. It not only brings together and assesses previous work in the area but also breaks new ground in the analysis of the effects of realignment on political elites and public policy. In addition, it is the first study to present an integrated theory of realignment that can be applied to the understanding of mass, elite, and policy change in times of social crisis. Contributors include Lawrence McMichael, David Nexon, Louis Seagull, Robert Lehnen, Philip Converse, Gregory Markus, Lester Seligman, Michael King, David Brady, Kenneth Meier, Kenneth Kramer, David Adamany, Charles Stewart, Susan Hansen, and the editors.Bruce A. Campbell taught political science at the University of Georgia. He is the author of The American Electorate.
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Realism and Institutionalism in International Studies
Michael Brecher and Frank P. Harvey, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002

Realism and Institutionalism in International Studies represents a unique collection of original essays by foremost scholars in the field of International Studies. Six essays advocate, critique, or revise Realism, the theoretical paradigm that explains international politics by emphasizing security competition and war among states. The remaining four essays address Institutionalism, the paradigm that offers explanations for the formation, maintenance, variation, and significance of international institutions.

The authors reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and suggest research agendas for the future. Together, this volume provides an accessible and wide-ranging survey of the issues concerning two major paradigms in International Studies. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students alike and will undoubtedly determine the shape of future research.

See table of contents and excerpts.

Frank P. Harvey is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at Dalhousie University.

Michael Brecher is the R.B. Angus Professor of Political Science at McGill University and past president of the International Studies Association.

Millennial Reflections on International Studies

This volume is part of the Millennial Reflections on International Studies project in which forty-five prominent scholars engage in self-critical, state-of-the-art reflection on international studies to stimulate debates about successes and failures and to address the larger questions of progress in the discipline.

Other paperbacks from this project:
Conflict, Security, Foreign Policy, and International Political Economy: Past Paths and Future Directions in International Studies
Evaluating Methodology
Critical Perspectives in International Studies

The full collection of essays is available in the handbook Millennial Reflections on International Studies.

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Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Revised Edition
Donald Pizer
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984

The 1966 edition of this book has be­come a standard work. In this new, re­vised edition, Pizer has dropped three chapters and has refined and extended the work by adding six: “American Liter­ary Naturalism: An Approach Through Form,” “American Literary Naturalism: The Example of Dreiser,” “The Prob­lem of Philosophy in the Naturalistic Novel,” “Hamlin Garland’s 1891 Main-Travelled Roads: Local Color as Art,” “Jack London: The Problem of Form,” and “Dreiser’s ‘Nigger Jeff’: The Devel­opment of an Aesthetic.”

The book contains definitions of real­ism and naturalism based on representa­tive novels of the period ranging from Howells’ Rise of Silas Lapham to Crane’s Red Badge of Courage; analyses of the literary criticism of the age, stressing that of Howells, Garland, and Norris; and close readings of specific works by major figures of the period.

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Realism And Pragmatic Epistemology
Nicholas Rescher
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

An examination of philosophical realism from the standpoint of pragmatic epistemology, this book addresses the core idea of Rescher's work in epistemology: that functional and pragmatic concerns exert a controlling influence on the conduct of rational inquiry and on the ways in which we can and should regard its products.

Pragmatism is widely regarded as a philosophical approach that stands at odds with realism, but Rescher takes a very different approach. He views pragmatism as a realistic position that can be developed from a pragmatic point of view, and utilizes a number of case studies to augment his position. Throughout, he shows how the pragmatic and purposive setting of our putative knowledge of the real world proves to be crucial for the constituting and also for the constitution of our knowledge.

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Realism and Role-Play
The Human Figure in French Art from Callot to the Brothers Le Nain
Marika Takanishi Knowles
University of Delaware Press, 2011
After the heroic nudes of the Renaissance and depictions of the tortured bodies of Christian saints, early seventeenth-century French artists turned their attention to their fellow humans, to nobles and beggars seen on the streets of Paris, to courtesans standing at their windows, to vendors advertising their wares, to peasants standing before their landlords. Fascinated by the intricate politics of the encounter between two human beings, artists such as Jacques Callot, Daniel Rabel, Abraham Bosse, Claude Vignon, Georges de la Tour, Jean de Saint-Igny, the Brothers Le Nain, Pierre Brébiette, Jean I Le Blond, and Charles David represented the human figure as a performer acting out a social role. The resulting figures were everyday types whose representations in series of prints, painted galleries, and illustrated books created a repertoire of such contemporary roles. Realism and Role-Play draws on literature, social history, and affect theory in order to understand the way that figuration performed social positions.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
 
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Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition
William W. Demastes
University of Alabama Press, 1996

Any review of 20th-century American theatre invariably leads to the term realism. Yet despite the strong tradition of theatrical realism on the American stage, the term is frequently misidentified, and the practices to which it refers are often attacked as monolithically tyrannical, restricting the potential of the American national theatre.
This book reconsiders realism on the American stage by addressing the great variety and richness of the plays that form the American theatre canon. By reconsidering the form and revisiting many of the plays that contributed to the realist tradition, the authors provide the opportunity to apprise strengths often overlooked by previous critics. The volume traces the development of American dramatic realism from James A. Herne, the "American Ibsen," to currently active contemporaries such as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Marsha Norman. This frank assessment, in sixteen original essays, reopens a critical dialog too long closed.

Essays include:


  • American Dramatic Realisms, Viable Frames of Thought

  • The Struggle for the Real--Interpretive Con§ict, Dramatic Method, and the Paradox of Realism

  • The Legacy of James A. Herne: American Realities and Realisms

  • Whose Realism? Rachel Crothers's Power Struggle in the American Theatre

  • The Provincetown Players' Experiments with Realism

  • Servant of Three Masters: Realism, Idealism, and "Hokum" in American High Comedy



 
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Realism for the 21st Century
A John Deely Reader
John Deely
University of Scranton Press, 2009

Realism for the 21st Century is a collection of thirty essays from John Deely—a major figure in contemporary semiotics and an authority on scholastic realism and the works of Charles Sanders Peirce. The volume tracks Deely’s development as a pragmatic realist, featuring his early essays on our relation to the world after Darwinism; crucial articles on logic, semiotics, and objectivity; overviews of philosophy after modernity; and a new essay on “purely objective reality.”

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Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud
Four Activist Intellectuals and their Strategies for Peace, 1945-1989--Louise Weiss (France), Leo Szilard (USA), E. P. Thompson (England), Danilo Dolci (Italy)
Michael Bess
University of Chicago Press, 1993
"Two world wars, concentration camps, the obliteration of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, and continued preparations for nuclear war illustrate the modern
world's propensity for mass destruction. . . . Yet there have been
important signs of resistance to this trend. These have included not only
the emergence of mass-based peace and disarmament movements but activist
intellectuals grappling with the growing problem posed by mass violence
among nation-states. . . . Bess examines the lives and ideas of four of
these intellectuals: Leo Szilard of Hungary and (later) the United States,
E. P. Thompson of England, Danilo Dolci of Italy, and Louise Weiss of
France. . . . Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud is a powerful,
important scholarly work, casting new light upon some of the great issues
of modern times. Readers will learn much from it."—Lawrence S.
Wittner, Peace and Change

"Bess seeks to understand the way in which the creation of the atomic bomb
has changed the social and political situation of humankind. Are we to be
held hostage by military forces or can we transform our situation? He
describes the lives of four very different activists, each with different
views on what causes conflict and how best to address conflict. . . .
Overall, this book offers an interesting perspective on life after the
atomic bomb. . . . In asking ourselves what the possibilities of our future
are, we can turn to these lives for some guidance. . . . This book is
informative, provocative, and encourages one to consider carefully how s/he
chooses to live."—Erin McKenna, Utopian Studies

"These four lives, researched and skillfully presented by historian Michael
Bess, make fascinating stories in themselves. They also serve as useful
vehicles for examining major cross-currents of Cold War resistance. . . .
From Weiss the cynical pragmatist to Szilard the high-level fixer to
hompson the social reformer to Dolce the spiritual street organizer,
Michael Bess has woven an illuminating tapestry of human efforts to cope
with life under the mushroom cloud."—Samuel H. Day Jr., The
Progressive
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Realism with a Human Face
Hilary Putnam
Harvard University Press, 1990

The time has come to reform philosophy, says Hilary Putnam, one of America’s great philosophers. He calls upon philosophers to attend to the gap between the present condition of their subject and the human aspirations that philosophy should and once did claim to represent. Putnam’s goal is to embed philosophy in social life.

The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions. Putnam rejects the contemporary metaphysics that insists on describing both the mind and the world from a God’s-eye view. In its place he argues for pluralism, for a philosophy that is not a closed systematic method but a human practice connected to real life. Philosophy has a task, to be sure, but it is not to provide an inventory of the basic furniture of the universe or to separate reality in itself from our own projections. Putnam makes it clear that science is not in the business of describing a ready-made world, and philosophy should not be in that business either.

The author moves on to show that the larger human context in which science matters is a world of values animated by ethics and aesthetic judgments. No adequate philosophy should try to explain away ethical facts. The dimension of history is added in the third part of the book. Here Putnam takes up a set of American philosophers, some firmly within and others outside the canon of analytic philosophy, such as William James and C. S. Peirce, and he explores the pragmatist contribution to philosophy from James to Quine and Goodman.

This book connects issues in metaphysics with cultural and literary issues and argues that the collapse of philosophical realism does not entail a fall into the abyss of relativism and postmodern skepticism. It is aimed primarily at philosophers but should appeal to a wide range of humanists and social scientists.

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Realism, Writing, Disfiguration
On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane
Michael Fried
University of Chicago Press, 1987
"A highly original and gripping account of the works of Eakins and Crane. That remarkable combination of close reading and close viewing which Fried uniquely commands is brought to bear on the problematic nature of the making of images, of texts, and of the self in nineteenth-century America."—Svetlana Alpers, University of California, Berkeley

"An extraordinary achievement of scholarship and critical analysis. It is a book distinguished not only for its brilliance but for its courage, its grace and wit, its readiness to test its arguments in tough-minded ways, and its capacity to meet the challenge superbly. . . . This is a landmark in American cultural and intellectual studies."—Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University
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