Film critic David Sterritt’s Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility showcases the social and aesthetic viewpoints of lynchpin Beat writers Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, juxtaposing their artistry with 1950s culture and achieving what Kerouac might have called a “bookmovie” riff. In clear prose, Sterritt captures the raw energy of the Beats and joins in their celebration of aesthetic freakishness. Tapping into the diversified spirit of the Beat Generation and its nuanced relationship with postwar American culture, Sterritt considers how the Beats variously foreground, challenge, and illuminate major issues in Hollywood and avant-garde film, critical and cultural theory, and music in the mass-media age.
Sterritt engages the creative and spiritual facets of the Beats, emulating their desire to evoke ephemeral aspects of human existence. Dealing with both high and low cultures as well as various subcultures, he highlights the complementary contributions to cultural creativity made by these authors. Screening the Beats grapples with paradoxes in Beat writing, in particular the conflict between spiritual purity and secular connectedness, which often materialized in the beatific bebop spontaneity, Zen-like transcendentalism, and plain hipster smarts that characterized the writings of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg.
This interdisciplinary study tackles such topics as Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s uses of racial and ethnic stereotypes prevalent in the popular movies of the 1950s era; the uses and limitations of improvisation as a creative tool in literature, jazz, and film; Kerouac’s use of cinematic metaphor to evoke Buddhist concepts; and intersections of the grotesque and carnivalesque in works as seemingly diverse as autobiographical novels by Kerouac, a radio play by Antonin Artaud, cultural theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and the boisterous lunacy of Three Stooges farce. Deftly threading literary, musical, and cinematic works with a colorful array of critical theories, Screening the Beats illuminates the relationship between American culture and the imaginative forces of the Beat Generation.
Filmmakers have long been drawn to the Gothic with its eerie settings and promise of horror lurking beneath the surface. Moreover, the Gothic allows filmmakers to hold a mirror up to their own age and reveal society's deepest fears. Franco Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet are just a few examples of film adaptations of literary Gothic texts. In this ground-breaking study, Lisa Hopkins explores how the Gothic has been deployed in these and other contemporary films and comes to some surprising conclusions. For instance, in a brilliant chapter on films geared to children, Hopkins finds that horror resides not in the trolls, wizards, and goblins that abound in Harry Potter, but in the heart of the family.
Screening the Gothic offers a radical new way of understanding the relationship between film and the Gothic as it surveys a wide range of films, many of which have received scant critical attention. Its central claim is that, paradoxically, those texts whose affiliations with the Gothic were the clearest became the least Gothic when filmed. Thus, Hopkins surprises readers by revealing Gothic elements in films such as Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, as well as exploring more obviously Gothic films like The Mummy and The Fellowship of the Ring. Written in an accessible and engaging manner, Screening the Gothic will be of interest to film lovers as well as students and scholars.
Graphic cinematic violence is a magnet for controversy. From passionate defenses to outraged protests, theories abound concerning this defining feature of modern film: Is it art or exploitation, dangerous or liberating?
Screening Violence provides an even-handed examination of the history, merits, and effects of cinematic “ultraviolence.” Movie reviewers, cinematographers, film scholars, psychologists, and sociologists all contribute essays exploring topics such as:
· the origins and innovations of film violence and attempts to regulate it
(from Hollywood’s Production Code to the evolution of the ratings system)
· the explosion of screen violence following the 1967 releases of Bonnie and Clyde and The Dirty Dozen, and the lasting effects of those landmark films
· the aesthetics of increasingly graphic screen violence
· the implications of our growing desensitization to murder and mayhem, from The Wild Bunch to The Terminator
Graphic cinematic violence is a magnet for controversy. From passionate defenses to outraged protests, theories abound concerning this defining feature of modern film: Is it art or exploitation, dangerous or liberating?
Screening Violence provides an even-handed examination of the history, merits, and effects of cinematic “ultraviolence.” Movie reviewers, cinematographers, film scholars, psychologists, and sociologists all contribute essays exploring topics such as:
· the origins and innovations of film violence and attempts to regulate it
(from Hollywood’s Production Code to the evolution of the ratings system)
· the explosion of screen violence following the 1967 releases of Bonnie and Clyde and The Dirty Dozen, and the lasting effects of those landmark films
· the aesthetics of increasingly graphic screen violence
· the implications of our growing desensitization to murder and mayhem, from The Wild Bunch to The Terminator
We think of the Hebrew Bible as the Book--and yet it was produced by a largely nonliterate culture in which writing, editing, copying, interpretation, and public reading were the work of a professional elite. The scribes of ancient Israel are indeed the main figures behind the Hebrew Bible, and in this book Karel van der Toorn tells their story for the first time. His book considers the Bible in very specific historical terms, as the output of the scribal workshop of the Second Temple active in the period 500-200 BCE. Drawing comparisons with the scribal practices of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, van der Toorn clearly details the methods, the assumptions, and the material means of production that gave rise to biblical texts; then he brings his observations to bear on two important texts, Deuteronomy and Jeremiah.
Traditionally seen as the copycats of antiquity, the scribes emerge here as the literate elite who held the key to the production as well as the transmission of texts. Van der Toorn's account of scribal culture opens a new perspective on the origins of the Hebrew Bible, revealing how the individual books of the Bible and the authors associated with them were products of the social and intellectual world of the scribes. By taking us inside that world, this book yields a new and arresting appreciation of the Hebrew Scriptures.
What were ancient scribes doing when they copied a manuscript of a literary work? This question is especially problematic when we realize that ancient scribes preserved different versions of the same literary texts. In Scribal Memory and Word Selection: Text Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Raymond F. Person Jr. draws from studies of how words are selected in everyday conversation to illustrate that the same word-selection mechanisms were at work in scribal memory. Using examples from manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, Person provides new ways of understanding the cognitive-linguistic mechanisms at work during the composition/transmission of texts. Person reveals that, while our modern perspective may consider textual variants to be different literary texts, from the perspective of the ancient scribes and their audiences, these variants could still be understood as the same literary text.
Showalter, a highly regarded critic known for her provocative and strongly held opinions, has here established a compelling new Who's Who of women's thought. Certain to spark controversy, the omission of such feminist perennials as Gloria Steinem, Susan B. Anthony, Robin Morgan, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Virginia Woolf will surprise and shock the conventional wisdom.
The essays in this volume testify to the far-reaching effects of Emanuel Swedenborg’s works in Western culture. From his early days as an ambitious young scientist in the ferment of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment Europe, through his mid-life entrance into an ongoing experience of the spiritual world, to his last decades as a researcher of things spiritual, Swedenborg built a career that left a unique legacy. His vivid descriptions of the nonphysical realm made a powerful impression on minds as diverse as Goethe, Blake, Emerson, Yeats, and Borges.
This book serves as a self-contained resource on Swedenborg’s life and thought and as a gateway into further exploration of the labyrinthine garden of Swedenborg’s works. It includes a biography, rich in fascinating detail; lively overviews of the content and history of Swedenborg’s writings on spiritual topics; and essays tracing Swedenborg’s impact in various regions of the world.
A revised view of the Pentateuch with consequences for the broader literary history of the Bible
This collection of thirty-one studies on the Pentateuch represents more than twenty years of Konrad Schmid’s research and publications advocating for a new view of the Pentateuch’s formation. Schmid’s essays present the case for a Persian period Priestly document that provided a basic narrative thread to the Torah, which included separate, pre-Priestly components of narratives in Genesis and the Moses story. Schmid’s open discussion includes evidence from various fields, such as literary history, comparative cultural history, historical linguistics, epigraphy, and archaeology. The essays are divided into eight sections usefully structured around the themes of the Pentateuch in the Enneateuch, the history of scholarship, the formation of the Torah, Genesis, the Moses story, the Priestly document, legal texts, and the Pentateuch in the history of ancient Israel’s religion.
Zacher's account delves into details inside a major newspaper operation during World War I and provides fascinating accounts of its struggles with competition, attending to patriotic duties, and internal editorial dissent. Zacher also looks at war-related issues, considering the newspapers' relationship with President Woodrow Wilson, American neutrality, the move to join the war, and fallout from disillusionment over the actuality of war. As Zacher shows, the progressive spirit and political independence at the Scripps newspapers came under attack and was changed forever during the era.
An anecdotal history of journalism education.
The Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca was created at a pivotal transitional moment, bridging an era when pictorial manuscripts dominated and one that witnessed the rising hegemony of alphabetic texts. The Historia was composed using both systems, yet, as Dana Leibsohn notes, neither was fully trusted. Leibsohn analyzes the choices made by the patron, don Alonso de Castañeda, and tlacuilos enlisted to create the manuscript. How does one create a history? Which narratives are included, and which are strikingly absent? Which modes of representation are called upon to convey certain types of information? Leibsohn argues how the very practice of history-keeping itself sustains or challenges a current reality.
Central to the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca is the creation, representation, and understanding of landscape. In the recording of ancestral migrations, don Alonso delineates territory, noting boundaries and their histories, and also reveals relationships with a sacred landscape, detailing how relationships with territory were constantly re-inscribed. In this sense, Script and Glyph is a particularly appropriate volume for Dumbarton Oaks, as it crosses the boundaries of Pre-Columbian and Landscape areas of study. The volume is beautifully illustrated with color images from the manuscript itself.
A miscellany of minor works.
Xenophon (ca. 430 to ca. 354 BC) was a wealthy Athenian and friend of Socrates. He left Athens in 401 and joined an expedition including ten thousand Greeks led by the Persian governor Cyrus against the Persian king. After the defeat of Cyrus, it fell to Xenophon to lead the Greeks from the gates of Babylon back to the coast through inhospitable lands. Later he wrote the famous vivid account of this “March Up-Country” (Anabasis); but meanwhile he entered service under the Spartans against the Persian king, married happily, and joined the staff of the Spartan king, Agesilaus. But Athens was at war with Sparta in 394 and so exiled Xenophon. The Spartans gave him an estate near Elis where he lived for years, writing and hunting and educating his sons. Reconciled to Sparta, Athens restored Xenophon to honor, but he preferred to retire to Corinth.
Xenophon’s Anabasis is a true story of remarkable adventures. Hellenica, a history of Greek affairs from 411 to 362, begins as a continuation of Thucydides’ account. There are four works on Socrates (collected in LCL 168). In Memorabilia Xenophon adds to Plato’s picture of Socrates from a different viewpoint. The Apology is an interesting complement to Plato’s account of Socrates’ defense at his trial. Xenophon’s Symposium portrays a dinner party at which Socrates speaks of love; and Oeconomicus has him giving advice on household management and married life. Cyropaedia, a historical romance on the education of Cyrus (the Elder), reflects Xenophon’s ideas about rulers and government.
We also have his Hiero, a dialogue on government; Agesilaus, in praise of that king; Constitution of Lacedaemon (on the Spartan system); Ways and Means (on the finances of Athens); Manual for a Cavalry Commander; a good manual of Horsemanship; and a lively Hunting with Hounds—mostly hare hunting. The Constitution of the Athenians, though clearly not by Xenophon, is an interesting document on politics at Athens. These eight books are collected in the present volume.
Hitchcock allowed his writers a great deal of creative freedom, which resulted in dynamic screenplays that expanded traditional narrative and defied earlier conventions. Critically examining the question of authorship in film, Raubicheck and Srebnick argue that Hitchcock did establish visual and narrative priorities for his writers, but his role in the writing process was that of an editor. While the writers and their contributions have generally been underappreciated, this study reveals that all the dialogue and much of the narrative structure of the films were the work of screenwriters Jay Presson Allen, Joseph Stefano, and Evan Hunter. The writers also shaped American cultural themes into material specifically for actors such as Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren, and Tony Perkins. This volume gives due credit to those writers who gave narrative form to Hitchcock's filmic vision.
The passage of texts from scroll to codex created a revolution in the religious life of late antiquity. It played a decisive role in the Roman Empire’s conversion to Christianity and eventually enabled the worldwide spread of Christian faith. The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity describes how canonical scripture was established and how scriptural interpretation replaced blood sacrifice as the central element of religious ritual. Perhaps more than any other cause, Guy G. Stroumsa argues, the codex converted the Roman Empire from paganism to Christianity.
The codex permitted a mode of religious transmission across vast geographical areas, as sacred texts and commentaries circulated in book translations within and beyond Roman borders. Although sacred books had existed in ancient societies, they were now invested with a new aura and a new role at the core of religious ceremony. Once the holy book became central to all aspects of religious experience, the floodgates were opened for Greek and Latin texts to be reimagined and repurposed as proto-Christian. Most early Christian theologians did not intend to erase Greek and Roman cultural traditions; they were content to selectively adopt the texts and traditions they deemed valuable and compatible with the new faith, such as Platonism. The new cultura christiana emerging in late antiquity would eventually become the backbone of European identity.
A fresh contribution to the growing body of New Testament scholarship on empire, both ancient and modern
Darden’s reading of Revelation examines John the Seer’s rhetorical strategy, in general, and imperial cult imagery in chapters 4 and 5, in particular, through the lens of an African American scripturalization supplemented by postcolonial theory. The scripturalization proposes that John the Seer’s signifyin(g) on empire demonstrated that he was well aware of the oppressive nature of Roman imperialism on the lives of provincial Asian Christians. Yet, ironically, John reinscribed imperial processes and practices. Darden argues that African American biblical scholarship must now attend adequately to these complex cultural negotiations lest it find itself inadvertently feeding the imperial beast.
Features:
The effect of religious factors on politics has been a key issue since the end of the Cold War and the subsequent rise of religious terrorism. However, the systematic investigations of these topics have focused primarily on the effects of religion on domestic and international conflict. Scriptures, Shrines, Scapegoats, and World Politics offers a comprehensive evaluation of the role of religion in international relations, broadening the scope of investigation to such topics as the relationship between religion and cooperation, religion and conflict, and the relationship between religion and the quality of life. Religion is often manipulated by political elites to advance their principal goal of political survival. Zeev Maoz and Errol A. Henderson find that no specific religion is either consistently more bellicose or consistently more cooperative than other religions. However, religious similarity between states tends to reduce the propensity of conflict and increase the opportunity for security cooperation. The authors find a significant relationship between secularism and human security.
Despite the popular myth that plays arrive at the theater fully formed and ready for production, the truth is that for centuries, most scripts have been developed through a collaborative process in rehearsal and in concert with other theater artists. David Kahn and Donna Breed provide the first codified approach to this time-honored method of play development, with a flexible methodology that takes into account differing environments and various stages of formation.
Directors can use this unique guidebook for new play development from the beginning to the end of the process. Kahn and Breed explore ways of choosing new projects, talk about where to find new scripts, and explore the legal aspects of script development. They present a detailed system for theatrical analysis of the new script and show how to continue exploration and development of the script within the laboratory of the theater. Most importantly, they delineate the parameters of the relationship between the director and the playwright, offering proven methods to help the playwright and help facilitate the healthy development of the script.
Breed and Kahn offer suggestions on casting, incorporating rewrites, and script handling plus how and when to use audience response and how to decide what step to take next. They also include extended interviews with developmental directors, dramaturgs, and playwrights, who give credence to the new script development process.
In short, Kahn and Breed demystify a common, though often convoluted, theater process, providing a unique codification of ways to work on new plays.
While people of previous ages relied on public performance as their chief means of experiencing poetry, the Hellenistic age developed what one may term a culture of reading. This was the first era in which poets consciously shaped their works with an eye toward publication and reception not just on the civic stage but in several media---in performance, on inscribed monuments, in scrolls. The essays in Peter Bing's collection explore how poetry accommodated various audiences and how these audiences in turn experienced the text in diverse ways. Over the years, Bing's essays have focused on certain Hellenistic authors and genres---particularly on Callimachus and Posidippus and on epigram. His themes, too, have been broadly consistent. Thus, although the essays in The Scroll and the Marble span some twenty years, they offer a coherent vision of Hellenistic poetics as a whole.
Peter Bing is Professor of Classics at Emory University and editor, most recently, of the Companion to Hellenistic Epigram: Down to Philip (coedited with Jon Steffen Bruss).
Jacket illustration: Film still from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, directed by Frank Capra, Columbia Pictures 1939. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.
This volume presents the first systematic evaluation of a feminist epistemology of sciences’ power to transform both the practice of science and our society. Unlike existing critiques, this book questions the fundamental feminist suggestion that purging science of alleged male biases will advance the cause of both science and by extension, social justice.
The book is divided into four sections: the strange status of feminist epistemology, testing feminist claims about scientific practice, philosophical and political critiques of feminist epistemology, and future prospects of feminist epistemology. Each of the essays¾most of which are original to this text¾ directly confronts the very idea that there could be a feminist epistemology or philosophy of science. Rather than attempting to deal in detail with all of the philosophical views that fall under the general rubric of feminist epistemology, the contributors focus on positions that provide the most influential perspectives on science. Not all of the authors agree amongst themselves, of course, but each submits feminist theories to careful scrutiny. Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology provides a timely, well-rounded, and much needed examination of the role of gender in scientific research.
Sculpting the Self addresses “what it means to be human” in a secular, post-Enlightenment world by exploring notions of self and subjectivity in Islamic and non-Islamic philosophical and mystical thought. Alongside detailed analyses of three major Islamic thinkers (Mullā Ṣadrā, Shāh Walī Allāh, and Muhammad Iqbal), this study also situates their writings on selfhood within the wider constellation of related discussions in late modern and contemporary thought, engaging the seminal theoretical insights on the self by William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault. This allows the book to develop its inquiry within a spectrum theory of selfhood, incorporating bio-physiological, socio-cultural, and ethico-spiritual modes of discourse and meaning-construction. Weaving together insights from several disciplines such as religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, critical theory, and neuroscience, and arguing against views that narrowly restrict the self to a set of cognitive functions and abilities, this study proposes a multidimensional account of the self that offers new options for addressing central issues in the contemporary world, including spirituality, human flourishing, and meaning in life.
This is the first book-length treatment of selfhood in Islamic thought that draws on a wealth of primary source texts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Greek, and other languages. Muhammad U. Faruque’s interdisciplinary approach makes a significant contribution to the growing field of cross-cultural dialogue, as it opens up the way for engaging premodern and modern Islamic sources from a contemporary perspective by going beyond the exegesis of historical materials. He initiates a critical conversation between new insights into human nature as developed in neuroscience and modern philosophical literature and millennia-old Islamic perspectives on the self, consciousness, and human flourishing as developed in Islamic philosophical, mystical, and literary traditions.
This volume addresses the question of the relation between sculpture and coins—or large statuary and miniature art—in the private and public domain. It originates in the Harvard Art Museums 2011 Ilse and Leo Mildenberg interdisciplinary symposium celebrating the acquisition of Margarete Bieber’s coin collection. The papers examine the function of Greek and Roman portraiture and the importance of coins for its identification and interpretation. The authors are scholars from different backgrounds and present case studies from their individual fields of expertise: sculpture, public monuments, coins, and literary sources.
Sculpture and Coins also pays homage to the art historian Margarete Bieber (1879–1978) whose work on ancient theater and Hellenistic sculpture remains seminal. She was the first woman to receive the prestigious travel fellowship from the German Archaeological Institute and the first female professor at the University of Giessen. Dismissed by the Nazis, she came to the United States and taught at Columbia. This publication cannot answer all the questions: its merit is to reopen and broaden a conversation on a topic seldom tackled by numismatists and archaeologists together since the time of Bernard Ashmole, Phyllis Lehmann and Léon Lacroix.
Sculpture in Wood was first published in 1950. 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.
In simple every-day language and with lavish use of photographs, a noted sculptor takes you, step-by-step, through the process of wood sculpture and explains how to appreciate and use this kind of art in your own home. The how-to-do-it section contains information on the tools needed, the various woods and their qualities, and finishes. Photographs showing examples of the author's work and that of other contemporary sculptors illustrate his points clearly. The beginner will find this book opens the way to a rewarding hobby; the serious artist will be challenged by Mr. Rood's forceful ideas on art.
Among the many artistic events of 1985 and 1986 devoted to the history and culture of India, one of the most notable is the exhibition of Indian sculpture organized by Pramod Chandra for the National Gallery of Art. It comprises more than one hundred choice sculptures in stone, ivory, and bronze from all regions of the subcontinent, many from very remote locations. Approximately half of them have never left India before. Several are familiar masterpieces of the highest quality; others are newly discovered works of great interest and beauty. Collectively they epitomize the richness of India's artistic heritage.
The exhibition catalogue has been written by Chandra, one of the world's leading experts on Indian art. He provides an introductory survey of Indian sculpture over the ages—its various styles and schools and diverse idioms—followed by illuminating analyses of the individual works. His descriptions are accompanied by stunning photographs, most of them taken in India, in situ, especially for this volume. Beyond its visual appeal, the catalogue, which includes a glossary and bibliography, makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Indian art.
“There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea,” wrote Joseph Conrad. And there is certainly nothing more integral to the development of the modern world. In The Sea: A Cultural History, John Mack considers those great expanses that both unite and divide us, and the ways in which human beings interact because of the sea, from navigation to colonization to trade. Much of the world’s population lives on or near the cost, and as Mack explains, in a variety of ways, people actually inhabit the sea.
The Sea looks at the characteristics of different seas and oceans and investigates how the sea is conceptualized in various cultures. Mack explores the diversity of maritime technologies, especially the practice of navigation and the creation of a society of the sea, which in many cultures is all-male, often cosmopolitan, and always hierarchical. He describes the cultures and the social and technical practices characteristic of seafarers, as well as their distinctive language and customs. As he shows, the separation of sea and land is evident in the use of different vocabularies on land and on sea for the same things, the change in a mariner’s behavior when on land, and in the liminal status of points uniting the two realms, like beaches and ports. Mack also explains how ships are deployed in symbolic contexts on land in ecclesiastical and public architecture. Yet despite their differences, the two realms are always in dialogue in symbolic and economic terms.
Casting a wide net, The Sea uses histories, maritime archaeology, biography, art history, and literature to provide an innovative and experiential account of the waters that define our worldly existence.
It was the original Survivor series, only without the omnipresent cameras, paramedics, and faux tribal rituals. Between the spring of 1947 and the summer of the year 2000, more than forty expeditions sought to drift across the oceans of the world on rafts made from straw, from bamboo, and from the same kinds of wood that children use to make model airplanes. These audacious raft voyages began with the legendary Kon-Tiki expedition, under the leadership of the renowned Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. The Kon-Tiki balsa wood raft drifted more than four thousand miles from Peru to Polynesia, and remained afloat months after experts predicted it would sink to the bottom of the Pacific. Heyerdahl’s radical thesis of a prehistoric world where ancient mariners drifted between continents on ocean currents electrified the postwar world. His Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft sold twenty million copies in sixty-five languages.
Sea Drift is the first and only book to document all of the transoceanic raft expeditions that were organized and carried out in the half century after Kon-Tiki. But it is much more than a simple history of exploration. Readers learn of the Mormon who drifted to Hawaii to prove that wise men from Israel had colonized America, and the Frenchman who squeezed fresh water from the entrails of fish as he drifted alone across the Atlantic in a rubber boat. Then there was the anthropologist who put five men and six women on a raft to see who would make love to whom first.
Spanning more than fifty years and recounting more than forty expeditions, Sea Drift is a riveting chronicle of human daring, endurance, and folly.
This 1940 swashbuckler is one of the best examples of the old Hollywood studio system at work. Scholars and film buffs will learn much about collaborative filmmaking on an exceptionally large scale as Rudy Behlmer traces step-by-step the evolution of The Sea Hawk. The very anti-thesis of an auteur film, The Sea Hawk illustrates the ways in which creative input from just about everyone on the Warner Brothers lot—producers, writers, art directors, director, cameraman, special effects team, editor and composer-conductor—resulted in a film in the familiar Warners house style.
This book includes the complete screenplay.
"Fun, wisdom, tasty language. Sea of Faith has real subways in it as well as real rivers, mountains and dogs, scoops of heartbreak, sightings of beauty. Yes, sad or happy, the poems are alive. Sea of Faith was a complete pleasure for me to read." —Alicia Ostriker, author of The Crack in Everything
In a masterful blending of lyric and narrative, Sea of Faith ranges widely across interior states and external worlds. From the Sierra Nevadas to New York City subways, from an imagined friendship with Lao Tzu to a rueful meditation on Coney Island, from a comic and poignant classroom discussion of "Dover Beach" to a sexual fantasy spawned by a tedious poetry reading, John Brehm’s poems explore the human predicament with tenderness, compassion, and unforgettable humor.
"The poems in Sea of Faith present us with a vivid dramatic voice, one determined to engage with a world that often seems intangible and remote, and to resist a world that seems all too real and disappointing. The speaker here is both self-mocking and self-accepting, taking his concerns seriously but always distant enough from them to regard them as a small part of a larger human story, a story we recognize at once to be our own."—Carl Dennis, Brittingham Prize judge and author of Practical Gods
"John Brehm writes on a knife edge. His voice would be ironic if it weren’t for the sustained emotion, the opening to the unknown, the ‘electric calm.’ These elegant poems wear their eloquence lightly; the stakes are high. Sea of Faith is an unforgettable book."—D. Nurkse, author of The Fall
In 1817 a Cantonese scholar was mocked in Beijing as surprisingly learned for someone from the boondocks; in 1855 another Cantonese scholar boasted of the flourishing of literati culture in his home region. Not without reason, the second man pointed to the Xuehaitang (Sea of Learning Hall) as the main factor in the upsurge of learning in the Guangzhou area. Founded in the 1820s by the eminent scholar-official Ruan Yuan, the Xuehaitang was indeed one of the premier academies of the nineteenth century.
The celebratory discourse that portrayed the Xuehaitang as having radically altered literati culture in Guangzhou also legitimated the academy's place in Guangzhou and Guangzhou's place as a cultural center in the Qing empire. This study asks: Who constructed this discourse and why? And why did some Cantonese elites find this discourse compelling while others did not? To answer these questions, Steven Miles looks beyond intellectual history to local social and cultural history. Arguing that the academy did not exist in a scholarly vacuum, Miles contends that its location in the city of Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta embedded it in social settings and networks that determined who utilized its resources and who celebrated its successes and values.
Readings by South Pacific islanders
This book offers readings of the Bible by native biblical critics from the South Pacific (Pasifika). An essay from editor Jione Havea introduces the volume by locating these essays within islander criticism and by explaining the flow of the book. Essays are presented in three sections. “Island Twists” offers readings that twist, like a whirlpool, biblical texts around insights of Pasifika novelists, composers, poets, and sages. “Island Turns” contains contextual readings that turn biblical texts toward Pasifika. “Across the Sea” contains responses by biblical critics from across the sea.
Features
“This perceptive and accessible edition brings Tulsidas’s version [of the Ramayana], the most widely read across Northern India, to English-speaking audiences, giving readers a fresh glimpse into the tale’s impressive energy.”—Publishers Weekly
Tulsidas’s Rāmcaritmānas, written in the sixteenth century in a literary dialect of classical Hindi, has become the most beloved retelling of the ancient Ramayana story across northern India. The revered masterpiece recounts the epic story of Ram’s exile and his journeys, and it is recited by millions of Hindus today.
The Sea of Separation presents some of the poem’s most renowned episodes—Ram’s battles with demons, the kidnapping of his wife Sita by Ravana, his alliance with a troop of marvelous monkeys, and, finally, the god Hanuman’s heroic journey to the island city of Lanka to find and comfort Sita.
This new translation into free verse conveys the passion and momentum of the inspired poet and storyteller.
“How could I allow my soldiers to sail on this disloyal and cruel sea?” These words, attributed to the most powerful caliph of medieval Islam, Umar Ibn al-Khattab (634–644), have led to a misunderstanding in the West about the importance of the Mediterranean to early Islam. This body of water, known in Late Antiquity as the Sea of the Romans, was critical to establishing the kingdom of the caliphs and for introducing the new religion to Europe and Africa. Over time, it also became a pathway to commercial and political dominion, indispensable to the prosperity and influence of the Islamic world. Sea of the Caliphs returns Muslim sailors to their place of prominence in the history of the Islamic caliphate.
As early as the seventh century, Muslim sailors competed with Greek and Latin seamen for control of this far-flung route of passage. Christophe Picard recreates these adventures as they were communicated to admiring Muslims by their rulers. After the Arab conquest of southern Europe and North Africa, Muslims began to speak of the Mediterranean in their strategic visions, business practices, and notions of nature and the state. Jurists and ideologues conceived of the sea as a conduit for jihad, even as Muslims’ maritime trade with Latin, Byzantine, and Berber societies increased.
In the thirteenth century, Christian powers took over Mediterranean trade routes, but by that time a Muslim identity that operated both within and in opposition to Europe had been shaped by encounters across the sea of the caliphs.
Sea turtles are flagship species for the world's oceans. They traverse international boundaries during their migrations, serve as vehicles for marine nutrients to terrestrial habitats, and embody the often tenuous relationship between human action and ecosystem health. The East Pacific Ocean is home to some of the most dynamic marine ecosystems, and the most unique sea turtles. Marine biodiversity within this massive ocean region abounds in mangrove estuaries, seagrass pastures, coral reefs, the open ocean, and many other habitats, with sea turtles often the most conspicuous species present. The distinctive traits of the Eastern Pacific have resulted in the smallest leatherbacks, a singular morph of the green turtle, dark and steeply domed olive ridleys, and the most cryptic hawksbills on the planet. Only now are we beginning to understand how these varieties have evolved.
However, the oceanographic conditions that make this an epicenter of sea turtle activity also promote massive artisanal and industrial fishing efforts that, coupled with illegal harvesting of eggs and turtles, have led to declines of several turtle populations in the region. The essays and stories in Sea Turtles of the Eastern Pacific describe for the first time the history of this exploitation, as well as recent sea turtle conservation initiatives and scientific research in the region. The first third of the book considers the biology of the turtles, focusing on general overviews of current ecological management challenges facing the turtles' survival. The second third treats issues of marine policy related to turtle conservation. In conclusion, the book offers six compelling stories of conservation success. By the end, readers will have gained a in-depth view not only of these magnificent creatures, but also the people involved in research and conservation efforts in one of the most remarkable regions of our planet.
A continuing, comprehensive and timely survey of the state of knowledge of ocean science, this distinguished series provides an overview of research frontiers as ocean science progresses. Areas covered include physical, biological, and chemical oceanography, marine geology, and geophysics and the interactions of the oceans with the atmosphere, the solid earth, and ice. Because ocean science is evolving so rapidly, straining the boundaries of traditional sub-disciplines, interdisciplinary topics have a special place in this series--including those topics related to the application of ocean science, for example, to ocean technology, marine operations, and the resources of the sea. As a treatise on advances and new developments, each topical volume starts with fundamentals and covers recent progress, so as to provide a balanced account of how oceanography is evolving.
Previous volumes (1-12) in the series are now available from Harvard University Press.
In the manifold, multidisciplinary efforts of science to understand and manage our planet, contemporary ocean science plays an essential role. Volumes 13 and 14 of the series The Sea focus on two of the most important components in the interdisciplinary field of ocean science today--the coastal ocean and its interactions with the deep sea, and coupled physical-biogeochemical and ecosystem dynamics.
Comprehensive, definitive studies, these volumes chart the real progress being made by ocean scientists in achieving lasting scientific understanding; specifically, they address issues surrounding significant applications--for coastal regions and in general--such as: the development of monitoring and prediction systems; functionality and stability of ecosystems; eutrophication; harmful algae blooms; habitat modification; and regime shift.
Intended as companion volumes to Volumes 10 and 11 on physical coastal oceanography, these studies of the global coastal ocean continue the series' overall effort to encourage and facilitate coastal and shelf ocean sciences and technology on a global basis.
A continuing, comprehensive and timely survey of the state of knowledge of ocean science, this distinguished series provides an overview of research frontiers as ocean science progresses. Areas covered include physical, biological, and chemical oceanography, marine geology, and geophysics and the interactions of the oceans with the atmosphere, the solid earth, and ice. Because ocean science is evolving so rapidly, straining the boundaries of traditional sub-disciplines, interdisciplinary topics have a special place in this series--including those topics related to the application of ocean science, for example, to ocean technology, marine operations, and the resources of the sea. As a treatise on advances and new developments, each topical volume starts with fundamentals and covers recent progress, so as to provide a balanced account of how oceanography is evolving.
Previous volumes (1-13) in the series are now available from Harvard University Press.
In the manifold, multidisciplinary efforts of science to understand and manage our planet, contemporary ocean science plays an essential role. Volumes 13 and 14 of the series The Sea focus on two of the most important components in the interdisciplinary field of ocean science today--the coastal ocean and its interactions with the deep sea, and coupled physical-biogeochemical and ecosystem dynamics.
Comprehensive, definitive studies, these volumes chart the real progress being made by ocean scientists in achieving lasting scientific understanding; specifically, they address issues surrounding significant applications--for coastal regions and in general--such as: the development of monitoring and prediction systems; functionality and stability of ecosystems; eutrophication; harmful algae blooms; habitat modification; and regime shift.
Intended as companion volumes to Volumes 10 and 11 on physical coastal oceanography, these studies of the global coastal ocean continue the series' overall effort to encourage and facilitate coastal and shelf ocean sciences and technology on a global basis.
Download PDF of corrected version of Chapter 32
A continuing, comprehensive and timely survey of the state of knowledge of ocean science, this distinguished series provides an overview of research frontiers as ocean science progresses. Areas covered include physical, biological, and chemical oceanography, marine geology, and geophysics and the interactions of the oceans with the atmosphere, the solid earth, and ice. Because ocean science is evolving so rapidly, straining the boundaries of traditional sub-disciplines, interdisciplinary topics have a special place in this series--including those topics related to the application of ocean science, for example, to ocean technology, marine operations, and the resources of the sea. As a treatise on advances and new developments, each topical volume starts with fundamentals and covers recent progress, so as to provide a balanced account of how oceanography is evolving.
Previous volumes (1-13) in the series are now available from Harvard University Press.
In the manifold, multidisciplinary efforts of science to understand and manage our planet, contemporary ocean science plays an essential role. Volumes 13 and 14 of the series The Sea focus on two of the most important components in the interdisciplinary field of ocean science today--the coastal ocean and its interactions with the deep sea, and coupled physical-biogeochemical and ecosystem dynamics.
Comprehensive, definitive studies, these volumes chart the real progress being made by ocean scientists in achieving lasting scientific understanding; specifically, they address issues surrounding significant applications--for coastal regions and in general--such as: the development of monitoring and prediction systems; functionality and stability of ecosystems; eutrophication; harmful algae blooms; habitat modification; and regime shift.
Intended as companion volumes to Volumes 10 and 11 on physical coastal oceanography, these studies of the global coastal ocean continue the series' overall effort to encourage and facilitate coastal and shelf ocean sciences and technology on a global basis.
With the recent catastrophe in Indonesia, the topic of tsunamis could not be more timely. This book, volume fifteen in a distinguished series surveying the frontiers of ocean science and research, looks at every aspect of the current science of tsunamis. The world’s foremost experts write about the dynamics of geophysical processes involved in tsunami generation, propagation, and inundation, along with the statistical and geophysical properties of tsunami recurrence, and their application to tsunami forecasts and warnings. Together, their work constitutes the first comprehensive overview of a topic of paramount importance in ocean science today. Coinciding with the recent completion of the United States, enhanced tsunami warning program—which will provide an unprecedented volume of data on tsunamis in the deep ocean—this book will help crystallize a research agenda and foster the study of this critical issue in our understanding of the sea.
In the manifold, multidisciplinary efforts of science to understand and manage our planet, contemporary ocean science plays an essential role. This new volume in the series The Sea advances these efforts with a clear focus on one of the ocean’s more significant deadly phenomena.
With marine ecosystems endangered by a warming climate and exploding human population growth, a critical transformation is taking place in the way the world's ocean resources are managed. Marine Ecosystem-Based Management presents a state-of-the-art synopsis of the conservation approaches that are currently being translated from theory to action on a global scale. With contributions from an international team of experts, this volume synthesizes the scientific literature of holistic practices in ecosystem-based management (EBM), focusing on protecting the marine ecologies that humans and countless other organisms vitally depend upon.
Human uses of ocean ecosystems have usually been divided into separate sectors--fisheries, transportation, tourism, and recreation, for example--and ecosystem boundaries defined as much by politics as geography. This approach is giving way to a broader strategy based on integrated management of human activities in scientifically identified regions of the marine environment. Spanning a range of issues from the tropics to the poles, the authors present analyses of open ocean systems and high-impact regions such as coastlines, coral reefs, and estuaries. Methods of modeling and evaluating marine EBM are explored, as well as the role of governmental and other regulatory frameworks in ocean management and the lessons to be learned from past ecological interventions.
It is now widely recognized that any viable strategy for sustaining the world's oceans must reflect the relationships among all ecosystem components, human and nonhuman species included. Marine Ecosystem-Based Management is an in-depth report of new advances in the rapidly evolving discipline of coupled Human-Ecological Systems.
Explore insights, methodologies, and advances in socio-rhetorical interpretation
Essays in this volume from Vernon K. Robbins merge social and rhetorical strategies of interpretation and set the stage for how socio-rhetorical interpretation has developed in the context of research into the rhetoric of religious antiquity. This book contains “By Land and By Sea: The We Passages and Ancient Sea Voyages” (1978), which initially received widespread praise and then became an object of significant criticism. The volume includes Robbins’s varied, detailed responses to both encouragement and critique of his approach.
Features:
Seachanges brings together original essays examining human and cultural mobility from a musical perspective. Musicians have always been migratory frontrunners, and musical encounters have always generated nodes of cultural complexity. But hearing past musicking that took place in diaspora and foreign lands requires new methodologies designed to center unsettled lives and ephemeral practices in history.
Employing interpretive strategies from musicology, ethnomusicology, historical performance practice, sociolinguistics, and cultural history, the contributors intentionally complicate national and regional accounts of music from 1550 to 1800. Repertorial subjects include Spanish guitar music in Italy, Italian songs in Bohemia, Turkish songs in France, Jewish rituals on Corfu, Jesuit hymns in the Greek Archipelago, and Ottoman court music; further chapters recover the experiences of Indigenous musicians in colonial Latin America, the diaspora of Neapolitan singers, fictional cartographies of Baroque opera, and the careers of enslaved Black musicians in Venice and pre-revolutionary Haiti. They promote a new theoretical vocabulary that coalesces around orality, voice, performers, and performance as matters to foreground in mobility studies.
Seachanges illustrates how musical microhistories can address mobility at the macro level of Mediterranean and Atlantic Studies while respecting the tempo of individual human lives and musical timeframes.
The poems in this captivating collection weave beauty with violence, the personal with the historic as they recount the harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. As the child of Bangladeshi immigrants, the poet in turn explores her own losses, as well as the complexities of bearing witness to the atrocities these war heroines endured.
Throughout the volume, the narrator endeavors to bridge generational and cultural gaps even as the victims recount the horror of grief and personal loss. As we read, we discover the profound yet fragile seam that unites the fields, rivers, and prisons of the 1971 war with the poet’s modern-day hotel, or the tragic death of a loved one with the holocaust of a nation.
Moving from West Texas to Dubai, from Virginia to remote villages in Bangladesh and back again, the narrator calls on the legacies of Willa Cather, César Vallejo, Tomas Tranströmer, and Paul Celan to give voice to the voiceless. Fierce yet loving, devastating and magical at once, Seam is a testament to the lingering potency of memory and the bravery of a nation’s victims.
Winner, Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, 2014
Winner, Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, 2015
Winner, Drake University Emerging Writers Award, 2015
Poet and critic are well met, as one of our best writers on poetry takes up one of the world’s great poets.
Where other books on the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have dwelt chiefly on the biographical, geographical, and political aspects of his writing, this book looks squarely and deeply at Heaney’s poetry as art. A reading of the poet’s development over the past thirty years, Seamus Heaney tells a story of poetic inventiveness, of ongoing experimentation in form and expression. It is an inspired and nuanced portrait of an Irish poet of public as well as private life, whose work has given voice to his troubled times.
With characteristic discernment and eloquence, Helen Vendler traces Heaney’s invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level (1996). In sections entitled “Second Thoughts,” she considers an often neglected but crucial part of Heaney’s evolving talent: self-revision. Here we see how later poems return to the themes or genres of the earlier volumes, and reconceive them in light of the poet’s later attitudes or techniques. Vendler surveys all of Heaney’s efforts in the classical forms—genre scene, elegy, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception—and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes.
Seamus Heaney’s development as a poet is inextricably connected to the violent struggle that has racked Northern Ireland. Vendler shows how, from one volume to the next, Heaney has maintained vigilant attention toward finding a language for his time—“symbols adequate for our predicament,” as he has said. The worldwide response to those discovered symbols suggests that their relevance extends far beyond this moment.
A rich body of mythology and literature has grown around the Celtic ritual known as the Feis of Tara or “marriage of sovereignty”—ancient ceremonies in which the future king pledges to care for the land and serve the goddess of sovereignty. Seamus Heaney, whose writing has attracted the overwhelming share of critical attention directed toward contemporary Irish poetry, has engaged this symbolic tradition in some of his most significant—and controversial—work.
Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope explores Heaney’s use of the family of sovereignty motifs and redresses the imbalance of criticism that has overemphasized the theme of sacrifice to the detriment of more optimistic symbols. Moreover, Moloney reviews the development of the marriage motif in Irish poetry from the ninth to the twenty-first centuries with a focus on Heaney’s adaptations from The Frenzy of Sweeney and The Midnight Court and on the work of such poets as Kinsella, Montague, Boland, and Ní Dhomhnaill. Karen Marguerite Moloney examines the central role that Heaney assigns the Feis of Tara in his response to the crisis of Ulster and to the general spiritual bankruptcy of our times, showing in his verse how the relationship of the male lover to the goddess—particularly in her more repugnant guises—serves as prototype for the humility and deference needed to repair the effects of English colonization of Ireland and, by extension, centuries of worldwide patriarchal abuse.
Through close, sustained readings of poems previously overlooked or misinterpreted, such as “Ocean’s Love to Ireland,” “Come to the Bower,” and “Bone Dreams”—poems that Irish feminist critics have deemed flawed and distressingly sexist—Moloney refutes views that have long stood unchallenged. She also considers the direction of Heaney’s more recent poems, which continue to resonate to the twin demands of conscience and artistic integrity.
An impeccably researched and immensely readable work, Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope reveals that Heaney’s poetry offers a reverence for archetypal femininity and Dionysian energy that can counter the sterility and violence of postcolonial Irish life. Moloney shows us that, in the tradition of poets who preceded him, Heaney turns to the marriage of sovereignty to encode a message for our times—and to offer up emblems of hope on behalf of us all.
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