BiblioVault

At The Beach

Jean-Didier Urbain

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

At the Borders of Sleep

On Liminal Literature

Peter Schwenger

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

At the Borders of Sleep is a unique exploration of the connections between literature and the liminal states between waking and sleeping—from falling asleep and waking up, to drowsiness and insomnia, to states in which sleeping and waking mix. Delving into philosophy as well as literature, Peter Schwenger investigates the threshold between waking and sleeping as an important and productive state between the forced march of rational thought and the oblivion of unconsciousness.

While examining literary representations of the various states between waking and sleeping, At the Borders of Sleep also analyzes how writers and readers alike draw on and enter into these states. To do so Schwenger reads a wide range of authors for whom the borders of sleep are crucial, including Marcel Proust, Stephen King, Paul Valéry, Fernando Pessoa, Franz Kafka, Giorgio de Chirico, Virginia Woolf, Philippe Sollers, and Robert Irwin. Considering drowsiness, insomnia, and waking up, he looks at such subjects as the hypnagogic state, the experience of reading and why it is different from full consciousness, the relationships between insomnia and writing and why insomnia is often a source of creative insight, and the persistence of liminal elements in waking thought. A final chapter focuses on literature that blurs dream and waking life, giving special attention to experimental writing.

Ultimately arguing that, taking place on the edges of consciousness, both the reading and writing of literature are liminal experiences, At the Borders of Sleep suggests new ways to think about the nature of literature and consciousness.

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At the Margins

Minority Groups in Premodern Italy

Stephen J. Milner

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Slaves, foundlings, prostitutes, nuns, homosexuals, exiles, the elderly, and mountain communities - such groups stood at the margins of society in premodern Italy. But where precisely the margins were was not so easily determined. Examining these minorities as the buffer zones between more readily recognizable centers, At the Margins explores identity as a process rather than a fixed entity, stressing the multiplicity of groups to which individuals belonged. By tracing the shifting relations of social margins to centers in Italy between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries - and showing how these shifts in turn relate to social order and identity formation - the authors challenge entrenched ideas about the nature of the Renaissance and its role in shaping modernity. Behind much cultural theory lies a critique of the centrality of modernity and its foundations in the discourse of Renaissance humanism. And yet, as this volume reveals, the insights of contemporary cultural theory serve to expose the flaws in this picture of cultural hegemony and, in decentering the Renaissance, return it to the heart of cultural debate.

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Atavistic Tendencies

The Culture of Science in American Modernity

Dana Seitler

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

A provocative exploration of the impact of the human sciences on literature, politics, and culture

The post-Darwinian theory of atavism forecasted obstacles to human progress in the reappearance of throwback physical or cultural traits after several generations of absence. In this original and stimulating work, Dana Seitler explores the ways in which modernity itself is an atavism, shaping a historical and theoretical account of its dramatic rise and impact on Western culture and imagination.

Examining late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science, fiction, and photography, Seitler discovers how modern thought oriented itself around this paradigm of obsolescence and return—one that served to sustain ideologies of gender, sexuality, and race. She argues that atavism was not only a discourse of violence—mapping racial and sexual divisions onto the boundary between human and animal—but was also an illustration of how modern science understood human being as a temporal category. On one hand, atavism positioned some humans as more advanced than others on an evolutionary scale. On the other, it undermined such progressivism by suggesting that because all humans had evolved from animals they were therefore not purely human. Atavism thus reveals how scientific theories of a recurrent past were a significant feature of modernity.At the beginning of the twentieth century, atavistic theory had widespread social and economic effects on the taxonomies of medicine, the logic of the welfare state, conceptions of the modern family, and images of the abnormal. Investigating the cultural logic of science in conjunction with naturalist, feminist, and popular narratives, Seitler exposes the influence of atavism: a fundamental shift in ways of knowing—and telling stories about—the modern human.

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An Atlas of Juvenile MMPI Profiles

Starke Hathaway

University of Minnesota Press, 1961

An Atlas of Juvenile MMPI profiles was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This is a reference work designed to facilitate the use of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a psychological test, with adolescents. It will be helpful to school counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, probation workers, and others who deal with either normal or problem youngsters of adolescent age. The volume provides brief case histories of 1,000 juveniles with their accompanying MMPI data. An introductory section discusses the method of using the Atlas, and nine appendixes provide summary tables of supplementary information.

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Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)

Akira Mizuta Lippit

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Dreams, x-rays, atomic radiation, and “invisible men” are phenomena that are visual in nature but unseen. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) reveals these hidden interiors of cultural life, the “avisual” as it has emerged in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Derrida, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô and Sigmund Freud, and H. G. Wells and Ralph Ellison, and in the early cinema and the postwar Japanese films of Kobayashi Masaki, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Kore-eda Hirokazu, and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, all under the shadow cast by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Akira Mizuta Lippit focuses on historical moments in which such modes of avisuality came into being—the arrival of cinema, which brought imagination to life; psychoanalysis, which exposed the psyche; the discovery of x-rays, which disclosed the inside of the body; and the “catastrophic light” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which instituted an era of atomic discourses.

With a taut, poetic style, Lippit produces speculative readings of secret and shadow archives and visual structures or phenomenologies of the inside, charting the materiality of what both can and cannot be seen in the radioactive light of the twentieth century.

Akira Mizuta Lippit is professor of cinema, comparative literature, and Japanese culture at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minnesota, 2000).

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Autoaffection

Unconscious Thought in the Age of Technology

Patricia Ticineto Clough

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

Explores the connection between new theories, new technologies, and new ways of thinking.

In this book, Patricia Ticineto Clough reenergizes critical theory by viewing poststructuralist thought through the lens of "teletechnology," using television as a recurring case study to illuminate the changing relationships between subjectivity, technology, and mass media.

Autoaffection links diverse forms of cultural criticism-feminist theory, queer theory, film theory, postcolonial theory, Marxist cultural studies and literary criticism, the cultural studies of science and the criticism of ethnographic writing—to the transformation and expansion of teletechnology in the late twentieth century. These theoretical approaches, Clough suggests, have become the vehicles of unconscious thought in our time.In individual chapters, Clough juxtaposes the likes of Derridean deconstruction, Deleuzian philosophy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She works through the writings of Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Grosz—to name only a few—placing all in dialogue with a teletechnological framework. Clough shows how these cultural criticisms have raised questions about the foundation of thought, allowing us to reenvision the relationship of nature and technology, the human and the machine, the virtual and the real, the living and the inert.

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Autobiography in Early Modern Spain

Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens, EditorsIntroduction by Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens

University of Minnesota Press, 1991

Autobiography in Early Modern Spain was first published in 1991. 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.

Autobiography in Early Modern Spain Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens, Editors

Introduction. The Construction of the Self: Notes on Autobiography in Early Modern Spain

Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens

Chapter 1. Narration and Argumentation in Autobiographical Discourse Antonio Gomez-Moriana

Chapter 2. A Clown at Court: Francesillo de Zuniga's Cronica burlesca George Mariscal

Chapter 3. A Methodological Prolegomenon to a Post-Modernist Reading of Santa Teresa's Autobiography

Patrick Dust

Chapter 4. Golden Age Autobiography: The Soldiers Margarita Levisi

Chapter 5. The Picaresque as Autobiography: Story and History Edward Friedman

Chapter 6. The Historical Function of Picaresque Autobiographies: Toward a History of Social Offenders

Anthony N. Zahareas

Chapter 7. Fortune's Monster and the Monarchy in Las relaciones de Antonio Perez Helen H. Reed

Chapter 8. The Woman at the Border: Some Thoughts on Cervantes and Autobiography Ruth El Saffar

Chapter 9. Poetry as Autobiography: Theory and Poetic Practice in Cervantes Jenaro Talens

Appendix Curriculum vitae

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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Autonomic Imbalance and the Hypthalamus

Implications for Physiology, Medicine, Psychology, and Neuropsychiatry

Ernst Gellhorn

University of Minnesota Press, 1957

Autonomic Imbalance and the Hypothalamus was first published in 1957.Fundamental alterations in the reactivity of autonomically innervated structures frequently have been observed in physiological tests as well as under clinical conditions. However, the mechanism of these alterations and the changes in the reactivity of the central structures of the autonomic nervous system that are their most frequent site of action had not been subjected to systematic, experimental analysis until Dr. Gellhorn launched the investigations he reports in this volume.The influence of the sino-aortic reflexes on the hypothalamus and the cortex is analyzed experimentally, and new data on the relation of the hypothalamus to vascular, respiratory, and visceral functions are presented. On the basis of his physiological work Dr. Gellhorn shows how clinically applicable methods for the diagnosis of parasympathetic and sympathetic disorders at the hypothalamic level may be devised. He shows the significance of his observations for an understanding of the physiology of the emotions and suggests clinical applications to such problems as hypertension, central autonomic disorders, and functional psychoses. The influence of age on parasympathetic and sympathetic excitability is shown on control subjects and on neuropsychiatric patients, and significant differences between these two groups at similar age levels are disclosed.For the convenience of the clinical reader the experimental results are summarized in a special section before the clinical applications are discussed.

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The Autonomous Animal

Self-Governance and the Modern Subject

Claire E. Rasmussen

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Autonomy is a vital concept in much of modern theory, defining the Subject as capable of self-governance. Democratic theory relies on the concept of autonomy to provide justification for participatory government and the normative goal of democratic governance, which is to protect the ability of the individual to self-govern.

Offering the first examination of the concept of autonomy from a postfoundationalist perspective, The Autonomous Animal analyzes how the ideal of self-governance has shaped everyday life. Claire E. Rasmussen begins by considering the academic terrain of autonomy, then focusing on specific examples of political behavior that allow her to interrogate these theories. She demonstrates how the adolescent—a not-yet-autonomous subject—highlights how the ideal of self-governance generates practices intended to cultivate autonomy by forming the individual’s relationship to his or her body. She points up how the war on drugs rests on the perception that drug addicts are the antithesis of autonomy and thus must be regulated for their own good. Showing that the animal rights movement may challenge the distinction between human and animal, Rasmussen also examines the place of the endurance athlete in fitness culture, where self-management of the body is the exemplar of autonomous subjectivity.

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Avant-Garde Museology

e-flux classics

Arseny Zhilyaev

University of Minnesota Press, 2015

The museum of contemporary art might be the most advanced recording device ever invented. It is a place for the storage of historical grievances and the memory of forgotten artistic experiments, social projects, or errant futures. But in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia, this recording device was undertaken by artists and thinkers as a site for experimentation.

Arseny Zhilyaev’s Avant-Garde Museology presents essays documenting the wildly encompassing progressivism of this period by figures such as Nikolai Fedorov, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Bogdanov, and others—many which are translated from the Russian for the first time. Here the urgent question is: How might the contents of the museum be reanimated so as to transcend even the social and physical limits imposed on humankind?

Contributors: David Arkin; Vladimir Bekhterev; Alexander Bogdanov; Osip Brik; Vasiliy Chekrygin; Leonid Chetyrkin; Nikolai Druzhinin; Nikolai Fedorov; Pavel Florensky; R. N. Frumkina; M. S. Ilkovskiy; V. I. Karmilov; V. Karpov; Valentin Kholtsov; P. N. Khrapov; Yuriy Kogan; Natalya Kovalenskaya; Nadezhda Krupskaya; S. P. Lebedyansky; A. F. Levitsky; Vera Leykina (Leykina-Svirskaya); Ivan Luppol; Kazimir Malevich; Andrey Platonov; Nikolay Punin; Aleksandr Rodchenko; Yuriy Samarin; I. F. Sheremet; Andrey Shestakov; Natan Shneerson; Ivan Skulenko; M. Vorobiev; N. Vorontsovsky; Boris Zavadovsky; I. M. Zykov.

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Avatar Bodies

A Tantra For Posthumanism

Ann Weinstone

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

An ethically-based approach to human relations for the media age

Otherness, alterity, the alien—over the course of the past fifty years many of us have based our hopes for more ethical relationships on concepts of difference. Combining philosophy, literary criticism, fiction, autobiography, and real and imagined correspondence, Ann Weinstone proposes that only when we stop ordering the other to be other—whether technological, animal, or simply inanimate—will we truly become posthuman.

Posthumanism has thus far focused nearly exclusively on human–technology relations. Avatar Bodies develops a posthumanist vocabulary for human-to-human relationships that turns our capacities for devotion, personality, and pleasure. Drawing on both the philosophies and practices of Indian Tantra, Weinstone argues for the impossibility of absolute otherness; we are all avatar bodies, consisting of undecidably shared gestures, skills, memories, sensations, beliefs, and affects.

Weinstone calls her book a “tantra”—by which she means a set of instructions for practices aimed at sensitizing the reader to the inherent permeability of self to other, self to world. This tantra for posthumanism elaborates devotional gestures that will expose us to more unfettered contacts and the transformative touch.

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