front cover of Poetry as Re-Reading
Poetry as Re-Reading
American Avant-Garde Poetry and the Poetics of Counter-Method
Ming-Qian Ma
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Rereading and rewriting our understanding of the poetics of modernism and postmodernism, this truly revisionary work identifies a significant counter-tradition in twentieth-century poetry. Postmodernism, Ming-Qian Ma argues, does not so much follow from modernism as coexist with it, with postmodernists employing the anarchic poetics introduced by Gertrude Stein in countering the rationalist method of high modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. 

Grounded in a detailed and compelling account of the philosophy guiding such a project, Ma’s book traces a continuity of thought and practice through the very different poetic work of objectivists Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and John Cage and language poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and Charles Bernstein. His deft individual readings provide an opening into this notoriously difficult work, even as his larger critique reveals a new and clarifying perspective on American modernist and post-modernist avant-garde poetics. Ma shows how we cannot understand these poets according to the usual way of reading but must see how they deliberately use redundancy, unpredictability, and irrationality to undermine the meaning-oriented foundations of American modernism--and to force a new and different kind of reading.

With its unusually clear explanation of the philosophy informing postmodern practice, and its unique insights into some of the more interesting and vexing poets of our time, this book points to a reading of an important strain of postmodern American poetry that is likely to develop well into the twenty-first century.

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Hir
A Play
Taylor Mac
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Finalist, 2015 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Drama 

Discharged from the Marines under suspicious circumstances, Isaac comes home from the wars, only to find the life he remembers upended. Isaac’s father, who once ruled the family with an iron fist, has had a debilitating stroke; his younger sister, Maxine, is now his brother, Max; and their mother, Paige, is committed to revolution at any cost. Determined to be free of any responsibility toward her formerly abusive husband—or the home he created—Paige fervently believes she can lead the way to a "new world order." Hir, Taylor Mac’s subversive comedy, leaves many of our so-called normative and progressive ideas about gender, families, the middle class—and cleaning—in hilarious and ultimately tragic disarray.

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Harlem's Theaters
A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939
Adrienne Macki Braconi
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Honorable Mention, 2016 Errol Hill Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theater, Drama and/or Performance

Based on a vast amount of archival research, Adrienne Macki Braconi’s illuminating study of three important community-based theaters in Harlem shows how their work was essential to the formation of a public identity for African Americans and the articulation of their goals, laying the groundwork for the emergence of the Civil Rights movement. Macki Braconi uses textual analysis, performance reconstruction, and audience reception to examine the complex dynamics of productions by the Krigwa Players, the Harlem Experimental Theatre, and the Negro Theatre of the Federal Theatre Project. Even as these theaters demonstrated the extraordinary power of activist art, they also revealed its limits. The stage was a site in which ideological and class differences played out, theater being both a force for change and a collision of contradictory agendas. Macki Braconi’s book alters our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, the roots of the Civil Rights movement, and the history of community theater in America.

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Fugitive Objects
Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century
Catriona MacLeod
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Winner of the 2014 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for Best Book on Romanticism

In Fugitive Objects, Catriona MacLeod examines the question of why sculpture is both intensively discussed and yet rendered immaterial in German literature. She focuses on three forms of disappearance: sculpture’s vanishing as a legitimate art form at the beginning of the nineteenth century in German aesthetics, statues’ migration from the domain of high art into mass reproduction and popular culture, and sculpture’s dislodging and relocation into literary discourse. Through original readings of Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Adalbert Stifter, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and others, MacLeod reveals that if sculpture has disappeared from much of nineteenth-century German literature and aesthetics, it is a vanishing act that paradoxically relocates the statue back onto another cultural pedestal, attesting to the powerful force of the medium.

 
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Rosie the Tarantula
A True Adventure in Chicago’s Field Museum
Peggy Macnamara
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Chicago’s famed Field Museum of Natural History is home to a collection of thirty million geological and biological specimens that enchant and dazzle two million visitors of all ages each year. Based on a true story, Rosie the Tarantula: A True Adventure in Chicago’s Field Museum is a beautifully illustrated introduction to the Field’s treasures through the eyes of Rosie, a member of the museum’s live arachnid collection.

Several years ago, Rosie went on an expedition to the wonders of the Field’s soaring halls, such as Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex, as well as the secret specimens of animal fossils and human artifacts hidden away in drawers, cabinets, and bins. Renowned Field Museum artist-in-residence Peggy Macnamara brings the marvels of the museum to vivid life in a set of gorgeous and meticulously accurate watercolors. Peggy’s daughter Katie narrates the story of this restless arachnid in rhyme ideal for reading aloud to children.

A keepsake quality book that will delight budding young scientists and their families, Rosie the Tarantula provides a colorful, interactive experience with one of Chicago’s foremost cultural institutions. This one-of-a-kind book is rounded out by fascinating notes for adult readers, and other fun features for further reading.
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The Anatomy of Disillusion
Martin Heidegger's Notion of Truth
W. B. Macomber
Northwestern University Press, 1967
The Anatomy of Disillusion is an introduction to Heidegger’s phenomenology that focuses on Heidegger’s notion of truth. Unlike many of his contemporaries, W.B. Macomber presents Heidegger as a systematic thinker, whose phenomenology is inextricably bound up with his ontology and epistemology.
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The Ethics of Postmodernity
Current Trends in Continental Thought
Gary B. Madison
Northwestern University Press, 1997
In The Ethics of Postmodernity, Gary B. Madison and Marty Fairbairn have collected instructive and illuminating essays that address the dilemmas left in the wake of the postmodern attack on foundationalism. This collection is a powerful statement on the many directions a postmetaphysical ethics might take.

Contributors include Barry Allen, Caroline Bayard, Robert Bernasconi, Thomas W. Busch, M.C. Dillon, Marty Fairbairn, Paul Fairfield, Morny Joy, Richard Kearney, Gary B. Madison, Joseph Margolis, Tom Rockmore, Charles E. Scott, Evan Simpson, and Mark Williams.
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Improbable Journeys
Robin Magowan
Northwestern University Press, 2002
All writers risk their identities, some with each sentence. But abroad, writing about a life that can't help but seem elusive, the charlatan in oneself may feel all too exposed. Limited to the surface, to the most fortuitous of impressions, how can a foreign pair of eyes hope to pen anything that can vie with something an insider, born there, carrying that landscape in his bones, might write?

For more than four decades, poet Robin Magowan has journeyed in search of ecstatic spiritual experiences. Hitchhiking and walking, by bus or boat or when necessary by horse, he has explored lands as exotic as Nepal and New Guinea, as classic as Italy or France, and as forgotten as Persia and pre-Castro Cuba. All the while he has submerged himself, whether in the mysteries of Haitian voodoo or the simples pleasures of Burgundian peasant life. Known for the beauty, wit, and expressive power of his prose, Magowan's writing vibrates with the intensity of an outsider who crawls into the skin of a country--and emerges transformed.
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Let Me See It
Stories
James Magruder
Northwestern University Press, 2014

James Magruder’s collection of linked stories follows two gay cousins, Tom and Elliott, from adolescence in the 1970s to adulthood in the early ’90s. With a rueful blend of comedy and tenderness, Magruder depicts their attempts to navigate the closet and the office and the lessons they learn about libidinous coworkers, résumé boosting, Italian suffixes, and frozen condoms. As Tom and Elliot search for trusting relationships while the AIDS crisis deepens, their paths diverge, leading Tom to a new sense of what matters most. Magruder is especially adept at rendering the moments that reveal unwritten codes of behavior to his characters, who have no way of learning them except through painful experience.

Loss is sudden, the fallout portrayed with a powerful economy. In Tom and Elliott, readers come to recognize themselves, driven by the same absurd desires and unconscious impulses, subjected to the same fates.

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Red Virgin Soil
Soviet Literature in the 1920's
Robert A. Maguire
Northwestern University Press, 2000
First published in 1968, this classic is a richly detailed study of the eponymous journal that was the most significant Soviet literary journal of the 1920s. It is also a comprehensive survey of Soviet literary culture in a critical period when writers could still engage in public debate.
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Black Theater, City Life
African American Art Institutions and Urban Cultural Ecologies
Macelle Mahala
Northwestern University Press, 2022
Macelle Mahala’s rich study of contemporary African American theater institutions reveals how they reflect and shape the histories and cultural realities of their cities. Arguing that the community in which a play is staged is as important to the work’s meaning as the script or set, Mahala focuses on four cities’ “arts ecologies” to shed new light on the unique relationship between performance and place: Cleveland, home to the oldest continuously operating Black theater in the country; Pittsburgh, birthplace of the legendary playwright August Wilson; San Francisco, a metropolis currently experiencing displacement of its Black population; and Atlanta, a city with forty years of progressive Black leadership and reverse migration.
 
Black Theater, City Life looks at Karamu House Theatre, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh Playwrights’ Theatre Company, the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the African American Shakespeare Company, the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival, and Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company to demonstrate how each organization articulates the cultural specificities, sociopolitical realities, and histories of African Americans. These companies have faced challenges that mirror the larger racial and economic disparities in arts funding and social practice in America, while their achievements exemplify such institutions’ vital role in enacting an artistic practice that reflects the cultural backgrounds of their local communities. Timely, significant, and deeply researched, this book spotlights the artistic and civic import of Black theaters in American cities.
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Forbidden Journey
Ella K. Maillart
Northwestern University Press, 2003
A classic account of a trip through China during the golden age of travel

In 1935 Ella Maillart contemplated one of the most arduous journeys in the world: the "impossible journey" from Peking, then a part of Japanese-occupied China, through the distant province of Sinkiang (present day Tukestan), to Kashmir. Enlisting with newswriter Peter Fleming (with the caveat that his company remain tolerable), Maillart undertook a journey considered almost beyond imagination for any European and doubly so for a woman.
The trip promised hardships such as typhus and bandits, as well as the countless hazards surrounding the civil war between Chinese communists and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists. Setting out with pockets full of Mexican money (the currency used in China at the time), Maillart encountered a way of life now lost, but one that then had gone unchanged for centuries.

Maillart describes it all with the sharp eye and unvarnished prose of a veteran reporter-the missionaries and rogues, parents binding daughters' feet with rags, the impatient Fleming lighting fires under stubborn camels. It's a hard road, not that Maillart cares. At all times she is a witty, always-enchanted guide-except when it comes to bureaucrats.

Forbidden Journey ranks among other travel narratives like Fleming's News from Tartary, (based on the same journey) and Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana. But it is also a portrait of a fascinating woman, one of many women from the pre-WWII era who ignored convention and traveled in hidden lands. It remains a vivid account of its time and a classic of travel literature.
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Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital
Ani Maitra
Northwestern University Press, 2020
In Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital, Ani Maitra urgently calls for a reevaluation of identity politics as an aesthetic maneuver regulated by capitalism. A dominant critical trend in the humanities, Maitra argues, is to dismiss or embrace identity through the formal properties of a privileged aesthetic medium such as literature, cinema, or even the performative body. In contrast, he demonstrates that identity politics becomes unavoidably real and material only because the minoritized subject is split between multiple sites of mediation—visual, linguistic, and sonic—while remaining firmly tethered to capitalism’s hierarchical logic of value production. Only in the interstices of media can we track the aesthetic conversion of identitarian difference into value, marked by the inequities of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
 
Maitra’s archive is transnational and multimodal. Moving from anticolonial polemics to psychoanalysis to diasporic experimental literature to postcolonial feminist and queer media, he lays bare the cunning by which capitalism produces and fragments identity through an intermedial “aesthetic dissonance” with the commodity form. Maitra’s novel contribution to theories of identity and to the concept of mediation will interest a wide range of scholars in media studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, and critical aesthetics.
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0°, 0°
Poems
Amit Majmudar
Northwestern University Press, 2009

0° , 0° is where the equator and prime meridian cross, but it is also, in Amit Majmudar’s poetic cartography, "the one True Cross, the rood’s wood warped and tacked / pole to pole." Unlikely intersections lie at the heart of Amit Majmudar's first collection of poetry. Mythical, biblical, political, and scientific allusion thrive side by side, inspiring surprise and wonder.

Majmudar’s training as a medical doctor is clearly at work as he is able to balance poetic forms requiring surgical precision—including the exceedingly difficult ghazal—with warmth and compassion for the world. Majmudar understands suffering on the large scale and the small, whether he is speaking up for the biblical character Job and "answering the whirlwind," or tallying the human cost of war at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

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Thunderclouds in the Forecast
A Novel
Clarence Major
Northwestern University Press, 2021
Thunderclouds in the Forecast traverses the linked histories of two friends—one Black, the other white—who grew up wards of the state in New York. It’s April 1976 and Ray is taking Amtrak to San Francisco to reconnect with Scotty, his oldest friend, whom he met in a shelter for abandoned children. While Ray has embraced the stable tedium of steady employment, Scotty’s life has been erratic, a trail of short-lived affairs and dead-end jobs. Maybe Ray, who’s just won the lottery, is finally in a position to help him.

When Ray’s train is delayed in Lorena, a Gold Rush outpost turned college town, he meets Alice. Together they embark on a romance that tempts him to stay. By the time Ray arrives in San Francisco, Scotty has abandoned his bartending job, his rented room, and his scant belongings and skipped town with a married woman from Lorena. Now Ray has more than one reason to return.

A preeminent American writer who thrives on reinvention, Major returns with an unforgettable exploration of life on the brink of sweeping change. With spare prose and subtle poignancy, Thunderclouds in the Forecast probes love, loyalty, and belonging. As Toni Morrison wrote, “Clarence Major has a remarkable mind and the talent to match.”
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The Loss
A Novella and Two Short Stories
Vladimir Makanin
Northwestern University Press, 1998
The novella and two short stories that make up this volume were written at three different periods in Makanin's life, yet they are united by their narrative and stylistic invention, their range of human emotion, and the profound humanity of their prose. Though banished and suppressed in the Brezhnev era, Makanin is now recognized as one of Russia's leading writers.

In his celebrated short story "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," two Russian soldiers take a Chechen prisoner during the war, and as events unfold, Makanin reveals the casual brutality of the war but also the secret truths of the character's lives. In the novella The Loss, Pekalov, a drunkard and dreamer obsessed with the idea of building a tunnel under the Ural River, disappears in a ditch while working and is made a saint by the people of his village. "Klyucharyov and Alimushkin" tells the story of what happens when one man becomes remarkably lucky while the other loses all his luck.
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Nikolai Klyuev
Time and Text, Place and Poet
Michael Makin
Northwestern University Press, 2010

Nikolai Klyuev is the first book in English to examine the life and work of this enigmatic poet. Klyuev (1884–1937) rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as the first of the so-called "new peasant poets" but later fell victim to Stalinist hostility to both his cultural ideology and his homosexuality. He was arrested and exiled in 1933, then shot in 1937.
 
Klyuev’s work incorporates rich elements of folklore, mysticism, politics, and religion, and he sometimes invokes arcane Russian syntax and vocabulary. Makin’s feat is particularly notable because Klyuev was often elusive in his own accounts of his life, and Makin successfully brings into focus the poet’s deliberate strategies of self-mythologization. Nikolai Klyuev is an indispensable guide to the life and the work of an important poet winning wider recognition outside of Russia.

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Kant's Worldview
How Judgment Shapes Human Comprehension
Rudolf A. Makkreel
Northwestern University Press, 2022
In Kant’s Worldview: How Judgment Shapes Human Comprehension, Rudolf A. Makkreel offers a new interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s theory of judgment that clarifies Kant’s well-known suggestion that a genuine philosophy is guided by a world‑concept (Weltbegriff). Makkreel shows that Kant increasingly expands the role of judgment from its logical and epistemic tasks to its reflective capacity to evaluate objects and contextualize them in worldly terms. And Makkreel shows that this final orientational power of judgment supplements the cognition of the understanding with the comprehension originally assigned to reason.

To comprehend, according to Kant, is to possess sufficient insight into situations so as to also achieve some purpose. This requires that reason be applied with the discernment that reflective judgment makes possible. Comprehension, practical as well as theoretical, can fill in Kant’s world concept and his sublime evocation of a Weltanschauung with a more down-to-earth worldview.

Scholars have recently stressed Kant’s impure ethics, his nonideal politics, and his pragmatism. Makkreel complements these efforts by using Kant’s ethical, sociopolitical, religious, and anthropological writings to provide a more encompassing account of the role of human beings in the world. The result is a major contribution to our understanding of Kant and the history of European philosophy.
 
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Changing Masters
Spirit Possession and Identity Construction among the Descendants of Slaves in the Sudan
G. P. Makris
Northwestern University Press, 2000
The spirit possession cult of zar tumbura has a devoted following among Muslim descendents of slaves and other subalterns in the Sudan. In Changing Masters, G. P. Makris studies zar tumbura as part of a wider zar complex for what it reveals about shifting ethnic identities in the modern Sudan. More generally, his work exposes the processes subordinate groups use to assert a positive identity that counters the identity conferred upon them by the dominant culture.

Makris engages the tumbura devotees of the area of Greater Khartoum in an animated discussion of their understanding of themselves and their world. Using oral histories, songs associated with the various spirits, and accounts of ceremonies he witnessed, he shows tumbura to be a response to victimization first in slavery and later by subordination. It functions as a counterdiscourse challenging the dominant discourse of the ex-slaveholding classes and enables its practitioners to assert a separate, alternative identity. This assertion, embodied in the idiom of possession, is achieved through a continuous reworking of meaning as it is imparted by religion, descent, and historical consciousness.

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Chicago and Its Botanic Garden
The Chicago Horticultural Society at 125
Cathy Jean Maloney
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Formed in 1890, during the heady days before the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the Chicago Horticultural Society boasted members with names deeply rooted in Chicago history: Buckingham, McCormick, and Palmer, among others. Today, as it leads the Garden in a model public-private partnership with the Forest Preserves of Cook County, the Society’s horticultural practices have exceeded the vision of its founders.

Chicago and Its Botanic Garden: The Chicago Horticultural Society at 125 is a lushly illustrated and thoughtful history of the Society and its evolution from a producer of monumental flower and botanical shows, through a fallow period, to the opening in 1972 of the Chicago Botanic Garden, a living museum and world leader in horticulture, plant science and conservation, education, and urban agriculture. Author Cathy Jean Maloney combines meticulous scholarship with a flair for storytelling in a narrative that will delight everyone from casual strollers of the grounds to the volunteers, professionals, and scientists who compose the influential society.


 
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Morte Darthur
Sir Thomas Malory
Northwestern University Press, 1968
The Morte Darthur is a superb story of adventure and love, honor and betrayal, and one of the classics of world literature. Malory perfected his art during the writing of the long and complex work and the earlier parts, though excellent, lack the dramatic power and pervasive tragic irony of the passion, war, and society that constitutes the last quarter of the book. By presenting the last quarter alone, this edition focuses on the greatness of Malory's achievement and allows the reader to see it and enjoy it more fully.
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Consequences of Hermeneutics
Fifty Years After Gadamer's Truth and Method
Jeff Malpas
Northwestern University Press, 2010

The publication of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s magnum opus Truth and Method in 1960 marked the arrival of philosophical hermeneutics as a dominant force in philosophy and the humanities as a whole. Consequences of Hermeneutics celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century with essays by most of the leading figures in contemporary hermeneutic theory, including Gianni Vattimo and Jean Grondin.

These essays examine the achievements of hermeneutics as well as its current status and prospects for the future. Gadamer’s text provides an important focus, but the ambition of these critical reappraisals extends to hermeneutics more broadly and to a range of other thinkers, such as Heidegger, Ricoeur, Derrida, and Rorty. Forcefully demonstrating the continuing relevance and power of hermeneutics, Consequences of Hermeneutics is a fitting tribute to Gadamer and the legacy of his thought.

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Acts of War
Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays
Karen Malpede
Northwestern University Press, 2011
As Karen Malpede points out in her introduction to Acts of War, tragedy "arose as a complement to, perhaps also as an antidote to, war." The greatest of the early playwrights wrote from experience—Aeschylus and Sophocles were generals in the Athenian army, and Euripides was a combat veteran. Electronic media reports war instantly, but the stage provides an unrivaled venue for facing the horror of armed conflict on a human scale.This timely anthology of plays by American and British writers bears witness to the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for combatants and civilians alike and asks what it means to be a citizen in a democracy at war. From violence on the battlefield and in the cells of Guantanamo to the toll exacted on the homefront, the seven plays collected by Malpede, Messina, and Shuman explore in depth the costs of war. Sometimes with humor or erotic charge, always with compassion and surprising insight, these contemporary plays return to the theater a necessary social edge.Karen Malpede’s introduction sets the plays in the broader contexts of theater’s roots and recent history, while award-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges provides a foreword.
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Fortune's Favored Child
Raouf Mama
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Raouf Mama is widely beloved by children and adults alike for his books and especially for his African and multicultural storytelling, which incorporates poetry, song, music, and dance.

In Fortune’s Favored Child, the master storyteller tells his own story, beginning in the West African country of Benin. Through a harrowing experience with sickness, an encounter with a clairvoyant traditional healer, and astonishing twists of fortune, the protagonist struggles to uncover his real identity, to get an education, and to make his own way in the world. His journey takes him to the shores of the United States to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan and begin a new chapter in his life.

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front cover of Why Monkeys Live in Trees and Other Stories from Benin
Why Monkeys Live in Trees and Other Stories from Benin
Raouf Mama
Northwestern University Press, 2006
This is a book for both young and old lovers of folklore. Why Monkeys Live in Trees and Other Stories from Benin is a rich tapestry of oral tales that come from a wide range of Beninese ethnic groups. They include trickster tales and sacred tales involving the greatest and meanest of mankind, as well as nature and the world of spirits. These ageless tales remind us of the power of love, the perils of greed and pride, and the redemptive virtues of courage, humility, and kindness.

The Western African Republic of Benin (formerly Dahomey) is gifted with a great folktale tradition, one of the richest in the world. As pieces of oral literature and cultural history, these tales shed light on some of the values and beliefs as well as the customs and traditions of the people of Benin.

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Bakhtin in Contexts
Across the Disciplines
Amy Mandelker
Northwestern University Press, 1995
The Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin has recently become a major figure in contemporary theory beyond his traditional influence in Slavic literary studies. Bakhtin in Contexts explores the revolutionary impact Bakhtin's ideas have carried in contemporary discussion of language, art, culture, and social science in recent years. The contributors represent a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, epitomizing the views of Russian and American specialists in those fields Bakhtin often referred to as "the human sciences." The diversity of perspective and flexibility of approach make this a unique contribution to Bakhtin studies and to the ongoing dialogue between Western and Russian theorists.
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The Noise of Time
Selected Prose
Osip Mandelstam
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Osip Mandelstam has in recent years come to be seen as a central figure in European modernism. Though known primarily as a poet, Mandelstam worked in many styles: autobiography, short story, travel writing, and polemic. Mandelstam's biographer, Clarence Brown, presents a collection of the poet's prose works that illuminates Mandelstam's far-ranging talent and places him within the canon of European modernism.

This volume includes Mandelstam's "The Noise of Time," a series of autobiographical sketches; "The Egyptian Stamp," a novella; "Fourth Prose;" and the famous travel memoirs "Theodosia" and "Journey to Armenia."
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Water's Edge
Writing on Water
Lenore Manderson
Northwestern University Press, 2023

A wide-ranging consideration of water’s plenitude and paucity—and of our relationship to its many forms

Water is quotidian, ubiquitous, precious, and precarious. With their roots in this element, the authors of Water’s Edge reflect on our natural environment: its forms, textures, and stewardship. Born from a colloquium organized by the editors at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, the anthology features a diverse group of writers and artists from half a dozen countries, from different fields of scholarship and practice: artists, biologists, geologists, poets, ecocritics, actors, and anthropologists. The contributors explore and celebrate water while reflecting on its disturbances and pollution, and their texts and art play with the boundaries by which we differentiate literary forms.

In the creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art collected here, water moves from backdrop to subject. Ashley Dawson examines the effects of industrial farming on the health of local ecosystems and economies. Painter Kulvinder Kaur Dhew captures water’s brilliance and multifaceted reflections through a series of charcoal pieces that interlace the collection. Poet Arthur Sze describes the responsibility involved in the careful management of irrigation ditches in New Mexico. Rather than concentrating their thoughts into a singular, overwhelming argument, the authors circulate moments of apprehension, intimation, and felt experience. They are like tributaries, each carrying, in a distinctive style, exigent and often intimate reports concerning a substance upon which all living organisms depend.

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Compulsory Happiness
Norman Manea
Northwestern University Press, 1994
In cool, precise prose, and with an unerring sense of the absurd, Norman Manea's four novellas create a picture of everyday life in a grotesque police state, expressing terror and hope, fear and solidarity, the humorous triviality of the ordinary, and the painful search for an ideal.
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The Idea of Indian Literature
Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method
Preetha Mani
Northwestern University Press, 2022
Winner of the 2023 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies

Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, Mani contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. In The Idea of Indian Literature, she explores the paradox that a single canon can be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to one another and to English.
 
Hindi, representing national aspirations, and Tamil, epitomizing the secessionist propensities of the region, are conventionally viewed as poles of the multilingual continuum within Indian literature. Mani shows, however, that during the twentieth century, these literatures were coconstitutive of one another and of the idea of Indian literature itself. The writers discussed here—from short-story forefathers Premchand and Pudumaippittan to women trailblazers Mannu Bhandari and R. Chudamani—imagined a pan-Indian literature based on literary, rather than linguistic, norms, even as their aims were profoundly shaped by discussions of belonging unique to regional identity. Tracing representations of gender and the uses of genre in the shifting thematic and aesthetic practices of short vernacular prose writing, the book offers a view of the Indian literary landscape as itself a field for comparative literature.
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Tragic Wisdom and Beyond
Gabriel Marcel
Northwestern University Press, 1980
This volume presents two works by Gabriel Marcel. The first, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, a collection of his later writings, shows the impact of his encounter with the later writings of Heidegger. The second, Conversations between Paul Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel, is a series of six conversations between Marcel and his most famous student.
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Hegel's Energy
A Reading of The Phenomenology of Spirit
Michael Marder
Northwestern University Press, 2021
Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit has been one of the most important works of philosophy since the nineteenth century, while the question of energy has been crucial to life in the twenty-first century. In this book, Michael Marder integrates the two, narrating a story about the trials and tribulations of energy embedded in Hegel’s dialectics. Through an original interpretation of actuality (Wirklichkeit) as energy in the Hegelian corpus, the book provides an exciting lens for understanding the dialectical project and the energy‑starved condition of our contemporaneity. To elaborate this theory, Marder undertakes a meticulous rereading of major parts of the Phenomenology, where the energy deficit of mere consciousness gives way to the energy surplus of self‑consciousness and its self‑delimitation in the domain of reason. In so doing, he denounces the current understanding of energy as pure potentiality, linking this mindset to pollution, profit-driven economies, and environmental crises. Surprising and deeply engaged with its contemporary implications, this book doesn’t simply illuminate aspects of The Phenomenology of Spirit—it provides an entirely new understanding of Hegel’s ideas.
 
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Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela
Angela Marino
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela explains how supporters of the emergent socialism of Hugo Chávez negotiated terms of national belonging and participatory democracy through performance. By foregrounding populism as an embodied act, Angela Marino draws attention to repertoires of populism that contributed to what is arguably the most significant social movement in the Americas since the Cuban Revolution.

Based on ethnographic and archival research, Marino focuses on performances of the devil figure, tracing this beloved trickster through religious fiestas, mid-century theater and film, and other media as it both antagonizes and unifies a movement against dictatorship and neoliberalism. She then demonstrates that performance became a vehicle through which cultural producers negotiated boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in ways that overcame the simplistic logic of good versus evil, us versus them. The result is a nuanced insight into the process of building political mobilization out of crisis and through monumental times of change.

The book will interest readers of Latin American politics, cultural studies, political science, and performance studies by providing a vital record of the revolution, with valuable insights into its internal dynamics and lessons towards building a populist movement of the left in contentious times.
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Reduction and Givenness
Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology
Jean-Luc Marion
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Through careful analysis of phenomenological texts by Husserl and Heidegger, Marion argues for the necessity of a third phenomenological reduction that concerns what is fully implied but left largely unthought by the phenomenologies of both Husserl and Heidegger: the unconditional "givenness" of the phenomenon. At once historically grounded and radically new, this phenomenology of givenness has revitalized phenomenological debate in Europe and the U.S.
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Renaissance Invention
Stradanus's Nova Reperta
Lia Markey
Northwestern University Press, 2020
This book is the first full-length study of the Nova Reperta (New Discoveries), a renowned series of prints designed by Johannes Stradanus during the late 1580s in Florence. Reproductions of the prints, essays, conversations from a scholarly symposium, and catalogue entries complement a Newberry Library exhibition that tells the story of the design, conception, and reception of Stradanus’s engravings.
 
Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s “Nova Reperta” seeks to understand why certain inventions or novelties were represented in the series and how that presentation reflected and fostered their adoption in the sixteenth century. What can Stradanus’s prints tell us about invention and cross-cultural encounter in the Renaissance? What was considered “new” in the era? Who created change and technological innovation?
 
Through images of group activities and interactions in workshops, Stradanus’s prints emphasize the importance of collaboration in the creation of new things, dispelling traditional notions of individual genius. The series also dismisses the assumption that the revival of the wonders of the ancient world in Italy was the catalyst for transformation. In fact, the Latin captions on the prints explain how contemporary inventions surpass those of the ancients. Together, word and image foreground the global nature of invention and change in the early modern period even as they promote specifically Florentine interests and activities. 
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Bethany
A Play
Laura Marks
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Winner, 2014 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Emerging American Playwright Award
 
At the height of the foreclosure crisis, single mother Crystal loses more than her house. She struggles to stay positive, though—with plenty of help from a roommate with conspiracy theories, a motivational speaker with a secret, and her colleagues at the local Saturn dealership. But optimism is no match for a bad economy, and before long Crystal’s desperate quest to regain what she’s lost turns into the fight of her life. This darkly comic thriller explores just how far we’ll go to get back what’s ours.
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Plato and Aristophanes
Comedy, Politics, and the Pursuit of a Just Life
Marina Marren
Northwestern University Press, 2022
In Plato and Aristophanes, Marina Marren contends that our search for communal justice must start with self-examination. The realization that there are things that we cannot know about ourselves unless we become the subject of a joke is integral to such self-scrutiny. Jokes provide a new perspective on our politics and ethics; they are essential to our civic self-awareness.
 
Marren makes this case by delving into Plato’s Republic, a foundational work of political philosophy. While the Republic straightforwardly condemns the decadence and greed of a tyrant, Plato’s attack on political idealism is both solemn and comedic. In fact, Plato draws on the same comedic stock and tropes as do Aristophanes’s plays. Marren’s book strikes up an innovative conversation between three works by Aristophanes—Assembly Women, Knights, and Birds—and Plato’s philosophy, prompting important questions about individual convictions and one’s personal search for justice. These dialogic works offer critiques of tyranny that are by turns brilliant, scathing, and exuberant, making light of faults and ideals alike. Philosophical comedy exposes despotism in individuals as well as systems of government claiming to be just and good. This critique holds as much bite against contemporary injustices as it did at the time of Aristophanes and Plato.
 
An ingenious new work by an emerging scholar, Plato and Aristophanes shows that comedy—in tandem with philosophy and politics—is essential to self-examination. And without such examination, there is no hope for a just life.
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Watergate's Legacy and the Press
The Investigative Impulse
Jon Marshall
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Did two reporters really change the course of history? And what impact did they actually have on American journalism and government? Jon Marshall explores different answers to those questions by charting the past and the possible future of the critical public service provided by investigative reporters.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein symbolize an era when investigative reporters were seen as courageous fighters of corruption and injustice. Although many mainstream news outlets no longer have the resources to support expensive investigative reporters on staff, journalists have found other ways to support themselves Marshall’s discussion of the opportunities they have found in blogs, crowd-sourcing, and nonprofit institutions offers hope for the future of investigative journalism.

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Maps and Mirrors
Topologies of Art and Politics
Steve Martinot
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Maps and Mirrors explores the links and gaps between the aesthetic and the political at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Testing the major voices of aesthetic and literary theory, it raises important questions about the implicit political contexts and commitments of thinkers from Kant to de Man. Taken together the essays provide a tour of the complexities and richness of contemporary modes of critique.
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Paranoia
A Novel
Victor Martinovich
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Immediately banned after it was published, Paranoia is a novel about how dictatorships survive by burrowing into the minds of those they rule, sowing distrust and blurring the boundaries between the state’s and the individual’s autonomy. Although Minsk and Belarus are never mentioned, they are clearly the author’s inspiration for the novel’s setting. The plot focuses on a doomed romance between a young man whose former lover has disappeared and a young woman whose other lover is the minister of state security. The novel evokes classic dissident literature while artfully depicting the post-Soviet, globalized world.

 
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If You See the Buddha
Studies in the Fiction of Ivan Bunin
Thomas Gaiton Marullo
Northwestern University Press, 1999
In a 1994 American Scholar article, Andrew Wachtel wrote of Ivan Bunin: "[He] is undoubtedly the greatest Russian writer whom no one reads." With the collapse of communism, however, Bunin's works are undergoing a revival in both Russia and the West. As enthusiastic as readers and publishers have been, scholarship has not kept pace with this "rediscovery," in part due to the many contradictions in Bunin's writing, in part because much past criticism has been used to advanced the critic's own view of what they love or hate about "modern" life.

In If You See the Buddha, Thomas Gaiton Marullo begins addressing the lack of scholarship by establishing that Bunin was a thoroughly modern writer whose images and ideas were rooted more in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth. But beyond that point, Marullo states that, of all the systems of belief that Bunin adopted and adapted throughout his career, it was his interest in Buddhism that best elucidates the dynamics of his writing. Key Buddhistic concepts figured prominently in Bunin's work. These ideas enabled him to make sense of his world and serves as the catalyst for an ars poetica that tempered his philosophical and aesthetic restiveness and contributed a sense of timelessness to work from both his prerevolutionary and émigré periods.
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Petersburg
The Physiology of a City
Thomas Gaiton Marullo
Northwestern University Press, 2009
This landmark collection of short works forms a vivid documentary of life in midnineteenth-century St. Petersburg. Editor Nikolai Nekrasov was the most influential literary entrepreneur of the day, and he assembled works ranging from ethnography to fiction to literary criticism, all written by leading authors and thinkers of the time. The book he edited represents many important strands in Russian culture and history, including the development of Russian prose and the rise of the intelligentsia. A vital political document as well, Petersburg is a record of—and served as a spur to—the changes in Russian society that culminated in the 1917 revolution. This first-ever English edition brings its storied and studied illumination to a new audience, providing a key to understanding the place that St. Petersburg holds in Russia’s identity.
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Marx on Suicide
Karl Marx
Northwestern University Press, 1999
In 1846, two years before the publication of The Communist Manifesto and twenty-one years before the publication of Das Kapital, Karl Marx published an essay titled "Peuchet on Suicide." Based on the writings of Jacques Peuchet, a leading French police administrator, economist, and statistician whose memoirs included discussions of suicides in Paris, Marx's essay is not a straightforward translation of Peuchet but instead an essay reflecting his own strong positions on the subjects addressed in Peuchet's work.
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Heidegger and the Tradition
Werner Marx
Northwestern University Press, 1971
A view of Heidegger's divergence from the traditional philosophies of reason.
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The Forces of Form in German Modernism
Malika Maskarinec
Northwestern University Press, 2018
The Forces of Form in German Modernism charts a modern history of form as emergent from force. Offering a provocative alternative to the imagery of crisis and estrangement that has preoccupied scholarship on modernism, Malika Maskarinec shows that German modernism conceives of human bodies and aesthetic objects as shaped by a contest of conflicting and reciprocally intensifying forces: the force of gravity and a self-determining will to form. Maskarinec thereby discloses, for the first time, German modernism's sustained preoccupation with classical mechanics and with how human bodies and artworks resist gravity. 

Considering canonical artists such as Rodin and Klee, seminal authors such as Kafka and Döblin, and largely neglected thinkers in aesthetics and art history such as those associated with Empathy Aesthetics, Maskarinec unpacks the manifold anthropological and aesthetic concerns and historical lineage embedded in the idea of form as the precarious achievement of uprightness.

The Forces of Form in German Modernism makes a decisive contribution to our understanding of modernism and to contemporary discussions about form, empathy, materiality, and human embodiment.
 
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Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson
A Biography
Elizabeth Maslen
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Margaret Storm Jameson (1891–1986) is primarily known as a compelling essayist; her stature as a novelist and champion of the dispossessed is largely forgotten. In Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson, Elizabeth Maslen reveals a figure who held her own beside fellow British women writers, including Virginia Woolf; anticipated the Angry Young Women, such as Doris Lessing; and was an early champion of such European writers as Arthur Koestler and Czesław Miłosz. Jameson was a complex character whose politics were grounded in social justice; she was passionately antifascist—her novel In the Second Year (1936) raised the alarm about Nazism—but always wary of communism. An eloquent polemicist, Jameson was, as president of the British P.E.N. during the 1930s and 1940s, of invaluable assistance to refugee writers. Elizabeth Maslen’s biography introduces a true twentieth century hedgehog, whose essays and subtly experimental fiction were admired in Europe and the States.

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Renaissance Drama 31
New Series XXXI 2002 Performing Affect
Jeffrey Masten
Northwestern University Press, 2002
"Performing Affect," Volume 31 of Renaissance Drama, examine the rehearsal of emotion on the Renaissance stage. These new essays consider the ways in which Renaissance plays represent emotional states, while also presenting new scholarship specifically on the performance of the "affect" on the early modern stage. Topics include: emotion and the humoral body; domestic abuse and trauma; the politics of onstage gesture; the relation of idolatry, desire, and necrophilia; the performance of such affective states as religious fervor, memory, jealousy, melancholy, and heroic masculinity.

Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theater, and performance.
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front cover of Renaissance Drama 32
Renaissance Drama 32
New Series 32
Jeffrey Masten
Northwestern University Press, 2003
Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theatre, and performance.
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front cover of Renaissance Drama 33
Renaissance Drama 33
Jeffrey Masten
Northwestern University Press, 2005
Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theatre, and performance.
[more]

front cover of Renaissance Drama 39
Renaissance Drama 39
Jeffrey Masten
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theater, and performance.

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The Supreme Court and the Press
The Indispensable Conflict
Joe Mathewson
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Although theirs has been a contentious relationship, Joe Mathewson shows that, since the framing of the Constitution, the Supreme Court has needed the press to educate the public about its actions, just as the press has depended on the Supreme Court to ensure the freedoms that give it life. The Court ignored the First Amendment for more than a century and then trampled it, but since the 1960s it has tended to uphold the rights of the press in the face of opposition, that coming from the Executive Branch. Still, the Court has repeatedly failed to fully inform the public of its decisions. Even today the Court permits only limited access to its audio tapes of oral arguments, and it famously refuses to allow television cameras into the courtroom. Mathewson argues that if the Supreme Court wants to maintain its legitimacy and authority in the internet age it must allow broader access for the press.
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Positive Hero in Russian Literature
Rufus Mathewson
Northwestern University Press, 2000
This classic text brings a period of Russian literature to life and demonstrates how the battles over the positive hero reappeared with dramatic clarity in the dissident literary movement after Stalin's death. Mathewson argues that the true continuity between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian prose was to be found in this persistent conflict between contrary views of the real nature and proper uses of literature. This new edition includes chapters on Belinsky, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and Sinyavsky.
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front cover of Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy After Postmodernity
Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy After Postmodernity
Martin Joseph Matustik
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Devoted to the most important American Continental philosopher of his generation and one of the discipline's founding fathers, and featuring some of the field's
most distinguished luminaries, this collection is a critical document in Continental philosophy, reflecting its recent history, its present state, and its debt to Calvin O. Schrag. Taking up themes central to Schrag's own philosophical concerns, these essays refer throughout to his salient "interventions" in the dialogue of late-twentieth-century thought characterized as "postmodernity." The authors address, implicitly or directly, the question of philosophy's role and responsibility, or "task."

The volume begins with an overview of this task and of Schrag's contributions to it, written from the perspective of a resolute defender of the phenomenological tradition that Schrag's work has extended and reconfigured. The essays are organized around the four conceptual figures widely considered Schrag's most significant and original philosophical achievements: transversal rationality, the self after post-modernity, the fourth cultural value sphere, and communication praxis. Following and expanding on the implications of these themes, the authors focus on topics ranging from Cartesian rationality to Foucauldian rational relativism; from transcendence in relation to the self to the Schragean self's connections with discourse, action, and community; from religion's disruptive presence in contemporary philosophy to recent developments in the philosophy of language. The book also contains Schrag's responses to many of the works in the collection.
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front cover of Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form
Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form
Suspense, Closure, Minor Characters
Greta Matzner-Gore
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Three questions of novelistic form preoccupied Fyodor Dostoevsky throughout his career: how to build suspense, how to end a narrative effectively, and how to distribute attention among major and minor characters. For Dostoevsky, these were much more than practical questions about novelistic craft; they were ethical questions as well. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form traces Dostoevsky’s indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that Dostoevsky wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels: Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov. In so doing, he anticipated some of the most pressing debates taking place in the study of narrative ethics today.
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The Translator in the Text
On Reading Russian Literature in English
Rachel May
Northwestern University Press, 1994
What does it mean to read one nation's literature in another language? The considerable popularity of Russian literature in the English-speaking world rests almost entirely upon translations. In The Translator and the Text, Rachel May analyzes Russian literature in English translation, seeing it less as a substitute for the original works than as a subset of English literature, with its own cultural, stylistic, and narrative traditions.
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Mayakovsky
Plays
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Northwestern University Press, 1995
One of Russia's greatest poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) was a Futurist, early Bolshevik, and champion of the avant-garde. Despite his revolutionary youth, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet society, and three of his plays—all banned until after Stalin's death—reflect his changing assessments of the Revolution.

Mayakovsky: Plays includes Mystery Bouffe, a mock medieval mystery written in 1918 to celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution; The Bathhouse, a sharp attack on Soviet bureaucracy subtitled "a drama of circus and fireworks"; and The Bedbug, in which a worker with bourgeois pretensions is frozen and resurrected fifty years later, when the world has become a material paradise. The collection also includes Mayakovsky's more personal first play, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy.
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front cover of Selected Poems
Selected Poems
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Northwestern University Press, 2013
James McGavran’s new translation of Vladimir Maya­kovsky’s poetry is the first to fully capture the Futurist and Soviet agitprop artist’s voice. Because of his work as a propagandist for the Soviet regime, and because of his posthumous enshrinement by Stalin as “the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch,” Mayakovsky has most often been interpreted—and translated—within a political context. McGavran’s translations reveal a more nuanced poet who possessed a passion for word creation and lin­guistic manipulation. Mayakovsky’s bombastic metaphors and formal élan shine through in these translations, and McGavran’s commentary provides vital information on Mayakovsky, illuminating the poet’s many references to the Russian literary canon, his contemporaries in art and culture, and Soviet figures and policies.
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Reveries of Community
French Epic in the Age of Henri IV, 1572–1616
Katherine Maynard
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Reveries of Community reconsiders the role of epic poetry during the French Wars of Religion, the series of wars between Catholics and Protestants that dominated France between 1562 and 1598. Critics have often viewed French epic poetry as a casualty of these wars, arguing that the few epics France produced during this conflict failed in power and influence compared to those of France’s neighbors, such as Italy’s Orlando Furioso, England’s Faerie Queene, and Portugal’s Os Lusíadas. Katherine S. Maynard argues instead that the wars did not hinder epic poetry, but rather French poets responded to the crisis by using epic poetry to reimagine France’s present and future.
 
Traditionally united by une foi, une loi, un roi (one faith, one law, one king), France under Henri IV was cleaved into warring factions of Catholics and Huguenots. The country suffered episodes of bloodshed such as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, even as attempts were made to attenuate the violence through frequent edicts, including those of St. Germain (1570) and Nantes (1598). Maynard examines the rich and often dismissed body work written during these bloody decades: Pierre de Ronsard’s Franciade, Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas’s La Judit and La Sepmaine, Sébastian Garnier’s La Henriade, Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques, and others. She traces how French poets, taking classics such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad as their models, reimagined possibilities for French reconciliation and unity.
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The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815
Robert D. Mayo
Northwestern University Press, 1962
The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815, explores the popularity of magazines in the nineteenth century and the ways that much of the published fiction of the time appeared serially in these publications. Robert D. Mayo's groundbreaking study remains important to scholars of the nineteenth century as one of the first books to examine in a systematic manner the impact of magazines on reading and the dissemination of fiction in nineteenth-century England.
 
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brutt, or The Sighing Gardens
Friederike Mayrocker
Northwestern University Press, 2007
brütt, or The Sighing Gardens is the hallucinatory tale of an obsessive writer’s love affair late in life as told through the daily journal entries of the writer—a montage of relentless observation interspersed with found materials from newspaper articles, literature, and private correspondence. The process of aging and the process of writing are two persistent and carefully intertwined themes, though it is apparent that plot and theme are subordinate to the linguistic experiments that Friederike Mayröcker performs as she explores them.

Mayröcker is known for crossing the boundaries of literary forms and in her prose work she creates a hypnotic, slurred narrative stream that is formally seamless while simultaneously overstepping all the bounds of grammar and style.  She is always pushing to expose the limits of language and explore its experimental potential, seeking a re-ordering of the world through the re-ordering of words. Her multilayered texts are reminiscent of the traditions of Surrealism and Dadaism and display influences from the works of Beckett, Hölderlin, Freud, and Barthes. Yet, much of Mayrocker’s writing simply has no corollary and the experience of reading Roslyn Theobald’s brilliant translation grants the English-speaking audience an unforgettable encounter with this completely original work. 
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The Void of Ethics
Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity
Patrizia McBride
Northwestern University Press, 2006
In a pluralistic society without absolute standards of judgment, how can an individual live a moral life? This is the question Robert Musil (1880-1942), an Austrian-born engineer and mathematician turned writer, asked in essays, plays, and fiction that grapple with the moral ambivalence of modern life. Though unfinished, his monumental novel of Vienna in the febrile days before World War I, The Man without Qualities, is identified by German scholars as the most important literary work of the twentieth century.

In a fresh examination of his essays, notebooks, and fiction, Patrizia McBride reconstructs Musil's understanding of ethics as a realm of experience that eludes language and thought. After situating Musil's work within its contemporary cultural-philosophical horizon, as well as the historical background of rising National Socialism, McBride shows how the writer's notion of ethics as a void can be understood as a coherent and innovative response to the crises haunting Europe after World War I. She explores how Musil rejected the outdated, rationalistic morality of humanism, while simultaneously critiquing the irrationalism of contemporary art movements, including symbolism, impressionism, and expressionism. Her work reveals Musil's remarkable relevance today-particularly those aspects of his thought that made him unfashionable in his own time: a commitment to fighting ethical fundamentalism and a literary imagination that validates the pluralistic character of modern life.
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The Manageable Cold
Poems
Timothy McBride
Northwestern University Press, 2010
Displaying a confidence and maturity rarely found in a first collection, Timothy McBride’s The Manageable Cold is a record of a sustained encounter with some of the most vital aspects of a life—childhood, language, romance, the body, the natural world.

The Manageable Cold showcases McBride’s mastery of a wide range of forms and subjects. Whether his attention is focused on boxing, jazz, or contranyms, McBride breathes new life into the sonnet and the villanelle and handles blank verse with the utmost ease. The combination of traditional techniques and McBride’s thoroughly modern sensibility gives rise to poems that seem simultaneously utterly fresh and immemorially old, calling to mind the rigorously embodied works of Robert Frost, Howard Nemerov, and Mary Oliver. Timothy McBride is a science writer and editor. His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Seneca Review, and Poetry Northwest, among other publications. The Manageable Cold is his first book of poetry.
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Prior to Meaning
The Protosemantic and Poetics
Steve McCaffery
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Prior to Meaning collects a decade of writing on poetry, language, and the theory of writing by one of the most innovative and conceptually challenging poets of the last twenty-five years. In essays that are wide ranging, richly detailed, and novel in their surprising juxtapositions of disparate material, Steve McCaffery works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice--to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical against which it must be read.
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Eva-Mary
Linda McCarriston
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Finalist, 1991 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner, Terrence Des Pres Prize for Poetry
 
"I lean into my own loving/touch, for which no wound/is too ugly,' Linda McCarriston says at the end of 'Healing the Mare,' one of the many poems of extraordinary poignancy and power in Eva-Mary. These unflinching poems of violence and violation and loss earn her the right to such a claim. It's a survivor's claim and these are the poems of a survivor, as scrupulous in their language and art as they are in their quest to register honestly the familial unspoken, a life inside a life." --Stephen Dunn
 

 
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front cover of Little River
Little River
New and Selected Poems
Linda McCarriston
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Linda McCarriston mobilizes feeling, thinking, and narrating simultaneously to create works of music, insight, and passion. With characteristic honesty and energy, she draws from the lives of fellow human beings and from those of animals, too--the telling moments, metaphors, and myths of family life, social structures, and gender. Her recent experiences in Alaska come to represent an emigration just as urgent as the previous generation's from Ireland.
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Kierkegaard as Psychologist
Vincent McCarthy
Northwestern University Press, 2015
Kierkegaard’s psychological thought has always been acknowledged as very rich—Reinhold Niebuhr hailed him as the greatest psychologist of the soul since Augustine—and has had a major influence on Heidegger, Sartre, and existential psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, his accomplishment has not always been fully appreciated, in part because it is so scattered across his works. As Vincent McCarthy demonstrates in Kierkegaard as Psychologist, Kierkegaard was pursuing “psychology” before there was a formally recognized academic field bearing that name, and a coherent thread runs through the so-called pseudonymous works. McCarthy elucidates often-difficult texts, highlights the rich psychological dimension of Kierkegaard’s thought, and provides an introduction for the nonspecialist and a commentary on Kierkegaard’s psychology that will interest both specialists and nonspecialists, while engaging in rich comparisons with such figures as Freud and Heidegger.
 
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The Company of Words
Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy
John McCumber
Northwestern University Press, 1993
In this provocative work, John McCumber asks us to understand Hegel's system as a new approach to linguistic communication. Hegel, he argues, is concerned with building community and mutual comprehension rather than with completing metaphysics or developing historical critique. According to McCumber's radial interpretation, Hegel constructs a complex ideal of how we should use certain words. This ideal philosophical vocabulary is flexible and open to revision, and is constructed according to principles available at all time and all places; it is responsive to, but not dictated by, the shared language of cultured discourse whose concepts it attempts to refine and universalize.
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front cover of Time in the Ditch
Time in the Ditch
American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era
John McCumber
Northwestern University Press, 2023
In Time in the Ditch, John McCumber explores the effects of McCarthyism on American philosophy in the 1940s and 1950 and the possibility that the political pressures of the McCarthy era skewed the development of the discipline. Why was silence maintained for so long? And what happens, McCumber asks, when political events and pressures go beyond interfering with individual careers to influence the nature of a discipline itself? 
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front cover of Acoustic Properties
Acoustic Properties
Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas
Tom McEnaney
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas discovers the prehistory of wireless culture. It examines both the coevolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, and the various populist political climates in which the emerging medium of radio became the chosen means to produce the voice of the people.
 
Based on original archival research in Buenos Aires, Havana, Paris, and the United States, the book develops a literary media theory that understands sound as a transmedial phenomenon and radio as a transnational medium. Analyzing the construction of new social and political relations in the wake of the United States’ 1930s Good Neighbor Policy, Acoustic Properties challenges standard narratives of hemispheric influence through new readings of Richard Wright’s cinematic work in Argentina, Severo Sarduy’s radio plays in France, and novels by John Dos Passos, Manuel Puig, Raymond Chandler, and Carson McCullers. Alongside these writers, the book also explores Che Guevara and Fidel Castro’s Radio Rebelde, FDR’s fireside chats, Félix Caignet’s invention of the radionovela in Cuba, Evita Perón’s populist melodramas in Argentina, Orson Welles’s experimental New Deal radio, Cuban and U.S. “radio wars,” and the 1960s African American activist Robert F. Williams’s proto–black power Radio Free Dixie.
 
From the doldrums of the Great Depression to the tumult of the Cuban Revolution, Acoustic Properties illuminates how novelists in the radio age converted writing into a practice of listening, transforming realism as they struggled to channel and shape popular power.
 
[more]

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Ornament as Crisis
Architecture, Design, and Modernity in Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers"
Sarah McGaughey
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Ornament as Crisis explores the ways in which the novels of Hermann Broch’s Sleepwalkers (Schlafwandler) trilogy participate in and employ the history of architecture and architectural theory.

Beginning with the visual and architectural experiences of the figures in each novel, Sarah McGaughey analyzes the role of architecture in the trilogy as a whole, while discussing work by Broch’s contemporaries on architecture. She argues that The Sleepwalkers allows us to better understand how literature responds and contributes to social, theoretical, and spatial concepts of architecture. Ornament as Crisis guides readers through the spaces of Broch’s mdernist masterpiece and the architectural debates of his time.

[more]

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Lessons and Legacies XV
The Holocaust; Global Perspectives, National Narratives, Local Contexts
Erin McGlothlin
Northwestern University Press, 2024
The contributions to this volume not only indicate the intellectual vibrancy and diversity of cutting-edge research in Holocaust studies but also reflect multiple approaches to the necessary work of expanding the canon of research in the field and of adopting varied disciplinary perspectives, engaging with global perspectives as well as local studies.
This collection’s chapters manifest three broad categories: history, literature, and memory; at the same time, however, as the interdisciplinary nature of these chapters indicate, these categories should not be regarded as mutually exclusive or discrete. On the contrary, they overlap and intersect in compelling ways, demonstrating the dynamic character of contemporary Holocaust studies, which views history, narrative representation, and commemoration as mutually informative. Further, the contributors continue the recent trend in Holocaust studies whereby specific regional and national narratives are integrated into a more global approach to the event: Newer studies have continued to incorporate what was once termed the periphery into a more global examination of the experiences of Jewish refugees in flight to Latin America, Africa, and the Soviet Union. At the same time, very specific local studies deepen our knowledge of the mechanics of genocide, along with the experiences of refugees in flight, and the subsequent dimensions of Holocaust memory and representation. 
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Only a Joke Can Save Us
A Theory of Comedy
Todd McGowan
Northwestern University Press, 2017

Only a Joke Can Save Us presents an innovative and comprehensive theory of comedy. Using a wealth of examples from high and popular culture and with careful attention to the treatment of humor in philosophy, Todd McGowan locates the universal source of comedy in the interplay of the opposing concepts lack and excess.

After reviewing the treatment of comedy in the work of philosophers as varied as Aristotle, G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alenka Zupancic, McGowan, working in a psychoanalytic framework, demonstrates that comedy results from the deployment of lack and excess, whether in contrast, juxtaposition, or interplay.

Illustrating the power and flexibility of this framework with analyses of films ranging from Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers classics to Dr. Strangelove and Groundhog Day, McGowan shows how humor can reveal gaps in being and gaps in social order. Scholarly yet lively and readable, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a groundbreaking examination of the enigmatic yet endlessly fascinating experience of humor and comedy.

[more]

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The Poetics of Unremembered Acts
Reading, Lyric, Pedagogy
Brian McGrath
Northwestern University Press, 2012
Poems—specifically romantic poems, such as those by Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, and John Keats—link what goes unremembered in our reading to ethics. In "Tintern Abbey," for example, Wordsworth finds in "little . . . unremembered . . . acts" the chance to hear the "still, sad music of humanity."In The Poetics of Unremembered Acts, Brian McGrath shows that poetry’s capacity to address its reader stages an ethical dilemma of continued importance. Situating romantic poems in relation to Enlightenment debate over how to teach reading, specifically debate about the role of poetry in the process of learning to read, The Poetics of Unremembered Acts develops an alternative understanding of poetry’s role in education. McGrath also explores the ways poetry makes ethics possible through its capacity to pass along what we do not remember and cannot know about our reading.
[more]

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Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form
Dematerialization in Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan
Jacob McGuinn
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Pushing the boundaries of critical reading and the role of objects in literature
 
How does literary objecthood contend with the challenge of writing objects that emerge at an extreme limit of material presence? Jacob McGuinn delves into the ways literature writes this indeterminate presence in the context of pre- and post-’68 Paris, a vital moment in the history of criticism. The works of poet Paul Celan, philosopher Theodor Adorno, and writer Maurice Blanchot highlight how the complexities of reading such a dematerialized object are part of the indeterminacy of material itself. Indeterminate objects—glass, snow, walls, screens—are subjects Celan describes as existing in “meridian” space, while for Adorno and Blanchot, criticism not only responds to this indeterminacy but also takes it as its condition. Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form: Dematerialization in Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan shows how these readings simultaneously limit the object of criticism and outline alternative ways of thinking that lie between the models of critical formalism and historicism, ultimately revealing the possible materiality of literature in unrealized history, incomplete politics, and nondetermining thinking.
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Foucault's Askesis
An Introduction to the Philosophical Life
Edward F. McGushin
Northwestern University Press, 2007
In his renowned courses at the Collège de France from 1982 to 1984, Michel Foucault devoted his lectures to meticulous readings and interpretations of the works of Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, among others. In this his aim was not, Edward F. McGushin contends, to develop a new knowledge of the history of philosophy; rather, it was to let himself be transformed by the very activity of thinking. Thus, this work shows us Foucault in the last phase of his life in the act of becoming a philosopher. Here we see how his encounter with ancient philosophy allowed him to experience the practice of philosophy as, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a way of becoming who one is: the work of self-formation that the Greeks called askēsis.

Through a detailed study of Foucault's last courses, McGushin demonstrates that this new way of practicing philosophical askēsis evokes Foucault's ethical resistance to modern relations of power and knowledge. In order to understand Foucault's later project, then, it is necessary to see it within the context of his earlier work. If his earlier projects represented an attempt to bring to light the relations of power and knowledge that narrowed and limited freedom, then this last project represents his effort to take back that freedom by redefining it in terms of care of the self. Foucault always stressed that modern power functions by producing individual subjects. This book shows how his excavation of ancient philosophical practices gave him the tools to counter this function-with a practice of self-formation, an askēsis.
[more]

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Time and the Shared World
Heidegger on Social Relations
Irene McMullin
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Time and the Shared World challenges the common view that Heidegger offers few resources for understanding humanity’s social nature. The book demonstrates that Heidegger’s reformulation of traditional notions of subjectivity has wide-ranging implications for understanding the nature of human relationships. Irene McMullin shows that, contrary to entrenched critiques, Heidegger’s characterization of selfhood as fundamentally social presupposes the responsive acknowledgment of each person’s particularity and otherness.

In doing so, McMullin argues that Heidegger’s work on the social nature of the self must be located within a philosophical continuum that builds on Kant and Husserl’s work regarding the nature of the a priori and the fundamental structures of human temporality, while also pointing forward to developments of these themes to be found in Heidegger’s later work and in such thinkers as Sartre and Levinas. By developing unrecognized resources in Heidegger’s work, Time and the Shared World is able to provide a Heidegger-inspired account of respect and the intersubjective origins of normativity.
[more]

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Ghosts of Chicago
Stories
John McNally
Northwestern University Press, 2010
Chicago is famously a "city of neighborhoods" that somehow balances metropolitan and parochial life. In the seventeen vividly rendered stories in Ghosts of Chicago, John McNally likewise captures the poignancy of both the shared experiences of a city and the interior details of his everyday characters.While McNally resurrects Chicago icons and institutions—including John Belushi, Walter Payton, and Richard J. Daley make appearances, and WGN’s "Creature Features" and a morning show for children featuring a silent goose are settings-- he is ultimately interested in the human condition, whether it’s railroad mogul George Pullman remembering his greatest triumph or the host of Romper Room experiencing her own awakening during the sexual revolution.Other stories tell of everyday people who must confront their own private ghosts—an accountant who falls in love with a woman who is in love with a man on death row; the son of a realtor who discovers his father’s secret life; a memoirist whose dark night of the soul leads him on a journey from which he may never return.McNally may be writing about Chicago—in the words of a Chicago Sun-Times reviewer, "He may have physically left Chicago, but the city has never left him"—but like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, the stories in this book transcend place.
[more]

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The Conservative Resurgence and the Press
The Media's Role in the Rise of the Right
James Brian McPherson
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Consumers of American media find themselves in a news world that has shifted toward more conservative reporting. This book takes a measured, historical view of the shift, addressing factors that include the greater skill with which conservatives have used the media, the media’s gradual trend toward conservatism, the role of religion, and the effects of media conglomeration. The book makes the case that the media have managed to not only enable today’s conservative resurgence but also ignore, largely, the consequences of that change for the American people.

[more]

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Immanuel Kant
The Very Idea of a Critique of Pure Reason
J. Colin McQuillan
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Immanuel Kant: The Very Idea of a Critique of Pure Reason is a study of the background, development, exposition, and justification of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Instead of examining Kant's arguments for the transcendental ideality of space and time, his deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, or his account of the dialectic of human reason, J. Colin McQuillan focuses on Kant's conception of critique. By surveying the different ways the concept of critique was used during the eighteenth century, the relationship between Kant's critique and his pre-critical experiments with different approaches to metaphysics, the varying definitions of a critique of pure reason Kant offers in the prefaces and introductions to the first Critique, and the way Kant responds to objections, McQuillan is able to highlight an aspect of Kant's critical philosophy that is too often overlooked—the reason that philosophy is critical.
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Redemption and the Merchant God
Dostoevsky's Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism
Susan McReynolds
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Dostoevsky’s Russian chauvinism and anti-Semitism have long posed problems for his readers and critics. How could the author of The Brothers Karamazov also be the source of the slurs against Jews in Diary of a Writer? And where is the celebrated Christian humanist in the nationalist outbursts of The Idiot? These enigmas—the coexistence of humanism and hatred, faith and doubt—are linked, Susan McReynolds tells us in Redemption and the Merchant God. Her book analyzes Dostoevsky’s novels and Diary to show how the author’s anxieties about Christianity can help solve the riddle of his anti-Semitism as well as that of his Russian messianism.

McReynolds’ reading demonstrates Dostoevsky suffered from a profound discomfort with the crucifixion as a vehicle for redemption. Through his work, she traces this ambivalence to certain beliefs and values that Dostoevsky held consistently throughout his life. And she reveals how this persistent ambivalence about the crucifixion led Dostoevsky to project what he didn’t like about Christianity onto the Jews—and to invest those aspects of the crucifixion that he could approve with the “Russian idea.”

A radical rereading of one of the Western canon’s most revered and perplexing authors, McReynolds’ book is also a major reconfiguring of Dostoevsky’s intellectual biography and a significant contribution to literary and cultural studies.

[more]

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Three Sons
Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald
Daniel L. Medin
Northwestern University Press, 2010
Franz Kafka was a self-conscious writer whose texts were highly if mysteriously autobiographical. Three giants of contemporary fiction—J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald—have all acknowledged their debt to the work of Kafka, both in interviews and in their own academic essays and articles for a general readership about him. In this striking feat of literary scholarship, Daniel Medin finds that the use of Kafka by Coetzee, Roth, and Sebald is similarly self-reflexive and autobiographical. That writers from such divergent national and ethnic traditions can have such unique critical readings of Kafka, and that Kafka could exert such a powerful influence over their oeuvres, Medin contends, attests to the central place of Kafka in the contemporary literary imagination.
[more]

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Tolstoy and His Problems
Views from the Twenty-First Century
Inessa Medzhibovskaya
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Assessing the relevance of Tolstoy's thought and teachings for the current day, Tolstoy and His Problems: Views from the Twenty-First Century is a collection of essays by a group of Tolstoy specialists who are leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

In the broadest sense—with essays on a variety of issues that occupied Tolstoy, such as nihilism, mysticism, social theory, religion, Judaism, education, opera, and Shakespeare—the volume offers a fresh evaluation of Tolstoy's program to reform the ways we live, work, commune with nature and art, practice spirituality, exchange ideas and knowledge, become educated, and speak and think about history and social change.
 
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Land and the Given Economy
The Hermeneutics and Phenomenology of Dwelling
Todd S. Mei
Northwestern University Press, 2017

Alarming environmental degradation makes ever more urgent the reconciliation of political economy and sustainability. Land and the Given Economy examines how the landed basis of human existence converges with economics, and it offers a persuasive new conception of land that transcends the flawed and inadequate accounts in classical and neoclassical economics.

Todd S. Mei grounds this work in a rigorous review of problematic economic conceptions of land in the work of John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Henry George, Alfred Marshall, and Thorstein Veblen.

Mei then draws on the thought of Martin Heidegger to posit a philosophical clarification of the meaning of land—its ontological nature. He argues that central to rethinking land is recognizing its unique manner of being, described as its "givenness." Concluding with a discussion of ground rent, Mei reflects on specific strategies for incorporating the philosophical account of land into contemporary economic policies.

Revivifying economic frameworks that fail to resolve the impasse between economic development and sustainability, Land and the Given Economy offers much of interest to scholars and readers of philosophy, environmentalism, and the full spectrum of political economy.

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On Emotional Presentation
Alexius Meinong
Northwestern University Press, 2020
On Emotional Presentation, first published in German in 1917, contains the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong’s clearest and most developed account of the emotions and their relation to values. In this work, written toward the end of his life, Meinong argues that values are given in and through emotions but are also ontologically independent of these emotions or any subjective attitude.

Available again in English, with a new foreword by John J. Drummond that situates Meinong’s account within contemporary discussions of the emotions, this translation will be welcome to those interested in Meinong and his theory of objects as well as those interested in the philosophy of the emotions and values.
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Poetic Maneuvers
Hans Magnus Enzensberger and the Lyric Genre
Charlotte Ann Melin
Northwestern University Press, 2004
One of the most innovative and respected figures of his literary generation in Europe, Hans Magnus Enzensberger has also become a major presence in international debates about literature and social change. The first English-language study of this influential literary figure, Poetic Maneuvers considers Enzensberger's poetical texts as part of a larger project to create a venue for intellectual reflection.

From the first, Enzensberger resisted the marginalization of literature–particularly poetry—by connecting it with ethical imperatives of the post-Holocaust era. Charlotte Ann Melin shows how Enzensberger has accomplished this by challenging prevailing aesthetic and social values. Departing from existing studies that focus on Enzensberger's political views or controversial texts, her book situates his full poetic program within contemporary discussions staged by various German writers, translators, and theorists, including Jürgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno. Melin proposes a framework for reading poetry by Enzensberger and his contemporaries—one that connects the radical evolution of poetic style with how questions about representation, identity, and ethical values developed under historical conditions unique to the second half of the twentieth century. Her account of postwar literary trends explores the fluidity of national literary boundaries and tastes after 1945, and reveals the relationship of such American poets as William Carlos Williams and Carolyn Forché to German verse. Essential to an understanding Enzensberger as an important literary figure, Poetic Maneuvers also offers invaluable insight into the status of recent postwar German literature and American-European literary relations.
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With or Without
Reading Postwar German Women Poets
Charlotte Ann Melin
Northwestern University Press, 2013

With or Without explores the role of German women’s poetry in the contemporary literary discourse of the latter half of the twentieth century. Melin highlights the significant role that women played in the shaping of postwar German poetry as a whole and also their deep engagement with the broader issues of modernism, postmodernism, and related discourses about the relationship between individual experience, communal ideals, and interpersonal expression. Melin shows that for German writers poetry became the genre that had the capacity to project subjectivity, voice, and authenticity.

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Circle of Love Over Death
The Story of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
Matilde Mellibovsky
Northwestern University Press, 1997
In Circle of Love Over Death, Matilde Mellibovsky documents the testimonies of mothers whose children were stripped from them in Argentina during the turbulent 1970s. She not only describes the personal anguish of families over the torture, death or "disappearance" of their children, but also shows how the women gave emotional support to each other and the way in which, since 1976, they slowly but surely organized and built an international movement.
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The Confidence-Man
His Masquerade
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Long considered Melville's strangest novel, The Confidence-Man is a comic allegory aimed at the optimism and materialism of mid-nineteenth century America. A shape-shifting Confidence-Man approaches passengers on a Mississippi River steamboat and, winning over his not-quite-innocent victims with his charms, urges each to trust in the cosmos, in nature, and even in human nature--with predictable results. In Melville's time the book was such a failure he abandoned fiction writing for twenty years; only in the twentieth century did critics celebrate its technical virtuosity, wit, comprehensive social vision, and wry skepticism.

This scholarly edition includes a Historical Note offering a detailed account of the novel's composition, publication, reception, and subsequent critical history. In addition the editors present the twenty-six surviving manuscript leaves and scraps with full transcriptions and analytical commentary.

This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as surviving evidence permits. Based on collations of both editions publishing during Melville's lifetime, it incorporates 138 emendations made by the present editors. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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Israel Potter
His Fifty Years of Exile, Volume Eight
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Unique among Melville's works, Israel Potter was the author's only historical novel, presuming to offer the life history of Revolutionary War figure Israel Potter--based on Potter's own obscure narrative Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter--and featuring characters such as Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allen. In offering the manuscript to his publisher, Melville assured him, "I engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure." This came as a relief, for his previous novel, Pierre, had shocked readers and brought down universal castigation.

This edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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Omoo
A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, Volume Two
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Melville's second book, Omoo, begins where his first book, Typee, left off. As the author said, "It embraces adventures in the South Seas (of a totally different character from 'Typee') and includes an eventful cruise in an English Colonial Whaleman (a Sydney Ship) and a comical residence on the island of Tahiti." The popular success of his first novel encouraged Melville to write a sequel, hoping it would be "a fitting successor." Typee describes Polynesian life in its "primitive" state, while Omoo represents it as affected by non-native influences.

Whitman praised its "good-natured style." But many reviewers doubted Melville's veracity, and some objected to his "raciness" and "indecencies." Some also denounced his criticism of missionary endeavors, for his attacks on missionaries were more polemical than those undertaken in the earlier book. Omoo, however, influenced later visitors to Tahiti such as Pierre Loti, Henry Adams, John La Farge, and Jack London; it was the book that sent Robert Louis Stevenson to the South Seas.
[more]

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Pierre, or The Ambiguities
Volume Seven
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Initially dismissed as "a dead failure" and "a bad book," and declined by Melville's British publisher, Pierre has since struck critics as modern in its psychological probings and literary technique--fit, as Carl Van Vechten said in 1922, to be ranked with The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, and Ulysses. None of Melville's other "secondary" works has so regularly been acknowledged by its most thorough critics as a work of genuine grandeur, however flawed.

When Pierre Glendinning's lifelong desire for a sister is seemingly realized on the eve of his marriage, his world is suddenly turned upside down, for he must choose between acknowledging his illegitimate half-sister or perpetuating his unsullied family legacy. Melville unfolds the story of an idealistic young man whose steadfast beliefs lead him to destroy his world and himself.
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Journals
Volume Fifteen
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1989
This volume presents Melville's three known journals. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Melville kept no habitual record of his days and thoughts; each of his three journals records his actions and observations on trips far from home. In this edition's Historical Note, Howard C. Horsford places each of the journals in the context of Melville's career, discusses its general character, and points out the later literary uses he made of it, notably in Moby-Dick, Clarel, and his magazine pieces.

The editors supply full annotations of Melville's allusions and terse entries and an exhaustive index makes available the range of his acquaintance with people, places, and works of art. Also included are related documents, illustrations, maps, and many pages and passages reproduced from the journals. This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as his difficult handwriting permits. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War
Volume Five
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Herman Melville wrote White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War during two months of intense work in the summer of 1849. He drew upon his memories of naval life, having spent fourteen months as an ordinary seaman aboard a frigate as it sailed the Pacific and made the homeward voyage around Cape Horn.

Already that same summer Melville had written Redburn, and he regarded the books as "two jobs, which I have done for money--being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood." The reviewers were not as hard on White-Jacket as Melville himself was. The English liked its praise of British seamen. The Americans were more interested in Melville's attack on naval abuses, particularly flogging, and his advocacy of humanitarian causes. Soon Melville was acclaimed the best sea writer of the day.

Part autobiography, part epic fiction, White-Jacket remains a brilliantly imaginative social novel by one of the great writers of the sea. This text of the novel is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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Clarel
Volume Twelve, Scholarly Edition
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1991
Melville's long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville's advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos of almost 18,000 lines, about a naïve American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions.

But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville's inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville's friend Hawthorne. Based on the only edition published during Melville's lifetime, this scholarly edition adopts thirty-nine corrections from a copy marked by Melville and incorporates 154 emendations by the present editors, an also includes a section of related documents and extensive discussions.

This scholarly edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
[more]

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Mardi and a Voyage Thither
Volulme Three, Scholarly Edition
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1970
Presented as narratives of his own South Sea experiences, Melville's first two books had roused incredulity in many readers. Their disbelief, he declared, had been "the main inducement" in altering his plan for his third book, Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849). Melville wanted to exploit the "rich poetical material" of Polynesia and also to escape feeling "irked, cramped, & fettered" by a narrative of facts. "I began to feel . . . a longing to plume my pinions for a flight," he told his English publisher.

This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as surviving evidence permits. Based on collations of all editions publishing during Melville's lifetime, it incorporates author corrections and many emendations made by the present editors. This edition of Mardi is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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Mardi and a Voyage Thither
Volume Three
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Presented as narratives of his own South Sea experiences, Melville's first two books had roused incredulity in many readers. Their disbelief, he declared, had been "the main inducement" in altering his plan for his third book, Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849). Melville wanted to exploit the "rich poetical material" of Polynesia and also to escape feeling "irked, cramped, & fettered" by a narrative of facts. "I began to feel . . . a longing to plume my pinions for a flight," he told his English publisher.

Mardi began as a sequel to Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), but changed radically while he was writing it and emerged as an altogether independent and original work. In its combination of adventure, allegorical romance, realistic portraits of characters and scenes from nature, philosophical speculation, and travelogue-satire, Mardi was Melville's first attempt to create a great work of fiction.

This edition of is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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Moby-Dick, or The Whale
Volume 6, Scholarly Edition
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1988
In Moby Dick Melville set out to write a "mighty book" on "a mighty theme." The editors of this critical text affirm that he succeeded. Nevertheless, their prolonged examination of the novel reveals textual flaws and anomalies that help to explain Melville's fears that his great work was in some ways a hash or a botch. A lengthy historical note also gives a fresh account of Melville's earlier literary career and his working conditions as he wrote; it also analyzes the book's contemporary reception and outlines how it finally achieved fame. Other sections review theories of the book's genesis, detail the circumstances of its publication, and present documents closely relating to the story.

This scholarly edition is based on collations of both editions published during Melville's lifetime, it adopts 185 revisions and corrections from the English edition and incorporates 237 emendations by the series editors. This is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
[more]

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Omoo
A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, Volume Two, Scholarly Edition
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1968
Melville's second book, Omoo, begins where his first book, Typee, left off. As the author said, "It embraces adventures in the South Seas (of a totally different character from 'Typee') and includes an eventful cruise in an English Colonial Whaleman (a Sydney Ship) and a comical residence on the island of Tahiti." The popular success of his first novel encouraged Melville to write a sequel, hoping it would be "a fitting successor." Typee describes Polynesian life in its "primitive" state, while Omoo represents it as affected by non-native influences.

This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as surviving evidence permits. Based on collations of all editions publishing during Melville's lifetime, it incorporates author corrections and many emendations made by the present editors. This edition of Omoo is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
[more]

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Redburn
Works of Herman Melville Volume Four
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1969
Redburn is a fictional narrative of a boy's first voyage, based loosely on Melville's own first voyage to and from Liverpool in 1839. Hastily composed and little esteemed by its author, Redburn was more highly thought of by his critics, who saw it regaining the ground of popular sea stories like Typee and Omoo.

Melville so disliked the novel that he submitted it to his publisher without polishing it. This scholarly edition corrects a number of errors that have persisted in subsequent editions. Based on collations of the editions published during his lifetime, it incorporates corrections made in the English edition and emendations made by the present editors.

As with all the books in the Northwestern-Newberry series, this edition of Redburn is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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front cover of White Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War
White Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War
Volume Five, Scholarly Edition
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1970
Herman Melville wrote White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War during two months of intense work in the summer of 1849. He drew upon his memories of naval life, having spent fourteen months as an ordinary seaman aboard a frigate as it sailed the Pacific and made the homeward voyage around Cape Horn.

Already that same summer Melville had written Redburn, and he regarded the books as "two jobs, which I have done for money--being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood." The reviewers were not as hard on White-Jacket as Melville himself was. The English liked its praise of British seamen. The Americans were more interested in Melville's attack on naval abuses, particularly flogging, and his advocacy of humanitarian causes. Soon Melville was acclaimed the best sea writer of the day.

Part autobiography, part epic fiction, White-Jacket remains a brilliantly imaginative social novel by one of the great writers of the sea. This text of the novel is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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