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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press