front cover of The Promise of Reason
The Promise of Reason
Studies in The New Rhetoric
John T. Gage
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011
No single work is more responsible for the heightened interest in argumentation and informal reasoning—and their relation to ethics and jurisprudence in the late twentieth century—than Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s monumental study of argumentation, La Nouvelle Rhétorique: Traité de l'Argumentation. Published in 1958 and translated into English as The New Rhetoric in 1969, this influential volume returned the study of reason to classical concepts of rhetoric. In The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric, leading scholars of rhetoric Barbara Warnick, Jeanne Fahnestock, Alan G. Gross, Ray D. Dearin, and James Crosswhite are joined by prominent and emerging European and American scholars from different disciplines to demonstrate the broad scope and continued relevance of The New Rhetoric more than fifty years after its initial publication. 

Divided into four sections—Conceptual Understandings of The New Rhetoric, Extensions of The New Rhetoric, The Ethical Turn in Perelman and The New Rhetoric, and Uses of The New Rhetoric—this insightful volume covers a wide variety of topics. It includes general assessments of The New Rhetoric and its central concepts, as well as applications of those concepts to innovative areas in which argumentation is being studied, such as scientific reasoning, visual media, and literary texts. Additional essays compare Perelman’s ideas with those of other significant thinkers like Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon, explore his career as a philosopher and activist, and shed new light on Perelman and Olbrechts- Tyteca’s collaboration. Two contributions present new scholarship based on recent access to letters, interviews, and archival materials housed in the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Among the volume’s unique gifts is a personal memoir from Perelman’s daughter, Noémi Perelman Mattis, published here for the first time. 

The Promise of Reason, expertly compiled and edited by John T. Gage, is the first to investigate the pedagogical implications of Perelman and Olbrechts- Tyteca’s groundbreaking work and will lead the way to the next generation of argumentation studies.
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Music in the Old Bones
Jezebel Through the Ages
Janet Howe Gaines
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

An alien, a polytheist from Phoenicia, the biblical Queen Jezebel posed a serious threat to the stability of the Israelites' single male deity. So powerful was this threat that writers through the ages have portrayed her as the incarnation of feminine evil, and her name has become synonymous with the misogynist view of women as seductresses.

Janet Howe Gaines argues that the bride of the Israelite king Ahab became a convenient scapegoat for biblical writers who portrayed her as the primary force behind their nation's apostasy. The biblical account presents the queen as a murderer, as a disruptive force for evil. Despised, the strong-willed Jezebel is still one of the most intriguing women of the Bible.

Music in the Old Bones is a guide to the eternal Jezebel story. The first part of this illustrated study is a detailed analysis that explores the biblical tale from traditional and feminist points of view. Gaines then analyzes the ways authors through the centuries have treated Jezebel. Her unburied bones became misogynist relics for generations of writers who retold her story as a warning about the dangers of rebelling against patriarchal society. From the sermons of John Knox to the novels of Margaret Atwood, from the poetry of Percy Shelley to the ballads of Boyz II Men, from the drama of Racine to the Academy Award-winning film starring Bette Davis, Jezebel has long been the subject of artistic inquiry. Her image as the bad girl of the Bible is still useful to writers. Most exploit her name and evil reputation to enhance their admonitions to women, but a few break away from tradition and openly admire Jezebel's courage and vigor.

Placing the biblical account of Jezebel's doomed reign in the context of its xenophobic writers, Gaines proposes a new and more sympathetic reading of the murdered queen whose body was left to rot in the streets and whose reputation suffered a fate even more egregious. Rather than providing a decent burial for the mangled bones of Jezebel, Gaines seeks to flesh them out and revivify them because, as she demonstrates, "there's music in the old bones yet."

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The World Wars Through the Female Gaze
Jean Gallagher
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

For some women writers and photographers during the two world wars—Edith Wharton, Mildred Aldrich, Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller, H.D., and Gertrude Stein—the construction of the female subject as an observer of combat became a vital concern. Their explorations of vision took place against the backdrop of a larger shift in Western culture's understanding of what "seeing" meant in common practice and philosophical discourse alike. The role of visuality in their lives was massively transformed not only by the rigid gender roles of war but by the introduction of new combat practices and technologies such as aerial surveillance, trench warfare, and civilian bombardment.

In The World Wars Through the Female Gaze, Jean Gallagher maps one portion of the historicized, gendered territory of what Nancy K. Miller calls the "gaze in representation." Expanding the notion of the gaze in critical discourse, Gallagher situates a number of visual acts within specific historic contexts to reconstruct the wartime female subject. She looks at both the female observer's physical act of seeing—and the refusal to see—for example, a battlefield, a wounded soldier, a torture victim, a national flag, a fashion model, a bombed city, or a wartime hallucination.

The book begins with two instances of wartime propaganda written by American women in France in 1915. Both Edith Wharton's Fighting France and Mildred Aldrich's A Hilltop on the Marne offer a complex and often contradictory sense of a woman writer's struggles with authority, resistance, and killing. In the process, Gallagher teases out the role of specular vision and the impossibility of "directly" seeing the war.

Gallagher then turns to literary and visual texts produced by two female journalists between 1940 and 1945. Martha Gellhorn's 1940 novel A Stricken Field exhibits a range of gendered seeing positions within and in opposition to the visual ideologies of fascism during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Lee Miller's war correspondence and photography for Vogue show how Miller constructed herself and her predominantly female American audience as antifascist observers of war by working with and against some of the conventions of surrealist fashion photography.

Gallagher concludes by focusing on the experimental autobiographical prose of H.D. and Gertrude Stein to explore the functions of vision on two World War II "homefronts"—London during the Blitz and Vichy France.

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Egg Island Almanac
Brendan Galvin
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
An endangered right whale attempting to nurse her new calf in the December ocean, foxgloves blooming in different places from year to year, or the rescue of imperiled Kemp’s ridley sea turtles—the bounty and cruelty of nature infuses this latest collection of poems from Brendan Galvin, which takes as its maxim finding the extraordinary in the ordinary all around us.

The poems chronicle the waxing and waning of the seasons from one winter to the next in the area around Egg Island, the dunes near a small seacoast town on the outermost reaches of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Galvin’s training as a naturalist and environmental writer is evident as his practiced eye roves the waves, marshes, and forests, finding meaning and beauty in the smallest detail— bird-watching, rebuilding a woodpile, or the flight of bobwhite quail. Other poems recall the poet’s affectionate memories of his deceased wife and the life they shared together, acknowledging grief without veering into the maudlin. Always present beneath the surface is the question of where humans fit into this wild, ever-changing landscape.

In meditations that recall the poetry and prose of Mary Oliver or W. S. Merwin, Galvin sets off on a vivid journey sure to increase readers’ appreciation for the natural world. Perhaps his most compelling message is that readers need not jet off to Everest or Kilimanjaro to experience mystery and beauty on Earth—there’s wonder aplenty in our own backyards.
 
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The Alliterative Morte Arthure
The Owl and the Nightingale and Five Other Middle English Poems
John Gardner
Southern Illinois University Press, 1973

Poets of every age deal with roughly the same human emotions, and for the experienced reader poetry is interesting or not depending upon the moment-by-moment intensity of its appeal. This skillful rendering by John Gardner of seven Middle English poems into sparklingly modern verse translation—most of them for the first time—represents a selection of poems that, generally, have real artistic value but are so difficult to read in the original that they are not as well known as they deserve to be. The seven poems are: The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Winner and Waster, The Parlia­ment of the Three Ages, Summer Sunday, The Debate of Body and Soul, The Thrush and the Nightingale,and The Owl and the Nightingale.

The first four poems represent high points in the alliterative renais­sance of the fourteenth century. Morte Arthure,here translated for the first time in its entirety into modern verse, is the only heroic romance in Middle English—a work roughly in the same genre as the French Song of Roland. The other three poems have been included in the anthology as further poetic examples.

With his employment of extensive comments and notes on the poems, Gardner provides a wealth of aids to appreciation and understanding of his outstanding translations. The anthology will be of interest to general readers as well as to students.

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Harry Truman and Civil Rights
Moral Courage and Political Risks
Michael Gardner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Given his background, President Truman was an unlikely champion of civil rights. Where he grew up—the border state of Missouri—segregation was accepted and largely unquestioned. Both his maternal and paternal grandparents had owned slaves, and his mother, victimized by Yankee forces, railed against Abraham Lincoln for the remainder of her ninety-four years. When Truman assumed the presidency on April 12, 1945, Michael R. Gardner points out, Washington, DC, in many ways resembled Cape Town, South Africa, under apartheid rule circa 1985.

Truman’s background notwithstanding, Gardner shows that it was Harry Truman—not Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, or John F. Kennedy—who energized the modern civil rights movement, a movement that basically had stalled since Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves. Gardner recounts Truman’s public and private actions regarding black Americans. He analyzes speeches, private conversations with colleagues, the executive orders that shattered federal segregation policies, and the appointments of like-minded civil rights activists to important positions. Among those appointments was the first black federal judge in the continental United States.

One of Gardner’s essential and provocative points is that the Frederick Moore Vinson Supreme Court—a court significantly shaped by Truman—provided the legal basis for the nationwide integration that Truman could not get through the Congress. Challenging the myth that the civil rights movement began with Brown v. Board of Education under Chief Justice Earl Warren, Gardner contends that the life-altering civil rights rulings by the Vinson Court provided the necessary legal framework for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Gardner characterizes Truman’s evolution from a man who grew up in a racist household into a president willing to put his political career at mortal risk by actively supporting the interests of black Americans.

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German Americans on the Middle Border
From Antislavery to Reconciliation, 1830–1877
Zachary Stuart Garrison
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
Before the Civil War, Northern, Southern, and Western political cultures crashed together on the middle border, where the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers meet. German Americans who settled in the region took an antislavery stance, asserting a liberal nationalist philosophy rooted in their revolutionary experience in Europe that emphasized individual rights and freedoms. By contextualizing German Americans in their European past and exploring their ideological formation in failed nationalist revolutions, Zachary Stuart Garrison adds nuance and complexity to their story.

Liberal German immigrants, having escaped the European aristocracy who undermined their revolution and the formation of a free nation, viewed slaveholders as a specter of European feudalism. During the antebellum years, many liberal German Americans feared slavery would inhibit westward progress, and so they embraced the Free Soil and Free Labor movements and the new Republican Party. Most joined the Union ranks during the Civil War.
After the war, in a region largely opposed to black citizenship and Radical Republican rule, German Americans were seen as dangerous outsiders. Facing a conservative resurgence, liberal German Republicans employed the same line of reasoning they had once used to justify emancipation: A united nation required the end of both federal occupation in the South and special protections for African Americans. Having played a role in securing the Union, Germans largely abandoned the freedmen and freedwomen. They adopted reconciliation in order to secure their place in the reunified nation. Garrison’s unique transnational perspective to the sectional crisis, the Civil War, and the postwar era complicates our understanding of German Americans on the middle border.
 
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The Writer and Religion
William H Gass
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

“Every significant religious system stands upon a sacred text. This text is indeed its temple. Inside, its heroes and their history are enshrined. Although leaders of varying degrees of divinity are always involved in the creation of a new sect, they usually have short lives, often come to bad ends, and their influence, diluted by disciples, soon disappears as water does in sand. What the leader leaves behind is Mein Kampf or its equivalent: his testament. Occasionally, by the indolent, an existent text is chosen, or a compilation selected—a golden treasury. From time to time, other writings may be dubbed divine, as though knighted. This is not a simple social thing, however. It is more important than a nation adding to its territories. Any addition to the divine canon will approve, proscribe, or admit new thoughts, new practices, and in consequence elevate different people to positions of privilege and power.”—William H. Gass

These essays and panel discussions made up The Writer and Religion Conference held at Washington University in St. Louis. The six essays, all by writers of international stature, were followed by panel discussions, with audience participation.

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The Ethics and Politics of Speech
Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century
Pat J. Gehrke
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

In The Ethics and Politics of Speech, Pat J. Gehrke provides an accessible yet intensive history of the speech communication discipline during the twentieth century. Drawing on several previously unpublished or unexamined sources—including essays, conference proceedings, and archival documents—Gehrke traces the evolution of communication studies and the dilemmas that often have faced academics in this field. In his examination, Gehrke not only provides fresh perspectives on old models of thinking; he reveals new methods for approaching future studies of ethical and political communication.
            Gehrke begins his history with the first half of the twentieth century, discussing the development of a social psychology of speech and an ethics based on scientific principles, and showing the importance of democracy to teaching and scholarship at this time. He then investigates the shift toward philosophical—especially existential—ways of thinking about communication and ethics starting in the 1950s and continuing through the mid-1970s, a period associated with the rise of rhetoric in the discipline. In the chapters covering the last decades of the twentieth century, Gehrke demonstrates how the ethics and politics of communication were directed back onto the practices of scholarship within the discipline, examining the increased use of postmodern and poststructuralist theories, as well as the new trend toward writing original theory, rather than reinterpreting the past.  In offering a thorough history of rhetoric studies, Gehrke sets the stage for new questions and arguments, ultimately emphasizing the deeply moral and political implications that by nature embed themselves in the field of communication.

            More than simply a history of the discipline's major developments, The Ethics and Politics of Speech is an account of the philosophical and moral struggles that have faced communication scholars throughout the last century. As Gehrke explores the themes and movements within rhetoric and speech studies of the past, he also provides a better understanding of the powerful forces behind the forging of the field. In doing so, he reveals history’s potential to act as a vehicle for further academic innovation in the future.

 

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Women and Rhetoric between the Wars
Ann George
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013


In Women and Rhetoric between the Wars, editors Ann George, M. Elizabeth Weiser, and Janet Zepernick have gathered together insightful essays from major scholars on women whose practices and theories helped shape the field of modern rhetoric. Examining the period between World War I and World War II, this volume sheds light on the forgotten rhetorical work done by the women of that time. It also goes beyond recovery to develop new methodologies for future research in the field.

Collected within are analyses of familiar figures such as Jane Addams, Amelia Earhart, Helen Keller, and Bessie Smith, as well as explorations of less well known, yet nevertheless influential, women such as Zitkala-Ša, Jovita González, and Florence Sabin. Contributors evaluate the forces in the civic, entertainment, and academic scenes that influenced the rhetorical praxis of these women. Each essay presents examples of women’s rhetoric that move us away from the “waves” model toward a more accurate understanding of women’s multiple, diverse rhetorical interventions in public discourse. The collection thus creates a new understanding of historiography, the rise of modern rhetorical theory, and the role of women professionals after suffrage. From celebrities to scientists, suffragettes to academics, the dynamic women of this volume speak eloquently to the field of rhetoric studies today.

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Writing Groups
History, Theory, and Implications
Anne Ruggles Gere
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987

Drawing upon previously unpublished archival materials as well as historical accounts, Gere traces the history of writing groups in America, from their origins over a century ago to their recent reappearance in the works of Macrorie, Elbow, Murray, and others.

From this historical perspective Gere examines the theoretical foundations of writing groups, challenging the traditional concept of writing as an individual performance. She offers instead a broader view of authorship that includes both individual and social dimensions, with implications not only for the teaching of composition but also for theories of rhetoric and literacy.

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front cover of To Life
To Life
The Story of a Chicago Lawyer
Elmer Gertz
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Elmer Gertz has defended famous people—including Henry Miller, Nathan Leopold, and Jack Ruby—and he has become famous in his own right through his struggle for civil liberties and personal rights.

Gertz has taken on a lengthy list of cases and causes over the six decades of his legal career. He fought successfully against the censorship of Henry Miller’s book Tropic of Cancer,which had been banned in Chicago for obscenity. He got Nathan Leopold released from prison after Leopold had served 34 years for his part in the death of 14-year-old Bobby Franks. An ardent foe of the death penalty, Gertz labored for years as part of a national team of lawyers that was finally able to overturn Jack Ruby’s death sentence for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Gertz’s cases have helped make libel law in the nation.

For this edition, Gertz adds an afterword that covers the 15 years since the book’s first publication. Gertz talks of Henry Miller’s last days and his travels to the USSR on behalf of the Refuseniks.

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Kerouac, the Word and the Way
Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester
Benedict F Giamo
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000
Jack Kerouac, a "ragged priest of the word" according to Ben Giamo, embarked on a spiritual quest "for the ultimate meaning of existence and suffering, and the celebration of joy in the meantime." For Kerouac, the quest was a sustained and creative experiment in literary form. Intuitive and innovative, Kerouac created prose styles that reflected his search for personal meaning and spiritual intensity. These styles varied from an exuberant brand of conventional narrative (On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Desolation Angels) to spontaneous bop prosody (Visions of Cody.Doctor Sax, and The Subterraneans). Giamo’s primary purpose is to chronicle and clarify Kerouac’s various spiritual quests through close examinations of the novels. Kerouac began his quest with On the Road, which also is Giamo’s real starting point. To establish early themes, spiritual struggles, and stylistic shifts, however, Giamo begins with the first novel, Town and Country, and ends with Big Sur, the final turning point in Kerouac’s quest.

Kerouac was primarily a religious writer bent on testing and celebrating the profane depths and transcendent heights of experience and reporting both truly. Baptized and buried a Catholic, he was also heavily influenced by Buddhism, especially from 1954 until 1957 when he integrated traditional Eastern belief into several novels. Catholicism remained an essential force in his writing, but his study of Buddhism was serious and not solely in the service of his literary art. As he wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1954, "Since I saw you I took up the study of Buddhism and for me it’s the word and the way I was looking for."

Giamo also seeks IT—"a vital force in the experience of living that takes one by surprise, suspending for the moment belief in the ‘real’ concrete grey everyday of facts of self and selfhood . . . its various meanings, paths, and oscillations: from romantic lyricism to ‘the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being and from the void-pit of the Great World Snake to the joyous pain of amorous love, and, finally, from Catholic/Buddhist serenity to the onset of penitential martyrhood."

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front cover of Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West
Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West
Andrew Gibb
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
In Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West, author Andrew Gibb argues that the mid-nineteenth-century encounter between Anglos and californios— the Spanish-speaking elites who ruled Mexican California between 1821 and 1848—resulted not only in the Americanization of California but also the “Mexicanization” of Americans. Employing performance studies methodologies in his analysis of everyday and historical events, Gibb traces how oligarchy evolved and developed in the region.
  
This interdisciplinary study draws on performance studies, theatre historiography, and New Western History to identify how the unique power relations of historical California were constituted and perpetuated through public performances—not only traditional theatrical productions but also social events such as elite weddings and community dances—and historical events like the U.S. seizure of the city of Monterey, the feting of Commodore Stockton in San Francisco, and the Bear Flag Revolt.
 
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front cover of Acts of Attention, Second Edition
Acts of Attention, Second Edition
The Poems of D. H. Lawrence
Sandra M. Gilbert
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

In the Preface to this second edition of her first book, Sandra M. Gilbert addresses the inevitable question: "How can you be a feminist and a Lawrentian?" The answer is intellectually satisfying and historically revealing as she traces an array of early twentieth-century women of letters, some of them proto-feminists, who revered Lawrence despite his countless statements that would today be condemned as "sexist."

H.D. regarded him as one of her "initiators" whose words "flamed alive, blue serpents on the page." Anais Nin insisted that he "had a complete realization of the feelings of women."

By focusing on Lawrence’s own definition of a poem as an "act of attention," Gilbert demonstrates how he developed the mature style of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, his finest collection of poetry. She discusses this volume at length, examines many of his later poems in detail, including the hymns from The Plumed Serpent, Pansies, Nettles, and More Pansies, and ends with a close look at Last Poems. Her detailed examination provides a clearer image of Lawrence as an artist—an artist whose poetry complements his novels and whose fiction enriches but does not outshine his poetry.

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Soluble Fish
Mary Jo Firth Gillett
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Soluble Fish transports readers to a place of discovery, exploring issues of borders, familial and love relationships, and other aspects of being human. Mary Jo Firth Gillett layers her poems in rich metaphor as she searches for meaning in everyday life. Contemplating a range of topics from teaching poetry to watching her father filet a fish, Gillett’s humorous and playful collection celebrates language and life.

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Composition and Cornel West
Notes toward a Deep Democracy
Keith Gilyard
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy identifies and explains key aspects of the work of Cornel West—the highly regarded scholar of religion, philosophy, and African American studies—as they relate to composition studies, focusing especially on three rhetorical strategies that West suggests we use in our questioning lives as scholars, teachers, students, and citizens.

In this study, author Keith Gilyard examines the strategies of Socratic Commitment (a relentless examination of received wisdom), Prophetic Witness (an abiding concern with justice and the plight of the oppressed), and Tragicomic Hope (a keep-on-pushing sensibility reflective of the African American freedom struggle). Together, these rhetorical strategies comprise an updated form of cultural criticism that West calls prophetic pragmatism.

This volume, which contains the only interview in which Cornel West directly addresses the field of composition,sketches the development of Cornel West’s theories of philosophy, political science, religion, and cultural studies and restates the link between Deweyan notions of critical intelligence and the notion of critical literacy developed by Ann Berthoff, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux. Gilyard provides examples from the classroom to illustrate the possibilities of Socratic Commitment as part of composition pedagogy, shows the alignment of Prophetic Witness with traditional aims of critical composition, and in his chapter on Tragicomic Hope, addresses African American expressive culture with an emphasis on music and artists such as Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and Kanye West.

The first book to comprehensively connect the ideas of one of America's premier scholars of religion, philosophy and African American studies with composition theory and pedagogy, Composition and Cornel West will be valuable to scholars, teachers, and students interested in race, class, critical literacy, and the teaching of writing.

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Pelican Tracks
Elton Glaser
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Pelican Tracks is a book of poems with a homing instinct. Elton Glaser travels a restless circuit between his native Louisiana and his adopted home of Ohio, from the “spice and license of the lowlands” to the “streets of Akron cobbled in ice.” These reflections, leavened with a fierce wit and moving bravura of language, are extracted from the origins and ends of the poet’s life—his birth in the final spasms of the second World War, the fears and excitements of youth, the death of parents, and the unexpected losses of adulthood. Marking his tracks between the Pelican State and the Buckeye State, Glaser records the damaged beauty of “everything sinking, everything rising again in the mind.”

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Winter Amnesties
Elton Glaser
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Winter Amnesties is a book of origins and endings, griefs and reconciliations. Each poem addresses the dilemma posed by G. K. Chesterton: “One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it.” The poems revisit the past, assess the present, and stare hard into the future. At middle age, Glaser remembers his youth in Louisiana and settles into the long stretch of his adult years in Ohio; he makes his peace with “the life that allows.” As son, as father, as poet, he looks to his legacy, whatever dim remnant of himself might continue after “all flesh falls back to salt and cinder.”

But these are poems of brio and bitter wit, not of self-pity and surrender. They take a jaunty stance towards life and welcome whatever the days may bring, confident that, like crows in the harvest cornfield, we can live on “the shocks and waste of this world” and “wring gold grain from the ruin.”

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Rhetoric Retold
Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance
Cheryl Glenn
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

After explaining how and why women have been excluded from the rhetorical tradition from antiquity through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn provides the opportunity for Sappho, Aspasia, Diotima, Hortensia, Fulvia, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Margaret More Roper, Anne Askew, and Elizabeth I to speak with equal authority and as eloquently as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine. Her aim is nothing less than regendering and changing forever the history of rhetoric.

To that end, Glenn locates women’s contributions to and participation in the rhetorical tradition and writes them into an expanded, inclusive tradition. She regenders the tradition by designating those terms of identity that have promoted and supported men’s control of public, persuasive discourse—the culturally constructed social relations between, the appropriate roles for, and the subjective identities of women and men.

Glenn is the first scholar to contextualize, analyze, and follow the migration of women’s rhetorical accomplishments systematically. To locate these women, she follows the migration of the Western intellectual tradition from its inception in classical antiquity and its confrontation with and ultimate appropriation by evangelical Christianity to its force in the medieval Church and in Tudor arts and politics.

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Unspoken
A Rhetoric of Silence
Cheryl Glenn
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

In our talkative Western culture, speech is synonymous with authority and influence while silence is frequently misheard as passive agreement when it often signifies much more. In her groundbreaking exploration of silence as a significant rhetorical art, Cheryl Glenn articulates the ways in which tactical silence can be as expressive and strategic an instrument of human communication as speech itself.

Drawing from linguistics, phenomenology, feminist studies, anthropology, ethnic studies, and literary analysis, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence theorizes both a cartography and grammar of silence. By mapping the range of spaces silence inhabits, Glenn offers a new interpretation of its complex variations and uses.

Glenn contextualizes the rhetoric of silence by focusing on selected contemporary examples. Listening to silence and voice as gendered positions, she analyzes the highly politicized silences and words of a procession of figures she refers to as “all the President’s women,” including Anita Hill, Lani Guiner, Gennifer Flowers, and Chelsea Clinton. She also turns an investigative ear to the cultural taciturnity attributed to various Native American groups—Navajo, Apache, Hopi, and Pueblo—and its true meaning. Through these examples, Glenn reinforces the rhetorical contributions of the unspoken, codifying silence as a rhetorical device with the potential to deploy, defer, and defeat power.

Unspoken concludes by suggesting opportunities for further research into silence and silencing, including music, religion, deaf communities, cross-cultural communication, and the circulation of silence as a creative resource within the college classroom and for college writers.

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front cover of Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope
Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope
Cheryl Glenn
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Rhetoric and feminism have yet to coalesce into a singular recognizable field. In this book, author Cheryl Glenn advances the feminist rhetorical project by introducing a new theory of rhetorical feminism. Clarifying how feminist rhetorical practices have given rise to this innovative approach, Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope equips the field with tools for a more expansive and productive dialogue.
 
Glenn’s rhetorical feminism offers an alternative to hegemonic rhetorical histories, theories, and practices articulated in Western culture. This alternative theory engages, addresses, and supports feminist rhetorical practices that include openness, authentic dialogue and deliberation, interrogation of the status quo, collaboration, respect, and progress. Rhetorical feminists establish greater representation and inclusivity of everyday rhetors, disidentification with traditional rhetorical practices, and greater appreciation for alternative means of delivery, including silence and listening. These tenets are supported by a cogent reconceptualization of the traditional rhetorical appeals, situating logos alongside dialogue and understanding, ethos alongside experience, and pathos alongside valued emotion.
 
Threaded throughout the book are discussions of the key features of rhetorical feminism that can be used to negotiate cross-boundary mis/understandings, inform rhetorical theories, advance feminist rhetorical research methods and methodologies, and energize feminist practices within the university. Glenn discusses the power of rhetorical feminism when applied in classrooms, the specific ways it inspires and sustains mentoring, and the ways it supports administrators, especially directors of writing programs. Thus, the innovative theory of rhetorical feminism—a theory rich with tactics and potentially broad applications—opens up a new field of research, theory, and practice at the intersection of rhetoric and feminism. 
 
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Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the New Century
Historiography, Pedagogy, and Politics
Cheryl Glenn
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
This collection of essays investigates the historiography of rhetoric, global perspectives on rhetoric, and the teaching of writing and rhetoric, offering diverse viewpoints. Addressing four major areas of research in rhetoric and writing studies, contributors consider authorship and audience, discuss the context and material conditions in which students compose, cover the politics of the field and the value of a rhetorical education, and reflect on contemporary trends in canon diversification. Providing both retrospective and prospective assessments, Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the New Century offers original research by important figures in the field.
 
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front cover of Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts
Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts
Cheryl Glenn
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011

In Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts,editors Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe bring together seventeen essays by new and established scholars that demonstrate the value and importance of silence and listening to the study and practice of rhetoric. Building on the editors’ groundbreaking research, which respects the power of the spoken word while challenging the marginalized status of silence and listening, this volumemakes a strong case for placing these overlooked concepts, and their intersections, at the forefront of rhetorical arts within rhetoric and composition studies.

            Divided into three parts—History, Theory and Criticism, and Praxes—this book reimagines traditional histories and theories of rhetoric and incorporates contemporary interests, such as race, gender, and cross-cultural concerns, into scholarly conversations about rhetorical history, theory, criticism, and praxes. For the editors and the other contributors to this volume, silence is not simply the absence of sound and listening is not a passive act. When used strategically and with purpose—together and separately—silence and listening are powerful rhetorical devices integral to effective communication. The essays cover a wide range of subjects, including women rhetors from ancient Greece and medieval and Renaissance Europe; African philosophy and African American rhetoric; contemporary antiwar protests in the United States; activist conflict resolution in Israel and Palestine; and feminist and second-language pedagogies.  

            Taken together, the essays in this volume advance the argument that silence and listening are as important to rhetoric and composition studies as the more traditionally emphasized arts of reading, writing, and speaking and are particularly effective for theorizing, historicizing, analyzing, and teaching. An extremely valuable resource for instructors and students in rhetoric, composition, and communication studies, Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts will also have applications beyond academia, helping individuals, cultural groups, and nations more productively discern and implement appropriate actions when all parties agree to engage in rhetorical situations that include not only respectful speaking, reading, and writing but also productive silence and rhetorical listening.     

             

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Stage Rigging Handbook, Third Edition
Jay O. Glerum
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Succinct and jargon free, Stage Rigging Handbook remains the only book in any language that covers the design, operation, and maintenance of stage-rigging equipment. It is written in an at-a-glance outline form, yet contains in-depth information available nowhere else. This fully indexed third edition includes three new parts: the first, an explanation of inspection procedures for rigging systems; the second, a discussion of training in the operation of rigging systems; and the third, essential information about the operation of fire curtains. The remaining six parts, as well as the glossary and bibliography, have been updated. This edition also contains a new preface, many new illustrations, and expanded information on Nicopress terminations.
Glerum explains that four main principles make up the core of this book: know the rigging system; keep it in safe working order; know how to use it; and keep your concentration. Glerum applies these principles to all of the major types of stage rigging systems, including block and tackle, hemp, counterweight, and motorized. He describes each type of rigging, then thoroughly reviews the operating procedures and methods of inspecting existing systems.
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Stage Rigging Handbook, Fourth Edition
Jay O. Glerum
Southern Illinois University Press, 2024

Updating the industry standard stage rigging text for a new generation 

First published in 1987 and revised in 1997 and 2007, Stage Rigging Handbook remains the only book in any language that covers the design, operation, and maintenance of stage rigging equipment. Though often unnoticed, these systems are critical in both easing the workload of stage technicians and creating storytelling magic for the audience. This landmark text imparts the foundations for understanding and implementing rigging systems, such that upon completion of the book, the reader is ready to begin hands-on training and practice.

Organized into four sections, the handbook combines research and practical experience to guide riggers through their work. It begins by explaining the construction and care of basic lifting media. Part two analyzes types of rigging systems; then the handbook details the forces that impact rigging, from Newtonian physics to calculating expansive modern systems. Finally, it presents day-to-day best safety practices, including brand new sections on risk assessment and fall protection.

This reorganized and greatly expanded fourth edition of Jay O. Glerum’s industry standard text updates much of the information in the previous editions with the addition of chapters on truss (the framework that supports lighting, screens, and other accessories), motorized chain hoists, hardware, and job safety, including fall protection systems. Award-winning production manager Shane Kelly preserves Glerum’s voice while bringing fresh information to a new generation of riggers, supplementing the text with updated versions of earlier photographs and drawings as well as an additional one hundred illustrations. The handbook facilitates the development of a rigging practice rooted in safety, precision, and professionalism.

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Behind the Wall
An American in East Germany, 1988-89
Paul Gleye
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Standing in long lines in the shops, coaxing clean laundry from an outdated washing machine, traveling despite unpredictable train schedules, and being without hot water, fruit, and vegetables through the gray winter months failed to dull Paul Gleye’s perceptions during the year he lived in Weimar, East Germany. Day by day Gleye documented his varied observations and experiences, unaware that they would prove a unique record of what would soon be an extinct society.

Gleye was in East Germany as a Fulbright lecturer. Living beyond the capital city of East Berlin and traveling and conversing freely, Gleye gained access to people and places that had been almost completely closed to Americans and other Westerners for decades.

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Jean Baudrillard
The Rhetoric of Symbolic Exchange
Brian Gogan
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Jean Baudrillard has been studied as sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. Brian Gogan establishes him as a rhetorician, demonstrating how the histories, traditions, and practices of rhetoric prove central to his use of language. In addition to Baudrillard’s standard works, Gogan examines many of the scholar’s lesser-known writings that have never been analyzed by rhetoricians, and this more comprehensive approach presents fresh perspectives on Baudrillard’s work as a whole.

Gogan examines both the theorist and his rhetoric, combining these two lines of inquiry in ways that allow for provocative insights. Part one of the book explains Baudrillard’s theory as compatible with the histories and traditions of rhetoric, outlining his novel understanding of rhetorical invention as involving thought, discourse, and perception. Part two evaluates Baudrillard’s work in terms of a perception of him—as an aphorist, an illusionist, an ignoramus, and an ironist. A biographical sketch and a critical review of the literature on Baudrillard and rhetoric round out the study.

This book makes the French theorist’s complex concepts understandable and relates them to the work of important thinkers, providing a thorough and accessible introduction to Baudrillard’s ideas.
 
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Rhetoric at the Margins
Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947
David Gold
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947 examines the rhetorical education of African American, female, and working-class college students in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rich case studies in this work encourage a reconceptualization of both the history of rhetoric and composition and the ways we make use of it.

Author David Gold uses archival materials to study three types of institutions historically underrepresented in disciplinary histories: a black liberal arts college in rural East Texas (Wiley College); a public women's college (Texas Woman's University); and an independent teacher training school (East Texas Normal College). The case studies complement and challenge previous disciplinary histories and suggest that the epistemological schema that have long applied to pedagogical practices may actually limit our understanding of those practices.

Gold argues that each of these schools championed intellectual and pedagogical traditions that differed from the Eastern liberal arts model—a model that often serves as the standard bearer for rhetorical education. He demonstrates that by emphasizing community uplift and civic participation and attending to local needs, these schools created contexts in which otherwise moribund curricular features of the era—such as strict classroom discipline and an emphasis on prescription—took on new possibilities.

Rhetoric at the Margins describes the recent revisionist turn in rhetoric and composition historiography, argues for the importance of diverse institutional microhistories, and argues that the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offer rich lessons for contemporary classroom practice. The study brings alive the voices of black, female, rural, Southern, and first-generation college students and their instructors, effectively linking these histories to the history of rhetoric and writing. Appendices include excerpts of important and rarely seen primary source material, allowing readers to experience in fuller detail the voices captured in this work.

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Educating the New Southern Woman
Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women's Colleges, 1884-1945
David Gold
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

From the end of Reconstruction through World War II, a network of public colleges for white women flourished throughout the South. Founded primarily as vocational colleges to educate women of modest economic means for life in the emerging “new” South, these schools soon transformed themselves into comprehensive liberal arts–industrial institutions, proving so popular that they became among the largest women’s colleges in the nation. In this illuminating volume, David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs examine rhetorical education at all eight of these colleges, providing a better understanding of not only how women learned to read, write, and speak in American colleges but also how they used their education in their lives beyond college.

With a collective enrollment and impact rivaling that of the Seven Sisters, the schools examined in this study—Mississippi State College for Women (1884), Georgia State College for Women (1889), North Carolina College for Women (1891), Winthrop College in South Carolina (1891), Alabama College for Women (1896), Texas State College for Women (1901), Florida State College for Women (1905), and Oklahoma College for Women (1908)—served as important centers of women’s education in their states, together educating over a hundred thousand students before World War II and contributing to an emerging professional class of women in the South. After tracing the establishment and evolution of these institutions, Gold and Hobbs explore education in speech arts and public speaking at the colleges and discuss writing instruction, setting faculty and departmental goals and methods against larger institutional, professional, and cultural contexts. In addition to covering the various ways the public women’s colleges prepared women to succeed in available occupations, the authors also consider how women’s education in rhetoric and writing affected their career choices, the role of race at these schools, and the legacy of public women’s colleges in relation to the history of women’s education and contemporary challenges in the teaching of rhetoric and writing.

The experiences of students and educators at these institutions speak to important conversations among scholars in rhetoric, education, women’s studies, and history. By examining these previously unexplored but important institutional sites, Educating the New Southern Woman provides a richer and more complex history of women’s rhetorical education and experiences.

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Writing Home
A Literacy Autobiography
Eli Goldblatt
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012
In this engrossing memoir, poet and literacy scholar Eli Goldblatt shares the intimate ways reading and writing influenced the first thirty years of his life—in the classroom but mostly outside it. Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography traces Goldblatt’s search for home and his growing recognition that only through his writing life can he fully contextualize the world he inhabits.
 
Goldblatt connects his educational journey as a poet and a teacher to his conception of literacy, and assesses his intellectual, emotional, and political development through undergraduate and postgraduate experiences alongside the social imperatives of the era. He explores his decision to leave medical school after he realized that he could not compartmentalize work and creative life or follow in his surgeon father’s footsteps. A brief first marriage rearranged his understanding of gender and sexuality, and a job teaching in an innercity school initiated him into racial politics. Literacy became a dramatic social reality when he witnessed the start of the national literacy campaign in postrevolutionary Nicaragua and spent two months finding his bearings while writing poetry in Mexico City.
Goldblatt presents a thoughtful and exquisitely crafted narrative of his life to illustrate that literacy exists at the intersection of individual and social life and is practiced in relationship to others. While the concept of literacy autobiography is a common assignment in undergraduate and graduate writing courses, few books model the exercise. Writing Home helps fill that void and, with Goldblatt’s emphasis on “out of school” literacy, fosters an understanding of literacy as a social practice.  
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The Rhetoric of Blair, Campbell, and Whately, Revised Edition
James L. Golden
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately, whose works were first published in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, constituted the great triumvirate of British Rhetoricians. For 20 years, earlier printings of this book, which contains substantial excerpts comprising the most significant portions of their writings, have been widely used as textbooks in history-of-rhetoric courses. An increasing interest in rhetoric at the college level has created a renewed demand for reprints of such classic primary texts.

The Preface places the three rhetoricians within the context of the rhetorical tradition, which began in 5th-century BCE Greece. The bibliographies have been updated to include 20th-century scholarly work on Blair, Campbell, and Whately, and on the 18th- and 19th-century rhetorical movement. Biographical sketches of Blair, Campbell, and Whately are also provided.

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Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics
Melissa A. Goldthwaite
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
Inspired by the need for interpretations and critiques of the varied messages surrounding what and how we eat, Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics collects eighteen essays that demonstrate the importance of food and food-related practices as sites of scholarly study, particularly from feminist rhetorical perspectives.

Contributors analyze messages about food and bodies—from what a person watches and reads to where that person shops—taken from sources mundane and literary, personal and cultural. This collection begins with analyses of the historical, cultural, and political implications of cookbooks and recipes; explores definitions of feminist food writing; and ends with a focus on bodies and cultures—both self-representations and representations of others for particular rhetorical purposes. The genres, objects, and practices contributors study are varied—from cookbooks to genre fiction, from blogs to food systems, from product packaging to paintings—but the overall message is the same: food and its associated practices are worthy of scholarly attention.
 
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front cover of Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom
Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom
Zan Meyer Goncalves
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Applying the complexities of literacy development and personal ethos to the teaching of composition, Zan Meyer Goncalves challenges writing teachers to consider ethos as a series of identity performances shaped by the often-inequitable social contexts of their classrooms and communities. Using the rhetorical experiences of students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender, she proposes a new way of thinking about ethos that addresses the challenges of social justice, identity, and transfer issues in the classroom.

Goncalves offers an innovative approach to teaching identity performance theory bound by social contexts. She applies this new approach to theories of specificity and intersectionality, illustrating how teachers can help students redefine the relationship between their social identities and their writing. She also addresses bringing social activism and identity politics into the classroom, helping writers make transfers across rhetorical contexts and linking students' interests to public conversations.

Theoretical and practical, Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom provides teachers of first-year and advanced composition studies with useful, detailed assignments based in specific identity performance. Goncalves offers techniques to subvert oppressive language practices, while encouraging students to recognize themselves as writers, citizens, and active participants in their own educations and communities.

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front cover of Casing a Promised Land, Expanded Edition
Casing a Promised Land, Expanded Edition
The Autobiography of an Organizational Detective as Cultural Ethnographer
H. L. Goodall
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

H. L. Goodall’s ground-breaking study of what people do with symbols and what symbols do to people explores the lives led by people in organizations. His narratives take on the form of six detective mysteries in which the narrator figures into the plot of the intrigue and then works out its essential patterns.

In the first mystery, "Notes on a Cultural Evolution: The Remaking of a Software Company," Goodall looks at the transition of a Huntsville regional office of a Boston-based computer software company where the lives and social dramas of the participants reflect the current state of high technology. The second essay and perhaps the most insightful, "The Way the World Ends: Inside Star Wars," penetrates the various defenses of the Star Wars command office in Huntsville to discover its secrets and surprises. Goodall shows how media, technology, fear of relationships, and symbolic images of the future unite into the day-to-day operations of people who believe they are responsible for the outer limits of our nation’s defense.

"Lost in Space: The Layers of Illusion Called Adult Space Camp" illustrates how a supposedly innocent theme park invites participation in rituals and ceremonies designed to influence a future generation of taxpayers. In "Articles of Faith," Goodall enters a super mall in Huntsville, noting how shopping centers provide consumers with far more than places to purchase goods and services. "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" finds Goodall back in an academic environment, at a conference of communication scholars, where he demonstrates the difficult task of translating cultural understandings from one context to another. "The Consultant as Organizational Detective" offers the sobering message that real-life mysteries may surprise even the most accomplished sleuth. A concluding chapter, "Notes on Method," and a new autobiographical afterword round out Goodall’s penetrating look at our symbol-making culture.

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Divine Signs
Connecting Spirit to Community
H. L. Goodall
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

Divine Signs is the concluding volume of the ethnographic trilogy about the communicative tensions in everyday American cultural life H. L. Goodall, Jr., began with Casing a Promised Land and continued with Living in the Rock n Roll Mystery.

In this final work, the terms for understanding these tensions are found in a historical and mythological drama featuring Power (as the embodiment of the modern), Other (as the embodiment of the postmodern), and Spirit (as the unifying power capable of connecting disparate selves to dangerously fragmented communities). For this study, the localized site of interpretation is in and around Pickens and Oconee Counties, South Carolina, where every day street signs, business advertisements on billboards, signs that announce church themes, Internet postings, and other forms of public communication that invite private meanings are read as rhetorical invitations to participate in these myths and mysteries.

Using themes discoverable in such public forms of communication, Goodall deconstructs a variety of communal experiences—from annual community celebrations to weekly therapy sessions in local beauty salons to the fall audience rituals of Clemson University football games—to gain a deeper appreciation of the unifying symbolic orders that enrich the interpretive possibilities of our lives and that serve as signs of our deeply spiritual connections to each other and to the planet.

In the last sections of the book, the interplays of Power, Other, and Spirit are read into and against a wide variety of everyday interpretive contexts, from Rush Limbaugh and talk radio to narratives about angels and stories about the transformative powers of spiritual practices in organizations. Goodall then asks the important question: Where are the themes of this mythological drama leading us? In the stunning conclusion, Goodall creates communicative, cultural, and spiritual challenges for us all.

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Living in the Rock N Roll Mystery
Reading Context, Self, and Others as Clues
H. L. Goodall
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Mystery, rather than “problem,” provides the con­text that the cultural ethnographer best uses to ap­proach the experience of both the living and the writ­ing of culture. In this work, H. L. Goodall, Jr., continues his discussion of the cultural ethnographer as detective through an investigation of what he calls the “rock n roll mystery.”

Using Bakhtin’s notion of “Carnival,” Goodall posi­tions rock n roll as an important aspect of the American cultural experience using its lyrics and rhythm as a force of resistance to the dominant bureaucratic order. He argues that interpretive eth­nography, where sentences use rhythms and emo­tions along with words to construct a work, parallels rock n roll in its creation of multiple voices strug­gling for creative and interpretive presence and space in the text. As there is no privileged text in the social life of rock n roll, there is no privileged voice in the writing of interpretive ethnography. It is, instead, a reading and writing method within the field of communication and the field of cultural studies that challenges the “existing wisdom.”

Goodall invites the reader to join him in the role of the detective who confronts, enters, and then participates in the mysteries of living. Through the use of his interpretive method, Goodall is able to move under the skin of experience to disclose the relationship among self, other(s), and context, an understanding only achieved by “going beneath the often cosmetic surfaces of cultural traffic to where symbols mingle with the driven stuff of life.” Be­cause the “stuff of life” is laid out on the pages of this book, Goodall’s text is as compelling as a good novel and in some ways more intimate.

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The Real Nick and Nora
Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Writers of Stage and Screen Classics
David L Goodrich
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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It's Good to Be Black
Ruby Berkley Goodwin
Southern Illinois University Press, 1953

From the preface by Carmen Kenya Wadley:

“Is it good to be black? To Ruby Berkley Goodwin it was....The black she writes about has nothing to do with skin color, but it does have a great deal to do with self images, values, spiritual strength, and most of all love. Unlike the contradicting definitions of blackness we see reflected in today's crime statistics, movies, television, newspapers, political speeches, advertisements, and sociological reports, Ruby Berkley Goodwin's definition of blackness is simple and to the point: black is good. It's Good to be Black is more than the story (history) of a black family living in Du Quoin, Illinois, during the early 1900s; it is a reaffirmation for all of us who know in our hearts that there is still good in the world and that some of that good is black.”
 

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Black Identity
Rhetoric, Ideology, and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism
Dexter B Gordon
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Exploring the role of rhetoric in African American identity and political discourse

Dexter B. Gordon’s Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism explores the problem of racial alienation and the importance of rhetoric in the formation of black identity in the United States. Faced with alienation and disenfranchisement as a part of their daily experience, African Americans developed collective practices of empowerment that cohere as a constitutive rhetoric of black ideology. Exploring the origins of that rhetoric, Gordon reveals how the ideology of black nationalism functions in contemporary African American political discourse.

Rooting his study in the words and works of nineteenth-century black abolitionists such as Maria Stewart, David Walker, and Henry Garnet, Gordon explores the rapprochement between rhetorical theory, race, alienation, and the role of public memory in identity formation. He argues that abolitionists used language in their speeches, pamphlets, letters, petitions, and broadsides that established black identity in ways that would foster liberation and empowerment. The arguments presented here constitute the only sustained treatment of nineteenth-century black activists from a rhetorical perspective.

Gordon demonstrates the pivotal role of rhetoric in African American efforts to create a viable public voice. Understanding nineteenth-century black alienation—and its intersection with twentieth-century racism—is crucial to understanding the continued sense of alienation that African Americans express about their American experience. Gordon explains how the ideology of black nationalism disciplines and describes African American life for its own ends, exposing a central piece of the ideological struggle for the soul of America. The book is both a platform for further discussion and an invitation for more voices to join the discourse as we search for ways to comprehend the sense of alienation experienced and expressed by African Americans in contemporary society.

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Art Isn't Easy
The Achievement of Stephen Sondheim
Joanne Gordon
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

The new musical theatre of Stephen Sondheim shuns the traditional story of love triumphant, probing instead the more disturbing issues of contemporary life.

Confident that the musical is America’s greatest original contribution to theatre, Joanne Gordon explicates the works of Sondheim to repudiate the common perception of the genre as mere escapist entertainment.

Gordon notes that Sondheim tackles real themes, that he has no fear of introducing pain, trauma, and complex ideas onto the Broadway stage. Tracing Sondheim’s career from his initial success as lyricist for West Side Story and Gypsy to the opening of Into the Woods, Gordon demonstrates that the value of Sondheim’s work obviously lies in its seriousness of theme coupled with its disturbing content; less obvious, but equally important, is Sondheim’s innovative use of form.

From A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum through Anyone Can Whistle, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods, Sondheim’s music and lyrics prove to be inextricably woven into the fabric of the entire work. Both music and lyrics, Gordon stresses, "grow out of the dramatic idea inherent in the show’s concept and themselves become part of the drama that previous theatre songs would only reflect."

Sondheim, Gordon notes, asks much of an audience that may not want to be challenged. In short, to enjoy a Sondheim play, the audience must participate intellectually. The audience willing to expend the effort will not be cheated, Gordon insists, because Sondheim, throughout his career, has demonstrated that "musical theatre can be serious, poignant, and still exhilarating."

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Boy Soldier of the Confederacy
The Memoir of Johnnie Wickersham
Kathleen Gorman
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Johnnie Wickersham was fourteen when he ran away from his Missouri home to fight for the Confederacy. Fifty years after the war, he wrote his memoir at the request of family and friends and distributed it privately in 1915. Boy Soldier of the Confederacy: The Memoir of Johnnie Wickersham offers not only a rare look into the Civil War through the eyes of a child but also a coming-of-age story.

Edited by Kathleen Gorman, the volume presents a new introduction and annotations that explain how the war was glorified over time, the harsh realities suppressed in the nation’s collective memory. Gorman describes a man who nostalgically remembers the boy he once was. She maintains that the older Wickersham who put pen to paper decades later likely glorified and embellished the experience, accepting a polished interpretation of his own past.

Wickersham recounts that during his first skirmish he was "wild with the ecstasy of it all" and notes that he was "too young to appreciate the danger." The memoir traces his participation in an October 1861 Confederate charge against Springfield, Missouri; his fight at the battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862; his stay at a plantation he calls Fairyland; and the battle of Corinth.

The volume details Wickersham’s assignment as an orderly for General Sterling Price, his capture at Vicksburg in 1863, his parole, and later his service with General John Bell Hood for the 1864 fighting around Atlanta. Wickersham also describes the Confederate surrender in New Orleans, the reconciliation of the North and the South, and his own return and reunification with his family.

While Gorman’s incisive introduction and annotations allow readers to consider how memories can be affected by the passage of time, Wickersham’s boy-turned-soldier tale offers readers an engaging narrative, detailing the perceptions of a child on the cusp of adulthood during a turbulent period in our nation’s history.

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Writing in the Feminine
Feminism and Experimental Writing in Quebec
Karen Gould
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Here is a celebration and an analysis of four Québécois feminist rebels whose self-conscious revolt against language has put them at the forefront of experimental writing in Quebec. These women—Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, Louky Bersianik, and France Theoret—are attempting to explode male-dominated language and to construct a new language and literature of women.

In this first major study of their work in English, Karen Gould examines in depth these women’s literary visions and the new ways in which they communicate those visions. Gould broadens her book’s appeal by showing how these four women’s works, in modern forms of experimental literature, are shaped not only by Quebec feminism, politics, and culture but by American and French influences as well.

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Women's Irony
Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories
Tarez Samra Graban
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

In Women’s Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories, author Tarez Samra Graban synthesizes three decades of feminist scholarship in rhetoric, linguistics, and philosophy to present irony as a critical paradigm for feminist rhetorical historiography that is not linked to humor, lying, or intention. Using irony as a form of ideological disruption, this innovative approach allows scholars to challenge simplistic narratives of who harmed, and who was harmed, throughout rhetorical history.

Three case studies of women’s political discourse between 1600 and 1900—examining the work of Anne Askew, Anne Hutchinson, and Helen M. Gougar—demonstrate how reading historical texts ironically complicates the theoretical relationships between women and agency, language and history, and archival location and memory. Interwoven throughout are shorter case studies from twentieth-century performances, revealing irony’s consciousness-raising potential for the present and the future.

Ultimately, Women’s Irony suggests alternative ways to question women’s histories and consider how contemporary feminist discourse might be better historicized. Graban challenges critical methods in rhetoric, asking scholars in rhetoric and its related disciplines—composition, communication, and English studies—to rethink how they produce historical knowledge and use archives to recover women’s performances in political situations.

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Teaching through the Archives
Text, Collaboration, and Activism
Tarez Samra Graban
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022

Disruptive pedagogies for archival research

In a cultural moment when institutional repositories carry valuable secrets to the present and past, this collection argues for the critical, intellectual, and social value of archival instruction. Graban and Hayden and 37 other contributors examine how undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric, history, community literacy, and professional writing can successfully engage students in archival research in its many forms, and successfully model mutually beneficial relationships between archivists, instructors, and community organizations.

Combining new and established voices from related fields, each of the book’s three sections includes a range of form-disrupting pedagogies. Section I focuses on how approaching the archive primarily as text fosters habits of mind essential for creating and using archives, for critiquing or inventing knowledge-making practices, and for being good stewards of private and public collections. Section II argues for conducting archival projects as collaboration through experiential learning and for developing a preservationist consciousness through disciplined research. Section III details praxis for revealing, critiquing, and intervening in historic racial omissions and gaps in the archives in which we all work. 

Ultimately, contributors explore archives as sites of activism while also raising important questions that persist in rhetoric and composition scholarship, such as how to decolonize research methodologies, how to conduct teaching and research that promote social justice, and how to shift archival consciousness toward more engaged notions of democracy. This collection highlights innovative classroom and curricular course models for teaching with and through the archives in rhetoric and composition and beyond.

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Literacy and Historical Development
A Reader
Harvey J Graff
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Representing three decades of research, Literacy and Historical Development: A Reader presents some of the most important historical scholarship on literacy in Europe and the United States. The approaches, research, and conclusions reflected in this collection of fifteen essays has changed how historians and many others conceptualize literacy and represents a body of scholarship that is transforming both contemporary and historical literacy theories.

In this revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking volume Literacy and Social Development in the West, editor Harvey J. Graff provides a new introduction and nine new essays by nationally and internationally renowned contributors from a range of disciplines. Replacing an unquestioned certainty that literacy’s powers are universal, independent, and determinative, Graff brings together studies that support new concepts, contending that the importance and influences of literacy depend on specific social and historical contexts, the impacts of literacy are mediated and restricted, the effects of literacy are social and particular, and the role of literacy must be understood within the burgeoning array of communication technologies.

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Queer People
Carroll Graham
Southern Illinois University Press, 1976

A brilliantly savage story, Queer People is, according to Budd Schulberg, “a racy testament to an era as totally van­ished as the civilization of the Aztecs,” and if not the Hollywood novel is “at least a truly seminal work.”

Today’s readers will recognize in this long-forgotten Hollywood novel the seeds of three longer-lived ones, The Day of the Locust, What Makes Sammy Run?,and The Last Tycoon. They may also recognize Whitey, the hero of the Grahams’ novel, as a forerunner of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby.

The central figure in the novel is an archetypal newspaper reporter who drifts to Hollywood. Whitey discovers the social microcosm of the studio-people, and finds himself in his ele­ment. He penetrates strange places and encounters queer people—the story conference, the three-day party, the titans and the moguls. When a murder ends his interlude he leaves Hollywood as casually as he discovered it.

Originally published in 1930 Queer People was a scandalous roman à clef, irreverent to the “industry,” and totally amoral—qualities lacking in later Hol­lywood fiction. Hence itis at once an important social document and an ex­citing original work.

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A Farewell to Heroes
Frank Graham
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003
Originally published in 1981 and long out of print, this dual autobiography covers five unforgettable decades of the New York sporting life from 1915 to 1965. Told initially from the point of view of Frank Graham, premier sportswriter for The New York Sun, A Farewell to Heroes also includes the chronicles of Frank, Jr., who picks up the narrative as he becomes a sports journalist in his own right.  



Frank Graham, Sr., was a self-taught writer known for his uncanny ability to capture the high drama of a game-winning play or the color of a fight mob’ s conversation in spare, straightforward prose. As a reporter, he covered the rough-and-tumble Giants of John McGraw’ s day and continued through boxing’ s greatest era, spanning the reigns of Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis.

As the younger Frank tells more of the story, we watch Lou Gehrig take Babe Ruth’ s place as the Yankees’ star and then trace his glorious career to its tragic conclusion. We see firsthand the legendary Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson and boxing’ s brief but golden age on television in the 1950s.

 

Aided by sixteen photographs and preserving the most masterful of his father’ s writing while adding to it the best of his own, Frank Graham, Jr., has given the sports fan A Farewell to Heroes, perhaps the ultimate sports reminiscence of a time when the romance of sport gave life a golden hue, when heroes still roamed the earth.

 

“ In what he calls this ‘ kind of dual autobiography,’ he is his father’ s son, having learned to look and listen as his father did and still go his own way,” says W. C. Heinz, longtime sportswriter for The New York Sun, in his new foreword to this paperback edition.

 

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Gettysburg
The Living and the Dead
Kent Gramm
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
In Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead, writer Kent Gramm and photographer Chris Heisey tell the famous battle’s story through the eyes of those who lived and died there. Unlike histories that simply recount the three furious days in July 1863, this book transports readers onto the battlefield and into the event’s historical echoes, making for a delightful, immersive experience.
 
Creative nonfiction, fiction, dramatic dialogue, and poetry combine with full-color photographs to convey the essential reality of the famous battlefield as a place both terrible and beautiful. The living and the dead contained here include Confederates and Yankees, soldiers and civilians, male and female, young and old. Visitors to the battlefield after 1863, both well known and obscure, provide the voices of the living. They include a female admiral in the U.S. Navy and a man from rural Virginia who visits the battlefield as a way of working through the death of his son in Iraq. The ghostly voices of the dead include actual participants in the battle, like a fiery colonel and a girl in Confederate uniform, as well as their representatives, such as a grieving widow who has come to seek her husband.   
 
Utilizing light as a central motif and fourscore and seven voices to evoke how Gettysburg continues to draw visitors and resound throughout history, alternately wounding and stitching the lives it touches, Gramm’s words and Heisey’s photographs meld for a historical experience unlike any other. Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead offers a panoramic view wherein the battle and battlefield of Gettysburg are seen through the eyes of those who lived through it and died on it as well as those who have sought meaning at the site ever since. 
 
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Rhetoric as Philosophy
The Humanist Tradition
Ernesto Grassi
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

Originally published in English in 1980, Rhetoric as Philosophy has been out of print for some time. The reviews of that English edition attest to the importance of Ernesto Grassi’s work.

By going back to the Italian humanist tradition and aspects of earlier Greek and Latin thought, Ernesto Grassi develops a conception of rhetoric as the basis of philosophy. Grassi explores the sense in which the first principles of rational thought come from the metaphorical power of the word. He finds the basis for his conception in the last great thinker of the Italian humanist tradition, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). He concentrates on Vico’s understanding of imagination and the sense of human ingenuity contained in metaphor. For Grassi, rhetorical activity is the essence and inner life of thought when connected to the metaphorical power of the word.

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Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567 - 1642
Robert B. Graves
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

In Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642,R. B. Graves examines the lighting of early modern English drama from both historical and aesthetic perspectives. He traces the contrasting traditions of sunlit amphitheaters and candlelit hall playhouses, describes the different lighting techniques, and estimates the effect of these techniques both indoors and outdoors.

Graves discusses the importance of stage lighting in determining the dramatic effect, even in cases where the manipulation of light was not under the direct control of the theater artists. He devotes a chapter to the early modern lighting equipment available to English Renaissance actors and surveys theatrical lighting before the construction of permanent playhouses in London. Elizabethan stage lighting, he argues, drew on both classical and medieval precedents.

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Lincoln and Native Americans
Michael S. Green
Southern Illinois University Press, 2021

First exploration of Lincoln’s relationship with the Native population in more than four decades


President Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution of Indigenous people in American history, following the 1862 uprising of hungry Dakota in Minnesota and suspiciously speedy trials. He also issued the largest commutation of executions in American history for the same act. But there is much more to the story of Lincoln’s interactions and involvement, personal and political, with Native Americans, as Michael S. Green shows. His evenhanded assessment explains how Lincoln thought about Native Americans, interacted with them, and was affected by them.

Although ignorant of Native customs, Lincoln revealed none of the hatred or single-minded opposition to Native culture that animated other leaders and some of his own political and military officials. Lincoln did far too little to ease the problems afflicting Indigenous people at the time, but he also expressed more sympathy for their situation than most other politicians of the day. Still, he was not what those who wanted legitimate improvements in the lives of Native Americans would have liked him to be.

At best, Lincoln’s record is mixed. He served in the Black Hawk War against tribes who were combating white encroachment. Later he supported policies that exacerbated the situation. Finally, he led the United States in a war that culminated in expanding white settlement. Although as president, Lincoln paid less attention to Native Americans than he did to African Americans and the Civil War, the Indigenous population received considerably more attention from him than previous historians have revealed.

In addition to focusing on Lincoln’s personal and familial experiences, such as the death of his paternal grandfather at the hands of Indians, Green enhances our understanding of federal policies toward Native Americans before and during the Civil War and how Lincoln’s decisions affected what came after the war. His patronage appointments shaped Indian affairs, and his plans for the West would also have vast consequences. Green weighs Lincoln’s impact on the lives of Native Americans and imagines what might have happened if Lincoln had lived past the war’s end. More than any many other historians, Green delves into Lincoln’s racial views about people of color who were not African American.

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Lincoln and the Election of 1860
Michael S. Green
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011
 
Abraham Lincoln looms large in American memory. He is admired for his many accomplishments, including his skills as an orator and writer, his Emancipation Proclamation, and his unswerving leadership during the strife-ridden years of the Civil War. Now, Michael S. Green unveils another side to the sixteenth president of the United States: that of the astute political operator. Lincoln and the Election of 1860 examines how, through a combination of political intrigue and deep commitment to the principle of freedom, Lincoln journeyed from Republican underdog to an improbable victor who changed the course of American history. 

Although Lincoln rose to national prominence in 1858 during his debates with Stephen Douglas, he was unable to publicly stump for the presidency in a time when personal campaigning for the office was traditionally rejected. This limitation did nothing to check Lincoln’s ambitions, however, as he consistently endeavored to place himself in the public eye while stealthily pulling political strings behind the scenes. Green demonstrates how Lincoln drew upon his considerable communication abilities and political acumen to adroitly manage allies and enemies alike, ultimately uniting the Republican Party and catapulting himself from his status as one of the most unlikely of candidates to his party’s nominee at the national convention. 

As the general election campaign progressed, Lincoln continued to draw upon his experience from three decades in Illinois politics to unite and invigorate the Republican Party. Democrats fell to divisions between North and South, setting the stage for a Republican victory in November—and for the most turbulent times in U.S. history. 

Moving well beyond a study of the man to provide astute insight into the era’s fiery political scene and its key players, Green offers perceptive analysis of the evolution of American politics and Lincoln’s political career, the processes of the national and state conventions, how political parties selected their candidates, national developments of the time and their effects on Lincoln and his candidacy, and Lincoln’s own sharp—and often surprising—assessments of his opponents and colleagues. Green frequently employs Lincoln’s own words to afford an intimate view into the political savvy of the future president. 

The pivotal election of 1860 previewed the intelligence, patience, and shrewdness that would enable Lincoln to lead the United States through its greatest upheaval. This exciting new book brings to vivid life the cunning and strength of one of America’s most intriguing presidents during his journey to the White House.
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The Mayors, 3rd Edition
The Chicago Political Tradition
Paul M. Green
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition taps America’s most qualified observers to scrupulously assess the city’s mayors within the vigorous and tumultuous history of Chicago government. This revised and updated edition features extensive commentary on the enduring mayoral influence of Richard M. Daley.


“In the seventeen years since The Mayors was first published,” editors Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli write in the Preface to this edition, “Chicago politics has become more genteel, more docile, and more predictable. This dampening of the city’s once red-hot political coals is due to domination by one man: Mayor Richard M. Daley.” Also providing a political roadmap through the complex and fascinating labyrinth of Chicago politics are essays on other recent mayors: Richard J. Daley, Michael A. Bilandic, Jane M. Byrne, and Harold Washington.


Green and Holli’s popular study maintains that the key to the mayor’s office is power: the power to reward and the power to punish that comes with occupying the fifth floor of city hall in Chicago. Beginning with Joseph Medill, the Tribune publisher who guided the city in its rise from the ashes after the Great Fire of 1871, The Mayors takes readers through the terms of some of the city’s most colorful leaders: from the progressive Carter Harrison II and the radical Edward F. Dunne to the politically reticent Fred A. Busse and the loudmouth Big Bill Thompson. The essays collectively tell a riveting story of structures wherein aggressive power brokers surmount even massive corruption and scandal, and those who fail to seize the office’s inherent authority have short, uncomfortable tenures.

In addition to Green and Holli, contributors include David L. Protess, Edward R. Kantowicz, John D. Buenker, Maureen A. Flanagan, Douglas Bukowski, John R. Schmidt, Roger Biles, Arnold R. Hirsch, William J. Grimshaw, Monroe Anderson, Steve Neal, Steve Rhodes, and Laura S. Washington.

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The Mayors
The Chicago Political Tradition, fourth edition
Paul M. Green
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
 Originally released in 1987, The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition gathered some of the finest minds in political thought to provide shrewd analysis of Chicago’s mayors and their administrations. Twenty-five years later, this fourth edition continues to illuminate the careers of some of Chicago’s most respected, forceful, and even notorious mayors, leaders whose lives were often as vibrant and eclectic as the city they served. In addition to chapters on the individual mayors—including a new chapter on Rahm Emanuel, enhanced by an expert explanation of the current state of the city’s budget by Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation—this new edition offers an insightful overview of the Chicago mayoral tradition throughout the city’s history; rankings of the mayors evaluated on their leadership and political qualities; an appendix of Chicago’s mayors and their years of service; and additional updated materials.

Chicago’s mayoral history is one of corruption and reform, scandal and ambition. This well-researched volume, more relevant than ever twenty-five years after its first edition, presents an intriguing and informative glimpse into the fascinating lives and legacies of Chicago’s most influential leaders.

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A Readable Beowulf
The Old English Epic Newly Translated
Stanley B. Greenfield
Southern Illinois University Press, 1982

Stanley B. Greenfield, one of the world’s foremost Anglo-Saxon scholars, writes of why, after more than thirty years of study, he undertook the Herculean task of rendering Beowulf into con­temporary verse: “I wanted my translation to be not only faith­ful to the original but, as the late John Lennon would have put it, ‘A Poem in Its Own Write.’ I wanted it to ‘flow,’ to be easy to read, with the narrative movement of a modern prose story; yet to suggest the rhythmic cadences of the Old English poem. I wanted it both modern and Old English in its reflexes and sen­sibilities, delighting both the general reader and the Anglo-Saxon specialist. . . . I wanted it to reproduce the intoxication of aural contours which… might have pleased and amused war­riors over their cups in the Anglo-Saxon mead-hall, or those monks in Anglo-Saxon monasteries who paid more attention to song and to stories of Ingeld than to the lector and the gospels.”

Greenfield has succeeded to a remarkable degree in reaching his goals. An early reviewer of the manuscript, Daniel G. Calder of UCLA, wrote: “I find it the best translation of Beowulf.

One of the great problems with other translations is that they make the reading of Beowulf difficult. Greenfield’s translation speeds along with considerable ease. . . Scholars will find the translation fascinating as an exercise in the successful recreat­ing of various aspects of Old English poetic style.”

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Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces
The Studio Approach
Rhonda C. Grego
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces: The Studio Approach examines a dynamic approach to teaching composition that reimagines not only the physical space in which writing and learning occurs but also the place occupied by composition in the power structure of universities and colleges.

In response to financial and programmatic cutbacks at the University of South Carolina in the 1990s, authors Rhonda C. Grego and Nancy S. Thompson used their academic backgrounds in composition and English education, along with their personal histories in working-class families, to look at compositional spaces and places with an eye to challenging the embedded issues of race, class, and gender within the university hierarchies. The result was a supplemental writing program that they called the writing studio.

The studio model emphasizes individual participation in a small group that allows students to present work they are preparing for outside classes, discuss their challenges, and refine their ideas with other students and staff facilitators. This “interactional inquiry” is replicated and reinforced by the facilitators, who meet in their own small groups to analyze larger patterns, possibilities, and needs as they arise in their studios.

Grego and Thompson argue that because the studio is physically and institutionally “outside but alongside” both students’ other coursework and the hierarchy of the institution, it represents a “thirdspace,” a unique position in which to effect institutional change. The focus on interactional inquiry challenges traditional power hierarchies within classrooms and shifts the nature of discourse. As a bottom-up approach to the development of educational programs within institutions that have different needs, demographies, and histories, the studio model can address a multitude of different institutional needs with little disruption to the curriculum.

The studio model allows university administrators, teachers, student aides, and students to continually adapt to changing institutional environments with new teaching and learning strategies. Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces provides an alternative approach to traditional basic writing courses that can be adopted in educational institutions of all types and at all levels.

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D. H. Lawrence
Fifty Years on Film
Louis K Greiff
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Between 1949 and 1999, the life and works of D. H. Lawrence inspired ten feature films: nine based on works of fiction and one based on biography. In D. H. Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film, Louis K. Greiff examines these films as adaptations, as cultural or historical documents, and as independent works of art.

Significantly, the films were not spread evenly throughout the decades but appeared in three clusters. The first group, or the “black and white,” appeared between 1949 and 1960. With the exception of Marc Allegret’s L’Amant de Lady Chatterley (1955), all celebrate the British common man as a midcentury hero and promote an unmistakable yet never strident postwar ethos that is Marxist in spirit.

The second cluster occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These films show Lawrence’s values as similar to the cultural values of the time—nonconformity, neobohemianism, sexual rebellion, war protest, and the celebration of youth. In his discussion of the third group Greiff explains why, in an un-Lawrentian decade like the 1980s, there was a revival of Lawrence’s works on film.

Greiff also deals with the contributions made by directors Ken Russell and Christopher Miles, both of whom directed Lawrence films of the latter two clusters. He shows how Russell and, to a lesser extent, Miles were responsible for bringing mass audiences in touch with the works of Lawrence.

Greiff’s final and most important goal is to interpret and evaluate the Lawrence films. He looks first at the film as a visual representation of its text, then as an original act of creation and object of art.

           

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German Folk Tales
Collected and Edited by the Grimm Brothers
Francis P. Grimm Brothers
Southern Illinois University Press

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Starring the Text
The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies
Alan G. Gross
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies firmly establishes the rhetorical analysis of science as a respected field of study. Alan G. Gross, one of rhetoric’s foremost authorities, summarizes the state of the field and demonstrates the role of rhetorical analysis in the sciences. He documents the limits of such analyses with examples from biology and physics, explores their range of application, and sheds light on the tangled relationships between science and society. In this deep revision of his important Rhetoric of Science, Gross examines how rhetorical analyses have a wide range of application, effectively exploring the generation, spread, certification, and closure that characterize scientific knowledge. Gross anchors his position in philosophical rather than in rhetorical arguments and maintains there is rhetorical criticism from which the sciences cannot be excluded.

Gross employs a variety of case studies and examples to assess the limits of the rhetorical analysis of science. For example, in examining avian taxonomy, he demonstrates that both taxonomical and evolutionary species are the product of rhetorical interactions. A review of Newton’s two formulations of optical research illustrates that their only significant difference is rhetorical, a difference in patterns of style, arrangement, and argument. Gross also explores the range of rhetorical analysis in his consideration of the “evolution of evolution” of Darwin’s notebooks. In his analysis of science and society, he explains the limits of citizen action in executive, judicial, and legislative democratic realms in the struggle to prevent, ameliorate, and provide adequate compensation for occupational disease. By using philosophical, historical, and psychological perspectives, Gross concludes, rhetorical analysis can also supplement other viewpoints in resolving intellectual problems.

Starring the Text, which includes fourteen illustrations, is an updated, readable study geared to rhetoricians, historians, philosophers, and sociologists interested in science. The volume effectively demonstrates that the rhetoric of science is a natural extension of rhetorical theory and criticism.

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Chaim Perelman
Alan G. Gross
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002
This accessible book examines the philosophical foundations of Chaim Perel­man's rhetorical theory. In addition to offering a brief biography, it explores Perelman's deep philosophical commitments and his concern for the ways in which the details of actual texts realize those commitments. The authors show that Perelman still reigns supreme when it comes to the elucidation of actual texts. His is a micro-analysis of arguments, one that is endlessly suggestive of ways of analyzing texts at the level of the word and phrase, the arrangement of parts, and the structure of arguments.
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Rereading Aristotle's Rhetoric
Alan G. Gross
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

In this collection edited by Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer, scholars in communication, rhetoric and composition, and philosophy seek to “reread” Aristotle’s Rhetoric from a purely rhetorical perspective. So important do these contributors find the Rhetoric, in fact, that a core tenet in this book is that “all subsequent rhetorical theory is but a series of responses to issues raised by the central work.”

The essays reflect on questions basic to rhetoric as a humanistic discipline. Some explore the ways in which the Rhetoric explicates the nature of the art of rhetoric, noting that on this issue, the tensions within the Rhetoric often provide a direct passageway into our own conflicts.

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The Rise of Roosevelt University
Presidential Reflections
Theodore L. Gross
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005
Underscoring professional and educational issues pertinent to higher learning at universities across the country, Theodore L. Gross’ s memoir of his years in academia chronicles his successful fourteen-year presidency at Chicago’ s Roosevelt University, a period of leadership that resulted in an upsurge of fund-raising, sharp increases in enrollment and endowment, and the transformation of an urban campus into a metropolitan university.

 

Beginning with a description of his childhood and adolescent education and experiences, Gross recalls his years as a faculty member and academic administrator at the City College of New York from 1958 to 1978, when the college was moving from selective admissions to open enrollment. He also served in administrative positions at Penn State University and SUNY Purchase before accepting the Roosevelt presidency in 1988. Focusing on the tension between the promise of open admissions and aspirations of academic excellence, The Rise of Roosevelt University: Presidential Reflections relates Gross’ s perceptions of the failure of open admissions at CCNY and his resolution to learn from those mistakes while at Roosevelt.

           

Drawing on private correspondence and conversations, essays, university documents, and other archival materials and research, Gross re-creates the highs and lows of his quest to make Roosevelt distinctive. His strategic plan included the appointment of senior executives and deans, the creation of a performing arts conservatory, the development of an educational alliance with other universities, online instruction, an honors program, a Chicago School of Real Estate, an MBA for Chinese students, the Partners in Corporate Education program, and the implementation of a second comprehensive campus. He describes the creation of the Albert A. Robin campus in Schaumburg and the realization of Roosevelt as a metropolitan university, creating a vivid portrait of the suburban culture, the educational context of large community colleges throughout the northwest suburbs, the development of a community advisory board that helped secure funds, and the improved morale of faculty and administration.

 

Gross’ s fund-raising efforts increased the endowment from $3 million to $33 million, and a capital campaign surpassed the goal of $45 million. In this volume, he describes meetings with major donors, the successes and failures of contributions, and the development of greater alumni support in the context of fund-raising throughout Chicago. He also analyzes the highly publicized legal dispute between the Auditorium Theatre Council and Roosevelt University over ownership of the world renowned theatre, pointing out how the case epitomizes issues that all universities confront: the university’ s need to control its entities, detrimental publicity, sectional and regional conflicts, and a split in the arts community. Throughout this narrative, Gross juxtaposes his personal life and professional career, dramatizing how the two are related.

 

More than a retelling of anecdotes and statistics, the volume provides a rare perspective on the intersection of higher education and politics in Chicago. Gross analyzes the different public and private universities in the city and in surrounding Cook County to describe their relationships with ethnicity, religion, class, and with city hall. He also covers the Daley political machine’ s influence on higher education, the politics of university governance, the spectacular growth of the western suburbs, and city versus suburban identities.

 

A personal road map of the development of higher education through the post– World War II decades, The Rise of Roosevelt University: Presidential Reflections mirrors the social climate that affected the country’ s universities at large, from the open admissions policies and student rebellions of the ’ 60s and ’ 70s, to the urban blight and suburban sprawl of the ’ 80s, to the strategic planning and expansion of the ’ 90s and the new century. The result is a captivating account of the issues involved in presidential transition and leadership, the strategic development of metropolitan universities, and the future role of Roosevelt and similar institutions.  

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A Spectacle of Suffering
Clara Morris on the American Stage
Barbara Wallace Grossman
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

Once called "America's greatest actress," renowned for the passion and power of her performances, Clara Morris (1847-1925) has been largely forgotten. A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage is the first full-length study of the actress's importance as a feminist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Detailing her daunting health problems and the changing tastes in entertainment that led to her retirement from the stage, Barbara Wallace Grossman explores Morris's dramatic reinvention as an author. During a second robust career, she published hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and nine books—six works of fiction and three memoirs.

Grossman draws on the fifty-four-volume diary that Morris kept from 1868 until 1924, as well as on the manuscript fragments and notes of journalist George T. MacAdam, who died in 1929 before completing the actress's biography. Grossman provides a dramatic account of Morris's life and work from her troubled early years, through an unhappy marriage, morphine addiction, and invalidism, to the challenges of touring, the decline of her artistic reputation, and the demands of the writing career she pursued so tenaciously. A Spectacle of Suffering reveals how Morris, even after experiencing blindness and the loss of her home, livelihood, and family, did not succumb to despair and found comfort in the small pleasures of her circumscribed life.

A Spectacle of Suffering recovers an important figure in American theatre and ensures that Morris will be remembered not simply as an actress but as a respected writer and beloved public figure, admired for her courage in dealing with adversity. The book, which is enhanced by twenty-four illustrations, is the only published biography of Clara Morris. It is as much a tribute to the power of the human spirit as it is an effective means of exploring American theatre and society in the Gilded Age.

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Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas
Allen C. Guelzo
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

Despite the most meager of formal educations, Lincoln had a tremendous intellectual curiosity that drove him into the circle of Enlightenment philosophy and democratic political ideology. And from these, Lincoln developed a set of political convictions that guided him throughout his life and his presidency. This compilation of ten essays from Lincoln scholar Allen C. Guelzo uncovers the hidden sources of Lincoln’s ideas and examines the beliefs that directed his career and brought an end to slavery and the Civil War.

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Animal Rights
History and Scope of a Radical Social Movement
Harold D Guither
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

In the past decade, philosopher Bernard Rollin points out, we have "witnessed a major revolution in social concern with animal welfare and the moral status of animals." Adopting the stance of a moderate, Harold Guither attempts to provide an unbiased examination of the paths and goals of the members of the animal rights movement and of its detractors.

Given the level of confusion, suspicion, misunderstanding, and mistrust between the two sides, Guither admits the difficulty in locating, much less staying in, the middle of the road. The philosophical conflict, however, is fairly clear: those who resist reform, fearing that radical change in the treatment of animals will infringe on their business and property rights, versus the new activists who espouse a different set of moral and ethical obligations toward animals.

From his position as a moderate, Guither presents a brief history of animal protection and the emergence of animal rights, describes the scope of the movement, and identifies major players such as Paul and Linda McCartney and organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that are actively involved in the movement. He concentrates on what is actually happening in the 1990s, discussing in detail the possible consequences of the current debate for those who own, use, or enjoy animals in entertainment and leisure pursuits. A reference work for students in animal sciences and veterinary medicine, the book also poses questions for philosophers, sociologists, and public policymakers as well as animal owners, animal and biomedical researchers, and manufacturers and distributors of animal equipment and supplies.

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Chicago Transformed
World War I and the Windy City
Joseph Gustaitis
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
WINNER, Russell P. Strange Book of the Year Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2017!

It’s been called the “war that changed everything,” and it is difficult to think of a historical event that had a greater impact on the world than the First World War. Events during the war profoundly changed our nation, and Chicago, especially, was transformed during this period. Between 1913 and 1919, Chicago transitioned from a nineteenth-century city to the metropolis it is today. Despite the importance of the war years, this period has not been documented adequately in histories of the city. In Chicago in World War I: How the Great War Transformed a Great City, Joseph Gustaitis fills this gap in the historical record, covering the important wartime events, developments, movements, and people that helped shape Chicago.
 
Gustaitis attributes many of Chicago’s changes to the labor shortage caused by the war. African Americans from the South flocked to Chicago during the Great Migration, and Mexican immigration increased as well. This influx of new populations along with a wave of anti-German hysteria—which nearly extinguished German culture in Chicago—changed the city’s ethnic composition. As the ethnic landscape changed, so too did the culture. Jazz and blues accompanied African Americans to the city, and Chicago soon became America’s jazz and blues capital. Gustaitis also demonstrates how the nation’s first sexual revolution occurred not during the 1960s but during the World War I years, when the labor shortage opened up unprecedented employment opportunities for women. These opportunities gave women assertiveness and freedom that endured beyond the war years. In addition, the shortage of workers invigorated organized labor, and determined attempts were made to organize in Chicago’s two leading industrial workplaces—the stockyards and the steel mills—which helped launch the union movement of the twentieth century. Gustaitis explores other topics as well: Prohibition, which practically defined the city in the 1920s; the exploits of Chicago’s soldiers, both white and black; life on the home front; the War Exposition in Grant Park; and some of the city’s contributions to the war effort. The book also contains sketches of the wartime activities of prominent Chicagoans, including Jane Addams, Ernest Hemingway, Clarence Darrow, Rabbi Emil Hirsch, John T. McCutcheon, “Big Bill” Thompson, and Eunice Tietjens.
 
Although its focus is Chicago, this book provides insight into change nationwide, as many of the effects that the First World War had on the city also affected the United States as a whole. Drawing on a variety of sources and written in an accessible style that combines economic, cultural, and political history, Chicago in World War I: How the Great War Transformed a Great City portrays Chicago before the war, traces the changes initiated during the war years, and shows how these changes still endure in the cultural, ethnic, and political landscape of this great city and the nation.
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Chicago's Greatest Year, 1893
The White City and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis
Joseph Gustaitis
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

In 1893, the 27.5 million visitors to the Chicago World’s Fair feasted their eyes on the impressive architecture of the White City, lit at night by thousands of electric lights. In addition to marveling at the revolutionary exhibits, most visitors discovered something else: beyond the fair’s 633 acres lay a modern metropolis that rivaled the world’s greatest cities. The Columbian Exposition marked Chicago’s arrival on the world stage, but even without the splendor of the fair, 1893 would still have been Chicago’s greatest year.

An almost endless list of achievements took place in Chicago in 1893. Chicago’s most important skyscraper was completed in 1893, and Frank Lloyd Wright opened his office in the same year. African American physician and Chicagoan Daniel Hale Williams performed one of the first known open-heart surgeries in 1893. Sears and Roebuck was incorporated, and William Wrigley invented Juicy Fruit gum that year. The Field Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Science and Industry all started in 1893. The Cubs’ new ballpark opened in this year, and an Austro-Hungarian immigrant began  selling hot dogs outside the World’s Fair grounds. His wares became the famous “Chicago hot dog.”

“Cities are not buildings; cities are people,” writes author Joseph Gustaitis. Throughout the book, he brings forgotten pioneers back to the forefront of Chicago’s history, connecting these important people of 1893 with their effects on the city and its institutions today. The facts in this history of a year range from funny to astounding, showcasing innovators, civic leaders, VIPs, and power brokers who made 1893 Chicago about so much more than the fair. 

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front cover of The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand
The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand
The Game as Umpires See It
Lee Gutkind
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

To provide this unique—if controversial—look at major league baseball as umpires see it, Lee Gutkind spent the 1974 season traveling with the umpiring crew of Doug Harvey (crew chief), Nick Colosi, Harry Wendelstedt, and Art Williams, the first black umpire in the National League. The result is an honest, realistic, insightful study of the private and professional world of major league umpires: their prejudices and petty biases, their unbending pride in their performance, their inside perspectives on the game, and their bitter criticism of the abuse often directed at their profession and at their conduct. As relevant today as it was in 1974, this illustrated chronicle shows how little has changed in the lives and duties of umpires in the last quarter century.

Guided by his passionate love for the game as he wrote The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand!, Gutkind attempted to present the umpires in a positive but realistic light: "I portrayed them as real people, honorable, hard-working and dedicated, but with warts and flaws like the rest of us. But they didn't want to be compared with real people; they wanted to be umpires—on a plateau above most everyone else." Since the publication of this book in 1975, neither Harvey nor Wendelstedt have communicated with Gutkind, with Wendelstedt even denying that Gutkind traveled with the crew.

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front cover of Black Writing from Chicago
Black Writing from Chicago
In the World, Not of It?
Richard R. Guzman
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It? takes readers on a cultural trip through Chicago’s literary history. Editor Richard R. Guzman compiles the first comprehensive collection of the works of Chicago’s black writers from 1861 to the present day. The anthology, which includes works from newspaper writing, poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and historical and social commentary, seeks not only to represent a broad range of writings but also to focus tightly on such themes as hope and despair, racism and equality, spirituality and religion. More than sixty writers, from the anonymous “J. W. M. (Colored)” to Ken Green, unfold a story that reflects the literary periods in black American history. Each author’s selection is preceded by a biographical and a bibliographical introduction. Readers interested in Chicago, race relations, and literature, as well as scholars of history, sociology, urban studies, and cultural studies, will find the collection invaluable.

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