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Quality Maintenance in Stored Grains and Seeds
Clyde M. Christensen
University of Minnesota Press, 1986

Quality Maintenance in Stored Grains and Seeds was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Storage molds are a major cause of quality loss in grains and seeds held in farm bins and tanks, in commercial elevators and warehouses, and in barge and ship transport. The damage done by these storage molds is at first invisible, but later shows up as caking, mustiness, total spoilage of part or all of the grain, and heating - sometimes to the temperature of ignition. The authors, both of whom have had extensive first-hand field and laboratory experience with these grain storage fungi and the problems they cause, summarize in readable and readily understandable form the basic principles and specific practices to be followed in order to minimize such losses.

Chapters are devoted to grain grades and quality; storage fungi; conditions that promote or prevent loss in quality; spoilage in barge and ship transport; mycotoxins (toxic compounds produced by fungi growing in grains and feeds) and mycotoxicoses (the diseases caused in animals that consume such toxic products); insects, mites, and storage fungi, quality control; and identification of storage fungi as an aid in evaluation of grain condition and storability.

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Viral Cultures
Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS
Marika Cifor
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Delves deep into the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive
 

Serving as a vital supplement to the existing scholarship on AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, ViralCultures is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of those radical activities. Marika Cifor charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States and the infrastructure developed to maintain it, safeguarding the material for future generations to remember these social movements and to revitalize the epidemic’s past in order to remake the present and future of AIDS. 

Drawing on large institutional archives such as the New York Public Library, as well as those developed by small, community-based organizations, this work of archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators use these records to build on the cultural legacy of AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that continue to undergird current AIDS crises. Cifor analyzes the various power structures through which these archives are mediated, demonstrating how ideology shapes the nature of archival material and how it is accessed and used. Positioning vital nostalgia as both a critical faculty and a generative practice, this book explores the act of saving this activist past and reanimating it in the digital age. 

While many books, popular films, and major exhibitions have contributed to a necessary awareness of HIV and AIDS activism, Viral Cultures provides a crucial missing link by highlighting the powerful role of archives in making those cultural moments possible. 

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Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey
Bodies, Places, and Time
Alev Cinar
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
What would an Islamic modernism look like? The question is a pressing one, as cultures rebel against modernity in its almost exclusively European forms. Alev Cinar's groundbreaking examination of contemporary Turkey, which stands at the threshold of East and West, of religious and secular nationalism, explores modernity through daily practices and the social construction of identity and political agency in relation to nationalism, secularism, and Islam. Focusing on developments of the 1990s, Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey argues that Islamist ideology generated an alternative modernization project, which applied the same strategies and techniques as that of the modernizing state to produce and institutionalize its own version of an equally thorough nationalist program. Using local details and debates - including a fascinating discussion of veiling as symbolic of both the "liberation" of Western appearance and the Islamists' struggle to rescue their nation's culture - Cinar reveals modernity as a transformative intervention in bodies, places, and times.Bringing a much-needed critical theory approach to bear on the politics of an Islamic nation, Cinar's work introduces a new way of conceptualizing modernity based on the analysis of a non-Western context.
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Urban Imaginaries
Locating the Modern City
Alev Cinar
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

For millennia, the city stood out against the landscape, walled and compact. This concept of the city was long accepted as adequate for characterizing the urban experience. However, the nature of the city, both real and imagined, has always been more permeable than this model reveals.

The essays in Urban Imaginaries respond to this condition by focusing on how social and physical space is conceived as both indefinite and singular. They emphasize the ways this space is shared and thus made into urban culture. Urban Imaginaries offers case studies on cities in Brazil, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, and India, as well as in the United States and France, and in doing so blends social, cultural, and political approaches to better understand the contemporary urban experience.

Contributors: Margaret Cohen, Stanford U; Camilla Fojas, De Paul U; Beatriz Jaguaribe, Federal U of Rio de Janeiro; Anthony D. King, SUNY Binghamton; Mark LeVine, U of California, Irvine; Srirupa Roy, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Seteney Shami, Social Science Research Council; AbdouMaliq Simone, New School U; Maha Yahya; Deniz Yükseker, Koç U, Istanbul.

Alev Çinar is associate professor of political science and public administration at Bilkent University, Turkey. Thomas Bender is university professor of the humanities and history at New York University.

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Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions
Michelle Citron
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

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Readings
The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kakfa, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva
Helene Cixous
University of Minnesota Press, 1991
A leader in the feminist intellectual movement, Cixous presents this highly informative meditation on ethics and poetics which draws on philosophy and psychoanalysis
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Newly Born Woman
Helene Cixous
University of Minnesota Press, 1986
Published in France as La jeune née in 1975, and found here in its first English translation, The Newly Born Woman is a landmark text of the modern feminist movement. In it, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément put forward the concept of écriture feminine, exploring the ways women’s sexuality and unconscious shape their imaginary, their language, and their writing. Through their readings of historical, literary, and psychoanalytic accounts, Cixous and Clément explore what is hidden and repressed in culture, revealing the unconscious of history.
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Reading With Clarice Lispector
Helene Cixous
University of Minnesota Press, 1990
Edited, translated, and introduced by Verena Andermatt Conley. The foremost French feminist literary critic pays homage to the premiere Latin American woman prose writer of this century.
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First Days Of The Year
Helene Cixous
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

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News Parade
The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle
Joseph Clark
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A fascinating look at the United States’ conflicted relationship with news and the media, through the lens of the newsreel

When weekly newsreels launched in the early twentieth century, they offered the U.S. public the first weekly record of events that symbolized “indisputable evidence” of the news. In News Parade, Joseph Clark examines the history of the newsreel and how it changed the way Americans saw the world. He combines an examination of the newsreel’s methods of production, distribution, and reception with an analysis of its representational strategies to understand the newsreel’s place in the history of twentieth-century American culture and film history.

Clark focuses on the sound newsreel of the 1930s and 1940s, arguing that it represents a crucial moment in the development of a spectacular society where media representations of reality became more fully integrated into commodity culture. Using several case studies, including the newsreel’s coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the Sino–Japanese War, News Parade shows how news film transformed the relationship between its audience and current events, as well as the social and political consequences of these changes. It pays particular attention to how discourses of race and gender worked together with the rhetoric of speed, mobility, and authority to establish the power and privilege of newsreel spectatorship.

In the age of fake news and the profound changes to journalism brought on by the internet, News Parade demonstrates how new technologies and media reshaped the American public’s relationship with the news in the 1930s—a history that can help us to better understand the transformations happening today.

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Kenneth Clark
University of Minnesota Press
Vocational Interests of Non-Professional Men was first published in 1961.In contrast to most psychological research about occupational interests and related achievement, which has centered on professional and managerial occupations, the study reported here deals with the vocational interests of skilled trades workers. The study is important because, among young people not planning to go to college, many each year select occupations when they have only fragmentary information about the occupation and its requirements and about their own characteristics and needs; the findings of this study will contribute to better counseling of such young people in the future.Dr. Clark’s investigation is based on the responses of approximately 25,000 persons to the Minnesota Vocational Interest Inventory. About 6,000 of the subjects were civilians and the rest were enlisted personnel in the U.S. Navy. He describes the development of the Minnesota Vocational Interest Inventory and of scoring keys for use with it, examines the characteristics of these keys, and summarizes various studies of the psychometric characteristics of keys developed by different methods. He discusses use of keys in classifying individuals into occupational groups, then turns to the use of interest measures in predicting achievement and choice of specialty. In conclusion he suggests ways in which improved interest measures may be developed to the end that there may be not only better counseling of individuals but also greater understanding of the processes by which occupational choices occur.Vocational counselors, industrial psychologists, personnel managers, and psychometrists will find the book especially useful.
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Gaian Systems
Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene
Bruce Clarke
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A groundbreaking look at Gaia theory’s intersections with neocybernetic systems theory

 

Often seen as an outlier in science, Gaia has run a long and varied course since its formulation in the 1970s by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Gaian Systems is a pioneering exploration of the dynamic and complex evolution of Gaia’s many variants, with special attention to Margulis’s foundational role in these developments.

Bruce Clarke assesses the different dialects of systems theory brought to bear on Gaia discourse. Focusing in particular on Margulis’s work—including multiple pieces of her unpublished Gaia correspondence—he shows how her research and that of Lovelock was concurrent and conceptually parallel with the new discourse of self-referential systems that emerged within neocybernetic systems theory. The recent Gaia writings of Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour contest its cybernetic status. Clarke engages Latour on the issue of Gaia’s systems description and extends his own systems-theoretical synthesis under what he terms “metabiotic Gaia.” This study illuminates current issues in neighboring theoretical conversations—from biopolitics and the immunitary paradigm to NASA astrobiology and the Anthropocene. Along the way, he points to science fiction as a vehicle of Gaian thought. 

Delving into many issues not previously treated in accounts of Gaia, Gaian Systems describes the history of a theory that has the potential to help us survive an environmental crisis of our own making.

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Eric K. Clarke
University of Minnesota Press

Mental Hygiene for Community Nursing was first published in 1942. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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Work Of Cities
Susan E. Clarke
University of Minnesota Press, 1998
Are cities obsolete relics of an earlier era? In this pathbreaking book, Susan E. Clarke and Gary L. Gaile contend that contrary to this conventional wisdom, cities are growing in importance. Far from irrelevant, local governments are vital political arenas for the new work of cities--empowering their citizens to adapt and serve as catalysts for the global economy. Using Robert Reich's The Work of Nations as a point of departure, the authors argue that globalism, coupled with increasing disparities of wealth and power, changes not only the work of nations but also the role of communities. Clarke and Gaile begin by detailing the transformation of the United States to a postindustrial economy situated in a "global web." They then examine the emergence of local entrepreneurial policy choices in the context of economic and political restructuring and in the absence of federal resources. Using empirical data to test assumptions about what leads cities to choose new policies, Clarke and Gaile explore local context through four case studies: Cleveland, Tacoma, Syracuse, and Jacksonville. They discuss human capital as the linchpin of globalization, arguing that analytical ability, information skills, and the capacity to innovate are all key to wealth creation. In conclusion, they contend that inattention to the decline in human and social capital will ultimately undermine any local development efforts--unless local policymakers craft responses to globalization that integrate rather than isolate citizens. The Work of Cities is both bold and nuanced, pragmatic yet compassionate in its recommendations. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of our metropolitan communities and the people who live there. "Susan E. Clarke and Gary L. Gaile have written an interesting and provocative account of U.S. cities' past, present, and future as agents of local economic development. Clarke and Gaile contend that cities are vital political arenas for the new work of cities­promoting citizenship and building the human capital and local links necessary for cities to compete in the postindustrial global economy. Stimulating and useful, it should be widely read among urbanists in political science and other disciplines." American Political Science Review "This is a terrifically interesting book." Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban and Regional Policy "This book is an ambitious and effective discussion of the economic development of cities in a globalised economic context in which information strategies are more important than tax incentives in luring businesses, and within which a new 'localism' has emerged as a paradoxical aspect of development practice. The significance of this work lies in its ability to link an important theoretic argument (globalization) with an increasingly vital arena of practice (urban economic development). It has the potential of recasting both the empirical and the theoretical work on urban development, as it suggests new ways of understanding local decision-making within a global context. The authors deserve credit for keeping focus. They succeed." Urban Studies "Clarke and Gaile have put together a provocative analysis of contemporary economic development issues facing cities in the United States. The most convincing feature of the book is its critical treatment of globalization and the clarity of thought it brings to bear upon debates surrounding the 'new localism.'" Economic Geography "Clarke and Gaile succinctly and clearly describe the economic development activities of U.S. cities for the past 15 years. In addition, they examine how globalization may be transforming these practices.The material examines changing economic development practices and the role of government in a way no other book to date has. It is broadly and well written so both practitioners and academics would find the book topical." Journal of American Planning Association "Both bold and nuanced, practmatic yet compassionate in its recommendations. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of our metropolitan communities and the people who live there. A path-breaking book" Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society Susan E. Clarke is professor of political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Gary L. Gaile is professor of geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
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Drawing the Sea Near
Satoumi and Coral Reef Conservation in Okinawa
C. Anne Claus
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

How Japanese coastal residents and transnational conservationists collaborated to foster relationships between humans and sea life

 

Drawing the Sea Near opens a new window to our understanding of transnational conservation by investigating projects in Okinawa shaped by a “conservation-near” approach—which draws on the senses, the body, and memory to collapse the distance between people and their surroundings and to foster collaboration and equity between coastal residents and transnational conservation organizations. This approach contrasts with the traditional Western “conservation-far” model premised on the separation of humans from the environment.

Based on twenty months of participant observation and interviews, this richly detailed, engagingly written ethnography focuses on Okinawa’s coral reefs to explore an unusually inclusive, experiential, and socially just approach to conservation. In doing so, C. Anne Claus challenges orthodox assumptions about nature, wilderness, and the future of environmentalism within transnational organizations. She provides a compelling look at how transnational conservation organizations—in this case a field office of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Okinawa—negotiate institutional expectations for conservation with localized approaches to caring for ocean life. 

In pursuing how particular projects off the coast of Japan unfolded, Drawing the Sea Near illuminates the real challenges and possibilities of work within the multifaceted transnational structures of global conservation organizations. Uniquely, it focuses on the conservationists themselves: why and how has their approach to project work changed, and how have they themselves been transformed in the process?

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The Promise of Youth Anti-Citizenship
Race and Revolt in Education
Kevin L Clay
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

When inclusion into the fold of citizenship is conditioned by a social group’s conceit to ritual violence, humiliation, and exploitation, what can anti-citizenship offer us?
 

The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship argues that Black youth and youth of color have been cast as anti-citizens, disenfranchised from the social, political, and economic mainstream of American life. Instead of asking youth to conform to a larger societal structure undergirded by racial capitalism and antiblackness, the volume’s contributors propose that the collective practice of anti-citizenship opens up a liberatory space for youth to challenge the social order.

 

The chapters cover an array of topics, including Black youth in the charter school experiment in post-Katrina New Orleans; racial capitalism, the queering of ethnicity, and the 1980s Salvadoran migration to South Central Los Angeles; the notion of decolonizing classrooms through Palestinian liberation narratives; and more. Through a range of methodological approaches and conceptual interventions, this collection illuminates how youth negotiate and exercise anti-citizenship as forms of either resistance or refusal in response to coercive patriotism, cultural imperialism, and predatory capitalism.

 

Contributors: Karlyn Adams-Wiggins, Portland State U; Ariana Brazier; Julio Cammarota, U of Arizona; Michael Davis, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Damaris C. Dunn, U of Georgia; Diana Gamez, U of California, Irvine; Rachel F. Gómez, Virginia Commonwealth U; Luma Hasan; Gabriel Rodriguez, Iowa State U; Christopher R. Rogers, U of Pennsylvania; Damien M. Sojoyner, U of California, Irvine.

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Charles Cleaver
University of Minnesota Press
Japanese and Americans was first published in 1976.Long periods of residence, study, and teaching in Japan have given Professor Cleaver an opportunity to observe its culture and to compare it with that of the United States, where he is a specialist in American studies. He reaches the conclusion that differences in the two cultures have been emphasized so much that similarities have been overlooked. Further, he points out, when differences have been discovered, a moral judgment has often been implied. In this book he provides a balanced view which will, it is hoped, contribute to a better understanding between the two countries.Since an exhaustive comparison of the two cultures is out of the question within the limits of a single volume, he has chosen the method of an oil prospector, drilling down here and there, where science or hunch suggests there might be a payoff. In his study he uses the word culture in the manner of the anthropologist as meaning the whole way of life. He places more emphasis, however, than the ordinary anthropologist does on the clues which the arts provide. Thus, among the subjects he discusses at some length are fictional writing and architecture. Among his other subjects are political and military nationalism, international economic reputations of the two countries, attitudes toward nature, and the organization of work and leisure. In his concluding chapter he discusses current tendencies toward local and international loyalties as opposed to those which are national, and the growing interest in cultural nationalism which accompanies a distrust of political and military nationalism. Finally, he makes a plea for an international community with cultural diversity.
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Opera
The Undoing of Women
Catherine Clement
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

An incisive and impassioned examination of women’s treatment in opera.

Catherine Clément analyzes the plots of over thirty prominent operas-Otello and Siegfried to Madame Butterfly and The Magic Flute-through the lenses of feminism and literary theory to unveil the negative messages about women in stories familiar to every opera listener.

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Syncope
The Philosophy of Rapture
Catherine Clement
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

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James L. Clifford
University of Minnesota Press

Johnsonian Studies, 1887-1950 was first published in 1951. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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Samuel Johnson
A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies
James L. Clifford
University of Minnesota Press, 1970

Samuel Johnson was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

For anyone interested in the work of Samuel Johnson and his place in eighteenth-century studies, this bibliography will be of great value, for it includes virtually everything of importance that has been written about Johnson from his own lifetime to the present. In addition, Professors Clifford and Greene, in an introductory essay, survey and evaluate the changing attitudes toward Johnson through the entire period covered in the bibliography.

This volume is a revision and enlargement of Professor Clifford's earlier work Johnsonian Studies, 1887–1950: A Survey and Bibliography,long recognized as an indispensable tool for the study of Samuel Johnson, his circle, and his times, and now out of print. The present volume contains nearly four thousand bibliographical entries, grouped under twenty-five subject headings, and arranged chronologically within each classification. This arrangement enables the student to trace the development of the scholarship of the various aspects of Johnson's life and work. A detailed author and subject index to the whole volume makes it easy for him to find the description of the particular book or article for which he is searching.

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Autoaffection
Unconscious Thought in the Age of Technology
Patricia Ticineto Clough
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

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

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

Autoaffection links diverse forms of cultural criticism-feminist theory, queer theory, film theory, postcolonial theory, Marxist cultural studies and literary criticism, the cultural studies of science and the criticism of ethnographic writing—to the transformation and expansion of teletechnology in the late twentieth century. These theoretical approaches, Clough suggests, have become the vehicles of unconscious thought in our time.In individual chapters, Clough juxtaposes the likes of Derridean deconstruction, Deleuzian philosophy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She works through the writings of Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Grosz—to name only a few—placing all in dialogue with a teletechnological framework. Clough shows how these cultural criticisms have raised questions about the foundation of thought, allowing us to reenvision the relationship of nature and technology, the human and the machine, the virtual and the real, the living and the inert.
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The User Unconscious
On Affect, Media, and Measure
Patricia Ticineto Clough
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

Wide-ranging essays and experimental prose forcefully demonstrate how digital media and computational technologies have redefined what it is to be human

Over the past decade, digital media has expanded exponentially, becoming an essential part of daily life. The stimulating essays and experimental compositions in The User Unconscious delve into the ways digital media and computational technologies fundamentally affect our sense of self and the world we live in, from both human and other-than-human perspectives.

Critical theorist Patricia Ticineto Clough’s provocative essays center around the motif of the “user unconscious” to advance the challenging thesis that that we are both human and other-than-human: we now live, think, and dream within multiple layers of computational networks that are constantly present, radically transforming subjectivity, sociality, and unconscious processes.

Drawing together rising strains of philosophy, critical theory, and media studies, as well as the political, social, and economic transformations that are shaping the twenty-first-century world, The User Unconscious points toward emergent crises and potentialities in both human subjectivity and sociality. Moving from affect to data, Clough forces us to see that digital media and computational technologies are not merely controlling us—they have already altered what it means to be human.

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Our Long Heritage
Pages From the Books our Founding Fathers Read
Wilson O. Clough
University of Minnesota Press, 1955

Our Long Heritage was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This collection of readings, selected from the books and documents that were the major sources of American ideas and beliefs during the period of the founding of the democracy from 1750 to 1780, demonstrates that America has a long heritage behind its social and political philosophy. The excerpts are from the works that represent four different cultural or historical heritage, and they are presented in this order: the classical heritage, the English tradition to 1700, the continental stream, and the eighteenth century, both British and American. Mr. Clough, a former professor of English at the University of Wyoming, provides introductory and explanatory comment throughout the volume. The first book of its kind, it should be particularly useful in American studies programs.

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Making the Carry
The Lives of John and Tchi-Ki-Wis Linklater
Timothy Cochrane
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

An extraordinary illustrated biography of a Métis man and Anishinaabe woman navigating great changes in their homeland along the U.S.–Canada border in the early twentieth century

John Linklater, of Anishinaabeg, Cree, and Scottish ancestry, and his wife, Tchi-Ki-Wis, of the Lac La Croix First Nation, lived in the canoe and border country of Ontario and Minnesota from the 1870s until the 1930s. During that time, the couple experienced radical upheavals in the Quetico–Superior region, including the cutting of white and red pine forests, the creation of Indian reserves/reservations and conservation areas, and the rise of towns, tourism, and mining. With broad geographical sweep, historical significance, and biographical depth, Making the Carry tells their story, overlooked for far too long.

John Linklater, a renowned game warden and skilled woodsman, was also the bearer of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous heritage, both of which he was deeply committed to teaching others. He was sought by professors, newspaper reporters, museum personnel, and conservationists—among them Sigurd Olson, who considered Linklater a mentor. Tchi-Ki-Wis, an extraordinary craftswoman, made a sweeping array of necessary yet beautiful objects, from sled dog harnesses to moose calls to birch bark canoes. She was an expert weaver of large Anishinaabeg cedar bark mats with complicated geometric designs, a virtually lost art.

Making the Carry traces the routes by which the couple came to live on Basswood Lake on the international border. John’s Métis ancestors with deep Hudson’s Bay Company roots originally came from Orkney Islands, Scotland, by way of Hudson Bay and Red River, or what is now Winnipeg. His family lived in Manitoba, northwest Ontario, northern Minnesota, and, in the case ofJohn and Tchi-Ki-Wis, on Isle Royale. A journey through little-known Canadian history, the book provides an intimate portrait of Métis people.

Complete with rarely seen photographs of activities from dog mushing to guiding to lumbering, as well as of many objects made by Tchi-Ki-Wis, such as canoes, moccasins, and cedar mats, Making the Carry is a window on a traditional way of life and a restoration of two fascinating Indigenous people to their rightful place in our collective past.

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Good Boat Speaks For Itself
Isle Royale Fisherman and Their Boats
Timothy Cochrane
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

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Willard W. Cochrane
University of Minnesota Press

The City Man's Guide to the Farm Problem was first published in 1965. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Few domestic questions are so controversial as the farm problem, yet the average city man finds it difficult to understand the basic issues involved. In this book Professor Cochrane describes for the layman the nature and causes of the commercial farm problem and the rural poverty problem and provides the basis for making informed judgments about these problems and their possible solutions. He analyzes the economic and political forces which are at work in the farm economy, explains the organization of modern agriculture, showing the unique structure of farming, and draws a vivid picture of the revolutionary developments which have taken place in agriculture. He discusses behavior patterns of farmers and consumers as they relate to the farm economy, and the role of government in the farm industry and in the lives of farmers.

The analysis and discussion make clear the reasons why the government is so deeply involved in farm issues and point up what will be needed in order to make some headway toward solutions of the problems. Professor Cochrane emphasizes that there is no perfect solution to the farm problem but he provides the information and analyses from which the reader can gain a better understanding of the issues.

Sixteen photographic illustrations show old and new methods of farming and types of equipment. There are also a number of charts, graphs, and tables.

Willard W. Cochrane is dean of international programs and a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Minnesota. He was director of agricultural economics in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and economic adviser to the Secretary of Agriculture from 1961 to 1964, and served as agricultural adviser to John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign. He is the author also of Farm Prices: Myth and Reality.

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Farm Prices
Myth and Reality
Willard W. Cochrane
University of Minnesota Press, 1958

Farm Prices was first published in 1958. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Few domestic questions are so controversial as the farm problem, yet the average city man finds it difficult to understand the basic issues involved. In this book Professor Cochrane describes for the layman the nature and causes of the commercial farm problem and the rural poverty problem and provides the basis for making informed judgments about these problems and their possible solutions. He analyzes the economic and political forces which are at work in the farm economy, explains the organization of modern agriculture, showing the unique structure of farming, and draws a vivid picture of the revolutionary developments which have taken place in agriculture. He discusses behavior patterns of farmers and consumers as they relate to the farm economy, and the role of government in the farm industry and in the lives of farmers.

Farm prices are constantly fluctuating, and out of this price variability emerge such serious and continuing farm problems as variable incomes, low incomes over extended periods, and uncertainty in production planning. In this study Professor Cochrane seeks to get at the root of the trouble by, first, exploring and exposing what he considers a basic fallacy in our present day thinking and approach to the farm problem. This is the widely held myth of an automatically adjusting agriculture, an agriculture that is always out of balance because of an "emergency." This myth, he points out, beclouds the issues involved in the whole farm problem.

The farm price myth splits two ways in the public mind, Mr. Cochrane explains, but these divergent attitudes represent differences only in mechanics, not in principle, and they are equally effective in obscuring the real picture. One segment of the public believes that agriculture, if left alone for a while, would gravitate toward and stabilize at some desirable level and pattern of prices, production, and incomes. The other segment believes that the same result would occur if agriculture were given a temporary, helping hand by the government. Mr. Cochrane shows the fallacies inherent in both of these convictions by presenting an integrated, overall picture of farm price behavior as it really exists. On a basis of this realistic view, he presents the two alternatives or hard policy choices that he believes the American farmer faces today.

Willard W. Cochrane is Professor Emeritus of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of a number of books, including The City Man's Guide to the Farm Problem and Farm Prices: Myth and Reality. He previously served as an economist with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He is the co-author of Economics of American Agriculture and Economics of Consumption.

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Willard Cochrane
University of Minnesota Press
American Farm Policy, 1948-1973 was first published in 1976.American farm policies have had a profound effect on the lives of millions of people, both in this country and abroad. This comprehensive account records and explains American farm policies and programs in the last quarter-century and provides a background and analysis as well.The historical record describes in detail the farm policy legislation during the period 1948-1973 and the operations of the programs in those years. The program data are derived largely from materials published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture which are now difficult to obtain. The organization of the data into extensive tables makes the work particularly valuable for reference. A final section presents an interpretation and appraisal of the policies and programs. Since the senior author, Dr. Cochrane, was deeply involved with the farm programs of this period as a critic, analyst, and planner, he has a unique vantage point for this analysis.In discussing the contributions and achievements of the programs, the authors point out that shortcomings were numerous and impacts varied, but the programs may be summed into a concept of real social cost, and the contributions were essentially of one kind: the protection of the vital economic interests of producers of agricultural products and the consumer of those products. The authors conclude that the gains to society outweighed the costs.
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Minnesota’s Endangered Flora and Fauna
Barbara A. Coffin
University of Minnesota Press, 1988

Minnesota's Endangered Flora and Fauna was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"Extinction of species, the silent crisis of our time, diminishes our world...and a commitment to the preservation of species diversity is fundamental to an optimistic view of the future of our own species," says Harrison B. Tordoff in his forward to this comprehensive reference book. Minnesota's Endangered Flora and Fauna is the result of a legislative mandate -- the 1981 amendment to the State Endangered Species Act -- which called upon the state's Department of Natural Resources and an expert advisory committee to prepare a list of plants and animals in jeopardy.

Covered in the book are some 300 species, ranging from mosses and lichens to jumping spiders, and including vascular plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, fish, butterflies, mollusks, and tiger beetles. A chapter is devoted to each of these floral and faunal groups, with individual status accounts provided for all species. Each account includes the designation endangered, threatened,or special concern,the reasons for that choice, and related information on habitat and distribution. Endangered and threatened species are illustrated; state distribution maps are provided for all species, as well as information on national range. In their substantial introduction, the editors describe the historical background of this project; the components of Minnesota's Endangered Species Program -- one of the most comprehensive and respected in the nation; and the state's natural environment -- its diverse landforms and vegetation.

An up-to-date and expanded version of the information contained in Minnesota's Endangered Flora and Fauna is available online through the Minnesota DNR's Rare Species Guide at www.mndnr.gov/rsg.

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Lotus Coffman
University of Minnesota Press
Freedom Through Education was first published in 1939. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.February 15, 1939To the People of Minnesota:Knowing President Coffman as well as I did, I know he would have deprecated any elaborate eulogy of his work in and for the University of Minnesota. I know also that he welcomed always any opportunity to present his though about it and his reflections on the changing world that conditioned the flexible and forward-looking policy he thought the University should pursue. In the pages here published by the University are embodied some of his last and most suggestive thinking about the problems that concerned him always. They were prepared in large part in the year he used to rebuild his health and to formulate his ideas, free from the discursive and unending tasks of a university presidency. Of that year he in his last public address said:“. . . I am almost convinced that it would be a good thing if the administrative officers of the university, certainly the president, were compelled to take a leave of absence once every fife years. Their strength would be renewed and they would have ample opportunity, free from the restraints and responsibilities of office, to read, to reflect on education, and to visit other educational institutions . . .”Here were give voice to his thinking in the full faith that the works of men who are really builders are the reflection of their thinking.This booklet is also a memorial tribute that he would not deny us the right to pay to him and the work he did as an educator. His labors at Minnesota were so conceived and so carried on that they have a significance beyond the boundaries of the state and beyond the days of their doing.It is with profound appreciation of the importance of the contributions that Lotus Delta Coffman made to the University of Minnesota, and with deep admiration for the extent of his influence, that the Regents of the University of Minnesota issue Freedom Through Education as a tribute to him.Guy Stanton Ford,President
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Lotus Coffman
University of Minnesota Press
The State University: Its Work and Problems was first published in 1934. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This presentation of the views of the late University of Minnesota president, Lotus Delta Coffman, emphasizes his contention that state-supported institutions of higher learning should be open to all who have the ability to profit by the work offered in them. The volume contains a series of
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Medieval Identity Machines
Jeffrey J. Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
A provocative new approach to medieval culture. In Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey J. Cohen examines the messiness, permeability, and perversity of medieval bodies, arguing that human identity always exceeds the limits of the flesh. Combining critical theory with a rigorous reading of medieval texts, Cohen asks if the category "human" isn't too small to contain the multiplicity of identities. As such, this book is the first to argue for a "posthuman" Middle Ages and to make extensive use of the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze to rethink the medieval. Among the topics that Cohen covers are the passionate bond between men and horses in chivalric training; the interrelation of demons, celibacy, and colonialism in an Anglo-Saxon saint's life; Lancelot's masochism as envisioned by Chrétien de Troyes; the voice of thunder echoing from Margery Kempe; and the fantasies that sustained some dominant conceptions of race. This tour of identity-in all its fragility and diffusion-illustrates the centrality of the Middle Ages to theory as it enhances our understanding of self, embodiment, and temporality in the medieval world. Jeffrey J. Cohen is associate professor of English and human sciences at George Washington University. He is the author of Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (1999).
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Noah's Arkive
Jeffrey J. Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A timely rethinking of the archetypal story of Noah, the great flood, and who was left behind as the waters rose

Most people know the story of Noah from a children’s bible or a play set with a colorful ship, bearded Noah, pairs of animals, and an uncomplicated vision of survival. Noah’s ark, however, will forever be haunted by what it leaves to the rising waters so that the world can begin again.

In Noah’s Arkive, Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates examine the long history of imagining endurance against climate catastrophe—as well as alternative ways of creating refuge. They trace how the elements of the flood narrative were elaborated in medieval and early modern art, text, and music, and now shape writing and thinking during the current age of anthropogenic climate change. Arguing that the biblical ark may well be the worst possible exemplar of human behavior, the chapters draw on a range of sources, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ovid’s tale of Deucalion and Pyrrah, to speculative fiction, climate fiction, and stories and art dwelling with environmental catastrophe. Noah’s Arkive uncovers the startling afterlife of the Genesis narrative written from the perspective of Noah’s wife and family, the animals on the ark, and those excluded and so left behind to die. This book of recovered stories speaks eloquently to the ethical and political burdens of living through the Anthropocene.

Following a climate change narrative across the millennia, Noah’s Arkive surveys the long history of dwelling with the consequences of choosing only a few to survive in order to start the world over. It is an intriguing meditation on how the story of the ark can frame how we think about environmental catastrophe and refuge, conservation and exclusion, offering hope for a better future by heeding what we know from the past.

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Monster Theory
Reading Culture
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Explores concepts of monstrosity in Western civilization from Beowulf to Jurassic Park.

We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating collection that asks the question, What happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture?

In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.Contributors: Mary Baine Campbell, Brandeis U; David L. Clark, McMaster U; Frank Grady, U of Missouri, St. Louis; David A. Hedrich Hirsch, U of Illinois; Lawrence D. Kritzman, Dartmouth College; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell U; Stephen Pender; Allison Pingree, Harvard U; Anne Lake Prescott, Barnard College; John O'Neill, York U; William Sayers, George Washington U; Michael Uebel, U of Virginia; Ruth Waterhouse.
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Of Giants
Sex, Monsters, And The Middle Ages
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

Considers what monsters tell us about identity in the medieval period.

A monster lurks at the heart of medieval identity, and this book seeks him out. Reading a set of medieval texts in which giants and dismemberment figure prominently, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen brings a critical psychoanalytic perspective to bear on the question of identity formation-particularly masculine identity-in narrative representation. The giant emerges here as an intimate stranger, a monster who stands at the limits of selfhood.

Arguing that in the romance tradition of late fourteenth-century England, identity is inscribed on sexed bodies only through the agency of a monster, Cohen looks at the giant as the masculine body writ large. In the giant he sees an uncanny figure, absolutely other and curiously familiar, that serves to define the boundaries of masculine embodiment. Philosophically compelling, the book is also a philologically rigorous inquiry into the phenomenon of giants and giant-slaying in various texts from the Anglo-Saxon period to late Middle English, including Beowulf, Chrétien de Troyes’s The Knight and the Lion, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, several works by Chaucer, Sir Gowther, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and more.A significant contribution to our understanding of medieval culture, Of Giants also provides surprising insights into questions about the psychosocial work of representation in its key location for the individual: the construction of gender and the social formation of the boundaries of gender identification. It will engage students of the Middle Ages as well as those interested in discourses of the body, social identity, and the grotesque. ISBN 0-8166-3216-2 Cloth £00.00 $47.95xxISBN 0-8166-3217-0 Paper £00.00 $18.95x240 Pages 5 black-and-white photos 5 7/8 x 9 MayMedieval Cultures Series, volume 17Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
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Stone
An Ecology of the Inhuman
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the “really real”: blunt factuality, nature’s curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life.

Although geological time can leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that stone’s endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a profound challenge to modernity’s disenchantments. Its agency undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a bifurcation that renders nature “out there,” a mere resource for recreation, consumption, and exploitation.

Written with great verve and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept —“Geophilia,” “Time,” “Force,” and “Soul”—Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics including stone’s potential to transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time, the “petrification” of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear, the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether stones reproduce and have souls.

Showing that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to Iceland⎯a land that, writes the author, “reminds us that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient.”

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Elemental Ecocriticism
Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world.

The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation).

Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.


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Veer Ecology
A Companion for Environmental Thinking
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

The words most commonly associated with the environmental movement—save, recycle, reuse, protect, regulate, restore—describe what we can do to help the environment, but few suggest how we might transform ourselves to better navigate the sudden turns of the late Anthropocene. Which words can help us to veer conceptually along with drastic environmental flux? Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert asked thirty brilliant thinkers to each propose one verb that stresses the forceful potential of inquiry, weather, biomes, apprehensions, and desires to swerve and sheer. Each term is accompanied by a concise essay contextualizing its meaning in times of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and global climate change.

Some verbs are closely tied to natural processes: compost, saturate, seep, rain, shade, sediment, vegetate, environ. Many are vaguely unsettling: drown, unmoor, obsolesce, power down, haunt. Others are enigmatic or counterintuitive: curl, globalize, commodify, ape, whirl. And while several verbs pertain to human affect and action—love, represent, behold, wait, try, attune, play, remember, decorate, tend, hope—a primary goal of Veer Ecology is to decenter the human. Indeed, each of the essays speaks to a heightened sense of possibility, awakening our imaginations and inviting us to think the world anew from radically different perspectives. A groundbreaking guide for the twenty-first century, Veer Ecology foregrounds the risks and potentialities of living on—and with—an alarmingly dynamic planet.

Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Texas at Arlington; Joseph Campana, Rice U; Holly Dugan, George Washington U; Lara Farina, West Virginia U; Cheryll Glotfelty, U of Nevada, Reno; Anne F. Harris, DePauw U; Tim Ingold, U of Aberdeen; Serenella Iovino, U of Turin; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Scott Maisano, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Tobias Menely, U of California, Davis; Steve Mentz, St. John’s U; J. Allan Mitchell, U of Victoria; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Vin Nardizzi, U of British Columbia; Laura Ogden, Dartmouth College; Serpil Opperman, Hacettepe U, Ankara; Daniel C. Remein, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Margaret Ronda, U of California, Davis; Nicholas Royle, U of Sussex; Catriona Sandilands, York U; Christopher Schaberg, Loyola U; Rebecca R. Scott, U of Missouri; Theresa Shewry, U of California, Santa Barbara; Mick Smith, Queen’s U; Jesse Oak Taylor, U of Washington; Brian Thill, Golden West College; Coll Thrush, U of British Columbia, Vancouver; Cord J. Whitaker, Wellesley College; Julian Yates, U of Delaware.

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Japan’s Economy in War and Reconstruction
Jerome B. Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 1949

Japan's Economy in War and Reconstruction was first published in 1949. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Dr. Cohen's substantial monograph is a carefully documented account of Japan's economic development from 1937 to 1949. It describes with much statistical evidence a remarkable experiment in planned industrial expansion prior to 1941, then continues with a survey of the war years, showing both the successes and failures of the planning, controlling, financing, and developing of Japan's war industries.

The last part of the book deals with the post-war problems of Japan from the war's end to the latter part of 1948—three years of occupation by the Allied Powers. Dr. Cohen discusses the three key economic factors: the basic reforms, the rapidly mounting inflation, and the slowly increasing, but still low level of production.

Dr. Cohen's first chapter is devoted to the careful planning of the years before the war. The next chapters discuss Japan's efforts to cope with the problems of munitions, food supply, and labor as the Allied war effort gradually wore her down. There are detailed studies of separate industries, shipping, and agriculture, and a discussion of the parts played respectively by air, sea, and land operations in the destruction of Japan's ability to wage successful war.

One of the main theses of these chapters is that the increasingly enveloping blockade of Japan shut off necessary industrial raw materials, and so brought Japanese war production to a virtual standstill before the main weight of the strategic air attack was delivered, and so made it impossible for Japan to continue the war.

The author's grim picture of inter-service quarrels and overlapping and inconsistent controls demonstrates that the Japanese army, navy, and civil service, in spite of their reputation for exact and strict organization, in practice failed to make good use of their unlimited powers.

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Spectacles Of Realism
Gender, Body, Genre
Margaret Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

A rethinking of realism that reveals its relevance to sexual and cultural politics.

Despite rumors of its demise in literary theory and practice, realism persists. Why this is, and how realism is relevant to current interdisciplinary debates in gender studies and cultural studies, are the questions underlying Spectacles of Realism. With particular reference to nineteenth-century French culture, the contributors explore the role realism has played in the social construction of gender and sexuality. Among their subjects are nineteenth-century physiologies, photographs, caricatures, and Balzac’s Comédie humaine; the ethnographic claims of Goncourt’s naturalism and the historical claims of Zola’s; and the allure of exotica displayed at new museums and international expositions.

Contributors: April Alliston, Princeton U; Emily Apter, UCLA; Charles Bernheimer, U of Pennsylvania; Rhonda Garelick; Judith Goldstein, Vassar; Anne Higonnet, Wellesley; Roger Huss, Queen Mary and Westfield College; Dorothy Kelly, Boston U; Diana Knight, U of Nottingham; Jann Matlock, Harvard U; Linda Nochlin, NYU; Patrick O’Donovan, King’s College; Vanessa Schwartz, American U; Naomi Segal, U of Reading; Barbara Vinken, NYU.
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The Networked Wilderness
Communicating in Early New England
Matt Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

In The Networked Wilderness, Matt Cohen examines communications systems in early New England and finds that, surprisingly, struggles over information technology were as important as theology, guns, germs, or steel in shaping the early colonization of North America. Colonists in New England have generally been viewed as immersed in a Protestant culture of piety and alphabetic literacy. At the same time, many scholars have insisted that the culture of the indigenous peoples of the region was a predominantly oral culture. But what if, Cohen posits, we thought about media and technology beyond the terms of orality and literacy?

Reconceptualizing aural and inscribed communication as a spectrum, The Networked Wilderness bridges the gap between the history of the book and Native American systems of communication. Cohen reveals that books, paths, recipes, totems, and animals and their sounds all took on new interactive powers as the English negotiated the well-developed informational trails of the Algonquian East Coast and reported their experiences back to Europe. Native and English encounters forced all parties to think of each other as audiences for any event that might become a kind of "publication."

Using sources ranging from Thomas Morton's Maypole festival to the architecture of today's Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Cohen shows that the era before the printing press came to New England was one of extraordinary fertility for communications systems in America.

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The Silence of the Miskito Prince
How Cultural Dialogue Was Colonized
Matt Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Confronting the rifts created by our common conceptual vocabulary for North American colonial studies 

How can we tell colonial histories in ways that invite intercultural conversation within humanistic fields that are themselves products of colonial domination? Beginning with a famous episode of failed communication from the narrative of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, The Silence of the Miskito Prince explores this question by looking critically at five concepts frequently used to imagine solutions to the challenges of cross-cultural communication: understanding, cosmopolitanism, piety, reciprocity, and patience. 

Focusing on the first two centuries of North American colonization, Matt Cohen traces how these five concepts of cross-cultural relations emerged from, and continue to evolve within, colonial dynamics. Through a series of revealing archival explorations, he argues the need for a new vocabulary for the analysis of past interactions drawn from the intellectual and spiritual domains of the colonized, and for a historiographical practice oriented less toward the illusion of complete understanding and scholarly authority and more toward the beliefs and experiences of descendant communities. 

The Silence of the Miskito Prince argues for new ways of framing scholarly conversations that use past interactions as a site for thinking about intercultural relations today. By investigating the colonial histories of these terms that were assumed to promote inclusion, Cohen offers both a reflection on how we got here and a model of scholarly humility that holds us to our better or worse pasts.

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Material Events
Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory
Tom Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

Renowned contributors use the late work of this crucial figure to open new speculations on "materiality." 

A "material event," in one of Paul de Man’s definitions, is a piece of writing that enters history to make something happen. This interpretation hovers over the publication of this volume, a timely reconsideration of de Man’s late work in its complex literary, critical, cultural, philosophical, political, and historical dimensions.

A distinguished group of scholars responds to the problematic of "materialism" as posed in Paul de Man’s posthumous final book, Aesthetic Ideology. These contributors, at the forefront of critical theory, productive thinking, and writing in the humanities, explore the question of "material events" to illuminate not just de Man’s work but their own. Prominent among the authors here is Jacques Derrida, whose extended essay “Typewriter Ribbon:  Limited Inc (2)” returns to a celebrated episode in Rousseau’s Confessions that was discussed by de Man in Allegories of Reading. 

The importance of de Man’s late work is related to a broad range of subjects and categories and-in Derrida’s provocative reading of de Man’s concept of "materiality"-the politico-autobiographical texts of de Man himself. This collection is essential reading for all those interested in the present state of literary and cultural theory.  

Contributors: Judith Butler, UC Berkeley; T. J. Clark, UC Berkeley; Jacques Derrida, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and UC Irvine; Barbara Johnson, Harvard U; Ernesto Laclau, U of Essex; Arkady Plotnitsky, Purdue U; Laurence A. Rickels, UC Santa Barbara; and Michael Sprinker.

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Embodied
Victorian Literature and the Senses
William A. Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

Making sense of the body in Victorian literature

What does it mean to be human? British writers in the Victorian period found a surprising answer to this question. What is human, they discovered, is nothing more or less than the human body itself. In literature of the period, as well as in scientific writing and journalism, the notion of an interior human essence came to be identified with the material existence of the body. The organs of sensory perception were understood as crucial routes of exchange between the interior and the external worlds.

Anatomizing Victorian ideas of the human, William A. Cohen considers the meaning of sensory encounters in works by writers including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rather than regarding the bodily exterior as the primary location in which identity categories—such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability—are expressed, he focuses on the interior experience of sensation, whereby these politics come to be felt. In these elegant engagements with literary works, cultural history, and critical theory, Cohen advances a phenomenological approach to embodiment, proposing that we encounter the world not through our minds or souls but through our senses.
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Filth
Dirt, Digust, and Modern Life
William A. Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
From floating barges of urban refuse to dung-encrusted works of art, from toxic landfills to dirty movies, filth has become a major presence and a point of volatile contention in modern life. This book explores the question of what filth has to do with culture: what critical role the lost, the rejected, the abject, and the dirty play in social management and identity formation. It suggests the ongoing power of culturally mandated categories of exclusion and repression.Focusing on filth in literary and cultural materials from London, Paris, and their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary phobias, fictional representations of laboring women and foreigners as polluting, and relations among disease, disorder, and sexual-racial disharmony. Filth provides the first sustained consideration, both theoretical and historical, of a subject whose power to horrify, fascinate, and repel is as old as civilization itself.Contributors: David S. Barnes, U of Pennsylvania; Neil Blackadder, Knox College; Joseph Bristow, U of California, Los Angeles; Joseph W. Childers, U of California, Riverside; Eileen Cleere, Southwestern U; Natalka Freeland, U of California, Irvine; Pamela K. Gilbert, U of Florida; Christopher Hamlin, U of Notre Dame; William Kupinse, U of Puget Sound; Benjamin Lazier, U of Chicago; David L. Pike, American U; David Trotter, U of Cambridge.William A. Cohen is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction.Ryan Johnson is completing his Ph.D. in the Department of English at Stanford University, where he has served as general editor of the Stanford Humanities Review.
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Citizen, Invert, Queer
Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
Deborah Cohler
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? Citizen, Invert, Queer illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture.
 
Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, Deborah Cohler maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. Cohler integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in her readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
 
By examining the shifting intersections of nationalism and sexuality before, during, and after the Great War, this book illuminates profound transformations in our ideas about female homosexuality.
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Edward Albee - American Writers 77
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Ruby Cohn
University of Minnesota Press, 1969

Edward Albee - American Writers 77 was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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Sister Kenny
The Woman Who Challenged the Doctors
Victor Cohn
University of Minnesota Press, 1976

Sister Kenny was first published in 1976. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the Australian-born nurse, is remembered by thousands of grateful parents and grandparents of young polio patients, as well as others who were less personally affected, as the woman who successfully fought the medical profession to win acceptance of her techniques to combat the crippling effects of this disease.

In this biography Victor Cohn, a prize-winning science writer, details the life of Sister Kenny and her significant role in the history of medicine. It is an inspiring story and one which will be of particular interest to those of the present generation who are engaged in the movement for women's equality. Sister Kenny's struggle against the bitter opposition of many doctors to her concepts for the treatment of polio dramatized the then common attitude of male chauvinism on the part of the medical profession toward nurses.

The biography traces Sister Kenny's life from her birth in Australia, through her early nursing career in the bush, to her rise to prominence in America. Much of the narrative focuses on her confrontation with the medical establishment. Throughout, the author writes from an objective viewpoint, and in conclusion he assesses Sister Kenny's accomplishments.

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Traveling without Moving
Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America
Taiyon J. Coleman
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

A stunning lyrical commentary on the constructions of race, gender, and class in the fraught nexus of a Black woman’s personal experience and cultural history

 

The Fair Housing Act passed in 1968, and more than fifty years later, yours seems to be the only Black family on your block in Minneapolis. You and your Black African husband, both college graduates, make less money than some White people with a felony record and no high school diploma. You’re the only Black student in your graduate program. You just aren’t working hard enough. You’re too sensitive. Sandra Bland? George Floyd? Don't take everything so personally. Amid the White smiles of Minnesota Nice and the Minnesota Paradox—the insidious racism of an ostensibly inclusive place to live—what do you do? If you’re Taiyon J. Coleman, you write.

 

In Traveling without Moving, Coleman shares intimate essays from her life: her childhood in Chicago—growing up in poverty with four siblings and a single mother—and the empowering decision to leave her first marriage. She writes about being the only Black student in a prestigious and predominantly White creative writing program, about institutional racism and implicit bias in writing instruction, about the violent legacies of racism in the U.S. housing market, about the maternal health disparities seen across the country and their implication in her own miscarriage. She explores what it means to write her story and that of her family—an act at once a responsibility and a privilege—bringing forth the inherent contradictions between American ideals and Black reality.

 

Using a powerful blend of perspectives that move between a first-person lens of lived experience and a wider-ranging critique of U.S. culture, policy, and academia, Coleman’s writing evinces how a Black woman in America is always on the run, always Harriet Tubman, traveling with her babies in tow, seeking safety, desperate to survive, thrive, and finally find freedom.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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Beyond Gated Politics
Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy
Romand Coles
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
In the early years of the new millennium, the practice of democracy in America and around the world faces tremendous dangers: the proliferation of transnational corporations, the spread of oppressive fundamentalism, and environmental collapse. Within the United States, opposition to increasingly antidemocratic political and economic policies has been either nonexistent or unsuccessful. This trend includes, but far exceeds, the Bush administration’s policies from the Patriot Act and the war on Iraq to the “Clear Channelization” of the media and the private development of public lands. 

In Beyond Gated Politics, political theorist and grassroots activist Romand Coles argues that the survival of democracy depends on recognizing the failings of disengaged liberal democracy—the exclusions and subjugations that accompany every democratic “we,” for example—and experimenting with more radical modes of democratic theory and action. Among those brought into the conversation are John Howard Yoder, John Rawls, Alisdair MacIntyre, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde. 

Coles, whose work is deeply informed by his own experiences as an activist, pays close attention to the actual practice of democracy with particular interest in emerging social movements. In doing so, he not only moves beyond the paradigms of political liberalism, deliberative democracy, and communitarian republicanism, but also cultivates multidimensional modes of public discourse that reflect and sustain the creative tension at the heart of democratic life and responsibility. 

Romand Coles is professor of political theory at Duke University. His previous books include Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas and Self/Power/Other: Political Theory and Dialogical Ethics.
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Fighting Words
Black Women and the Search for Justice
Patricia Hill Collins
University of Minnesota Press, 1998
When Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins was published in 1990, reviewers called it "remarkable," "rich and valuable," and proclaimed, "with the publication of this book, Black feminism has moved to a new level." Now, in Fighting Words, Collins expands and extends the discussion of the "outsider within" presented in her earlier work, investigating how effectively Black feminist thought confronts the injustices African American women currently face. Collins takes on a broad range of issues-poverty, mothering, white supremacy and Afrocentrism, the resegregation of American society by race and class, the ideas of Sojourner Truth and how they can serve as a springboard for more liberating social theory. Contrasting social theories that support unjust power relations of race, class, gender, and nation with those that challenge inequalities, Collins investigates why some ideas are granted the status of "theory" while others remain "thought." "It is not that elites produce theory while everyone else produces mere thought," she writes. "Rather, elites possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as theory as being universal, normative, and ideal." Collins argues that because African American women and other historically oppressed groups seek economic and social justice, their social theories may emphasize themes and work from assumptions that are different from those of mainstream American society, generating new angles of vision on injustice. Collins also puts such oppositional social theory to the test: while the words of these theories may challenge injustice, do the ideas make a difference in the lives of the people they claim to represent? Throughout, Collins provides an essential understanding of how "outsiders" resist mainstream perspectives, and what the mainstream can learn from such "outsiders." Historically situated yet transcending the specific, Fighting Words provides a new interpretive framework for both thinking through and overcoming social injustice. "In her perceptive book, Fighting Words, Patricia Hill Collins, a leading scholar in critical theory, argues that intellectuals who break with conventional wisdom are more of a threat to the establishment than their numbers might suggest." Joe R. Feagin in The Chronicle of Higher Education "Fighting Words is a treatise, if you will, encouraging all black women to engage in dialogue and to reach out to each other, regardless of education, income, or class. Fighting Words is an amazing work in the way it seamlessly combines the histories of black women and feminism. Even more impressive is the way Collins blends her personal experiences as a black woman, educator, and sociologist. Collins is all about telling the truth, now. That is probably why Fighting Words is such a revelation." Black Issues Book Review "Fighting Words ably demonstrates that Collins is still our leading theorist. Those who understand black women in terms of reductionist categories and who need to read this book probably won't. But it gives the rest of us another sharp implement with which to saw at the ropes." Women's Review of Books "Collins argues that the political gains of black women's 'talking back' now must be measured against changes brought on by the postmodern criticism of social science and Afrocentricism. Collins calls for a critical social theory that not only encourages black women's full participation in social life but actually grounds its own authority in its ability to enable black women's full participation." American Journal of Sociology "Collins' exploration of the question, 'What is knowledge?' demonstrates the value of a perspective that brings together the complex interrelationships of race, gender and social ranking. The text is both counter-theoretical and practical­­a readable, persuasive and important source. Highly recommended." The Diversity Factor "Advances a much needed discussion, beyond feminism and identity politics for black women and, presumably, for women of color generally." National Women's Studies Association Journal "Hill Collins provides a refreshing new look at theory that is not mired in obscure language but purposely written in multiple languages to welcome a broader audience. By using accessible/inclusive language and drawing on many schools of intellectual thought, she informs and educates across disciplines ­ a unique characteristic in academia. She delivers a critical and passionate work that is inspiring to a new generation of scholars and renews the spirit of existing scholars." Gender and Society "Collins has offered an excellent text that helps us understand not only Black feminist thought and its relationship to Black women's experiences, but also how it may help those of us truly working for social justice." Feminist Collections "This book has many suggestive ideas and well-thought-through social theoretical analyses. In line with her earlier work, Collins continues to argue that group positions generate epistemological standpoints from which people ask and answer questions of social knowledge in different ways. She considers whether recent theories of Black women as having 'intersectional' positions is a better conceptualization of the specific standpoint of Black women. Collins's book offers much to think about and to discuss for those involved in struggles generated by encounters and events beyond theory." Hypatia "This is a work that is both theoretically rich and yet deeply personal in its expressive voice. Collins points us toward the construction of new critical theoretical approaches that can effectively advance the struggles for social justice. Fighting Words is a powerful and passionate work." --Manning Marable Patricia Hill Collins is Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Sociology in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati.
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The Makah Indians
A Study of an Indian Tribe in Modern American Society
Elizabeth Colson
University of Minnesota Press, 1953

The Makah Indians was first published in 1953. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Elizabeth Colson lived for a year among the Makah Indians at their reservation at Neah Bay, Washington, while engaged in the field work for this fascinating anthropological study. During that time she made friends with many of the tribe. She shared in their daily living and in their festivities. She listened with an understanding ear to their problems, to their rambling conversations, as well as to their replies in formal interviews.

The result is a richly detailed description of how an American Indian group lives in modern society and an acute analysis of their social problems and adjustments.

The author describes the land of the Makah, explains the origin of the tribe, and portrays their characteristic traits. In sections on the Makah and the Whites and the Makah and the Outer World, she analyzes group relationships. In another section, she describes the internal tribal rivalries that stem from the Makah tradition. Finally, she discusses the religious concepts and practices.

Anthropologists will find the study of primary importance. It is significant to social scientists in other fields as well and to all readers who are concerned about race relations and the special problems of the American Indian. In chronicling the effects of the U.S. Indian Service on one tribe, the book treats an important aspect of American social history.

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HENRY STEELE COMMAGER
University of Minnesota Press

Immigration and American History was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Ten scholars noted for their studies in immigration history contribute essays to this volume. Dr. Commager surveys the course of immigration studies over the years. Oscar Handlin reappraises the role of immigration in American life. Ingrid Semmingsen, Norwegian historian, writes on the image of American in Europe. Philip D. Jordan focuses on the immigrant's view of America. John T. Flanagan discusses the immigrant in fiction. Carlton C. Qualey contributes two essays. In the first he surveys world population movements and in the second he suggests new source materials for immigration studies. Henry A. Pochmann discusses the migration of ideas—what ideas have come into America, from where, and to what end? Franklin D. Scott inquires into the value of immigration studies of nationality groups. The Reverend Colman J. Barry explores possibilities for future immigration studies. Theodore C. Blegen takes a backward glance and a forward look at immigration studies.

The volume is based on the papers given at a conference held at the University of Minnesota in honor of Dr. Blegen on his retirement from the university.
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International Economic Relations
Commission of inquiry into National Policy in International Economic Relati
University of Minnesota Press, 1934

International Economic Relations was first published in 1934. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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Committee Committee on Educational Research
University of Minnesota Press
Studies in Higher Education was first published in 1943. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.The Biennial Report of the Committee on Educational Research, 1940-42During this period the Committee on Educational Research devoted its resources primarily to two university-wide studies: those concerned with faculty services, and with the curriculum. The teaching load investigation formed the basis for establishing a sensible teaching load and provided a comprehensive analysis of the manifold activities for which the faculty and administrative staff are responsible. The curriculum study will be of greatest value if followed by more intensive studies in particular departments or colleges, some of which are already under way.
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Committee Committee on Educational Research
University of Minnesota Press
The Effective General College Curriculum as Revealed by Examinations was first published in 1937. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This volume, authored by the Committee on Education Research of the University of Minnesota, is the ninth in a series dealing with obstacles and challenges in college education.The General College of the University of Minnesota was established in 1932 as an experiment in giving students who cannot spend four years or more in college as broad a cultural education as possible. This book sketches the development of the program, tells how that program operates and what its objectives are, and describes in detail the several courses and the examinations that have been devised to measure its success.Part I contains introductory chapters by President Coffman, Melvin E. Haggerty, Dean of the College of Education, Malcolm S. MacLean, director of the General College, and Professors Alvin C. Eurich and Palmer O. Johnson, examination counselors. Each chapter in Part II, “The Comprehensive Examination Areas,” deals with a specific field: contemporary affairs, history and government, economics, euthenics, psychology, art, physical science, biological science, and English. Each chapter is written by well-qualified authorities in their respective fields, and gives course content as well as examples and results of the tests by which the General College measures the growth of the individual student in judgment, in ability to solve problems, and in appreciation of the arts. Part III contains studies of related problems.
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Committee Committee on Land Utilization
University of Minnesota Press
Land Utilization in Minnesota was first published in 1934. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This volume constitutes the final report of the Minnesota Committee on Land Utilization. Appointed in 1932 by Governor Floyd B. Olson, the committee conducted an exhaustive, two-year study of land use in northern Minnesota, paying careful attention to the repopulation of the cut-over lands.Chaired by Lotus D. Coffman, president of the University of Minnesota, the Committee included twelve members representing different geographical locations of Minnesota. The report was prepared for publication by Professors William Anderson and Oscar B. Jesness of the University of Minnesota and Dr. Raphael Zon, director of the Lakes States Forest Experiment Station.Topics discussed include: physical and climatic features affecting land use; social and economic effects of past land development; population trends and land use; present and possible future need for agricultural and forest lands; the use of land for recreation; water and mineral resources as related to land use; taxation as it affects land use; and local government under changed land use conditions.In his foreword to the volume, Governor Olson remarks “The report discusses concretely the direction in which the commonwealth must move to bring our own house in order, and it lays a foundation for action by our state legislature. In my humble opinion, it is the most thorough and constructive research report outlining a land policy that has ever been brought together in this state.”
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Cartographic Cinema
Tom Conley
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Cartography and cinema are what might be called locational machinery. Maps and movies tell their viewers where they are situated, what they are doing, and, to a strong degree, who they are. In this groundbreaking work, eminent scholar Tom Conley establishes the ideological power of maps in classic, contemporary, and avant-garde cinema to shape the imaginary and mediated relations we hold with the world. Cartographic Cinema examines the affinities of maps and movies through comparative theory and close analysis of films from the silent era to the French New Wave to Hollywood blockbusters. In doing so, Conley reveals that most of the movies we see contain maps of various kinds and almost invariably constitute a projective apparatus similar to cartography. In addition, he demonstrates that spatial signs in film foster a critical relation with the prevailing narrative and mimetic registers of cinema. Conley convincingly argues that the very act of watching films, and cinema itself, is actually a form of cartography. Unlike its function in an atlas, a map in a movie often causes the spectator to entertain broader questions—not only about cinema but also of the nature of space and being.
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An Errant Eye
Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France
Tom Conley
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
An Errant Eye studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a "new poetics of space" ranging throughout French Renaissance poetry, prose, and cartography, Tom Conley performs dazzling readings of maps, woodcuts, and poems to plot a topographical shift in the late Renaissance in which space, subjectivity, and politics fall into crisis. He charts the paradox of a period whose demarcation of national space through cartography is rendered unstable by an ambient world of printed writing.

This tension, Conley demonstrates, cuts through literature and graphic matter of various shapes and forms-hybrid genres that include the comic novel, the emblem-book, the eclogue, sonnets, and the personal essay. An Errant Eye differs from historical treatments of spatial invention through Conley's argument that the topographic sensibility is one in which the ocular faculty, vital to the description of locale, is endowed with tact and touch.

Detailed close readings of Apian, Rabelais, Montaigne, and others empower the reader with a lively sense of the topographical impulse, deriving from Conley's own "errant eye," which is singularly discerning in attentiveness to the ambiguities of charted territory, the contours of woodcut images, and the complex combinations of word and figure in French Renaissance poetry, emblem, and politics.
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Film Hieroglyphs
Tom Conley
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
At a time when traditional film theory privileged the purely visual, Film Hieroglyphs introduced a new way of watching film—examining the ways in which writing bears on cinema. Author Tom Conley gives special consideration to the points (ruptures) at which story, image, and writing appear to be at odds with one another.Conley hypothesizes that major directors—Renoir, Lang, Walsh, Rossellini—tend unconsciously to meld history and ideology. Graphic elements are seen as simultaneously foreign and integral to the field of the image. From these contradictions hieroglyphs emerge that mark a design attesting to a hidden rhetoric and to configurations of meaning that cinema cannot always control.Tom Conley is Lowell Professor of romance languages and visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. Among his books is The Self-Made Map (1996), as well as translations of The Fold (1992) by Gilles Deleuze and In the Metro (2002) by Marc Augé, all available from the University of Minnesota Press.
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The Self-Made Map
Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France
Tom Conley
University of Minnesota Press, 2011
The Self-Made Map argues that during the Renaissance in France a "new cartographic impulse" affected both the "graphic and imaginary forms of literature." In this wide-ranging and fascinating work, Tom Conley demonstrates that as new maps were plotted during this period, a new sense of self emerged, one defined in part by the relationship of the self to space.

Conley traces the explosion of interest in mapmaking that occurred with the discovery of the New World, and discusses the commensurate rise of what he defines as cartographic writing-writing that "holds, penetrates, delineates, and explores space." Considering the works of such writers as Rabelais, Montaigne, and Descartes, Conley provides a "navigation" through the printed page, revealing the emerging values of Renaissance France. In his examination of the placing of words, letters, and graphic elements in books, he exposes the playful and sometimes enigmatic relation between spatial organization and text.

Conley also exposes the ideological exercise inherent in mapmaking, arguing that Renaissance cartography is inseparably bound up with the politics of the era. He undertakes close readings of maps and illustrations, discussing the necessity of viewing Renaissance maps in the context of their typographic layout, graphic reproduction, and literary and ideological import.

Richly illustrated throughout, The Self-Made Map combines studies of art, geography, history, literature, and printing to show a clear historical transformation, along the way linking geographical discoveries, printing processes, and political awareness. Conley's provocative analysis discloses how early modern printed literature and cartography worked together to crystallize broader issues engaging the then emergent status of cultural identity, nation, and individuality.
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The War Against The Beavers
Learning to Be Wild in the North Woods
Verena Andermatt Conley
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
A lifelong city dweller, Verena Andermatt Conley had long harbored romantic ideals about the natural world and dreamed of a wilderness retreat for herself and her husband, Tom. When a sizable tract of land along the Vermillion River on the edge of Minnesota's Boundary Waters - complete with two primitive log cabins - became available, they jumped at the chance to own a piece of paradise.The War against the Beavers is a wry and funny account of two people's ten-year apprenticeship in backwoods living, from their arrival as literal babes in the woods to their education in the ways of nature as they face plagues of insects, fungus, storms, and droughts, and embark on a lengthy campaign to eradicate a colony of beavers that threatens the peace and beauty of their forest refuge. It is only the coming of a mechanized and much more menacing threat - bulldozers and other heavy machinery clear-cutting the woods - that restores perspective to the obsessed cabin dwellers.
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Donald Connelly
University of Minnesota Press
Clinical Decisions and Laboratory Use was first published in 1982.As the national expenditure for health care continues to mount, pressures from within and outside of medicine are encouraging more effective and economical use of medical resources. Though much of the current attention is focused on a few high-cost, technologically dramatic procedures, the rapidly growing use of laboratory tests makes up a substantial portion of heal care costs. Evidence suggests that a significant amount of laboratory use is ineffective and unnecessary and could be eliminated with no harmful effects on the quality of care.This book, which is based on the Conference on Clinical Decision Making and Laboratory Use held at the University of Minnesota in 1980, focuses on the problems faced by health care professionals as they attempt to control laboratory costs and suggests ways of making rational and effective decisions. The 32 chapters deal with the following topics: Medical Decisions, Technology, and Social Needs; The Process of Clinical Decision Making; Clinical Decisions and the Clinical Laboratory; Medical Education and Effective Laboratory Use; Tools for Supporting the Decision-Making Process; and Research Initiatives Toward Effective Decision Making and Laboratory Use. Physicians, clinic and hospital administrators, laboratory directors, and health care planners will find this book a useful source of information in establishing their own procedures for clinical decision making.
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Homeless Mothers
Face to Face with Women and Poverty
Deborah R. Connolly
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
A first-person look at the challenges and cultural perceptions confronting homeless women. Homeless Mothers follows the lives of mothers on the margins and asks where they fit in the increasingly black-and-white model of motherhood set up by society. Their voices, so rarely heard and so often ignored, resonate throughout this book. Both an anthropologist in the field and a social worker on the job, Deborah R. Connolly is ideally placed to draw out these women's life stories. Using their own words, by turns eloquent and awkward, poignant and harsh, she maps the perilous territory between the promise of childhood and the hard reality of motherhood on the street. What emerges is a glimpse of the cultural, class, gender, and economic challenges these women experience, a glimpse as real for us as the headlines and stereotypes that so often displace homeless mothers and consign them to silence. "Connolly explores in rich detail the day-to-day experiences of women who use family shelters. Homeless Mothers is an insider's view on poverty and homelessness from the standpoint of mothers, families, and the social service providers who work with them. Connolly uses ethnographic methods and skills worthy of a good fiction writer to portray the daily lives, struggles, and intricate negotiations of homeless mothers." --Housing Studies Deborah R. Connolly is an advocate for the homeless and a senior research associate at Edgewood Center for Children and Families in San Francisco. She recently taught cultural anthropology at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
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Ethos Of Pluralization
William Connolly
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

A skeptical examination of the inclusiveness of pluralism.

How plural, really, is pluralism today? In this book a prominent political theorist reworks the traditional pluralist imagination, rendering it more inclusive and responsive to new drives to pluralization. Traditional pluralism, William E. Connolly shows, gives too much priority to past political settlements, allotments of public space and power relations already made and fixed. It deflates the politics of pluralization. The Ethos of Pluralization explores the constitutive tension between pluralism and pluralization, pursuing an ethos of politics that enables new forces of pluralization to find receptive responses in public life.

Connolly explores how contemporary drives to pluralize stir the reactionary forces of political fundamentalism and how fundamentalism generates the cultural fragmentation it purports to resist. The reluctance of traditional pluralists to address the tension between pluralism and pluralization plays into the hands of fundamentalist forces. The Ethos of Pluralization eventually ranges beyond the borders of the territorial state to explore relations between the globalization of economic life and a more adventurous pluralization of political identities. Engaging images of pluralism and nationalism advanced by Tocqueville, Schumpeter, Ricoeur, Walzer, Herz, and Kurth, Connolly draws selectively upon Nietzsche, Foucault, Butler and Deleuze to delineate an ethos of politics that makes for new identities while protecting conditions that make pluralism and governance possible.
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Aspirational Fascism
The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism
William E. Connolly
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Coming to terms with a new period of uncertainty when it is still replete with possibilities

This quick and engaging study clearly lays out the United States’ current democratic crisis. Examining the early stages of the Nazi movement in Germany, William E. Connolly detects synergies with Donald Trump’s rhetorical style. Tapping into a sense of contemporary fragility, Aspirational Fascism pays particular attention to how conflicts between neoliberalism and the pluralizing left have placed the white working class in a bind. Ultimately, Connolly believes a multifaceted democracy constitutes the best antidote to aspirational fascism and rethinks what a politics of the left might look like today.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
 

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Identity/Difference
Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox
William E. Connolly
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

A new edition of this classic work on the idea of difference.

In this foundational work in contemporary political theory, William Connolly makes a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the relationship between personal identity and democratic politics, particularly in the domains of religion, ethics, sexuality, and ethnicity. Every identity, Connolly argues, whether individual or social, presents us with a fundamental and troubling paradox: an identity establishes itself in relation to a set of differences, and it operates under powerful pressures to fix, regulate, or exclude some of these differences as otherness. The dignity of a people or political regime, and the quality of democratic culture, depends on the acknowledgment and ethos cultivated in response to these pressures.

In a substantial new essay, Connolly responds to the heated controversy surrounding his ideas when Identity\Difference was first published in 1991, while augmenting his discussion of the virtues of critical responsiveness. The issues of identity and difference cannot be ignored, he contends, and are ubiquitous in modern life.
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Neuropolitics
Thinking, Culture, Speed
William E. Connolly
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
A surprising exploration of connections between culture, neuroscience, and our experience of time. Why would a political theorist venture into the nexus between neuroscience and film? According to William Connolly--whose new book is itself an eloquent answer--the combination exposes the ubiquitous role that technique plays in thinking, ethics, and politics. By taking up recent research in neuroscience to explore the way brain activity is influenced by cultural conditions and stimuli such as film technique, Connolly is able to fashion a new perspective on our attempts to negotiate-and thrive-within a deeply pluralized society whose culture and economy continue to quicken. In Neuropolitics Connolly draws upon recent brain/body research to explore the creative potential of thinking, the layered character of culture, the cultivation of ethical sensibilities, and the critical role of technique in all three. He then shows how a series of films--including Vertigo, Five Easy Pieces, and Citizen Kane--enhances our appreciation of technique and contests the linear image of time now prevalent in cultural theory. Connolly deftly brings these themes together to support an ethos of deep pluralism within the democratic state and a politics of citizen activism across states. His book is an original and rigorous study that attends to the creative possibilities of thinking in identity, culture, and ethics. William E. Connolly is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recent books are Why I Am Not a Secularist (1999) and The Ethos of Pluralization (1995), and IdentityDifference (2002). His work The Terms of Political Discourse won the 1999 Benjamin Lippincott Award. Why would a political theorist venture into the nexus between neuroscience and film? According to William Connolly--whose new book is itself an eloquent answer--the combination exposes the ubiquitous role that technique plays in thinking, ethics, and politics. By taking up recent research in neuroscience to explore the way brain activity is influenced by cultural conditions and stimuli such as film technique, Connolly is able to fashion a new perspective on our attempts to negotiate-and thrive-within a deeply pluralized society whose culture and economy continue to quicken. In Neuropolitics Connolly draws upon recent brain/body research to explore the creative potential of thinking, the layered character of culture, the cultivation of ethical sensibilities, and the critical role of technique in all three. He then shows how a series of films--including Vertigo, Five Easy Pieces, and Citizen Kane--enhances our appreciation of technique and contests the linear image of time now prevalent in cultural theory. Connolly deftly brings these themes together to support an ethos of deep pluralism within the democratic state and a politics of citizen activism across states. His book is an original and rigorous study that attends to the creative possibilities of thinking in identity, culture, and ethics. William E. Connolly is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recent books are Why I Am Not a Secularist (1999) and The Ethos of Pluralization (1995), and IdentityDifference (2002). His work The Terms of Political Discourse won the 1999 Benjamin Lippincott Award.
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Why I Am Not a Secularist
William E. Connolly
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

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On The Way To Diplomacy
Costas M. Constantinou
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

A deconstruction of the idea of diplomacy that explores the links between its theory and practice.

What does theory have to do with the concept-let alone the practice-of diplomacy? More than we might think, as Costas M. Constantinou amply demonstrates in this ambitious reconsideration of both the concept of diplomacy and the working of theory. Here, Constantinou focuses on the language that underwrites and directs theory and diplomacy, and shows that such a critical approach is actually a way of practicing politics.

Constantinou underscores the original intertextual association between theory and diplomacy by employing the ancient Greek term theoria. Theoria once referred to both philosophical thinking and a sacred embassy sent to discharge a religious duty. The use of the term in this book leads to a new view of theory and diplomacy. Constantinou considers the structures of diplomacy and theory together with the notion of representation that is peculiar to Western metaphysical thought. A deconstruction of diplomacy itself, this work bridges classical and contemporary philosophy, ancient and modern political practice, and, ultimately, politics and the arts in general. It will alter the study, understanding, and practice of diplomacy.
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Alan Conway
University of Minnesota Press

The Reconstruction of Georgia was first published in 1966. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this study of the reconstruction period in Georgia following the Civil War, a British historian provides a dispassionate account of a highly controversial subject. A revisionist reappraisal, Dr. Conway's study is the first substantial history of the period to be published in fifty years. The sources include considerable material that has become available since the publication of the last major work on the subject in 1915.

The author gives close attention to the last days of the Civil War and its aftermath in Georgia, the early attempts at political reconstruction in 1865, the work of the Freedmen's Bureau, the economic problems involved in reshaping the state's economy, the development of the state-cropping and crop-lien systems, the imposition of Congressional reconstruction on Georgia under military supervision, the political maneuverings and economic ventures of such prominent figures as Joseph E. Brown, Benjamin Hill, and Hannibal I. Kimball, the efforts of the Ku-Klux Klan to nullify Negro voting rights and re-establish "white supremacy" concepts, and, finally, the investigations by the Democratic party of Republication misgovernment during the administration of Governor Rufus B. Bullock.

Dr. Conway, who did the research for the book in Georgia, has made considerable use of primary manuscripts, travelers' accounts, state and federal reports, and contemporary newspaper material to arrive at an account which judiciously assesses the claims and counter-claims of violently opposed groups which were vitally concerned with the place of the Negro in Southern society after emancipation and with the return of Georgia to the Union.

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The Welsh in America
Letters From the Immigrants
Alan Conway
University of Minnesota Press, 1961

The Welsh in America was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The Welsh formed a small but significant part of the great migration from Europe to the United States during the nineteenth century. In this volume they tell their own story in letters they wrote from America to their families and friends back home. The letters are highly readable, written, for the most part, in vivid and entertaining style which reveals the Welsh as an unusually literate people.

The 197 letters are arranged chronologically and geographically, starting with letters that tell of the voyage across the Atlantic. Once in America, the immigrants described their experiences in the farming country of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and some of the other midwestern states. Later, as the frontier moved west, they wrote of their efforts to establish exclusive Welsh settlements on the Great Plains. From the industrial centers there are letters from coal miners and iron and steel workers. The fortune seekers who went to California in the gold rush or to the mines in Colorado are also represented. Still others tell of their search for salvation in the Mormon Zion of Utah.

For each chapter or group of letters Mr. Conway has written an introduction giving the general background of the region or period and relating it to the Welsh settlers. Thus the events chronicled and the views expressed in the letters become significant in the history of the times. The majority of the letters were written in Welsh and they appear here in translation. Some were obtained from the files of old newspapers or denominational magazines; others came from the collections of the National Library of Wales or from individuals.

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Postcinematic Vision
The Coevolution of Moving-Image Media and the Spectator
Roger F. Cook
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A study of how film has continually intervened in our sense of perception, with far-ranging insights into the current state of lived experience

How has cinema transformed our senses, and how does it continue to do so? Positing film as a stage in the long coevolution of human consciousness and visual technology, Postcinematic Vision offer a fresh perspective on the history of film while providing startling new insights into the so-called divide between cinematic and digital media.

Starting with the argument that film viewing has long altered neural circuitry in our brains, Roger F. Cook proceeds to reevaluate film’s origins, as well as its merger with digital imaging in the 1990s. His animating argument is that film has continually altered the relation between media and human perception, challenging the visual nature of modern culture in favor of a more unified, pan-sensual way of perceiving. Through this approach, he makes original contributions to our understanding of how mediation is altering lived experience.

Along the way, Cook provides important reevaluations of well-known figures such as Franz Kafka, closely reading cinematic passages in the great author’s work; he reassesses the conventional wisdom that Marshall McLuhan was a technological determinist; and he lodges an original new reading of The Matrix. Full of provocative and far-reaching ideas, Postcinematic Vision is a powerful work that helps us see old concepts anew while providing new ideas for future investigation.

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Camp Sights
Sam Cook
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Unforgettable stories perfect for sharing around the campfire-now in paperback!

Camp Sights welcomes you to the intimate beauty of camps-quiet camps for fathers and daughters, familiar camps on a favorite lake with good friends, hunting camps with their rich histories and traditions, serene camps under the starry sky of a summer night, peaceful camps warmed by supper cooking on the stove.

You’ll experience the challenges and adventures of life in the North Woods-a chance encounter with Arctic wolves on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, a night on the Gods River on a canoe trip to Hudson Bay, a whiteout storm in the barren lands of the Northwest Territories. But you’ll also learn of the everyday pleasures of the outdoors-stories of steelhead fishing, deer and duck hunting, and unforgettable characters like canoe builder Joe Seliga, legendary trout fisherman Benny Larson, and Ely’s "Jackpine" Bob Cary.Throughout the book, Sam Cook offers insights into the subtleties of the natural world that all too often go unnoticed, inviting you to see your world anew.In 1976 Sam Cook trekked north from his native Kansas to work for an outfitter in the Superior-Quetico canoe country. Now, as the Duluth News-Tribune’s outdoors writer, he uses Duluth, Minnesota, as "base camp" for creating his humorous, powerful, and compassionate columns.
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Quiet Magic
Sam Cook
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

A collection of essays dedicated to the awe and solitude that can only be found in nature-now in paperback!

Step outside and marvel at the grand experience of the North-the power of a storm building on the greatest of the Great Lakes, the glory of Northern Lights in the shimmering night sky, the embracing, absolute silence of a snowhouse. Or stay inside with Quiet Magic and savor Sam Cook’s unique blend of sensitive portrayals and gentle humor.

Starting with his discovery of one of nature’s wonders-the simplicity of a stand of reeds against a wide-open sunset-and ending with a deep appreciation for the never-ending surprises of the outdoors, Sam Cook weaves a tapestry of enchanting images of the North Woods and keeps you smiling and chuckling all the way.In this long-awaited paperback edition, Sam Cook invites you to look outward to discover the North Country, and look inward to discover yourself."A special book about a special place." Jim Brandenburg, National Geographic"An uncommonly compassionate writer, Cook is arguably Minnesota’s best-loved newspaper columnist." Minnesota Monthly"The word pictures in Sam Cook’s latest literary sketch pad are poignant reminders of the depth of wonder and enjoyment that can be drawn from every experience in nature’s world." Paul Schurke, North Pole explorer
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Up North
Sam Cook
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Memorable descriptions of the Northern seasons—now in paperback!

In this unforgettable collection of essays, Sam Cook portrays the enchanting North Country as a state of mind as much as a geographical area. Up North captures the mystic moods, seasonal subtleties, and colorful characters that fill the region from the Minnesota canoe country to the vast expanse of the Northwest Territories.

Organized by time of year, Up North describes every season’s pleasures—sled dog racing in winter, hooking a northern pike on the first spring fishing trip, building a summer campfire, watching the aurora borealis in fall. Up North is an invitation to explore canoe country through Sam Cook’s eyes and your own.
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Love Rules
Silent Hollywood And The Rise Of The Managerial Class
Mark Garrett Cooper
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Arguing for a sweeping new consideration of the shift from print to cinema as a governing system for organizing modern American social relations, this book uncovers an intimate connection between Hollywood romances of the silent era and the empowerment of a managerial class. During the 1910s and 1920s, American movies told love stories through what rapidly became ubiquitous images. Again and again, silent features showed lovers separated by seeming happenstance and reunited as if by magical forces. Mark Garrett Cooper argues that this "magic" implies the expertise of the corporate movie studio with its hierarchies of professional experts. In other words, the Hollywood love story amounts to a managerial technique. Through close study of such films as Birth of a Nation, Enoch Arden, The Crowd, Why Change Your Wife? and The Jazz Singer, Love Rules shows how cinematic romance offers an object lesson in how to arrange American society-a lesson that implies that such work can be accomplished only by a managerial class. Love Rules offers a boldly original account of how the Hollywood feature film supplanted the "imagined community" of print culture and, in doing so, played a key role in the transformation of American mass culture. Mark Garrett Cooper is assistant professor of English at Florida State University.
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Russell Cooper
University of Minnesota Press
The Two Ends of the Log was first published in 1958. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Distinguished professors and administrators from a number of colleges, universities, and related organizations pool their thinking in this volume for an appraisal of college teaching as it stands today and a synthesis of ideals for the improvement of teaching and learning in higher education. The book is based on a series of papers presented at a conference on college teaching held at the University of Minnesota under the sponsorship of the Association of Minnesota Colleges. There are 27 chapters by 24 contributors.The chapters in the first section consider various aspects of the learning process. The subjects discussed include an analysis of learning, the motivation of students’ interest, the gifted student, the use of examinations, student-teacher relations, the stimulation of creativity, and the development of critical thinking and judgment.The second section, which deals with teaching, includes chapters on such subjects as a historical survey of teaching, the role of teaching in relation to technological progress, and artistry in teaching.The final section is devoted to individual methods of teaching, both traditional and new. Among chapter topics are the use of television and other audio-visual methods, student personnel services, and the role of the community in college teaching.In addition to presenting the material based on the major conference addresses, the book also includes the reports of analysts who participated in the conference programs. There is a foreword by James Lewis Morrill, former president of the University of Minnesota.
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Control of the Imaginary
Reason and Imagination in Modern Times
Luiz Costa Lima
University of Minnesota Press, 1989

Control of the Imaginary was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In Control of the Imaginary Luiz Costa Lima explains how the distinction between truth and fiction emerged at the beginning of modern times and why, upon its emergence, fiction fell under suspicion. Costa Lima not only describes the continuous relationship between Western notions of reason and subjectivity over a broad time-frame—the Renaissance to the first decade of the twentieth century—but he uses this occasion to reexamine the literary traditions of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, and Germany. The book reconstructs the dominant frames in the European tradition between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century from the perspective of a Latin American who sees the culture of his native Brazil haunted by unresolved questions from the Northern Hemisphere. Costa Lima manages to synthesize positions from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and history without separating the theoretical discussion from his historical reconstructions.

The first chapter situates the problem and grounds the emergent distinction between truth and fiction in a very close analysis of one of the first European historians, Fernao Lopes, who sets the tone for the condemnation of fiction in the name of the truth of history and the potential for individual interpretation. Costa Lima pursues these notions through the aesthetic debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the writings of the French historian Michelet. He also devotes an illuminating chapter to the invention of the strictures imposed on fiction.

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Narrative As Communication
Didier Coste
University of Minnesota Press, 1989
The first major treatise on narrative and narrative theory to make use of all the analytic tools developed in the last two decades.
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Let Me Take You Down
Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever
Jonathan Cott
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

The conception, creation, recording, and significance of the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”

John Lennon wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever” in Almería, Spain, in fall 1966, and in November, in response to that song, Paul McCartney wrote “Penny Lane” at his home in London. A culmination of what was one of the most life-altering and chaotic years in the Beatles’ career, these two songs composed the 1967 double A-side 45 rpm record that has often been called the greatest single in the history of popular music and was, according to Beatles producer George Martin, “the best record we ever made.”

 

In Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, Jonathan Cott recounts the conception and creation of these songs; describes the tumultuous events and experiences that led the Beatles to call it quits as a touring band and redefine themselves solely as recording artists; and details the complex, seventy-hour recording process that produced seven minutes of indelible music. In writing about these songs, he also focuses on them as inspired artistic expressions of two unique ways of experiencing and being in the world, as Lennon takes us down to Strawberry Fields and McCartney takes us back to Penny Lane.

 

In order to gain new vistas and multiple perspectives on these multifaceted songs, Cott also engages in conversation with five remarkable people: media artist Laurie Anderson; guitarist Bill Frisell; actor Richard Gere; Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck; and urban planner, writer, and musician Jonathan F. P. Rose. The result is a wide-ranging, illuminating exploration of the musical, literary, psychological, cultural, and spiritual aspects of two of the most acclaimed songs in rock and roll history.

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Social Figures
George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation
Daniel Cottom
University of Minnesota Press, 1987

Centers on the discourse of the liberal intellectual as exemplified in the novels of George Eliot, whose awareness of her aesthetic and social task was keener than that of most Victorian writers.

 

“…Daniel Cottom has produced a readable, well-researched, and thoroughly referenced work that speaks to a broad scholarly audience composed of philosophers, psychologists, sociolinguists, literary critics, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, to name but a few.” Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly

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Text and Culture
The Politics of Interpretation
Daniel Cottom
University of Minnesota Press, 1989

Text and Culture was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In Text & Culture, Daniel Cottom examines the political aspects of contemporary disciplines of interpretation. He pleads against limiting the act of reading by disqualifying some readings as "wrong" or unscholarly, and he argues for the necessity of multiple readings, claiming that a closed-off text glosses over differences that are political in nature. He proceeds, then, from the notion of text to culture. Just as the reading of the text is conditioned by irreducible political differences, so is the reading of culture. Finally, to illustrate and further develop his arguments, Cottom presents an extensive analysis of Great Expectations.

Cottom's materials range from academic jokes to King Lear, and the writers he discusses range from Kant to Derrida, from Freud to Basil Bernstein, from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bronislaw Malinowski to Erving Goffman, Clifford Geertz, and Stanley Fish. This study is especially concerned with the way "culture" and related terms, such as "context" and "norm," are part of a larger discourse in the contemporary humanities and social sciences - a discourse in which their effect is to repress recognition of important historical differences, conflicts, and possibilities. At the same time that he shows how difficult it is to get "beyond culture," he tries to indicate how interpretation may be turned into a more socially responsible practice.

Daniel Cottom is associate professor of English at the University of Florida. He is the author of Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minnesota, 1987) and The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott.

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Intimacy in America
Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature
Peter Coviello
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Nineteenth-century America was a sprawling new nation unmoored from precedent and the mainstays of European nationalism. In their search for nationality, Americans sought coherence in a feeling of belonging shared among diverse and scattered strangers. Reading seminal works by Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers' enthusiasms and their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an assumed national coherence. As Coviello shows, race - and especially whiteness - functioned less as a form of identity than as a model of attachment and identification, a language of affiliation. Whiteness created an imaginary fraternity that symbolized citizenship, the ownership of property, and an affinity between strangers, which became entangled in the nation's evolving codes of sexuality. Bringing race theory and "white studies" into dialogue with questions of intimacy and affect, Coviello provides a practical rapprochement between historicist and psychoanalytic methodologies. Intimacy in America gives us a new perspective on the national meanings of race and sex in American literature, as well as on the still-current dream of American-ness as an impassioned relation to far-flung, anonymous others.
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Elizabeth Cowie
University of Minnesota Press

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Recording Reality, Desiring the Real
Elizabeth Cowie
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Documentary has once again emerged as one of the most vital cultural forms, whether seen in cinemas or inside the home, as digital, film, or video. In Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, Elizabeth Cowie looks at the history of documentary and its contemporary forms, showing how it has been simultaneously understood as factual, as story, as art, and as political, addressing the seeming paradox between the pleasures of spectacle in the documentary and its project of informing and educating.

Cowie claims that, as a radical film form, documentary has been a way for filmmakers to acknowledge historical and contemporary realities by presenting images of these realities. If documentary is the desire to know reality through its images and sounds, she asks, what kind of speaking (and speaking about) emerges in documentary, and how are we engaged by it? In considering this and other questions, Cowie examines a range of noteworthy films, including Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, John Huston’s Let There Be Light, and Milica Tomic’s Portrait of My Mother.

Recording Reality, Desiring the Real
stakes documentary’s central place in cinema as both an art form and a form of social engagement, which together create a new understanding of spectatorship.
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The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History
James H. Cox
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Bringing fresh insight to a century of writing by Native Americans


The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History challenges conventional views of the past one hundred years of Native American writing, bringing Native American Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers into conversation with their predecessors. Addressing the political positions such writers have adopted, explored, and debated in their work, James H. Cox counters what he considers a “flattening” of the politics of American Indian literary expression and sets forth a new method of reading Native literature in a vexingly politicized context. 

Examining both canonical and lesser-known writers, Cox proposes that scholars approach these texts as “political arrays”: confounding but also generative collisions of conservative, moderate, and progressive ideas that together constitute the rich political landscape of American Indian literary history. Reviewing a broad range of genres including journalism, short fiction, drama, screenplays, personal letters, and detective fiction—by Lynn Riggs, Will Rogers, Sherman Alexie, Thomas King, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Winona LaDuke, Carole laFavor, and N. Scott Momaday—he demonstrates that Native texts resist efforts to be read as advocating a particular set of politics

Meticulously researched, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History represents a compelling case for reconceptualizing the Native American Renaissance as a literary–historical constellation. By focusing on post-1968 Native writers and texts, argues Cox, critics have often missed how earlier writers were similarly entangled, hopeful, frustrated, contradictory, and unpredictable in their political engagements.

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The Red Land to the South
American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico
James H. Cox
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

The forty years of American Indian literature taken up by James H. Cox—the decades between 1920 and 1960—have been called politically and intellectually moribund. On the contrary, Cox identifies a group of American Indian writers who share an interest in the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peoples of Mexico—and whose work demonstrates a surprisingly assertive literary politics in the era.

By contextualizing this group of American Indian authors in the work of their contemporaries, Cox reveals how the literary history of this period is far more rich and nuanced than is generally acknowledged. The writers he focuses on—Todd Downing (Choctaw), Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and D’Arcy McNickle (Confederated Salish and Kootenai)—are shown to be on par with writers of the preceding Progressive and the succeeding Red Power and Native American literary renaissance eras.

Arguing that American Indian literary history of this period actually coheres in exciting ways with the literature of the Native American literary renaissance, Cox repudiates the intellectual and political border that has emerged between the two eras.

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Louis Coxe
University of Minnesota Press
The Second Man and Other Poems was first published in 1955.The forty poems which make up this second volume of Mr. Coxe’s poetry display an impressive range of subject and technique. He writes of love and religion, of men at sea, of historical moments of violence decision, and of the face of nature. But the predominant themes are those which Mr. Coxe treats with especial authority: the living meaning of his native New England, of its past, and of the people who make it.Mr. Coxe writes many kinds of poetry. There are lyrics, songs, reflective poems, and dramatic monologues. Although he experiments with meter and explores the riches of language, his poetry is traditional in the best sense.Among the poems in this volume are some that have been published previously in such magazines as The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Western Review, Furioso, Hudson Review, Poetry, and Paris Review.
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Louis Coxe
University of Minnesota Press
The Wilderness and Other Poems was first published in 1958.This collection, Mr. Coxe’s third published volume of poetry, includes the long narrative poem “The Wilderness” and thirty-four shorter lyric poems. Of this book, Morton Dauwen Zabel writes: “The Wilderness is a collection of series and thoughtful poems, scrupulously conceived and phrased, many of them notable for personal charm and feeling as well, and for combining a keenly responsible intelligence with genuine lyric and reflective emotion.”Each of the poems dramatizes a single experience or complex of feelings about certain fairly common experiences. In many of the poems there is a prevailing theme of the tension between the opposite poles of will and fate. A few of the more ambitious poems attempt to answer the question, How is a man to live today?Since Mr. Coxe believes that a poem should sound well, these are poems for the ear as well as for the eye.The long title poem is published here for the first time. Some of the shorter poems have appeared in such magazines as the New Yorker, the Nation, the New Republic, Poetry, and the Sewanee Review.Earlier volumes of Mr. Coxe’s poetry are The Second Man and Other Poems (University of Minnesota Press) and The Sea Faring and Other Poems. He is also the co-author, with Robert Chapman, of Billy Budd: A Play.
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E.A. Robinson - American Writers 17
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Louis O. Coxe
University of Minnesota Press, 1962

E.A. Robinson - American Writers 17 was first published in 1962. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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City Of Plagues
Disease, Poverty, And Deviance In San Francisco
Susan Craddock
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

An eye-opening discussion of the ways disease shapes urban society

Disease may not discriminate, but it helps those who do. In this fascinating book, Susan Craddock examines the role of disease and health policy in the construction of race, gender, and class, and in urban development in nineteenth- and twentieth-century San Francisco. An absorbing look at the role of disease and health policy in the construction of race, gender, and class in urban development during nineteenth- and twentieth-century San Francisco. Susan Craddock considers tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, and syphilis as diseases whose devastations were derived in part from their use as political tools and disciplinary mechanisms

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Profit over Privacy
How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet
Matthew Crain
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A deep dive into the political roots of advertising on the internet

The contemporary internet’s de facto business model is one of surveillance. Browser cookies follow us around the web, Amazon targets us with eerily prescient ads, Facebook and Google read our messages and analyze our patterns, and apps record our every move. In Profit over Privacy, Matthew Crain gives internet surveillance a much-needed origin story by chronicling the development of its most important historical catalyst: web advertising.

The first institutional and political history of internet advertising, Profit over Privacy uses the 1990s as its backdrop to show how the massive data-collection infrastructure that undergirds the internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. Crain considers the social causes and consequences of the internet’s rapid embrace of consumer monitoring, detailing how advertisers and marketers adapted to the existential threat of the internet and marshaled venture capital to develop the now-ubiquitous business model called “surveillance advertising.” He draws on a range of primary resources from government, industry, and the press and highlights the political roots of internet advertising to underscore the necessity of political solutions to reign in unaccountable commercial surveillance.

The dominant business model on the internet, surveillance advertising is the result of political choices—not the inevitable march of technology. Unlike many other countries, the United States has no internet privacy law. A fascinating prehistory of internet advertising giants like Google and Facebook, Profit over Privacy argues that the internet did not have to turn out this way and that it can be remade into something better.

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Mediterranean Crossroads
Marseille and Modern Architecture
Sheila Crane
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Marseille was a booming Mediterranean port. Positioned at the very edge of France, the city functioned as a critical fulcrum between the metropolitan center and its overseas empire. A notoriously dangerous and cosmopolitan city, Marseille became the focus of the extraordinary energies of some of the most remarkable architects and theorists of urban modernity.

Drawing together a cast of both world-renowned and less familiar architects, photographers, and cultural theorists, including Le Corbusier, Sigfried Giedion, Walter Benjamin, and László Moholy-Nagy, Mediterranean Crossroads examines how mythic ideas about Marseille helped to shape its urban landscape. Tracing successive planning proposals in tandem with shifting representations of the city in photographs, film, guidebooks, and postcards, Sheila Crane reconstructs the history and politics of architecture in Marseille from the 1920s through the years of rebuilding after World War II.

By exploring how architects and planners negotiated highly localized pressures, evolving imperial visions, and transnational aspirations at the borders of Europe and the Mediterranean region, Mediterranean Crossroads brings to life a lost chapter in the history of modern architecture.
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In Place/Out of Place
Geography, Ideology, and Transgression
Tim Cresswell
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

In Place/Out of Place was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

What is the relationship between place and behavior? In this fascinating volume, Tim Cresswell examines this question via "transgressive acts" that are judged as inappropriate not only because they are committed by marginalized groups but also because of where they occur.

In Place/Out of Place seeks to illustrate the ways in which the idea of geographical deviance is used as an ideological tool to maintain an established order. Cresswell looks at graffiti in New York City, the attempts by various "hippie" groups to hold a free festival at Stonehenge during the summer solstices of 1984–86, and the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in Berkshire, England. In each of the cases described, the groups involved were designated as out of place both by the media and by politicians, whose descriptions included an array of images such as dirt, disease, madness, and foreignness.

Cresswell argues that space and place are key factors in the definition of deviance and, conversely, that space and place are used to construct notions of order and propriety. In addition, whereas ideological concepts being expressed about what is good, just, and appropriate often are delineated geographically, the transgression of these delineations reveals the normally hidden relationships between place and ideology-in other words, the "out-of-place" serves to highlight and define the "in-place." By looking at the transgressions of the marginalized, Cresswell argues, we can gain a novel perspective on the "normal" and "taken-for-granted" expectations of everyday life. The book concludes with a consideration of the possibility of a "politics of transgression," arguing for a link between the challenging of spatial boundaries and the possibility of social transformation.

Tim Cresswell is currently lecturer in geography at the University of Wales.

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Producing Sovereignty
The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada
Karrmen Crey
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Exploring how Indigenous media has flourished across Canada from the 1990s to the present

 

In the early 1990s, Indigenous media experienced a boom across Canada, resulting in a vast landscape of film, TV, and digital media. Coinciding with a resurgence of Indigenous political activism, Indigenous media highlighted issues around sovereignty and Indigenous rights to broader audiences in Canada. In Producing Sovereignty, Karrmen Crey considers the conditions—social movements, state policy, and evolutions in technology—that enabled this proliferation. 

 

Exploring the wide field of media culture institutions, Crey pays particular attention to those that Indigenous media makers engaged during this cultural moment, including state film agencies, arts organizations, provincial broadcasters, and more. Producing Sovereignty ranges from the formation of the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance in the early 1990s and its partnership with the Banff Centre for the Arts to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s 2016 production of Highway of Tears—an immersive 360-degree short film directed by Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson—highlighting works by Indigenous creators along the way and situating Indigenous media within contexts that pay close attention to the role of media-producing institutions.

 

Importantly, Crey focuses on institutions with limited scholarly attention, shifting beyond the work of the National Film Board of Canada to explore lesser-known institutions such as educational broadcasters and independent production companies that create programming for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. Through its refusal to treat Indigenous media simply as a set of cultural aesthetics, Producing Sovereignty offers a revealing media history of this cultural moment.

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Gameplay Mode
War, Simulation, and Technoculture
Patrick Crogan
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

From flight simulators and first-person shooters to MMPOG and innovative strategy games like 2008’s Spore, computer games owe their development to computer simulation and imaging produced by and for the military during the Cold War. To understand their place in contemporary culture, Patrick Crogan argues, we must first understand the military logics that created and continue to inform them. Gameplay Mode situates computer games and gaming within the contemporary technocultural moment, connecting them to developments in the conceptualization of pure war since the Second World War and the evolution of simulation as both a technological achievement and a sociopolitical tool.

Crogan begins by locating the origins of computer games in the development of cybernetic weapons systems in the 1940s, the U.S. Air Force’s attempt to use computer simulation to protect the country against nuclear attack, and the U.S. military’s development of the SIMNET simulated battlefield network in the late 1980s. He then examines specific game modes and genres in detail, from the creation of virtual space in fight simulation games and the co-option of narrative forms in gameplay to the continuities between online gaming sociality and real-world communities and the potential of experimental or artgame projects like September 12th: A Toy World and Painstation, to critique conventional computer games.

Drawing on critical theoretical perspectives on computer-based technoculture, Crogan reveals the profound extent to which today’s computer games—and the wider culture they increasingly influence—are informed by the technoscientific program they inherited from the military-industrial complex. But, Crogan concludes, games can play with, as well as play out, their underlying logic, offering the potential for computer gaming to anticipate a different, more peaceful and hopeful future.

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Nothing Permanent
Modern Architecture in California
Todd Cronan
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A critical look at the competing motivations behind one of modern architecture’s most widely known and misunderstood movements

 

Although “mid-century modern” has evolved into a highly popular and ubiquitous architectural style, this term obscures the varied perspectives and approaches of its original practitioners. In Nothing Permanent, Todd Cronan displaces generalizations with a nuanced intellectual history of architectural innovation in California between 1920 and 1970, uncovering the conflicting intentions that would go on to reshape the future of American domestic life.

Focusing on four primary figures—R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Ray Eames—Nothing Permanent demonstrates how this prolific era of modern architecture in California, rather than constituting a homogenous movement, was propelled by disparate approaches and aims. Exemplified by the twin pillars of Schindler and Neutra and their respective ideological factions, these two groups of architects represent opposing poles of architectural intentionality, embodying divergent views about the dynamic between interior and exterior, the idea of permanence, and the extent to which architects could exercise control over the inhabitants of their structures.

Looking past California modernism’s surface-level idealization in present-day style guides, home decor publications, films, and television shows, Nothing Permanent details the intellectual, aesthetic, and practical debates that lie at the roots of this complex architectural moment. Extracting this period from its diffusion into visual culture, Cronan argues that mid-century architecture in California raised questions about the meaning of architecture and design that remain urgent today.

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Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism
Thl Vol 53
Edmond Cros
University of Minnesota Press, 1988

Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Edmond Cros is a leading French Hispanicist whose work is unique in Continental theory because it brings Spanish and Mexican texts into current literary debates, which have so far centered mainly on the French and German traditions. Equally distinctive is the nature of his work, which Cros terms sociocriticism. Unlike most sociological approaches to literature, which leave the structure of texts untouched, sociocriticism aims to prove that the encounter with "ideological traces," and with antagonistic tensions between social classes, is central to any reading of texts. Cros's method distinguishes between the "semiotic and "ideological" elements within a text, and involves the patient, exacting reconstruction of the concrete text from these elements, a process that enables the sociocritic to interpret its fault lines, its internal contradictions - in the end , its irreducibly social nature.

As its title suggests, Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism is structured in two parts. Its opening chapters analyze sociological theories of discourse, including those of Foucault, Bakhtin, and Goldman; in the second part, Cros applies theory to practice in readings of specific works: the film Scarface, contemporary Mexican poetry and prose (Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes), and the picaresque novel of the Spanish Golden Age. In their foreword, Jurgen Link and Ursula Link-Heer differentiate sociocriticism from other social approaches to literature and show how Cros's method works in specific textual readings. They emphasize his resistance to the reductive modes and "misreadings" that dominate much of contemporary theory.

Edmond Cros is a professor of literary theory and Hispanic studies at the Universite Paul Valery in Montpellier, France, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Jurgen Link teaches at the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum and Ursula Link-Heer at the Universitat Siegen, both in West Germany.

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