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Kafka
Toward a Minor Literature
Gilles Deleuze
University of Minnesota Press, 1986
In this classic of critical thought, Deleuze and Guattari challenge conventional interpretations of Kafka’s work. Instead of exploring preexisting categories or literary genres, they propose a concept of “minor literature”—the use of a major language that subverts it from within. Writing as a Jew in Prague, they contend, Kafka made German “take flight on a line of escape” and joyfully became a stranger within it. His work therefore serves as a model for understanding all critical language that must operate within the confines of the dominant language and culture.
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Kant on Causality, Freedom, and Objectivity
William L. Harper and Ralf Meerbote, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1984

Kant on Causality, Freedom, and Objectivity was first published in 1984. 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.

Kant's account of causation is central to his views on objective truth and freedom. The Second Analogy of Experience, in the Critique of Pure Reason,where he provides his defense of the causal principle, has long been the focus of intense philosophical research. In the past twenty years, there have been two major periods of interest in Kantian themes, The first coincided with a general turn away from positivism by analytic philosophers, and resulted in a fruitful interchange between Kant scholars and those who applied Kantian ideas to contemporary philosophical problems. In recent years, a new surge of interest in Kant's work occurred along with the developing controversy over realism generated by the work of Dummett and Putnam. Scholars now appreciate the extent to which the Kantian causal principle is illuminated by the philosopher's argument that his transcendental idealism supports an empirical realism. And in turn, Kant's views on objectivity, causation, and freedom are especially relevant to the philosophical concerns raised by the new debate over realism.

The eight papers in this book are drawn from two conferences that honored Lewis White Beck, an influential Kant scholar. Together with the introductory essay by the editors, they show the continuing relevance of Kant's analysis for the present-day philosophy of causation.

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Kant’s Critical Philosophy
The Doctrine of the Faculties
Gilles Deleuze
University of Minnesota Press, 1985

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Karma Of Brown Folk
Vijay Prashad
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
Village Voice Favorite Books of 2000

The popular book challenging the idea of a model minority, now in paperback!

“How does it feel to be a problem?” asked W. E. B. Du Bois of black Americans in his classic The Souls of Black Folk. A hundred years later, Vijay Prashad asks South Asians “How does it feel to be a solution?” In this kaleidoscopic critique, Prashad looks into the complexities faced by the members of a “model minority”-one, he claims, that is consistently deployed as "a weapon in the war against black America."

On a vast canvas, The Karma of Brown Folk attacks the two pillars of the “model minority” image, that South Asians are both inherently successful and pliant, and analyzes the ways in which U.S. immigration policy and American Orientalism have perpetuated these stereotypes. Prashad uses irony, humor, razor-sharp criticism, personal reflections, and historical research to challenge the arguments made by Dinesh D’Souza, who heralds South Asian success in the U.S., and to question the quiet accommodation to racism made by many South Asians. A look at Deepak Chopra and others whom Prashad terms “Godmen” shows us how some South Asians exploit the stereotype of inherent spirituality, much to the chagrin of other South Asians. Following the long engagement of American culture with South Asia, Prashad traces India’s effect on thinkers like Cotton Mather and Henry David Thoreau, Ravi Shankar’s influence on John Coltrane, and such essential issues as race versus caste and the connection between antiracism activism and anticolonial resistance.

The Karma of Brown Folk locates the birth of the “model minority” myth, placing it firmly in the context of reaction to the struggle for Black Liberation. Prashad reclaims the long history of black and South Asian solidarity, discussing joint struggles in the U.S., the Caribbean, South Africa, and elsewhere, and exposes how these powerful moments of alliance faded from historical memory and were replaced by Indian support for antiblack racism. Ultimately, Prashad writes not just about South Asians in America but about America itself, in the tradition of Tocqueville, Du Bois, Richard Wright, and others. He explores the place of collective struggle and multiracial alliances in the transformation of self and community-in short, how Americans define themselves.

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Katherine Anne Porter - American Writers 28
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Ray B. West Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, 1963

Katherine Anne Porter - American Writers 28 was first published in 1963. 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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Katherine Mansfield Notebooks
Complete Edition
Katherine Mansfield
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

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Kenneth Burke - American Writers 75
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Merle E. Brown
University of Minnesota Press, 1989

Kenneth Burke - American Writers 75 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.

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Kierkegaard And The Ends Of Language
Geoffrey A. Hale
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
A timely and original intervention in our understanding of this major philosopher through the lens of his influence on others. What do we read when we read Kierkegaard? How do we know? Insisting that Kierkegaard remains a far more enigmatic and paradoxical writer than is often assumed, Geoffrey A. Hale argues that the best way to approach Kierkegaard's work and understand its significance for our own thought is to retrace its formative influence on major intellectuals of the early twentieth century. In mutually reflective readings of Kierkegaard's foundational texts through the work of three pivotal authors-Franz Kafka, Theodor Adorno, and Rainer Maria Rilke-Hale shows how each of these writers draws attention to the unwavering sense of human finitude that pervades all of Kierkegaard's work and, with it, the profoundly unsettling indeterminacy in which it results. It is the very limitations of language, Hale argues, that hold it open to meaning, to interpretation, and thus to freedom. Resisting clear circumscription in this way, Kierkegaard's work becomes all the more fruitful to us-and all the more challenging-to the extent that it resists our understanding. Geoffrey A. Hale received a Ph.D. in German from The Johns Hopkins University and studied at the Free University in Berlin through a Fulbright scholarship.
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Kierkegaard
Construction of the Aesthetic
Theodor Adorno
University of Minnesota Press, 1989

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Kill the Overseer!
The Gamification of Slave Resistance
Sarah Juliet Lauro
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Explores the representation of slave revolt in video games—and the trouble with making history playable

Kill the Overseer! profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and “gamify” slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others dramatically stage the slave’s choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. In this work, Sarah Juliet Lauro questions whether the reduction of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin’s Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodification of slavery’s victims, or whether these interactive experiences offer an empowering commemoration of the history of slave resistance. 

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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A Kinder, Gentler America
Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s
Mary Caputi
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
“In the Norman Rockwell paintings of the 1940s and 1950s,” wrote Newt Gingrich, “there was a clear sense of what it meant to be an American.” Gingrich’s words underline what Mary Caputi sees as a desire of the neoconservative movement to set a foundation for modern America that ennobles the past. 

Analyzing these competing uses of the past, A Kinder, Gentler America reveals how longing for the era of “the greatest generation” actually exposes a disillusionment with the present. Caputi draws on the theoretical frameworks of Julia Kristeva and Walter Benjamin to look at how the decade has been portrayed in movies such as Pleasantville and Far from Heaven and delves further to investigate our disenchantment’s lost origins in early modernity through a reading of the poetry of Baudelaire. What emerges is a stark contrast between the depictions of a melancholic present and a cheerful, shiny past. In the right’s invocation of the mythical 1950s and the left’s criticism of the same, Caputi recognizes a common unfulfilled desire, and proposes that by understanding this loss both sides can begin to accept that American identity, despite chaos and confusion, lies in the here and now. 

Mary Caputi is professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach, and is author of Voluptuous Yearnings: A Feminist Theory of the Obscene.
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Kindred Specters
Death, Mourning, and American Affinity
Christopher Peterson
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

The refusal to recognize kinship relations among slaves, interracial couples, and same-sex partners is steeped in historical and cultural taboos. In Kindred Specters, Christopher Peterson explores the ways in which non-normative relationships bear the stigma of death that American culture vehemently denies.

Probing Derrida’s notion of spectrality as well as Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death,” Peterson examines how death, mourning, and violence condition all kinship relations. Through Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, Peterson lays bare concepts of self-possession and dispossession, freedom and slavery. He reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved against theoretical and historical accounts of ethics, kinship, and violence in order to ask what it means to claim one’s kin as property. Using William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! he considers the political and ethical implications of comparing bans on miscegenation and gay marriage.

Tracing the connections between kinship and mourning in American literature and culture, Peterson demonstrates how racial, sexual, and gender minorities often resist their social death by adopting patterns of affinity that are strikingly similar to those that govern normative relationships. He concludes that socially dead “others” can be reanimated only if we avow the mortality and mourning that lie at the root of all kinship relations.

Christopher Peterson is visiting assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.

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The King of Skid Row
John Bacich and the Twilight Years of Old Minneapolis
James Eli Shiffer
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

The story of a much different Minneapolis, through the words and photographs of one of its most colorful characters—now in paperback
 

City blue laws drove the liquor trade and its customers—hard-drinking lumberjacks, pensioners, farmhands, and railroad workers—into the oldest quarter of Minneapolis. In the fifty-cent-a-night flophouses of the city’s Gateway District, they slept in cubicles with ceilings of chicken wire. In rescue missions, preachers and nuns tried to save their souls. Sociology researchers posing as vagrants studied them. And in their midst John Bacich, aka Johnny Rex, who owned a bar, a liquor store, and a cage hotel, documented the gritty neighborhood’s last days through photographs and film of his clientele.

 

The King of Skid Row follows Johnny Rex into this vanished world that once thrived in the heart of Minneapolis. Drawing on hours of interviews conducted in the three years before Bacich’s death in 2012, James Eli Shiffer brings to life the eccentric characters and strange events of an American skid row. Supplemented with archival and newspaper research and his own photographs, Bacich’s stories recreate the violent, alcohol-soaked history of a city best known for its clean, progressive self-image. His life captures the seamy, richly colorful side of the city swept away by a massive urban renewal project in the early 1960s and gives us, in a glimpse of those bygone days, one of Minneapolis’s most intriguing figures—spinning some of its most enduring and enthralling tales.

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Klondike Saga
The Chronicle of a Minnesota Gold Mining Company
Carl L. Lokke
University of Minnesota Press, 1965

Klondike Saga 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.

This is the story of the Monitor Gold Mining and Trading Company, an organization of sixteen Minnesotans who went to the Canadian Klondike region in the late 1890's to prospect for gold. It is based on diaries and letters written by the men during their venture. Most of the company members were of Scandinavian origin, recent immigrants to America, and a number of the letters were written to Nye Normanden, a Norwegian-language newspaper published in Minneapolis at the time.

The leader of the company, Lars Gunderson, was the grandfather of the late Carl L. Lokke, author of the book. Mr. Lokke, a historian, was chief of the foreign affairs branch of the National Archives at the time of his death in 1960.

This is the first book issued under a joint publishing arrangement between the University of Minnesota Press and the Norwegian-American Historical Association. It is Volume 7 in the association's Travel and Description Series. There is a preface by Kenneth O. Bjork, editor of the association, and Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska writes a foreword.

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Knowing Nukes
The Politics and Culture of the Atom
William Chaloupka
University of Minnesota Press, 1992

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Knowing Silence
How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School
Ariana Mangual Figueroa
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Learning from children about citizenship status and how it shapes their schooling
 

There is a persistent assumption in the field of education that children are largely unaware of their immigration status and its implications. In Knowing Silence, Ariana Mangual Figueroa challenges this “myth of ignorance.” By listening carefully to both the speech and significant silences of six Latina students from mixed-immigration-status families, from elementary school into middle school and beyond, she reveals the complex ways young people understand and negotiate immigration status and its impact on their lives.

 

Providing these children with iPod Touches to record their own conversations, Mangual Figueroa observes when and how they choose to talk about citizenship at home, at school, and in public spaces. Analyzing family conversations about school forms, in-class writing assignments, encounters with the police, and applications for college, she demonstrates that children grapple with the realities of citizenship from an early age. Educators who underestimate children’s knowledge, Mangual Figueroa shows, can marginalize or misunderstand these students and their families.

 

Combining significant empirical findings with reflections on the ethical questions surrounding research and responsibility, Mangual Figueroa models new ways scholars might collaborate with educators, children, and families. With rigorous and innovative ethnographic methodologies, Knowing Silence makes audible the experiences of immigrant-origin students in their own terms, ultimately offering teachers and researchers a crucial framework for understanding citizenship in the contemporary classroom.

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Knowledge Power And Discipline
German Studies And National Identity
Pier Carlo Bontempelli
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
An essential critical history of German studies as an academic discipline. German studies has confronted many crises, as well as severe criticism and self-criticism, and yet it has managed to maintain its disciplinary system through every upheaval--the revolution of 1848, the establishment of the Second Reich in 1871, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich, the Second World War and the reconstruction era, the creation and reunification of the two German states. Pier Carlo Bontempelli focuses on this continuity, dating back to the early nineteenth century, when the "founding fathers" of Germanistik secured its status by grounding it in a set of fixed principles, revived by each successive generation of scholars in order to legitimize their position of power--and to ensure their capacity for cultural reproduction. Using the works of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, Bontempelli investigates the institution and principles of German studies and critically reconstructs its history. Mindful of the mechanisms of choice and domination operating at every turn in this history, his book exposes the repressed social and political history of German studies. Pier Carlo Bontempelli is an associate professor of German studies at University of Cassino, Italy. Gabriele Poole teaches English language at University of Cassino, Italy.
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Konduru
Structure and Integration in a South Indian Village
Paul G. Hiebert
University of Minnesota Press, 1971

Konduru was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is a detailed anthropological description and analysis of life in Konduru, a village in the central part of southern India about one hundred miles south of Hyderabad. The study is based on field work done by Professor Hiebert over a period of several years when he lived in the village, spoke its language, Telugu, and became closely acquainted with the people and their culture.

After sketching the geographic and historical setting of the village, Professor Hiebert describes and discusses the social structure, including the societal categories, the various castes, the social groups including family, patrilineage, associations, and communities, and hamlets, villages, and towns in the region. There are chapters on status and power, networks of interpersonal relationships, panchayats (the system of justice), and rituals. Finally, the author discusses changes which are taking place in the society and culture of Konduru and presents his conclusions. He points out that this study of Konduru illustrates the importance of the village within the social order but at the same time demonstrates that the village cannot be understood apart from the other social groups in which its members are involved and interrelated, and that these relationships are neither static nor simple. But, as he concludes, the village is, for the individual, the concrete expression of his society.

The book is illustrated with photographs, maps, and drawings. E. Adamson Hoebel, Regents' professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, writes a foreword.

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The Kuhlman-Binet Tests for Children of Preschool Age
Florence Goodenough
University of Minnesota Press, 1928


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