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The Yale Critics
Deconstruction in America
Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1983

The Yale Critics was first published in 1983. 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.

A heated debate has been raging in North America in recent years over the form and function of literature. At the center of the fray is a group of critics teaching at Yale University—Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller—whose work can be described in relation to the deconstructive philosophy practiced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. For over a decade the Yale Critics have aroused controversy; most often they are considered as a group, to be applauded or attacked, rather than as individuals whose ideas merit critical scrutiny. Here a new generation of scholars attempts for the first time a serious, broad assessment of the Yale group. These essays appraise the Yale Critics by exploring their roots, their individual careers, and the issues they introduce.

Wallace Martin's introduction offers a brilliant, compact account of the Yale Critics and of their relation to deconstruction and the deconstruction to two characteristically Anglo-American enterprises; Paul Bove explores the new criticism and Wlad Godzich the reception of Derrida in America. Next come essays giving individual attention to each of the critics: Michael Sprinker on Hartman, Donald Pease on Miller, Stanley Corngold on de Man, and Daniel O'Hara on Bloom. Two essays then illuminate "deconstruction in America" through a return to modern continental philosophy: Donald Marshall on Maurice Blanchot, and Rodolphe Gasche on Martin Heidegger. Finally, Jonathan Arac's afterword brings the volume together and projects a future beyond the Yale Critics.

Throughout, the contributors aim to provide a balanced view of a subject that has most often been treated polemically. While useful as an introduction, The Yale Critics also engages in a serious critical reflection on the uses of the humanities in American today.

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Yellow Future
Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema
Jane Chi Hyun Park
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Yellow Future examines the emergence and popularity of techno-oriental representations in Hollywood cinema since the 1980s, focusing on the ways East Asian peoples and places have become linked with technology to produce a collective fantasy of East Asia as the future. Jane Chi Hyun Park demonstrates how this fantasy is sustained through imagery, iconography, and performance that conflate East Asia with technology, constituting what Park calls oriental style.

Park provides a genealogy of oriental style through contextualized readings of popular films-from the multicultural city in Blade Runner and the Japanese American mentor in The Karate Kid to the Afro-Asian reworking of the buddy genre in Rush Hour and the mixed-race hero in The Matrix. Throughout these analyses Park shows how references to the Orient have marked important changes in American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the past thirty years, from abjection to celebration, invisibility to hypervisibility.
 
Unlike other investigations of racial imagery in Hollywood, Yellow Future centers on how the Asiatic is transformed into and performed as style in the backdrop of these movies and discusses the significance of this conditional visibility for representations of racial difference.
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The Young Child and His Parents
A Study of One-Hundred Cases
Josephine Foster
University of Minnesota Press, 1929
These brief case histories deal with the everyday behavior of normal children between the ages of two and six. Each history includes a brief characterization of the salient features of the case, a description of the home situation, a discussion of developmental history, a history of the adjustments of the child, and where possible, the treatment suggestion and the later history of the case. A valuable feature of this revised edition is a follow-up of more than seventy cases after a lapse of four years.
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Young Man From The Provinces
A Gay Life Before Stonewall
Alan Helms
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

An insider’s account of gay high society in pre-Stonewall New York City—now back in print

Young, intelligent, and handsome, Alan Helms left a brutal midwestern childhood for New York City in 1955. Denied a Rhodes scholarship because of his sexual orientation, he soon became an object of desire in a gay underground scene frequented by, among many others, Noel Coward, Leonard Bernstein, and Marlene Dietrich. In this unusually vivid and sensitive account, Helms describes the business of being a sex object and its psychological and physical toll.

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Young-Girls in Echoland
#Theorizing Tiqqun
Andrea Jonsson
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Who’s worse, the Young-Girl or the Man-Child?

Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl is a controversial work of anticapitalist philosophy that has attracted musicians, playwrights, feminist theorists, and men's-rights activists since its publication in 1999. More than twenty years after its publication the international reverberation of Young-Girls shows no signs of weakening. 

Young-Girls in Echoland: #Theorizing Tiqqun is a guide to this ongoing postdigital conversation, engaging with artworks and textual criticism provoked by Tiqqun’s audacious, arguably misogynistic textual voice. Heather Warren-Crow and Andrea Jonsson show how Tiqqun’s polarizing figure has grown and matured but also stayed unapologetically girly in the works of artists and scholars discussed here. Rethinking the myth of Echo and Narcissus by performing a different kind of listening, they take us on a journey from VSCO girls to basic bitches to vampires.

With an ear for the sound of Tiqqun’s polemic and its ensemble of Anglophone and Francophone rejoinders, Young-Girls in Echoland offers a model for analyzing the call-and-response of pop philosophy and for hearing the affective rhythms of communicative capitalism.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. 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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Your Teeth
Their Past, Present, and Probable Future
Peter J. Brekhus
University of Minnesota Press, 1941

Your Teeth was first published in 1941. 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.

Are your teeth perfect? If they are, you are one in a hundred, for 99 per cent of the population suffers from some dental disease at some time or other. Caries and pyorrhea are the most widespread diseases of civilized man, more common than the common cold. Despite wide educational efforts, our teeth are worse than they have ever been before.

In this popular book Dr. Brekhus reviews virtually all known facts and theories about the teeth of civilized man. Fish teeth five hundred million years old, Stone-Age human skulls, and the increasing number of people born without a complete set of teeth are analyzed. Public health programs of Scandinavia and New Zealand are described.

Every dentist and his patients should read this book. A fascinating introduction for dental students; a helpful reference for practitioners with clear, readable answers to hundreds of patients' questions.

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Youth Media Matters
Participatory Cultures and Literacies in Education
Korina M. Jocson
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

In an information age of youth social movements, Youth Media Matters examines how young people are using new media technologies to tell stories about themselves and their social worlds. They do so through joint efforts in a range of educational settings and media environments, including high school classrooms, youth media organizations, and social media sites. Korina M. Jocson draws on various theories to show how educators can harness the power of youth media to provide new opportunities for meaningful learning and “do-it-together production.” Describing the impact that youth media can have on the broader culture, Jocson demonstrates how it supports expansive literacy practices and promotes civic engagement, particularly among historically marginalized youth.

In Youth Media Matters, Jocson offers a connective analysis of content area classrooms, career and technical education, literary and media arts organizations, community television stations, and colleges and universities. She provides examples of youth media work—including videos, television broadcasts, websites, and blogs—produced in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, and St. Louis. At a time when educators are increasingly attentive to participatory cultures yet constrained by top-down pedagogical requirements, Jocson highlights the knowledge production and transformative potential of youth media with import both in and out of the classroom.

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