In Solidarity and Survival, three generations of Iowa workers tell of their unrelenting efforts to create a labor movement in the coal mines and on the rails, in packinghouses and farm equipment plants, on construction sites and in hospital wards. Drawing on nearly one thousand interviews collected over more than a decade by oral historians working for the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, Shelton Stromquist presents the resonant voices of the men and women who defined a new, prominent place for themselves in the lives of their communities and in the politics of their state.
Urza discusses the genesis of the National Basque Monument to the Basque Sheepherder that is located in Reno, Nevada. He also describes the competition held to determine the monument's design and the debates arising from the modern sculpture created by renowned Basque artist Nestor Basterrextea. Urza examines the arguments of those who favored the selection of a figurative, traditional symbol and those who preferred a modern, forward-looking symbol. He utilizes this discussion to explore the evolution of Basque ethnicity and its relationship to society.
Robert Sayre brings a special kind of literary intelligence to his study of the problem of isolation in modern society. He gives us a spirited instance of a sociological approach to literature, more specifically a Marxist approach that forcefully links a literary theme to a social fact. In contrast to the existentialist interpretation of alienation (in which isolation is the eternal dilemma of Man), a Marxist analysis interprets solitude in society as precisely a modern phenomenon, directly related to the evolution of advanced capitalism.
Sayre first discusses the notion of solitude as it is treated in classical literature and carries it through to the nineteenth century, with emphasis on the literary history of France. In the second part of the book he presents detailed interpretations of five twentieth-century French novels (by Proust, Malraux, Bernanos, Camus, and Sarraute). Controversial, but persuasive, these in-depth studies are certain to influence the reader's way of looking at the writers in question.
A revealing account of the three main disciples of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, an essential figure in Orthodox Judaism in America
Orthodox Judaism is one of the fastest-growing religious communities in contemporary American life. Anyone who wishes to understand more about Judaism in America will need to consider the tenets and practices of Orthodox Judaism: who its adherents are, what they believe in, what motivates them, and to whom they turn for moral, intellectual, and spiritual guidance.
Among those spiritual leaders none looms larger than Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, heir to the legendary Talmudic dynasty of Brisk and a teacher and ordainer of thousands of rabbis during his time as a Talmud teacher at Yeshiva University from the Second World War until the 1980s. Soloveitchik was not only a Talmudic authority but a scholar of Western philosophy. While many books and articles have been written about Soloveitchik’s legacy and his influence on American Orthodoxy, few have looked carefully at his disciples in Torah and Talmud study, and even fewer at his disciples in Jewish thought and philosophy.
Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America is the first book to study closely three of Soloveitchik’s major disciples in Jewish thought and philosophy: Rabbis Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg, David Hartman, and Jonathan Sacks. Daniel Ross Goodman narrates how each of these three major modern Jewish thinkers learned from and adapted Soloveitchik’s teachings in their own ways, even while advancing his philosophical and theological legacy.
The story of religious life and Judaism in contemporary America is incomplete without an understanding of how three of the most consequential Jewish thinkers of this generation adapted the teachings of one of the most consequential Jewish thinkers of the previous generation. Soloveitchik’s Children tells this gripping intellectual and religious story in a learned and engaging manner, shining a light on where Jewish religious thought in the United States currently stands—and where it may be heading in future generations.
Praise for Ariel Dorfman
“One of the most important voices coming out of Latin America.”—Salman Rushdie
“A remarkable writer . . . writing out of a very different cultural perspective from comfortable American readers.”—Digby Diehl, Los Angeles Herald Examiner
“One of the six greatest Latin American novelists.”—Jacobo Timmerman, Newsweek
John Neary shows that the theological dichotomy of via negativa (which posits the authentic experience of God as absence, darkness, silence) and via affirmativa (which emphasizes presence, images, and the sounds of the earth) is an overlooked key to examining and comparing the works of John Fowles and John Updike.
Drawing on his extensive knowledge of both Christian and secular existentialism within the modern theology of Barth and Levinas and the contemporary critical theory of Derrida and J. Hillis Miller, Neary demonstrates the ultimate affinity of these authors who at first appear such opposites. He makes clear that Fowles’s postmodernist, metafictional experiments reflect the stark existentialism of Camus and Sartre while Updike’s social realism recalls Kierkegaard’s empirical faith in a generous God within a kind of Christian deconstructionism.
Neary’s perception of uncanny similarities between the two authors—whose respective careers are marked by a series of novels that structurally and thematically parallel each other—and the authors’ shared long-term interest in existentialism and theology support both his critical comparison and his argument that neither author is "philosophically more sophisticated nor aesthetically more daring."
A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples.
Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed.
The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee’s “God’s Black Lamb,” Moyshe Nadir’s “Closer,” and Esther Shumiatsher’s “At the Border of China.”
These poets dreamed of a moment when “we” could mean “we workers” rather than “we Jews.” Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.
Rebellions broke out in many areas of South Africa shortly after the institution of white rule in the late nineteenth century and continued into the next century. However, distrust of the colonial regime reached a new peak in the mid-twentieth century, when revolts erupted across a wide area of rural South Africa. All these uprisings were rooted in grievances over taxes. Rebels frequently invoked supernatural powers for assistance and accused government officials of using witchcraft to enrich themselves and to harm ordinary people.
As Sean Redding observes in Sorcery and Sovereignty, beliefs in witchcraft and supernatural powers were part of the political rhetoric; the system of taxation—with all its prescribed interactions between ruler and ruled—was intimately connected to these supernatural beliefs.
In this fascinating study, Redding examines how black South Africans’ beliefs in supernatural powers, along with both economic and social change in the rural areas, resulted in specific rebellions and how gender relations in black South African rural families changed. Sorcery and Sovereignty explores the intersection of taxation, political attitudes, and supernatural beliefs among black South Africans, shedding light on some of the most significant issues in the history of colonized Africa.
Young analyzes a range of U.S. figures and organizations, examining how each deployed Third World discourse toward various cultural and political ends. She considers a trip that LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse, and Robert F. Williams made to Cuba in 1960; traces key intellectual influences on Angela Y. Davis’s writing; and reveals the early history of the hospital workers’ 1199 union as a model of U.S. Third World activism. She investigates Newsreel, a late 1960s activist documentary film movement, and its successor, Third World Newsreel, which produced a seminal 1972 film on the Attica prison rebellion. She also considers the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African and African American artists who made films about conditions in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. By demonstrating the breadth, vitality, and legacy of the work of U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power firmly establishes their crucial place in the history of twentieth-century American struggles for social change.
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.
To know the poetry of our time, to look through its lenses and filters, is to see our lives illuminated. In these eloquent essays on recent American, British, and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows us contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form by some of our most celebrated poets. An incomparable reader of poetry, Vendler explains its power; it is, she says, the voice of the soul rather than the socially marked self speaking directly to us through the stylization of verse. "Soul Says," the title of a poem by Jorie Graham, is thus the name of this collection. In essays on Seamus Heaney, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, and others, Vendler makes difficult poetry accessible. She reveals the idiosyncratic nature of lyric form, and points out the artistic choices present in even the simplest texts. Vendler examines the use of abstraction in lyric poems; considers what readers seek and receive from verse; describes the role of such stylistic devices as compression, structural dynamics, and syntactic ordering; and renders a wide variety of poetic styles meaningful. Through her perceptive eyes we see how lyric poetry, speaking with natural musicality and rhythm, can by arrangement, pacing, metaphor, and tone create symbol from fact-and fill us with new understanding. In these direct and engaged commentaries, she explores the force, beauty, and intellectual complexity of contemporary lyric verse.
During the 1950s, when less than 20 percent of American high school graduates attended college, a group of ambitious young African Americans enrolled at Ohio University, a predominantly white school in Athens, Ohio. Because they were a tiny, barely tolerated minority, they banded together, supported each other, and formed lasting bonds. Years later, at a series of “Soulful Reunions,” they recalled the joys and challenges of living on a white campus before the civil rights era, and eighteen of them decided to share their stories.
The authors of the eighteen autobiographical sketches in Soulful Bobcats were a diverse group. They were athletes, rhetoricians, musicians, and actresses; they aspired to professions in the military, business, education, government, architecture, and the arts. Some grew up in poor families, while others enjoyed the comforts of the middle class. But they had several things in common. They all came from families that believed education was important. They had been taught to avoid trouble, to persist despite setbacks, and to expect to encounter prejudice and even discrimination.
The authors vividly describe instances in which they were humiliated—by other students, by professors, or by townspeople—as well as the few occasions when violence seemed inevitable. In addition, they describe their “first,” including becoming the first African American students at Ohio University to be awarded scholarships for their prowess in football, basketball, track, and tennis; the first to compete for titles such as “Mr. Fraternity” or “Queen of the Military Ball”; the first to appear in theatrical performances alongside their white schoolmates. They also tell of their success in providing a social life for themselves by organizing two Greek letter fraternities and one sorority, holding their own off-campus dances, and joining the few campus organizations that were open to them. Above all, their stories speak to a resilience that allowed these “Soulful Bobcats” to learn from their experiences at Ohio University, to engage in meaningful careers, and to lead rich, fulfilling lives.
An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture.
What’s in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe.
Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Białoszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz Różewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds.
Kremer’s is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experiments—from poetic “sound postcards,” to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.
From the Bible’s “Canst thou raise leviathan with a hook?” to Captain Ahab’s “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!,” from the trials of Job to the legends of Sinbad, whales have breached in the human imagination as looming figures of terror, power, confusion, and mystery.
In the twentieth century, however, our understanding of and relationship to these superlatives of creation underwent some astonishing changes, and with The Sounding of the Whale, D. Graham Burnett tells the fascinating story of the transformation of cetaceans from grotesque monsters, useful only as wallowing kegs of fat and fertilizer, to playful friends of humanity, bellwethers of environmental devastation, and, finally, totems of the counterculture in the Age of Aquarius. When Burnett opens his story, ignorance reigns: even Nature was misclassifying whales at the turn of the century, and the only biological study of the species was happening in gruesome Arctic slaughterhouses. But in the aftermath of World War I, an international effort to bring rational regulations to the whaling industry led to an explosion of global research—and regulations that, while well-meaning, were quashed, or widely flouted, by whaling nations, the first shot in a battle that continues to this day. The book closes with a look at the remarkable shift in public attitudes toward whales that began in the 1960s, as environmental concerns and new discoveries about whale behavior combined to make whales an object of sentimental concern and public adulation.
A sweeping history, grounded in nearly a decade of research, The Sounding of the Whale tells a remarkable story of how science, politics, and simple human wonder intertwined to transform the way we see these behemoths from below.
Timothy D. Taylor tracks the use of music in American advertising for nearly a century, from variety shows like The Clicquot Club Eskimos to the rise of the jingle, the postwar upsurge in consumerism, and the more complete fusion of popular music and consumption in the 1980s and after. The Sounds of Capitalism is the first book to tell truly the history of music used in advertising in the United States and is an original contribution to this little-studied part of our cultural history.
Wide-ranging and astute, The Sounds of Place explores high art music's role in the making of national myth and memory.
Sounds of the Modern Nation explores the development of modernist and avant-garde art music styles and aesthetics in Mexico in relation to the social and cultural changes that affected the country after the 1910-1920 revolution. Alejandro Madrid argues that these modernist works provide insight into the construction of individual and collective identities based on new ideas about modernity and nationality. Instead of depicting a dichotomy between modernity and nationalism, Madrid reflects on the multiple intersections between these two ideas and the dialogic ways through which these notions acquired meaning.
Madrid challenges the view that Latin American modernist music and other art were mere imitations of European trends, advancing instead the argument that Latin American artists resignified European ideas according to their specific historical and cultural circumstances. His work shows how microtonal and futurist music, modernist and avant-garde aesthetics, as well as indigenist and indianist ideas, entered a process of negotiation that ultimately shaped the ideological framework of twentieth-century Mexico.
After apartheid, South Africa established a celebrated new political order that imagined the postcolonial nation as belonging equally to the descendants of indigenous people, colonizing settlers, transported slaves, indentured laborers, and immigrants. Its constitution, adopted in 1996, was the first in the world to include gays and lesbians as full citizens. Brenna M. Munro examines the stories that were told about sexuality, race, and nation throughout the struggle against apartheid in order to uncover how these narratives ultimately enabled gay people to become imaginable as fellow citizens. She also traces how the gay, lesbian, or bisexual person appeared as a stock character in the pageant of nationhood during the transition to democracy. In the process, she offers an alternative cultural history of South Africa.
Munro asserts that the inclusion of gay people made South Africans feel “modern”—at least for a while. Being gay or being lesbian was reimagined in the 1990s as distinctly South African, but the “newness” that made these sexualities apt symbols for a transformed nation can also be understood as foreign and un-African. Indeed, a Western-style gay identity is often interpreted through the formula “gay equals modernity equals capitalism.” As South Africa’s reentrance into the global economy has failed to bring prosperity to the majority of its citizens, homophobic violence has been on the rise.
Employing a wide array of texts—including prison memoirs, poetry, plays, television shows, photography, political speeches, and the postapartheid writings of Nobel Laureates Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee—Munro reports on how contemporary queer activists and artists are declining to remain ambassadors for the “rainbow nation” and refusing to become scapegoats for the perceived failures of liberation and liberalism.
These Texas stories are among the best produced by the state's writers in the mid-twentieth century. Selected above all for their artistic excellence and their narrative mastery, they also present a vital picture of the Southwest in microcosm, as revealed in its largest state.
Texas and Texas writing moved from a Southern orientation in the 1940s—reflected here in works by William Goyen, William Humphrey, and others—to the strong Southwestern flavor of stories by such authors as Larry McMurtry and A. C. Greene to, finally, urban or Sunbelt Texas, mirrored in the edgy, sometimes experimental prose of Doug Crowell, William Harrison, and Peter LaSalle.
Here are stories by such celebrated authors as Paul Horgan and William A. Owens, as well as startling, in some cases previously unpublished work by writers like Harryette Mullen, Naomi Shihab Nye, Pat Ellis Taylor, and Thomas Zigal. A few stories may already be favorites—Larry McMurtry's "There Will Be Peace in Korea," Amado Muro's "Cecilia Rosas." Many others have become classics, such as Vassar Miller's poignantly autobiographical "Pact," Hughes Rudd's hilarious record of grade school fieldtrips, R. E. Smith's gripping story of a Houstonian's life-changing encounter with nature, and Dave Hickey's astonishing account of an old cowboy's imprisonment . . . in a bathtub.
Bill Brett, James Crumley, Linda West Eckhardt, Robert Flynn, Mary Gray Hughes, Carolyn Osborn—all are represented here by stories guaranteed to banish stereotypes and boredom and to enlarge one's vision of the Lone Star State. Anyone who thinks that oil wells and big hair define Texas will find out differently in the dazzling short fiction presented in South by Southwest.
An interdisciplinary study of Katherine Anne Porter’s troubled relationship to her Texas origins and southern roots, South by Southwest offers a fresh look at this ever-relevant author.
Today, more than thirty years after her death, Katherine Anne Porter remains a fascinating figure. Critics and biographers have portrayed her as a strikingly glamorous woman whose photographs appeared in society magazines. They have emphasized, of course, her writing— particularly the novel Ship of Fools, which was made into an award-winning film, and her collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which cemented her role as a significant and original literary modernist. They have highlighted her dramatic, sad, and fragmented personal life. Few, however, have addressed her uneasy relationship to her childhood in rural Texas.
Janis P. Stout argues that throughout Porter’s life she remained preoccupied with the twin conundrums of how she felt about being a woman and how she felt about her Texas origins. Her construction of herself as a beautiful but unhappy southerner sprung from a plantation aristocracy of reduced fortunes meant she construed Texas as the Old South. The Texas Porter knew and re-created in her fiction had been settled by southerners like her grandparents, who brought slaves with them. As she wrote of this Texas, she also enhanced and mythologized it, exaggerating its beauty, fertility, and gracious ways as much as the disaffection that drove her to leave. Her feelings toward Texas ran to both extremes, and she was never able to reconcile them.
Stout examines the author and her works within the historical and cultural context from which she emerged. In particular, Stout emphasizes four main themes in the history of Texas that she believes are of the greatest importance in understanding Porter: its geography and border location (expressed in Porter’s lifelong fascination with marginality, indeterminacy, and escape); its violence (the brutality of her first marriage as well as the lawlessness that pervaded her hometown); its racism (lynchings were prevalent throughout her upbringing); and its marginalization of women (Stout draws a connection between Porter’s references to the burning sun and oppressive heat of Texas and her life with her first husband).
The coal mining photographs of C. William Horrell, taken across the southern Illinois Coal Belt over a twenty-year period from 1966 to 1986, are extraordinary examples of documentary photography—so stark and striking that captions often seem superfluous.
Horrell’s photographs capture the varied phenomena of twentieth-century coal mining technology: the awesome scale of surface mining machines and their impact on the land; massive machines forced into narrow passageways with inches to spare as they carry coal from the face to conveyer belts; and, more significant, the advent of continuous miners, machines that can handle four previously separate processes and which have been a fixture in underground or “deep” mines since the mid-1960s.
Horrell was also intrigued by the related activities of mining, including coal’s processing, cleaning, and transportation, as well as the daily, behind-the-scenes operations that keep mines and miners working. His photographs reflect the beauty of the commonplace—the clothes of the miners, their dinner pails, and their tools—and reveal the picturesque remnants of closed mines: the weathered boards of company houses, the imposing iron beauty of an ancient tipple, and an abandoned building against the lowering sky of an approaching storm. Finally, his portraits of coal minersshow the strength, dignity, and enduring spirit of the men and women who work the southern Illinois coal mines.
Southern out-migration drew millions of southern workers to the steel mills, automobile factories, and even agricultural fields and orchards of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. Through vivid oral histories, Chad Berry explores the conflict between migrants' economic success and their "spiritual exile" in the North. He documents the tension between factory owners who welcomed cheap, naive southern laborers and local "native" workers who greeted migrants with suspicion and hostility. He examines the phenomenon of "shuttle migration," in which migrants came north to work during the winter and returned home to plant spring crops on their southern farms. He also explores the impact of southern traditions--especially the southern evangelical church and "hillbilly" music--brought north by migrants.
Berry argues that in spite of being scorned by midwesterners for violence, fecundity, intoxication, laziness, and squalor, the vast majority of southern whites who moved to the Midwest found the economic prosperity they were seeking. By allowing southern migrants to assess their own experiences and tell their own stories, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles refutes persistent stereotypes about migrants' clannishness, life-style, work ethic, and success in the North.
This timely collection addresses the neglected state of scholarship on southern women dramatists by bringing together the latest criticism on some of the most important playwrights of the 20th century.
Coeditors Robert McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige attribute the neglect of southern women playwrights in scholarly criticism to "deep historical prejudices" against drama itself and against women artists in general, especially in the South. Their call for critical awareness is answered by the 15 essays they include in Southern Women Playwrights, considerations of the creative work of universally acclaimed playwrights such as Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Lillian Hellman (the so-called "Trinity") in addition to that of less-studied playwrights, including Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, Alice Childress, Naomi Wallace, Amparo Garcia, Paula Vogel, and Regina Porter.
This collection springs from a series of associated questions regarding the literary and theatrical heritage of the southern woman playwright, the unique ways in which southern women have approached the conventional modes of comedy and tragedy, and the ways in which the South, its types and stereotypes, its peculiarities, its traditions-both literary and cultural-figure in these women's plays. Especially relevant to these questions are essays on Lillian Hellman, who resisted the label "southern writer," and Carson McCullers, who never attempted to ignore her southernness.
This book begins by recovering little-known or unknown episodes in the history of southern drama and by examining the ways plays assumed importance in the lives of southern women in the early 20th century. It concludes with a look at one of the most vibrant, diverse theatre scenes outside New York today-Atlanta.
Mass festivals were a trademark of twentieth-century authoritarianism, as seen in fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere. But nowhere was this phenomenon more prevalent than in the Soviet Union. Despite being a dominant feature of Soviet culture, these public spectacles have been largely overlooked as objects of study by historians.
Originally published in German, Malte Rolf’s highly acclaimed work examines the creation and perpetuation of large-scale celebrations such as May Day, the anniversary of the October Revolution, Harvest Day, and others throughout the Soviet era. He chronicles the overt political agendas, public displays of power, forced participation, and widespread use of these events in the Soviet drive to eradicate existing cultural norms and replace them with new icons of Soviet ideology. Rolf shows how the new Red Calendar became an essential tool in redefining celebrations in the Soviet Union.
Rolf traces the roots of Soviet mass festivals in disparate multiethnic celebrations, protests, and street marches during the late imperial era. He then contrasts these with postrevolutionary events that sought to dissolve ethnic rituals and unify the masses. By the end of the civil war, the Bolsheviks had a well-defined calendar of events and began to dictate the forms of public celebration in accordance with party rhetoric. In distant regions, organizers attempted to follow the models of Moscow and Leningrad, despite budgetary constraints and local resistance. In many outlying areas a hybridization of events developed as local customs merged with party mandates. People often made use of official holidays to adopt their own agendas, yet continued to follow the line of an official Soviet culture. Mass festivals were thus an important tool for Sovietizing the cultural landscape.
After the Second World War, the Soviets exported their festival culture to Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, which resulted in a melding of Soviet guidelines with national cultural forms. Additionally, Rolf compares and contrasts Soviet mass spectacles with mass events in Italy, Germany, and the United States to reveal their similar influence despite divergent political, cultural, and social systems.
In the Soviet Union, mass festivals continued through the time of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and up until perestroika, despite their fading political impact. Rolf finds that in the end, Soviet celebrations became effectively ingrained in Russia’s post-Soviet national memory, which ironically was the intent of the original festival planners.The story of Spain during World War II has largely been viewed as the story of dictator Francisco Franco’s foreign diplomacy in the aftermath of civil war. Wayne H. Bowen now goes behind the scenes of fascism to reveal less-studied dimensions of Spanish history. By examining the conflicts within the Franco regime and the daily lives of Spaniards, he has written the first book-length assessment of the regime’s formative years and the struggle of its citizens to survive.
Bowen argues that the emphasis of previous scholars on Spain’s foreign affairs is misplaced—that even the most pro-Axis elements of Franco’s regime were more concerned with domestic politics, the potential for civil unrest, and poverty than with events in Europe. Synthesizing a wide range of Spanish-language scholarship and recently declassified government documents, Bowen reveals how Franco’s government stumbled in the face of world war, inexperienced leaders, contradictory political ideology, and a divided populace. His book tells the dramatic story of a six-year argument among the general, the politicians, and the clerics on nothing less than what should be the nature of the new Spain, touching on issues as diverse as whether the monarchy should be restored and how women should dress.
Examining the effects of World War II years on key facets of Spanish life—Catholicism, the economy, women, leisure, culture, opposition to Franco, and domestic politics—Bowen explores a wide range of topics: the grinding poverty following the civil war, exacerbated by poor economic decisions; restrictions on employment for women versus the relative autonomy enjoyed by female members of the Falange; the efforts of the Church to recover from near decimation; and methods of repression practiced by the regime against leftists, separatists, and Freemasons. He also shows that the lives of most Spaniards remained apolitical and centered on work, family, and leisure marked by the popularity of American movies and the resurgence of loyalty to regional sports teams.
Unlike other studies that have focused exclusively on Spain’s foreign affairs during the Second World War, Bowen’s work stresses the importance of the home front not only in keeping Spain out of the war but also in keeping Franco in power. He shows that in spite of internal problems and external distractions, Franco’s government managed to achieve its goals of state survival and internal peace. As the only single-volume survey of this era available in English, Spain during World War II is a masterful synthesis that offers a much-needed alternative view of the Franco regime during crucial times as it provides a testament to the Spanish people’s will to survive.
In The Spanish American Novel, John S. Brushwood analyzes the twentieth-century Spanish American novel as an artistic expression of social reality. In relating the generic history of the novel to extraliterary events in Spanish America, he shows how twentieth-century fiction sets forth the essence of such phenomena as the first Perón regime, the Mexican Revolution, the Che Guevara legend, indigenismo, and the strongman political type. In essence, he views the novel as art rather than as document, but not as art alienated from society.
The discussion is organized chronologically, opening with the turn of the century and focusing on novels from 1900 to 1915 that exemplify various aspects of the nineteenth-century literary inheritance. Brushwood then highlights the avant-garde fiction (influenced by Proust and Joyce) of the 1920s as a precursory movement to the “new” Latin American novel, a phenomenon that came into its own during the 1940s. He then examines the “boom” in Spanish American fiction, the period of extensive international recognition of certain works, which he dates from 1962 or 1963.
In each era considered, the development of the novel is placed in dual perspective. One view—that of particularly significant novels in light of others published during the same year—is a cross section of the genre at one particular moment. The second view—that of a panorama of novels published in intervals between significant moments in the history of the novel—is more general and selective in the number of books discussed. Combining the historical with the analytical approach, the author proposes that the experience of a novel in which reality has been transformed into art is essential to our understanding of that reality.
Has poetry lost its relevance in the postmodern age, unable to keep pace with other forms of cultural production such as film, mass media, and the Internet? Quite the contrary, argues Jill Kuhnheim in this pathfinding book, which explores how recent Spanish American poetry participates in the fundamental cultural debates of its time.
Using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, Kuhnheim engages in close readings of numerous poetic works to show how contemporary Spanish American poetry struggles with the divisions between politics and aesthetics and between visual and written images; grapples with issues of ethnic, national, sexual, and urban identities; and incorporates rather than rejects technological innovations and elements from the mass media. Her analysis illuminates the ways in which contemporary issues such as indigenismo and Latin America's postcolonial legacy, modernization, immigration, globalization, economic shifts toward neoliberalism and informal economies, urbanization, and the technological revolution have been expressed in—and even changed the very form of—Spanish American poetry since the 1970s.
From the exhilarating impact of Isaac Albeniz at the beginning of the century to today's complex and adventurous avant-garde, this complete interpretive history introduces twentieth-century Spanish music to English-speaking readers. With graceful authority, Tomas Marco, award-winning composer, critic, and bright light of Spanish music since the 1960s, covers the entire spectrum of composers and their works: trends and movements, critical and popular reception, national institutions, influences from Europe and beyond, and the effect of such historic events as the Spanish Civil War and the death of Franco. Marco's penetrating aesthetic critiques are threaded throughout each phase of this rich account.
Marco provides detailed coverage of the key figures, induding a chapter devoted entirely to Manuel de Falla—Spain's most celebrated twentieth-century composer—and a panoramic survey of recent arrivals on the contemporary music scene. Exploring the rise and fall of the zarzuela, the author highlights innovative works in this authentic Spanish genre. He analyzes the attempts to find an audience for Spanish opera; demonstrates the flowering of symphonic and chamber music at the beginning of this century; traces currents such as romanticism, impressionism, and neoclassicism; and tracks the influence of Spain's distinctive regional folk traditions. Covering musical innovation after Spain's emergence from its period of isolation, Marco notes the speed with which many composers absorbed the work of Stravinsky and Bartok, the twelve-tone system, aleatory forms, electronic techniques, and other European developments.
English-speaking scholars, musicians, critics and general readers have for decades been without full information on the rich and varied work coming out of Spain in this century. This lively history fills a long-felt need and fills it superbly, with the knowledge and insights of a major figure in the musical world.
A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment.
A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.
Speak to Me Words is a stimulating blend of classic articles and original pieces that reflect the energy of modern American Indian literary studies. Highlighting various aspects of poetry written by American Indians since the 1960s, it is a wide-ranging collection that balances the insights of Natives and non-Natives, men and women, old and new voices. Included here are such landmark articles as "Answering the Deer" by Paula Gunn Allen, "Herbs of Healing" by Carter Revard, and "Song, Poetry and Language—Expression and Perception" by Simon Ortiz—all pieces that have shaped how we think about Native poetry. Among the contributions appearing for the first time are Elaine Jahner writing on Paula Gunn Allen's use of formal structures; Robert Nelson addressing pan-Indian tropes of emergence, survival, return, and renewal; and Janet McAdams focusing on Carter Revard's "angled mirrors." Although many Native writers may disregard distinctions between genres, together these writings help readers see the difference between American Indian poetry and other forms of Native literature.
These essays are as broad, encompassing, and provocative as Native poetry itself, branching off from and weaving back into one another. In showing how American Indian poetry redefines our social order and articulates how Indian communities think about themselves, these writers establish a new foundation for the study—and enjoyment—of this vital art.
On December 11, 1954, Charles Patrick drove to downtown Birmingham to buy a Boy Scout uniform for his son. Christmas traffic around the downtown department stores was heavy, and Patrick circled unsuccessfully until at last a streetside spot opened up and he began to pull in. As he did so, he was cut off by a woman who ordered him out of the way, as she was the wife of a city police officer. Patrick pulled away, remarking, “Ma’am, he doesn’t own the streets of Birmingham.”
Normal low-level urban hassle? Not in 1954 Birmingham, when the woman was white and Patrick black. The woman reported to her husband that a black man had sassed her, and Patrick was summarily arrested, charged with disorderly conduct, and placed in a cell where he was beaten by the husband and another police officer.
Usually that would have been the end of it, but Patrick was not the sort of man to meekly endure an injustice. He found an attorney, went to court to fight the charges, and brought his assailants to justice--as whites, blacks, politicians and the press offered public support.
This book tells the story of Patrick’s quest for justice in segregated Alabama on the eve of the civil rights movement and represents a telling instance of the growing determination of African Americans to be treated fairly, part of the broadening and deepening stream of resolve that led to the widespread activism of the civil rights movement.
The author has chosen seventeen of the most important or representative British spy novelists to write about. He presents some basic literary analysis and criticism, trying both to place them in historical perspective and to describe and analyze the content and form of their fiction.
In the late 20th century, a tidal wave of calls for reform and inclusion of special needs students swept over public special education. The current debates over implementing these themes today are authoritatively addressed by 19 distinguished scholars in this thorough volume. Organized into three cohesive sections, it begins with the issues of educational reform and the emerging discourses of disability and integration in the inclusion movement. Respective chapters appraise specific arguments for inclusion and the federal legislation and litigation surrounding and supporting special education.
The second part features the thorny issue of assessment, the technological revolution in special education, and the disposition of teacher training. The third section scrutinizes the inclusion of various populations of students with exceptional needs, particularly how teachers can make an easy transition from ideology to educational practice.
Special Education in the 21st Century sets the standard for extrapolating future directions by wisely weighing classroom practices for different groups and the technical problems of resources, management, social groupings, instructional design, and the supposition that teachers will automatically change to accommodate an even greater diversity of learners.
“Masterful…An indispensable warning for our own time.”
—Samuel Moyn
“Magisterial…Covers this dark history with insight and skill…A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history.”
—The Nation
For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Haunting Europe shows that this paranoid fantasy persists today in the toxic politics of revitalized right-wing nationalism.
“It is both salutary and depressing to be reminded of how enduring the trope of an exploitative global Jewish conspiracy against pure, humble, and selfless nationalists really is…A century after the end of the first world war, we have, it seems, learned very little.”
—Mark Mazower, Financial Times
“From the start, the fantasy held that an alien element—the Jews—aimed to subvert the cultural values and national identities of Western societies…The writers, politicians, and shills whose poisonous ideas he exhumes have many contemporary admirers.”
—Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs
Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.
A look at the violent “Red Summer of 1919” and its intersection with the highly politicized New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance
With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness and artistic creativity. In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the origins of this revolutionary era to the turbulent year 1919, identifying the events and trends in American society that spurred the black community to action and examining the forms that action took as it evolved.
Unlike prior studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as significant mostly because of the geographic migrations of blacks to the North, Spectres of 1919 looks at that year as the political crucible from which the radicalism of the 1920s emerged. Foley draws from a wealth of primary sources, taking a bold new approach to the origins of African American radicalism and adding nuance and complexity to the understanding of a fascinating and vibrant era.
For almost thirty years, William F. Gavin wrote speeches at the highest levels of government. Speechwright is his insider’s view of politics, a shrewd critique of presidential and congressional rhetoric, and a personal look at the political leaders for whom he wrote speeches. While serving President Richard Nixon and candidate Ronald Reagan, Gavin advocated for “working rhetoric”—well-crafted, clear, hard-hitting arguments that did not off er visions of the unattainable, but instead limited political discourse to achievable ends reached through practical means. Filled with hard-earned wisdom about politics and its discontents, Speechwright describes Gavin’s successes, his failures, and his call for political rhetoric built on strong argument rather than the mere search for eloquence.
Duffy plunges full-throttle into speed’s “adrenaline aesthetics,” offering deft readings of works ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, through J. G. Ballard’s Crash, to the cautionary consumerism of Ralph Nader. He describes how speed changed understandings of space, distance, chance, and violence; how the experience of speed was commodified in the dawning era of mass consumption; and how society was incited to abhor slowness and desire speed. He examines how people were trained by new media such as the cinema to see, hear, and sense speed, and how speed, demanded of the efficient assembly-line worker, was given back to that worker as the chief thrill of leisure. Assessing speed’s political implications, Duffy considers how speed pleasure was offered to citizens based on criteria including their ability to pay and their gender, and how speed quickly became something to be patrolled by governments. Drawing on novels, news reports, photography, advertising, and much more, Duffy provides a breakneck tour through the cultural dynamics of speed.
Illuminating a powerful intersection between popular culture and global politics, Spies and Holy Wars draws on a sampling of more than eight hundred British and American thrillers that are propelled by the theme of jihad—an Islamic holy war or crusade against the West. Published over the past century, the books in this expansive study encompass spy novels and crime fiction, illustrating new connections between these genres and Western imperialism.
Demonstrating the social implications of the popularity of such books, Reeva Spector Simon covers how the Middle Eastern villain evolved from being the malleable victim before World War II to the international, techno-savvy figure in today's crime novels. She explores the impact of James Bond, pulp fiction, and comic books and also analyzes the ways in which world events shaped the genre, particularly in recent years. Worldwide terrorism and economic domination prevail as the most common sources of narrative tension in these works, while military "tech novels" restored the prestige of the American hero in the wake of post-Vietnam skepticism. Moving beyond stereotypes, Simon examines the relationships between publishing trends, political trends, and popular culture at large—giving voice to the previously unexamined truths that emerge from these provocative page-turners.
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