A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY136 start with M start with M
In the autobiographical essay, Thomas reveals his passion for his homeland and his ever-present hunger for spiritual and natural exploration:
those rocks, I certainly was reminded of the transience of human existence,
and my own in particular. As Pindar put it: “A dream about a
shadow is man.” I began to ponder more the being and nature of God
and his relation to the late twentieth-century situation, which science and
technology had created in the western world. Where did the ancient
world of rock and ocean fit into an environment in which nuclear physics
and the computer were playing an increasingly prominent part? . . .
During the years leading up to her marriage with Leonard Woolf in 1912, the year in which she finished The Voyage Out and sent it to be published by her cousin at Duckworth’s, the future Virginia Woolf was teaching herself how to be a writer. While her brothers were sent first to private schools, then to Cambridge to be educated, Virginia Stephen and her sister Vanessa were informally educated at home. With this background, how did she know she was a writer? What were her struggles? How did she teach herself? What made Miss Stephen into the author Virginia Woolf?
Miss Stephen’s Apprenticeship explores these questions, delving into Virginia Woolf ’s letters and diaries, seeking to understand how she covered the distance from the wistful “I only wish I could write,” to the almost casual statement, “the novels are finished.” These days, the trajectory of a writer very often starts with studying for an MFA. In Woolf ’s case, however, it’s instructive to ask: How did a great writer, who had no formal education, invent for herself the framework she needed for a writing life? How did she know what she had to learn? How did she make her own way?
Novelist Rosalind Brackenbury explores these questions and others, and in the process reveals what Virginia Woolf can give to young writers today.
Literary scholars, educators, and those interested in southern literature will appreciate the new light this publication sheds on a classic American novel. Mockingbird Grows Up offers a deeper understanding of a canonical American work and prepares a new generation to engage with Harper Lee’s appealing prose, complex characters, and influential metaphors.
Combining close readings of literary texts with the study of interviews, essays, diaries, and letters, Zerba advances a revisionary account of how to approach relationships between antiquity and modernity. Instead of frontal encounters with the Odyssey, Cavafy, Woolf, and Césaire indirectly—but no less significantly—engage with Homer’s epic poem. In demonstrating how such encounters operate, Modern Odysseys explores issues of race and sexuality that connect antiquity with the modern period.
But their critique of masculinity created enormous challenges: How could they appropriate a feminine aesthetic while retaining their own masculine idenitites? How did appropiating the feminine affect their personal relationships or their political views? Modernism and Masculinity seeks to answer these questions. In this absorbing combination of biography and formal critique, Izenberg reconsiders the works of Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky and semonstrates how the cirses of masculinity they endure are found not just within the images and forms of their art, but in the distinct and very personal impulses that inspired it.
The contributors to this volume (Jory Johnson, Robert Nauman, Sheri Olson, James Russell, and Kristen Schaffer) and editor Robert Bruegmann chronicle the complex history of the planning, design, and construction of the Air Force Academy. As the most conspicuous commission of the American military at the height of the Cold War, the design of the Academy generated intense popular interest and was a lightning rod for conflicting values in postwar society. The design, by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has been hailed as the final triumph of the International Style and as a monument to military bureaucracy.
In the 1920s and ‘30s, understandings of time, place, and civilization were subjected to a barrage of new conceptions. Ronald Berman probes the work of three writers who wrestled with one or more of these issues in ways of lasting significance.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Orwell all grappled with fluid notions of time: Hemingway’s absolute present, Fitzgerald’s obsession with what might be and what might have been, and Orwell’s concerns with progress. For these authors, progress is also tied to competing senses of place--for Fitzgerald, the North versus the South; for Hemingway, America versus Europe. At stake for each is an understanding of what constitutes true civilization in a post-war world. Berman discusses Hemingway’s deployment of language in tackling the problems of thinking and knowing. Berman follows this notion further in examining the indisputable impact upon Hemingway’s prose of Paul Cézanne’s painting and the nature of perception.
Finally, Berman considers the influence on Orwell of Aristotle and Freud’s ideas of civilization, translated by Orwell into the fabric of 1984 and other writings.
Ronald Berman is Professor of English at the University of California at San Diego and past chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is author of six books, including “The Great Gatsby” and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas and Fitzgerald-Wilson-Hemingway: Language and Experience.
Analyzes nineteenth-century seafaring narratives and their importance to ideas of modernity
At once a literary-philosophical meditation on the question of modernity and a manifesto for a new form of literary criticism, Modernity at Sea argues that the nineteenth-century sea narrative played a crucial role in the emergence of a theory of modernity as permanent crisis.
In a series of close readings of such works as Herman Melville’s White-Jacket and Moby Dick, Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the "Narcissus” and The Secret Sharer, and Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, Cesare Casarino draws upon the thought of twentieth-century figures including Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Leo Bersani, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Antonio Negri to characterize the nineteenth-century ship narrative as the epitome of Michel Foucault’s "heterotopia"—a special type of space that simultaneously represents, inverts, and contests all other spaces in culture.Elaborating Foucault’s claim that the ship has been the heterotopia par excellence of Western civilization since the Renaissance, Casarino goes on to argue that the nineteenth-century sea narrative froze the world of the ship just before its disappearance—thereby capturing at once its apogee and its end, and producing the ship as the matrix of modernity.
2022 PROSE Award Finalist in Architecture and Urban Planning
2022 Association for Latin American Art Arvey Foundation Book Award, Honorable Mention
Throughout the early twentieth century, waves of migration brought working-class people to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This prompted a dilemma: Where should these restive populations be situated relative to the city’s spatial politics? Might housing serve as a tool to discipline their behavior?
Enter Antonio Bonet, a Catalan architect inspired by the transatlantic modernist and surrealist movements. Ana María León follows Bonet's decades-long, state-backed quest to house Buenos Aires's diverse and fractious population. Working with totalitarian and populist regimes, Bonet developed three large-scale housing plans, each scuttled as a new government took over. Yet these incomplete plans—Bonet's dreams—teach us much about the relationship between modernism and state power.
Modernity for the Masses finds in Bonet's projects the disconnect between modern architecture’s discourse of emancipation and the reality of its rationalizing control. Although he and his patrons constantly glorified the people and depicted them in housing plans, Bonet never consulted them. Instead he succumbed to official and elite fears of the people's latent political power. In careful readings of Bonet's work, León discovers the progressive erasure of surrealism's psychological sensitivity, replaced with an impulse, realized in modernist design, to contain the increasingly empowered population.
Leon begins by analyzing the performance of Molière’s plays during the Revolution, showing how his privileged position as royal servant was disrupted by the practical conditions of the revolutionary theatre. Next she explores Molière’s relationship to Louis XIV, Tartuffe, and the social function of his comedy, using Rousseau’s famous critique of Molière as well as appropriations of George Dandin in revolutionary iconography to discuss how Moliérean laughter was retooled to serve republican interests. After examining the profusion of plays dealing with his life in the latter years of the Revolution, she looks at the exhumation of his remains and their reentombment as the tangible manifestation of his passage from Ancien Régime favorite to new national icon.
The great Molière is appreciated by theatre artists and audiences worldwide, but for the French people it is no exaggeration to say that the Father of French Comedy is part of their national soul. By showing how he was represented, reborn, and reburied in the new France—how the revolutionaries asserted his relevance for their tumultuous time in ways that were audacious, irreverent, imaginative, and extreme—Leon clarifies the important role of theatrical figures in preserving and portraying a nation’s history.
"[A] dazzling book. . . . He has turned out one of the most powerful, as well as one of the most ambitious, art-historical works of the last decade." — Anthony Grafton, New Republic
"Rich and splendid. . . . Joseph Koerner's book is a dazzling display of scholarship, enfolding Durer's artistic achievement within the broader issues of self and salvation, and like [Durer's] great Self-
Portrait it holds up a mirror to the modern fable of identity." — Bruce Boucher, The Times
"Remarkable and densely argued." — Marcia Pointon, British Journal of Aesthetics
"Herculean and brilliant. . . . Will echo in fields beyond the Sixteenth-Century and Art History." — Larry Silver, Sixteenth Century Journal
"May be the most ambitious of recent American reflections on the mysteries of German art. His elegantly written book deals with the fateful period in the history of German art when it reached its highest point. . . . Offers deeper and more disturbing insights into German Renaissance art than most earlier scholarship." — Willibald Sauerlander, New York Review of Books
Thoreau asserted that the leaves of the earth's strata were not page upon page to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, "but living poetry like the leaves of a tree." The continuing vitality of Walden shows that it, too, is not a fossil but a living book, still putting out green leaves of insight.
Each decade since Walden was published in 1854 has seen the world grow more crowded and less "simple." What, in our consumerist, speed-of-light, hypermediated world would Thoreau have found worth pursuing? How would he structure his life so as to shut out the phones ringing, the cars honking, the litter trashing his beloved haunts? Readers still seek answers to such questions by picking up their dog-eared copy of Walden and immersing themselves yet again in its pages. Students convince us that this book still holds the power to change lives. These essays are written with the expectation that Thoreau in the new century can help us realize that there are more lives to live and more day to dawn—that "the sun is but a morning star."
Contributors include Nina Baym, Robert Cummings, Robert Oscar López, Lance Newman, H. Daniel Peck, Dana Phillips, Larry J. Reynolds, David M. Robinson, William Rossi, Robert Sattelmeyer, Sarah Ann Wider, and Michael G. Ziser.
This book tells the story of Stegner and his family as they made a home just outside of Palo Alto, California, during its transition from the Valley of Heart’s Delight (known for its rolling hills and orchards) to Silicon Valley. In this thoughtful study of the novels Stegner wrote in California—including his Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose—readers are invited to consider with Stegner what the practice of place requires in the American West. Specialists in the literature and history of the American West will find new analyses of Stegner and his influential work. Other readers will be guided through Stegner’s work in concrete and accessible prose, and anyone who has longed for home and a sense of place will encounter a powerful, beautiful, and at times tragic attempt to build and preserve it.
Focusing on specific texts by Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Condé, and Paule Marshall, this fascinating study explores the intricate trichotomous relationship between the mother (biological or surrogate), the motherlands Africa and the Caribbean, and the mothercountry represented by England, France, and/or North America. The mother-daughter relationships in the works discussed address the complex, conflicting notions of motherhood that exist within this trichotomy. Although mothering is usually socialized as a welcoming, nurturing notion, Alexander argues that alongside this nurturing notion there exists much conflict. Specifically, she argues that the mother-daughter relationship, plagued with ambivalence, is often further conflicted by colonialism or colonial intervention from the "other," the colonial mothercountry.
Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women offers an overview of Caribbean women's writings from the 1990s, focusing on the personal relationships these three authors have had with their mothers and/or motherlands to highlight links, despite social, cultural, geographical, and political differences, among Afro-Caribbean women and their writings. Alexander traces acts of resistance, which facilitate the (re)writing/righting of the literary canon and the conception of a "newly created genre" and a "womanist" tradition through fictional narratives with autobiographical components.
Exploring the complex and ambiguous mother-daughter relationship, she examines the connection between the mother and the mother's land. In addition, Alexander addresses the ways in which the absence of a mother can send an individual on a desperate quest for selfhood and a home space. This quest forces and forges the creation of an imagined homeland and the re-validation of "old ways and cultures" preserved by the mother. Creating such an imagined homeland enables the individual to acquire "wholeness," which permits a spiritual return to the motherland, Africa via the Caribbean. This spiritual return or homecoming, through the living and practicing of the old culture, makes possible the acceptance and celebration of the mother's land.
Alexander concludes that the mothers created by these authors are the source of diasporic connections and continuities. Writing/righting black women's histories as Kincaid, Condé, and Marshall have done provides a clearing, a space, a mother's land, for black women. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women will be of great interest to all teachers and students of women's studies, African American studies, Caribbean literature, and diasporic literatures.
A major new study of Sergei Eisenstein delivers fresh, in-depth analyses of the iconic filmmaker’s body of work
What can we still learn from Sergei Eisenstein? Long valorized as the essential filmmaker of the Russian Revolution and celebrated for his indispensable contributions to cinematic technique, Eisenstein’s relevance to contemporary culture is far from exhausted. In Movement, Action, Image, Montage, Luka Arsenjuk considers the auteur as a filmmaker and a theorist, drawing on philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gilles Deleuze—as well as Eisenstein’s own untranslated texts—to reframe the way we think about the great director and his legacy.
Focusing on Eisenstein’s unique treatment of the foundational concepts of cinema—movement, action, image, and montage—Arsenjuk invests each aspect of the auteur’s art with new significance for the twenty-first century. Eisenstein’s work and thought, he argues, belong as much to the future as the past, and both can offer novel contributions to long-standing cinematic questions and debates.
Movement, Action, Image, Montage brings new elements of Eisenstein’s output into academic consideration, by means ranging from sustained and comprehensive theorization of Eisenstein’s practice as a graphic artist to purposeful engagement with his recently published, unfinished book Method, still unavailable in English translation. This tour de force offers new and significant insights on Eisenstein’s oeuvre—the films, the art, and the theory—and is a landmark work on an essential filmmaker.
We know Mozart as one of history’s greatest composers. But his contemporaries revered him as a multi-instrumentalist, a dazzling improviser, and the foremost keyboard virtuoso of his time. When he composed, it was often with a single aim in mind: to set the stage, quite literally, for compelling and captivating performances. He wrote piano concertos not with an eye to posterity but to give himself a repertoire with which to flaunt his keyboard wizardry before an awestruck public. The same was true of his sonatas, string quartets, symphonies, and operas, all of which were painstakingly crafted to produce specific effects on those who played or heard them, amusing, stirring, and ravishing colleagues and consumers alike.
Mozart the Performer brings to life this elusive side of Mozart’s musicianship. Dorian Bandy traces the influence of showmanship on Mozart’s style, showing through detailed analysis and imaginative historical investigation how he conceived his works as a series of dramatic scripts. Mozart the Performer is a book for anyone who wishes to engage more deeply with Mozart’s artistry and legacy and understand why, centuries later, his music still captivates us.
Lydia Huntley was born in 1791 in Norwich, CT, the only child of a poor Revolutionary war veteran. But her father’s employer, a wealthy widow, gave young Lydia the run of her library and later sent her for visits to Hartford, CT. After teaching at her own school for several years in Norwich, Lydia returned to Hartford to head a class of 15 girls from the best families. Among her students was Alice Cogswell, a deaf girl soon to be famous as a student of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc.
Lydia’s inspiration came from a deep commitment to the education of girls and also for African American, American Indian, and deaf children. She left teaching to marry Charles Sigourney, then turned to writing to support her family, publishing 56 books, 2,000 magazine articles, and popular poetry. Lydia Sigourney never abandoned her passion for deaf education, remaining a supporter of Gallaudet’s school for the deaf until her death. Yet, her contributions to deaf education and her writing have been forgotten until now.
All of Lydia Sigourney’s of Lydia Sigourney’s work on the nascent Deaf community is presented in this new volume. Her writing intertwines her mastery of the sentimentalism form popular in her day with her sharp insights on the best ways to educate deaf children. In the process, Mrs. Sigourney of Hartford reestablishes her rightful place in history.
This book explores the inter-relationships between Agatha Christie and her works to seek the wholeness in the Christie experience. The authors perceive an integration in personal experience and moral and aesthetic values between the woman and her art.
As Drury writes in his preface, Herbert lived “a quiet life with a crisis in the middle of it.” Drury follows Herbert from his academic success as a young man, seemingly destined for a career at court, through his abandonment of those hopes, his devotion to the restoration of a church in Huntingdonshire, and his final years as a country parson. Because Herbert’s work was only published posthumously, it has always been difficult to know when or in what context Herbert wrote his poems. But Drury skillfully places readings of the poems into his narrative at biographically credible moments, allowing us to appreciate not only Herbert’s frame of mind while writing, but also the society that produced it. A sensitive critic of Herbert’s poems as well as a theologian, Drury does full justice to the spiritual dimension of Herbert’s work. In addition, he reveals the occasions of sorrow, happiness, regret, and hope that Herbert captured in his poetry and that led T. S. Eliot to write, “What we can confidently believe is that every poem . . . is true to the poet’s experience.”
Painting a picture of a man torn between worldly ambition and spiritual life, Music at Midnight is an eloquent biography that breathes new life into some of the greatest English poems ever written.
"The Music of Django Reinhardt is an impressive contribution to the field of jazz studies. The book offers a penetrating view into the music of one of jazz's most intriguing early figures."
---Keith Waters, coauthor, Jazz: The First Hundred Years
"An important addition to the literature on jazz, Givan's book provides many insights into Reinhardt’s solo building and unorthodox guitar playing; it is richly illustrated with many excellent musical transcriptions."
---Thomas Owens, author of Bebop: The Music and Its Players
"Givan has painstakingly assembled an analytical interpretation of Reinhardt's music that is rigorous, compelling, and illuminating. This book makes a unique contribution to the field of jazz studies and guitar music in general."
---Brian Harker, author of Jazz: An American Journey
When most people think of the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, they conjure up the unusual details of his colorful life: a childhood spent in gypsy encampments outside of Paris; the tragic caravan fire when he was eighteen that rendered his left hand nearly unusable; and his survival during World War II, when gypsies were massacred by the hundreds of thousands. The amazing story of Reinhardt’s life even became the basis for Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown.
Yet, it is the music of Django Reinhardt that made him one of the most original guitarists in history. In particular, his partnership with violinist Stéphane Grappelli, in the Quintette du Hot Club de France, brought him international renown and the attention of some of the most important American jazz musicians of the day, including Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, and Duke Ellington.
The Music of Django Reinhardt explores the story of the man and his music as never before. Benjamin Givan shows how one of jazz's greatest guitarists created his unparalleled sound. This book is an analytical study of his music, including his process, his improvisational style, and his instrumental technique.
The book features transcriptions from records of the 1920s through the 1950s and includes detailed discussion of selected performances from one of the most important guitarists in history.
Benjamin Givan is Assistant Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His writings on jazz have appeared in scholarly publications such as Current Musicology and the Musical Quarterly, as well as the popular jazz magazine Down Beat. He received his Ph.D. in music theory from Yale University.
Robert Wannamaker's monumental two-volume study explores the influential music and ideas of American composer, theorist, writer, performer, and educator James Tenney. Delving into the whole of Tenney's far-ranging oeuvre, Wannamaker provides in-depth, aurally grounded analyses of works linked to the artist's revolutionary theories of musical form, timbre, and harmonic perception.
Volume 1, Contexts and Paradigms, chronologically surveys Tenney's creative development and output. Wannamaker begins each section with biographical, aesthetic, and technical context that illuminates a distinct period in Tenney's career. From there, he analyzes a small number of pieces that illuminate the concerns, characteristics, and techniques that emerged in Tenney's music during that time. Wannamaker supplements the text with musical examples, graphs, and diagrams while also drawing on unpublished material and newly available primary sources to flesh out each work and the ideas that shaped it.
A landmark in experimental music scholarship, The Music of James Tenney is a first-of-its-kind consideration of the experimental music titan and his work.
Robert Wannamaker's monumental two-volume study explores the influential music and ideas of American composer, theorist, writer, performer, and educator James Tenney. Delving into the whole of Tenney's far-ranging oeuvre, Wannamaker offers close, aurally grounded analyses of works linked to the artist's revolutionary theories of musical form, timbre, and harmonic perception.
Written as a reference work, Volume 2, A Handbook to the Pieces, presents detailed entries on Tenney's significant post-1959 experimental works (excepting pieces covered in volume 1). Wannamaker includes technical information, an analysis of intentions and goals, graphs and musical examples, historical and biographical context, and thoughts from Tenney and others on specific works. Throughout, he discusses the striking compositional ideas found in Tenney's music and, where appropriate, traces an idea's appearance from one piece to the next to reveal the evolution of the composer's art and thought.
A landmark in experimental music scholarship, The Music of James Tenney is a first-of-its-kind consideration of the experimental music titan and his work.
From his careful readings of Oppen’s and Bronk’s poetry to his fascinating examination of the letters they exchanged, Weinfield provides important aesthetic, epistemological, and historical insights into their poetry and poetic careers. In bringing together for the first time the work of two of the most important poets of the postwar generation, The Music of Thought not only illuminates their poetry but also raises important questions about American literary history and the categories in terms of which it has generally been interpreted.
The Musician as Philosopher explores the philosophical thought of avant-garde musicians in postwar New York: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. It contends that these musicians—all of whom are understudied and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers—not only challenged the rules by which music is written and practiced but also confounded and reconfigured gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social tendency of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self.
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For William Blake, living is creating, conforming is death, and “the imagination . . . is the Human Existence itself.” But why are imagination and creation—so vital for Blake—essential for becoming human? And what is imagination? What is creation? How do we create? Blake had answers for these questions, both in word and in deed, answers that serve as potent teachings for aspiring writers and accomplished ones alike. Eric G. Wilson’s My Business Is to Create emulates Blake, presenting the great figure’s theory of creativity as well as the practices it implies.
In both his life and his art, Blake provided a powerful example of creativity at any cost—in the face of misunderstanding, neglect, loneliness, poverty, even accusations of insanity. Just as Los cries out in Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, “I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's; / I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create,” generations of writers and artists as diverse as John Ruskin, William Butler Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Philip K. Dick, songwriter Patti Smith, the avant-garde filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and the underground comic-book artist R. Crumb have taken Blake’s creed as inspiration.
Unwilling to cede his vision, Blake did more than simply produce iconoclastic poems and paintings; he also cleared a path toward spiritual and ethical enlightenment. To fashion powerful art is to realize the God within and thus to feel connected with enduring vitality and abundant generosity. This is Blake’s everlasting gospel, distilled here in an artist’s handbook of interest to scholars, writing teachers, and those who have made writing their way of life. My Business Is to Create is indispensable for all serious artists who want to transform their lives into art and make their art more alive.
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