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Earthquake
Nature and Culture
Andrew Robinson
Reaktion Books, 2012
The 2011 devastating, tsunami-triggering quake off the coast of Japan and 2010’s horrifying destruction in Haiti reinforce the fact that large cities in every continent are at risk from earthquakes. Quakes threaten Los Angeles, Beijing, Cairo, Delhi, Singapore, and many more cities, and despite advances in earthquake science and engineering and improved disaster preparedness by governments and international aid agencies, they continue to cause immense loss of life and property damage.
 
Earthquake explores the occurrence of major earthquakes around the world, their effects on the societies where they strike, and the other catastrophes they cause, from landslides and fires to floods and tsunamis. Examining the science involved in measuring and explaining earthquakes, Andrew Robinson looks at our attempts to design against their consequences and the possibility of having the ability to predict them one day. Robinson also delves into the ways nations have mythologized earthquakes through religion and the arts—Norse mythology explained earthquakes as the violent struggling of the god Loki as he was punished for murdering another god, the ancient Greeks believed Poseidon caused earthquakes whenever he was in a bad mood or wanted to punish people, and Japanese mythology states that Namazu, a giant catfish, triggers quakes when he thrashes around. He discusses the portrayal of earthquakes in popular culture, where authors and filmmakers often use the memory of cities laid to waste—such as Kobe, Japan, in 1995 or San Francisco in 1906—or imagine the hypothetical “Big One,” the earthquake expected someday out of California’s San Andreas Fault.
 
With tremors happening in seemingly implausible places like Chicago and Washington DC, Earthquake is a timely book that will enrich earthquake scholarship and enlighten anyone interested in these ruinous natural disasters.
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Eclipse of Empires
World History in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture
Patricia Jane Roylance
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Eclipse of Empires analyzes the nineteenth-century American fascination with what Patricia Jane Roylance calls “narratives of imperial eclipse,” texts that depict the surpassing of one great civilization by another.

Patricia Jane Roylance’s central claim in Eclipse of Empires is that historical episodes of imperial eclipse, for example Incan Peru yielding to Spain or the Ojibway to the French, heightened the concerns of many American writers about specific intranational social problems plaguing the nation at the time—race, class, gender, religion, economics. Given the eventual dissolution of great civilizations previously plagued by these very same problems, many writers, unlike those who confidently emphasized U.S. exceptionalism, exhibited both an anxiety about the stability of American society and a consistent practice of self-scrutiny in identifying the national defects that they felt could precipitate America’s decline.

Roylance studies, among other texts, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Water-Witch (1830) and The Bravo (1831), which address the eclipse of Venice by New York City as a maritime power in the eighteenth century; William Hickling Prescott’s Conquest of Peru (1847), which responds to widespread anxiety about communist and abolitionist threats to the U.S. system of personal property by depicting Incan culture as a protocommunist society doomed to failure; and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), which resists the total eclipse of Ojibwa culture by incorporating Ojibway terms and stories into his poem and by depicting the land as permanently marked by their occupation.
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Ecocritique
Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture
Timothy W. Luke
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

Ecocriticism, whether coming from “back to nature” conservatives, Nature Conservancy liberals, or Earth First! radicals, is familiar enough. But when we listen do we really hear what these groups are saying? In a book that examines the terms of ecocriticism, Timothy W. Luke exposes how ecological critics, organizations, and movements manipulate our conception of the environment. Turning the tables on the ecocritics, Luke demonstrates how ecocriticism can move beyond its familiar confines to engage larger cultural, economic, and political questions.

Ecocritique rereads ecocriticism to reveal how power and economy, society and culture, community and technology compete over what are now widely regarded as the embattled ecosystems of nature. Luke considers in particular how the meanings and values attached to the environment by various groups—from the Worldwatch Institute, the Nature Conservancy, and Earth First! to proponents of green consumerism, social ecology, and sustainable development—articulate new visions of power and subjectivity for a post-Cold War era.

This accessibly written work opens with deep ecology and concludes with social ecology, along the way reconsidering thinkers with green philosophical leanings, including Herbert Marcuse, Paolo Soleri, and Murray Bookchin. In systematic critiques reexamining the cultural practices and ethical values of contemporary environmentalism, Luke highlights the political dilemmas of biocentrism and anthropocentrism in modern ecological thinking.

With its critical analysis of many contemporary environmental discourses and organizations, Ecocritique makes a major contribution to ongoing debates about the political relationships among nature, culture, and economics in the current global system.

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Economics
The Culture of a Controversial Science
Melvin W. Reder
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Economics has always had an unstable reputation in the academic world as well as in the public eye. Some consider economists to be scientists while others see them as disguised ideologues. The resulting insecurity of their discipline's status has driven economists continually to redefine its scope, methods, and content.

Since the 1930s economists have increasingly emphasized the scientific, quantitative side of their field, which has directed research to topics that can be elaborated through mathematical models. Economist Melvin Reder argues that this ongoing historical shift has been the result of pressure from two directions: from society's demand that expert advice be based on "scientific findings," and from economists themselves, who have wanted to view their own profession as a science. This book describes the profession of economics as it has developed in response to these challenges.

The diversity of the responses points to persistent internal disagreements within the economics community about its proper scope and methods. These disagreements, in turn, have led to incompatible proposals for the direction of research and divergent recommendations for public policy. Although Reder does not pretend to resolve these difficulties, he appraises different arguments and demonstrates how they have influenced both economists' behavior and public esteem for the profession. While recognizing that serious questions remain about economics's scientific status and practical utility, this book shows where economics has obtained practically usable results and where its fruits have been limited to elaboration of analytical constructions of uncertain applicability.

"[A] fascinating account of the sociology and philosophy of a profession. . . . This is an important book about an important field."—John L. Casti, New Scientist

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The Economy of Prestige
Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value
James F. English
Harvard University Press, 2008

This is a book about one of the great untold stories of modern cultural life: the remarkable ascendancy of prizes in literature and the arts. Such prizes and the competitions they crown are almost as old as the arts themselves, but their number and power--and their consequences for society and culture at large--have expanded to an unprecedented degree in our day. In a wide-ranging overview of this phenomenon, James F. English documents the dramatic rise of the awards industry and its complex role within what he describes as an economy of cultural prestige.

Observing that cultural prizes in their modern form originate at the turn of the twentieth century with the institutional convergence of art and competitive spectator sports, English argues that they have in recent decades undergone an important shift--a more genuine and far-reaching globalization than what has occurred in the economy of material goods. Focusing on the cultural prize in its contemporary form, his book addresses itself broadly to the economic dimensions of culture, to the rules or logic of exchange in the market for what has come to be called "cultural capital." In the wild proliferation of prizes, English finds a key to transformations in the cultural field as a whole. And in the specific workings of prizes, their elaborate mechanics of nomination and election, presentation and acceptance, sponsorship, publicity, and scandal, he uncovers evidence of the new arrangements and relationships that have refigured that field.

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Edited Clean Version
Technology and the Culture of Control
Raiford Guins
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

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Educating Artists for the Future
Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture
Edited by Mel Alexenberg
Intellect Books, 2008
In Educating Artists for the Future, some of the world’s most innovative thinkers about higher education in the arts offer fresh directions for educating artists and designers for a post-digital future. A group of artists, researchers, and teachers from a dozen countries here redefine art at the interdisciplinary interface where scientific inquiry and new technologies shape aesthetic values. This volume offers groundbreaking guidelines for art educators, demonstrating how the interplay between digital and cultural systems calls for alternative pedagogical strategies that encourage student-centered interactive learning.
 
“Mel Alexenberg, a very sophisticated artist and scholar of much experience in the complex playing field of art-science-technology, addresses the rarely asked question: How does the ‘media magic’ communicate content?”—Otto Piene, Professor Emeritus and Director, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 

 
 
 
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Educating For Professionalism
Creating A Culture Of Humanism In Medical Education
Delese Wear
University of Iowa Press, 2000

 The thirteen essays in Educating for Professionalism examine the often conflicting ethical, social, emotional, and intellectual messages that medical institutions send to students about what it means to be a doctor. Because this disconnection between what medical educators profess and what students experience is partly to blame for the current crisis in medical professionalism, the authors offer timely, reflective analyses of the work and opportunities facing medical education if doctors are to win public trust.

In their drive to improve medical professionalism within the world of academic medicine, editors Delese Wear and Janet Bickel have assembled thought-provoking essays that elucidate the many facets of teaching, valuing, and maintaining medical professionalism in the middle of the myriad challenges facing medicine at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

The collection traces how the values of altruism and service can influence not only mission statements and admission policies but also the content of medical school ethics courses, student-led task forces, and mentoring programs, along with larger environmental issues in medical schools and the communities they serve.

Contributors: 

Stanley Joel Reiser
Jack Coulehan
Peter C. Williams
Frederic W. Hafferty
Richard Martinez
Judith Andre
Jake Foglio
Howard Brody
Sheila Woods
Sue Fosson
Lois Margaret Nora
Mary Anne C. Johnston
Tana A. Grady-Weliky
Cynthia N. Kettyle
Edward M. Hundert
Norma E. Wagoner
Frederick A. Miller
William D. Mellon
Howard Waitzkin
Donald Wasylenki
Niall Byrne
Barbara McRobb
Edward J. Eckenfels
Lucy Wolf Tuton
Claudia H. Siegel
Timothy B. Campbell

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Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America
Adam R. Nelson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
Vividly revealing the multiple layers on which print has been produced, consumed, regulated, and contested for the purpose of education since the mid-nineteenth century, the historical case studies in Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America deploy a view of education that extends far beyond the confines of traditional classrooms. The nine essays examine “how print educates” in settings as diverse as depression-era work camps, religious training, and broadcast television—all the while revealing the enduring tensions that exist among the controlling interests of print producers and consumers. This volume exposes what counts as education in American society and the many contexts in which education and print intersect.
    Offering perspectives from print culture history, library and information studies, literary studies, labor history, gender history, the history of race and ethnicity, the history of science and technology, religious studies, and the history of childhood and adolescence, Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America pioneers an investigation into the intersection of education and print culture.
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Education, Culture, and Identity in Twentieth-Century China
Glen Peterson, Ruth Hayhoe, and Yongling Lu, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Educational pursuits run like a rich thread through the fabric of China's turbulent twentieth century. From the founding of China's first modern school system in the late Qing dynasty through the republican era to the latest educational developments in the People's Republic of China, this book seeks to understand how developments in education contributed to, and were in turn influenced by, cultural patterns and the ongoing search for identity by individuals, collectivities, and states. Its sixteen contributors explore three themes that have enlivened China studies in recent years: sino-foreign interactions, state-society relations, and gender representation and identification.
Unlike most studies of modern Chinese education that focus exclusively on the post-1949 era, Education, Culture, and Identity in Twentieth-Century China represents a deliberate attempt to break through the 1949 barrier and embrace the entire century. Culture emerges in this study as a deeper level factor that underlay the development of education in each period and shaped certain recurrent patterns, while identity involves a search for individual and collective meaning that went on under different regimes.
The product of a genuinely multidisciplinary effort to promote cross-fertilization among an international team of scholars in a wide range of disciplines, Education, Culture, and Identity in Twentieth-Century China will interest students and scholars of modern China, comparative and international education, educational policy, and international relations. It will also appeal to policy makers and professionals associated with international organizations.
Glen Peterson is Associate Professor of History, University of British Columbia. Ruth Hayhoe is Director, Hong Kong Institute of Education. Yongling Lu is a graduate student in the History Department, Stanford University.
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Eloquent Obsessions
Writing Cultural Criticism
Marianna Torgovnick, ed.
Duke University Press, 1994
Out of the core of experience, these essays began as obsessions. Whether founded in some strongly lived moment, deeply held conviction, long-term interest, or persistent and unanswered question, these essays reveal the writer’s voice—personal, often passionate, full of conviction, certainly unmistakable. Marianna Torgovnick has drawn together writings by leading contemporary scholars in the humanities, representing fields of literary criticism, American and Romance studies, anthropology, and art history. Eloquent Obsessions presents cultural criticism at its thoughtful and writerly best.

This collection explores a wide range of issues at the intersection of personal and social history—from growing up in the South to exploring a love for France or Japan, from coming of age as a feminist to mapping the history of National Geographic, from examining the cultural "we" to diagnosing class structures in Israel or showing how photography deals with AIDS. The authors here bring writerly genres—autobiography, memoir, or travel narrative—to intellectual tasks such as textual readings or investigating the histories of institutions. Continuing a tradition of cultural criticism established by writers such as Samuel Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Edmund Wilson, Hannah Arendt, or Raymond Williams, these essays seek to make a difference, to have an impact, and are based on the fundamental premise that writers have something to say about society. Simply put, this collection offers models for writing eloquently about culture—models that are intellectually and socially responsible, but attuned to the critic’s voice and the reader’s ear.

Aimed not just at academics but also at a more general audience alive to the concerns and interests of society today, Eloquent Obsessions, a revised and expanded version of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Winter 1992), will extend beyond the academy contemporary ways of writing about culture.

Contributors. Jane Collins, Cathy N. Davidson, Virginia R. Dominguez, Mark Edmundson, Gerald Graff, Richard Inglis, Aldona Jonaitis, Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Catherine Lutz, Nancy K. Miller, Linda Orr, Andrew Ross, Henry M. Sayre, Jane Tompkins, Marianna Torgovnick

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The Emancipation Circuit
Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom
Thulani Davis
Duke University Press, 2022
In The Emancipation Circuit Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.
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Embodied Rhetorics
Disability in Language and Culture
Edited by James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

Presenting thirteen essays, editors James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson unite the fields of disability studies and rhetoric to examine connections between disability, education, language, and cultural practices. Bringing together theoretical and analytical perspectives from rhetorical studies and disability studies, these essays extend both the field of rhetoric and the newer field of disability studies.

The contributors span a range of academic fields including English, education, history, and sociology. Several contributors are themselves disabled or have disabled family members. While some essays included in this volume analyze the ways that representations of disability construct identity and attitudes toward the disabled, other essays use disability as a critical modality to rethink economic theory, educational practices, and everyday interactions. Among the disabilities discussed within these contexts are various physical disabilities, mental illness, learning disabilities, deafness, blindness, and diseases such as multiple sclerosis and AIDS.

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The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–1939
A Study in Class and Culture
Peter Friedlander
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975
Peter Friedlander documents the formation of a local United Automobile Workers union at a mid-sized parts factory during the turbulent 1930s. Blending oral history based on personal interviews with a keen analysis of the worker's class structure and widely varied cultural backgrounds, Freidlander describes the transformation of a working-class community by its own actions and the ensuing stratification and factionalizing within that union. The result is a firsthand account of the experience of unionization in personal and social terms.
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The Emotional Mind
The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition
Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel
Harvard University Press, 2019

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel.

Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel.

Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more.

From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique.

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Emotions at Work
Normative Control, Organizations, and Culture in Japan and America
Aviad E. Raz
Harvard University Press, 2002
Our work life is filled with emotions. How we feel on the job, what we say we feel, and what feelings we display—all these are important aspects of organizational behavior and workplace culture. Rather than focusing on the psychology of personal emotions at work, however, this study concentrates on emotions as role requirements, on workplace emotions that combine the private with the public, the personal with the social, and the authentic with the masked. In this cross-cultural study of "emotion management," the author argues that even though the goals of normative control in factories, offices, and shops may be similar across cultures, organizational structure and the surrounding culture affect how that control is discussed and conceived.
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Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China
The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics
Patricia Buckley Ebrey
Harvard University Press, 2006
Huizong was an exceptional emperor who lived through momentous times. A man of many talents, he wrote poetry and created his own distinctive calligraphy style; collected paintings, calligraphies, and antiquities on a large scale; promoted Daoism; and involved himself in the training of court artists, the layout of gardens, and reforms of music and medicine. The quarter century when Huizong ruled is just as fascinating. The greatly enlarged scholar-official class had come into its own but was deeply divided by factional strife. The long struggle between the Chinese state and its northern neighbors entered a new phase when Song proved unable to defend itself against the newly emergent Jurchen state of Jin. Huizong and thousands of members of his family and court were taken captive, and the Song dynasty had to recreate itself in the South.
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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, Vol. 1 and 2
Edited by Joep Leerssen
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
This monumental encyclopedia documents the presence and effects of cultural consciousness-raising in the early decades of European nationalism. The volume tracks how intellectuals, historians, novelists, poets, painters, folklorists, and composers, in an intensely collaborative transnational network, articulated the national identities and aspirations that would go on to determine European history and politics with effects that are still felt today.
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The Enduring Legacy
Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela
Miguel Tinker Salas
Duke University Press, 2009
Oil has played a major role in Venezuela’s economy since the first gusher was discovered along Lake Maracaibo in 1922. As Miguel Tinker Salas demonstrates, oil has also transformed the country’s social, cultural, and political landscapes. In The Enduring Legacy, Tinker Salas traces the history of the oil industry’s rise in Venezuela from the beginning of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the experiences and perceptions of industry employees, both foreign and Venezuelan. He reveals how class ambitions and corporate interests combined to reshape many Venezuelans’ ideas of citizenship. Middle-class Venezuelans embraced the oil industry from the start, anticipating that it would transform the country by introducing modern technology, sparking economic development, and breaking the landed elites’ stranglehold. Eventually Venezuelan employees of the industry found that their benefits, including relatively high salaries, fueled loyalty to the oil companies. That loyalty sometimes trumped allegiance to the nation-state.

North American and British petroleum companies, seeking to maintain their stakes in Venezuela, promoted the idea that their interests were synonymous with national development. They set up oil camps—residential communities to house their workers—that brought Venezuelan employees together with workers from the United States and Britain, and eventually with Chinese, West Indian, and Mexican migrants as well. Through the camps, the companies offered not just housing but also schooling, leisure activities, and acculturation into a structured, corporate way of life. Tinker Salas contends that these practices shaped the heart and soul of generations of Venezuelans whom the industry provided with access to a middle-class lifestyle. His interest in how oil suffused the consciousness of Venezuela is personal: Tinker Salas was born and raised in one of its oil camps.

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Engaged Humanities
Rethinking Art, Culture, and Public Life
Aagje Swinnen
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
What is the role of the humanities at the start of 21st century? In the last few decades, the various disciplines of the humanities (history, linguistics, literary studies, art history, media studies) have encountered a broad range of challenges, related to the future of print culture, to shifts in funding strategies, and to the changing contours of culture and society. Several publications have addressed these challenges as well as potential responses on a theoretical level. This coedited volume opts for a different strategy and presents accessible case studies that demonstrate what humanities scholars contribute to concrete and pressing social debates about topics including adoption, dementia, hacking, and conservation. These “engaged” forms of humanities research reveal the continued importance of thinking and rethinking the nature of art, culture, and public life.
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Engendering China
Women, Culture, and the State
Christina Gilmartin
Harvard University Press, 1994

This first significant collection of essays on women in China in more than two decades captures a pivotal moment in a cross-cultural—and interdisciplinary—dialogue. For the first time, the voices of China-based scholars are heard alongside scholars positioned in the United States. The distinguished contributors to this volume are of different generations, hold citizenship in different countries, and were trained in different disciplines, but all embrace the shared project of mapping gender in China and making power-laden relationships visible. The essays take up gender issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Chapters focus on learned women in the eighteenth century, the changing status of contemporary village women, sexuality and reproduction, prostitution, women's consciousness, women's writing, the gendering of work, and images of women in contemporary Chinese fiction.

Some of the liveliest disagreements over the usefulness of western feminist theory and scholarship on China take place between Chinese working in China and Chinese in temporary or longtime diaspora. Engendering China will appeal to a broad academic spectrum, including scholars of Asian studies, critical theory, feminist studies, cultural studies, and policy studies.

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The Engineer in America
A Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture
Edited by Terry S. Reynolds
University of Chicago Press, 1991
With some two million practitioners, engineers form one of America's largest professional groups; indeed, it is the single largest occupation of American males today. The rise of this profession and its place in American society provide the focus for this anthology.

Spanning two centuries and the various subdisciplines of the field, these essays demonstrate the paradoxical role engineers have played in building (although usually not controlling) the infrastructure on which America's prosperity is based. This collection of seventeen essays traces the rise of the engineering profession and its evolving contribution to the development of America's material and economic success. Topics addressed include:

*American engineering's birth from European traditions
*Impact of science on engineering practice
*Changing relationship between engineers and bureaucratic organizations
*Growth of engineering professional institutions

Thoughtfully organized and unique in its scope, this volume will be a welcome overview for both students and scholars of the history of technology.

These essays were originally published in the journal Technology and Culture.
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Engineering the Eternal City
Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome
Pamela O. Long
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the “engineering pope” Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects—sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before.
 
This portrait of an early modern Rome examines the many conflicts, failures, and successes that shaped the city, as decision-makers tried to control not only Rome’s structures and infrastructures but also the people who lived there. Taking up visual images of the city created during the same period—most importantly in maps and urban representations, this book shows how in a time before the development of modern professionalism and modern bureaucracies, there was far more wide-ranging conversation among people of various backgrounds on issues of engineering and infrastructure than there is in our own times. Physicians, civic leaders, jurists, cardinals, popes, and clerics engaged with painters, sculptors, architects, printers, and other practitioners as they discussed, argued, and completed the projects that remade Rome.
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Enquiries into Religion and Culture (The Works of Christopher Dawson)
Christopher Dawson
Catholic University of America Press, 2009
The essays presented in this volume are among the most wide-ranging, intellectually rich, and diverse of Christopher Dawson's reflections on the relations of faith and culture
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Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture
Rey Chow
Duke University Press, 2012
How might the pornographic be associated with Brecht's and Benjamin's media theories? How are Foucault's and Deleuze's writings on visibilities "postcolonial"? What happens when Rancière's discussions of art are juxtaposed with cultural anthropology? What does a story by Lao She about collecting reveal about political collectivism in modern China? How does Girard's notion of mimetic violence speak to identity politics? How might Arendt's and Derrida's reflections on forgiveness be supplemented by a film by Lee Chang-dong? What can Akira Kurosawa's films about Japan say about American Studies? How is Asia framed transnationally, with what consequences for those who self-identify as Asian?

These questions are dispersively heterologous yet mutually implicated. This paradoxical character of their discursive relations is what Rey Chow intends with the word "entanglements," by which she means, first, an enmeshment of topics: the mediatized image in modernist reflexivity; captivation and identification; victimhood; the place of East Asia in globalized Western academic study. Beyond enmeshment, she asks, can entanglements be phenomena that are not defined by affinity or proximity? Might entanglements be about partition and disparity rather than about conjunction and similarity?
Across medial forms (including theater, film, narrative, digitization, and photographic art), and against more popular trends of declaring things and people to be in flux, Chow proposes conceptual frames that foreground instead aesthetic, ontological, and sentient experiences of force, dominance, submission, fidelity, antagonism, masochism, letting-go, and the attraction to self-annihilation. Boundary, trap, capture, captivation, sacrifice, and mimesis: these riveting terms serve as analytic pressure points in her readings, articulating perversity, madness, and terror to pursuits of freedom.

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Entering the Fray
Gender, Politics, and Culture in the New South
Edited by Jonathan Daniel Wells & Sheila R. Phipps
University of Missouri Press, 2009
The study of the New South has in recent decades been greatly enriched by research into gender, reshaping our understanding of the struggle for woman suffrage, the conflicted nature of race and class in the South, the complex story of politics, and the role of family and motherhood in black and white society. This book brings together nine essays that examine the importance of gender, race, and culture in the New South, offering a rich and varied analysis of the multifaceted role of gender in the lives of black and white southerners in the troubled decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Ranging widely from conservative activism by white women in 1920s Georgia to political involvement by black women in 1950s Memphis, many of these essays focus on southern women’s increasing public activities and high-profile images in the twentieth century. They tell how women shouldered responsibilities for local, national, and international interests; but just as nineteenth-century women’s status could be at risk from too much public presence, women of the New South stepped gingerly into the public arena, taking care to work within what they considered their current gender limitations.
The authors—both established and up-and-coming scholars—take on subjects that reflect wide-ranging, sophisticated, and diverse scholarship on black and white women in the New South. They include the efforts of female Home Demonstration Agents to defeat debilitating diseases in rural Florida and the increasing participation of women in historic preservation at Monticello. They also reflect unique personal stories as diverse as lobbyist Kathryn Dunaway’s efforts to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in Georgia and Susan Smith’s depiction by the national media as a racist southerner during coverage of her children’s deaths.
Taken together, these nine essays contribute to the picture of women increasing their movement into political and economic life while all too often still maintaining their gendered place as determined by society. Their rich insights provide new ways to consider the meaning and role of gender in the post–Civil War South.
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Entrepreneurial Seoulite
Culture and Subjectivity in Hongdae, Seoul
Mihye Cho
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Entrepreneurial Seoulite might be read as a memoir on Hongdae based on the author’s observations as a member of South Korea’s Generation X. During the 1990’s, Hongdae became widely known as a cool place associated with discourses on alternative music, independent labels, and club culture. Today, Hongdae is well known for its youth culture and nightlife, as well as its gentrification. 

Recent research on Korean culture approaches the K-wave phenomenon from the perspectives of cultural consumption, media analysis, and cultural management and policy. Meanwhile, studies on Seoul have centered on its transformation as a global, creative city. Rather than examining the K-wave or the city itself, this book explores the experience of living through the city-in-transition, focusing on the relationship between “the ideology that justified engagement in capitalism” and the “subjectification process.” The book aims to understand the project to institutionalize a cultural district in Hongdae as a demonstration of the coevolution of ideologies and citizenship in a society undergoing rapid liberalization—politically, culturally, and economically. 

A cultural turn took place in Korea during the 1990s, amid the economic prosperity driven by state-led industrialization and the collapse of the military dictatorship due to democratization movements. Cultural critiques, emerging as an alternative to social movements, proliferated to assert the freedom and autonomy of individuals against regulatory systems and institutions. The nation was hit by the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and witnessed massive economic restructuring including layoffs, stakeouts, and a prevalence of contingent employment. As a result, the entire nation had to find new engines of economic growth while experiencing a creative destruction. At the center of this national transformation, Seoul has sought to recreate itself from a mega city to a global city, equipped with cutting-edge knowledge industries and infrastructures.

By juxtaposing the cultural turn and cultural/creative city-making, Entrepreneurial Seoulite interrogates the formation of new citizen subjectivity, namely the enterprising self, in post-Fordist Seoul. What kinds of logic guide individuals in the engagement of new urban realities in rapidly liberalized Seoul—culturally and economically? In order to explore this query, Mihye Cho draws on Weber’s concept of “the spirit of capitalism” on the formation of a new economic agency focusing on the re-configuration of meanings, and seeks to capture a transformative moment detailing when and how capitalism requests a different spirit and lifestyle of its participants. Likewise, this book approaches the enterprising self as the new spirit of post-Fordist Seoul and explores the ways in which people in Seoul internalize and negotiate this new enterprising self.
 
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Ephesos, Metropolis of Asia
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Its Archaeology, Religion, and Culture
Helmut Koester
Harvard University Press

This volume brings together studies of Ephesos—a major city in the Greco-Roman period and a primary center for the spread of Christianity into the Western world—by an international array of scholars from the fields of classics, fine arts, history of religion, New Testament, ancient Christianity, and archaeology. The studies were presented at a spring 1994 Harvard Divinity School symposium on Ephesos, focusing on the results of one hundred years of archaeological work at Ephesos by members of the Austrian Archaeological Institute.

The contributors to this volume discuss some of the most interesting and controversial results of recent investigations: the Processional Way of Artemis, the Hadrianic Olympieion and the Church of Mary, the so-called Temple of Domitian, and the heroes Androkolos and Arsinoe.

Since very little about the Austrian excavations at Ephesos has been published in English, this volume should prove useful in introducing the archaeology of this metropolis to a wider readership.

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Erotic Innocence
The Culture of Child Molesting
James R. Kincaid
Duke University Press, 1998
In Erotic Innocence James R. Kincaid explores contemporary America’s preoccupation with stories about the sexual abuse of children. Claiming that our culture has yet to come to terms with the bungled legacy of Victorian sexuality, Kincaid examines how children and images of youth are idealized, fetishized, and eroticized in everyday culture. Evoking the cyclic elements of Gothic narrative, he thoughtfully and convincingly concludes that the only way to break this cycle is to acknowledge—and confront—not only the sensuality of children but the eroticism loaded onto them.
Drawing on a number of wide-ranging and well-publicized cases as well as scandals involving such celebrities as Michael Jackson and Woody Allen, Kincaid looks at issues surrounding children’s testimonies, accusations against priests and day-care centers, and the horrifying yet persistently intriguing rumors of satanic cults and “kiddie porn” rings. In analyzing the particular form of popularity shared by such child stars such Shirley Temple and Macaulay Culkin, he exposes the strategies we have devised to deny our own role in the sexualization of children. Finally, Kincaid reminds us how other forms of abuse inflicted on children—neglect, abandonment, inadequate nutrition, poor education—are often overlooked in favor of the sensationalized sexual abuse coverage in the news, on daytime TV talk shows, and in the elevators and cafeterias of America each day.
This bold and critically enlightened book will interest readers across a wide range of disciplines as well as a larger general audience interested in American culture.
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Essential Essays, Volume 1
Foundations of Cultural Studies
Stuart Hall
Duke University Press, 2018
From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance.

Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies focuses on the first half of Hall's career, when he wrestled with questions of culture, class, representation, and politics. This volume's stand-out essays include his field-defining “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies"; the prescient “The Great Moving Right Show,” which first identified the emergent mode of authoritarian populism in British politics; and “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” one of his most influential pieces of media criticism. As a whole, Volume 1 provides a panoramic view of Hall's fundamental contributions to cultural studies.
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Essential Essays, Volume 2
Identity and Diaspora
Stuart Hall
Duke University Press, 2018
From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance.

Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora draws from Hall's later essays, in which he investigated questions of colonialism, empire, and race. It opens with “Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” which frames the volume and finds Hall rethinking received notions of racial essentialism. In addition to essays on multiculturalism and globalization, black popular culture, and Western modernity's racial underpinnings, Volume 2 contains three interviews with Hall, in which he reflects on his life to theorize his identity as a colonial and diasporic subject.
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Etazhi
Second Year Russian Language and Culture
Evgeny Dengub and Susanna Nazarova
Georgetown University Press, 2023

A highly communicative approach to Intermediate Russian grounded in everyday culture and authentic texts

Etazhi uses the communicative approach to advance student’s Russian proficiency from the Novice High / Intermediate Low level of the ACTFL scale to an Intermediate Mid / Intermediate High level. Designed for one academic year of instruction, Etazhi engages students with highly relevant topics to internalize new vocabulary, expand their grammatical reach, and deepen their cultural understanding of Russian speakers.

Chapters on Russian daily life, travel, dating and marriage, clothing, cuisine, health and medicine, education, holiday traditions, and careers are infused with humor and help students acquire the vocabulary and cultural nuance needed to discuss Russian literature, culture, and the arts. Hundreds of authentic texts, photographs, and illustrations gathered from across the Russian Federation–including authentic material written by real people about their experiences in Russia–show the diversity of Russian speakers, culture, and society. Each of the six chapters contains approximately fifty exercises that help students practice the four basic language skills–listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

This textbook improves vocabulary and grammar while promoting deeper cultural competency, preparing students to study abroad, and providing a firm foundation for advanced courses.

Special features include:

  • Audio transcripts to aid in comprehension checks (available for free on the Press's website)
  • A grammar reference with charts and tables, including case and verb charts
  • An extensive Russian-English glossary
  • Over 120 authentic photographs and hand-drawn images by a Russian artist
  • A sample of presentation materials and a sample exam for chapter one to aid instructors (available for free on the Press's website)
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Ethnographic Chiasmus
Essays on Culture, Conflict and Rhetoric
Ivo Strecker
Michigan State University Press, 2011
The essays assembled in this volume are shaped by conditions—both enabling and constraining—that can perhaps best be described as an “ethnographic chiasmus.” This expression refers to the surprise and reversal of position that are characteristic of fieldwork, and it attends to the fact that transcultural understanding comes about as a meeting, touching, or “crossing.” Chiasmus also pertains to the relationship between culture and rhetoric in general. Culture structures rhetoric; rhetoric structures culture. Both are coemergent. In order to elucidate this process, ethnography has to focus on the manifold modes of rhetoric through which culture-specific patterns of thought and action are created.
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Ethnographic Sorcery
Harry G. West
University of Chicago Press, 2007

According to the people of the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, sorcerers remake the world by asserting the authority of their own imaginative visions of it. While conducting research among these Muedans, anthropologist Harry G. West made a revealing discovery—for many of them, West’s efforts to elaborate an ethnographic vision of their world was itself a form of sorcery. In Ethnographic Sorcery, West explores the fascinating issues provoked by this equation.

A key theme of West’s research into sorcery is that one sorcerer’s claims can be challenged or reversed by other sorcerers. After West’s attempt to construct a metaphorical interpretation of Muedan assertions that the lions prowling their villages are fabricated by sorcerers is disputed by his Muedan research collaborators, West realized that ethnography and sorcery indeed have much in common. Rather than abandoning ethnography, West draws inspiration from this connection, arguing that anthropologists, along with the people they study, can scarcely avoid interpreting the world they inhabit, and that we are all, inescapably, ethnographic sorcerers.

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Everyday Genius
Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity
Gary Alan Fine
University of Chicago Press, 2004
From Henry Darger's elaborate paintings of young girls caught in a vicious war to the sacred art of the Reverend Howard Finster, the work of outsider artists has achieved unique status in the art world. Celebrated for their lack of traditional training and their position on the fringes of society, outsider artists nonetheless participate in a traditional network of value, status, and money. After spending years immersed in the world of self-taught artists, Gary Alan Fine presents Everyday Genius, one of the most insightful and comprehensive examinations of this network and how it confers artistic value.

Fine considers the differences among folk art, outsider art, and self-taught art, explaining the economics of this distinctive art market and exploring the dimensions of its artistic production and distribution. Interviewing dealers, collectors, curators, and critics and venturing into the backwoods and inner-city homes of numerous self-taught artists, Fine describes how authenticity is central to the system in which artists—often poor, elderly, members of a minority group, or mentally ill—are seen as having an unfettered form of expression highly valued in the art world. Respected dealers, he shows, have a hand in burnishing biographies of the artists, and both dealers and collectors trade in identities as much as objects.

Revealing the inner workings of an elaborate and prestigious world in which money, personalities, and values affect one another, Fine speaks eloquently to both experts and general readers, and provides rare access to a world of creative invention-both by self-taught artists and by those who profit from their work.

“Indispensable for an understanding of this world and its workings. . . . Fine’s book is not an attack on the Outsider Art phenomenon. But it is masterful in its anatomization of some of its contradictions, conflicts, pressures, and absurdities.”—Eric Gibson, Washington Times

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Everynight Life
Culture and Dance in Latin/o America
Celeste Fraser Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz, eds.
Duke University Press, 1997
The function of dance in Latin/o American culture is the focus of the essays collected in Everynight Life. The contributors interpret how Latin/o culture expresses itself through dance, approaching the material from the varying perspectives of literary, cultural, dance, performance, queer, and feminist studies. Viewing dance as privileged sites of identity formation and cultural resistance in Latin/o America, Everynight Life translates the motion of bodies into speech, and the gestures of dance into a provocative socio-political grammar.
This anthology looks at many modes of dance—including salsa, merengue, cumbia, rumba, mambo, tango, samba, and norteño—as models for the interplay of cultural memory and regional conflict. Barbara Browning’s essay on capoeira, for instance, demonstrates how dance has been used as a literal form of resistance, while José Piedra explores the meanings conveyed by women of color dancing the rumba. Pieces such as Gustavo Perez Fírmat’s "I Came, I Saw, I Conga’d" and Jorge Salessi’s "Medics, Crooks, and Tango Queens" illustrate the lively scope of this volume’s subject matter.

Contributors. Barbara Browning, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Jane C. Desmond, Mayra Santos Febres, Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, Josh Kun, Ana M. López, José Esteban Muñoz, José Piedra, Gustavo Perez Fírmat, Augusto C. Puleo, David Román, Jorge Salessi, Alberto Sandoval

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Evolution and Culture
Marshall D. Sahlins and Elman R. Service, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1960
A unified interpretation of the evolution of species, humanity, and society
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Exoticism and the Culture of Exploration, Volume 26
Robert P. Maccubbin and Christa Knellwolf, eds.
Duke University Press
Historians use the phrase “the cult of the exotic” to describe the fascination with the foreign or strange that both led to and was intensified by the eighteenth century’s scientific and imperialistic ventures in the Pacific and elsewhere. This volume offers new historical contexts for encounters both real and imaginary and shows the evolution of Europeans’ ideas about themselves and those cultures they considered exotic. The essays draw on a wide variety of sources—art, architecture, scientific and literary works, journals and diaries, and the European popular cultural and political press—to explore eighteenth-century perceptions of the exotic and to demonstrate just how far-reaching “the cult of the exotic” was.

Contributors. Geraldine Barnes, Alexandra Cook, David Culpin, John Greene, Suzanne Kiernan, Christa Knellwolf, Adrian Mitchell, Lisa O’Connell, David Paxman, Ali Uzay Peker, Glynis Ridley, Nicholas Rogers, Walter Veit

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The Expediency of Culture
Uses of Culture in the Global Era
George Yúdice
Duke University Press, 2003
The Expediency of Culture is a pioneering theorization of the changing role of culture in an increasingly globalized world. George Yúdice explores critically how groups ranging from indigenous activists to nation-states to nongovernmental organizations have all come to see culture as a valuable resource to be invested in, contested, and used for varied sociopolitical and economic ends. Through a dazzling series of illustrative studies, Yúdice challenges the Gramscian notion of cultural struggle for hegemony and instead develops an understanding of culture where cultural agency at every level is negotiated within globalized contexts dominated by the active management and administration of culture. He describes a world where “high” culture (such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain) is a mode of urban development, rituals and everyday aesthetic practices are mobilized to promote tourism and the heritage industries, and mass culture industries comprise significant portions of a number of countries’ gross national products.

Yúdice contends that a new international division of cultural labor has emerged, combining local difference with transnational administration and investment. This does not mean that today’s increasingly transnational culture—exemplified by the entertainment industries and the so-called global civil society of nongovernmental organizations—is necessarily homogenized. He demonstrates that national and regional differences are still functional, shaping the meaning of phenomena from pop songs to antiracist activism. Yúdice considers a range of sites where identity politics and cultural agency are negotiated in the face of powerful transnational forces. He analyzes appropriations of American funk music as well as a citizen action initiative in Rio de Janeiro to show how global notions such as cultural difference are deployed within specific social fields. He provides a political and cultural economy of a vast and increasingly influential art event— insite a triennial festival extending from San Diego to Tijuana. He also reflects on the city of Miami as one of a number of transnational “cultural corridors” and on the uses of culture in an unstable world where censorship and terrorist acts interrupt the usual channels of capitalist and artistic flows.

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Exploring The Beloved Country
American Society And Culture
Wilbur Zelinsky
University of Iowa Press, 1994

 For fifty years geographer Wilbur Zelinsky has charted the social, cultural, and historical map of the American experience. A self-confessed incurable landscape voyeur, he has produced order and pattern from massive amounts of data, zestfully finding societal meaning in the terra incognita of our postmodern existence. Now he has gathered his most original and exciting explorations into a volume that captures the nature and dynamics of this remarkable phenomenon we call the United States of America. Each the product of Zelinsky's joyous curiosity, these energetic essays trace the innermost contours of our bewildering American reality.

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Exploring the Caucasus in the 21st Century
Essays on Culture, History and Politics in a Dynamic Context
Edited by Françoise Companjen, László Marácz, and Lia Versteegh
Amsterdam University Press, 2011
Although the name Caucasus has been around for some 2000 years, and may suggest unity and coherence, the region these days is best known for the ethnic and religious divides resulting in recurrent bloody conflicts between the various minorities and the post-Soviet independent states. Geographically, the Caucasus has traditionally been a buffer between Russia, Turkey and Iran. Part Russian Federation, part Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the area has a tradition of fast-shifting partnerships, of rich and varied cultural heritage, and fierce ethnic tensions going back centuries. This fascinating volume creates an illuminating perspective on the politics, history and culture of the Caucasus: it includes an account of how several 19th century Hungarian linguists fascinated by the region’s famously difficult languages conducted field research still used by politicians to prove or disprove ethnic links ; an analysis of the recurring forcible movements of the people; a study of the region’s Russian Imperial past; an exploration of the Muslim North/Christian South division in the context of the recent conflicts and their international ramifications; the elite-driven nature of the region’s politics; finally, the role of art as a medium of freedom in the war-torn zones of the region. Necessary reading for everyone with an interest in the history of one of the world’s tinderboxes.
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Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture
Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos
Lawrence S. Rainey
University of Chicago Press, 1991
In the summer of 1922, Ezra Pound viewed the church of San Francesco in Rimini, Italy, for the first time. Commonly known as the Tempio Malatestiano, the edifice captured his imagination for the rest of his life. Lawrence S. Rainey here recounts an obsession that links together the whole of Pound's poetic career and thought.

Written by Pound in the months following his first visit, the four poems grouped as "The Malatesta Cantos" celebrate the church and the man who sponsored its construction, Sigismondo Malatesta. Upon receiving news of the building's devastation by Allied bombings in 1944, Pound wrote two more cantos that invoked the event as a rallying point for the revival of fascist Italy. These "forbidden" cantos were excluded from collected editions of his works until 1987. Pound even announced an abortive plan in 1958 to build a temple inspired by the church, and in 1963, at the age of eighty, he returned to Rimini to visit the Tempio Malatestiano one last, haunting time.

Drawing from hundreds of unpublished materials, Rainey explores the intellectual heritage that surrounded the church, Pound's relation to it, and the interpretation of his work by modern critics. The Malatesta Cantos, which have been called "one of the decisive turning-points in modern poetics" and "the most dramatic moment in The Cantos," here engender an intricate allegory of Pound's entire career, the central impulses of literary modernism, the growth of intellectual fascism, and the failure of critical culture in the twentieth century. Included are two-color illustrations from the 1925 edition of Pound's cantos and numerous black-and-white photographs.
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