front cover of Galileo, Courtier
Galileo, Courtier
The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism
Mario Biagioli
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Informed by currents in sociology, cultural anthropology, and literary theory, Galileo, Courtier is neither a biography nor a conventional history of science. In the court of the Medicis and the Vatican, Galileo fashioned both his career and his science to the demands of patronage and its complex systems of wealth, power, and prestige. Biagioli argues that Galileo's courtly role was integral to his science—the questions he chose to examine, his methods, even his conclusions.

Galileo, Courtier is a fascinating cultural and social history of science highlighting the workings of power, patronage, and credibility in the development of science.
[more]

front cover of Galileo's Idol
Galileo's Idol
Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge
Nick Wilding
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Galileo’s Idol offers a vivid depiction of Galileo’s friend, student, and patron, Gianfrancesco Sagredo (1571–1620). Sagredo’s life, which has never before been studied in depth, brings to light the inextricable relationship between the production, distribution, and reception of political information and scientific knowledge.
           
Nick Wilding uses as wide a variety of sources as possible—paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and others—to challenge the picture of early modern science as pious, serious, and ecumenical. Through his analysis of the figure of Sagredo, Wilding offers a fresh perspective on Galileo as well as new questions and techniques for the study of science. The result is a book that turns our attention from actors as individuals to shifting collective subjects, often operating under false identities; from a world made of sturdy print to one of frail instruments and mistranscribed manuscripts; from a complacent Europe to an emerging system of complex geopolitics and globalizing information systems; and from an epistemology based on the stolid problem of eternal truths to one generated through and in the service of playful, politically engaged, and cunning schemes.
[more]

front cover of The Game Changed
The Game Changed
Essays and Other Prose
Lawrence Joseph
University of Michigan Press, 2011

Praise for Lawrence Joseph:

"Poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness… Joseph gives us new hope for the resourcefulness of humanity, and of poetry."
---John Ashbery

"Like Henry Adams, Joseph seems to be writing ahead of actual events, and that makes him one of the scariest writers I know."
---David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review

"The most important lawyer-poet of our era."
---David Skeel, Legal Affairs
 
 
 A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

Essays on poetry by the most important poet-lawyer of our era

The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose presents works by prominent poet and lawyer Lawrence Joseph that focus on poetry and poetics, and on what it is to be a poet. Joseph takes the reader through the aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, a lineage that includes Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein, switching critical tracks to major European poets like Eugenio Montale and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and back to American masters like James Schuyler and Adrienne Rich.

Always discerning, especially on issues of identity, form, and the pressures of history and politics, Joseph places his own poetry within its critical contexts, presenting narratives of his life in Detroit, where he grew up, and in Manhattan, where he has lived for 30 years. These pieces also portray Joseph’s Lebanese, Syrian, and Catholic heritages, and his life as a lawyer, distinguished law professor, and legal scholar.

[more]

front cover of The Gardens of Emily Dickinson
The Gardens of Emily Dickinson
Judith Farrwith a chapter by Louise Carter
Harvard University Press, 2005

In this first substantial study of Emily Dickinson's devotion to flowers and gardening, Judith Farr seeks to join both poet and gardener in one creative personality. She casts new light on Dickinson's temperament, her aesthetic sensibility, and her vision of the relationship between art and nature, revealing that the successful gardener's intimate understanding of horticulture helped shape the poet's choice of metaphors for every experience: love and hate, wickedness and virtue, death and immortality.

Gardening, Farr demonstrates, was Dickinson's other vocation, more public than the making of poems but analogous and closely related to it. Over a third of Dickinson's poems and nearly half of her letters allude with passionate intensity to her favorite wildflowers, to traditional blooms like the daisy or gentian, and to the exotic gardenias and jasmines of her conservatory. Each flower was assigned specific connotations by the nineteenth century floral dictionaries she knew; thus, Dickinson's association of various flowers with friends, family, and lovers, like the tropes and scenarios presented in her poems, establishes her participation in the literary and painterly culture of her day. A chapter, "Gardening with Emily Dickinson" by Louise Carter, cites family letters and memoirs to conjecture the kinds of flowers contained in the poet's indoor and outdoor gardens. Carter hypothesizes Dickinson's methods of gardening, explaining how one might grow her flowers today.

Beautifully illustrated and written with verve, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson will provide pleasure and insight to a wide audience of scholars, admirers of Dickinson's poetry, and garden lovers everywhere.

[more]

front cover of Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim
Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim
Creating Countercultural Community
Timothy Gray
University of Iowa Press, 2006
In Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim, Timothy Gray draws upon previously unpublished journals and letters as well as his own close readings of Gary Snyder's well-crafted poetry and prose to track the early career of a maverick intellectual whose writings powered the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. Exploring various aspects of cultural geography, Gray asserts that this west coast literary community seized upon the idea of a Pacific Rim regional structure in part to recognize their Orientalist desires and in part to consolidate their opposition to America's cold war ideology, which tended to divide East from West. The geographical consciousness of Snyder's writing was particularly influential, Gray argues, because it gave San Francisco's Beat and hippie cultures a set of physical coordinates by which they could chart their utopian visions of peace and love.Gray's introduction tracks the increased use of “Pacific Rim discourse” by politicians and business leaders following World War II. Ensuing chapters analyze Snyder's countercultural invocation of this regional idea, concentrating on the poet's migratory or “creaturely” sensibility, his gift for literary translation, his physical embodiment of trans-Pacific ideals, his role as tribal spokesperson for Haight-Ashbury hippies, and his burgeoning interest in environmental issues. Throughout, Gray's citations of such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger shed light on Snyder's communal role, providing an amazingly intimate portrait of the west coast counterculture. An interdisciplinary project that utilizes models of ecology, sociology, and comparative religion to supplement traditional methods of literary biography, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim offers a unique perspective on Snyder's life and work. This book will fascinate literary and Asian studies scholars as well as the general reader interested in the Beat movement and multicultural influences on poetry.
[more]

front cover of Gathering Medicines
Gathering Medicines
Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South
Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai
University of Chicago Press, 2021
In the early 2000s, the central government of China encouraged all of the nation’s registered minorities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” folk medical knowledges in an effort to create local health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of traditional Chinese medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of knowledge development while sympathetically introducing the myriad therapeutic traditions of southern China.
 
Over a period of six years, Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai worked with seven minority nationality groups in China’s southern mountains, observing how medicines were gathered and local healing systems codified. Gathering Medicines shares their intimate view of how people understand ethnicity, locality, the body, and nature. This ethnography of knowledge diversities in multiethnic China is a testament to the rural wisdom of mountain healers, one that theorizes, from the ground up, the dynamic encounters between formal statist knowledge and the popular authority of the wild.
[more]

front cover of George Eliot's Dialogue with John Milton
George Eliot's Dialogue with John Milton
Anna K. Nardo
University of Missouri Press, 2003
In George Eliot’s Dialogue with John Milton, Anna K. Nardo details how Eliot reimagined Milton’s life and art to write epic novels for an age of unbelief. Nardo demonstrates that Eliot directly engaged Milton’s poetry, prose, and the well-known legends of his life—transposing, reframing, regendering, and thus testing both the stories told about Milton and the stories Milton told.
In Romola and Middlemarch, Eliot’s contemporary audience would immediately have recognized in her heroines’ stories the plight of Milton’s daughters—enlisted as readers for a blind poet and scholar. By evoking the well-known legends of Milton’s life in these novels, Eliot places Milton in dialogue with himself in order to imagine new possibilities. In Romola, a daughter uses what she has learned from one Miltonic father to liberate herself from subjugation to the other, and in Middlemarch, Eliot tests Milton’s fundamental assumptions about gender and knowledge by evoking, then reframing scenes from his life and his epic Paradise Lost.
This strategy for establishing a dialogue with authoritative discourse, which Eliot evolved in midcareer, is complex and elegant. Eliot’s first full-length novel, however, poses a direct challenge to the pastoral assumptions of Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”—a challenge that she extends to the theology of Milton’s epic of a lost pastoral paradise. In Adam Bede, Eliot summons Miltonic patterns into situations that expose their absence, leaving not the denial of these patterns, but their echo. Having separated Milton’s characteristic patterns of choice from his theology, Eliot then began to experiment with transformations of the Miltonic hero. By reimagining the story of the virtuous Lady of Comus, Eliot discovers the possibility for a heroic deliverance for the beleaguered heroine of The Mill on the Floss. In Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, she first characterizes a male protagonist as a Miltonic hero, and then confronts her female, rather than her male, protagonist with the trials faced by that hero.
In these complex transformations, we see Eliot’s strenuous and lifelong dialogue with Milton—a dialogue that liberated Eliot’s imagination. The author shows that Eliot opens the authoritative discourse by and about Milton to new possibilities envisioned by a towering female intellect. Scholars of both seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century British literature, especially those specializing in Eliot or Milton, as well as theorists engaged in the ongoing debate about intertextuality, will find this book of great interest.
[more]

front cover of Global Health for All
Global Health for All
Knowledge, Politics, and Practices
Jean-Paul Gaudillière
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Global Health for All trains a critical lens on global health to share the stories that global health’s practices and logics tell about 20th and 21st century configurations of science and power. An ethnography on multiple scales, the book focuses on global health’s key epistemic and therapeutic practices like localization, measurement, triage, markets, technology, care, and regulation. Its roving approach traverses policy centers, sites of intervention, and innumerable spaces in between to consider what happens when globalized logics, circulations, and actors work to imagine, modify, and manage health. By resting in these in-between places, Global Health for All simultaneously examines global health as a coherent system and as a dynamic, unpredictable collection of modular parts.
[more]

logo for Temple University Press
God In The Street
New York Writing from The Penny Press to Melville
Hans Bergmann
Temple University Press, 1995

In the fast changing culture of antebellum New York, writers of every stripe celebrated "the City" as a stage for the daily urban encounter between the familiar and the inexplicable. Probing into these richly varied texts, Hans Bergmann uncovers the innovations in writing that accompanied the new market society— the penny newspapers' grandiose boastings, the poetic catalogues of Walt Whitman, the sentimental realism of charity workers, the sensationalism of slum visitors, and the complex urban encounters of Herman Melville's fiction.

The period in which New York, the city itself, became firmly established as a subject invented a literary form that attempts to capture the variety of the teeming city and the flaneur, the walking observer. But Bergmann does not simply lead a parade of images and themes; he explores the ways in which these observers understood what was happening around them and to them, always attentive to class struggle and race and gender issues.

God in the Street shows how the penny press and Whitman's New York poetry create a new mass culture hero who interprets and dignifies the city's confusions. New York writers, both serious and sensationalist, meditate upon street encounters with tricksters and confidence-men and explore the meanings of encounters. Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrinever" underlines the unrelenting isolation and inability to control the interpreter. Bergmann reinterprets Melville's The Confidence Man as an example of how a complex literary form arises directly from its own historical materials and is itself socially symbolic. Bergmann sees Melville as special because he recognizes his inability to make sense of the surface of chaotic images and encounters. In mid-century New York City, Melville believes God is in the street, unavailable and unrecognizable, rather than omnipresent and guiding.

 
[more]

front cover of The Greek Pursuit of Knowledge
The Greek Pursuit of Knowledge
Jacques Brunschwig
Harvard University Press, 2003
Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the intellectual, ethical, and political civilization of the West draws and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In this volume drawn from the reference work Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, major scholars take up basic topics in philosophy and science, offering an account of the extraordinary explosion of desire for knowledge in the classical Greek world.
[more]

front cover of Green Victorians
Green Victorians
The Simple Life in John Ruskin's Lake District
Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
From Henry David Thoreau to Bill McKibben, critics and philosophers have long sought to demonstrate how a sufficient life—one without constant, environmentally damaging growth—might still be rich and satisfying. Yet one crucial episode in the history of sufficiency has been largely forgotten. Green Victorians tells the story of a circle of men and women in the English Lake District who attempted to create a new kind of economy, turning their backs on Victorian consumer society in order to live a life dependent not on material abundance and social prestige but on artful simplicity and the bonds of community.
           
At the center of their social experiment was the charismatic art critic and political economist John Ruskin. Albritton and Albritton Jonsson show how Ruskin’s followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from hand spinning and woodworking to gardening, archaeology, and pedagogy. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for there was a dark side to Ruskin’s community as well—racist thinking, paternalism, and technophobia. Richly illustrated, Green Victorians breaks new ground, connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin’s utopian community with the problems of ethical consumption then and now.
[more]

front cover of Groovy Science
Groovy Science
Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture
Edited by David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, Theodore Roszak described the youth of the late 1960s as fleeing science “as if from a place inhabited by plague,” and even seeking “subversion of the scientific worldview” itself. Roszak’s view has come to be our own: when we think of the youth movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, we think of a movement that was explicitly anti-scientific in its embrace of alternative spiritualities and communal living.
           
Such a view is far too simple, ignoring the diverse ways in which the era’s countercultures expressed enthusiasm for and involved themselves in science—of a certain type. Rejecting hulking, militarized technical projects like Cold War missiles and mainframes, Boomers and hippies sought a science that was both small-scale and big-picture, as exemplified by the annual workshops on quantum physics at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, or Timothy Leary’s championing of space exploration as the ultimate “high.” Groovy Science explores the experimentation and eclecticism that marked countercultural science and technology during one of the most colorful periods of American history.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter