4030 books match the query 'Language Arts & Disciplines' and 351 start with a

cover of Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change

Addressing Postmodernity

Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change

Barbara Biesecker

University of Alabama Press, 2000

Reveals the full range of Kenneth Burke's contribution to the possibility of social change

In Addressing Postmodernity, Barbara Biesecker examines the relationship between rhetoric and social change and the ways human beings transform social relations through the purposeful use of symbols. In discerning the conditions of possibility for social transformation and the role of human beings and rhetoric in it, Biesecker turns to the seminal work of Kenneth Burke.
 
Through a close reading of Burke's major works, A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology, the author addresses the critical topic of the
fragmentation of the contemporary lifeworld revealing postmodernity will have a major impact on Burkeian scholarship and on the rhetorical critique of social relations in general.
 
Directly confronting the challenges posed by postmodernity to social theorists and critics alike and juxtaposing the work of Burke and Jurgen Habermas, Biesecker argues that a radicalized rereading of Burke's theory of the negative opens the way toward a resolutely rhetorical theory of social change and human agency.
 

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cover of Adequate: Rewriting the Logics of Success in Rhetoric and Composition

Adequate

Rewriting the Logics of Success in Rhetoric and Composition

Timothy Oleksiak

Utah State University Press, 2025

Adequate: Rewriting the Logics of Success in Rhetoric and Composition proposes a fresh approach to teaching rhetoric and composition—a field awash with unrealistic labor expectations and untenable and often unattainable requirements for both the educator and the educated—that takes “success” and “failure” out of the equation and advocates for the concept of adequacy over that of perfection.
 
Fourteen essays from established scholars, ranging from deeply personal, to darkly humorous, to impassioned and blunt, offer theoretical and pragmatic resources for responding to unjust labor extraction and the discipline’s demands that teachers do it all. Drawing on an array of intellectual traditions including labor studies, feminist rhetoric, disability studies, Jewish rhetoric, and theories of writing program administrations, authors assert the reasonable position of being enough and thriving outside of work in the face of growing demands for professional excellence and even perfection.
 
Adequate reimagines what the concept of adequacy holds for the future of academic work. An invaluable resource for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in the rhetoric and composition field, this volume covers the realities of teaching rhetoric and composition in the modern college environment, as well as potential paths forward for educators in need of a better work-life balance.
 
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cover of Adult Literacy and American Identity: The Moonlight Schools and Americanization Programs

Adult Literacy and American Identity

The Moonlight Schools and Americanization Programs

Samantha NeCamp

Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

The release of U.S. census data in 1910 sparked rhetoric declaring the nation had a literacy crisis and proclaiming illiterate citizens a threat to democratic life. While newspaper editors, industrialists, and officials in the federal government frequently placed the blame on newly arrived immigrants, a smaller but no less vocal group of rural educators and clubwomen highlighted the significant number of native-born illiterate adults in the Appalachian region. Author Samantha NeCamp looks at the educational response to these two distinct literacy narratives—the founding of the Moonlight Schools in eastern Kentucky, focused on native-born nonliterate adults, and the establishment of the Americanization movement, dedicated to the education of recent immigrants.

Drawing on personal correspondence, conference proceedings, textbooks, and speeches, NeCamp demonstrates how the Moonlight Schools and the Americanization movement competed for public attention, the interest of educators, and private and governmental funding, fueling a vibrant public debate about the definition of literacy. The very different pedagogical practices of the two movements—and how these practices were represented to the public—helped shape literacy education in the United States. Reading the Moonlight Schools and the Americanization movement in relation to one another, Adult Literacy and American Identity expands the history and theory of literacy and literacy education in the United States. This book will be of interest to scholars in literacy, Appalachian studies, and rhetoric and composition.

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cover of Adult Programs in the Library

Adult Programs in the Library

Brett W. Lear

American Library Association, 2013

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cover of Adults Just Wanna Have Fun: Programs for Emerging Adults

Adults Just Wanna Have Fun

Programs for Emerging Adults

Audrey Barbakoff

American Library Association, 2016

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cover of Advances in Educational Interpreting

Advances in Educational Interpreting

Elizabeth A. Winston

Gallaudet University Press, 2021

In this follow up to Educational Interpreting: How It Can Succeed, published in 2004, Elizabeth A. Winston and Stephen B. Fitzmaurice present research about the current state of educational interpreting in both K-12 and post-secondary settings. This volume brings together experts in the field, including Deaf and hearing educational interpreters, interpreter researchers, interpreter educators, and Deaf consumers of educational interpreting services. The contributors explore impacts and potential outcomes for students placed in interpreted education settings, and address such topics as interpreter skills, cultural needs, and emergent signers.

Winston and Fitzmaurice argue massive systemic paradigm shifts in interpreted educations are as needed now as they were when the first volume was published, and that these changes require the collaborative efforts of everyone on the educational team, including: administrators, general education teachers, teachers of the deaf, interpreters, and counselors. The contributors to this volume address research-based challenges and make recommendations for how interpreting practitioners, and all members of the educational team, can enact meaningful changes in their work towards becoming part of a more comprehensive solution to deaf education.
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cover of Advances in Teaching Sign Language Interpreters

Advances in Teaching Sign Language Interpreters

Cynthia B. Roy

Gallaudet University Press, 2005

Picking up where Innovative Practices in Teaching Sign Language Interpreters left off, this new collection presents the best new interpreter teaching techniques proven in action by the eminent contributors assembled here. In the first chapter, Dennis Cokely discusses revising curricula in the new century based upon experiences at Northeastern University. Jeffrey E. Davis delineates how to teach observation techniques to interpreters, while Elizabeth Winston and Christine Monikowski suggest how discourse mapping can be considered the Global Positioning System of translation.

In other chapters, Laurie Swabey proposes ways to handle the challenge of referring expressions for interpreting students, and Melanie Metzger describes how to learn and recognize what interpreters do in interaction. Jemina Napier contributes information on training interpreting students to identify omission potential. Robert G. Lee explains how to make the interpreting process come alive in the classroom. Mieke Van Herreweghe discusses turn-taking and turn-yielding in meetings with Deaf and hearing participants in her contribution. Anna-Lena Nilsson defines “false friends,” or how contextually incorrect use of facial expressions with certain signs in Swedish Sign Language can be detrimental influences on interpreters. The final chapter by Kyra Pollitt and Claire Haddon recommends retraining interpreters in the art of telephone interpreting, completing Advances in Teaching Sign Language Interpreters as the new authoritative volume in this vital communication profession.

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cover of Adventures in Pen Land: One Writer's Journey from Inklings to Ink

Adventures in Pen Land

One Writer's Journey from Inklings to Ink

Marianne Gingher

University of Missouri Press, 2008

She invites us along on a raucous tour of soul-sucking jobs, marriage, and a teaching career, with accompanying disquisitions on blasphemous reading preferences, ’60s pop culture, writing workshops, and other amusing detours and distractions on the way to publication. She also shares her keen insights into the role of a Southern writer in American literary culture, the experience of writing as a mother, and the process of novel-writing as compared to a lengthy family car trip.

Featuring guest appearances by other writers such as Fred Chappell, Max Steele, and Annie Dillard plus cameos by the likes of Patty Hearst, Richard Nixon, and Bon Jovi, Adventures in Pen Land celebrates writing as a form of play that Gingher has never outgrown. The lighthearted illustrations by novelist Daniel Wallace (author of Big Fish) serve to reinforce this refreshing message as they depict one writer and her imagination growing up together.
 
Adventures in Pen Land conveys a writer’s sheer doggedness, with a few bones of advice tossed in along the way. Candid and irreverent, but always humane, this memoir is must reading for fans of Southern literature, students of creative writing, and anyone who can’t resist the treat of reading about a writer’s resilience and dedication to her craft.
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cover of Advertising at War: Business, Consumers, and Government in the 1940s

Advertising at War

Business, Consumers, and Government in the 1940s

Inger L. Stole

University of Illinois Press, 2012

Advertising at War challenges the notion that advertising disappeared as a political issue in the United States in 1938 with the passage of the Wheeler-Lea Amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act, the result of more than a decade of campaigning to regulate the advertising industry. Inger L. Stole suggests that the war experience, even more than the legislative battles of the 1930s, defined the role of advertising in U.S. postwar political economy and the nation's cultural firmament. She argues that Washington and Madison Avenue were soon working in tandem with the creation of the Advertising Council in 1942, a joint effort established by the Office of War Information, the Association of National Advertisers, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

Using archival sources, newspapers accounts, and trade publications, Stole demonstrates that the war elevated and magnified the seeming contradictions of advertising and allowed critics of these practices one final opportunity to corral and regulate the institution of advertising. Exploring how New Dealers and consumer advocates such as the Consumers Union battled the advertising industry, Advertising at War traces the debate over two basic policy questions: whether advertising should continue to be a tax-deductible business expense during the war, and whether the government should require effective standards and labeling for consumer products, which would render most advertising irrelevant. Ultimately the postwar climate of political intolerance and reverence for free enterprise quashed critical investigations into the advertising industry. While advertising could be criticized or lampooned, the institution itself became inviolable.

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cover of Advocacy and Awareness for Archivists

Advocacy and Awareness for Archivists

Kathleen D. Roe

American Library Association, 2019

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cover of Advocacy, Outreach & the Nation’s Academic Libraries: A Call for Action

Advocacy, Outreach & the Nation’s Academic Libraries

A Call for Action

William C. Welburn

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2011

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cover of Advocacy, Outreach & the Nation’s Academic Libraries: A Call for Action

Advocacy, Outreach & the Nation’s Academic Libraries

A Call for Action

William C. Welburn

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2011

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cover of Affordable Course Materials: Electronic Textbooks and Open Educational Resources

Affordable Course Materials

Electronic Textbooks and Open Educational Resources

Chris Diaz

American Library Association, 2017

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cover of Affrilachian Tales: Folktales from the African-American Appalachian Tradition

Affrilachian Tales

Folktales from the African-American Appalachian Tradition

Lynette Ford

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2012

Folktales from the African American Appalachian tradition. Told by Lyn Ford, one of America’s busiest touring storytellers. The power of Lyn's storytelling comes straight out of her family heritage, which is the content of this, her first book. Here she tells how she learned stories from her father and grandfather—and she includes many of the stories they told her.

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cover of African American English Speakers and Their Participation in Local Sound Changes: A Comparative Study, Volume 84

African American English Speakers and Their Participation in Local Sound Changes

A Comparative Study, Volume 84

Erik R. Thomas

Duke University Press, 0

This volume examines variation in vowel configurations in African American English as spoken by members of seven U.S. communities, including Roanoke Island, North Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and several parishes in rural Louisiana. The contributors argue that African American English exhibits considerable diversity, disproving the commonly held view that it is a uniform national dialect. Although some features of African American English are universal, others vary by region. In each community, African Americans adopted variants from local vernaculars. The study finds the most assimilation in the oldest communities in the rural South, where multiple races have lived together for centuries.
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cover of African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom

African American Literacies Unleashed

Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom

Arnetha F. Ball and Ted Lardner

Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

This pioneering study of African American students in the composition classroom lays the groundwork for reversing the cycle of underachievement that plagues linguistically diverse students. African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom approaches the issue of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in terms of teacher knowledge and prevailing attitudes, and it attempts to change current pedagogical approaches with a highly readable combination of traditional academic discourse and personal narratives.

Realizing that composition is a particular form of social practice that validates some students and excludes others, Arnetha Ball and Ted Lardner acknowledge that many African American students come to writing and composition classrooms with talents that are not appreciated. To empower and inform practitioners, administrators, teacher educators, and researchers, Ball and Lardner provide knowledge and strategies that will help unleash the potential of African American students and help them imagine new possibilities for their successes as writers.

African American Literacies Unleashed asserts that necessary changes in theory and practice can be addressed by refocusing attention from teachers’ knowledge deficits to the processes through which teachers engage information relevant to culturally informed pedagogy. Providing strategies for unlearning racism in the classroom and changing the status quo, this volume stresses the development and maintenance of a real sense of teaching efficacy—teachers’ beliefs in their abilities to connect with and work effectively with all students—and reflective optimism—teachers’ informed expectations that all students have the potential to succeed.

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cover of African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives

African American Rhetoric(s)

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Edited By Elaine B. Richardson and Ronald L. Jackson II. Foreword by Jacqueline Jones Royster. Introduction by Keith Gilyard

Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives is an introduction to fundamental concepts and a systematic integration of historical and contemporary lines of inquiry in the study of African American rhetorics. Edited by Elaine B. Richardson and Ronald L. Jackson II, the volume explores culturally and discursively developed forms of knowledge, communicative practices, and persuasive strategies rooted in freedom struggles by people of African ancestry in America.
Outlining African American rhetorics found in literature, historical documents, and popular culture, the collection provides scholars, students, and teachers with innovative approaches for discussing the epistemologies and realities that foster the inclusion of rhetorical discourse in African American studies. In addition to analyzing African American rhetoric, the fourteen contributors project visions for pedagogy in the field and address new areas and renewed avenues of research. The result is an exploration of what parameters can be used to begin a more thorough and useful consideration of African Americans in rhetorical space.
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cover of Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples

Africans and Native Americans

The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples

Jack D. Forbes

University of Illinois Press, 1993

Jack D. Forbes's monumental Africans and Native Americans has become a canonical text in the study of relations between the two groups. Forbes explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo--terms that no longer carry their original meanings. Forbes also presents strong evidence that Native American and African contacts began in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.
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cover of After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory

After Disruption

A Future for Cultural Memory

Trevor Owens

University of Michigan Press, 2024

The digital age is burning out our most precious resources and the future of the past is at stake. In After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory, Trevor Owens warns that our institutions of cultural memory—libraries, archives, museums, humanities departments, research institutes, and more—have been “disrupted,” and largely not for the better. He calls for memory workers and memory institutions to take back control of envisioning the future of memory from management consultants and tech sector evangelists. 

After Disruption posits that we are no longer planning for a digital future, but instead living in a digital present. In this context, Owens asks how we plan for and develop a more just, sustainable, and healthy future for cultural memory. The first half of the book draws on critical scholarship on the history of technology and business to document and expose the sources of tech startup ideologies and their pernicious results, revealing that we need powerful and compelling counter frameworks and values to replace these ideologies. The second half of the book makes the case for the centrality of maintenance, care, and repair as interrelated frameworks to build a better future in which libraries, archives, and museums can thrive as sites of belonging and connection through collections.
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cover of After Plato: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing

After Plato

Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing

John Duffy

Utah State University Press, 2020

After Plato redefines the relationships of rhetoric for scholars, teachers, and students of rhetoric and writing in the twenty-first century. Featuring essays by some of the most accomplished scholars in the field, the book explores the diversity of ethical perspectives animating contemporary writing studies—including feminist, postmodern, transnational, non-Western, and virtue ethics—and examines the place of ethics in writing classrooms, writing centers, writing across the curriculum programs, prison education classes, and other settings.

When truth is subverted, reason is mocked, racism is promoted, and nationalism takes center stage, teachers and scholars of writing are challenged to articulate the place of rhetorical ethics in the writing classroom and throughout the field more broadly. After Plato demonstrates the integral place of ethics in writing studies and provides a roadmap for future conversations about ethical rhetoric that will play an essential role in the vitality of the field.
 

Contributors: Fred Antczak, Patrick W. Berry, Vicki Tolar Burton, Rasha Diab, William Duffy, Norbert Elliot, Gesa E. Kirsch, Don J. Kraemer, Paula Mathieu, Robert J. Mislevy, Michael A. Pemberton, James E. Porter, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Xiaoye You, Bo Wang

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cover of After Rhetoric: The Study of Discourse Beyond Language and Culture

After Rhetoric

The Study of Discourse Beyond Language and Culture

Stephen R. Yarbrough

Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Aware that categorical thinking imposes restrictions on the ways we communicate, Stephen R. Yarbrough proposes discourse studies as an alternative to rhetoric and philosophy, both of which are structuralistic systems of inquiry.

Discourse studies, Yarbrough argues, does not support the idea that languages, cultures, or conceptual schemes in general adequately describe linguistic competence. He asserts that a belief in languages and cultures "feeds a false dichotomy: either we share the same codes and conventions, achieving community but risking exclusivism, or we proliferate differences, achieving choice and freedom but risking fragmentation and incoherence." Discourse studies, he demonstrates, works around this dichotomy.

Drawing on philosopher Donald Davidson, Yarbrough establishes the idea that community can be a consequence of communication but is not a prerequisite for it. By disassociating our thinking from conceptual schemes, we can avoid the problems that come with believing in an abstract structure that predates any utterance.

Yarbrough also draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism to define how utterances operate in life and to show how utterances are involved with power and how power relates to understanding. His discussion of Michel Meyer's problematology treats the questions implied by a statement as the meaning of the statement.

Yarbrough introduces readers to a credible theoretical framework for focusing on discourse rather than on conceptual schemes that surround it and to the potential advantages of our using this approach in daily life.

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cover of After the Czars and Commissars: Journalism in Authoritarian Post-Soviet Central Asia

After the Czars and Commissars

Journalism in Authoritarian Post-Soviet Central Asia

Eric Freedman

Michigan State University Press, 2011

From Czarism and Bolshevism to the current post-communist era, the media in Central Asia has been tightly constrained. Though the governments in the region assert that a free press is permitted to operate, research has shown this to be untrue. In all five former Soviet republics of Central Asia, the media has been controlled, suppressed, punished, and often outlawed. This enlightening collection of essays investigates the reasons why these countries have failed to develop independent and sustainable press systems. It documents the complex relationship between the press and governance, nation-building, national identity, and public policy. In this book, scholars explore the numerous and broad-reaching implications of media control in a variety of contexts, touching on topics such as Internet regulation and censorship, press rights abuses, professional journalism standards and self-censorship, media ownership, ethnic newspapers, blogging, Western broadcasting into the region, and coverage of terrorism.
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cover of After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University

After the Program Era

The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University

Loren Glass

University of Iowa Press, 2016

The publication in 2009 of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era provoked a sea change in the study of postwar literature. Even though almost every English department in the United States housed some version of a creative writing program by the time of its publication, literary scholars had not previously considered that this institutional phenomenon was historically significant. McGurl’s groundbreaking book effectively established that “the rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history,” forcing us to revise our understanding not only of the relationship between higher education and literary production, but also of the periodizing terminology we had previously used to structure our understanding of twentieth-century literature.

After the Program Era explores the consequences and implications, as well as the lacunae and liabilities, of McGurl’s foundational intervention. Glass focuses only on American fiction and the traditional MFA program, and this collection aims to expand and examine its insights in terms of other genres and sites. Postwar poetry, in particular, has until now been neglected as a product of the Program Era, even though it is, arguably, a “purer” example, since poets now depend almost entirely on the patronage of the university. Similarly, this collection looks beyond the traditional MFA writing program to explore the pre-history of writing programs in American universities, as well as alternatives to the traditionally structured program that have emerged along the way.

Taken together, the essays in After the Program Era seek to answer and explore many of these questions and continue the conversations McGurl only began.

CONTRIBUTORS
Seth Abramson, Greg Barnhisel, Eric Bennett, Matthew Blackwell, Kelly Budruweit, Mike Chasar, Simon During, Donal Harris, Michael Hill, Benjamin Kirbach, Sean McCann, Mark McGurl, Marija Rieff, Juliana Spahr, Stephen Voyce, Stephanie Young
 
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cover of After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur

After the Public Turn

Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur

Frank Farmer

Utah State University Press, 2013

 In After the Public Turn, author Frank Farmer argues that counterpublics and the people who make counterpublics—“citizen bricoleurs”—deserve a more prominent role in our scholarship and in our classrooms. Encouraging students to understand and consider resistant or oppositional discourse is a viable route toward mature participation as citizens in a democracy. 

Farmer examines two very different kinds of publics, cultural and disciplinary, and discusses two counterpublics within those broad categories: zine discourses and certain academic discourses. By juxtaposing these two significantly different kinds of publics, Farmer suggests that each discursive world can be seen, in its own distinct way, as a counterpublic, an oppositional social formation that has a stake in widening or altering public life as we know it.

Drawing on major figures in rhetoric and cultural theory, Farmer builds his argument about composition teaching and its relation to the public sphere, leading to a more sophisticated understanding of public life and a deeper sense of what democratic citizenship means for our time.
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cover of After-School Clubs for Kids: Thematic Programming to Encourage Reading

After-School Clubs for Kids

Thematic Programming to Encourage Reading

Lisa M. Shaia

American Library Association, 2014

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cover of Afterimages: Photography and U.S. Foreign Policy

Afterimages

Photography and U.S. Foreign Policy

Liam Kennedy

University of Chicago Press, 2016

In 2005, photographer Chris Hondros captured a striking image of a young Iraqi girl in the aftermath of the killing of her parents by American soldiers. The shot stunned the world and has since become iconic—comparable to the infamous photo by Nick Ut of a Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack. Both images serve as microcosms for their respective conflicts. Afterimages looks at the work of war photographers like Hondros and Ut to understand how photojournalism interacts with the American worldview.

Liam Kennedy here maps the evolving relations between the American way of war and photographic coverage of it. Organized in its first section around key US military actions over the last fifty years, the book then moves on to examine how photographers engaged with these conflicts on wider ethical and political grounds, and finally on to the genre of photojournalism itself. Illustrated throughout with examples of the photographs being considered, Afterimages argues that photographs are important means for critical reflection on war, violence, and human rights. It goes on to analyze the high ethical, sociopolitical, and legalistic value we place on the still image’s ability to bear witness and stimulate action.
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cover of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print

Against a Sharp White Background

Infrastructures of African American Print

Edited by Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

The work of black writers, editors, publishers, and librarians is deeply embedded in the history of American print culture, from slave narratives to digital databases. While the printed word can seem democratizing, it remains that the infrastructures of print and digital culture can be as limiting as they are enabling. Contributors to this volume explore the relationship between expression and such frameworks, analyzing how different mediums, library catalogs, and search engines shape the production and reception of written and visual culture. Topics include antebellum literature, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement; “post-Black” art, the role of black librarians, and how present-day technologies aid or hinder the discoverability of work by African Americans. Against a Sharp White Background covers elements of production, circulation, and reception of African American writing across a range of genres and contexts. This collection challenges mainstream book history and print culture to understand that race and racialization are inseparable from the study of texts and their technologies.
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cover of Against the Grain: Interviews with Maverick American Publishers

Against the Grain

Interviews with Maverick American Publishers

Robert Dana

University of Iowa Press, 1986

Against the Grain is a collection of interviews with nine small press publishers, each one characterized by strength of resolve and a dedication to good books. Each press reflects, perhaps more directly than any large trade publisher could, the character of its founder; and each has earned its own place in the select group of important small presses in America.

This collection is the first of its kind to explore with the publishers themselves the historical, aesthetic, practical, and personal impulses behind literary publishing. The publishers included are Harry Duncan (the Cummington Press), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights), David Godine (David R. Godine), Daniel Halpern (the Ecco Press), Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson (Copper Canyon Press), James Laughlin (New Directions), John Martin (Black Sparrow), and Jonathan Williams (the Jargon Society). Their passion for books, their belief in their individual visions of what publishing is or could be, their inspired mulishness crackle on the page.

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cover of Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland: When Life Becomes Craft

Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland

When Life Becomes Craft

Pauline Garvey and Daniel Miller

University College London, 2021

On the role smartphones play in the lives of the aging in contemporary Ireland.

This volume documents a radical change in the experience of aging. Based on two ethnographies in Dublin, Ireland, the book illustrates how smartphones enable old people to focus on crafting a new life in retirement. For some, the smartphone is an intimidating burden linked to being on the wrong side of a new digital divide. But for most, however, it has become integral to a new trajectory towards a more sustainable life, both for themselves and their environment. The smartphone has reunited extended family and old friends, helped resolve intergenerational conflicts though new forms of grandparenting, and has become a health resource. This is a book about acknowledging late middle age in contemporary Ireland and examines how older people in Ireland experience life today.
 
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cover of Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda: Togetherness in the Dotcom Age

Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda

Togetherness in the Dotcom Age

Charlotte Hawkins

University College London, 2023

Examines the impact of smartphones and mobile phones on older people’s health and everyday lives as part of the global Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing project.

Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda is based on a sixteen-month ethnography about experiences of aging in a neighborhood in central Kampala, Uganda. Taking a convivial approach, which celebrates multiple ways of knowing about social life, Charlotte Hawkins draws from these expressions about cooperative morality and modernity to consider the everyday mitigation of profound social change. “Dotcom” is understood to encompass everything from the influence of information and communications technologies to urban migration and lifestyles in the city to shifts in ways of knowing and relating. At the same time, dotcom tools such as mobile phones and smartphones facilitate elder care through, for example, regular mobile money remittances.

This book explores how dotcom relates to older people’s health, their care norms, their social standing, their values of respect and relatedness, and their intergenerational relationships—both political and personal. It also re-frames the youth-centricity of research on the city and work, new media and technology, and politics and service provision in Uganda. Through ethnographic consideration of everyday life and self-formation in this context, this monograph seeks to contribute to an ever-incomplete understanding of how we relate to each other and to the world around us.
 
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cover of Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil: A Work in Progess

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil

A Work in Progess

Marília Duque

University College London, 2022

An exploration of technology’s role in the day-to-day life of aging urban Brazilians.

With people living longer all over the world, aging has begun to be framed as a socioeconomic problem. In Brazil, older people are expected to remain healthy and autonomous while actively participating in society. Based on ethnographic research in São Paulo, this book shows how older people in a middle-class neighborhood try to reconcile these expectations with the freedom and pleasures reserved for old age by using smartphones. Smartphones have become of great importance to the residents as they search for and engage in new forms of work and hobbies. Connected by a digital network, they work as content curators, sharing activities that fill their schedules. Managing multiple WhatsApp groups is a job in itself, as well as a source of solidarity and hope. Friendship groups help each to download new apps, search for medical information and guidance, and navigate the city. Together, the author shows, older people are reinventing themselves as volunteers, entrepreneurs, and influencers, or they are finding a new interest that gives their later life a purpose. The smartphone, which enables the residents to share and discuss their busy lives, is also helping them, and us, to rethink aging.
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cover of Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile: The Experience of Peruvian Migrants

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile

The Experience of Peruvian Migrants

Alfonso Otaegui

University College London, 2023

An anthropological account of the experience of aging among Peruvian migrants to Chile in the smartphone era.

What does it mean to be aging in Chile as a migrant? Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile analyzes the experience of aging for Peruvian migrants aged around sixty who have lived in Chile for more than twenty years. Their lives, we discover, are informed by a series of experiences of being ‘in between’. They live between two countries, two generations, and two different stages in life, between giving care and not wanting care, and between a continuing legacy and not transmitting legacy. By focusing on the entanglement of aging, migration, and technology, this book is an ethnographic contribution to an unexplored subject in the vast literature on migration studies in Chile.
 
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cover of Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China: From the Cultural to the Digital Revolution in Shanghai

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China

From the Cultural to the Digital Revolution in Shanghai

Xinyuan Wang

University College London, 2023

An anthropological account of the experience of aging in the smartphone era in China.

The current oldest generation in Shanghai was born at a time when the average household could not afford electric lights, but today they can turn their lights off using smartphone apps. Grounded in extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China tackles the intersection between the “two revolutions” experienced by the older generation in Shanghai: the contemporary smartphone-based digital revolution and the earlier communist revolutions and argues that we can only understand the smartphone revolution if we first appreciate the long-term consequences of these people’s experiences during the communist revolutions. Supported by detailed ethnographic material, the observations and analysis here provide a panorama view of the social landscape of contemporary China, addressing such topics the digital and everyday life, aging and healthcare, intergenerational relations and family development, community building and grassroots organizations, collective memories, and political attitudes among ordinary Chinese people.
 
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cover of Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy: Care and Community in Milan and Beyond

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

Care and Community in Milan and Beyond

Shireen Walton

University College London, 2021

An anthropological account of the experience of age and ageing in an inner-city neighborhood in Milan.

This book is an anthropological account of the experience of age and ageing in an inner-city neighborhood in Milan, exploring the relationship between ageing and technology amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including the advent of mobile health, smart cities, and a number of wider socioeconomic and technological transformations. Through extensive urban and digital ethnographic research in Milan, Shireen Walton shows how the smartphone has become a “constant companion” in contemporary life, accompanying people throughout the day and through individual and collective experiences. The volume argues that ageing with smartphones in the contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change, and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with others.
 
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cover of Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act

Agents of Integration

Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act

Rebecca S. Nowacek

Southern Illinois University Press, 2011

The question of how students transfer knowledge is an important one, as it addresses the larger issue of the educational experience. In Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act, Rebecca S. Nowacek explores, through a series of case studies, the issue of transfer by asking what in an educational setting engages students to become “agents of integration”— individuals actively working to perceive, as well as to convey effectively to others, the connections they make. 

While many studies of transfer are longitudinal, with data collected over several years, Nowacek’s is synchronous, a rich cross-section of the writing and classroom discussions produced by a team-taught learning community—three professors and eighteen students enrolled in a one-semester general education interdisciplinary humanities seminar that consisted of three linked courses in history, literature, and religious studies. With extensive field notes, carefully selected student and teacher self-reports in the form of interviews and focus groups, and thorough examinations of recorded classroom discussions, student papers with professor comments, and student notebooks, Nowacek presents a nuanced and engaging analysis that outlines how transfer is not simply a cognitive act but a rhetorical one that involves both seeing connections and presenting them to the instructors who are institutionally positioned to recognize and value them. 

Considering the challenges facing instructors teaching for transfer and the transfer of writing-related knowledge, Nowacek develops and outlines a new theoretical framework and methodological model of transfer and illustrates the practical implications through case studies and other classroom examples. She proposes transfer is best understood as an act of recontextualization, and she builds on this premise throughout the book by drawing from previous work in cognitive psychology, activity theory, and rhetorical genre theory, as well as her own analyses of student work. 

This focused examination complements existing longitudinal studies and will help readers better understand not only the opportunities and challenges confronting students as they work to become agents of integration but also the challenges facing instructors as they seek to support that student work.
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cover of Alandra's Lilacs: The Story of a Mother and Her Deaf Daughter

Alandra's Lilacs

The Story of a Mother and Her Deaf Daughter

Tressa Bowers

Gallaudet University Press, 1999

When, in 1968, 19-year-old Tressa Bowers took her baby daughter to an expert on deaf children, he pronounced that Alandra was “stone deaf,” she most likely would never be able to talk, and she probably would not get much of an education because of her communication limitations. Tressa refused to accept this stark assessment of Alandra’s prospects. Instead, she began the arduous process of starting her daughter’s education.

Economic need forced Tressa to move several times, and as a result, she and Alandra experienced a variety of learning environments: a pure oralist approach, which discouraged signing; Total Communication, in which the teachers spoke and signed simultaneously; a residential school for deaf children, where Signed English was employed; and a mainstream public school that relied upon interpreters. Changes at home added more demands, from Tressa’s divorce to her remarriage, her long work hours, and the ongoing challenge of complete communication within their family. Through it all, Tressa and Alandra never lost sight of their love for each other, and their affection rippled through the entire family. Today, Tressa can triumphantly point to her confident, educated daughter and also speak with pride of her wonderful relationship with her deaf grandchildren. Alandra’s Lilacs is a marvelous story about the resiliency and achievements of determined, loving people no matter what their circumstances might be.

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Algebraic Semantics in Language and Philosophy

Godehard Link

CSLI, 1997

The philosophical approach of this volume is mainly structuralist, using logical tools to investigate the formal structure of various kinds of objects in our world, as characterised by language and as systematised by philosophy. This volume mainly analyses the structural properties of collections or pluralities (with applications to the philosophy of set theory), homogeneous objects like water, and the semantics and philosophy of events. This book thereby complements algebraic work that has been done on other philosophical entities, i.e. propositions, properties, relations, or situations. Located in the triangle of language, logic and philosophy, this volume is unique in combining the resources of different ¹elds in an interdisciplinary enterprise. Half of the fourteen chapters of this volume are original papers, complementing the collection of the author's previously published essays on the subject.
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cover of Algebras, Diagrams and Decisions in Language, Logic and Computation

Algebras, Diagrams and Decisions in Language, Logic and Computation

Edited by Kees Vermeulen and Ann Copestake

CSLI, 2002

This exemplary volume shows how the shared interests of three different research areas can lead to significant and fruitful exchanges: six papers each very accessibly present an exciting contribution to the study and uses of algebras, diagrams, and decisions, ranging from indispensable overview papers about shared formal members to inspirational applications of formal tools to specific problems. Contributors include Pieter Adriaans, Sergei Artemov, Steven Givant, Edward Keenan, Almerindo Ojeda, Patrick Scotto di Luzio, and Edward Stabler.
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cover of Algorithmic Worldmaking: The Rhetorical Craft of Networked Order

Algorithmic Worldmaking

The Rhetorical Craft of Networked Order

Jeremy David Johnson

University of Alabama Press, 2025

Illuminates how algorithms, intertwined with human biases, damage political discourse and civic engagement.

Algorithmic Worldmaking is an urgent exploration of the dynamic relationship between algorithms that encode their human creators’ assumptions and the humans whose choices are shaped by these algorithms in search engines, social media, and other digital spaces. Transcending discussions of one or the other, Jeremy David Johnson traces the corrupting political and social influences that arise from their mutual interaction.

Johnson uses the concept of kosmos in its sense of a dynamic order to frame the interplay between algorithms, humans, and their environments. He first shows how algorithms, far from being objective or unbiased, perpetuate human errors. Johnson then suggests a framework of four parts—navigation, exploration, maintenance, and monetization—to map the variety of political consequences to a society influenced by these four factors.

Citing controversies at major platforms such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook, Johnson demonstrates how algorithms limit and shape human thought. He makes several persuasive arguments. First, algorithms and humans share agency but humans have exceptional responsibility. Second, the algorithmic kosmos mirrors and shapes social oppression. Third, algorithms incentivize capitalist exploitation. Last, these influences damage democratic deliberation.

This landmark study is essential for scholars and students of political science, media studies, and those interested in the perilous implications of algorithmic systems on civic and political life.

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cover of Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov

Alive in the Writing

Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov

Kirin Narayan

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Anton Chekhov is revered as a boldly innovative playwright and short story writer—but he wrote more than just plays and stories. In Alive in the Writing—an intriguing hybrid of writing guide, biography, and literary analysis—anthropologist and novelist Kirin Narayan introduces readers to some other sides of Chekhov: his pithy, witty observations on the writing process, his life as a writer through accounts by his friends, family, and lovers, and his venture into nonfiction through his book Sakhalin Island. By closely attending to the people who lived under the appalling conditions of the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin, Chekhov showed how empirical details combined with a literary flair can bring readers face to face with distant, different lives, enlarging a sense of human responsibility.

Highlighting this balance of the empirical and the literary, Narayan calls on Chekhov to bring new energy to the writing of ethnography and creative nonfiction alike. Weaving together selections from writing by and about him with examples from other talented ethnographers and memoirists, she offers practical exercises and advice on topics such as story, theory, place, person, voice, and self. A new and lively exploration of ethnography, Alive in the Writing shows how the genre’s attentive, sustained connection with the lives of others can become a powerful tool for any writer.

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cover of All Ages Welcome: Recruiting and Retaining Younger Generations for Library Boards, Friends Groups, and Foundations

All Ages Welcome

Recruiting and Retaining Younger Generations for Library Boards, Friends Groups, and Foundations

Lina Bertinelli

American Library Association, 2020

According to 2016 Pew Research Center survey data, Millennials are more likely to have visited a public library in the past year than any other adult demographic. But despite being core library users, millennials and other younger generations are often underrepresented on library boards and library advocacy groups, including Friends groups and Foundations.  But you can change that, with the help of this planner’s hands-on worksheets, brainstorming activities, checklists, and expert advice. Using this toolkit from United for Libraries you will

  • understand generational differences and commonalities through statistics and analysis of Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z/post-Millennials;
  • learn how to navigate the challenges of fundraising with the “debt generations” by persuasively answering the question “what’s in it for me?”;
  • master the ABCs of recruitment and retention, tailoring them to fit your library;
  • craft several customized pitches, giving you confidence no matter the situation or audience;
  • discover how to cement buy-in from two key groups, current organization members and your new recruits, thereby ensuring acceptance and enthusiasm all around;
  • work towards defining and managing diversity for your advocacy group; and
  • use tried and true methods for successful onboarding of volunteers, including a Board Member Orientation Checklist and guidance on mentoring.

Using this resource, libraries of all kinds will be empowered to grow and strengthen their recruitment, retention, and training of Trustees, Friends, and Foundation members.

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cover of All Edge: Inside the New Workplace Networks

All Edge

Inside the New Workplace Networks

Clay Spinuzzi

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Work is changing. Speed and flexibility are more in demand than ever before thanks to an accelerating knowledge economy and sophisticated communication networks. These changes have forced a mass rethinking of the way we coordinate, collaborate, and communicate. Instead of projects coming to established teams, teams are increasingly converging around projects. These “all-edge adhocracies” are highly collaborative and mostly temporary, their edge coming from the ability to form links both inside and outside an organization. These nimble groups come together around a specific task, recruiting personnel, assigning roles, and establishing objectives. When the work is done they disband their members and take their skills to the next project.

Spinuzzi offers for the first time a comprehensive framework for understanding how these new groups function and thrive. His rigorous analysis tackles both the pros and cons of this evolving workflow and is based in case studies of real all-edge adhocracies at work. His provocative results will challenge our long-held assumptions about how we should be doing work.
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cover of All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification

All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing

An Explanation of Meter and Versification

Timothy Steele

Ohio University Press, 1999

Perfect for the general reader of poetry, students and teachers of literature, and aspiring poets, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing is a lively and comprehensive study of versification by one of our best contemporary practitioners of traditional poetic forms. Emphasizing both the coherence and the diversity of English metrical practice from Chaucer’s time to ours, Timothy Steele explains how poets harmonize the fixed units of meter with the variable flow of idiomatic speech, and examines the ways in which poets have used meter, rhyme, and stanza to communicate and enhance meaning. Steele illuminates as well many practical, theoretical, and historical issues in English prosody, without ever losing sight of the fundamental pleasures, beauties, and insights that fine poems offer us. Written lucidly, with a generous selection of helpful scansions and explanations of the metrical effects of the great poets of the English language, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing is not only a valuable handbook on technique; it is also a wide-ranging study of English verse and a mine of entertaining information for anyone wishing more fully to write, enjoy, understand, or teach poetry.
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cover of All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification

All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing

An Explanation of Meter and Versification

Timothy Steele

Ohio University Press, 2024

25th Annniversary Edition, with a new preface by the author Perfect for the general reader of poetry, students and teachers of literature, and aspiring poets, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing is a lively and comprehensive study of versification by one of our best contemporary practitioners of traditional poetic forms. Emphasizing both the coherence and the diversity of English metrical practice from Chaucer’s time to ours, Timothy Steele explains how poets harmonize the fixed units of meter with the variable flow of idiomatic speech, and examines the ways in which poets have used meter, rhyme, and stanza to communicate and enhance meaning. Steele illuminates as well many practical, theoretical, and historical issues in English prosody, without ever losing sight of the fundamental pleasures, beauties, and insights that fine poems offer us. Written lucidly, with a generous selection of helpful scansions and explanations of the metrical effects of the great poets of the English language, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing is not only a valuable handbook on technique; it is also a wide-ranging study of English verse and a mine of entertaining information for anyone wishing more fully to write, enjoy, understand, or teach poetry.
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cover of Alternative Conceptions of Phrase Structure

Alternative Conceptions of Phrase Structure

Edited by Mark R. Baltin and Anthony S. Kroch

University of Chicago Press, 1989

In the early years of generative grammar it was assumed that the appropriate mechanism for generating syntactic structures was a grammar of context-free rewriting rules. The twelve essays in this volume discuss recent challenges to this classical formulation of phrase structure and the alternative conceptions proposed to replace it. Each article approaches this issue from the perspective of a different linguistic framework, such as categorical grammar, government-binding theory, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and tree-adjoining grammar. By contributing to the understanding of the differing assumptions and research strategies of each theory, this volume serves as an important survey of current thinking on the frontier of theoretical and computation linguistics.
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cover of Amazonian Linguistics: Studies in Lowland South American Languages

Amazonian Linguistics

Studies in Lowland South American Languages

Edited by Doris L. Payne

University of Texas Press, 1990

Lowland South American languages have been among the least studied ln the world. Consequently, their previous contribution to linguistic theory and language universals has been small. However, as this volume demonstrates, tremendous diversity and significance are found in the languages of this region.

These nineteen essays, originally presented at a conference on Amazonian languages held at the University of Oregon, offer new information on the Tupian, Cariban, Jivaroan, Nambiquaran, Arawakan, Tucanoan, and Makuan languages and new analyses of previously recalcitrant Tupí-Guaraní verb agreement systems.

The studies are descriptive, but typological and theoretical implications are consistently considered. Authors invariably indicate where previous claims must be adjusted based on the new information presented. This is true in the areas of nonlinear phonological theory, verb agreement systems and ergativity, grammatical relations and incorporation, and the uniqueness of Amazonian noun classification systems. The studies also contribute to the now extensive interest in grammatical change.

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cover of Ambiguity in Language Learning: Computational and Cognitive Models

Ambiguity in Language Learning

Computational and Cognitive Models

Hinrich Schütze

CSLI, 1997

This volume is concerned with how ambiguity and ambiguity resolution are learned, that is, with the acquisition of the different representations of ambiguous linguistic forms and the knowledge necessary for selecting among them in context. Schütze concentrates on how the acquisition of ambiguity is possible in principle and demonstrates that particular types of algorithms and learning architectures (such as unsupervised clustering and neural networks) can succeed at the task. Three types of lexical ambiguity are treated: ambiguity in syntactic categorisation, semantic categorisation, and verbal subcategorisation. The volume presents three different models of ambiguity acquisition: Tag Space, Word Space, and Subcat Learner, and addresses the importance of ambiguity in linguistic representation and its relevance for linguistic innateness.
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cover of America and the Blitz: The Shaping of US Public Opinion and Policy on Great Britain

America and the Blitz

The Shaping of US Public Opinion and Policy on Great Britain

Sean Dettman

University of Missouri Press, 2026

In this work, Sean Dettman traces an observable correlation over the course of late summer 1940 between the bombings of London and other UK cities and the changing attitude of the American people towards adopting a moderate pro-aid position, and argues that these processes were aided by pro-aid US journalists who deployed a positive Blitz narrative centered on themes of resilience, courage, and fortitude. This shift in US public opinion allowed the Roosevelt Administration and pro-aid pressure groups to advance conversations in Washington towards aiding Britain, even at the risk of war.

Dettman also argues that this shift in opinion was caused by fear that a Nazi victory would threaten US national security and the American way of life, rather than an interest in expanding pro-democratic structures and institutions in Britain. 

Whereas the vast body of literature examining US public opinion during the ‘Great Debate’ reduces the Blitz narrative to a minor cause, America and the Blitz demonstrates how the Blitz narrative influenced domestic conversations regarding US national security and the American way of life. The author reveals that when the events and themes of the Blitz come into dialogue with conversations about US aid to Britain and national security, the traditional narrative changes.

America and the Blitz offers a new framework for understanding the ‘Great Debate,’ revealing the relationship between US journalists’ Blitz narrative and its effect on US public opinion towards aiding Britain and the ascendancy of American global power.

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cover of America the Middlebrow: Women's Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars

America the Middlebrow

Women's Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars

Jaime Harker

University of Massachusetts Press, 2007

Between the two world wars, American publishing entered a “golden age” characterized by an explosion of new publishers, authors, audiences, distribution strategies, and marketing techniques. The period was distinguished by a diverse literary culture, ranging from modern cultural rebels to working-class laborers, political radicals, and progressive housewives. In America the Middlebrow, Jaime Harker focuses on one neglected mode of authorship in the interwar period—women's middlebrow authorship and its intersection with progressive politics. 

With the rise of middlebrow institutions and readers came the need for the creation of the new category of authorship. Harker contends that these new writers appropriated and adapted a larger tradition of women's activism and literary activity to their own needs and practices. Like sentimental women writers and readers of the 1850s, these authors saw fiction as a means of reforming and transforming society. Like their Progressive Era forebears, they replaced religious icons with nationalistic images of progress and pragmatic ideology. In the interwar period, this mode of authorship was informed by Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which insisted that art provided vicarious experience that could help create humane, democratic societies.

Drawing on letters from publishers, editors, agents, and authors, America the Middlebrow traces four key moments in this distinctive culture of letters through the careers of Dorothy Canfield, Jessie Fauset, Pearl Buck, and Josephine Herbst. Both an exploration of a virtually invisible culture of letters and a challenge to monolithic paradigms of modernism, the book offers fresh insight into the ongoing tradition of political domestic fiction that flourished between the wars.

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cover of America's First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC's Stockton Helffrich

America's First Network TV Censor

The Work of NBC's Stockton Helffrich

Robert Pondillo

Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

 America’s First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC’s Stockton Helffrichis a unique examination of early television censorship, centered around the papers of Stockton Helffrich, the first manager of the censorship department at NBC. Set against the backdrop of postwar America and contextualized by myriad primary sources including original interviews and unpublished material, Helffrich’s reports illustrate how early censorship of advertising, language, and depictions of sex, violence, and race shaped the new medium.  

While other books have cited Helffrich’s reports, none have considered them as a body of work, complemented by the details of Helffrich’s life and the era in which he lived. America’s First Network TV Censor explores the ways in which Helffrich’s personal history and social class influenced his perception of his role as NBC-TV censor and his tendency to ignore certain political and cultural taboos while embracing others.

Author Robert Pondillo considers Helffrich’s life in broadcasting before and after the Second World War, and his censorial work in the context of 1950s American culture and emerging network television. Pondillo discusses the ways that cultural phenomena, including the arrival of the mid-twentieth-century religious boom, McCarthyism, the dawn of the Civil Rights era, and the social upheaval over sex, music, and youth, contributed to a general sense that the country was morally adrift and ripe for communist takeover.

Five often-censored subjects—advertising, language, and depictions of sex, violence, and race—are explored in detail, exposing the surprising complexity and nuance of early media censorship. Questions of whether too many sadistic westerns would coarsen America’s children, how to talk about homosexuality without using the word “homosexuality,” and how best to advertise toilet paper without offending people were on Helffrich’s mind; his answers to these questions helped shape the broadcast media we know today.
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