Results by title

Winner, 2015 LAJSA Best Book in Latin American Jewish Studies

The practices of interrogation, torture, and confession have resurfaced in public debates since the early 2000s following human rights abuses around the globe. Yet discussion of torture has remained restricted to three principal fields: the legal, the pragmatic, and the moral, eclipsing the less immediate but vital question of what torture does.Figurative Inquisitions seeks to correct this lacuna by approaching the question of torture from a literary vantage point.

This book investigates the uncanny presence of the Inquisition and marranismo (crypto-Judaism) in modern literature, theater, and film from Mexico, Brazil, and Portugal. Through a critique of fictional scenes of interrogation, it underscores the vital role of the literary in deconstructing the relation between torture and truth. Figurative Inquisitions traces the contours of a relationship among aesthetics, ethics, and politics in an account of the "Inquisitional logic" that continues to haunt contemporary political forms. In so doing, the book offers a unique humanistic perspective on current torture debates.

Finding Italy explores the journey of the Romans’ ancestor Aeneas and his fellow Trojans from their old home, Troy, to their new country, Italy, narrated in Vergil’s epic poem Aeneid. K. F. B. Fletcher argues that a main narrative theme is patriotism, specifically the problem of how one comes to love one’s new country. The various directions Aeneas receives throughout the first half of the poem are meant to create this love, explaining both to Aeneas and to Vergil’s readers how they should respond to the new, unified Italy synonymous with Rome. These directions come from the gods, or from people close to Aeneas who have divine connections, and they all serve to instill an emotional connection to the land, creating a mental image of Italy that tells him far more about his destination than merely its location, and ultimately making him fall in love with Italy enough to fight for it soon after his arrival. The poem thus dramatizes the birth of nationalism, as Italy is only a concept to Aeneas throughout his trip; these directions do not describe Italy as it is at the time of Aeneas’ journey, but as an ideal to be realized by Aeneas and his descendants, reaching its final, perfect form under Augustus Caesar.

Finding Italy provides a very detailed reading of the directions Aeneas receives by situating them within their relevant contexts: ancient geography, Greek colonization narratives, prophecy, and ancient views of wandering. Vergil draws on all of these concepts to craft instructions that create in Aeneas an attachment to Italy before he ever arrives, a process that dramatizes a key emotional problem in the late first century BCE in the wake of the Social and Civil Wars: how to balance the love of one's modest birthplace with the love of Rome, the larger city that now encompasses it.

In his 1862 eulogy for Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson reflected that his friend “dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills, and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea.” Finding Thoreau traces the reception of Thoreau's work from the time of his death to his ascendancy as an environmental icon in the 1970s, revealing insights into American culture's conception of the environment.

Moving decade by decade through this period, Richard W. Judd unveils a cache of commentary from intellectuals, critics, and journalists to demonstrate the dynamism in the idea of nature, as Americans defined and redefined the organic world around them amidst shifting intellectual, creative, and political forces. This book tells the captivating story of one writer's rise from obscurity to fame through a cultural reappraisal of the work he left behind.

In this book, a group of prominent scholar-teachers meditate on how to read, in the context of a specifically Christian university or college education, some of the greatest texts of the Western tradition. Each author devotes himself or herself to a single text. In many cases, the authors have been reading, rereading, marking, ruminating, inwardly digesting, teaching, and discussing their text for several decades, so that they offer here a distillation of years of familiarity and reflection. 
    The texts span nearly 3,000 years. They are pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian. Each kind of text – indeed, each individual text – offers its own special opportunities and challenges for Christian interpretation. From these diverse readings emerges a sense that these texts all belong to a single great tradition, one to which Christianity made and continues to make enormous contributions. Medieval Christian writers exploit and transform pagan texts, and post-Christian writers like Nietzsche and Joyce are often preoccupied with Christian themes. In one way or another all the texts are about what it is to be a human being and what a good human life might look like. Thus “common threads” bind one text to the next, creating countless resonances among them. 
    The authors of the essays in this book all address the question, “How shall we read these texts from the vantage point of faith in God and Jesus Christ? Moreover, how shall we read them as members of a community with a common vision of the human good, aiming to nurture our students in that vision by reading with them some of the profoundest and most delightful things the human hand has penned?” As the Introduction suggests, the volume hopes to contribute to a renewal of the original intention of university education: to cultivate minds and hearts formed and informed by wisdom, the highest of intellectual goods. 

Where language, body, and form converge in the poetry of Larry Eigner.

Larry Eigner (1927–1996) wrote thousands of poems in his lifetime, despite profound physical limitations caused by cerebral palsy. Using only the thumb and index finger of his right hand, Eigner generated a torrent of urgent and rich language, participating in vital correspondences as well as publishing widely in literary magazines and poetry journals.

While Eigner wrote before the emergence of ecopoetics, his poetry reflected a serious engagement with scientific writing and media, including Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring. Eigner was writing about environmental disasters and climate change long before such concerns took on a moral incumbency. Similarly, Eigner was ahead of his time in his exploration of disability. The field of disability studies has expanded rapidly in the new millennium. Eigner was not an overtly biographical poet, at least as far as his physical limitations were concerned, but his poetry spoke volumes on the idea of embodiment in all its forms.

Finding the Weight of Things: Larry Eigner’s Ecrippoetics is the first full-length study of Eigner’s poetry, covering his entire career from the beginning of his mature work in the 1950s to his last poems of the 1990s. George Hart charts where Eigner’s two central interests intersect, and how their interaction fueled his work as a poet-critic—one whose work has much to tell us about the ecology and embodiment of our futures. Hart sees Eigner’s overlapping concerns for disability, ecology, and poetic form as inextricable, and coins the phrase ecrippoetics here to describe Eigner’s prescient vision.

A contemporary account of how virtue can have significance in a world that has lost the certainty of common and collective meanings.

Finite Perfection: Reflections on Virtue is a work of political philosophy and ethical theory in which Michael A. Weinstein develops a rigorous and original account of virtue grounded in the existentialist tradition rather than in classical metaphysics or theology. The book's title captures its central philosophical tension: where classical and religious traditions have often located virtue in relation to an infinite, divine, or transcendent standard of perfection, Weinstein insists on taking seriously the finitude of the human condition—the irreducible limits of time, mortality, and embodied existence—and asking what excellence and virtue can mean for beings who are, by nature, incomplete and bounded.

Weinstein's approach is rooted in the concept of the self-possessed individual—a person who has achieved a kind of integrity and mastery over themselves not through escape from finitude, but through honest acknowledgment and creative embrace of it. Virtue, on this view, is not a transcendence of human limitation but a perfecting of what is possible within it: the best a finite being can be. This framework draws productively on the existentialist tradition (particularly its emphasis on authenticity, self-creation, and the confrontation with mortality), while also engaging with the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics and the Nietzschean understanding of self-overcoming. 

Throughout its pages, Weinstein brings his characteristic intellectual breadth to bear, moving across political philosophy, ethics, and social theory to construct an account of virtue that is both philosophically rigorous and deeply humane. 

Examining the power of speculative fiction to reimagine historical accounts of the conquest of the Americas

The historical conquest of the Americas resides at the core of all first-contact narratives, which stage colonization and resistance in the generic guise of speculative fiction. Starting from this axiom, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period’s historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac Zimmer examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. First Contact thus poses a foundational question: Can we understand the conquest as an originary world-historical event without eclipsing the other cosmologies that existed, and continue to exist, within the contact zone? Can we decolonize the speculative imagination itself?

Exposes a stylistic tradition of flamboyantly failed passing in queer literature and film

This book posits formal experimentation as an index for evolving expressions of male homosexuality from literary modernism to the German New Wave and the present day. Ian Fleishman exposes a tradition of flamingly failed passing that is itself a surreptitious mode of passing: the flaunting of queer style as an intentionally unconvincing cover for queer content. Exploring a corpus of films and novels by André Gide, Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan, among others, Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing intervenes in trenchant debates about queer agency, visibility, negativity, and disidentification. Mapping queer strategies of storytelling onto queer practices of self-invention, Flamboyant Fictions wagers that it is precisely in instances of conflict between these auteurs and their inventions that narrative becomes a laboratory for testing the sovereignty and self-determination of queer identity.

Michigan is renowned for its natural beauty and automotive history, yet its rich literary heritage often goes unrecognized. This engaging and extensively researched book aims to change that by providing vivid portraits of both well-known and overlooked authors. It also offers an enjoyable tour through the state’s libraries and bookstores. The book takes readers on a fascinating journey across the back roads and highways of Michigan writing, showcasing the remarkable diversity of authors who have called the state home as well as those who have found it inspirational. It is perfect for anyone interested in reading, Michigan’s literary heritage, and its culture.

The studies span from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, and the contributing scholars occupy diverse fields within Latin American and Hispanic Studies. As such, their essays showcase eclectic critical and theoretical approaches to the subject of Latin American and Iberian food.

Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain also introduces the first English-language publication of works from such award-winning scholars as Adolfo Castañón of the Mexican Academy of Language; Sergio Ramírez, winner of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize in Literature; and Carmen Simón Palmer, winner of the 2015 Julián Marías Prize for Research.