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A bold argument and model for how to bring one’s personal voice and experience into philosophical writing.

Contemporary philosophical writing is deeply impersonal: technical, abstract, and stripped of an individual human voice. In contrast, many of the historical philosophers we most admire saw emotion, style, narrative and humor as essential parts of doing philosophy well. What if they were on to something?

Philosophy in the First Person offers a deft and engaging case for the philosophical personal essay, a genre of writing that unites intimate revelation with intellectual depth and literary flair. As a manifesto, the book argues for a return to the more personal forms of philosophy that preceded academic professionalization. As a guide, it provides substantive advice for aspiring personal-philosophical writers, drawing on ideas from creative nonfiction. As a demonstration, the book is itself a set of philosophical personal essays, tracing one philosopher’s sentimental-intellectual journey through a vocation that frustrates and captivates her in equal measure. 

Blending memoir, theory, and model, the book offers a roadmap for writing philosophy that’s enlightening as well as moving, gripping, and fun. Along the way, it makes a refreshing argument for reconnecting a philosophical vocation with a fully human way of life.

A follow-up to the highly praised Poets Teaching Poets, Daniel Tobin and Pimone Triplett's Poet's Work, Poet's Play gathers together essays by some of the most important voices in contemporary poetry: Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Eleanor Wilner, Dean Young, and the late Larry Levis and Agha Shahid Ali.

Lively, accessible, and erudite, the pieces range from discussions on syntax and the syllable to an exploration of the complexities of canon formation under the shadow of imperialism, race, and history. Exploring the work of John Donne, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, Charles Olsen, Ezra Pound, Anne Carson, Robert Herrick, Harryette Mullen, and many others, Poet's Work, Poet's Play---like its predecessor volume---will be an invaluable tool for teachers, students, and poets at every level.

"Much more than a set of essays on poetic craft or aesthetic understandings, this collection takes on two of the most prevalent anxieties about writing poetry in our time: the place of subjectivity in poetry, and how to make a significant shape in language while both affirming and interrogating the poetic I's authority. This is a book for anyone who wants to write better poems, who wants to read with greater passion, and who believes that poetry is an independent category of human consciousness that can be as capaciousness as the world, and as nuanced."
---Tom Sleigh, author of Space Walk and Far Side of the Earth

"Gathering together essays by unquestionably important poets, Poet's Work, Poet's Play has immense pedagogical value in the way it demonstrates how to discover in poetry resources of language and structure often overlooked in first, and ensuing, readings of complex texts."
---Laurence Goldstein, Professor of English, University of Michigan, and Editor, Michigan Quarterly Review

"A valuable document illuminating critical aspects of the contemporary American poetry scene."
---John Koethe, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and author of Sally's Hair: Poems

During the period of Aztec expansion and empire (ca. 1325–1525), scribes of high social standing used a pictographic writing system to paint hundreds of manuscripts detailing myriad aspects of life, including historical, calendric, and religious information. Following the Spanish conquest, native and mestizo tlacuiloque (artist-scribes) of the sixteenth century continued to use pre-Hispanic pictorial writing systems to record information about native culture. Three of these manuscripts—Codex Boturini, Codex Azcatitlan, and Codex Aubin—document the origin and migration of the Mexica people, one of several indigenous groups often collectively referred to as “Aztec.”

In Portraying the Aztec Past, Angela Herren Rajagopalan offers a thorough study of these closely linked manuscripts, articulating their narrative and formal connections and examining differences in format, style, and communicative strategies. Through analyses that focus on the materials, stylistic traits, facture, and narrative qualities of the codices, she places these annals in their historical and social contexts. Her work adds to our understanding of the production and function of these manuscripts and explores how Mexica identity is presented and framed after the conquest.

In Postprocess Postmortem, Kristopher M. Lotier surveys the postprocess era-that-never-was, its end, and its after-lives. Employing cutting-edge digital research tools to track the circulation of texts and shifting scales from the global to the local and back again, he offers a revisionist history of a largely unchronicled past. From one perspective, the history of postprocess might seem to be a history of failure: what could have become The Next Big Thing in composition and writing studies during the 1990s and early 2000s never quite ascended. Today, few writing studies scholars apply the term postprocess to their own research or self-identify with a postprocess movement. And yet, as Lotier demonstrates, numerous core postprocess tenets have attained disciplinary centrality. The result: whether they admit to doing so or not, many contemporary scholars employ a postprocess vocabulary, allowing the ideas underlying this important movement/theory/period/attitude to live on.

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia.

Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítĕzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

Precariously Centered confronts the troubling intersection of gender and contingency in administrative writing center work—an intersection that has haunted writing centers for decades. Featuring findings from a groundbreaking qualitative study of a diverse group of contingent women writing center administrators, Liliana M. Naydan, Maggie M. Herb, and Clint Gardner demonstrate that gender and its intersections have personal, professional, disciplinary, and pedagogical consequences in writing centers.

This report on interview-based qualitative research documents the experiences of sixteen writing center administrators—how their working lives are often complicated by the intersection of gender, contingency, and other identities. The authors address precarity, identity-based discrimination, extensive and invisible emotional labor, limited resources, lack of institutional support, and barriers to promotion. The words of these administrators come into conversation with scholarship on identity, feminist theory, and the current labor crisis in higher education and reveal challenges ranging from a dearth of resources to discrimination. Their words also reveal dire disciplinary and pedagogical consequences for our institutions and higher education.

Amid increasingly distressing labor conditions in the early twenty-first century, Precariously Centered addresses how writing center professionals—and all academics—can better address contingency, the corporatization of higher education, and the patriarchy. It emphasizes the value of discourse about working conditions, intersectional solidarity, and organizing for labor justice.

The Predator Effect concerns predatory publishing — it is the first to chart both the rise and impact of deceptive publishing. The author — a scientific communications expert with 20 years’ experience — looks at how predatory journals had become an accepted part of scholarly publishing, reviewing in turn the history, development and impact of predatory journals. The book also puts their rise in context of wider issues such as Open Access and publication ethics. Other issues it addresses include: defining predatory journals, the history of predatory publishing practices, Beall’s List, authors’ motivations and the future of predatory publishing practices. 

Marcel Proust’s multivolume masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, began to appear in 1913. Over the next fifty years, it gained a reputation as one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century. But the novel’s classic image as a completed work was later shattered by the discovery of unpublished drafts, and the “war of the Prousts” has kept scholars arguing over its definitive form ever since.

Christine M. Cano’s Proust’s Deadline presents a concise history of the publishing and reception of À la recherche du temps perdu, and sorts out the most important issues that have arisen from the ensuing debates about the text. She ultimately shows how this quintessential “book about time” tells another story about time’s passage: the story of Proust’s mortal confrontation with the temporality of writing, publishing, and reading.

With a little knowledge and a lot of practice, you can do more than just sound more professional when you skillfully use commas, semicolons, and other forms of punctuation. You can, importantly, become more persuasive. 

That’s what students who have taken Professor Patrick Barry’s classes at the University of Michigan Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, and the UCLA School of Law have learned, as have the over 100,000 people who have enrolled in his online course “Good with Words: Writing and Editing” on the educational platforms Coursera and FutureLearn. 

Now, thanks to this book, you can undergo that same rhetorical transformation. Punctuation doesn’t have to be a pain point. When properly mastered, it can be a powerful tool for all kinds of advocates.