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A meditation on the lessons to be learned from South Africa’s transformation in the wake of apartheid

Justice, truth, and identity; race, society, and law—all come into dramatic play as South Africa makes the tumultuous transition to a post-apartheid democracy. Seeking the timeless through the timely and trying to find the deeper meaning in the sweep of events, Daniel Herwitz brings the vast resources of the philosophical essay to bear on the new realities of post-apartheid South Africa—from racial identity to truth commissions, from architecture to film and television.

In 1950 the poet Charles Olson published his influential essay “Projective Verse” in which he proposed a poetry of “open field” composition—to replace traditional closed poetic forms with improvised forms that would reflect exactly the content of the poem.

The poets and poetry that have followed in the wake of the “projectivist” movement—the Black Mountain group, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Language poets—have since been studied at length. But more often than not they have been studied through the lens of continental theory with the effect that these highly propositional, pragmatic, and adaptable forms of verse were interpreted in very cramped, polemical ways.

Miriam Nichols highlights many of the impulses original to the thinking and methods of each poet: appeals to perceptual experience, spontaneity, renewed relationships with nature, engaging the felt world—what Nichols terms a “poetics of outside”—focusing squarely on experiences beyond the self-regarding self. As Nichols states, these poets may well “represent the last moment in recent cultural history when a serious poet could write from perception or pursue a visionary poetics without irony or quotation marks and expect serious intellectual attention.”

This collection takes as its point of departure the proposition that one can, in fact, tell a book by its cover. The contributors examine the ways in which the material qualities of books—including typography, paper, bindings, layout , and promotional copy—as well as their editing, production, and distribution profoundly affect how they have been read and understood. 

The volume includes essays on the publishing history of Melville's early novels, Twain's The Innocents Abroad, the Tauchnitz edition of Hawthornes's The Marble Faun, and Jackson's Romona. Other chapters examine the reception of Dante's works in America, Houghton Mifflin's biographical series, the binding styles of Ticknor and Fields, and the packaging of literature for American high schools.

For too long, the visual culture of the American South has been framed through narrow lenses: elite patronage, regional nostalgia, and selective narratives that privilege whiteness while overlooking the complexity of the region’s artistic production. Reading Southern Art: Essays on the Visual Arts in the United States from the Colonies to Today intervenes decisively in this tradition, illuminating the vast visual and material history of the South through works produced by a variety of artists across the region. 

Edited by Rachel Stephens, this collection examines Southern art from the seventeenth century until today, covering a diverse variety of media, from traditional fine arts to material and visual culture, ephemera, and public monuments. Analyzing an array of works, from portraits to vernacular traditions to contemporary artistic practice, Reading Southern Art considers how histories, visual and otherwise, are constructed and revised and how the art of the American South has shaped, and been shaped by, such contested histories. 

This collection of essays examines the contributions of some of the most notable interpreters of southern history and culture, furthering our understanding of the best historical work produced on the region.

Historian Glenn Feldman gathers together a group of essays that examine the efforts of important scholars to discuss and define the South's distinctiveness. The volume includes 18 chapters on such notable historians as John Hope Franklin, Anne Firor Scott, Frank L. Owsley, W. J. Cash, and C. Vann Woodward, written by 19 different researchers, both senior historians and emerging scholars, including Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, John Shelton Reed, Bruce Clayton, and Ted Ownby. The essays examine the major work or works of each scholar under consideration as well as that scholar's overall contribution to the study of southern history.

Reading Southern History will enlighten readers on the more compelling themes currently and traditionally explored by southern historians. It will appeal greatly to professors and students as a valuable multidisciplinary introduction to the study of southern history, since several of the essays are on scholars who are working outside the discipline of history proper, in the fields of political science, sociology, journalism, and economics. Feldman's collection, therefore, sheds light on a broad spectrum of themes important in southern history, including the plight of poor whites, race, debates over race and class, the "reconstruction syndrome," continuity versus discontinuity in relation to blacks and whites, and regional culture and distinctiveness.

Reading Southern History will be valuable to students and scholars of women's studies, African American history, working-class history, and ethnic studies, as well as traditional southern history. Most important, the publication makes a significant contribution to the development and ongoing study of the historiography of the South.

New Strategies for Reading the Most Innovative Poetry of Our Time.

Definitions of what constitutes innovative poetry are innumerable and are offered from every quarter. Some critics and poets argue that innovative poetry concerns free association (John Ashbery), others that experimental poetry is a “re-staging” of language (Bruce Andrews) or a syntactic and cognitive break with the past (Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian). The tenets of new poetry abound.

But what of the new reading that such poetry demands? Essays in Reading the Difficulties ask what kinds of stances allow readers to interact with verse that deliberately removes many of the comfortable cues to comprehension—poetry that is frequently nonnarrative, nonrepresentational, and indeterminate in subject, theme, or message.

Some essays in Thomas Fink and Judith Halden-Sullivan’s collection address issues of reader reception and the way specific stances toward reading support or complement the aesthetic of each poet. Others suggest how we can be open readers, how innovative poetic texts change the very nature of reader and reading, and how critical language can capture this metamorphosis. Some contributors consider how the reader changes innovative poetry, what language reveals about this interaction, which new reading strategies unfold for the audiences of innovative verse, and what questions readers should ask of innovative verse and of events and experiences that we might bring to reading it.

 

When Sarah Bird arrived in Austin in 1973 in pursuit of a boyfriend who was “hotter than lava,” she found an abundance of inspiration for storytelling (her sweetheart left her for Scientology, but she got to taste a morsel of Lynda Bird Johnson’s poorly preserved wedding cake as a temp worker at the LBJ Library). Sarah Bird went on to write ten acclaimed novels and contribute hundreds of articles to publications coast to coast, developing a signature voice that combines laser-sharp insight with irreverent, wickedly funny prose in the tradition of Molly Ivins and Nora Ephron

Now collecting forty of Bird’s best nonfiction pieces, from publications that range from Texas Monthly to the New York Times and others, Recent Studies Indicate presents some of Bird’s earliest work, including a prescient 1976 profile of a transgender woman, along with recent calls to political action, such as her 2017 speech at a benefit for Annie’s List.

Whether Bird is hanging out with socialites and sanitation workers or paying homage to her army-nurse mom, her collection brings a poignant perspective to the experience of being a woman, a feminist, a mother, and a Texan—and a writer with countless, spectacular true tales to tell us.

Larry Bennett explores the complexities of nostalgia with considerations of the historic preservation of brutalist architecture, specifically Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago; the memoirs and recollections of early and mid-twentieth-century Brooklyn and Detroit; and the turntable’s rebirth as a musical instrument alongside the vinyl LP’s resurgence as a prized way of consuming music. Bennett tracks modernity as expressed through ideas, artistic products, and widespread social practices. His consideration of nostalgia focuses on our inclination to rediscover value in people, places, and social habits diminished by the passage of time.

Provocative and multidisciplinary, Reclaiming Modernity delves into the paradox of how we feel nostalgia for ideas and times that emerged from an impulse to shun nostalgia.

A selection of essays revealing the singular brilliance of Ferguson’s critical writing over four decades.

Ranging across literature, philosophy, and social thought, Frances Ferguson asks how forms—whether aesthetic, legal, or bureaucratic—help to assign value and thereby organize our relations as well as our personal identities. Ferguson is a literary critic who takes her lead, unexpectedly, from Jeremy Bentham, showing how modernity tracks and makes perceptible the values of a host of human activities—the knowledge that comes from early learning exercises, the specialized knowledge that funds particular professions, and the exacting if unspecialized knowledge of the social world of courtship or hanging out.

Gathering Ferguson’s most influential and still timely essays, Records of Reward includes, among others, “The Nuclear Sublime,” in which Ferguson turns to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to examine how the aesthetic logic of the sublime obscures the claims of domesticity and the beautiful; “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” which examines the history of rape law to highlight the importance of Samuel Richardson’s foregrounding of consent in Clarissa; “Pornography, the Theory,” where she explores the threshold between speech and action to identify environments—such as schools and workplaces—in which pornographic expression can be harmfully potentiated; and “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” in which she analyzes Austen’s use of free indirect style to depict both her protagonist and her reader engaged in acts of “over-knowing” others in everyday life. Most unexpectedly, perhaps, the collection also includes an essay analyzing Bitcoin as a small language model that exerts enormous affective pressure on its partisans.

A vivid demonstration of the enduring rewards of theory and close reading alike, Records of Reward will be essential reading across the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and political thought.