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Studying the early modern split between science and literature and the aftermath of their division

The conception of computers as thinking machines and literature as a social field stems from the early modern phenomenon of competing over the infinite as an object not just of contemplation but of appropriation in a race toward virtual control. The rediscovery of this origin undoes a collective forgetting of what technology and texts have in common, what they don’t, and what they can and ought to be in the future. David L. Sedley offers a new history of literature and science’s disciplinary divide—its origin and significance—tracing a series of points along the emerging frontier between these two fields. At each point there are two objects in play and two authors who push the objects in opposite directions: on the one hand, mechanical arts and the essay, probability theory and the novel, and geometry and epic; on the other, Montaigne and Bacon, Pascal and Lafayette, and Hobbes and Milton. Each of these authors, Sedley shows, tried to render an object either algorithmic or infinite to oppose the other’s efforts. Ultimately, Race to Infinity: Early Modern Distinctions Between Literature and Science illuminates the fortunes of the literary in the digital revolution and beyond.

Returns us to Gertrude Stein’s theater by way of the modernist medium of radio

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

This study of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land guides the reader through the poem line by line, taking into account a number of previous interpretations. Aims to offer a part-by-part analysis of the poem with periodic summations and a meditation on the limits of interpretation and the problematic nature of reading in the late 20th century.

Drawing on the ordinary language philosophy of Toril Moi and Stanley Cavell, Dan Dixon argues that the act of reading shares emotional ground with our social lives. It prompts us to attend to the kinds of affective attachments that frequently resist description, as well as the attachments that encourage debate among scholars of literature.

Dixon posits that the interpretation of a text is significantly shaped by our impression of the writer. Through the lens of persona, this book examines the work of influential and iconic post-1945 American essayists, such as Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson, James Baldwin, Janet Malcolm, Teju Cole, David Foster Wallace, and Ben Lerner. The attachments we form might facilitate insight, consolation, distrust, or vanity. But whatever their effects, they can’t be ignored.

Jane Austen has more readers today than at any time in history. Many of Austen’s legions of fans, however, came to her novels after first seeing films or other adaptations made for twenty-first-century audiences. Austen herself conversely spent her literary career undermining romantic clichés and rethinking novel conventions. Confident that she and her contemporaries shared a common reading culture, Austen deliberately constructed her novels to set readerly expectations, only to disrupt or confound those expectations by challenging her readers’ assumptions and values. In Reading with Jane Austen, Elaine Bander carefully rereads the great author’s novels—beginning with her late work of juvenilia, “Catharine, or The Bower,” and ending with her final fragment, “Sanditon”—against the rich context of late Georgian literary and intellectual culture. In doing so, Bander invites us into the transformative experience that Austen intentionally designed for her earliest readers, adding new layers of appreciation for those who love her work.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Elaine Bander speaking at the Atwater Library in Quebec (https://youtu.be/UeEjFOfp9cQ?si=Wv2hsLxkGK157WZI)
 

Exploring the books and reading practices behind the creation of Transcendentalist philosophy and community

Transcendentalism emerged in early 19th century New England as a uniquely American philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement. Its first generation of thinkers—including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller—created a worldview that stressed the inherent goodness of the “self-reliant” individual and the presence of the divine in nature. These intellectuals gathered in informal symposia devoted to what Emerson called “creative reading,” a practice that stresses the transformative potential of the written word that was central to the movement’s emergence, growth, and spread. But what were these thinkers reading and how did it influence the development of Transcendentalism?

In Reading with the Transcendentalists, renowned literary scholar Philip F. Gura focuses on 10 American, British, and European books that were essential to the movement’s thoughts, writings, and activities. Many of the authors of these books—James Marsh, Madame de Staël, Samson Reed, George Ripley, Thomas Carlyle, Albert Brisbane, and George Sand—stood outside of Transcendentalism yet profoundly influenced it. Others such as Emerson, Parker, and Fuller were the movement’s central architects, whose writings in turn inspired the next generation, including Henry David Thoreau and Caroline Healey Dall. Each of these books challenged prevailing religious, philosophical, and social conventions in ways that resonated deeply with burgeoning Transcendentalist ideals.

Blending intellectual biography with book history, Gura crafts a captivating cultural history that reconstructs the dynamic social networks of the early Transcendentalists, in which ideas from the written word circulated, evolved, and acquired new meanings. The result is an rich portrait of reading as a creative and communal act, and an exploration of how books ignite curiosity, sustain friendship, and catalyze intellectual transformation. Through a carefully developed narrative structure that is filled not only with books and reading but with headline-worthy scandals, disputes, and falling outs and realignments, Gura traces the historical arc of a transnational intellectual movement that helped lay the foundation for the idea of “America.”

Between the outbreak of civil war in El Salvador in 1979 and its conclusion in 1992, some 1.5 million Salvadorans fled the violence. This book focuses on the displaced Salvadorans who remained in Central America, seeking refuge in Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. Their story has been almost entirely overshadowed by the greater numbers who fled farther north to the United States; however, as Rachael De La Cruz shows, the Central American history of Salvadoran refugees is rich, complex, and instructive for scholars of refugee studies, international relations, and human rights.

The isthmus nations that received Salvadoran refugees did not react consistently, and the arriving Salvadorans themselves were not passive participants. National mythologies, perceptions of economic contributions and burdens, regional militarization, state violence, and varying capacities for refugee activism, compounded by the fraught and variable circumstances of the Cold War, together shaped the multitude of government attitudes and policies toward the refugee communities within these countries’ borders. Rarely were refugees simply “a problem to solve”; rather, they represented and acted as catalysts for economic, social, and geopolitical change.
 

Reveals how literary scenes of recognition stage the process of coming to know reality

In this deeply researched and thought-provoking study, Jessica C. Resvick traces nineteenth-century German realist writing’s paradoxical investment in mediated accounts of the world and the direct, unfiltered experience of reality. Focusing on the motif and operation of recognition in its Aristotelean sense, Resvick examines self-reflexive narratives in which the authors struggle to resolve this tension between the media they choose and the immediacy they hope to create. 

Through close readings of key works by canonical authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, and Wilhelm Raabe, Resvick demonstrates the medially influenced and historically contingent ways in which they represent reality. Each chapter focuses on a different form of recognition, reconstructing the techniques that allow these authors to generate an effect of presence. Exploring the history and poetics of knowledge exchange, Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Mediation of Presence expands on recent media histories of realism, examining the material bases for realist aesthetics while also investigating media’s epistemological accomplishments, and astutely elaborates the role of recognition as a medium-specific tool.

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.

The 1960s was a pivotal decade in dance, an era of intense experimentation and rich invention. In this volume an impressive range of dance critics and scholars examine the pioneering choreographers and companies of the era, such as Anna Halprin’s West Coast experiments, the innovative Judson Dance Theater, avant-garde dance subcultures in New York, the work of Meredith Monk and Kenneth King, and parallel movements in Britain. The contributors include Janice Ross, Leslie Satin, Noël Carroll, Gus Solomons jr., Deborah Jowitt, Stephanie Jordan, Joan Acocella, and Sally Banes.

The second of five planned volumes, this book collects Wittgenstein’s unabridged writings on mathematics and logic composed between 1939 and 1941.

In 1956, a significant but abridged portion of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1937–1944 writings for a continuation of what became Philosophical Investigations was published as Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Now, in these five German-English facing-page volumes, the writings of Remarks on Mathematics and Logic are presented in full as Wittgenstein wrote them: in chronological order, without editorial omissions, selections, or rearrangements.

Volume III contains materials from 1939 to 1941, including previously unpublished—one manuscript and four manuscript parts—and one manuscript from which selections were made for previous abridgements. 

The topics covered in this volume include surveyability and perspicuity in mathematics; Cantor and Gödel; Russellian logicism; geometrical cogency of proofs; consensus as part of the phenomenon of our calculating; rule-following and unwinding; consistency proofs; calculation as invention rather than discovery; superstitious fear of contradictions; why mathematicians cannot philosophize about mathematics; mathematical propositions are overdetermined; the idea of a mathematical reality; the connection between the sense of a mathematical proposition and its use; positioning a proposition in a system; an unproved mathematical proposition as the expression of a problem; the role of mathematical propositions in descriptions (of reality).

This edition will be the authoritative source for Wittgenstein’s writings in their original context.

Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past.

The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.

On February 2, 1848, representatives of the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, officially ending hostilities between the two countries and ceding over one-half million square miles of land to the northern victors. In Mexico, this defeat has gradually moved from the periphery of dishonor to the forefront of national consciousness. In the United States, the war has taken an opposite trajectory, falling from its once-celebrated prominence into the shadowy margins of forgetfulness and denial.

Why is the U.S.–Mexican War so clearly etched in the minds of Mexicans and so easily overlooked by Americans? This book investigates that issue through a transnational, comparative analysis of how the tools of collective memory—books, popular culture, historic sites, heritage groups, commemorations, and museums—have shaped the war's multifaceted meaning in the 160 years since it ended. Michael Van Wagenen explores how regional, ethnic, and religious differences influence Americans and Mexicans in their choices of what to remember and what to forget. He further documents what happens when competing memories clash in a quest for dominance and control.

In the end, Remembering the Forgotten War addresses the deeper question of how remembrance of the U.S.–Mexican War has influenced the complex relationship between these former enemies now turned friends. It thus provides a new lens through which to view today's cross-border rivalries, resentments, and diplomatic pitfalls.