1832 books match the query 'Essays' and 137 start with s

cover of Signs and Images: Writings on Art, Cinema and Photography

Signs and Images

Writings on Art, Cinema and Photography

Roland Barthes

Seagull Books, 2016

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback.
 
Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator—often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another—he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France’s preeminent Collège de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980.
 
The greater part of Barthes’s published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume four, Signs and Images, gathers pieces related to his central concerns—semiotics, visual culture, art, cinema, and photography—and features essays on Marthe Arnould, Lucien Clergue, Daniel Boudinet, Richard Avedon, Bernard Faucon, and many more. 
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cover of Signs and Signals from Vietnam: Essays on Contemporary Art

Signs and Signals from Vietnam

Essays on Contemporary Art

Edited by Pamela N. Corey, Nora A. Taylor, and Do Tuong Linh

National University of Singapore Press, 2026

The first English-language volume on Vietnamese contemporary art.

Contemporary art in Vietnam is a dynamic field shaped by memory, history, and experimentation. Over the last thirty years, Vietnamese artists have come to command international recognition, even as a growing domestic market for contemporary art fosters alternative infrastructures of collection and exhibition. Signs and Signals from Vietnam brings together artists, curators, and academics to examine artistic practice and contemporary art histories in Vietnam today.

Moving beyond familiar North-South or diasporic-national divides, the essays represent the perspectives of Vietnamese, Vietnamese diasporic, and non-Vietnamese writers of different generations, affiliations, and positionalities. Contributors trace the inventive ways artists work with language, narrative, performance, and archival practice to communicate through their art. Key themes running through the volume represent the predominant concerns of Vietnamese artists over the past three decades, including the enduring impact of socialist paradigms in contemporary art, gender, diaspora, memory, and the environment. Together, these essays demonstrate how contemporary art can convey lesser-known histories, contested narratives, and personal perspectives. 

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cover of Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes

Silence and Power

A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes

Edited by Mary Lynn Broe. Afterword by Catharine Stimpson

Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Roughly chronological, these essays explore Barnes’ early work in the New York newspaper world of the ‘teens, proceed through the 1954 publication of The Antiphon, and include several approaches to such works as Ryder, Ladies Almanack, and Nightwood. This judicious mix of essays—many of them illustrated by photographs and drawings—presents a comprehensive picture of the creative imagination of Djuna Barnes.

Essayists include Mary Lynn Broe, Nancy J. Levine, Ann Larabee, Joan Retallack, Carolyn Allen, Carolyn Burke, Sheryl Stevenson, Marie Ponsot, Frances M. Doughty, Susan Sniader Lanser, Frann Michel, Karla Jay, Jane Marcus, Judith Lee, Julie L. Abraham, Meryl Altman, Lynda Curry, Louise A. DeSalvo, and Catharine Stimpson. Individuals sharing personal recollections of Barnes are Ruth Ford, James B. Scott, Alex Gildzen, Hank O’Neal, Chester Page, Andrew Field, and Frances McCullough. Janice Thom and Kevin Engel provide an updated bibliography.

From The Book of Repulsive Women to The Antiphon, Barnes challenged old gender dichotomies as she shaped radical sociopolitical views. Her textual methods celebrated a multiplicity of voices, heterodox forms, and genres, transgressing those tenets of modernism that privilege the “high art” of a single, unified textual identity or a discrete discourse. These essays offer various critical approaches and sinuous readings of the full range of Barnes’ achievement. Interwoven through the essays and reminiscences is a lively commentary from Barnes’ friends and contemporaries as well as Barnes herself.

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cover of Simple Things: Lessons from the Family Farm

Simple Things

Lessons from the Family Farm

Jerry Apps

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018

In this collection of thoughtful essays, Jerry Apps reflects on the “simple things” that made up everyday life on the farm—an old cedar fencepost, Fanny the farm dog, the trusty tools used for farmwork, the kerosene lantern the family gathered around each morning and evening. As he holds each item up to the light for a closer look, he plumbs his memories for the deeper meanings of these objects, sharing the values instilled in him during his rural boyhood in the 1940s and 1950s. He concludes that people who had the opportunity to grow up on family farms gained useful skills, important knowledge, and lifelong values that serve them well throughout their lives. Apps captures and shares those things for people who remember them and those who never had the benefit of living on a small farm.
 
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cover of Sing by the Burying Ground: Essays

Sing by the Burying Ground

Essays

Marianne Boruch

Northwestern University Press, 2024

Meditations on life, literature, and curiosity amid the shadows
 
In her fourth essay collection, award-winning author Marianne Boruch explores the possibilities of hope even in darkness. Through poetry, the silence of Trappist monks, the pandemic moment, the Wright brothers’ quirky stab at flight, treasured knickknacks, and more, this book celebrates the weird, the mundane, the overlooked, and the promise of a future. Though each essay is distinct, foraging fresh ways into Louise Glück, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Langston Hughes, and more, they are all connected through the thread of Emily Dickinson’s comment that her fate was to “sing, as a Boy does by the Burying Ground . . .” Even in times filled with horror, we find beauty. Maybe we can sing in the blackest of nights.

Thoughtful and expressive, this collection provides solace and humor for readers in a world where both are often in short supply.
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cover of Singing Stone

Singing Stone

Thomas L Fleischner

University of Utah Press, 1999

Integrating personal narrative and natural history, Fleischner presents what he calls a "guide to understanding" the relatively unknown landscape of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Like a bright blue seam incised deep in solid rock, the Escalante River binds the fir forests of Utah’s High Plateau with the barren deserts of the canyonlands region in the newly designed Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. To this wild landscape, naturalist Thomas Fleischner brings both emotional engagement and a wealth of knowledge. With unabashed passion and patient and learned observations Fleischner presents this relatively unknown landscape.

Singing Stone is ideal for curious visitors to the national monument as well as students of environmental studies. Fleischner’s background as a conservation biologist and former park ranger, a professor of environmental studies, and a naturalist in the Escalante Region for almost twenty years has provided him with a deep reservoir of experience and knowledge.

The book’s first three chapters survey the unique geology, flora and fauna, and human history of the region. Chapters four and five trace the more recent impacts of human activities—grazing and wilderness recreation—and explore the shifts in cultural values and public policy that have occurred as a result. Examining these topics in the context of a specific landscape offers a lens through which these changes, now the topic of examination and controversy throughout the New West, can be clearly seen and, hopefully, re-evaluated.

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cover of Sir John's Vision: What Do We Know? What Is There to Learn?

Sir John's Vision

What Do We Know? What Is There to Learn?

Davies

Templeton Press, 2018

In 2017, the year marking the 105th anniversary of the birth of Sir John Templeton, a group of scientists, scholars, and advisors who knew him personally gathered in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. Their purpose: to discuss how the Foundation that bears his name could best extend his philanthropic vision into the twenty-first century.

This volume is a result of that meeting—a collection of thirteen essays written by experts in fields that most fascinated Sir John. The contributors assess the Foundation’s fidelity to its founder’s intent, chart promising avenues for future grantmaking, and champion Sir John’s contrarian mission of unlocking life’s deepest mysteries.

The members of the John Templeton Foundation are the custodians of Sir John’s vision—bold in its aspiration; humble in its approach—charged with using the tools of science to advance the frontiers of the spirit. May the essays collected here serve as inspiration as we carry that vision forward.
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cover of Sites of Writing: Essays in Honor of Anne Ruggles Gere

Sites of Writing

Essays in Honor of Anne Ruggles Gere

James Edward Beitler

University Press of Colorado, 2026

Sites of Writing builds upon the multiple contributions of Anne Ruggles Gere across a long and highly productive career. The chapters in this edited collection, written by leading scholars (including some of Gere’s former students) to track her major contributions to writing studies, situate those contributions within the broader landscape of field development, and draw on those findings to assess important trends and project productive pathways for the future. The contributors to the collection consider disciplinary history, language and literacy, writing across the curriculum, digital rhetoric, writing’s extracurriculum, assessment, and English education, among other areas. Connecting these multiple fields of activity, Sites of Writing affirms Gere’s view of writing as a powerful social and cultural activity and of literacy, broadly conceived, as enabling cultural transformations and, in the process, transforming writing studies and other fields.

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cover of Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry

Skeptical Music

Essays on Modern Poetry

David Bromwich

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Skeptical Music collects the essays on poetry that have made David Bromwich one of the most widely admired critics now writing. Both readers familiar with modern poetry and newcomers to poets like Marianne Moore and Hart Crane will relish this collection for its elegance and power of discernment. Each essay stakes a definitive claim for the modernist style and its intent to capture an audience beyond the present moment.

The two general essays that frame Skeptical Music make Bromwich's aesthetic commitments clear. In "An Art without Importance," published here for the first time, Bromwich underscores the trust between author and reader that gives language its subtlety and depth, and makes the written word adequate to the reality that poetry captures. For Bromwich, understanding the work of a poet is like getting to know a person; it is a kind of reading that involves a mutual attraction of temperaments. The controversial final essay, "How Moral Is Taste?," explores the points at which aesthetic and moral considerations uneasily converge. In this timely essay, Bromwich argues that the wish for excitement that poetry draws upon is at once primitive and irreducible.

Skeptical Music most notably offers incomparable readings of individual poets. An essay on the complex relationship between Hart Crane and T. S. Eliot shows how the delicate shifts of tone and shading in their work register both affinity and resistance. A revealing look at W. H. Auden traces the process by which the voice of a generation changed from prophet to domestic ironist. Whether discussing heroism in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, considering self-reflection in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, or exploring the battle between the self and its images in the work of John Ashbery, Skeptical Music will make readers think again about what poetry is, and even more important, why it still matters.
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cover of Slavic Excursions: Essays on Russian and Polish Literature

Slavic Excursions

Essays on Russian and Polish Literature

Donald Davie

University of Chicago Press, 1991

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cover of Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics

Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers

Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics

Carl Elliott, ed.

Duke University Press, 2001

Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers uses insights from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to rethink bioethics. Although Wittgenstein produced little formal writing on ethics, this volume shows that, in fact, ethical issues permeate the entirety of his work. The scholars whom Carl Elliott has assembled in this volume pay particular attention to Wittgenstein’s concern with the thick context of moral problems, his suspicion of theory, and his belief in description as the real aim of philosophy. Their aim is not to examine Wittgenstein’s personal moral convictions but rather to explore how a deep engagement with his work can illuminate some of the problems that medicine and biological science present.
As Elliott explains in his introduction, Wittgenstein’s philosophy runs against the grain of most contemporary bioethics scholarship, which all too often ignores the context in which moral problems are situated and pays little attention to narrative, ethnography, and clinical case studies in rendering bioethical judgments. Such anonymous, impersonal, rule-writing directives in which health care workers are advised how to behave is what this volume intends to counteract. Instead, contributors stress the value of focusing on the concrete particulars of moral problems and write in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s belief that philosophy should be useful. Specific topics include the concept of “good dying,” the nature of clinical decision making, the treatment of neurologically damaged patients, the moral treatment of animals, and the challenges of moral particularism.
Inspired by a philosopher who deplored “professional philosophy,” this work brings some startling insights and clarifications to contemporary ethical problems posed by the realities of modern medicine.

Contributors. Larry Churchill, David DeGrazia, Cora Diamond, James Edwards, Carl Elliott, Grant Gillett, Paul Johnston, Margaret Olivia Little, James Lindemann Nelson, Knut Erik Tranoy

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cover of Small Creatures and Ordinary Places: Essays on Nature

Small Creatures and Ordinary Places

Essays on Nature

Allen M. Young

University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

Small Creatures and Ordinary Places reveals to us the beauty and value of hornets, bats, katydids, mice, cicadas, and other tiny dwellers in our own backyards. Young, a renowned expert on butterflies and cicadas of the American tropics, records in these charming essays his keen observations of the natural world as he walks through an urban woods near the Lake Michigan shore, or sits on his deck facing his backyard, or gazes at a field of corn stubble in autumn. He invites us to venture into our own yards, neighborhood parks, fields, and forests and pause there . . .  to look and to listen.
    Small creatures have unique and interesting stories to tell us, Young points out. Their brief life cycles illustrate the intricate workings of a bigger clock driving the seasons, and they dominate the larger web of life in which humans are but a strand. Far too often they are ignored, taken for granted, reviled, or misunderstood. Even now, Young writes, as we move into a new millennium as a species and the technological pace of our existence further quickens, we can gain much from appreciating nature close at hand, despite how steadily it is being pushed aside.

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cover of Snapshot Versions of Life

Snapshot Versions of Life

Richard Chalfen

University of Wisconsin Press, 1987

Snapshot Versions of Life is an important foray into the culture of photography and home life from an anthropologist’s perspective. Examining what he calls “Home Mode” photography, Richard Chalfen explores snapshots, slide shows, family albums, home movies, and home videos, uncovering what people do with their photos as well as what their personal photos do for them.
    Chalfen’s “Polaroid People” are recognizable—if ironically viewed—relatives, uncles, aunts, and All-American kids. As members of “Kodak Culture” they watch home movies, take pictures of newborn babies, and even, in their darker moments, scratch out the faces of disliked relatives in group photographs. He examines who shoots these photos and why, as well as how they think (or don’t) of planning, editing, and exhibiting their shots. Chalfen’s analysis reveals the culturally structured behavior underlying seemingly spontaneous photographic activities. 
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cover of Snow Fleas and Chickadees: Everyday Observations in the Sierra

Snow Fleas and Chickadees

Everyday Observations in the Sierra

Eve Quesnel

University of Nevada Press, 2025

In Snow Fleas and Chickadees, Eve Quesnel invites readers to join her on strolls through the forest surrounding her neighborhood in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Lake Tahoe. The book serves as an extended field guide and natural history reference for residents of the region and those visiting and exploring the Sierra. Through her writing, the author shares personal narratives and information gleaned from experts in the field, including biologists, ornithologists, and foresters. Each of the book’s twenty-one essays begins with a detailed black-and-white drawing by illustrator Anne Chadwick that provides a backdrop for the vignettes that follow.

Quesnel embraces the notion that to simply walk in one’s neighborhood is to familiarize oneself with the local flora and fauna, drawing attention to everyday things too often neglected. She argues that we can be complacent with what surrounds us, but with careful observation and research, we become acutely aware—and in awe of—nature’s everyday activities. The black bear’s hibernation techniques and mountain chickadee’s caching methods reveal just two of nature’s wily ways. Quesnel chases other curiosities as well, asking, “How does a spider create an orb web?” or, “How does a boulder the size of a small car end up alone in the woods?” In the introduction, she writes, “It is this ‘un-peeling’ of layers in nature that opens up our world.” 

For anyone interested in nature writing, whether an armchair explorer, outdoor enthusiast, or science aficionado, Snow Fleas and Chickadees provides an entertaining and engaging discovery of the picturesque Sierra Nevada.
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cover of So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews

So Ask

Essays, Conversations, and Interviews

Philip Levine

University of Michigan Press, 2002

An engaging and intimate collection by an American original
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cover of So What, or How to Make Films with Words

So What, or How to Make Films with Words

Alexander García Düttmann

Northwestern University Press, 2023

A series of philosophical meditations on the nature of aesthetics across a wide array of filmmaking styles
 
Images, whether filmic or not, cannot be replaced by words. Yet words can make images. This is the general thesis underlying So What, a collection of essays on canonical filmmakers like Luchino Visconti and Orson Welles; more experimental directors, such as Marguerite Duras and Albert Serra; and visual artists, including Hollis Frampton and Agnes Martin. Alexander García Düttmann aims to make their films as if they did not precede his text, capturing their idea and experience.
 
If the relationship between filmic image and text is a heterogeneous one, then this heterogeneity must leave a trace. This is why the book’s chapters are organized not according to historical periods or on the basis of film theories but rather by single concepts that function like dictionary entries. The chapters adopt different forms, blurring the lines between art and philosophy. So What is a practical exercise in “making films with words,” inviting readers to draw out insights from its conceptual play.
 
So What compiles previously untranslated and hard-to-find essays into a single volume, one that represents the absorbing and singular thought process of a major contemporary philosopher.
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cover of Social Action Stories: Impact Tales for the School and Community

Social Action Stories

Impact Tales for the School and Community

Kevin D. Cordi, Ph.D., Kirstin J. Milks, PhD., Rebecca Van Tassell

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022

Activist storytellers, educators, and organizers help us learn to tell a different story for our future
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cover of Social Science as Civic Discourse: Essays on the Invention, Legitimation, and Uses of Social Theory

Social Science as Civic Discourse

Essays on the Invention, Legitimation, and Uses of Social Theory

Richard Harvey Brown

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Richard Harvey Brown's pioneering explorations in the philosophy of social science and the theory of rhetoric reach a culmination in Social Science as Civic Discourse. In his earlier works, he argued for a logic of discovery and explanation in social science by showing that science and art both depend on metaphoric thinking, and he has applied that logic to society as a narrative text in which significant action by moral agents is possible. This new work is at once a philosophical critique of social theory and a social-theoretical critique of politics. Brown proposes to redirect the language and the mission of the social sciences toward a new discourse for a humane civic practice.
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cover of Social Science in the Making: Essays on the Russell Sage Foundation, 1907-1972

Social Science in the Making

Essays on the Russell Sage Foundation, 1907-1972

David C. Hammack

Russell Sage Foundation, 1994

"Together, the historical essays in this volume provide the best account of how the Foundation moved away from its roots as a policy think tank.... This book of essays is the only extended treatment of the Foundation's history that includes both its distinguished early years and its emergence after World War II as the principal private foundation devoted to strengthening basic research in the social sciences." —ERIC WANNER, president of the Russell Sage Foundation, in his foreword to the volume
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cover of Social Theory and the Study of Israelite Religion: Essays in Retrospect and Prospect

Social Theory and the Study of Israelite Religion

Essays in Retrospect and Prospect

Saul M. Olyan

SBL Press, 2012

This volume assesses past, theoretically engaged work on Israelite religion and presents new approaches to particular problems and larger interpretive and methodological questions. It gathers previously unpublished research by senior and mid-career scholars well known for their contributions in the area of social theory and the study of Israelite religion and by junior scholars whose writing is just beginning to have a serious impact on the field. The volume begins with a critical introduction by the editor. Topics of interest to the contributors include gender, violence, social change, the festivals, the dynamics of shame and honor, and the relationship of text to ritual. The contributors engage theory from social and cultural anthropology, sociology, postcolonial studies, and ritual studies. Theoretical models are evaluated in light of the primary data, and some authors modify or adapt theory to increase its utility for biblical studies. The contributors are Susan Ackerman, Stephen L. Cook, Ronald Hendel, T. M. Lemos, Nathaniel B. Levtow, Carol Meyers, Saul M. Olyan, Rüdiger Schmitt, Robert R. Wilson, and David P. Wright.
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cover of Socialism and War: Essays, Documents, Reviews

Socialism and War

Essays, Documents, Reviews

F. A. Hayek

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Throughout the twentieth century socialism and war were intimately connected. The unprecedented upheavals wrought by the two world wars and the Great Depression provided both opportunity and impetus for a variety of socialist experiments. This volume in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek documents the evolution of Hayek's thought on socialism and war during the dark decades of the 1930s and 1940s.

Opening with Hayek's arguments against market socialism, the volume continues with his writings on the economics of war, many in response to the proposals made in John Maynard Keynes's famous pamphlet, How to Pay for the War. The last section presents articles that anticipated The Road to Serfdom, Hayek's classic meditation on the dangers of collectivism. An appendix contains a number of topical book reviews written by Hayek during this crucial period, and a masterful introduction by the volume editor, Bruce Caldwell, sets Hayek's work in context.

Socialism and War will interest not just fans of The Road to Serfdom, but anyone concerned with the ongoing debates over the propriety of government intervention in the economy.

"When he wrote The Road to Serfdom, [Hayek's] was a voice in the wilderness. Now the fight [has] been taken up by people all over the world, by institutions and movements, and the ideas that seemed so strange to many in 1944 can be found from scholarly journals to television programs."—Thomas Sowell, Forbes

"Intellectually [Hayek] towers like a giant oak in a forest of saplings."—Chicago Tribune

"Each new addition to The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, the University of Chicago's painstaking series of reissues and collections, is a gem."—Liberty on Volume IX of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek
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cover of Socially Engaged Creative Practice: Contemporary Case Studies

Socially Engaged Creative Practice

Contemporary Case Studies

Edited by Jess Moriarty and Kate Aughterson

Intellect Books, 2024

This edited collection engages with both identity and specific time-limited notions in performance: textual, embodied, visual, and communal.

Each chapter of Socially Engaged Creative Practice focuses on an individual or group’s mode of working and methodological practice of performance across a range of modes, disciplines, and media, from community opera to online queer performance; from anti-racist classroom pedagogy to 1980s cabaret in nightclubs; from community art projects in schools to community writing projects in transport interchanges. The performers, writers, and creators represented here engage and grapple with contemporary performance as a situated practice and as a problem.

The personal perspective of each performer—as directors, librettists, producers, and writers—is explicitly located in a community, and the book offers a series of case studies detailing socially engaged work that aligns with concepts of performance and community.
 
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cover of Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality

Society as Text

Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality

Richard Harvey Brown

University of Chicago Press, 1987

Brown makes elegant use of sociological theory and of insights from language philosophy, literary criticism, and rhetoric to articulate a new theory of the human sciences, using the powerful metaphor of society as text.
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cover of Sociology Hesitant: Thinking with W. E. B. DuBois, Volume 27

Sociology Hesitant

Thinking with W. E. B. DuBois, Volume 27

Ronald A. T. Judy, ed.

Duke University Press, 0

This collection of essays reflects a new, distinctively rigorous engagement with W. E. B. DuBois’s theoretical and philosophical thought. It includes the first publication of DuBois’s important critical essay on the conceptual foundations of sociology as a science, “Sociology Hesitant.” Taking its title from that 1905 essay, Sociology Hesitant draws attention to the ways in which DuBois’s thinking about the “Negro problem” was an explicit effort to think about the problem of historical agency.
Spanning a wide array of disciplines, from German studies and sociology to literary criticism, philosophy, and anthropology, with contributions from some of the most outstanding scholars in these fields, Sociology Hesitant contributes to the recognition of DuBois as an important historical figure by focusing on the complexity of his theoretical work. These essays offer an extended interaction with the ideas and projects DuBois formulated in a series of essays written between 1887 and 1910 that take up intricate questions concerning the nature of methodology and the theory of knowledge. Using DuBois’s work as a point of departure, contributors explore current thinking about diverse subjects such as geopolitics and postcolonialism. Demonstrating that engaging the question of race requires rethinking the historical nature of theoretical understanding, this collection brings to light the notion that the struggle for equality is a struggle for freedom of thought in pursuit of truth.

Contributors. Kenneth Barkin, Nahum Chandler, Ronald Judy, David Krell, Charles Lemert, Sieglinde D. Lemke, Tommy Lott, Kevin Miles, Abdulkarim Mustapha, Ken Warren

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cover of Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction

Some Write to the Future

Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction

Ariel Dorfman

Duke University Press, 1991

Formerly exiled Chilean author Ariel Dorfman, one of Latin America's greatest writers and a major literary figure of the twentieth century, is known for such critically acclaimed works as the novel Widows and the play Death and the Maiden. A master of various literary forms, this collection draws together Dorfman's critical essays on contemporary Latin American writing. Spanning more than twenty years and arranged in chronological order, each essay is devoted to a single author—Miguel Angel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, José Maria Arguedas, Alejo Carpentier, Gabrial Garcia Márquez, Roa Bastos—and one final essay looks at the "testimonial" or concentration camp literature from Chile.

Praise for Ariel Dorfman
“One of the most important voices coming out of Latin America.”—Salman Rushdie

“A remarkable writer . . . writing out of a very different cultural perspective from comfortable American readers.”—Digby Diehl, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

“One of the six greatest Latin American novelists.”—Jacobo Timmerman, Newsweek

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cover of Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg

Somebody Told Me

The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg

Rick Bragg

University of Alabama Press, 2000

One of the South’s most loved authors
 
Over the past twenty years, writer Rick Bragg has earned legions of fans with his award-winning newspaper stories and with his critically aclaimed memoir All Over but the Shoutin'. His unique storytelling talent and his sympathy for the day-to-day struggles of everyday people set him apart from journalists who focus on political intrigue and the foibles of the rich and famous.
 
This collection showcases Bragg's talent for turning seemingly ordinary situations into extraordinary stories by bringing together more than sixty of his most recent feature articles, most of them written for the New York Times. Bragg explores such questions as: What happens to someone released from prison for a crime he didn't commit? Who takes care of the graves of poor people? What keeps an elderly woman from selling her land for a tidy profit? Bragg's curiosity often leads him to society's margins, where he wins the confidence of those who have good reason to mistrust others.
 
Bragg has reported on some of the most newsworthy tragedies in the nation, and his unfolding coverage of events such as the Oklahoma City bombing and the Susan Smith child murders is included here. Once again, though, his special ability to connect with people allows him accesss and perspectives that many other reporters do not achieve.
 
Whether he's profiling the sheriff who broke the Smith case or relating the efforts of Alabama churchgoers to understand a Sunday morning tornado strike, Bragg writes with genuine compassion and sentiment but without being sensationalist. He looks where others don’t and gets behind the headlines to the people standing there stunned and often, until he finds them, voiceless. When asked how he came up with his remarkable stories, Bragg has his answer down pat: “Somebody told me.”
 
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cover of Something I Said?: Innuendo and Out the Other

Something I Said?

Innuendo and Out the Other

Michael Feldman

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

What we have here is another mighty slim volume from Michael Feldman, best known (when known at all) for his public radio show "Whad'ya Know" (sic). Feldman, who spouts off about things he knows "not much" about weekly, here writes them down:
    · how to get your own radio show and what you can do with it once you do
    · paranoia
    · marriage (or as Feldman likes to refer to it, "a long-term bad relationship")
    · Hitler
    · SUVs
    · child-rearing (although it sounds like it's the author who is being reared)
    · a number of short pieces on places he and his crew have visited for their "remote possibilities" 
    · more references to "gentiles" than absolutely necessary (seems to be an issue for Feldman, although he is tickled with the 
        notion that, to a Mormon, he is one)
    · some attempts to misrepresent scientific or social research for humorous purposes
    · many personal revelations that prove the examined life is not necessarily worth living either
    · and pages and pages of fluff.

Mr. Feldman has not been compared, to our knowledge, to S. J. Perlman.

But here is some of what Michael Feldman says in Something I Said:
"The paranoid no longer is: paranoia has outlived its usefulness when everybody is out to get us."

"Take the phrase 'no problem': I can use it, although it is the very opposite of my two-word world view ('Nothing works')."

"Whatever latitude beauty may have in the eye of the beholder, funny is not readily apparent to all, and, who knows, they may be right. More importantly, they may be bigger."

Includes a music CD by Michael Feldman and John Sieger.

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cover of Somos Tejanas!: Chicana Identity and Culture in Texas

Somos Tejanas!

Chicana Identity and Culture in Texas

Edited by Jody A. Marín and Norma E. Cantú

University of Texas Press, 2025

2026 Outstanding Book Award for Non-Fiction, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Tejas Foco
2026 Silver Medal for the Dolores Huerta Best Cultural & Community Themed Book – English, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)

An expansive volume on Tejana identity and Tejanidad told through personal narratives, poetry, and essays.

Being Tejanx is different than just being from Texas. Being Tejanx means you are a border subject. Being Tejanx means living in and from a certain history of oppression, possibility, activism, and cultural-linguistic hybridity arising within the US-Mexico borderland that is home. And being Tejanx means something in particular if you are a woman.

In ¡Somos Tejanas!, editors Norma E. Cantú and Jody A. Marín assemble contemporary Tejanx writers who provide firsthand accounts of their experience of identity, enriching the field of Tejanx studies through an encounter with gender and sexuality. The contributions, including personal and scholarly essays, poems, criticism, and artworks, explore the heterogeneity of Tejana identity and the sociopolitical movements, stories, dances, music, and athletic feats that mark Tejanidad. Authors contemplate the history and memory of segregation in Texas, the struggles of surviving the unnatural disaster and blackouts of 2021 amid the global pandemic of COVID-19, and the drug-war violence and ever-tightening immigration restrictions that strangle a transborder way of life shared by millions. An unrepentant act of expression from women under attack by state policymakers, this collection dispels the silence imposed by colonial erasure.

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cover of Sonata

Sonata

By Charles Bowden; foreword by Alfredo Corchado

University of Texas Press, 2020

"I believe every sunrise and I remember the smell of wet grass, the color of robins, and rustle of leaves on the big oaks that outlive nations, all this comes with each sunrise."

Sonata marks the sixth and final installment of Charles Bowden’s towering “Unnatural History of America” series. While his earlier volumes were suffused with violence and war, Bowden offers here a celebration of rebirth and regrowth. Rendered in Bowden's inimitable style, more prose poetry than reportage, he evokes panoramas that contain the potential for respite and offer a state of grace all but lost in the endless wars of man.

Bowden travels back in time to the worlds of artists Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh, the latter painting furiously against encroaching madness. “Van Gogh tries to dream a life of color,” writes Bowden. “Powder blue sheds, yellow stubble, pink skies—but the fears and dark things drag him down.” As Bowden’s vivid prose wrestles with the madness of the world, van Gogh’s paintings represent an act of resistance, ultimately unsuccessful, against depression and suicide.

Moving from the vibrant hues of van Gogh’s painted gardens to America’s southern border, Bowden returns once more to the Mexican asylum run by "El Pastor," Jose Antonio Galvan, who was first introduced to readers of the sextet in Jericho. Here, too, is the dream of a garden that will be planted in the desert, a promise of regeneration in a world gone mad. Poetic, elegiac, and elliptical, Sonata is the final, captivating book of Bowden’s monumental career.

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cover of Song and Self: A Singer's Reflections on Music and Performance

Song and Self

A Singer's Reflections on Music and Performance

Ian Bostridge

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Award-winning singer Ian Bostridge examines iconic works of Western classical music to reflect on the relationship between performer and audience.

Like so many performers, renowned tenor Ian Bostridge spent much of 2020 and 2021 unable to take part in live music. The enforced silence of the pandemic led him to question an identity that was previously defined by communicating directly with audiences in opera houses and concert halls. It also allowed him to delve deeper into many of the classical works he has encountered over the course of his career, such as Claudio Monteverdi’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Robert Schumann’s popular song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben. In lucid and compelling prose, Bostridge explores the ways Monteverdi, Schumann, and Britten employed and disrupted gender roles in their music; questions colonial power and hierarchy in Ravel’s Songs of Madagascar; and surveys Britten’s reckoning with death in works from the War Requiem to his final opera, Death in Venice.

As a performer reconciling his own identity and that of the musical text he delivers on stage, Bostridge unravels the complex history of each piece of music, showing how today’s performers can embody that complexity for their audiences. As readers become privy to Bostridge’s unique lines of inquiry, they are also primed for the searching intensity of his interpretations, in which the uncanny melding of song and self brings about moments of epiphany for both the singer and his audience.
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cover of Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Songs of Degrees

Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

John Taggart

University of Alabama Press, 1994

Songs of Degrees brings together 19 related essays on contemporary American poetry and poetics, published as journal articles between 1975 and 1989, by poet and theorist John Taggart. Over the past two decades, Taggart has been a significant intellectual and artistic force for a number of major American poets. By focusing on the work of several major and less well-known American experimental poets from the 1930s to the present, Taggart not only traces the origins and evolution of this experimental tendency in recent poetry, but also develops new theoretical tools for reading and appreciating these innovative and complex works.
 
The essays are written from the engaged perspective of an active poet for other poets, as well as for those who would like to read and think about poetry in a participatory fashion. The essays thus present “inside narratives” of some of the most challenging contemporary American poetry.
 
The range of Songs of Degrees extends from the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Duncan to such “language poets as Bruce Andres and Susan Howe. Taggart closely examines the work of the objectivist poets George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky. Three essays are devoted to each of these poets, providing detailed readings of individual poems and considerations of each poet’s overall achievement. Taggart also concentrates on poets whose work has not been widely recognized or is only now beginning to be recognized. These include Theodore Enslin, Frank Samperi, and William Bronk. Taggart’s essay “Reading William Bronk” is the first extensive reading of this relatively unknown but truly outstanding poet.
Taggart’s essays also focus on his own poetry. He describes the composition process and the thinking behind it, as well as the poet’s own evolving sense of what the poem can and ought to be. These very personal reflections are unique in their attention to current questions concerning form and the issue of spiritual vision. Avoiding political and cultural reductionism, Taggart throughout keeps his eye—and heart—on the poetic, singing his own “Songs of Degrees,” even as he discovers notes of the same music in the works of other.
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cover of Sonoran Desert Bestiary: A More-than-Natural History

Sonoran Desert Bestiary

A More-than-Natural History

Text by Gary Paul Nabhan; Illustrations by Robert J. Long

University of Arizona Press, 2026

The Sonoran Desert has many marvelous and well-known creatures such as the javelina and the coyote, often found on postcards and lawn ornaments. But what about the lesser-known creatures—the ones that are underfoot yet unseen, that lurk only in the shadows and in our imaginations? In this collection of essays, prose poems, and illustrations, naturalist Gary Paul Nabhan and artist Robert J. Long team up to celebrate these unsung beings of the Sonoran Desert.

This desert bestiary includes creatures whose existence lies largely in traditional story and belief, as well as creatures whose life cycles are so cryptic they seem mythic, such as the walking catfish and the carbunco. Positioned at the dynamic intersection of folklore and natural history, the book reflects on the reasons why human imaginations over the ages have reached into this realm of seldom seen but often intuited animals. Focusing on small animals and charismatic mini-fauna, Nabhan expands our understanding of the natural world by delightfully describing the interactions between animals and plants.

This more-than-natural history is for anyone who finds joy in the marvels of the natural world.

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cover of Sonoran Desert Journeys: Ecology and Evolution of Its Iconic Species

Sonoran Desert Journeys

Ecology and Evolution of Its Iconic Species

Theodore H. Fleming

University of Arizona Press, 2022

Lizards dashing rapidly between plants. Songbirds and woodpeckers flying to and from their nests. Hawks perched on saguaros. What kinds of journeys have these and many other animals and plants and their ancestors taken in space and time to arrive in the Sonoran Desert? How long have these species been living together here?

In Sonoran Desert Journeys ecologist Theodore H. Fleming discusses two remarkable journeys. First, Fleming offers a brief history of our intellectual and technical journey over the past three centuries to understand the evolution of life on Earth. Next, he applies those techniques on a journey of discovery about the evolution and natural history of some of the Sonoran Desert’s most iconic animals and plants. Fleming details the daily lives of a variety of reptiles, birds, mammals, and plants, describing their basic natural and evolutionary histories and addressing intriguing issues associated with their lifestyles and how they cope with a changing climate. Finally, Fleming discusses the complexity of Sonoran Desert conservation.

This book explores the evolution and natural history of iconic animals and plants of the northern Sonoran Desert through the eyes of a curious naturalist and provides a model of how we can coexist with the unique species that call this area home.
 
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cover of Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music

Soundtrack Available

Essays on Film and Popular Music

Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight, eds.

Duke University Press, 2001

From the silent era to the present day, popular music has been a key component of the film experience. Yet there has been little serious writing on film soundtracks that feature popular music. Soundtrack Available fills this gap, as its contributors provide detailed analyses of individual films as well as historical overviews of genres, styles of music, and approaches to film scoring.
With a cross-cultural emphasis, the contributors focus on movies that use popular songs from a variety of genres, including country, bubble-gum pop, disco, classical, jazz, swing, French cabaret, and showtunes. The films discussed range from silents to musicals, from dramatic and avant-garde films to documentaries in India, France, England, Australia, and the United States. The essays examine both “nondiegetic” music in film—the score playing outside the story space, unheard by the characters, but no less a part of the scene from the perspective of the audience—and “diegetic” music—music incorporated into the shared reality of the story and the audience. They include analyses of music written and performed for films, as well as the now common practice of scoring a film with pre-existing songs. By exploring in detail how musical patterns and structures relate to filmic patterns of narration, character, editing, framing, and mise-en-scene, this volume demonstrates that pop music is a crucial element in the film experience. It also analyzes the life of the soundtrack apart from the film, tracing how popular music circulates and acquires new meanings when it becomes an official soundtrack.

Contributors.
Rick Altman, Priscilla Barlow, Barbara Ching, Kelley Conway, Corey Creekmur, Krin Gabbard, Jonathan Gill, Andrew Killick, Arthur Knight, Adam Knee, Jill Leeper, Neepa Majumdar, Allison McCracken, Murray Pomerance, Paul Ramaeker, Jeff Smith, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi
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cover of Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia: Essays in History and Social Anthropology

Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia

Essays in History and Social Anthropology

Donald L. Donham

Ohio University Press, 2002

This pioneering book, first published to wide acclaim in 1986, traces the way the Ethiopian center and the peripheral regions of the country affected each other. It looks specifically at the expansion of the highland Ethiopian state into the western and southern lowlands from the 1890s up to 1974.

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cover of Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging

Sown in Earth

Essays of Memory and Belonging

Fred Arroyo

University of Arizona Press, 2020

Sown in Earth is a collection of personal memories that speak to the larger experiences of hardworking migratory men. Often forgotten or silenced, these men are honored and remembered in Sown in Earth through the lens of Arroyo’s memories of his father. Arroyo recollects his father’s anger and alcohol abuse as a reflection of his place in society, in which his dreams and disappointments are patterned by work and poverty, loss and displacement, memory and belonging.

In Sown in Earth, Arroyo often roots his thoughts and feelings in place, expressing a deep connection to the small homes he inhabited in his childhood, his warm and hazy memories of his grandmother’s kitchen in Puerto Rico, the rivers and creeks he fished, and the small cafés in Madrid that inspired writing and reflection in his adult years. Swirling in romantic moments and a refined love for literature, Arroyo creates a sense of belonging and appreciation for his life despite setbacks and complex anxieties along the way.

By crafting a written journey through childhood traumas, poverty, and the impact of alcoholism on families, Fred Arroyo clearly outlines how his lived experiences led him to become a writer. Sown in Earth is a shocking yet warm collage of memories that serves as more than a memoir or an autobiography. Rather, Arroyo recounts his youth through lyrical prose to humanize and immortalize the hushed lives of men like his father, honoring their struggle and claiming their impact on the writers and artists they raised.
 
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cover of Space Syntax: Selected Papers by Bill Hillier

Space Syntax

Selected Papers by Bill Hillier

Edited by Laura Vaughan, John Peponis, and Ruth Dalton

University College London, 2025

Discover the visionary ideas that redefined architecture and urbanism—Bill Hillier’s most influential writings on space syntax, all in one critical volume.

Few scholars have reshaped our understanding of architecture and urban design as profoundly as Bill Hillier. Space Syntax compiles the most influential works from his career, spanning over half a century, to showcase the evolution of his innovative theories on the spatial structure of cities and the social functions of built environments.

Including his early explorations of architecture as a research discipline and his later theories on how spatial configurations influence human movement and urban vitality, this collection provides a definitive overview of Hillier’s intellectual legacy. Featuring newly redrawn figures, rare texts, and expert introductions from leading theorists and practitioners, the volume offers fresh viewpoints on the continued relevance of space syntax in contemporary research and practice.

Relevant to subjects ranging from archaeology to physics, Space Syntax cements Hillier’s place as a revolutionary thinker whose ideas continue to shape how we design and understand space.
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cover of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry

Speak to Me Words

Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry

Edited by Dean Rader and Janice Gould

University of Arizona Press, 2003

Although American Indian poetry is widely read and discussed, few resources have been available that focus on it critically. This book is the first collection of essays on the genre, bringing poetry out from under the shadow of fiction in the study of Native American literature.

Speak to Me Words is a stimulating blend of classic articles and original pieces that reflect the energy of modern American Indian literary studies. Highlighting various aspects of poetry written by American Indians since the 1960s, it is a wide-ranging collection that balances the insights of Natives and non-Natives, men and women, old and new voices. Included here are such landmark articles as "Answering the Deer" by Paula Gunn Allen, "Herbs of Healing" by Carter Revard, and "Song, Poetry and Language—Expression and Perception" by Simon Ortiz—all pieces that have shaped how we think about Native poetry. Among the contributions appearing for the first time are Elaine Jahner writing on Paula Gunn Allen's use of formal structures; Robert Nelson addressing pan-Indian tropes of emergence, survival, return, and renewal; and Janet McAdams focusing on Carter Revard's "angled mirrors." Although many Native writers may disregard distinctions between genres, together these writings help readers see the difference between American Indian poetry and other forms of Native literature.

These essays are as broad, encompassing, and provocative as Native poetry itself, branching off from and weaving back into one another. In showing how American Indian poetry redefines our social order and articulates how Indian communities think about themselves, these writers establish a new foundation for the study—and enjoyment—of this vital art.

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cover of Speaking of America: Great Conversations at the Library of Congress

Speaking of America

Great Conversations at the Library of Congress

David M. Rubenstein

Duke University Press, 2026

Featuring interviews with eminent historians, journalists, and writers, Speaking of America brings together nineteen wide-ranging conversations from philanthropist and financier David M. Rubenstein’s long-running Congressional Dialogues series of interviews at the Library of Congress. Highlights include Ken Burns on documenting American history, Stacy Schiff on Samuel Adams, Manisha Sinha on Reconstruction, and David McCullough on the American frontier.

Published in association with the Library of Congress

Featuring interviews with eminent historians, journalists, and writers, Speaking of America brings together nineteen wide-ranging conversations from philanthropist and financier David M. Rubenstein’s long-running Congressional Dialogues series of interviews at the Library of Congress. Rubenstein and his guests bring to life notable figures, events, and trends drawn from American history and culture and beyond.

Highlights include Ken Burns on bringing American history to life, Stacy Schiff on Samuel Adams, Manisha Sinha on Reconstruction, David McCullough on the American frontier, Beverly Gage on J. Edgar Hoover, Chris Wallace on the presidential election of 1960, Evan Thomas on Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Eric Schmidt on artificial intelligence, Arthur Brooks on happiness, and David Grann on The Wager, his best-selling story of shipwreck and mutiny. Taken together, the conversations in Speaking of America all build toward the same shared message of dialogue, cooperation, and the importance of knowledge and reflection, highlighting how the study of history can enrich our understanding of current-day challenges in politics and policy.

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Speculate This!

Uncertain Commons

Duke University Press, 2013

Speculate This! is a concise, provocative manifesto advocating practices of "affirmative speculation" over and against contemporary forms of speculation that quantify and contain risk to generate financial profit for a privileged few. This latter mode of speculation is predatory and familiar, its fallout evident in ongoing environmental degradation, in restrictive legal claims on natural resources in distant lands, and in the foreclosures, evictions, and unemployment resulting from the financial collapse of 2007–08. While such exploitive speculation seeks to reduce uncertainty and pin down the future, the affirmative practices championed by the authors of Speculate This! engage uncertainty, contingency, and difference, and they multiply, rather than reduce, possible futures. In these affirmative practices, social relations and the creation of goods and knowledge are not driven by the desire for financial gain or professional status. Whether manifest in open-source software, eco-communes, global activist movements, community credit networks, or experimental art, speculative living affirms our commonality. As a collaborative work coauthored by a group of anonymous scholars, Speculate This! argues for and embodies affirmative speculation.
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cover of Speculation, Now: Essays and Artwork

Speculation, Now

Essays and Artwork

Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, with Prem Krishnamurty and Carin Kuoni, eds.

Duke University Press, 2014

Interdisciplinary in design and concept, Speculation, Now illuminates unexpected convergences between images, concepts, and language. Artwork is interspersed among essays that approach speculation and progressive change from surprising perspectives. A radical cartographer asks whether "the speculative" can be represented on a map. An ethnographer investigates religious possession in Islam to contemplate states between the divine and the seemingly human. A financial technologist queries understandings of speculation in financial markets. A multimedia artist and activist considers the relation between social change and assumptions about the conditions to be changed, and an architect posits purposeful neglect as political strategy. The book includes an extensive glossary with more than twenty short entries in which scholars contemplate such speculation-related notions as insurance, hallucination, prophecy, the paradox of beginnings, and states of half-knowledge. The book's artful, nonlinear design mirrors and reinforces the notion of contingency that animates it. By embracing speculation substantively, stylistically, seriously, and playfully, Speculation, Now reveals its subversive and critical potential.

Artists and essayists include William Darity Jr., Filip De Boeck, Boris Groys, Hans Haacke, Darrick Hamilton, Laura Kurgan, Lin + Lam, Gary Lincoff, Lize Mogel, Christina Moon, Stefania Pandolfo, Satya Pemmaraju, Mary Poovey, Walid Raad, Sherene Schostak, Robert Sember, and Srdjan Jovanović Weiss.

Published by Duke University Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School
 
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cover of Spencer Kimball's Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music

Spencer Kimball's Record Collection

Essays on Mormon Music

Michael Hicks

Signature Books, 2020

At times jubilant, at times elegiac, this set of ten essays by music historian Michael Hicks navigates topics that range from the inner musical life of Joseph Smith to the Mormon love of blackface musicals, from endless wrangling over hymnbooks to the compiling of Mormon folk and exotica albums in the 1960s.  It also offers a brief memoir of what happened to LDS Church President Spencer Kimball’s record collection and a lengthy, brooding piece on the elegant strife it takes to write about Mormon musical history in the first place.  There are surprises and provocations, of course, alongside judicious sifting of sources and weighing of evidence. The prose is fresh, the research smart, and the result a welcome mixture of the careful and the carefree from Mormonism’s best-known scholar of musical life.
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cover of Spirit Things

Spirit Things

Lara Messersmith-Glavin

University of Alaska Press, 2022

A collection of essays that evoke an adventurous spirit and the craving for myth, Spirit Things examines the hidden meanings of objects found on a fishing boat, as seen through the eyes of a child. Author Lara Messersmith-Glavin blends memoir, mythology, and science as she relates the uniqueness and flavor of the Alaskan experience through her memories of growing up fishing in the commercial salmon industry off Kodiak Island.
 
“Spirit things” are those mundane objects that offer new insights into the world on closer consideration—fishing nets, a favorite knife, and the bioluminescent gleam of seawater in a twilight that never truly grows dark. Spirit Things recounts stories of fishing, family, synesthesia, storytelling, gender, violence, and meaning. Each essay takes an object and follows it through histories: personal, material, and scientific, drawing together the delicate lines that link things through their making and use, their genesis and evolution, and the ways they gain significance in an individual’s life.
 
A contemplative take on everything from childcare to neurodivergence, comfort foods to outlaws, Spirit Things uses experiences from the human world and locates them on the edges of nature. Contact with wilderness, with wildness, be it twenty-foot seas in the ocean off Alaska’s coast or chairs flying through windows of a Kodiak bar, provides an entry point for meditations on the ways in which patterns, magic, and wonder overlap.
 
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cover of Spirit Things

Spirit Things

Lara Messersmith-Glavin

University of Alaska Press, 2022

A collection of essays that evoke an adventurous spirit and the craving for myth, Spirit Things examines the hidden meanings of objects found on a fishing boat, as seen through the eyes of a child. Author Lara Messersmith-Glavin blends memoir, mythology, and science as she relates the uniqueness and flavor of the Alaskan experience through her memories of growing up fishing in the commercial salmon industry off Kodiak Island.
 
“Spirit things” are those mundane objects that offer new insights into the world on closer consideration—fishing nets, a favorite knife, and the bioluminescent gleam of seawater in a twilight that never truly grows dark. Spirit Things recounts stories of fishing, family, synesthesia, storytelling, gender, violence, and meaning. Each essay takes an object and follows it through histories: personal, material, and scientific, drawing together the delicate lines that link things through their making and use, their genesis and evolution, and the ways they gain significance in an individual’s life.
 
A contemplative take on everything from childcare to neurodivergence, comfort foods to outlaws, Spirit Things uses experiences from the human world and locates them on the edges of nature. Contact with wilderness, with wildness, be it twenty-foot seas in the ocean off Alaska’s coast or chairs flying through windows of a Kodiak bar, provides an entry point for meditations on the ways in which patterns, magic, and wonder overlap.
 
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cover of Spiritual Evolution: Scientists Discuss Their Beliefs

Spiritual Evolution

Scientists Discuss Their Beliefs

John Marks Templeton

Templeton Press, 1998

 

Spiritual Evolution: Scientists Discuss Their Beliefs describes the intellectual and emotional journeys traveled by esteemed scientists worldwide. Authors share the personal steps they have taken to blend an understanding of the Divine with their scientific perspectives.

Charles Birch, S. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Larry Dossey, Owen Gingerich, Peter E. Hodgson, Stanley L. Jaki, Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, Russell Stannard, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker offer accounts of their spirituality and scientific inquiry. Noting the impact of religious upbringing, academic and spiritual mentors, personal devotional practice, and study, these authors make a compelling case for the blending of both scientific and spiritual worlds. They share insights that keep them attending church, engaging in prayer, and continuing the search to understand the Infinite.

 

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cover of Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry

Spirituality and the Writer

A Personal Inquiry

Thomas Larson

Ohio University Press, 2019

Today, the surprisingly elastic form of the memoir embraces subjects that include dying, illness, loss, relationships, and self-awareness. Writing to reveal the inner self—the pilgrimage into one’s spiritual and/or religious nature—is a primary calling. Contemporary memoirists are exploring this field with innovative storytelling, rigorous craft, and new styles of confessional authorship. Now, Thomas Larson brings his expertise as a critic, reader, and teacher to the boldly evolving and improvisatory world of spiritual literature.

In his book-length essay Spirituality and the Writer, Larson surveys the literary insights of authors old and new who have shaped religious autobiography and spiritual memoir—from Augustine to Thomas Merton, from Peter Matthiessen to Cheryl Strayed. He holds them to an exacting standard: they must render transcendent experience in the writing itself. Only when the writer’s craft prevails can the fleeting and profound personal truths of the spirit be captured. Like its predecessor, Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist,Spirituality and the Writer will find a home in writing classrooms and book groups, and be a resource for students, teachers, and writers who seek guidance with exploring their spiritual lives.

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cover of Sport and Exercise Science: ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF SPORTS MEDICINE

Sport and Exercise Science

ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF SPORTS MEDICINE

Edited by Jack W. Berryman and Roberta J. Parks

University of Illinois Press, 1992

Topics are as far-ranging and current as the use of steroids, training for competition,
athlete's heart, exercise physiology, physical activity and sport for females, women's
health, physical culture and quackery, diet, and more.
 
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cover of Sport and Moral Conflict: A Conventionalist Theory

Sport and Moral Conflict

A Conventionalist Theory

William J.Morgan

Temple University Press, 2020

What is the purpose of sport, and how are ethical conceptions of sport shaped by the answers to this question? In Sport and Moral Conflict, William Morgan investigates, examining sport as a moral crucible that puts athletes in competitive, emotionally charged situations where fairness and equality are contested alongside accomplishment.

Morgan looks at the modern Olympics—from 1906 Athens to 1924 Paris, when the Games reached international prestige — in order to highlight the debate about athletic excellence and the amateur-professional divide. Whereas the Americans emphasized winning, the Europeans valued a love of the game. Morgan argues that the existing moral theories of sport—formalism and broad internalism (aka interpretivism), which rely on rules and general principles—fall short when confronted with such a dispute as the transition from amateur to professional sport. As such, he develops a theory of conventionalism, in which the norms at work in athletic communities determine how players should ethically acquit themselves. Presenting his case for an ethical theory of sport, Morgan provides insights regarding the moral controversies and crises that persist today.

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cover of Sport and the Law: Historical and Cultural Intersections

Sport and the Law

Historical and Cultural Intersections

Samuel O. Regalado

University of Arkansas Press, 2014

This new collection examines not only how athletes looked to the nation’s judicial system to solve conflicts but also how their cases trans¬formed the interpretation of laws. These essays examine a vast array of social and legal controversies including Heywood v. NBA (1971), which allowed any player to enter the draft; Flood v. Kuhn (1972), which considered baseball’s antitrust status; the Danny Gardella lower level 1948 case regarding free agency and baseball; Muhammad Ali’s celebrated stance against the U.S. draft; Renée Richards’s 1976 lawsuit against the U.S. Tennis Association and its due process ramifications; and human rights violations in international law with respect to the increased recruitment of underage Latin baseball players in the Caribbean region are a few examples of the vast array of stories included. Sport and the Law links these cases to other cases and topics, giving the reader the opportunity to see the threads weaving law and sport together in American society.
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cover of Sports through the Lens: Essays on 25 Iconic Photographs

Sports through the Lens

Essays on 25 Iconic Photographs

Edited by Maureen M. Smith, Daniel A. Nathan, and Sarah K. Fields

University of Texas Press, 2024

2025 Anthology Award, North American Society for Sport History

The stories behind and legacies of important sports photos from the last 130 years.

Ever since photography and professional sports originated in the nineteenth century, photographers have shaped how we perceive sports. Sports through the Lens collects essays by twenty-five historians that consider what it means to capture and revisit a moment of cultural significance in sports, looking at each photo’s creation, its contexts, and how its meaning has shifted over time. Some essays provide fresh perspectives on such iconic images as Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston at their 1965 rematch and Michael Jordan soaring at the 1988 NBA All-Star Game slam dunk competition; others introduce readers to the lesser-known stories of the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon or the inaugural World Indigenous Games. The authors examine the photos' legacies alongside the artistry of both the athletes and the photographers. Reflecting on images of athletes from around the world engaged in sports from baseball to horse-racing to hockey, Sports through the Lens provides a wide-ranging meditation on the visual, historical, and cultural meaning of sports photographs.

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