Results by title

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

cover of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland

SportsWorld

An American Dreamland

Lipsyte, Robert

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Tough and witty, SportsWorld is a well-known commentator’s overview of the most significant form of mass culture in America—sports. It’s a sweaty Oz that has grown in a century from a crucible for character to a complex of capitalism, a place where young people can find both self-fulfillment and cruel exploitation, where families can huddle in a sanctuary of entertainment and be force fed values and where cities and countries can be pillaged by greedy team owners and their paid-for politicians. But this book is not just a screed, it’s a guided visit with such heroes of sports as Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Joe Namath, who the author knew well, and with some he met in passing, like Richard Nixon, who seemed never to have gotten over missing the cut in college varsity football, a major mark of manhood. We see how SportsWorld sensibilities help elect our politicians, judge our children, fight our wars, and oppress our minorities. And now featuring a new introduction by the author,SportsWorld is a book that will provide the foundation for understanding today’s world of sports and the time of Trump. 

In the America of 2017—where the SuperBowl is worth billions, athletes are penalized or forced out of sports for political and anti-racist activism, and Title IX is constantly questioned and undermined—Robert Lipsyte’s 1975 critique remains startlingly and intensely relevant.
[more]
cover of Springs of Scientific Creativity: Essays on Founders of Modern Science

Springs of Scientific Creativity

Essays on Founders of Modern Science

claire Aris

University of Minnesota Press, 1983

Springs of Scientific Creativity was first published in 1983.Mathematician Henri Poincaré was boarding a bus when he realized that the transformations of non-Euclidian geometry were just those he needed in his research on the theory of functions. He did not have to interrupt his conversation, still less to verify the equation in detail; his insight was complete at that point. Poincaré’s insight into his own creativity -- his awareness that preliminary cogitation and the working of the subconscious had prepared his mind for an intuitive flash of recognition -- is just one of many possible analyses of scientific creativity, a subject as fascinating as it is elusive.The authors of this book have chosen to search for the springs of scientific creativity by examining the lives and work of a dozen innovative thinkers in the fields of mathematics, physics, and chemistry from the seventeenth down to the mid-twentieth century. First prepared for delivery in a lecture series held at the University of Minnesota, these essays delve into the social, psychological, and intellectual factors that fostered creativity in the lives of Galilei Galileo, Isaac Newton, J. P. Joule, James Cler Maxwell, Josiah Willard Gibbs, Lord Rayleigh, Elmer Sperry and Adrian Leverkühn, Walter Nernst, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Michael Polyani, and John von Neumann.The contributors are Thomas B. Settle, Richard S. Westfall, Donald S. L. Cardwell, C. W. F. Everitt, Martin J. Klein, John N. Howard, Thomas P. Hughes, Erwin N. Hiebert, Stanley Goldberg, Linda Wessels, William T. Scott, and Herman H. Goldstine.
[more]
cover of Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theater

Staging Resistance

Essays on Political Theater

Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1998

Staging Resistance interrogates political performance in a variety of cultural and national contexts. The book's essays examine work by artists ranging from the Bread and Puppet Theatre to Théatre du Soleil to Athol Fugard to lesser-known grassroots organizations across the globe. The contributors' broad survey of work, as varied as the contexts in which it occurs, indicates that older paradigms for the study of political theater may no longer be viable. As the essays show, a wide variety of theoretical approaches and political assumptions must be actively and self-consciously negotiated in order to make sense of the theater's relevance to the social sphere.
Focused studies of individual plays complement broad-based discussions of the place of theater in a radically democratic society. Staging Resistance is particularly strong in its concern with the intersection of gender and national politics; the collection specifically engages work by and about women in relation to broader geopolitical issues. Resisting the urge to be representative, the editors smartly highlight the divergent interests and concerns of authors who envision their work as an active form of cultural struggle. This consistently challenging collection of essays describes an art of change confronting the processes of change itself.
Jeanne Colleran is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department, John Carroll University.
Jenny S. Spencer is Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
[more]
cover of Stan Hochman Unfiltered: 50 Years of Wit and Wisdom from the Groundbreaking Sportswriter

Stan Hochman Unfiltered

50 Years of Wit and Wisdom from the Groundbreaking Sportswriter

Gloria Hochman

Temple University Press, 2020

The late Philadelphia Daily News sportswriter Stan Hochman was known for his many zingers, such as “Harry Litwack, the stoic Temple coach, stalks the sidelines like a blind man at a nudist colony.” As a reporter, he was more interested in how athletes felt, what their values were, how they lived their lives, or what made them tick than he was about how many runs they scored or punches they landed.

In Stan Hochman Unfiltered, his wife Gloria collects nearly 100 of his best columns from the Daily News about baseball, horse racing, boxing, football, hockey, and basketball (both college and pro), as well as food, films, and even Liz Taylor. Each section is introduced by a friend or colleague, including Garry Maddox, Bernie Parent, Larry Merchant, and Ray Didinger, among others. 

Hochman penned a candid, cantankerous column about whether Pete Rose belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame; wrote a graphic account of the Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fight of the century; and skewered Norman “Bottom Line” Braman, the one-time owner of the Eagles. He also wrote human-interest stories, including features about the importance of kids with special needs playing sports. 

In addition to being a beloved writer, Hochman was also known for his stint on WIP’s radio as the Grand Imperial Poobah, where he would settle callers’ most pressing debates. Hochman long earned the respect and admiration of his subjects, peers, and readers throughout his career, and Stan Hochman Unfiltered is a testament to his enduring legacy.

[more]
cover of Staredown: Another Year Inside Boxing

Staredown

Another Year Inside Boxing

Thomas Hauser

University of Arkansas Press, 2020

Each year, readers, writers, and critics alike look forward to Thomas Hauser’s newest collection of articles about the contemporary boxing scene. Reviewing his 2019 collection, Booklist proclaimed, “It's hard to think of another sports journalist who knows more about his or her sport of choice. As it does every year, Hauser’s anthology laps the field. The man is a treasure.”

Staredown continues this tradition of excellence with inside reporting from the dressing room before some of last year’s biggest fights, in-depth investigations into corruption in boxing, and more. Hauser also moves beyond the norm to explore incidents like street fights and examine boxing’s storied history in new and creative ways.
[more]
cover of State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity: Essays on the “Ever-Dying People”

State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity

Essays on the “Ever-Dying People”

Simon Rawidowicz

Brandeis University Press, 1998

This readable, insightful, and thought-provoking collection of essays, presents an original and innovative ideology that stirringly affirms the unity of the Jewish people. Rawidowicz's rich themes include the relationship between the State of Israel and the Diaspora; Jewish "difference" and its repercussions; Jewish learning; and Jewish continuity in the post-Holocaust world. In his foreword to the paper edition, Michael A. Meyer writes, "Forty years after his death, [Rawidowicz's] sober analyses, his realism with regard to both the State of Israel and the Diaspora, and his striving to find unities among dichotomies that divide the Jewish people -- all of these make his images and ideas still worthy of our reflection."
[more]
cover of Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory

Statemaking and Social Movements

Essays in History and Theory

Edited by Charles Bright and Susan Harding

University of Michigan Press, 1984

Statemaking does not end once states emerge but is a continuous process, argue the contributors to this volume. In their view, states are not static structures that “act upon" society, nor are states simple reflections of economic relations; states are instead highly dynamic structures that are constantly built up, dismantled, and transformed by complex interplays of political, social, and economic processes. This collection of original essays by leading scholars in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, and economics argues for historically specific theories of states and politics in place of ahistorical models. Case studies range in scope from Aztec Mexico and feudal Europe to Nazi Germany and contemporary America. What emerges from this ground-breaking interdisciplinary dialogue is a historically sensitive way of thinking about states, politics, and social movements and the transformative relationship between states and societies.
[more]
cover of Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory

Statemaking and Social Movements

Essays in History and Theory

Charles Bright and Susan Harding, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1984

Statemaking does not end once states emerge but is a continuous process, argue the contributors to this volume. In their view, states are not static structures that “act upon" society, nor are states simple reflections of economic relations; states are instead highly dynamic structures that are constantly built up, dismantled, and transformed by complex interplays of political, social, and economic processes. This collection of original essays by leading scholars in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, and economics argues for historically specific theories of states and politics in place of ahistorical models. Case studies range in scope from Aztec Mexico and feudal Europe to Nazi Germany and contemporary America. What emerges from this ground-breaking interdisciplinary dialogue is a historically sensitive way of thinking about states, politics, and social movements and the transformative relationship between states and societies.
[more]
cover of Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History

Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development

Essays in Anthropometric History

Edited by John Komlos

University of Chicago Press, 1994

What can body measurements tell us about living standards in the past? In this collection of essays studying height and weight data from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, North America, and Asia, fourteen distinguished scholars explore the relation between physical size, economic development, and standard of living among various socioeconomic groups.

Analyzing the differences in physical stature by social group, gender, age, provenance, and date and place of birth, these essays illuminate urban and rural differences in well-being, explore the effects of market integration on previously agricultural societies, contrast the experiences of several segments of society, and explain the proximate causes of downturns and upswings in well-being. Particularly intriguing is the researchers' conclusion that the environment of the New World during this period was far more propitious than that of Europe, based on data showing that European aristocrats were in worse health than even the poorest members of American society.
[more]
cover of Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling

Steel Chair to the Head

The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling

Nicholas Sammond, ed.

Duke University Press, 2005

The antagonists—oiled, shaved, pierced, and tattooed; the glaring lights; the pounding music; the shouting crowd: professional wrestling is at once spectacle, sport, and business. Steel Chair to the Head provides a multifaceted look at the popular phenomenon of pro wrestling. The contributors combine critical rigor with a deep appreciation of wrestling as a unique cultural form, the latest in a long line of popular performance genres. They examine wrestling as it happens in the ring, is experienced in the stands, is portrayed on television, and is discussed in online chat rooms. In the process, they reveal wrestling as an expression of the contradictions and struggles that shape American culture.

The essayists include scholars in anthropology, psychology, film studies, communication studies, and sociology, one of whom used to wrestle professionally. Classic studies of wrestling by Roland Barthes, Carlos Monsiváis, Sharon Mazer, and Henry Jenkins appear alongside original essays. Whether exploring how pro wrestling inflects race, masculinity, and ideas of reality and authenticity; how female fans express their enthusiasm for male wrestlers; or how lucha libre provides insights into Mexican social and political life, Steel Chair to the Head gives due respect to pro wrestling by treating it with the same thorough attention usually reserved for more conventional forms of cultural expression.

Contributors. Roland Barthes, Douglas L. Battema, Susan Clerc, Laurence de Garis, Henry Jenkins III, Henry Jenkins IV, Heather Levi, Sharon Mazer, Carlos Monsiváis, Lucia Rahilly, Catherine Salmon, Nicholas Sammond, Phillip Serrat, Philip Sewell

[more]
cover of Stepping Up to the Plate: Building a Liberal Pluralistic Israel

Stepping Up to the Plate

Building a Liberal Pluralistic Israel

Rabbi Robert L. Samuels

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2017

U'vamakom she'ein anashim, hishtadel l'hiyot ish…"In the place where no one stands up to do what is right, be the one who steps up to the plate."

Stepping Up to the Plate is the autobiography of Rabbi Robert L. Samuels, a visionary who fused Zionism and Progressive Judaism and who had a tremendous impact on Israel.

[more]
cover of Still on Call

Still on Call

Richard Stern

University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Richard Stern is a literary treasure."
---Scott Turow

"Stern's new miscellany reveals a literary mind of the first order, thinking in elegant prose about dozens of interesting subjects."
---Philip Roth

"Stern is a great virtuoso. . . . [I]n an ailing literary culture, we should be grateful for a work like this and a career, too, spanning the American half-century."
---New York Times Book Review

"Stern's skill gives vitality to everything he treats."
---Edmund White, Los Angeles Times

"Like a gifted dancer in a small space, Stern has tremendous grace and ease on the page, executing dynamic turns and dips with a fine economy of motion and without sacrificing nuance."
---Booklist

Still on Call is the sixth and final collection of critically acclaimed novelist and educator Richard Stern. "Orderly miscellany" is the author's term for this aggregation of reflections, essays, reviews, reportage, commentary, and observations on writing and fellow writers, life, and contemporary culture.

The collection's three sections, Coasting, Posting, and Hosting, contain pieces that range from reflections on becoming a writer in the 1940s to assessments of such major writers and close colleagues as Saul Bellow, and Donald Justice to topical offerings from Stern's popular blog for the New Republic.

This wide-ranging collection is intended as the culmination of sixty years of the writing life but, first and foremost, as provocative entertainment. Stern is a prolific writer, and this selection of some of his highest-quality writing both educates and enthralls.

Richard Stern is the Helen A. Regenstein Emeritus Professor of English and of the Humanities at the University of Chicago and the author of nineteen works of fiction and nonfiction. His books include the novels A Father's Words and Golk, and, most recently, the collection What Is What Was. Stern has been the subject of two books: The Writings of Richard Stern: The Education of an Intellectual Everyman by David Garret Izzo and Richard Stern by James Schiffer.

[more]
cover of Stones, Bones, and the Sacred: Essays on Material Culture and Ancient Religion in Honor of Dennis E.

Stones, Bones, and the Sacred

Essays on Material Culture and Ancient Religion in Honor of Dennis E.

Alan H. Cadwallader

SBL Press, 2016

A crucial text for any university course on the interaction of archaeology and the Bible

The world of early Christians was not a world lived in texts; it was a world saturated with material reality and concerns: what, where and when to eat or drink; how to present oneself in the space of bodily life and that of death; how to move from one place to another; what impacted status or the adjudication of legal charges. All these and more controlled so much of life in the ancient world. The Christians were not immune from the impact of these realities. Sometimes they absorbed their surrounds; sometimes they quite explicitly rejected the material practices bearing in on them; frequently they modified the practice and the rationale to create a significant Christian alternative. The collection of essays in this volume come from a range of international scholars who, for all their different interests and critical commitments, are yet united in treasuring research into the Greek and Roman worlds in which Christians sought to make their way. They offer these essays in honor of one who has made a lifetime's work in mining ancient material culture to extract nuggets of insight into early Christian dining practices: Dennis E. Smith.

Features

  • Rich examples of method in the utilization of ancient material culture for biblical interpretation.
  • Thirteen essays with a response from Dennis E. Smith
  • Maps, diagrams, and plates
    [more]
    cover of Stories From Under The Sky

    Stories From Under The Sky

    John Madson

    University of Iowa Press, 2006

    In Stories from under the Sky, John Madson salutes the outdoor life. These thirty-six essays display his healthy respect for the forces of nature, without diminishing his wry awareness of the foibles of beast, bird, fish, and human.
    In sections on mammals, the river, and birds, Madson acquaints readers with some real characters—not all of them four-footed! Some are old favorites: the raccoon, the otter, the fawn, and the badger. Others are less familiar—the demonic shrew, the indomitable dogfish, and the exotic blue heron. Even the “unloved” come in for their share of attention: toads, waterbugs, wasps, and turkey buzzards. Madson has a yarn to spin about each one. Where else would you find an essay on “Snake Liars”?

    Whatever the topic, Madson’s love of nature shines through, be it coon hunting or an explanation of the incredible bird machine. His obvious affection is tempered with the recognition that not everything “natural” is a pretty sight. All of which leaves readers with a better understanding of life under the sky. 

    [more]
    cover of Stories and Stone: Writing the Ancestral Pueblo Homeland

    Stories and Stone

    Writing the Ancestral Pueblo Homeland

    Reuben Ellis

    University of Arizona Press, 1997

    Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Mesa Verde, Hovenweep . . . For many, such historic places evoke images of stone ruins, cliff dwellings, pot shards, and petroglyphs. For others, they recall ancestry. Remnants of the American Southwest's ancestral Puebloan peoples (sometimes known as Anasazi) have mystified and tantalized explorers, settlers, archaeologists, artists, and other visitors for centuries. And for a select group of writers, these ancient inhabitants have been a profound source of inspiration.

    Collected here are more than fifty selections from a striking body of literature about the prehistoric Southwest: essays, stories, travelers' reports, and poems spanning more than four centuries of visitation. They include timeless writings such as John Wesley Powell's The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Tributaries and Frank Hamilton Cushing's "Life at Zuni," plus contemporary classics ranging from Colin Fletcher's The Man Who Walked Through Time to Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian to Edward Abbey's "The Great American Desert." Reuben Ellis's introduction brings contemporary insight and continuity to the collection, and a section on "reading in place" invites readers to experience these great works amidst the landscapes that inspired them. For anyone who loves to roam ancient lands steeped in mystery, Stories and Stone is an incomparable companion that will enhance their enjoyment.
    [more]
    cover of Stories of a Forest Ranger: Tales of Life in the U.S. Forest Service

    Stories of a Forest Ranger

    Tales of Life in the U.S. Forest Service

    Pete Griffin

    Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2020

    Stories about the life of a Forest Ranger, the habitat and animals he has worked to protect, together with no small number of self-effacing humorous anecdotes. This book of stories draws on the author's thirty years in the US Forest service, including encounters with bears, elk, moose, and that strangest of animals, humans. Laced with happy humor, the stories inform and educate while they entertain. Adventures have come along with the work and Griffin is a natural storyteller.
     
    [more]
    cover of Storm Beat: A Journalist Reports from the Oregon Coast

    Storm Beat

    A Journalist Reports from the Oregon Coast

    Lori Tobias

    Oregon State University Press, 2020

    Journalist Lori Tobias arrived on the Oregon Coast in 2000. After freelancing from Newport for several years, she signed on to the Oregonian as a stringer covering the coast from Florence to Astoria; later she would be hired as a staff writer responsible for the entirety of Oregon’s coast—one person for more than three hundred miles. This meant long hours, being called out for storms in the middle of the night (and in dangerous conditions), driving hundreds of miles in a day if stories called for it.

    The Oregon Coast is a rugged, beautiful region. Separated from the state’s population centers by the Coast Range, it is a land of small towns reliant primarily on fishing and tourism, known for its dramatic landscapes and dramatic storms. Many of the stories Tobias covered were tragedies: car crashes, falls, drownings, capsizings. And those are just the accidents; Tobias covered plenty of violent crimes as well. But her stories also include more lighthearted moments, including her own experiences learning to live on and cover the coast. Tobias’s story is as much her own as it is the coast’s; she takes the reader through familiar beats of life (regular trips back east as her parents age), the decline of journalism in the twenty-first century, and the unexpected (and not entirely glamorous) experiences of a working reporter—such as a bout of vertigo after rappelling from a helicopter onto a ship. Ultimately, Tobias tells a compelling story of a region that many visit but few truly know.
    [more]
    cover of Storm Warnings: Science Fiction Confronts the Future

    Storm Warnings

    Science Fiction Confronts the Future

    George E Slusser

    Southern Illinois University Press, 1987

    These 17 original essays, written for the sixth Eaton Conference on Fantasy and Science Fiction, explore the uses, origins, and forms of future fiction. The contributors are George E. Slusser, Paul Alkon, Marie-Hélène Huet, Howard V. Hendrix, Bradford Lyau, Gregory Benford, José Manuel Mota, Frederik Pohl, George Hay, Colin Greenland, John Huntington, Elizabeth Maslen, W. M. S. and Claire Russell, T. A. Shippey, Kenneth V. Bailey, Gary Kern, and Frank McConnell.

    The essays address the question “Do we call up images of future societies in order to prepare for them, or to forestall their ever coming into existence?”

    [more]
    cover of Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance

    Strange Attractors

    Lives Changed by Chance

    Edie Meidav

    University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

    Has a stunning surprise or lucky encounter ever propelled you in an unanticipated direction? Are you doing what you always thought you would be doing with your life or has some unseen magnetism changed your course? And has that redirection come to seem inevitable? Edie Meidav and Emmalie Dropkin asked leading contemporary writers to consider these questions, which they characterize through the metaphor of “the strange attractor,” a scientific theory describing an inevitable occurrence that arises out of chaos. Meidav's introduction and the thirty-five pieces collected here offer imaginative, arresting, and memorable replies to this query, including guidance from a yellow fish, a typewriter repairman, a cat, a moose, a bicycle, and a stranger on a train. Absorbing and provocative, this is nonfiction to be read in batches and bursts and returned to again and again.

    [more]
    cover of Strange Good Fortune: Essays on Contemporary Poetry

    Strange Good Fortune

    Essays on Contemporary Poetry

    David Wojahn

    University of Arkansas Press, 2000

    Strange Good Fortune is a collection of fifteen essays on the state of American verse, written by a well-known American poet whose criticism has also attracted considerable attention. Passionate in his engagement with both the practice of poetry and in the observation of verse as it exists within an increasingly professionalized and sometimes perplexing scene, Wojahn follows in the tradition of poet-critics such as Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz, offering provocative and insightful observations about such topics as the persistence of autobiographical poetry, poetry and politics, the creative writing industry, American poets and travel, recent literary hoaxes, and the poetry of depression and invective. The essays discuss not only familiar figures such as Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, and Robert Lowell but also under-appreciated poets such as Weldon Kees, Frederick Seidel, and Armand Schwerner, as well as younger poets such as Mark Doty, Susan Mitchell, and Denis Johnson. Wojahn's is a humanistic and practical criticism, devoid of theoretical cant, and capable of both acute analysis of individual poems and larger generalizations about poetic method. Forceful, readable, and unflappable, Strange Good Fortune is the work of a poet writing about what he cares about; it is not hobbled by jargon or addled by theory.
    [more]
    cover of Strength to Strength: Essays in Honor of Shaye J. D. Cohen

    Strength to Strength

    Essays in Honor of Shaye J. D. Cohen

    Michael L. Satlow

    SBL Press, 2018

    Essays that engage the scholarship of Shaye J. D. Cohen

    The essays in Strength to Strength honor Shaye J. D. Cohen across a range of ancient to modern topics. The essays seek to create an ongoing conversation on issues of identity, cultural interchange, and Jewish literature and history in antiquity, all areas of particular interest for Cohen. Contributors include: Moshe J. Bernstein, Daniel Boyarin, Jonathan Cohen, Yaakov Elman, Ari Finkelstein, Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Steven D. Fraade, Isaiah M. Gafni, Gregg E. Gardner, William K. Gilders, Martin Goodman, Leonard Gordon, Edward L. Greenstein, Erich S. Gruen, Judith Hauptman, Jan Willem van Henten, Catherine Hezser, Tal Ilan, Richard Kalmin, Yishai Kiel, Ross S. Kraemer, Hayim Lapin, Lee I. Levine, Timothy H. Lim, Duncan E. MacRae, Ivan Marcus, Mahnaz Moazami, Rachel Neis, Saul M. Olyan, Jonathan J. Price, Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Michael L. Satlow, Lawrence H. Schiffman, Daniel R. Schwartz, Joshua Schwartz, Karen Stern, Stanley Stowers, and Burton L. Visotzky.

    Features:

    • A full bibliography of Cohen’s published works
    • An essay on the contributions of Cohen
    [more]
    cover of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History: Volume 13

    Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History

    Volume 13

    Joel T. Rosenthal

    Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018

    Formerly published by AMS Press, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History continues with an annual volume now published by ACMRS.
    [more]
    cover of Style and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance

    Style and Time

    Essays on the Politics of Appearance

    Andrew Benjamin

    Northwestern University Press, 2006

    Interruption is often read as the foundational gesture of modernity—the means through which modernity asserts its existence by claiming its discontinuity with the past. Exposing the limitations of such an understanding, this book offers a very different approach: here, modernity is the site that poses the question of how we are to continue when every attempt to think and understand the present is marked by the necessity of an interruption. Through a reading of Walter Benjamin's writings—particularly on interruption, fashion, and Jugendstil (or Art Nouveau)—Andrew Benjamin in this work offers a sustained meditation on the role of interruption in modernity. His book departs from and elaborates an important but overlooked dimension of Benjamin's discourse: the question of style as it bears upon temporality and spatiality. Extending this meditation in exciting and unexpected ways--toward problems of cosmopolitanism, immigration, and the graphically pornographic, for instance—the author is able to translate Benjamin's multifaceted formulations on style, the dialectical image, awakening, temporality, and spatiality into lucid and highly intelligent stylistics underscoring the philosophical notions of Schein and Erscheining, the interruptions of modernity, and the politics of sameness and otherness.

    Nothing less than a rethinking of the conditions of Western art as it relates to politics, architecture, and time, this study of Walter Benjamin's modernity in temporal and spatial terms is a provocative and original work of philosophy in its own right—a work that suggests that the time has come to revise existing paradigms.
    [more]
    cover of Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being against the Capitalocene

    Subaltern Studies 2.0

    Being against the Capitalocene

    Milinda Banerjee and Jelle J.P. Wouters

    Prickly Paradigm Press, 2022

    On a second wave of anti-colonial revolutions.

    State and Capital reign over the Age of Sorrow. We face inequality, pandemics, ethnocide, climate crisis, and mass extinction. Our desire for security and power governs us as State. Our desire for possessions governs us as Capital. Our desires imprison and rule us beings as Unbeing. Yet, from Nagaland to New Zealand, Bhutan to Bolivia, a second wave of anti-colonial revolutions has begun. Arising from assemblies of humans and other-than-humans, these revolutions replace possessive individualism with non-exploitative interdependence. Naga elders, Bhutanese herders and other indigenous communities, feminists, poets, seers, yaks, cranes, vultures, and fungi haunt this pamphlet. The original Subaltern Studies narrated how Indian peasant communities destroyed the British empire. Subaltern Studies 2.0 prophesies the multi-being demos and liberates Being from Unbeing. Re-kin, Re-nomad, Re-animate, Re-wild! The Animist Revolution has come.
     
    [more]
    cover of Subversive Stages: Theater in Pre- and Post-Communist Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria

    Subversive Stages

    Theater in Pre- and Post-Communist Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria

    Ileana Alexandra Orlich

    Central European University Press, 2017

    Exploring theater practices in communist and post-communist Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, this book analyzes intertextuality or "inter-theatricality" as a political strategy, designed to criticize contemporary political conditions while at the same time trying to circumvent censorship. Plays by Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian dramatists are examined, who are "retrofitting" the past by adapting the political crimes and horrifying tactics of totalitarianism to the classical theatre (with Shakespeare a favorite) to reveal the region's traumatic history. By the sustained analysis of the aesthetic devices used as political tools, Orlich makes a very strong case for the continued relevance of the theater as one of the subtlest media in the public sphere. She embeds her close readings in a thorough historical analysis and displays a profound knowledge of the political role of theater history. In the Soviet bloc the theater of the absurd, experimentation, irony, and intertextual distancing (estrangement) are not seen as mere aesthetic language games but as political strategies that use indirection to say what cannot be said directly.
    [more]
    cover of Success for All: Programs to Support Students Throughout Their College Experience

    Success for All

    Programs to Support Students Throughout Their College Experience

    Melisa N. Choroszy

    University of Nevada Press, 2019

    While the most important measure of success for many degree-seeking students is the timely attainment of a Bachelor’s degree, there remains a host of other indicators of student success that vary by student population and students’ personal goals. Many of these smaller successes lead to the ultimate goal of graduation and are significant triumphs throughout the journey through higher education.

    Success for All is a strategic guide for administrators and educators that offers methods for advising students through the myriad of challenges they face. Every bit of success contributes to the accomplishment of a larger goal, and this book highlights success at every level. It provides a specific roadmap to the research, services, and programs at the University of Nevada, Reno and Truckee Meadows Community College that support student success in undergraduate and graduate programs regardless of a student’s social, emotional, or prior academic experiences. Contributors discuss how to make students feel welcome in their social and educational environments and how to directly assist them with the timely completion of their degree. Administrators and educators demonstrate how these programs help make a positive contribution to the students and the institutions they serve while implementing practical solutions to increase graduation rates.
     
    [more]
    cover of Sum Total Of Human Happiness

    Sum Total Of Human Happiness

    James V. Schall

    St. Augustine's Press, 2006

    [more]
    cover of Summa metaphysicae ad mentem Sancti Thomae: Essays in Honor of John F. Wippel

    Summa metaphysicae ad mentem Sancti Thomae

    Essays in Honor of John F. Wippel

    Therese Scarpelli Cory

    Catholic University of America Press, 2023

    This volume is a tribute to Fr. John F. Wippel. Following the philosophical order that Aquinas might have adopted “had he chosen to write a Summa metaphysicae”—an order that Wippel himself lays out in his Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas—these essays unfold new research on some of the most intriguing topics in Aquinas’s metaphysics, from the most recent generation of scholars formed by Wippel’s pioneering work. The contributors address the discovery of being qua being via separation (Gregory T. Doolan), propter quid metaphysical demonstrations (Philip Neri Reese), the origins of the controversies about the real distinction between essence and esse (Mark Gossiaux), a defense of essence-realism as a key to the real distinction (David Twetten), the relationship of likeness and agency (Therese Scarpelli Cory), created form as act and potency (Stephen Brock), the variation of accidental forms (Gloria Frost), the possibility of angelic judgment (Francis Feingold), argumentation for the existence of God (Gaven Kerr), the propriety of “Qui Est” as a Divine Name (Brian Carl), ‘Beauty’ as a Divine Name (Michael Rubin), and God’s application of creaturely powers to action (Jason Mitchell).
    [more]
    cover of Sundancers and River Demons: Essays on Landscape and Ritual

    Sundancers and River Demons

    Essays on Landscape and Ritual

    Conger Beasley Jr.

    University of Arkansas Press, 1990

    [more]
    cover of Superior North Shore: A Natural History of Lake Superior’s Northern Lands and Waters

    Superior North Shore

    A Natural History of Lake Superior’s Northern Lands and Waters

    Thomas F. Waters

    University of Minnesota Press, 1999

    Lake Superior has been known by many names through the centuries, from Kitchi Gami to le lac superieur, but the lake itself remains the same expansive and inspiring body of water. Here, Thomas F. Waters explores the natural and human history of the Superior basin. From the trout and salmon swimming in its icy depths to the red and white pines towering overhead, Lake Superior has an ancient past. As Waters depicts the geology of the region, he traces the development of the rugged shoreline from Duluth to Thunder Bay to Sault Ste. Marie. The Superior North Shore also vividly describes the human history lived out in this sometimes harsh, always spectacular natural setting, from the earliest Native Americans to the voyageurs to the modern fishing industry. Charmingly illustrated by Carol Yonker Waters, this volume conveys to the reader an intimacy with the legends of Lake Superior, as well as a sense of the grandeur behind this unique and vital ecological system. "Waters's vivid prose transports you from the volcanic origins of the Superior Basin, to the Ojibwe Kitchi Gami (the "great lake"), to the wild, daunting days of exploration and exploitation of the area's natural resources, primarily fur and fish." Imprint "Thomas F. Waters gives a detailed account of the region's land and waters, resources, and human settlement. His description of the series of frontiers--the fishermen's frontier, the mining frontier, the lumbering frontier, and the development of recreation--admirably combines human and natural history." Journal of Forest History Thomas F. Waters is a professor emeritus of the University of Minnesota. He is also the author of Streams and Rivers of Minnesota (1998).
    [more]
    cover of Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day

    Supremely Tiny Acts

    A Memoir of a Day

    Sonya Huber

    The Ohio State University Press, 2021

    Winner (Bronze, Autobiography & Memoir), 2021 Foreword Indies Awards

    “I think we have to get to the real, to catch the facts we have, to hold on to what we see. . . .in this time where lies are currency,” Sonya Huber writes in her book-length essay Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day. On the theory that naming the truths of quotidian experience can counter the dangerous power of lies, she carefully recounts two anxiety-fueled days one fall. On the first, she is arrested as part of a climate protest in Times Square. On the other, she must make it to her court appearance while also finding time to take her son to get his learner's permit. Paying equal attention to minor details, passing thoughts, and larger political concerns around activism and parenting in the Trump-era United States, Huber asks: How can one simultaneously be a good mother, a good worker, and a good citizen? As she reflects on the meaning of protest and on whiteness and other forms of privilege within political activism, Huber offers a wry, self-aware, and stirring testament to the everyday as a seedbed for meaningful change.
    [more]
    cover of Surrender (But Don't Give Yourself Away): Old Cars, Found Hope, and Other Cheap Tricks

    Surrender (But Don't Give Yourself Away)

    Old Cars, Found Hope, and Other Cheap Tricks

    By Spike Gillespie

    University of Texas Press, 2003

    Spike Gillespie tells it like it is. Whether she's writing about men, mothering or money, she cuts to the chase, unabashedly recounting the exhilaration and uncertainty she is forever encountering along the odd path that is her life. Gillespie approaches her subjects with a keen eye for curious details and a readiness to ask hard questions and give honest, even brutal, answers. Her willingness to "put it all down—the painful, the funny, the mundane, the embarrassing" has won legions of readers for her print and online columns.

    Surrender (But Don't Give Yourself Away) collects forty-six essays, which initially appeared in such publications as the Washington Post, Austin Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Bust, Gargoyle, and thecommonspace.org. As Gillespie describes them, "There are odes to my good days and bad, to trips I've taken—both real and metaphorical, to holiness found in unexpected places, to men I have not slept with, to learning to live sober. Too, there are miscellaneous ruminations on my alter-ego, my inner-teen, the floor mat in my car, a dead squirrel in the road." Binding these pieces is the thread of hope: there are moments the thread slips out of view only to resurface in some unexpected location. Sometimes it takes awhile, but Gillespie always relocates hope, discovering even in her darkest times that life is full of an embarrassment of riches.

    [more]
    cover of Survival of the Fireflies

    Survival of the Fireflies

    Georges Didi-Huberman

    University of Minnesota Press, 2018

    Seeking out the minor lights of friendship in a time of fascism


    Dante once spoke, in his Divine Comedy, of the miniscule lights, in the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, who, contrary to the great lights that shined bright within the sublime circles of Paradise, frailly wandered in the somber pockets of glimmering light within the darkness. Pliny the Elder was once preoccupied by a type of fly named pyrallis or pyrotocon, which was only able to fly within fire: “as long as it remains in the fire, it can fly; when its flight takes it out too far a distance, it dies.” 

    Through his readings of Dante, Pasolini, Walter Benjamin, and others, Georges Didi-Huberman seeks again to understand this strange, minor light, the signals of small beings in search of love and friendship. Their flickering presence serves as a counterforce to the blinding sovereign power that Giorgio Agamben calls The Kingdom and the Glory, that artificial brilliance that once surrounded dictators and today emanates from every screen. In this timely reflection, much needed in our time of excessive light, Didi-Huberman’s Survival of the Fireflies offers a humble yet powerful image of individual hope and desire: the firefly-image.

    [more]
    cover of Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction

    Susan Glaspell

    Essays on Her Theater and Fiction

    Linda Ben-Zvi, Editor

    University of Michigan Press, 1995

    The career of Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), the American playwright and novelist, follows closely the trajectory of other "reclaimed" American women writers of the century such as Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Zora Neale Hurston. She was well known in her time, effaced from canonical consideration after her death, and rediscovered years later through the surfacing of one work around which critical attention has focused. Glaspell was a respected international playwright and novelist who amassed some of the most impressive credentials in American theater history, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. Over the past fifteen years, she has been rediscovered through the work of leading feminist scholars; and her one-act play Trifles and its short story form, "A Jury of Her Peers," have become classics. This book is the first collection devoted to the study of the body of Glaspell's work. Essays by leading playwrights and scholars provide an array of perspectives on the writer and her work. The book features the first complete Glaspell bibliography, including original reviews of her plays and fiction and recent critical studies of her writing.

    [more]
    cover of Sustainability: A Love Story

    Sustainability

    A Love Story

    Nicole Walker

    The Ohio State University Press, 2018

    In Sustainability: A Love Story, Nicole Walker questions what it means to live sustainably while still being able to have Internet and eat bacon. After all, who wants to listen to a short, blond woman who is mostly a hypocrite anyway—who eats cows, drives a gasoline-powered car, who owns no solar panels—tsk-tsking them? Armed with research and a bright irony that playfully addresses the devastation of the world around us, Walker delves deep into scarcity and abundance, reflecting on matters that range from her uneasy relationship with bats to the fragility of human life, from adolescent lies to what recycling can reveal about our not so moderate drinking habits. With laugh-out-loud sad-funny moments, and a stark humor, Walker appeals to our innate sense of personal commitment to sustaining our world, and our commitment to sustaining our marriages, our families, our lives, ourselves.
     
    This book is for the burnt-out environmentalist, the lazy environmentalist, the would-be environmentalist. It’s for those who believe the planet is dying. For those who believe they are dying. And for those who question what it means to live and love sustainably, and maybe even with hope.
     
    [more]
    cover of Swaying: Essays On Intercultural Love

    Swaying

    Essays On Intercultural Love

    Jessie Carroll Grearson

    University of Iowa Press, 1995

    Intercultural couples struggle, often quite successfully, with the kind of questions anyone who wants to live responsibly in a multicultural world must raise. They live, as we must all learn to do, in a place where multiple cultures find expression. This engaging anthology of literary nonfiction celebrates the creative potential of choosing diversity and explores in many voices the real-life social, cultural, and spiritual consequences of this choice. These are the honest voices of women who have made commitments across national and cultural lines, who have moved toward the revitalizing and educating potential of such partnerships.

    [more]
    cover of solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays

    solo/black/woman

    scripts, interviews, and essays

    Edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera and with a foreword by D. Soyini Madison

    Northwestern University Press, 2013

    The collection solo/black/woman features seven solo performances by emerging and established feminist performance artists from the past three decades. The scripts are accompanied by interviews and critical essays, as well as a DVD showcasing the performances. The performers range from Robbie McCauley and Rhodessa Jones, who were at the leading edge of the solo monologue boom of the 1980s, to new talents such as Stacey Robinson and Misty DeBerry. Collectively, their work displays an enormous range of aesthetic approach and thematic emphasis. The anthology offers a comprehensive, stimulating introduction to the beauty, richness, urgency, pleasure, and political promise of black feminist performance.
    [more]