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748 books match the query 'Influence' and 172 start with t
Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classrooms and CommunitiesEdited by Margaret Cantú-Sánchez, Candace de León-Zepeda, Norma E. Cantú
University of Arizona Press, 2020
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa—theorist, Chicana, feminist—famously called on scholars to do work that matters. This pronouncement was a rallying call, inspiring scholars across disciplines to become scholar-activists and to channel their intellectual energy and labor toward the betterment of society. Scholars and activists alike have encountered and expanded on these pathbreaking theories and concepts first introduced by Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La frontera and other texts.
Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa is a pragmatic and inspiring offering of how to apply Anzaldúa’s ideas to the classroom and in the community rather than simply discussing them as theory. The book gathers nineteen essays by scholars, activists, teachers, and professors who share how their first-hand use of Anzaldúa’s theories in their classrooms and community environments.
The collection is divided into three main parts, according to the ways the text has been used: “Curriculum Design,” “Pedagogy and Praxis,” and “Decolonizing Pedagogies.” As a pedagogical text, Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa also offers practical advice in the form of lesson plans, activities, and other suggested resources for the classroom. This volume offers practical and inspiring ways to deploy Anzaldúa’s transformative theories with real and meaningful action.
Contributors
Carolina E. Alonso
Cordelia Barrera
Christina Bleyer
Altheria Caldera
Norma E. Cantú
Margaret Cantú-Sánchez
Freyca Calderon-Berumen
Stephanie Cariaga
Dylan Marie Colvin
Candace de León-Zepeda
Miryam Espinosa-Dulanto
Alma Itzé Flores
Christine Garcia
Patricia M. García
Patricia Pedroza González
María del Socorro Gutiérrez-Magallanes
Leandra H. Hernández
Nina Hoechtl
Rían Lozano
Socorro Morales
Anthony Nuño
Karla O’Donald
Christina Puntasecca
Dagoberto Eli Ramirez
José L. Saldívar
Tanya J. Gaxiola Serrano
Verónica Solís
Alexander V. Stehn
Carlos A. Tarin
Sarah De Los Santos Upton
Carla Wilson
Kelli Zaytoun
Terrible Swift Sword
The Legacy of John BrownPeggy A. Russo
Ohio University Press, 2005
More than two centuries after his birth and almost a century and a half after his death, the legendary life and legacy of John Brown go marching on. Variously deemed martyr, madman, monster, terrorist, and saint, he remains one of the most controversial figures in America’s history. Brown’s actions in Kansas and in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, were major catalysts for the American Civil War, and continue today to evoke praise or condemnation.
Through the prisms of history, literature, psychology, criminal justice, oral history, African American studies, political science, film studies, and anthropology, Terrible Swift Sword offers insights not only into John Brown’s controversial character and motives but also into the nature of a troubled society before, during, and after the Civil War. The contributors discuss reasons why Brown’s contemporaries supported him, analyze Brown’s behavior and his depiction in literature, and examine the iconography and mythology surrounding him.
The interdisciplinary focus brought by editors Peggy A. Russo and Paul Finkelman makes this collection unique. Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown will appeal to a broad audience of readers interested in this turbulent moment in American history.
Terror, Theory and the Humanities
Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan, editors
Michigan Publishing Services, 2012
That Could Be Us
News Media, Politics, and the Necessary Conditions for Disaster Risk ReductionThomas Jamieson and Douglas A. Van Belle
University of Michigan Press, 2022
In That Could Be Us, Jamieson and Van Belle find that the news media delivers information to observing communities in a form that enables learning from other disasters. Experimental evidence shows that people react to this information in a way that would punish leaders who do not back DRR efforts. Case studies, interviews, experiments, and illustrative examples suggest that leaders and political entrepreneurs heed this public demand, react to news media coverage, and act accordingly. Taken as a whole, this suggests that the policy and research implications derived from this book’s theoretical model are worthy of further exploration, particularly in terms of how they might resolve the puzzle presented by the variations in DRR policy uptake around the world that do not seem to be driven by developmental differences across communities.
The Afterlife of Plutarch
Edited by John North and Peter Mack
University of London Press, 2018
The American Stravinsky
The Style and Aesthetics of Copland's New American Music, the Early Works, 1921-1938Gayle Murchison
University of Michigan Press, 2013
One of the country's most enduringly successful composers, Aaron Copland created a distinctively American style and aesthetic in works for a diversity of genres and mediums, including ballet, opera, and film. Also active as a critic, mentor, advocate, and concert organizer, he played a decisive role in the growth of serious music in the Americas in the twentieth century.
In The American Stravinsky, Gayle Murchison closely analyzes selected works to discern the specific compositional techniques Copland used, and to understand the degree to which they derived from European models, particularly the influence of Igor Stravinsky. Murchison examines how Copland both Americanized these models and made them his own, thereby finding his own compositional voice. Murchison also discusses Copland's aesthetics of music and his ideas about its purpose and social function.
The Americans Are Coming!
Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South AfricaRobert Trent Vinson
Ohio University Press, 2011
For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and “American Negroes”—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators.
Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African government as “honorary whites” exempt from segregation, also saw their activities in South Africa as a divinely ordained mission to establish “Africa for Africans,” liberated from European empires. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, the largest black-led movement with two million members and supporters in forty-three countries at its height in the early 1920s, was the most anticipated source of liberation. Though these liberation prophecies went unfulfilled, black South Africans continued to view African Americans as inspirational models and as critical partners in the global antiapartheid struggle.
The Americans Are Coming! is a rare case study that places African history and American history in a global context and centers Africa in African Diaspora studies.
The Anxiety of Obsolescence
The American Novel in the Age of TelevisionKathleen Fitzpatrick
Vanderbilt University Press, 2006
It almost goes without saying that the rise in popularity of television has killed the audience for "serious" literature. This is such a given that reading Fitzpatrick's challenge to this notion can be very disconcerting, as she traces the ways in which a small cadre of writers of "serious" literature--DeLillo, Pynchon, and Franzen, for instance--have propagated this myth in order to set themselves up as the last bastions of good writing. Fitzpatrick first explores whether serious literature was ever as all-pervasive as critics of the television culture claim and then asks the obvious question: what, or who, exactly, are these guys defending good writing against?
Fitzpatrick examines the ways in which the anxiety about the supposed death of the novel is built on a myth of the novel's past ubiquity and its present displacement by television. She explores the ways in which this myth plays out in and around contemporary fiction and how it serves as a kind of unacknowledged discourse about race, class, and gender. The declaration constructs a minority status for the "white male author" who needs protecting from television's largely female and increasingly non-white audience. The novel, then, is transformed from a primary means of communication into an ancient, almost forgotten, and thus, treasured form reserved for the well-educated and well-to-do, and the men who practice it are exalted as the practitioners of an almost lost art.
Such positioning serves to further marginalize women writers and writers of color because it makes the novel, by definition, the preserve of the poor endangered white man. If the novel is only a product of a small group of white men, how can the contributions of women and writers of color be recognized? Instead, this positioning abandons women and people of color to television as a creative outlet, and in return, cedes television to them. Fitzpatrick argues that there's a level of unrecognized patronization in assuming that television serves no purpose but to provide dumb entertainment to bored women and others too stupid to understand novels. And, instead, she demonstrates the real positive effects of a televisual culture.
The Apathy of Empire
Cambodia in American GeopoliticsJames A. Tyner
University of Minnesota Press, 2024
What America’s intervention in Cambodia during the Vietnam War reveals about Cold War–era U.S. national security strategy
The Apathy of Empire reveals just how significant Cambodia was to U.S. policy in Indochina during the Vietnam War, broadening the lens to include more than the often-cited incursion in 1970 or the illegal bombing after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. This theoretically informed and thoroughly documented case study argues that U.S. military intervention in Cambodia revealed America’s efforts to construct a hegemonic spatial world order.
James Tyner documents the shift of America’s post-1945 focus from national defense to national security. He demonstrates that America’s expansionist policies abroad, often bolstered by military power, were not so much about occupying territory but instead constituted the construction of a new normal for the exercise of state power. During the Cold War, Vietnam became the geopolitical lodestar of this unfolding spatial order. And yet America’s grand strategy was one of contradiction: to build a sovereign state (South Vietnam) based on democratic liberalism, it was necessary to protect its boundaries—in effect, to isolate it—through both covert and overt operations in violation of Cambodia’s sovereignty. The latter was deemed necessary for the former.
Questioning reductionist geopolitical understandings of states as central or peripheral, Tyner explores this paradox to rethink the formulation of the Cambodian war as sideshow, revealing it instead as a crucial site for the formation of this new normal.
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The Audacity of Hoop
Basketball and the Age of ObamaAlexander Wolff
Temple University Press, 2015
While basketball didn’t take up residence in the White House in January 2009, the game nonetheless played an outsized role in forming the man who did. In The Audacity of Hoop, celebrated sportswriter Alexander Wolff examines Barack Obama, the person and president, by the light of basketball. This game helped Obama explore his identity, keep a cool head, impress his future wife, and define himself as a candidate.
Wolff chronicles Obama’s love of the game from age 10, on the campaign trail—where it eventually took on talismanic meaning—and throughout his two terms in office. More than 125 photographs illustrate Obama dribbling, shooting free throws, playing pickup games, cooling off with George Clooney, challenging his special assistant Reggie Love for a rebound, and taking basketball to political meetings. There is also an assessment of Obama’s influence on the NBA, including a dawning political consciousness in the league’s locker rooms.
Sidebars reveal the evolution of the president’s playing style, “Baracketology”—a not-entirely-scientific art of filling out the commander in chief’s NCAA tournament bracket—and a timeline charts Obama’s personal and professional highlights.
Equal parts biographical sketch, political narrative, and cultural history, The Audacity of Hoop shows how the game became a touchstone in Obama’s exercise of the power of the presidency.
The Barthes Effect
The Essay as Reflective TextRéda BensmaïaTranslated by Pat FedkiewForeword by Michèle H. Richman
University of Minnesota Press, 1987
The Barthes Effect was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The author acknowledges the essay as an eccentric phenomenon in literary history, one that has long resisted entry into the taxonomy of genres, as it concentrates on four works by Roland Barthes: The Pleasure of the Text, A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and Camera Lucida. Maintains that with Barthes the essay achieves a status of its own, as reflective text.
". . . a study rigorously conscious of the critical maneuvers it executes and, more importantly, questions as critical practice . . . " Bensmaïa's strategy produces a successful investigation of the interstices and slippages of meaning which Barthes addressed in his work." SubStance
Reda Bensmaia is associate professor in the departments of French and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, and translator Pat Fedkiew, a graduate student in French at Minnesota. Michele Richman is associate professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift.
The Bastille
A History of a Symbol of Despotism and FreedomHans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt
Duke University Press, 1997
To facilitate the symbolic nature of the investigation, this analysis of the evolving signification of the Bastille moves from the French Revolution to the nineteenth century to contemporary history. The narrative also shifts from France to other cultural arenas, like the modern European colonial sphere, where the overthrow of the Bastille acquired radical new signification in the decolonization period of the 1940s and 1950s. The Bastille demonstrates the potency of the interdisciplinary historical research that has characterized the end of this century, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, and taking its methodological tools from history, sociology, linguistics, and cultural and literary studies.
The Betrayal of Dissent
Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American CenturyScott Lucas
Pluto Press, 2004
political writer, and the standard-bearer of honesty and decency for the honourable 'Left'. In this controversial polemic, Scott Lucas argues that the exaltation of Orwell, far from upholding dissent against the State, has sought to quash such opposition. Indeed, Orwell has become the icon of those who, in the pose of the contrarian, try to silence public opposition to US and U K foreign policy in the 'War on Terror'.
Lucas's lively and readable critique of public intellectuals including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, David Aaronovitch, and Johann Hari – who have all invoked Orwellian honesty and decency to shut down dissent – will appeal to anyone disillusioned with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Lucas contends that these leading journalists and commentators have used Orwell to justify their own political transition from radicals to upholders of the establishment. All of them play influential roles in supporting the UK and US governments' charge that opponents of war -- and those who question the motives behind American foreign policy and its implementation -- should be condemned as 'appeasers of mass murder'.
This controversial book shows how Orwell has been used since 9/11 to justify, in the guise of independent thought, the suppression of dissent. We must rescue ourselves from Orwell and from those who take on his guise so, as Lucas puts it, our ‘silencing is… vital to a "manufacture of consent" for the wars which are supposedly being fought in our name and for our good’.
The Bible in the American Experience
Claudia Setzer
SBL Press, 2020
An interdisciplinary investigation of the Bible's place in American experience
Much has changed since the Society of Biblical Literature's Bible in American Culture series was published in the 1980s, but the influence of the Bible has not waned. In the United States, the stories, themes, and characters of the Bible continue to shape art, literature, music, politics, education, and social movements to varying degrees. In this volume, contributors highlight new approaches that move beyond simple citation of texts and explore how biblical themes infuse US culture and how this process in turn transforms biblical traditions.
Features
- An examination of changes in the production, transmission, and consumption of the Bible
- An exploration of how Bible producers disseminate US experiences to a global audience
- An assessment of the factors that produce widespread myths about and nostalgia for a more biblically grounded nation
The Bible in the Public Square
Its Enduring Influence in American LifeMark A. Chancey
SBL Press, 2014
Explore perceptions and interpretations of scripture in American politics, identity, popular culture, and public education
Essays from the perspectives of American history, the history of ideas, film studies, visual studies, cultural studies, education, and church-state studies provide essential research for those interested in the intersection of the Bible and American culture. The contributors are Yaakov Ariel, Jacques Berlinerblau, Mark A. Chancey, Rubén Dupertuis, John Fea, Shalom Goldman, Charles C. Haynes, Carol Meyers, Eric M. Meyers, David Morgan, Adele Reinhartz, and David W. Stowe.
Features:
- Ten essays and an introduction present research from professors of biblical studies, Judaism, English, and history
- Articles relevant to scholars, students, and the general public
- Analysis of the tensions in American society regarding the Bible and its role in public life.
The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy
Nietzsche and the Modern DramaDavid Kornhaber
Northwestern University Press, 2016
The Birth of Theory
Andrew Cole
University of Chicago Press, 2014
By uncovering these theoretical filiations across time, The Birth of Theory will not only change the way we read Hegel, but also the way we think about the histories of theory. With chapters that powerfully reanimate the overly familiar topics of ideology, commodity fetishism, and political economy, along with a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Hegel’s famous master/slave dialectic, The Birth of Theory places the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history in conversation with one another in an unprecedented way. Daring to reconcile the sworn enemies of Hegelianism and Deleuzianism, this timely book will revitalize dialectics for the twenty-first century.
The Booke of Ovyde Named Methamorphose
William Caxton
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2013
The Bop Apocalypse
The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and BurroughsJohn Lardas
University of Illinois Press, 2000
Presenting a religious biography of the Beats from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, John Lardas shows that in rejecting many of the cultural tenets of postwar America, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs created new visions of both self and country, visions they articulated through distinctive literary forms. Lardas examines how the Beat writers distilled a theology of experience--a religious vision that animated their everyday existence as well as their art--from a flurry of disparate influences that included the saxophone wails of Charlie Parker and Lester Young, the psychology of Wilhelm Reich, the linguistic theories of Alfred Korzybski, the hipster dialects of New York City, and especially the prophecies of Oswald Spengler. Revisiting the major works the Beats produced in the 1950s in terms of critical content, Lardas considers how their lived religion was incorporated into the way they wrote.
The first sustained treatment of Beat religiosity, The Bop Apocalypse takes a sophisticated look beyond the cartoonish reductions of the Beat counterculture. The Bop Apocalypse takes the Beats at face value, interpreting their sexual openness, drug use, criminality, compulsion to travel, and madness as the logical, physical enactments of a religious representation of the world. Far from dallying irrelevantly on the fringes of society, Lardas asserts, the Beats engaged America on moral grounds through the discourse of public religion.
The British Blues Network
Adoption, Emulation, and CreativityAndrew Kellett
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The CIA in Hollywood
How the Agency Shapes Film and TelevisionBy Tricia Jenkins
University of Texas Press, 2016
What’s your impression of the CIA? A bumbling agency that can’t protect its own spies? A rogue organization prone to covert operations and assassinations? Or a dedicated public service that advances the interests of the United States? Astute TV and movie viewers may have noticed that the CIA’s image in popular media has spanned this entire range, with a decided shift to more positive portrayals in recent years. But what very few people know is that the Central Intelligence Agency has been actively engaged in shaping the content of film and television, especially since it established an entertainment industry liaison program in the mid-1990s.
The CIA in Hollywood offers the first full-scale investigation of the relationship between the Agency and the film and television industries. Tricia Jenkins draws on numerous interviews with the CIA’s public affairs staff, operations officers, and historians, as well as with Hollywood technical consultants, producers, and screenwriters who have worked with the Agency, to uncover the nature of the CIA’s role in Hollywood. In particular, she delves into the Agency’s and its officers’ involvement in the production of The Agency, In the Company of Spies, Alias, The Recruit, The Sum of All Fears, Enemy of the State, Syriana, The Good Shepherd, and more. Her research reveals the significant influence that the CIA now wields in Hollywood and raises important and troubling questions about the ethics and legality of a government agency using popular media to manipulate its public image.
The Chekhovian Intertext
Dialogue with a ClassicLyudmila Parts
The Ohio State University Press, 2008
In The Chekhovian Intertext Lyudmila Parts explores contemporary Russian writers’ intertextual engagement with Chekhov and his myth. She offers a new interpretative framework to explain the role Chekhov and other classics play in constructing and maintaining Russian national identity and the reasons for the surge in the number of intertextual engagements with the classical authors during the cultural crisis in post-perestroika Russia.
The book highlights the intersection of three distinct concepts: cultural memory, cultural myth, and intertextuality. It is precisely their interrelation that explains how intertextuality came to function as a defense mechanism of culture, a reaction of cultural memory to the threat of its disintegration.
In addition to offering close readings of some of the most significant short stories by contemporary Russian authors and by Chekhov, as a theoretical case study the book sheds light on important processes in contemporary literature: it explores the function of intertextuality in the development of Russian literature, especially post-Soviet literature; it singles out the main themes in contemporary literature, and explains their ties to national cultural myths and to cultural memory. The Chekhovian Intertext may serve as a theoretical model and impetus for examinations of other national literatures from the point of view of the relationship between intertextuality and cultural memory.
The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation
Politics of a New Millennial MestizajePancho McFarland
Michigan State University Press, 2013
The Chief Justice
Appointment and InfluenceDavid J. Danelski and Artemus Ward, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2016
The Chilean Senate
Internal Distribution of InfluenceBy Weston H. Agor
University of Texas Press, 1971
Weston Agor’s carefully documented analysis of the organization and workings of the Chilean Senate is the first of its kind and fills a long-standing need in the comparative study of the internal structure of legislative bodies.
Making eclectic use of role, power, and exchange theories, Agor bases his discussion on personal interviews with senators and staff as well as on extensive observation of the Senate in action during 1967–1968. He also analyzes in detail relevant documents, committee reports, and floor debates. Focused primarily on the formal decision-making structure within the Senate and on internal norms, both formal and informal, that hold that structure together, Agor’s study fruitfully compares the Chilean Senate with its peers, including the United States Senate, to which it bears surprising resemblance in form and function.
Agor examines the role of compromise and informal rules of the game in achieving a majority vote in the Senate, the power of committees and committee presidents, and political party control over Senate members. The influence of the executive, particularly in the passage of executive legislation, and its effect on the Senate’s internal system of checks and balances—both stated and understood—are examined in terms of their effect on the political strength of the Senate.
The Chilean Senate, unlike its counterparts in most other “developing countries,” has exercised genuine and effective influence in the national political system. In an epilogue to this study, Agor views events since 1968, including the election of Allende, that affected the future role of the Senate in Chilean politics.
The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory
Edited by Daniel J. Kapust and Gary Remer
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Individual chapters examine the ways thinkers throughout history, specifically Augustine, John of Salisbury, Thomas More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, have engaged with and been influenced by Cicero. A final chapter surveys the impact of Cicero’s ideas on political thought in the second half of the twentieth century. By tracing the long reception of these ideas, the collection demonstrates not only Cicero’s importance to both medieval and modern political theorists but also the comprehensive breadth and applicability of his philosophy.
The Claremont Run
Subverting Gender in the X-MenJ. Andrew Deman; Foreword by Jay Edidin
University of Texas Press, 2023
Winner — 2024 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards in Best Academic/Scholarly Work, announced at San Diego Comic-Con International (2024)
A data-driven deep dive into a legendary comics author’s subversion of gender norms within the bestselling comic of its time.
By the time Chris Claremont’s run as author of Uncanny X-Men ended in 1991, he had changed comic books forever. During his sixteen years writing the series, Claremont revitalized a franchise on the verge of collapse, shaping the X-Men who appear in today’s Hollywood blockbusters. But, more than that, he told a new kind of story, using his growing platform to articulate transgressive ideas about gender nonconformity, toxic masculinity, and female empowerment.
J. Andrew Deman’s investigation pairs close reading and quantitative analysis to examine gender representation, content, characters, and story structure. The Claremont Run compares several hundred issues of Uncanny X-Men with a thousand other Marvel comics to provide a comprehensive account of Claremont’s sophisticated and progressive gender politics. Claremont’s X-Men upended gender norms: where female characters historically served as mere eye candy, Claremont’s had leading roles and complex, evolving personalities. Perhaps more surprisingly, his male superheroes defied and complicated standards of masculinity. Groundbreaking in their time, Claremont’s comics challenged readers to see the real world differently and transformed pop culture in the process.
The Comparative Reception of Darwinism
Edited by Thomas F. Glick
University of Chicago Press, 1988
The Constructed Mennonite
History, Memory, and the Second World WarHans Werner
University of Manitoba Press, 2013
The Construction of Memory in Interwar France
Daniel J. Sherman
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Sherman shows how a wartime visual culture saturated with images of ordinary foot soldiers, together with contemporary novels, memoirs, and tourist literature, promoted a distinctive notion of combat experience. The contrast between battlefield and home front, soldier and civilian was the basis for memory and collective gratitude. Postwar commemoration, however, also grew directly out of the long and agonized search for the remains of hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers, and the sometimes contentious debates over where to bury them. For this reason, the local monument, with its inscribed list of names and its functional resemblance to tombstones, emerged as the focal point of commemorative practice. Sherman traces every step in the process of monument building as he analyzes commemoration's competing goals—to pay tribute to the dead, to console the bereaved, and to incorporate mourners' individual memories into a larger political discourse.
Extensively illustrated, Sherman's study offers a visual record of a remarkable moment in the history of public art. It is at once a moving account of a culture haunted by war and a sophisticated analysis of the political stakes of memory in the twentieth century.
Winner of the 2000 J. Russell Major Prize of the American Historical Association
The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem
Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Arendt and Scholem met in 1932 in Berlin and quickly bonded over their mutual admiration for and friendship with Walter Benjamin. They began exchanging letters in 1939, and their lively correspondence continued until 1963, when Scholem’s vehement disagreement with Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem led to a rupture that would last until Arendt’s death a dozen years later. The years of their friendship, however, yielded a remarkably rich bounty of letters: together, they try to come to terms with being both German and Jewish, the place and legacy of Germany before and after the Holocaust, the question of what it means to be Jewish in a post-Holocaust world, and more. Walter Benjamin is a constant presence, as his life and tragic death are emblematic of the very questions that preoccupied the pair. Like any collection of letters, however, the book also has its share of lighter moments: accounts of travels, gossipy dinner parties, and the quotidian details that make up life even in the shadow of war and loss.
In a world that continues to struggle with questions of nationalism, identity, and difference, Arendt and Scholem remain crucial thinkers. This volume offers us a way to see them, and the development of their thought, anew.
The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World
Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, PatockaLubica Ucník
Ohio University Press, 2016
In The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World, Ľubica Učník examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl’s final work, which she argues is very much with us today: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patočka.
For Husserl, 1930s Europe was characterized by a growing irrationalism that threatened to undermine its legacy of rational inquiry. Technological advancement in the sciences, Husserl argued, had led science to forget its own foundations in the primary “life-world”: the world of lived experience. Renewing Husserl’s concerns in today’s context, Učník first provides an original and compelling reading of his oeuvre through the lens of the formalization of the sciences, then traces the unfolding of this problem through the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Patočka.
Although many scholars have written on Arendt, none until now has connected her philosophical thought with that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. Učník provides invaluable access to the work of the latter, who remains understudied in the English language. She shows that together, these four thinkers offer new challenges to the way we approach key issues confronting us today, providing us with ways to reconsider truth, freedom, and human responsibility in the face of the postmodern critique of metanarratives and a growing philosophical interest in new forms of materialism.
The Cross of War
Christian Nationalism and U.S. Expansion in the Spanish-American WarMatthew McCullough
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies
Gender, Asceticism, and HistoriographyDale B. Martin and Patricia Cox Miller, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
The contributors investigate three key concerns of late ancient studies: gender, asceticism, and historiography. They consider Macrina’s scar, Mary’s voice, and the harlot’s body as well as Augustine, Jovinian, Gregory of Nazianzus, Julian, and Ephrem the Syrian. Whether examining how animal bodies figured as a means for understanding human passion and sexuality in the monastic communities of Egypt and Palestine or meditating on the almost modern epistemological crisis faced by Theodoret in attempting to overcome the barriers between the self and the wider world, these essays highlight emerging theoretical and critical developments in the field.
Contributors. Daniel Boyarin, David Brakke, Virginia Burrus, Averil Cameron, Susanna Elm, James E. Goehring, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, David G. Hunter, Blake Leyerle, Dale B. Martin, Patricia Cox Miller, Philip Rousseau, Teresa M. Shaw, Maureen A. Tilley, Dennis E. Trout, Mark Vessey
The Culture of Merit
Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600-1789Jay M. Smith
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Jay M. Smith argues that the early modern nobility instinctively drew a correlation between the meaning of merit and an image of the "sovereign's gaze." In the early seventeenth century, merit meant the qualities traditionally associated with aristocratic values: generosity, fidelity, and honor. Nobles sought to display those qualities before the appreciative gaze of the king himself. But the expansion of the monarchy forced the routinization of the sovereign's gaze, and Louis XIV began to affirm and reward new qualities--talent and application--besides those thought innately noble.
The contradictions implicit within the absolute monarchy's culture of merit are demonstrated by the eighteenth-century French army, which was dominated by the nobility, but also committed to efficiency and expertise. Smith shows that the army's continuous efforts to encourage and reward "merit" led to a clash of principles. The ever-growing emphasis on talent and discipline led reformers--the great majority of them noble--to attack the most egregious examples of privilege and favoritism in the army. Smith's analysis of the long-term evolution in conceptions of royal service suggests a new explanation for the shift in values signified by the French Revolution. The transition away from the "personal" gaze of the king toward the "public" gaze of the monarchy and nation foretold the triumph of a new culture of merit in which noble birth would have no meaning.
The Culture of Merit will interest historians and other social scientists concerned with issues of aristocratic identity, state formation, professionalization, and the changing political culture of pre-Revolutionary France.
Jay M. Smith is Assistant Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
The Dance of the Intellect
Studies in the Poetry of the Pound TraditionMarjorie Perloff
Northwestern University Press, 1996
The Dangerous Lover
Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction NarrativeDeborah Lutz
The Ohio State University Press, 2006
The dangerous lover has haunted our culture for over two hundred years; English, American, and European literature is permeated with his erotic presence. The Dangerous Lover takes seriously the ubiquity of the brooding romantic hero—his dark past, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living. Deborah Lutz traces the recent history of this figure, through the melancholy iconoclasm of the Romantics, the lost soul redeemed by love of the Brontës, and the tormented individualism of twentieth-century love narratives. Arguing for this character’s central influence not only in literature but also in the history of ideas, this book places the dangerous lover firmly within the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the Modernism of Georg Lukács, and Roland Barthes’s theories on love and longing. Working with canonical authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, and also with non-canonical texts such as contemporary romance, The Dangerous Lover combines a lyrical, essayistic style with a depth of inquiry that raises questions about the mysteries of desire, death, and eroticism.
The Dangerous Lover is the first book-length study of this pervasive literary hero; it also challenges the tendency of sophisticated philosophical readings of popular narratives and culture to focus on male-coded genres. In its conjunction of high and low literary forms, this volume explores new historical and cultural framings for female-coded popular narratives.
The Dark Sister
Rebecca Goldstein
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
If you like the fiction of Henry James, the psychology of his brother William, and have a taste for Gothic mysteries you will enjoy The Dark Sister. The novel is a curious mixture of the Victorian repressiveness about sex, intricate stories within stories, and Jewish humor.
With a new afterword
The Director's Prism
E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-GardeDassia N. Posner
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Shortlist, 2019 Prague Quadrennial Best Scenography and Design Publication Award
The Director's Prism investigates how and why three of Russia's most innovative directors— Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein—used the fantastical tales of German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann to reinvent the rules of theatrical practice. Because the rise of the director and the Russian cult of Hoffmann closely coincided, Posner argues, many characteristics we associate with avant-garde theater—subjective perspective, breaking through the fourth wall, activating the spectator as a co-creator—become uniquely legible in the context of this engagement. Posner examines the artistic poetics of Meyerhold's grotesque, Tairov's mime-drama, and Eisenstein's theatrical attraction through production analyses, based on extensive archival research, that challenge the notion of theater as a mirror to life, instead viewing the director as a prism through whom life is refracted. A resource for scholars and practitioners alike, this groundbreaking study provides a fresh, provocative perspective on experimental theater, intercultural borrowings, and the nature of the creative process.
The Dybbuk Century
The Jewish Play That Possessed the WorldDebra Caplan and Rachel Merrill Moss, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2023
A little over 100 years ago, the first production of An-sky’s The Dybbuk, a play about the possession of a young woman by a dislocated spirit, opened in Warsaw. In the century that followed, The Dybbuk became a theatrical conduit for a wide range of discourses about Jews, belonging, and modernity. This timeless Yiddish play about spiritual possession beyond the grave would go on to exert a remarkable and unforgettable impact on modern theater, film, literature, music, and culture.
The Dybbuk Century collects essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars who explore the play’s original Yiddish and Hebrew productions and offer critical reflections on the play’s enduring influence. The collection will appeal to scholars, students, and theater practitioners, as well as general readers.
The Economy of Glory
From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of NapoleonRobert Morrissey
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The Emerson Effect
Individualism and Submission in AmericaChristopher Newfield
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Christopher Newfield analyzes the interplay of liberal and authoritarian impulses in Emerson's work in various domains: domestic life, the changing New England economy, theories of poetic language, homoerotic friendship, and racial hierarchy. Focusing on neglected later writings, Newfield shows how Emerson explored the tensions between autonomy and community—and consistently resolved these tensions by "abandoning crucial elements of both" and redefining autonomy as a kind of liberating subjection. He argues that in Emersonian individualism, self-determination is accompanied by submission to authority, and examines the influence of this submissive individualism on the history of American liberalism. In a provocative reading of Emerson's early and neglected later works, Newfield analyzes Emerson's emphasis on collective, or "corporate", world-building, rather than private possession. Tracing the development of this corporate individualism, he illuminates contradictions in Emerson's political outlook, and the conjunctions of liberal and authoritarian ideology they produced.
The Errant Art of Moby-Dick
The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American StudiesWilliam V. Spanos
Duke University Press, 1995
Combining Heideggerian ontology with a sociopolitical perspective derived primarily from Foucault, the reading of Moby-Dick that forms the center of this book demonstrates that the traditional identification of Melville’s novel as a "romance" renders it complicitous in the discourse of the Cold War. At the same time, Spanos shows how New Americanist criticism overlooks the degree to which Moby-Dick anticipates not only America’s self-representation as the savior of the world against communism, but also the emergent postmodern and anti-imperial discourse deployed against such an image. Spanos’s critique reveals the extraordinary relevance of Melville’s novel as a post-Cold War text, foreshadowing not only the self-destructive end of the historical formation of the American cultural identity in the genocidal assault on Vietnam, but also the reactionary labeling of the current era as "the end of history."
This provocative and challenging study presents not only a new view of the development of literary history in the United States, but a devastating critique of the genealogy of ideology in the American cultural establishment.
The Essential Hayim Greenberg
Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and ZionismHayim Greenberg, Edited and introduced by Mark Raider, Foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr
University of Alabama Press, 2016
This collection of thoroughly annotated essays, spanning the 1920s to the early 1950s, includes Greenberg’s meditations on socialism and ethics, profiles of polarizing twentieth-century figures (among them Trotsky, Lenin, and Gandhi), and several essays investigating the compatibility of socialism and communism. Greenberg always circles back, however, to the recurring question of how Jews might situate themselves in modernity, both before and after the Holocaust, and how Labor Zionist ideology might reshape the imbalances of Jewish economic life.
Alongside his role as an American Zionist leader, Greenberg maintained a lifelong commitment to the vitality of the Jewish diaspora. Rather than promoting Jewish autonomy and statehood, he argued for fidelity to the Jewish spirit. This volume not only seeks to restore Greenberg to his previous stature in the field of Judaic studies but also to return a vital and authentic voice, long quieted, to the continuing debate over what it means to be Jewish.
The Essential Hayim Greenberg provides an accessible text for scholars, historians, and students of Jewish studies, religion, and theology.
The Ethics of Oneness
Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad GitaJeremy David Engels
University of Chicago Press, 2021
In The Ethics of Oneness, Jeremy David Engels reads the Bhagavad Gita alongside the works of American thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Drawing on this rich combination of traditions, Engels presents the notion that individuals are fundamentally interconnected in their shared divinity. In other words, everything is one. If the lessons of oneness are taken to heart, particularly as they were expressed and celebrated by Whitman, and the ethical challenges of oneness considered seriously, Engels thinks it is possible to counter the pervasive and problematic American ideals of hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and domination.
The Evolution of Pragmatism in India
Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of ReconstructionScott R. Stroud
University of Chicago Press, 2023
In The Evolution of Pragmatism in India, Scott R. Stroud delivers a comprehensive exploration of the influence of John Dewey’s pragmatism on Bhimrao Ambedkar, architect of the Republic of India’s constitution. Stroud traces Ambedkar’s development in Dewey’s Columbia University classes in 1913–1916 through his final years in 1950s India when he rewrote the story of Buddhism. Stroud examines pragmatism’s influence not only on the philosophical ideas underpinning Ambedkar’s fight against caste oppression but also how his persuasive techniques drew on pragmatism’s commitment to reconstruction and meliorism. At the same time, Stroud is careful to point out the ways that Ambedkar pushed back against Dewey’s paradigm and developed his own approach to challenges in India. The result is a nuanced study of one of the most important figures in Indian history.
The Fate of Texas
The Civil War and the Lone Star StateCharles D. Grear
University of Arkansas Press, 2018
The Fathers of the Church in Christian Theology
Catholic University of America Press, 2019
The Flesh of the Matter
A Critical Forum on Hortense SpillersEdited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton
Vanderbilt University Press, 2024
Hortense Spillers is one of the most important literary critics and Black feminist scholars of the last fifty years. Her 1987 scholarly article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” is one of the most-cited essays in African American literary studies.
Edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton, The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers is the first collection to take up directly how Spillers’s writing on literature, culture, and theory have been signal posts to the varied and universal threads of Black thought, as well as countless other areas of the academy. Interspersed with archival fragments from Spillers’s papers kept at the Pembroke Center for Feminist Thought at Brown University, the fourteen essays in this collection demonstrate a fidelity to the ways of reading Spillers has taught us, the nomenclature of enslavement keyed into the American lexicon, and the ways that history permeates our cultural boundaries today.
The Floracrats
State-Sponsored Science and the Failure of the Enlightenment in IndonesiaAndrew Goss
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011
Situated along the line that divides the rich ecologies of Asia and Australia, the Indonesian archipelago is a hotbed for scientific exploration, and scientists from around the world have made key discoveries there. But why do the names of Indonesia’s own scientists rarely appear in the annals of scientific history? In The Floracrats Andrew Goss examines the professional lives of Indonesian naturalists and biologists, to show what happens to science when a powerful state becomes its greatest, and indeed only, patron.
With only one purse to pay for research, Indonesia’s scientists followed a state agenda focused mainly on exploiting the country’s most valuable natural resources—above all its major export crops: quinine, sugar, coffee, tea, rubber, and indigo. The result was a class of botanic bureaucrats that Goss dubs the “floracrats.” Drawing on archives and oral histories, he shows how these scientists strove for the Enlightenment ideal of objective, universal, and useful knowledge, even as they betrayed that ideal by failing to share scientific knowledge with the general public. With each chapter, Goss details the phases of power and the personalities in Indonesia that have struggled with this dilemma, from the early colonial era, through independence, to the modern Indonesian state. Goss shows just how limiting dependence on an all-powerful state can be for a scientific community, no matter how idealistic its individual scientists may be.