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3 books match the query 'Marshall, Kate'

cover of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction

Corridor

Media Architectures in American Fiction

Kate Marshall

University of Minnesota Press, 2013


Corridor offers a series of conceptually provocative readings that illuminate a hidden and surprising relationship between architectural space and modern American fiction. By paying close attention to fictional descriptions of some of modernity’s least remarkable structures, such as plumbing, ductwork, and airshafts, Kate Marshall discovers a rich network of connections between corridors and novels, one that also sheds new light on the nature of modern media.


The corridor is the dominant organizational structure in modern architecture, yet its various functions are taken for granted, and it tends to disappear from view. But, as Marshall shows, even the most banal structures become strangely visible in the noisy communication systems of American fiction. By examining the link between modernist novels and corridors, Marshall demonstrates the ways architectural elements act as media. In a fresh look at the late naturalist fiction of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, she leads the reader through the fetus-clogged sewers of Manhattan Transfer to the corpse-choked furnaces of Native Son and reveals how these invisible spaces have a fascinating history in organizing the structure of modern persons.


Portraying media as not only objects but processes, Marshall develops a new idiom for Americanist literary criticism, one that explains how media studies can inform our understanding of modernist literature.


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cover of Nevada's Great Recession: Looking Back, Moving Forward

Nevada's Great Recession

Looking Back, Moving Forward

Elliott Parker

University of Nevada Press, 2017

Of all economic recessions experienced by the United States in the postwar period, the Great Recession that began in 2008 was the deepest, longest, and most destructive. Nevada was among the hardest hit states, its people reeling from the aftereffects, and the state government also experiencing a severe fiscal crisis. University of Nevada economics professor Elliott Parker and then-State Treasurer Kate Marshall make sense of what went wrong and why, with the hope the state will learn lessons to prevent past mistakes from being made again.
 
This is a different kind of economics book. Parker uses his expertise from doing research on the East Asian fiscal crisis to give profound insights into what happened and how to avoid future catastrophes. Marshall personalizes it by providing vignettes of what it was actually like to be in the trenches and fighting the inevitable political battles that came up, and counteracting some of the falsehoods that certain politicians were spreading about the recession.
 
Parker and Marshall’s book should be required reading for not only every single elected official in Nevada, but for any private citizen who cares about the public good.
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cover of Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century

Novels by Aliens

Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century

Kate Marshall

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A wide-ranging account of the twenty-first century’s fascination with the weird.
 
Twenty-first-century fiction and theory have taken a decidedly weird turn. They both show a marked interest in the nonhuman and in the preternatural moods that the nonhuman often evokes. Writers of fiction and criticism are avidly experimenting with strange, even alien perspectives and protagonists. Kate Marshall’s Novels by Aliens explores this development broadly while focusing on problems of genre fiction. She identifies three key generic hybrids that harness a longing for the nonhuman: the old weird, an alternative tradition within naturalism and modernism for the twenty-first century’s cowboys and aliens; cosmic realism, the reach for words legible only from space in otherwise terrestrial narratives; and pseudoscience fiction, which imagines speculative futures beyond human life on earth. Offering sharp and surprising insights about a breathtaking range of authors, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Kazuo Ishiguro, Willa Cather to Maggie Nelson, Novels by Aliens tells the story of how genre became mood in the twenty-first century.
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