Humanities at Stanford
Inside the humanities at Stanford University
Humanities at Stanford
Book of the Month
Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
W.W. Norton & Company
A new, incisive history of the transcontinental railroads and how they transformed America in the decades after the Civil War.
The transcontinental railroads of the late nineteenth century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating panics in the U.S. economy. Their dependence on public largess drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, and remade the landscape of the West. As wheel and rail, car and coal, they opened new worlds of work and ways of life. Their discriminatory rates sparked broad opposition and a new antimonopoly politics.
Getting to the 'Heart' of the Matter
Haiyan Lee, an associate professor in Stanford's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, has been studying Chinese literature and culture from the pivotal period between 1900 and 1950 with the aim of documenting what she calls the "sentimental revolution" of China.
Professor Lee states, globalization has entailed the embracing of "basic western-derived, sentiment-based assumptions about personhood and sociality," which she said, "has paved the path for melodramatic love stores like Titanic to conquer China and much of the rest of the world."
Publications
Recent Humanities Publications - 2012
Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition
Robert Proctor
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.
Weill's Musical Theater
University of California Press
A book by Stanford Music professor Stephen Hinton charts the full range of theatrical achievements by one of the key figures in twentieth-century musical theater - Kurt Weill. This is the first musicological study of Weil's complete stage works, from one-act operas and plays with music to Broadway musicals and film-opera. In his book, Hinton addresses the idea of the "two Weills" - one European and one American, and through a thought journey though the composer's extraodinary life reveals Weill's brief yet intense career.
Joshua Landy, French and Italian
How to Do Things with Fictions
Oxford University Press
A book by Stanford French and Italian professor Joshua Landy challenges the assumption that literary texts must be informative or morally improving to be of any benefit. He reveals that authors are often best thought of not as entertainers or as educators but as personal trainers of the brain, putting their willing readers through exercises that fortify their mental capacities. He convincingly shows how the imaginative writings sitting our shelves may well be our best allies in the struggle for more rigorous thinking, deeper faith, greater peace of mind, and richer experience.
Özgen Felek, Religious Studies
Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies
State University of New York Press
This book by Özgen Felek, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Religious Studies, considers the place of dreams and visions in Isalmic socities from the premodern period to the present. Dreams and visions are significant in a range of social, education, and cultural roles. Through accounts and detailed experiences, this book addresses how ordinary Muslims, Muslim notables, Sufis, legal scholars, and rulers have perceived both themselves and the world around them through the prism of dreams and visions.
The Orphan Master's Son
Random House
A novel by Stanford English professor Adam Johnson delves into the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. The story follows Pak Jun Do, who is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.

Aron Rodrigue, History and Sarah Abrevaya, History, UCLA
A Jewish Voice from Salonica
Stanford University Press
This book presents for the first time the complete text of the earliest known Ladino-language memoir, transliterated from the original script, translated into English, and introduced and explicated by the editors. The memoirist, Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi (1820–1903), wrote about Ottoman Jews' daily life at a time when the long-ascendant fabric of Ottoman society was just beginning to unravel.
Recent Humanities Publications - 2011
Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture
Cambridge University Press
Why did Roman portrait statues, famed for their individuality, repeatedly employ the same body forms? The complex issue of the Roman copying of Greek 'originals' has so far been studied primarily from a formal and aesthetic viewpoint. Jennifer Trimble takes a broader perspective, considering archaeological, social historical and economic factors, and examines how these statues were made, bought and seen.
Andrea Nightingale, Classics and Comparative Literaure
Once Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body
University of Chicago Press
In Augustine’s writings, humans live both in and out of nature—exiled from Eden and punished by mortality, they are “resident aliens” on earth. Andrea Nightingale draws on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, and social history to analyze Augustine’s conception of temporality, eternity, and the human and transhuman condition.
The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George
Harvard University Press
In most accounts of John’s life, George plays a small role. He is often depicted as a scoundrel who left his brother destitute and dying to pursue his own fortune in America. But as Gigante shows, George ventured into a land of prairie fires, flat-bottomed riverboats, wildcats, and bears in part to save his brothers, John and Tom, from financial ruin. There was a vital bond between the brothers. Gigante demonstrates that John’s 1819 Odes and Hyperion fragments emerged from his profound grief following George’s departure and Tom’s death—and that we owe these great works of English Romanticism in part to the deep, lasting fraternal friendship that Gigante reveals in these pages.
Shahzad Bashir, Religious Studies
Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam
Columbia University Press
Between 1300 and 1500 C.E. a new form of Sufi Islam took hold among central Islamic peoples, joining individuals through widespread networks resembling today’s prominent paths and orders. Understanding contemporary Sufism requires a sophisticated analysis of these formative years. Moving beyond a straight account of leaders and movements, Shahzad Bashir weaves a rich history around the depiction of bodily actions by Sufi masters and disciples, primarily in Sufi literature and Persian miniature paintings of the period.
Laura Wittman, French and Italian
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body
University of Toronto Press
At the end of the First World War, countries across Europe participated in an unprecedented ritual in which a single, anonymous body was buried to symbolize the overwhelming trauma of the battlefields. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier explores the creation and reception of this symbolic national burial as an emblem for modern mourning. Bringing together literature, newspaper accounts, wartime correspondence, and popular culture, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier examines how the Unknown Soldier was imagined in diverse national contexts.
Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain
Oxford University Press
The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 shocked the world. Ever since, the image of the impenetrable barrier between East and West, imposed by communism, has been a central symbol of the Cold War. Based on vast research in untapped archival, oral and private sources, this book reveals the hidden origins of the Iron Curtain, presenting it in a startling new light with an unprecedented, in-depth focus of Burned Bridge, the intersection of divided sister cities Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg.
Steven P. Weitzman, Religious Studies
Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom
Yale University Press
Tradition has it that King Solomon knew everything there was to know—the mysteries of nature, of love, of God himself—but what do we know of him? Esteemed biblical scholar Steven Weitzman reintroduces readers to Solomon's story and its surprising influence in shaping Western culture, and he also examines what Solomon's life, wisdom, and writings have come to mean for Jews, Christians, and Muslims over the past two thousand years.
Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430-1530
Palgrave Macmillan
This book illuminates the origins of the great European witch hunts by placing early witch trials in the comparative light of other criminal proceedings in Basel, Lucerne and Nuremberg. The study reveals that the increasingly harsh treatment was paralleled by mounting judicial severity in general, as well as by a keen interest in social control.
Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
In a new, incisive history of the transcontinental railroads, Professor White shows the transcontinentals to be pivotal actors in the making of modern America, including their impact on America in the decades after the Civil War. But this isn't only a tale of the triumphal myths of the golden spike, robber barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism. Instead White offers a new vision of the Gilded Age, in often darkly funny tone, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success.
Paul DeMarinis, Art and Art History
Buried in Noise
Kehrer Verlag
This artist’s book is the first comprehensive monograph on sound and media artist Paul DeMarinis, born in 1948 in Cleveland, Ohio. DeMarinis has avidly followed the development of communication media, interested in discoveries being made in the realm of physical phenomena and the corresponding objects and devices that have been invented as well as in their cultural and social aspects. His works embody an aesthetic culture of invention permeated by a critical, yet humorous and poetic spirit. Buried in Noise is being published on the occasion of DeMarinis’s artist fellowshipat the DAAD artists’ program in Berlin. The publication compiles ocumentation on Paul DeMarinis’s complete oeuvre since 1973 and the first published compendium of texts by the artist.
Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Comparative Literature
Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression
University Of Michigan Press
Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedy Salomé has had a rich afterlife in literature, opera, dance, film, and popular culture. Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression is the first comprehensive scholarly exploration of that extraordinary resonance that persists to the present. Petra Dierkes-Thrun positions Wilde as a founding figure of modernism and Salomé as a key text in modern culture's preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression, arguing that Wilde's Salomé marks a major turning point from a dominant traditional cultural, moral, and religious outlook to a utopian aesthetic of erotic and artistic transgression. Wilde and Salomé are seen to represent a bridge linking the philosophical and artistic projects of writers such as Mallarmé, Pater, and Nietzsche to modernist and postmodernist literature and philosophy and our contemporary culture. Dierkes-Thrun addresses subsequent representations of Salome in a wide range of artistic productions of both high and popular culture through the works of Richard Strauss, Maud Allan, Alla Nazimova, Ken Russell, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Altman, Tom Robbins, and Nick Cave, among others.
Yoshiko Matsumoto, Asian Languages
Faces of Aging: The Lived Experiences of the Elderly in Japan
Stanford University Press
The indisputable fact of Japan's rapidly aging population has been known for some time. But beyond statistics and implications for the future, we do not know much about the actual aging process. Senior citizens and their varied experiences have, for the most part, been obscured by stereotypes. This fascinating new collection of research on the elderly works to put a human face on aging by considering multiple dimensions of the aging experience in Japan.
Faces of Aging foregrounds a spectrum of elder-centered issues—social activity, caregiving, generational bias, suicide, sexuality, and communication with medical professionals, to name a few—from the perspective of those who are living them. The volume's diverse contributors represent the fields of sociology, anthropology, medicine, nursing, gerontology, psychology, film studies, gender studies, communication, and linguistics, offering a diverse selection of qualitative studies of aging to researchers across the social sciences.
The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics & Aesthetics in the New Millennium
Stanford University Press
The Souls of Mixed Folk examines representations of mixed race in literature and the arts that redefine new millennial aesthetics and politics. Focusing on black-white mixes, Elam analyzes expressive works—novels, drama, graphic narrative, late-night television, art installations—as artistic rejoinders to the perception that post-Civil Rights politics are bereft and post-Black art is apolitical. Reorienting attention to the cultural invention of mixed race from the social sciences to the humanities, Elam considers the creative work of Lezley Saar, Aaron McGruder, Nate Creekmore, Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, Emily Raboteau, Carl Hancock Rux, and Dave Chappelle. All these writers and artists address mixed race as both an aesthetic challenge and a social concern, and together, they gesture toward a poetics of social justice for the "mulatto millennium."
The Souls of Mixed Folk offers case studies of the creative work of contemporary writers, artists, and performers in an effort to expand the contemporary idiom about mixed race in the so-called post-race moment, asking how might new millennial expressive forms suggest an aesthetics of mixed race? And how might such an aesthetics productively reimagine the relations between race, art, and social equity in the twenty-first century?
Recent Humanities Publications - 2010
The Eden Hunter
Counterpoint
Louisiana-born Horack's novel (after The Southern Cross collection) offers a stylish, fast-paced, historical narrative based on an 1816 slave insurrection. Spanish slave traders enter the Congo and purchase a captured Pygmy named Kau, transporting him to Pensacola, Fla., where he's sold to an innkeeper. Five years later, Kau kills the innkeeper's son and flees into the wilds of southern Florida. Along his wilderness trek, Kau regrets the murder, yearns for his family in Africa, and encounters a "Negro fort" on the Apalachicola River built by General Garçon. The remote fort's ostentatious "genius" commander befriends the diminutive Kau, who is allowed to take an escaped slave as his mate. The American victory in the War of 1812 makes Garçon, an ally of the British, a target of the imminent American invasion. While sympathetic to the slaves' desire to be free, Kau realizes the slim chance for success against the Americans; he's more inclined to follow his heart and "live quietly" in Florida than stand with Garçon. This diminutive man serves as a watchful protagonist in Horack's crisp, vivid tale.
Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema
Hong Kong University Press
Jean Ma offers an innovative study of three provocative Chinese directors: Wong Karwai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang, whose highly stylized and non-linear configurations of time have brought new global respect for Chinese cinema. Amplifying motifs of loss, nostalgia, haunting, and ephemeral poetics, they each insist on the significance of being out of time, not merely out of place, as a condition of global modernity and transnational cultures of memory.
Patrick Hunt, Structured Liberal Education, African Studies, and Continuing Studies
Myth and Art in Ekphrasis
Cognella
Mythology has inspired countless generations of humanity for millennia, from the parent culture of a myth to cultures fairly removed in time, space and language. Poets, artists, historians and philosophers have interpreted the stories in many ways, and Greek and Roman myths in particular are rich in paradox and narrative wisdom that artists have also visually illustrated, often depicting the crux or dramatic climax of a story in close detail. Biblical material also provides a wealth of material for similar reinterpretations for artists or writers. Whether in language with figures like similes and metaphors, or in visual imagery from sculptures, mosaics, wall-paintings and other ancient media, retelling of mythology in parallel versions often borrow from each other and influence each other. For example, a wide range of artists including Dürer, Cranach, Rembrandt, Dore, Klimt, Waterhouse or anonymous ancient vase painters, mosaicists and sculptors reinterpret seminal texts of poets and thinkers such as Homer, Plato, Virgil, Ovid, Dante or biblical material.
Whether ancient or modern in its applications, Ekphrasis is an ancient Greek word that essentially has to do with literary versions inspiring visual artistic versions, or vice versa. Visual literacy can be as important as verbal literacy, and tracing these symbiotic influences and looking at their backgrounds are some of the primary foci of Patrick Hunt’s new book, Myth and Art in Ekphrasis.
Joseph Frank, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature
Between Religion and Rationality: Essays in Russian Literature and Culture
Princeton University Press
In this book, acclaimed Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank explores some of the most important aspects of nineteenth and twentieth century Russian culture, literature, and history. Delving into the distinctions of the Russian novel as well as the conflicts between the religious peasant world and the educated Russian elite, Between Religion and Rationality displays the cogent reflections of one of the most distinguished and versatile critics in the field.
Frank's essays provide a discriminating look at four of Dostoevsky's most famous novels, discuss the debate between J. M. Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa on the issue of Dostoevsky and evil, and confront Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism. The collection also examines such topics as Orlando Figes's sweeping survey of the history of Russian culture, the life of Pushkin, and Oblomov's influence on Samuel Beckett. Investigating the omnipresent religious theme that runs throughout Russian culture, even in the antireligious Chekhov, Frank argues that no other major European literature was as much preoccupied as the Russian with the tensions between religion and rationality. Between Religion and Rationality highlights this unique quality of Russian literature and culture, offering insights for general readers and experts alike.
Kathleen Coll, Anthropology, Chicano Studies, and Feminist Studies
Remaking Citizenship: Latina Immigrants and New American Politics
Stanford University Press
Standing at the intersection of immigration and welfare reform, immigrant Latin American women are the target of special scrutiny in the United States. Both the state and the media often present them as scheming "welfare queens" or long-suffering, silent victims of globalization and machismo. This book argues for a reformulation of our definitions of citizenship and politics, one inspired by women who are usually perceived as excluded from both.
Weaving the stories of Mexican and Central American women with history and analysis of the anti-immigrant upsurge in 1990s California, this compelling book examines the impact of reform legislation on individual women's lives and their engagement in grassroots political organizing. Their accounts of personal and political transformation offer a new vision of politics rooted in concerns as disparate as domestic violence, childrearing, women's self-esteem, and immigrant and workers' rights.
Christopher Bononich, Philosophy
Plato's 'Laws': A Critical Guide
Cambridge University Press
Long understudied, Plato's Laws has been the object of renewed attention in the past decade, and is now considered to be his major work of political philosophy besides the Republic. In his last dialogue, Plato returns to the project of describing the foundation of a just city and sketches in considerable detail its constitution, laws and other social institutions. Written by leading Platonists, these essays cover a wide range of topics central for understanding the Laws, such as the aim of the Laws as a whole, the ethical psychology of the Laws, especially its views of pleasure and non-rational motivations, and whether and, if so, how the strict law code of the Laws can encourage genuine virtue. They make an important contribution to ongoing debates and will open up fresh lines of inquiry for further research.
Vincent Barletta, Iberian and Latin American Cultures
Death in Babylon: Alexander the Great & Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient
University of Chicago Press
Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, Vincent Barletta shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come.
Death in Babylon depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death. But Barletta also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, Death in Babylon develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. A novel contribution to the literature of empire building, Death in Babylon provides a frame for the deep mortal anxiety that has infused and given shape to the spread of imperial Europe from its very beginning.
Russell A. Berman, German Studies and Comparative Literature
Freedom or Terror: Europe faces Jihad
University of Chicago Press
In the nearly ten years since 9/11, Europe has oscillated through a range of stances to the threat of Islamist terrorism. Some European soldiers have fought side by side with Americans in Afghanistan; Europeans have also shown leadership on other fronts, especially in their domestic counterterrorism efforts. But not all Europeans have stepped forward to defend democratic modernity against the jihadist challenge. Many in fact have been reluctant even to recognize the special character of the threat, let alone to resist it.
In this book, Russell A. Berman offers an analysis of Europe's ambivalence toward jihadist terror and the spread of aggressive Islamism, with particular emphasis on the European responses—or lack thereof—to Islamist terrorism. Berman describes how some European countries opt for appeasing and apologizing for terror, whereas others stand up for freedom. He presents an outline of a complex continent of different nations and traditions to further our understanding of the range of reactions to Islamism. Ultimately, the author reveals, the question of European responses to Islamist terrorism is a question of culture: the confrontation of contemporary European culture with the cultural values of jihadist radicals. Whether Europe is truly up to the challenge will only become clear in the struggles of the next decade.
Dan Edelstein, French and Italian
The Enlightenment: A Genealogy
University of Chicago Press
What was the Enlightenment? Though many scholars have attempted to solve this riddle, none has made as much use of contemporary answers as Dan Edelstein does here. In seeking to recover where, when, and how the concept of “the Enlightenment” first emerged, Edelstein departs from genealogies that trace it back to political and philosophical developments in England and the Dutch Republic. According to Edelstein, by the 1720s scholars and authors in France were already employing a constellation of terms—such as l’esprit philosophique—to describe what we would today call the Enlightenment. But Edelstein argues that it was within the French Academies, and in the context of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, that the key definition, concepts, and historical narratives of the Enlightenment were crafted.
A necessary corrective to many of our contemporary ideas about the Enlightenment, Edelstein’s book turns conventional thinking about the period on its head. Concise, clear, and contrarian, The Enlightenment will be welcomed by all teachers and students of the period.
The History of British Women's Writing, 1500-1610 (Vol. 2)
Palgrave Macmillan
This volume initiates a new history of early women’s writing. Focusing on a wide variety of texts—from verse and drama to household records and recipes—it reconsiders what writing meant to the women who produced and used it.
The 110 years of British history that define this volume’s scope (1500-1610) witnessed dramatic upheavals in politics, religion, society, and culture. As these illuminating essays reveal, women actively participated through their writing, in key developments of the period: new media technologies, emergent performance spaces, Reformation and Counter-Reformation movements, and shifting representations of nation and race that marked colonial expansion.
Stalin's Genocides
Princeton University Press
Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them.
Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace--the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror--and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.
Ian Morris, Classics and History
Why the West Rules - For Now
McClelland & Stewart
Why does the West rule? In this magnum opus, eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing on 50,000 years of history, archeology, and the methods of social science, to make sense of when, how, and why the paths of development differed in the East and West — and what this portends for the 21st century.
If we want to know why the West rules, we need a whole new theory. Ian Morris, boldly entering the turf of Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson, provides the broader approach that is necessary, combining the textual historian's focus on context, the anthropological archaeologist's awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist's comparative methods to make sense of the past, present, and future — in a way no one has ever done before.
Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets
Oxford University Press
What's wrong with markets in everything? Markets today are widely recognized as the most efficient way in general to organize production and distribution in a complex economy. And with the collapse of communism and rise of globalization, it's no surprise that markets and the political theories supporting them have seen a considerable resurgence. For many, markets are an all-purpose remedy for the deadening effects of bureaucracy and state control. But what about those markets we might label noxious-markets in addictive drugs, say, or in sex, weapons, child labor, or human organs? Such markets arouse widespread discomfort and often revulsion.
In Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, philosopher Debra Satz takes a penetrating look at those commodity exchanges that strike most of us as problematic. An accessibly written work that will engage not only philosophers but also political scientists, economists, legal scholars, and public policy experts, this book is a significant contribution to ongoing discussions about the place of markets in a democratic society.
Margaret Cohen, Comparative Literature
The Novel and the Sea
Princeton University Press
For a century, the history of the novel has been written in terms of nations and territories: the English novel, the French novel, the American novel. But what if novels were viewed in terms of the seas that unite these different lands? Examining works across two centuries, The Novel and the Sea recounts the novel's rise, told from the perspective of the ship's deck and the allure of the oceans in the modern cultural imagination. Margaret Cohen moors the novel to overseas exploration and work at sea, framing its emergence as a transatlantic history, steeped in the adventures and risks of the maritime frontier.
A significant literary history, The Novel and the Sea challenges readers to rethink their land-locked assumptions about the novel.
Hazel Rose Markus and Paula Moya, English
Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century
W.W. Norton & Company
Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe.
Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do.
Harper Collins
From one of America's most brilliant critics and cultural commentators comes a long-awaited collection of penetrating autobiographical essays and a riveting short memoir, novelistic in style and ambition, about the pathos, comedy, and devastation of early love.
Stanford professor and longtime contributor to the London Review of Books, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Slate, and other publications, Terry Castle is widely admired for the wit, panache, intellectual breadth, and emotional honesty of her writings on life, literature, and art. Now, at long last, she has collected some of the more personal of her recent essays in a single volume.
In this account of a sentimental education, as in all the essays in The Professor and Other Writings, Terry Castle reveals herself as a truly remarkable writer: utterly distinctive, wise, frank, and fearless.
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Jack Rakove, American History and Political Science
Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
In the early 1770s, the men who invented America were living quiet, provincial lives in the rustic backwaters of the New World, devoted primarily to family, craft, and the private pursuit of wealth and happiness. None set out to become "revolutionary" by ambition, but when events in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved, in a matter of months, from protest to war.
In this remarkable book, the historian Jack Rakove shows how the private lives of these men were suddenly transformed into public careers--how Washington became a strategist, Franklin a pioneering cultural diplomat, Madison a sophisticated constitutional thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policymaker. Rakove shakes off accepted notions of these men as godlike visionaries, focusing instead on the evolution of their ideas and the crystallizing of their purpose. In Revolutionaries, we see the founders before they were fully formed leaders, as individuals whose lives were radically altered by the explosive events of the mid-1770s. They were ordinary men who became extraordinary--a transformation that finally has the literary treatment it deserves.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, English and American Studies
The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works
Library of America
For William Dean Howells, Mark Twain was “the Lincoln of our literature”; for William Faulkner, he was “the first truly American writer,” and for Eugene O’Neill, “the true father of American literature.” Ernest Hemingway famously asserted that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” During his lifetime and in the hundred years since his death, Mark Twain has been one of the most beloved and widely read of authors, not just in America but around the world. He has been especially cherished by other writers, who have drawn inspiration from many different aspects of his work.
The Mark Twain Anthology brings together the words of over 60 writers, from his earliest reviewers to today, probing the many facets of Mark Twain: his incomparable humor, his revolutionary use of vernacular language, his exploration of the realities of American life, his irreverence and skepticism, his profound grappling with issues of race, his fearless opposition to the injustices and outrages of an imperialistic age.
John Bender, English and Comparative Literature
Michael Marrinan, Art and Art History
The Culture of Diagram
Stanford University Press
The Culture of Diagram is about visual thinking. Exploring a terrain where words meet pictures and formulas meet figures, the book foregrounds diagrams as tools for blurring those boundaries to focus on the production of knowledge as process. It outlines a history of convergence among diverse streams of data in real-time: from eighteenth-century print media and the diagrammatic procedures in the pages of Diderot's Encyclopedia to the paintings of Jacques-Louis David and mathematical devices that reveal the unseen worlds of quantum physics. Central to the story is the process of correlation, which invites observers to participate by eliciting leaps of imagination to fill gaps in data, equations, or sensations. This book traces practices that ran against the grain of both Locke's clear and distinct ideas and Newton's causality—practices greatly expanded by the calculus, probabilities, and protocols of data sampling.Today's digital technologies are rooted in the ability of high-speed computers to correct errors when returning binary data to the human sensorium. High-tech diagrams echo the visual structures of the Encyclopedia, arraying packets of dissimilar data across digital spaces instead of white paper. The culture of diagram broke with the certainties of eighteenth-century science to expand the range of human experience. Speaking across disciplines and discourses, Bender and Marrinan situate our modernity in a new and revealing light.
Recent Humanities Publications - 2009
Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?
Johns Hopkins University Press
Blakey Vermeule wonders how readers become involved in the lives of fictional characters, people they know do not exist. Vermeule examines the ways in which readers' experiences of literature are affected by the emotional attachments they form to fictional characters and how those experiences then influence their social relationships in real life. She focuses on a range of topics, from intimate articulations of sexual desire, gender identity, ambition, and rivalry to larger issues brought on by rapid historical and economic change. Vermeule discusses the phenomenon of emotional attachment to literary characters primarily in terms of 18th—century British fiction but also considers the postmodern work of Thomas Mann, J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, and Chinua Achebe.
From the perspective of cognitive science, Vermeule finds that caring about literary characters is not all that different from caring about other people, especially strangers. The tools used by literary authors to sharpen and focus reader interest tap into evolved neural mechanisms that trigger a caring response. This book contributes to the emerging field of evolutionary literary criticism. Vermeule draws upon recent research in cognitive science to understand the mental processes underlying human social interactions without sacrificing solid literary criticism. People interested in literary theory, in cognitive analyses of the arts, and in Darwinian approaches to human culture will find much to ponder.
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The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much
Voltaire Foundation
Historians of eighteenth-century thought have implied a clear distinction between mystical or occult writing, often termed ‘illuminist’, and better-known forms of Enlightenment thinking and culture. But where are the boundaries of ‘enlightened’ human understanding?
This is the question posed by contributors to this volume, who put forward a completely new way of configuring these seemingly antithetical currents of thought, and identify a grey area that binds the two, a ‘Super-Enlightenment’. Through articles exploring the social, religious, artistic, political and scientific dimensions of the Super-Enlightenment, contributors demonstrate the co-existence of apparent opposites: the enlightened and the esoteric, empiricism and imagination, history and myth, the secretive and the public, mysticism and science. The Enlightenment can no longer be seen as a sturdy, homogeneous movement defined by certain core beliefs, but one which oscillates between opposing poles in its social practices, historiography and even its epistemology: between daring to know, and daring to know too much.
China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty
Harvard University Press
The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu.
The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars.
China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties
Harvard University Press
After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new religions.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, English
Mark Twain's Book of Animals
University of California Press
Longtime admirers of Mark Twain are aware of how integral animals were to his work as a writer, from his first stories through his final years, including many pieces that were left unpublished at his death. This beautiful volume, illustrated with 30 new images by master engraver Barry Moser, gathers writings from the full span of Mark Twain's career and elucidates his special attachment to and regard for animals. What may surprise even longtime readers and fans is that Twain was an early and ardent animal welfare advocate, the most prominent American of his day to take up that cause. Edited and selected by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who has also supplied an introduction and afterword, Mark Twain's Book of Animals includes stories that are familiar along with those that are appearing in print for the first time.
Joseph Frank, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
Princeton University Press
Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works--from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov--by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.
Lazar Fleishman, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Russian Emigration Encounter with Doctor Zhivago and Cold War
Stanford University Press
The book tells the story behind the publication of Pasternak’s novel in Russian outside the Soviet Union in 1957 – a far-reaching event in the cultural life of Russia and the West and a real coup for the West and anti-Soviet intelligentsia in the cold war era. Fleishman pieces together a complex web of interaction among the many players in this publication history. He shows convincingly that in this story, it was the tail that wagged the dog, that is to say, it was the cultural elite of the Russian emigration (Nina Berberova, Boris Filippov, Gleb Struve, among them) who influenced the CIA’s choice of this particular and many other ideological battles and not the other way around. More specifically, Fleishman lays to rest the sensational thesis advanced by Ivan Tolstoy that the novel and its author were a plaything in the hands of the CIA.
Gregory Friedin, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Isaac Babel’s Selected Writings
W. W. Norton & Company
The first Norton Critical Edition of a twentieth-century Russian author, Isaac Babel's Selected Writings contains most of Isaac Babel's ouevre in Peter Constantine's translation and annotated by the editor, a selection of Babel's correspondence with his mother and sister (1926-1939), selected reminiscences and reactions of his friends and contemporaries (most, for the first time in English), a selection of critical and scholarly response to Babel, the editor's extensive chronology of Babel's works and days, and finally, a brief selected bibliography.
Jack Rakove, History, American Studies and Political Science
The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence
Harvard University Press
In The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Jack Rakove, guides his readers through the two founding documents of the United States of America: the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787-8). In making the documents more accessible, Rakove provides an introductory essay, commentaries, historical background, targets language that has proved particularly difficult or controversial and cites leading Supreme Court cases. A chronology of events also provides a framework for understanding the road to Philadelphia.
A Companion to Bede
Boydell Press
The Venerable Bede is a crucial figure for Anglo-Saxonists, arguably the most important, known character from the period. A scholar of international standing from an early period of the Anglo-Saxon church (c.672-732), he was an author not only of the well-known Ecclesiastical History of the English People, but also of scriptural commentaries, hagiographies, scientific works, admonitory letters, and poetry. This book provides an informative, comprehensive, and up-to-date guide to Bede and his writings, underlining in his particular his importance in the development of European history and culture. It places Bede in his contemporary Northumbrian and early Anglo-Saxon England, dedicates individual chapters to his works, and includes a chapter on Bede's legacy for subsequent history.
Dan Edelstein, French and Italian
The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution
University of Chicago Press
In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. But the significance of the natural right did not end with its legal application. Edelstein argues that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he argues that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre.
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy
Princeton University Press, 2009
Machiavelli praised his military genius. European royalty sought out his secret elixir against poison. His life inspired Mozart's first opera, whilst for centuries poets and playwrights recited bloody, romantic tales of his victories, defeats, intrigues, concubines, and mysterious death. But until now no modern historian has recounted the full story of Mithradates, the ruthless king and visionary rebel who challenged the power of Rome in the first century BC. In this richly illustrated book -- the first biography of Mithradates in fifty years -- Adrienne Mayor combines a storyteller's gifts with the most recent archaeological and scientific discoveries to tell the tale of Mithradates as it has never been told before.
Life: Organic Form and Romanticism
Yale University Press, 2009
What makes something alive? Or, more to the point, what is life? The question is as old as the ages and has not been (and may never be) resolved. Life springs from life, and liveliness motivates matter to act the way it does. Yet vitality in its very unpredictability often appears as a threat. In this intellectually stimulating work, Denise Gigante looks at how major writers of the Romantic period strove to produce living forms of art on an analogy with biological form, often finding themselves face to face with a power known as monstrous.
The poets Christopher Smart, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats were all immersed in a culture obsessed with scientific ideas about vital power and its generation, and they broke with poetic convention in imagining new forms of “life.” In Life: Organic Form and Romanticism, Gigante offers a way to read ostensibly difficult poetry and reflects on the natural-philosophical idea of organic form and the discipline of literary studies.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, English
Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
This book offers historically-grounded, feminist interventions into American literary history by one of the country's leading scholars in American Studies. Integrating criticism, biography, social history, popular culture, and personal narrative Fishkin explores the poetry, fiction, nonfiction and drama of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century. These charismatic, readable essays range from explorations of feminist humor and chutzpah, to meditations on the personal and the political, to examinations of feminists' challenges to cultural paradigms. Fishkin’s lively voice engages readers with the American past and leaves a bold stamp on the literary landscape.
Islam and Social Change in French West Africa: History of an Emancipatory Community
Cambridge University Press, 2009
Exploring the history and religious community of a group of Muslim Sufi mystics who came largely from socially marginal backgrounds in colonial French West Africa, this study shows the relationship between religious, social, and economic change in the region. It highlights the role that intellectuals – including not only elite men, but also women, slaves, and the poor – played in shaping social and cultural change and illuminates the specific religious ideas on which Muslims drew and the political contexts that gave their efforts meaning. In contrast to depictions that emphasize the importance of international networks and anti-modern reaction in twentieth-century Islamic reform, this book claims that, in West Africa, such movements were driven by local forces and constituted only the most recent round in a set of centuries-old debates about the best way for pious people to confront social injustice. It argues that traditional historical methods prevent an appreciation of Muslim intellectual history in Africa by misunderstanding the nature of information gathering during colonial rule and misconstruing the relationship between documents and oral history.
Michael Marrinan, Art and Art History
Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800-1850
Stanford University Press, 2009
Romantic Paris is a richly illustrated survey of cultural life in Paris during some of the most tumultuous decades of the city's history. Between the coups d'état of Napoléon Bonaparte and of his nephew, Louis-Napoléon, Paris weathered extremes of political and economic fortune. Once the shining capital of a pan-European empire, it was overrun by foreign armies. Projects for grand public works were delayed and derailed by plague, armed uprisings, and civil war. At the same time, Paris was the theater of a revolution in the arts that challenged classical culture by depicting the vagaries of contemporary life and the thrill of unbridled experimentation. In Romantic Paris, Michael Marrinan plots the zigzag trajectory of the monuments, spaces, and habits of a city that looks both to the past and the future with all the optimism, self-doubts, and creative energy of a culture poised at the threshold of modernity.
Touching Fire: A Forestry Memoir
Hooper, Trish Publications, 2009
A professor in the Stanford English Department for over thirty years, George Dekker has written a book that recalls a decidedly unscholarly adventure of his youth. Touching Fire: A Forestry Memoir brings back to life the seven student summers he spent as a forest firefighter in northwestern California. A description of fighting fires in the wild, his narrative celebrates the coastal redwoods and protests the irresponsible harvesting practices that have made them an endangered species. The memoir also recounts the hard choices he had to make as a young man between a life in the Forestry and very different kind of life in the Academy.
Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems
Yale University Press, 2009
Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force and beauty. In our own time of environmental crises, he contends, poetry has a unique capacity to restore our attention to our environment in its imperiled state. And, as we take heed, we may well become better stewards of the earth.
Steven J. Zipperstein, History
Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing
Yale University Press, 2009
Born in Chicago in 1918, the prodigiously gifted and erudite Isaac Rosenfeld was anointed a “genius” upon the publication of his “luminescent” novel, Passage from Home and was expected to surpass even his closest friend and rival, Saul Bellow. Yet when felled by a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, Rosenfeld had published relatively little, his life reduced to a metaphor for literary failure.
In this deeply contemplative book, Steven J. Zipperstein seeks to reclaim Rosenfeld's legacy by “opening up” his work. Zipperstein examines for the first time the “small mountain” of unfinished manuscripts the writer left behind, as well as his fiercely candid journals and letters. In the process, Zipperstein unearths a turbulent life that was obsessively grounded in a profound commitment to the ideals of the writing life.
Paula Findlen (History), Wendy Wassyng Roworth, and Catherine M. Sama, eds.
Italy's Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour
Stanford University Press, 2009
In the age of the Grand Tour, foreigners flocked to Italy to gawk at its ruins and paintings, enjoy its salons and cafés, attend the opera, and revel in their own discovery of its past. But they also marveled at the people they saw, both male and female. In an era in which castrati were "rock stars," men served women as cicisbei, and dandified Englishmen became macaroni, Italy was perceived to be a place where men became women. The great publicity surrounding female poets, journalists, artists, anatomists, and scientists, and the visible roles for such women in salons, academies, and universities in many Italian cities also made visitors wonder whether women had become men. Such images, of course, were stereotypes, but they were nonetheless grounded in a reality that was unique to the Italian peninsula. This volume illuminates the social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Italy by exploring how questions of gender in music, art, literature, science, and medicine shaped perceptions of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour.
Joshua Landy (French) and Michael Saler, eds.
The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age
Stanford University Press, 2009
The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is, of course, something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"—or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy. More details here.
Recent Humanities Publications - 2008
Hilton Obenzinger, Hume Writing Center for Honors and Advanced Writing
Busy Dying
Chax Press, 2008
Muslim enclaves within non-Islamic polities are commonly believed to have been beleaguered communities undergoing relentless cultural and religious decline. Cut off from the Islamic world, these Muslim groups, it is assumed, passively yielded to political, social, and economic forces of assimilation and acculturation before finally accepting Christian dogma.
At Columbia University in April 1968, Hilton Obenzinger was one of many students who dramatically occupied the presidentâs office. For six days they protested the universityâs secret research to support the Vietnam War and its plans to build a gym in Morningside Park despite the opposition of Harlem. The occupation and subsequent strike was a generational moment repeated in universities around the country and throughout the world. Busy Dying is an autobiographical novel, a portrait of the authorâs Polish Jewish family, a coming of age in poetry, music, politics, and friends in New York City and Columbia, including a dangerous exodus through the Yukon to end up teaching on an Indian reservation in Northern California. All of this is comically and sometimes tragically relived as the author is inspired by a series of encounters and coincidences, including the revelations of students he teaches at Stanford today and the surprising discovery of the story behind Hilton Obenzinger, a 1980s Long Island high school humor magazine.
Guardians of Islam: Religious Authority and Muslim Communities of Late Medieval Spain
Columbia University Press, 2008
Muslim enclaves within non-Islamic polities are commonly believed to have been beleaguered communities undergoing relentless cultural and religious decline. Cut off from the Islamic world, these Muslim groups, it is assumed, passively yielded to political, social, and economic forces of assimilation and acculturation before finally accepting Christian dogma.
Kathryn A. Miller radically reconceptualizes what she calls the exclave experience of medieval Muslim minorities. By focusing on the legal scholars (faqihs) of fifteenth-century Aragonese Muslim communities and translating little-known and newly discovered texts, she unearths a sustained effort to connect with Muslim coreligionaries and preserve practice and belief in the face of Christian influences. Devoted to securing and disseminating Islamic knowledge, these local authorities intervened in Christian courts on behalf of Muslims, provided Arabic translations, and taught and advised other Muslims. Miller follows the activities of the faqihs, their dialogue with Islamic authorities in nearby Muslim polities, their engagement with Islamic texts, and their pursuit of traditional ideals of faith. She demonstrates that these local scholars played a critical role as cultural mediators, creating scholarly networks and communal solidarity despite living in an environment dominated by Christianity.
Jody Allen Randolph, ed.
Eavan Boland: A Critical Companion
W. W. Norton, 2008
Over the course of ten books of poems spanning four decades, Eavan Boland has changed the landscape of Irish poetry, creating new spaces and a new language. A Critical Companion is an essential guide to the poetry, prose, and critical writing of this acclaimed poet. Contains biographical introductions and chronology; introductory surveys of each aspect of Boland's work; a representative selection of Boland's poetry and prose writings; reviews, interviews and critical discussions of each of Boland's books; photographs; and a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
Golden Legends: Images of Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson to Bob Marley
Stanford University Press, 2008
From the eighteenth century to the present, travelers, explorers, journalists, and imaginative writers like Samuel Johnson and legendary reggae musician Bob Marley have shared a fascination with Abyssinia. So did even earlier writers and mapmakers, who thought Abyssinia was the land of the mythical (and fabulously rich) Christian ruler Prester John. In this book, Carnochan examines the allure of the exotic, as represented by Abyssinia, to the British imagination, as well as the beginnings of anthropology and the variations of quest narrative in modern travel writing.
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global
Oxford University Press, 2008
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet analyzes the relationship between the imagination of the global and the ethical commitment to the local in environmentalist thought and writing from the 1960s to the present. The book combines in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed analyses of novels, poems, films, computer software and installation artworks from the U.S. and abroad that translate new connections between global, national and local forms of awareness into innovative aesthetic forms combining allegory, epic, and views of the planet as a whole with modernist and postmodernist strategies of fragmentation, montage, collage, and zooming.
Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England
University of Chicago Press, 2008
In Jennifer Summit’s latest publication, Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England she asserts that libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shaped the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Memory’s Library also demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.
Josiah Ober, Political Science
Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens
Princeton University Press, 2008
Combining a history of Athens with contemporary theories developed by economists and political scientists, Josiah Ober examines Athenian democracy's unique contribution to the ancient Greek city-state's remarkable success, and demonstrates the valuable lessons Athenian political practices hold for us today.
Gregory Freidin (editor), Slavic Languages & Literatures
Isaac Babel's Selected Writings
W. W. Norton, 2008
The scope of this Norton Critical Edition surpasses that of any other Isaac Babel paperback edition and includes his fiction, non-fiction, autobiography, plays and political writings. The texts are introduced and annotated by the renowned Babel scholar and Slavic Languages & Literatures professor, Gregory Freidin.
Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970
Stanford University Press, 2008
Co-edited by History professor, Gordon Chang, Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 is the first comprehensive study of the lives and artistic production of artists of Asian ancestry active in the United States before 1970.
Walter Scheidel, Classics with Ian Morris, Classics and Richard Saller, History
The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World
Cambridge University Press, 2008
By combining textual and archaeological data that have previously been treated separately, Classics professor Walter Scheidel (with editors Ian Morris and Richard P. Saller) has produced the first inclusive one-volume survey of the economies of classical antiquity: The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World. This important work represents a major advance in our understanding of the economic expansion that made the civilization of the classical Mediterranean world possible.
Andrew Foster Altschul, English (Creative Writing)
Lady Lazarus
Harcourt, 2008
“Lady Lazarus is the story of Calliope Bird Morath, the daughter of famous punk rockers Brandt Morath and Penny Power. Her father committed suicide when she was four years old, and she has grown up to become "the most famous poet in America, perhaps the most famous poet in American history" (the title is from Sylvia Plath), hounded by the media and haunted by memories of her father. It's set in Southern California during the "grunge revolution" of the early 1990s, as well as in the crazed celebrity culture of the 21st century (think: Gawker), and is partly narrated by a washed-up music journalist who’s obsessed with Calliope, her father, and the connections between punk rock and poetry.” - Andrew Foster Altschul, Book Notes essay for Lady Lazarus
For more information, visit: https://www.andrewfosteraltschul.com/ladylazarus.html
Silverfish
HarperCollins India Original, 2008
A retired schoolteacher in present-day Calcutta is caught in the labyrinth of rusty bureaucracy and political crime under a communist government. Across a vast ocean of time, a widow leads a life of stark suffering in a wealthy feudal household in 19th century, British-ruled Bengal, at a time when widow burning has gone out of practice but widow remarriage is far from coming into vogue.
As their stories begin to connect, they weave a larger narrative of historical forgetting, of voices that have been pushed out of a nation’s memory. And what we are left with is the intriguing tale of two cities: the same geographical space separated by decades of experience and neglect.
Silverfish is available in bookshops throughout India, and also from many online stores, many of which will deliver internationally.
For more information, visit: https://www.saikatmajumdar.com/silverfish/index.html
Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
Knopf Publications, 2008
“One of our most exquisite storytellers” (Esquire) gives us his first collection in over a decade: ten potent new stories that, along with twenty-one classics, display his mastery over a quarter century.
Tobias Wolff’s first two books, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and Back in the World, were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can “provoke our amazed appreciation,” as The New York Times Book Review wrote then. In the years since, he’s written a third collection, The Night in Question, as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs (This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army), the novella The Barracks Thief, and, most recently, a novel, Old School.
Now he returns with fresh revelations—about biding one’s time, or experiencing first love, or burying one’s mother—that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains for Iraq, a lawyer taking a difficult deposition, an American in Rome indulging the Gypsy who’s picked his pocket. In these stories, as with his earlier, much-anthologized work, he once again proves himself, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.”
Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children’s literature. Its history is inseparable from the history of childhood, as children are indelibly molded by the tales they hear and read—stories they will one day share with their own sons and daughters.
Children’s Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop’s fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter. Seth Lerer here explores the iconic books, ancient and contemporary alike, that have forged a lifelong love of literature in young readers during their formative years. Along the way, Lerer also looks at the changing environments of family life and human growth, schooling and scholarship, and publishing and politics in which children found themselves changed by the books they read. This ambitious work appraises a broad trajectory of influences—including Shakespeare’s plays, John Locke’s theories of education, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and the Puritan tradition—which have each shaped children’s literature through the ages as well.
The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children’s literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Shel Silverstein, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers. Children’s Literature is an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word.
Robert Harrison, French & Italian
Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.
With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.
Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison’s earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility—and its enduring importance to humanity.
New Collected Poems
W.W. Norton, 2008
An Origin Like Water: Poems 1967–1987 confirmed Eavan Boland’s place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems now brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding material from her subsequent volumes and filling out key poems from the early years. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Boland’s work traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement, and patient experimentation with form, theme, and language.
Spies in Arabia
Oxford University Press, 2008
At the dawn of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents began to venture in increasing numbers to the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, a region of crucial geopolitical importance spanning present-day Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. They were drawn by the twin objectives of securing the land route to India and finding adventure and spiritualism in a mysterious and ancient land. But these competing desires created a dilemma: how were they to discreetly and patriotically gather facts in a region they were drawn to for its legendary inscrutability and by the promise of fame and escape from Britain?
In this groundbreaking book, Priya Satia tracks the intelligence community's tactical grappling with this problem and the myriad cultural, institutional, and political consequences of their methodological choices during and after the Great War. She tells the story of how an imperial state in thrall to the cultural notions of equivocal agents and beset by an equally captivated and increasingly assertive mass democracy invented a wholly new style of "covert empire" centered on the world's first brutal aerial surveillance regime in Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources--from the fictional to the recently declassified--this book explains how Britons reconciled genuine ethical scruples with the actual violence of their Middle Eastern empire. As it vividly demonstrates how imperialism was made fit for an increasingly democratic and anti-imperial world, what emerges is a new interpretation of the military, cultural, and political legacies of the Great War and of the British Empire in the twentieth century.
Unpacking the romantic fascination with "Arabia" as the land of espionage, Spies in Arabia presents a stark tale of poetic ambition, war, terror, and failed redemption--and the prehistory of our present discontents.
Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008
An eminent historian offers a sweeping look at Europe's tumultuous twentieth century, showing how the rejection of violence after World War II transformed a continent.
In the last decade we've seen an ever-widening rift between the United States and Europe, most visibly over Iraq. But as James J. Sheehan reminds us in his timely book, it wasn't always thus. How did America and Europe come to take such different paths?
In Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? Stanford historian Sheehan charts what is perhaps the most radical shift in Europe's history. For centuries, nations defined themselves by their willingness and ability to wage war. But after World War II, Europe began to redefine statehood, rejecting ballooning defense budgets in favor of material well-being, social stability, and economic growth. Sheehan reveals how and why this happened, and what it means for America as well as the rest of the world.
Succinct yet broad in scope, Sheehan's authoritative history provides much-needed context for understanding the fractured era in which we live.
Recent Humanities Publications - 2007
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Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (Religious Studies), eds.
Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910-1927
Northwestern University Press (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), 2007
In the decades since Martin Heidegger's death, many of his early writings--notes and talks, essays and reviews--have made it into print, but in such scattershot fashion and erratic translation as to mitigate their usefulness for understanding the development, direction, and ultimate shape of his work. This timely collection, edited by two preeminent Heidegger scholars, brings together in English translation the most philosophical of Heidegger's earliest occasional writings from 1910 to the end of 1927. These important philosophical documents fill out the context in which the early Heidegger wrote his major works and provide the background against which they appeared.
Structures of Agency
Oxford University Press, 2007
Michael Bratman is a highly distinguished philosopher known for his recent contributions to important debates on human agency. In this volume he tries to extend the reach of his theory, known as the "planning theory of intention and agency" which he has been developing over the last twenty years.
Bratman's primary concern is with what he calls "strong" forms of human agency--including forms of human agency that are the target of our talk about self-determination, self-government, and autonomy. The essays in this volume, a mixture of published and unpublished, explore the theoretical possibilities of using his planning theory with other concerns about phenomena of identification and with resources from hierarchical theories of agency. This work has been widely discussed, is unusually cohesive and focused, and will be very useful and influential in book form.
Domestic Violence
W. W. Norton, 2007
These are poems about the charged spaces in which people live, about the interiors where seductions, quarrels, memories, and griefs occur. A marriage is a window for outward violence; a painted cup becomes a theater for a long love; in an ordinary room a mythic violation takes place.
Charlotte Elishva Fonrobert (Religious Studies) and Martin Jaffee, eds.
The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature
Cambridge University Press, 2007
This volume guides beginning students of rabbinic literature to the range of historical-interpretive and culture-critical issues that contemporary scholars use when studying the rabbinic texts of late antiquity. The editors, themselves well-known interpreters of rabbinic literature, have gathered an international collection of scholars to support students' initial steps in confronting the enormous and complex rabbinic corpus. Unlike other introductions to rabbinic writings, the present volume includes approaches shaped by anthropology, gender studies, oral-traditional studies, classics, and folklore studies.
Estelle Freedman, History, ed.
The Essential Feminist Reader
Modern Library, 2007
The Essential Feminist Reader is the first anthology to present the full scope of feminist history. Prizewinning historian Estelle B. Freedman brings decades of teaching experience and scholarship to her selections, which span more than five centuries. Moving beyond standard texts by English and American thinkers, this collection features primary source material from around the globe, including short works of fiction and drama, political manifestos, and the work of less well-known writers.
Freedman’s cogent Introduction assesses the challenges facing feminism, while her accessible, lively commentary contextualizes each piece. The Essential Feminist Reader is a vital addition to feminist scholarship, and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of women.
American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945
Princeton University Press, 2007
Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression.
Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference.
Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History
Penguin Plume, 2007
If any global archaeologist were asked to name the top ten archaeological discoveries that have made the greatest impact on archaeology and history, most lists would be likely to unanimously mention the following huge impact discoveries: the Rosetta Stone, Pompeii, Nineveh, Troy, King Tut's Tomb, Machu Picchu, Thera-Akrotiri, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Olduvai Gorge starting with the Leakey Era and the Tomb of the Ten Thousand Warriors in China. This exciting book, written with a taut narrative, relates the dramatic moments of these discoveries, whether by professional archaeologists or by amateurs' accidents, and highlights their significance to history.
For more information, visit https://www.tendiscoveries.com/.
Inventing English: A Portable History of Language
Columbia University Press, 2007
Seth Lerer’s Inventing English is a masterful, engaging history of the English language from the age of Beowulf to the rap of Eminem. Many have written about the evolution of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, but only Lerer situates these developments in the larger history of English, America, and literature. Each concise chapter illuminates a moment of invention--a time when people discovered a new form of expression or changed the way they spoke or wrote. In conclusion, Lerer wonders whether globalization and technology have turned English into a world language that reflects on what has been preserved and what has been lost. A unique blend of historical and personal narrative, Inventing English is a surprising tale of a language that is as dynamic as the people to whom it belongs.
The Archimedes Codex: Revealing the Secrets of the World’s Greatest Palimpsest (with William Noel)
Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 2007
In 1998, the auction house Christie's sold a medieval prayer book for more than $2 million. The price owed to a startling discovery: the prayers had been written over the earliest surviving manuscript of Archimedes (287–212 B.C.), the ancient world's greatest mathematician. In a delightful and fast-paced archeological and scientific detective story, Netz, a Stanford classicist, and Noel, director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, make palpable the excitement this discovery evoked.
After the auction, they were given access to study the palimpsest; after frustrating days of trying to read the writings beneath the prayer manuscript, Netz, Noel and a team of scientists and conservators turned to a variety of imaging techniques to reconstruct the hidden Archimedes manuscript, which turned out to be heretofore undiscovered works, Balancing Planes, On Floating Bodies, The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion, in which Archimedes wrote about topics ranging from gravity to infinity.
The manuscript also revealed some lost speeches by Hyperides, one of the 10 canonical orators of antiquity. Netz and Noel's book chronicles the often difficult and demanding work surrounding the preservation of antiquities as they uncover one of the most exciting documents of ancient history.
More information can be found in the Stanford Magazine: https://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/sepoct/features/archimedes.html
Josiah Ober, Classics (with Kurt Raaflaub and Robert Wallace)
Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece
University of California Press, 2007
This book presents a state-of-the-art debate about the origins of Athenian democracy by five eminent scholars. The result is a stimulating, critical exploration and interpretation of the extant evidence on this intriguing and important topic. The authors address such questions as: Why was democracy first realized in ancient Greece? Was democracy "invented" or did it evolve over a long period of time? What were the conditions for democracy, the social and political foundations that made this development possible? And what factors turned the possibility of democracy into necessity and reality?
The authors first examine the conditions in early Greek society that encouraged equality and "people's power." They then scrutinize, in their social and political contexts, three crucial points in the evolution of democracy: the reforms connected with the names of Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes in the early and late sixth and mid-fifth century. Finally, an ancient historian and a political scientist review the arguments presented in the previous chapters and add their own perspectives, asking what lessons we can draw today from the ancient democratic experience.
Designed for a general readership as well as students and scholars, the book intends to provoke discussion by presenting side by side the evidence and arguments that support various explanations of the origins of democracy, thus enabling readers to join in the debate and draw their own conclusions.
San Francisco Ballet at Seventy-Five
Chronicle Books, 2007
Long renowned as one of the world's preeminent ballet companies, San Francisco Ballet marks its seventy-fifth anniversary with a stunningly beautiful retrospective. Replete with intimate portraits of the dancers and behind-the-scenes contributors, this book is the first serious depiction of America's oldest ballet company.
The illustrated volume, with more than 100 full-color and archival photographs, includes a DVD that provides insight into the Company's illustrious history, including interviews with key insiders and exclusive footage of rehearsals and performances. It is being distributed by Chronicle Books, sold online and is available for purchase in San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House Ballet Shop.
The First Day of the Blitz
Yale University Press, 2007
On September 7, 1940, the long-feared and anticipated attack by the German Luftwaffe plunged London into a cauldron of fire and devastation. This compelling book recreates that day in all its horror, using rich archival sources and first-hand accounts, many never before published. Eminent historian Peter Stansky weaves together the stories of people who recorded their experiences of the opening hours of the Blitz. Then, exploring more deeply, the author examines what that critical day meant to the nation at the time, and what it came to mean in following years.
Much of the future of Britain was determined in the first twelve hours of bombing, Stansky contends. The Blitz set in motion a range of responses that contributed to ultimate victory over Germany and to a transformation of British society. The wave of terror, though designed to quash morale, instead inspired stoicism, courage, and a new camaraderie. The tragic London bombing can reveal much of relevance to our own violent times, Stansky concludes: both the effectiveness of modern terror and its ultimate failure are made powerfully clear by the events of September 7, 1940.
The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900
Cornell University Press, 2007
In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women's classicism during its glory days from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom.
Using both texts and material culture, Winterer exposes the neoclassical world of furnishings, art, and fashion created in part through networks dominated by elite women. Many of these women were at the center of the national experience. Here readers will find Abigail Adams, teaching her children Latin and signing her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman senator Brutus; the Massachusetts slave Phillis Wheatley, writing poems in imitation of her favorite books, Alexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey; Dolley Madison, giving advice on Greek taste and style to the U.S. Capitol's architect, Benjamin Latrobe; and the abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child, who showed Americans that modern slavery had its roots in the slave societies of Greece and Rome.