Stanford University Press

This book explores the accomplishments of the golden age of “macrohistory,” the sociologically informed analysis of long-term patterns of political, economic, and social change that has reached new heights of sophistication in the last decades of the twentieth century.

It describes the scholarly revolution that has taken place in the Marxian-inspired theory of revolutions, the shift to a state-breakdown model in which revolutions, rather than bubbling up from discontent below, start at the top in the fiscal strains of the state. The author links revolutions to military-centered transformations of the state, and reviews how he used this theory in the early 1980s to predict the breakdown of the Soviet empire.

He goes on to show the implications of viewing states and societies from the outside in, including the geopolitical patterns that affect the legitimacy of dominant ethnic groups and thus determine the direction of ethnic assimilation or fragmentation. Another application is the author’s new theory of democratization, which asserts that democracy depends not merely on a widening of the franchise but on a geopolitical pattern favoring federated structures of collegially shared power.

Using this new theoretical tool, the author argues that Anglophone scholars have polemically misinterpreted German history, and that the roots of the Holocaust cannot be determined by German-bashing but must be attributed to processes that affect all of us. Other essays generalize about the historical dynamics and transformations of markets. Going beyond Weber’s Eurocentric model, the author proposes a more general theory that explains the origins of capitalism in Japan on an independent but parallel path.

Written by one of America's preeminent labor historians, this book is the definitive account of one of the most spectacular, captivating, complex and strangely neglected stories in Western history—the emergence of migratory farmworkers and the development of California agriculture.

Street has systematically worked his way through a mountain of archival materials—more than 500 manuscript collections, scattered in 22 states, including Spain and Mexico—to follow the farmworker story from its beginnings on Spanish missions into the second decade of the twentieth century. The result is a comprehensive tour de force. Scene by scene, the epic narrative clarifies and breathes new life into a controversial and instructive saga long surrounded by myth, conjecture, and scholarly neglect.

With its panoramic view spanning 144 years and moving from the US-Mexico border to Oregon, Beasts of the Field reveals diverse patterns of life and labor in the fields that varied among different crops, regions, time periods, and racial and ethic groups.

Enormous in scope, packed with surprising twists and turns, and devastating in impact, this compelling, revelatory work of American social history will inform generations to come of the history of California and the nation.

The Czech philosopher Jan Patocka (1907-1977), who studied with Husserl and Heidegger, is widely recognized as the most influential thinker to come from postwar Eastern Europe. Refusing to join the Communist party after World War II, he was banned from academia and publication for the rest of his life, except for a brief time following the liberalizations of the Prague spring of 1968. Joining Vaclav Havel and Jiri Hajek as a spokesman for the Chart 77 human-rights declaration of 1977, Patocka was harassed by authorities, arrested, and finally died of a heart attack during prolonged interrogation.

Plato and Europe, arguably Patocka's most important book, consists of a series of lectures delivered in the homes of friends after his last banishment from the academy just three years before his death. Here, he presents his most mature ideas about the history of Western philosophy, arguing that the idea of the care of the soul is fundamental to the philosophical tradition beginning with the Greeks. Explaining how the care of the soul is elaborated as the problem of how human beings may make their world one of truth and justice, Patocka develops this thesis through a treatment of Plato, Democritus, and Aristotle, showing how considerations about the soul are of central importance in their writings. He demonstrates in vivid fashion how this idea forms the spiritual heritage of Europe.

The last several decades have witnessed major restructurings—economic, political, and cultural—in the international arena. The depth and scope of these changes have prompted anthropologists to rethink many of their most basic assumptions, to problematize issues that have long gone unexamined, and to grapple with new and unique problems. Doing so has left the discipline profoundly unsettled. Existing standards of scholarship and research methodologies have come under attack, key conceptual categories have been called into question, and truths once considered secure have been subjected to severe scrutiny and even ridicule.

Seizing upon the opportunity afforded by the contemporary conjuncture of disciplinary crisis and redefinition, this book raises questions about two interrelated aspects of historical process and academic production. The volume contributes to ongoing debates about the degree to which the developments of recent decades represent the advent of a new historical era, a rupture with the past that requires new conceptualizations and logics in order to be understood. In confronting this question, the contributors to this volume have assembled a range of materials that place the present period of reconstruction in the context of a broader history and geography of other, related restructurings.

Locating Capitalism in Time and Space also raises questions about the degree to which the scholarship of recent decades represents a qualitative break with that of the past. At issue here is whether one understands the history of academic production as a linear process of intellectual growth punctuated by major breakthroughs in understanding, or as a political process structured by the same kinds of inequalities and struggles that characterize the social worlds that are the object of anthropological analysis.

For almost two centuries, Americans expected that their public schools would cultivate the personal, moral, and social development of individual students, create citizens, and bind diverse groups into one nation. Since the 1980s, however, a new generation of school reformers has been intent on using schools to solve the nation’s economic problems. An economic justification for public schools—equipping students with marketable skills to help the nation compete in a global, information-based workplace—overwhelmed other historically accepted purposes for tax-supported public schools.

Private sector management has become the model for public school systems as schools and districts are “downsized,” “restructured,” and “outsourced.” Recent reform proposals have called for government-funded vouchers to send children to private schools, the creation of self-governing charter schools, the contracting of schools to private entrepreneurs, and the partnerships with the business community in promoting new information technologies. But if there is a shared national purpose for education, should it be oriented only toward enhancing the country’s economic success? Is everything public for sale? Are the interests of individuals or selected groups overwhelming the common good that the founders of tax-supported public schools so fervently sought?

This volume explores the ongoing debates about what constitutes the common good in American public education, assessing the long-standing tensions between shared purposes and individual interests in schooling. It shows how recent school reform efforts, driven by economic concerns, have worsened the conflict between the legitimate interests of individuals and society as a whole, and demonstrates that reconstructing the common good envisioned by the founders of public education in the United States remains essential and unfinished work.

This book examines the role of the Vichy regime in bringing about profound changes in the French colonial empire after World War II. In the war's aftermath, the French colonial system began to break down. Indochina erupted into war in 1945 and Madagascar in 1947, while Guadeloupe chose an opposite course, becoming territorially part of France in 1946.

The book traces the introduction of an integralist ideology of "National Revolution" to the French colonial realm, shedding new light on the nature of the Vichy regime, on the diversity of French colonialism, and on the beginnings of decolonization. Encompassing three very different regions and cultures, the study reveals both a unity in Vichy's self-reproduction overseas and a diversity of forms which this ideological cloning assumed.

World War II is often presented as an agent of change in the French colonial empire only insofar as it engendered a loss of prestige for France as colonizer. The author argues that Marshal Philippe Pétain's Vichy regime contributed to decolonization in a much more substantial way, by ushering in an ideology based on a new, harsher brand of colonialism that both directly and indirectly fueled indigenous nationalism.

The author also rejects the popular notion that Nazi pressure lurked behind the Vichy government's colonial actions, and that the regime lacked any real agency in colonial affairs. He shows that, far from allowing the Germans to run French colonies from behind the scenes, Vichy leaders vigorously promoted their own undiluted form of ultra-conservative ideology throughout the French empire. They delivered to the colonies an authoritarianism that not only elicited fierce opposition but sowed the seeds of nationalist resurgence among indigenous cultures. Ironically, the regime awoke long-dormant nationalist sentiments by introducing to the empire Pétain's cherished themes of authenticity, tradition, folklore, and völkism.

Up in Flames is the first comprehensive study of the traditional Chinese craft of paper sculpture: the construction in bamboo and paper of human figures, figures of gods, buildings, and other objects—all intended to be ritually burned. The book documents this ancient craft as it exists today in Taiwan. The fascinating fundamentals of the craft, the tools and materials, as well as the techniques used to construct houses and human figures, never investigated before, are described and illustrated in detail. The written material is augmented by many color photographs showing the objects and the men and women who make them.

Although the tradition of burning objects as a part of religious ceremonies is still strong, the traditional paper and bamboo objects are being more and more often replaced by plastic components and whole preprinted cardboard counterparts. The resulting changes in the personal, business, and especially the creative and artistic side of the craft are therefore also addressed.

Ranging over all George Eliot's fiction and drawing as well on her letters, essays, and translations, in this book the distinguished critic Neil Hertz documents Eliot's lifelong questioning of the nature of authorship and of what it might mean, in the language of one of her early letters, for her "not simply to be, but to utter."

Pursuing oddities of diction and figuration, of plotting and characterization, Hertz finds everywhere in Eliot's works passages of high mimetic realism that ask to be read as allegories of writing or as characters whose actions and destinies can only be understood if they are seen as disguised surrogates of their author. Each essay begins with an intriguing or problematic bit of language, then moves about within a particular work of fiction or criss-cross to other writings of Eliot's as well as to works by philosophers, psychoanalysts, and literary theorists.

Focusing on the early Modern and Victorian periods, the author finds covert revolutionaries in four female practitioners of a strategy she calls creative negativity. She opens up for inspection the lives and creative endeavors of poet-photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), novelist-essayist Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919), activist-spiritual leader Annie Besant (1847-1933), and actress-writer Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952).

Creative negativity grows out of either philosophical or emotional negativity; it evokes a focal point, often a place; it combines reality and illusion; it suggests a shift in magnitude, a sense of multifariousness or zooming out; it includes an altered sense of time by reaching backward, moving outside temporality, or attenuating time; and it evokes self-referentiality, an aesthetic or formal invocation in a work of art, a sense of self-consciousness in social contexts.

As she explores the interacting elements of creative negativity that their work exemplifies, the author demonstrates how the artistic and performative techniques employed by the four women provide them with the rhetorical tools with which they can construct, take apart, and reconstruct themselves. This uniquely interactive response propels the women through their successful enactments of the female quest. Their creative interpretations of their life experiences point up the distinctive ways in which women’s self-expression can be reconceived as a manifestation of the female quest—a voicing of multiple stories and selves, both within themselves and others, in myriad and fantastical domains of their own creation. Overall, this book provides a working model for seeing how a covert feminism operated during a key period of history.

This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today’s most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies.

The first part of the book addresses questions of current critical concern: Does it still make sense to search for objectivity in ethnography? What do we gain when we invoke “context” in our interpretations? How does literacy change the work of the ethnographer, and what are the boundaries between ethnology and history? This part ends with a plea for recuperating negativity in our thinking about culture.

The second part extends the work of critique into the past by examining the beginning of modern ethnography in the exploration of Central Africa during the late nineteenth century: the justification of a scientific attitude, the collecting of ethnographic objects, the presentation of knowledge in narration, and the role of recognition—given or denied—in encounters with Africans. A final essay examines how the Congolese have returned the “imperial gaze” of Belgium by the work of critical memory in popular history. The ten chapters are framed by two meditations on the relevance of theory and the irrelevance of the millennium.

This book argues that the invention of Asian American identities serves as an index to the historical formation of modern America. By tracing constructions of "Asian American" to an interpenetrating dynamic between Asia and America, the author obtains a deeper understanding of key issues in American culture, history, and society.

The formation of America in the twentieth century has had everything to do with "westward expansion" across the "Pacific frontier" and the movement of Asians onto American soil. After the passage of the last piece of anti-Asian legislation in the 1930's, the United States found it had to grapple with both the presence of Asians already in America and the imperative to develop its neocolonial interests in East Asia. The author argues that, under these double imperatives, a great wall between "Asian" and "American" is constructed precisely when the two threatened to merge. Yet the very incompleteness of American identity has allowed specific and contingent fusion of "Asian" and "American" at particular historical junctures.

From the importation of Asian labor in the mid-nineteenth century, the territorialization of Hawaii and the Philippines in the late-nineteenth century, through wars with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam and the Cold War with China, to today's Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation group, the United States in the modern age has seen its national identity as strongly attached to the Pacific. As this has taken place, so has the formation of a variety of Asian American identities. Each contains a specific notion of America and reveals a particular conception of "Asian" and "American."

Complicating the usual notion of "identity politics" and drawing on a wide range of writings—sociological, historical, cultural, medical, anthropological, geographic, economic, journalistic, and political—the author studies both how the formation of these identifications discloses the response of America to the presence of Asians and how Asian Americans themselves have inhabited these roles and resisted such categorizations, inventing their own particular subjectivities as Americans.

Are there classes in America? In The Classless Society Paul Kingston forcefully answers no.

This book directly challenges a long-standing intellectual tradition of class analysis, recently revitalized by such prominent scholars as Erik Olin Wright and John Goldthorpe. Insisting on a realist conception of class, Kingston argues that presumed "classes" do not significantly share distinct, life-defining experiences.

Individual chapters assess the extent of class structuration in five dimensions of life: mobility (how demographically cohesive are classes?), interaction patterns (do classes exist as communal groups?), cultural orientation (are there class cultures, as Bourdieu and his followers maintain?), class sentiment (to what extent do objective position and subjective sentiments align?), and political orientations (do classes represent distinct political forces?). This broad assessment is the basis for Kingston's conclusion that classes do not exist in America in any meaningful way.

The Classless Society analyzes prominent general "maps" of the American class structure, as well as the less-studied extremes of socioeconomic position ("Lives of the Rich and Poor"), the alleged emergence of post-industrial classes (the "New Class" and the "McProletariat"), and class structuration in other societies ("American Unexceptionalism").

Kingston rigorously addresses the question, "How would you recognize a class if you saw one?" thus establishing clear grounds for engaging the issue. He relates the findings and methods of the best contemporary research in substantial detail, allowing the reader to assess the book's conclusions from a thorough evidentiary base.

This book explores the possible relations between Western types of rationality and Buddhism. It also examines some clichés about Buddhism and questions the old antinomies of Western culture ("faith and reason," or "idealism and materialism"). The use of the Buddhist notion of the Two Truths as a hermeneutic device leads to a double or multiple exposure that will call into question our mental habits and force us to ask questions differently, to think "in a new key."

Double Exposure is somewhat of an oddity. Written by a specialist for nonspecialists, it is not a book of vulgarization. Although it aims at a better integration of Western and Buddhist thought, it is not an exercise in comparative philosophy or religion. It is neither a contribution to Buddhist scholarship in the narrow sense, nor a contribution to some vague Western "spirituality." Cutting across traditional disciplines and blurring established genres, it provides a leisurely but deeply insightful stroll through philosophical and literary texts, dreams, poetry, and paradoxes.

This book explores the theoretical paradoxes and practical dilemmas that flow from the still radical idea that in a democracy it is the people who rule, and argues that accepting the open and uncertain character of democratic politics can lead to more sustainable and widespread forms of democratic engagement.

The author engages theorists from a range of democratic thought—Rousseau, Arendt, Benhabib, Sandel, Laclau, and Mouffe—to show how each either ignores or downplays the difficulties that democratic principles pose. Though there can be no entirely valid solution to the paradoxes that plague democracy, the author nonetheless argues that democratic politics—particularly under contemporary conditions of social fragmentation and insecurity—urgently requires new practical and rhetorical strategies. The book concludes by addressing the American context, elaborating the need for a language of democratic engagement less ensnared in the anti-political logic of moralism and resentment that now characterizes the American political spectrum.

“What is time then?” asked St. Augustine some 1,600 years ago. It was a question he could not answer, and over the centuries that followed, it was one that few scholars dared to address. Yet there are answers to this question of the true nature of time, and this book discusses several of them as a means of approaching its central concern: that humanity creates a variety of times and these different times affect the experiences of life—as times vary, so does life. Not so much focusing on watches, clocks, and calendars (though these are covered), the author argues that time is a fundamental component of the technological development of humanity.

The book addresses the relationships between time and life on three fundamental premises: (1) all times are not the same, (2) all times are social constructions, and (3) the times humanity creates direct the way humanity lives. The book addresses the major ways in which times differ (polychronicity, speed and punctuality, and orientation to past, present and future), how these differences are coordinated (entrainment), and how these differences affect human life, including such extreme effects that produce the best and worst of times. Building on these differences and the effects they produce, the author examines the possibility of humanity consciously creating more good times than bad. Throughout the analysis, a vital connection between time and life gradually emerges, namely, the impact of time on the meaning of life itself.

Materials from several disciplines inform the discussions, notably theory and research from the social and behavioral sciences, in particular the organization sciences. The author uses historical examples extensively throughout the book, but also presents new results that derive from original data he has collected.

The book will be valuable not only to those involved in the management and organization sciences, but also to sociologists and psychologists, who have largely avoided coming to terms with one of the central issues of human life—time.

This book is both a concise and lucid introduction to Nietzsche and an original contribution to critical debates concerning Nietzsche interpretation and reception. This overview takes issue with the prevailing tendency to focus on Nietzsche's later work, which reaches its extreme with Heidegger's almost exclusive focus on the group of late notes posthumously collected as The Will to Power. Vattimo aims to mediate between two prominent hermeneutic readings of Nietzsche: Wilhelm Dilthey's view that Nietzsche's work fits into the nineteenth-century tradition of the philosophy of life and Heidegger's belief that Nietzsche is best understood as the author of a pair of ontological doctrines, the will to power and the eternal return of the same.

Vattimo aims to show that Nietzsche's early interest in cultural and historical criticism can be found throughout his corpus and that it informs, and helps to explain, Nietzsche's later doctrines and writings. This allows us to understand these later doctrines in a deeper way, to see their connections with his wider concerns, and thus to make greater sense of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole.

This working hypothesis guides Vattimo through his elegant exposition of the basic views of the early and late Nietzsche, from the philological beginnings and the musings on Dionysus through the so-called positivist phase of the middle period up to the philosophy of Zarathustra and the fragmented insights that bespeak the will to power. Throughout, Vattimo's intellectual agenda is to present the philosophical relevance of a cultural criticism that does not let itself be reduced to a merely literary presentation of the psychology of decadence and nihilism, or to the grand ontological-metaphysical finale that Heidegger had in mind in his monumental Nietzsche studies.

As an appendix, Vattimo provides a history of Nietzsche reception in Europe that counters the narrow Anglo-American bias of much English-language Nietzsche scholarship.

During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, American publishing experienced unprecedented, exponential growth. An emerging market economy, widespread religious revival, educational reforms, and innovations in print technology worked together to create a culture increasingly formed and framed by the power of print. At the center of this new culture was the Bible, the book that has been called "the best seller" in American publishing history. Yet it is important to realize that the Bible in America was not a simple, uniform entity. First printed in the United States during the American Revolution, the Bible underwent many revisions, translations, and changes in format as different editors and publishers appropriated it to meet a wide range of changing ideological and economic demands.

This book examines how many different constituencies (both secular and religious) fought to keep the Bible the preeminent text in the United States as the country's print marketplace experienced explosive growth. The author shows how these heated battles had profound consequences for many American cultural practices and forms of printed material. By exploring how publishers, clergymen, politicians, educators, and lay persons met the threat that new printed material posed to the dominance of the Bible by changing both its form and its contents, the author reveals the causes and consequences of mutating God's supposedly immutable Word.

The examination's arbitrariness and cultural bias, its association with a normalizing surveillance, and its ridiculous attempts to quantify the unquantifiable have been perfectly obvious to generations of authors, educators, and even bureaucrats—yet it still dominates both British and American education systems.

This book explores the examination's figurative power for nineteenth-century discourses of subject formation and value through readings of works by Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, writers who were active during the 1850s and 1860s, when the examination began to structure a range of British institutions, from the working-class primary school to the Indian Civil Service.

Although they routinely resisted the spread of formal educational testing, their work reveals a fascination with the examination's unique ability to make reading and writing visible as value-able labor. As an element in literary discourse—as topos, plot structure, and figurative intersection—the examination remaps relations between the subject and knowledge, the person and the state, masculine self-discipline and feminine self-sacrifice, and intellectual and money economies. The book thus speculates on institutional, sexual, and economic aspects of Victorian professional gentility, as well as contributing to recent debates on Arnold's seductive stupidity, Trollope's "mechanical" realism, Dickens's bourgeois critique of capitalist exchange, and Ruskin's ambivalent attachment to schoolgirls.

The economic, erotic, and institutional relationships implicit in educational testing and the debates surrounding it continue to trouble literary critics as well as scholars, administrators, and teachers. Pedagogical Economies can thus shed light on current questions about the relationship between school and society.

This book focuses on the extension of realist writing toward alterity, toward otherness, in its ongoing efforts to enable individuals to speak and be heard correctly. Through a series of close readings of six authors from Balzac to Proust, the author shows the ways realist narrative engages the problem of bringing the other into the realm of the discursively representable. The acts of representation involved in that development were not necessarily coterminous with either the representation of the exotic and its attendant stereotypes or with the representation of individuals themselves. The representation of the other was the extension of discourse to what was previously unrepresentable. The author argues that the unrepresentable is often perceived as oppositional because of the structuring of discourse by hierarchies and metaphysics, whereby any bivalent pair is made into an oppositional pair.

This book consists of transcripts from two lecture courses Levinas delivered in 1975-76, his last year at the Sorbonne. They cover some of the most pervasive themes of his thought and were written at a time when he had just published his most important—and difficult—book, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Both courses pursue issues related to the question at the heart of Levinas's thought: ethical relation. The Foreword and Afterword place the lectures in the context of his work as a whole, rounding out this unique picture of Levinas the thinker and the teacher.

The lectures are essential to a full understanding of Levinas for three reasons. First, he seeks to explain his thought to an audience of students, with a clarity and an intensity altogether different from his written work. Second, the themes of God, death, and time are not only crucial for Levinas, but they lead him to confront their treatment by the main philosphers of the great continental tradition. Thus his discussions of accounts of death by Heidegger, Hegel, and Bloch place Levinas's thought in a broader context. Third, the basic concepts Levinas employs are those of Otherwise than Being rather than the earlier Totality and Infinity: patience, obsession, substitution, witness, traumatism. There is a growing recognition that the ultimate standing of Levinas as a philosopher may well depend on his assessment of those terms. These lectures offer an excellent introduction to them that shows how they contribute to a wide range of traditional philosophical issues.

The figure of the New Woman, soon to become a major signpost of Chinese modernity, was in the process of being composed at the turn of the twentieth century. This was a liminal moment in Chinese history, a period of great possibilities and much fluidity. At this time, the term xin nüxin or xin funü (the New Woman) had not yet achieved currency, for she represented an ideal yet to be fully articulated.

The cultural production of this period in China illustrates that the New Woman was constructed vis-à-vis her significant "others," whether domestic or foreign, male or female. To know the New Woman, then, it is necessary to know not just herself but also her others. Instead of offering a model of Western influence or indigenous origin, this study employs a model of translation, in which both the self and the other are subject to multiple transformations. It reads several popular Chinese writers and translators of the period whose abundant fiction (whether original or translated) bristles with difficulties in presuming either fidelity of translation or adequacy of depicting cross-cultural experience in the construction of the New Woman.

The late Qing era witnessed the translating, printing, and reading of a vast amount of Western literature, amounting to what has been called a "translation fever." The author focuses on the fictional and translational representation of a range of Western female icons, including Sophia Perovskaia (the Russian anarchist and would-be assassin of the tsar), the French Revolutionary figure Madame Roland, and Dumas's "la Dame aux camélias." In tracing the circulation and transformation of these popular figures through travel books, biographies, newspaper articles, oral performance scripts, and novels, this book narrates the complex relationship between imagining a foreign other and re-imagining the self. In investigating the very processes of translation, it provides a sustained analysis of the cultural and historical forces that produced the New Woman in China.

This book studies the structural inequalities between states as they evolve and influence the political process. Through the prism of inequality, it analyzes various forms of political violence including war and revolution, the origins and dissolution of states, and the sources of cooperation between states. The ultimate genesis of democracy is shown to be a consequence of the processes detailed in the book.

Using the emergence of inequality as a theoretical wedge into the substantive material, the author develops a theoretical-probabilistic argument linking scarcity and inequality. He presents evidence for this relationship in the form of an exponentially declining probability of attaining valued commodities under conditions of scarcity. Moreover, the greater the scarcity, the more rapid the decline. This is shown to be a recipe for the emergence of inequality under conditions of scarcity and requires no assumptions beyond those of scarcity and randomness. In other words, we need make no assumption concerning human nature or structural economic relations in order to derive the existence of inequality.

But this is only half of the author’s argument. Under conditions of expansion—outward movement of populations, conquest, and/or the resettlement of conquered populations—a distribution of even greater inequality emerges, namely the Pareto, or fractal, distribution of extreme inequality. The author argues that this distribution of vastly greater inequality is associated both with state formation, and, under different conditions, with the dissolution of states.

This new collection of challenging literary studies plays with a foundational definition of Western culture: the word become flesh. But the word become flesh is not, or no longer, a theological already-given. It is a millennial goal or telos toward which each text strives.

Both witty and immensely erudite, Jacques Rancière leads the critical reader through a maze of arrivals toward the moment, perhaps always suspended, when the word finds its flesh. That is what he, a valiant and good-humored companion to these texts, goes questing for through seven essays examining a wide variety of familiar and unfamiliar works.

A text is always a commencement, the word setting out on its excursions through the implausible vicissitudes of narrative and the bizarre phantasmagorias of imagery, Don Quixote's unsent letter reaching us through generous Balzac, lovely Rimbaud, demonic Althusser. The word is on its way to an incarnation that always lies ahead of the writer and the reader both, in this anguished democracy of language where the word is always taking on its flesh.

In this collection of essays Samuel Wheeler discusses Derrida and other “deconstructive” thinkers from the perspective of an analytic philosopher willing to treat deconstruction as philosophy, taking it seriously enough to look for and analyze its arguments. The essays focus on the theory of meaning, truth, interpretation, metaphor, and the relationship of language to the world. Wheeler links the thought of Derrida to that of Davidson and argues for close affinities among Derrida, Quine, de Man, and Wittgenstein. He also demonstrates the propinquity of Plato and Derrida and shows that New Criticism shares deconstruction’s conception of language. Of the twelve essays in the collection, four are published here for the first time.

The fundamental resemblance between Derrida and such analytic thinkers as Quine, Wittgenstein, and Davidson, the author argues, is that they deny the possibility of meanings as self-interpreting media constituting thoughts and intentions. Derrida argues that some form of magic language has determined the very project of philosophy, and his arguments work out the consequences of denying that there are such self-interpreting mental contents. In addition, Derrida and Davidson agree in denying any “given.” Without a given, questions about realism and idealism cease to have a point. Derrida and Davidson are both committed to the textuality of all significant marks, whether in neurons or on paper. They argue that there is no mode of representation more direct than language.

This pathbreaking volume will force a reassessment of many common assumptions about the relationship between Christianity and modern China. The overall thrust of the twenty essays is that despite the conflicts and tension that often have characterized relations between Christianity and China, in fact Christianity has been, for the past two centuries or more, putting down roots within Chinese society, and it is still in the process of doing so. Thus Christianity is here interpreted not just as a Western religion that imposed itself on China, but one that was becoming a Chinese religion, as Buddhism did centuries ago.

Eschewing the usual focus on foreign missionaries, as is customary, this research effort is China-centered, drawing on Chinese sources, including government and organizational documents, private papers, and interviews. The essays are organized into four major sections: Christianity’s role in Qing society, including local conflicts (6 essays); ethnicity (3 essays); women (5 essays); and indigenization of the Christian effort (6 essays). The editor has provided sectional introductions to highlight the major themes in each section, as well as a general Introduction.

Widely acknowledged as the leading architectural photographer of Northern California, the late Morley Baer had an enduring passion for photographing barns, which he began doing in the 1950s. This book makes available fine-arts quality prints of sixty-eight extraordinary black-and-white photographs of California barns, those often ghostly but comforting shapes in a grassy pasture we glimpse as we fly down the freeway at seventy miles an hour.

The photographs also serve as a documentary record of a once common and now vanishing element of the landscape of California and the West. What is it about an old barn that wrenches a heartfelt pang from us today? Why do we photograph them, visualize them in their prime, and voice strenuous objections when new developments threaten to wipe them away? For many of us, abandoned farm structures are the focus of romantic reverie, an evocation of our agrarian roots, inviting us back to what we imagine must have been simpler, less complicated lives. A vision of life on the farm conjures a sense of wholesomeness and hard work, tillers of the soil taming the wild land as the American way of life moved West.

Enjoyment of the superb photographs will be deepened by Bright Eastman’s colorful discussion of the history and various roles and styles of barns, as well as by the description by Patrick Jablonski—Morley Baer’s last assistant—of how Baer took pictures, developed his negatives, and printed them.

This is one of the first books in any language on the life and work of Miraji (1912-49), a member of the triumvirate of canonical Urdu poets of the twentieth century. Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings aims to unravel the paradox of an acclaimed modernist writer whose poems are widely regarded as impossibly difficult to comprehend. It also grapples with the vexed issue of how to speak of a Muslim male poet who wrote under a Hindu woman's name, and whom contemporary critics described as mad, sexually perverse, and a voyeur.

Miraji's short life spanned the final period of British colonialism in South Asia, and his work played a part in the nationalist struggle. This book locates Miraji's writings in the colonial milieu of his time by linking them to the literary and theoretical concerns of a prior generation of writers. By contextualizing Miraji's life and lyrics within a literary history of modernist poetry, it suggests new ways of conceiving modernizing nationalisms and their relationship to gender and sexuality. In a manner consistent with Miraji's own poetics, the author traces the logic of nationalist discourses in order to identify multiple intersections and possibilities foreclosed in the process of state formation in India and Pakistan.

Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings does more than delineate the construction of a modern Urdu literary canon from the 1920s to the 1940s. It teases out the threads that wove Urdu modernism into the global Marxist and progressive literary movements of the time; it resituates Miraji as an anticolonial, nationalist writer; it examines the way critics have played Miraji's life off his work and provides an alternative biography; and it presents close readings of some of his most compelling and challenging poems. In the process, the author reconceives the relationships among nationalism, gender, and sexuality. Appendixes offer a rich sampling of new translations of Miraji's poems, essays, and other prose works.

Studying a range of writers, genres, and disciplines, this book interrogates the status of geopolitics as a powerful twentieth-century fiction. The first part argues, through a reading of anarchist and imperialist geographers, that geopolitics emerged as a pseudoscience from the breakdown of nineteenth-century ideas of culture.

The book’s second part addresses the fate of the European hypothesis of culture, beginning with a chapter that studies the novels of Wilkie Collins within the historical context of democratic reform and the formalization of Empire. The next chapter finds, in the affinities between Olive Schreiner and Friedrich Nietzsche, a shared diagnosis of the nihilist positivism and eurocentrism of the culture hypothesis.

The third part examines the relation between the utopian globalism of international socialism and the geopolitical dystopia of world war. One chapter delineates the geography of politics in the 1890s through the medium of R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s political journalism and early modernist sketch-artistry. The final chapter traces the meaning of “sabotage” from its anarcho-syndicalist origins to its geopolitical significance in early films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Charting the contours of the long turn of the century, from 1860 to 1940, the book moves back and forth from Victorian to modernist fields of study to show how the nineteenth-century European hypothesis of culture haunts the twentieth-century fiction of geopolitics.

Independence Park, Tel Aviv, is the best-known meeting place for gay men in Israel; Independence Park, Jerusalem, is perhaps the second-best-known; and the hope for independence is the dominant theme of this wide-ranging collection of personal narratives told in the voices of twelve gay men representing a cross-section of contemporary Israeli society.

The speakers are Jew and Arab, ranging in age from 22 to 72. They include students and teachers, a waiter, a prostitute, a journalist, and a janitor. Some are married to women, some are “married” to men, some are single; their families come from Yemen, Germany, Morocco, Romania, Egypt, Russia. They talk about their family backgrounds and early childhood memories, their first stirrings of sexuality and responses to those feelings. They reveal their emotional struggles as well as their religious and political views.

The conviction structuring this book is that by allowing these men to render their different worlds in their own words, their voices will produce a layered chorus approximating the vibrant cacophony of the Israeli street. A remarkably rich assemblage of anthropological fieldwork, the book also can be read as literature—there are some fine storytellers here—or for pure human interest, as the narratives themselves are deeply moving.

This book is an introduction to the nature of modernity as envisioned by Germany’s leading social theorist of the late twentieth century, Niklas Luhmann. For Luhmann, modernity is neither an Enlightenment project nor a ludic rejection of that project, but rather the pre-condition of all our deliberations, the structure within which our semantics makes sense, even as we think we celebrate (or mourn) its passing. Rather than viewing modernity as a disease for which we seek a cure, Luhmann poses it as a question to which we continually devise incomplete and partial answers. When we grow impatient with the contingency and indeterminacy that is thus forced upon us and seek solace in community, religion (orthodox or civic), consensus, and a universal vision of the good life, we grow impatient with modernity itself.

The book injects concepts derived from Luhmann’s influential systems theory (complexity, contingency, and enforced selectivity; system differentiation, self-referential closure, and autopoiesis) into debates about modernity and postmodernity, constructivist and foundationalist epistemologies, the relationship between politics and ethics, and the possibilities of interdisciplinary work that spans the great divide between science and the humanities. Delighting in Luhmann’s provocatively cool and dispassionate bursting of cherished balloons, the book stages challenging engagements with such thinkers as Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Drucilla Cornell, Judith Butler, Michel Serres, N. Katherine Hayles, and such political theorists as Chantal Mouffe and Carl Schmitt. The irrepressibility of paradox emerges as a stubborn feature of all of these confrontations.

The book closes with two interviews: one a discussion with Luhmann and Hayles on epistemology, the other with Luhmann on the functional differentiation of modern society.

Given the attacks on the humanities by the right ("Goethe is not taught anymore!") and the left ("Why teach dead white males?") over the past decade, how can we teach and research in the humanities in the years to come? Drawing on thirty years of experience, a distinguished teacher and scholar here presents a series of closely interconnected exercises in understanding the present state and future possibilities of the humanities, especially the teaching of "foreign" languages and culture.

Rather than rail at a worldwide conspiracy by universities against the humanities, the author argues that the gradual erosion of the status of the humanities has been due to the muddling of the goals of teachers, students, and administrators: all are at fault. Teachers are at fault because they have lost sight of the goal of their profession—the clear and direct transmission of critical thinking and complex knowledge to those who may not immediately benefit from it. Students are at fault because they want social mobility without the necessary investment of time in an apprenticeship to learning and the generation of knowledge. Administrators are at fault because they want to have an economically viable structure in a world in which value is too often measured by a cost/benefit ratio. All three groups must rethink the university.

The underlying theme of the eight essays and addresses, four of them published for the first time, is that teachers in the humanities are the spokespersons of the university's history and future, doing the heavy lifting in teaching the bulk of the students those intellectual skills—critical reading, writing, culture, and thought—that will serve them no matter what their major or future employment. The volume illustrates a series of positions from how a teacher should be able to get tenure to what can be taught in innovative, cross-disciplinary teaching. Other topics address why one should teach European languages, how books and jobs are related in today's academy, and whether scientific research can have a place in the teaching of the humanities.

The Romantic era in England and Germany saw a sudden renewal of prophetic modes of writing. Biblical prophecy and, to a lesser extent, classical oracle again became viable models for poetry and even for journalistic prose. Notably, this development arose out of the new-found freedom of biblical interpretation that began in the mid-eighteenth century, as the Bible was increasingly seen to be a literary and mythical text.

Taking Walter Benjamin’s thinking about history as a point of departure, the author shows how the model for Romantic prophecy emerges less as a prediction of the future than as a call to change in the present, even as it quotes, at key turns, texts from the past. After surveying developments in eighteenth-century biblical hermeneutics, as well as the numerous instances of prophetic eruption in Romantic poetry, the book culminates in close readings of works by Blake, Hölderlin, and Coleridge.

Each of these writers interpreted the Bible in strong, variously radical and conservative ways, and each reworked prophetic texts in often startling fashion. The author’s reading of Blake focuses on the complex temporal and rhetorical dynamics at work in a prophetic tradition, with attention paid to the key mediating figure of Milton. The chapter on Hölderlin investigates the truth-claim of poetry and the consequences of Hölderlin’s insight into the necessarily figural character of poetry. The analysis of Coleridge correlates his theory of allegory and symbol with his theory and practice of political writing, which often relies on mobilizing prophetic authority. Together, the readings force us to reexamine the claims and practices of Romantic poets and thinkers and their ideas and ideologies, not without engendering some allegorical resonance with issues in our own time.

This book argues that The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first book, does not mark a rupture with his prior philosophical undertakings but is, in fact, continuous with them and with his later writings as well. These continuities are displayed above all in the entanglement of his surface narratives, in the self-consuming artifice of his writing, in the interplay of his voices, posturings, and ironies—in a word, in his staging of meaning rather than in his advocacy of one position or another.

The author shows that many of the substantive elements of The Birth of Tragedy are reminiscent of Nietzsche's earlier revisions of philology and that they anticipate the later writings: the inversion of the Dionysian and Appollinian domains; the interest in the atomistic challenge to Platonism (one of Nietzsche's lifelong concerns); and the theory of the all-too-human subject that emerges as a cultural anthropology, a hauntingly present reminder of human pretensions and their limits, which is likewise a thread that runs through the whole of Nietzsche's oeuvre, critically undoing what his philosophy appears to erect. The author argues that the coherence of Nietzsche's writings up to and including The Birth of Tragedy is incontestable. It points to a fact that needs to be turned to account in any reading of The Birth of Tragedy, namely that Nietzsche is a most unreliable witness to his own meaning.

The first parts of the study focus on broader issues: the relation of The Birth of Tragedy to the later writings; the problems of what the author calls "the metaphysics of appearances" (as opposed to the identification of the metaphysical as a realm lurking "behind" appearances); and the appearance—the apparition—of metaphysics in both the early and late works. In the latter parts of the study, the focus falls more narrowly on the formal and thematic complications in the narrative of The Birth of Tragedy. This book, the author argues, is a self-standing, complexly organized, and complete piece of imagining that needs to be examined on its own terms. And so while the surrounding philosophical reflections that Nietzsche made prior to and at the time of The Birth of Tragedy are brought in as needed, for instance the notes on Kant, Schopenhauer, and Lange, the primary interest lies in the self-presentation of the work itself.

Examining Latin American security in the post-Cold War era, policymakers and analysts from across the Americas assess the security threats and agendas of different subregions and evaluate the potential for wider hemispheric cooperation.

With the decline in Cold War tensions and external interference, along with a near-consensus favoring democracy and free market economics, Latin America faces an unusual opportunity to shape its own regional strategic agenda. Traditional threats such as border disputes must be addressed even while growing transnational problems challenge the capacities of young democracies. With increasing globalization, national security is inseparable from regional security and depends on the establishment of effective mechanisms for cooperation.

The contributors assess both the theoretical and empirical background of cooperation in the Americas, and argue that different subregions--such as the Caribbean Basin, the Andean nations, and the Southern Cone--approach cooperation from different strategic perspectives and traditions. They show that building hemispheric security requires pragmatic attention to local complexities and a concerted effort to emphasize common interests, including the defense of democracy, economic stability, citizens' security, and environmental protection.

The book asserts that the creation of a framework for regional cooperation will depend on the establishment at the local level of what it calls ConfidenceBuilding Measures (CBMs). It evaluates the potential roles of such international organizations as the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Defense Board, and studies the changing regional policies of the United States for their effectiveness and impact on regional security.

Sustaining Loss explores the uncanny, traumatic weaving together of the living and the dead in art, and the morbid fascination it holds for modern philosophical aesthetics. Beginning with Kant, the author traces how aesthetic theory has been drawn back repeatedly to the moving power of the undead body of the work of art. He locates the most potent expressions of this philosophical compulsion in Hegel's thesis that art is a thing of the past, and in Freud's view that the work of art is the haunting of the present by the endless suffering of what is dead but still has claims over the living.

The book asserts that modern aesthetics holds the key to unlocking the tortured relation of modernity to the past it is perpetually leaving behind. As the capacity to withstand the inescapable force of a past that is dead for us becomes the supreme test for a fully modern, fully secular philosophy, aesthetics moves to the center of philosophical reflection. But, the author argues, this secular philosophical orientation can be sustained only if aesthetic theory remains oriented by intimate contact with modernist works of art.

Sustaining Loss examines not only Kant, Hegel, and Freud, but also the contemporary artists Gerhard Richter and Ilya Kabakov, whose art turns fruitfully against art's own past. To live as a modern, the author asserts, is to live with the dead past that modernist art ceaselessly disgorges. Overall, the book aims to articulate an aesthetic theory suitable to the task of living in a time when, in Flannery O'Connor's words, "The blind don't see and the lame don't walk, and what's dead stays that way."

Here for the first time is the story of one of history's great scholarly and marital collaborations. J. L. and Barbara Hammond were among the most innovative and influential historians of the twentieth century. Between 1911 and 1934, they wrote eight books together that amount, in effect, to the first sustained social history of modern England. Three of their books in particular—The Village Labourer (1911), The Town Labourer (1917), and The Skilled Labourer (1919)—not only anticipated what came to be known as "history from below," but also permanently changed the way most people think about the Industrial Revolution, which they defined in the apocalyptic terms to which we have become accustomed.

The Hammonds were also public figures prominently involved, along with L. T. Hobhouse, J. A. Hobson, C. P. Scott, and others, in the definition and dissemination of "the new liberalism." From the point of involvement in the politics of one century, they helped give enduring historical shape to another, and thus exercise, like their friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb, a dual fascination.

Of the two Hammonds, J. L. was the more prolific, writing six books on his own and serving as a political journalist for virtually his entire professional life, which saw him intervene editorially in every public crisis from the Boer War to the Second World War. Ireland was (after the Industrial Revolution) arguably his greatest passion, one to which he devoted much of his editorial life and his supreme literary effort, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (1938).

Barbara Hammond was an accomplished classicist, the first woman to earn a First Class degree in Greats at Oxford. She is shown here to have done much more work on the labourer books than has been previously recognized, and to sustain through her letters an artful running commentary on the foibles of her age. Through her, especially, the author evokes a radical but also doggedly Victorian sensibility that survived uneasily into the age of Bloomsbury and beyond.

The Hammonds were unique in the extent of their fused identity, in the extent to which they became, as G. M. Trevelyan once put it, "one flesh and one author." The Hammonds is part dual-biography, part evocation of an age, but it is also a study of marriage, a marriage at a particular moment in history, a marriage in the art and craft of history.

This study of politics in early modern England uses the relations between provincial towns, the landed elite, and the crown to argue that the growth of connections, as much as of conflict, explains the development of early modern government.

Institutions provided a basic structure, but government relied on individuals and patronage for the articulation of political power. Patronage linked the powerful with the petitioners, enabling not only communication but also access and enforcement; personal connections made government work. This book shows the paradigmatic nature of patronage by examining how corporate towns adapted to new demands and needs by innovative use of personal connections.

The author traces the networks of personal relationships that provided dynamic interaction between central and local government. Borough corporations used these connections to further local business, but in the process, they bound their localities more tightly to the English state. Cultivation of patronage relations with peers and gentry gave townsmen access to the halls of power. In return for political favor and practical service, corporators offered patrons deference and obedience, gifts and hospitality, and office and authority. Clients gained benefits, patrons acquired prestige, and the crown increased its power.

The patterns of connection that helped shape the state are revealed in five thematic chapters and a case study, employing manuscript and printed records from over thirty provincial towns, from noble and gentle patrons, and from the central government from the 1580s to 1640. Rather than seeking independence or isolation from other authorities, corporate leaders worked to integrate themselves into the larger patterns of the state. Patronage offered a vital tool that suited both local needs and the royal will. Urban Patronage both illuminates the increasing cohesiveness of the English state and reveals the increasing stresses that plagued early Stuart government.

In this groundbreaking work, the author effects the first extended rhetorical-philosophical reading of the historically problematic relationship between Jews and Germans, based on an analysis of texts from the Enlightenment through Modernism by Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. The theoretical underpinning of the work lies in the author’s rereading, in terms of contemporary rhetorical theory, of the medieval tradition known as “figural representation,” which defines the Jewish-Christian relation as that between the dead, prefigural letter and the living, fulfilled spirit.

After arguing that the German Enlightenment ultimately plays out the historical phantasm of a necessary “Judaization” of Protestant rationality, the author shows that German Early Romanticism consists fundamentally in the attempt to solve the aporias raised by this impossible confrontation between Protestant spirit and Jewish letter. In readings of Dorothea Schlegel—Mendelssohn’s daughter—and her husband Friedrich Schlegel, the author provides a new interpretation of the Neo-Catholic turn of later German Romanticism. Further, he situates the proleptic end and reversal of the project of Jewish emancipation in the two extreme versions of late-nineteenth-century anti-Judaism, those of Marx and Wagner, here viewed as binary concretizations of a specifically post-Romantic paganized Protestantism.

Finally, the author argues that twentieth-century Modernism as represented by Nietzsche and Freud renews, if in a multiply ironic displacement, the secret “Judaizing” tendencies of the Enlightenment. Fascism and Communism both denigrate this Modernism, which affirms the letter of language as quasi-synonymous with the force of temporality—or anticipatory repetition—that disrupts all claims to the full presence of spirit. The book ends with a note on recent debates about Holocaust memory.

This book presents a new and comprehensive biography of one of the most prominent artists of the twentieth century in dialogue with the events and ideologies of his time. It encompasses the 98 years of Chagall’s life (1887-1985) in Russia, France, the US, as well as Germany and Israel, his deep roots in folk culture, his personal relationships and loves, his involvement with the art of the Russian Revolution, with Surrealism, Communism, Zionism, Yiddish literature and the state of Israel. The book exposes the complex relationships between Chagall’s three cultural identities: Jewish-Russian-French. Indeed, it is a biography of the turbulent times of the twentieth century and the transformations of a Jew in it, his meteoric rise from the “ghetto” of the Russian Pale of Settlement to the centers of modern culture.

The book reveals Chagall’s endless curiosity, his forays in many directions beyond painting and drawing: public art, theater and ballet, stained glass windows in churches and synagogues, lithographs, etchings, and illustrations of literature and the Bible. We observe the intricate relations between Chagall’s life and consciousness and the impact of his life on the iconography of his art. Thus, the book provides an indispensable key to the understanding of Chagall’s often enigmatic art. Indeed, it is a contribution to the understanding of some of the central problems of Modern art, such as the question of originality, the interaction between the formal discoveries of the avant-garde and cultural or multi-cultural representation, and the relations between an artist’s art and his personal biography.

Renowned Israeli-American scholar Benjamin Harshav presents the first comprehensive investigation of Marc Chagall’s life and consciousness after the classic 1961 biography by Chagall’s son-in-law Franz Meyer. Harshav’s narrative includes hundreds of private letters and documents written by Chagall and his contemporaries in Russian, Yiddish, French, English and other languages, translated by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav into English, and placed in their personal and historical context.

Giving the reader a unique window into the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy in President Bill Clinton’s first term, this book highlights the major foreign policy challenges faced and decisions made in a turbulent era. The book is organized around thirty seven key speeches by the Secretary of State, each introduced by an extensive essay that describes its policy context and purpose, and includes anecdotes, local color, and brief sketches of some of the leading figures on the world stage. These introductions, which constitute more than half the book, not only give the who, what, when, and where behind the speeches, but most important, explain the why and how.

For example, the group of speeches on Bosnia is preceded by an incisive account of the twists and turns of U.S. policy leading up to the Dayton Conference and the intense negotiations, involving several volatile personalities, that led to the historic Dayton agreement. Among the other subjects covered by the essays are our relations with China, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Haiti, the Middle East, Africa, and South America; international organizations such as NATO and the United Nations; and the global issues of human rights, terrorism, nuclear threat, and the environment.

The book begins with a Prologue that emphasizes Secretary Christopher’s long-standing interest in speeches as an instrument of public policy and the decision making behind this often overlooked aspect of statecraft. It also describes how the Secretary was offered the position by President-elect Clinton, the state of affairs as he found them when he took office, and his strategy and plans for U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War period. An epilogue recounts the Secretary’s decision to return to private life, offers his insights on the challenges facing the United States in the international arena in the years ahead, and sets forth some suggestions for future policy makers.

Above all, this book provides ample evidence that the author took seriously the advice that United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas gave him when he served as the justice’s law clerk in the 1949 term: “Get out in the stream of history, and swim as fast as you can.”

This long-awaited study, the magnum opus of a leading railroad historian, describes the conception, construction, and early operation of the first narrow gauge railroads in northern California. It is lavishly illustrated by some 600 photographs and drawings, almost three-quarters of which have never before been published.

The topic is approached through an unusual lens: the history of the relatively small but extraordinarily inventive contracting and engineering firm of the brothers Thomas and Martin Carter. The Carters were able to reduce the cost and complexity of light railroad construction to the point where local narrow gauge lines could initially compete with the state’s notorious railroad monopolies.

Pioneering a mobile manufacturing operation that could supply locally funded short lines with rolling stock (which traditionally came from East Coast manufacturers), the Carter Brothers began with a line to serve Salinas Valley wheat farmers, desperate to achieve an independent means for conveying their crops to the wharf in Monterey. The narrow gauge railroad that resulted was an act of political and economic defiance, but ultimately a hopeless assault on the "Octopus"—the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads.

Rallying around the example set in Monterey, a narrow gauge movement in California flourished in the mid-1870s, with the rapid launching of five more companies—the North Pacific Coast, the Santa Cruz Railroad, the Santa Cruz & Felton, the Nevada County Narrow Gauge, and the South Pacific Coast—all of which drew on the Carter Brothers for manufacturing and engineering. Soon, Thomas and Martin Carter were not only selling railroad supplies and engineering to all six short lines, but had won management positions with the strongest, the South Pacific Coast. Until personal and financial disaster overtook them in 1880, the Carters were at the forefront of not just a new business, but a new technology.

Behind the headlines of our time stands an unobtrusive army of science advisors. Panels of scientific, medical, and engineering experts evaluate the safety of the food we eat, the drugs we take, and the cars we drive. But despite the enormous influence of science advice, its authority is often problematic, and struggles over expert advice are thus a crucial aspect of contemporary politics. Science on Stage is a theoretically informed and empirically grounded study of the social process through which the credibility of expert advice is produced, challenged, and sustained.

Building on the sociology of Erving Goffman, the author analyzes science advice as a form of performance, examining how advisory bodies work to bring authoritative advice to the public stage. From this perspective, advisory bodies emerge as performers who engage in impression management: they selectively reveal and conceal themselves, actively presenting some things to their audiences while hiding others "backstage."

The book demonstrates that techniques for information control—including stagecraft, strategic self-presentation, and unauthorized disclosures or "leaks"—play a fundamental role in efforts to create and contest expert authority. The author uncovers this complex assemblage of dramaturgical machinery through a richly detailed comparative analysis of three controversial reports on diet and health, including a proposed revision to the Recommended Daily Allowances, prepared by the National Academy of Sciences—the most prestigious source of expert advice in the United States today.

This lively and accessible analysis—which includes its own drama, complete with Greek chorus—provides not only new insights about science advice but also a fresh look at the social dimensions of scientific writing. The theatrical metaphor highlights issues that more familiar theoretical frameworks often leave waiting in the wings. In the author's hands, scientific texts emerge not just as rhetorical constructions or forms of discourse, but also as crucial parts of systems for controlling the enclosure and disclosure of information, and thereby for structuring relations between experts and their audiences.

Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion of management education and practice. At the same time, the formalization of management practice has allowed for a widespread diffusion of management ideas across sectors and continents. This book provides an up-to-date summary of the development, refinement, and diffusion of managerial ideas, adding detail and explanation to commonly held conceptions about the explosion of management knowledge.

The contributors contend that management ideas do not flow automatically but are actively shaped and transformed by knowledge carriers—business schools, consultancies, and the media. Drawing on data from worldwide empirical studies, the chapters analyze how such carriers are organized, how they act and react, and how they shape and reshape knowledge. The book places the development and diffusion of management knowledge in a wider environmental and historical context and offers stimulating comparisons of European and American management traditions.

The combination of theory and practice will make this book a valuable resource for courses dealing with management, organizational and institutional theory, and globalization.

This book is a rich collection of philosophical essays radically interrogating key notions and preoccupations of the phenomenological tradition. While using Heidegger's Being and Time as its permanent point of reference and dispute, this collection also confronts other important philosophers, such as Kant, Nietzsche, and Derrida. The projects of these pivotal thinkers of finitude are relentlessly pushed to their extreme, with respect both to their unexpected horizons and to their as yet unexplored analytical potential. A Finite Thinking shows that, paradoxically, where the thought of finitude comes into its own it frees itself, not only to reaffirm a certain transformed and transformative presence, but also for a non-religious reconsideration and reaffirmation of certain theologemes, as well as of the body, heart, and love. This book shows the literary dimension of philosophical discourse, providing important enabling ideas for scholars of literature, cultural theory, and philosophy.

Throughout the twentieth century, public universities were established across the United States at a dizzying pace, transforming the scope and purpose of American higher education. Leading the way was California, with its internationally renowned network of public colleges and universities. This book is the first comprehensive history of California's pioneering efforts to create an expansive and high-quality system of public higher education.

The author traces the social, political, and economic forces that established and funded an innovative, uniquely tiered, and geographically dispersed network of public campuses in California. This influential model for higher education, "The California Idea," created an organizational structure that combined the promise of broad access to public higher education with a desire to develop institutions of high academic quality. Following the story from early statehood through to the politics and economic forces that eventually resulted in the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, The California Idea and American Higher Education offers a carefully crafted history of public higher education.

This book explores the accomplishments of the golden age of “macrohistory,” the sociologically informed analysis of long-term patterns of political, economic, and social change that has reached new heights of sophistication in the last decades of the twentieth century.

It describes the scholarly revolution that has taken place in the Marxian-inspired theory of revolutions, the shift to a state-breakdown model in which revolutions, rather than bubbling up from discontent below, start at the top in the fiscal strains of the state. The author links revolutions to military-centered transformations of the state, and reviews how he used this theory in the early 1980s to predict the breakdown of the Soviet empire.

He goes on to show the implications of viewing states and societies from the outside in, including the geopolitical patterns that affect the legitimacy of dominant ethnic groups and thus determine the direction of ethnic assimilation or fragmentation. Another application is the author’s new theory of democratization, which asserts that democracy depends not merely on a widening of the franchise but on a geopolitical pattern favoring federated structures of collegially shared power.

Using this new theoretical tool, the author argues that Anglophone scholars have polemically misinterpreted German history, and that the roots of the Holocaust cannot be determined by German-bashing but must be attributed to processes that affect all of us. Other essays generalize about the historical dynamics and transformations of markets. Going beyond Weber’s Eurocentric model, the author proposes a more general theory that explains the origins of capitalism in Japan on an independent but parallel path.

Independence Park, Tel Aviv, is the best-known meeting place for gay men in Israel; Independence Park, Jerusalem, is perhaps the second-best-known; and the hope for independence is the dominant theme of this wide-ranging collection of personal narratives told in the voices of twelve gay men representing a cross-section of contemporary Israeli society.

The speakers are Jew and Arab, ranging in age from 22 to 72. They include students and teachers, a waiter, a prostitute, a journalist, and a janitor. Some are married to women, some are “married” to men, some are single; their families come from Yemen, Germany, Morocco, Romania, Egypt, Russia. They talk about their family backgrounds and early childhood memories, their first stirrings of sexuality and responses to those feelings. They reveal their emotional struggles as well as their religious and political views.

The conviction structuring this book is that by allowing these men to render their different worlds in their own words, their voices will produce a layered chorus approximating the vibrant cacophony of the Israeli street. A remarkably rich assemblage of anthropological fieldwork, the book also can be read as literature—there are some fine storytellers here—or for pure human interest, as the narratives themselves are deeply moving.

This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today’s most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies.

The first part of the book addresses questions of current critical concern: Does it still make sense to search for objectivity in ethnography? What do we gain when we invoke “context” in our interpretations? How does literacy change the work of the ethnographer, and what are the boundaries between ethnology and history? This part ends with a plea for recuperating negativity in our thinking about culture.

The second part extends the work of critique into the past by examining the beginning of modern ethnography in the exploration of Central Africa during the late nineteenth century: the justification of a scientific attitude, the collecting of ethnographic objects, the presentation of knowledge in narration, and the role of recognition—given or denied—in encounters with Africans. A final essay examines how the Congolese have returned the “imperial gaze” of Belgium by the work of critical memory in popular history. The ten chapters are framed by two meditations on the relevance of theory and the irrelevance of the millennium.

In words that are as clean and precise as his haunting, starkly beautiful photographs, the author vividly recreates the life and times of the Western Homestead Era, that period beginning around 1885 when the prairie lands lying westward from the longitude of the western Dakotas became available to pioneering farmers. Some 70 black-and-white duotone photographs, with detailed captions, record the bleak landscapes and the abandoned farms, outbuildings, farm implements, and hand tools that are mute testimonies to the failed hopes of several million families who settled on these arid and semi-arid lands.

The author explains how their failure resulted from a deadly combination of natural and economic causes. Neither the federal government nor the homesteaders themselves were aware that some of the western homestead land was so dry that artificial irrigation often was required. But irrigation was unavailable to most of these farms, and many thousands of them failed within a few years. On most of the homestead lands, however, dry farming—by which crops are watered by falling rain and snow—permitted the newcomers to plant and reap a variety of crops. For several decades, these regions produced flourishing farms, towns, railroad lines, and dirt and gravel roads.

Meanwhile, and again unanticipated by both government and the prospering farmers, the climate of these productive regions was becoming increasingly dry. This was the natural phenomenon that culminated in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, which was coincidentally accompanied by the Great Depression. Crops went begging for lack of water, banks closed, railroads were abandoned, and the formerly prosperous homesteaders went broke by the several millions.

Historians of the Western United States have largely ignored the homesteaders. There is little romance in farming, especially when compared with that attached to cowboys, Indians, explorers, and fur traders. Still, the homesteaders were heroes in their own right. Theirs was the last great endeavor in the opening of the West, and this book, with its moving text, historical introduction, and stunning photographs, tells their story.

This book focuses on the cultural processes by which the idea of a Yugoslav nation was developed and on the reasons that this idea ultimately failed to bind the South Slavs into a viable nation and state. The author argues that the collapse of multinational Yugoslavia and the establishment of separate uninational states did not result from the breakdown of the political or economic fabric of the Yugoslav state; rather, that breakdown itself sprang from the destruction of the concept of a Yugoslav nation. Had such a concept been retained, a collapse of political authority would have been followed by the eventual reconstitution of a Yugoslav state, as happened after World War II, rather than the creation of separate nation-states.

Because the author emphasizes nation building rather than state building, the causes and evidence he cites for Yugoslavia’s collapse differ markedly from those that have previously been put forward. He concentrates on culture and cultural politics in the South Slavic lands from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in order to delineate those ideological mechanisms that helped lay the foundation for the formation of a Yugoslav nation in the first place, sustained the nation during its approximately seventy-year existence, and led to its dissolution.

The book describes the evolution of the idea of Yugoslav national unity in four major areas: linguistic policies geared to creating a shared national language, the promulgation of a Yugoslav literary and artistic canon, an educational policy that emphasized the teaching of literature and history in schools, and the production of new literary and artistic works incorporating a Yugoslav view.

In the book’s conclusion, the author discusses the relevance of the Yugoslav case for other parts of the world, considering whether the triumph of particularist nationalism is inevitable in multinational states.

What should we make of the return to the sacred evidenced by the new vitality of churches, sects, and religious beliefs in many parts of the world today? What are the boundaries between the essential traits of religion and those of ethics and justice? Is there a "truth" to religion? This remarkable volume includes reflections on such questions by three of the most important philosophers of our time—Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Together with other distinguished thinkers, they address a wide range of questions about the meaning, status, and future prospects of religion.

In his meditation on the "return of religion," entitled "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of Mere Reason," Derrida addresses the ways in which this return is intrinsically linked to transformations of which the new media are both the carriers and the symptom. Derrida coins this process one of globalatinization. This neologism signals, among other things, the process of a certain universalization of the Roman word or concept of religion, which tends to become hegemonic, as well as a certain performativity discernible in the new media and in contemporary structures of testimony and confession. Examples of this include, Derrida reminds us, not only the phenomenon of televangelism and televisual stagings of the pope's journeys, and not only the portrayal and self-presentation of Islam, but also the fetishization and becoming virtually absolute of the televisual and the multimedial as such.

Using Being and Time as a point of reference, Vattimo suggests that religious experience is both an individual experience and a manifestation of a historical rhythm within which religion regularly appears and disappears. A commentary by Gadamer summarizes and enriches the contributions by Derrida and Vattimo.

Four essays by Maurizio Ferraris, Eugenio Trias, Vincenzo Vitiello, and Aldo Giorgio Gargani complete the volume by examining other facets of the "religious."

This is a study of love, specifically of men’s and women’s emotional roles vis-à-vis one another in Northeast Brazil; of how people form conjugal relationships in this region; and of the impact of rapid socioeconomic change on courtship, marriage, cohabitation, and infidelity.

Rapid urbanization and expansion of the cash economy have transformed the region in a few decades. Among the transformations are shifts in how people conduct courtship, form marriages, view the proprieties of sexual behavior, and assess the proper social and economic roles of men and women. These changes have altered the relative importance of physical, economic, and emotional intimacy in conjugal relationships, transforming the nature of marriage—once defined as a largely economic relationship—into a largely emotional relationship, as ideas of romance once associated with infidelity, concubinage, and courtship are increasingly attached to marriage.

The book is largely based on interviews with men and women who talked about their often complicated love lives with wit and passion, and the book is rich in personal stories and quotations. Women were asked to discuss the nature of men and women, and men were asked to talk about women. Both sexes were questioned about their views on prostitution, concubinage, and promiscuity, as well as their definitions of love. Parents were asked for their views about marriage and child rearing (especially differences in raising boys and girls), their relations with their own parents, lovers, spouses, and friends, and their views on virginity and sexual propriety. The bluntness and articulateness of the informants about their motivations and experiences not only demonstrated that men and women viewed conjugal relationships very differently but enabled the author to specify and explore these differences in unusually interesting ways.

The year 1492 is only the last in a series of "ends" that inform the representation of medieval Spain in modern Jewish historical and literary discourses. These ends simultaneously mirror the traumas of history and shed light on the discursive process by which hermetic boundaries are set between periods, communities, and texts. This book addresses the representation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from Christian Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts.

The book offers a reading of texts that emerge from its Andalusi, Jewish, and Arabic cultural sphere: Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed; the major text of Kabbalah, the Zohar; and the Arabic rhymed prose narrative of Ibn al-Astarkuwi. The author argues that these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a pre-existing cultural situation, a recognizable literary tradition, or a particular genre.

At stake are issues—texts and contexts—that have gained particular urgency in the writings of such recent thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Avital Ronell. The book reads the place and taking place of language, interrogating the notion of disappearing contexts and the view that language is derivative of its true place, the context that, having ended, is mourned as silent and lost.

What made some 700 men and women in the Yorkshire town of Kingston-upon-Hull, in the years 1837 to 1900, decide to suffer no longer “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and take their own lives? In this study, the author seeks to uncover the experiences that drove people to suicide; to analyze how suicide was understood by victims, by their families and friends, and by legal and medical authorities; to study how the presumed causes of suicide and the meanings of suicide changed over time and in response to changed social circumstances; and to see what “suicide narratives” elicited by coroners’ inquests can tell us about Victorian life, beliefs, and values in general.

The book is based on an unprecedentedly complete and comprehensive collection of inquest files covering the entire Victorian era in Hull (most coroners’ files have not survived or exist only in fragmentary form). Hitherto, suicide in the Victorian period has been examined only on a national basis; where local evidence has been used, it has come chiefly from London. Through the testimony of relatives, neighbors, friends, and even the deceased (by means of suicide notes), the author has been able to get closer to the experience of suicide and its social construction than has been possible in any previous study.

The framework within which the author evaluates the paths to suicide is the life cycle. By placing each suicide in its local socioeconomic context, and by examining each stage in the life course for each sex and for different social levels, the author has been able to assess causation factors with great confidence. He establishes arguments (such as the importance of declining wages and job security for older men and the loss of a marital partner for either sex) more securely than have earlier studies, and puts some new arguments on the agenda (such as the importance of the presence or absence of interpersonal ties and the influence of Poor Law policy).

The century bounded by the Henrician Reformation and the Civil Wars marked an important stage in the development of urban institutions, culture, and society in England. At the outset of this period, England was still very much an agrarian society; by its end, it was well on the way to becoming an urban one as well. The complexity and subtlety of those developments become especially vivid when we experience them through the lives of more or less ordinary townspeople, which Tittler allows us to do here.

These biographical studies not only have much to tell us about the time and milieu, but also provide an array of interesting and varied characters: Henry Manship, the historian of his native Yarmouth; Henry Hardware, who removed “the giant, the naked boys and the devil in feathers” from Chester’s Midsummer Show; Robert Swaddon the swindler and John Pulman the “thief-taker” of London; Joyce Jeffries, the spinster money-lender of Hereford; John Brown, the speculator in dissolved monastic lands in Boston; John Pitt, the overseer of guildhall construction in Blandford Forum; John and Joan Cooke, the Mayor and Mayoress of Gloucester, the subjects of a most revealing posthumous portrait; and Sir Thomas White of London, the philanthropist and “merchant hero.” Tittler introduces these studies with a comprehensive but succinct description of English towns and cities of the time.

What does it mean to be a child or an adolescent growing up on the streets or in a state institution? How do children define their everyday lives in the midst of global processes? This ethnographic study situates childhood and adolescence as social forms within the changing family and political structures of the complex urban world of Caracas, Venezuela.

The presence of youngsters on the streets of Caracas embodies social contradictions at the national level, and this book discusses how these contradictions are played out in an oil-producing nation afflicted with hyperinflation, generalized corruption, the deterioration of public services, increasing poverty, and violence. Vivid life stories told by street children themselves portray their relations with family and friends, as well as with people they encounter: police officers, journalists, social workers, and passersby at their local hangouts. The book also describes and analyzes the justice system and institutions for minors, illustrating the constant failures to respond to, contain, or lessen youth violence.

Many young people come from shantytowns to the streets of Caracas for a better life, and the author shows how they seek status and power through style, pursuing commodities of the global consumer market, from Nike shoes to cellular phones. Drawing on her ethnographic data and contemporary theories of power, control, and style, the author critiques the inequalities of the Venezuelan class structure and the oil boom’s failure to provide adequate social services for a great majority of the population.

The study of Greece as an icon of culture appears to be as old as Greece itself, as if, like Pallas Athene springing from the head of Zeus, its cultural significance had attained full maturity at birth. In Silent Urns, the author reveals how Greece attained such significance as the result of the attempt to reconcile individuality, freedom, history, and modernity in eighteenth-century aesthetics. He argues that Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art (1764) produced this reconciliation by developing a concept of culture that effectively defined our modern understanding of the term, as well as our sense of what it is to be modern. From this reconciliation, Greece emerges as the form in which culture is first conceptualized as a historically and politically defined category.

In readings of works by Keats, Schelling, Aeschylus, Shelley, and Hölderlin, the author studies different aspects of Winckelmann's conceptualization of culture as it passes into Romantic Hellenism. Through these readings—in which individuality, identity, freedom, the tragic, and memory are all discussed—the book demonstrates how Romanticism took issue with the legacy of Greece that emerged in the eighteenth century, and did so in the name of a freedom that our cultural modernity no longer recalls.

This book proposes a new view of the democratization of America by recasting democracy as a symbolic theater, historically realized in an untheorized and irrational public utterance that began with the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692 and extended through the Great Awakening and the antebellum era. This discursive practice gave rise, as popular voice, to a distinctive mode of political and literary subjectivity, "democratic personality," which emerged without reference to the political-philosophical currents and attendant humanistic values that anticipated the formation of a liberal democratic society.

The author constructs a genealogy of democratic personality by examining the historical and, later, fictional theaters within which it emerged to redefine the relation of appearance to reality and thus challenge hierarchies of political and cultural power. Its history, as outlined in the first half of the book, traces how colonial culture forsook Puritan cosmology to embrace the complex cultural semiosis of a democratic society based on the representational potential of the individual. As a strategy for self-production that spurred an urgent inquiry into the ontological status of representation, democratic personality crucially influenced the rise of a national literature by complicating the ideological problem of establishing a "democratic" poetics.

The second half of the book examines the development—in the work of Brown, Crèvecoeur, Burroughs, Cooper, Emerson, and Whitman—of an American "aesthetic of innocence." As a platform for the production of a national literature that would claim a unique exemption from the deformations of fiction, the aesthetic of innocence evolved into the practice of a literary eugenics that intended to domesticate democratic personality by embracing its primitive energies as uniquely American while attempting to contain the subversive uncontainability of its voice. The book concludes with a reading of Billy Budd, Melville's novelistic rejection of liberal culture's attempt to domesticate democratic personality.

At the close of the twentieth century, democracy appeared to have overcome the Cold War partition of the world, as countries across the globe had deposed autocratic regimes and held free elections. Nowhere were these developments dramatized more brightly than in Eastern Europe in 1989, as newly formed civic movements replaced long-standing Leninist regimes with democratic governments.

Yet it is clear that the “waves” of democracy that initially seemed similar have led to widely varying outcomes. While some countries in Eastern Europe were invited to join NATO and the European Union, others were excluded. Former communists were elected to power in post-communist Poland and Hungary, but were largely absent in the Czech Republic and were transformed into populists in Slovakia. These differences have led the author to address several questions, including: How similar actually were the Leninist regimes before their dissolution, and how similar were their demises? How did the way communism fell affect the founding of democratic states in Eastern Europe, notably in Poland and Czechoslovakia?

This book offers a critique and reformulation of existing theories of democratization, as well as of earlier understandings of the fall of communism. By contrasting the negotiated pact in Poland with the collapse of the regime in Czechoslovakia, it provides a theoretical framework to explain how different paths of democratization affected the prospects for sustainable democracy. The book goes beyond the explanation that a “Gorbachev” effect determined events in the late 1980s by contrasting mobilization against Leninist regimes with negotiations for democratic institutions. It highlights competition between aspiring leaders, reconceptualizing the notion of civil society as a master frame within which movements and leaders sought to mobilize popular support.

The book also emphasizes the transformation of networks associated with the birth of a democratic nation, such as the Catholic Church in Poland and the theater strikes in Czechoslovakia. Finally, it analyzes how paths of change structured political competition in new democracies in both the short and the medium term.

Over the past decade, increasing attention has been paid to the life and work of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), considered by many the major African-American fiction writer before the Harlem Renaissance by virtue of the three novels and two collections of short stories he published between 1899 and 1905.

Less familiar are the essays he wrote for American periodicals from 1899 through 1931, the majority of which are analyses of and protests against white racism. Collected as well in this volume are the addresses he made to both white and black audiences from 1881 through 1931, on topics ranging from race prejudice to the life and literary career of Alexandre Dumas.

The 77 works included in this volume comprise all of Chesnutt’s known works of nonfiction, 38 of which are reprinted here for the first time. They reveal an ardent and often outraged spokesman for the African American whose militancy increased to such a degree that, by 1903, he had more in common with W. E. B. Du Bois than Booker T. Washington. He was, however, a lifelong integrationist and even an advocate of “race amalgamation,” seeing interracial marriage as the ultimate means of solving “the Negro Problem,” as it was termed at the end of the century. That he championed the African American during the Jim Crow era while opposing Black Nationalism and other “race pride” movements attests to the way Chesnutt defined himself as a controversial figure, in his time and ours.

The essays and speeches in this volume are not, however, limited to polemical writings. An educator, attorney, and man of letters with wide-ranging interests, Chesnutt stands as a humanist addressing subjects of universal interest, including the novels of George Meredith, the accomplishments of Samuel Johnson, and the relationship between literature and life.

This book argues that the invention of Asian American identities serves as an index to the historical formation of modern America. By tracing constructions of "Asian American" to an interpenetrating dynamic between Asia and America, the author obtains a deeper understanding of key issues in American culture, history, and society.

The formation of America in the twentieth century has had everything to do with "westward expansion" across the "Pacific frontier" and the movement of Asians onto American soil. After the passage of the last piece of anti-Asian legislation in the 1930's, the United States found it had to grapple with both the presence of Asians already in America and the imperative to develop its neocolonial interests in East Asia. The author argues that, under these double imperatives, a great wall between "Asian" and "American" is constructed precisely when the two threatened to merge. Yet the very incompleteness of American identity has allowed specific and contingent fusion of "Asian" and "American" at particular historical junctures.

From the importation of Asian labor in the mid-nineteenth century, the territorialization of Hawaii and the Philippines in the late-nineteenth century, through wars with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam and the Cold War with China, to today's Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation group, the United States in the modern age has seen its national identity as strongly attached to the Pacific. As this has taken place, so has the formation of a variety of Asian American identities. Each contains a specific notion of America and reveals a particular conception of "Asian" and "American."

Complicating the usual notion of "identity politics" and drawing on a wide range of writings—sociological, historical, cultural, medical, anthropological, geographic, economic, journalistic, and political—the author studies both how the formation of these identifications discloses the response of America to the presence of Asians and how Asian Americans themselves have inhabited these roles and resisted such categorizations, inventing their own particular subjectivities as Americans.

Where does courtly literature come from? What is the meaning of "courtly love"? What is the relation between religious and secular culture in the Middle Ages, and why does it matter? This book addresses these questions, as its title indicates, by way of contradiction. Contradiction is central both to medieval logic and to most modern protocols of reading; it therefore informs both the production and the reception of medieval texts. Yet contradiction itself is rarely analyzed, serving more often as a spur to interpretation than as its object.

This book works between the complex philosophical culture of the twelfth century (principally the traditions of Aristotle and of philosophical Neoplatonism, which diverge significantly in their treatment of contradiction) and the no less complex thought of Lacan (which is just as bound up with contradictoriness). Situating twelfth-century Anglo-Norman, French, and Occitan literature within this philosophical embrace, the author studies the interaction of three major literary genres—hagiography, troubadour lyric, and romance—an interaction that, in the course of the century, generates what we now call "courtly literature."

She shows how preferences for different ways of dealing with contradiction migrate from one genre to another during the twelfth century. She also shows how this movement resulted, by about 1170, in different traditions converging to produce the complex artifacts that canonized literary "courtliness," not only for the Middle Ages but for us as well. Coinciding with this convergence, there is a shift in the locus of contradiction from subject to object. This crucial development not only privileges the object within texts, it also cements the value of texts themselves as object.

In a series of comparisons between religious and courtly texts that draws on the writings of Lacan and Kristeva, the author explores how these objects can be variously described in terms of the psychoanalytical concepts of abjection, sublimation, or perversion. The book concludes by suggesting that the historical importance of courtly literature lies in its capacity to mediate, through the centrality accorded to the contradictory object, this transfer from medieval to modern structures of thought and thereby to shape modern forms of enjoyment.

Socrates banished poetry from the ideal republic, adopting the philosophical position that poetic language operates outside the conventions of public discourse and is private in expression. But what does the banished language of poetry say about its relation to public space? Is it possible to draw a line severing the language of beauty from the language of truth? Derrida asks whether the line ought rather to pass between Western metaphysics, with its logic of polar opposites, and another way that does not organize everything in oppositional terms. The verbal economy organized around the poem as inscription, for instance, fits awkwardly with a division between a public discourse under the aegis of truth and a private one regulated by aesthetic pleasure.

Poetry's Appeal takes the reemergence of a viable poetry in the politicized culture of revolutionary and post-revolutionary France as a signal that poetry's sentence of exile from the public arena is unresolved. It finds that poetry addresses history and the political through a disjunction between its illusory status as a song of private, lyrical intent and its actual state as a material inscription, inevitably public in character.

The book confronts several issues raised by the gap between poetry's aesthetic status and its material state. It shows that this gap allows poetry to make a strong critique of symbols as weapons for waging ideological warfare. As lyric, a poem naturalizes linguistic structures whose artificiality, as inscription, it makes manifest. Inscription thus enables the poem to act subversively against the ideology it supposedly supports. Furthermore, the chances and economies of the letter, the mark, and the page can have productive, positing power in poetry. The author argues that the zones and pockets that emerge thanks to nonsignifying elements of language have analogies for reading the city space.

In chapters on Chénier, Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, the book details some of the struggles between the ideological and material sides of poetry with the nineteenth-century remappings of political space: memory and the archive, the censorship of material history, the propping of founding performatives, the legibility of founding texts, the need to redefine action where technique is productive, and the recognition and assimilation of zones owed to technique.

Institutional logics, the underlying governing principles of societal sectors, strongly influence organizational decision making. Any shift in institutional logics results in a similar shift in attention to alternative problems and solutions and in new determinants for executive decisions. Examining changes in institutional logics in higher-education publishing, this book links cultural analysis with organizational decision making to develop a theory of attention and explain how executives concentrate on certain market characteristics to the exclusion of others.

Analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data from the 1950s to the 1990s, the author shows how higher education publishing moved from a culture of independent domestic publishers focused on creating markets for books based on personal, relational networks to a culture of international conglomerates that create markets from corporate hierarchies. This book offers broader lessons beyond publishing—its theory is applicable to explaining institutional changes in organizational leadership, strategy, and structure occurring in all professional services industries.

Focusing on the lives and work of women teachers in two rural California counties from 1850 to 1950, Country Schoolwomen explores the social context of teaching, seeking to understand what teaching meant to women teachers, what it provided them, and how it shaped their categories of experience.

The women we meet in this study taught in isolated one- and two-room schoolhouses and in the migrant schools of the Depression years; many of them witnessed the profound upheavals brought about by the two world wars. Through the lens of their lives, the author examines the growth of state control over schools, the irrevocable impact of powerful economic and political changes on small-town life, and the patterns of racism that have divided California from the time of the earliest European settlement.

This study challenges a number of assumptions about the lives and work of women teachers. It is often assumed, for example, that the work of women in schools has always been controlled by men—that education has, with rare exceptions, remained a patriarchal space in which women care for children in classrooms while men hold positions of authority, define issues, and set policy. Country Schoolwomen introduces us to a network of women educators who occupied positions of power at the state level, who supported one another, and who defined an alternative, far more positive image of the woman teacher. The work of these women put forth a vision of classroom teaching as a serious and stimulating profession. And for many of the women in this study, teaching clearly did provide material resources and intellectual satisfaction.

The historical record thus suggests that rather than signaling their subjugation, teaching has afforded women a potential source of power; it has offered them respect, autonomy, and financial independence. But women have had to struggle—not always successfully—to claim this potential, which male educators have often sought to deny or disregard. In addition, both university experts and local communities have persisted in viewing classroom teaching as "women's work" and have consequently been slow to acknowledge competing perspectives on the profession. This study ultimately reveals, then, not a homogeneous tradition but a dense ideological landscape, one in which representations of "the woman teacher" were often caught among contradictory and contested visions.

Lacan and the Matter of Origins traces the development of Lacan's thinking about the role of the mother in psychical formation. It examines the conceptual struggle throughout his work over issues of maternal agency in relation to the constitution of human subjectivity, and the theoretical, historical, and autobiographical reasons for this struggle. Lacan is widely held to emphasize the paternal dimension of human subjectivity and the phallic signifier. This book demonstrates that the mother occupies a crucial position in the Lacanian project, even if the maternal relation is not systematically theorized. The maternal figure appears as a Cheshire Cat who fades away and reappears at different times.

The book traces the major shifts in Lacan's understanding of the maternal within an intertextual framework that includes Augustine, Klein, Kojève, and Rank. Pursuing in Lacan's writings the sometimes contradictory or unassimilable functions of the mother, the book closely tracks his variations on and departures from the Freudian definition of such concepts as primary identification, narcissism, castration, deferred action, and the death drive. Lacan's major contribution to twentieth-century thought emerges here in the context of his ostensibly loyal yet revisionist stance toward Freud as his major precursor in the psychoanalytic field.

For those reading Lacan's often recondite work for the first time, Lacan and the Matter of Origins provides an accessible point of entry, with its clear explication of key terms together with their historical and conceptual background. For readers familiar with Lacanian theory, the book offers a reconceptualization of the evolution of his teachings from literary-critical, cultural, and biographical perspectives; it also presents a new approach to Lacan through the interplay of influences integral to the formation of his revisionary thought.

In late 1910, three American adventurers set off on a remarkable around-the-world journey by automobile. Sponsored by the Hupp Motor Car Corporation, the trip was intended to publicize the durability of the Hupmobile and help stimulate export sales.

The car was first driven from Detroit to San Francisco—a very difficult journey in its own right in 1910. From San Francisco, the car and its drivers took a steamship to Hawaii, and from there to Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, unloading and touring at each port of call. The men and their machine spent the next five weeks attempting to drive through the Philippines, and then pushed on to Japan and China, where they managed to stay one step ahead of the Chinese revolution. They then drove across India, and from there, sailed to Egypt, brining the first automobile ever to be seen in that country. Next, the Hupmobilists sailed to Italy. In Rome, the adventurers met Pope Pius X, and then drove north to Germany and France. They crossed the English Channel to Folkstone, toured England, and then ferried from Liverpool to Ireland. They returned to New York in time for the 1912 auto show.

In the end, the Hupmobile was driven 41,000 miles and transported by steamship another 28,000. A new world was dawning, both for transportation and for American business enterprise.

This book examines how the early modern Portuguese state used convicts and orphans to populate its global empire over a period of two hundred years. In a country with as small a population base and the global labor requirements of Portugal, no one was expendable, not even such marginal figures as criminals, gypsies, orphans, and prostitutes. The author examines how the Portuguese judicial system, Overseas Council, Courts of the Inquisition, and charities coordinated their efforts to populate border cities in Portugal during the Middle Ages, and then turned to various sites in the empire as places of exile for these elements of society. In addition, he addresses the issue of gender in the state’s use of two distinct groups of single women as colonizers, orphan girls and reformed prostitutes, each given state-awarded dowries if they agreed to relocate overseas.

We are well acquainted with this system as it was used by the British in Australia in the nineteenth century, and much work has been done on similar efforts by other imperial powers, such as France, Spain, Russia, and China, to populate remote regions of their empires. However, this is the first study of the much earlier Portuguese case, and it provides a significant link between the medieval and modern applications of penal exile.

The Portuguese state, with a population in 1600 one-sixth that of Great Britain and one-tenth that of France, exiled around 50,000 people, the same number as each of these larger powers. The punishment of exile was thus far more pervasive in Portuguese society. This work represents a new chapter in the study of exile as a punishment and the use of criminals as colonizers. It helps to explain the longevity of the Portuguese global empire as well as the growth of informal Portuguese-related communities around the world.

This collection of fifteen essays deals with the representations, theories, and problematics of homosexuality in French writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though focusing on literature, it also includes other self-conscious writing, such as medical discourse and lexicography. The authors examine how homosexuality is a component in the representation of ideology, desire, and structures in the nineteenth century, and how, in the twentieth century, homosexuality emerges in its own right as a subject for representation and study.

Drawn from insights of the past twenty years, the essays reflect the renewed approach of gender and sexuality as they relate to homosexuality and its representation, and they rely on models that differentiate between sexuality and gender and between natural inclinations and social constructs. Despite the wide variety of subjects, critical positions, and authors' backgrounds, what these essays have in common is the willingness of the contributors to go beyond a set of rhetorics, a set of limitations that were a defining moment in the struggle of gay liberation, and its reflection in both creative and critical writing.

The essays are the product of a new stage in the development of gender studies: a look at all the genders, a recognition of a completely destabilized system of genders and sexes, a privileging of the slippages, ambiguities, and tropings among these positions. The essays range from studies of traditional narrative and poetry to readings of medical records, from examinations of twentieth-century narratives of gay liberation to readings of gender in the post-colonial world. For that reason, the editors have given the collection the title Articulation of Difference, for in that title, beyond gender and genre, is the idea of new production, new worlds, and new ideas.

What does it mean to be a child or an adolescent growing up on the streets or in a state institution? How do children define their everyday lives in the midst of global processes? This ethnographic study situates childhood and adolescence as social forms within the changing family and political structures of the complex urban world of Caracas, Venezuela.

The presence of youngsters on the streets of Caracas embodies social contradictions at the national level, and this book discusses how these contradictions are played out in an oil-producing nation afflicted with hyperinflation, generalized corruption, the deterioration of public services, increasing poverty, and violence. Vivid life stories told by street children themselves portray their relations with family and friends, as well as with people they encounter: police officers, journalists, social workers, and passersby at their local hangouts. The book also describes and analyzes the justice system and institutions for minors, illustrating the constant failures to respond to, contain, or lessen youth violence.

Many young people come from shantytowns to the streets of Caracas for a better life, and the author shows how they seek status and power through style, pursuing commodities of the global consumer market, from Nike shoes to cellular phones. Drawing on her ethnographic data and contemporary theories of power, control, and style, the author critiques the inequalities of the Venezuelan class structure and the oil boom’s failure to provide adequate social services for a great majority of the population.

Complex Pleasure deals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writers—Lessing, Kant, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin. On the basis of close readings of these authors Stanley Corngold makes vivid the following ideas: that where there is literature there is complex pleasure; that this pleasure is complex because it involves the impression of a disclosure; that this thought is foremost in the minds of a number of canonical writers; that important literary works in the German tradition—fiction, poetry, critique—can be illuminated through their treatment of literary feeling; and, finally, that the conceptual terms for these forms of feeling continually vary.

The types of feeling treated in Complex Pleasure include wit (the startling perception of likeness) and the disinterested pleasure of aesthetic judgment; Hölderlin's "swift conceptual grasp," in which "the tempo of the process of thought is stressed"; "artistic imagination," mood, sadistic enjoyment, rapturous distraction, homonymic dissonance, and courage as a mode of literary experience. At the same time, through the deftness, range, and surprise of its execution, the book itself conveys complex pleasure. The reader will also find fascinating, hitherto untranslated material by Nietzsche ("On Moods") and Kafka (important sections from his journals and from his unfinished novel The Boy Who Sank Out of Sight).

Two questions have intrigued observers of the Lou Henry Hoover House, built at Stanford University in 1919 by Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover and now the official residence of the university’s president. Who was the building’s architect? And what was the motive for its unusual, cubic, flat-roofed, undecorated form? Although professional architects were involved in the project, this book shows that the architect was actually Lou Henry Hoover herself, who conceived the design of the house and worked out its details, using her architects largely for technical matters and to produce the drawings and supervise construction. As for the design, the book argues that it was inspired mainly by the Native American Pueblo architecture of New Mexico and Arizona. Herbert Hoover, in fact, called it a “Hopi house,” and Lou referred to her “Pueblo walls,” but the Pueblo connection was later denied by others involved in the project.

The book reveals that both of the Hoovers were interested in Native American culture, and that Lou, in particular, was fascinated with the “primitive” architecture of the non-Western world, which she had studied during the years when she and Herbert had lived and worked in Asia and elsewhere. Primitive forms did not appeal to her for their exoticism, as was typical at that time, but for the virtues she found in them. The Hoover House is a remarkable example of the contribution of non-Western or indigenous architecture to the development of modernism.

The essays in this volume are united by their attention to the many ways in which residents of Greece’s southern Argolid peninsula have attempted to shelter, feed, and advance the economic situation of their families over the last three centuries. This work juxtaposes a series of research projects undertaken in various communities, projects that, taken together, have made the southern Argolid the focus of more ethnographic and ethnohistorical study than any other comparable region of Greece. Ethnographic, geographic, historical, and archaeological methodologies are integrated to yield an image of the southern Argolid as a contingent countryside whose boundaries, character, people, and external connections have been reconfigured time and again.

Such notions strengthen general reformulations occurring within Greek ethnography and speak directly to archaeological attempts to connect the Greek past and present. This volume, the fourth in a series of books deriving from the Argolid Exploration Project conducted by Stanford University, sets forth the material conditions of rural Greek life as mutable and negotiated in ways that complement archaeological interest in the repeated settlement fluctuations of the Greek past. It also exemplifies recent ethnographic shifts in conceiving other aspects of modern Greek life.

The volume replaces assumptions of village longevity with inquiry into what causes settlements to form and grow or to decline. It places idealized inheritance patterns alongside records of actual land transactions. Houses expand, contract, and change over time. The social boundaries among shepherds, farmers, and sailors blur through an exploration of personal occupation histories. In short, the book reexamines and questions many of the categories and concepts by which rural Greece has long been represented.

The high school reunion occurs throughout the United States and cuts across differences in age, locality, and ethnicity. This popular event is commonly thought of as a light-hearted social occasion or an exercise in nostalgia that has little other significance in the lives of its participants. Drawing on candid personal narratives derived from reunions ranging from the fifth to the fiftieth, this pathbreaking study demonstrates, however, that for many Americans the high school reunion is a rich and often poignant experience.

Of particular interest is the fact that this ethnographic study was conducted by a Japanese anthropologist trained in the United States, who offers a comparative perspective on high schools in the two countries. High schools serve very different social purposes in Japan and the United States, and the ways people in the two countries view their high school years differ accordingly.

The author examines the American high school reunion as a dramatic scene in the construction of self and meaning in adulthood. During the high school reunion, Americans are thrown into a room full of mirrors in which they are confronted by different visions of themselves. There they see images of their high school selves filtered through the lights and shadows cast by classmates’ memories and projected against the backdrop created by the lives of those classmates in the present day. Through an analysis of the multiple reflections of self that emerge during reunions, the author shows how reunions afford people an occasion on which to reevaluate their own memories and arrive at a new understanding of self. The American high school reunion thus provides participants with a series of self-perceptions from which they can construct new narratives of their own lives.

This book is a history of the Mixtec Indians of southern Mexico, who in their own language call themselves Tay Ñudzahui, "people of the rain place." These people were among the most populous cultural and language groups of Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest. This study focuses on several dozen Mixtec communities in the region of Oaxaca during the period from about 1540 to 1750.

The work is largely based on an extraordinary collection of primary sources, translated and analyzed by the author, that were written by Mixtecs in the roman alphabet from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. To complement this native-language corpus, the author has examined preconquest and early colonial pictorial writings, Spanish-language civil and trial records, and Nahuatl (Aztec) texts.

The book addresses many interrelated topics, including writing, language, sociopolitical organization, local government, social and gender relations, land tenure, trade, rebellion, religion, ethnicity, and historical memory. Throughout, the author emphasizes the internal, indigenous perspective instead of relying on Spanish sources and points of view. In its focus on indigenous concepts, the book introduces a new terminology and new categories of analysis in colonial Mexican history. The conclusion makes detailed comparisons with recent findings on the Nahuas of central Mexico and the Maya of Yucatán, and revisits the question of cultural change among indigenous peoples under colonial rule.

Published in France in 1943, Faux Pas is the first collection of Maurice Blanchot's essays on literature and language, consisting of fifty-four short pieces that were originally issued as reviews in literary journals, and one long introductory meditation that defines the trajectory of the whole volume. These essays—like those collected in the other five books of criticism published over several decades—have established Blanchot as the most lucid and powerful French critic of the second half of the twentieth century. Sober reconstructions of the main tenets of both classical and modern, both literary and theoretical texts, they have attained the status of model readings for authors as diverse as da Vinci and Kierkegaard, Melville and Proust, Molière, Goethe, and Mallarmé.

However, the book is not a miscellaneous collection of exquisite essays. The first section of the volume, "From Anguish to Language," indicates the relative unity of its trajectory and its special moment in the development of Blanchot's thought. "Anguish" was a prominent notion for the existentialist philosophies of the period of his first work, and in this book Blanchot reflects on the necessary transition from the paradoxes of anguish to a focus on the paradoxes of language. He does so without ever betraying the affective tensions that attach themselves to linguistic utterances, but he also insists that the pathos of anxiety is, in the last resort, comical. Whoever writes "I am lonely" can judge himself to be quite comical, as he evokes his solitude by addressing a reader and using means that make it impossible to be alone.

This comedy of language is retraced in Blanchot's intensely luminous essays on poetry and narration, on silence and symbolism, the novel and morals, the stranger, the enigma, time, and the very possibility of literature in the works of Blake, Balzac, Rimbaud, and Gide, Bergson and Brice Parain, Rilke and Bataille, Sartre, Camus, Queneau, and so many others.

Lacan and the Matter of Origins traces the development of Lacan's thinking about the role of the mother in psychical formation. It examines the conceptual struggle throughout his work over issues of maternal agency in relation to the constitution of human subjectivity, and the theoretical, historical, and autobiographical reasons for this struggle. Lacan is widely held to emphasize the paternal dimension of human subjectivity and the phallic signifier. This book demonstrates that the mother occupies a crucial position in the Lacanian project, even if the maternal relation is not systematically theorized. The maternal figure appears as a Cheshire Cat who fades away and reappears at different times.

The book traces the major shifts in Lacan's understanding of the maternal within an intertextual framework that includes Augustine, Klein, Kojève, and Rank. Pursuing in Lacan's writings the sometimes contradictory or unassimilable functions of the mother, the book closely tracks his variations on and departures from the Freudian definition of such concepts as primary identification, narcissism, castration, deferred action, and the death drive. Lacan's major contribution to twentieth-century thought emerges here in the context of his ostensibly loyal yet revisionist stance toward Freud as his major precursor in the psychoanalytic field.

For those reading Lacan's often recondite work for the first time, Lacan and the Matter of Origins provides an accessible point of entry, with its clear explication of key terms together with their historical and conceptual background. For readers familiar with Lacanian theory, the book offers a reconceptualization of the evolution of his teachings from literary-critical, cultural, and biographical perspectives; it also presents a new approach to Lacan through the interplay of influences integral to the formation of his revisionary thought.

This book is a rich collection of philosophical essays radically interrogating key notions and preoccupations of the phenomenological tradition. While using Heidegger's Being and Time as its permanent point of reference and dispute, this collection also confronts other important philosophers, such as Kant, Nietzsche, and Derrida. The projects of these pivotal thinkers of finitude are relentlessly pushed to their extreme, with respect both to their unexpected horizons and to their as yet unexplored analytical potential. A Finite Thinking shows that, paradoxically, where the thought of finitude comes into its own it frees itself, not only to reaffirm a certain transformed and transformative presence, but also for a non-religious reconsideration and reaffirmation of certain theologemes, as well as of the body, heart, and love. This book shows the literary dimension of philosophical discourse, providing important enabling ideas for scholars of literature, cultural theory, and philosophy.

Confronting the Occupation is a study of work, education, political-national resistance, family, and community relations in a Palestinian refugee camp under conditions of Israeli military occupation. It is based on extended field research carried out by an Israeli sociologist-anthropologist in Dheisheh camp, south of Bethlehem, between 1992 and 1996. Emphasis is placed on how men and women, families, and the local refugee community confront the occupation regime as they seek livelihoods, invest in the education of younger generations, and mount a political and often militant struggle. In the process, men lose their jobs in the Israeli labor market, women, old and young, enter the workforce, university graduates are compelled to migrate to the Gulf, and political cadres challenge harsh prison circumstances by establishing their own comprehensive counterorder. While directed against the occupation, patterns of coping and resistance adopted by Dheishehians introduced tensions and conflicts into family life, furthering the transformation of gender and generational relationships.

In this collection, a leading sociologist brings his distinctive method of social criticism to bear on some of the most significant ideas, political and social events, and thinkers of the late twentieth century. Of the seventeen essays, two are published for the first time, and several of the previously published essays have been expanded and updated for this volume.

In the first section, the author critiques several concepts that have figured prominently in political-ideological controversies—capitalism, rationality, totalitarianism, power, alienation, left and right, and cultural relativism/multiculturalism. He considers their origins, historical shifts in their meaning and the myths surrounding them, and their subtle resonance beyond their formal definitions.

The second section highlights the author’s lifelong interest in the relation of intellectuals to social classes and institutions. The author critically assesses the notion of a “New Class” in which intellectuals have been alleged to play a prominent role, considers the implications for class structure of the increasing centering of intellectual life in the university, and assesses the relation of sociology to professional jargon. The final essays in this section discuss four influential thinkers: David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Allan Bloom. The book closes with an autobiographical statement centered on the author’s intellectual-political life.

The subject of this original and provocative work is the white male body, a counterpoint in gender studies to the many readings of the representation of the female body. To look at the construction of this figure, the author examines a group of discontinuous works that are representative of the discontinuity in the intermittent representation of the male body.

Especially in nineteenth-century narrative, where Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant write astutely on the subject, there is never continuity in representing the male body. "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Bel-Ami are flickering, episodic investigations into the male body as subject, as sentient feeling, as the subject of torture or of adulation. Not until the twentieth century can this male subject be continuously represented. Though the male body is often at center stage, in works that treat it as a metonymy of its own phallic and phallocentric power, this body has less often been seen relative to pleasure and pain, to aesthetics, to human vulnerability.

An introductory chapter explores a work by Alberto Moravia, Io e lui, as well as various manifestations of the male body's most salient part, the penis, in contemporary discourse and aesthetics. Another chapter deals with writings about the forbidden activity of masturbation and focuses on the work of three disparate writers: Paul Bonnetain, Michel Tournier, and Philip Roth.

In the final chapter, the author discusses several works that focus on the representation of the male body during the gay liberation movement in France and the subsequent celebration of the male body, ending with the inscription of the male body in the literature of AIDS. Among the authors discussed are Guy Hocquenghem, Hervé Guibert, and Michel Foucault.

This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his work and will be welcomed by scholars in many disciplines—politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs.

Derrida's arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political questions—sometimes they are vivid polemics on behalf of a position or figure, sometimes they are reflective analyses of a philosophical problem. They are united by the recurrent question of political decision or responsibility and the insistence that the apparent simplicity or programmatic character of political decision is in fact a profound avoidance of the political. This volume testifies to the possibility and the necessity of a philosophical politics.

Negotiations assembles some of the most telling examples of the intrinsic relationship, so often affirmed by Derrida in more abstract philosophical terms, between deconstructive reading practices and what is called the "political"—more precisely, politics in an almost down-to-earth, pragmatic, and commonsense use of the word. Among the many subjects covered in the book are: the death penalty in the United States, the civil war in Algeria, globalization and cosmopolitanism, the American Declaration of Independence, Jean-Paul Sartre, the value of objectivity, politics and friendship, and the relationship between deconstruction and actuality.

Giving the reader a unique window into the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy in President Bill Clinton’s first term, this book highlights the major foreign policy challenges faced and decisions made in a turbulent era. The book is organized around thirty seven key speeches by the Secretary of State, each introduced by an extensive essay that describes its policy context and purpose, and includes anecdotes, local color, and brief sketches of some of the leading figures on the world stage. These introductions, which constitute more than half the book, not only give the who, what, when, and where behind the speeches, but most important, explain the why and how.

For example, the group of speeches on Bosnia is preceded by an incisive account of the twists and turns of U.S. policy leading up to the Dayton Conference and the intense negotiations, involving several volatile personalities, that led to the historic Dayton agreement. Among the other subjects covered by the essays are our relations with China, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Haiti, the Middle East, Africa, and South America; international organizations such as NATO and the United Nations; and the global issues of human rights, terrorism, nuclear threat, and the environment.

The book begins with a Prologue that emphasizes Secretary Christopher’s long-standing interest in speeches as an instrument of public policy and the decision making behind this often overlooked aspect of statecraft. It also describes how the Secretary was offered the position by President-elect Clinton, the state of affairs as he found them when he took office, and his strategy and plans for U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War period. An epilogue recounts the Secretary’s decision to return to private life, offers his insights on the challenges facing the United States in the international arena in the years ahead, and sets forth some suggestions for future policy makers.

Above all, this book provides ample evidence that the author took seriously the advice that United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas gave him when he served as the justice’s law clerk in the 1949 term: “Get out in the stream of history, and swim as fast as you can.”

By narrating a protracted and frequently bizarre altercation between a London minister and a member of his flock, this book provides a vivid picture of puritanism at the parish level in early Stuart England.

On February 11, 1627, Stephen Denison preached a sermon that violently denounced an erstwhile boxmaker, John Etherington, as a heretic, a sect master, and an Anabaptist. The accused stood before Denison and then was returned to prison, where he languished for another three years. Denison published his denunciation later that year under the title The White Wolf. By the 1630s, however, Denison himself was in trouble with the same Court of High Commission that had sentenced Etherington. Denison was deprived of his living after being denounced by parishioners who resented his irascible temper, his harsh pulpit style, and his belittling of their church activities. Then, in 1641, Etherington came back to haunt Denison when, taking advantage of the collapse of censorship, the boxmaker heatedly replied in print to the accusations made against him fourteen years before.

The book places this dispute in the multiple social, cultural, and political contexts necessary to understand it. What forces and what ideological and personal trajectories brought these two men into conflict? What issues did the dispute raise and what do they tell us about the religious history of early Stuart England? The story of Denison and Etherington provides an example, almost unique before 1640, of the interaction between a minister and a parishioner. We also gain a portrait of an arena of lay activities and at least potentially heterodox doctrinal debate in puritan circles.

The author challenges the bad name that polemic has acquired of late among scholars by using overtly polemical sources, arguing that polemical intensity allows us a privileged glimpse into a world we do not usually get to see. He reads his sources against the grain, collating and comparing them to overcome the biases, silences, and exaggerations that the polemical mode also produces. In the end, the polemical constructions through which the story of Denison and Etherington has come down to us become necessarily a part of the story itself.

This wide-ranging work confronts the complex question of nationalism in France in its various permutations—myths, obsessions, possibilities, and dangers. French nationalism has always been a double-edged sword, from its beginnings in the French Revolution through the two Napoleonic empires, Boulangism, the Dreyfus affair, the fascist groups of the 1930’s, Marshal Pétain’s National Revolution during World War II, and its latest contemporary incarnation in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.

The author distinguishes between an “open” nationalism, based on the revolutionary values of liberty and equality for all, and “closed” nationalism, which is xenophobic—and, more particularly, antisemitic. He studies not only governments and political figures—Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, Marshal Pétain, and General de Gaulle—but also the myths associated with nationalism. These myths are captured in newspaper articles (the charity bazaar fire of 1897), in literature (Huysmans, Céline), and in the writings of insurgents (Edouard Drumont, Jules Guérin). The author pays particular attention to French “national socialism,” which wanted to transcend the categories of left and right in order to unite workers and owners under the banner of a providential leader, but which inevitably scapegoated the Jews. In tracing the history of closed nationalism and its need for a providential man, the author also sheds new light on the relation between socialism and fascism in France, most recently brought to the fore by the Mitterand government in the 1980’s.

In the process of analyzing nationalism in France, the author draws on areas of study ranging from French anti-Americanism and Zeev Sternhell’s history of “unconscious” fascism in France to the mythical use of Joan of Arc in the service of antisemitism.

Victorian Testaments examines the changing nature of biblical and religious authority during the first half of the Victorian period. The book argues that these changes had a profound impact on concepts of cultural authority in general. Among the figures discussed are Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, Ruskin, Dickens, Florence Nightingale, and the missionaries of the British and Foreign Bible Society. In developing its picture of Victorian religious ideology, the book analyzes major works of the period, as well as works and documents that have received little critical attention. Its methods are interdisciplinary, building upon recent ideas in literary theory, cultural criticism, and gender studies.

The book proposes that changes in religious faith and Bible reading tended in two directions, the one a celebration of spiritual individualism, the other of the nuclear family. As the credibility of a supernatural source for the scriptures diminished, the need for certainty in moral and religious matters was increasingly filled by the importance attached to individual character. Those Victorians who nurtured their individual character on Bible reading were understood to reveal the perfect spirit of the scriptures—just as the scriptures themselves, it seemed, could no longer do so. However, the desire for religious heroes was counterpoised by another and highly sentimentalized model of the spiritual life, one where religious authority was decentered across a social spectrum of fathers, mothers, and children. In this second direction explored by the book, a complex economy of spiritual power and authority is created by the distribution of sexual, intellectual, and affective attributes to figures who together constitute the nuclear family—one might say the secular holy family.

By tracing these two narrative patterns—the intellectual drama of the spiritual hero and the sentimental saga of the nuclear family—the author demonstrates that the spirituality of many nineteenth-century texts was not an allegory of transcendence so much as a by-product of the narratives themselves. A large-scale cultural confrontation with the disappearance of God was, to a certain extent, deferred by narratives that picked up the slack in faith, creating performances of sacred power with characters who demonstrated either an awesome religious interiority or a recognizably sentimental display of idealized femininity or childhood innocence.

Two features of mathematics stand out: its menagerie of seemingly eternal objects (numbers, spaces, patterns, functions, categories, morphisms, graphs, and so on), and the hieroglyphics of special notations, signs, symbols, and diagrams associated with them. The author challenges the widespread belief in the extra-human origins of these objects and the understanding of mathematics as either a purely mental activity about them or a formal game of manipulating symbols. Instead, he argues that mathematics is a vast and unique man-made imagination machine controlled by writing.

Mathematics as Sign addresses both aspects—mental and linguistic—of this machine. The opening essay, "Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics" (long acknowledged as a seminal contribution to its field), sets out the author's underlying model. According to this model, "doing" mathematics constitutes a kind of waking dream or thought experiment in which a proxy of the self is propelled around imagined worlds that are conjured into intersubjective being through signs.

Other essays explore the status of these signs and the nature of mathematical objects, how mathematical ideograms and diagrams differ from each other and from written words, the probable fate of the real number continuum and calculus in the digital era, the manner in which Platonic and Aristotelean metaphysics are enshrined in the contemporary mathematical infinitude of endless counting, and the possibility of creating a new conception of the sequence of whole numbers based on what the author calls non-Euclidean counting.

Reprising and going beyond the critique of number in Ad Infinitum, the essays in this volume offer an accessible insight into Rotman's project, one that has been called "one of the most original and important recent contributions to the philosophy of mathematics."

According to the poet Victor Hugo, the year 1870/71 was France's année terrible. The country suffered a humiliating defeat by the Prussian military, and Parisians endured a cruel siege. In the wake of the siege, Paris exploded and revolutionaries proclaimed the birth of the Paris Commune.

The conservative government of the young Third Republic portrayed the Communards as savage destroyers of civilization. The Communards were depicted as plagued by original sin, the evil nature of fallen man, and atavistic degeneration. These alleged traits aligned them with tribal peoples who were commonly thought to be severed from justice, liberty, and divine love. The punishment of the Communards was an odd one; some 4,500 revolutionaries were exiled to the South Pacific colony of New Caledonia with the hope that the inherent truths of nature would instill in their minds a natural morality.

However, the French government had not sufficiently considered the presence of the indigenous people of these "wilderness islands," the Melanesian Kanak. If the Communards were to be moralized by New Caledonia, how was it that the Kanak—who had lived for thousands of years on this land—did not also profit from this moralizing influence? This was just the first paradox provoked by the deportation of Parisian "political savages" to the land of these "natural savages." The surprising parallels and interactions between the Melanesians and the Parisians in their confrontation with the forces of French civilization form the substance of this book. It explores such themes as the history of the self, moralization as a means to civilization, nostalgia as a fatal illness, and colonial humanitarianism and gendered hybridity.

The French attempt to impose a universal moral standard and a particular form of "civilized self" on Communards and Kanak provoked fearsome battles, acerbic rhetorical inversions and fictional re-visionings through which oppositional identities and non-civilized "selves" took on form and solidity. This book places moral imperialism within the context of French republicanism and points to the beginnings of an era (the 1910s) when the recognition, rather than the domination, of the other attained an honored place in French theory.

Throughout the twentieth century, public universities were established across the United States at a dizzying pace, transforming the scope and purpose of American higher education. Leading the way was California, with its internationally renowned network of public colleges and universities. This book is the first comprehensive history of California's pioneering efforts to create an expansive and high-quality system of public higher education.

The author traces the social, political, and economic forces that established and funded an innovative, uniquely tiered, and geographically dispersed network of public campuses in California. This influential model for higher education, "The California Idea," created an organizational structure that combined the promise of broad access to public higher education with a desire to develop institutions of high academic quality. Following the story from early statehood through to the politics and economic forces that eventually resulted in the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, The California Idea and American Higher Education offers a carefully crafted history of public higher education.

Assuming the burden of reading imposed by the correlation of the order of language and the order of events, this book argues that the possibility of reading and writing history is tied to the endurance of traces of the past and their coming to legibility, allegorically, at a given time. Through attentive readings of a range of texts—including theoretical writings, diaries, newspaper reports, and "live" television broadcasts—In the Event elaborates the ways in which allegory disrupts our presumptions of continuity and simultaneity between the image (whatever its medium) and what we take it to represent.

The author demonstrates that a theoretical corpus must be understood not merely as a discrete set of arguments, but as work that takes place in time and on which time itself is at work. Against the temptation to regard a text (including a text of philosophical aesthetics or critical linguistics) as explained or defined by a fixed temporal context, this book emphasizes the textual operation of time. This attention to temporality opens the possibility of reading the notoriously difficult and resistant text of television.

The book's central chapters analyze the seductions of "live" broadcasting: an incisive account of news coverage of the Gulf War, for example, reveals how the unproblematic articulation of "live" television with the real has its impulse in a broader realist ideology that finds its opportunity in the failure to reflect on the distances of space and time that characterize the medium. The author also explores the very different punctuality of the journal in evocative readings of the diaries of Alice James and Derek Jarman, both "journals of survival" written at the uncertain boundary of life and death. Here, and throughout the book, the readings argue that what we take to be historical events are actually produced, even constituted, by an array of discursive technologies, including language itself.

Crosspaths in Literary Theory and Criticism traces several of the most recent trends in both the Italian and the American critical traditions, exploring the points at which the two traditions intersect or for specific reasons fail to intersect. Though the primary focus is on literary questions, attention is also given to the broader concerns of the creative force of culture and, when relevant, to economic, social, and political phenomena. Throughout, it aims to illuminate not only the forms of literary and critical discourse but also their underlying generative principles—their ideologies.

The book is in three parts. Part I studies recent theoretical trends, including deconstruction, Marxism, and feminism; critical pluralism; the history of Marxist critique; and the use of the thought of Antonio Gramsci in recent cultural studies. Part II discusses the views of Italian writers (principally Giambattista Vico and Gramsci) who have engaged the problems of the historical imagination; history and myth in Luigi Pirandello's last plays; and the depiction of social life in the "historical" novels of Elsa Morante, William Faulkner, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Part III considers the reaction in the United States to the discovery of the wartime writings of Paul de Man and to the "against theory" debate. The book concludes by setting forth a model of cultural analysis that avoids the mystifications of Gianni Vattimo's "weak thought" and the reductive drawbacks of Marxist views of literary production and expression (both Italian and American) as well as suggesting the advantages of recent materialist perspectives, in the process delineating the differences between modernism and postmodernism.

At the close of the twentieth century, democracy appeared to have overcome the Cold War partition of the world, as countries across the globe had deposed autocratic regimes and held free elections. Nowhere were these developments dramatized more brightly than in Eastern Europe in 1989, as newly formed civic movements replaced long-standing Leninist regimes with democratic governments.

Yet it is clear that the “waves” of democracy that initially seemed similar have led to widely varying outcomes. While some countries in Eastern Europe were invited to join NATO and the European Union, others were excluded. Former communists were elected to power in post-communist Poland and Hungary, but were largely absent in the Czech Republic and were transformed into populists in Slovakia. These differences have led the author to address several questions, including: How similar actually were the Leninist regimes before their dissolution, and how similar were their demises? How did the way communism fell affect the founding of democratic states in Eastern Europe, notably in Poland and Czechoslovakia?

This book offers a critique and reformulation of existing theories of democratization, as well as of earlier understandings of the fall of communism. By contrasting the negotiated pact in Poland with the collapse of the regime in Czechoslovakia, it provides a theoretical framework to explain how different paths of democratization affected the prospects for sustainable democracy. The book goes beyond the explanation that a “Gorbachev” effect determined events in the late 1980s by contrasting mobilization against Leninist regimes with negotiations for democratic institutions. It highlights competition between aspiring leaders, reconceptualizing the notion of civil society as a master frame within which movements and leaders sought to mobilize popular support.

The book also emphasizes the transformation of networks associated with the birth of a democratic nation, such as the Catholic Church in Poland and the theater strikes in Czechoslovakia. Finally, it analyzes how paths of change structured political competition in new democracies in both the short and the medium term.

The clear-cut distinction between texts (literature) and images (art) has been challenged by a culture saturated with television and by an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary studies. From the viewpoint of our present culture, the author suggests, we can now see how some of the great writers and artists of the past overstepped the boundaries of the media in which they worked. The Mottled Screen studies as an example of this process a great literary work that cannot be confined to language alone, even though it consists exclusively of words: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

The author of Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, a widely acclaimed study of Rembrandt's discursive, rhetorical, and narrative painting, now offers a symmetrical counterpart to that study with this sustained "visual" reading of Proust's masterpiece, pointing out its visual strategies of representation, fantasy, and poetic thought. She focuses on the narrative and descriptive passages, examining how they make us "see," arguing that this visual writing is by no means a derivative writing that uses visual imagery as an inspiration or model. Instead, it is the writing of a true vision.

Beginning with the attempts to emulate painting, the book develops a Proust à la Chardin, working around Chardin's painting The Skate, but only after first reading Chardin through Proust. Viewing a Chardin with anxieties and emulation, Proust writes in Chardin's mood when he sets up the mottled screen as the metaphor of reading. Chardin's appeal to a wavering, roving eye is matched by Proust's uncertain perceptions, and the nervous quality of The Skate is matched by the famous passages recording Proust's disgust at the debris of the breakfast table.

The second part of the book is devoted to Proust's use of optical instruments—such as the magnifying glass, the eyeglass, the telescope—to produce or enhance the visions that constitute the raw material of his poetic imagination. These optical instruments guide the probing of the paradoxes of seeing close-up or at a distance, the latter flattening out, the former blinding.

The final part reads the specifically "photographic" writing that permeates Remembrance as a highly original and astonishing contemporary, almost postmodern, poetics. The photographic shows in the way Proust's narrator frames what he sees, contrasts light and dark, zooms in and out, and represents "contact sheets" of snapshots rapidly taken so as to capture the most fleeting sensations and visions.

In this collection, a leading sociologist brings his distinctive method of social criticism to bear on some of the most significant ideas, political and social events, and thinkers of the late twentieth century. Of the seventeen essays, two are published for the first time, and several of the previously published essays have been expanded and updated for this volume.

In the first section, the author critiques several concepts that have figured prominently in political-ideological controversies—capitalism, rationality, totalitarianism, power, alienation, left and right, and cultural relativism/multiculturalism. He considers their origins, historical shifts in their meaning and the myths surrounding them, and their subtle resonance beyond their formal definitions.

The second section highlights the author’s lifelong interest in the relation of intellectuals to social classes and institutions. The author critically assesses the notion of a “New Class” in which intellectuals have been alleged to play a prominent role, considers the implications for class structure of the increasing centering of intellectual life in the university, and assesses the relation of sociology to professional jargon. The final essays in this section discuss four influential thinkers: David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Allan Bloom. The book closes with an autobiographical statement centered on the author’s intellectual-political life.

Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance.

Offering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet's tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as "A is for apple." The new market for children's books in the eighteenth century established for the "republic of ABC" a cultural potency equivalent to its high-culture counterpart, the "republic of letters," while shaping its child-readers into consumers. As a central rite of socialization, alphabetization schooled children to conflicting expectations, as well as to changing models of authority, understandings of the world, and uses of literature.

In the nineteenth century, literacy became a crucial aspect of American middle-class personality and subjectivity. Furnishing the readers and writers needed for a national literature, the alphabetization of America between 1800 and 1850 informed the sentimental-reform novel as well as the self-consciously aesthetic novel of the 1850s. Through readings of conduct manuals, reading primers, and a sentimental bestseller, the author shows how the alphabet became embedded in a maternal narrative, which organized the world through domestic affections.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, by contrast, insisted on the artificiality of the alphabet and its practices in his antimimetic, hermetic The Scarlet Letter, with its insistent focus on the letter A. By understanding this novel as part of the network of alphabetization, The Story of A accounts for its uniquely persistent cultural role. The author concludes, in an epilogue, with a reading of postmodern alphabets and their implications for the future of literacy.

This collection presents the first scholarly attempt to map the rapidly emerging field of mixed-race literature, defined as texts written by authors who represent multiple cultural and literary traditions—African-European, Native-European, Eurasian, African-Asian, and Native-African American. It not only allows scholars to engage a wide variety of mixed race literatures and critical approaches, but also to situate these literatures in relation to contemporary fields of literary inquiry.

The editor’s introduction provides a historical context for the development of mixed-race identity and literature, summarizing existing scholarship on the subject, interrogating the social construction of race and mixed race, and arguing for a literary (rather than literal) inquiry into mixed-race texts.

The essays examine such subjects as mythmaking and interpreting; the illustration of mixed-race texts; the mixed-race drama of Velina Hasu Houston; race, gender, and transnational spaces; the meaning and negotiation of identity; the theory of kin-aesthetic in Asian-Native American literatures; and Maori-Pakeha mixed-race writing in New Zealand.

The editor’s conclusion argues that rather than following the tragic employment assigned to mulattos, octoroons, and half-bloods, the evolution of mixed-race texts has been from tragedy to trickster. The role of the tragic trickster facilitates a shift in which new and distinct literary strategies and forms emerge. These models represent critical sites from which to theorize the overall formation of American literature and to complicate its formation in ways that unfold our usual notions of race, gender, and culture.

This book studies Nahuas and Spaniards in the central Mexican jurisdiction of Coyoacan from the Spanish conquest until 1650, crafting a multidimensional portrait of their relations in both institutional and informal settings.

Initially, the primary site of Nahua-Spaniard contact was institutional, as Spanish authorities attempted to reshape local practices to fit their own notions and needs, changing regional states into Spanish municipalities and Christian parishes, local ruling bodies into town councils, and tribute goods into standardized payments in coin. These efforts were never entirely successful, as Nahuas only partially adjusted their own practices when faced with the changes initiated by the Spaniards. The author explores the ways in which new forms of government and economic customs developed, drawing on both Nahua and Spanish traditions.

Nahua-Spanish contact was not limited to formal political and economic settings. The author describes the development of Spanish estates and the market economy, which opened up a new arena of cultural contact in the countryside. A growing number of Nahuas found themselves working for a Spanish landowner, acquiring a horse for peddling fruit from a local Spaniard, or selling land to a newly-arrived Spaniard. The Spanish land market altered Nahua land tenure and led to the loss of much Nahua land. The author demonstrates how Nahua practices came into play as they resorted to indigenous concepts of land tenure to justify the sale of land or of legal process to formalize it.

In bringing Nahuas and Spaniards together in this study, the book explores the changing contours of their relationship in Central Mexico, emphasizing informal interethnic contact in the making of both the Spanish colonial economy and postconquest Nahua society.

This book provides an authoritative history of the Brazilian army from the army’s overthrow of the monarchy in 1889 to its support of the coup that established Brazil’s first civilian dictatorship in 1937. The period between these two events laid the political foundations of modern Brazil—a period in which the army served as the core institution of an expanding and modernizing Brazilian state.

The book is based on detailed research in Brazilian, British, American, and French archives, and on numerous interviews with surviving military and civilian leaders. It also makes extensive use of hitherto unused internal army documents, as well as of private correspondence and diaries. It is thus able to shed new light on the army’s personnel and ethos, on its ties with civilian elites, on the consequences of military professionalization, and on how the army reinvented itself after the collapse of its command structure in the crisis of 1930—a reinvention that allowed the army to become the backbone of the post-1937 dictatorship of Getulio Vargas.

In a bold reassessment, this book analyzes the works of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, two poets who frame our sense of modern poetry and define the beginning and end of modernity itself.

The two poets share a feature that seems to block their placement in such an easy chronological or historical scheme: each accounts for an experience that will not fully enter memory, but dissipates in the mind in the form of trauma, fragments, and shock. While Baudelaire, as Paul Valéry was the first to show, explores the trauma of the minute personal shocks of everyday existence in modern life, Celan engages with the catastrophic magnitude of the Holocaust and how it has altered our understanding of history. Can we relate the shocks registered in Baudelaire's poems to the historical horror addressed in Celan's work without denying either the singularity of suffering and loss or the uniqueness of the historical event of the Shoah?

Drawing on trauma studies and Holocaust research, Remnants of Song challenges existing interpretations of Baudelaire and Celan by constantly holding in view both the aesthetic dimension of their works and their historical import. The author demonstrates that the act of engaging with a poem on its own terms may serve as an important model for an ethical response to the radical experiences of trauma. Answering Adorno's famous dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, he shows that Celan's poetry continues to posit its own truth by drawing on Baudelaire as a precedent—yet it does so in ways that have little to do with conventional understandings of history.

What made some 700 men and women in the Yorkshire town of Kingston-upon-Hull, in the years 1837 to 1900, decide to suffer no longer “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and take their own lives? In this study, the author seeks to uncover the experiences that drove people to suicide; to analyze how suicide was understood by victims, by their families and friends, and by legal and medical authorities; to study how the presumed causes of suicide and the meanings of suicide changed over time and in response to changed social circumstances; and to see what “suicide narratives” elicited by coroners’ inquests can tell us about Victorian life, beliefs, and values in general.

The book is based on an unprecedentedly complete and comprehensive collection of inquest files covering the entire Victorian era in Hull (most coroners’ files have not survived or exist only in fragmentary form). Hitherto, suicide in the Victorian period has been examined only on a national basis; where local evidence has been used, it has come chiefly from London. Through the testimony of relatives, neighbors, friends, and even the deceased (by means of suicide notes), the author has been able to get closer to the experience of suicide and its social construction than has been possible in any previous study.

The framework within which the author evaluates the paths to suicide is the life cycle. By placing each suicide in its local socioeconomic context, and by examining each stage in the life course for each sex and for different social levels, the author has been able to assess causation factors with great confidence. He establishes arguments (such as the importance of declining wages and job security for older men and the loss of a marital partner for either sex) more securely than have earlier studies, and puts some new arguments on the agenda (such as the importance of the presence or absence of interpersonal ties and the influence of Poor Law policy).