E. B. White: The Essayist as First-Class Writer by G. Douglas Atkins G'77 now available from Palgrave Macmillan.
This is the first book-length critical study of E. B. White, the American essayist and author of Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, and co-author of The Elements of Style. G. Douglas Atkins focuses on White and ‘the writing life’, offering fresh, detailed readings of the major essays and revealing White’s distinctiveness as an essayist through his capacity for storytelling and his use of literary devices.
(Source: palgrave.com)
Gender, Sex, and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India, 1780-1870 by Ruth Vanita F'03 now available from Palgrave Macmillan.
Gender, Sex, and the City explores the urban, cosmopolitan sensibilities of Urdu poetry written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Lucknow. Ruth Vanita analyzes Rekhti, a type of Urdu poetry distinguished by a female speaker and a focus on women’s lives,and shows how it becamea catalyst for the transformation of the ghazal.
(Source: palgrave.com)
Hemingway and the Black Renaissance edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and Charles Scruggs G'84 now available from the Ohio State University Press.
Hemingway and the Black Renaissance, edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and Charles Scruggs, explores a conspicuously overlooked topic: Hemingway’s wide-ranging influence on writers from the Harlem Renaissance to the present day. An observable who’s who of black writers—Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Chester Himes, Alex la Guma, Derek Walcott, Gayl Jones, and more—cite Hemingway as a vital influence. This inspiration extends from style, Hemingway’s minimalist art, to themes of isolation and loneliness, the dilemma of the expatriate, and the terrifying experience of living in a time of war. The relationship, nevertheless, was not unilateral, as in the case
of Jean Toomer’s 1923 hybrid, short-story cycle Cane, which influenced Hemingway’s collage-like 1925 In Our Time. Just as important as Hemingway’s influence, indeed, is the complex intertextuality, the multilateral conversation, between Hemingway and key black writers. The diverse praises by black writers for Hemingway in fact signify that the white author’s prose rises out of the same intensely American concerns that their own writings are formed on: the integrity of the human subject faced with social alienation, psychological violence, and psychic disillusionment. An understanding of this literary kinship ultimately initiates not only an appreciation of Hemingway’s stimulus but also a perception of an insistent black presence at the core of Hemingway’s writing.
(Source: osupress.blogspot.com)
ACLS Fellows in the News. The American Council of Education has named Steven Yao F'05 a Fellow for 2012-13.
The ACE Fellows Program, established in 1965, is designed to strengthen institutions and leadership in American higher education by identifying and preparing promising senior faculty and administrators for responsible positions in college and university administration. Fifty-seven Fellows, nominated by the presidents or chancellors of their institutions, were selected this year following a rigorous application process.
(Source: hamilton.edu)
Darger’s Resources by Michael Moon F'89 now available from Duke University Press.
Henry Darger (1892–1973) was a hospital janitor and an immensely productive artist and writer. In the first decades of adulthood, he wrote a 15,145-page fictional epic, In the Realms of the Unreal. He spent much of the rest of his long life illustrating it in astonishing drawings and watercolors. In Darger’s unfolding saga, pastoral utopias are repeatedly savaged by extreme violence directed at children, particularly girls. Given his disturbing subject matter and the extreme solitude he maintained throughout his life, critics have characterized Darger as eccentric, deranged, and even dangerous, as an outsider artist compelled to create a fantasy universe. Contesting such pathologizing interpretations, Michael Moon looks to Darger’s resources, to the narratives and materials that inspired him and often found their way into his writing, drawings, and paintings. Moon finds an artist who reveled in the burgeoning popular culture of the early twentieth century, in its newspaper comic strips, pulp fiction, illustrated children’s books, and mass-produced religious art. Moon contends that Darger’s work deserves and rewards comparison with that of contemporaries of his, such as the “pulp historians” H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, the Oz chronicler L. Frank Baum, and the newspaper cartoonist Bud Fisher.
(Source: dukeupress.edu)
ACLS Fellows in the News. Paul Kroll F'95 delivers Horizons of Knowledge Lecture on “Personal Moments in Medieval Chinese Poetry” today at Indiana University, 12:00-1:15 pm.
Medieval Chinese poetry, like most self-consciously traditional literature, ardently embraces learning, presumption, and intertextuality. But those moments that suddenly engage the heart (a somewhat neglected organ in the postmodern era) affect us at a deeper level. It is for these irregular but personally cherished splendors and miseries that one continues to read throughout a lifetime. In this lecture readings and interpretations will be offered from two medieval poets with rather contradictory histories—Lu Zhaolin 盧照鄰 from the mid-seventh century and Jiang Yan 江淹 from the late fifth century. Reflecting on their works may also prod us to reconsider the critical limits latent in the oft-heralded “death of the author.”
(Source: intliu.blogspot.com)
Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature by Christopher P. Iannini F'08 now available from the University of North Carolina Press.
Drawing on letters, illustrations, engravings, and neglected manuscripts, Christopher Iannini connects two dramatic transformations in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world–the emergence and growth of the Caribbean plantation system and the rise of natural science. Iannini argues that these transformations were not only deeply interconnected, but that together they established conditions fundamental to the development of a distinctive literary culture in the early Americas. In fact, eighteenth-century natural history as a literary genre largely took its shape from its practice in the Caribbean, an oft-studied region that was a prime source of wealth for all of Europe and the Americas.
The formal evolution of colonial prose narrative, Ianinni argues, was contingent upon the emergence of natural history writing, which itself emerged necessarily from within the context of Atlantic slavery and the production of tropical commodities. As he reestablishes the history of cultural exchange between the Caribbean and North America, Ianinni recovers the importance of the West Indies in the formation of American literary and intellectual culture as well as its place in assessing the moral implications of colonial slavery.
(Source: uncpress.unc.edu)
ACLS Fellows in the News. Marcus Rediker F'05 is keynote speaker of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Spring Symposium “Empire from Below.”
This lecture will explore a famous and dramatic rebellion by 53 Africans aboard a Cuban slave ship in 1839: its African origins and cultural logic; its American chapter, in which the insurrectionists built an alliance with abolitionists and waged a legal battle while in jail; and its Atlantic consequences for four empires: Vai (southern Sierra Leone), Spanish, British, and American.
(Source: iprh.illinois.edu)
“The calling of the humanities is to make us truly human in the best sense of the word.” — —J. Irwin Miller
New books from Joy Ladin F'05:
Coming to Life: Poems (Sheep Meadow Press)
Named one of the five most important Jewish poetry books of 2011 by The Forward.
The Definition of Joy: Poems (Sheep Meadow Press)
“Ladin draws the reader into a world of harsh truths, uncanny beauty, inspired erudition, ironic wit, and cadenced music … imagination rules, wedding poetic forms to unflinching meditations on human suffering, terror, love, and unbearable loss. Despite the ubiquity of evil and death in her poems, there is, in Yeats’s words, ‘a gaiety transfiguring all that dread.’”—Herbert Leibowitz
Through the Door: A Jewish Journey Between Genders (The University of Wisconsin Press)
Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman—Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self. Ladin’s poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn’t, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life.
Can the liberal arts college help to save our democracy?
The Lycoming College History Department will host a lecture by Dr. Stanley Katz, president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, as part of the 39th annual Ewing Lecture. His presentation, “Can the liberal arts college help to save our democracy?” is scheduled for Tuesday, April 3, at 7:30 p.m. in Heim Building G-11. The event is free and open to the public.
Katz is professor and director of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. His recent research focuses upon the relationship of civil society and constitutionalism to democracy, and upon the relationship of the United States to the international human rights regime. He received the annual Fellows Award from Phi Beta Kappa in 2010 and the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2011.
(Source: lycoming.edu)
ACLS is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2012 Collaborative Research Fellowships. Each group of two to three fellows will collaborate intensively on a single, substantive project. This year, the program brings together 15 scholars from different institutions, disciplines, and countries whose varied perspectives will yield new advances in research.
Art historians Carolyn Dean (Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz) and Dana Leibsohn (Professor, Smith College) combine their expertise on the art of New Spain and the Andes to co-author a book that explores how indigenous art, global trade networks, and cosmopolitan ambitions intersected in colonial Spanish America.
Philosophers Karen Detlefsen (Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania) and Andrew Janiak (Associate Professor, Duke University) draw on the history of early modern philosophy, the study of gender relations in Enlightenment Europe, and the history of modern physics to produce the first English-language book on Émilie Du Châtelet’s (1706-1749) philosophy and its intellectual landscape.
Anthropologists Judith Farquhar (Professor, University of Chicago) and Lili Lai (Lecturer, Peking University) join their research on heritage cultures of China’s minority nationalities and the rise of medical diversities in the modern world to investigate confrontation between the cultures of folk healing and the formal health sector in China.
Historians Clare Crowston (Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) and Steven Kaplan (Professor Emeritus, Cornell University) synthesize economic, quantitative historical, and cultural and intellectual historical approaches to the study of apprenticeship in France from 1675 to 1830, an activity and an institution that affected all aspects of social life.
Historians Alastair Bellany (Associate Professor, Rutgers University, New Brunswick) and Thomas Cogswell (Professor, University of California, Riverside) reignite the debate on the causes of the English Revolution of 1640-60 by employing a new interdisciplinary methodology that places histories of media, image-manufacture, and popular perception at the core of analysis.
Literature scholars Rachel Buurma (Assistant Professor, Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (Assistant Professor, University of North Florida) incorporate their expertise on the Victorian and Modern eras in their examination of the major archives of mid-century literary critics; their research will illuminate the alternate ways that English professors of the past created value in the classroom—ways that are not necessarily tied to literary canons, aesthetic form, or trans-historical ideas of the human.
Digital humanities scholars Jeremy Douglass (Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, San Diego), Mark Marino (Associate Professor, University of Southern California), and Jessica Pressman (Assistant Professor, Yale University) develop a collaborative method of digital humanities scholarship that integrates “traditional” hermeneutics with more recent methodologies—media visualization, critical code studies, and digital forensics—to provide the multiple perspectives necessary to approach digital media and its poetics.
See project abstracts.
“This new cohort joins the previous three in establishing excellent examples of the range and value of jointly conducted research in the humanities,” said ACLS Director of Fellowship Programs Nicole Stahlmann. “Their work will model how such collaboration may be carried out successfully.”
(Source: acls.org)
East Asian National Identities: Common Roots and Chinese Exceptionalism edited by Gilbert Rozman F'92 now available from Stanford University Press.
This rigorous comparative study of national identity in Japan, South Korea, and China examines countries with long histories influenced by Confucian thought, surging nationalism, and far-reaching ambitions for regional importance. East Asian National Identities compares national identities in terms of six dimensions encompassing ideology; history; the salience of cultural, political, and economic factors; superiority as a model national community; displacement of the U.S. in Asia; and depth of national identity. Through this analysis, Gilbert Rozman draws the three countries together in an East Asian National Identity Syndrome. Other contributors review historical sources and critical themes of identity in all three countries.
(Source: sup.org)
Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America edited by Jennifer L. Hochschild F'00, Vesla M. Weaver, and Traci R. Burch now available from Princeton University Press.
The American racial order–the beliefs, institutions, and practices that organize relationships among the nation’s races and ethnicities–is undergoing its greatest transformation since the 1960s. Creating a New Racial Order takes a groundbreaking look at the reasons behind this dramatic change, and considers how different groups of Americans are being affected. Through revealing narrative and striking research, the authors show that the personal and political choices of Americans will be critical to how, and how much, racial hierarchy is redefined in decades to come.
(Source: press.princeton.edu)
A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830 by Aurelian Craiutu F'08 now available from Princeton University Press.
Political moderation is the touchstone of democracy, which could not function without compromise and bargaining, yet it is one of the most understudied concepts in political theory. How can we explain this striking paradox? Why do we often underestimate the virtue of moderation? Seeking to answer these questions, A Virtue for Courageous Minds examines moderation in modern French political thought and sheds light on the French Revolution and its legacy.
(Source: press.princeton.edu)
