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Title: Fast food, fast talk: service work and the routinization of everyday life
Author: Leidner, Robin
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Technology and Society | Economics and Business | Gender Studies | Popular Culture | Food and Cooking
Publisher's Description: Attending Hamburger University, Robin Leidner observes how McDonald's trains the managers of its fast-food restaurants to standardize every aspect of service and product. Learning how to sell life insurance at a large midwestern firm, she is coached on exactly what to say, how to stand, when to make eye contact, and how to build up Positive Mental Attitude by chanting "I feel happy! I feel terrific!"Leidner's fascinating report from the frontlines of two major American corporations uncovers the methods and consequences of regulating workers' language, looks, attitudes, ideas, and demeanor. Her study reveals the complex and often unexpected results that come with the routinization of service work.Some McDonald's workers resent the constraints of prescribed uniforms and rigid scripts, while others appreciate how routines simplify their jobs and give them psychological protection against unpleasant customers. Combined Insurance goes further than McDonald's in attempting to standardize the workers' very selves, instilling in them adroit maneuvers to overcome customer resistance.The routinization of service work has both poignant and preposterous consequences. It tends to undermine shared understandings about individuality and social obligations, sharpening the tension between the belief in personal autonomy and the domination of a powerful corporate culture.Richly anecdotal and accessibly written, Leidner's book charts new territory in the sociology of work. With service sector work becoming increasingly important in American business, her timely study is particularly welcome.   [brief]
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Title: The fate of place: a philosophical history
Author: Casey, Edward S 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Philosophy | Classical Philosophy | Architecture | Intellectual History | Geography
Publisher's Description: In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, The Fate of Place is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century.Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray.   [brief]
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Title: Fathering the nation: American genealogies of slavery and freedom 
Author: Castronovo, Russ 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Russ Castronovo underscores the inherent contradictions between America's founding principles of freedom and the reality of slavery in a book that probes mid-nineteenth-century representations of the founding fathers. He finds that rather than being coherent and consensual, narratives of nationhood are inconsistent, ambivalent, and ironic. He examines competing expressions of national memory in a wide range of mid-nineteenth-century artifacts: slave autobiography, classic American fiction, monumental architecture, myths of the Revolution, proslavery writing, and landscape painting.Castronovo theorizes a new American cultural studies which takes into consideration what Toni Morrison calls the "Africanist presence" that permeates American literature. He presents a genealogy that recovers those members of the national family whose status challenges the body politic and its history. The forgotten orphans in Melville's Moby-Dick and Israel Potter , the rebellious slaves in the work of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, the citizens afflicted with amnesia in Lincoln's speeches, and the dispossessed sons in slave narratives all provide dissenting voices that provoke insurrectionary plots and counter-memories. Viewed here as a miscegenation of stories, the narrative of "America" resists being told of an intelligible story of uncontested descent. National identity rests not on rituals of consensus but on repressed legacies of parricide and rebellion.   [brief]
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Title: Faultlines: cultural materialism and the politics of dissident reading 
Author: Sinfield, Alan
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: If we come to consciousness within a language that is complicit with the social order, how can we conceive, let alone organize, resistance to that social order? This key question in the politics of reading and subcultural practice informs Alan Sinfield's book on writing in early-modern England.New historicism has often shown people trapped in a web of language and culture. In lively discussions of writings by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Donne, Sinfield reassesses the scope of dissidence and control. The early-modern state, Christianity, and the cultural apparatus, despite an ideology of unity and explicit violence, could not but allow space to challenging voices. Sinfield shows that disruptions in concepts of hierarchy, nationality, gender, and sexuality force their way into literary texts.Sinfield is often provocative. He "rewrites" Julius Caesar to produce a different politics, compares Sidney's idea of poetry to Leonid Brezhnev's, and reinstates the concept of character in the face of post-structuralist theory. He keeps the current politics of literary study in view, especially in a substantial chapter on Shakespeare in the U.S. Sinfield subjects interactions between class, ethnicity, sexuality, and the professional structures of the humanities to a detailed and hard-hitting critique, and argues for new commitments to collectivities and subcultures.   [brief]
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Title: Fear at the edge: state terror and resistance in Latin America
Author: Corradi, Juan E 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Politics | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Despite the emergence of fragile democracies in Latin America in the 1980s, a legacy of fear and repression haunts this region. This provocative volume chronicles the effect of systematic state terror on the social fabric in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay from the 1960s to the mid-1980s.The contributors, primarily Latin American scholars, examine the deep sense of insecurity and the complex social psychology of people who live in authoritarian regimes. There is Argentina, where the brutal repression of the 1976 coup almost completely smothered individuals who might once have opposed government practices, and Uruguay, where the government forced the population into neutrality and isolation and cast a silent pall on everyday life. Accounts of repression and resistance in Chile and Brazil are also vividly presented. The denial and rationalization by citizens in all four countries can only be understood in the context of the generalized fear and confusion created by the violent military campaigns, which included abductions, torture, and disappearances of alleged terrorists.The recent transition to civilian rule in these countries has spotlighted their powerful legacy of fear. These important essays reveal disturbing insights into how fear is generated, legitimized, accommodated, and resisted among people living under totalitarian rule.   [brief]
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Title: Female subjects in black and white: race, psychoanalysis, feminism
Author: Abel, Elizabeth
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | African American Studies | Gender Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: This landmark collaboration between African American and white feminists goes to the heart of problems that have troubled feminist thinking for decades. Putting the racial dynamics of feminist interpretation center stage, these essays question such issues as the primacy of sexual difference, the universal nature of psychoanalytic categories, and the role of race in the formation of identity. They offer new ways of approaching African American texts and reframe our thinking about the contexts, discourses, and traditions of the American cultural landscape. Calling for the racialization of whiteness and claiming that psychoanalytic theory should make room for competing discourses of spirituality and diasporic consciousness, these essays give shape to the many stubborn incompatibilities - as well as the transformative possibilities - between white feminist and African American cultural formations.Bringing into conversation a range of psychoanalytic, feminist, and African-derived spiritual perspectives, these essays enact an inclusive politics of reading. Often explosive and always provocative, Female Subjects in Black and White models a new cross-racial feminism.   [brief]
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Title: The feminine sublime: gender and excess in women's fiction 
Author: Freeman, Barbara Claire
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine." Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction, but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime.Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida while also engaging a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Addressing the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency and passion in modern and contemporary women's fiction. Arguments that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also functioned to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that is almost always gendered as feminine. Freeman explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime."   [brief]
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Title: Feminism and politics: a comparative perspective 
Author: Gelb, Joyce 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Politics | Gender Studies | European Studies | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: This incisive work provides a comparative political analysis of the women's movement in England, the United States, and Sweden from the 1960s to the present. Based on extensive interviews in each of the three countries, Feminism and Politics focuses not only on the internal dynamics of the movements themselves, but also on the relationship of feminist politics to the political process as a whole and to the economic and ideological context.Gelb finds that differences in the feminist movements in each country relate to systemic and cultural differences. In Britain the closed nature of the political system has greatly narrowed opportunities for feminist political activities. By contrast, the feminist movement in the United States has enjoyed relative autonomy and success, primarily because it has been unconstrained by the necessity of working through existing groups such as unions and political parties. In Sweden Gelb finds an anomalous situation in which the state has implemented many feminist policies but has allowed little ideological or political space for an autonomous movement.In its scope and analysis, Feminism and Politics offers a valuable new perspective on women's political activities.   [brief]
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Title: The festive state: race, ethnicity, and nationalism as cultural performance
Author: Guss, David M
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: If, as David Guss argues, culture is a contested terrain with constantly changing contours, then festivals are its battlegrounds, where people come to fight and dispute in large acts of public display. Festive behavior, long seen by anthropologists and folklorists as the "uniform expression of a collective consciousness, is contentious and often subversive," and The Festive State is an eye-opening guide to its workings. Guss investigates "the ideology of tradition," combining four case studies in a radical multisite ethnography to demonstrate how in each instance concepts of race, ethnicity, history, gender, and nationhood are challenged and redefined. In a narrative as colorful as the events themselves, Guss presents the Afro-Venezuelan celebration of San Juan, the "neo-Indian" Day of the Monkey, the mestizo ritual of Tamunangue, and the cultural policies and products of a British multinational tobacco corporation. All these illustrate the remarkable fluidity of festive behavior as well as its importance in articulating different cultural interests.   [brief]
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Title: Fiction as history: Nero to Julian 
Author: Bowersock, G. W. (Glen Warren) 1936-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Classics | Literature | European History | Classical Religions | Christianity | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: Using pagan fiction produced in Greek and Latin during the early Christian era, G. W. Bowersock investigates the complex relationship between "historical" and "fictional" truths. This relationship preoccupied writers of the second century, a time when apparent fictions about both past and present were proliferating at an astonishing rate and history was being invented all over again. With force and eloquence, Bowersock illuminates social attitudes of this period and persuasively argues that its fiction was influenced by the emerging Christian Gospel narratives.Enthralling in its breadth and enhanced by two erudite appendices, this is a book that will be warmly welcomed by historians and interpreters of literature.   [brief]
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Title: Fieldwork under fire: contemporary studies of violence and survival
Author: Nordstrom, Carolyn 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: Fieldwork Under Fire is a path-breaking collection of essays written by anthropologists who have experienced the unpredictability and trauma of political violence firsthand. These essays combine theoretical, ethnographic, and methodological points of view to illuminate the processes and solutions that characterize life in dangerous places. They describe the first, often harrowing, experience of violence, the personal and professional problems that arise as troubles escalate, and the often surprising creative strategies people use to survive.In "writing violence," the authors give voice to all those affected by the conditions of violence: perpetrators as well as victims, civilians and specialists, black marketeers and heroes, jackals and researchers. Focusing on everyday experiences, these essays bring to light the puzzling contradictions of lives disturbed by violence: the simultaneous existence of laughter and suffering, of fear and hope. By doing so, they challenge the narrow conceptualization that associates violence with death and war, arguing that instead it must be considered a dimension of living.   [brief]
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Title: Fifteen jugglers, five believers: literary politics and the poetics of American social movements 
Author: Reed, T. V. (Thomas Vernon)
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: T.V. Reed urges an affiliation between literary theory and political action - and between political action and literary theory. What can the "new literary theory" learn from "new social movements"; and what can social activists learn from poststructuralism, new historicism, feminist theory, and neomarxism?In strikingly new interpretations of texts in four different genres - Agee and Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , Ellison's Invisible Man, Mailer's Armies of the Night , and the ecofeminist Women's Pentagon Actions of the early 1980s - Reed shows how reading literary texts for their political strategies and reading political movements as texts can help us overcome certain rhetorical traps that have undermined American efforts to combat racism, sexism, and economic inequality.   [brief]
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Title: Fighting women: anger and aggression in Aboriginal Australia 
Author: Burbank, Victoria Katherine
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Women's Studies | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Fighting is common among contemporary Aboriginal women in Mangrove, Australia - women fight with men and with other women. Victoria Burbank's depiction of these women offers a powerful new perspective that can be applied to domestic violence in Western settings.Noting that Aboriginal women not only talk without shame about their emotions of anger but also express them in acts of aggression and defense, Burbank emphasizes the positive social and cultural implications of women's refusal to be victims. She explores questions of hierarchy and the expression of emotions, as well as women's roles in domestic violence. Human aggression can be experienced and expressed in different ways, she says, and is not necessarily always "wrong." Timely and controversial, Fighting Women will stimulate discussion of aggression and gender relations and will enlarge the debate on the victimization of women and children everywhere.   [brief]
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Title: Film quarterly: forty years--a selection 
Author: Henderson, Brian
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: During its forty years as a forum for scholars, filmmakers, critics, and film lovers, Film Quarterly has looked in depth at the most critical elements in the political, social, theoretical, and aesthetic history of the cinema. Once closely tied to Hollywood, the journal was investigated by the Tenney committee in 1946 and two of its board members came under fire from the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. After several metamorphoses, however, and with the dedicated participation of its editors, board members, and authors, the journal now stands as the oldest and most prominent journal in cinema studies, publishing film (and video and television) history, criticism, theory, analysis, interviews, and film and book reviews.Spanning the 1950s to the 1990s, Film Quarterly: Forty Years - A Selection is a collaborative effort by the past and present editors and the editorial board to celebrate and illuminate the medium that has prompted so much thought and exchange during the journal's lifetime. From articles on documentary and genre to history and technology, narrative and the avant-garde, this carefully selected collection proposes groundbreaking theoretical models, fresh approaches to individual film classics, reassessments of filmmakers' bodies of work, and discussions of new films and technologies.   [brief]
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Title: The films of Oshima Nagisa: images of a Japanese iconoclast
Author: Turim, Maureen Cheryn 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Japan
Publisher's Description: This study of the films of Oshima Nagisa is both an essential introduction to the work of a major postwar director of Japanese cinema and a theoretical exploration of strategies of filmic style. For almost forty years, Oshima has produced provocative films that have received wide distribution and international acclaim. Formally innovative as well as socially daring, they provide a running commentary, direct and indirect, on the cultural and political tensions of postwar Japan. Best known today for his controversial films In the Realm of the Senses and The Empire of Passion , Oshima engages issues of sexuality and power, domination and identity, which Maureen Turim explores in relation to psychoanalytic and postmodern theory. The films' complex representation of women in Japanese society receives detailed and careful scrutiny, as does their political engagement with the Japanese student movement, postwar anti-American sentiments, and critiques of Stalinist tendencies of the Left. Turim also considers Oshima's surprising comedies, his experimentation with Brechtian and avant-garde theatricality as well as reflexive textuality, and his essayist documentaries in this look at an artist's gifted and vital attempt to put his will on film.   [brief]
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Title: Final judgments: duty and emotion in Roman wills, 200 B.C.-A.D. 250
Author: Champlin, Edward 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Classics | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: Freed from the familial and social obligations incumbent on the living, the Roman testator could craft his will to be a literal "last judgment" on family, friends, and society. The Romans were fascinated by the contents of wills, believing the will to be a mirror of the testator's true character and opinions. The wills offer us a unique view of the individual Roman testator's world. Just as classicists, ancient historians, and legal historians will find a mine of information here, the general reader will be fascinated by the book's lively recounting of last testaments.Who were the testators and what were their motives? Why do family, kin, servants, friends, and community all figure in the will, and how are they treated? What sort of afterlife did the Romans anticipate? By examining wills, the book sets several issues in a new light, offering new interpretations of, or new insights into, subjects as diverse as captatio (inheritance-seeking), the structure of the Roman family, the manumission of slaves, public philanthropy, the afterlife and the relation of subject to emperor.Champlin's principal argument is that a strongly felt "duty of testacy" informed and guided most Romans, a duty to reward or punish all who were important to them, a duty which led them to write their wills early in life and to revise them frequently.   [brief]
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Title: A finger in the wound: body politics in quincentennial Guatemala
Author: Nelson, Diane M 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: Many Guatemalans speak of Mayan indigenous organizing as "a finger in the wound." Diane Nelson explores the implications of this painfully graphic metaphor in her far-reaching study of the civil war and its aftermath. Why use a body metaphor? What body is wounded, and how does it react to apparent further torture? If this is the condition of the body politic, how do human bodies relate to it - those literally wounded in thirty-five years of war and those locked in the equivocal embrace of sexual conquest, domestic labor, mestizaje , and social change movements?Supported by three and a half years of fieldwork since 1985, Nelson addresses these questions - along with the jokes, ambivalences, and structures of desire that surround them - in both concrete and theoretical terms. She explores the relations among Mayan cultural rights activists, ladino (nonindigenous) Guatemalans, the state as a site of struggle, and transnational forces including Nobel Peace Prizes, UN Conventions, neo-liberal economics, global TV, and gringo anthropologists. Along with indigenous claims and their effect on current attempts at reconstituting civilian authority after decades of military rule, Nelson investigates the notion of Quincentennial Guatemala, which has given focus to the overarching question of Mayan - and Guatemalan - identity. Her work draws from political economy, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, and has special relevance to ongoing discussions of power, hegemony, and the production of subject positions, as well as gender issues and histories of violence as they relate to postcolonial nation-state formation.   [brief]
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Title: First cut: conversations with film editors
Author: Oldham, Gabriella
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: First Cut offers an opportunity to learn what film editing really is, and to learn from the source. Gabriella Oldham's interviews with twenty-three award-winning film editors give a full picture of the complex art and craft of editing a film. Filled with animated anecdotes and detailed examples, thi . . . [more]
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Title: Fish: an enthusiast's guide
Author: Moyle, Peter B
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Marine and Freshwater Sciences | Ecology | Sports | Biology
Publisher's Description: Engagingly written, with both learning and humor, Fish bridges the gap between purely pictorial books and scholarly texts, and provides a succinct summary of fish biology and conservation for students and fish enthusiasts.
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Title: Flesh wounds: the culture of cosmetic surgery
Author: Blum, Virginia L 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: American Studies | Gender Studies | Film | Psychology | Literary Theory and Criticism | Sociology | Anthropology | Television and Radio | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: When did cosmetic surgery become a common practice, the stuff of everyday conversation? In a work that combines a provocative ethnography of plastic surgery and a penetrating analysis of beauty and feminism, Virginia L. Blum searches out the social conditions and imperatives that have made ours a culture of cosmetic surgery. From diverse viewpoints, ranging from cosmetic surgery patient to feminist cultural critic, she looks into the realities and fantasies that have made physical malleability an essential part of our modern-day identity. For a cultural practice to develop such a tenacious grip, Blum argues, it must be fed from multiple directions: some pragmatic, including the profit motive of surgeons and the increasing need to appear young on the job; some philosophical, such as the notion that a new body is something you can buy or that appearance changes your life. Flesh Wounds is an inquiry into the ideas and practices that have forged such a culture. Tying the boom in cosmetic surgery to a culture-wide trend toward celebrity, Blum explores our growing compulsion to emulate what remain for most of us two-dimensional icons. Moving between personal experiences and observations, interviews with patients and surgeons, and readings of literature and cultural moments, her book reveals the ways in which the practice of cosmetic surgery captures the condition of identity in contemporary culture.   [brief]
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