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Title: A theory of language and mind 
Author: Bencivenga, Ermanno 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Philosophy
Publisher's Description: In his most recent book, Ermanno Bencivenga offers a stylistically and conceptually exciting investigation of the nature of language, mind, and personhood and the many ways the three connect. Bencivenga, one of the most iconoclastic voices to emerge in contemporary American philosophy, contests the basic assumptions of analytic (and also, to an extent, postmodern) approaches to these topics. His exploration leads through fascinating discussions of education, courage, pain, time and history, selfhood, subjectivity and objectivity, reality, facts, the empirical, power and transgression, silence, privacy and publicity, and play - all themes that are shown to be integral to our thinking about language. Relentessly bending the rules, Bencivenga frustrates our expectations of a "proper" theory of language. He invokes the transgressions of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein even as he appropriates the aphoristic style of Wittgenstein's Tractatus . Written in a philosophically playful and experimental mode, A Theory of Language and Mind draws the reader into a sense of continual surprise, therapeutic discomfort, and discovery.   [brief]
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Title: My Kantian ways 
Author: Bencivenga, Ermanno 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought
Publisher's Description: In My Kantian Ways , Ermanno Bencivenga, one of the most creative and iconoclastic practitioners of American philosophy, sets out to explore Kant's legacy for contemporary thought. Seeking to extricate the German philosopher's work from the stranglehold of the prevailing analytic tradition, he presents his own defamiliarizing and unique interpretation of Kantianism. Kant emerges as a master thinker whose emphasis on judgment provides the basis for a new approach to the practice of philosophy as a vehicle for learning. Ranging from speculations on the electronic self to a tour-de-force critique of the postmodern thought of Richard Rorty, Bencivenga's book is an inviting blend of styles and genres. Plucky, irritating, and sometimes wickedly funny, My Kantian Ways calls attention to the frequent mediocrity and false piety of much of today's professional philosophy. Through these intensely personal essays, Bencivenga reminds us just how much philosophy can matter.   [brief]
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Title: Reflections of an American composer 
Author: Berger, Arthur 1912-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Music | American Music | Classical Music | Contemporary Music | Composers | Musicology
Publisher's Description: In this engrossing collection of essays, distinguished composer, theorist, journalist, and educator Arthur Berger invites us into the vibrant and ever-changing American music scene that has been his home for most of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and always entertaining, Berger describes the music scene in New York and Boston since the 1930s, discussing the heady days when he was a member of a tight-knit circle of avant-garde young composers mentored by Aaron Copland as well as his participation in a group at Harvard University dedicated to Stravinsky. As Virgil Thomson's associate on the New York Herald Tribune and founding editor of the prestigious Perspectives of New Music, Berger became one of the preeminent observers and critics of American music. His reflections on the role of music in contemporary life, his journalism career, and how changes in academia influence the composition and teaching of music offer a unique perspective informed by Berger's abundant intelligence and experience.   [brief]
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Title: Authors of their own lives: intellectual autobiographies 
Author: Berger, Bennett M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Sociology | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: All students and scholars are curious about the human faces behind the impersonal rhetoric of academic disciplines. Here twenty of America's most prominent sociologists recount the intellectual and biographical events that shaped their careers. Family history, ethnicity, fear, private animosities, extraordinary determination, and sometimes plain good fortune are among the many forces that combine to mold the individual talents presented in Authors of Their Own Lives . With contributions from women and men, young and old, native-born Americans and immigrants, quantitative scholars and qualitative ones, this book provides a fascinating source for students and professional sociologists alike.Some of the autobiographies maintain their reserve, others are profoundly revealing. Their subjects range from childhood, educational, and intellectual influences, to academic careerism and burnout, to the history of American sociology. Authors stands alone as a deeply personal autobiographical account of contemporary sociology.   [brief]
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Title: Women, culture, and politics in Latin America 
Author: Bergmann, Emilie L 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Women's Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: The result of a collaboration among eight women scholars, this collection examines the history of women's participation in literary, journalistic, educational, and political activity in Latin American history, with special attention to the first half of this century.
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Title: Big business and industrial conflict in nineteenth-century France: a social history of the Parisian Gas Company 
Author: Berlanstein, Lenard R
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies | Economics and Business | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Founded in 1855, the Parisian Gas Company (PGC) quickly developed into one of France's greatest industrial enterprises, an exemplar of the new industrial capitalism that was beginning to transform the French economy. The PGC supplied at least half the coal gas consumed in France through the 1870s and became the city's single largest employer of clerical and factory labor. Representing a new form and scale of capitalistic endeavor, the firm's history illuminates the social tensions that accompanied the nation's industrialization and democratization.To study the company over its fifty-year life is to see industrializing France writ small. Using previously untapped company archives, Lenard R. Berlanstein has written a rich and detailed study that skillfully bridges the divide between business, social, and labor history.   [brief]
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Title: Sonia's daughters: prostitutes and their regulation in imperial Russia 
Author: Bernstein, Laurie
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | European History | European Studies | Women's Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: Prostitution in Imperial Russia was so tenacious that it survived not only the tsarist regime's most tumultuous years but the Bolshevik revolution itself. Laurie Bernstein's comprehensive study is the first to look at how the state and society responded to the issue of prostitution - the attitudes of prostitutes themselves, state regulation, societal reactions, and attempts at reform. She finds that prostitution and its regulation were integral to Russia's structures of gender, class, and politics.The first historian from outside the former Soviet Union to be granted access to these archival materials on prostitution, Bernstein takes the reader to the streets of Russia's cities, to the state-licensed brothels, medical clinics, hospital wards, halfway houses for "fallen women," and to the highest circles of the tsarist administration.   [brief]
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Title: Foregone conclusions: against apocalyptic history 
Author: Bernstein, Michael André 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Jewish Studies | Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Michael André Bernstein's passionate denunciation of apocalyptic thinking provides a moral, philosophical, and literary challenge to the way most of us make sense of our worlds. In our search for coherence, Bernstein argues, we tend to see our lives as moving toward a predetermined fate. This "foreshadowing" demeans the variety, the richness, and especially the unpredictability of everyday life. Apocalyptic history denies the openness and choice available to its actors.Bernstein chooses the Holocaust as the prime example of our tendency toward foregone conclusions. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who depict the Holocaust as foreordained and its victims as somehow implicated in a fate they should have been able to foresee. But his argument ranges wider. From recent biographies of Kafka to the Israeli-P.L.O. peace accords, from campus cultural diversity debates to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns against our passive acceptance of historical or personal victimization.An essential contribution to Holocaust studies, this book is also a lucid call to transform the way we read and write history and the way we make sense of our lives.   [brief]
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Title: Insider/outsider: American Jews and multiculturalism 
Author: Biale, David 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Jewish Studies | American Studies | Popular Culture | Judaism | Gender Studies | United States History | Literature
Publisher's Description: Twelve distinguished historians, political theorists, and literary critics present new perspectives on multiculturalism in this important collection. Central to the essays (all but one is appearing in print for the first time) is the question of how the Jewish experience can challenge the conventional polar opposition between a majority "white monoculture" and a marginalized "minorities of color multiculture." This book takes issue with such a dichotomy by showing how experiences of American Jews can undo conventional categories. Neither a complaint against multiculturalism by Jews who feel excluded from it, nor a celebration of multiculturalism as the solution to contemporary Jewish problems, Insider/Outsider explores how the Jews' anomalous status opens up multicultural history in different and interesting directions. The goal of the editors has been to transcend the notion of "comparative victimology" and to show the value of a narrative that does not rely on competing histories of persecution. Readers can discover in these essays arguments that will broaden their understanding of Jewish identity and multicultural theory and will enliven the contemporary debate about American culture generally.   [brief]
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Title: The other economy: pastoral husbandry on a medieval estate 
Author: Biddick, Kathleen
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: While the cereal agriculture of medieval Europe has been studied exhaustively, the pastoral resources and livestock husbandry of medieval estates have been seriously neglected. Kathleen Biddick's examination of one estate, Peterborough Abbey, during several decades before and after 1100 and the first decade after 1300, brings a new balance to the subject of the medieval economy. Her pioneering methodology and the conclusions she reaches will interest archaeologists and agricultural historians as well as anthropologists, economists, and historians of early European development.Drawing on the archival records of the abbey, an estate that straddled the "classic" open-field agriculture of the English Midlands and the more pastorally-oriented farming of the English peat fens, Biddick describes in great detail how these farmers managed their herds and consumed and marketed livestock products such as meat, wool, hides, milk, and cheese. Commitment to conserving consumption strategies did not mean that the Abbey resisted market involvement and technological innovation. Large numbers of work and cart horses indicate the estate's economic interest in speedy haulage. Cereal yields, where they are calculable, compare favorably to the high-yielding demesnes of parts of Norfolk, the most agriculturally advanced region of medieval England. By showing how the Abbey coordinated its resources to enhance diversity and flexibility, The Other Economy enlarges our understanding of agrarian lordship and political control over resources in the medieval economy.   [brief]
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Title: Writing signs: the Fatimid public text 
Author: Bierman, Irene A
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Literature
Publisher's Description: Irene Bierman explores the complex relationship between alphabet and language as well as the ways the two elements are socially defined by time and place. She focuses her exploration on the Eastern Mediterranean in the sixth through twelfth centuries, notably Cairo's Fatimid dynasty of 969-1171. Examining the inscriptions on Fatimid architecture and textiles, Bierman offers insight into all elements of that society, from religion to the economy, and the enormous changes the dynasty underwent during that period. Bierman addresses fundamental issues of what buildings mean, how inscriptions affect that meaning, and the role of written messages and the ceremonies into which they are incorporated in service of propagandist goals. Her method and conclusions provide a pioneering model for studying public writing in other societies and offer powerful evidence to show that writing is a highly charged and deeply embedded social practice.   [brief]
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Title: The fabrication of labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914 
Author: Biernacki, Richard 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Sociology | Labor Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This monumental study demonstrates the power of culture to define the meaning of labor. Drawing on massive archival evidence from Britain and Germany, as well as historical evidence from France and Italy, The Fabrication of Labor shows how the very nature of labor as a commodity differed fundamentally in different national contexts. A detailed comparative study of German and British wool textile mills reveals a basic difference in the way labor was understood, even though these industries developed in the same period, used similar machines, and competed in similar markets. These divergent definitions of the essential character of labor as a commodity influenced the entire industrial phenomenon, affecting experiences of industrial work, methods of remuneration, disciplinary techniques, forms of collective action, and even industrial architecture. Starting from a rigorous analysis of detailed archival materials, this study broadens out to analyze the contrasting developmental pathways to wage labor in Western Europe and offers a startling reinterpretation of theories of political economy put forward by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In his brilliant cross-national study, Richard Biernacki profoundly reorients the analysis of how culture constitutes the very categories of economic life.   [brief]
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Title: Inside the drama-house: Rama stories and shadow puppets in South India 
Author: Blackburn, Stuart H
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | South Asia | Cinema and Performance Arts | Hinduism
Publisher's Description: Stuart Blackburn takes the reader inside a little-known form of shadow puppetry in this captivating work about performing the Tamil version of the Ramayana epic. Blackburn describes the skill and physical stamina of the puppeteers in Kerala state in South India as they perform all night for as many as ten weeks during the festival season. The fact that these performances often take place without an audience forms the starting point for Blackburn's discussion - one which explores not only this important epic tale and its performance, but also the broader theoretical issues of text, interpretation, and audience.Blackburn demonstrates how the performers adapt the narrative and add their own commentary to re-create the story from a folk perspective. At a time when the Rama story is used to mobilize political movements in India, the puppeteers' elaborate recitation and commentary presents this controversial tale from another ethical perspective, one that advocates moral reciprocity and balance.While the study of folk narrative has until now focused on tales, tellers, and tellings, this work explores the importance of audience - absent or otherwise. Blackburn's elegant translations of the most dramatic and pivotal sequences of the story enhance our appreciation of this unique example of performance art.   [brief]
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Title: Family size and achievement 
Author: Blake, Judith
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Sociology | Demography
Publisher's Description: The children born since the end of the postwar baby boom are the first in American history to come primarily from small families - families of three or fewer children. Judith Blake calls this momentous change the sibsize revolution, and this book focuses on the cognitive and educational consequences . . . [more]
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Title: Misogyny, misandry, and misanthropy 
Author: Bloch, R. Howard
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
Publisher's Description: These essays, originally comprising an issue of Representations , explore the relation between gender, eroticism, and violence through close analysis of a range of both high and popular cultural forms, from R. Howard Bloch on medieval theology to Carol Clover on contemporary slasher films. Does misogyny differ from misandry? Can author intention be separated from social context? Do good women counterbalance or reenforce the misogyny of negative examples? Is an obsession with women itself misogynistic? These questions are approached from various angles by Joel Fineman, Charles Bernheimer, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Frances Ferguson, Naomi Schor and Gillian Brown. In sum, the authors detail not only the ways in which gender is represented, but also the changes to which representation subjects questions of sexual difference.   [brief]
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Title: Early Gothic Saint-Denis: restorations and survivals 
Author: Blum, Pamela Z
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Art | Architectural History | Art History | Medieval Studies | Archaeology
Publisher's Description: quality. Indeed, the well-preserved sculptural passages provide a key to the Early Gothic style as well as revealing the distinct imprints of three artists and their influences on each other. Blum's penetrating analyses of the restorative techniques and materials are accompanied by telling photograph-diagrams that distinguish the original work from that done later.Pamela Blum's investigation has relevance not only for students and scholars of medieval art but for curators and collectors as well. Anyone concerned with survivals from the past will appreciate her scrupulous detection in studying one of France's greatest monuments.   [brief]
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Title: Between feminism and labor: the significance of the comparable worth movement 
Author: Blum, Linda M
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: "Equal pay for equal work" has long been a forceful slogan of the feminist and labor movements. Now, however, as the American economy depends more and more on "women's work," it has become clear that this objective does not benefit the majority of women, who are employed in sex-segregated jobs. In Between Feminism and Labor , Linda M. Blum examines the movement for comparable worth, or equal pay for comparable work, as a strategy to raise wages for the "pink-collar" jobs that are most frequently occupied by women. She explores the larger political implications of the movement and provides the first study of pay equity to focus directly on the mobilization of the female work force at the grass-roots level.Through two case studies of local comparable worth movements - in San Jose and Contra Costa County, California - Blum probes several important issues. She asks whether comparable worth can contribute to the formation of active labor-feminist alliances, and after a nuanced, intelligent analysis of the complexities and contradictions of comparable worth, endorses its radical potential to improve women's wages and forge links between gender- and class-based politics. Between Feminism and Labor also situates comparable worth in the context of the limitations of affirmative action, a strategy seeking to move women into male jobs as opposed to raising the value of women's work. It is the first study to contrast these two strategies and to place them within the theoretical and political debates over the validation of gender difference versus the requirement of gender neutrality. As such, the book should stimulate debate among those concerned with the future of the feminist movement, as well as those interested in the future of organized labor and progressive politics in America.   [brief]
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Title: Environment and experience: settlement culture in nineteenth-century Oregon 
Author: Boag, Peter G
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | United States History | Californian and Western History | Environmental Studies
Publisher's Description: The pioneer battling with a hostile environment - whether it be arid land, drought, dust storms, dense forests, or harsh winters - is a staple of western American history. In this innovative, multi-disciplinary work, Peter Boag takes issue with the image of the settler against the frontier, arguing that settlers viewed their new surroundings positively and attempted to create communities in harmony with the landscape. Using Oregon's Calapooia Valley as a case study, Boag presents a history of both land and people that shows the process of change as settlers populated the land and turned it to their own uses.By combining local sources, ranging from letters and diaries to early maps and local histories, and drawing upon the methods of geography, natural history, and literary analysis, Boag has created a richly detailed grass-roots portrait of a frontier community. Most significantly, he analyzes the connections among environmental, cultural, and social changes in ways that illuminate the frontier experience throughout the American west.   [brief]
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Title: May her likes be multiplied: biography and gender politics in Egypt 
Author: Booth, Marilyn
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Women's Studies | Literature | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: Marilyn Booth's elegantly conceived study reveals the Arabic tradition of life-writing in an entirely new light. Though biography had long been male-authored, in the late nineteenth century short sketches by and about women began to appear in biographical dictionaries and women's journals. By 1940, hundreds of such biographies had been published, featuring Arabs, Turks, Indians, Europeans, North Americans, and ancient Greeks and Persians. Booth uses over five hundred "famous women" biographies - which include subjects as diverse as Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, Aisha bt. Abi Bakr, Sarojini Naidu, and Lucy Stone - to demonstrate how these narratives prescribed complex role models for middle-class girls, in a context where nationalist programs and emerging feminisms made defining the ideal female citizen an urgent matter.Booth begins by asking how cultural traditions shaped women's biography, and to whom the Egyptian biographies were directed. The biographies were published at a time of great cultural awakening in Egypt, when social and political institutions were in upheaval. The stories suggested that Islam could be flexible on social practice and gender, holding out the possibility for women to make their own lives. Yet ultimately they indicate that women would find it extremely difficult to escape the nationalist ideal: the nuclear family with "woman" at its center. This conflict remains central to Egyptian politics today, and in her final chapter Booth examines Islamic biographies of women's lives that have been published in more recent years.   [brief]
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Title: Precious nonsense: the Gettysburg address, Ben Jonson's epitaphs on his children, and Twelfth night 
Author: Booth, Stephen
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Literature
Publisher's Description: Why do we value literature so? Many would say for the experience it brings us. But what is it about that experience that makes us treasure certain writings above others? Stephen Booth suggests that the greatest appeal of our most valued works may be that they are, in one way or another, nonsensical. He uses three disparate texts - the Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's epitaphs on his children, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night - to demonstrate how poetics triumphs over logic in the invigorating mental activity that enriches our experience of reading. Booth presents his case in a book that is crisply playful while at the same time thoroughly analytical. He demonstrates the lapses in logic and the irrational connections in examples of very different types of literature, showing how they come close to incoherence yet maintain for the reader a reliable order and purpose. Ultimately, Booth argues, literature gives us the capacity to cope effortlessly with, and even to transcend, the complicated and demanding mental experiences it generates for us.This book is in part a witty critique of the trends - old and new - of literary criticism, written by an accomplished and gifted scholar. But it is also a testimony to the power of the process of reading itself. Precious Nonsense is certain to bring pleasure to anyone interested in language and its beguiling possibilities.   [brief]
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