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Title: Flight from Eden: the origins of modern literary criticism and theory 
Author: Cassedy, Steven
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | European Literature
Publisher's Description: Steven Cassedy takes aim at two of the most enduring myths of modern criticism: that it is secular, and that it is new and autonomous. He argues that though modern criticism is often forbiddingly scientific and technical, the modern critic remains something of a mystic. Every school of modern criticism - from structuralism to postmodern criticism - rests on a faith in an "Eden," an irreducible essence, a myth, like the common myth that there is an intrinsic distinction between "poetic" language and "ordinary" language. The modern critic attempts to abandon all mystical faith; this is the "flight from Eden." But it is always in vain.It is traditionally assumed that modern literary criticism and theory came from France, and relatively recently. In fact, according to Cassedy, the entire modern critical consciousness was already formed by the early twentieth century in the minds of writers who were primarily neither professional critics nor philosophers, but poets. Some were French (Mallarmé, and Valéry); others were not (Rilke, Bely, and the Russian avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov). In them we find the same Edenic faith, the same effort to abandon it, and the same failure of that effort.   [brief]
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Title: The flight of the mind: Virginia Woolf's art and manic-depressive illness 
Author: Caramagno, Thomas C
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Autobiographies and Biographies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this major new book on Virginia Woolf, Caramagno contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. Literary studies of Woolf's life have been written almost exclusively from a psychoanalytic perspective. They portray Woolf as a victim of the Freudian "family romance," reducing her art to a neurotic evasion of a traumatic childhood.But current knowledge about manic-depressive illness - its genetic transmission, its biochemistry, and its effect on brain function - reveals a new relationship between Woolf's art and her illness. Caramagno demonstrates how Woolf used her illness intelligently and creatively in her theories of fiction, of mental functioning, and of self structure. Her novels dramatize her struggle to imagine and master psychic fragmentation. They helped her restore form and value to her own sense of self and lead her readers to an enriched appreciation of the complexity of human consciousness.   [brief]
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Title: A flourishing Yin: gender in China's medical history, 960-1665
Author: Furth, Charlotte
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Asian History | Asian Studies | Women's Studies | China | Medicine
Publisher's Description: This book brings the study of gender to Chinese medicine and in so doing contextualizes Chinese medicine in history. It examines the rich but neglected tradition of fuke , or medicine for women, over the seven hundred years between the Song and the end of the Ming dynasty. Using medical classics, popular handbooks, case histories, and belles lettres , it explores evolving understandings of fertility and menstruation, gestation and childbirth, sexuality, and gynecological disorders.Furth locates medical practice in the home, where knowledge was not the monopoly of the learned physician and male doctors had to negotiate the class and gender boundaries of everyday life. Women as healers and as patients both participated in the dominant medical culture and sheltered a female sphere of expertise centered on, but not limited to, gestation and birth. Ultimately, her analysis of the relationship of language, text, and practice reaches beyond her immediate subject to address theoretical problems that arise when we look at the epistemological foundations of our knowledge of the body and its history.   [brief]
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Title: A flowering tree: and other oral tales from India A.K. Ramanujan ; edited with a preface by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes 
Author: Ramanujan, A. K 1929-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Fiction | Language and Linguistics | Asian Literature | Folklore and Mythology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: This book of oral tales from the south Indian region of Kannada represents the culmination of a lifetime of research by A. K. Ramanujan, one of the most revered scholars and writers of his time. The result of over three decades' labor, this long-awaited collection makes available for the first time a wealth of folktales from a region that has not yet been adequately represented in world literature. Ramanujan's skill as a translator, his graceful writing style, and his profound love and understanding of the subject enrich the tales that he collected, translated, and interpreted.With a written literature recorded from about 800 A.D., Kannada is rich in mythology, devotional and secular poetry, and more recently novels and plays. Ramanujan, born in Mysore in 1929, had an intimate knowledge of the language. In the 1950s, when working as a college lecturer, he began collecting these tales from everyone he could - servants, aunts, schoolteachers, children, carpenters, tailors. In 1970 he began translating and interpreting the tales, a project that absorbed him for the next three decades. When Ramanujan died in 1993, the translations were complete and he had written notes for about half of the tales.With its unsentimental sympathies, its laughter, and its delightfully vivid sense of detail, the collection stands as a significant and moving monument to Ramanujan's memory as a scholar and writer.   [brief]
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Title: The flux of history and the flux of science 
Author: Margolis, Joseph 1924-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Philosophy | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: Does thinking have a history? If there are no necessarily changeless structures to be found in things and in our inquiry into them, then what knowledge of the world and ourselves is possible? In this boldly original and elegantly written study, Joseph Margolis argues for a radically historicized view of history that treats it as both a real process and a narrative account, each a product of continual change. Developing his argument through discussions of such influential philosophers of history and the natural sciences as Vico, Danto, Collingwood, Habermas, Hempel, Popper, Putnam, and Gadamer, he provides a coherent theory of flux and invariance that resolves several deep puzzles regarding human nature and understanding.While maintaining a thorough command of Anglo-American philosophy, Margolis challenges many of its most cherished assumptions and demonstrates the sense in which history and interpretation are one and the same. Exploring one of the master themes of this century, his book offers a novel theory of the human condition whose conclusions and concerns seem certain to inform philosophy in the next century as well.   [brief]
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Title: Fluxus experience
Author: Higgins, Hannah 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Art | Art History | Art Theory | Art Criticism
Publisher's Description: In this groundbreaking work of incisive scholarship and analysis, Hannah Higgins explores the influential art movement Fluxus. Daring, disparate, contentious - Fluxus artists worked with minimal and prosaic materials now familiar in post-World War II art. Higgins describes the experience of Fluxus for viewers, even experiences resembling sensory assaults, as affirming transactions between self and world. Fluxus began in the 1950s with artists from around the world who favored no single style or medium but displayed an inclination to experiment. Two formats are unique to Fluxus: a type of performance art called the Event, and the Fluxkit multiple, a collection of everyday objects or inexpensive printed cards collected in a box that viewers explore privately. Higgins examines these two setups to bring to life the Fluxus experience, how it works, and how and why it's important. She does so by moving out from the art itself in what she describes as a series of concentric circles: to the artists who create Fluxus, to the creative movements related to Fluxus (and critics' and curators' perceptions and reception of them), to the lessons of Fluxus art for pedagogy in general. Although it was commonly associated with political and cultural activism in the 1960s, Fluxus struggled against being pigeonholed in these too-prescriptive and narrow terms. Higgins, the daughter of the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, makes the most of her personal connection to the movement by sharing her firsthand experience, bringing an astounding immediacy to her writing and a palpable commitment to shedding light on what Fluxus is and why it matters.   [brief]
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Title: For documentary: twelve essays
Author: Vaughan, Dai
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Anthropology | Photography | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: These essays, which span twenty-five years of writing and a lifetime of experience, offer fresh and challenging insights into documentary. Dai Vaughan, one of the most highly regarded documentary editors to have worked in Britain in recent decades, makes his starting point plain: "Most of us would feel that the word 'documentary' had not justified its place in the dictionary if the films so called did not manifest some relationship with the world not shared by others." That elusive relationship is the subject of his eloquent reflections and analyses.As critic, Vaughan contrasts the Olympic Games films of Riefenstahl (1936) and Ichikawa (1964); as participant, he tells how the introduction of portable 16mm equipment gave rise to cinéma vérité and observational visual anthropology. The twin perspective of analyst and practitioner results in a radical restatement of the documentary project, one in which documentary is seen as engaging the viewer's freedom in a way that fiction does not. A chapter near the end, "From Today, Cinema Is Dead," is uncompromising in its pessimistic view that digitalization threatens the privileged relationship we have always granted between a photograph and its object. Film theorists and filmmakers, indeed everyone who cares about how our society represents itself to itself, will find For Documentary engrossing as well as illuminating.   [brief]
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Title: For love of the automobile: looking back into the history of our desires
Author: Sachs, Wolfgang
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Science | European History | Technology and Society | German Studies
Publisher's Description: In his cultural analysis of the motor car in Germany, Wolfgang Sachs starts from the assumption that the automobile is more than a means of transportation and that its history cannot be understood merely as a triumphant march of technological innovation. Instead, Sachs examines the history of the automobile from the late 1880s until today for evidence on the nature of dreams and desires embedded in modern culture. Written in a lively style and illustrated by a wealth of cartoons, advertisements, newspaper stories, and propaganda, this book explores the nature of Germany's love affair with the automobile. A "history of our desires" for speed, wealth, violence, glamour, progress, and power - as refracted through images of the automobile - it is at once fascinating and provocative.Sachs recounts the development of the automobile industry and the impact on German society of the marketing and promotion of the motor car. As cars became more affordable and more common after World War II, advertisers fanned the competition for status, refining their techniques as ownership became ever more widespread.Sachs concludes by demonstrating that the triumphal procession of private motorization has in fact become an intrusion. The grand dreams once attached to the automobile have aged. Sachs appeals for the cultivation of new dreams born of the futility of the old ones, dreams of "a society liberated from progress," in which location, distance, and speed are reconceived in more appropriately humane dimensions.   [brief]
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Title: For the hell of it: the life and times of Abbie Hoffman
Author: Raskin, Jonah 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: American Studies | United States History | Politics | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: As cultural revolutionary, media celebrity, Yippie, lost soul, and tragic suicide, Abbie Hoffman embodied the contradictions of his era. In this riveting new biography, Jonah Raskin draws on his own twenty-year relationship with Hoffman; hundreds of interviews with friends, family members, and former comrades; and careful scrutiny of FBI files, court records, and public documents. For the Hell of It is a must-read not only for those interested in this ultimate iconoclast, but also for all who seek a fuller understanding of Abbie Hoffman's America.   [brief]
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Title: For those who come after: a study of Native American autobiography 
Author: Krupat, Arnold
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Native American Studies | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: Drawing on the life stories of Native Americans solicited by historians during the 19th century and, later, by anthropologists concerned with amplifying the cultural record, Arnold Krupat examines the Indian autobiography as a specific genre of American writing.
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Title: The ford
Author: Austin, Mary Hunter 1868-1934
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Fiction | California and the West
Publisher's Description: Mary Austin's 1917 novel illuminates one of the crucial issues in California history - the usurpation of water from the Owens Valley. Ranging from the eastern Sierra to the financial district in San Francisco, the plot portrays the frenzied speculation in land and resources, labor protests, and femi . . . [more]
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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: Forget colonialism?: sacrifice and the art of memory in Madagascar
Author: Cole, Jennifer 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Geography | African History | Cultural Anthropology | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: While doing fieldwork in a village in east Madagascar that had suffered both heavy settler colonialism and a bloody anticolonial rebellion, Jennifer Cole found herself confronted by a puzzle. People in the area had lived through almost a century of intrusive French colonial rule, but they appeared to have forgotten the colonial period in their daily lives. Then, during democratic elections in 1992-93, the terrifying memories came flooding back. Cole asks, How do once-colonized peoples remember the colonial period? Drawing on a fine-grained ethnography of the social practices of remembering and forgetting in one community, she develops a practice-based approach to social memory.   [brief]
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Title: The forgiving air: understanding environmental change 
Author: Somerville, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Ecology | Earth Sciences | Science
Publisher's Description: The Forgiving Air is an authoritative, up-to-date handbook on global change. Written by a scientist for nonscientists, this primer humanizes the great environmental issues of our time - the hole in the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and air pollution - and explains everything in accessible prose. A new preface takes into account developments in environmental policy that have occurred since publication. Highlighting the interrelatedness of human activity and global change, Richard Somerville stresses the importance of an educated public in a world where the role of science is increasingly critical.   [brief]
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Title: The forgotten hermitage of Skellig Michael 
Author: Horn, Walter William 1908-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Architecture | Art | Architectural History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: This book is a dramatically told and visually stunning account of a ninth-century hermitage discovered on the South Peak of Skellig Michael, an island off the west coast of Ireland. It is the story, pieced together from fragmentary remains, study, and conjecture, of a man's attempt to live on a tiny ledge some 700 feet above the Atlantic on the outer edge of the European land mass, alone, as close to God as possible, in what is perhaps the ne plus ultra of ecstatic monastic solitude.Richly illustrated with maps, plans, and photographs that capture both the astonishing beauty and isolation of the hermitage, the text also includes reconstruction drawings of the site that combine a surveyor's accuracy with an artist's imaginative response to the hermit who found spiritual refuge on a pinnacle.   [brief]
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Title: Form and good in Plato's Eleatic dialogues: the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman 
Author: Dorter, Kenneth 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Classics | Philosophy | Classical Literature and Language
Publisher's Description: In this innovative analysis, Plato's four eleatic dialogues are treated as a continuous argument. In Kenneth Dorter's view, Plato reconsiders the theory of forms propounded in his earlier dialogues and through an examination of the theory's limitations reaffirms and proves it essential. Contradicted are both those philosophers who argue that Plato espoused his theory of forms uncritically and those who argue that Plato in some sense rejected the theory and moved toward the categorical analysis developed byAristotle. Dorter's reexamination of Plato's insights implies an important new direction for modern philosophical inquiry.   [brief]
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Title: Foundational fictions: the national romances of Latin America
Author: Sommer, Doris 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | Comparative Literature | Latin American Studies | Gender Studies
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Title: Foundations of political economy: some early Tudor views on state and society
Author: Wood, Neal
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Political Theory | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Conventional wisdom claims that the seventeenth century gave birth to the material and ideological forces that culminated in the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. Not true, according to Neal Wood, who argues that much earlier reformers - Dudley, Starkey, Brinklow, Latimer, Crowley, Becon, Lever, and Thomas Smith, as well as the better-known More and Fortescue - laid the groundwork by fashioning an economic conception of the state in response to social, economic and political conditions of England. Wood's innovative study of these early Tudor thinkers, who upheld the status quo yet condemned widespread poverty and suffering, will interest historians, political scientists, and social and political theorists.   [brief]
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Title: Founder of Hasidism: a quest for the historical Baʾal Shem Tov
Author: Rosman, Murray Jay
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Judaism
Publisher's Description: This book goes farther than any previous work in uncovering the historical Israel ben Eliezer - known as the Ba'al Shem Tov, or the Besht - the eighteenth-century Polish-Jewish mystic who profoundly influenced the shape of modern Judaism. As the progenitor of Hasidism, the Ba'al Shem Tov is one of the key figures in Jewish history; to understand him is to understand an essential element of modern Jewish life and religion.Because evidence about his life is scanty and equivocal, the Besht has long eluded historians and biographers. Much of what is believed about him is based on stories compiled more than a generation after his death, many of which serve to mythologize rather than describe their subject. Rosman's study casts a bright new light on the traditional stories about the Besht, confirming and augmenting some, challenging others. By concentrating on accounts attributable directly to the Besht or to contemporary eyewitnesses, Rosman provides a portrait drawn from life rather than myth. In addition, documents in Polish and Hebrew discovered by Rosman during the research for this book enable him to give the first detailed description of the cultural, social, economic, and political context of the Ba'al Shem Tov's life.   [brief]
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Title: Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840-1890
Author: Johnson, David Alan 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | United States History | Californian and Western History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: Founding the Far West is an ambitious and vividly written narrative of the early years of statehood and statesmanship in three pivotal western territories. Johnson offers a model example of a new approach to history that is transforming our ideas of how America moved west, one that breaks the mold of "regional" and "frontier" histories to show why Western history is also American history.Johnson explores the conquest, immigration, and settlement of the first three states of the western region. He also investigates the building of local political customs, habits, and institutions, as well as the socioeconomic development of the region. While momentous changes marked the Far West in the later nineteenth century, distinctive local political cultures persisted. These were a legacy of the pre-Civil War conquest and settlement of the regions but no less a reflection of the struggles for political definition that took place during constitutional conventions in each of the three states.At the center of the book are the men who wrote the original constitutions of these states and shaped distinctive political cultures out of the common materials of antebellum American culture. Founding the Far West maintains a focus on the individual experience of the constitution writers - on their motives and ambitions as pioneers, their ideological intentions as authors of constitutions, and the successes and failures, after statehood, of their attempts to give meaning to the constitutions they had produced.   [brief]
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