Title: Inscribed landscapes: travel writing from imperial China 
Author: Strassberg, Richard E
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: Alongside the scores of travel books about China written by foreign visitors, Chinese travelers' impressions of their own country rarely appear in translation. This anthology is the only comprehensive collection in English of Chinese travel writing from the first century A.D. through the nineteenth. Early examples of the genre describe sites important for their geography, history, and role in cultural mythology, but by the T'ang dynasty in the mid-eighth century certain historiographical and poetic discourses converged to form the "travel account" ( yu-chi ) and later the "travel diary" ( jih-chi ) as vehicles of personal expression and autobiography. These first-person narratives provide rich material for understanding the attitudes of Chinese literati toward place, nature, politics, and the self.The anthology is abundantly illustrated with paintings, portraits, maps, and drawings. Each selection is meticulously translated, carefully annotated, and prefaced by a brief description of the writer's life and work. The entire collection is introduced by an in-depth survey of the rise of Chinese travel writing as a cultural phenomenon. Inscribed Landscapes provides a unique resource for travelers as well as for scholars of Chinese literature, art, and history.   [brief]
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Title: Behind the scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the struggle for the Abbey Theatre 
Author: Frazier, Adrian Woods
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Poetry | Theatre
Publisher's Description: Behind the Scenes presents the story of Dublin's famous Abbey Theatre and its major creative personalities: W. B. Yeats, Annie Horniman, J. M. Synge, and Lady Gregory. Part history, part sociology, part biography, Frazier's work recreates the forces that shaped the Abbey stage, forces that involved the spirited participation of actors, audiences, press, and financiers as well as of the famous poet-playwright who was its co-director. His book unfolds an entertaining and suspenseful tale, centered on the undeniably autocratic personality of W.B. Yeats and with the political struggles of Ireland as a backdrop.   [brief]
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Title: Displaying the Orient: architecture of Islam at nineteenth-century world's fairs 
Author: Çelik, Zeynep
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Architecture | European History | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Gathering architectural pieces from all over the world, the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 introduced to fairgoers the notion of an imaginary journey, a new tourism en place . Through this and similar expositions, the world's cultures were imported to European and American cities as artifacts and presented to nineteenth-century men and women as the world in microcosm, giving a quick and seemingly realistic impression of distant places.Çelik examines the display of Islamic cultures at nineteenth-century world's fairs, focusing on the exposition architecture. She asserts that certain sociopolitical and cultural trends now crucial to our understanding of historical transformations in both the West and the world of Islam were mirrored in the fair's architecture. Furthermore, dominant attitudes toward cross-cultural exchanges were revealed repeatedly in Westerners' responses to these pavilions, in Western architects' interpretations of Islamic stylistic traditions, and in the pavilions' impact in such urban centers.Although the world's fairs claimed to be platforms for peaceful cultural communication, they displayed the world according to a hierarchy based on power relations. Çelik's delineation of this hierarchy in the exposition buildings enables us to understand both the adversarial relations between the West and the Middle East, and the issue of cultural self-definition for Muslim societies of the nineteenth century.   [brief]
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Title: And now my soul is hardened: abandoned children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 
Author: Ball, Alan M
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: Warfare, epidemics, and famine left millions of Soviet children homeless during the 1920s. Many became beggars, prostitutes, and thieves, and were denizens of both secluded underworld haunts and bustling train stations. Alan Ball's study of these abandoned children examines their lives and the strategies the government used to remove them from the streets lest they threaten plans to mold a new socialist generation. The "rehabilitation" of these youths and the results years later are an important lesson in Soviet history.   [brief]
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Title: The chances of rhyme: device and modernity 
Author: Wesling, Donald
Published: University of California Press,  1980
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
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Title: William Grant Still: a study in contradictions 
Author: Smith, Catherine Parsons 1933-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Music | Composers | African American Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: During the 1930s and 1940s William Grant Still (1895-1978) was known as the "Dean of Afro-American Composers." He worked as an arranger for early radio, on Broadway, and in Hollywood; major symphony orchestras performed his concert works; and an opera, written in collaboration with Langston Hughes, was produced by the New York City Opera. Despite these successes the composer's name gradually faded into obscurity. This book brings William Grant Still out of the archives and examines his place in America's musical heritage. It also provides a revealing window into our recent cultural past.Until now Still's profound musical creativity and cultural awareness have been obscured by the controversies that dogged much of his personal and professional life. New topics explored by Catherine Parsons Smith and her contributors include the genesis of the Afro American Symphony , Still's best-known work; his troubled years in film and opera; and his outspoken anticommunism.   [brief]
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Title: A silent minority: deaf education in Spain, 1550-1835 
Author: Plann, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Language and Linguistics | Medieval History | European History | Education | European Studies | Medieval Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: This timely, important, and frequently dramatic story takes place in Spain, for the simple reason that Spain is where language was first systematically taught to the deaf. Instruction is thought to have begun in the mid-sixteenth century in Spanish monastic communities, where the monks under vows of silence employed a well-established system of signed communications. Early in the 1600s, deaf education entered the domain of private tutors, laymen with no use for manual signs who advocated oral instruction for their pupils. Deaf children were taught to speak and lip-read, and this form of deaf education, which has been the subject of controversy ever since, spread from Spain throughout the world.Plann shows how changing conceptions of deafness and language constantly influenced deaf instruction. Nineteenth-century advances brought new opportunities for deaf students, but at the end of what she calls the preprofessional era of deaf education, deaf people were disempowered because they were barred from the teaching profession. The Spanish deaf community to this day shows the effects of the exclusion of deaf teachers for the deaf.The questions raised by Plann's narrative extend well beyond the history of deaf education in Spain: they apply to other minority communities and deaf cultures around the world. At issue are the place of minority communities within the larger society and, ultimately, our tolerance for human diversity and cultural pluralism.   [brief]
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Title: The rhetoric of confession: shishōsetsu in early twentieth-century Japanese fiction 
Author: Fowler, Edward
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature | Japan | Literary Theory and Criticism | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: The shishosetsu is a Japanese form of autobiographical fiction that flourished during the first two decades of this century. Focusing on the works of Chikamatsu Shuko, Shiga Naoya, and Kasai Zenzo, Edward Fowler explores the complex and paradoxical nature of shishosetsu , and discusses its linguisti . . . [more]
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Title: The memory of Tiresias: intertextuality and film 
Author: I︠A︡mpolʹskiĭ, M. B
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Literature | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: The concept of intertextuality has proven of inestimable value in recent attempts to understand the nature of literature and its relation to other systems of cultural meaning. In The Memory of Tiresias , Mikhail Iamposlki presents the first sustained attempt to develop a theory of cinematic intertextuality.Building on the insights of semiotics and contemporary film theory, Iampolski defines cinema as a chain of transparent, mimetic fragments intermixed with quotations he calls "textual anomalies." These challenge the normalization of meaning and seek to open reading out onto the unlimited field of cultural history, which is understood in texts as a semiotically active extract, already inscribed.Quotations obstruct mimesis and are consequently transformed in the process of semiosis, an operation that Iampolski defines as reading in an aura of enigma. In a series of brilliant analyses of films by D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and Luis Buñuel, he presents different strategies of intertextual reading in their work. His book suggests the continuing centrality of semiotic analysis and is certain to interest film historians and theorists, as well as readers in cultural and literary studies.   [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: Representation and its discontents: the critical legacy of German romanticism 
Author: Seyhan, Azade
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Philosophy | Literary Theory and Criticism | German Studies
Publisher's Description: Azade Seyhan provides a concise, elegantly argued introduction to the critical theory of German Romanticism and demonstrates how its approach to the metaphorical and linguistic nature of knowledge is very much alive in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Her analysis of key thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis explores their views on rhetoric, systematicity, hermeneutics, and cultural interpretation. Seyhan examines German Romanticism as a critical intervention in the debates on representation, which developed in response to the philosophical revolution of German Idealism.Facing a chaotic political and intellectual landscape, the eighteenth-century theorists sought new models of understanding and new objectives for criticism and philosophy. Representation and Its Discontents identifies the legacy of this formative moment in modern criticism and suggests its relevance to contemporary discussions of post-structuralism, orientalism, theories of textuality, and the nature of philosophical discourse.   [brief]
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Title: A skeptic among scholars: August Frugé on university publishing 
Author: Frugé, August 1909-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Reference | Publishing
Publisher's Description: When August Frugé joined the University of California Press in 1944, it was part of the University's printing department, publishing a modest number of books a year, mainly monographs by UC faculty members. When he retired as director 32 years later, the Press had been transformed into one of the largest, most distinguished university presses in the country, publishing more than 150 books annually in fields ranging from ancient history to contemporary film criticism, by notable authors from all over the world. August Frugé's memoir provides an exciting intellectual and topical story of the building of this great press. Along the way, it recalls battles for independence from the University administration, the Press's distinctive early style of book design, and many of the authors and staff who helped shape the Press in its formative years.   [brief]
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Title: An archaeology of Greece: the present state and future scope of a discipline 
Author: Snodgrass, Anthony M
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Classics | Archaeology | European History
Publisher's Description: Classical archaeology probably enjoys a wider appeal than any other branch of classical or archaeological studies. As an intellectual and academic discipline, however, its esteem has not matched its popularity. Here, Anthony Snodgrass argues that classical archaeology has a rare potential in the who . . . [more]
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Title: Hollywood in Berlin: American cinema and Weimar Germany 
Author: Saunders, Thomas J
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | German Studies | Film | United States History | European History
Publisher's Description: The setting is 1920s Berlin, cultural heart of Europe and the era's only serious cinematic rival to Hollywood. In his engaging study, Thomas Saunders explores an outstanding example of one of the most important cultural developments of this century: global Americanization through the motion picture.The invasion of Germany by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation. On the one hand it fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the specter of wholesale Americanization. On the other hand it spawned unprecedented levels of cooperation and exchange.In Berlin, American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition. Hollywood in Berlin correlates the changing forms of Hollywood's contributions to Weimar culture and the discourses that framed and interpreted them, restoring historical contours to a leading aspect of cultural interchange in this century. At the same time, the book successfully embeds Weimar cinema in its contemporary international setting.   [brief]
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Title: Aristotle on the goals and exactness of ethics 
Author: Anagnostopoulos, Georgios
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Classical Philosophy
Publisher's Description: Philosophers as diverse as Socrates, Plato, Spinoza, and Rawls have sometimes argued that ethics can be an exact discipline whose propositions can match the exactness we associate with mathematics. Yet for Aristotle, knowledge of ethical matters is essentially inexact, and his perceptive criticisms of the Socratic-Platonic ideal of ethical knowledge and its metaphysical presuppositions remain of enduring interest to contemporary moral theorists.Georgios Anagnostopoulos offers the most systematic and comprehensive critical examination to date of Aristotle's views on the exactness of ethics. Combining rigorous philosophical argument and close analysis of the philosopher's treatises on human conduct, he gives form to Aristotle's belief that knowledge of matters of conduct, not unlike knowledge of most natural phenomena, can never be free of certain kinds of inexactness. He concludes that according to Aristotle, ethics constitutes a mode of knowledge that is neither totally nondemonstrative on account of its inexactness nor free of the important epistemological difficulties common to all nonmathematical disciplines.   [brief]
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Title: Plato's Euthydemus: analysis of what is and is not philosophy 
Author: Chance, Thomas H
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | Classical Philosophy | Literature
Publisher's Description: With Plato's Euthydemus , Thomas Chance solves a longstanding riddle of Platonic studies. Thought to be an early, immature work, the Euthydemus has come across to scholars as lacking Plato's characteristic greatness. This apparent lack, Chance argues, is not a failure of the text but of scholarly perception. He advances a single thesis: that Plato deliberately presents eristic - contentious debate - as the antithesis to his own philosophical method. Once this thesis is accepted, the "hidden" purpose of the Euthydemus becomes manifest: Plato has used the occasion of his dialogue to combine a brilliantly crafted parody of sophistic antilogy with a subtle yet forceful exhortation designed to persuade all of us to pursue virtue and to love wisdom.   [brief]
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Title: The American musical landscape 
Author: Crawford, Richard 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Music | Musicology | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: In this refreshingly direct and engaging historical treatment of American music and musicology, Richard Crawford argues for the recognition of the distinct and vital character of American music. What is that character? How has musical life been supported in the United States and how have Americans understood their music? Exploring the conditions within which music has been made since the time of the American Revolution, Crawford suggests some answers to these questions.Surveying the history of several musical professions in the United States - composing, performing, teaching, and distributing music - Crawford highlights the importance of where the money for music comes from and where it goes. This economic context is one of his book's key features and gives a real-life view that is both fascinating and provocative. Crawford discusses interconnections between classical and popular music, using New England psalmody, nineteenth-century songs, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin to illustrate his points.Because broad cultural forces are included in this unique study, anyone interested in American history and American Studies will find it as appealing as will students and scholars of American music.   [brief]
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Title: The new German cinema: music, history, and the matter of style 
Author: Flinn, Caryl
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | German Studies | Music
Publisher's Description: When New German cinema directors like R. W. Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, and Werner Schroeter explored issues of identity - national, political, personal, and sexual - music and film style played crucial roles. Most studies of the celebrated film movement, however, have sidestepped the role of music, a curious oversight given its importance to German culture and nation formation. Caryl Flinn's study reverses this trend, identifying styles of historical remembrance in which music participates. Flinn concentrates on those styles that urge listeners to interact with difference - including that embodied in Germany's difficult history - rather than to "master" or "get past" it. Flinn breaks new ground by considering contemporary reception frameworks of the New German Cinema, a generation after its end. She discusses transnational, cultural, and historical contexts as well as the sexual, ethnic, national, and historical diversity of audiences. Through detailed case studies, she shows how music helps filmgoers engage with a range of historical subjects and experiences. Each chapter of The New German Cinema examines a particular stylistic strategy, assessing music's role in each. The study also examines queer strategies like kitsch and camp and explores the movement's charged construction of human bodies on which issues of ruination, survival, memory, and pleasure are played out.   [brief]
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Title: The limits of realism: Chinese fiction in the revolutionary period 
Author: Anderson, Marston
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: Chinese intellectuals of the early twentieth century were attracted to realism primarily as a tool for social regeneration. Realism encouraged writers to adopt the stance of the independent cultural critic and drew into the compass of serious literature the disenfranchised "others" of Chinese society. As historical pressures forced new ideological commitments in the late twenties and thirties, however, writers grew suspicious both of the "individualism" implicit in the realist model and of the often superficial nature of the sympathies that their fiction evoked in the middle class. Anderson argues that realism must be defined negatively as a "discourse of limitations" and is of minimal utility in the Chinese search for political and cultural empowerment. He shows how hesitations about the realist model affect the fiction of four representative authors, Lu Xun, Ye Shaojun, Mao Dun, and Zhang Tianyi. He also considers the demise of critical realism in the face of a new collectivist understanding of Chinese reality.   [brief]
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Title: Cognition: an introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit 
Author: Rockmore, Tom 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Philosophy | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit , the philosopher's first and perhaps greatest work, is the most important philosophical treatise of the nineteenth century. In this companion volume to his general introduction to Hegel, Tom Rockmore offers a passage-by-passage guide to the Phenomenology for first-time readers of the book and others who are not Hegel specialists.Rockmore demonstrates that Hegel's concepts of spirit, consciousness, and reason can be treated as elements of a single, coherent theory of knowledge, one that remains strikingly relevant for the contemporary discussion. He shows how the various conceptions of cognition developed in the text culminate in absolute knowing, which Rockmore reads, in opposition to the frequent religious readings of Hegel, in a wholly secular manner. Unlike commentators who isolate Hegel's text from its philosophical origins, Rockmore analyzes the book in the philosophical context from which it emerged, lucidly discussing notoriously difficult passages in relation to the ideas of Aristotle and Descartes, and above all to those of Kant and other German idealists.   [brief]
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