Title: Singular women: writing the artist 
Author: Frederickson, Kristen 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Art | Art History | Art Criticism | Art Theory | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this groundbreaking volume, contemporary art historians - all of them women - probe the dilemmas and complexities of writing about the woman artist, past and present. Singular Women proposes a new feminist investigation of the history of art by considering how a historian's theoretical approach affects the way in which research progresses and stories are told. These thirteen essays on specific artists, from the Renaissance to the present day, address their work and history to examine how each has been inserted into or left out of the history of art. The authors go beyond an analysis of the past to propose new strategies for considering the contributions of women to the visual arts, strategies that take into account the idiosyncratic, personal, and limited rhetoric that confines all writers.   [brief]
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Title: Late modernism: politics, fiction, and the arts between the world wars 
Author: Miller, Tyrus 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Literature | Fiction | Art Theory | Cinema and Performance Arts | Politics | Political Theory | History
Publisher's Description: Tyrus Miller breaks new ground in this study of early twentieth-century literary and artistic culture. Whereas modernism studies have generally concentrated on the vital early phases of the modernist revolt, Miller focuses on the turbulent later years of the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the dissolution of modernism in the interwar years.In the post-World War I reconstruction and the worldwide crisis that followed, Miller argues, new technological media and the social forces of mass politics opened fault lines in individual and collective experience, undermining the cultural bases of the modernist movement. He shows how late modernists attempted to discover ways of occupying this new and often dangerous cultural space. In doing so they laid bare the ruin of the modernist aesthetic at the same time as they transcended its limits.In his wide-ranging theoretical and historical discussion, Miller relates developments in literary culture to tendencies in the visual arts, cultural and political criticism, mass culture, and social history. He excavates Wyndham Lewis's hidden borrowings from Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer ; situates Djuna Barnes between the imagery of haute couture and the intellectualism of Duchamp; uncovers Beckett's affinities with Giacometti's surrealist sculptures and the Bolshevik clowns Bim-Bom; and considers Mina Loy as both visionary writer and designer of decorative lampshades. Miller's lively and engaging readings of culture in this turbulent period reveal its surprising anticipation of our own postmodernity.   [brief]
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Title: The cigarette papers 
Author: Glantz, Stanton A
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Politics | Medicine | Public Policy | Law | United States History
Publisher's Description: Around-the-clock tobacco talks, multibillion-dollar lawsuits against the major cigarette companies, and legislative wrangling over how much to tax a pack of cigarettes - these are some of the most recent episodes in the war against the tobacco companies. The Cigarette Papers shows what started it all: revelations that tobacco companies had long known the grave dangers of smoking, and did nothing about it.In May 1994 a box containing 4,000 pages of internal tobacco industry documents arrived at the office of Professor Stanton Glantz at the University of California, San Francisco. The anonymous source of these "cigarette papers" was identified only as "Mr. Butts." These documents provide a shocking inside account of the activities of one tobacco company, Brown & Williamson, over more than thirty years. Quoting extensively from the documents themselves and analyzing what they reveal, The Cigarette Papers shows what the tobacco companies have known and galvanizes us to take action.   [brief]
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Title: Rhetorics of self-making 
Author: Battaglia, Debbora
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Departing from an essentialist concept of the self, this highly original volume advances the cross-cultural study of selfhood with three contributions to the literature: First, it approaches the self as an ideological process, arguing that selfhood is culturally situated and emergent in social practices of persuasion. Second, it demonstrates how postmodernity problematizes the experience and concept of the self. Finally, the book challenges the pervasive practice of equating an individuated self with the Western world and a relational self with the non-Western world. Contributions cover a broad range of topics - from the development of the eccentric self to the ritual circumcision of Jewish males.   [brief]
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Title: An obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and The diary 
Author: Graver, Lawrence 1931-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | American Studies | History | European History
Publisher's Description: Anne Frank's Diary has been acclaimed throughout the world as an indelible portrait of a gifted girl and as a remarkable document of the Holocaust. For Meyer Levin, the respected writer who helped bring the Diary to an American audience, the Jewish girl's moving story became a thirty-year obsession that altered his life and brought him heartbreaking sorrow.Lawrence Graver's fascinating account of Meyer Levin's ordeal is a story within a story. What began as a warm collaboration between Levin and Anne's father, Otto Frank, turned into a notorious dispute that lasted several decades and included litigation and public scandal. Behind this story is another: one man's struggle with himself - as a Jew and as a writer - in postwar America. Looming over both stories is the shadow of the Holocaust and its persistent, complex presence in our lives.Graver's book is based on hundreds of unpublished documents and on interviews with some of the Levin-Frank controversy's major participants. It illuminates important areas of American culture: publishing, law, religion, politics, and the popular media. The "Red Scare," anti-McCarthyism, and the commercial imperatives of Broadway are all players in this book, along with the assimilationist mood among many Jews and the simplistic pieties of American society in the 1950s.Graver also examines the different and often conflicting ways that people the world over, Jewish and Gentile, wanted Anne Frank and her much-loved book to be represented. That her afterlife has in extraordinary ways taken on the shape and implications of myth makes Graver's story - and Meyer Levin's - even more compelling.   [brief]
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Title: Modern drama and the rhetoric of theater 
Author: Worthen, William B 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Theatre | Rhetoric
Publisher's Description: The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience.How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play.Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.   [brief]
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Title: The collected essays of Robert Creeley. 
Author: Creeley, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
Publisher's Description: For nearly four decades, Robert Creeley has been a popular and often controversial force in American poetry and letters. His essays, written from the 1950s to the 1980s and collected here for the first time, show a poet deeply touched by and in touch with the concerns of his post-war generation. His spare prose illuminates many important literary and artistic figures - Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, John Chamberlain, and others - capturing the essence of their distinctively American achievements.   [brief]
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Title: No aging in India: Alzheimer's, the bad family, and other modern things 
Author: Cohen, Lawrence 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Aging | South Asia
Publisher's Description: From the opening sequence, in which mid-nineteenth-century Indian fishermen hear the possibility of redemption in an old woman's madness, No Aging in India captures the reader with its interplay of story and analysis. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic work, Lawrence Cohen links a detailed investigation of mind and body in old age in four neighborhoods of the Indian city of Varanasi (Banaras) with events and processes around India and around the world. This compelling exploration of senility - encompassing not only the aging body but also larger cultural anxieties - combines insights from medical anthropology, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. Bridging literary genres as well as geographic spaces, Cohen responds to what he sees as the impoverishment of both North American and Indian gerontologies - the one mired in ambivalence toward demented old bodies, the other insistent on a dubious morality tale of modern families breaking up and abandoning their elderly. He shifts our attention irresistibly toward how old age comes to matter in the constitution of societies and their narratives of identity and history.   [brief]
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Title: The "new woman" revised: painting and gender politics on fourteenth street 
Author: Todd, Ellen Wiley
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Art | Art History | United States History | Women's Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In the years between the world wars, Manhattan's Fourteenth Street-Union Square district became a center for commercial, cultural, and political activities, and hence a sensitive barometer of the dramatic social changes of the period. It was here that four urban realist painters - Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and Isabel Bishop - placed their images of modern "new women." Bargain stores, cheap movie theaters, pinball arcades, and radical political organizations were the backdrop for the women shoppers, office and store workers, and consumers of mass culture portrayed by these artists. Ellen Wiley Todd deftly interprets the painters' complex images as they were refracted through the gender ideology of the period.This is a work of skillful interdisciplinary scholarship, combining recent insights from feminist art history, gender studies, and social and cultural theory. Drawing on a range of visual and verbal representations as well as biographical and critical texts, Todd balances the historical context surrounding the painters with nuanced analyses of how each artist's image of womanhood contributed to the continual redefining of the "new woman's" relationships to men, family, work, feminism, and sexuality.   [brief]
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Title: A critical study of Philip Guston 
Author: Ashton, Dore
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Art | Art History | Art Criticism | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Dore Ashton has updated the bibliography and added a new concluding chapter to her classic study of the paintings and drawings of Philip Guston, the only study of his work completely authorized by the artist.Philip Guston (1913-1980) was one of the most independent of the painters whose work was loosely linked by the term "abstract expressionism" during the 1950s, and he baffled admirers of his lushly beautiful abstract expressionist paintings by moving abruptly in mid-career to gritty figurative paintings in an almost cartoon-like style. One of the few critics who saw this at the time as a progressive development in his work was Dore Ashton, who here analyzes Guston's paintings and drawings in the context of the cultural milieu in which he worked, illuminating the dilemma facing artists who try to live with, understand, and express both the ideals of art and the reality of the world.   [brief]
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Title: Religion and Rajput women: the ethic of protection in contemporary narratives 
Author: Harlan, Lindsey
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Religion | Hinduism | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: What is the relationship between caste and gender in the narratives of Rajput woman? During a year and a half of fieldwork in Rajasthan, a parched land dominated by the great Indian Desert, Lindsey Harlan interviewed more than a hundred women from all levels of Rajput society. She wanted to understand why certain religious practices were so important to Rajput women, and how they justified these to themselves. During the course of her interviews, the women described their religious practices - chief among them the worship of the family kuldevi (the goddess who exemplifies the ideal wife by staving off sickness, poverty, and infertility) and the veneration of satimatas (women who have immolated themselves on their husband's funeral pyre). As the women discussed these rituals, many of them also told Harlan religious myths and stories, drawing parallels between their behavior and that of various Indian heroines. These narratives and the role they play in the women's self-perception are the fascinating and enlightening subject of this book.   [brief]
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Title: Women and the war story 
Author: Cooke, Miriam
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Gender Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | European History
Publisher's Description: In a book that radically and fundamentally revises the way we think about war, Miriam Cooke charts the emerging tradition of women's contributions to what she calls the "War Story," a genre formerly reserved for men. Concentrating on the contemporary literature of the Arab world, Cooke looks at how alternatives to the master narrative challenge the authority of experience and the permission to write. She shows how women who write themselves and their experiences into the War Story undo the masculine contract with violence, sexuality, and glory. There is no single War Story, Cooke concludes; the standard narrative - and with it the way we think about and conduct war - can be changed.As the traditional time, space, organization, and representation of war have shifted, so have ways of describing it. As drug wars, civil wars, gang wars, and ideological wars have moved into neighborhoods and homes, the line between combat zones and safe zones has blurred. Cooke shows how women's stories contest the acceptance of a dyadically structured world and break down the easy oppositions - home vs. front, civilian vs. combatant, war vs. peace, victory vs. defeat - that have framed, and ultimately promoted, war.   [brief]
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Title: Immigration and the political economy of home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945-1992 
Author: Buff, Rachel 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | American Studies | Native American Studies | Native American Ethnicity | United States History
Publisher's Description: Rachel Buff's innovative study of festivals in two American communities launches a substantive inquiry into the nature of citizenship, race, and social power. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as well as archival research, Buff compares American Indian powwows in Minneapolis with the West Indian American Day Carnival in New York. She demonstrates the historical, theoretical, and cultural links between two groups who are rarely thought of together and in so doing illuminates our understanding of the meaning of home and citizenship in the post-World War II period. The book also follows the history of federal Indian and immigration policy in this period, tracing the ways that migrant and immigrant identities are created by both national boundaries and transnational cultural memory. In addition to offering fascinating discussions of these lively and colorful festivals, Buff shows that their importance is not just as a form of performance or entertainment, but also as crucial sites for making and remaking meanings about group history and survival. Cultural performances for both groups contain a history of resistance to colonial oppression, but they also change and creatively respond to the experiences of migration and the forces of the global mass-culture industry. Accessible and engaging, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home addresses crucial contemporary issues. Powwow culture and carnival culture emerge as vital, dynamic sites that are central not only to the formation of American Indian and West Indian identities, but also to the understanding modern America itself: the history of its institution of citizenship, its postwar cities, and the nature of metropolitan culture.   [brief]
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Title: Seducing the French: the dilemma of Americanization 
Author: Kuisel, Richard F
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | Popular Culture | French Studies
Publisher's Description: When Coca-Cola was introduced in France in the late 1940s, the country's most prestigious newspaper warned that Coke threatened France's cultural landscape. This is one of the examples cited in Richard Kuisel's engaging exploration of France's response to American influence after World War II. In analyzing early French resistance and then the gradual adaptation to all things American that evolved by the mid-1980s, he offers an intriguing study of national identity and the protection of cultural boundaries.The French have historically struggled against Americanization in order to safeguard "Frenchness." What would happen to the French way of life if gaining American prosperity brought vulgar materialism and social conformity? A clash between American consumerism and French civilisation seemed inevitable.Cold War anti-Communism, the Marshall Plan, the Coca-Cola controversy, and de Gaulle's efforts to curb American investment illustrate ways that anti-Americanization was played out. Kuisel also raises issues that extend beyond France, including the economic, social, and cultural effects of the Americanized consumer society that have become a global phenomenon.Kuisel's lively account reaches across French society to include politicians, businessmen, trade unionists, Parisian intelligentsia, and ordinary citizens. The result reveals much about the French - and about Americans. As Euro Disney welcomes travellers to its Parisian fantasyland, and with French recently declared the official language of France (to defend it from the encroachments of English), Kuisel's book is especially relevant.   [brief]
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Title: The dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: culture, politics, and the formation of a modern diaspora 
Author: Beinin, Joel 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Religion | Judaism | Middle Eastern Studies | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: In this provocative and wide-ranging history, Joel Beinin examines fundamental questions of ethnic identity by focusing on the Egyptian Jewish community since 1948. A complex and heterogeneous people, Egyptian Jews have become even more diverse as their diaspora continues to the present day. Central to Beinin's study is the question of how people handle multiple identities and loyalties that are dislocated and reformed by turbulent political and cultural processes. It is a question he grapples with himself, and his reflections on his experiences as an American Jew in Israel and Egypt offer a candid, personal perspective on the hazards of marginal identities.   [brief]
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Title: Incidents 
Author: Barthes, Roland
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Autobiography | Literary Theory and Criticism | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1979, just after having written skeptically on the question of whether a journal was worth keeping "with a view to publication," Roland Barthes began to keep an intimate journal called "Soirées de Paris" in which he gave direct notation to his gay desire in its various states of excitation, panic, and despair. Together with three other uncollected texts by Barthes, including an earlier journal he kept in Morocco, this remarkable document was published in France after its author's death under the title of Incidents . Richard Howard's translation now makes the volume available to readers of English."I gave him some money, he promised to be at the rendezvous an hour later, and of course never showed up. I asked myself if I was really so mistaken (the received wisdom about giving money to a hustler in advance! ) and concluded that since I really didn't want him all that much (nor even to make love), the result was the same: sex or no sex, at eight o'clock I would find myself back at the same point in my life." - from Incidents   [brief]
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Title: Cool conduct: the culture of distance in Weimar Germany 
Author: Lethen, Helmut
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Sociology | German Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Cool Conduct is an elegant interpretation of attitudes and mentalities that informed the Weimar Republic by a scholar well known for his profound knowledge of this period. Helmut Lethen writes of "cool conduct" as a cultivated antidote to the heated atmosphere of post-World War I Germany, as a way o . . . [more]
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Title: War and popular culture: resistance in modern China, 1937-1945 
Author: Hung, Chang-tai 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: This is the first comprehensive study of popular culture in twentieth-century China, and of its political impact during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 (known in China as "The War of Resistance against Japan"). Chang-tai Hung shows in compelling detail how Chinese resisters used a variety of popular cultural forms - especially dramas, cartoons, and newspapers - to reach out to the rural audience and galvanize support for the war cause. While the Nationalists used popular culture as a patriotic tool, the Communists refashioned it into a socialist propaganda instrument, creating lively symbols of peasant heroes and joyful images of village life under their rule. In the end, Hung argues, the Communists' use of popular culture contributed to their victory in revolution.   [brief]
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Title: American sensations: class, empire, and the production of popular culture 
Author: Streeby, Shelley 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | American Literature | Californian and Western History | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: This innovative cultural history investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848--including dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this "literature of sensation" that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture. Streeby's analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept of empire for understanding U.S. history and literature. This accessible, interdisciplinary book brilliantly analyzes the sensational literature of George Lippard, A.J.H Duganne, Ned Buntline, Metta Victor, Mary Denison, John Rollin Ridge, Louisa May Alcott, and many other writers. Streeby also discusses antiwar articles in the labor and land reform press; ideas about Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua in popular culture; and much more. Although the Civil War has traditionally been a major period marker in U.S. history and literature, Streeby proposes a major paradigm shift by using mass culture to show that the U.S.-Mexican War and other conflicts with Mexicans and Native Americans in the borderlands were fundamental in forming the complex nexus of race, gender, and class in the United States.   [brief]
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Title: The Berlin novels of Alfred Döblin: Wadzek's Battle with the steam turbine, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Men without mercy, and November 1918 
Author: Dollenmayer, David B
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature
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