Title: Loyola's acts: the rhetoric of the self 
Author: Boyle, Marjorie O'Rourke 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance History | Christianity | Rhetoric | Art History | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: This revisionist view of Ignatius Loyola argues that his "autobiography" - until now taken to be a literal, documentary account - is in reality a work of rhetoric, a moral narrative that exploits the techniques of fiction. In radically reinterpreting this canonical text, our main source of information about the founder of the largest and most powerful religious order in Roman Catholicism, Boyle paints a vivid picture of Loyola's world. She surveys rhetorical and artistic theory, religious iconography, everyday custom, and an astonishing array of scenes and subjects: from curiosity, to codes of honor, to the holy places of Spain, to the significance of apparitions and flying serpents.Written in the tradition of Renaissance studies on individualism, Loyola's Acts engages current interest in autobiography and in the history of private life. The book also provides a powerful heuristic for interpreting a wide range of texts of the Christian tradition. Finally, this secular treatment of a canonized saint provides revealing insights into how a prestigious sixteenth-century figure like Loyola understood himself.   [brief]
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Title: Abuses 
Author: Lingis, Alphonso 1933-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Literature | Cultural Anthropology | Social and Political Thought | Psychology | Travel
Publisher's Description: Part travelogue, part meditation, Abuses is a bold exploration of central themes in Continental philosophy by one of the most passionate and original thinkers in that tradition writing today.A gripping record of desires, obsessions, bodies, and spaces experienced in distant lands, Alphonso Lingis's book offers no less than a new approach to philosophy - aesthetic and sympathetic - which departs from the phenomenology of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me. . . . These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting."Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, Abuses contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, Abuses will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself."   [brief]
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Title: Faultlines: cultural materialism and the politics of dissident reading 
Author: Sinfield, Alan
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: If we come to consciousness within a language that is complicit with the social order, how can we conceive, let alone organize, resistance to that social order? This key question in the politics of reading and subcultural practice informs Alan Sinfield's book on writing in early-modern England.New historicism has often shown people trapped in a web of language and culture. In lively discussions of writings by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Donne, Sinfield reassesses the scope of dissidence and control. The early-modern state, Christianity, and the cultural apparatus, despite an ideology of unity and explicit violence, could not but allow space to challenging voices. Sinfield shows that disruptions in concepts of hierarchy, nationality, gender, and sexuality force their way into literary texts.Sinfield is often provocative. He "rewrites" Julius Caesar to produce a different politics, compares Sidney's idea of poetry to Leonid Brezhnev's, and reinstates the concept of character in the face of post-structuralist theory. He keeps the current politics of literary study in view, especially in a substantial chapter on Shakespeare in the U.S. Sinfield subjects interactions between class, ethnicity, sexuality, and the professional structures of the humanities to a detailed and hard-hitting critique, and argues for new commitments to collectivities and subcultures.   [brief]
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Title: When God is a customer: Telugu courtesan songs 
Author: Kṣētrayya 17th cent
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | Poetry | Hinduism | South Asia
Publisher's Description: How is it that this woman's breastsglimmer so clearly through her saree?Can't you guess, my friends?What are they but rays from the crescentsleft by the nails of her loverpressing her in his passion,rays now luminous as the moonlightof a summer night?These South Indian devotional poems show the dramatic use of erotic language to express a religious vision. Written by men during the fifteenth to eighteenth century, the poems adopt a female voice, the voice of a courtesan addressing her customer. That customer, it turns out, is the deity, whom the courtesan teases for his infidelities and cajoles into paying her more money. Brazen, autonomous, fully at home in her body, she merges her worldly knowledge with the deity's transcendent power in the act of making love.This volume is the first substantial collection in English of these Telugu writings, which are still part of the standard repertoire of songs used by classical South Indian dancers. A foreword provides context for the poems, investigating their religious, cultural, and historical significance. Explored, too, are the attempts to contain their explicit eroticism by various apologetic and rationalizing devices.The translators, who are poets as well as highly respected scholars, render the poems with intelligence and tenderness. Unusual for their combination of overt eroticism and devotion to God, these poems are a delight to read.   [brief]
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Title: Songs to make the dust dance: the Ryōjin hishō of twelfth-century Japan 
Author: Kwon, Yung-Hee K
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Asian Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Japan | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: Breaking through the long-established image of Heian Japan (794-1185) as a culture dominated by ritualized aristocratic values, Yung-Hee Kim presents the picture of a country in transition, filled with a wide variety of common people responding to very ordinary situations. In popular songs called imayo , they expressed their concerns about religion, love, aging, and even current affairs.In 1179 Emperor Go-Shirakawa compiled Ryojin hisho , a twenty-volume collection of this song genre that juxtaposes the sacred with the profane, the high with the low, the male with the female, the old with the new. Kim makes these songs the core of her book, in translations that faithfully reflect the sounds and images of the originals and bring them to life within their own literary and cultural context.   [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: Writing tricksters: mythic gambols in American ethnic literature 
Author: Smith, Jeanne Rosier 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Ethnic Studies | African American Studies | Asian Literature | Native American Studies
Publisher's Description: Writing Tricksters examines the remarkable resurgence of tricksters - ubiquitous shape-shifters who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds - on the contemporary cultural and literary scene. Depicting a chaotic, multilingual world of colliding and overlapping cultures, many of America's most successful and important women writers are writing tricksters. Taking up works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison, Jeanne Rosier Smith accessibly weaves together current critical discourses on marginality, ethnicity, feminism, and folklore, illuminating a "trickster aesthetic" central to non-Western storytelling traditions and powerfully informing American literature today.   [brief]
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Title: Inscribing the time: Shakespeare and the end of Elizabethan England 
Author: Mallin, Eric Scott
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: Combining the resources of new historicism, feminism, and postmodern textual analysis, Eric Mallin reveals how contemporary pressures left their marks on three Shakespeare plays written at the end of Elizabeth's reign. Close attention to the language of Troilus and Cressida , Hamlet , and Twelfth Night reveals the ways the plays echo the events and anxieties that accompanied the beginning of the seventeenth century. Troilus reflects the rebellion of the Earl of Essex and the failure of the courtly, chivalric style. Hamlet resonates with the danger of the bubonic plague and the difficult succession history of James I. Twelfth Night is imbued with nostalgia for an earlier period of Elizabeth's rule, when her control over religious and erotic affairs seemed more secure.   [brief]
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Title: Toward a new poetics: contemporary writing in France: interviews, with an introduction and translated texts 
Author: Gavronsky, Serge
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Poetry | European Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Writing | French Studies
Publisher's Description: A quiet revolution is taking place in avant-garde French poetry and prose. In this collection of twelve interviews with some of France's most important poets and writers, Serge Gavronsky introduces American readers to these exciting new developments.As Gavronsky explains, a neolyricism is now replacing the formalism of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. In his substantial introduction, Gavronsky notes how the ideological definition of writing ( écriture ) has given way to more open forms of writing. Human experiences of the most ordinary kinds are finding a place in the text.These interviews offer a view of the poets' and writers' creative processes and range over such topics as current literary theory, the impact of American poetry in France, and the place of feminism in contemporary French writing. Each interview is accompanied by samples of the writer's work in French and in Gavronsky's English translations. Toward a New Poetics provides a highly informative cultural and critical perspective on contemporary writing in France, introducing us to works which are now transforming the idea of literature itself.   [brief]
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Title: The novel according to Cervantes 
Author: Gilman, Stephen
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | European History | Literature in Translation | Intellectual History
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Title: Another kind of love: male homosexual desire in English discourse, 1850-1920 
Author: Craft, Christopher 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Sociology | Literary Theory and Criticism | Gender Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: In a study that will be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, Christopher Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it?Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam , Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest , Stoker's Dracula , and Lawrence's Women In Love .   [brief]
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Title: Robert Maynard Hutchins: a memoir 
Author: Mayer, Milton Sanford 1908-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | Autobiographies and Biographies | Print Media | Education | United States History
Publisher's Description: At age 28, he was dean of Yale Law School; at 30, president of the University of Chicago. By his mid-thirties, Robert Maynard Hutchins was an eminent figure in the world of educational innovation and liberal politics. And when he was 75, he told a friend, "I should have died at 35."Milton Mayer, Hutchins's colleague, and friend, gives an intimate picture of the remarkably outstanding, and fallible, man who participated in many of this century's most important social and political controversies. He captures the energy and intellectual fervor Hutchins could transmit to others, and which the man brought to the fields of law, politics, civil rights, and public affairs.Rich in detail and anecdote, this memoir vividly brings to life both a man and an age.   [brief]
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Title: On the margins of modernism: decentering literary dynamics 
Author: Kronfeld, Chana
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Comparative Literature | Language and Linguistics | Literary Theory and Criticism | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: Modernism valorizes the marginal, the exile, the "other" - yet we tend to use writing from the most commonly read European languages (English, French, German) as examples of this marginality. Chana Kronfeld counters these dominant models of marginality by looking instead at modernist poetry written in two decentered languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. What results is a bold new model of literary dynamics, one less tied to canonical norms, less limited geographically, and less in danger of universalizing the experience of minority writers.Kronfeld examines the interpenetrations of modernist groupings through examples of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry in Europe, the U.S., and Israel. Her discussions of Amichai, Fogel, Raab, Halpern, Markish, Hofshteyn, and Sutskever will be welcomed by students of modernism in general and Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in particular.   [brief]
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Title: Victorian literature and the Victorian visual imagination 
Author: Christ, Carol T
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | Art History | English Literature | Victorian History | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Nineteenth-century British culture frequently represented the eye as the preeminent organ of truth. These essays explore the relationship between the verbal and the visual in the Victorian imagination. They range broadly over topics that include the relationship of optical devices to the visual imagination, the role of photography in changing the conception of evidence and truth, the changing partnership between illustrator and novelist, and the ways in which literary texts represent the visual. Together they begin to construct a history of seeing in the Victorian period.   [brief]
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Title: Paris as revolution: writing in the nineteenth-century city 
Author: Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Social Theory | European Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | European History | French Studies
Publisher's Description: In nineteenth-century Paris, passionate involvement with revolution turned the city into an engrossing object of cultural speculation. For writers caught between an explosive past and a bewildering future, revolution offered a virtuoso metaphor by which the city could be known and a vital principle through which it could be portrayed.In this engaging book, Priscilla Ferguson locates the originality and modernity of nineteenth-century French literature in the intersection of the city with revolution. A cultural geography, Paris as Revolution "reads" the nineteenth-century city not in literary works alone but across a broad spectrum of urban icons and narratives. Ferguson moves easily between literary and cultural history and between semiotic and sociological analysis to underscore the movement and change that fueled the powerful narratives defining the century, the city, and their literature. In her understanding and reconstruction of the guidebooks of Mercier, Hugo, Vallès, and others, alongside the novels of Flaubert, Hugo, Vallès, and Zola, Ferguson reveals that these works are themselves revolutionary performances, ones that challenged the modernizing city even as they transcribed its emergence.   [brief]
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Title: The naked text: Chaucer's Legend of good women 
Author: Delany, Sheila
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies | English Literature | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: A sequel to her seminal book on Chaucer's House of Fame , Sheila Delany's elegant and innovative study of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women explores what it meant to be a reader and a writer, and to be English and a courtier, in the late fourteenth century. The richness of late medieval art, philosophy, and history are powerfully brought to bear on one of Chaucer's most controversial works. So too are the insights of modern critical theory - semiotics, historicism, and gender studies especially - making this a unique achievement in medieval and Chaucerian studies.Delany's strikingly original readings of Chaucer's Orientalism, his sexual wordplay, his theological attitudes, and his treatment of sex and gender have given us a Chaucer for our time.   [brief]
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Title: Wordsworth and the cultivation of women 
Author: Page, Judith W 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | English Literature | Poetry | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Focusing on the poems of Wordsworth's "Great Decade," feminist critics have tended to see Wordsworth as an exploiter of women and "feminine" perspectives. In this original and provocative book, Judith Page examines works from throughout Wordsworth's long career to offer a more nuanced feminist account of the poet's values. She asks questions about Wordsworth and women from the point of view of the women themselves and of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture. Making extensive use of family letters, journals, and other documents, as well as unpublished material by the poet's daughter Dora Wordsworth, Page presents Wordsworth as a poet not defined primarily by egotistical sublimity but by his complicated and conflicted endorsement of domesticity and familial life.   [brief]
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Title: Roads to Rome: the antebellum Protestant encounter with Catholicism 
Author: Franchot, Jenny 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | American Studies | United States History | Christianity
Publisher's Description: The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the "foreign" practices of the "immigrant" church is the focus of Jenny Franchot's cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America.Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about America's origins and destiny. She then focuses on the popular tales of convent incarceration, with their Protestant "maidens" and lecherous, tyrannical Church superiors. Religious captivity narratives, like those of Indian captivity, were part of the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism.Discussions of Stowe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell - writers who sympathized with "Romanism" and used its imaginative properties in their fiction - further demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character.   [brief]
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Title: A life's mosaic: the autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala 
Author: Ntantala, Phyllis
Published: University of California Press,  1986
Subjects: Literature | Gender Studies | Latin American Studies | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
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Title: Ethnocriticism: ethnography, history, literature 
Author: Krupat, Arnold
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Anthropology | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Native American Studies
Publisher's Description: Ethnocriticism moves cultural critique to the boundaries that exist between cultures. The boundary traversed in Krupat's dexterous new book is the contested line between native and mainstream American literatures and cultures.For over a century the discourses of ethnography, history, and literature have sought to represent the Indian in America. Krupat considers all these discourses and the ways in which Indians have attempted to "write back," producing an oppositional - or at least a parallel - discourse.   [brief]
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