Bøger udgivet af Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

In Like Leaven in the Dough: Protestant Social Thought in Latin America, 1920-1950, Carlos Mondragn, offers an introduction to the ideas of notable Protestant writers in Latin America during the first half of the twentieth century. Despite their national and denominational differences, Mondragn argues that Protestant intellectuals developed a coherent set of ideas about freedom of religion and thought, economic justice, militarism, and national identity. This was a period when Protestants comprised a very small proportion of Latin America's total population; their very marginality compelled them to think creatively about their identity and place in Latin American society. Accused of embracing a foreign faith, these Protestants struggled to define national identities that had room for religious diversity and liberty of conscience. Marginalized and persecuted themselves, Latin America's Protestants articulated a liberating message decades before the appearance of Catholic Liberation Theology.

As it happens with other early-Modern corpora, the descriptive texts from sixteenth-century encounters of the Portuguese colonizers in Brazil are well-known for their strangeness. In them we find references to entities like monsters and demons, bizarre descriptions, and odd classification systems of plants and animals. Modern scholars usually dismiss these elements as mere eccentricities. Instead, this book takes these elements seriously. They are focused on and tackled with a theoretical tool-styles of thinking- developed in the fields of philosophy and history of science. By doing so the book aims to unveil epistemological and ontological issues in which colonial and post-colonial studies are entangled, and which have a relevance that goes beyond debates concerning, for instance, the formation of Brazil's cultural identity. This book contributes to Luso-Brazilian studies, science studies, and the history of the early-modern period. The notion of "e;styles of thinking"e; as presented and used in it benefitted from the many discussions about philosophy and history of science that emerged since the 1980s, with authors such as Ian Hacking, Lorraine Daston, and Peter Galison, who have already done much reassessing critically what is best in the work of previous authors such as Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, and Michel Foucault.This book considers that the well-known puzzling passages of the corpus of the Portuguese have a fictional and figurative character that acquires full intelligibility in view of literary and mystical traditions typical of the late Renaissance, and influential over the Portuguese. Nature is understood as emerging from an excessive source which permanently overflows it and which is impossible to refer to and depict literally. The book points to the fact that such an idea would connect the Portuguese with other peculiar pre-Modern and post-Modern authors with similar ontological insights: from the neo-Platonists to Boccaccio, Nietzsche, and more recently, Derrida.

This work explores the experiences of Hans Werner Richter and Alfred Andersch, authors who served in the German army during World War II, were captured by U.S. forces, and enlisted into a secret program to promote American democracy to their fellow POWs while imprisoned in the United States. Upon repatriation, they brought their experiences with the POW publication Der Ruf back to Germany, where they founded a periodical of the same name. Having grown disillusioned with the American occupation, the authors' stark criticisms of U.S. policies led to their dismissal from the second Der Ruf after only fifteen issues. This study attempts to understand their journey from acceptance and endorsement of American democratic ideals to disappointment and opposition to U.S. occupation policies. This transition played a crucial role in the foundation of the most influential West German literary circle: Group 47, organized a few months after the authors' dismissal.

Music in the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates and analyzes the ways in which Fitzgerald integrated music with literature through his entire writing career, from his early Triangle Club lyrics to his later Hollywood screenplays, but most significantly in the novels and short stories for which he is most famous.

Filming Forster focuses upon the challenges of producing film adaptations of five of E. M. Forster's novels. Rather than follow the older comparative approach, which typically damned the film for not being ';faithful' to the novel, this project explores the interactive relationship between film and novel. That relationship is implicit in the title ';Filming' Forster, rather than ';Forster Filmed,' which would suggest a completed process. A film adaptation forever changes the novel from which it was adapted, just as a return to the novel changes the viewer's perceptions of the film. Adapting Forster's novels for the screen was postponed until well after the author's death in 1970 because the trustees of the author's estate fulfilled his wish that his work not be filmed. Following the appearance of David Lean's film A Passage to India in 1984, four other film adaptations were released within seven years. Perhaps the most important was the Merchant Ivory production of Maurice, based upon Forster's ';gay' novel, published a year after his death. That film was among the first to approach same-sex relationships between men in a serious, respectful, and generally optimistic manner.

This book is a collection of critical essays that examine a radical shift in focus and orientation. In the challenge to the hermeneutics of suspicion, the adoption of alternative reading strategies, and the investigation of well-being, this collection is an analogue of a new discourse that has immensely enriched literary studies in the last decade.

The shift from orality to literacy that began with the invention of the phonetic alphabet, and which went into high-gear with Gutenberg's printing press more than 500 years ago, helped make the modern world. Some commentators have argued that this shift from orality to literacy marked a much broader, cultural shift of cataclysmic proportions. Today, with everything from e-mail to blogs, iPods and podcasts, through Google, Yahoo, eBay, and with cutting-edge smart phones, we find ourselves developing relationships with these newest communication tools that aren't simply allowing us to communicate faster, farther and with more ease than ever before. We aren't just moving around ideas, data, and information at unimaginable speed and scale. Our interminglings and fusions with digital communication technologies are also altering both individual and group consciousness in fundamental ways how we form and sustain relationships, how we think and perceive, what it means to see and to feel. We are remaking human identity once more, and manufacturing a new kind of culture along the way. The processes bound up in our digination may well be consequential to the trajectory of human evolution. That time-honored trope: the notion that technology is not the problem, rather, it's how people use technology that's the problem is shown to be wanting. Highlighting Marshall McLuhan's ';tetrads' or laws of media as a primary tool of analysis, R.C. MacDougall argues in line with other media ecologists that it's not so much how we use certain tools that matters, it's that we use them. More than any other technological form perhaps, communication technologies play particularly powerful and systemic roles in our culture, or any culture for that matter. Late adopters and even abstainers are not exempt from the psychological, social and cultural effects (and side-effects) of modern digital communication technology. While there are certainly varying degrees of immersion that is to say, while some of us live in the high-rise downtown district, some at the city limits, and still others out in the proverbial ';woods' we all live in Digination today.

This collection of essays investigates the various connections between Willa Cather's fiction and her aesthetic beliefs and practices.

Kevin De Ornellas argues that in Renaissance England the relationship between horse and rider works as an unambiguous symbol of domination by the strong over the weak. There was little sentimental concern for animal welfare, leading to the routine abuse of the material animal. This unproblematic, practical exploitation of the horse led to the currency of the horse/rider relationship as a trope or symbol of exploitation in the literature of the period. Engaging with fiction, plays, poems, and non-fictional prose works of late Tudor and early Stuart England, De Ornellas demonstrates that the horsea bridled, unwilling slavebecomes a yardstick against which the oppression of England's poor, women, increasingly uninfluential clergyman, and deluded gamblers is measured. The status of the bitted, harnessed horse was a low one in early modern Englandto be compared to such a beast is a demonstration of inferiority and subjugation. To think anything else is to be nave about the realities of horse management in the period and is to be nave about the realities of the exploitation of horses and other mammals in the present-day world.

This book is one of the few studies of small-town, Orthodox Jewish communities in central Europe. The author analyzes more than two centuries (1738-1950) of Jewish history.

During the years of Weimar and the Third Reich, Toller was one of the more active of the other Germanys left-wing intellectuals. A leader of the Bavarian Soviet of 1919, he had in addition won the Kleist prize and was recognized as one of Germanys best playwrights. Indeed, during the years of the Weimar Republic, the popularity of his works was unquestioned. His first play, Die Wandlung, was soon sold out and required a second edition; his dramatic works and poems were translated into twenty-seven languages. During the 1920's it was said that he dominated the German and Russian theatre and that he was the most spectacular personality in modern German literature. It was common for contemporaries to classify him as one of the foremost German writers of the Weimar era. During the 1930s, as an exile, he popularized to foreign audiences the idea of ';the other Germany' and became a leading spokesman against Hitler.However, it is Toller the social critic rather than Toller the dramatist with which thisbook is concerned, his ideas, his visions for Germany and Europe as transmitted in his works of fiction and prose. The book reflects on the responsibility an intellectual-critic has when writing about a democratic society (the Weimar Republic) that is unsuccessfully balancing between survival and annihilation. Toller was furthermore a Jewish intellectual. How did his religious traditions shape his views? He was also German and this raises a whole host of specifically Germanic patterns of looking at the world. He was also a left-wing intellectual and Toller is set in the broader context of left-wing intellectuals in Weimar and the Nazi era. A related reflection is to ask: so what? What difference did it make? How much of an influence do intellectuals have in the development of society? What is the relationship between intellectuals and their readers in a troubled society?

Embodying Difference: Scripting Social Images of the Female Body in Latina Theatre explores contemporary theatrical productions by Latina dramatists in the United States and focuses on the effects that neoliberal politics, global market strategies, gender formation, and racial and ethnic marginalization have had on Latinas. Through the analysis of select plays by dramatists Nao Bustamante, Coco Fusco, Anne Garca-Romero, Josefina Lopez, Cherre Moraga, Linda Nieves-Powell, Dolores Prida, and Milcha Snchez-Scott, Embodying Difference shows how the bodies of Latinas are represented on stage in order to create an image of Latina consolidation. The performances of a dynamic female body challenge assumptions about ethno-racial expressions, exoticized ';otherness,' and political correctness as this book explores often uneasy sites of representations of the body including phenotype, sexuality, obesity, and the body as a political marker. Drawing on the theoretical framework of difference, including differing gender voices, performances, and performative acts, Embodying Difference examines social images of the Latina body as a means of understanding and rearticulating Latina subjectivity through an expression of difference. By means of a gradual realization and self-acclamation of their own images, Latinas can learn to embody notions of self that endorse their curvaceous, sexualized, and oversized bodies that have historically been marked and marketed by their ';brownness.'

Honoring the work of W. Barnett Pearce, this volume of 16 essays explores various applications of the theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning. It anticipates futures in many areas of the communication field.

This book provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of five adaptations of Shakespeare from the early eighteenth century. Providing a critical introduction and extensive explanatory notes, Shakespeare Adaptations from the Early Eighteenth Century firmly situates the texts of Coriolanus, Richard II, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, and Henry V in the literary, cultural, and political contexts of the period.

Since the publication of John PolidoriΓÇÖs The Vampyre (1819), the vampire has been a mainstay of Western culture, appearing consistently in literature, art, music (notably opera), film, television, graphic novels and popular culture in general. Even before its entrance into the realm of arts and letters in the early nineteenth century, the vampire was a feared creature of Eastern European folklore and legend, rising from the grave at night to consume its living loved ones and neighbors, often converting them at the same time into fellow vampires. A major question exists within vampire scholarship: to what extent is this creature a product of European cultural forms, or is the vampire indeed a universal, perhaps even archetypal figure? In this collection of sixteen original essays, the contributors shed light on this question. One essay traces the origins of the legend to the early medieval Norse draugr, an ΓÇ£undeadΓÇ¥ creature who reflects the underpinnings of Dracula, the latter first appearing as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram StokerΓÇÖs 1897 novel, Dracula.In addition to these investigations of the Western mythic, literary and historic traditions, other essays in this volume move outside Europe to explore vampire figures in Native American and Mesoamerican myth and ritual, as well as the existence of similar vampiric traditions in Japanese, Russian and Latin American art, theatre, literature, film, and other cultural productions. The female vampire looms large, beginning with the Sumerian goddess Lilith, including the nineteenth-century Carmilla, and moving to vampiresses in twentieth-century film, literature, and television series. Scientific explanations for vampires and werewolves constitute another section of the book, including eighteenth-century accounts of unearthing, decapitation and cremation of suspected vampires in Eastern Europe. The vampireΓÇÖs beauty, attainment of immortality and eternal youth are all suggested as reasons for its continued success in contemporary popular culture.

This collection of essays extends the conversation on communication ethics and crisis communication to offer practical wisdom for meeting the challenges of a complex and ever-changing world. In multiple contexts ranging from the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and family to the political and public, moments of crisis call us to respond from within particular standpoints that shape our understanding and our response to crisis as we grapple with contested notions of the good in our shared life together. With no agreed-upon set of absolutes to guide us, this moment calls us to learn from difference as we seek resources to continue the human conversation as we engage the unexpected. This collection of essays invites multiple epistemological and methodological standpoints to consider alternative ways of thinking about communication ethics and crisis.

Modern literary scholarship has traced the ways in which a distinctly modern sense of selfhood and subjectivity, and of the individualist liberal society in which such a self takes shape, emerges from the drama and poetry of the early seventeenth century. John Milton, writer of the greatest long poem in English, Paradise Lost, takes up the challenge of modern character and social formation from Shakespeare and Donne and their contemporaries. He begins this task in his own early maturity, some thirty years before the publication of his great epic, with A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle,I>, more commonly known as Comus. There has not been a major book-length study of Milton's Maske in the past twenty years, so Lady in the Labyrinth fills a major gap in Milton and Renaissance criticism. It comprehensively surveys, evaluates, and integrates recent and traditional criticism of Comus in the context of Milton's other work, while developing new directions for study, focusing anthropological and psychological analysis on the poem's characters and mythological dimensions. Parallels between the ritual elements of the Maske and the rites of passage of non-European cultures will widen the horizons of both canonically based and multiculturally engaged scholars and writers. The book's study of Milton's identification with his female hero, and his advocacy of womens ethical, sexual, and political autonomy, gives a jolt to ongoing debates about Milton and feminism. The first of Milton's heroes of Christian Liberty, the fifteen-year-old Lady who performs in his Maske, is also the first of his characters to act out this transformation of human identity. Lady in the Labyrinth treats Comus, first performed in 1634, as a rite of passage for its Lady, and for the emerging culture whose hopes are invested in her. Displaying in song, argument and dance such character qualities as inferiority, self-consciousness, flexibility, and independence, the Lady gives vital form to

Americans and other English speakers have long associated the name of Hans Christian Andersen exclusively with fairy tales for children. Danes and other Scandinavians, however, have preserved an awareness that the fairy tales are but part of an extensive and respectable lifework that embraces several other literary forms. Moreover, they have never lost sight of the fact that the fairy tales themselves address adults no less than children. Significantly, many of Andersens coevals in the U.S. knew of his broader literary activity and the sophistication of his fairy tales. Major authors and critics commented on his various works in leading magazines and books, establishing a noteworthy corpus of criticism. One of them, Horace E. Scudder, wrote a seminal essay that surpassed virtually all contemporary writing on him in any language. The basic purpose of this study, the first of its kind, is to trace the course of American Andersen criticism over the second half of the nineteenth century and to view it in several American contexts.

This is a study of the changing relationship between two of the most important political figures of the first decades of the twentieth century. The author contrasts their backgrounds and training, their mind-sets, and their understanding of the power of the president to understand how they came to a parting of the ways.

While recent works of criticism on Frank O'Hara have focused on the technical similarities between his poetry and painting, or between his use of language and poststructuralism, Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Saying 'I' argues that what is most significant in O'Hara's work is not such much his 'borrowing' from painters or his proto-Derridean use of language, but his preoccupation with self exploration and the temporal effects of his work as artifacts. Following Pasternak's understanding of artistic inspiration as an act of love for the material world, O'Hara explores moments of experience in an effort to both complicate and enrich our experience of the material world. On the one hand, in poems such as Second Avenue, for example, O'Hara works to 'muddy' language through which experience is, in part, mediated with the use of parataxis, allusions, and absurd metaphors and similes. On the other, in his 'I do this I do that' poems, he names the events of his lunch hour in an effort, among other things, to experience time as a moment of fullness rather than as a moment of loss. The book argues, furthermore, that O'Hara's view of the self as both an expression of the creative force at work in the world and as the temporal aggregate of finite experiences, places him between so-called 'Romantic' and 'postmodern' theories of the lyric. While it is often argued that O'Hara is a forerunner of a new, critically informed, 'materialist' poetics, this study concludes that O'Hara's work is somewhat less radical in its understanding of poetic meaning than is often claimed. Moreover, while O'Hara is preoccupied with his experience in his poems, the book argues that he espouses, in some respects, a rather traditional view of love. In addition to being a metaphor for the creative act, love, for O'Hara, is the chance coming together of two entities. Yet, one of the ironies of this is that while love is, for O'Hara, a feeling that is the result of movement, or the unexpected coming together of two otherwise separate entities, and is itself characterized in his work as a moving, 'life-giving vulgarity,' it produces a feeling of peace and stillness-a feeling that will not remain because of the fact that the self changes and that love is itself a moving, living thing. Thus, love contains within itself the ominous promise of future loss and is, therefore, the highest feeling that contains within itself the seeds of the lowest.

How do poems remember? What kinds of memory do poems register that factual, chronological accounts of the past are oblivious to? What is the self created by such practices of memory? To answer these questions, Uta Gosmann introduces a general theory of 'poetic memory,' a manner of thinking that eschews simple-minded notions of linearity and accuracy in order to uncover the human subject's intricate relationship to a past that it cannot fully know. Gosmann explores poetic memory in the work of Sylvia Plath, Susan Howe, Ellen Hinsey, and Louise GlYck, four contemporary American poets writing in a wide range of styles and discussed here for the first time together. Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and thinkers from Nietzsche and Benjamin to Halbwachs and Kristeva, Gosmann uses these demanding poets to articulate an alternative, non-empirical model of the self in poetry. Plath, the quintessential 'confessional' poet, faces the precariousness of personal memory and first suffers, but then sardonically embraces the most horrific and vulgar fragments from the storehouse of collective memory. Howe, the experimentalist language poet, becomes the rememberer of marginal or 'nonconformist' figures, whose eccentricities, incoherences, and silences are the very grounds that enable her to inhabit the past. Hinsey, the lesser known of these poets who writes in the European tradition of poetry of witness, creates 'cities of memory' for us to dwell in, allowing us to imagine the past's spatial and temporal texture and its personal significance in fresh ways. GlYck, the 'post-confessional,' expands the memory of the self by enmeshing personal and archetypal memory via the persona of Persphone, a generative confluence which leaves both kinds of memory transformed. When these poets look at the past, they perceive its flawed representations, its lack of certainty, its margins and gaps, its traces in space, its deep marks in the psyche. They share an intuitive certainty of self as being other, and they look in different places to find what was split off, forgotten, and psychically lost. They use words, which are complex bits of memory, to push against encrusted structures or apparent boundaries of the mind and seek to represent more fluid states of consciousness. Poetic language--riven with metaphor, unrestricted by familiar forms of logic--is especially conducive to the work of poetic memory. Poetic memory embraces a vision of the self as malleable and mysterious, characterized by a radical otherness, and shaped by unconscious forces, while it remains open for continual imaginative reinvention. Through the practice of poetic memory, to speak with Plotinus, the soul 'is and becomes what it remembers.'

Engaging Strangers: Civil Rites, Civic Capitalism, and Public Order in Boston by Daniel J. Monti, Jr. explores how the people of Boston have learned to practice a more congenial and respectful set of civic virtues. Monti provides a model for civic conduct for the rest of America to study and follow, showing how the cultural ideals we share and the civic-minded practices we follow in and out of the business world reflect a mix of liberal and conservative values that work for all of us.

New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies, Volume 2: The Arts and History deals with practicing cultural studies by offering articles that are valuable for both scholars of Italian studies and students interested in a cultural studies approach. Divided in four sections, the articles included offer complex approaches to literature, film, the visual arts, and a particular moment in Italian history with which Italians are still coming to terms, fascism.

Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updikes Fiction offers a selective reading of this prolific authors oeuvre, concentrating on Updikes career-spanning reoccupation with issues of faith and doubt. In Baileys reading, at the heart of Updike's work is the tension between affirming the continuance of the 'heady wine of religious consolation' and the deepening anxiety that the best that humanity can hope for is 'the bleak fare of more endurance.' Focusing on a trio of Olinger stories, the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, In the beauty of the Lilies, and Rabbit Remembered, Bailey locates the dialectical situation at the center of Updike's literary career in his conflicted sense of himself as a Christian novelist and Howellsian realist. Bailey's thematically centered study reveals a substantial stylistic component in Updike's dilemma of belief; therefore, a significant objective of this study involves illuminating the author's conflict between creating an eschatologically inspired mimesis reflective of a 'knowing eye' behind appearances of reality, or settling for a historically based realism that, in Howellsian fashion, can do nothing more spiritually meaningful than to record (and thus literally preserve) that which is an will one day be no more. Rabbit Angstrom is Updike's most significant fictional creation, Bailey contends, because his impulses toward religious skepticism are so inadequately possessed of the intellectual and literary buffers that provide Updike and some of his other protagonists with temporary forms of solace or compensation. Rabbit's deepening skepticism that 'goodness lies inside, there is nothing outside' finds it corollary in the evolution delineated in Updike's work, transforming it from the 'song of joy' in affirmation of creation the 'The Blessed Man of Boston' narrator David Kern invokes, to the chronological reconstruction of history as attempted compensation for a relinquished belief in times spiritual significance in In the Beauty of th

The Christian Goddess: Archetype and Theology in the Fantasies of George MacDonald, examines this British Victorian writer's employment of female figures to represent Deity. Such symbolism is extremely unusual for a Christian author of this period and anticipates the efforts of many modern theologians to develop an image of God as Mother. Bonnie Gaarden reads the goddess-figures in MacDonald's fantasies as both archetypes of the collective unconscious and as emblems articulating MacDonald's unique Christian theology, which is Trinitarian, Neo-Platonic, mystical and universalist. The goddesses become the central figures around which the author develops her interpretations of MacDonald's adult fantasy-novels, his children's books and some of his fairy tales. These readings discover MacDonald's ideas about God and the nature of good and evil, models of spiritual and psychological development that foreshadow the theories of Carl Jung and Eric Neumann, and acerbic commentary on the values and customs of Victorian society and religion. According to The Christian Goddess, MacDonald's Romantic belief in God's self-revelation in Nature led him to create Nature-mothers (such as the Green Lady in 'The Golden Key' and Lilith's Eve) which evoke both the Great Mother archetype described by Eric Neumann, and the modern neopagan Great Mother as developed in the works of James Frazer, Robert Graves, and Marija Gimutas. MacDonald dramatized his view of evil and its cure in the title character of Lilith, a Terrible Mother archetype historically embodied in the Hindu goddess Kali. MacDonald's notion of the world as Keat's 'vale of Soulmaking,' also elaborated by religious philosopher John Hick, is conveyed by Magic Cauldron archetypes in The Wise Woman, 'The Gray Wolf,' and Lilith. Muse-figures in Phantastes and At the Back of the North Wind express MacDonald's conviction that a 'right imagination' is the voice of God, while Divine Children in The Wise Woman and 'The Golden Key' communicate his belief that 'true childhood' is the Divine nature. The great-grandmother in the Princess books, a personification of the multi-dimensional activity of Divine Wisdom, springs from the Judeo-Christian Sophia and the classical Athena, while Kore figures in The Princess and the Goblin, Lilith, and Phantastes re-present the transforming descents of Persephone and Christ. This book shows MacDonald's fantasies as a chronological bridge, anchored in the traditions of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, incorporating the teachings of Christian mysticism and theistic Romanticism, and linking to the contemporary concerns in Western society that have given birth to the New Age. The Christian goddess portrayed in these fantasies may strike the reader as a Deity whose time has come.

Barcelonan Okupas: Squatter Power! is the first book to combine close-readings of the representations of Spanish squatters known as okupas with the study of everyday life, built environment, and city planning in Barcelona. Vilaseca broadens the scope of Spanish cultural studies by integrating into it notions of embodied cognition and affect that respond to the city before and against the fixed relations of capitalism. Social transformation, as demonstrated by the okupas, is possible when city and art interrelate, not through capital or the urbanization of consciousness but through bodily thought. The okupas reconfigure the way thoughts, words, images and bodily responses are linked by evoking and communicating the idea of free exchange and openness through art (poetry, music, performance art, the plastic arts, graffiti, urban art and cinema); and by acting out and rehearsing these ideas in the practice of squatting. The okupas challenge society to differentiate the images and representations instituted by state domination or capitalist exploitation from the subversive potential of imagination. The okupas unify theory and practice, word and body, in pursuit of a positive, social vision that might serve humanity and lead the way out of the current problems caused by capitalism.

This book examines vampires as an international phenomenon, not restricted to the original folk character, the literary vampire, or twentieth-century film versions. Instead, the authors reshape the legend into a post-modern image that is psychologically and socially relevant while retaining elements of folklore mixed with a hint of science fiction.

For generations, historians believed that the study of the African-American experience centered on the questions about the processes and consequences of enslavement. Even after this phase passed, the modern Civil Rights Movement took center stage and filled hundreds of pages, creating a new framework for understanding both the history of the United States and of the world. Suburban Erasure by Walter David Greason contributes to the most recent developments in historical writing by recovering dozens of previously undiscovered works about the African-American experience in New Jersey. More importantly, his interpretation of these documents complicates the traditional understandings about the Great Migration, civil rights activism, and the transformation of the United States as a global, economic superpower. Greason details the voices of black men and women whose vision and sacrifices made the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. possible. Then, in the second half of this study, the limitations of this dream of integration become clear as New Jerseya state that took the lead in showing American how to overcome the racism of the pastfell victim to a recurring pattern of colorblindness that entrenched the legacy of racial inequality in the consumer economy of the late twentieth century. Suburbanization simultaneously erased the physical architecture of rural segregation in New Jersey and ideologically obscured the deepening, persistent injustices that became the War on Drugs and the prison-industrial complex. His solution for the twenty-first century involves the most fundamental effort to racially integrate state and local government conceived since the Reconstruction Era. Suburban Erasure is a must read for people concerned with democracy, human rights, and the future of civil society.

Public expression in the United States has become increasingly coarse. Whether it's stupid, rude, base, or anti-intellectual talk, it surrounds us. Popular television, film, music, art, and even some elements of religion have become as coarse, we argue, as our often-disparaged political dialogue. This book's contention is that the U.S. semantic environment is governed by tactics, not tact. We craft messages that workthat perform their desired function. We are instrumental, strategic communicators. As such, entertainment and journalism that draw an audience, for instance, are ';good.' This follows the logic that the marketplace, an aggregate of hedonically motivated individuals, decides what's good. Market logic, when unencumbered by what some characterize as quaint human sentimentalities, liberates us to cynically communicate whatever and however we want. Whatever improves ratings, web traffic, ticket sales, concession sales, repeat purchases, and earnings is good. Embracing this communicative paradigm more fully necessitates the culture's abandonment of collective notions of both taste and veracity, thus weakening the forces that keep individual desires in check. Our present communication environment is one that invites the hypertrophic expression of the ego, enabling elites to erode public communication standards and repeal laws and regulations resulting in immeasurable individual fortunes. Meanwhile, perpetual plutocratic rule is made even more certain by the cacophonous public noise the rest of us are busy making, leaving us incapable, disinterested, and unwilling to listen to one another.

This is a wide-ranging anthology that examines, in chronological order, several genres that have been prominent in the history of Western philosophy. The programmatic introduction outlines the diverse range of genres used by philosophers (dialogue, commentary, biography, etc.) and explains how genre-based exegesis can enrich our analysis and interpretation of philosophical texts. The remaining essays examine individual texts from this perspective. This examination begins with two studies of Plato's dialogues. It then turns to three studies of ancient and medieval texts in which genre is used to explore the boundaries of 'philosophy.' The next eight essays examine representative philosophical works from the Middle Ages to the present. The epilogue considers how disparate genres and styles may be used to establish different ethical relationships between the author, the audience, and the subject matter.