Bøger udgivet af Michigan State University Press

States are thought only to exercise power over the land of the living. Benjamin Ginsberg argues otherwise, exploring the state's reach into the realm of the Grim Reaper, bureaucratizing death to strengthen the state's hold on life. He notes that increasingly institutions are using the regulation of death as an essential source of power. They do this by not only threatening death to their enemies but also securing loyalty and obedience by extending citizens' lives and promising to effectuate the postmortem fulfillment of citizens' antemortem desires. The state treats the loyal dead with respect, sometimes offering them a place in the secular afterlife of honor and memory, while consigning the faithless to the void.

This definitive assessment of Cormac McCarthy's novels captures the interactions among the literary and mythic elements, the social dynamics of violence, and the natural world. Drawing on René Girard's mimetic theory, mythography, thermodynamics, and information science, Markus Wierschem identifies a literary apocalypse at the center of McCarthy's work, one that unveils another buried deep within the history, religion, and myths of American and Western culture.

Even the Least of These presents the work of a poet and a printmaker responding to the small and often overlooked moments of our daily lives and reflecting upon the significance of experience and memory. The result is a thoughtful and often joyful collection of poetry and prints that celebrate an awareness of the world around us and reflect on past experiences, lessons learned (or not).

"Richard Gebhart traces the Atlantic-bound voyages of Great Lakes ships, recovering the voices of long-ago ship captains, along with their cargo manifests and itineraries. Drawing on research in old newspapers and maritime archives, he traces the construction of new ships and shipyards, the comings and goings and travails of the lakes' workhorses, and makes a visit to a boneyard where many ships ended their lives. Among many other lost tales, Gebhart brings back to light the rise of oil tankers, marking the great twentieth-century energy transition in shipping"--

Like many American urban waterways, Ken-O-Sha has been in decline for nearly two hundred years. Once life-supporting, the waterway now known as Plaster Creek is life-threatening. In this provocative book, scholars and environmentalists Gail Gunst Heffner and David P. Warners explore the watershed's ecological, social, spiritual, and economic history to determine what caused the damage, and describe more recent efforts to repair it.

Translated into English for the first time by leading mimetic studies scholar William A. Johnsen, The World of René Girard is a must-have for those new to and familiar with Girard's work. In these interviews, Girard discusses the flurry of intellectual activity that followed the landmark 1981 Stanford University conference, Disorder and Order. Girard also discusses Theater of Envy, his then-forthcoming book on Shakespeare and the first book written in English, as well as corrects several misunderstandings of his mimetic hypothesis.

Elder provides a uniquely moving insider's perspective into the quest to protect the Great Lakes and surrounding public lands, from past battles to protect Michigan wilderness and establish the region's national lakeshores to present fights against toxic pollution and climate change. Situated within the region's broader history, Wilderness, Water, and Rust argues endless cycles of resource exploitation and boom and bust created the "rust belt" legacy, and for the Great Lakes' natural and human communities to thrive, we must imagine new ways of living in the region.

While the history of Great Lakes shipping has been discussed frequently over the years, little has been said about the factors that influenced the use, design, and evolution of the boats that made this trade possible. Sail, Steam, and Diesel: Moving Cargo on the Great Lakes provides a comprehensive overview of the development of Great Lakes ships over the past several centuries, from small birch-bark canoes originally used in the region to the massive thousand-footers of today. The author also looks at the economics of vessel operation, including the various considerations involved in expanding the scope of the shipping industry, a move that aided in catapulting America into becoming an industrial juggernaut. Although they might not realize it, millions of Americans have owed their livelihoods to the Great Lakes boats and the cargoes they carried that supported a wide range of industries, and this volume is an excellent way to recognize to what extent our lives have been affected by this region's industry.

In 1924, an orphan train passed through the Midwest, and two teenagers, seeking a new life, find nothing but hardship when taken in to live on a farm in Michigan. After they are forced to flee, they are hunted by a determined police chief and the reemergent KKK. A bond of mutual trust and determination help the two orphans navigate a stark American landscape shaped by prejudice, hypocrisy, and fear.

"This book turns the spotlight on thirteen women who were leaders on Mackinac Island, Michigan, in the 19th and early 20th centuries"--

This history of Ukrainian immigrants in Michigan and their American descendants examines both the choices people made and the social forces that impelled their decision to migrate and to make new homes in the state. Michigan's Ukrainians came in four waves, each unique in time and character, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing in the twenty-first. Detroit attracted many of them with the opportunities it offered in its booming automobile industry. Yet others put down roots in cities and towns across the state. Wherever they settled, they established churches and community centers and continued to practice the customs of their homeland.

This exciting compendium brings together, for the first time, some of the foremost scholars of Rene Girard's mimetic theory, with leading imitation researchers from the cognitive, developmental, and neuro sciences. These chapters explore some of the major discoveries and developments concerning the foundational, yet previously overlooked, role of imitation in human life, revealing the unique theoretical links that can now be made from the neural basis of social interaction to the structure and evolution of human culture and religion. Together, mimetic scholars and imitation researchers are on the cutting edge of some of the most important breakthroughs in understanding the distinctive human capacity for both incredible acts of empathy and compassion as well as mass antipathy and violence. As a result, this interdisciplinary volume promises to help shed light on some of the most pressing and complex questions of our contemporary world.

In a fascinating analysis of critical themes in Feodor Dostoevsky's work, Ren Girard explores the implications of the Russian author's "e;underground,"e; a site of isolation, alienation, and resentment. Brilliantly translated, this book is a testament to Girard's remarkable engagement with Dostoevsky's work, through which he discusses numerous aspects of the human condition, including desire, which Girard argues is "e;triangular"e; or "e;mimetic"e;-copied from models or mediators whose objects of desire become our own. Girard's interdisciplinary approach allows him to shed new light on religion, spirituality, and redemption in Dostoevsky's writing, culminating in a revelatory discussion of the author's spiritual understanding and personal integration. Resurrection is an essential and thought-provoking companion to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground.

Tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. Drawing on dozens of interviews with the surviving workers and their families, this book highlights the daily challenges and joys of these mostly first- and second-generation immigrant women.

The northern white-cedar's future is uncertain. Here scientists Gerald L. Storm and Laura S. Kenefic describe the threats to this modest yet essential member of its ecosystem and call on all of us to unite to help it to thrive.

In this rich exploration of Rene Girard's insights, his French editor and longtime collaborator Benoit Chantre brings Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans into dialogue with both Proust and Girard in order to push to its logical endpoint the idea of a back-and-forth movement from chaos to order.

In his seventh book of poems, celebrated poet Todd Davis explores the many forms of violence we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here racism, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia.

Natascha Wodin's personal homage to her mother's life story is an important lyrical memorial for the thousands of Eastern Europeans who were forced to leave their homes and work in Germany during the war, and a moving reflection of the plight of displaced peoples throughout the ages.

From its first scene in a benighted Great Lakes river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes, alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines and invasive species, Indigenous peoples and federal agencies.

Never before translated in English, this 1973 discussion between Rene Girard (1923-2015) and other prominent scholars represents one of the most significant breakthroughs in mimetic theory. The conversation was an opportunity for Girard to debate with his interlocutors the theories he expounded in Violence and the Sacred.

In 2017, Laura Apol's daughter, Hanna, took her own life. Apol had long believed in the therapeutic possibilities of writing, having conducted workshops on writing-for-healing. Yet after Hanna's death, she had her own therapeutic writing to do, turning her anguish, disbelief, and love into poems that map the first year of loss.