Books Books Press imprint: 2592 books
Post-Fascist Fantasies
Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany
Language: English
Release Date: November 17, 1997
Post-Fascist Fantasies examines the cultural function of the novels of communist authors in East Germany from a psychoanalytic angle. Various critics have argued that these socialist realist fictions were monolithic attempts to translate Communist dogma into the realm of aesthetics. Julia Hell argues...
Memory Bytes
History, Technology, and Digital Culture
Language: English
Release Date: January 12, 2004
Digital culture is often characterized as radically breaking with past technologies, practices, and ideologies rather than as reflecting or incorporating them. Memory Bytes seeks to counter such ahistoricism, arguing for the need to understand digital culture—and its social, political, and ethical...
by Ranjan Ghosh, J. Hillis Miller
Language: English
Release Date: November 17, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: November 17, 2016
Thinking Literature across Continents finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of...
Visual Time
The Image in History
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 2013
Visual Time offers a rare consideration of the idea of time in art history. Non-Western art histories currently have an unprecedented prominence in the discipline. To what extent are their artistic narratives commensurate with those told about Western art? Does time run at the same speed in all places?...
The Mangle in Practice
Science, Society, and Becoming
Language: English
Release Date: January 14, 2009
In The Mangle of Practice (1995), the renowned sociologist of science Andrew Pickering argued for a reconceptualization of research practice as a “mangle,” an open-ended, evolutionary, and performative interplay of human and non-human agency. While Pickering’s ideas originated in science and...
After Eden
The Evolution of Human Domination
Language: English
Release Date: December 20, 2006
When did the human species turn against the planet that we depend on for survival? Human industry and consumption of resources have altered the climate, polluted the water and soil, destroyed ecosystems, and rendered many species extinct, vastly increasing the likelihood of an ecological catastrophe....
Vibrant Matter
A Political Ecology of Things
Language: English
Release Date: December 14, 2009
In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces...
Public Properties
Museums in Imperial Japan
Language: English
Release Date: November 27, 2013
In the late nineteenth century, Japan's new Meiji government established museums to showcase a national aesthetic heritage. Inspired by Western museums and expositions, these institutions were introduced by government officials hoping to spur industrialization and self-disciplined public behavior,...
Contemporary Carioca
Technologies of Mixing in a Brazilian Music Scene
Language: English
Release Date: April 23, 2012
Brazilian popular music is widely celebrated for its inventive amalgams of styles and sounds. Cariocas, native residents of Rio de Janeiro, think of their city as particularly conducive to musical mixture, given its history as a hub of Brazilian media and culture. In Contemporary Carioca, the ethnomusicologist...
Blues and Roots/Rue and Bluets
A Garland for the Southern Appalachians
Language: English
Release Date: March 29, 2008
Jonathan Williams’s poetry has been described as brilliant, sensuous, lyrical, quirky, suave, vital, joyful, sardonic, melodious, passionate, alive, pyrotechnic. This new, much enlarged edition of Blues and Roots displays all of the above. Williams has tramped the Appalachian Trail for decades,...
Power Lines
On the Subject of Feminist Alliances
Language: English
Release Date: September 25, 2008
Like the complex systems of man-made power lines that transmit electricity and connect people and places, feminist alliances are elaborate networks that have the potential to provide access to institutional power and to transform relations. In Power Lines, Aimee Carrillo Rowe explores the formation...
Arts in Earnest
North Carolina Folklife
Language: English
Release Date: October 31, 1989
Arts in Earnest explores the unique folklife of North Carolina from ruddy ducks to pranks in the mill. Traversing from Murphy to Manteo, these fifteen essays demonstrate the importance of North Carolina’s continually changing folklife. From decoy carving along the coast, to the music of tobacco...
Anxious Intellects
Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values
Language: English
Release Date: April 24, 2000
Intellectuals occupy a paradoxical position in contemporary American culture as they struggle both to maintain their critical independence and to connect to the larger society. In Anxious Intellects John Michael discusses how critics from the right and the left have conceived of the intellectual’s...
Cherry Grove, Fire Island
Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2015
First published in 1993, the award-winning Cherry Grove, Fire Island tells the story of the extraordinary gay and lesbian resort community near New York City. This new paperback edition includes a new preface by the author.