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  Isn't That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy

  Steven Gimbel

  Publication Date: 2017

  Isn’t That Clever provides a new account of the nature of humor – the cleverness account – according to which humor is intentional conspicuous acts of playful cleverness. By defining humor in this way, answers can be found to longstanding questions about humor ethics (Are there jokes that are wrong to tell? Are there jokes that can only be told by certain people?) and humor aesthetics (What makes for a good joke? Is humor subjective?). In addition to humor in general, Isn’t That Clever asks questions about comedy as an art form such as whether there are limits to what can be said in dealing with a heckler and how do we determine whether one comedian has stolen jokes from another.

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  Text in the Natural World: Topics of Evolutionary Theory of Literature

  Laurence A. Gregorio

  Publication Date: 8-23-2017

  The study of literature has expanded to include an evolutionary perspective. Its premise is that the literary text and literature as an overarching institution came into existence as a product of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to the human species. In this view, literature is an evolutionary adaptation that functions as any other adaptation does, as a means of enhancing survivability and also promoting benefits for the individual and society. Text in the Natural World is an introduction to the theory and a survey of topics pertinent to the evolutionary view of literature. After a polemical, prefatory chapter and an overview of the pertinent aspects of evolutionary theory itself, the book examines integral building blocks of literature and literary expression as effects of evolutionary development. This includes chapters on moral sense, symbolic thought, literary aesthetics in general, literary ontology, the broad topic of form, function and device in literature, a last theoretical chapter on narrative, and a chapter on literary themes. The concluding chapter builds on the preceding one as an illustration of evolutionary thematic study in practice, in a study of the fauna in the fiction of Maupassant. This text is designed to be of interest to those who read and think about things literary, as well as to those who have interest in the extension of Darwin’s great idea across the horizon of human culture. It tries to bridge the gulf that has separated the humanities from the sciences, and would be a helpful text for courses taught in both literary theory and interdisciplinary approaches to literature and philosophy.

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  An Artist as Soldier: Seeking Refuge in Love and Art

  Barbara S. Heisler

  Publication Date: 8-21-2017

  At the center of this book are the World War II letters (Feldpostbriefe) of a German artist and art teacher to his wife. While Bernhard Epple’s letters to his wife, Gudrun, address many of the topics usually found in war letters (food, lodging conditions, the weather, problems with the mail service, requests for favors from home), they are unusual in two respects. Each letter is lovingly decorated with a drawing and the letters make few references to the war itself. In addition to many personal communications and expressions of love for his wife and children, Epple writes about landscapes he saw as well as churches, museums and bookstores he visited. Epple’s letters give testimony to how a particular German soldier who was drafted and survived the war did his best to remain a civilian in uniform; distancing himself from a reality that was not of his choosing, seeking comfort and refuge in his love for art and his ability to share this love with his wife, herself an artist. While Epple’s letters are deeply personal, this book is about the human experience of war and the separation from civilian life and from family and friends.

  The introduction provides a short discussion of the importance and uses of war letters as historical documents, followed by a biography of the letter writer. The letters make up the two central chapters. The drawings form an integral part of the letters; each is reproduced and accompanied by an English translation of the letter. In addition to the drawings, the text includes several photographs of the letter writer and his family.

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  The Passion of the Infant Christ: Critical Edition

  Caryll Houselander and Kerry S. Walters

  Publication Date: 3-20-2017

  Although forgotten until quite recently, Caryll Houselander, who died in 1954, was a sensitive and profound English Roman Catholic writer on Christian spirituality. In this critical edition of her 1949 book The Passion of the Infant Christ, Houselander argues that the physical world is an "inscaped" revelation of the mind of the Creator. Every concrete object and every temporal event mirrors the eternal, just as the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus mirror the circumstances surrounding his death and resurrection.

  Editor Kerry Walters discusses both Houselander's life and the primary themes of The Passion of the Infant Christ in his introduction to this critical edition of one of Houselander's most insightful books.

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  Remembering the Great War: Writing and Publishing the Experiences of WWI

  Ian A. Isherwood

  Publication Date: 2-28-2017

  The horrors and tragedies of the First World War produced some of the finest literature of the century: including Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Goodbye to All That; the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas; and the novels of Ford Madox Ford. Collectively detailing every campaign and action, together with the emotions and motives of the men on the ground, these 'war books' are the most important set of sources on the Great War that we have. Through looking at the war poems, memoirs and accounts published after the First World War, Ian Andrew Isherwood addresses the key issues of wartime historiography-patriotism, cowardice, publishers and their motives, readers and their motives, masculinity and propaganda. He also analyses the culture, society and politics of the world left behind. Remembering the Great War is a valuable, fascinating and stirring addition to our knowledge of the experiences of WWI.

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  Living Currency

  Pierre Klossowski, Daniel W. Smith, Nicolae Morar, and Vernon W. Cisney

  Publication Date: 5-4-2017

  'I should have written you after my first reading of The Living Currency; it was already breath-taking and I should have responded. After reading it a few more times, I know it is the best book of our times.'

  Letter to Pierre Klossowski from Michel Foucault, winter 1970.

  Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski's La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.

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  Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum

  Nadine S. Meyer

  Publication Date: 4-2017

  Nadine Meyer's second book of poetry compiles work previously featured in publications such as The Southern Review, Southwest Review, Shenandoah, Literary Imagination, Boulevard, Nimrod, North American Review, storySouth, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Western Humanities Review, and Ploughshares. It is the winner of the 2017 Green Rose Prize and contains poetry on a variety of subjects, such as family, death, hope, grief, and sanctuary.

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  Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations From Earth to Cosmos

  Salma Monani and Joni Adamson

  Publication Date: 2017

  This book addresses the intersections between the interdisciplinary realms of Ecocriticism and Indigenous and Native American Studies, and between academic theory and pragmatic eco-activism conducted by multiethnic and indigenous communities. It illuminates the multi-layered, polyvocal ways in which artistic expressions render ecological connections, drawing on scholars working in collaboration with Indigenous artists from all walks of life, including film, literature, performance, and other forms of multimedia to expand existing conversations. Both local and global in its focus, the volume includes essays from multiethnic and Indigenous communities across the world, visiting topics such as Navajo opera, Sami film production history, south Indian tribal documentary, Maori art installations, Native American and First Nations science-fiction literature and film, Amazonian poetry, and many others. Highlighting trans-Indigenous sensibilities that speak to worldwide crises of environmental politics and action against marginalization, the collection alerts readers to movements of community resilience and resistance, cosmological thinking about inter- and intra-generational multi-species relations, and understandings of indigenous aesthetics and material ecologies. It engages with emerging environmental concepts such as multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and trans-indigeneity, as well as with new areas of ecocritical research such as material ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and media studies. In its breadth and scope, this book promises new directions for ecocritical thought and environmental humanities practice, providing thought-provoking insight into what it means to be human in a locally situated, globally networked, and cosmologically complex world.

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  Yearning to Labor: Youth, Unemployment, and Social Destiny in Urban France

  John P. Murphy

  Publication Date: 4-1-2017

  In the first decade of the twenty-first century, France underwent a particularly turbulent period during which urban riots in 2005 and labor protests in 2006 galvanized people across the country and brought the question of youth unemployment among its poorer, multiethnic outer cities into the national spotlight.

  Drawing on more than a year of ethnographic field research in the housing projects of the French city of Limoges, Yearning to Labor chronicles the everyday struggles of a group of young people as they confront unemployment at more than triple the national rate—and the crushing despair it engenders. Against the background of this ethnographic context, John P. Murphy illuminates how the global spread of neoliberal ideologies and practices is experienced firsthand by contemporary urban youths in the process of constructing their identities. An original investigation of the social ties that produce this community, Yearning to Labor explores the ways these young men and women respond to the challenges of economic liberalization, deindustrialization, and social exclusion.

  At its heart, Yearning to Labor asks if the French republican model of social integration, assimilation, and equality before the law remains viable in a context marked by severe economic exclusion in communities of ethnic and religious diversity. Yearning to Labor is both an ethnographic account of a certain group of French youths as they navigate a suffocating job market and an analysis of the mechanisms underlying the shifting economic inequalities at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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  Im Schatten der Sehnsucht nach Freiheit: Argentinische Geschichten

  Jorge R. G. Sagastume, Utz Rachowski, and Michael Ritterson

  Publication Date: 5-2017

  A series of seven accounts, originally in English, of incidents Jorge R. G. Sagastume experienced as a teenager during the 1970s military dictatorship in Argentina. Jorge Sagastume is an associate professor of Spanish at Dickinson College.

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  Weaving the Legacy: Remembering Paula Gunn Allen

  Stephanie A. Sellers and Menoukha Case

  Publication Date: 11-2017

  This collection is a celebration of Paula Gunn Allen’s life (1939–2008) as an indigenous scholar, writer, and woman. It features the creative writing, art, and memoir of Native American and other writers, scholars, and activists including Patricia Clark Smith, Maurice Kenny, Barbara Mann, Janice Gould, LeAnne Howe, Elaine Jacobs, Annette van Dyke, Margara Averbach, Kristina Bitsue, Deborah Miranda, Carolyn Dunn, Jennifer Browdy, Joseph Bruchac III, Sandra Cox, and La Vonne Brown Ruoff. It follows the 2010 West End Press edition of Paula Gunn Allen’s final works, America the Beautiful: Last Poems, edited by Patricia Clark Smith.

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  Gending Raré: Children's Songs and Games from Bali

  Brent C. Talbot

  Publication Date: 2017

  This delightful collection of children's folksongs and games from Bali is perfect for elementary classrooms exploring cultural traditions from around the world.

  The collection includes an Introductory Booklet containing: a colorful topographical map of Bali, a description of the island of Bali and its people, a description of the context and historical background of the project, a guide to reading Titilaras Nding-Ndong notation (the notation system used in Bali), a pedagogical guide for creating lesson plans, biographies of the author, collaborator, composer, and illustrators, and thirteen Song Booklets (10 for songs with games, 3 for songs without games). Each song booklet includes: a beautifully illustrated cover by Balinese artists, a description of the song and how it is related to daily life in Bali, a description of how to play the game, the song notated in Titilaras Nding-Ndong notation, the lyrics in Basa Bali (the language spoken in Bali) and a transliteration in English, and an arrangement of the song by famed Balinese composer, Ketut Gede Asnawa. Each arrangement is notated in Western notation and can be performed on gamelan (the instrumental ensemble most common in Bali) or on classroom Orff instruments. Also included is a Build-Your-Own Shadow Puppet Kit containing three puppets (Arjuna, Krishna, and the Kayon) that you can color, cut out, and assemble on your own. Access to the multimedia portion of this book's website is included, which contains high definition videos of Balinese children playing the games, of Balinese children singing the songs, of Balinese children pronouncing the lyrics, audio recordings of gamelan, and photographs of Bali

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  Marginalized Voices in Music Education

  Brent C. Talbot

  Publication Date: 10-19-2017

  Marginalized Voices in Music Education explores the American culture of music teachers by looking at marginalization and privilege in music education as a means to critique prevailing assumptions and paradigms. In fifteen contributed essays, authors set out to expand notions of who we believe we are as music educators -- and who we want to become. This book is a collection of perspectives by some of the leading and emerging thinkers in the profession, and identifies cases of individuals or groups who had experienced marginalization. It shares the diverse stories in a struggle for inclusion, with the goal to begin or expand conversation in undergraduate and graduate courses in music teacher education. Through the telling of these stores, authors hope to recast music education as fertile ground for transformation, experimentation and renewal.

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  Entornos Digitales: Conceptualización y Praxis

  Beatriz Trigo and Mary Ann Dellinger

  Publication Date: 8-17-2017

  Entornos digitales: conceptualización y praxis responde a la nueva realidad transmedial en la que se desarrollan las humanidades en el siglo XXI, donde el mundo de lo digital no solamente se ha implantado, sino que ha cambiado y seguirá transformando el discurso y la praxis que se establece entre el académico y los textos con los que trabaja. Los ensayos que comprenden este volumen reflejan la emblemática interdisciplinariedad de los estudios humanísticos dentro del entorno digital, así como el profundo cambio que dicho entorno ha supuesto para el investigador. Entornos digitales parte entonces de una perspectiva global de lo que son las humanidades digitales y cómo se manifiestan estas en la producción, investigación y docencia académica del siglo XXI, para luego pasar de lo global a lo específico, abarcando temas de transmedialidad en la producción literaria, fílmica, pictórica, virtual y la metodología didáctica del español como lengua extranjera.

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  No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2nd Edition

  James N. Udden

  Publication Date: 11-2017

  Taiwan is a peculiar place resulting in a peculiar cinema, with Hou Hsiao-hsien being its most remarkable product. Hou’s signature long and static shots almost invite critics to give auteurist readings of his films, often privileging the analysis of cinematic techniques at the expense of the context from which Hou emerges. In this pioneering study, James Udden argues instead that the Taiwanese experience is the key to understanding Hou’s art. The convoluted history of Taiwan in the last century has often rendered fixed social and political categories irrelevant. Changing circumstances have forced the people in Taiwan to be hyperaware of how imaginary identity—above all national identity—is. Hou translates this larger state of affairs in such masterpieces as City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, and Flowers of Shanghai, which capture and perhaps even embody the elusive, slippery contours of the collective experience of the islanders. Making extensive uses of Chinese sources from Taiwan, the author shows how important the local matters for this globally recognized director.

  In this new edition of No Man an Island, James Udden charts a new chapter in the evolving art of Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose latest film, The Assassin, earned him the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015. Hou breaks new ground in turning the classic wuxia genre into a vehicle to express his unique insight into the working of history. The unconventional approach to conventions is quintessential Hou Hsiao-hsien.

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  Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany

  Kerry Wallach

  Publication Date: 8-22-2017

  Weimar Germany (1919–33) was an era of equal rights for women and minorities, but also of growing antisemitism and hostility toward the Jewish population. This led some Jews to want to pass or be perceived as non-Jews; yet there were still occasions when it was beneficial to be openly Jewish. Being visible as a Jew often involved appearing simultaneously non-Jewish and Jewish. Passing Illusions examines the constructs of German-Jewish visibility during the Weimar Republic and explores the controversial aspects of this identity—and the complex reasons many decided to conceal or reveal themselves as Jewish. Focusing on racial stereotypes, Kerry Wallach outlines the key elements of visibility, invisibility, and the ways Jewishness was detected and presented through a broad selection of historical sources including periodicals, personal memoirs, and archival documents, as well as cultural texts including works of fiction, anecdotes, images, advertisements, performances, and films. Twenty black-and-white illustrations (photographs, works of art, cartoons, advertisements, film stills) complement the book’s analysis of visual culture.

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  Between Foucault and Derrida

  Yubraj Aryal, Vernon W. Cisney, Nicolae Morar, and Christopher Penfield

  Publication Date: 10-2016

  Between Foucault and Derrida explores the notorious Cogito debate and includes: the central articles, an important piece by Jean-Marie Beyssade, along with a letter Foucault wrote to Beyssade in response DS both these pieces available for the first time in English translation. In the second part of the book, 10 essays written by some of the most well-known scholars working in contemporary continental philosophy address the various philosophical intersections and divergences of these two profoundly important thinkers.

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  Machito and His Afro-Cubans: Selected Transcriptions

  Paul Austerlitz and Jere Laukkanen

  Publication Date: 2016

  Machito (Francisco Raúl Grillo, 1909–1984) was born into a musical family in Havana, Cuba, and was already an experienced vocalist when he arrived in New York City in 1937. In 1940 he teamed up with his brother-in-law, the Cuban trumpeter Mario Bauzá (1911–1993), who had already made a name for himself with top African American swing bands such as those of Chick Webb and Cab Calloway. Together, Machito and Bauzá formed Machito and his Afro-Cubans. With Bauzá as musical director, the band forged vital pan-African connections by fusing Afro-Cuban rhythms with modern jazz and by collaborating with major figures in the bebop movement. Highly successful with Latino as well as black and white audiences, Machito and his Afro-Cubans recorded extensively and performed in dance halls, nightclubs, and on the concert stage. In this volume, ethnomusicologist Paul Austerlitz and bandleader and professor Jere Laukkanen (both experienced Latin jazz performers) present transcriptions from Machito’s recordings which meticulously illustrate the improvised as well as scored vocal, reed, brass, and percussion parts of the music. Austerlitz’s introductory essay traces the history of Afro-Cuban jazz in New York, a style that exerted a profound impact on leaders of the bebop movement, including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, who appears as a guest soloist with Machito on some of the music transcribed here. This is MUSA’s first volume to represent the significant Latino heritage in North American music.

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  African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast

  Abou B. Bamba

  Publication Date: 10-24-2016

  Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ivory Coast was touted as an African miracle, a poster child for modernization and the ways that Western aid and multinational corporations would develop the continent. At the same time, Marxist scholars—most notably Samir Amin—described the capitalist activity in Ivory Coast as empty, unsustainable, and incapable of bringing real change to the lives of ordinary people.

  In African Miracle, African Mirage, Abou B. Bamba incorporates economics, political science, and history to craft a bold, transnational study of the development practices and intersecting colonial cultures that continue to shape Ivory Coast today. He considers French, American, and Ivorian development discourses in examining the roles of hydroelectric projects and the sugar, coffee, and cocoa industries in the country’s boom and bust. In so doing, he brings the agency of Ivorians themselves to the fore in a way not often seen in histories of development. Ultimately, he concludes that the “maldevelopment” evident by the mid-1970s had less to do with the Ivory Coast’s “insufficiently modern” citizens than with the conflicting missions of French and American interests within the context of an ever-globalizing world.

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  The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace: Philosophical Footholds on Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life'

  Jonathan Beever and Vernon W. Cisney

  Publication Date: 6-2016

  Amid all the controversy, criticism, and celebration of Terence Malick's award-winning film The Tree of Life, what do we really understand of it? The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace thoughtfully engages the philosophical riches of life, culture, time, and the sacred through Malick's film. This groundbreaking collection traverses the relationships among ontological, moral, scientific, and spiritual perspectives on the world, demonstrating how phenomenological work can be done in and through the cinematic medium, and attempting to bridge the gap between narrow "theoretical" works on film and their broader cultural and philosophical significance. Exploring Malick's film as a philosophical engagement, this readable and insightful collection presents an excellent resource for film specialists, philosophers of film, and film lovers alike. [From the Publisher]

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  En Busca de la Ciudadanía: Los Movimientos Sociales y la Democratización en la República Dominicana

  Emelio R. Betances

  Publication Date: 2016

  En busca de la ciudadania analyzes a broad spectrum of movements including labor, peasant, urban grassroots, teachers, and environmental. It examines the successes and failures of popular struggles and their relations with political parties, the state, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the U.S. Embassy. Further, it tells us how various popular organizations aided in the construction of social citizenship and the process of democratization in a society that underwent major transformation in the 1970s and 1980s.

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  Popular Sovereignty and Constituent Power in Latin America: Democracy from Below

  Emelio R. Betances and Carlos Figueroa Ibarra

  Publication Date: 2016

  This book combines a bottom-up and top-down approach to the study of social movements in relationship to the development of constituent and constituted power in Latin America. The contributors to this volume argue that the radical transformation of liberal representative democracy into participative democracy is what colours these processes as revolutionary. The core themes include popular sovereignty, constituted power, constituent power, participatory democracy, free trade agreements, social citizenship, as well as redistribution and recognition issues. Unlike other collections, which provide broad coverage of social movements at the expense of depth, this book is of thematic focus and illuminates the relationships between rulers and ruled as they transform liberal democracy.

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  The Poetics of Chinese Cinema

  Gary Bettinson and James N. Udden

  Publication Date: 2016

  This book examines the aesthetic qualities of particular Chinese-language films and the rich artistic traditions from which they spring. It brings together leading experts in the field, and encompasses detailed and wide-ranging case studies of films such as Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Spring in a Small Town, 24 City, and The Grandmaster, and filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, Fei Mu, Zhang Yimou, Johnnie To, and Wong Kar-wai. By illuminating the form and style of Chinese films from across cinema history, The Poetics of Chinese Cinema testifies to the artistic value and uniqueness of Chinese-language filmmaking.

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  Going to the Source: The Bedford Reader in American History

  Victoria Bissell Brown and Timothy J. Shannon

  Publication Date: 2016

  Many document readers offer lots of sources, but only Going to the Source combines a rich diversity of primary and secondary sources with in-depth instructions for how to use each type of source. Mirroring the chronology of the U.S. history survey, each of the main chapters familiarizes students with a single type of source — from personal letters to political cartoons — while focusing on an intriguing historical episode such as the Cherokee Removal or the 1894 Pullman Strike. A capstone chapter in each volume prompts students to synthesize information on a single topic from a variety of source types. The wide range of topics and sources across 28 chapters provide students with all they need to become fully engaged with America’s history.

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  Third Person References: Forms and Functions in Two Spoken Genres of Spanish

  Jenny Dumont

  Publication Date: 2016

  This volume, a case study on the grammar of third person references in two genres of spoken Ecuadorian Spanish, examines from a discourse-analytic perspective how genre affects linguistic patterns and how researchers can look for and interpret genre effects. This marks a timely contribution to corpus linguistics, as many linguists are choosing to work with empirical data. Corpus based approaches have many advantages and are useful in the comparison of different languages as well as varieties of the same language, but what is often overlooked in such comparisons is the genre of language under examination. As this case study shows, genre is an important factor in interpreting patterns and distributions of forms.

  The book also contributes toward theories of anaphora, referentiality and Preferred Argument Structure. It is relevant for scholars who work with referentiality, genre differences, third person references, and interactional linguistics, as well as those interested in Spanish morphosyntax. [From the Publisher]