- Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature
- Tina Lu
- Hardcover 2008
- The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture
- Amy Kaplan
- Kaplan shows how U.S. imperialism--from "Manifest Destiny" to the "American Century"--has profoundly shaped key elements of American culture at home, and how the struggle for power over foreign peoples and places has disrupted the quest for domestic order. In literature, journalism, film, political speeches, and legal documents, Kaplan traces the undeniable connections between American efforts to quell anarchy abroad and the eruption of such anarchy at the heart of the empire.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
- The Arcades Project
- Walter Benjamin
- Edited by Rolf Tiedemann
- Howard Eiland, Translator
- Kevin McLaughlin, Translator
- Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. Preoccupied with the commodification of things and focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Catacombs," "Prostitution," and "Theory of Progress."
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2002
- As Seen on TV
- Karal Ann Marling
- From the painting-by-numbers fad to the public fascination with the First Lady's apparel to the television sensation of Elvis Presley to the sculptural refinement of the automobile, Marling explores what Americans saw and what they looked for in the 1950s with a gaze newly trained by TV.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover 1998
- The Averaged American
- Sarah E. Igo
- Americans today "know" that a majority of the population supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. But remarkably, such data--now woven into our social fabric--became common currency only in the last century. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Sarah Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2008
- Benjamin's -abilities
- Samuel Weber
- In this book, Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.
- Hardcover 2008
- Born in Flames
- Howard Hampton
- Twenty years as an outsider scouring the underbelly of American culture has made Howard Hampton a uniquely hardnosed guide to the heart of pop darkness. Bridging the fatalistic, intensely charged space between Apocalypse Now Redux and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," his writing breaks down barriers of ignorance and arrogance that have segregated art forms from each other and from the world at large. Born in Flames is a headlong plunge into the passions and disruptive power of art.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2008
- Brand New China
- Jing Wang
- One part riveting account of fieldwork and one part rigorous academic study, Brand New China offers a unique perspective on the advertising and marketing culture of China. Wang's experiences in the disparate worlds of Beijing advertising agencies and the U.S. academy allow her to share a unique perspective on China during its accelerated reintegration into the global market system.
- Hardcover 2008
- Dead Elvis
- Greil Marcus
- As he listens in on the public conversation that recreates Elvis after death, Marcus tracks the path of Presley's resurrection. He grafts together scattered fragments of the eclectic dialogue--snatches of movies and music, books and newspapers, photographs, posters, cartoons--and amazes us with not only what America has been saying as it raises its late king, but also what this strange obsession with a dead Elvis can tell us about America itself.
- Paperback 1999
- Deliberate Speed
- W. T. Lhamon
- By surveying the artistic terrain of the period--examining works by figures as varied as Miles Davis, Ralph Ellison, Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Little Richard, Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, Thomas Pynchon, and Ludwig Wittgenstein--Lhamon demonstrates how many of the distinctive elements that so many attribute to the revolutionary period of the 1960s had their roots in the fertile soil of the 1950s.
- Paperback 2002
- Democracy Denied, 1905-1915
- Charles Kurzman
- Hardcover 2008
- The Dustbin of History
- Greil Marcus
- With the startling insights and electric style that have made him our foremost writer on American music, Greil Marcus brings back to life the cultural events that have defined us and our time. Again and again he skewers the widespread assumption that history exists only in the past, that it is behind us, relegated to the dustbin.
- Paperback 1997 / Hardcover 1998
- The Economy of Prestige
- James F. English
- This is a book about one of the great untold stories of modern cultural life: the remarkable ascendancy of prizes in literature and the arts. James F. English documents the dramatic rise of the awards industry and its complex role within what he describes as an economy of cultural prestige.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2008
- Feeling Backward
- Heather Love
- Feeling Backward weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses--losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet.
- Hardcover 2007
- Gamer Theory
- McKenzie Wark
- Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides? Welcome to gamespace, the world in which we live. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark contends that digital computer games are our society's emergent cultural form, a utopian version of the world as it is. Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society.
- Hardcover 2007
- Gates of Eden
- Morris Dickstein
- Now, on the twentieth anniversary of Gates of Eden's original publication, Dickstein has written a new introduction, reassessing the period's achievements and failures, and providing a fresh perspective on the ways that the sixties continue to influence our politics and culture.
- Paperback 1997
- Graceland
- Karal Ann Marling
- He wasn't articulate on the subject of himself, but when he created his dream house Elvis Presley spoke volumes. What the mansion says of Elvis, and what it says to--and of--the millions of fans who make the journey there each year, is what Graceland is about.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1997
- In the Fascist Bathroom
- Greil Marcus
- Was punk just another moment in music history? Greil Marcus, author of the renowned Lipstick Traces, delves into the after-life of punk as a much richer phenomenon--a form of artistic and social rebellion that continually erupts into popular culture. In more than seventy short pieces written over fifteen years, he traces the uncompromising strands of punk from Johnny Rotten to Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, even Bruce Springsteen.
- Paperback 1999
- Lipstick Traces
- Greil Marcus
- Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. "I am an antichrist!" shouted singer Johnny Rotten-where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise.
- Hardcover 1989 / Paperback 1990
- Lost Soul
- John Makeham
- Since the mid-1980s, Taiwan and mainland China have witnessed a sustained resurgence of academic and intellectual interest in ruxue—“Confucianism”—variously conceived as a form of culture, an ideology, a system of learning, and a tradition of normative values. This study aims to show how ruxue has been conceived in order to assess the achievements of this enterprise.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Material Unconscious
- William Brown
- Within the ephemera of the everyday--old photographs, circus posters, iron toys--lies a challenge to America's dominant cultural memory. What this memory has left behind, Brown recovers in the "material unconscious" of Stephen Crane's work, the textual residues of daily sensations that add up to a new history of the American 1890s. As revealed in Crane's disavowing appropriation of an emerging mass culture--from football games and freak shows to roller coasters and early cinema--the decade reappears as an underexposed moment in the genealogy of modernism and modernity.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1997
- Modern Enchantments
- Simon During
- Magic, During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts--and by "magic," During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows--affect people?
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004
- The Moral Resonance of Arab Media
- Flagg Miller
- The Moral Resonance of Arab Media studies contemporary Arab political poetry, providing insights into how modern Arab media forms are shaped by language and culture. Through an examination of the lives and works of individual poets, singers, and audiences, it shows how tribalism becomes a resource for critical reform when expressed in tropes of community, place, person, and history.
- Paperback 2007
- Nightmare on Main Street
- Mark Edmundson
- Once we've terrified ourselves reading Anne Rice or Stephen King, watching Halloween or following the O. J. Simpson trial, we can rely on the comfort of our inner child or Robert Bly's bongos, an angel, or even a crystal. In a brilliant assessment of American culture on the eve of the millennium, Mark Edmundson asks why we're determined to be haunted, courting the Gothic at every turn--and, at the same time, committed to escape through any new scheme for ready-made transcendence.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1999
- Persons and Things
- Barbara Johnson
- In Persons and Things, Johnson begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence. The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space.
- Hardcover 2008
- Popular Entertainment, Class, and Politics in Munich, 1900-1923
- Robert Eben Sackett
- Hardcover 1982
- Raising Cain
- W. T. Lhamon
- Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to consider, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
- The Rooster’s Egg
- Patricia J. Williams
- To a culture speaking with barely masked hysteria, this book brings a voice of reason and a reminder of the decency that is missing from so much of our public debate. Patricia J. Williams addresses the wounds in America's public soul, and uncovers the shifting, often covert rules of conversation that determine who "we" are as a nation.
- Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1997
- The Secret Life of Puppets
- Victoria Nelson
- Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, she shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2003
- Sexual Violence and American Manhood
- T. Walter Herbert
- In materials as diverse as Hannah Foster's post-Revolutionary War novel The Coquette and the Coen brothers' 1996 movie Fargo, this book taps into popular culture and high art alike to outline the logic of American manhood's violent streak--and its dire consequences for a culture with truly democratic and egalitarian ambitions.
- Hardcover 2002
- The Shows of London
- Richard D. Altick
- Hardcover
- The Sixties Unplugged
- Gerard J. DeGroot
- This book revisits the Sixties we forgot or somehow failed to witness. In a kaleidoscopic global tour of the decade, DeGroot reminds us that the “Ballad of the Green Beret” outsold “Give Peace a Chance,” that the Students for a Democratic Society were outnumbered by Young Americans for Freedom, that revolution was always a pipe dream, and that the Sixties belong to Reagan and de Gaulle more than to Kennedy and Dubcek.
- Hardcover 2008
- Skin Trade
- Ann DuCille
- Challenging the increasingly popular argument that blacks should settle down, stop whining, and get jobs, Skin Trade insists that racism remains America's premier national story and its grossest national product. From Aunt Jemima Pancakes to ethnic Barbie dolls, Ann duCille explains, corporate America peddles racial and gender stereotypes.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover 1996
- Swing Changes
- David W. Stowe
- Bands were playing, people were dancing, the music business was booming. It was the big-band era, and swing was giving a new shape and sound to American culture. Swing Changes looks at New Deal America through its music and shows us how the contradictions and tensions within swing--over race, politics, its own cultural status, the role of women--mirrored those played out in the larger society. Drawing on memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, magazines, recordings, photographs, literature, and films, Swing Changes offers a vibrant picture of American society at a pivotal time, and a new perspective on music as a cultural force.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover 1998
- Transpacific Imaginations
- Yunte Huang
- Transpacific Imaginations is a study of how American literature is enmeshed with the literatures of Asia. The book begins with Western encounters with the Pacific, with Huang discussing such titles as Moby Dick as Pacific works. Huang then turns to Asian American encounters with the Pacific, concentrating on the "Angel Island" poems and works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Araki Yasusada.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Virtual Life of Film
- D. N. Rodowick
- As almost every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of "watching a film" is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media, what will happen to cinema--and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of the twenty-first century.
- Paperback 2007 / Hardcover 2007
- Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927-1934
- Walter Benjamin
- Series edited by Michael W. Jennings
- This volume brings together previously untranslated writings on major figures such as Brecht, Valéry and Gide, and on subjects ranging from film, radio, and the novel to memory, kitsch, and the theory of language. We find the manifoldly inquisitive Benjamin musing on the new modes of perception opened tip by techniques of photographic enlargement and cinematic montage, on the life and work of & Goethe at Weimar, on the fascination of old toys and the mysteries of food, and on the allegorical significance of Mickey Mouse.
- Hardcover 1999
- When Our Eyes No Longer See
- Gregory Golley
- As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of “objective observation,” modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.
- Hardcover 2008
- Worrying about China
- Gloria Davies
- What can we do about China? Davies pursues this inquiry through a wide range of contemporary topics, including the changing fortunes of radicalism, the peculiarities of Chinese postmodernism, shifts within official discourse, attempts to revive Confucianism for present-day China, and the historically problematic engagement of Chinese intellectuals with Western ideas.
- Hardcover 2007