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A book that looks beyond the usual explanations of why sports fascinates, In Praise of Athletic Beauty also strives for a language that can frame the pleasure we take in watching athletic events. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht argues that the fascination with watching sports is probably the most popular and potent contemporary form of aesthetic experience. Exploring athletic beauty, this book makes us understand the widespread passion sport inspires as an untamed form of aesthetic fascination.
The Homemade Art of Grandma Moses
In this book, Karal Ann Marling looks at Grandma Moses as a cultural phenomenon of the postwar period and explores the meaning of her subject matter--and her astonishing fame. Between the cultural ephemera, folklore, song, and history embedded in Moses' paintings and the potent advertising shorthand for Americana that her images rapidly became, this book reveals the widespread longing for the memories, comforts, and small victories of a mythic, intimate American past tapped by the phenomenon of Grandma Moses.
A Biography of the Color Line
Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook, Nella Larsen lived her life in the shadows of America's racial divide. Her writings about that life, briefly celebrated in her time, were lost to later generations--only to be rediscovered and hailed by many. In his search for Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding her, as well as the complex reality they mask and mirror. His book is a cultural biography of the color line as it was lived by one person who truly embodied all of its ambiguities and complexities.
In Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Susan Suleiman conducts a profound exploration of where individual memories converge with public remembrance of traumatic events. In this book she argues that memories of World War II transcend national boundaries, due not only to the global nature of the war but also to the increasingly global presence of the Holocaust as a site of collective memory.
Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America
The importance of blacks for Jews and Jews for blacks in conceiving of themselves as Americans, when both remained outsiders to the privileges of full citizenship, is a matter of voluminous but perplexing record. A monumental work of literary criticism and cultural history, Strangers in the Land draws upon politics, sociology, law, religion, and popular culture to illuminate a vital, highly conflicted interethnic partnership over the course of a century.
The Fate of the Poet in Modernity
The argument of Delirious Milton is that Milton's creative power is drawn from a rift at the center of his consciousness over the question of creation itself. This rift forces the poet to oscillate deliriously between two incompatible perspectives, at once affirming and denying the presence of spirit in what he creates. From one perspective, the act of creation is centered in God and the purpose of art is to imitate and praise the Creator. From the other perspective, the act of creation is centered in the human, in the built environment of the modern world.
The Constitution of the United States and Classic American Literature
The United States Constitution is a quintessentially political document. Yet, until now, no one has seriously considered the formative influence of this document on American cultural life. In this ambitious book, Mitchell Meltzer demonstrates the extent to which the Constitution is both source and inspiration for America's greatest literary masterworks.
Imagination and Belief
Barber traces the history of the legends surrounding the Grail, beginning with Chrétien de Troyes's great romances of the twelfth century and the medieval Church's religious version of the secular ideal. He pursues the myths through Victorian obsessions and enthusiasms to the popular bestsellers of the late twentieth century that have embraced its mysteries. From Lancelot to Parsifal, chivalric romances to Wagner's Ring, T. S. Eliot to Monty Python, the Grail has fascinated and lured the Western imagination from beyond the reach of the ordinary world.
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The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley
The cultural landscape of the Hudson River Valley is crowded with ghosts--the ghosts of Native Americans and Dutch colonists, of Revolutionary War soldiers and spies, of presidents, slaves, priests, and laborers. Possessions asks why this region became the locus for so many ghostly tales, and shows how these hauntings came to operate as a peculiar type of social memory whereby things lost, forgotten, or marginalized returned to claim possession of imaginations and territories.
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In the mid-nineteenth century writers such as Hawthorne and Melville produced works of fiction that even today help define American literature. In this work of innovative literary history, Jonathan Arac explains what made this remarkable creativity possible and what it accomplished. His work also delves into a deep paradox that has haunted American literature: our nation's great works of literary narrative place themselves at a tense distance from our national life.
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Weird English explores experimental and unorthodox uses of English by multilingual writers traveling from the canonical works of Nabokov and Hong Kingston to the less critiqued linguistic terrain of Junot Díaz and Arundhati Roy. Ch'ien looks at how the collision of other languages with English invigorated and propelled the evolution of language in the twentieth century and beyond.
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Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats
Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. Yet Vendler argues that, although they may prefer different means, all poets of any value are thinkers. The four poets taken up in this volume--Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats--come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic.
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Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie--such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers twenty-seven brilliant pieces, nineteen of which have never before been translated.
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Walter Benjamin's posthumously published collection of writings on hashish is a detailed blueprint for a book that was never written. A series of "protocols of drug experiments," written between 1927 and 1934, together with short prose pieces, On Hashish provides a peculiarly intimate portrait of Benjamin and of his unique form of thought.
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Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900 is a recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century. In this diagram of his life, Benjamin focuses not on persons or events but on places and things, all seen from the perspective of a child. This book is one of Benjamin's great city texts, bringing to life the cocoon of his childhood--the parks, streets, schoolrooms, and interiors of an emerging metropolis.
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Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination
Intense, resonant, and deeply literary, this account of an American poetics shows how today's consumerist and conformist culture subverts the imagination of a free people. While centering on American vision, the argument extends our horizon, striking a blow against all economically sanctioned attacks upon the finer, stronger human capacities. Poetry, the author maintains, is central to any coherent vision of life.
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