"This is the colorful and dramatic biography of two of America's most controversial entrepreneurs: Moses Louis Annenberg, 'the racing wire king, ' who built his fortune in racketeering, invested it in publishing, and lost much of it in the biggest tax evasion case in United States history; and his son, Walter, launcher of TV Guide and Seventeen magazines and former ambassador to Great Britain."--Jacket.
Humanity: Texts and Contexts is a record of the 2007 Singapore “Building Bridges” seminar, an annual dialogue between Muslim and Christian scholars cosponsored by Georgetown University and the Archbishop of Canterbury. This volume explores three central questions: What does it mean to be human? What is the significance of the diversity that is evident among human beings? And what are the challenges that humans face living within the natural world? A distinguished group of scholars focuses on the theological responses to each of these questions, drawing on the wealth of material found in both Christian and Islamic scriptures. Part one lays out the three issues of human identity, difference, and guardianship. Part two explores scriptural texts side by side, pairing Christian and Islamic scholars who examine such themes as human dignity, human alienation, human destiny, humanity and gender, humanity and diversity, and humanity and the environment. In addition to contributions from an international cast of outstanding scholars, the book includes an afterword by Archbishop Rowan Williams.
"The great pleasure of this book is the writing itself. Not only is it free of academic and ‘lit-crit' jargon, it is lively prose, often deliciously witty or humorous, and utterly contemporary. Poetry's Afterlife has terrific classroom potential, from elementary school teachers seeking to inspire creativity in their students, to graduate students in MFA programs, to working poets who struggle with the aesthetic dilemmas Stein elucidates, and to teachers of poetry on any level." --- Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Arizona State University "Kevin Stein is the most astute poet-critic of his generation, and this is a crucial book, confronting the most vexing issues which poetry faces in a new century." ---David Wojahn, Virginia Commonwealth University At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed "death," Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, and universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms. It flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence largely overlooked by national media. It's this second life, or better, Poetry's Afterlife, that his book examines and celebrates. Kevin Stein is Caterpillar Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bradley University and has served as Illinois Poet Laureate since 2003, having assumed the position formerly held by Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism. digitalculturebooksis an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.
This distinguished collection of essays, edited under the direction of David Lyle Jeffrey and Dominic Manganiello, emerged from the discussions that surrounded the 1995-1996 McMartin Lectures. Dedicated to studying the relationship and contributions of historic Christian thought to the intellectual life of university disciplines, this series of lectures served as an occasion for scholars to rethink the present crisis in the relationship between the historic identity of the university and the development of the modern university. Published in English.
Published in 1998, Wiring the Writing Center was one of the first few books to address the theory and application of electronics in the college writing center. Many of the contributors explore particular features of their own "wired" centers, discussing theoretical foundations, pragmatic choices, and practical strengths. Others review a range of centers for the approaches they represent. A strong annotated bibliography of signal work in the area is also included.
Canadian literature, and specifically the teaching of Canadian literature, has emerged from a colonial duty to a nationalist enterprise and into the current territory of postcolonialism. From practical discussions related to specific texts, to more theoretical discussions about pedagogical practice regarding issues of nationalism and identity, Home-Work constitutes a major investigation and reassessment of the influence of postcolonial theory on Canadian literary pedagogy from some of the top scholars in the field.
In the 1990s, amid political upheaval and civil war, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia dissolved into five successor states. The subsequent independence of Montenegro and Kosovo brought the total number to seven. Balkan scholar and diplomat to the region Mieczyslaw P. Boduszynski examines four of those states—Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—and traces their divergent paths toward democracy and Euro-Atlantic integration over the past two decades. Boduszynski argues that regime change in the Yugoslav successor states was powerfully shaped by both internal and external forces: the economic conditions on the eve of independence and transition and the incentives offered by the European Union and other Western actors to encourage economic and political liberalization. He shows how these factors contributed to differing formulations of democracy in each state. The author engages with the vexing problems of creating and sustaining democracy when circumstances are not entirely supportive of the effort. He employs innovative concepts to measure the quality of and prospects for democracy in the Balkan region, arguing that procedural indicators of democratization do not adequately describe the stability of liberalism in post-communist states. This unique perspective on developments in the region provides relevant lessons for regime change in the larger post-communist world. Scholars, practitioners, and policymakers will find the book to be a compelling contribution to the study of comparative politics, democratization, and European integration.
Thought-provoking and controversial, Lawless Universe is a complement to, even an antidote for, books that create the misimpression that science can explain everything.
James L. Machor offers a sweeping exploration of how American fiction was received in both public and private spheres in the United States before the Civil War. Machor takes four antebellum authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro'—and analyzes how their works were published, received, and interpreted. Drawing on discussions found in book reviews and in private letters and diaries, Machor examines how middle-class readers of the time engaged with contemporary fiction and how fiction reading evolved as an interpretative practice in nineteenth-century America. Through careful analysis, Machor illuminates how the reading practices of nineteenth-century Americans shaped not only the experiences of these writers at the time but also the way the writers were received in the twentieth century. What Machor reveals is that these authors were received in ways strikingly different from how they are currently read, thereby shedding significant light on their present status in the literary canon in comparison to their critical and popular positions in their own time. Machor deftly combines response and reception criticism and theory with work in the history of reading to engage with groundbreaking scholarship in historical hermeneutics. In so doing, Machor takes us ever closer to understanding the particular and varying reading strategies of historical audiences and how they impacted authors’ conceptions of their own readership.
This book raises fundamental questions about the propriety of continuing to use a premedical curriculum developed more than a century ago to select students for training as future physicians for the twenty-first century. In it, Dr. Donald A. Barr examines the historical origins, evolution, and current state of premedical education in the United States. One hundred years ago, Abraham Flexner's report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada helped establish the modern paradigm of premedical and medical education. Barr’s research finds the system of premedical education that evolved to be a poor predictor of subsequent clinical competency and professional excellence, while simultaneously discouraging many students from underrepresented minority groups or economically disadvantaged backgrounds from pursuing a career as a physician. Analyzing more than fifty years of research, Barr shows that many of the best prospects are not being admitted to medical schools, with long-term adverse consequences for the U.S. medical profession. The root of the problem, Barr argues, is the premedical curriculum—which overemphasizes biology, chemistry, and physics by teaching them as separate, discrete subjects. In proposing a fundamental restructuring of premedical education, Barr makes the case for parallel tracks of undergraduate science education: one that would largely retain the current system; and a second that would integrate the life sciences in a problem-based, collaborative learning pedagogy. Barr argues that the new, integrated curriculum will encourage greater educational and social diversity among premedical candidates without weakening the quality of the education. He includes an evaluative research framework to judge the outcome of such a restructured system. This historical and cultural analysis of premedical education in the United States is the crucial first step in questioning the appropriateness of continuing a hundred-year-old, empirically dubious pedagogical model for the twenty-first century.
