In Antoine Innocent's 1906 novel Mimola or the Story of a Casket, Mimola, daughter of Madame Georges, suffers from an incurable nervous disease. In desperation, Madame Georges goes on a pilgrimage to Ville-Bonheur in order to implore the African divinities to help her ailing daughter. She meets a cousin, whose son Léon, is suffering from a similar disorder. Léon rejects the voodoo beliefs, will sink into madness; ardently believing, Mimola will recover and be hounsi.
Winner of the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for Poetry Winner of the 2015 Idaho Prize for Poetry The poems in Danielle Pieratti's Fugitives are punctuated by avoidance, disguise, and sheltering of all kinds--escapes both from and to. They combine the magical and the mundane, shifting between dreams and the domestic, while exploring the nebulous confines of marriage, motherhood, and girlhood. Ultimately they learn a kind of tentative security in a 'strange, unyielding, ' and deserved present, one in which 'You are / safer than you thought. / You are almost / sleeping. And your body / is shaped like cloth and sounds / like a century.'
For premodern audiences, poetic form did not exist solely as meter, stanzas, or rhyme scheme. Rather, the form of a poem emerged as an experience, one generated when an audience immersed in a culture of dance encountered a poetic text. Exploring the complex relationship between medieval dance and medieval poetry, Strange Footing argues that the intersection of texts and dance produced an experience of poetic form based in disorientation, asymmetry, and even misstep. Medieval dance guided audiences to approach poetry not in terms of the body’s regular marking of time and space, but rather in the irregular and surprising forces of virtual motion around, ahead of, and behind the dancing body. Reading medieval poems through artworks, paintings, and sculptures depicting dance, Seeta Chaganti illuminates texts that have long eluded our full understanding, inviting us to inhabit their strange footings askew of conventional space and time. Strange Footing deploys the motion of dance to change how we read medieval poetry, generating a new theory of poetic form for medieval studies and beyond.
No human society has ever been perfect, a fact that has led thinkers as far back as Plato and St. Augustine to conceive of utopias both as a fanciful means of escape from an imperfect reality and as a useful tool with which to design improvements upon it. The most studied utopias have been proposed by men, but during the eighteenth century a group of reform-oriented female novelists put forth a series of work that expressed their views of, and their reservations about, ideal societies. In Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century, Alessa Johns examines the utopian communities envisaged by Mary Astell, Sarah Fielding, Mary Hamilton, Sarah Scott, and other writers from Britain and continental Europe, uncovering the ways in which they resembled--and departed from--traditional utopias. Johns demonstrates that while traditional visions tended to look back to absolutist models, women's utopias quickly incorporated emerging liberal ideas that allowed far more room for personal initiative and gave agency to groups that were not culturally dominant, such as the female writers themselves. Women's utopias, Johns argues, were reproductive in nature. They had the potential to reimagine and perpetuate themselves.
The essence of the matter -- The politics of Black friendship : Gadamer, Baldwin and the Black hermeneutic -- The Aardvark of history : Malcolm X, language and power -- Black aesthetic autonomy : Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and "literary Negro-ness" -- The revolutionary will not be hypnotized : Eldridge Cleaver and Black ideology -- Unrepeatable : Angela Y. Davis and Black critical theory -- Black aesthetic theory.
Introduction: Black and white -- Little Foxes and little brown wrens -- The poetics of color in Jezebel -- Melodramas of blood in In This Our Life -- The whiteness of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? -- Bette Davis black and white.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers “a master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment" (The Wall Street Journal). It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."
To understand the history of "English", Ross Winterowd insists, one must understand how literary studies, composition-rhetoric studies, and influential textbooks interrelate. Stressing the interrelationship among these three forces, Winterowd presents a history of English studies in the university since the Enlightenment.
When Portia Bates is made redundant from the college she loves, she swears revenge. Soon she is diverting money from the English Department to set up a brothel and plotting the blackmail of prominent politicians. Even the cunning Portia, however, hasn’t reckoned on the students’ ability to create enough mayhem to ruin her plans—especially when they discover a wartime arms cache beneath the college. Readers of this black satire on English education in the tradition of Tom Sharpe will never look at jacuzzis in the same way again.
An assistant professor’s fight against campus harassment soon becomes a fight for her life in this “totally compelling and utterly modern mystery” (Judy Grahn, American Book Award–winning author). Assistant professor Nan Weaver, an outspoken feminist, is working toward tenure at Berkeley. Nan’s blue-collar family left her with a legacy of endurance and hard work, and she is dedicated to her ideals and her students. But Nan’s bold campaign against on-campus sexual harassment may be putting her career prospects in jeopardy. When an infamously chauvinistic male English professor turns up dead in his office, everyone suspects activist Nan. But she is innocent. And she knows who the murderer is. A fast-paced, nontraditional mystery that places a strong woman in a battle for her innocence and principles, Murder in the English Department is a must-read for academics and mystery lovers alike.
