| Elusive Archives | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/2021_Elusive_Archives_Bruckner.jpg | | 127 | Elusive Archives | Brückner, Martin | Sandy Isenstadt | University of Delaware Press | Newark, Delaware | 2021 | https://udpress.udel.edu/book-title/elusive-archives/ | <p>The essays that comprise <em>Elusive Archives</em> raise a common
question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are
transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist the
taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives,
rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What
holds these disparate things together here are the questions authors ask
of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional
collection of things, an elusive archive. Scattered matter then becomes
fixed within each author’s analytical framework rather than within the
walls of an archive’s reading room or in cases along a museum corridor.<br><br>
This book follows the ways in which objects may be identified,
gathered, arranged, conceptualized and even displayed rather than by
“discovering” artifacts in an archive and then asking how they came to
be there. The authors approach material culture outside the traditional
bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are varied not only in
subject matter but also in narrative format and conceptual reach, making
the volume accessible and easy to navigate for a quick reference or, if
read straight through, build toward a new way to think about material
culture.<br><br></p> | mcb | | |
| The Delaware Naturalist | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Delaware-Naturalist.jpg | | 5 | The Delaware Naturalist | Jenkins, McKay | Susan Barton | University of Delaware Press | | 2021 | | <p><em>The Delaware Naturalist Handbook</em> (University of Delaware Press), a 14-chapter, 340-page collection of natural history essays written by McKay and environmental science colleagues at UD and the Delaware Nature Society. Co-edited with Sue Barton, from UD's Plant and Soil Chemistry department, the book covers everything from environmental history and environmental justice to climate change, watershed ecology, insects, birds, and native and invasive plants. The book also serves as the textbook for the new statewide Delaware Master Naturalist Certification Program, which McKay helped design, and which is designed to train hundreds of ecological restoration volunteers every year. You can find out more about the Master Naturalist Program here: https://www.udel.edu/academics/colleges/canr/cooperative-extension/environmental-stewardship/master-naturalist/<br></p> | mckay | | |
| Speaking Up, Speaking Out: Lived Experiences of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty in Writing Studies | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Speaking up speaking out.jpg | | 115 | Speaking Up, Speaking Out: Lived Experiences of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty in Writing Studies | Edwards, Jessica;McGuire, Meg | Rachel Sanchez | Utah State University Press | Louisville, CO | 2021 | https://upcolorado.com/utah-state-university-press/item/3968-speaking-up-speaking-out | <p><em>Speaking Up, Speaking Out</em> addresses the lived experiences of those working in the non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) trenches through storytelling and reflection. By connecting NTTF voices from various aspects of writing studies, the collection offers fresh perspectives and meaningful contributions, imagining the possibilities for contingent faculty to be valued and honored in educational systems that often do the opposite. Challenging traditional ways of seeing NTTF, the work contains multiple entry points to NTT life: those with and without “terminal degrees,” those with PhDs, and those who have held or currently hold tenured positions. Each chapter suggests tangible ways that writing departments and supporters can be more thoughtful about their policies and practices as they work to create more equitable spaces for NTTF. <em>Speaking Up, Speaking Out</em> considers the rhetorical power of labeling and asserts why contingent faculty, for far too long, have been compared to and against TT faculty and often encouraged to reach the same or similar productivity with scholarship, teaching, and service that TT faculty produce. The myopic ideas about what is valued and whose position is deemed more important impacts contingent faculty in ways that, as contributors in this collection share, effect and affect faculty productivity, emotional health, and overall community involvement.<br></p> | edwardsj;mmcguire | | |
| The History of American Literature on Film | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Leitch, The History of American Literature on Film(1).jpg | | 132 | The History of American Literature on Film | Leitch, Thomas | | Bloomsbury Publishing | New York | 2021 | https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/history-of-american-literature-on-film-9781628923735/ | <p>From William Dickson's <em>Rip Van Winkle</em> films (1896) to Baz Luhrmann's
big-budget production of <em>The Great Gatsby</em> (2013) and beyond, cinematic
adaptations of American literature participate in a rich and fascinating
history. Unlike previous studies of American literature and film, which
emphasize particular authors like Edith Wharton and Nathaniel
Hawthorne, particular texts like <em>Moby-Dick</em>, particular literary periods
like the American Renaissance, or particular genres like the novel, this
volume considers the multiple functions of filmed American literature
as a cinematic genre in its own right—one that reflects the specific
political and aesthetic priorities of different national and historical
cinemas even as it plays a decisive role in defining American literature
for a global audience<br></p> | tleitch | | |
| ModelWork The Material Culture of Making and Knowing | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Model Work.jpeg | | 129 | ModelWork The Material Culture of Making and Knowing | Brückner, Martin | Sandy Isenstadt, Sarah Wasserman | University of Minnesota Press | Minneapolis, MN | 2021 | https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/modelwork | <div class="handle">How making models allows us to recall what was and to discover what still might be<br></div><p>
In this wide-ranging volume,
scholars from diverse fields examine the interrelationships between a
model’s material foundations and the otherwise invisible things it
gestures toward, underscoring the pivotal role of models in
understanding and shaping the world around us. Whether in the form of
reproductions, interpretive processes, or constitutive tools, models may
bridge the gap between the tangible and the abstract. <br></p><p><br><br></p> | mcb | | |
| FuturePanic | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/FuturePanic.png | | 134 | FuturePanic | Trivedi, Amish | | co•im•press | | 2021 | http://www.coimpress.com/books/futurepanic.shtml | <p>Sweeping and subversive and anxious and heartfelt, <em>FuturePanic</em> by Amish Trivedi is a <em>Four Quartets</em>
for the Millennial set. Infused with the nervous energies of the past
half decade, when living with macro-tragedy and dread have become more
ingrained in day-to-day functioning than ever, Trivedi's third book of
poetry employs a deliberate and plaintive lyric mode across five
unfolding sections to wrestle with how much of the psyche one can let
untether before the self faces annihilation. The poet confronts the
gathering terrors that creep forth from simultaneously pondering vast,
heady concepts like time and futurity in conjunction with more
localized, proximate concerns like whether one will face the looming
specter of a mass shooting the next time one goes to a box store,
concert, movie theater, grocery store, school, or other public space. In
<em>FuturePanic</em>, Trivedi questions whether the collective grief
and guilt of our shared transgressions and fears are all-consuming or if
we can use humanity's boundless potential for creativity to rouse an
alternative we've never known enough of to embrace fully—a moment's
peace.</p> | atrivedi | | |
| The Baltimore Black Sox: A Negro Leagues History, 1913-1936 | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/2020_The Baltimore Black Sox_McKenna.jpg | | 128 | The Baltimore Black Sox: A Negro Leagues History, 1913-1936 | McKenna, Bernard | | McFarland & Company Inc. | North Carolina | 2020 | https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/the-baltimore-black-sox/ | <p>Providing a comprehensive history of the Baltimore Black Sox from before
the team’s founding in 1913 through its demise in 1936, this history
examines the social and cultural forces that gave birth to the club and
informed its development. The author describes aspects of Baltimore’s
history in the first decades of the 20th century, details the team’s
year-by-year performance, explores front-office and management dynamics
and traces the shaping of the Negro Leagues. The history of the Black
Sox’s home ballparks and of the people who worked for the team both on
and off the field are included.<br><br></p> | mckennab | | |
| Christianity in a Time of Climate Change: To Give a Future with Hope | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Christianity in a time of Climate Change.jpg | | 3 | Christianity in a Time of Climate Change: To Give a Future with Hope | Poole, Kristen | | Wipf and Stock | Eugene, Oregon | 2020 | https://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Time-Climate-Change-Future/dp/1725257130/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Kristen+Poole&qid=1587998348&sr=8-2 | <p>What does climate change have to do with religion and spirituality? Even though a changing environment will have a dire impact on human populations—affecting everything from food supply to health to housing—the vast majority of Americans do not consider climate change a moral or a religious issue. Yet the damage of climate change, a phenomenon to which we all contribute through our collective carbon emissions, presents an unprecedented ethical problem, one that touches a foundational moral principle of Christianity: Jesus’s dictate to love the neighbor. This care for the neighbor stretches across time as well as space. We are called to care for the neighbors of the future as well as those of the present. How can we connect the ethical considerations of climate change—the knowledge that our actions directly or indirectly cause harm to others—to our individual and collective spiritual practice? <em>Christianity in a Time of Climate Change </em>offers a series of reflective essays that consider the Christian ethics of climate change and suggest ways to fold the neighbors of the future into our spiritual lives as an impetus to meaningful personal, social, and ultimately environmental transformation</p> | kpoole | | |
| The Death of Things | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/The Death of Things.jpg | | 117 | The Death of Things | Wasserman, Sarah | | The University of Minnesota Press | | 2020 | https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-death-of-things | <p>“Nothing ever really disappears from the internet” has become a common warning of the digital age. But the twentieth century was filled with ephemera—items that were designed to disappear forever—and these objects played crucial roles in some of that century’s greatest works of literature. In <em>The Death of Things</em>, author Sarah Wasserman delivers the first comprehensive study addressing the role ephemera played in twentieth-century fiction and its relevance to contemporary digital culture.</p><p>Representing the experience of perpetual change and loss, ephemera was central to great works by major novelists like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson. Following the lives and deaths of objects, Wasserman imagines new uses of urban space, new forms of visibility for marginalized groups, and new conceptions of the marginal itself. She also inquires into present-day conundrums: our fascination with the durable, our concerns with the digital, and our curiosity about what new fictional narratives have to say about deletion and preservation.</p><em>The Death of Things </em>offers readers fascinating, original angles on how objects shape our world. Creating an alternate literary history of the twentieth century, Wasserman delivers an insightful and idiosyncratic journey through objects that were once vital but are now forgotten. | swasser | | |
| Nat Turner in Black and White: Race, Trauma, and the American Cultural Imaginary | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/nat-turner-in-black-and-white.png | | 133 | Nat Turner in Black and White: Race, Trauma, and the American Cultural Imaginary | | | Cambridge Scholars Publishing | | 2020 | https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-5822-9 | <p>This book reveals how writers, as explorers of collective memory and
historical record, imagine cautionary Nat Turner-tales that reflect
their time and beliefs. The book critically surveys how Turner inspired
the cultural imagination and became a largely misunderstood and
polarizing figure in the US imaginary. By locating the Turner
Insurrection within the territory of historical race trauma, writers
across the color-line have exposed the lasting impact of slavery on
American society. As African Americans continue to endure the
indignities and inequity of an insidiously racist system, servile
insurrections emerge as models of heroic rebellion. Historical
literature is mnemonic in nature and cautionary in purpose. Since
rebellion is predetermined within unjust systems, as recently as May
2020, the police killing of yet another unarmed Black man caused
nation-wide protests. The US is undergoing a paradigm shift that dispels
the political fiction of racial equality and the optimistic rhetoric of
a colorblind and racially reconciled America, as it exposes the
devastating effects of race trauma.</p> | | | |
| Early Modern Histories of Time The Periodizations of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Early Modern Histories of Time The Periodizations of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England.jpg | | 7 | Early Modern Histories of Time The Periodizations of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England | Poole, Kristen | Williams, Owen | University of Pennsylvania Press | Philadelphia, PA | 2019 | https://www.amazon.com/Early-Modern-Histories-Time-Seventeenth-Century/dp/0812251520/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Kristen+Poole+and+Owen+Williams&qid=1574171357&s=books&sr=1-1 | <p><em>Early Modern Histories of Time</em> examines how a range of chronological modes intrinsic to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped the thought-worlds of those living during this time and explores how these temporally indigenous models can productively influence our own working concepts of historical period. This innovative approach thus moves beyond debates about where we should divide linear time (and what to call the ensuing segments) to reconsider the very concept of "period." Bringing together an eminent cast of literary scholars and historians, the volume develops productive historical models by drawing on the very texts and cultural contexts that are their objects of study. What happens to the idea of "period" when English literature is properly placed within the dynamic currents of pan-European literary phenomena? How might we think of historical period through the palimpsested nature of buildings, through the religious concept of the secular, through the demographic model of the life cycle, even through the repetitive labor of laundering? From theology to material culture to the temporal constructions of Shakespeare, and from the politics of space to the poetics of typology, the essays in this volume take up diverse, complex models of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century temporality and contemplate their current relevance for our own ideas of history. The volume thus embraces the ambiguity inherent in the word "contemporary," moving between our subjects' sense of self-emplacement and the historiographical need to address the questions and concerns that affect us today.</p> | kpoole | | |
| The Power of Teacher Talk | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/The Power of Teacher Talk.jpg | | 119 | The Power of Teacher Talk | Bieler, Deborah | | Teachers College Press | | 2019 | https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807759570/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0 | <p><em>The Power of Teacher Talk</em> investigates the connections between two persistent educational challenges: high numbers of students who drop out and of teachers who leave the profession. Based on a study of thousands of daily interactions between new justice-oriented English teachers and their students, this book proposes that teachers who show a commitment to equity in their communications can positively affect student retention and are more likely to remain in the profession. Blending vivid descriptions of classroom life with equity and language research, the author urges teachers to be aware of and intentional about the power of their interactions with students―in everything from their classroom décor and informal hallway chats to their responses to challenging moments during class and in after-class discussions. This must-read book shifts the narrative on what kinds of teaching practices matter and how teachers can and do work toward equity.</p> | deb | | |
| Pilgrim You Find the Path by Walking | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Walker_Pilgrim You Find the Path by Walking.jpg | | 124 | Pilgrim You Find the Path by Walking | Walker, Jeanne | | Paraclete Press | Orleans, MA | 2019 | https://www.amazon.com/Pilgrim-You-Find-Path-Walking/dp/1640600086 | <p>[These sonnets] bear the feel of classic, observational, “quiet" American poetry. The theme is the ordinary, the everyday. Bakers and shoemakers. A 12-point buck, a bird watching someone shower. Walking in the woods, a girl learning how to write her name, the tension before a concert begins. But “classic" does not mean worn or cliched; work that is classic in form or content can mean fresh, ever fresh. Like any good writing [this book] takes up questions you suddenly realize have been latent within you as well. In “The Haunting," “Why do we love what's miniature and take it to our hearts?" Why indeed? Or in “Farewell": “Everything we long for,/ we make ours through longing. Apples seem/ crisper, sweeter when they're conjured/ than if I taste them on the tongue." After reading the poem “Foreboding": “Only we stay,/ who can't migrate, we who hear the scratch/ and fall of leaves, more anxious every day/ as darkness lengthens," it hits me for the first time: humans are the only creatures who know that, eventually, they are going to die. A small gift of insight born of those odd little nooks poetry can create in us, a small access point to let in something new. <em>Joe Hoover</em><br><em> </em><br><br></p> | jwalker | | |
| Contested Liberalisms Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Iain Crawford book.jpg | | 13 | Contested Liberalisms Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press | Crawford, Iain | | Edinburgh University Press | Edinburgh, United Kingdom | 2019 | https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-contested-liberalisms.html | <h4>Reframes the long-standing critical narrative of the relationship between Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens</h4><ul><li>Demonstrates, through new readings of Martineau and Dickens’s travel in and writing about the United States, how their encounters with the American public sphere were crucially formative in both writers’ careers and in their shaping as journalists</li><li>Places Martineau and Dickens within the context of Anglo-American liberalism, thereby expanding our reading of them beyond earlier schema framed in narrower terms of political economy</li><li>Expands understandings of transatlantic literary exchange to offer a more comprehensive reading than those offered through an earlier critical focus simply on the issue of international copyright</li></ul><p>Focusing on the importance of Martineau’s contribution to the development of the early Victorian press, this book highlights the degree to which the public quarrel between her and Dickens in the mid-1850s represented larger fissures within nineteenth-century liberalism. It places Martineau and Dickens within the context of Anglo-American liberalism and demonstrates how these fissures were embedded within a transatlantic conversation over the role of the press in forming a public sphere essential to the development of a liberal society.</p> | icrawf | | |
| Gathering Force_Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557-1623_Vol. 1 | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Gathering Force_Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557-1623_Vol. 1.jpg | | 14 | Gathering Force_Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557-1623_Vol. 1 | Poole, Kristen | Shohet, Lauren | Cambridge University Press | Cambridge, United Kingdom | 2019 | https://www.amazon.com/Gathering-Force-Literature-Transition-1557-1623/dp/1108419631/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Gathering+Force+Kristen+Poole&qid=1574171321&s=books&sr=1-1 | <p>During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England grew from a marginal to a major European power, established overseas settlements, and negotiated the Protestant Reformation. The population burgeoned and became increasingly urban. England also saw the meteoric rise of commercial theatre in London, the creation of a vigorous market for printed texts, and the emergence of writing as a viable profession. Literacy rates exploded, and an increasingly diverse audience encountered a profusion of new textual forms. Media, and literary culture, transformed on a scale that would not happen again until television and the Internet. The twenty innovative contributions in Gathering Force: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1557-1623 trace ways that five different genres both spurred and responded to change. Chapters explore different facets of lyric poetry, romance, commercial drama, masques and pageants, and non-narrative prose. Exciting and accessible, this volume illuminates the dynamic relationships among the period's social, political, and literary transformations.</p> | kpoole | | |
| The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Poole_Bible-Shakespearean-Stage.jpg | | 90 | The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England | Poole, Kristen | Thomas Fulton | Cambridge University Press | | 2018 | https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/bible-on-the-shakespearean-stage/CB324C9FA456A5D4562C9BA6DA3CD245 | <p>The Bible was everywhere in Shakespeare's England. Through sermons, catechisms, treatises, artwork, literature and, of course, biblical reading itself, the stories and language of the Bible pervaded popular and elite culture. In recent years, scholars have demonstrated how thoroughly biblical allusions saturate Shakespearean plays. But Shakespeare's audiences were not simply well versed in the Bible's content - they were also steeped in the practices and methods of biblical interpretation. Reformation and counter-reformation debate focused not just on the biblical text, but - crucially - on how to read the text. The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage is the first volume to integrate the study of Shakespeare's plays with the vital history of Reformation practices of biblical interpretation. Bringing together the foremost international scholars in the field of 'Shakespeare and the Bible', these essays explore Shakespeare's engagement with scriptural interpretation in the tragedies, histories, comedies, and romances.<br></p> | kpoole | | |
| One Rough Life: Ted Ashlaw: Adirondack Lumber Camp and Barroom Singer | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/One Rough Life.png | | 18 | One Rough Life: Ted Ashlaw: Adirondack Lumber Camp and Barroom Singer | Bethke, Robert | | TAUNY Publications in Regional Folkways | | 2018 | https://tauny-folkstore.myshopify.com/products/one-rough-life-ted-ashlaw-adirondack-lumber-camp-and-barron | <p>This is the first folklore fieldwork case study with ethnographic
and musicological focus, and contextual photographs, devoted to a
northern New York State career-long Adirondack logger. The
book includes texts, tunes, and annotations for 35 British, Irish, and
American folk ballads and songs sung unaccompanied, as learned by Ted
Ashlaw mainly through oral tradition ca. 1910-1950. Two CDs that come with
the book present the singing as field collected by the
author during the 1970s. Additional details about the book along
with ordering information are found at www. tauny.org.</p><p>
</p> | rbethke | | |
| Black in America | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Jessica Edwards book.jpg | | 15 | Black in America | Edwards, Jessica | | Broadview Press | | 2018 | https://broadviewpress.com/product/black-in-america/?ph=520e08a63daa08ffebfa06f6#tab-companion-site | <p>B<em>lack in America</em> samples the breadth of non-fiction writing on African American experiences in the United States. The emphasis is on twenty-first-century authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, and Roxane Gay, but a substantial representation of vitally important writing from other eras is also included, from Olaudah Equiano and Sojourner Truth to James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker; in all there are over 50 selections. Selections are arranged by author in rough chronological order; the book also includes alternative tables of contents listing material by thematic subject and by genre and rhetorical style. A headnote, explanatory notes, and discussion questions facilitate student engagement with each piece.</p> | edwardsj | | |
| Feminism and Intersectionality in Academia: Women’s Narratives and Experiences in Higher Education | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Feminism and Intersectionality.jpg | | 11 | Feminism and Intersectionality in Academia: Women’s Narratives and Experiences in Higher Education | Flynn, Jill | Shelton, Stephanie Anne, Groseland, Tanetha Jamaey (Eds.) | Springer | | 2018 | https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-90590-7#about | <p>This edited volume explores the diversities and complexities of women’s experiences in higher education. Its emphasis on personal narratives provides a forum for topics not typically found in in print, such as mental illness, marital difficulties, and gender identity. The intersectional narratives afford typically disenfranchised women opportunities to share experiences in ways that de-center standard academic writing, while simultaneously making these stories accessible to a range of readers, both inside and outside higher education.<br></p> | jeflynn | | |
| The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Leitch_oxford-handbook-adaptation.jpg | | 81 | The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies | Leitch, Thomas | | Oxford University Press | | 2017 | https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-adaptation-studies-9780199331000 | <p>This collection of forty new essays, written by the leading scholars in adaptation studies and distinguished contributors from outside the field, is the most comprehensive volume on adaptation ever published. Written to appeal alike to specialists in adaptation, scholars in allied fields, and general readers, it hearkens back to the foundations of adaptation studies a century and more ago, surveys its ferment of activity over the past twenty years, and looks forward to the future. It considers the very different problems in adapting the classics, from the Bible to <em>Frankenstein</em> to Philip Roth, and the commons, from online mashups and remixes to adult movies. It surveys a dizzying range of adaptations around the world, from Latin American telenovelas to Czech cinema, from Hong Kong comics to <em>Classics Illustrated</em>, from Bollywood to zombies, and explores the ways media as different as radio, opera, popular song, and videogames have handled adaptation. Going still further, it examines the relations between adaptation and such intertextual practices as translation, illustration, prequels, sequels, remakes, intermediality, and transmediality. The volume's contributors consider the similarities and differences between adaptation and history, adaptation and performance, adaptation and revision, and textual and biological adaptation, casting an appreciative but critical eye on the theory and practice of adaptation scholars--and, occasionally, each other. <em>The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies </em>offers specific suggestions for how to read, teach, create, and write about adaptations in order to prepare for a world in which adaptation, already ubiquitous, is likely to become ever more important.<br></p> | tleitch | | |
| The Prentice Hall Reader, 12th Edition | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Miller_Prentice-Hall-12ed.jpg | | 85 | The Prentice Hall Reader, 12th Edition | Miller, George | Jon Miller | Pearson | | 2017 | https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Miller-The-Prentice-Hall-Reader-12th-Edition/PGM328460.html | <p><em>The Prentice Hall Reader</em> helps students organize their writing around structural patterns and engage in these patterns by reading. These patterns help students organize their knowledge to see different ways in which information can be conveyed. Most commonly used in academic writing, the structural patterns will guide students through skills such as narration, description, classification, comparison, explanation, analysis, definition, and argument – across all subject matter they may encounter in their academic work.</p><p>The 12th Edition expands on previous editions with 43 essays. This includes 26 new essays, 11 written by students, and 27 that employ examples of the organizational strategies emphasized throughout the book, used in academic and literary texts, and visuals. Readings are chosen based on how well they demonstrate a particular pattern of organization, appeal to an audience of first-year students, and promote interesting discussion and writing activities.<br></p> | miller | | |
| Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/julianbookcover (2).jpg | | 16 | Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression | Yates, Julian | | University of Minnesota Press | | 2017 | https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/of-sheep-oranges-and-yeast | <p>In what senses do animals, plants, and minerals “write”? How does their “writing” mark our lives—our past, present, and future? Addressing such questions with an exhilarating blend of creative flair and theoretical depth, <em>Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast</em> traces how the lives of, yes, sheep, oranges, gold, and yeast mark the stories of those animals we call “human.”</p><p>Bringing together often separate conversations in animal studies, plant studies, ecotheory, and biopolitics, <em>Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast</em> crafts scripts for literary and historical study that embrace the fact that we come into being through our relations to other animal, plant, fungal, microbial, viral, mineral, and chemical actors. The book opens and closes in the company of a Shakespearean character talking through his painful encounter with the skin of a lamb (in the form of parchment). This encounter stages a visceral awareness of what Julian Yates names a “multispecies impression,” the way all acts of writing are saturated with the “writing” of other beings. Yates then develops a multimodal reading strategy that traces a series of anthropo-zoo-genetic figures that derive from our comaking with sheep (keyed to the story of biopolitics), oranges (keyed to economy), and yeast (keyed to the notion of foundation or infrastructure).</p><p>Working with an array of materials (published and archival), across disciplines and historical periods (Classical to postmodern), the book allows sheep, oranges, and yeast to dictate their own chronologies and plot their own stories. What emerges is a methodology that fundamentally alters what it means to read in the twenty-first century. </p> | jyates | | |
| Negotiating Disability | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Negotiating Disability_Kerschbaum.jpg | | 19 | Negotiating Disability | | Laura T. Eisenman, and James M. Jones | University of Michigan Press | Ann Arbor, MI | 2017 | https://www.press.umich.edu/9426902/negotiating_disability | <p>Disability is not always central to claims about diversity and inclusion in higher education, but should be. This collection reveals the pervasiveness of disability issues and considerations within many higher education populations and settings, from classrooms to physical environments to policy impacts on students, faculty, administrators, and staff. While disclosing one’s disability and identifying shared experiences can engender moments of solidarity, the situation is always complicated by the intersecting factors of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. With disability disclosure as a central point of departure, this collection of essays builds on scholarship that highlights the deeply rhetorical nature of disclosure and embodied movement, emphasizing disability disclosure as a complex calculus in which degrees of perceptibility are dependent on contexts, types of interactions that are unfolding, interlocutors’ long- and short-term goals, disabilities, and disability experiences, and many other contingencies. </p> | | | |
| Alphabet Year | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_DMD_Alphabet-Year.jpg | | 38 | Alphabet Year | Miller-Duggan, Devon | | Wipf and Stock | | 2017 | https://wipfandstock.com/alphabet-year.html | <p>These poems started with a bag of children's beach toys--primary-colored alphabet sand-molds--and a quiet afternoon. They ended up needing a spreadsheet to keep track of the first words. "Love" is the "L" word for all the disorderly abecedarians because it creates a thread with which to gather all the ribbons of art, religion, human cruelty, anger, and the infinite intrusions by the random that both buffer us from a frequently distressing world and buffet us with that same world's constant noise. Because the proper abecedarians have a more orderly arrangement with the universe simply by virtue of progressing through the alphabet the way it's supposed to line up, the "L" words shift and wiggle even as the poems fun-house-mirror each other. Ultimately, the poems reach for peace without demanding either understanding, or patience, deciding that it is not only necessary, but lovely to dance with the monsters underneath our beds.<br></p> | dmd | | |
| For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Duckert_For-All-Waters.jpg | | 40 | For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes | Duckert, Lowell | | University of Minnesota Press | | 2017 | https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/for-all-waters | <p>
Lowell Duckert shows that when playwrights and travel writers physically interacted with rivers, glaciers, monsoons, and swamps, they composed “hydrographies,” or bodily and textual assemblages of human and nonhuman things that dissolved notions of human autonomy and its singular narrativity. Duckert concludes by investigating waterscapes in peril today and outlining what we can learn from early moderns’ eco-ontological lessons.<br></p> | lduckert | | |
| Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Duckert_Veer-Ecology.jpg | | 41 | Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking | Duckert, Lowell | Jeffrey Jerome Cohen | University of Minnesota Press | | 2017 | https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/veer-ecology | <p><em>Veer Ecology </em>is a groundbreaking guide for the twenty-first century, with the editors asking thirty brilliant thinkers to each propose one verb that stresses the forceful potential of inquiry, weather, biomes, apprehensions, and desires to swerve and sheer. Each term is accompanied by a concise essay contextualizing its meaning in times of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and global climate change.<br></p> | lduckert | | |
| The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Brueckner_Social-Life-Maps_180-3.jpg | | 31 | The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 | Brückner, Martin | | Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and UNCP | Chapel Hill, NC | 2017 | https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469632605/the-social-life-of-maps-in-america-1750-1860/ | <p><em>Winner of the 2018 Fred B. Kniffen Book Award, International Society for Landscape, Place, and Material Culture</em><br></p><p>In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A "carto-coded" America--a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful--had to be created. <em>The Social Life of Maps</em> tracks American cartography's spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence.Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensions. They became affordable and intelligible to ordinary American men and women looking for their place in the world. School maps quickly entered classrooms, where they shaped reading and other cognitive exercises; giant maps drew attention in public spaces; miniature maps helped Americans chart personal experiences. In short, maps were uniquely social objects whose visual and material expressions affected commercial practices and graphic arts, theatrical performances and the communication of emotions. This lavishly illustrated study follows popular maps from their points of creation to shops and galleries, schoolrooms and coat pockets, parlors and bookbindings. Between the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, early Americans bonded with maps; Martin Brückner's comprehensive history of quotidian cartographic encounters is the first to show us how.</p> | mcb | | |
| Food Fight: GMOS and the Future of the American Diet | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Jenkins_Food-Fight.jpg | | 66 | Food Fight: GMOS and the Future of the American Diet | Jenkins, McKay | | Avery | | 2017 | https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/318796/food-fight-by-mckay-jenkins/9781101982204/ | <p>Are GMOs really that bad? A prominent environmental journalist takes a fresh look at what they actually mean for our food system and for us.</p><p>In the past two decades, GMOs have come to dominate the American diet. Advocates hail them as the future of food, an enhanced method of crop breeding that can help feed an ever-increasing global population and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Critics, meanwhile, call for their banishment, insisting GMOs were designed by overeager scientists and greedy corporations to bolster an industrial food system that forces us to rely on cheap, unhealthy, processed food so they can turn an easy profit. In response, health-conscious brands such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have started boasting that they are “GMO-free,” and companies like Monsanto have become villains in the eyes of average consumers.</p><p>Where can we turn for the truth? Are GMOs an astounding scientific breakthrough destined to end world hunger? Or are they simply a way for giant companies to control a problematic food system? </p><p>Environmental writer McKay Jenkins traveled across the country to answer these questions and discovered that the GMO controversy is more complicated than meets the eye. He interviewed dozens of people on all sides of the debate—scientists hoping to engineer new crops that could provide nutrients to people in the developing world, Hawaiian papaya farmers who credit GMOs with saving their livelihoods, and local farmers in Maryland who are redefining what it means to be “sustainable.” The result is a comprehensive, nuanced examination of the state of our food system and a much-needed guide<strong> </strong>for consumers to help them make more informed choices about what to eat for their next meal.<br></p> | mckay | | |
| Object Oriented Environs | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Yates_Object-Environs_180.jpg | | 111 | Object Oriented Environs | Yates, Julian | Jeffrey Jerome Cohen | Punctum Books | New York | 2016 | http://punctumbooks.com/titles/object-oriented-environs/ | Object Oriented Environs is the lively archive of a critical confluence between the environmental turn so vigorous within early modern studies, and thing theory (object oriented ontology, vibrant materialism, the new materialism and speculative realism). The book unfolds a conversation that attempts to move beyond anthropocentrism and examine nonhumans at every scale, their relations to each other, and the ethics of human enmeshment within an agentic material world. The diverse essays, reflections, images and ephemera collected here offer a laboratory for probing the mystery and potential autonomy of objects, in their alliances and in performance.
The book is the trace of an event-space crafted over a day of conversation in two seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 2014 in St. Louis and offers its nineteen essays as the end to the work-cycle of the collective we crafted that day. It is a noisy collation, full of bees, bushes, laundry, crutches, lists, poems, plague vectors, planks, chairs, rain, shoes, meat, body parts, books, and assorted humans (living and dead), and also a repertoire of dance steps, ways of configuring the relations between subject and object, actors or actants (human and otherwise). It is also a book that asks readers to ponder their environs, to consider the particularities of their world, of their reading experiences, and to consider what orders of meaning we might be able to derive from attending closely to all the very many things we come into being with.
Contributors include: Lizz Angello, Sallie Anglin, Keith M. Botelho, Patricia A. Cahill, Jeffrey Cohen, Drew Daniel, Christine Hoffmann, Neal Klomp, Julia Lupton, Vin Nardizzi, Tara Pedersen, Tripthi Pillai, Karen Raber, Pauline Reid, Emily Rendek, Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Debapriya Sarkar, Rob Wakeman, Jennifer Waldron, Luke Wilson, and Julian Yates. | jyates | | |
| After Disasters | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Dinh_After-Disasters_180.jpg | | 37 | After Disasters | Dinh, Viet | | Little A | Newburyport, MA | 2016 | https://www.amazon.com/After-Disasters-Viet-Dinh/dp/1477849998 | Beautifully and hauntingly written, After Disasters is told through the eyes of four people in the wake of a life-shattering earthquake in India. An intricate story of love and loss weaves together the emotional and intimate narratives of Ted, a pharmaceutical salesman turned member of the Disaster Assistance Response Team; his colleague Piotr, who still carries with him the scars of the Bosnia conflict; Andy, a young firefighter eager to prove his worth; and Dev, a doctor on the ground racing against time and dwindling resources. Through time and place, hope and tragedy, love and lust, these four men put their lives at risk in a country where danger lurks everywhere.
O. Henry Prize-winning author Viet Dinh takes us on a moving and evocative journey through an India set with smoky funeral pyres, winding rivers that hold prayers and the deceased, and the rubble of Gujarat, a crumbling place wavering between life and death. As the four men fight to impose order on an increasingly chaotic city, where looting and threats of violence become more severe, they realize the first lives they save might be their own. | vdinh | | |
| The American School of Empire | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Larkin_American-School-Empire_180.jpg | | 77 | The American School of Empire | Larkin, Edward | | Cambridge University Press | New York | 2016 | http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/early-republic-and-antebellum-history/american-school-empire | Early American artists and political thinkers wrestled with the challenges of forming a cohesive, if not coherent, culture and political structure to organize the young republic and its diverse peoples. The American School of Empire shows how this American idea of empire emerged through a dialogue with British forms of empire, becoming foundational to how the US organized its government and providing early Americans with the framework for thinking about the relations between states and the disparate peoples and cultures that defined them. Edward Larkin places special emphasis on the forms of the novel and history painting, which were crucial vehicles for the articulation of the American vision of empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. | elarkin | | |
| ContamiNation: My Quest to Survive in a Toxic World | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Jenkins_contamination_180.jpg | | 65 | ContamiNation: My Quest to Survive in a Toxic World | Jenkins, McKay | | Avery | New York | 2016 | http://www.amazon.com/ContamiNation-Quest-Survive-Toxic-World/dp/0399573402 | An investigation into the dangers of the chemicals present in our daily lives, along with practical advice for reducing these toxins in our bodies and homes, from acclaimed journalist McKay Jenkins.
A few years ago, journalism professor McKay Jenkins went in for a routine medical exam. What doctors found was not routine at all: a tumor, the size of a navel orange, was lurking in his abdomen. When Jenkins returned to the hospital to have the tumor removed, he was visited by a couple of researchers with clipboards. They had some questions for him. Odd questions. How much exposure had he had to toxic chemicals and other contaminants? Asbestos dust? Vinyl chlorine? Pesticides? A million questions, all about seemingly obscure chemicals. Jenkins, an exercise nut and an enviro-conscious, organic-garden kind of guy, suddenly realized he'd spent his life marinating in toxic stuff, from his wall-to-wall carpeting, to his dryer sheets, to his drinking water. And from the moment he left the hospital, he resolved to discover the truth about chemicals and the "healthy" levels of exposure we encounter each day as Americans.
Jenkins spent the next two years digging, exploring five frontiers of toxic exposure-the body, the home, the drinking water, the lawn, and the local box store-and asking how we allowed ourselves to get to this point. He soon learned that the giants of the chemical industry operate virtually unchecked, and a parent has almost no way of finding out what the toy her child is putting in his or her mouth is made of. Most important, though, Jenkins wanted to know what we can do to turn things around. Though toxins may be present in products we all use every day--from ant spray, perfume, and grass seed to shower curtains and, yes, baby shampoo--there are ways to lessen our exposure. ContamiNation is an eye-opening report from the front lines of consumer advocacy. | mckay | | |
| The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Ianetta_Oxford-writing-tutors_180.jpg | | 61 | The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research | | Lauren Fitzgerald | Oxford University Press | Oxford | 2015 | https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-guide-for-writing-tutors-9780199941841?cc=us&lang=en& | Distinctive features
Includes scholarship authored by undergraduate tutor-researchersProvides extensive references to and bibliographic citations of the scholarship of the fieldOffers references to research that supports and challenges disciplinary common knowledgeContains assignments designed to support discussion, writing, and inquiry | | | |
| Reading Sounds Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Reading Sounds.jpg | | 113 | Reading Sounds Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture | Zdenek, Sean | | The University of Chicago Press | Chicago, IL | 2015 | https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo21933882.html | <p>Imagine a common movie scene: a hero confronts a villain. Captioning such a moment would at first glance seem as basic as transcribing the dialogue. But consider the choices involved: How do you convey the sarcasm in a comeback? Do you include a henchman’s muttering in the background? Does the villain emit a <em>scream</em>, a <em>grunt</em>, or a <em>howl</em> as he goes down? And how do you note a gunshot without spoiling the scene?These are the choices closed captioners face every day. Captioners must decide whether and how to describe background noises, accents, laughter, musical cues, and even silences. When captioners describe a sound—or choose to ignore it—they are applying their own subjective interpretations to otherwise objective noises, creating meaning that does not necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script.<em>Reading Sounds</em> looks at closed-captioning as a potent source of meaning in rhetorical analysis. Through nine engrossing chapters, Sean Zdenek demonstrates how the choices captioners make affect the way deaf and hard of hearing viewers experience media. He draws on hundreds of real-life examples, as well as interviews with both professional captioners and regular viewers of closed captioning. Zdenek’s analysis is an engrossing look at how we make the audible visible, one that proves that better standards for closed captioning create a better entertainment experience for all viewers.</p> | zdenek | | |
| Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Duckert_Elemental-Ecocriticism.jpg | | 39 | Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire | Duckert, Lowell | Jeffrey Jerome Cohen | University of Minnesota Press | | 2015 | https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/elemental-ecocriticism | <p>Decentering the human, the essays collected in <em>Elemental Ecocriticism </em>provide important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential for a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.<br></p> | lduckert | | |
| Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Kerschbaum-toward-rhetoric-difference_180.jpg | | 73 | Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference | | | National Council of Teachers of English | Urbana, IL | 2015 | https://secure.ncte.org/store/toward-a-new-rhetoric-of-difference | Unlike much current writing studies research, Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference addresses conversations about diversity in higher education, institutional racism, and the teaching of writing by taking a microinteractional look at the ways people define themselves and are defined by others within institutional contexts.
Focusing on four specific peer review moments in a writing classroom, Stephanie L. Kerschbaum reveals the ways in which students mark themselves and others, as well as how these practices of marking are contextualized within writing programs and the broader institution.
Kerschbaum's unique approach provides a detailed analysis of diversity rhetoric and the ways institutions of higher education market diversity in and through student bodies, as well as sociolinguistic analyses of classroom discourse that are coordinated with students' writing and the moves they make around that writing.
Each of these analyses is grounded in an approach to difference that understands it to be dynamic, relational, and emergent-in-interaction, a theory developed out of Bakhtin's ethical scholarship, the author's lived experience of deafness, and close attention to students' interactions with one another in the writing classroom.
Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference enriches the teaching of writing by challenging forms of institutional racism, enabling teachers to critically examine their own positioning and positionality vis-a-vis their students, and highlighting the ways that differences motivate rich relationship building within the classroom. | | | |
| The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Yagoda_B-side_180.jpg | | 103 | The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song | Yagoda, Ben | | Riverhead Books | New York | 2015 | http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-b-side-ben-yagoda/1119671287 | Everybody knows and loves the American Songbook. But it's a bit less widely understood that in about 1950, this stream of great songs more or less dried up. All of a sudden, what came over the radio wasn't Gershwin, Porter, and Berlin, but <br>Come on-a My House" and "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" Elvis and rock and roll arrived a few years later, and at that point the game was truly up. What happened, and why? In The B Side, acclaimed cultural historian Ben Yagoda answers those questions in a fascinating piece of detective work. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources and on scores of interviews, the voices include Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Linda Ronstadt, and Herb Alpert the book illuminates broad musical trends through a series of intertwined stories. Among them are the battle between ASCAP and Broadcast Music, Inc.; the revolution in jazz after World War II; the impact of radio and then television; and the bitter, decades-long feud between Mitch Miller and Frank Sinatra.
The B Side is about taste, and the particular economics and culture of songwriting, and the potential of popular art for greatness and beauty. It's destined to become a classic of American musical history. | byagoda | | |
| An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in British Imagination, 1750-1850 | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Carroll-Empire-Air-Water_180.jpg | | 32 | An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in British Imagination, 1750-1850 | Carroll, Siobhan | | University of Pennsylvania Press | Philadelphia | 2015 | http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15349.html | Planetary spaces such as the poles, the oceans, the atmosphere, and subterranean regions captured the British imperial imagination. Intangible, inhospitable, or inaccessible, these blank spaces--what Siobhan Carroll calls "atopias"--existed beyond the boundaries of known and inhabited places. The eighteenth century conceived of these geographic outliers as the natural limits of imperial expansion, but scientific and naval advances in the nineteenth century created new possibilities to know and control them. This development preoccupied British authors, who were accustomed to seeing atopic regions as otherworldly marvels in fantastical tales. Spaces that an empire could not colonize were spaces that literature might claim, as literary representations of atopias came to reflect their authors' attitudes toward the growth of the British Empire as well as the part they saw literature playing in that expansion.
Siobhan Carroll interrogates the role these blank spaces played in the construction of British identity during an era of unsettling global circulations. Examining the poetry of Samuel T. Coleridge and George Gordon Byron and the prose of Sophia Lee, Mary Shelley, and Charles Dickens, as well as newspaper accounts and voyage narratives, she traces the ways Romantic and Victorian writers reconceptualized atopias as threatening or, at times, vulnerable. These textual explorations of the earth's highest reaches and secret depths shed light on persistent facets of the British global and environmental imagination that linger in the twenty-first century. | sicarrol | | |
| Ambition: Essays by Members of the Chrysostom Society | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Walker_Ambition_180.jpg | | 94 | Ambition: Essays by Members of the Chrysostom Society | Walker, Jeanne | Luci Shaw | Cascade Books | Eugene, OR | 2015 | https://www.amazon.com/Ambition-Essays-members-Chrysostom-Society/dp/1625641346 | In a world of selfies and social media, where each of us reach for "fifteen minutes of fame," as Andy Warhol put it, is it good or bad to have ambition? Without ambition how is it possible to do anything well? But ambition can feed on itself, take over, become insatiable. A goal, duly accomplished, often leads to greater plans. Success with those plans leads to even grander possibilities, and soon blatant ambition is running the whole show.
Nine members of the Chrysostom Society of Writers asked themselves what role ambition has played in their lives. The volume, Ambition, is the result: a collection of essays in which, with striking honesty, they muse on their own motivations and experiences of ambition. The book contains a fascinating spectrum of responses and cautions, ranging from Diane Glancy's praise of ambition as a gift, to Eugene Peterson's narrative about how busyness can become spiritually crippling. Along the way Dain Trafton ponders his family's respect for ambition, on the one hand, and on the other, biblical condemnations of overweening pride. Erin McGraw argues that the extent to which ambition is good or bad depends upon the goal, the what for which one is ambitious. Jeanne Murray Walker wrestles with the ambivalences that accompany the gender-specific challenges of a woman with ambitions, while Gina Ochsner offers an entertaining appraisal of ambition's insatiability. Luci Shaw recounts her ambivalence regarding her literary acknowledgment. And Emily Griffin reflects on her own wrestling with the lure of "Fame." Finally, Bret Lott urges that wherever we are, having achieved our ambitions or still struggling with them, they should take a back seat to gratitude.
The purpose of Ambition is to inspire honest self-searching. It will encourage readers to probe their own identities and purposes, helping them to find a balance between hubris and self-abnegation. What is the legitimate role of ambition in a sane and ethical person's life? Does gender affect ambition? What does it mean to be justifiably ambitious for our children? How can we set and maintain limits for ambition in our own lives? These questions may be more urgent now than they have ever been. The fresh and original thinking of well-known and widely-published authors will challenge the readers' pre-conceptions, leaving them to ponder their own deeper reasons for doing what they do. | jwalker | | |
| Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Wasserman-Culture-Obsolescence_180.jpg | | 99 | Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age | Wasserman, Sarah | Babette B. Tischleder | Palgrave Macmillan | New York | 2015 | http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/cultures-of-obsolescence-babette-b-tischleder/?K=9781137470898 | Obsolescence is fundamental to the experience of modernity, not simply one dimension of an economic system. The contributors to this book investigate obsolescence as a historical phenomenon, an aesthetic practice, and an affective mode. Because obsolescence depends upon the supersession and disappearance of what is old and outmoded, this volume sheds light on what usually remains unseen or overlooked. Calling attention to the fact that obsolescence can structure everything from the self to the skyscraper, Cultures of Obsolescence asks readers to rethink existing relationships between the old and the new. Moreover, the essays in this volume argue for the paradoxical ways in which subjects and their concepts of the human, of newness, and of the future are constituted by a relationship to the obsolete. | swasser | | |
| Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Walker-Helping-The-Morning.jpg | | 125 | Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems | Walker, Jeanne | | WordFarm Press | | 2014 | https://www.abebooks.com/Helping-Morning-New-Selected-Poems-Walker/18524666235/bd | <p>Reading these poems from Walker's last four collections, along with the new poems included at the beginning to the volume, I am constantly reminded of Allen Tate's neglected but brilliant essay “The Man of Letters in the Modern World," in which he distinguishes between the mere “communication" that abounds in our consumer culture and the real “communion" that is at the heart of true literature. Tate writes, “Perhaps it is not too grandiose a conception to suggest that works of literature, from the short lyric to the long epic, are the recurrent discovery of the human communion as experience, in a definite place and at a definite time." Walker, in her carefully crafted and vivid poems, fulfills that challenging call to a renewed, ever contemporary and specific communion as well as any poet writing today. <em>Ben Meyers.</em></p><p>Many of the poems in <em>Helping the Morning </em>display a quality that can fairly be called sacramental. Jeanne Murray Walker is a major poet. <em>Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer Book Review</em></p><p><br><br></p> | jwalker | | |
| Douglass in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Ernest_Douglass-Own-Time_180.jpg | | 44 | Douglass in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs | Ernest, John | | University of Iowa Press | Iowa City, IA | 2014 | http://www.uiowapress.org/books/2014-fall/douglass-his-own-time.htm | One of the most incredible stories in American history is that of Frederick Douglass, the man who escaped from slavery and rose to become one of the most celebrated and eloquent orators, writers, and public figures in the world. He first committed his story to writing in his 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Over the course of his life, he would expand on his story considerably, writing two other autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, as well as innumerable newspaper articles and editorials and orations.
As valuable as these writings are in illuminating the man, the story Douglass told in 1845 has become rather too easy to tell, obscuring as much as it reveals. Less a living presence than an inspiring tale, Frederick Douglass remains relatively unknown even to many of those who celebrate his achievements. Douglass in His Own Time offers an introduction to Douglass the man by those who knew him. The bookincludes a broad range of writings, some intended for public viewing and some private correspondence, all of which contend with the force of Douglass's tremendous power over the written and spoken word, his amazing presence before crowds, his ability to improvise, to entertain, to instruct, to inspire, indeed, to change lives through his eloquent appeals to righteous self-awareness and social justice. In approaching Douglass through the biographical sketches, memoirs, letters, editorials, and other articles about him, readers will encounter the complexity of a life lived on a very public stage, the story of an extraordinary black man in an insistently white world. | jrernest | | |
| Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Leitch_wikipedia-u_180.jpg | | 83 | Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age | Leitch, Thomas | | Johns Hopkins University Press | Baltimore | 2014 | https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/wikipedia-u | Since its launch in 2001, Wikipedia has been a lightning rod for debates about knowledge and traditional authority. It has come under particular scrutiny from publishers of print encyclopedias and college professors, who are skeptical about whether a crowd-sourced encyclopedia--in which most entries are subject to potentially endless reviewing and editing by anonymous collaborators whose credentials cannot be established--can ever truly be accurate or authoritative.
In Wikipedia U, Thomas Leitch argues that the assumptions these critics make about accuracy and authority are themselves open to debate. After all, academics are expected both to consult the latest research and to return to the earliest sources in their field, each of which has its own authority. And when teachers encourage students to master information so that they can question it independently, their ultimate goal is to create a new generation of thinkers and makers whose authority will ultimately supplant their own.
Wikipedia U offers vital new lessons about the nature of authority and the opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0. Leitch regards Wikipedia as an ideal instrument for probing the central assumptions behind liberal education, making it more than merely, as one of its severest critics has charged, "the encyclopedia game, played online." | tleitch | | |
| You Need to Read This | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Yagoda_Read-this-imperative_180.jpg | | 107 | You Need to Read This | Yagoda, Ben | | Riverhead Books | New York | 2014 | http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/you-need-to-read-this-ben-yagoda/1121228398 | In You Need to Read This, language expert Ben Yagoda writes about the cuckoo things we have done to the English language. His witty, insightful, and wise observations and advice are gathered here together for the first time.
From the phenomenon of curate, to the rise of the glottal stop, to the prevalence of starting sentences with so, to the story of an epithet of the moment (douchey), Yagoda chronicles the trends in our language. In the second part of You Need to Read This, he examines the issue of mistakes and "mistakes," and the battles between prescriptivists, who nitpick grammar, and descriptivists, who defend new expressions and casual usage. Yagoda is on the front lines of the language wars, and you need to read this book to find out which side you're on. | byagoda | | |
| The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/Ernest_2.jpg | | 9 | The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative | Ernest, John | | | | 2014 | http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199731480 | <p>The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative approaches
the history of slave testimony in three ways: by prioritizing the broad
tradition over individual authors; by representing interdisciplinary
approaches to slave narratives; and by highlighting emerging scholarship
on slave narratives, concerning both established debates over concerns
of authorship and agency, for example, and developing concerns like
ecocritical readings of slave narratives. Ultimately, the aim of the
Handbook is not to highlight the singularity of any particular account,
nor to comfortably locate slave narratives in traditional literary or
cultural history, but rather to faithfully represent a body of writing
and testimony that was designed to speak for the many, to represent the
unspeakable, and to account for the experience of enslaved and nominally
free communities. The Handbook is organized into six sections:
“Historical Fractures,” “Layered Testimonies,” “Textual Bindings,”
“Experience and Authority,” “Environments and Migrations,” and “Echoes
and Traces.” The Handbook’s contributing scholars address testimony
from a broad range of sources, including traditional archives, Works
Progress Administration (WPA), newspapers, diaries or memoirs, pension
records, and even the testimony suggested by traces in the landscape and
architecture of slave plantations. The reach of sources covered in the
Handbook is not exhaustive, but instead is intended to indicate the
broad range of sources from which testimony can be recovered. Other
chapters address matters of gender, sexuality, and community,
environmental concerns, legal contexts and implications, and
manifestations of slave testimony in visual and aural cultures. Many
essays work to locate African American slave narratives both
historically and geographically, through considerations of literary
history, through considerations of the geography covered by slave
narratives, and through hemispheric and transatlantic connections
central to understanding U.S. testimony. There are no chapters devoted
to major writers, since various resources already exist for that purpose
and since those writers emerge as central figures in many of the
essays. The purpose of all chapters in the Handbook is to account for
the conventional wisdom on the subject in the process of exploring
critical new directions for approaching these concerns. The Handbook’s
goal is to encourage research on a great number of understudied
narratives while demonstrating the rich complexity of this field of
study for those just entering it.</p> | jrernest | | |
| Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Jenkins_poison-spring_180.jpg | | 69 | Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA | Jenkins, McKay | E.G. Vallianatos | Bloomsbury | New York | 2014 | http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/poison-spring-eg-vallianatos/1115438139 | When you order a meal in a restaurant, you won't find malathion, kelthane or arsenic listed on the menu as an ingredient of your entrè, but these and scores of other pesticides and dangerous chemicals are in the food we eat. They are dumped into the environment where they seep into our water supply and float in the air we breathe. The use of these poisons is approved,or in some cases, simply ignored by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Poison Spring documents, in devastating detail, the EPA's corruption and misuse of science and public trust. In its half-century of existence, the agency has repeatedly reinforced the chemical-industrial complex by endorsing deadly chemicals, botching field investigations, turning a blind eye to toxic disasters, and swallowing the self-serving claims of industry. E. G. Vallianatos, who saw the EPA from the inside for more than two decades with rising dismay, reveals in Poison Spring how the agency has allowed our lands and waters to be poisoned with more toxic chemicals than ever. No one who cares for the natural world, or for the health of future generations, can ignore this powerful exposè. | mckay | | |
| A Christmas Far from Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival during the Korean War | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Weintraub_xmas-far-home_180.jpg | | 100 | A Christmas Far from Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival during the Korean War | | | Da Capo Press | Boston | 2014 | http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-christmas-far-from-home-stanley-weintraub/1118704540 | The day after Thanksgiving, five months into the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur flew to American positions in the north and grandly announced an end-the-war-by-Christmas offensive, despite recent evidence of intervention by Mao's Chinese troops. Marching north in plunging temperatures, General Edward Almond's X Corps, which included a Marine division under the able leadership of General Oliver Smith, encountered little resistance. But thousands of Chinese, who had infiltrated across the frozen Yalu River, were lying in wait and would soon trap tens of thousands of US troops.
Led by the Marines, an overwhelmed X Corps evacuated the frigid, mountainous Chosin Reservoir vastness and fought a swarming enemy and treacherous snow and ice to reach the coast. Weather, terrain, Chinese firepower, and a 4,000-foot chasm made escape seem impossible in the face of a vanishing Christmas. But endurance and sacrifice prevailed, and the last troopships weighed anchor on Christmas Eve.
In the tradition of his Silent Night and Pearl Harbor Christmas, Stanley Weintraub presents another gripping narrative of a wartime Christmas season. | | | |
| What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Yates_Worst-Thing_180.jpg | | 112 | What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? | Yates, Julian | Richard Burt | Palgrave Macmillan | London | 2013 | http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/whats-the-worst-thing-you-can-do-to-shakespeare-richard-burt/1114597416 | What's the worst thing you can do to Shakespeare? The answer is simple: don't read him. To that end, Richard Burt and Julian Yates embark here on a project of un/reading the Bard, through both reverent and irreverent discourse. Addressing recent critical debates around problems of print and performance, works in media theory and deconstruction, and film adaptations, the chapters uncover areas of confluence and reveal the inventive ways in which these areas respond to each other. Ultimately, this book turns conventional challenges into a roadmap for textual analysis and a thorough reconsideration of the plays in light of their absorption into global culture. | jyates | | |
| How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Yagoda_Not-write-bad_180.jpg | | 106 | How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them | Yagoda, Ben | | Riverhead Books | New York | 2013 | http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-to-not-write-bad-ben-yagoda/1111431593 | Ben Yagoda's How to Not Write Bad illustrates how we can all write better, more clearly, and for a wider readership.
He offers advice on what he calls "not-writing-badly," which consists of the ability, first, to craft sentences that are correct in terms of spelling, diction (word choice), punctuation, and grammar, and that also display clarity, precision, and grace. Then he focuses on crafting whole paragraphs with attention to cadence, consistency of tone, sentence transitions, and paragraph length.
In a fun, comprehensive guide, Yagoda lays out the simple steps we can all take to make our writing more effective, more interesting and just plain better. | byagoda | | |
| Rethinking the Romance Genre: Global Intimacies in Contemporary Literary and Visual Culture | https://www.english.udel.edu/Bookshelf/PUB_Davis_rethinking-romance_180.jpg | | 33 | Rethinking the Romance Genre: Global Intimacies in Contemporary Literary and Visual Culture | Davis, Emily | | Palgrave Macmillan | London | 2013 | http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/rethinking-the-romance-genre-emily-s-davis/1116331706 | Rethinking the Romance Genre examines why the romance has proven such an irresistible form for contemporary writers and filmmakers approaching global issues. Through a series of close readings informed by historical context and transnational reception, Emily S. Davis demonstrates that the generic instability of the romance makes it an especially malleable tool for representing fluid political, sexual, and racial identities and coalitions in an era of flexible global capitalism. In contemporary texts ranging from literary works to films to social media, romance facilitates a range of intimacies that offer new feminist models for understanding affinity and solidarity in the age of globalization. | edavis | | |
