College of Arts & Humanities Faculty Books

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Beyond the Corporate University: Culture and Pedagogy in the New Millennium

Henry A. Giroux and Kostas Myrsiades

A decade of budgetary, policy, and ideological contention has left American universities under the yoke of narrow-minded management models. As corporate culture increasingly invades educational and other public sectors, we as a nation have lost a clear vision of the public good and the necessary components of a vital democracy. Prominent scholars in this book seek to redress these trends. They move boldly beyond critique to show how and why the critical functions of a democratically informed civic education (not merely professional training) must become the core of the university's mission. They show why higher education must address what it means to relate knowledge to public life, and social responsibility to the demands of critical citizenship. Moreover, they show why democratic forms of education and various elements of a critical pedagogy are vital not only to individual students, but also to our economy and our democratic institutions and future leadership. They also suggest how we can move beyond the stagnation of current debates to more fully embrace the democratic possibilities of public education.
Family Matters in the British and American Novel

Andrea O'Reilly Herrera, Elizabeth M. Nollen, and Sheila Reitzel Foor

Contributors examine the literature that challenges widely held assumptions about the form of the family, familial authority patterns, and the function of courtship, marriage, and family life from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Topics include: the family as a microcosm of the larger political sphere in Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Elizabeth Fenwick, Mrs. Opie, and Mary Shelley, and alternatives to the nuclear patriarchal family in Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Mary Louisa Molesworth.
A Reference Guide to Modern Fantasy for Children

Helen M. Hill and Pat Pflieger

A very thorough guide to the fantasies and fantasists selected, this is unlike any other guide to the genre. Only English and American authors of full-length fantasies are included, just 36, with entries for titles, characters, places, and magical objects, and of course the authors. Authors' entries describe major themes of all their full-length works, following biographical notes. Book-title entries give plot synopses and information about the first editions of the books. People who remember something of a fantasy sequence and want to find it again will find this the most helpful guide to fantasies. Choice
Power and Public Reason

Zachary Hoskins and Joan Woolfrey

This volume of Social Philosophy Today contains a selection of papers presented at the 33rd International Social Philosophy Conference (2016), an annual event sponsored by the North American Society for Social Philosophy. The theme of the conference was "Power and Public Reason"; this volume invites wider discussion of the issues explored at the conference. Contributors include Noëlle McAfee, Gerald Gaus, and Paul B. Thompson.
Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre

Erin Hurt

Scholars and readers alike need little help identifying the infamous Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw. While it is no stretch to say that these fictional characters are the most recognizable within the chic lit genre, there are certainly many others that have helped define this body of work. While previous research has focused primarily on white American chick lit, Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre, takes a wider look at the genre, by exploring chick lit novels featuring protagonists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds set both within and outside of the US.
Edward Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer Syndicate

Deidre Johnson

Deidre Johnson's biography of Edward Stratemeyer leaves little, if anything, to be desired. His entire history is covered here with, of course, special emphasis on his incredible "Syndicate" - a Syndicate which produced the most influential juvenile fiction of the 20th century (Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew to mention but a few) and whose influence is still felt to this day.
Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity: Labor and Action in English Composition

Seth Kahn, William B. Lalicker, and Amy Lynch-Biniek

Composition has been a microcosm of the corporatization of higher education for thirty years, with adjuncts often handling the hard work of writing instruction. We've learned enough to know that change is needed. Influenced by the efforts of organizations such as New Faculty Majority, Faculty Forward, PrecariCorps, and national faculty unions, this collection highlights action, describing efforts that have improved adjunct working conditions in English departments. The editors categorize these efforts into five threads: strategies for self-advocacy; organizing within and across ranks; professionalizing in complex contexts; working for local changes to workload, pay, and material conditions; and protecting gains.
Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement

Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee

This volume examines the role of rhetoric in today’s culture of democratic activism. The volume takes on two of the most significant challenges currently facing contemporary rhetorical studies: (1) the contested meanings and practices of democracy and civic engagement in global context, and (2) the central role of rhetoric in democratic activist practices. In presenting a variety of political and rhetorical struggles in their specific contexts, editors Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee allow contributors to reflect on and elaborate possibilities for both activist approaches to rhetorical studies, and rhetorical approaches to activist projects, facilitating better understanding the socio-political consequences of this work.
International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

International Communism and the Spanish Civil War provides an intimate picture of international communism in the Stalin era. Exploring the transnational exchanges that occurred in Soviet-structured spaces – from clandestine schools for training international revolutionaries in Moscow to the International Brigades in Spain – the book uncovers complex webs of interaction, at once personal and political, that linked international communists to one another and the Soviet Union. The Spanish civil war, which coincided with the great purges in the Soviet Union, stands at the center of this grassroots history. For many international communists, the war came to define both their life histories and political commitments. In telling their individual stories, the book calls attention to a central paradox of Stalinism – the simultaneous celebration and suspicion of transnational interactions – and illuminates the appeal of a cause that promised solidarity even as it practiced terror.
Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

Small Comrades is a fascinating examination of Soviet conceptions of childhood and the resulting policies directed toward children. Working on the assumption that cultural representations and self-representations are not entirely separable, this book probes how the Soviet regime's representations structured teachers' observations of their pupils and often adults' recollections of their childhood. The book draws on work that has been done on Soviet schooling, and focuses specifically on the development of curricula and institutions, but it also examines the wider context of the relationship between the family and the state, and to the Bolshevik vision of the "children of October."
The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

The siege of Leningrad constituted one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II, one that individuals and the state began to commemorate almost immediately. Official representations of “heroic Leningrad” omitted and distorted a great deal. Nonetheless, survivors struggling to cope with painful memories often internalized, even if they did not completely accept, the state’s myths, and they often found their own uses for the state’s monuments. Tracing the overlap and interplay of individual memories and fifty years of Soviet mythmaking, this book contributes to understandings of both the power of Soviet identities and the delegitimizing potential of the Soviet Union’s chief legitimizing myths. Because besieged Leningrad blurred the boundaries between the largely male battlefront and the predominantly female home front, it offers a unique vantage point for a study of the gendered dimensions of the war experience, urban space, individual memory, and public commemoration.
Nature's Transcendence and Immanence: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism

Marilynn Lawrence and Jea Sophia Oh

What does it mean for nature to be sacred? Is anything supernatural or even unnatural? Nature’s Transcendence and Immanence: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism discusses nature’s divinizing process of unfolding and folding through East-West dialogues and interdisciplinary methodologies. Nature’s selving/god-ing processes are the sacred that is revealed as nature’s transcendent and immanent dimensions. Each chapter of Nature’s Transcendence and Immanence: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism shares a part of nature’s sacred folds that are complexes within nature that have unusual semiotic density. These discussions serve to help restore a better relationship to nature as a whole through an innovative combination of research and ideas from a variety of traditions and disciplines. This collection not only introduces ecstatic naturalism and deep pantheism as sacred practices of philosophy and theology, but also invites a broader audience from a wide range of academic disciplines such as neuro-psychoanalysis, aesthetics, mythology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Essentials of Public Relations Management

Edward J. Lordan

Filling a gap in current PR literature, Essentials of Public Relations Management takes students to the next level. Designed to help students and professionals who have mastered the fundamentals of public relations, this book develops management skills needed for further career advancement. Appropriate for those in the fields of business, communications, journalism or political science, this down-to-earth study of the practical application of public relations covers: Relating to clients, Managing staff, Conducting and applying research, Coping with crises, Handling finances, Understanding the power and the problems of technology, Recognizing actual and potential legal issues, Defining professional ethics.
Politics, Ink: How American Editorial Cartoonists Skewer Politicians, From King George III to George Dubya

Edward J. Lordan

This fun and extensively illustrated book tells the story of the American political cartoon, from its origins over 250 years ago to today. Edward Lordan gives us a tour of artists, politics, media, American society, and the technology of cartooning, including the work of Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, Currier & Ives, Thomas Nast, Dr. Seuss, Pat Oliphant, Draper Hill, Tom Toles, Ted Rall, Mike Keefe, and countless others. Interviews with today's political cartoonists—including Pulitzer winners Ann Telnaes and Signe Wilkinson—go behind the art form, to show how and why we respond to editorial cartoons as well as what syndication and the Internet mean to the future of political cartooning.
Sports and Scandals: How Leagues Protect the Integrity of Their Games

Edward J. Lordan

Sports are inspiring and uplifting. They can also bring out some of the worst characteristics in human nature: narcissism, prejudice, greed. This book looks at the major sports scandals in modern American history, from the Black Sox fix of 1919 to the current concussion crisis in the NFL.
The Case for Combat: How Presidents Persuade Americans To Go To War

Edward J. Lordan

From Abraham Lincoln to George W. Bush, many American presidents have used their words to garner support to go to war. What are the techniques they employed to convince citizens to get behind their president in committing to combat? Are these methods effective—or ethical?
Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies

Graham MacPhee

This radical reassessment shows how, after the Second World War, British national identity and culture was shaped in ways that still operate today. As empires declined, globalisation spread, and literature responded to these influences. As Graham MacPhee explains, postwar writers blended the experimentalism of prewar modernism with other cultural traditions. In this way, they reveal both the pain and the pleasures of multiculturalism, as they seek to cope with the shock of post-imperial downsizing.
The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture

Graham MacPhee

Visual technology saturates everyday life. Theories of the visual-now key to debates across cultural studies, social theory, art history, literary studies and philosophy-have interpreted this new condition as the beginning of a dystopian future, of cultural decline, social disempowerment and political passivity. Intellectuals-from Baudelaire to Debord, Benjamin, Virilio, Jameson, Baudrillard and Derrida-have explored how technology not only reinvents the visual, but also changes the nature of culture itself. The heartland of all such cultural analysis has been the city, from Baudelaire's flaneur to Benjamin's arcades. The Architecture of the Visible presents a wide-ranging critical reassessment of contemporary approaches to visual culture through an analysis of pivotal technological innovation from the telescope, through photography to film. Drawing on the examples of Paris and New York-two key world cities for over two centuries-Graham MacPhee analyzes how visual technology is revolutionizing the landscape of modern thought, politics and culture.
Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective

Graham MacPhee and Prem Poddar

The growing debate over British national identity, and the place of "Englishness" within it, raises crucial questions about multiculturalism, postimperial culture and identity, and the past and future histories of globalization. However, discussions of Englishness have too often been limited by insular conceptions of national literature, culture, and history, which serve to erase or marginalize the colonial and postcolonial locations in which British national identity has been articulated. This volume breaks new ground by drawing together a range of disciplinary approaches in order to resituate the relationship between British national identity and Englishness within a global framework. Ranging from the literature and history of empire to analyses of contemporary culture, postcolonial writing, political rhetoric, and postimperial memory after 9/11, this collection demonstrates that far from being parochial or self-involved, the question of Englishness offers an important avenue for thinking about the politics of national identity in our postcolonial and globalized world.
Strategic Social Media: From Marketing to Social Change

L. Meghan Mahoney and Tang Tang

Strategic Social Media is the first textbook to go beyond the marketing plans and how-to guides, and provide an overview of the theories, action plans, and case studies necessary for teaching students and readers about utilizing social media to meet marketing goals.
An Exalted House

Paul Maltby

PR man George Burghess, employed to whitewash the name of a firm linked to a fatal factory fire, suffers torments of conscience. Then a friendship with a woman, who squats in the flat above his own, points the way to the redemption he seeks. But Burghess cannot give up a hard-won career in corporate PR and, instead, descends into spiritual ruin. Through its story of a soul in crisis, "An Exalted House" brings into view the warring sides of London: the corporate zone of hostile takeovers and monuments to financial power versus an alternative zone of popular-festive breakouts and squats, presided over by the spirit of William Blake.
Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment

Paul Maltby

Within the familiar clash of religious conservatism and secular liberalism Paul Maltby finds a deeper discord: an antipathy between Christian fundamentalism and the postmodern culture of disenchantment. Arguing that each camp represents the poles of America's virulent culture wars, he shows how the cultural identity, lifestyle, and political commitments of many Americans match either the fundamentalist profile of one who cleaves to metaphysical and authoritarian beliefs or the postmodern profile of one who is disposed to critical inquiry and radical-democratic values. Maltby offers a critique that operates in both directions. His use of the resources of postmodern theory to contest fundamentalism's doctrinal claims, ultra-right politics, anti-environmentalism, and conservative aesthetics informs his engagement with contemporary fundamentalist painting, spiritual warfare fiction, dominionist attitudes to nature, and a profoundly undemocratic interpretation of Christianity. At the same time, Maltby identifies some of fundamentalism’s legitimate spiritual concerns, assesses the cost of perpetual critique, and exposes the deficit of spiritual meaning that haunts the culture of disenchantment.
Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon

Paul Maltby

Critics who hold that postmodernist art is essentially non-adversarial and apolitical, Paul Maltby contends, have ignored the historical context of the postmodern focus on problems of language. In "Dissident Postmodernists", Maltby examines a major current of postmodernist fiction that can be read as a dissident response to developments of late capitalism that have transformed the field of language and communications. Among Maltby's models of dissident postmodernist writings are "Gravity's Rainbow", "The Public Burning", "Snow White" and more recent publications like "Vineland" and "Spanking the Maid". In a series of readings, he examines the ways in which these works respond to the erosion of the public sphere, the elevation of functionalist discourse, the enlargement of the state propaganda network, the corporate management of mass communications, and the diffusion of concept-poor language forms which limit social understanding. Alert to such developments, Maltby argues, dissident postmodernists such as Barthelme, Coover and Pynchon write with politicized perceptions of language and a heightened awareness of language as a medium of social integration.
The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique

Paul Maltby

In The Visionary Moment, Paul Maltby draws on postmodern theory to examine the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment, or 'epiphany', in twentieth-century American fiction. Engaging critically with the works of Don DeLillo, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and William Faulkner, Maltby explains show the literary convention of the visionary moment promotes the myth that there is a superior level of knowledge that can redeem or regenerate the individual. He contends that this common-sense assumption is a paradigm that needs to be confronted and critiqued.
Standing Up, Speaking Out: Stand-Up Comedy and the Rhetoric of Social Change

Matthew R. Meier and Casey R. Schmitt

In recent decades, some of the most celebrated and culturally influential American oratorical performances have come not from political leaders or religious visionaries, but from stand-up comics. Even though comedy and satire have been addressed by rhetorical scholarship in recent decades, little attention has been paid to stand-up. This collection is an attempt to further cultivate the growing conversation about stand-up comedy from the perspective of the rhetorical tradition. It brings together literatures from rhetorical, cultural, and humor studies to provide a unique exploration of stand-up comedy that both argues on behalf of the form’s capacity for social change and attempts to draw attention to a series of otherwise unrecognized rhetors who have made significant contributions to public culture through comedy.