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  Margins in the Classroom: Teaching Literature

  Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades

  Brings together established scholars and emerging voices from diverse backgrounds to show how politics and theory can and do affect the most pressing problems confronting the contemporary teacher of literature. The essays in this volume go beyond questioning and examining existing practices to suggest fresh approaches to teaching the expanding literary canon within the context of the politics of the educational institution.

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  Un-Disciplining Literature: Literature, Law, and Culture

  Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades

  This collection offers fresh and challenging essays by scholars in law, English and comparative literature, social and political thought, and communication studies. It explores unique angles of vision that allow us to read legal opinions as well as criminal cases, abortion clinic violence, trial testimony (victim impact statements), legal authority, and legal fictions of personal and national identity (passports). The literature it analyzes ranges from Shakespeare's Richard II and The Merchant of Venice to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm, and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Providing a breadth of material, this collection breaks through disciplinary boundaries as new voices challenge old paradigms, pushing marginalized questions into the center of the literature and law enterprise.

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  Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection: The Legal Culture and Trials, 1794-1795

  Linda Myrsiades

  Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection treats the legal culture that informed the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and its trials. Linda Myrsiades examines conflicts between state and federal courts and the judicial philosophy of Federalist judges, as well as grand jury charges, law reports, judges’ bench notes, and defense notes for the trials, to develop a portrait of the hegemony of official interpretations of the law. At the same time, the book illuminates popular attitudes about the courts and the law and explores the nature of extralegal courts operated by the people.
  
  Myrsiades captures the agitation-propaganda efforts mounted by rebel communities and groups together with petitions and speeches in the rebel assemblies in demonstrating that popular culture offered a clear politico-legal justification within the rebel movement on the unofficial side of legal culture. Myrsiades thus presents a holistic picture of the legal culture of the rebellion. Her examination denies the common perception that the rebel movement was incoherent and chaotic and presents an alternative view that its perceptions are a necessary correlative to understanding how treason law functioned and what its critical elements were in the late-eighteenth century, serving as a lesson for democracy in the present era.

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  From Treason to Runaway Slaves: Legal Culture in New Republic Trials, 1783–1808

  Linda Myrsiades

  Law in early America was culturally special, not just a foundation for history but for the culture that bound the nation and its collective identity. From Treason to Runaway Slaves studies six high-profile trials (military order, Indian murder, land seizure, treason, libel, interracial urban crime) that incorporate themes to which the early republic attached special significance. The trials demonstrate the criticality of legal culture and legal history and the central role of the rule of law in a democracy. Tracking the new nation’s bitterest and most challenging moments, we are led to ask what lies below the surface; what is American society really like; how did we come to be who we are?

  The book fits into the area of eighteenth-century legal culture and history, tracing across the chapters the development of early American law during the critical formative period 1783 to 1808 and focusing on important historical moments (courts martial in the American Revolution, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Philadelphia Yellow Fever epidemic, runaway slaves, among others). It attends to such areas of law as treason, libel, land law, murder, and racial justice as well as the growth of a legal profession and the changing influence of judges, juries, and lawyers.

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  Cultural Representation in Historical Resistance: Complexity and Construction in Greek Guerrilla Theater

  Linda Myrsiades and Kostas Myrsiades

  Traces the history of Greek resistance theatre which began under Nazi occupation.

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  Karagiozis: Culture and Comedy in Greek Puppet Theater

  Linda S. Myrsiades and Kostas Myrsiades

  Karagiozis—a form of comic folk drama employing stock puppet figures—was immensely popular in Greece until recent years, when newer forms of entertainment have virtually eclipsed it. Derived from ancient Byzantine and Greek sources, it takes its name from the principal puppet character, the clever, humpbacked fool-hero Karagiozis, who appears in many guises, surrounded by a cast of folk caricatures from all walks of life.
  
  
  

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  A Postcolonial Theology of Life: Planetarity East and West

  Jea Sophia Oh

  We have here nothing less than a theology of life—life in the intensity of its postcolonial ecology, rippling through the creaturely interconnections of our planetary process, yet at the same time grounded in the beautiful local metaphors of an Asian counter-history. Jea Sophia Oh’s luminous book is a must-read for all who care about the global socio-ecology, about process theology, about eco-femnism, about comparative theology—singly and together. —Catherine Keller, author of On the Mystery and Face of the Deep.

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  Ursa Minor and Other Poems

  Takis Papatsonis, Kimon Friar, and Kostas Myrsiades

  Modern Greek poetry by Takis Papatsonis. Translated by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades.

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  The Transparent Illusion: Image and Ideology in French Text and Film

  Rebecca M. Pauly

  This unique study interprets forty major French films, their texts and intertexts, analyzing them both as windows on their subject, projections of the imagination, and as frames or mirrors reflecting the cultural contexts that produced them. They are grouped in three major categories, foregrounding their relationship to history, literature or the filmmaking process itself, in ascending order of opacity and modernity. This much needed work offers not only comparative cultural perspectives on French text and film but also a better understanding of the poetics of image and ideology.

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  Beverly Cleary

  Pat Pflieger

  Finally an academic tome on one of America's most beloved children's authors. Pflieger discusses and analyzes all of Cleary works as well as giving some biographical material about her. Academic journals, popular press magazines and newspapers about Cleary's novels are all cited in order to provide other people's reviews and analysis of Cleary's works. This book is a must for anyone who has read any of Cleary's novel and would be particularly useful for college students who are thinking of becoming English teachers, librarians or Ph.D. students in children's literature. Unlike many academic writers, Pflieger's writing style is clear and easy to understand which is a nice contrast to all the boring, pedantic academic writings which are often employed when analyzing children's literature.

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  Letters from Nineteenth-Century American Children to Robert Merry's Museum Magazine

  Pat Pflieger

  This collection of letters offers an insight into 19th century America viewed through the eyes of children. They wrote about themselves, their families, and their activities. The letters display children's attitudes to major events, public figures, minorities, women's right, and the Civil War.

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  The Fog's Net

  Pat Pflieger

  Devora, the weaver, must make a net for the Fog, who promises not to take away her brother, a fisherman, if she complies. When her brother does not return from the sea the next day, Devora realizes that the Fog has not kept its promise, and that it is she who must go and rescue him.

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  Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women's Films

  Geetha Ramanathan

  Feminist Auteurs examines a rich and diverse body of work that has received insufficient attention both in film studies and in feminist theory on film. Looking at individual films within the context of feminist film as a genre, Ramanathan examines film from diverse cultural traditions, while paying close attention to what might be regarded as feminist in different cultural contexts. The films chosen expand our ideas of feminism covering as they do film from Africa, Latin America, Europe, Asia and the US. Full-length interpretations of twenty-four films, both older and contemporary, including Vagabond, India Song,Bhaji on the Beach, Chocolat, and Daughters of the Dust lay out a complete and powerful framework for reading women’s film.

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  Kathleen Collins: The Black Essai Film

  Geetha Ramanathan

  A philosopher-filmmaker, Kathleen Collins decisively redefined the parameters of African American film with The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) and Losing Ground (1982). This book uses detailed analyses of Collins’s films to contextualise her work in the African American, feminist and world film traditions, and it highlights her contribution to each of these canons. Exploring the philosophical aspects of Collins’s films and placing her in a genealogy of African American auteurs, Geetha Ramanathan argues that Collins uses film to integrate diverse elements of African American culture, showing how the medium can transform the visual and become a site of convergence for ideas on philosophy, otherness, art, aesthetics and the craft of filmmaking.

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  Locating Gender in Modernism: The Outsider Female

  Geetha Ramanathan

  This book visits modernism within a comparative, gendered, and third-world framework, questioning current scholarly categorisations of modernism and reframing our conception of what constitutes modernist aesthetics. It describes the construction of modernist studies and argues that despite a range of interventions which suggest that philosophical and material articulations with the third world shaped modernism, an emphasis on modernist "universals" persists. Ramanathan argues that women and third-world authors have reshaped received notions of the modern and revised orthodox ideas on the modern aesthetic.

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  Sexual Politics and the Male Playwright: The Portrayal of Women in Ten Contemporary Plays

  Geetha Ramanathan

  Traditional studies of theater have long neglected an overall study of female roles as written by male playwrights. Are the roles blatantly sexist or do they adhere to the cultural norms that even progressive male playwrights cannot ignore? From Georg Buchners Woyzeck to David Hares Plenty, the ten plays studied here have traditionally been seen as extraordinarily innovative and progressive. Despite their seeming openness, each of the plays is affected by the playwrights sexual politics. Laid out is a framework for studying the plays in a feminist context that permits a new reading of the female roles, while still allowing the critic enjoyment of the performance as a whole.

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  Approaches to Select Texts in World Literature

  Geetha Ramanathan and Christian Kwame Awuyah

  This book covers many selections in world literature from the epic, dramatic, prose, novel, and African-American poetry traditions.

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  Argumentation and Debate: A Public Speaking Approach

  Martin Remland, Tim Brown, and Kay Neal

  Argumentation and Debate: A Public Speaking Approach addresses the needs of students with no prior experience in formal debate, limited experience in public speaking, and little or no plans to compete in speech and debate tournaments. The publication takes content beyond the classroom by featuring a chapter dedicated to discussing argumentation and debate in different professional contexts.

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  Intercultural Communication: A Peacebuilding Perspective

  Martin Remland, Tricia S. Jones, Anita K. Foeman, and Dolores Rafter Arvalo

  We live in an increasingly more globalized world, where living and working with people of various cultures is a nearly everyday occurrence. These interactions, combined with ever-growing opportunities for students to explore and study in foreign settings, make it important to master effective ways to engage and learn from these experiences.Intercultural Communication will engage readers interested in developing intercultural competence with an eye towards fostering diverse and vibrant communities that coexist peacefully.

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  Greek-American Relations from Monroe to Truman

  Angelo Repousis

  Repousis chronicles American public attitudes and government policies toward modern Greece from its war for independence (1821–1829) to the Truman Doctrine (1947) when Washington intervened to keep Greece from coming under communist domination.

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  Monovasia and the Women of Monemvasia

  Yannis Ritsos, Kimon Friar, and Kostas Myrsiades

  Translated from the modern Greek with an introduction by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades. Monovasia, as is called by the demoticists, and Monemvasia by the purists, is a town and island promontory on the Argolic Bay some four hundred meters from land on the southeastern Peloponnesus. Here Yannis Ritsos was born on May 1, 1909. In this book the poet celebrates the women of his birthplace, young and old, housekeepers and warriors who keep sleepless sentry before their homes and embrace life with courage.

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  Scripture of the Blind: Poems

  Yannis Ritsos, Kimon Friar, and Kostas Myrsiades

  Carefully oberved and simply expressed visions of the human condition.
  Written mostly in a time of war and turmiol, the language is sparse and unflinching in its portrayal of everyday life. Each poem is set within lives discreetly lived in plain veiw of the observer. Yet with each superficial glimpse of the woman next door, or the hunter, or the deaf mute on the bus, the observer contemplates the roots of human perception and motivation and the interaction between the two. "Perhaps in this way he learned the deep secret not even he must reveal."
  Small gestures can have monumental signficance in human interactions. This book will remind everyone who reads it of the poetry all around us: in the people we see on the street; in the passing phrase that takes its context in accidental occurences; in the gesture of a stranger standing far away.
  This poetry reaffirms life in all its shades and colorings. It never forgets death is inevitable, but it reminds us there is a lot of poetry in between.

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  Yannis Ritsos: Selected Poems 1938-1988

  Yannis Ritsos, Kimon Friar, and Kostas Myrsiades

  1991 Outstanding Academic Book of the Year--Choice. "Friar and Mysiades deserve much credit for providing, in one volume, the first full-range sampling of this fecund, variegated, and highly original poet in English."--The New Republic

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  Silence in Shakespeare: Drama, Power and Gender

  Harvey Rovine

  This study suggests a different method of examining Shakespeare's use of silent characters. The study is organized in terms of dramatic relationships between characters rather than by examining different uses of the silent character within the context of theatrical conventions. The focus is on the relationship between the silence and the language around it.

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  Muslim Women's Rights: Contesting Liberal-Secular Sensibilities in Canada

  Tabassum Fahim Ruby

  In the post-9/11 environment, the figure of the Muslim woman is at the forefront of global politics. Her representation is often articulated within a rights discourse owing much to liberal-secular sensibilities—notions of freedom, equality, rational thinking, individualism, and modernization. Muslim Women’s Rights explores how these liberal-secular sensibilities inform, shape, and foreclose public discussion on questions of Islam and gender. The book draws on postcolonial, antiracist, and transnational feminist studies in order to analyze public and legal debates surrounding proposed shari‘ah tribunals in Canada. It examines the cultural and epistemological suppositions underlying common assumptions about Islamic laws; explores how these assumptions are informed by the Western progress narrative and women’s rights debates; and asks what forms of politics these enable and foreclose. The book assesses the influence of secularism on the ontology, epistemology, and ethics afforded to Islam in the West, and begins to trace possibilities by which Islamic family law might be productively addressed on its own terms.