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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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  Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women's Prison Writings, 200 AD to the Present

  Judith A. Scheffler

  Breaking histories of silence and invisibility, Wall Tappings presents an international collection of women's writings, from prisons around the world and across centuries. “These are the marginal texts in a tradition of marginal texts,” writes Judith A. Scheffler in introducing her groundbreaking anthology of writing by women prisoners. Unique in its geographic and historical ranges, this rich collection gives a voice to women whose stories have been long neglected. Speaking from settings as diverse as a Roman prison cell in 203 AD, the labor camps of Siberia in the 1930s, and a Philippines prison in the 1980s, these writers explore the ways in which actual incarceration rests in the shadow of imprisonment within larger society.

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  Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America

  Lydia Cushman Schurman and Deidre Johnson

  Many works now considered classics were scorned by critics when they were first published. While some of these works received little attention when initially released, others were enormously popular. So too, there is a large body of popular American fiction that is only now beginning to receive critical attention. This book examines the growing respect given to American fiction that was scorned by cultural gatekeepers such as librarians and educators, though these works were widely read by the American public. The volume looks at such scorned literature as dime novels, comic books, juvenile fiction, romance novels, and pulp magazines. Expert contributors discuss what these works say about the mores and morals of the people who so avidly read them and the values of those who sought to censor them. The book covers the period from the 1830s to the 1950s and shows how popular literature reflected such concerns as feminism and anti-feminism, notions of the heroic and unheroic, and violence and racism. In doing so, the volume helps fill a gap in scholarship about literature that was clearly important to a large number of readers.

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  The History of the Book in the West: 1700–1800, Volume III

  Eleanor Shevlin

  Influenced by Enlightenment principles and commercial transformations, the history of the book in the eighteenth century witnessed not only the final decades of the hand-press era but also developments and practices that pointed to its future: ‘the foundations of modern copyright; a rapid growth in the publication, circulation, and reading of periodicals; the promotion of niche marketing; alterations to distribution networks; and the emergence of the publisher as a central figure in the book trade, to name a few.’ The pace and extent of these changes varied greatly within the different sociopolitical contexts across the western world. The volume’s twenty–four articles, many of which proffer broader theoretical implications beyond their specific focus, highlight the era’s range of developments. Complementing these articles, the introductory essay provides an overview of the eighteenth–century book and milestones in its history during this period while simultaneously identifying potential directions for new scholarship.

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  Model Voices: Finding a Writing Voice

  Jeffrey Sommers

  Jeffrey Sommers is an Associate Professor of English at West Chester University. His interests include composition and rhetoric, writing assessment, professional journal editing, and pedagogy.

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  From Community to College: Reading and Writing Across Diverse Contexts

  Jeffrey Sommers and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson

  Jeffrey Sommers is Associate Professor of English at West Chester University with a Ph.D. from New York University. His research interests & activities include composition and rhetoric, writing assessment, professional journal editing, and pedagogy. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson is Professor Emerita from Miami University. Difference theory cuts across the three areas of her research interests: Composition and Rhetoric (basic writing, open admissions and disabled students, histories of writing programs); Disability Studies (disability memoir and rhetoric, disability pedagogy); and Women’s Studies (feminist pedagogies and epistemologies).

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  Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833–1879

  Carolyn Sorisio

  Fleshing Out America explores the representation of the body in the work of seven authors, all of whom were involved with their era's reform movements: Lydia Maria Child, Frances E. W. Harper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin R. Delany. For such American writers, who connected the individual body symbolically with the body politic, the new science was fraught with possibility and peril. Covering topics from representation, spectatorship, and essentialism to difference, power, and authority, Carolyn Sorisio places these writers' works in historical context and in relation to contemporary theories of corporeality. She shows how these authors struggled, in diverse and divergent ways, to flesh out America—to define, even defend, the nation's body in a tumultuous period.

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  Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa

  Paul Stoller

  A study of the West African Hauka - spirits that grotesquely mimic and mock "Europeans" of the colonial epoch. The author considers spirit possession as a set of embodied practices with serious social and cultural consequences. Embodying Colonial Memories is the first in-depth study of the West African Hauka, spirits in the body of (human) mediums which mimic and mock Europeans of the colonial epoch. Paul Stoller, who was initiated into a spirit possession troupe, recounts an insider's tale of the Hauka with respect and "brotherly" deference. He combines narrative description, historical analysis, and reflections on the importance of embodiment and mimesis to social theory, with particular reference to the Songhay peoples of the Republic of Niger.

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  Fusion of the Worlds: Ethnography of Possession Among the Songhay of Niger

  Paul Stoller

  "Stoller brilliantly recreates the reality of spirit presence; hosts are what they mediate, and spirits become flesh and blood in the 'fusion' with human existence. . . . An excellent demonstration of the benefits of a new genre of ethnographic writing. It expands our understanding of the harsh world of Songhay mediums and sorcerers."—Bruce Kapferer, American Ethnologist

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  Gallery Bundu: A Story of an African Past

  Paul Stoller

  In Paul Stoller's work of fiction framed by African storytelling, David is the 52-year-old co-owner of Gallery Bundu, an African art shop in New York City. As a young man in the late 1960s, he joined the Peace Corps to avoid the draft. Assigned to teach English in Niger, he was eager to seek out adventure, and he found it—from drugged-out American expatriates and mamba-filled forests to seductive African women. In the course of his stay in Niger, David meets and falls in love with Zeinabou, a strikingly beautiful woman who professes her love to him, though David believes that he is not the only man she dates. Two weeks before his anticipated return to the United States, Zeinabou informs David that she is pregnant with what she believes is his child. Not knowing how to react, David flees Niger and returns to America ridden with guilt. The hastiness of David's decision will shadow his every move for the rest of his life and will lead him to eventually return to Niger and try to make amends.

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  Jaguar: A Story of Africans in America

  Paul Stoller

  Issa Boureima is a young, hip African street vendor who sells knock-off designer bags and hats in an open-air market on 125th street in Harlem. His goal is to become a "Jaguar"—a West African term for a keen entrepreneur able to spot trends and turn a profit in any marketplace. This dynamic world, largely invisible to mainstream culture, is the backdrop of this timely novel.

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  Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City

  Paul Stoller

  In February 1999 the tragic New York City police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed street vendor from Guinea, brought into focus the existence of West African merchants in urban America. In Money Has No Smell, Paul Stoller offers us a more complete portrait of the complex lives of West African immigrants like Diallo, a portrait based on years of research Stoller conducted on the streets of New York City during the 1990s.

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  Sensuous Scholarship

  Paul Stoller

  Among the Songhay of Mali and Niger, who consider the stomach the seat of personality, learning is understood not in terms of mental activity but in bodily terms. Songhay bards study history by "eating the words of the ancestors," and sorcerers learn their art by ingesting particular substances, by testing their flesh with knives, by mastering pain and illness. In Sensuous Scholarship Paul Stoller challenges contemporary social theorists and cultural critics who—using the notion of embodiment to critique Eurocentric and phallocentric predispositions in scholarly thought—consider the body primarily as a text that can be read and analyzed. Stoller argues that this attitude is in itself Eurocentric and is particularly inappropriate for anthropologists, who often work in societies in which the notion of text, and textual interpretation, is foreign.

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  Stranger in the Village of the Sick: A Memoir of Cancer, Sorcery and Healing

  Paul Stoller

  Stranger in the Village of the Sick follows Stoller down this unexpected path toward personal discovery, growth, and healing. The stories here are about life in the village of the healthy and the village of the sick, and they highlight differences in how illness is culturally perceived. In America and the West, illness is war; we strive to eradicate it from our bodies and lives. In West Africa, however, illness is an ever-present companion, and sorcerers learn to master illnesses like cancer through a combination of acceptance, pragmatism, and patience.

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  The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch

  Paul Stoller

  The most prolific ethnographic filmmaker in the world, a pioneer of cinéma vérité and one of the earliest ethnographers of African societies, Jean Rouch (1917-) remains a controversial and often misunderstood figure in histories of anthropology and film. By examining Rouch's neglected ethnographic writings, Paul Stoller seeks to clarify the filmmaker's true place in anthropology.

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  The Power of the Between: an Anthropological Odyssey

  Paul Stoller

  Beginning with his early days with the Peace Corps in Africa and culminating with a recent bout with cancer, The Power of the Between is an evocative account of the circuitous path Stoller’s life has taken, offering a fascinating depiction of how a career is shaped over decades of reading and research. Stoller imparts his accumulated wisdom not through grandiose pronouncements but by drawing on his gift for storytelling. Tales of his apprenticeship to a sorcerer in Niger, his studies with Claude Lévi-Strauss in Paris, and his friendships with West African street vendors in New York City accompany philosophical reflections on love, memory, power, courage, health, and illness.

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  The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology

  Paul Stoller

  The Taste of Ethnographic Things describes how, through long-term participation in the lives of the Songhay of Niger, Stoller eventually came to his senses. Taken together, the separate chapters speak to two important and integrated issues. The first is methodological—all the chapters demonstrate the rewards of long-term study of a culture. The second issue is how he became truer to the Songhay through increased sensual awareness.

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  Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Wellbeing in the World

  Paul Stoller

  Yaya’s Story is a book about Yaya Harouna, a Songhay trader originally from Niger who found a path to America. It is also a book about Paul Stoller—its author—an American anthropologist who found his own path to Africa. Separated by ethnicity, language, profession, and culture, these two men’s lives couldn’t be more different. But when they were both threatened by a grave illness—cancer—those differences evaporated, and the two were brought to profound existential convergence, a deep camaraderie in the face of the most harrowing of circumstances. Yaya’s Story is that story.

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  In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship Among The Songhay of Niger

  Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes

  The tale of Paul Stoller's sojourn among sorcerors in the Republic of Niger is a story of growth and change, of mutual respect and understanding that will challenge all who read it to plunge deeply into an alien world.

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  Benjamin's Spectacles

  Spring Ulmer

  Allusions to the early 20th century intellectual Walter Benjamin appear throughout this book of poetry that explores such diverse topics as history, shadows, and the season of spring. Shifting through perspectives that blur gender lines and chronological boundaries, there is a darker undercurrent running through the poems that adds emotional depth to the lines and makes it all the more striking when the verse returns to spring.

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  The Age of Virtual Reproduction

  Spring Ulmer

  Spring Ulmer's THE AGE OF VIRTUAL REPRODUCTION disrupts and redefines established patterns of seeing as she looks both at and beyond suffering and slaughter for an ethical way to live. Relentlessly in relation and in isolation, Ulmer meditates on moral and emotional anaesthesia--our age of numbing. On the road in Rwanda, investigating executions, meditating on photographs of the past, Ulmer interrogates her own and others' often romantic obsession with what is disappearing and asks how to be in touch with the real and reality--either through the self or through its loss. Looking at work by August Sander, Walter Benjamin, Congolese painter Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, John Berger, Jean Genet, Kenzaburo Oe, and others, she finds, with Benjamin, that there is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism. THE AGE OF VIRTUAL REPRODUCTION offers a catalogue (of people, stories, nature, and art) that maintains that more than just surviving, life can be overwhelmingly and beautifully patterned, and thus, critically, recognizable.

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  Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain

  Cheryl L. Wanko

  Celebrity biographies, with their stories of scandal, never fail to titillate. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find record of the best-seller list they didn't punctuate. But delving into professional struggles, private torments, and sexual escapades of performing artists has a long and unexplored history. Eighteenth-century Britain had its own tradition of celebrity biographies and autobiographies. In fact, the genre began in English in 1695, with the story of Matthew Coppinger, a little-known actor who wrote verses, engaged in pretty crime, and ended his life on the gallows. Roles of Authority provides the first comprehensive study of the earliest hundred years of celebrity biography in English, from actor-thief Coppinger to the superstars David Garrick and Sarah Siddons.

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  Creating Cultural Monsters: Serial Murder in America

  Julie B. Wiest

  Serial murderers generate an abundance of public interest, media coverage, and law enforcement attention, yet after decades of studies, serial murder researchers have been unable to answer the most important question: Why? Providing a unique and comprehensive exploration, Creating Cultural Monsters: Serial Murder in Americaexplains connections between American culture and the incidence of serial murder, including reasons why most identified serial murderers are white, male Americans. It describes the omnipresence of serial murder in American media and investigates what it would take to decrease its occurrence.