Scripps Faculty Books

Follow

• 

  Missing Persons: A Memoir

  Gayle Greene

  Missing Persons is a memoir about dealing with death in a culture that gives no help. As the last of her family, Greene’s losses are stark, first her aunt, then her mother, in quick succession. She is as ill-equipped for the challenges of caring for a dying person at home as she is for the other losses, long repressed, that rise to confront her at this time: the suicide of her younger brother, the death of her father. As the professional identity on which she’s based her selfhood comes to feel brittle and trivial, she is catapulted into questions of “who am I?” and “what have I done with my life?”
  
  The memoir is structured as an account of her mother's and aunt’s final days and the year that follows, a year in which she reconstructs her life. This is a powerful story about family, what it means to have one, to lose one, never to have made one, and what, if anything, might take its place. It’s the story of a vexed mother-daughter relationship that mellows with age. It is also a search for home, as the very landscape shifts around her and the vast orchards are dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, freeways, and the Santa Clara Valley, once known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight, is transformed to “Silicon.”

• 

  The Fragile Bee: Nancy Macko at MOAH

  Kathleen Stewart Howe, Carole Ann Klonarides, Stephen Nowlin, and Nancy Macko

  “The Fragile Bee” was exhibited at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA and is an outcry to the plight of the bees in relationship to the environment. This accompanying catalog critically examines the work in the exhibition beginning with a foreword by Andi Campognone, museum manager and curator at MOAH. Artist Nancy Macko established a garden for native bee-attracting plants in order to document them throughout the year. The resulting series of photographs, "Botanical Portraits", are the subject of the essay by museum director Kathleen Stewart Howe. Contemporary art writer and curator Carole Ann Klonarides writes in depth about Macko's videos, "Lore of the Bee Priestess" and "Bee Stories", locating the work along the continuum of video art and discussing how Macko uses digital technologies as an art form integrating computer-generated images and audio experimentation with a sociopolitical message. Curator Stephen Nowlin writes about Macko's large scale installation, "Honey Teachings: In the Mother Tongue of the Bees", a 100 panel work depicting the reaction of the bees to the insecticides and pesticides on the plants they pollinate which causes them to experience confusion and disorientation - a form of memory loss and dementia.

• 

  Culture in Crisis: The English Novel in the Late Twentieth Century

  Michael F. Harper

  Culture in Crisis begins with political and social history at the moment of the election of Margaret Thatcher. Many saw in this event the dissolution of the ideal of the liberal State once believed to be shared by both the Left and the Right. Ranging widely over such writers as Anthony Powell, John LeCarre, Samuel Selvon, Salman Rushdie, and Margaret Drabble, Harper examines various responses to this “crisis” which he shows to have roots in a pernicious ideal of “Englishness” going back many generations. With considerable skill and a masterful grasp of books and ideas, he presents the novel as a lightning rod for broader concerns about the Real—the possibilities of its representation and its inevitable vulnerability to exclusionism and denial. This book was nearing completion in 2006 when Professor Harper died suddenly of pancreatic cancer. Its relevance to our own era could not be more salient.

• 

  Gusto for Things : A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome

  Corey Tazzara, Renata Ago, Bradford Bouley, and Paula Findlen

  Foreword: Early Modern Romans and Their Things, by Paula Findlen

  Acknowledgments A Note on Roman Coins and Money

  Introduction Part One. The Nature of Goods

  Chapter One. The Function of Goods

  Chapter Two. Reflecting on Things

  Part Two. Material Goods

  Chapter Three. Furniture

  Chapter Four. Furnishings and Clothing

  Part Three. Immaterial Things

  Chapter Five. The Great Collections

  Chapter Six. Paintings

  Chapter Seven. Ostentatious Things

  Chapter Eight. Books

  Conclusion

• 

  The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia

  Matthew F. Delmont

  American Bandstand, one of the most popular television shows ever, broadcast from Philadelphia in the late fifties, a time when that city had become a battleground for civil rights. Counter to host Dick Clark’s claims that he integrated American Bandstand, this book reveals how the first national television program directed at teens discriminated against black youth during its early years and how black teens and civil rights advocates protested this discrimination. Matthew F. Delmont brings together major themes in American history—civil rights, rock and roll, television, and the emergence of a youth culture—as he tells how white families around American Bandstand’s studio mobilized to maintain all-white neighborhoods and how local school officials reinforced segregation long after Brown vs. Board of Education. The Nicest Kids in Town powerfully illustrates how national issues and history have their roots in local situations, and how nostalgic representations of the past, like the musical film Hairspray, based on the American Bandstand era, can work as impediments to progress in the present

• 

  Insomniac

  Gayle Greene

  Gayle Greene offers a uniquely comprehensive account of the devastating and little-understood condition of insomnia. From interviews with neurologists, sleep researchers, doctors, psychotherapists, and insomniacs of all sorts comes an up-to-date account of what is known about insomnia, providing the information every insomniac needs to know to make intelligent choices among medications and therapies. Insomniac is at once a field guide through the hidden terrain inhabited by insomniacs and a book of consolations for anyone who has struggled with this affliction that has long been trivialized and neglected.

• 

  Lynching in the West: 1850–1935

  Ken Gonzales-Day

  Accounts of lynching in the United States have primarily focused on violence against African Americans in the South. Ken Gonzales-Day reveals racially motivated lynching as a more widespread practice. His research uncovered 350 instances of lynching that occurred in the state of California between 1850 and 1935. The majority were perpetrated against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans; more Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity. An artist and writer, Gonzales-Day began this study by photographing lynching sites in order to document the absences and empty spaces that are emblematic of the forgotten history of lynching in the West. Drawing on newspaper articles, periodicals, court records, historical photographs, and souvenir postcards, he attempted to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the lynchings that had occurred in the spaces he was photographing. The result is an unprecedented textual and visual record of a largely unacknowledged manifestation of racial violence in the United States. Including sixteen color illustrations, Lynching in the West juxtaposes Gonzales-Day’s evocative contemporary photographs of lynching sites with dozens of historical images. Gonzales-Day examines California’s history of lynching in relation to the spectrum of extra-legal vigilantism common during the nineteenth century—from vigilante committees to lynch mobs—and in relation to race-based theories of criminality. He explores the role of visual culture as well, reflecting on lynching as spectacle and the development of lynching photography. Seeking to explain why the history of lynching in the West has been obscured until now, Gonzales-Day points to popular misconceptions of frontier justice as race-neutral and to the role of the anti-lynching movement in shaping the historical record of lynching in the United States.

• 

  Wars Of Words: The Politics Of Language In Ireland 1537-2004

  Tony Crowley

  Wars of Words is the first comprehensive survey of the politics of language in Ireland during the colonial and post-colonial periods. Challenging received notions, Tony Crowley presents a complex, fascinating, and often surprising history which has suffered greatly in the past from over-simplification. Beginning with Henry VIII's Act for English Order, Habit, and Language (1537) and ending with the Republic of Ireland's Official Languages Act (2003) and the introduction of language rights under the legislation proposed by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (2004), this clear and accessible narrative follows the continuities and discontinuities of Irish history over the past five hundred years. The major issues that have both united and divided Ireland are considered with regard to language, including ethnicity, cultural identity, religion, sovereignty, propriety, purity, memory, and authenticity. But rather than simply presenting the accepted wisdom on many of the language debates, this book re-visits the material and considers previously little-known evidence in order to offer new insights and to contest earlier accounts. The materials range from colonial state papers to the writings of Irish revolutionaries, from the work of Irish priest historians to contemporary loyalist politicians, from Gaelic dictionaries to Ulster-Scots poetry. Wars of Words offers a reading of the crucial role language has played in Ireland's political history. It concludes by arguing that the Belfast Agreement's recognition that languages are 'part of the cultural wealth of the island of Ireland', will be central to the social development of the Republic and Northern Ireland. The final chapter analyses the way in which contemporary poets have used Gaelic, Hiberno-English, Ulster-English, and Ulster-Scots, as vehicles for the various voices that demand to be heard in the new societies on both sides of the border.

• 

  God and Elizabeth Bishop: Meditations on Religion and Poetry

  Cheryl Walker

  In God and Elizabeth Bishop Cheryl Walker takes the bold step of looking at the work of Elizabeth Bishop as though it might have something fresh to say about religion and poetry. Going wholly against the tide of recent academic practice, especially as applied to Bishop, she delights in presenting herself as an engaged Christian who nevertheless believes that a skeptical modern poet might feed our spiritual hungers. This is a book that reminds us of the rich tradition of religious poetry written in English, at the same time taking delicious detours into realms of humour, social responsibility, and mysticism.

• 

  Standard English and the Politics of Language

  Tony Crowley

  The 'Standard English' question has featured in linguistic, educational and cultural debates for decades. At critical points in British history the language became a symbol and focus, with particular varieties of the language acquiring ideological importance. In this careful and balanced account, Tony Crowley draws on theoretical insights from Bakhtin, Foucault and Volosinov in a study of representations of the English language from the eighteenth century onwards, on the development of different concepts of the 'Standard Language' and the value attached within the wider society to varieties of spoken and written English. Placing the 'Standard English' question within its historical perspectiv he explores the educational consequences of these debates, bringing the reader up to date in this second edition with an analysis of the effect on English language teaching of Conservative educational policies of the 1980s and 90s and the implications of the National Curriculum. Students and researchers of English language, cultural theory, and language education will find this treatment comprehensive, carefully researched and lively reading.
  
  The first edition of this book appeared outside North America with the title The Discourse of Politics.

• 

  States, Banks, and Markets: Mexico’s Path to Financial Liberalization in Comparative Perspective

  Nancy Neiman Auerbach

  In States, Banks, and Markets, Nancy Neiman Auerbach approaches financial policymaking as a strategic interaction between two sets of domestic actors: private financiers and state officials. Through a comparative lens, Auerbach explains why the transition to financial liberalization was accompanied by economic crisis and declining growth rates in countries such as Mexico, while the same policy was associated with higher growth rates and a relatively more equitable distribution of income in other countries such as South Korea and Hong Kong. Auerbach demonstrates how it is not financial liberalization itself but the timing and duration of the liberalization process that differentiates the performance of newly industrializing countries. She also takes the analysis a step further by explaining the economic and political preconditions that put a country in the position to choose a reasonable reform path.

• 

  The Language and Cultural Theory Reader

  Tony Crowley

  This is a core introduction to the most innovative and influential writings to have shaped and defined the relations between language, culture and cultural identity.

• 

  The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366-1922: A Sourcebook

  Tony Crowley

  For almost a thousand years language has been an important and contentious issue in Ireland but above all it reflects the great themes of Irish history: colonial, invasion, native resistance, religious and cultural difference. Collected here for the first time are texts on language from the date of the first legislation against the Irish: the Statute of Kilkenny, 1366, to the constitution of the Free State in 1922. Crowley's introduction connects these texts to current debates, giving The Belfast Agreement as a textual example and illustrating that the language debates continue today. Divided into six historical sections with detailed editor's introductions, this unique sourcebook includes familiar cultural texts such as essays and letters by Yeats along side less familiar writings including the Preface to the New Testament in Irish. (1602) Providing direct access to original texts, this is an historical resource book which can be used as a case study in the relations between language and cultural identity.

• 

  The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation

  Gayle Greene

  This biography illuminates the life and achievements of the remarkable woman scientist who revolutionized the concept of radiation risk. In the 1950s Alice Stewart began research that led to her discovery that fetal X rays double a child's risk of developing cancer. Two decades later, when she was in her seventies, she again astounded the scientific world with a study showing that the U.S. nuclear weapons industry is about twenty times more dangerous than safety regulations permit. This finding put her at the center of the international controversy over radiation risk. The Woman Who Knew Too Much traces Stewart's life and career from her early childhood in Sheffield to her medical education at Cambridge to her research positions at Oxford University and the University of Birmingham.

• 

  Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms

  Cheryl Walker

  Indian Nation documents the contributions of Native Americans to the notion of American nationhood and to concepts of American identity at a crucial, defining time in U.S. history. Departing from previous scholarship, Cheryl Walker turns the "usual" questions on their heads, asking not how whites experienced indigenous peoples, but how Native Americans envisioned the United States as a nation. This project unfolds a narrative of participatory resistance in which Indians themselves sought to transform the discourse of nationhood. Walker examines the rhetoric and writings of nineteenth-century Native Americans, including William Apess, Black Hawk, George Copway, John Rollin Ridge, and Sarah Winnemucca. Demonstrating with unique detail how these authors worked to transform venerable myths and icons of American identity, Indian Nation chronicles Native American participation in the forming of an American nationalism in both published texts and speeches that were delivered throughout the United States. Pottawattomie Chief Simon Pokagon’s "The Red Man’s Rebuke," an important document of Indian oratory, is published here in its entirety for the first time since 1893. By looking at this writing through the lens of the best theoretical work on nationality, postcoloniality, and the subaltern, Walker creates a new and encompassing picture of the relationship between Native Americans and whites. She shows that, contrary to previous studies, America in the nineteenth century was intercultural in significant ways.

• 

  Language in History: Theories and Texts

  Tony Crowley

  Using a re-reading of Saussure and Bahktin, the author demonstrates the ways in which language has been used to construct social and cultural identity in Britain and Ireland. For example, he examines the ways in whcih language was employed to construct a bourgeois public sphere in 18th-century England, and he reveals how language is still being used in contemporary Ireland to articulate national and political aspirations. By bringing together linguistic and critical theory, this study provides an agenda for language study; one which acknowledges the fact that writing about history has always been determined by the historical context, and by issues of race, class and gender.

• 

  Language in History: Theories and Texts

  Tony Crowley

  In Language in History, Tony Crowley provides the analytical tools for answering such questions. Using a radical re-reading of Saussure and Bahktin, he demonstrates, in four case studies, the ways in which language has been used to construct social and cultural identity in Britain and Ireland. For example, he examines the ways in which language was employed to construct a bourgeois public sphere in 18th Century England, and he reveals how language is still being used in contemporary Ireland to articulate national and political aspirations and why the Irish language died.

  By bringing together linguistic and critical theory with his own sharp historical and political consciousness, Tony Crowley provides a new agenda for language study; one which acknowledges the fact that writing about history has always been determined by the historical context, and by issues of race, class and gender. Language in History represents a major contribution to the field, and an essential text for anyone interested in language, discourse and communication.

• 

  Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change

  Gayle Greene

  Doris Lessing has been a chronicler of our age for nearly half a century, and a study of her writing career does not yield easy generalizations. Difficult though she is to categorize, she is always concerned with change, with a search for "something new" against "the nightmare repetition" of history. The feminist quest she articulated in The Children of Violence and The Golden Notebook entered the culture with the force of a new myth: these books changed lives. The Golden Notebook--together with such works as The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique--raised the consciousness of a generation of women readers and played a major part in making the second wave of feminism. It is the power of Lessing's novels to change people's lives, the effect she had raising the consciousness of a generation of women and the effect she continues to have on young readers, that is the subject of this book.

• 

  Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism

  Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn

  These twenty autobiographical essays by eminent feminist literary critics explore the process by which women scholars became feminist scholars, articulating the connections between the personal and political in their lives and work. They describe the experiences that radicalised women within academia and without, as students, professors, scholars, political activists, women. From these diverse histories a collective history emerges of the development of feminism as an intellectual and social movement, as a heuristic tool, as the redefinition of knowledge and power. This book presents a history of the field through the eyes of those who have created it. Offering a spectrum of experiences and critical positions that engage with current debates in feminism, it will be valuable to teachers and students of feminist theory, women's studies, and the history of the women's movement. It will interest female writers and scholars in all disciplines and anyone who cares about feminism and its future.

• 

  American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology

  Cheryl Walker

  This publication marks the first time in a hundred years that a wide range of nineteenth-century American women's poetry has been accessible to the general public in a single volume. Included are the humorous parodies of Phoebe Cary and Mary Weston Fordham and the stirring abolitionist poems of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, Maria Lowell, and Rose Terry Cooke. Included, too, are haunting reflections on madness, drug use, and suicide of women whose lives, as Cheryl Walker explains, were often as melodramatic as the poems they composed and published. In addition to works by more than two dozen poets, the anthology includes ample headnotes about each author's life and a brief critical evaluation of her work. Walker's introduction to the volume provides valuable contextual material to help readers understand the cultural background, economic necessities, literary conventions, and personal dynamics that governed women's poetic production in the nineteenth century.

• 

  Proper English: Readings in Language, History and Cultural Identity

  Tony Crowley

  The texts in this book have been selected to illustrate the process by which particular forms of English usage are erected and validated as correct and standard. At the same time, the texts demonstrate how a certain group of people, and certain sets of cultural practices are privileged as correct, standard and central. Covering a period of 300 years, these writers, who include Locke, Swift, Webster, James, Newbolt and Marenbon, consider the questions of language change and decay, correct and incorrect usage and what to prescribe and proscribe. Reread in the light of recent debates about cultural identity - how is it constructed and maintained? what are its effects? - these texts attempt to demonstrate the formative roles of race, class and gender in the construction of "proper Englishness". This book should be of interest to students and teachers of English studies and language and linguistics including discourse theory and the history of language.

• 

  Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition

  Gayle Greene

  The feminist fiction movement of the 1960s–1980s was and is as significant a movement as Modernism. Gayle Greene focuses on the works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Laurence to trace the roots of this feminist literary explosion. She also speculates on the future of feminist fiction in the current regressive period of "post feminism."

• 

  Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets

  Cheryl Walker

  Concentrating on Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Louise Bogan, Walker analyzes the highly stylized self-images—from Lowell's androgyne to Millay's body-conscious romantic—projected by these women who attempted to renegotiate the terms upon which they could function successfully as poets.

• 

  The Politics of Discourse: The Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates

  Tony Crowley

  Crowley demythologizes 'standard English' as a marker of uniformity, neutrality, and the one language of truth...One strength of these core chapters is that Crowley positions opposing views/theories in interesting ways in an attempt to offer some balance in prespective...By the end...[he] has successfully woven an historical tapestry of parallel, yet interesting discourses to reveal that every time the question of language surfaces...it means that a series of problems are coming to the fore.

• 

  Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism

  Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn

  An invaluable overview of feminist critical thinking. The essays address a wide range of topics including: the politics of language, feminist readings of the canon, psychoanalysis, and French theories of the feminine.