Böcker utgivna av Cornell University Press

In Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste-in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources-from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the...

In Unfinished Spirit, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein brings to light the extraordinary archive of Muriel Rukeyser's (1913-1980) unpublished and incomplete literary works, revealing the ways in which misogyny influences the kinds of texts we read and value. Despite her status today as an influential poet, much of Rukeyser's critical and feminist writing remained unfinished, suppressed by the sexism of editors, political censure, the withdrawal of funding and publishing contracts, as well the conditions of single motherhood and economic precarity.From Savage Coast, her novel of the Spanish Civil War (which Kennedy-Epstein recovered, edited, and published to great acclaim in 2013) to her photo-text collaboration with Berenice Abbott, essays on women writers, radio scripts, and biographies, Unfinished Spirit traces the creation, reception, and rejection of Rukeyser's most ambitious texts-works that continued the radical, avant-garde project of modernism and challenged an increasingly hegemonic Cold War culture. Bound together by Rukeyser's radical vision of artistic creation and political engagement, these incomplete texts open a space to theorize the politics of the unfinished for understanding women's artistic production, reasserting the importance of the archive as a primary site of feminist criticism.

Vacationing in Dictatorships examines the political effects of international tourism in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain in the postwar era. Despite sharp economic and political differences between the two dictatorial regimes at the start of the Cold War, significant similarities existed as both states took advantage of international tourism to improve their image abroad and pursued processes of economic modernization to acquire hard currencies. By the end of the 1970s though, the two countries achieved rather different results in terms of tourism development, despite the fact that both shared many features in the 1940s and 1950s.By comparing the rise and evolution of international tourism on different sides of the Iron Curtain, Adelina Stefan provides a different assessment of the geopolitics of postwar Europe and that further refines the Cold War's geographies separating eastern and western Europe. As a result, Vacationing in Dictatorships reveals a new perspective on the Cold War that reveals not only the developmental similarities between Eastern and Southern Europe, but also the ideological struggle that pitted socialist East against capitalist West.

An Imaginary Cinema is the first systematic study of Sergei Eisenstein's unrealized films as well as a deeply informed historical and theoretical inquiry into the role and meaning of the unmade in his oeuvre. Eisenstein directed some of the twentieth century's most important films, from the early classic of montage, Battleship Potemkin, to his late masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible. Alongside these, however, the Soviet filmmaker also toiled over a compelling array of unrealized projects, from ideas that never grew beyond complex, passionate notebook scrawls and sketches to productions that were mounted and shot to some degree of completion without ever being finished. Working from the archival remnants of several of the director's most fascinating unrealized projects--from his bold vision to film Marx's Das Kapital to his time in Hollywood struggling to adapt Dreiser's An American Tragedy--Dustin Condren's book reveals new aspects of Eisenstein's genius, showing the filmmaker in a constant state of process, open to working toward impossible and sometimes utopian ends, and committed to the pursuit of creative and theoretical discovery. Condren's analysis of these unrealized projects in An Imaginary Cinema reveals Eisenstein at crucial moments of his personal and artistic biography, and it also tells the wider story of a canonical artist negotiating the political labyrinths of Stalinist Russia, the economic pitfalls of Hollywood, and the technological shifts of early cinema.

Murder in a cathedral, horrific illnesses and deformities, narrow escapes from injury and death, a vengeful dragon, a wandering eyeball, a bawdy monk and other sinners redeemed--the accounts of miracles performed by the Virgin Mary gathered and translated in The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France provide vivid glimpses into medieval life and beliefs. Bruce L. Venarde provides fluent translations of the first five collections of Marian miracle narratives from France, written in Latin between 1130 and 1150, and never before available in English.The stories recorded in these collections--by Herman of Tournai; Hugh Farsit; Haimo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives; John, son of Peter; and Gautier of Compiègne--offer descriptions of travel, living conditions, medical knowledge, conflict between lay and religious authorities, and the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary, which had only recently become important to Christian devotion. Including notes, tables, and maps that orient and illuminate the texts, The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France makes these riveting tales available to readers seeking a view into the medieval past.

The War on Rescue documents how governments block assistance to people in times of crisis. Focusing on the European Migration Crisis of 2015 to 2022 to address the reasons why governments do this, William Plowright discusses the strategies employed which prevent suffering people from receiving help. The European Migration Crisis motivated people from across the world to offer assistance to needy refugees and migrants across Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa. Both large and small organizations rushed to bring food, medical care, and rescue to those stranded at sea. However, many European governments sought to prevent humanitarian assistance and deny safe haven to the desperate. Boats filled with those rescued were blocked from harbors, activists were arrested, staff were threatened, and at times faced violence. The War on Rescue adds to social science understanding and explanations for humanitarian assistance and the reasons why governments obstruct rescue efforts.

Crucible of the Incurable concerns how people face life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Anthony Stavrianakis spent a year in clinics and with people living with the illness in the United States. He examines the multiple meanings of care in a context of a chronic, degenerative, one-hundred percent fatal, neuromuscular illness, whose most common duration is between two and five years. How do people diagnosed with ALS continue to "live as well as possible, for as long as possible" in accordance with the normative work at the heart of outpatient ALS care? Crucible of the Incurable shows how those touched by the situation of a person living with ALS bear this problem and this task. Given the sense of certitude around the diagnosis, given past experiences of those aware of its usual progression, and given the uncertainty of the disease's cause and its progression for each specific person; how then do people orient themselves to the experience of life with this illness, how to support those who are confronted with it, and how to provide aid or solace.

The Ecosystem of Exile Politics relays the events in Bhutan that led to the exodus of one-sixth of the population, and then recounts the activism by Bhutan's refugee diaspora that followed in response. Susan Banki asserts that activism functions like a physical ecosystem, in which hubs of activism in different locations interact to pressure the home country. For Bhutan's refugee mobilizers, physical proximity offers advantages in Nepal and India, where organizing protests, lobbying, and collecting information about government abuse in Bhutan is aided by being close to the homeland. But in an ecosystem of exile politics, proximity is both a boon and a bane. Sites proximate to Bhutan can be spaces of risk and disempowerment, and refugee activists rarely secure legal, political, and social protection. While distant diasporas in the Global North may not be in precarious situations, they cannot tap into the advantages of proximity. In examining these phenomena, The Ecosystem of Exile Politics adds to theoretical understandings of exile politics and to empirical research on Bhutan and its refugee population.

Fyodor Dostoevsky--Darkness and Dawn (1848-1849), the third and final volume on the writer's childhood, adolescence, and youth, seeks to disclose, in a detailed and intimate way, Dostoevsky's last two years before his exile to Siberia. Together with the first two volumes, it attempts to present for the first time a complete and congruent picture of the writer's first twenty-eight years on earth. Thomas Gaiton Marullo first examines diverse responses of Russian church, state, and citizens to the French socialists, in particular, Charles Fourier, and to the revolutions of 1848 before he moves to lively debates on Dostoevsky's socialism and new attacks on his writings. He then considers the dynamics of the Petrashevsky and Durov circles; fresh assaults on Dostoevsky's works; and the increasing desperation of the writer himself, particularly with Andrei Kraevsky. In the final sections of his study, Marullo sheds light on Dostoevsky's readings of Belinsky's Letter to Gogol, the arrests of Petrashevsky and company, including Dostoevsky and brothers Andrei and Mikhail, as well as his responses to members of the Investigative Commission for the Petrashevsky Affair, his eight months in prison in the Peter-Paul Fortress, his mock execution on Semyonovsky Parade Ground, and his departure to exile in Siberia. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students, and devotees not only of Dostoevsky, but also of Russian and European history, culture, and civilization.

Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France uncovers the unexplored history of matrimonial agents, their novel marketing tactics, and the rise of personal advertisements to track the commercialization of marriage in nineteenth-century France. Brokers transformed courtship and marriage into forms of commercial exchange, linking them to the new urban values of abundance, pleasure, and social mobility. By studying agents' and readers' media fictions on love alongside court cases, legislation, and literature surrounding the industry, Andrea Mansker reveals the intimate and socioeconomic pressures of finding a spouse, while demonstrating how contemporaries used the business of matrimony to reimagine their public identities, relationships, and courtship rituals following unprecedented historical change from the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The matchmaking business both responded to and helped shape national anxieties regarding fluctuating nuptial rates and changing laws on marriage and divorce. As a result, marriage itself was reconceived as a commercial contract inseparable from the atomistic and corrupt marketplace. The debates and pressures described in Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France are still relevant today. As online daters have discovered, the possibility of finding a mate in an expanded pool of candidates beyond one's family, locality, and nation offered individuals the liberating opportunity to explore new personas just as it produced a novel sense of danger about these impersonal transactions in the anonymous marketplace.

Drawing Coastlines reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots inscribe material conditions of existence and horizons of loss that entangle life forms. V. Chitra interlaces graphics and text by redrawing scientific images, the moments of their construction, the choices and consequences of what gets drawn and what does not, and how images are seen, performed, and manifest. These visual reconstructions show how images remake human-nonhuman relationships, arrange urban politics, and materialize landscapes in complex and contradictory ways. The multimodal format of Drawing Coastlines engages in the politics of its context where words and images combine to create coastal worlds, and to find, through a creative anthropology, openings to build new forms of care in the midst of crisis.

Today's Russia, Unstuck in Time suggests, is a nation of time travelers, living either in memories of the Great Patriotic War and a society that provided for all its citizens or an alternative future in which the USSR never collapsed. Eliot Borenstein examines the ways in which films, fiction, television, social media, political parties, and even theme parks use the conventions of time travel and alternate history to fantasize about narratives that are more appealing than the post-Soviet present.Unstuck in Time explores the centrality of an uncannily persistent USSR in the post-Soviet cultural imagination through deeply engaged and entertaining readings of an impressive array of texts: fantasies in which characters time-crash into the Soviet past, fictions of triumphant far-future Soviet societies, and real-life enterprises feeding the belief that the Soviet Union never ended. Whether channeled into benign nostalgia or dangerous mythmaking, the cases that Borenstein analyzes reveal the extent to which the psychic shock of the end of the Soviet Union left Russians adrift, caught between a past many still long for and a future few can imagine.

Lex Lu argues in Appearance Politics that crafting an appealing and powerful outward image has long been an essential political instrument in China. Its traces may be found in historical records, imperial portraits, physiognomic prognostications, photographs, posters, statues, and digital images. Employing rare archival materials from Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, Lu tells the story of these political maneuverings. We learn the ways in which political actors and their agents designed their images, and we observe the shifting standards of male beauty that guided their decisions. Appearance Politics examines five case studies: the usurpation of Ming Prince Zhu Di; the rise of Manchu masculinity and its mixed standards of Han Chinese and Manchu beauty at the Yongzheng court; the use of modern photography and Western male beauty standards at the turn of the twentieth century; the making of the Republican founding father Sun Yat-sen; and the creation of visual templates of Mao Zedong. Lu's rich empirical study counters systematic stereotypical descriptions of Chinese male leadership embedded in Western media and scholarship.

In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world's languages disappear this century. Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People's Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future. The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis.

The second volume of Old Norse Folklore explores medieval and early modern Nordic magic and witchcraft, covering syncretism, continuity, survival, and the reconstruction of pagan beliefs and cultic practices in this last area of western Europe to be Christianized. This volume not only considers these issues, but also pulls back the curtain on more obscure, yet important, corners of Nordic magico-religious tradition.In these chapters, Stephen A. Mitchell draws on materials from many different periods of the vast Nordic world, stretching from Greenland to the Baltic, and examines such diverse witnesses as sagas, judicial records, ballads, synodal statutes, runes, proverbs, church murals, leechbooks, and the language used to discuss magic and its actors. Old Norse Folklore addresses how theology helped shape the Nordic magical world and how language can help reveal this world, how magic was used as a practical matter in, and what it meant philosophically to, the medieval Nordic world, and how inherited traditions between and among the historically connected societies of northern Europe impacted cultural developments in late medieval Scandinavia.

In Bounded Wilderness, Kathryn Jasper focuses on the innovations undertaken at the hermitage of Fonte Avellana in central Italy during the eleventh century by its prior, Peter Damian (d. 1072). The congregation of Fonte Avellana experimented with reforming practices that led to new ways of managing property and relations among clergy, nobles, and the laity.Kathryn Jasper charts how Damian's notion of monastic reform took advantage of the surrounding topography and geography to amplify the sensory aspects of ascetic experiences. By focusing on monastic landscapes and land ownership, Jasper demonstrates that reform extended beyond abstract ideas. Rather, reform circulated locally through monastic networks and addressed practical concerns such as property boundaries and rights over water, orchards, pastures, and mills. Putting new sources, both documentary and archaeological, into conversation with monastic charters and Damian's letters, Bounded Wilderness reveals the interrelationship of economic practices, religious traditions, and the natural environment in the idea and implementation of reform.

Much of the hoopla surrounding quality circles, teams, and high-performance work systems has been based on anecdotes and very thin evidence. It has not been established that those employee involvement strategies amount to anything more than another series of management fads or ruses designed to get more out of workers without giving them anything in return. This revelatory book, written by some of the skeptics, lays some of the suspicion to rest.Based on their visits to 44 plants and surveys of more than 4,000 employees, Eileen Appelbaum, Thomas Bailey, Peter Berg, and Arne L. Kalleberg concluded that companies are indeed more successful when managers share knowledge and power with workers and when workers assume increased responsibility and discretion.The study of steel, apparel, and medical electronics and imaging plants revealed much. In self-directed teams, workers were able to eliminate bottlenecks and coordinate the work process. In task forces created to improve quality, they communicated with individuals outside their own work groups and were able to solve problems. Expensive equipment in steel mills operated with fewer interruptions, turnaround and labor costs were cut in apparel factories, and costly inventories of components and medical equipment were reduced.And what did the employees think? The worker survey showed that jobs in participatory work systems often provide more challenging tasks and more opportunities for creativity. Employees in apparel had higher hourly earnings; those in steel had both higher hourly earnings and higher job satisfaction. Workers in more participatory settings were no more likely than others to report heavy workloads or excessive demands on their time. They were, however, less likely to report involuntary overtime or conflict with co-workers, and were more likely to be satisfied with their surroundings. Manufacturing Advantage provides the best assessment available of the effectiveness of high-performance work systems. Freestanding chapters near the end of the book provide full documentation of research data without interrupting the narrative flow.

Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" explores Ovid's reconceptualization of the heroines' maternal experience. Rather than aligning them with the stereotypical roles of Roman women, motherhood enables the Ovidian heroines to challenge traditional norms with irreverent perspectives on gender categories and familial relationships. Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" confronts these perspectives to overcome the dialectic between the (male) voice of the poet and the (female) voice of the heroines, by arguing for a form of polyphonic "cooperation" between the two voices, thus providing new angles on ironical discourse and gender fluidity within the Heroides.By reading the Heroides both through feminist theory and against Ovid's poetic production, Simona Martorana provides a novel approach to describe how motherhood enhances the heroines' agency, drawing upon works of Kristeva, Irigaray, Butler, Mulvey, Cavarero, Braidotti, and Ettinger. The application of theory is flexible throughout Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" and tailored to the nuances of specific passages, rather than being uniformly imposed on the ancient text.Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" reveals how the irony, ambiguity, and polyphony intrinsic to Ovid's poetry are amplified by the heroines' poetic voices. Martorana breaks new ground by incorporating contemporary feminist theories within the analysis of the Heroides and provides an original comprehensive analysis of motherhood that encompasses other Ovidian works, Latin poetry, and classical literature more broadly.

Revolutionary Warfare investigates how efforts to counter a revolution could also be revolutionary. The Algerian War fractured the French Empire, destroyed the legitimacy of colonial rule, and helped launch the Third Worldist movement for the liberation of the Global South. By tracing how French generals, officers, and civil officials sought to counter Algerian independence with their own project of radical social transformation, Terrence G. Peterson reveals that the conflict also helped to transform the nature of modern warfare.The French war effort was never defined solely by repression. As Terrence G. Peterson details, it also sought to fashion new forms of surveillance and social control that could capture the loyalty of Algerians and transform Algerian society. Hygiene and medical aid efforts, youth sports and education programs, and psychological warfare campaigns all attempted to remake Algerian social structures and bind them more closely to the French state. In tracing the emergence of such programs, Peterson reframes the French war effort as a project of armed social reform that sought not to preserve colonial rule unchanged, but to revolutionize it in order to preserve it against the global challenges of decolonization. Revolutionary Warfare demonstrates how French officers' efforts to transform warfare into an exercise in social engineering not only shaped how the Algerian War unfolded from its earliest months, but also helped to forge a paradigm of warfare that dominated strategic thinking during the Cold War and after: counterinsurgency.

Queen of Sorrows takes an original approach to both late-medieval Italian history and the history of Christianity, using both quantitative and qualitative analyses of a remarkable archive of 1,904 testaments to determine patterns in giving to the Virgin of Loreto shrine in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Bianca M. Lopez argues that in central Italy, as elsewhere, the cult of the Virgin Mary gained new prominence at this time of unprecedented mortality. Individuals gave to Santa Maria di Loreto, which houses the structure in which Mary is believed to have lived, as an expression of their grief, in the hope of strengthening family lineages beyond death, and to care for loved ones believed to be languishing in purgatory.Lopez establishes statistical correlations between different social groups and their donations to Loreto over time, uncovering informative new historical patterns, such as the prominence of widow and migrant donors in the notarial record. The documents also provide a social history of Recanati, revealing how its denizens venerated Mary as a saint with unrivaled spiritual power and uniquely sympathetic to grief, having lost her own son, Jesus. In the fourteenth century, plague survivors transformed their anguish into Marian devotion. The devastation of the plague brought the Virgin out of noble courts and monasteries and onto city streets. However, as Queen of Sorrows details, the popularity and growing wealth of the Loreto's Marian shrine attracted the attention of the papacy and peninsular seigneurial lords, who eventually brought Santa Maria di Loreto under the control of the Church.

"The heart of history, for Heidegger, is not a sequence of occurrences but the eruption of significance at critical junctures that bring us into our own by making all being, including our being, into an urgent issue. In emergency, being emerges."--from The Emergency of BeingThe esoteric Contributions to Philosophy, often considered Martin Heidegger's second main work after Being and Time, is crucial to any interpretation of his thought. Here Heidegger proposes that being takes place as "appropriation." Richard Polt's independent-minded account of the Contributions interprets appropriation as an event of emergency that demands to be thought in a "future-subjunctive" mode. Polt explores the roots of appropriation in Heidegger's earlier philosophy; Heidegger's search for a way of thinking suited to appropriation; and the implications of appropriation for time, space, human existence, and beings as a whole. In his concluding chapter, Polt reflects critically on the difficulties of the radically antirationalist and antimodern thought of the Contributions.Polt's original reading neither reduces this challenging text to familiar concepts nor refutes it, but engages it in a confrontation--an encounter that respects a way of thinking by struggling with it. He describes this most private work of Heidegger's philosophy as "a dissonant symphony that imperfectly weaves together its moments into a vast fugue, under the leitmotif of appropriation. This fugue is seeded with possibilities that are waiting for us, its listeners, to develop them. Some are dead ends--viruses that can lead only to a monolithic, monotonous misunderstanding of history. Others are embryonic insights that promise to deepen our thought, and perhaps our lives, if we find the right way to make them our own."

Philosophy at the Gymnasium returns Greek moral philosophy to its original context--the gyms of Athens--to understand how training for the body sparked training for the mind. The result is an engaging inroad to Greek thought that wrestles with big questions about life, happiness, and education, while providing fresh perspectives on standing scholarly debates.In Philosophy at the Gymnasium, Erik Kenyon reveals the egalitarian spirit of the ancient gym, in which clothes--and with them social markers--are shed at the door, leaving individuals to compete based on their physical and intellectual merits alone. The work opens with Socratic dialogues set in gyms, which call for reform in character education. It explores Plato's moral and political philosophy through the lens of mental and civic health. And it holds up Olympic victors as Aristotle's model for the life of happiness through training.