While some students need more writing instruction than others, The Politics of Remediation reveals how that need also pertains to the institutions themselves. Mary Soliday argues that universities may need remedial English to alleviate their own crises in admissions standards, enrollment, mission, and curriculum, and English departments may use remedial programs to mediate their crises in enrollment, electives, and relationships to the liberal arts and professional schools.Following a brief history of remedial English and the political uses of remediation at CCNY before, during, and after the open admissions policy, Soliday questions the ways in which students' need for remedial writing instruction has become widely associated with the need to acculturate minorities to the university. In disentangling identity politics from remediation, she challenges a powerful assumption of post-structuralist work: that a politics of language use is equivalent to the politics of access to institutions.

Wright's Lectures are packed not only with data, but with carefully drawn conclusions. It would behoove us to take these into account before drawing our own.

Poetry in America is flourishing in this new millennium and asking serious questions of itself: Is writing marked by gender and if so, how? What does it mean to be experimental? How can lyric forms be authentic? This volume builds on the energetic tensions inherent in these questions, focusing on ten major American women poets whose collective work shows an incredible range of poetic practice.Each section of the book is devoted to a single poet and contains new poems; a brief "statement of poetics" by the poet herself in which she explores the forces - personal, aesthetic, political - informing her creative work; a critical essay on the poet's work; a biographical statement; and a bibliography listing works by and about the poet. Underscoring the dynamic give and take between poets and the culture at large, this anthology is indispensable for anyone interested in poetry, gender and the creative process.CONTRIBUTORS: Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lucie Brock Broido, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Harryette Mullen.

Winner of the 2001 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry Selected by Marilyn Chin A poet with an artist’s eye, a painter with an ear for language, Gray Jacobik creates poems out of the mundane and extraordinary moments of our lives. Mirroring the structure of a Pollock painting, elegizing Larry Levis and avocados, reflecting on Johnny Depp’s "terribly surreal" life, embarking upon a seventy-two-line meditation on the color blue, exposing a lover’s—or a mother’s—secrets, Jacobik's poems are mature, elegant, and crackling with energy.

Lumen was first published by Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) in 1872 as part of the Stories of Infinity collection. Flammarion was a well-known French astronomer, writer and highly successful popularizer of science during the late 19th century. This famous novel, written in the form of a philosophical dialogue, features a cosmic spirit named Lumen who reveals the scientific wonders of the celestial universe to Quaerens, a young seeker of knowledge. Within its pages, the author mixes empirical observations about the nature and speed of light with vivid speculations about such diverse subjects as reincarnation, time travel, the reversibility of history and the ecospheres of alien planets. Lumen is one of the first science fiction novels to include detailed descriptions of alien life forms and the first to imagine (30 years before Einstein's theory of relativity) the differences in perception that might result from traveling at velocities close to and beyond the speed of light. This Wesleyan edition is the first English translation of the original French text in over a hundred years. The volume includes notes, appendices and a critical introduction.

Robert Duncan's poetic creativity does not exist without a language of illness, nor the revelation and insight that such language generates. This ground-breaking interdisciplinary work is one of the first book-length studies of Robert Duncan's poetry, and it includes a treatment of his influences (H.D. and Freud) and those he influenced (Nathaniel Mackey and John Taggart). Through close readings of crucial poems, Peter O'Leary shows how Duncan's poetry locates a gnostic insight expressed through a language of illness in the realms of religion. Gnosticism is a doctrine of salvation by knowledge.In addition to studying Duncan's poetry and his life, O'Leary considers the psychological impact Freud's ideas of the unconscious and dream interpretation had on the poet. O'Leary continues with an analysis of Duncan's work in light of the theories of shamanism put forth by religion historian Mircea Eliade. Along the way, O'Leary undertakes detailed discussions of gnosticism, hermeticism, spiritualism, psychoanalysis, shamanism and religions of the African diaspora.

The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction is a lively account of the role of women and feminism in the development of American science fiction during its formative years, the mid-20th century. Beginning in 1926, with the publication of the first issue of Amazing Stories, Justine Larbalestier examines science fiction's engagement with questions of femininity, masculinity, sex and sexuality. She traces the debates over the place of women and feminism in science fiction as it emerged in stories, letters and articles in science fiction magazines and fanzines. The book culminates in the story of James Tiptree, Jr. and the eponymous Award. Tiptree was a successful science fiction writer of the 1970s who was later discovered to be a woman. Tiptree's easy acceptance by the male-dominated publishing arena of the time proved that there was no necessary difference in the way men and women wrote, but that there was a real difference in the way they were read.

Compiled with the student in mind, Costaz’s Syriac-French-English-Arabic dictionary provides for each Syriac gloss its meaning in French, English, and Arabic. Under each root lemma, all derivatives of the root are given with their morphological data. The entries are typeset so that the French, English or Arabic definitions are easily found. The dictionary also contains a mini dictionary of proper names..

Since Romanticism, poetry has reigned as the most exalted of literary forms; consequently, as Joseph Harrington argues in this new study, public debates about the nature and function of poetry are really debates about larger cultural and political values. In Poetry and the Public, Harrington sheds new light on changes in the textual form of poems, the critical reception of poems, debates in the popular press about the nature of poetry and the poetic theories of poets. The period 1910-1940 represents a major transition in the social meaning of poetry in the U. S. Harrington focuses on three important factions of the US poetry scene during these years. The first, popularizers, wished to retain the older, popular notion of poetry as a public art, a communal experience shared between writer and readers. The second, high modernists, responded with the well-known notions of the self-sufficient art object and the autonomous artist who held no responsibility to a reading public or public affairs. The third group, poets of the radical labor movement of the 1910s, combined aspects of both popular and modernist poetries in order to intervene in specific historical settings or to interact with specific audiences. Poetry and the Public shows how this more public tendency in poetry evolved into the latter half of the 20th century in forms such as poetry slams and community-based workshops, and how the history of poetry can help us understand the genre's relative absence from histories of American literature.

Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dickens's novels. Here, Meckier argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. He periodically revised his competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairy tales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairy tale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from The Tales of the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's tragicomic view of the world.

The last book Giles published before her death in 1979, Wellspring has been out of print for years.The nineteen selections bring together Giles's fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, and fictionalized autobiography to reveal a behind-the-scenes look at her life, her family, her love for her adopted state of Kentucky and its people, her politics, her favorite authors, her thoughts on writing, and her views of her own work. Wellspring is available again for old and new readers of Janice Holt Giles. Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years. Her biography is told in Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life.

This extraordinary poetic voyage uses explorations of the material culture of our past and present as points of departure. Sandra McPherson succeeds in drawing us into her examination of objects from the 20th and late 19th centuries through her weaving together of images both familiar and startling into deeply satisfying poems. She is especially interested in articles that might seem useless, extinct, or "irrelevant" to us now, such as children's military playthings, diaries and scrapbooks of unknown and unfamous people, quilts from people of Mennonite and Amish convictions, "primitive" utilitarian wooden objects, telegrams and curious photographs. These poems are characteristically simple and unadorned, bringing readers closer and closer to a physical world we often overlook, but which is filled with sensation and meaning. From traditional stanzaic poems to collages and prose ghazals, the author embraces "civilization" by visiting the spirit of the secret voices of its people.

In the South, railroads have two meanings: they are an economic force that can sustain a town and they are a metaphor for the process of southern industrialization. Recognizing this duality, Joseph Millichap's Dixie Limited is a detailed reading of the complex and often ambivalent relationships among technology, culture, and literature that railroads represent in selected writers and works of the Southern Renaissance. Tackling such Southern Renaissance giants as Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and William Faulkner, Millichap mingles traditional American and Southern studies -- in their emphases on literary appreciation and evaluation in terms of national and regional concerns -- with contemporary cultural meaning in terms of gender, race, and class. Millichap juxtaposes Faulkner's semi-autobiographical families with Wolfe's fiction, which represents changing attitudes toward the "Southern Other." Faulkner's later fiction is compared to that of Warren, Welty, and Ellison, and Warren's later poetry moves toward the contemporary post-Southernism of Dave Smith. These disparate examples suggest the subject of the final chapter -- the continuing search for post-Southern patterns of persistence and change that reiterate, reject, and perhaps reconfigure the Southern Renaissance. As we enter the twenty-first century, that we recall how much the twentieth-century South was shaped by railroads built in the nineteenth century. It is also important that we recognize how much our future will be determined by the technological and cultural tracks we lay.

These nine stories are teeming with people on the margins, where destitute New Yorkers and determined immigrants are as much at the mercy of social services, media attention, opportunistic politicians, and \u0022quality-of-life\u0022 campaigns as they are prey to grinding poverty, dangerous streets, and their own haunting memories. Delving into Lucy Honig's fiction, one is willingly drawn into an intimacy with these resilient, but flawed characters—among them, a woman who cleans a beauty salon, a high school kid who\u2019s lost a parent, a runaway Cambodian bride, an actress, and a homeless woman. Crossing paths, these difficult characters often misunderstand and sometimes demean each other, yet they also redeem and rescue one other in odd and unexpected ways. In The Truly Needy, Lucy Honig has created a heartbreaking, imaginative world that is the American urban landscape.

Hard-hitting, sophisticated, lyrical exploration of the meaning of the body. Questions icons and invokes taboos.

Donald Revell's new work, Arcady, draws its inspiration from Charles Ives and Henry David Thoreau to create a distinctly American poetic music. Triggered by a series of deaths in the poet's intimate circle, anchored in the deserts of the Spring Mountains of Nevada, this book is nonetheless replete with lush, still moments. Many of the poems begin as meditations on loss and then transform themselves, thanks to the poet's awareness of the spaciousness and openness of the void following grief. The attention to rhythm and the exploration of seen and unseen worlds lead the poet to find solace in the earthly rhythms of seasons' passage and seasonal rituals. Revell's sparse, experimental lines are soundings within which the music of language harnesses us to the present and its infinite resonance. Like Ives's notion of music heard through and against other music, Revell's words and images well up against each other and a profound language of images, meter and rhythm emerges.