Taking Dante and other catalogers of failure and ruin (Baudelaire, Trakl, Rimbaud) as its guiding lights, Scarecrow charts situations of extremity and madness: “Are you / insistent? Are you dead? / Are you guilty? Has your / name been lifted, a vein / of earth from earth?” It also charts the insistence of time’s passing and with it the awakening to both new and foreclosed possibilities. What will remain for us after the disaster? How will we rebuild? To whom will we address ourselves and with what voice? Also a love poem, one of desire and hope, Scarecrow aligns a tragic sensibility with a faith in the other and in the redemptive power of forgiveness. Within the beauty and strangeness of this work rests an imperative that captures the directive of poetry at its best: “Present yourself / in the full radiance of captivation.” In its mystery and defiance, Robert Fernandez’s collection does precisely this. An online reader’s companion will be available at robertfernandezsite.wesleyan.edu.

Make no mistake: Martha Bragg Picket is a headstrong southern woman with a rebellious spirit, a characteristic her son Michael shares. Yet to see her after almost twenty years of marriage, it might no longer seem clear. A Yankee contractor's arrival in town catalyzes her dissatisfaction, leading her to turn her life upside down -- unaware that her son will follow suit. Both heartfelt and shrewdly humorous, this widely acclaimed first novel from author Fenton Johnson is an affecting look at one woman's reawakening and her son's coming of age in the heartland of America.

Along with his siblings, Raphael Hardin left his childhood home in rural Kentucky. Grappling with an AIDS diagnosis, he returns to care for his dying father. Told from the perspectives of Raphael, his family, and their lifelong neighbor, Fenton Johnson's landmark novel reveals the blood struggles and binding loves of a broken family made whole.

Playing hopscotch in the schoolyard or hide-and-seek in the woods, Appalachian children once recited traditional nursery rhymes from memory. As kids do, they frequently altered the original rhymes, making them even more colorful in the process.In Mommy Goose: Rhymes from the Mountains, author Mike Norris honors this special piece of American heritage with a one-of-a-kind collection of fifty original nursery rhymes celebrating Appalachian tradition and speech. Illustrated with art-quality photographs of more than one hundred new hand-carved and -painted works by renowned folk artist Minnie Adkins, this enchanting book introduces readers of all ages to the whimsical world of Mommy Goose and shares her love of the rare music of Appalachian speech and of words in general.Mommy Goose is designed to engage young children with a series of simple and often humorous verses that gradually become more challenging as the book progresses. Readers can advance to longer, more complex rhymes as their skills develop -- at home or with the guidance of teachers. Featuring sheet music for the original song "Tell me, Mommy Goose," this multidimensional book is certain to entertain while introducing a new generation to hallowed folk traditions.

Morphology is the general theory of form and formation, which can be seen as the innovative and fruitful point of intersection of the scientific and the humanistic cultures. The three papers presented in the book by Olaf Breidbach, Pietro Corvaja and Angelo Vianello respectively illustrate different features of morphology from the epistemic viewpoints of history of science, mathematics and biology. The texts were produced in the context of the second meeting of the “Centro Interdipartimentale di Morfologia F. Moiso”, which took place in Udine on 14 December 2007.

Excavation of approximately a third of a hectare in the north-western part of the historic core of Worcester revealed evidence for activity dating from the Roman to the post-medieval and early modern period. The deepest deposits were recorded in geotechnical and archaeological boreholes, and in two sondages: the rest of the site was excavated to the depth of formation level for development.The earliest feature was a Roman road running on the approximate alignment of the present-day Newport Street. Deposits relating to road construction and ground consolidation comprised metal-working waste, with finds of later 2nd to 3rd-century date. No in situ evidence of Roman occupation was excavated. These levels were sealed by alluvial deposits. In the early 13th century the area was divided by boundaries, which were consolidated during the subsequent medieval and post-medieval periods into building plots with frontages onto both Newport Street and Dolday. The Newport Street frontage was developed with substantial stone and timber buildings, some over stone-built cellars. A series of ovens, hearths, structures and surfaces suggest a mixture of craft and domestic activities took place in the back plots of these properties. The style, construction and layout of some of the medieval buildings, coupled with artefactual and environmental evidence, suggest the occupants were relatively prosperous.The major plot boundaries changed little throughout the post-medieval and early modern period, although documentary research indicates a complex history of ownership and holdings featuring sub-division, amalgamation and multiple occupancy. The street frontages of both Newport Street and Dolday continued to be occupied throughout the post-medieval and early modern periods. Open spaces and structural remains, including wells, hearths, ovens and cess pits, in the back plots reflect a variety of activities associated with trade and domestic activity. Finds and environmental evidence has helped to link some of these structures to trades associated with the owners and occupants known from historical records. The remains of bread-ovens, a bake-house, a malthouse and a warehouse for hemp have been identified, and there is more tentative archaeological evidence for cordwaining, cloth-making, brewing and distilling, the latter trades replacing cloth-making as that trade declined in the 17th and 18th centuries. The sub-division of properties and the crowding of small cottages into the back plots during the 18th and 19th centuries reflect the increase in residential occupancy that resulted in over-crowding and a decline in status for this area of the city.The excavations represent the first large-scale archaeological investigation of this part of Worcester. The results complement those of previous major investigations of the Roman and medieval town and provide valuable insights into the economic and social status of the medieval town’s expansion onto the former floodplain. An integrated approach, analysing all aspects of the archaeological evidence in combination with detailed study of the available documentary and historical sources, has been particularly valuable in achieving an understanding of the site in later periods, providing the first major archaeological study of the post-medieval development of the city.

Among the various issues debated in philosophy today, this book focuses on one which is unquestionably central: can we claim to have any regulated procedure that uses common norms to resolve human disagreements? Although this is a question with profound classical roots, it is explored in this work through the prism of a key notion in today’s thought: controversy. The aim of adopting this approach is to determine whether controversies might constitute this regulated procedure. What are controversies? Are they only a type of reasoned and ordered debate? Are they a complex process of making or fixing rational beliefs? Each chapter of this book can be seen as a way of contributing to the analysis of human rationality, but viewed not so much as something unitary and pre-established that needs to be discovered, but rather as something that is neither unitary or pre-established; something that still needs to be achieved.

From 1981 to 2000, Sulfur magazine presented an American and international overview of innovative writing across forty-six issues, totaling some 11,000 pages and featuring over eight hundred writers and artists, including Norman O. Brown, Jorie Graham, James Hillman, Mina Loy, Ron Padgett, Octavio Paz, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Carlos Williams. Each issue featured a diverse offering of poetry, translations, previously unpublished archival material, visual art, essays, and reviews. Sulfur was a hotbed for critical thinking and commentary, and also provided a home for the work of unknown and younger poets. In the course of its twenty year run, Sulfur maintained a reputation as the premier publication of alternative and experimental writing. This was due in no small measure to its impressive masthead of contributing editors and correspondents: Marjorie Perloff, James Clifford, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Keith Tuma, Allen Weiss, Jed Rasula, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, Jayne Cortez, Marjorie Welish, Jerome Rothenberg, Eliot Weinberger, managing editor Caryl Eshleman, and founding editor Clayton Eshleman.A Sulfur Anthology offers readers an expanded view of artistic activity at the century's end. It's also a luminous document of international poetic vision. Many of the contributions have never been published outside of Sulfur, making this an indispensible collection of poetry in translation, and poetry in the world.

Today, Henry David Thoreau's status as one of America's most influential public intellectuals remains unchallenged. Recent scholarship on Thoreau has highlighted his activism as a committed antislavery reformer and proto-environmentalist whose life became a seminal model for the image of the liberal conscience. While modern scholars have firmly established Thoreau's relevance, their focus on his public activism has undervalued the complexity and range of his contributions to American political thought and has neglected crucial facets of his philosophy regarding democratic citizenship. In The Political Thought of Henry David Thoreau, Jonathan McKenzie analyzes not only Thoreau's well-known works but also his journals and correspondence to provide a fresh portrait of the Sage of Walden as a radical individualist. This new account examines the influence that ancient philosophers, particularly the Stoics, had on Thoreau and demonstrates his importance as one of the best modern interpreters of Socrates's vision of the self. McKenzie also argues that Thoreau's own political life was shaped by a theory of privatism that encouraged both a radical simplification of one's commitments and regular engagement in experiments that plumbed life for its most essential values.Shunning grand abstractions and cosmopolitanism in favor of the wonders of daily life, Thoreau's work provides a critique of political and social life that seeks to restore the wholeness of the human subject by rescuing it from the clutches of public concerns. Indeed, McKenzie's nuanced, provocative analysis reveals Thoreau as a multifaceted philosopher who brilliantly wrestled with the complexities of ethical participation in modern democracy.

The itineraries suggested in this book interrogate the ontological and metaphysical sense of aesthetic experience, understood as the primary experience, in which our complexity as human beings is invested by the world and manifests itself. Readers will find two different yet convergent intentions. The first, exquisitely ontologico-aesthetic, develops Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh-element towards an ontology of virtuality, with the aim of understanding a new entity, neither properly living nor properly artificial, appearing on the background of being. The second, predominantly aesthetico-metaphysical, takes the entity’s force of being in the aesthetico-linguistic experience of deixis, and tries to show the work of the aesthetic logos as a condition of possibility for meta-empirical inference.working title

BAX 2015 is the second volume of an annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year's volume, guest edited by Douglas Kearney, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors - like Dodie Bellamy, Anselm Berrigan, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, Aaron Kunin, Joyelle McSweeney, and Fred Moten - as well as emerging voices. Best American Experimental Writing is also an important literary anthology for classroom settings, as individual selections are intended to provoke lively conversation and debate. The series coeditors are Seth Abramson and Jesse Damiani.

Appalachia faces overwhelming challenges that plague many rural areas across the country, including poorly funded schools, stagnant economic development, corrupt political systems, poverty, and drug abuse. Its citizens, in turn, have often been the target of unkind characterizations depicting them as illiterate or backward. Despite entrenched social and economic disadvantages, the region is also known for its strong sense of culture, language, and community. In this innovative volume, a multidisciplinary team of both established and rising scholars challenge Appalachian stereotypes through an examination of language and rhetoric. Together, the contributors offer a new perspective on Appalachia and its literacy, hoping to counteract essentialist or class-based arguments about the region's people, and reexamine past research in the context of researcher bias.Featuring a mix of traditional scholarship and personal narratives, Rereading Appalachia assesses a number of pressing topics, including the struggles of first-generation college students and the pressure to leave the area in search of higher-quality jobs, prejudice toward the LGBT community, and the emergence of Appalachian and Affrilachian art in urban communities. The volume also offers rich historical perspectives on issues such as the intended and unintended consequences of education activist Cora Wilson Stewart's campaign to promote literacy at the Kentucky Moonlight Schools.A call to arms for those studying the heritage and culture of Appalachia, this timely collection provides fresh perspectives on the region, its people, and their literacy beliefs and practices.

Dominican American author and Pulitzer Prize–winner Junot Díaz has gained international fame for his blended, cross-cultural fiction. Reading Junot Díaz is the first study to focus on his complete body of published works. It explores the totality of his work and provides a concise view of the interconnected and multilayered narrative that weaves throughout Díaz's writings. Christopher González analyzes both the formal and thematic features and discusses the work in the context of speculative and global fiction as well as Caribbean and Latino/a culture and language. Topics such as race, masculinity, migration, and Afro-Latinidad are examined in depth. González provides a synthesis of the prevailing critical studies of Díaz and offers many new insights into his work.

"Mental hygiene" films developed for classroom use touted vigilance, correct behavior, morality, and model citizenship. They also became powerful tools for teaching literacy skills and literacy-based behaviors to young people following the Second World War. In this study, Kelly Ritter offers an extensive theoretical analysis of the alliance of the value systems inherent in mental hygiene films (class-based ideals, democracy, patriotism) with writing education—an alliance that continues today by way of the mass digital technologies used in teaching online. She further details the larger material and cultural forces at work in the production of these films behind the scenes and their effects on education trends. Through her examination of literacy theory, instructional films, policy documents, and textbooks of the late 1940s to mid–1950s, Ritter demonstrates a reliance on pedagogies that emphasize institutional ideologies and correctness over epistemic complexity and de-emphasize the role of the student in his or her own learning process. To Ritter, these practices are sustained in today's pedagogies and media that create a false promise of social uplift through formalized education, instead often resulting in negative material consequences.

During his lifetime, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 - 1898) was recognized as one of the greatest living French poets. He wrote extensively on themes of reality and his desire to turn away from it, marrying form and content in revolutionary ways that departed drastically from the more tightly controlled French tradition. Despite his status as one of the first modernists, much of Mallarmé's radicalism has been lost in translation. Finally, in this new collection by Blake Bronson-Bartlett and Robert Fernandez, the magic and mastery of form and diction, so striking in Mallarmé's French verse, comes to life in English. Drawing from Poésies (1899), Un coup de dés (A Cast of Dice), and the "Livre" (the "Book" - the overarching conceptual work left unfinished at the death of the poet), this collection captures Mallarmé's true linguistic brilliance, bringing the poems into our current history while retaining the music, playfulness, and power of the originals.

This book is about the map of an English county – Hertfordshire – which was published in 1766 by two London map-makers, Andrew Dury and John Andrews.For well over two centuries, from the time of Elizabeth I to the late 18th century, the county was the basic unit for mapping in Britain and the period witnessed several espisodes of comprehensive map making. The map which forms the subject of this book followed on from a large number of previous maps of the county but was greatly superior to them in terms of quality and detail. It was published in a variety of forms, in nine sheets with an additional index map, over a period of 60 years. No other maps of Hertfordshire were produced during the rest of the century, but the Board of Ordnance, later the Ordnance Survey, established in the 1790s, began to survey the Hertfordshire area in 1799, publishing the first maps covering the county between 1805 and 1834. The OS came to dominate map making in Britain but, of all the maps of Hertfordshire, that produced by Dury and Andrews was the first to be surveyed at a sufficiently large scale to really allow those dwelling in the county to visualise their own parish, local topography and even their own house, and its place in the wider landscape. The first section examines the context of the map’s production and its place in cartographic history, and describes the creation of a new, digital version of the map which can be accessed online . The second part describes various ways in which this electronic version can be interrogated, in order to throw important new light on Hertfordshire’s landscape and society, both in the middle decades of the eighteenth century when it was produced, and in more remote periods. The attached DVD contains over a dozen maps which have been derived from the digital version, and which illustrate many of the issues discussed in the text, as well as related material which should likewise be useful to students of landscape history, historical geography and local history.