Saul Bellow is one of the twentieth century's most influential, respected, and honored writers. His novels The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet won the National Book Award, and Humboldt's Gift was awarded the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In addition, his plays garnered popular and critical acclaim, and some were produced on Broadway. Known for his insights into life in a post-Holocaust world, Bellow's explorations of modernity, Jewish identity, and the relationship between art and society have resonated with his readers, but because his writing is not overtly political, his politics have largely been ignored. A Political Companion to Saul Bellow examines the author's novels, essays, short stories, and letters in order to illuminate his evolution from liberal to neoconservative. It investigates Bellow's exploration of the United States as a democratic system, the religious and ideological influences on his work, and his views on race relations, religious identity, and multiculturalism in the academy. Featuring a fascinating conclusion that draws from interviews with Bellow's sons, this accessible companion is an excellent resource for understanding the political thought of one of America's most acclaimed writers.

It is commonly agreed that we live in an age of globalization, but the profound consequences of this development are rarely understood. Usually, globalization is equated with the expansion of economic and financial markets and the proliferation of global networks of communication. In truth, much more is at stake: Traditional concepts of individual and national identity as well as perceived relationships between the self and others are undergoing profound change. Every town has become a potential cosmopolis -- an international city -- affecting the way that people conceptualize the relationship between public order and political practice.In Being in the World, noted political theorist Fred Dallmayr explores the globe's transition from the traditional Westphalian system of states to today's interlocking cosmopolitan network. Drawing upon sacred scriptures as well as the work of ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and more recent scholars such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Raimon Panikkar, this book delves into what Dallmayr calls "being in the world," seen as an aspect of ethical-political engagement. Rather than lamenting current problems, he suggests addressing them through civic education and cosmopolitan citizenship. Dallmayr advocates a politics of the common good, which requires the cultivation of public ethics, open dialogue, and civic responsibility.

Ang Lee (b. 1954) has emerged as one of cinema's most versatile, critically acclaimed, and popular directors. Known for his ability to transcend cultural and stylistic boundaries, Lee has built a diverse oeuvre that includes films about culture clashes and globalization ( Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994, and The Wedding Banquet, 1993), a period drama ( Sense and Sensibility, 1995), a martial arts epic ( Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), a comic book action movie ( Hulk, 2003), and an American western ( Brokeback Mountain, 2005). The Philosophy of Ang Lee draws from both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions to examine the director's works. The first section focuses on Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist themes in his Chinese-language films, and the second examines Western philosophies in his English-language films; but the volume ultimately explores how Lee negotiates all of these traditions, strategically selecting from each in order to creatively address key issues. With interest in this filmmaker and his work increasing around the release of his 3-D magical adventure The Life of Pi (2012), The Philosophy of Ang Lee serves as a timely investigation of the groundbreaking auteur and the many complex philosophical themes that he explores through the medium of motion pictures.

Too many incoming students are fluent in English but unable to discuss the language grammatically. Introductory language courses and textbooks often assume a proficiency and familiarity with grammatical terms that is not possessed by the students. This guide delivers an understanding of English grammar starting from simple concepts and presupposing no background or vocabulary. This book is designed as a textbook and a reference for students beginning a New Testament Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic or Latin course.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

This paper examines the “muscular Christianity” phenomenon in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ and Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 short play, “Today is Friday.”

Annie Finch's Spells brings together her most memorable and striking poems written over forty years. Finch's uniquely mysterious voice moves through the book, revealing insights on the classic themes of love, spirituality, death, nature, and the patterns of time. A feminist and pagan, Finch writes poems as "spells" that bring readers to experience words not just in the mind, but in the body. Celebrated for her extraordinary love and knowledge of poetic craft, over the course of her career Finch has shaped her own innovative and radically traditional aesthetic. Her strange but familiar metrical language decenters the Self, creating a new, more open emotional relationship between ourselves, other people, and the world. Spells displays Finch's virtuosity in a broad range of genres and forms, from lyrics, chants, and narrative poems to performance pieces, poetic drama, and verse translation. The book also includes a number of new and previously unpublished poems, notably her 1980s-era "Lost Poems," experimental work in meter that prefigures postmodern reclamations of poetic form. This wonderfully talented poet gives voice to the female and earth-centered spirituality of our era. Her emotionally eloquent and rhetorically powerful work will echo in the reader's ear long after the book is closed. Check for the online reader's companion at http://spells.site.wesleyan.edu.

A student’s avatar navigates a virtual world and communicates the desires, emotions, and fears of its creator. Yet, how can her writing instructor interpret this form of meaningmaking?Today, multiple modes of communication and information technology are challenging pedagogies in composition and across the disciplines. Writing instructors grapple with incorporating new forms into their curriculums and relating them to established literary practices. Administrators confront the application of new technologies to the restructuring of courses and the classroom itself. Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres examines the possibilities, challenges, and realities of mutimodal composition as an effective means of communication. The chapters view the ways that writing instructors and their students are exploring the spaces where communication occurs, while also asking \u201cwhat else is possible.\u201d The genres of film, audio, photography, graphics, speeches, storyboards, PowerPoint presentations, virtual environments, written works, and others are investigated to discern both their capabilities and limitations. The contributors highlight the responsibility of instructors to guide students in the consideration of their audience and ethical responsibility, while also maintaining the ability to \u201cspeak well.\u201d Additionally, they focus on the need for programmatic changes and a shift in institutional philosophy to close a possible \u201cdigital divide\u201d and remain relevant in digital and global economies. Embracing and advancing multimodal communication is essential to both higher education and students. The contributors therefore call for the examination of how writing programs, faculty, and administrators are responding to change, and how the many purposes writing serves can effectively converge within composition curricula.

Phallos is a 2004 novel by the acclaimed novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany. Taking the form of a gay pornographic novella, with the explicit sex omitted, Phallos is set during the reign of the second-century Roman emperor Hadrian, and circles around the historical account of the murder of the emperor's favorite, Antinous. The story moves from Syracuse to Egypt, from the Pillars of Hercules to Rome, from Athens to Byzantium, and back. Young Neoptolomus searches after the stolen phallus of the nameless god of Hermopolis, crafted of gold and encrusted with jewels, within which are reputedly the ancient secrets of science and society that will lead to power, knowledge, and wealth. Vivid and clever, the original novella has been expanded by nearly a third. Appended to the text are an afterword by Robert F. Reid-Pharr and three astute speculative essays by Steven Shaviro, Kenneth R. James, and Darieck Scott.

In Jan Beatty’s fourth collection, The Switching/Yard, she takes us through the ravaged landscape of the American West. In unflinching lines of burning lyric and relentless narrative, she forges the constructed body into movement. What is still stereotyped as the romantic journey—now becomes as scarred as the Rust Belt. What lives in our collective unconscious as the Golden West becomes almost surreal, as these poems snap that vision in half with extended description of ghost explorers.We see the open truck cab, the farm workers on the corner waiting for pick-up; we see the speaker returning west to find the long-abandoned story of the birthfather. There is no stable landscape here except the horizontal action of moving through. Landscape becomes story. In this extended tale of the idea of family, we find stand-ins for the father in the form of a hit man, Jim Morrison, and ultimately the unyielding road takes the place of the body. The Switching/Yard is at once the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where gender routinely shifts and switches, and the actual switching yard of the trains that run the inevitable tracks of this book.

This book is the first attempt to apply formal pragmatics to Judaic studies as a discipline under the auspices of cultural studies, reconstructing the pragmatic approach in Judaism and defining some of the pragmatic limits assumed in the Torah. It is a continuation of previous work considering Judaic reasoning from the standpoint of analytic philosophy and logic. The present volume aims to explicate the Judaic pragmatic point of view with an emphasis on logic, political studies, ethics, and speech act theory.

Called "one of our brightest cultural commentators" by Publishers Weekly, Kit Reed draws from life-with a difference. This new collection brings together thirty-four of her strong, original stories, from early classics like "The Wait" and "Winter" to six never-before-collected short stories, including "The Legend of Troop 13" and "Wherein We Enter the Museum." An early favorite, "Automatic Tiger," is the first in a series of Reed's stories about animals. There's a monkey who grinds out bestsellers with the help of a "creative writing" app. Her uncanny black dog can enter a crowded room and sit down at the feet of the next man to die. Her characters confront war in various arenas: mother/daughter battles, the war of the sexes, the struggles of men scarred by war. Kit Reed's self-described "transgenred" fiction is confirmation of an "extraordinary talent" (The Financial Times). The range and complexity of her work speaks for itself in The Story Until Now.

Daisy Fried’s third book of poetry is a book of unsettling, unsettled Americans. Fried finds her Americans everywhere, watching Henry Kissinger leave the Louvre, trapped on a Tiber bridge by a crowd of neo-fascist thugs, yearning outside a car detailing garage for a car lit underneath by neon lavender, riding the train with Princeton seniors who have been rejected by recession-bound Wall Street, feeding stray cats drunk at midnight, bitching at her mother in the labor room, shopping with wide-bodied hunters for deer-dismembering band saws in the world’s largest supplier of seasonal camouflage, cursing her cell phone and husband at eighty-five miles an hour, hiding behind the mask of an advice column to proclaim Charles Bukowski \u201cAmerica’s greatest poetess.\u201d There is nothing like this book, because there is nothing in it but America. No comfort, no consolation, no life-affirming pats on the back, no despair about God, no fear or acceptance of death, no irrational exuberance, no guilt or weariness, no misery even in the middle of personal and political crisis. Plenty of humor and plenty of seriousness. Joy. And a new kind of poetry: not nice, but rich and real.

Fifteen papers present the results of new research into various aspects of material culture and historical archaeology that reflect culture, trade and social interaction shared by Britain and Colonial America during the Tudor and Stuart periods. Recurrent themes include the use, significance and, in some cases, trade in specific types of pottery, including the ubiquitous stoneware flasks or canteens for sailors and solders on both sides of the Atlantic, and commodities such as wine and copper objects; the architectural history of manor houses and archaeology of plantations; aspects of the historical archaeology of Jamestown and Martins Hundred; the role of specific individuals in the development of Tudor-Stuart life and our new understand of a London destroyed the Great Fire based on Noel Humes rescue digs in a London destroyed by the Blitz. Overall the papers reflect the wide-ranging interests of Ivor Noël Hume, to whom the volume is dedicated.

This anthology brings to English-language readers the riches of the Judaeo-Persian literary tradition produced by the Jewish community of Iran between the eighth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the translations were prepared specifically for this anthology from unpublished manuscripts. Extensive notes accompany each selection to clarify its meaning in Jewish and Islamic history and legend.

Drunk on the sun and the sea, Kazim Ali's new poems swoop linguistically but ground themselves vividly in the daily and real. Both imprisoned by endlessness and dependent on it for nurturing and care, in Sky Ward Ali goes further than ever before in sounding out the spaces between music and silence, between sky and ocean, between human and eternal. "Daily I wish stitched here to live," moans his Prometheus, wondering what release from familiar bondage might actually portend. "So long liberation," his Icarus sings as he plummets from the sky with desperation and grace, ready to unfeather and plunge into the everything-new. Whether in the extended poem-prayer to Alice Coltrane or in the "deleted scenes" and "alternate endings" to his critically acclaimed volume Bright Felon, or in the spirit-infused and multi-faceted lyrics he has become known for, Ali once again reinvents possibilities for the personal lyric and narrative.