Wesleyan University Press

Since its inception in 1957, Wesleyan University Press has published more than 250 titles within its internationally renowned poetry series, collecting four Pulitzer prizes, a Bollingen, and two National Book Awards in that one series alone. Wesleyan University Press also aspire to maintain and develop their rigorous and multifaceted publishing program that serves the academic and intellectual life of the University; an editorial program that focuses on the publication of poetry, music, dance, science fiction, film-TV, and Connecticut history and culture.

Shadow Distance Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 372
ISBN: 9780819562814
Pub Date: 01 Sep 1994
Description:
Author of The Heirs of Columbus, Hotline Healers, Interior Landscapes, Crossbloods, and numerous other works, Gerald Vizenor is one of the century's most important and prolific Native American writers. Drawing on the best work of an acclaimed career, Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader reveals the wide range of his imagination and the evolution of his central themes.This compelling collection includes not only selections from Vizenor's innovative fiction, but also poetry, autobiography, essays, journalism, and the previously unpublished screenplay "Harold of Orange," winner of the Film-in-the-Cities national screenwriting competition.
Hinge & Sign Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 237
ISBN: 9780819512161
Pub Date: 09 May 1994
Description:
A renowned poet’s artful collection is a striking body of work
Visual Culture Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 461
ISBN: 9780819562678
Pub Date: 01 May 1994
Illustrations: 124 illus.
Description:
"We can no longer see, much less teach, transhistorical truths, timeless works of art, and unchanging critical criteria without a highly developed sense of irony about the grand narratives of the past," declare the editors, who also coedited Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1990). The field of art history is not unique in finding itself challenged and enlarged by cultural debates over issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Visual Culture assembles some of the foremost scholars of cultural studies and art history to explore new critical approaches to a history of representation seen as something different from a history of art.
Black Noise Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 257
ISBN: 9780819562753
Pub Date: 29 Apr 1994
Illustrations: 10 illus. 4 figs. Map.
Description:
From its beginnings in hip hop culture, the dense rhythms and aggressive lyrics of rap music have made it a provocative fixture on the American cultural landscape. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it.Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies.
Rider Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 122
ISBN: 9780819512178
Pub Date: 09 Apr 1994
Illustrations: 1 illus.
Description:
Mark Rudman - poet, essayist, translator, and teacher - has consistently pursued questions of human relationship and identity, and in Rider he takes the poetry of autobiography and confessional to a new plane. In a polyphonic narrative that combines verse with lyrical prose and often humorous dialogue, Rudman examines his own coming-of-age through the lens of his relationships with his grandfather, father, step-father, and son. These memories emerge against the background of a family history anchored in the traditions of Judaism and the culture of the diaspora.
Dissonant Identities Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780819562760
Pub Date: 01 Apr 1994
Illustrations: 9 illus. Map.
Description:
Music of the bars and clubs of Austin, Texas has long been recognized as defining one of a dozen or more musical "scenes" across the country. In Dissonant Identities, Barry Shank, himself a musician who played and lived in the Texas capital, studies the history of its popular music, its cultural and economic context, and also the broader ramifications of that music as a signifying practice capable of transforming identities.While his focus is primarily on progressive country and rock, Shank also writes about traditional country, blues, rock, disco, ethnic, and folk musics.
Tug Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 64
ISBN: 9780819512154
Pub Date: 01 Apr 1994
Illustrations: 5 illus.
Description:
Stephen Todd Booker, an inmate on Florida's death row, writes piercingly of incarceration. But he also sings, in a voice at once jagged and polished, of racism in Brooklyn and the South and of growing up black in 20th-century America, as he examines his life experience with metaphors that test the limits of language.
Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 428
ISBN: 9780819562685
Pub Date: 28 Mar 1994
Illustrations: 20 illus. 20 figs.
Description:
Drawing of the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpsichore in Sneakers, Sally Banes's Writing Dancing documents the background and developments of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements. With a sure grasp of shifting cultural dynamics, Banes shows how postmodern dance is integrally connected to other oppositional, often marginalized strands of dance culture, and considers how certain kinds of dance move from the margins to the mainstream.Banes begins by considering the act of dance criticism itself, exploring its modes, methods, and underlying assumptions, and examining the work of other critics.

The Whole Motion

Format: Paperback
Pages: 494
ISBN: 9780819512185
Pub Date: 01 Mar 1994
Description:
For over three decades, James Dickey has been one of the nation's most important poets and a prominent man of letters. The Whole Motion collects his poetic oeuvre into a single volume: 235 poems from his first book, Into the Stone (1960), to The Eagle's Mile (1990), along with previously uncollected poems and unpublished "apprentice" works.

The Wesleyan Tradition

Format: Paperback
Pages: 316
ISBN: 9780819512291
Pub Date: 28 Jan 1994
Description:
Since issuing its first volumes in 1959, the Wesleyan poetry program has challenged the reigning aesthetic of the time and profoundly influenced the development of American poetry. One of the country's oldest programs, its greatest achievement has been the publication of early works by yet undiscovered poetry who have since become major awarded Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes, National Book Awards, and many other honors. At a time when other programs are being phased out, Wesleyan takes this opportunity to celebrate its distinguished history and reaffirm its commitment to poetry with publication of The Wesleyan Tradition.
Against the Evidence Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 196
ISBN: 9780819512147
Pub Date: 01 Jan 1994
Description:
For over half a century, David Ignatow has crafted spare, plain, haunting poetry pf working life, urban images, and dark humor. The poetic heir of Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Ignatow is characteristically concerned with human mortality and human alienation in the world: the world as it is, defined by suffering and despair, yet at crucial times redeemed by cosmic vision and shared lives. His development as a poet is chronicled in Against the Evidence, title of the poem in part quoted above and meant by Ignatow as the metaphor for the whole body of his work.
Deeds of Utmost Kindness Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 86
ISBN: 9780819512123
Pub Date: 01 Jan 1994
Description:
A haunting and peculiar travelogue, Deeds of the Utmost Kindness employs forms as diverse as haiku and prose poetry in settings that range from Japan to the rural Ozarks to contemporary Moscow. The compelling strangeness of the poems' precise details exposes varied rhythms of thought and illustrated how different logics work in the metaphoric structures of changing places . Yet behind the uneasy sense of dislocation felt by the constant traveler lies the personal, essentially moral, voice of the poet as observer.
Upside Your Head! Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 212
ISBN: 9780819562876
Pub Date: 19 Nov 1993
Illustrations: 78 illus. Fig.
Description:
Legendary jazzman Johnny Otis has spent a lifetime at the center of L.A.'s black music scene as a composer, performer, producer, d.
Bright Existence Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780819512079
Pub Date: 01 Oct 1993
Description:
The poems in Brenda Hillman's new collection, a companion volume to her recent Death Tratates, offer a dynamic vision of a universe founded on the tensions between light and dark , existence and non-existence, male and female, spirit and matter. Informed in part by Gnostic concepts of the separate soul in search of its divine origins ("spirit held by matter"). This dualistic vision is cast in contemporary terms and seeks resolution of these tensions through acceptance.
Broken English Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 170
ISBN: 9780819562722
Pub Date: 01 Aug 1993
Illustrations: 31 illus. 2 figs.
Description:
"When I call poetry a form of partiality," writes Heather McHugh, "I mean its economies operate by powers of intimation: glimmering and glints, rather than exhaustible sums. It is a broken language from the beginning, brimming with non-words: all that white welled up to keep the line from surrendering to the margin; all that quiet, to keep the musics marked." In Broken English, McHugh applies her poetic sensibility and formidable critical insight to topics ranging from the poetry of Valéry and Rilke to ancient Greek drama and Yoruba folk songs, offering intense, passionate, highly personal readings that are informed and unified by her concern for the relationships among language, culture, and poetry.
Roll over Beethoven Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 291
ISBN: 9780819562623
Pub Date: 21 May 1993
Description:
The question of culture has become central for a new generation of scholars raised in a world of television and mass production. At the same time debates about culture have become a point of reference for criticism of current trends in academia and society, variously defended or derided on the grounds of "multiculturalism," "canonicity," and political correctness." In his re-examination off these debates, Stanley Aronowitz traces the history of the cultural issue - in both its British and American manifestations - and relates it to the contemporary rethinking of the nature of knowledge and culture.