Creativity and the Poetic Mind mingles the voices of well-known writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Donald Hall, John Koethe, Marge Piercy, and Robert Pinsky with newer voices, and includes engaging excerpts from interviews with thirty-eight American poets. Within a sustained argument about creative states of mind, this book innovatively presents and explores the technique of -going to the place- as more reliable in writing poetry than waiting for -inspiration-. It explains why poets frequently believe that talking about their own poetry may damage their creativity and why, for centuries,...

In Defense of Partisan Criticism is a far-reaching exploration of the legal, philosophical, and rhetorical basis for understanding social justice in the United States. Through a thoughtful investigation of key political, social, and legal events in the history of the United States, Omar Swartz develops a compelling argument for engaged political scholarship by American academics, and offers readers a critical understanding of the place of race and class in American cultural history. Central to this understanding is an awareness of the -communication imagination- the power of citizens...

Education and the Great Depression: Lessons from a Global History examines the history of schools in terms of pedagogies, curricula, policies, and practices at the point of intersection with worldwide patterns of economic crisis, political instability, and social transformation. Examining the Great Depression in the historical contexts of Egypt, Turkey, Germany, Brazil, and New Zealand and in the regional contexts of the United States, including Virginia, New York City, Cleveland, Chicago, and South Carolina, this collection broadens our understanding of the scope of this crisis while...

Black Heart is a provocative and polemical critique of African American literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Through a series of sharp and insightful essays on a wide range of critical thinkers, Phillip M. Richards traces what he sees as an erosion of moral reflection in African American literary culture a process that has left contemporary black academic criticism socially, politically, and culturally hollow. Exploring the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Michael Dyson, Karla Holloway and others, Black Heart sets forth the rhetorical strategies of...

Designed as a reading guide, this book provides a three-tiered approach to the literary fabric of Cervantes masterpiece: story, narrators, characters, style and structure. Its three major divisions The Exemplary Story, The Quixotic Fiction, The Mythical Don Quixote, trace and analyze episode by episode the hero s transformation from a clinical case of literary insanity and chivalric folly, through the artifice of interlocking fictions that sustain his rise to mock in Part I, to mythical status as redemptive hero of social satire in Part II."

Cyberspaces of Their Own interrogates the social and spatial relations of the rapidly expanding virtual terrain of media fandom. For the first time, issues of identity, community and space are brought together in this in-depth ethnographic study of two female internet communities. Members are fans of the American television series The X-Files and the Canadian series Due South. Forging links between media, cultural and internet studies, this book examines negotiations of gender, class, sexuality and nationality in making meaning out of a television show, producing fiction...

Given the rapidly growing presence of girls online, serious academic inquiry into the relationship between girls and the Internet is imperative. Girl Wide Web is an innovative collection of cutting-edge research exploring a wide sweep of issues related to the ways adolescent girls interact with the Internet. Employing a range of methodologies and theoretical perspectives primarily within cultural studies, the authors examine a variety of topics from instant messaging and web-diaries to online fan communities and Internet advertising that targets young girls. Taken together, these...

Neoplatonic Aesthetics: Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts explores the idea of a Neoplatonic aesthetic, a philosophy of the arts based on the writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists principally Plotinus, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Nicolas Cusanus, and Marsilio Ficino and more contemporary philosophers Stephen MacKenna, Iris Murdoch, Denman Ross, Jacques Derrida, and Hans Georg Gadamer. This book examines the artistic production of figures such as Gioseffe Zarlino, Fra Angelico, Leon Battista Alberti, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Giorgio Vasari, and it formulates...

Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophies & the Visual Arts examines philosophical structures of Plato in their structural, spatial, and architectonic implications. It examines elements of Plato s philosophical systems in relation to other philosophical systems, including those of Anaximander, Plotinus, Proclus, Nicolas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. It also examines Plato s philosophy in relation to architectonic conceptions in the arts, including the work of Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca in the Renaissance, Paul...