Service Alert
Website maintenance April 24 10pm ET
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
Showing 19761 - 19780 of 31691 items
By Caroline Weber. 2018
From the author of the acclaimed Queen of Fashion--a brilliant look at the glittering world of turn-of-the-century Paris through the…
first in-depth study of the three women Proust used to create his supreme fictional character, the Duchesse de Guermantes.Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Adhéaume de Chevigné; and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, the Comtesse Greffulhe--these were the three superstars of fin-de-siècle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber says, "transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style." All well but unhappily married, these women sought freedom and fulfillment by reinventing themselves, between the 1870s and 1890s, as icons. At their fabled salons, they inspired the creativity of several generations of writers, visual artists, composers, designers, and journalists. Against a rich historical backdrop, Weber takes the reader into these women's daily lives of masked balls, hunts, dinners, court visits, nights at the opera or theater. But we see as well the loneliness, rigid social rules, and loveless, arranged marriages that constricted these women's lives. Proust, as a twenty-year-old law student in 1892, would worship them from afar, and later meet them and create his celebrated composite character for The Remembrance of Things Past.By C. S. Lewis. 1982
With his trademark warmth and wit, Lewis uses fiction as a vehicle for revelation.Includes: • The Screwtape Letters • The…
Great Divorce • Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer • The Pilgrim’s Regress • Out of the Silent Planet • Perelandra • That Hideous Strength • The Dark Tower • Till We Have FacesBy Sonya Freeman Loftis. 2015
A disorder that is only just beginning to find a place in disability studies and activism, autism remains in large…
part a mystery, giving rise to both fear and fascination. Sonya Freeman Loftis's groundbreaking study examines literary representations of autism or autistic behavior to discover what impact they have had on cultural stereotypes, autistic culture, and the identity politics of autism. Imagining Autism looks at fictional characters (and an author or two) widely understood as autistic, ranging from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Harper Lee's Boo Radley to Mark Haddon's boy detective Christopher Boone and Steig Larsson's Lisbeth Salander. The silent figure trapped inside himself, the savant made famous by his other-worldly intellect, the brilliant detective linked to the criminal mastermind by their common neurology--these characters become protean symbols, stand-ins for the chaotic forces of inspiration, contagion, and disorder. They are also part of the imagined lives of the autistic, argues Loftis, sometimes for good, sometimes threatening to undermine self-identity and the activism of the autistic community.By Robert Stevenson.
By Max Boot. 2018
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In chronicling the adventurous life of legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, The Road Not Taken…
definitively reframes our understanding of the Vietnam War. In this epic biography of Edward Lansdale (1908– 1987), the man said to be the fictional model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, best-selling historian Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneered a “hearts and mind” diplomacy, first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America’s giant military bureaucracy, steered by elitist generals and blueblood diplomats who favored troop build-ups and napalm bombs over winning the trust of the people. Through dozens of interviews and access to neverbefore-seen documents—including long-hidden love letters—Boot recasts this cautionary American story, tracing the bold rise and the crashing fall of the roguish “T. E. Lawrence of Asia” from the battle of Dien Bien Phu to the humiliating American evacuation in 1975. Bringing a tragic complexity to this so-called “ugly American,” this “engrossing biography” (Karl Marlantes) rescues Lansdale from historical ignominy and suggests that Vietnam could have been different had we only listened. With reverberations that continue to play out in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Road Not Taken is a biography of profound historical consequence.By Jay T Dolmage. 2017
Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by…
higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.By Michael Greaney. 2018
Sleep and the Novel is a study of representations of the sleeping body in fiction from 1800 to the present…
day which traces the ways in which novelists have engaged with this universal, indispensable -- but seemingly nondescript -- region of human experience. Covering the narrativization of sleep in Austen, the politicization of sleep in Dickens, the queering of sleep in Goncharov, the aestheticization of sleep in Proust, and the medicalization of sleep in contemporary fiction, it examines the ways in which novelists envision the figure of the sleeper, the meanings they discover in human sleep, and the values they attach to it. It argues that literary fiction harbours, on its margins, a “sleeping partner”, one that we can nickname the Schlafroman or “sleep-novel”, whose quiet absorption in the wordlessness and passivity of human slumber subtly complicates the imperatives of self-awareness and purposive action that traditionally govern the novel.By Ellis Henican, Luis Carlos Montalvan. 2017
Following the success of his New York Times bestseller, Until Tuesday, Iraq War veteran Luis Carlos Montalván took to the…
road with his beloved Golden Retriever service dog, Tuesday, to advocate for America's wounded warriors and for each other. Luis's first book sparked a national conversation about service dogs and PTSD. In this spectacular new memoir, he and Tuesday brought their healing mission to the next level, showing how these beautifully trained animals can assist soldiers, veterans, and many others with disabilities. They rescued a forgotten Tuskegee airman, battled obstinate VA bureaucrats, and provided solace to troubled war heroes coast-to-coast. Everywhere these two went, they highlighted the miraculous talents of service dogs. As Luis and Tuesday celebrated exhilarating victories, a grave obstacle threatened to derail their life-saving campaign: though Luis had made great progress battling his own PTSD, his physical wounds left him wheelchair-bound. He was forced to decide whether to amputate his leg and carry on with a bionic prosthesis. Even as he struggled with this dramatic decision, he and ten-year-old Tuesday prepared to welcome a female Golden Retriever puppy to their all-male pack. As this stirring memoir neared publication, Luis Montalván took his own life in December 2016, another terrible tragedy of the invisible wounds of war. This book is his last letter of love to his best friend, Tuesday, and to veterans, readers, friends, and fellow dog lovers everywhere. Never more timely than now, TUESDAY'S PROMISE is an inspiring story of love, service, teamwork, and the remarkable bond between humans and canines.By Edward Butscher. 2003
This is the first full-length biography of Sylvia Plath, whose suicide in made her a misinterpreted cause celebre and catapulted…
her into the ranks of the major confessional voices of her generation.By Stephen Greenblatt. 2004
La biografía definitiva del dramaturgo más importante de todos los tiempos. Son muchos los que consideran a William Shakespeare el…
mejor escritor de todos los tiempos por su ingenio, la universalidad de sus conflictos, la profundidad de los personajes, la revolución sin precedentes que supuso su obra... Pocos autores han marcado un antes y un después de forma tan incuestionable. Sin embargo, casi nada se sabe con certeza de su vida. Durante siglos se han sucedido especulaciones de todo tipo, sin que ninguna arrojara luz convincente sobre el gran misterio. Stephen Greenblatt, uno de los mayores expertos en Shakespeare, propone aquí una original hipótesis arropándose en la obra misma del dramaturgo y en la de sus coetáneos. De un modo similar a la manera en que Hamlet observaba la efigie de su padre («Una combinación y una forma sin duda / en las que cada dios parece / haber puesto su sello / para mostrar al mundo el espejo de un hombre»), así mismo es este libro mucho más que una biografía. También es un riguroso estudio de los escritos de Shakespeare y, sobre todo, un magnífico retrato de la Inglaterra isabelina. Reseñas:«Asombrosamente bueno. Es el libro más inteligente y sofisticado, y también el estudio más colosalmente apasionado que he leído jamás sobre la vida y obra de Shakespeare.»Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker «Un libro de lectura compulsiva, original como pocos. Greenblatt ha conducido la investigación más empática posible sobre el modo en que las experiencias vitales de Shakespeare penetraron en sus obras.»Stanley Wells «Tan absorbente, lúcido y coherente que su llegada no es solo bienvenida sino motivo de celebración.»Dan Cryer, Newsday «Elocuentemente escrito, ricamente detallado y revelador desde el primero hasta el último capítulo [...]. Es inevitable que logre un lugar entre los estudios esenciales de losmejoresescritores.»William E. Cain, Boston Sunday Globe «Una magnífica hazaña.»Denis Donoghue «Una deslumbrante e ingeniosa biografía.»Richard Lacayo, Time «Greenblatt evoca con concisión y vívidamente el mundo isabelino.»Mitchiko Kakutami, The New York TimesBy Vivian Liska. 2017
InGerman-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife,Vivian Liska innovatively focuses on the changing form, fate and function of messianism, law, exile, election,…
remembrance, and the transmission of tradition itself in three different temporal and intellectual frameworks: German-Jewish modernism, postmodernism, and the current period. Highlighting these elements of theJewish tradition in the works of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan, Liska reflects on dialogues and conversations between themandonthereception of their work.She shows how this Jewish dimension of their writings is transformed, but remains significant in the theories of Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida and how it is appropriated, dismissed or denied by some of the most acclaimed thinkers at the turn of the twenty-first century such as Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj i ek, and Alain Badiou.By María Scherer, Nacho Lozano. 2016
Cómico y trágico a la vez, El priista que llevamos dentro recuerda una sentencia que se ha tratado en más…
de un discurso, incluso por quienes niegan la cruz de su parroquia: ¿tenemos un priista interior?María Scherer Ibarra y Nacho Lozano, destacados periodistas de la fuente política, comparten en este libro una reflexión para todos los tiempos y el resultado de desenmascarar un rasgo que nos afecta a todos. Si la modernidad en México nació con el final de la Revolución , sería prudente pensar que heredamos algo de aquellos que nos formaron. Pero queda pendiente una pregunta después de toda una historia sin demasiados cambios: ¿tenemos una huella genética que se dejó alcanzar por una cultura priista? Una conclusión es segura: todo cabe en un priista sabiéndolo acomodar."¿Qué es la moral? Un árbol que da moras""Un político pobre es un pobre político""Ni los veo ni los oigo""El que no transa no avanza"By J. Jesús Esquivel. 2016
J. Jesús Esquivel, autor de La D.E.A. en México, ha conseguido develar los entresijos del narcotráfico en Estados Unidos al…
sumergirse en la lectura de incontables expedientes judiciales, además de entrevistar a informantes clave.De San Francisco a Nueva York y de la línea divisoria hasta Chicago, Los narcos gringos describe con minucioso detalle los ingeniosos trucos de que se valen los brokers, los artífices del tráfico de estupefacientes, para llevar sus mercancías al interior de la Unión Americana y lavar el producto de su labor ilícita que hacen llegar a los cárteles mexicanos, el verdadero poder de la ecuación.A lo largo de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos, una de las más extensas y complejas del mundo, tiene lugar uno de los comercios más perniciosos, aunque con implicaciones desiguales para una y otra nación: mientras de un lado se queda la sangre y la violencia, en el otro imperan la logística, los prejuicios raciales y la insaciable avidez de los consumidores; todo envuelto por un manto de corrupción .Relatos y retratos insólitos -algunos dignos de llegar a las pantallas cinematográficas, como el del inolvidable Don Henry Ford Jr.- desfilan por estas páginas para cuestionar mitos como la despenalización y el perdón presidencial a delincuentes, presentando en cambio un panorama demoledor sobre la adicción y el alcance de los intereses que buscan satisfacerla. Los narcos gringos no usan camisas de seda italiana o botas de pieles de animales exóticos, tampoco gruesas cadenas de oro y mucho menos relojes caros con incrustaciones de diamantes. El prototipo del narco gringo es una persona común y corriente que viste un pantalón de mezclilla, camisa o camiseta, que no usa anillos ni conduce autos caros.By Zack Furness, Jeremy Withers, Daniel P. Shea. 2016
Bicycles have more cultural identities than many realize, functioning not only as literal vehicles in a text but also as…
“vehicles” for that text’s themes, ideas, and critiques. In the late nineteenth century the bicycle was seen as a way for the wealthy urban elite to reconnect with nature and for women to gain a measure of personal freedom, while during World War II it became a utilitarian tool of the French Resistance and in 1970s China stood for wealth and modernization. Lately it has functioned variously as the favored ideological steed of environmentalists, a means of community bonding and aesthetic self-expression in hip hop, and the ride of choice for bike messenger–idolizing urban hipsters. Culture on Two Wheels analyzes the shifting cultural significance of the bicycle by examining its appearances in literary, musical, and cinematic works spanning three continents and more than 125 years of history. Bringing together essays by a variety of cyclists and scholars with myriad angles of approach, this collection highlights the bicycle’s flexibility as a signifier and analyzes the appearance of bicycles in canonical and well-known texts such as Samuel Beckett’s modernist novel Molloy, the Oscar-winning film Breaking Away, and various Stephen King novels and stories, as well as in lesser-known but equally significant texts, such as the celebrated Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Sacrifice and Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s nineteenth-century travelogue A Canterbury Pilgrimage, the latter of which traces the route of Chaucer’s pilgrims via bicycle. Listen to an interview with the author.By Harry Berger. 2000
The Absence of Grace is a study of male fantasy, representation anxiety, and narratorial authority in two sixteenth-century books, Baldassare…
Castiglione's Il libro del Cortegiano (1528) and Giovanni Della Casa's Galateo (1558). The interpretive method is a form of close reading the author describes as reconstructed old New Criticism, that is, close reading conditioned by an interest in and analysis of the historical changes reflected in the text. The book focuses on the way the Courtier and Galateo cope with and represent the interaction between changes of elite culture and the changing construction of masculine identity in early modern Europe. More specifically, it connects questions of male fantasy and masculine identity to questions about the authority and reliability of narrators, and shows how these questions surface in narratorial attitudes toward socioeconomic rank or class, political power, and gender. The book is in three parts. Part One examines a distinction and correlation the Courtier establishes between two key terms, (1) sprezzatura, defined as a behavioral skill intended to simulate the attributes of (2) grazia, understood as the grace and privileges of noble birth. Because sprezzatura is negatively conceptualized as the absence of grace it generates anxiety and suspicion in performers and observers alike. In order to suggest how the binary opposition between these terms affected the discourse of manners, the author singles out the titular episode of Galateo, an anecdote about table manners, which he reads closely and then sets in its historical perspective. Part Two takes up the question of sprezzatura in the gender debate that develops in Book 3 of the Courtier, and Part Three explores in detail the characterization of the two narrators in the Courtier and Galateo, who are represented as unreliable and an object of parody or critique.By Judith Scherer Herz. 2017
This collection of poems and essays by both poets and scholars explores how John Donne's writing has entered into the…
language, the imagination, and the navigation of erotic and spiritual desires and experiences of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. The chapters chart a winding path from a description of the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project at Fordham University to an encounter with the Holy Sonnets to a set of modern holy sonnets and then through the work of a poet who used Donne's Devotions on Emergent Occasions to chart his own dying. There are further poems on sickness and recovery, an essay on Donne and disease that brings in the work of an Australian poet, and several chapters of poems with various Donnean echoes. Of the final four chapters, one places Donne in relation to another poet and one to the Psalms, followed by two chapters on Donne's speech figures and his poetics.By Mary A. Renda. 1995
The U.S. invasion of Haiti in July 1915 marked the start of a military occupation that lasted for nineteen years--and…
fed an American fascination with Haiti that flourished even longer. Exploring the cultural dimensions of U.S. contact with Haiti during the occupation and its aftermath, Mary Renda shows that what Americans thought and wrote about Haiti during those years contributed in crucial and unexpected ways to an emerging culture of U.S. imperialism.At the heart of this emerging culture, Renda argues, was American paternalism, which saw Haitians as wards of the United States. She explores the ways in which diverse Americans--including activists, intellectuals, artists, missionaries, marines, and politicians--responded to paternalist constructs, shaping new versions of American culture along the way. Her analysis draws on a rich record of U.S. discourses on Haiti, including the writings of policymakers; the diaries, letters, songs, and memoirs of marines stationed in Haiti; and literary works by such writers as Eugene O'Neill, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston.Pathbreaking and provocative, Taking Haiti illuminates the complex interplay between culture and acts of violence in the making of the American empire.As the first successful revolution emanating from a slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution remains an inspired site of investigation for…
a remarkable range of artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora. In The Black Radical Tragic, Jeremy Matthew Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Black Radical Tragic explores work from Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, Edouard Glissant, Malcolm X, and others, ultimately enacting a speculative encounter between Bertolt Brecht and C.L.R. James to reconsider the relationship between tragedy and revolution. In its grand refusal to forget, The Black Radical Tragic demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution has influenced the ideas of freedom and self-determination that have propelled Black radical struggles throughout the modern era.By Santiago Gamboa. 2014
Gracias al Premio Internacional Rubén BonifazNuño, en la categoría de ensayo, el filólogo nar radorde estas pág inas puede comprar…
su casa. Después detoda una vida de desearla, de obser varla, de acercar sea sus paredes de piedra y ladrillo rojo para descifrar elenigma de su atracción, logra por fin saberla suya, yen el momento en el que franquea el umbral comosu dueño, reconoce en ella su destino, su lugar en elmundo, el espacio a la medida de sus gustos y de suconcepción de la vida.La instalación en esta vieja casona bogotana es unproceso paciente y, más que físico, reflexivo y memorístico.Pues cada r incón, la madera de los pisos, losbaños, el comedor, la vajilla, la biblioteca, las habitaciones,la mansarda, incluso el bar rio entrevisto por lasventanas, dan pie a un viaje fascinante por la vida delprotagonista. Conocemos de su existencia itineranteen compañía de su tía, sus preocupaciones intelectuales,su amor por los libros y la lengua, sus ricas experiencias sexuales, su descubrimiento del lado oscurode las ciudades, así como las estelas de una remotatragedia que lo persigue desde la niñez.By Anne Gisleson. 2017
Recommended Summer Reading -- Louise Erdrich, New York TimesA memoir of friendship and literature chronicling a search for meaning and…
comfort in great books, and a beautiful path out of griefAnne Gisleson had lost her twin sisters, had been forced to flee her home during Hurricane Katrina, and had witnessed cancer take her beloved father. Before she met her husband, Brad, he had suffered his own trauma, losing his partner and the mother of his son to cancer in her young thirties. "How do we keep moving forward," Anne asks, "amid all this loss and threat?" The answer: "We do it together." Anne and Brad, in the midst of forging their happiness, found that their friends had been suffering their own losses and crises as well: loved ones gone, rocky marriages, tricky childrearing, jobs lost or gained, financial insecurities or unexpected windfalls. Together these resilient New Orleanians formed what they called the Existential Crisis Reading Group, jokingly dubbed "The Futilitarians." From Epicurus to Tolstoy, from Cheever to Amis to Lispector, each month they read and talked about identity, parenting, love, mortality, and life in post-Katrina New Orleans, gatherings that increasingly fortified Anne and helped her blaze a trail out of her well-worn grief. Written with wisdom, soul, and a playful sense of humor, The Futilitarians is a guide to living curiously and fully, and a testament to the way that even from the toughest soil of sorrow, beauty and wonder can bloom.