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Biblio-file

Biblio-file presents a revolving selection of new books of interest to humanities scholars.  Every two weeks, the front page of the Townsend Humanities Lab will feature nine titles, including professors' picks, award winners, books in the news, and works by Berkeley faculty.

Each month, a special edition of the Biblio-file will be dedicated to the recommendations of authors featured in Berkeley Books, a THL initiative highlighting new scholarship by Berkeley faculty and members of the campus community. 

Read a good book lately? We're always interested in hearing about what you've read recently that would be of interest to other scholars. Send us a note here.

2013/05/02

"At a time when the emotions, no matter how differently construed, are regularly celebrated for the knowledge and agency they are supposed to afford, Cameron’s book presents a salutary counterpoint. In a series of powerful essays, she explores how a surprising cluster of writers, from Emerson and Melville to William Empson and Simone Weil, aspires to emotion-cancelling impersonality. My favorite chapter explains why the Puritan author Jonathan Edwards turned against his own religious enthusiasm and encouraged his readers to 'think of the same that the sleeping rocks dream of.'"

"Published in English only a year after the equally important Specters of Marx, The Politics of Friendship develops two crucial concepts (passive decision and teleiopoesis) that align Derrida with the activist formalism of recent reading practices emphasizing the agency of emotions. To my knowledge, it is also the only text of Derrida’s to engage Blake. Although his remarks on the poet are brief, they incisively identify Blake as a forerunner of the deconstructive Marx he is eager to promote."

"Best known for its defense of academic freedom, Conflict of the Faculties (1798) also includes a short essay from 1795 that responds directly to the French Revolution. There Kant argues that the revolution’s transformational power lies not with those agents participating directly in political events but in the response of nonparticipant spectators at a distance, those whose engaged but detached attitude (much like his own) is characterized by 'a wishful participation bordering on enthusiasm.' Kant’s belief in the revolutionary role of the spectator-intellectual, combined with h

"Makdisi’s book is the best on Blake since the flourishing of poststructuralist criticism in the 1980s. Equally adept at reconstructing the popular politics of the 1790s and theorizing Blake’s proto-Marxist understanding of that politics, Makdisi brilliantly explicates Blake’s critique of the intersecting forms of domination in British society, tracing the origins of Blake’s insights to the radical traditions of seventeenth-century antinomianism. In my view, Makdisi reads Blake exactly as Blake wished to be read. While his powerful identification with Blake yields a continuou

"Milton’s late dramatic poem has prompted endless controversy. Critics still cannot agree on whether Milton disavows or endorses the revolutionary violence of his biblical protagonist, who invokes the divine will, pulls the pillars down, and leaves 3000 Philistines dead. Long before 9/11, when Samson’s resemblance to a suicide bomber dramatically heightened the moral stakes of interpretation, Samson Agonistes haunted Blake. Most importantly, the poem provided Blake with a model that distances critical reading from misguided acts of human violence without entirely suppr

"Ngai explores the neglected aesthetics of 'ugly feelings' that accompany situations of suspended agency, with chapters on anxiety, irritation, paranoia, envy, disgust, and a few categories of her own invention: 'stuplimity' and 'affectedness.' Her archive dazzles in range, imagination, and juxtaposition, summoning everything from classic nineteenth-century American literature to the most recent avant-garde experiments. If Ngai dramatically expands our sense of the emotions that inform modern and postmodern cultural expression, she also reflects a dominant assumption motivating the cur

"Written on the eve of World War II, Sartre’s small book contends that we resort to emotions when the difficult world makes agency inconceivable. Since we cannot alter the world with our actions, we transform it with our emotions, subjectively, magically. Sartre’s theory illuminates the critical emotions remarkably well, for these affects often arise when modern critics wish to insert agency into deterministic social systems that appear to be totalizing and daunting. Thus Sartre’s diagnosis helps to explain the appeal of the recent affective turn in criticism and theory.&nbsp

"Taking its title from Milton: A Poem, Oe’s novel (1983) is indeed saturated by Blake. An author-narrator tries to prepare his mentally disabled son for independence by equipping him with concepts derived (of all things) from his reading of Blake. As improbable as that plot may seem, it prompts a radical rethinking of sympathy that remains true to Blake’s own experiments while extending sympathy into entirely new territory. Tracking the transformation of an English Rom

"Of all the books published on the emotions in the last two decades, Terada’s is the most incisive. Realizing that emotion has become the default position among humanists trying to fend off poststructuralist critique, Terada demonstrates just how wrong a reading they provide of emotion and theory both. Emotion lies at the center of posthumanist discourse (in Derrida, de Man, Deleuze, and others) precisely because emotion 'requires the death of the subject.' In addition to its startling originality and elegant thinking, Feeling in Theory is also one of the few books o

2013/04/04

"This is a fascinating account of the massive cultural, political, and economic changes that have taken place in Ireland in the past 40 years, and something of a coda to Foster’s monumental volume, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972. Foster is the most influential Irish historian around and his two-volume biography of W.B. Yeats has reinvigorated scholarship on the great modernist poet.

"Ireland’s neutrality during World War II was one of the most monumental political decisions made in the early decades of Ireland’s history as an independent state. And it still has the power to provoke significant arguments. Wills reads a wide range of literary and cultural materials in order to provide a detailed account of what life was like in Ireland during what was known as 'The Emergency.' Earlier in her career, Wills did pioneering work on contemporary Irish poetry, including scholarshi

"Nagy is an English professor at UCLA and one of the foremost Celticists in the world. This volume, a revised version of which is being released this year by the Dublin-based Four Courts Press, is a comprehensive account of the Fenian cycle of Irish mythology and folklore. The book’s central figure is the Irish hero Finn mac Cumaill (Finn MacCool) and his band of followers, the Fianna. Nagy examines the central medieval manuscripts that tell the stories of Finn’s exploits and considers Finn’s role within Irish literature a

"This is a wonderful history of the complicated question of language in Ireland. Crowley begins with Henry VIII’s 1537 Act for English Order, Habit, and Language and follows the story for nearly 500 years. He examines the relationship between English and Irish as an aspect of the larger colonial situation, and situates the importance of debates over and policies pertaining to language within the context of Irish nationalism and identity."

"This is a wide-ranging survey of how various forms of transnationalism (migration, travel, diaspora, colonialism, decolonization, globalization) register within modern and contemporary poetry. Ramazani looks at major modernist poets like Yeats, Eliot, and Hughes as well as more recent writers such as Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Lorna Goodison, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. He maps the complex paths of literary influence and formal energy that have shaped the development of a global Anglophone poetry."

"This volume includes essays by one of Britain’s important contemporary poets. Wilkinson, now Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago, has long been a central figure in experimental poetry circles in Britain. The Lyric Touch contains essays on a number of important and often overlooked poets, and includes stunning pieces on the formidable poetry of J.H. Prynne."

"This short book contains the texts of lectures that Fillmore delivered in Santa Cruz in 1971, which have become milestones in linguistics. Fillmore gives a comprehensive view of deictic forms—those words whose meaning depends on context, such as there, now, or you—and his book pulls off the difficult trick of being both path-making for scholars in the field and accessible to non-specialists. Fillmore is interested primarily in deixis as a linguistic phenomenon, but it also plays a crucial, if knotty, role

"This slim volume collects a handful of pieces of literary scholarship by one of the most significant figures in critical theory and contemporary European Philosophy. Dante is the book’s key presider as Agamben thinks through questions about the relationship between literature, language, theology, and philosophy, and approaches from a number of angles the larger question of poetry’s ends."

"Stewart ranges over thousands of years of poetic production in multiple languages in order to consider the importance of poetry as a central act of human making. She studies the way in which poems mediate between individual and social existence, and argues for the importance of how poetry encodes forms of sensory experience. This book contains thrilling meditations on the creation and reception of poetry, reconsiderations of many of the key philosophical statements on poetry from Plato to Hege