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The more radical poetries today are known by their admirers and detractors alike for their extreme difficulty, a difficulty, Marjorie Perloff argues, dependent less on the recondite imagery and obscure allusion one associates with early modernism than on a large-scale deconstruction of syntax and emphasis on morphology and pun, paragram and paratext. She suggests this new "non-sensical" poetry cannot be explained away as some sort of pernicious fad, designed to fool the gullible and flatter the pretentious; it is, on the contrary, an inevitable--and important--response to the wholesale mediaization of postmodern culture in the United States. But the conventional alienation model, the still-dominant myth of the sensitive and isolated poet, confronted by the hostile mass media, is no longer adequate. On the contrary, Perloff argues, we must recognize that poetry today, like the visual arts and theater, is always contaminated by media discourse; there is no escape into some bucolic, purer realm. What this means is that poetry actively engages the communication models of everyday discourse, producing language constructions that foreground the artifice of the writing process, the materiality of writing itself. How the negotiation between poetic and media discourses takes place is the subject of Marjorie Perloff's groundbreaking study. Radical Artifice considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the great modernist poets comes up against the "natural speech" of the Donahue "talk show", or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the discourse of billboards and sound bytes. Among the many poets whose works are discussed are John Ashbery, GeorgeOppen, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Steve McCaffery. But the strongest presence in Perloff's book is a "poet" better known as a composer, a philosopher, a printmaker, a polymath, one who understood, almost half a century ago, that from now on no word, no musical note, no painted surface, no theoretical statement could ever again escape "contamination" from the media landscape in which we live. That poet is John Cage and it is under his sign that Radical Artifice was composed.

Sex, although considered by many in our culture the quintessential private activity, is blanketed by a staggering number and variety of laws. This first concise compendium of the nation's sex laws brings together in one place and summarizes the laws regulating personal sexual activity. In doing so, it reveals gaps, anachronisms, anomalies, inequalities, and irrationalities, and provides an empirical basis for studies of sexual regulation. From Alabama to Wyoming, this informative and fascinating reference book will be an essential resource to a wide range of persons both within and outside the legal profession - specialists in the regulation of sexual behavior, students of the legislative process, lawyers involved in family and sex law, and anyone interested in social and political issues involving sexual orientation and sexual morality.

What causes conflict among high-level American corporate executives? How do executives manage their conflicts? Based on remarkably candid interviews with over two hundred executives and their support personnel, Calvin Morrill provides an intimate portrait of these men and women as they cope with problems usually hidden from those outside their exclusive ranks. Personal and corporate scandals, compensation battles, budget worries, interdepartmental rivalries, personal enmities, and general rancor are among everyday challenges faced by executives. Morrill shows that what most influences the way managers handle routine conflicts are the cultures created by their company's organizational structure: whether there is a strong hierarchy, a weak hierarchy, or an absence of any strong central authority. The issues most likely to cause conflict within corporations Morrill identifies as managerial style, competition between departments, and performance evaluations, promotions, and compensation. Unprecedented in its direct access to top managers, this ambitious and sophisticated portrayal of daily life and conflict management among corporate elites will be vital reading for professionals, scholars, and practitioners in organizational culture and behavior, managerial decision making, dispute, social control, law and society, and organizational ethnography.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 unleashed a form of energy as mysterious as it was deadly. Suffering Made Real is the compelling story of the first attempts to understand how radiation affected the survivors of the atomic bomb and subsequent generations of Japanese. Arguing that Cold War politics and cultural values fundamentally shaped this scientific research, M. Susan Lindee examines the daily workings, expectations, purposes, and limitations of a project that raises disturbing questions about the ethical implications of using human subjects in scientific research. In 1946, an American scientific agency, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), was established in Japan to study the long-term biomedical effects of radiation on the survivors. Over the next twenty-nine years, American scientists and physicians, with funding from the Atomic Energy Commission, published hundreds of papers documenting the effects of radiation on aging, life span, fertility, and disease. In 1975, the agency was renamed and reorganized to permit greater Japanese input. How did the emerging Cold War affect the work of the ABCC? What problems seemed most important to ABCC scientists in their interpretation and public presentation of their data? Why did the ABCC have a "no-treatment" policy toward the survivors, one that conflicted with the ABCC's actual practices? Through a detailed examination of ABCC policies, archival materials, the minutes of committee meetings, newspaper accounts, and interviews with ABCC scientists, Lindee demonstrates how political and cultural interests were reflected in the day-to-day operations of this controversial research program. Set in aperiod of conflicting views on nuclear weapons and nuclear power, Suffering Made Real follows the course of a politically charged research program and reveals in detail how politics and cultural values can shape the conduct, results, and uses of science. As scientists, politicians, and health care professionals have become sensitized to the ethical problems of research on human subjects, this book speaks not only to the painful legacy of the atomic bomb, but also to contemporary concerns about the biomedical use of potentially dangerous substances on patients, children, prisoners, and other vulnerable citizens.

In this wide-ranging work, the master of structural anthropology considers the many variations in a story that occurs in both North and South America, but especially among the Salish-speaking peoples of the Northwest Coast. He also shows how centuries of contract with Europeans have altered the tales. Levi-Strauss focuses on the opposition between Wild Cat and Coyote to explore the meaning and uses of gemellarity, or twinness, in Native American culture. The concept of dual organization that these tales exemplify is one of non-equivalence: everything has an opposite or other, with which it coexists in unstable tension. In contrast, Levi-Strauss argues, European notions of twinness - as in the myth of Castor and Pollux - stress the essential sameness of the twins. This fundamental cultural difference lay behind the fatal clash of European and Native American peoples. The Story of Lynx addresses and clarifies all the major issues that have occupied Levi-Strauss for decades, and is the only one of his books in which he explicitly connects history and structuralism. The result is a work that will appeal to those interested in American Indian mythology. It will be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the thought of one of the most important and influential minds of the twentieth century.

Although the Japanese economy was in shambles at the end of World War II, its growth performance has been spectacular during the past few decades. No less phenomenal was the unprecedented rapidity with which Japan moved through the final stages of its demographic transition. Over the last forty years, Japan has experienced a striking decline in its birthrate. This decline has occurred in parallel with rapid urbanization, industrialization, and socioeconomic development. How much have Japan's unique cultural factors been related to the fertility change? Robert W. Hodge and Naohiro Ogawa develop a detailed statistical model of determinants of fertility in modern Japan. They persuasively demonstrate that these same factors combined with others continue to affect Japanese reproductive behavior at the microlevel. Using a variety of statistical tools designed for cross-sectional and time-series analysis, the authors study, in the context of Japanese socioeconomic transformations, changes in key demographic variables such as cumulative fertility, desired family size, abortion, and contraceptive use. All of the statistical apparatus they employ is carefully explained, both in detail and in a step-by-step fashion. Rich in insights into Japanese society, this volume will be of interest to social and economic demographers, development economists, and Japan-area specialists.

Nietzsche once remarked that some men are born posthumously. Of no one has this been truer than Nietzsche himself, and the last decade has witnessed yet another rebirth of this most protean of thinkers.

Based upon a unique set of twenty case studies of large and medium-sized state owned Chinese industrial enterprises, this volume illuminates previously unsuspected variations in Chinese industry from the standard central planning model.

This book tells a new story story of the development of city government in nineteenth-century America. Combining insights suggested by several important recent (and not so recent) studies with archival research in a previously unavailable documentary record, this book builds a narrative that is very different from those most urban historians have recounted.

With this volume, Louis Dumont's decades-long research into modern ideology reaches a new level. Following his chronological study of the development of individualism, what Dumont calls "the individualist configuration" (see Essays on Individualism, and his book devoted especially to the economic ideology, From Mandeville to Marx), Dumont now turns to comparing different national forms of modern ideology. By means of precise studies of chosen German texts by Troeltsch, Thomas Mann, Goethe, and others, against the background of previously gathered evidence and of French common notions, he pinpoints the differences - otherwise frequently but vaguely alluded to - between French and German cultures. While the basic social ideology of France was largely fashioned by the Enlightenment and the Revolution, the main formative influences in Germany were the Reformation and Pietism. While for the French a universalist view of mankind comes first, what is paramount for the Germans is German culture. In Dumont's words, the Frenchman sees himself "as being a man by nature, and a Frenchman by accident" while the German feels he is "a German in the first place, and a man through his being a German". Furthermore, while individualism in the French fashion stresses equality and centers in the sociopolitical domain, in Germany it focuses on the uniqueness, the irreplaceability of the individual subject and the duty to cultivate it by self-education (Bildung). As opposed to the French, German notions of individualism are entirely a matter of culture having little or nothing to do with politics.