Böcker utgivna av UNIV OF WISCONSIN PR

Fleeing her family, a woman finds unexpected solace in an empty hotel. A therapist struggling to make sense of a shattering professional failure becomes convinced someone is watching his every move. A coach's disciplinary tactic doesn't so much backfire as it implodes his players' lives. Inhabiting a (mostly) midwestern landscape, Alex Pickett's characters specialize in breaking rules. Believing themselves to be good people, they try to bend their situations to fit their needs or fulfill their desires. The results are rarely completely disastrous or successful, but are tinged with a humor that rides comfortably alongside embarrassment, regret, and longing. Pickett's tensely modulated world hums with the vitality of its characters, balancing restraint and impulse. Again and again, with wry wisdom and rich prose, he leads us to imagine what an individual should do versus what they want to do--and in the process reminds us that it is achingly hard to live up to expectations.

Originally published by the University Press of New England under the title Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism, copyright Ã1993 by Trustees of Brandeis University.

English translation of six essays which originally appeared in the Danish journal Tilskueren (The Observer), between August 1889 and May 1890.

Transnational solidarity movements often play an important role in reshaping structures of global power. However, there remains a significant gap in the historical literature on collaboration between parties located in the Global South. Facing increasing repression, the Latin American left in the 1960s and 1970s found connection in transnational exchange, organizing with distant activists in Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. By exploring the particularities of South-South solidarity, this volume begins new conversations about what makes these movements unique, how they shaped political identities, and their lasting influence. Jessica Stites Mor looks at four in-depth case studies: the use of legal reform to accomplish the goals of solidarity embedded in Mexico's revolutionary constitution, visual and print media circulated by Cuba and its influence on the agenda of the Afro-Asian block at the United Nations, organizing on behalf of Palestinian nationalism in reshaping Argentina's socialist left, and the role of Latin American Catholic activists in challenging the South African apartheid state. These examples serve as a much-needed road map to navigate our current political climate and show us how solidarity movements might approach future struggles.

Grief fractures and scars. In Afterlife Michael Dhyne picks up the shattered remains, examining each shard in the light, attempting to find meaning--or at least understanding--in the death of his father. "If I tell the story in reverse, / it still ends with nothing," he writes. Yet it is in the telling that Dhyne's story--and the world he creates--is filled. The echoes of his childhood loss reverberate through adolescence and adulthood, his body, the bodies of those he loves, and the world around them--from Bourbon Street to dark and lonely bedrooms, from grief support groups to heartachingly beautiful sunsets. How we are shaped by our experiences, and how we refuse to be shaped, is at the heart of the poet's search for memory, meaning, and love--in all its forms and wonders. This bold and tender debut is a rousing reminder that poetry and art can heal. "It's one thing to remember, another to not forget. A girl says, Can I start with my birth? and I ask her if anything happened before that, her eyes bright with wonder." --Excerpt from "95 South"

Electrifying Indonesia tells the story of the entanglement of politics and technology during Indonesia's rapid post-World War II development. As a central part of its nation-building project, the Indonesian state sought to supply electricity to the entire country, bringing transformative socioeconomic benefits across its heterogeneous territories and populations. While this project was driven by nationalistic impulses, it was also motivated by a genuine interest in social justice. The entanglement of these two ideologies--nation-building and equity--shaped how electrification was carried out, including how the state chose the technologies it did. Private companies and electric cooperatives vied with the hegemonic state power company to participate in a monumental undertaking that would transform daily life for all Indonesians, especially rural citizens. In this innovative volume, Anto Mohsin brings Indonesian studies together with science and technology studies to understand a crucial period in modern Indonesian history. He shows that attempts to illuminate the country were inseparable from the effort to maintain the new nation-state, chart its path to independence, and legitimize ruling regimes. In exchange for an often dramatically improved standard of living, people gave their votes, and their acquiescence, to the ruling government.

In December 1825, a group of liberal aristocrats, officers, and intelligentsia mounted a coup against the tsarist government of Russia. Inspired partially by the democratic revolutions in the United States and France, the Decembrist movement was unsuccessful; however, it led Russia's civil society to new avenues of aspiration and had a lasting impact on Russian culture and politics. Many writers and thinkers belonged to the conspiracy while others, including the poet Alexander Pushkin, were loosely or ambiguously affiliated. While the Decembrist movement and Pushkin's involvement has been well covered by historians, Emily Wang takes a novel approach, examining the emotional and literary motivations behind the movement and the dramatic, failed coup. Through careful readings of the literature of Pushkin and others active in the northern branch of the Decembrist movement, such as Kondraty Ryleev, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, and Fyodor Glinka, Wang traces the development of "emotional communities" among the members and adjacent writers. This book illuminates what Wang terms "civic sentimentalism" the belief that cultivating noble sentiments on an individual level was the key to liberal progress for Russian society, a core part of Decembrist ideology that constituted a key difference from their thought and Pushkin's. The emotional program for Decembrist community members was, in other ways, a civic program for Russia as a whole, one that they strove to enact by any means necessary.

Anton Chekhov is justly famous as an author and a playwright, with his work continuing to appear on stages around the world more than a century after his death. However, he is rarely studied for his intellectual and philosophical theories. His disinterest in developing a "unified idea"--in vogue for Russian intellectuals of his time--and his aversion to the maximalism characteristic of contemporary Russian culture and society set him apart from his fellow writers. As a result, Chekhov's contribution to intellectual and philosophical discourse was obscured both by his contemporaries and by subsequent scholars. Svetlana Evdokimova tackles this gap in Chekhov scholarship, examining the profound connections between his unstated philosophy and his artistic production. Arguing that Chekhov's four major plays (The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, The Seagull, and Uncle Vanya) constitute a kind of cycle, Staging Existence offers a major reappraisal of this critical playwright in Russian intellectual history. Evdokimova's deep, careful research into Chekhov's engagement with contemporary philosophy provides insight into both Chekhov's oeuvre and the writer himself.

By the time the Roman poet Valerius Flaccus wrote in the first century CE, the tale of Jason and his famous ship the Argo had been retold so often it was a byword for poetic banality. Why, then, did Valerius construct his epic Argonautica? In this innovative analysis, Jessica Blum-Sorensen argues that it was precisely the myth's overplayed nature that appealed to Valerius, operating in and responding to a period of social and political upheaval. Seeking to comment obliquely on Roman reliance on mythic exempla to guide action and expected outcomes, there was no better vessel for his social and political message than the familiar Argo. Focusing especially on Hercules, Blum-Sorensen explores how Valerius' characters--and, by extension, their Roman audience--misinterpret exemplars of past achievement, or apply them to sad effect in changed circumstances. By reading such models as normative guides to epic triumph, Valerius' Argonauts find themselves enacting tragic outcomes: effectively, the characters impose their nostalgic longing for epic triumph on the events before them, even as Valerius and his audience anticipate the tragedy awaiting his heroes. Valerius thus questions Rome's reliance on the past as a guide to the present, allowing for doubt about the empire's success under the new Flavian regime. It is the literary tradition's exchange between triumphant epic and tragedy that makes the Argo's voyage a perfect vehicle for Valerius' exploration: the tensions between genres both raise and prohibit resolution of anxieties about how the new age--mythological or real--will turn out.

Although understudied in the West, Iurii Trifonov was a canonical Soviet author whose lifetime spanned nearly the whole of the USSR's history and who embodied many of its contradictions. The son of a Bolshevik murdered on Stalin's orders, he wrote his first novel in praise of the dictator's policies. A lifelong Muscovite, he often set his prose in the Central Asian peripheries of the USSR's empire. A subtle critic of the communist regime, he nonetheless benefited from privileges doled out by a censorious state. Scholars have both neglected Trifonov in recent years and focused their limited attention on the author's most famous works, produced in the 1960s through 1980s. Yet almost half of his output was written before then. In Empire of Objects, Benjamin Sutcliffe takes care to consider the author's entire oeuvre. Trifonov's work reflects the paradoxes of a culture that could neither honestly confront the past nor create a viable future, one that alternated between trying to address and attempting to obscure the trauma of Stalinism. He became increasingly incensed by what he perceived as the erosion of sincerity in public and private life, by the impact of technology, and by the state's tacit support of greed and materialism. Trifonov's work, though fictional, offers a compelling window into Soviet culture.

Moving beyond a biting indictment of American popular culture, Jameka Williams captures the reader's gaze and stares right back: "I'm sorry, America, but I'm rich in baby oil & paperback novels only these days. So finish paying for me with what is mint. No conditions." In this stunning debut collection, Williams offers a deeply personal investigation into how Americans (herself included) have been duped, buying into classism, sexism, and racist beauty ideals, while sacrificing the freedom of self-love and self-determination. With whip-fast profanity and fiery humor, she charts a tender, exalting, and vibrant path to freedom from mirrors, stages, and screens. Fiercely feminist, Black, American, and powerful, Williams speaks for a generation of obsessive social media influencers and consumers, revealing the complex ways in which we are all actors, witnesses, and victims in our public and private performances. Though we may be permanent residents of this soulless cultural landscape, this stunning collection refuses to let it define us. I am not the same machine which came rambling off the conveyor belt, hugging the bolts & wires spilling from her vivisection. I'm last year's model with a sleeker, softer system of cool disdain for my Internet addictions. --Excerpt from "I Intend to Outlast"

Plain tells the story of Mary Alice Hostetter's journey to define an authentic self amid a rigid religious upbringing in a Mennonite farm family. Although endowed with a personality "prone toward questioning and challenging," the young Mary Alice at first wants nothing more than to be a good girl, to do her share, and-alongside her eleven siblings-to work her family's Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, farm. She feels fortunate to have been born into a religion where, as the familiar hymn states, she is "safe in the arms of Jesus." As an adolescent, that keen desire for belonging becomes focused on her worldly peers, even though she knows that Mennonites consider themselves a people apart. Eventually she leaves behind the fields and fences of her youth, thinking she will finally be able to grow beyond the prohibitions of her church. Discovering and accepting her sexuality, she once again finds herself apart, on the outside of family, community, and societal norms. This quietly powerful memoir of longing and acceptance casts a humanizing eye on a little-understood American religious tradition and a woman's striving to grow within and beyond it.

Ripple Effects will be a go-to source for all who love lakes and who advocate for their protection; its driving question is summed up by one of Rulseh's interviewees: We love this lake. What can we do to keep it healthy?

Orville, Illinois, is bucolic, charming, and almost Norman Rockwellesque-if you're white. But like many midwestern cities in the 1960s, it is a "sundown" town-a place where Black Americans are prohibited from entering or remaining after dark. The town's most adventurous woman, Cassie Zeul, is an outcast because she has no husband and takes an occasional lover. Her son, Gus, guided by Sister Damien, aspires to be a priest, but he is increasingly overwhelmed by his infatuation with Pat Lemkey-who is herself drawn to Jenny Biel, considered by many to be the most beautiful girl in town. Gus's best friend, Fenza Ryzchik Jr., a somewhat notorious bully desperate for his father's attention, hates "colored people," doesn't think he knows any, and is certain he can convince Jenny to marry him one day-without realizing that her devout mother has been passing for white her entire life. Events come to a head when a visiting nun from the South brings an African American friend with her to Midnight Mass one Christmas Eve. The dreams and desires of these characters collide and intersect as they navigate life and coming of age in the rural Midwest. In Janko's masterful hands, the darkness-of prejudice, privilege, and power-that they don't even recognize threatens to overwhelm their lives and their plans for the future. This novel forces us, as well as its characters, to acknowledge the cost of hiding our true selves, and of judging others based on the color of their skin or the longing of their hearts.