Bøker utgitt av Yale University Press

From the time that George Bernard Shaw remarked that “Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely,” West’s writings and her politics have elicited strong reactions. This collection of her letters—the first ever published—has been culled from the estimated ten thousand she wrote during her long life. The more than two hundred selected letters follow this spirited author, critic, and journalist from her first feminist campaign for women’s suffrage when she was a teenager through her reassessments of the twentieth century written in 1982, in her ninetieth year.The letters, which are presented in full, include correspondence with West’s famous lover H. G. Wells and with Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Emma Goldman, Noel Coward, and many others; offer pronouncements on such contemporary authors as Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and provide new insights into her battles against misogyny, fascism, and communism. West deliberately fashions her own biography through this intensely personal correspondence, challenging rival accounts of her groundbreaking professional career, her frustrating love life, and her tormented family relations. Engrossing to read, the collection sheds new light on this important figure and her social and literary milieu.

Stephen Eric Bronner is a prolific author, activist, and one of America's leading political thinkers. His new book presents bigotry as a systematic, all-encompassing mindset that has a special affinity for right-wing movements. In what will surely prove a seminal study, Bronner explores its appeal, the self-image it justifies, the interests it serves, and its complex connection with modernity. He reveals how prejudice shapes the conspiratorial and paranoid worldview of the true believer, the elitist, and the chauvinist. In the process, it becomes apparent how the bigot hides behind mainstream conservative labels in order to support policies designed to disadvantage the targets of his contempt. Examining bigotry in its various dimensions-anthropological, historical, psychological, sociological, and political-Professor Bronner illustrates how the bigot's intense hatred of "e;the other"e; is a direct reaction to social progress, liberal values, secularism, and an increasingly complex and diverse world. A sobering look at the bigot in the twenty-first century, this volume is essential for making sense of the dangers facing democracy now and in the future.

Enlightenment's Frontier is the first book to investigate the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith's famous defense of free trade? Fredrik Albritton Jonsson recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism.

The forgotten protagonist of this true account aspired to be a cubist painter in his native Kyïv. In a Europe remade by the First World War, his talents led him to different roles—intelligence operative, powerful statesman, underground activist, lifelong conspirator. Henryk Józewski directed Polish intelligence in Ukraine, governed the borderland region of Volhynia in the interwar years, worked in the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet underground during the Second World War, and conspired against Poland’s Stalinists until his arrest in 1953. His personal story, important in its own right, sheds new light on the foundations of Soviet power and on the ideals of those who resisted it. By following the arc of Józewski’s life, this book demonstrates that his tolerant policies toward Ukrainians in Volhynia were part of Poland’s plans to roll back the communist threat.The book mines archival materials, many available only since the fall of communism, to rescue Józewski, his Polish milieu, and his Ukrainian dream from oblivion. An epilogue connects his legacy to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the democratic revolution in Ukraine in 2004.

Jackson Pollock (19121956) not only put American art on the map with his famous "e;drip paintings,"e; he also served as an inspiration for the character of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desirethe role that made Marlon Brando famous. Like Brando, Pollock became an icon of rebellion in 1950s America, and the brooding, defiant persona captured in photographs of the artist contributed to his celebrity almost as much as his notorious paintings did. In the years since his death in a drunken car crash, Pollock's hold on the public imagination has only increased. He has become an enduring symbol of the tormented artistour American van Gogh.In this highly engaging book, Evelyn Toynton examines Pollock's itinerant and poverty-stricken childhood in the West, his encounters with contemporary art in Depression-era New York, and his years in the run-down Long Island fishing village that, ironically, was transformed into a fashionable resort by his presence. Placing the artist in the context of his time, Toynton also illuminates the fierce controversies that swirled around his work and that continue to do so. Pollock's paintings captured the sense of freedom and infinite possibility unique to the American experience, and his life was both an American rags-to-riches story and a darker tale of the price paid for celebrity, American style.

In this brilliant new book, a preeminent literary thinker muses over the central question of how we can feel at home in the world, given that the world is independent of and indifferent to our wishes. Drawing on books and films, cultural history and his own experiences, Gabriel Josipovici argues that it is possible to feel comfortable in the world and in our relationships with others only if we value touch over sight, if we respect distance but also work to overcome it.Josipovici moves from a Charlie Chaplin movie to passages from Proust, from the world of sport to the world of addiction, from medieval pilgrimages to the cult of relics, from a wedding photograph of his grandparents to some of Chardin's most enigmatic paintings. Through these seemingly disparate topics he provides engaging and wise commentary on connection and communication in life. Contrasting the senses of sight and touch, Josipovici notes that although sight seems to give us the totality of what we behold, it is only when we walk or feel our way across the distances that things become more than images and begin to constitute the world in which we as touchers and not mere observers are included. If we depend on sightwhich seems to offer a frictionless domination over realitywe may avoid the pains and uncertainties of living, but we also lose our involvement with life.Lucid, imaginative, and daring, Josipovici's book will inspire and, yes, deeply touch us all.

Thorstein Veblen is best known for his authorship of The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise, which made him a celebrated figure in the fields of economics and sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. In this book, Sidney Plotkin and Rick Tilman argue that in addition to his well-known work in these fields Veblen also made importantand until now overlookedstatements about politics.While Veblen's writings seldom mention politics, they are saturated with political ideas: about the relationship among war, executive power, and democracy; about the similarities between modern executive positions and monarchy; about the political influence of corporate power; about the symbolism of politics; and about many other issues. By demonstrating the deep relevance of Veblens writings to today's political troubles, The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen offers an important reconsideration of a major American thinker.

Drawing insight from a diverse array of sources including moral philosophy, political theory, cognitive psychology, ecology, and science and technology studies Douglas Kysar offers a new theoretical basis for understanding environmental law and policy. He exposes a critical flaw in the dominant policy paradigm of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis, which asks policymakers to, in essence, regulate from nowhere. As Kysar shows, such an objectivist stance fails to adequately motivate ethical engagement with the most pressing and challenging aspects of environmental law and policy, which concern how we relate to future generations, foreign nations, and other forms of life. Indeed, world governments struggle to address climate change and other pressing environmental issues in large part because dominant methods of policy analysis obscure the central reasons for acting to ensure environmental sustainability. To compensate for these shortcomings, Kysar first offers a novel defense of the precautionary principle and other commonly misunderstood features of environmental law and policy. He then concludes by advocating a movement toward environmental constitutionalism in which the ability of life to flourish is always regarded as a luxury we can afford.

Commentators from Bill Cosby to Barack Obama have observed the phenomenon of black schoolchildren accusing studious classmates of acting white. How did this contentious phrase, with roots in Jim Crow-era racial discord, become a part of the schoolyard lexicon, and what does it say about the state of racial identity in the American system of education?The answer, writes Stuart Buck in this frank and thoroughly researched book, lies in the complex history of desegregation. Although it arose from noble impulses and was to the overall benefit of the nation, racial desegegration was often implemented in a way that was devastating to black communities. It frequently destroyed black schools, reduced the numbers of black principals who could serve as role models, and made school a strange and uncomfortable environment for black children, a place many viewed as quintessentially white.Drawing on research in education, history, and sociology as well as articles, interviews, and personal testimony, Buck reveals the unexpected result of desegregation and suggests practical solutions for making racial identification a positive force in the classroom.

Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianitys highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies. A probing study of the cultural fragmentationsocial, spatial, and racialthat took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals.Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities. Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race.Using his bold, creative, and courageous critique to imagine a truly cosmopolitan citizenship that transcends geopolitical, nationalist, ethnic, and racial boundaries, Jennings charts, with great vision, new ways of imagining ourselves, our communities, and the landscapes we inhabit.

Susan Cheever observed in a New York Times Book Review appraisal of his memoir Down from Troy that Richard Selzer "e;cares more about truth than consequences . . . [and] immerses us in the facts we all know but hate to admit."e; Selzer's Diary picks up roughly where the memoir leaves off, as his writing life flourishes and surgical career ends. Stripped of the doctor-writer's "e;privilege of [walking] about all day in the middle of a short story,"e; Selzer shifts his focus to his interior life. In Diary, the author's successes and regrets, as well as the humor and sadness that surround him, are revealed with the same empathy and vividness that made him one of the great doctor-writers of modern literature.Diary brings together stories and observations dashed off on park benches and in library carrels over the past decade. Following the success of such books as Confessions of a Knife and The Doctor Stories, Selzer's diary entries recount life lived in the shadow of both achievement and disappointment. He introduces a varied cast of characters, from the distinguished fellowship of the "e;Boys Friendly"e; to his "e;fellow loonies,"e; and evokes the streets, buildings, and parks of Yale and New Haven with vibrancy and affection. And throughout, Selzer faces the looming specter of old age. The distinctive voice that paved the way for other notable doctor-writers like Jerome Groopman and Abraham Verghese is revealed here to be no less compelling with the spotlight turned on himself and the drama of everyday living.

The work of Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996), one of Russia’s great modern poets, has been the subject of much study and debate. His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the Soviet Union and his achievements as a Nobel Prize winner and America’s poet laureate.In this penetrating biography, Brodsky’s life and work are illuminated by his great friend, the late poet and literary scholar Lev Loseff. Drawing on a wide range of source materials, some previously unpublished, and extensive interviews with writers and critics, Loseff carefully reconstructs Brodsky’s personal history while offering deft and sensitive commentary on the philosophical, religious, and mythological sources that influenced the poet’s work. Published to great acclaim in Russia and now available in English for the first time, this is literary biography of the first order, and sets the groundwork for any books on Brodsky that might follow.

Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translators role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented.For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable.Throughout the four chapters of this bracing volume, Grossmans belief in the crucial significance of the translators work, as well as her rare ability to explain the intellectual sphere that she inhabits as interpreter of the original text, inspires and provokes the reader to engage with translation in an entirely new way.

Novelists, artists, and philosophers of the eighteenth century understood pleasure as a virtuea gift to be shared with ones companion, with a reader, or with the public.In this daring new book, Thomas Kavanagh overturns the prevailing scholarly tradition that views eighteenth-century France primarily as the incubator of the Revolution. Instead, Kavanagh demonstrates how the art and literature of the era put the experience of pleasure at the center of the cultural agenda, leadingto advances in both ethics and aesthetics.Kavanagh shows that pleasure is not necessarily hedonistic or opposed to Enlightenment ideals in general; rather, he argues that the pleasure of individuals is necessary for the welfare of theircommunity.

Kazimir Malevich’s painting Black Square is one of the twentieth century's emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. None of Malevich’s contemporary revolutionaries created a manifesto, an emblem, as capacious and in its own way unique as this work; it became both the quintessence of the Russian avant-gardist's own art—which he called Suprematism—and a milestone on the highway of world art. Writing about this single painting, Aleksandra Shatskikh sheds new light on Malevich, the Suprematist movement, and the Russian avant-garde.Malevich devoted his entire life to explicating Black Square's meanings. This process engendered a great legacy: the original abstract movement in painting and its theoretical grounding; philosophical treatises; architectural models; new art pedagogy; innovative approaches to theater, music, and poetry; and the creation of a new visual environment through the introduction of decorative applied designs. All of this together spoke to the tremendous potential for innovative shape and thought formation concentrated in Black Square.To this day, many circumstances and events of the origins of Suprematism have remained obscure and have sprouted arbitrary interpretations and fictions. Close study of archival materials and testimonies of contemporaries synchronous to the events described has allowed this author to establish the true genesis of Suprematism and its principal painting.

Listeners have enjoyed classical music recordings for more than a century, yet important issues about recorded performances have been little explored. What is the relationship between performance and recording? How are modern audiences affected by the trends set in motion by the recording era? What is the impact of recordings on the lives of musicians? In this wide-ranging book, Robert Philip extends the scope of his earlier pioneering book, Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance 19001950. Philip here considers the interaction between music-making and recording throughout the entire twentieth century.The author compares the lives of musicians and audiences in the years before recordings with those of today. He examines such diverse and sometimes contentious topics as changing attitudes toward freedom of expression, the authority of recordings made by or approved by composers, the globalization of performing styles, and the rise of the period instrument movement. Philip concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of the future of classical music performance.