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"Born several weeks after her parents' arrival in the United States, Carol Ascher came of age in Topeka, Kansas, where her father, a Vienna-trained lay analyst, found work among the group of refugee clinicians recruited there for the Menninger Clinic. Growing up, Ascher's challenge was to reconcile the Midwestern views of her community; the irrepressible optimism of her mother and her mother's tendency to romanticize her Berlin childhood; and the more sardonic views of her father and his highly cultured emigre circle, for whom memory was both illness and cure."--BOOK JACKET.
Nine-year-old Eva Hoffman is the daughter of Austrian Jewish refugees who have found a place of precarious safety among a small Kansas community of European exiles. As the rising river inundates the town, the Hoffmans open their home to refugees from the flood, and Eva learns the complexities of prejudice-and courage-both within and outside her family.
After many years of publishing journalistic and scholarly articles, Gert Niers decided to break away from this format and to apply to his writing a more personal style suitable for autobiography and memoirs. Arrived at Last is the story of his life in Germany after World War Two and then in America, the country of his choice. He tells his autobiography in an uncomplicated, colloquial fashion the way one would talk perhaps at a bar table surrounded by friends. This approach allows him to comment on many experiences and aspects of life. He also reminisces about his excursions into France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and later on about the many people he met in the German and German-Jewish community of New York City. Everything is seen from a very personal perspective, confession-style. Still the author has rendered historical facts as precisely and correctly as it was possible to him. His descriptions and conclusions are those of an experienced observer. His book is a contribution to minority and immigrant literature, but also a cultural commentary about life in Europe and the U.S.
Interweaving the personal, private voice with scholarly, public intent, Nelson and the other contributors argue for a more interactive and cooperative approach to the teaching, reading, critiquing, and writing of literature. These essays are a direct result of the desire by many women within the academic community to break free of what has been called the “masculine” or “adversary” mode of literary criticism. Private Voices, Public Lives is of critical importance to readers, teachers, reviewers, and critics. The essays incorporate ideas on current issues of autobiography, memoir, women's voice, reader response, diversity, life writing, and gender.
"On subjects from Superman to rock 'n' roll, from Donald Duck to the TV news, from soap operas and romance novels to the use of double speak in advertising, these lively essays offer students of contemporary media a comprehensive counterstatement to the conservatism that has been ascendant since the seventies in American politics and cultural criticism. Donald Lazere brings together selections from nearly forty of the most prominent marxist, feminist, and other leftist critics of American mass culture--from a dozen academic disciplines and fields of media activism. The collection will appeal to a wide range of students, scholars, and general readers." -- Book Jacket.
If questions of subjectivity and identification are at stake in all biographical writing, they are particularly trenchant for contemporary women biographers of women. Often, their efforts to exhume buried lives in hope of finding spiritual foremothers awaken maternal phantoms that must be embraced or confronted. Do women writing in fact have any greater access to their own mothers' lives than to the lives of other women whose stories have been swept away like dust in the debris of the past? In Thinking through the Mothers, Janet Beizer surveys modern women's biographies and contemplates alternatives to an approach based in lineage and the form of thought that emphasizes the line, the path, h...
Achieving Blackness offers an important examination of the complexities of race and ethnicity in the context of black nationalist movements in the United States. By examining the rise of the Nation of Islam, the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the “Afrocentric era” of the 1980s through 1990s Austin shows how theories of race have shaped ideas about the meaning of “Blackness” within different time periods of the twentieth-century. Achieving Blackness provides both a fascinating history of Blackness and a theoretically challenging understanding of race and ethnicity. Austin traces how Blackness was defined by cultural ideas, social practices and shared identities as we...
Faith in the free market--the idea that profit seeking, managed care companies will improve the health care delivery system--has become a hot topic in the public policy debate. But, as Joel Blau demonstrates in this splendid work, so-called "free market" programs have been a dismal failure. Here, he launches a far-reaching assault on the idea that "the market" knows best. He looks at recent reforms in NAFTA, education, job training, welfare, and much more, showing that the new social policies have made matters worse and calling for a stronger, more caring government to counter the debilitating effects of the market. He also urges the development of the broadest possible political alliances to ensure economic security. Sure to raise controversy, this book turns today's conventional wisdom inside out, making a profound case for the importance of a strong government in a world where markets do not have all the answers.
"A magnificent read . . . a profoundly personal narrative. The Family Silver is on the cutting edge of feminist scholarship."--Verta Taylor, coeditor of Feminist Frontiers "Just as Krieger's The Mirror Dance was the first to describe the lesbian community, The Family Silver is the first book to blend the personal, familial, relational, professional, and political roles of lesbians in today's society. I loved reading it."--Esther Rothblum, editor of Journal of Lesbian Studies
Until about 1986, feminists generally considered modernism a reactionary, misogynist, and hegemonic mire not worth investigating. Since then enough studies of modernism have appeared that 17 feminist critics can now review and debate their treatment of the period. They evaluate the progress and goals of the new era of modernist scholarship. As the authors in this volume suggest, instead of condemning writers for not practicing or portraying an acceptable politics of gender, we ought instead to show how their assumptions about the nature of the sexes inform their texts, both in their creation and in their reception. This also allows examination of the complex and changing relationship between human subjectivity and aesthetics. This volume is a highly reflective dialogue, introspective and evaluative, at a moment of crisis within modernist studies and feminist studies. The analysis of critical work on early-twentieth-century literature not only helps reread and redefine a definition of modernism; it also intends to redirect and reintegrate feminist theory.