Research & Innovation

From the publisher's website:

The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others,  makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.

From the publisher: 

How does a sensitive, scholarly boy from an affluent Egyptian family become a hijacker? Set in the two decades leading up to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, To Kill the Other tells the story of Taher and his spiritual transformation from an innocent young boy into a ruthless, disillusioned conformist. Exploring the circumstances and choices that shaped him, To Kill the Other builds toward an unimaginable act of mass terror in which Taher finally confronts who and what he has become.

 

Locations, he contends, simultaneously engage and transgress the social, architectural, and juridical meanings attributed to the areas that they occupy by means of the subversive bodies that collectively inhabit and pass through them. He goes on to characterize this concept in these terms: "queer space is in large part the function of wishful thinking or desires that become solidified: a seduction of the reading space where queerness, at a few brief points and for some fleeting moments, dominates the (heterocentric) norm, the dominant social narrative of the landscape" (21, emphasis added).1 The term "queer space" is most often employed as a way to discuss and analyze the precarious positioning of gay, lesbian, and transgender social spaces and the politics of gentrification in regard to these locations.2 However, I believe that Désert's formulation reveals the potential of the lens of "queer space" to exceed its strictly geographical or architectural valence and provide a framework for theoretical and formal analysis within literary studies.

In a small town under a spell, a child bride prays for the sheriff’s gun. Iron under a bed stops a nightmare. The carousel artist can carve only birds. Part fairy tale and part gothic ballad, Wait spans a single year: the year before a young woman’s marriage. Someone is always watching—from the warehouse, from the woods. And on the outskirts of town, someone new is waiting.

Raoult’s high-energy BOOM of linguistic pyrotechnics falls onto the page in bursts of rhythmic pulse, parallelisms, and tonal families. The style of his sentences seems to imitate more familiar styles, the way patterns on moth wings might imitate eyes. Here comes Rimbaud reborn, addled, and set on fire for the 21st century.

The phenomenon of polarity sensitivity has been an important source of evidence for theories about the mental architecture of grammar over the last fifty years, and to many the oddly dysfunctional sensitivities of polarity items have seemed to support a view of grammar as an encapsulated mental module fundamentally unrelated to other aspects of human cognition or communicative behavior. This book draws on insights from cognitive/functional linguistics and formal semantics to argue that, on the contrary, the grammar of sensitivity is grounded in a very general human cognitive ability to form categories and draw inferences based on scalar alternatives, and in the ways this ability is deployed for rhetorical effects in ordinary interpersonal communication.

Funded by the Lillian and Don Bauder Fund, was inaugurated in April 2011 to support the writing of Detroit college and high school students.

Explored the impact of digital media on literary production and reception broadly construed, from new technologies of authorship on computers and laptops to literary reception and reputation online (in blogs and other social media), and finally the challenges associated with preserving the digital legacies of today's writers for future generations.

With the emergence of a culture of images in the early twentieth-century, the question of how literature engages the visual arts has become key for literary studies. This extended treatment of poetic ekphrasis (the verbal representation of visual representation) explores the complex, dynamic relationships between words and images that characterize this flourishing genre and provided one way of making poetry new. Elegantly and persuasively written, Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts considers a wide range of twentieth-century poets from several English-speaking cultures, from W.B. Yeats and Marianne Moore to Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes and Rita Dove.

Press info: Cambridge University Press, 2008 (hardcover), 2011 (paperback)