Humanities: Sample Titles

For one semester/quarter courses on Introduction to the Humanities or Cultural Studies.   Now in full color, Arts and Culture provides an introduction to global civilizations and their artistic achievements, history, and cultures.  The authors consider two important questions:  What makes a work a masterpiece of its type? And what qualities of a work enable it to be appreciated over time?  Critical thinking is also highlighted throughout the text with 4 different box features that ask students to explore connections across the humanities and different cultures. These boxes are entitled Connections, Cross Currents, Then & Now, and Cultural Impact boxes. Open the new fourth edition of Arts and Culture and open a world of discovery.

The Bodies of Others explores the politics of gender in motion. From drag ballerinas to faux queens, and from butoh divas to the club mothers of modern dance, this book delves into four decades of drag dances on American stages, tracing the ways in which bodies can be imagined otherwise. Drag dances take us beyond glittery one-liners and into the spaces between gender norms. In these backstage histories, we see dancers who give their bodies over to other selves, opening up the category of realness. When realness becomes a practice, dancing can become a way of restaging the histories of bodies. The book maps out a drag politics of embodiment, connecting drag dances to queer hope, memory, and mourning. There are aging étoiles, midnight shows, mystical séances, and all of the dust and velvet of divas in their dressing-rooms. But these forty years of drag dances are also a cultural history, including Mark Morris dancing the death of Dido in the shadow of AIDS, and the swans of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo sketching an antiracist vision for ballet. Drawing on queer theory, dance history, and the embodied practices of dancers themselves, The Bodies of Others examines the ways in which drag dances undertake the work of a shared queer and trans politics. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working on performance, gender and sexuality, and embodiment.

In recent decades the humanities have been in thrall to postmodern skepticism, while Darwinists, brimming with confidence in the genuine progress they have made in the sciences of biology and psychology, have set their sights on rescuing the humanities from the ravages of postmodernism. In this volume, Eugene Goodheart attacks the neo-Darwinist approach to the arts and articulates a powerful defense of humanist criticism. E. O. Wilson, the distinguished Harvard biologist, has spoken of converting philosophy into science, substituting science for religion, and formulating a biological theory of literature and the arts in Consilence: The Unity of Knowledge. Goodheart demonstrates that Wilson's efforts, and those of his colleagues Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett among others, have resulted in scientism rather than science. If, for example, Dawkins had contented himself in The Selfish Gene with the claim that Darwinism had made worthless other answers to the question of how we have evolved, he would have given offense only to creationists, but questions of meaning and purpose are of another order. Contemporary Darwinist critiques err in assuming that art and traditional criticism aspire to truths that can be codified in terms of scientific laws. If this were so, we would have to regard the speculations of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Rousseau as worthless. Goodheart exposes the philistinism of literary Darwinism, the bad faith and inverted fundamentalism of the Darwinian approach to religion, and the dangers of the eff ort to create a Darwinian ethical system. Taken together, Goodheart's arguments show that in moving beyond their area of competence, the neo -Darwinists commit an ideology, not a science.

This volume compares and contrasts British and German colonialist discourses from a variety of angles: philosophical, political, social, economic, legal, and discourse-linguistic. British and German cooperation and competition are presented as complementary forces in the European colonial project from as early as the sixteenth century but especially after the foundation of the German Second Empire in 1871 -- the era of the so-called "Scramble for Africa". The authors present the points of view not only of the colonizing nations, but also of former colonies, including Cameroon, Ghana, Morocco, Namibia, Tanzania, India, China and the Pacific Islands. The title will prove invaluable for students and researchers working on British colonial history, German colonial history and postcolonial studies.

At the seventh biennial David B. Warren Symposium, seven scholars examined varied cultures in Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest before 1900 and their national and international context.  The resulting papers explore how diverse peoples interacted with material culture across the American South and Southwest and at the nexus of international trade networks. In this volume, Marion Oettinger explicates the biographies of six Texans of the 1700s. Evelyn Montgomery explores the transformation of  Texas log cabins to homes reflecting a "domestic" architectural aesthetic. Donna Pierce delves into the domestic furnishings of homes in Spanish Colonial New Mexico. Harry J. Shafer considers the material culture of early Native peoples in what is now Texas. Mark A. Goldberg analyzes the ways in which Native dress was understood and employed in Spanish and Mexican Texas. The publication concludes with an essay by Marjorie Denise Brown and Theresa Jach on the complex visual iconography of a silver inkwell with international connections.

The first book to address the historical failures of philosophy--and what we can learn from them Philosophers are generally unaware of the failures of philosophy, recognizing only the failures of particular theories, which are then remedied with other theories. But, taking the long view, philosophy has actually collapsed several times, been abandoned, sometimes for centuries, and been replaced by something quite different. When it has been revived it has been with new aims that are often accompanied by implausible attempts to establish continuity with a perennial philosophical tradition. What do these failures tell us? The Failures of Philosophy presents a historical investigation of philosophy in the West, from the perspective of its most significant failures: attempts to provide an account of the good life, to establish philosophy as a discipline that can stand in judgment over other forms of thought, to set up philosophy as a theory of everything, and to construe it as a discipline that rationalizes the empirical and mathematical sciences. Stephen Gaukroger argues that these failures reveal more about philosophical enquiry and its ultimate point than its successes ever could. These failures illustrate how and why philosophical inquiry has been conceived and reconceived, why philosophy has been thought to bring distinctive skills to certain questions, and much more. An important and original account of philosophy's serial breakdowns, The Failures of Philosophy ultimately shows how these shortcomings paradoxically reveal what matters most about the field.

A collaboration between well-established and rising scholars, Futures of Dance Studies suggests multiple directions for new research in the field. Essays address dance in a wider range of contexts - onstage, on screen, in the studio, and on the street - and deploy methods from diverse disciplines. Engaging African American and African diasporic studies, Latinx and Latin American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and Asian American and Asian studies, this anthology demonstrates the relevance of dance analysis to adjacent fields.

Octavio Paz: Ontology and Surrealism discusses poet Octavio Paz (1914-1998), one of Mexicos most controversial intellectuals. Over several decades, Paz has been celebrated for his impact on literature and culture as a poet as well as an essayist, and he is recognized as a great thinker and as a student of German ontology and phenomenology. Roberto Sanchez Benitez analyzes in detail Paz's training within the European philosophical thinking of the twentieth century, as well as in the artistic avant-garde, to illustrate the way in which philosophical, anthropological, linguistic, sociological, literary, and artistic proposals enriched his work and Mexican culture during the post-revolutionary period. Sanchez Benitez posits that Paz moved from a phenomenological ontology to a historicism of the human condition, wherein morality, politics, and the arts all reside in an ideological context where dogmatisms where impose in the face of a lack of internal criticism. This book explores the themes of the poetic act that Paz associated with his ontological and surrealist readings, leading up to when they were transformed by his experience in India and the assimilation of Eastern philosophies, along with going through a set of Western proposals relating to love, eroticism, and art. Scholars of literature, philosophy, Latin American Studies, and history will find this book particularly useful.

Why did Greek philosophy begin in the sixth century BCE? Why did Indian philosophy begin at about the same time? Why did the earliest philosophy take the form that it did? Why was this form so similar in Greece and India? And how do we explain the differences between them? These questions can only be answered by locating the philosophical intellect within its entire societal context, ignoring neither ritual nor economy. The cities of Greece and northern India were in this period distinctive also by virtue of being pervasively monetised. The metaphysics of both cultures is marked by the projection (onto the cosmos) and the introjection (into the inner self) of the abstract, all-pervasive, quasi-omnipotent, impersonal substance embodied in money (especially coinage). And in both cultures this development accompanied the interiorisation of the cosmic rite of passage (in India sacrifice, in Greece mystic initiation).

Sonata form is the most commonly encountered organizational plan in the works of the classical-music masters, from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to Schubert, Brahms, and beyond. Sonata Theory, an analytic approach developed by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy in their award-winning Elements of Sonata Theory (2006), has emerged as one of the most influential frameworks for understanding this musical structure. What can this method from "the new Formenlehre" teach us about how these composers put together their most iconic pieces and to what expressive ends? In this new Sonata Theory Handbook, Hepokoski introduces readers step-by-step to the main ideas of this approach. At the heart of the book are close readings of eight individual movements -- from Mozart's Piano Sonata in B-flat, K. 333, to such structurally complex pieces as Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" String Quartet and the finale of Brahms's Symphony No 1 -- that show this analytical method in action. These illustrative analyses are supplemented with four updated discussions of the foundational concepts behind the theory, including dialogic form, expositional action zones, trajectories toward generically normative cadences, rotation theory, and the five sonata types. With its detailed examples and deep engagements with recent developments in form theory, schema theory, and cognitive research, this handbook updates and advances Sonata Theory and confirms its status as a key lens for analyzing sonata form.

Surprisingly little is known about what ancient Confucian thinkers struggled with in their own social and political contexts and how these struggles contributed to the establishment and further development of classical Confucian political theory. Leading scholar of comparative political theory, Sungmoon Kim offers a systematic philosophical account of the political theories of Mencius and Xunzi, investigating both their agreements and disagreements as the champions of the Confucian Way against the backdrop of the prevailing realpolitik of the late Warring States period. Together, they contributed to the formation of Confucian virtue politics, in which concerns about political order and stability and concerns about moral character and moral enhancement are deeply intertwined. By presenting their political philosophies in terms of constitutionalism, Kim shows how they each developed the ability to authorize the ruler's legitimate use of power in domestic and interstate politics in ways consistent with their distinctive accounts of human nature.