An enthusiast's look at American comedies and the physical comedians who made them great. Winner of the Theater Library Association's Special Jury Prize for Distinguished Achievement (2001). "Comedy is famously difficult to analyze. But Alan Dale shows that you can talk about a joke without completely stepping on it. In Comedy Is a Man in Trouble, Dale seasons his weightier theories about slapstick in film with engaging opinions and witty asides. Dale tackles many of the great film comedians, from Charlie Chaplin to Jim Carrey. His seemingly encyclopedic knowledge, back to the most obscure silent films, produces admirable close readings." --Ted Loos, New York Times Book Review "A delightful study. Fun to read." --The Bloomsbury Review "A delicate balancing act between traditional cinematic criticism and pie-in-the-face pratfalls, and Dale manages to pull it off with the skill and aplomb of the silent slapstick clowns he so clearly idolizes. Rather than attempt of account for every low-comedy star and his/her entire repertoire, Dale focuses on a handful of key superstars-specifically Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers and Jerry Lewis-and combines biography with cinematic analysis to create a convincing timeline of the rise, fall, and rebirth of one of the movies' most popular genres. He also takes time to examine the controversial role of women in Hollywood comedy, ultimately anointing Katherine Hepburn as the Queen of Slapstick. Comedy is a Man in Trouble hits the mark." --Fade In Legendary screen comedian Jerry Lewis once said, "The premise of all comedy is a man in trouble." The films that endeared Lewis and others to us hinged on the physical assault of their hero, the pie in the face or slip on the banana peel that reduced the movie star to the level of the audience. Comedy Is a Man in Trouble presents the legacy of physical humor from the performances of vaudeville actors and circus clowns-who coined the term "slapstick" by playfully and noisily beating each other with wooden paddles-to its ongoing popularity today in the films of Jim Carrey and the Farrelly brothers. Alan Dale's personal and passionate tour of movie slapstick begins with an original assessment of the work of famed silent clowns Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. Dale rejects the long-held notion that the talent of these comedians lies in their ability to combine comedy and tragedy and suggests that their riotous imaginations and their physical grace revealed greatness in comedy for its own sake. A decade later the Marx Brothers exploited the new technology of sound film in their fast-paced verbal exchanges-and, in doing so, invented a verbal form of slapstick later exploited by directors such as Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Jerry Lewis energetically revised and combined the physical and verbal humor of his predecessors for a new generation of viewers. Comedy Is a Man in Trouble presents a lively, accessible, and lavishly illustrated look at a form of comedy that has its origins in ancient Greece and in American vaudeville and has been expanded and refashioned in film by everyone from W. C. Fields and Marion Davies to Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Here is not only an amusing look at film comedy history, but an insight into the human condition and what causes us to laugh. Alan Dale worked at a Los Angeles talent agency before earning a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton University. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Double Toil and Trouble is the first new volume of fiction in more than a decade by beloved Arkansas writer Donald Harington (1935–2009). Featuring the long-lost suspense novel of the title and four previously unpublished or uncollected stories, this volume adds several new chapters to the saga of Stay More, the fictional Ozarks village that serves as the setting for more than a dozen other Harington novels.

Edited by longtime Harington scholar Brian Walter, Double Toil and Trouble also includes an appendix featuring the author’s spirited correspondence with the editor who originally inspired the title novel, providing an insider’s look at the American literary scene and Harington’s own early assessment of his work. Spanning several decades of the author’s career, this volume gives readers a Harington who is at once familiar and fresh as he experiments with new formal possibilities, only to once again endear the vagaries of love, life, and folk language to us.
 

William Goyen was a writer of startling originality and deep artistic commitment whose work attracted an international audience and the praise of such luminaries as Northrop Frye, Truman Capote, Gaston Bachelard, and Joyce Carol Oates. His subject was the land and language of his native East Texas; his desire, to preserve the narrative music through which he came to know his world. Goyen sought to transform the cherished details of his lost boyhood landscape into lasting, mythic forms. Cut off from his native soil and considering himself an “orphan,” Goyen brought modernist alienation and experimentation to Texas materials. The result was a body of work both sophisticated and handmade—and a voice at once inimitable and unmistakable.

It Starts with Trouble is the first complete account of Goyen’s life and work. It uncovers the sources of his personal and artistic development, from his early years in Trinity, Texas, through his adolescence and college experience in Houston; his Navy service during World War II; and the subsequent growth of his writing career, which saw the publication of five novels, including The House of Breath, nonfiction works such as A Book of Jesus, several short story collections and plays, and a book of poetry. It explores Goyen’s relationships with such legendary figures as Frieda Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Spender, Anaïs Nin, and Carson McCullers. No other twentieth-century writer attempted so intimate a connection with his readers, and no other writer of his era worked so passionately to recover the spiritual in an age of disabling irony. Goyen’s life and work are a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling and the absolute necessity of narrative art.

Blame society. Blame a bad upbringing. Blame the circumstances. Blame the victim--she may even blame herself. But what about the perpetrator? When the blame is all assigned, will anyone be left to take responsibility?

This powerful book takes up the disturbing topic of victimization and blame as a pathology of our time and its consequences for personal responsibility. By probing the psychological dynamics of victims and perpetrators of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, Sharon Lamb seeks to answer some crucial questions: How do victims become victims and sometimes perpetrators? How can we break the psychological circle of perpetrators blaming others and victims blaming themselves? How do victims and perpetrators view their actions and reactions? And how does our social response to them facilitate patterns of excuse?

With clarity and compassion, Lamb examines the theories, excuses, and psychotherapies that strip both victims of their power and perpetrators of their agency--and thus deprive them of the means to human dignity, healing, and reparation. She shows how the current practice of painting victims as pure innocents may actually help perpetrators of abuse to shirk responsibility for their actions; they too can claim to be victims in their own right, passive and will-less in their wrongdoing.

The Trouble with Blame clarifies the social cost (quickly becoming so apparent) of letting perpetrators off too easily, and points out the dangers of over-emphasizing victimization, two problems which eclipse our dire need for accountability and recovery.

'Community' is one of social science's longest-standing concepts. The assumption, of much social science, has been that it is in communities -- and to communities -- that human individuals, as social and cultural beings, belong. Communities are said to embody that interactive environment from which individuals' identities and senses of self derive, and in which they continue to dwell.

The trouble with 'community' is that this is not necessarily so; the personal social networks of individuals' actual experience crosscut collective categories, situations and institutions. Communities can prove unviable or imprisoning; the reality of community life and identity can often be very different from the ideology and the ideal.

In this provocative new book, anthropologists Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport draw on their various ethnographic experiences to reappraise the concept and the reality of 'community', in the light of globalization, religious fundamentalism, identity politics, and renascent localisms. How might anthropology better apprehend social identities which are intrinsically plural, transgressive and ironic? What has anthropology to say about the way in which civil society might hope to accommodate the on-going construction and the rightful expression of such migrant identities? Nigel Rapport and Vered Amit give their own answers to these questions before entering into dialogue to assess each other's positions.

Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews. He is author of Transcendent Individual (1997). Vered Amit is an Associate Professor at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the editor of Realizing Community (2002).

In Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and other parts of East and Southeast Asia, as well as China, people are asking, "What does Confucianism have to offer today?" For some, Confucius is still the symbol of a reactionary and repressive past; for others, he is the humanist admired by generations of scholars and thinkers, East and West, for his ethical system and discipline. In the face of such complications, only a scholar of Theodore de Bary's stature could venture broad answers to the question of the significance of Confucianism in today's world.

In the past thirty years, Americans have lost faith in their government and the politicians who lead it. They have blamed Washington for a long list of problems, ranging from poor schools to costly medical care to high rates of violent crime. After investigating these complaints and determining that many are justified, Derek Bok seeks to determine the main reasons for the failings and frustrations associated with government.

Discounting three common explanations--deteriorating leadership, the effect of the media on the political process, and the influence of interest groups--Bok identifies four weaknesses that particularly need explaining: a persistent tendency by Congress to design programs poorly; to impose expensive and often quixotic regulations that produce only modest results; to do less than other leading democracies to protect working people from illness, unemployment, and other basic hazards of life; and to leave large numbers of people, especially children, living in poverty.

Bok goes on to explore the reasons for these fundamental weaknesses and to discuss popular remedies such as term limits, devolution, "reinventing" government, and campaign finance reform. While some of these proposals have merit, Bok finds a deeper, more troubling paradox: Americans want to gain more power over their government, but are devoting less time to exerting a constructive influence. Their dissatisfaction with government is growing as their participation in the political process is declining. These contradictory trends, Bok argues, contribute to the problems of our democracy. Fortunately, there are many concrete steps that Americans can take to be politically engaged and to help their government improve its performance.

"Democracy," Bok concludes, "is a collective venture which falters or flourishes depending on the efforts citizens invest in its behalf."

Stanley Fish is an equal opportunity antagonist. A theorist who has taken on theorists, an academician who has riled the academy, a legal scholar and political pundit who has ruffled feathers left and right, Fish here turns with customary gusto to the trouble with principle. Specifically, Fish has a quarrel with neutral principles. The trouble? They operate by sacrificing everything people care about to their own purity. And they are deployed with equal highmindedness and equally absurd results by liberals and conservatives alike.

In this bracing book, Fish argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality--no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim--and that those who invoke one are always making a rhetorical and political gesture. In the end, it is history and context, the very substance against which a purportedly abstract principle defines itself, that determines a principle's content and power. In the course of making this argument, Fish takes up questions about academic freedom and hate speech, affirmative action and multiculturalism, the boundaries between church and state, and much more. Sparing no one, he shows how our notions of intellectual and religious liberty--cherished by those at both ends of the political spectrum--are artifacts of the very partisan politics they supposedly transcend. The Trouble with Principle offers a provocative challenge to the debates of our day that no intellectually honest citizen can afford to ignore.

 Examining autobiographical texts by Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X), Oscar Zeta Acosta (The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and Revolt of the Cockroach People), Amiri Baraka (The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones), and Richard Rodriguez  (Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation, and Brown), Walker questions the often rosy views and simplistic binary conceptions of religious conversion. Her reading of these texts takes into account the conflict and serial changes the authors experience in a society that marginalizes them, the manner in which religious conversion offers ethnic Americans “salvation” through cultural assimilation or cultural nationalism, and what conversion, anticonversion, and deconversion narratives tell us about the problematic effects of religion that often go unremarked because of a code of “special respect” and political correctness.

In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006 and appearing here in English for the first time, Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not as a block but through the way they diverge from each other. Drawing on thinkers ranging from Dewey to Deleuze, she develops what she calls an “ecology of practices” into a capacious and heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers first advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way each should be situated by the kind of relationship demanded by what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the disabling scientific/nonscientific binary—like the opposition between the neutrino and Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices stimulates instead an appetite for thinking reality not as an arbiter but as what we can relate with through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations.