Arts & Sciences

Newsletter
Fall 1996 Vol. 18 No. 1

Books by Faculty

Brink Road (W. W. Norton and Company, 1996) is a collection of more than 150 poems from 1973 to the present by A. R. Ammons (English). They deal with Ammons's lifelong concerns with language, mortality, and nature's beauties and impersonal forces. (Poem below reprinted with permission. ©1996 by A. R. Ammons.)

The Incomplete Life

At the extreme
tip of
the future is

death, of course,
and short
of that something not

much like life,
a careless caring
and pain perhaps

one's
ceasing ceases: an
experience whose

experience shuts
experience down:
at the

moment one has
the whole world's way to
say one

is beyond words,
just words,
just beyond words.

The Powers of Speech: the Politics of Culture in the GDR (University of Nebraska Press, 1995), by David Bathrick (German studies and theatre arts), examines East German culture before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Bathrick argues that East German writers were unique among East European literary intellectuals in that they tried "to open up alternative spaces for public speech from within the framework" of Marxism and state socialism and that they were both and sometimes even simultaneously privileged and hunted or censored.

The Story of Creation: Its Origin and Its Interpretation in Philo and the Fourth Gospel (Cornell University Press, 1996), by Calum M. Carmichael (comparative literature), argues that texts are often the products of the ancient authors' interpretation of still other literary compositions. He uncovers the influence of the exodus story on the creation story and the influence of the creation story and contemporary cosmological speculation (particularly Philo's) on John's Gospel.

The End of Conduct: "Grobianus" and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (Cornell University Press, 1996), by Barbara Correll (English), analyzes "Grobianus et Grobiana," a sixteenth-century ironic poem that recommends utterly disgusting behavior in order to instill decency.

The American Research University: National Treasure or Endangered Species? (Cornell University Press, 1996), edited by Ronald G. Ehrenberg (industrial and labor relations and economics), reviews the accusations against American universities and suggests ways for them to proceed.

How Cyrano's Bravoure Turns Comedy into Tragedy (Linguistica, Ithaca, NY, 1995), by Robert A. Hall, Jr. (linguistics), is a short textual analysis.

Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 1996), one of the Cornell Studies in Political Economy series, edited by Peter J. Katzenstein (government), analyzes the reluctance of Japanese police and military to use physical violence to enforce state security. Further, Katzenstein traces the relationship between the United States and Japan since 1945 and compares Japan with postwar Germany. He suggests that although Japan's security policy is usually thought unusual, the definition of security used in the United States is, in international terms, the exceptional definition.

Network Power: Japan in Asia (Cornell University Press, 1996), edited by Peter J. Katzenstein (government) and Takashi Shiraishi (history), examines Japanese dominance of politics, economics, and cultures of the area. The contributors compare Japan's leading role in Asian regionalism with the role of Germany in European regionalism. The question is whether Chinese or Japanese domination of Asia is more likely.

Earthly Goods: Environmental Change and Social Justice (Cornell University Press, 1996), edited by Fen Hampson (Carleton University) and Judith Reppy (science and technology studies), is a collection of essays that use accounts of actual negotiations and question what fairness means in dividing responsibility for problems of global warming between rich and poor nations, whether the environment itself has moral standing, and if it does, how interests of people can be reconciled with the environment. What is the role of science if it is not, as the book argues it is not, to provide morally disinterested solutions?

The State of Americans: The Disturbing Facts and Figures on Changing Values, Crime, the Economy, Poverty, Family Education, the Aging Population and What They Mean for Our Future (The Free Press, 1996) by Urie Bronfenbrenner (human development), Peter McClelland (economics), Elaine Wethington (family studies), and Phyllis Moen (life-course studies), presents and interrelates the demographic data on social trends of "this generation and the next."

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House, 1995), by Carl Sagan (astronomy), says, "We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster." Sagan applies his personal and scientific experience to a series of popular beliefs such as alien abduction, faith healing, the "face" on Mars, and channelers.

Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (Oxford University Press, 1996), by Shirley Samuels (English and women's studies), traces through novels (primarily), poems, pamphlets, cartoons, and sermons" how gender [and the female body] implicates race and nation in signifying relations of power." It considers "how an [national] identity bound up with racial, ethnic, or gendered embodiments is harnessed to the national project. At the same time, race, gender, and nation are emphatically not casual or isomorphic substitutions for one another: to understand them that way is to overlook the problematic competition of such categories at precisely the points where their identities are most at stake."

Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), by Mary Beth Norton (history), links the theoretical concerns of Sir Robert Filmer's paternalism (idea that the family and state are analogous institutions) and "Lockean" contractualism with the realities of daily life in the colonies (approximately 1620-70). It describes the inchoate American beginnings of the very different way of thinking eventually adopted by Enlightenment theorists and reveals colonial life as more varied than usually supposed.

The Naked Mole-Rat Mystery: Scientific Sleuths at Work (The Lerner Publishing Group, 1996), by Gail Jarrow and Paul Sherman (biology), and illustrated by Raymond A. Mendez, describes how scientists discovered this unusual underground dweller. Naked Mole-Rats (Carolrhoda Books, 1996), also by Jarrow and Sherman and illustrated by Mendez, introduces children to the naked mole-rats' life cycle and social system.

Allegory and Violence (Cornell University Press, 1996), by Gordon Teskey (English), is a literary history and a theoretical account of the genre. The only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from antiquity to the Enlightenment and most fully complex in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Fairie Queene, allegory confronts fundamental questions about the violence inherent in cultural forms and is the site of intense ideological struggle.