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• Meena Alexander
  Illiterate Heart
• Joshua Brown
  Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America
• Mary Ann Caws, editor and translator
  Surrealist Love Poems
• Todd R. Clear and David R. Karp, editors
  What is Community Justice
• Forrest Colburn
  Latin America at the End of Politics
• Morris Dickstein
  Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970
• Daniel Gerould and Marvin Carlson, editors and translators
  Pixérécourt: Four Melodramas
• N. J. Hall
  Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life
• David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, editors
  Loss: The Politics of Mourning
• William Kornblum
  At Sea in the City
• Nancy K. Miller
  But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives
• Abbe Mowshowitz
  Virtual Organization: Toward a Theory of Transformation Stimulated by Information Technology
• Manning Marable and Leith Mullings
  FREEDOM: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle
• Paul Oppenheimer
  Rubens: A Portrait
• Wallis Reid, Ricardo Otheguy and Nancy Stern, editors
  Signal, Meaning, and Message
• Philip Rupprecht
  Britten's Musical Language
• Thomas C. Spear, editor
  La culture française vue d'ici et d'ailleurs


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Meena Alexander
Illiterate Heart
(Triquarterly Books, 2002; 106 pp.)

Alexander explores, in her fifth full-length collection of poems, the life of the exile who must tirelessly "translate" one life into the next, with poems located in India, Europe, and the United States. Her subject matter includes an imaginary visit from the Persian poet Rumi to her New York apartment, a meditation on the Holocaust ("Low Hills of Bavaria"), evocations of an Indian youth redolent with sense impressions, and a reflection on fellow poet Allen Ginsberg's trips to her home country: "I see you young again / teeth stained with betel and bhang, / nostrils tense with the smoke of Manhattan, / ankles taut in a yogic asana, prickly with desire." Winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, Alexander is distinguished professor of English at Hunter College and The Graduate Center.

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Joshua Brown
Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America
(University of California Press, 2002; 361 pp.)

This beautifully illustrated book focuses on the importance of the role of pictorial journalism—before the age of photography and video—in the nineteenth-century press, concentrating on the history and influence of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, with asides on Harper's Weekly, the New York Daily Graphic, and other publications. Brown finds these images to be important gauges of the raging issues of the time: the Civil War, Reconstruction, important labor battles, strikes, trials, assassinations, and the plights of freed slaves and immigrants that characterized the time. Joshua Brown—executive director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center—has compiled the best source of material from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and written the first study to situate these images within the social context of Gilded Age America.

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Mary Ann Caws, editor and translator
Surrealist Love Poems
(University of Chicago Press, 2002; 120 pp.)

Prolific author/editor/translator Mary Ann Caws—her books Manifesto, Surrealist Painters, and Picasso's Weeping Women were all published last year—edited this collection of Surrealist love poems, described as "erotic, impassioned and necrophilic works [that] celebrate the idea of obsessive and transformative love" by Publisher's Weekly. Poems by the likes of art's original "bad boys," André Breton and Paul Eluard, as well as by Philippe Soupault, Octavio Paz, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Frida Kahlo, are gathered here, accompanied by fourteen lushly printed photos by Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun. ("The embrace of poetry like that of bodies / As long as it lasts / Shuts out all the woes of the world"—Breton.) Mary Ann Caws is distinguished professor of comparative literature, English, and French at The Graduate Center.

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Todd R. Clear and David R. Karp, editors
What is Community Justice
(Sage Publications, 2002; 193 pp.)

Traditional methods of probation and parole supervision have relied on "case workers" who observe their clients as closely as they can, but as the number of "clients" increases, studies show, present-day methods are proving ineffective. Todd R. Clear (distinguished professor of criminal justice at John Jay College and The Graduate Center) and David R. Karp (assistant professor of sociology at Skidmore College and editor of Community Justice: An Emerging Field) address specific ways to rethink community supervision by presenting six case studies of probation programs that represent a practical side of the community justice ideal. This book presents a provocative, engaging new approach to probation and parole models.

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Forrest Colburn
Latin America at the End of Politics
(Princeton University Press, 2002; 152 pp.)

"The one book on Latin America that is essential reading this year," according to Foreign Affairs, Latin America at the End of Politics shows a region whose democracies are fragile and lethargic—having embraced liberalism through default, after decades of socialist struggles—with pronounced poverty and inequality, and a populace that is not engaged in deep discussions about state and society. Colburn, professor of political science at Lehman College and The Graduate Center, has crafted a remarkable and unconventional book, drawing on a deep scholarly and personal knowledge of Latin America. He enriches his study with poignant individual narratives that are emblematic of the disillusionment in the region.

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Morris Dickstein
Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970
(Harvard University Press, 2002; 242 pp.)

In an acclaimed work of literary criticism and cultural history, Dickstein turns his attention to the rich flowering of novelistic writing that occurred in the first 25 years after World War II. Leopards in the Temple provides a wide-ranging and frank reassessment of more than 20 key figures, including Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, and Jack Kerouac. Showing that the "conservative" 50s were a time when artists were laying the groundwork for what would become the eruptive 60s, Dickstein's fluid prose deftly relates the work of these varied authors—one a Russian émigré, another an African American in Paris, another a rambunctious originator of the "Beat" aesthetic—to each other and to their time. Morris Dickstein is distinguished professor of English at The Graduate Center.

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Daniel Gerould and Marvin Carlson, editors and translators
Pixérécourt: Four Melodramas
(Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 2002; 322 pp.)

Though the reputation of French playwright René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844) has waned since his heyday in the years following the French Revolution, the past 20 years have brought about a resurgence of interest in the "father of melodrama," author of 120 plays. This volume contains four of his most important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or Jafar and Zaida, The Dog of Montatgis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher Columbus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or The Scottish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodier's "Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixérécourt's plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama." Daniel Gerould is Lucille Lortel Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center; Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center.

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N. J. Hall
Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life
(Yale University Press, 2002; 304 pp.)

Celebrated as the wittiest man of his age, Max Beerbohm enjoyed a career that spanned three-generations—he became famous in the mid-1890s, when he was a London caricaturist, journalist, and critic, and remained so through the last decades of his life, when he was an occasional BBC broadcaster. Written in an idiosyncratic, opinionated, and lively style reminiscent of Beerbohm, Hall's biography notes that, though the early part of Beerbohm's career concerned contemporary art and life, his later work—after his "retirement" in 1910—hearkened back to the late Victorian/Edwardian era, even to the Pre-Raphaelites, making him an inspiring link to the past. A Kind of Life highlights Beerbohm's connection with various luminaries: J.A.M. Whistler, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and many others. N. J. Hall is distinguished professor of English at Bronx Community College and The Graduate Center.
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David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, editors 
Loss: The Politics of Mourning
(University of California Press, 2002; 488 pp.)

The contributors to this volume—including political theorists, film and literary critics, museum curators, feminists, AIDS activists, and psychoanalysts—look toward a new experience of both the past and the future by considering "what is lost" in terms of "what remains." Their subjects, viewed through the lens of melancholy, range from the Irish Famine and the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians, to the aftermath of the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, to problems of partial immigration and assimilation, AIDS, and the re-envisioning of leftist movements. Their hope is to reinvigorate possibilities in the workings of witness, memory, and melancholy after a century of pervasive loss due to warfare, disease, and political strife. David L. Eng is associate professor of English at Rutgers University, and David Kazanjian is assistant professor of English at Queens College and visiting professor of English at The Graduate Center. 

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William Kornblum
At Sea in the City
(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2002; 232 pp.)

For Kornblum, New York City is shaped by the water and the people who have sailed it for goods, money, pirate's loot, and freedom—from a time long before Broadway was "a muddy cart track," to today. Kornblum takes readers along as he sails through and around his hometown—as he has been doing his whole life—and paints a vivid portrait of the city's history in relation to its waterfront and maritime culture. As much a work of urban sociology—including tales of shipwrecks and the city's financial beginnings—as a memoir of his adventures on his restored ancient catboat named Tradition, At Sea in the City is an evocative personal narrative that "grapples afresh with the history and complexity of the metropolis" (Philip Lopate). William Kornblum is a professor of sociology at The Graduate Center.

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Nancy K. Miller
But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives
(Columbia University Press, 2002; 145 pp.)

Miller, distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at The Graduate Center, has carved out a distinctive niche with her books of personal criticism, this time mixing memoir with a group portrait of a generation of literary women who grew up in an age of profound social change. But Enough About Me tells the story of a girl who matured in the 1950s, got lost in the 1960s, and became a feminist critic in the 1970s. But it becomes a "transpersonal" memoir as it weaves in stories of other notable feminists of her age. Its stylistic blend of social criticism and deep anecdote, complemented by photographs that are by turns provocative and intimate, makes this a unique read: a candid autobiographical essay that is also a meditation on the social phenomenon of the "memoir" as genre.

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Abbe Mowshowitz
Virtual Organization: Toward a Theory of Societal Transformation Stimulated by Information Technology
(Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002; 280 pp.)

With rapid changes in the power, speed, and reliability of digital communications, computers have become mediators between individuals—acting as brokers between buyers and sellers, employers and employees, and resources and work processes. Companies are no longer constrained by geography, and managers are able to oversee projects from great distances, moving work production from place to place—a process called "switching"—as cheap labor pools open up. Virtual Organization analyzes this phenomenon, which has replaced traditional models of organization, including the ways in which "switching" weakens personal, political, and business loyalties. Abbe Mowshowitz, professor of computer science at City College and The Graduate Center, compellingly describes a new feudal system in the making, in which power and authority are vested in private hands but which is based on globally distributed resources rather than on possession of land.

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Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, authors; Sophie Spencer-Wood, photo editor
FREEDOM: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle
(Phaidon Press, 2002; 512 pp.)

From nineteenth-century daguerreotypes to photos from Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns; from the most iconic images of Martin Luther King, Jr., to many images of daily life never before published; FREEDOM tells the history of the African American struggle for equality through an unprecedented array of 600 photographs, the result of extensive archival research. With text by Manning Marable, professor at Columbia University, and Presidential Professor Leith Mullings of The Graduate Center's Ph.D. Program in Anthropology, this monumental book—in both size and scope—chronicles the battle to eradicate slavery through the Civil War and traces slavery's legacies of segregation and racism, with extensive coverage of the civil rights movement. The last chapter focuses on the societal conflicts and public figures (such as Colin Powell, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Jordan) of today.

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Paul Oppenheimer
Rubens: A Portrait
(Cooper Square Press, 2002; 432 pp.)

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was the most popular painter of his day, and his posthumous reputation has ranged from the "Prince of Painters" to an artist whose style, subjects, and methods of painting have been subject to withering criticism. Rubens, a contemporary of Shakespeare, Rembrandt, and Galileo, possessed many ideas about beauty—that it is a process and not a quality, a history of actions rather than an ideal to be aspired to—that have proved ahead of their time. His monumental canvases with their sensual gardens, scenes from Biblical and classical lore, and "Rubenesque" women are the epitome of the Baroque School of painting, which later influenced Delecroix, Renoir, and many others. Paul Oppenheimer is professor of comparative literature at The Graduate Center.

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Wallis Reid, Ricardo Otheguy and Nancy Stern, editors
Signal, Meaning, and Message
(John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002; 413 pp.)

This volume, co-edited by Richard Otheguy, a professor of linguistics and Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian literatures at The Graduate Center, is the second set of papers on sign-based linguistics to emerge from the Columbia School linguistics conferences. The collection covers a wide array of topics including: English full-verb inversion; Serbo-Croatian deictic pronouns; English auxiliary do; Italian pronouns egli and lui; the Celtic-influenced use of on (e.g. "he played a trick on me"); and a monosemic analysis of the English verb break. A second set of essays deals with theoretical issues, such as the appropriateness of statistical tests of significance in text-based analysis and the future of "minimalist linguistics" in a maximalist world, while a third set explains phonotactic patterning in terms of ease of articulation. The introduction highlights the theoretical and analytical points of each article and relates them to the Columbia School framework.

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Philip Rupprecht
Britten's Musical Language
(Cambridge University Press, 2002; 275 pp.)

Several of British composer Benjamin Britten's most important works were based on classics of literature—Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, Death in Venice, and Peter Grimes among them. Rupprecht's study focuses on aspects of "utterance" in these operas—both as "musical utterance," considering Britten's music as a language composed of themes and motifs, and in terms of the utterance of words in the operas' texts. "For the listener, utterance names an experience of being addressed directly by the performer or (less directly) by the composer... a musical thought moves from 'in here' to 'out there'...." Philip Rupprecht—assistant professor of music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center—has crafted a distinctive, detailed study of the major vocal works of this important twentieth-century composer.

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Thomas C. Spear, editor
La culture française vue d'ici et d'ailleurs
(Karthala, 2002; 258 pp.)

The French language is a fundamental element of identity for the 13 contributors to this volume, just as it is a site of conflict when confronted with other national and cultural realities. As French speakers, the essayists react strongly and diversely to the official politics of institutionalized "Francophonie" and to the influences of French culture as it radiates from the cultural hub of Paris. They redefine the relationship between the language's European center and its multicultural, postcolonial variations, both within and outside of France itself. Written in the first person, these essays offer poignant critical perspectives and give testimony to particular paths taken in various communities. Thomas C. Spear, editor, is a professor of French at The Graduate Center. The book also contains a preface by Edouard Glissant, distinguished professor in the French program.

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