Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2006

Communication Top

Beginning with America's first newspaper, investigative reporting has provided journalism with its most significant achievements and challenging controversies. Yet it was an ill-defined practice until the 1960s when it emerged as a potent voice in newspapers and on television news programs. In the Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, James L. Aucoin provides readers with the first comprehensive history of investigative journalism, including a thorough account of the founding and achievements of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). Aucoin begins by discussing in detail the tradition of exposure journalism from the colonial era through the golden age of muckraking in the 1900s, and into the 1960s. Subsequent chapters examine the rise of investigative journalism from 1960 to 1975 and the founding of IRE by a group of journalists in the 1970s to promote investigative journalism and training methods. Through the organization's efforts, investigative journalism has evolved into a distinct practice, with defined standards and values. Aucoin applies the social-moral development theory of Alasdair MacIntyre-who has explored the function, development, and value of social practices-to explain how IRE contributed positively to the evolution of American investigative journalism. Also included is a thorough account of IRE's role in the controversial Arizona Project. After Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles (a founding member of IRE) was murdered while investigating land fraud, scores of reporters from around the country descended on the area to continue his work and expose those who conspired to kill him. the Arizona Project brought national attention and stature to the fledgling IRE and was integral to its continuing survival. Emerging investigative reporters and editors, as well as students and scholars of journalism history, will benefit from the detailed presentation and insightful discussion provided in this book.

From EverQuest to World of Warcraft, online games have evolved from the exclusive domain of computer geeks into an extraordinarily lucrative staple of the entertainment industry. People of all ages and from all walks of life now spend thousands of hours—and dollars—partaking in this popular new brand of escapism. But the line between fantasy and reality is starting to blur. Players have created virtual societies with governments and economies of their own whose currencies now trade against the dollar on eBay at rates higher than the yen. And the players who inhabit these synthetic worlds are starting to spend more time online than at their day jobs. In Synthetic Worlds, Edward Castronova offers the first comprehensive look at the online game industry, exploring its implications for business and culture alike. He starts with the players, giving us a revealing look into the everyday lives of the gamers—outlining what they do in their synthetic worlds and why. He then describes the economies inside these worlds to show how they might dramatically affect real world financial systems, from potential disruptions of markets to new business horizons. Ultimately, he explores the long-term social consequences of online games: If players can inhabit worlds that are more alluring and gratifying than reality, then how can the real world ever compete? Will a day ever come when we spend more time in these synthetic worlds than in our own? Or even more startling, will a day ever come when such questions no longer sound alarmist but instead seem obsolete? With more than five million active players worldwide—and with Microsoft and Sony pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into video game development—online games have become too big to ignore. Synthetic Worlds spearheads our efforts to come to terms with this virtual reality and its concrete effects.

Countering the assumption that journalism is concerned only with the present, Kitch analyzes more than 60 American consumer magazines, from "Newsweekand "Rolling Stone to "Black Enterpriseand "Reader's Digest, to show how magazines actively participate in the construction of America's historical memory.

Essayist Stephen Miller pursues a lifelong interest in conversation by taking an historical and philosophical view of the subject. He chronicles the art of conversation in Western civilization from its beginnings in ancient Greece to its apex in eighteenth-century Britain to its current endangered state in America. As Harry G. Frankfurt brought wide attention to the art of bullshit in his recent bestselling On Bullshit, so Miller now brings the art of conversation into the light, revealing why good conversation matters and why it is in decline. nbsp; Miller explores the conversation about conversation among such great writers as Cicero, Montaigne, Swift, Defoe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Virginia Woolf. He focuses on the world of British coffeehouses and clubs in “The Age of Conversation” and examines how this era ended. Turning his attention to the United States, the author traces a prolonged decline in the theory and practice of conversation from Benjamin Franklin through Hemingway to Dick Cheney. He cites our technology (iPods, cell phones, and video games) and our insistence on unguarded forthrightness as well as our fear of being judgmental as powerful forces that are likely to diminish the art of conversation.

By the late 1960s more than a few critics of American culture groused about the condition of television programming and, in particular, the quality and content of television shows for children. In the eyes of the reform-minded, commercial television crassly exploited young viewers; its violence and tastelessness served no higher purpose than the bottom line. The Children's Television Workshop (CTW) -- and its fresh approach to writing and producing programs for kids -- emerged from this growing concern. Sesame Street -- CTW's flagship, hour-long show -- aimed to demonstrate how television could help all preschoolers, including low-income urban children, prepare for first grade. In this engaging study Robert W. Morrow explores the origins and inner workings of CTW, how the workshop in New York scripted and designed Sesame Street, and how the show became both a model for network television as well as a thorn in its side. Through extensive archival research and a systematic study of sample programs from Sesame Street's first ten seasons, Morrow tells the story of Sesame Street's creation; the ideas, techniques, organization, and funding behind it; its place in public discourse; and its ultimate and unfortunate failure as an agent of commercial television reform.

Tuning Out Blackness fills a glaring omission in U.S. and Latin American television studies by looking at the history of Puerto Rican television. In exploring the political and cultural dynamics that have shaped racial representations in Puerto Rico's commercial media from the late 1940s to the 1990s, Yeidy M. Rivero advances critical discussions about race, ethnicity, and the media. She shows that televisual representations of race have belied the ideology of a racially mixed heritage that pervades Puerto Rico's national culture and positions the island's alleged egalitarianism in opposition to racial conflicts in the United States. White performers in blackface have often portrayed "blackness" in local television productions, while black actors have been largely excluded. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, archival research, and textual analysis, Rivero considers representations of race in Puerto Rico, taking into account how they are intertwined with the island's status as a U.S. commonwealth, its national culture, and its relationship with Cuba before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, as well as with the massive influx of Cuban migrants after 1960. She focuses on locally produced radio and television shows, particular television events, and characters that became popular media icons-from performer Ramon Rivero's use of blackface and "black" voice in the 1940s and 1950s to the battle between black actors and television industry officials over racism in the 1970s to the creation, in the 1990s, of the first Puerto Rican situation comedy featuring a black family. As the twentieth century drew to a close, multinational corporations had purchased all of Puerto Rico's stations, and they threatened to wipe out locally produced programs. Tuning Out Blackness not only brings to the forefront the marginalization of non-white citizens in Puerto Rico's media culture; it also raises important questions about the significance of local sites of television production.

In The Invention of Journalism Ethics Stephen Ward argues that, given the current emphasis in the news media on interpretation, analysis, and perspective, journalists and the public need a new theory of objectivity - pragmatic objectivity - to enable them to recognize and avoid biased and unbalanced reporting. Ward uses ideas from rhetorical theory to explain the ethical assertions of journalists in various eras, focusing on the changing relationship between journalist and audience. He shows that the objectivity required in journalism is not a set of absolute standards but the same "fallible but reasonable" objectivity used for making decisions in professions and public institutions and must be understood as a long and complex interaction between many social, economic, and ideational factors. Ward also shows that the origin of journalism ethics is much earlier than previously recognized, going back to the partisan English newsbooks of the seventeenth century. Concern for objectivity gained momentum in journalism in the late 1800s and Ward discusses the many factors that prompted journalists to construct their own idea of objectivity. His proposed theory of pragmatic objectivity draws on studies in epistemology and philosophy of science to construct a richer, more adequate conception of objectivity to guide journalism practice today.

"Don Quixote is the first great modern paranoid adventurer. . . . Grandiosity and persecution define the characters of Swift' Gulliver, Stendhal' Julien Sorel, Melville' Ahab, Dostoyevsky' Underground Man, Ibsen' Masterbuilder Solness, Strindberg' Captain (in A Father), Kafka' K., and Joyce' autobiographical hero Stephen Dedalus. . . . The all-encompassing conspiracy, very much in its original Rousseauvian cast, has become almost the normal way of representing society and its institutions since World War Two, giving impetus to heroic plots and counter-plots in a hundred films and in the novels of Burroughs, Heller, Ellison, Pynchon, Kesey, Mailer, DeLillo, and others."-from Paranoia and ModernityParanoia, suspicion, and control have preoccupied key Western intellectuals since the sixteenth century. Paranoia is a dominant concern in modern literature, and its peculiar constellation of symptoms-grandiosity, suspicion, unfounded hostility, delusions of persecution and conspiracy-are nearly obligatory psychological components of the modern hero.How did paranoia come to the center of modern moral and intellectual consciousness? In Paranoia and Modernity, John Farrell brings literary criticism, psychology, and intellectual history to the attempt at an answer. He demonstrates the connection between paranoia and the long history of struggles over the question of agency-the 336 to which we are free to act and responsible for our actions. He addresses a wide range of major authors from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, among them Luther, Bacon, Cervantes, Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Swift, and Rousseau. Farrell shows how differently paranoid psychology looks at different historical junctures with different models of agency, and in the epilogue, "Paranoia and Postmodernism," he draws the implications for recent critical debates in the humanities.

A guide to the history of literary criticism from antiquity to the present day. An overview of the major movements, figures and texts of literary criticism. The cultural, historical, and philosophical background which enables students to see literary criticism in context. Starting with a comprehensive section on classical literary criticism, Habib shows how the central philosophical principles of Plato and Aristotle not only underlie their specific comments on literature, but also lay out the foundations and categories of much subsequent Western thought. Similarly, for each subsequent period, the book combines background information, whether on the philosophy of Locke, the history of the French Revolution, the political theories of Marx and Engels, or Freud's views on civilization, with coverage of the major figures and texts of literary-critical thought.

The first comprehensive critical history of the origins and development of science fiction for many decades, The Palgrave History of Science Fiction explores the genre from an international perspective and in depth. It covers SF from the ancient Greeks, through the rebirth of the genre at the Reformation, with detailed coverage of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century science fiction, and a wide-ranging account of twentieth-century sci-fi in book, film, televisual and comic book forms, concluding with an account of the current state of the genre.

This unique anthology translates for the first time a little-known body of Yiddish poetry by American Yiddish proletarian writers who identified politically and poetically with the American Left from the 1920s to the early 1950s. In his introduction, Dovid Katz explains how a McCarthy-era "American Yiddish Political Correctness" wrote these leftist poets out of the canon. Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub correct this erasure, recovering the work of thirty poets. Proletpen introduces the reader to an untold chapter of American's tumultuous history during the pre- and inter-war period, revealing the depth and power of Yiddish literature through the backdrop of twentieth-century world politics. Published in Association with the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture.

A landmark in scholarship and culture, this volume uncovers the stunning literary legacy of African women, heretofore all but invisible.

Beginning with a Sesotho womens lament song from 1842, this volume brings together poetry, songs, newspaper columns, political petitions, personal letters, and prison diaries, along with little-known works by writers such as Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Yvonne Vera, Zoe Wicomb, and Nadine Gordimer. Each of the 120 texts in the volume is accompanied by a scholarly note that provides detailed background information, while an introductory essay sets the broader historical stage. Approximately one third of the texts are oral in origin, and few have previously been available in book form.

The acclaimed Women Writing Africa project"opens up worlds too often excluded from thehistory books" (Booklist) and is an "essential resourcefor scholars and general readers alike"(Library Journal). It reveals the cultural legacy ofAfrican women in their own words, in never-before-published texts that include communalsongs and lullabies, letters and speeches, poetryand fiction. Representing 20 languages and 12 countries,volume 2 covers western Africa, wheremost African Americans find their roots. Thecollection presents an epic history of the regionthrough the eyes of its women, from theage of African kings through colonialism andindependence. Volume 1 of the series, Women Writing Africa:The Southern Region, is also available; volumes 3and 4 will be published in 2006.

For centuries the sub-national languages of China have been a fundamental feature in daily life and popular culture, while a standardized form of Mandarin has been adopted as the language of the state (including education). Suppressed during powerful movements to establish a modern, national culture, these local languages or dialects have nevertheless survived, and their resurgence in the media and literature has caused tensions to surface. Concerns for education, law, and commerce have all promoted a standard national language, yet, at the same time, as local societies have undergone massive transformations, the need to re-imagine communities has repeatedly challenged the adequacy of a single language to represent them. Moreover, local languages have been presented in dramatically different and conflicted roles-as symbols of the failure to assimilate to a cultural mainstream (which in turn may be parodied as contingent and inadequate) or asserting the identity of a community as a site of its own cultural production and not merely as a venue for transmitting a national culture. Acknowledging local language as authentic may also reveal cultural hegemonies within regions and contested versions of communities. This ground-breaking study surveys in detail the sweep of local languages in television, radio, film, and print culture of late twentieth-century mainland China, especially Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Chengdu, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Focusing on these regions, the analysis contrasts and compares these distinct communities to each other and to the ways in which they mediate culture as a national institution. It draws on a wide range of critical, cultural, and media studies and explores how varied genres and media have sought to represent the tensions and assertions within these societies and how they construct the local in an age of globalization.

Sheldon Pollock examines the remarkably close parallels in formations of culture and power, the one cosmopolitan and the other vernacular, that occurred in Western Europe with the rise of the Latin and the Roman Empire, and the one in South Asia that cooresponded with the rise of Sanskrit.

As medieval Chinese manuscripts were copied and recopied through the centuries, both mistakes and deliberate editorial changes were introduced, thereby affecting readers' impressions of the author's intent. In Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture, Xiaofei Tian shows how readers not only experience authors but produce them by shaping texts to their interpretation. Tian examines the mechanics and history of textual transmission in China by focusing on the evolution over the centuries of the reclusive poet Tao Yuanming into a figure of epic stature. Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture is a study of how this cultural icon was produced and of the elusive traces of another, historical Tao Yuanming behind the icon. By comparing four early biographies of the poet, Tian shows how these are in large measure constructed out of Tao Yuanming's self-image as projected in his poetry and prose. Drawing on work in European medieval literature, she demonstrates the fluidity of the Chinese medieval textual world and how its materials were historically reconfigured for later purposes.

1. Introduction: From the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century Part I. Contiguities: Women, Fiction, and Print Culture Circa 1830 2. The Women of Jinghua yuan 3. Hou Zhi and "Women's Tanci" 4. Fiction in Three Prominent Women's Lives 5. Fiction as Women's Literature: The View Circa 1830 Part II. Continuities: Honglou meng ying in Its Nineteenth-Century Setting 6. Honglou meng ying Sequels and Their Female Readers 7. Honglou meng Sequels and Their Female Readers 8. Women, Publishing, and Late Qing Literary Currents Afterword: Women and the "Rise of the Novel" in China Appendices A. Three Generations of Women B. Three Poems in Translation Notes Bibliography Index

In this bold work, Thomas Habinek offers an entirely new theoretical perspective on Roman cultural history. Although English words such as "literature" and "religion" have their origins in Latin, the Romans had no such specific concepts. Rather, much of the sense of these words was captured in the Latin word carmen, usually translated into English as "song." Habinek argues that for the Romans, "song" encompassed a wide range of ritualized speech, including elements of poetry, storytelling, and even the casting of spells. Habinek begins with the fraternal societies, or sodalitates, which predated the Republic and endured into the Imperial era, and whose rites, although adapted over time to different deities and cults, were from the beginning centered on song (perhaps most notably in the ancient Carmen Saliare). He goes on to show how this early use of song became a paradigm for cultural reproduction throughout Roman history. Ritual mastery of the chaos of everyday life, embodied and enacted in song, produced and transmitted the beliefs on which Roman culture was founded and by which Roman communities were sustained. By the emergence of the Empire, "song," in all of its senses, served in particular to reproduce the power of the state, organizing relations of power at every level of society. The World of Roman Song presents a systematic and comprehensive approach to Roman cultural history. Informed and imaginative, this book challenges classicists, social theorists, and literary scholars to engage in a provocative discussion of the power of song.

What drove the ancient Greeks to explore human nature and invent Western politics? This book argues that the Greeks believed speech made humans different from other animals. But, this zoological comparison also provided the metaphorical means for viewing those 'lacking' authoritative speech--women, barbarians, and slaves, etc.--as bestial. This link between speech, humanity, and status is revealed through close study of both Homeric epics, classical Athenian culture, Aeschylus' Oresteia, and Plato's Dialogues.

This book offers a comprehensive examination of the language of Roman comedy in general and that of Terence in particular. The study explores Terence's use of language to differentiate his characters and his language in relation to the language of the comic fragments of the palliata, the togata and the atellana. Linguistic categories in the Terentian corpus explored include colloquialisms, archaisms, hellenisms and idiolectal features. Terence is shown to give his old men an old-fashioned and verbose tone, while low characters are represented as using colloquial diction. An examination of Eunuchus' language shows it to be closer to the Plautine linguistic tradition. The book also provides a thorough linguistic/stylistic commentary on all the fragments of the palliata, the togata and the atellana. It shows that Terence, except in the case of his Eunuchus, consciously distances himself from the linguistic/stylistic tradition of Plautus followed by all other comic poets.