http://www.sup.org/rss/history.xml Stanford University Press - History RSS Feed Sat, 17 Jun 2017 09:02:01 +0000 en-us Copyright 2017 Stanford University Press SimpleXML (http://www.php.net//manual/en/book.simplexml.php) webmaster@www.sup.org http://www.sup.org/img/icons/treeWhiteOnRed200x200.jpg http://www.sup.org/rss/history.xml Written in pieces over the last fifteen years of his life and published posthumously, S. Y. Agnon's <i>A City in Its Fullness</i> is an ambitious, historically rich sequence of stories memorializing Buczacz, the city of his birth. This town in present-day Ukraine was once home to a vibrant Jewish population that was destroyed twice over—in the First World War and again in the Holocaust. Agnon's epic story cycle, however, focuses not on the particulars of destruction, but instead reimagines the daily lives of Buczacz's Jewish citizens, vividly preserving the vanished world of early modern Jewry. <i>Ancestral Tales</i> shows how this collection marks a critical juncture within the Agnon canon. Through close readings of the stories against a shifting historical backdrop, Alan Mintz presents a multilayered history of the town, along with insight into Agnon's fictional transformations. Mintz relates these narrative strategies to catastrophe literature from earlier periods of Jewish history, showing how Agnon's Buczacz is a literary achievement at once innovative in its form of remembrance and deeply rooted in Jewish tradition. http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27719 http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27719 This book challenges the ways we read, write, store, and retrieve information in the digital age. Computers—from electronic books to smart phones—play an active role in our social lives. Our technological choices thus entail theoretical and political commitments. Dennis Tenen takes up today's strange enmeshing of humans, texts, and machines to argue that our most ingrained intuitions about texts are profoundly alienated from the physical contexts of their intellectual production. Drawing on a range of primary sources from both literary theory and software engineering, he makes a case for a more transparent practice of human–computer interaction. <i>Plain Text</i> is thus a rallying call, a frame of mind as much as a file format. It reminds us, ultimately, that our devices also encode specific modes of governance and control that must remain available to interpretation. http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26821 http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26821 Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, <i>Love As Human Freedom</i> sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, Paul A. Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives. Through keen interpretations of the best known philosophical and literary depictions of its topic—including Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Ovid, Flaubert, and Tolstoy—his book treats love as a fundamental way that we humans make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life. http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=21398 http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=21398