Faculty Bookshelf
Imagination
and Innovation, The Story of Weston Woods
by John Cech (English)
A nonfiction work that follows trailblazers in the children's entertainment industry: Weston Woods and Mort Schindel.
A rival to Walt Disney and the Disney studios, Woods and Schindel have introduced kids to Maurice Sendak, Rosemary Wells, Mo Willems, and may other notable authors.
Heroic Measures
by Jill Ciment (English)
In this Oprah Winfrey Book Club 2009 summertime reading pick, a gasoline tanker truck is "stuck" in the Midtown Tunnel. Is this the next big attack? Alex, an artist, and Ruth, a former school teacher must get their beloved dachshund, whose back legs have suddenly become paralyzed, to the animal hospital sixty blocks north. But the streets of Manhattan are at a standstill. Their dog is the emotional center of Alex and Ruth's forty-five-year-long childless marriage. In shifting points of view man, woman, and one small tenacious beast try to make sense of the cacophony of rumors, opinions, and innuendos coming from news anchors, cable TV pundits, pollsters, bomb experts, hostages, witnesses, real estate agents, house hunters, bargain seekers, howling dogs, veterinarians, nurses, and cab drivers.
Albert Camus, Oeuvres Complètes
edited by Raymond Gay-Crosier (Professor Emeritus of French)
The publication of volumes III and IV of Camus' complete works constitutes the completion of a twelve-year project of which Gay-Crosier was contributing editor for volumes I-IV and editor-in-chief of volumes III and IV. This edition, including numerous heretofore unpublished writings of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, features extensive introductions, footnotes and variants.
Une saison en enfer / Yon sezon matchyavèl
by Arthur Rimbaud. Translated by Benjamin Hebblethwaite (Haitian Creole) and Jacques Pierre
This powerful literary text transposes the creative and violent love affair of the younger Arthur Rimbaud with the older and married Paul Verlaine into whirling poetry that is piercing, hallucinatory and mysterious. The juxtaposition of the French original with the Haitian Creole allows readers to compare the languages to see how the cultural and idiomatic expressions in the source text were rendered in the Haitian Creole target text. This volume is designed for students, scholars and lovers of French and Haitian Creole, and the bilingual format is designed for accelerated study.
Literature and the Brain
by Norman N. Holland (Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar Emeritus at UF)
Literature and the Brain goes straight to the human core of literature when it explains the different ways our brains convert stories, poems, plays, and films into pleasure. When we are deep into a film or book, we find ourselves "absorbed," unaware of our bodies or our surroundings. We don't doubt the existence of Spider-Man or Harry Potter, and we have real feelings about these purely imaginary beings. Our brains are behaving oddly, because we know we cannot act to change what we are seeing. And this is only one of the special ways our brains behave with literature.
Languages of Urban Africa
by Fiona McLaughlin (Associate Professor of African Linguistics)
Languages of Urban Africa is a series of case studies addressing four main themes: the history of African urban languages; theoretical issues in the study of African urban languages; the relationship between language and identity in the urban setting; and evolution of urban languages in Africa.
Brazil, Lyric, and the Americas
by Charles A. Perrone (Professor of Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian Culture & Literatures)
Available through the University of Florida Press
In this highly original volume, Perrone explores how recent Brazilian lyrics engage with counterparts throughout the Western Hemisphere in an increasingly globalized world.
This pioneering, tour-de-force study focuses on the years from 1985 to the present and examines poetic output -- from song and visual poetry to discursive verse -- across a range of media.
Everyday Ethics and Social Change: The Education of Desire
by Anna Peterson (Professor of Religion)
Americans increasingly cite moral values as a factor in how they vote, but when we define morality simply in terms of a voter's position on gay marriage and abortion, we lose sight of the ethical decisions that guide our everyday lives. In our encounters with friends, family members, nature, and nonhuman creatures, we practice a non-utilitarian morality that makes sacrifice a rational and reasonable choice. How can we move past the irreconcilable conflicts of culture and refocus on issues that affect real social change?
The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?
by Padgett Powell (Professor of English)
Powell is fascinated by what it feels like to walk through everyday life, to hear the swing and snap of American talk, to be both electrified and overwhelmed by the mad cacophony -- the "muchness" -- of America. A playful and profound bebop solo of a book in which every sentence is a question.
One D.O.A., One on the Way: A Novel
by Mary Robison (Professor of English).
Oprah Winfrey's Book Club for 2009 summertime reading pick is an effortlessly smart, deliriously off-kilter story of an extended New Orleans family trying to reclaim a shadow of their former selves. The story opens on Jay, a location scout for a movie production company. Standing left of center of this prosperous but mortally wounded family does not get easier as Jay finds more than the Louisiana heat getting to be oppressive.
Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future
by Bron Taylor (Professor of Religion)
In Dark Green Religion, Taylor provides detailed evidence that many of the innovative responses to the Darwinian revolution are forms of religious or religion-resembling expression, in which nature is considered sacred and worthy of reverent care, and non-human organisms are considered kin and as having intrinsic value.
The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement
from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey
by Trysh Travis (Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Gender Research).
Travis explores the rich cultural history of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), its offshoots, and the "recovery movement" that has grown out of them. From AA's beginnings in the mid-1930s as a men's fellowship that met in church basements to the commercialized addiction treatment centers of today, Travis chronicles the development of recovery, examining its relationship to the American tradition of self-help, and highlighting the roles that gender, mysticism, and print culture have played in that development.
Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties
by Phillip E. Wegner (Associate Professor of English)
Through virtuoso readings of significant works of American film, television, and fiction, Wegner demonstrates that the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the bombing of the World Trade Center in September 2001 fostered a unique consciousness and represented a moment of immense historical possibilities now at risk of being forgotten in the midst of the "war on terror."