U. of Alabama Press

American drama in the age of film.

Is theater really dead? How have changes in cinematic techniques and technologies altered the relationship between stage and film? Examining the strengths and weaknesses of both the dramatic and cinematic arts, Brietzke (English, comparative literature, Columbia University) confronts the standard arguments in the film-versus-theater debate. He contrasts stage and film productions of ten widely known works, including David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, Sam Shepard's True West, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Margaret Edson's Wit. In reading the dual productions of these works, he argues that theater is still vital and important, though for reasons that run counter to many of the virtues traditionally attributed to it as an art form. The new critical paradigm that he offers champions spectacle and simultaneity as the most, not least, important elements of drama. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Archaeology of the Lower Muskogee Creek Indians, 1715-1836.

They were a diverse people who populated parts of the southern US and influences development substantially, particularly during the historic period (1540-1836). Their location came from migrations throughout the historic and prehistoric periods but their towns were stable, sometimes for hundreds of years. They lived in clans, and those clans extended across towns across a wide area. The Muskogee Indians (in this particular case also called the "Creek") have therefore had significant influence in the development of the southeastern US. From his research on the nation and its artifacts as well as oral histories and other sources of information, Foster (anthropology, Northern Kentucky U.) believes we can better understand the Muskogee nation if we study it across territory rather than time, comparing town to town rather than segments of time. He uses as support environmental evidence and clues from pottery, architecture, and with contributors, botanical and animal remains. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Archaeology of the Moundville chiefdom. (Reprint, 1998)

They lived near the Black Warrior River from about 1020 to about 1650, and in their prime they numbered about a thousand. They created homes, enterprises and what appeared to be a thriving culture in mounds surrounding a central plaza. Now their town is one of the largest and best-preserved Mississippian sites in the US and also one of the most intensely studied. These nine essays come from a 1993 symposium, and a new preface to this edition by the editors describes the latest discoveries and theories. The researchers describe the town's quick decline from a market center to a ceremonial site, population trends from habitations and burials, domestic life and health, human subsistence as indicated by stable-isotope data, and relations with outlying sites. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Chronicle of a failure foretold; the peace process of Colombian president Andres Pastrana.

Kline (political science, U. of Alabama) would rather have written about one of the successful negotiation efforts in Latin America, but believes an analysis of this failure might help avoid another in the future. He describes Pastrana's attempts to negotiate peace with guerrilla groups 1998-2002 while fighting continued in the countryside and spread to the cities. One of his arguments is that the Columbian government had not learned from its mistakes from before 1998. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Circular villages of the Monongahela tradition.

It is as if they attended the same urban planning convention. Across the eastern woodlands of what became the US, amongst the Plains Indians and in Central and South America, indigenous people began to reside in ring-shaped village settlements. The largest number of completely excavated sites are those of the Monongahela in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, dated to about 1000 to 1635 AD. Here Means (anthropology, Washington and Lee U.) focuses on these villages, describing their spatial layouts and the social organizations indicated by them, later prehistoric Monongahela tradition and the recently developed chronology of villages in the Allegheny Mountains, social organizations and communities, models of spatial and social organization, data sources and variables, analytical approaches, models from the Allegheny region, comparative analyses form modeling individual village components and implications drawn from interpreting community organization through village spatial layouts. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Edith Wharton and the visual arts.

In a presentation of close readings of several of Edith Wharton's short stories and sections of her longer works, Orlando (American literature, Tennessee State U.) develops an argument for the author's often critical engagement with the representation of women by painters of her time, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites. Two chapters are devoted to Wharton's critical response to the representation of women in the painting and the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti as seen in characters in The age of innocence and The buccaneers. In its comparison with the trends in painting and poetry of her time, Orlando's thought-provoking work provides a new context for understanding Wharton's writings and thought. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

A Florida fiddler; the life and times of Richard Seaman.

Hansen (English and folklore, Arkansas State U.) offers a life history of fiddler Richard Seaman (1904-2002), a native Floridian, based on interviews and informal conversation with him and study of his music, public performances, and storytelling. The book is organized in terms of performances and his music is analyzed to understand his conceptual, interpretive, and theoretical perspectives. Hansen notes that the volume is neither a biography (it is not in chronological order) nor an ethnomusicological analysis of fiddling. His aim is to present Seaman's stories and understand how they and the fiddle tunes illustrate how a musician creates performances, while placing Seaman's style within the larger Florida fiddling context. Some of the transcribed fiddle tunes are included. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Imprinting the South; southern printmakers and their images of the region, 1920s-1940s.

Surprisingly inexpensive for the quality, this handsome, oversized (9.25x12.25 inches) volume presents a much-needed survey of printmaking in the South, with knowledgeable essays accompanying the 60 prints selected. Many of the artists are African-American. A glossary of terms, list of artist's biographies, and lengthy historical introduction by Williams (art and special collections librarian, Auburn U.) round out the catalog, making this a valuable addition to the history of American art. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Like grass before the scythe; the life and death of Sgt. William Remmel, 121st New York Infantry. Ed. by Robert Patrick Bender.

This collection features the letters of Sgt. William Remmel, a German-American soldier who fought with the Union forces in the Civil War. Bender (history, Eastern New Mexico U.-Roswell) collects the letters he wrote to his family during his service, which lasted from 1862 to 1864 (the year he went missing in action). They recount his experiences as a soldier, and his thoughts on camp life, slavery, illness and hospital care, and the war and campaigns and his frustrations with them. Bender's aim is to show the growth of a typical soldier in the context of his military and familial roles, as Remmel also gives advice on family issues. The epilogue explains Remmel's family's attempts to find answers about his disappearance. The letters are held at the Special Collections Department of Mullins Library at the U. of Arkansas. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Mark Twain and the spiritual crisis of his age.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) is well-known for his barbs at conventional religion in The Mysterious Stranger and Letters from the Earth (the latter surprisingly not mentioned). Less well-studied is the role of spirituality in his life as reflected in his roots, friendships, and writings, which in turn, mirror religious trends in post-Civil War America. Bush (English, Saint Louis U.) traces these parallels in the life of Twain and the country: e.g., revivalism, Social Christianity, spiritualism, and agnosticism. He makes a plausible case for how the deaths of family members (pictured) influenced Twain's later belief and writings. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

New lights in the valley; the emergence of UAB.

A longtime history professor and administrator at U. of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), McWilliams presents a narrative institutional history of the entire UAB institution including the medical center and the programs and people associated with the arts and sciences, business, engineering, and teacher education as well as student life, from athletics to student activism to enrollment patterns. Tracing UAB's development from its early days as a struggling offshoot of the Tuscaloosa campus to its current status as Alabama's largest employer, the text explores the role of the urban research university as both a creator and reflector of modernization in the South. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Paper empire; William Gaddis and the world system.

Gaddis was famously unfamous, and even after death there has not been enough of an effort by critics to rectify his neglect while living. This collection of papers and other materials takes up the gap in scholarship on Gaddis's approach to aesthetics, systems, media and capital and includes two biographical pieces as well. They include an interview with Gaddis from about 1980, Gaddis's intellectual relationship with Kierkegaard, his approach to the encyclopedic novel, and to dialog, his aesthetics of cybernetics (to the first and second order), his place n the autopoiesis of American literature, cognitive gothic relevance theory and its iteration and style, Gaddis's transition to postmodernism, his cognitive map, the debates around him, and the remarkable commentary on the media in such works as Agapé Agapé. This makes Agaddis more famous, but just as delightfully difficult. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Plaquemine archaeology.

Named for the small Louisiana town along the Mississippi River, Plaquemine is the designation for the material remains and sites of pre-Columbian and proto-historic Native American societies extending from the Mississippi delta on the Gulf coast to just south of the Arkansas River. In this volume, Rees (anthropology, U. of Louisiana) and Livingood (anthropology, U. of Oklahoma) present nine papers describing recent research on Plaquemine material culture. Topics addressed include antecedents of Plaquemine mound construction, use of computer-assisted petrographic analysis to investigate Plaquemine ceramic recipes, site excavations in the Natchez Bluffs of Mississippi, and Plaquemine culture in the northerly borderlands. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The point is to change it; poetry and criticism in the continuing present.

Independent scholar and critic McGann presents case studies from Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein and others that back his assertion that contemporary writing, which is almost entirely language-oriented, indicates we are rethinking our poetic tradition and the ways we practice it. He begins with an assessment of Benjamin's adaptation of Marx along a specific historical and aesthetic line, then moves to explanations of basic tenets of modern poetry, ranging from the ideas that it must be abstract to assertions that it must change, it must give pleasure, and it must exist in the continuing present. Along the way he analyzes the contributions of such luminaries as Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Robert Duncan, Charles Bernstein, and a host of canonical and non-canonical authors. He closes with a fascinating and pithy conversation with Johanna Drucker. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Prehistoric digital poetry; an archaeology of forms, 1959-1995.

The genre is in a perpetual stage of birth. Even aficionados are not completely certain how to define it. However, we do know it first hit air in the late 1950s, so digital poetry can be said to have a history. Funkhouser (humanities, New Jersey Institute of Technology) analyzes that history up to the birthing of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, providing the background necessary to begin to understand this ever-new art form without going into questions of who or what gets into the canon. Wisely he focuses on text generation, visual and kinetic poems, hypertext and hypermedia, alternative arrangements and techniques enabled by computers; he includes dozens of examples so diverse so fascinating one understands why definition is not really necessary. This is an elegant introduction to the art form of digital poetry and thereby to twenty-first century poetry. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Rhetoric and the republic; politics, civic discourse, and education in early America.

Based within the theoretical methods of Gramsci, this study examines the relationship of politics to pedagogy through a close examination of the rhetoric used in debates, orations, student presentations, and other events at Yale, William and Mary, Columbia U., and other American universities in the 18th century. The result is a nuanced discussion of the sources of political discourse in the U.S. Longaker teaches rhetoric and writing at the U. of Texas at Austin. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Roger Brown; southern exposure.

Published to accompany an exhibition held at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, this oversized catalog (10x11 inches) presents an essay about Brown's life and art by Sidney Lawrence, who was guest curator, with several photos of the artist and his studios. The paintings from the exhibition are reproduced in full-page color plates. A list of Brown's paintings in southern collections, a timeline of his life, and a list of further reading are provided. Not indexed. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Southeastern ceremonial complex; chronology, content, context.

How certain Southern indigenous viewed themselves from prehistory to decimation by Europeans was already a significant subject of study fifty years ago, but more recent scholarship has proven that what was once considered a single cult was actually a complex of cults, with myriad adaptations of myths and artifacts. This collection of 12 articles details archeological findings and analysis of how this warrior-based set of precepts and practices developed and grew into elaborate ceremonial places and burial grounds. Topics include the implications of recent analysis of sites, early evidence of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC) and its contexts, the role of time in development of the SECC, material and iconographic evidence of the SECC in Erowah culture, evidence from Moundville potsherds, SECC ritual regalia in the southern Appalachians and other regions, the role of sex in SECC, and future directions of research. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The struggle for the Georgia coast.

The documents earnestly report on when they landed, where they colonized, when their soldiers fought the indigenous and who governed what. The Spanish thought the documents would convince the English of Spanish sovereignty from Georgia south of St. Mary's River to the "island" of Florida, years of pitched battles notwithstanding. However, the English in fact recruited indigenous people to engage in war with the Spanish. This collection of the translated documents, supplemented in this edition by new research, is rich in detail about what the Spanish thought they had done, and why they were justified in waging open war for Georgia and Florida. It also helps to explain why the indigenous people would consider fighting alongside the English a viable option in ensuring survival. There is also a certain poignancy, as we know what happened to both the Spanish and all the indigenous nations involved. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Toxic tourism; rhetorics of pollution, travel, and environmental justice.

An effective tool for raising public awareness of egregious cases of pollution, so-called toxic tours highlight as well the disparate impact pollution has on low-income populations. In this well-researched study, Pezzullo (communication and culture, Indiana U.) describes the people, businesses, politics, environment, and histories of several toxic tours, while maintaining a focus on rhetoric and its use by those in power. Highlighting stubborn and prevalent attitudes and mores in American commerce and society, this study engages with questions of ethics and class as they are played out in the use of the environment. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)