Michael Davidson

Disability and the Poetics of Error

Distressing Language

Lyn Hejinian

Barrett Watten

Ron Silliman

Leningrad/American Writers in the Soviet Union

Edmund Marlowe

And Other Writings

Sicilian Vespers

Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materiality—from the holograph manuscript to the printed book—Davidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Modern Poetry and the Material Word

Ghostlier Demarcations

Brian Saber

Fundraising is the hardest work you ask your board members to do. If they're not fully committed and engaged and they don't feel they have a strong stake in your organization, they aren't going to fundraise for it. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Davidson and Brian Saber bring their collective expertise and their 20 years of working together on governance and fundraising issues to help you understand how good governance is a means to inspire your board to fundraise. Most board members are not actively engaged in fundraising and don't have the proper level of responsibility for it. This holds nonprofits back in critical ways. In Engaged Boards Will Fundraise! we will provide you with an understanding of the relationship between overall board governance and fundraising; strategies that are most likely to motivate and engage your board in fundraising; and practices that can support board fundraising.

Engaged Boards Will Fundraise!

The World, the Flesh and Myself

Henry Lee

Matthew Bunn

Daniel P. Schrag

Wei Peng

Wang Pu

Mao Zhimin

Overview of how decisions by China on climate, energy, and environmental policy will influence the country's capacity to decarbonize.

Foundations for a Low-Carbon Energy System in China

Guys Like Us considers how writers of the 1950s and '60s struggled to craft literature that countered the politics of consensus and anticommunist hysteria in America, and how notions of masculinity figured in their effort. Michael Davidson examines a wide range of postwar literature, from the fiction of Jack Kerouac to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. He also explores the connection between masculinity and sexuality in films such as Chinatown and The Lady from Shanghai, as well as television shows, plays, and magazines from the period. What results is a virtuoso work that looks at American poetic and artistic innovation through the revealing lenses of gender and history.

Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics

Guys Like Us

Invalid Modernism contributes to an intersectional moment in disability studies by looking at modernist aesthetics through a 'defamiliar body'. It also offers an intersectional understanding of modernism by studying the representation of physical and cognitive difference during a period marked by progressive reforms in health, labor, and welfare. Readings of texts by Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Oscar Wilde, F.T. Marinetti, Jean Toomer, an opera by Alexander Zemlinsky, and paintings and constructions by dadaists and surrealists are set against the historical developments in sexology, medical discourse, and the pseudo-sciences of eugenics and anthropometry. Modernist works are well known for challenging formal features of narration and representation, but it is seldom observed that this challenge has often been enabled by figures of shell-shocked veterans, tubercular heroines, blind soothsayers, invalid aesthetes, and neurasthenic women. Such figures complicate an aesthetics of autonomy by which modernism is often understood. Since its evolution in the eighteenth century, aesthetics has been seen in terms of judgments based on detached appreciation. What begins as a highly privative, sensate response to an object or natural formation results in a disinterested judgment about the value of that response. By looking at modernist aesthetics through a disability optic, Invalid Modernism attempts to restore the missing body to aesthetics by disclosing a structure of feeling around dramatic changes in modernity. These changes are registered on and through the bodies and minds of figures considered in medical discourse of the period as 'invalid' citizens and subjects.

Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic

Invalid Modernism

The Mad Thing characterizes that most uncommon of all slayers, the female serial killer. A self-appointed vigilante roams the streets of Los Angeles at night, hunting, killing and mutilating men who have but one tortured behavior in common. Jon Sadler, a profiling for long-time friend, Larry Radino of the Los Angeles Police Department, discovers a common denominator between the victims buried deep within the voluminous files of LA’s largest bureaucracy, the Los Angeles Department of Children’s Services. In a bizarre turn of events, Jon discovers the identity of the killer, but is compelled to withhold the identification.

THE MAD THING

In this classic work, the author joins the dots between three of the most powerful words in language: life, judgment, and inheritance. The edition is packed with new thoughts that move the reader both spiritually and metaphorically from life through judgment to the wedding feast of the Lamb. (Christian)

The Invitation

"Professor Davidson---an accomplished literary critic---offers a focused and balanced analysis of poetry, film, and the arts honed with his excellent knowledge of the latest advances in disability studies. He is brilliant at reading texts in a sophisticated and aesthetically pleasurable way, making Concerto for the Left Hand one of the smartest books to date in disability studies." ---Lennard Davis, University of Illinois, Chicago "Moving elegantly among social theorists and cultural texts, Davidson exemplifies and propels an ethical-aesthetic model for criticism. Davidson asks continuously and with a committed intensity 'where a disability ends and the social order begins' . . . this book brings the study of poetry and poetics into the twenty-first century." ---Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University Concerto for the Left Hand is at the cutting edge of the expanding field of disability studies, offering a wide range of essays that investigate the impact of disability across various art forms---including literature, performance, photography, and film. Rather than simply focusing on the ways in which disabled persons are portrayed, Michael Davidson explores how the experience of disability shapes the work of artists and why disability serves as a vital lens through which to interpret modern culture. Covering an eclectic range of topics---from the phantom missing limb in film noir to the poetry of American Sign Language---this collection delivers a unique and engaging assessment of the interplay between disability and aesthetics. Written in a fluid, accessible style, Concerto for the Left Hand will appeal to both specialists and general audiences. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book should appeal not only to scholars of disability studies but to all those working in minority art, deaf studies, visual culture, and modernism. Michael Davidson is Professor of American Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His other books include Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics and Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World.

Disability and the Defamiliar Body

Concerto for the Left Hand

In the heyday of the foreign correspondent, Michael Davidson traveled the globe and campaigned against oppression and injustice. He joined the Berlin communists against Hitler, crossed wartime Morocco in Arab disguise, and opposed the British authorities in Malaya and Cyprus. Twice sent to prison for his sexuality, he bravely wrote in 1962 Life Story Of A Lover Of Boys. This autobiography, praised by Arthur Koestler and James Cameron, is a classic memoir of gay life in the first half of the century.

Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materiality--from the holograph manuscript to the printed book--Davidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts. Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materiality--from the holograph manuscript to the printed book--Davidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts.

Michael Davidson

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