Sneak Previews

Going through the offerings of more than 30 university presses for the fall and winter publishing, I kept an eye out for two things. The first was anything of possible interest to readers who don’t come across university press books very often, or ever. Or, to put it another way, the general reader.

From time to time it has pointed out that "the general reader" is a cultural fiction; no such species actually exists, except, perhaps, as a marketing category. And this is true, to a point. We are all, ultimately, specific readers, reading our specific books. Yet quite a few more readers, with a wider range of backgrounds, will be drawn to The Letters of Leonard Bernstein (Yale University Press, Oct.) than to a monograph on West Side Story. (And yes, there is one.)

My other goal was to identify trends or patterns emerging from catalog to catalog. Most proved fairly obvious and come as no surprise – any topic making the front page of the newspaper long enough is taken on eventually. But in a couple of cases, interesting or odd connections among books occurred to me after a third or fourth tour of the listings.

So without further ado, here’s my selection of fall and winter books from American university presses -- compiled by means of hunchwork and caffeine. It won’t be exhaustive. It might get kaleidoscopic. But there’s something here for everyone.

Let’s start with a few forthcoming volumes on “the higher learning in America,” to borrow the title of a book by Thornstein Veblen that the author originally planned to subtitle “A Study in Total Depravity.” However critical he may be of the institution, former Harvard University president Derek Bok probably won’t be that stringent in Higher Education in America (Princeton University Press, Aug.) – a work almost 500 pages long and covering, the publisher says, “the entire system, public and private, from community colleges and small liberal arts colleges to great universities with their research programs and their medical, law, and business schools.”

Jerry Jacobs takes a cold, hard look at a boundary-erasing buzzword with In Defense of Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and Specialization in the Research University (University of Chicago Press, Oct.). More in the nature of a career guide is Frank Furstenberg’s Behind the Academic Curtain: How to Find Success and Happiness With a Ph.D. (Chicago, Sept.). Please remember: that’s “with,” not “despite.” Postgraduate life would be less like Waiting for Godot if the institution follows the lead of a volume edited by Keith Hoeller called Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System (Vanderbilt University Press, Jan.)

Among the titles recalling the scholarly worlds of yesteryear -- erudition unplugged! --  are forthcoming translations of Jürgen Leonhardt’s Latin: Story of a World Language (Harvard University Press, Nov.) and Arlette Farge's The Allure of the Archives  (Yale, Sept.) The Library: A World History (Chicago, Nov.) brings together James W. P. Campbell’s knowledge of the history of architecture and Will Pryce’s photography “to tell the story of library architecture around the world and through time in a single volume, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern China and from the beginnings of the written word to the present day.”

Seeking to navigate the passage between dead-tree and new-media cultures we have Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era (University of Minnesota Press, Jan.), a collection of papers edited by N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, which argues "for seeing print as a medium along with the scroll, electronic literature, and computer games." A cluster of titles will consider the effect of digitality on personality, though possibly it's the other way around.

Anna Poletti and Julie Rak's edited collection Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (University of Wisconsin Press, Jan.) sounds as if it must overlap somewhat with Howard Gardner and Katie Davis's The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World (Yale, Oct.) and Alice E. Marwick's Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale, Nov.) Beyond celebrity, publicity, and branding, we seemingly have sainthood in view with Brett T. Robinson's Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs (Baylor University Press, Aug.).

Digital technology itself continues on course for apotheosis -- omnipresent and pretty nearly omniscient, it hasn't become omnipotent yet, but just you wait. In the meantime, The Intelligent Web: Search, Smart Algorithms, and Big Data (Oxford University Press, Jan.) by Gautam Shroff sounds fascinating and, frankly, scary: a treatment of algorithms that "operate on the vast and growing amount of data on the Web, sifting, selecting, comparing, aggregating, correcting; following simple but powerful rules to decide what matters." The days of thinking of the Internet as some kind of Wild West anarchist frontier have given way to The Global War for Internet Governance (Yale, Jan.), according to Laura DeNardis's study of "the inner power structure already in place within the architectures and institutions of Internet governance." I'm not sure if that argument confirms or undermines military science scholar Thomas Rid's assessment that Cyber War Will Not Take Place  (Oxford, Sept.).

Whatever may happen in the quest for artificial intelligence, the human kind retains its mysteries. A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard, Feb.) by Michael Tomasello will pull together the evidence for his fairly well-known thesis that we made our evolutionary leap as a species thanks to the survival value of cooperation and empathy. In his Philosophy of Dreams (Yale, Oct.), Christoph Türcke advances the theory that "both civilization and mental processes are the results of a compulsion to repeat early traumas, one to which hallucination, imagination, mind, spirit, and God all developed in response."

Joyce Davidson and Michael Orsini's edited collection Worlds of Autism: Across the Spectrum of Neurological Difference (Minnesota, Nov.) takes issue with the usual conception of autism as a disorder, "instead situating autism within an abilities framework that respects the complex personhood of individuals with autism." Anyone interested in that volume will also want to look for The Arachnean and Other Texts (Minnesota, Oct.), the first English translation of writings by the French psychiatrist and filmmaker Fernand Deligny, who worked with autistic children.

Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Harvard, Oct.) is the latest in a series of works by the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum exploring how affect and public life interact. That question will also to be pursued, from their own disciplinary perspective, by the contributors to Doing Emotions History, edited by Susan Matt and Peter N. Stearns (University of Illinois, Jan.). A number of Nussbaum's recent studies have concerned negative affect -- emotions such as shame and disgust, which push or pull away from social contact -- so her readers may be relieved to think about love for a while. But for those who haven't had their fill of it, there's Valerie Curtis's The Science Behind Revulsion; Don’t Look, Don’t Touch, Don’t Eat (Chicago, Oct.).

There's power and big money to be had from exploiting forms of negative affect, as Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj will explore in The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility (Oxford, Jan.) -- and on that note, let me invite you back next time, when we'll look ahead to some titles bound to incite as well as stimulate.