New Books by Dartmouth Authors

A poignant, unflinching study of black grief as a form of elegy found in visual art, music, literature-everywhere, if you know how to see it. In Black Elegies, Kimberly Juanita Brown examines the form of the elegy and its unique capacity to convey the elongated grief borne of sustained racial violence. Structured around the sensorial, the book moves through sight, sound, and touch to reveal what Okwui Enwezor calls the "national emergency of black grief." With her characteristic literary skill, Brown analyzes the work of major figures including Toni Morrison, Carrie Mae Weems, Audre Lorde, and Marvin Gaye, among others. Brown contemplates recognizable sites of mourning- forced migration and enslavement, bodily violations, imprisonment and death. And she examines sites that do not register immediately as archives of grief- the landscape of southern U.S. slave plantations, a spontaneous street party, a quilt constructed out of the clothing worn by a loved one, a dance performance to hold the memory of history, and an aeolian harp installed at an institute of European art, among others. In this, the book offers a framework of mourning while black, within the parameters of contemporary artistic production. Brown asks- How do you mourn those you are not supposed to see? And where does the grief go? She shows us that grief is everywhere- "It spills out of photographs and modulates music. It hovers in the tenor and tone of cinematic performances. It resides in the body like an inspired concept, waiting for its articulation." Black Elegies is the second title of On Seeing, a new publication series devoted to visual literacy. Publications foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in visuality and representation. The MIT Press will publish each On Seeing volume as a print book, ebook, and open access digital edition created by Brown University Digital Publications. The URL for this publication is https-//on-seeing-black-elegies.org.

Generics are sentences that express generalizations about a particular group or kind: like "birds fly," "hikers love to snack," and "children are seen and not heard." A social script can be understood like an interpersonal dialogue, as with a script in a movie or play, that tells someone how to act in a given scenario: for example, saying "thank you" when receiving a compliment. A social script can also be a narrative about how one's life or behavior ought to go, or a set of expected generalizations and behaviors for a certain social role. On all conceptualizations, social scripts contribute to and reinforce biases and stereotypes. Generics, too, both describe and reinforce stereotypes about social kinds.Stereotypes and Scripts forges new ground by offering an interdisciplinary account of stereotypes, social scripts, and generics by identifying connections between language use and stereotyping, then drawing on those insights to provide linguistic strategies for resisting harmful stereotypes. Samia Hesni analyzes how we enact and express stereotypes through language: specifically social scripts and generics. Hesni draws out relations between stereotypes, scripts, and generics, and connects them to individual action and social change through script disruption and careful uses of counter-evidence and counter-examples. The book also outlines how features of scripts and generics can be used to resist and undermine harmful stereotypes. The lessons we draw from this can be applied to resist various kinds of harmful speech, as part of a broader project of identifying and cultivating language of resistance.

On April 22, 2015, the sorority sisters at Ohio's Muskingum University's Delta house encountered a horrific scene: pools of blood and gore in the first-floor bathroom. No one knew exactly what had happened, but the sisters suspected it had something to do with Emile Weaver. Studious, athletic, and well-liked, Emile had recently started wearing bulky sweatsuits and hiding her midsection, as if she was covering up a sudden weight gain. Could Emile be pregnant?   Emboldened by fear, the sorority sisters investigated. In the driveway next to the kitchen door, they found Emile's newborn baby girl dead inside a garbage bag. Emile's crime seemed senseless and left her family and friends with an aching question: what happened?   American Infanticide situates Emile's tragic act in a long intellectual, social, and legal history, uncovering disturbing missing chapters in our national history that undercut myths that have shaped public reactions to so-called monster moms and dumpster babies since the colonial era. Ultimately, the book uncovers how bias and inconsistency dictate how women accused of infant homicide are perceived and punished and sheds new light on how and why our legal responses to infanticide are so deeply misguided.

The cold case of a young Hollywood starlet's death sets a contemporary writer on an epic and comic quest to uncover the truth, and its connection to his own family--a new novel by "a major talent" (New York Times) and "one of the most distinctive voices of his generation" (Granta). Jed Rosenthal hasn't published a book in fourteen years, the mother of his child left him in a "trial separation" that has stretched on indefinitely, and he struggles to navigate the daily sorrows of their co-parenting arrangement. But the implosion of Jed's family is simply a footnote in the larger history of the Rosenthal family's decline.   Just days after the JFK assassination, Karyn "Cookie" Kupcinet was found dead in her Hollywood apartment. The press reported that the 22-year-old was strangled, yet unanswered questions linger to this day. Cookie's parents--Chicago royalty, Irv and Essee Kupcinet--had been close friends with Jed's grandparents, but in the aftermath of her death, their friendship abruptly and inexplicably ended. Decades later, Jed pores over family stories, newspaper archives, old photos, and crime scene notes, believing that if he can divine the truth of Cookie's death--whether it was suicide, murder, or part of a larger conspiracy--it might shed light on a mystery closer to home.    Spanning seventy plus years, and weaving together family drama and a true-life unsolved case, The Gossip Columnist's Daughter is a singular, wryly comic, and deeply human exploration into friendship and the bonds that sustain us.  

The Given-Up Girl is the story of Bonnie Koller, who joins the country's brightest women at idyllic Halstead College in 1969. With her roommate Hollis as her guide, Bonnie trades her skirts for jeans and her innocence for independence. An unwanted pregnancy forces Bonnie and Hollis to navigate the traps of pre-Roe America - a boyfriend consumed with fear of the draft, doctors of questionable competence, and a hospital bureaucracy rife with corruption. Their search for an abortion puts their ambitions, their friendship and their lives at risk. Twenty years later, Bonnie is determined to find the daughter she bore and gave up when her choices ran out. Now a successful small-town lawyer, Bonnie knows her way around a paper trail. But she doesn't know if the given-up girl wants to be found, or the truth about 1969.

Counter-Modernities in Nineteenth-Century French Literature explores a counterview of modernity in late nineteenth-century French literature (1848-1891). The principal claim of this book is that what we find in the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Flaubert is a form of 'writing against the grain' of history: not the elegant lyricism of history's victors, but a use of literature against the erasures of past injustices and for those 'lost futurities' upon which the order of the present is founded. What we find, in other words, is a critical literary archive of the powerless that persists in contesting the legitimacy of the powerful, which persists in haunting the nineteenth century every bit as much as it does our own achingly out-of-joint present. The story Counter-Modernities seeks to tell is, in other words, about the meaning of loss, and the significance of losers as possible figures of opposition to the dominant order, in nineteenth-century French literature that is also a story about modernity as an aesthetic politics. What brings together the authors in this study, however, cannot be reduced be the biographical: that is, to the uneven successes, financial hardships, and, in one case, outright failure (i.e., Rimbaud) shared by the authors in the literary market of their lifetime. At stake in this study is not an account of the ironies of literary history, wherein, to gloss Walter Benjamin's take on Baudelaire, a prior and benighted era sees little of interest in an artist in which a later epoch recognizes the "genius" of modernity. Rather, Constellations of Loss in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Flaubert demonstrates how each author in this critical corpus insists on tarrying with history as an experience of irrevocable loss: each lingers with history as a force of negations, and thereby insists on the significance of historical setbacks and political defeats that seem to affect-if not more dramatically wipe out-the collective hopes of entire generations. Each one gives us losers as subjects who matter in the nineteenth century (Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud), narratives of historical defeat that are as negative as they are meaningful (Baudelaire, Flaubert), or the contours of events whose meanings and narratives are themselves lost (Baudelaire, Rimbaud), whose meanings remain, in other words, perhaps less absent than open-ended: a possible grammar for what may come next, when hope seems lost and dreams dashed. Indeed, as this books shows, it is precisely in its representation of history as a dilemma or undoing of meaningfulness, a problem of legibility and not-knowingness, that we can most fully recognize the formal calling-cards of literary "modernity": ironic undecidabilities and difficulties, infinite interpretability and the death of the author, the dissolution of previously stable cultural and historical narratives or forms of subjectivity, formal breaks with semantically oriented modes of representation, and so on.

In Rethinking Metaphysics, Amie Thomasson aims to change how we think about metaphysics: what it can do, and why it matters. Traditional metaphysics has aimed to discover deep truths about the world. But this has led to rivalries with science, epistemological mysteries, and a despairing scepticism about how we could gain knowledge in metaphysics. Thomasson argues that the problems with prior approaches to metaphysics arise from a problematic assumption that all discourse functions in the same way. Drawing on work in linguistics, she shows how to develop a richer view of linguistic functions that enables us to see why this assumption leads us astray. By better understanding the plurality of linguistic functions, she argues, we can also disentangle ourselves from many old metaphysical problems--including problems about properties, numbers, morality and modality. In place of the traditional model, we should think of metaphysics as work in conceptual engineering--including both a reverse engineering project aimed at understanding how various parts of our language and conceptual scheme work and what functions they serve, and a constructive engineering project that investigates what concepts and language we should use and how we should use them. Rethinking metaphysics as conceptual engineering in this way enables us to avoid the problems of traditional metaphysics, while also demonstrating the perennial importance of metaphysics to human life.