Columbia University Press

This weekend, the Los Angeles Review of Books ran a review by N. Katherine Hayles of Mark C. Taylor’s Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo. Hayles examines the way that Taylor chooses to “construct [his] own audience” rather than write for “other critics,” and after a thorough look at the insights that Taylor offers in linking literature and religion, claims that “even if Taylor would likely disagree, … [Rewiring the Real] is a provocative, engaging, significant, and resistant work of literary criticism.”

Hayle’s review begins by pointing out the differences between most works of literary criticism and Rewiring the Real, notably the fact that Taylor seems to be engaging with philosophers and theologians rather than critics:

The absence of references to literary scholarship in Taylor’s book is all the more striking because of his wide-ranging evocations of difficult works in religion and philosophy. The presumed reader has perhaps heard of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Derrida, Kant, Fichte, and a host of others in these traditions, but may not know their philosophies in depth. Rewiring the Real dares to imagine the creature whose existence seems increasingly imperiled by web surfing, video games, and distracted attention: the general educated book reader. Significantly, Taylor does more than ignore literary criticism; he actively resists it, choosing to locate the payoff for his readings as contributions to a field that does not yet exist — literature and religion, or better still literature as secular theology — but that he strives to bring into being. As if following the mantra, “if you build it, they will come,” he aims to convince his readers not only to believe in, but also to imagine themselves inhabiting, this hypothetical field.

In addressing this general reader, Rewiring the Real modifies the kind of argumentation in which literary criticism typically engages. Devoting one chapter to each of the four authors whose names populate the subtitle, Rewiring the Real may appear on first reading to lack an overall thesis. Each chapter stands more or less alone as an in-depth reading of a literary text, with few explicit connections between chapters. Many books are constructed using this model, gathering into one volume essays previously published separately. Rewiring the Real, however, follows a more creative and devious strategy. The thematic connections are there, but they are not framed as explicit arguments. Rather, they work through subtle repetitions of tropes that gain resonance as they reappear in new contexts: the counterfeit, the uncanny, the virtual, the cave, and most importantly, the void, the nihilation, the nothing (no-thing). These repetitions function more like poetry than explication, gesturing toward something that cannot be named or grasped directly. The role of this elusive something, it turns out, is the book’s major thesis.

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Our weekly list of new titles including just published books from our new distributed press Transcript Verlag:

Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks: One CEO’s Quest for Meaning and Authenticity
August Turak

The Engine of Complexity: Evolution as Computation
John E. Mayfield

New Perspectives on International Migration and Development
Edited by Jeronimo Cortina and Enrique Ochoa-Reza

Confronting Injustice and Oppression: Concepts and Strategies for Social Workers
David G. Gil

Film Dialogue
Edited by Jeff Jaeckle

Eastwood’s Iwo Jima: Critical Engagements With Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima
Edited by Anne Gjelsvik and Rikke Schubart

Transatlantic Cultural Exchange: African American Women’s Art and Activism in West Germany
Katharina Gerund

Placing America: American Culture and its Spaces
Edited by Michael Fuchs and Maria-Theresia Holub

(Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes
Edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka

The Body at Stake: Experiments in Chinese Contemporary Art and Theatre
Edited by Jörg Huber and Zhao Chuan

Does War Belong in Museums?: The Representation of Violence in Exhibitions
Edited by Wolfgang Muchitsch

Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage
Edited by Karin Bijsterveld

Ambiguity in Star Wars and Harry Potter: A (Post)Structuralist Reading of Two Popular Myths
Christina Flotmann

The Ages of Life: Living and Aging in Conflict?
Edited by Ulla Kriebernegg and Roberta Maierhofer

Ornamenting the Cold Roast: The Domestic Architecture and Interior Design of Upper-Class Boston Homes, 1760-1880
Dorothee Wagner von Hoff

“I ask this crucial question: how did we move from what was originally presented as a communitarian vision for the new genetic biomedicine to the now-dominant personalized medicine paradigm?”—Donna Dickenson

The following post is by Donna Dickenson, author of Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good.

Even in the increasingly individualized American medical system, advocates of personalized medicine claim that healthcare isn’t individualized enough. Backed up by the glamor of new biotechnologies such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing or neurocognitive enhancement, personalized medicine—what I call “Me Medicine”– appears to its advocates as the inevitable and desirable way of the future. By contrast, what I term “We Medicine”—public health programs such as flu jabs or childhood vaccinations—is widely distrusted and highly vulnerable to austerity cutbacks.

I don’t automatically assume that Me Medicine is bad and We Medicine is good, even though the proponents of personalized healthcare very rarely challenge their own preconception that the reverse is true. Instead, I do my level best to give a balanced, evidence-based account. In some areas of Me Medicine, such as pharmacogenetic individualized drug regimes for cancer care, there really has been genuine progress, but the evidence base is patchy or even damaging for other Me Medicine technologies such as private umbilical cord blood banking. Given that the scientific evidence alone doesn’t dictate that you have to be ready to accept the supposed revolution of personalized medicine, what does?

I look critically at four possible explanations for the growing dominance of Me Medicine, some of which turn out to be more convincing than others: a sense of threat to our health, narcissism and decline in public-spiritedness, corporate interests backed up by neoliberal government policy, and the near-sacredness of autonomy and choice in our thinking. And I ask this crucial question: how did we move from what was originally presented as a communitarian vision for the new genetic biomedicine to the now-dominant personalized medicine paradigm?

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Personalized healthcare—or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls “Me Medicine”—is radically transforming our longstanding “one-size-fits-all” model. Technologies such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing, pharmacogenetically developed therapies in cancer care, private umbilical cord blood banking, and neurocognitive enhancement claim to cater to an individual’s specific biological character. However, whatever is behind the rise of Me Medicine, is more than just science. So why is Me Medicine rapidly edging out We Medicine, and how has our commitment to our collective health suffered as a result?

These issues are explored in Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good, by Donna Dickenson. Throughout the week, we will be featuring TMe Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good. For more on the book you can also read an excerpt from the chapter A Reality Check for Personalized Medicine.

We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to a lucky winner.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on June 21 at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

The United Nations’ most recent report on Syria was published on June 13, and the MIT Press blog has an excerpt from an essay on the Syrian government’s increasingly close relationship with Hezbollah in the years after Bashar Al-Assad took over the presidency in 2000. This relationship is particularly important now, as Hezbollah leadership has confirmed that Hezbollah forces will join the fighting in Syria in support of Al-Assad.

Alexander the Great died on June 10, 323 BC. The OUPblog looked back at the reign and legacy of one of the best-known leaders of the ancient world with an excerpt from John Atkinson’s introduction to Arrian’s Alexander the Great. Elsewhere on the OUPblog, Deborah Sims has an entertaining and informative history of Superman for those who want to brush up on their Man of Steel knowledge before seeing Man of Steel.

At the JHU Press Blog, Donald R. Prothero (also a CUP author and editor several times over) addresses the “litany of bad climate news” that has come out over the past year, explains how the new climate studies reinforce the message that man-made climate change is very real, and gives our title The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars a shoutout along the way.

What is a “trash animal”? At the University of Minnesota Press blog, Kelsi Nagy discusses how the phrase “trash animal” has been used in different contexts to denigrate various species of animals deemed undesirable for any number of reasons. Nagy claims, however, that “we can’t call an animal “trash” without implicating ourselves.”

“Are young people aspiring to creative careers just a bunch of whiny trust fund brats?” At the McGill-Queen’s University Press blog, Miranda Campbell looks at the messages put forward in a new advertising campaign designed to “persuade youth to consider a career in the skilled trades” by the government of British Columbia.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis have made waves with the popularity of “Same Love,” a “a “conscious” rap about rejecting gay stereotypes in support of same-sex marriage.” However, at From the Square, the blog of NYU Press, Karen Tongson talks about the problems she sees with the song, pointing out that it “unwittingly plays upon the classical tropes of homosexual narcissism, while also trotting out the newer rhetoric of equivalency.”

At the UNC Press Blog, Andrew Cayton has a fascinating post about how the personal letters of historical figures (in this particular case, nineteenth-century intellectuals Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Gilbert Imlay) can elucidate the thoughts and feelings of long-dead people, allowing readers to “[meet] these people as interlocutors more than as subjects.”

This week, the University of California Press Blog put up “God in Proof,” the latest episode of their UC Press Podcast featuring Nathan Schneider, who takes listeners on a philosophical tour of proofs of the existence of God.

At The Florida Bookshelf, the blog of the University Press of Florida, Kathleen Kaska continues her ongoing series on the whooping cranes’ battle for survival as a species. This week, she discusses how habitat destruction, the Keystone XL pipeline in particular, impacts the future of the whooping crane.

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a guest post by John Haddad at North Philly Notes, the blog of Temple University Press. In his post, Haddad looks at the Hong Kong Reperatory Theater’s staging of a play about the first commercial voyage taken to China by an American ship.

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!

In “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave,” originally published in Mother Jones and included in The Best Business Writing 2013, Mac McClelland describes her experiences working at a warehouse for an Internet company. She describes conditions in which workers are tightly monitored and work under difficult, even painful conditions as they are pressured to pick items as quickly as possible so they can get out to customers. Given the scarcity of jobs, the workers have little choice but to endure the difficult, frequently unreasonable demands.

Below is an excerpt from the article:

“Strategic trust will not be attainable for the foreseeable future. The U.S. and China have many areas of fruitful cooperation, which can and should go forward without waiting for trust to break out…. For these inherent rivals and potential adversaries, the emphasis belongs on ‘verify,’ not ‘trust.’”—Denny Roy

As recent talks between Barack Obama Chinese President Xi Jingping demonstrated, the United States and China are still searching for a way to trust one another. But is trust really necessary or possible?

In a recent, much-discussed article for The Diplomat, Denny Roy, author of Return of the Dragon: Rising China and Regional Security, argues that more and deeper dialogue between the United States and China might not necessarily lead to an ease of tension or greater trust. Ultimately, Roy argues, suspicions between the US and China are warranted and the two nations have “irreconcilable differences over several fundamental strategic questions.” These include some of China’s sovereignty claims; the future strategic roles of Japan and South Korea; and the extent of China’s sphere of influence.

The misunderstandings surrounding the positions of each nation cannot be easily solved. Roy explains:

The problem is not that each country erroneously perceives the other as warlike. Both want peace, but on their own terms. Some of what China calls “defensive” looks to others like aggression. What America terms “stability” is “containment” to China.

Indeed, more “bluntness and honesty” might bring out additional attitudes that are not often discussed publicly and that would drive Americans and Chinese further apart, such as the Americans hoping for the demise of the Chinese Communist Party or the Chinese suggesting that all U.S. military forces in the Asia-Pacific should relocate to areas no further west than the Hawaiian Islands. More transparency would not dispel mutual suspicions, it would confirm them.

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“I always believed getting an education was the only way to succeed in life. Now I regret it every single day.”—Donna DeNaro, from The Trouble is the Banks excerpted in The Best Business Writing 2013

The Trouble is the Banks comes from a volume published by n+1 which includes letters from Occupy the Boardroom, a site that collects letters to banks and financial institution in the wake of the 2008 collapse. A portion of The Trouble is the Banks is included in The Best Business Writing 2013. Here’s an excerpt:

Please Don’t Harass My Father Any Further

Deena DeNaro

To: Lloyd H. Dean, Wells Fargo

Dear Lloyd,

In May 2007, I became the first person in my immediate family to get a degree, at age 38. I graduated owing more than $100,000 in private student loans. Payments were more than $1,100 per month. My 74-year-old retired father is the cosigner for most of these loans, but in September 2008, my dad lost $70,000 of his pension with the banks’ collapse.

In December 2009, after just one year in the workforce, I was laid off due to cut-backs. For most of 2010, I wasn’t able to find steady employment. In January 2011, I ran out of defer­ment with my private student loans. The banks began chasing my father as the cosigner. They have wrecked his line of credit and called in his home equity loan on which he never missed any payments.

In June 2011, my father saw a lawyer to try to get the pay­ments reduced to something proportionate to his fixed in­come. In October 2011, he got word that the lawyer failed to get payments reduced enough. My dad wrote me a letter say­ing he had to sell his life insurance and rearrange his will to protect my sister and stepmom.

The letter arrived last Saturday.

He had a stroke on Sunday.

Now Wells Fargo is harassing him for payment of another student loan.

I am asking you to please suspend collection actions against my father until I have a job that will pay me enough to make the payments myself.

I always believed getting an education was the only way to succeed in life. Now I regret it every single day.

Sincerely,
Deena DeNaro
Durham, NC 27701

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This week two different stories looked at the ideas at the center of The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving , by Michael Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd.

In his post, Adventures with quantitative philanthropy, Felix Salmon, examines the Robin Hood Foundation approach to giving and its “relentless monetization” framework. Salmon explains how the Robin Hood Foundation seeks to monetize the benefits of philanthropic giving to make sure it is effective and helps those it is intended to help.

An article for the Fast Company blog, Co.EXIST, also explores the Robin Hood method. The book’s coauthor, Michael Weinstein explains how the Robin Hood foundation developed its approach and the various factors it considers when trying to establish a cost-benefit analysis for giving money.

Increasingly, as the article points out, the Robin Hood Foundation method is being adopted by other philanthropic organizations, such as The Gates Foundation, and it is winning many adherents among donors in the financial industry.

The article concludes with Weinstein’s reflections on the aims of The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving:

Weinstein hopes that the book pushes even more people to consider Robin Hood’s techniques. “We wrote the book for two reasons. One reason is that donors, other foundations, and philanthropists are often asking us to advise them, to share what we’re doing,” he says. “The second reason is the opposite. We hope that by laying it out in black and white, we get feedback that tells us how to do things better. We already know our 170 equations [for monetization] are wrong. We’d love for people to say we have another wrong way to monetize interventions, but we have a less wrong way to do it.”

Steve Coll’s “Gusher,” published in The Best Business Writing 2013 offers a behind-the-scenes look at the tremendous influence ExxonMobil has in Washington and in shaping environmental and climate policy. In this excerpt, Steve Coll documents some of the early battles between ExxonMobil and the Obama administration and how the company and its CEO, Rex Tillerson, helped to kill the cap-and trade bill:

ExxonMobil’s initial efforts to reach out to the Obama adminis­tration gave way, during 2009 and 2010, to a succession of legis­lative and policy battles in which the corporation and the new president found themselves on opposite sides. Tillerson sought meetings with Treasury and White House officials to explain ExxonMobil’s views on energy markets, domestic drilling, cli­mate legislation, and the recession. On one occasion, Tillerson joined a group of chief executives at dinner with Obama. In general, however, wary administration officials saw no reason to favor ExxonMobil with access. There was little basis for trust on either side. ExxonMobil lobbying sessions with Obama’s team at the Treasury Department or the Department of Energy could be stiff, with Fariello and other lobbyists enunciating ExxonMo­bil’s advocacy positions, sometimes just by reading from notes and prepared materials. During the first three years of Obama’s presidency, the corporation spent more than fifty-two million dollars on lobbying in Washington, about 50 percent more per year than during the Bush presidency.

The most important challenge that ExxonMobil faced was the climate bill, known as “cap-and-trade,” which Obama and congressional Democrats introduced early in 2009. The House of Representatives passed a version of the law in June and moved it to the Senate, where the most difficult negotia­tions were expected. The proposed law would have established a new regulatory system under which polluting corporations could buy and sell permits to emit greenhouse gases, under an overall “cap” that would seek to reduce the rate of global warming.

ExxonMobil denounced the cap-and-trade system as un­wieldy and bureaucratic. It did, however, announce that it would support a straight “carbon tax,” which would create incentives for reductions in coal and oil use.

The proposal was a major policy shift for the corporation, which had come to it aft er years of isolated, deliberative policy analysis. But there was little support for the idea among Demo­crats. They knew that Republicans—many of whom had signed pledges never to raise taxes—wouldn’t go for it. And they had determined that cap-and-trade was the climate-change policy they would try to pass. Exxon’s support for a carbon tax would have been welcome in, say, the early nineties, when Al Gore was pushing the idea. But the debate had moved on.

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“There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subcon­scious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive render­ing of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.”—Charles Duhigg, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”

As we learn about the extent to which the United States government monitored its citizens phone calls and online activity, Charles Duhigg’s article “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” from the New York Times Magazine, reminds us that corporations are also keeping a close eye on our activities in the name of trying to sell us more stuff. The following excerpt is from Duhigg’s article, which is included in The Best Business Writing 2013:

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code—known internally as the Guest ID number—that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon or fill out a survey or mail in a refund or call the customer help line or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our website, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet, and what websites you visit. Tar­get can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal, or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving, and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Ana­lytics department come in.

Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to invest­ment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a “predictive analyt­ics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits so as to more effi­ciently market to them. “But Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. “We’re living through a golden age of behavioral research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now.”

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Our weekly list of new titles:

The Avian Migrant: The Biology of Bird Migration
John H. Rappole

The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (Now available in paper)
Amy Allen

François Laruelle’s Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction and Guide
Rocco Gangle

Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For de Man
Andrzej Warminski

Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory
Andrzej Warminski

Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama
Andrea Stevens

The declining middle-class, foreclosures, pharmaceutical companies behaving badly, the corporate misdeeds of Wal-Mart and Apple, are some of the stories that have been in the news in the past few months and are the ones that reveal the changing economic, political, and social aspects of our lives. These issues have been uncovered and analyzed by some of the excellent journalism and investigative reporting included in The Best Business Writing 2013, edited by Dean Starkman, Martha M. Hamilton, Ryan Chittum, and Felix Salmon

Throughout the week, we will be featuring The Best Business Writing 2013 Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page. For more on the book you can also read the Table of Contents and the Introduction by Dean Starkman.

We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to a lucky winner.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on June 14 at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

An Akronism, the University of Akron Press Blog, has a post explaining why sometimes it can pay to be the “tortoises of publishing.” “University presses, rightly or wrongly, are viewed as the tortoises of publishing. Slow. Ponderous. Stuffy. However, paying some attention to detail may not gratify the masses, but it only takes one bad result, quoted repeatedly, to misinform generations.”

For prospective authors, AMACOM’s Executive Editor Christina Parisi has a list of five simple things you can do to make your editor and publisher love you. Particularly important: #2. “Don’t hide bad news.”

At Beacon Broadside, Rodger Streitmatter confronts an important question about writing about same-sex couples from the past: “Isn’t it unethical for you to expose these people as being gay when many of them concealed their sexuality and their relationship when they were alive?”

This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press, continues their fascinating series on the history of cotton with a detailed explanation of the tools used historically and today to collect and ready cotton for sale.

The Harvard University Press Blog had a couple of excellent posts over the last two weeks. First, Richard Noll continues the HUP blog’s ongoing discussion of the DSM-5 and of the state of mental health treatment in general with a passionate post insisting that suffering and sadness can be a part of human life without necessitating the diagnosis of a mental disease. And second, James Dawes defends empathy in response to a recent New Yorker article denouncing “empathy’s devaluing of faceless suffering.”

At the JHU Press Blog, James Mulholland looks back at the bizarre and fascinating story of late 18th century bardic performers, led by Iolo Morganwg, who aimed to revive the ancient customs of Wales.

Why should readers today care about the Civil War? At the LSU Press Blog, David C. Keehn makes the case that “studying events of that era is important and relevant to what is happening today.”

Magic, often of the “personal and vicious” kind, was common and important in the everyday lives of people living in ancient Greece and Rome. At the University of Michigan Press blog, Andrew T. Wilburn talks about his work digging up and analyzing the paraphernalia of magic in the ancient world, from curse tablets to erotic spells.

June 5 was World Environment Day, and the MIT Press blog has a Q&A with philosopher William P. Kabasenche discussing the role of philosophers in environmental issues.

Stanislaw Lem is probably best known for his scifi stories, Solaris notable among them, but he also wrote several treatises on the philosophy of science and technology. At the University of Minnesota Press Blog, Joanna Zylinska, the translator of Lem’s Summa Technologiae , has a blog post in which she describes Lem’s work as “a perhaps unwitting counterpoint to the idealism that underpins the French philosopher’s [Henri Bergson's] Creative Evolution, with its notion of vital impetus (élan vital), Lem’s Summa offers a much more sober, even ironic view of evolution, one that is rooted in scepticism and in the scientific method.”

At From the Square, the NYU Press blog, Karen M. Dunak looks at the ways that same-sex couples are “negotiating the traditions and terminologies associated with marriage.”

“Who’s the cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about? / Shaft! / Right on!” At the OUPblog, Tim Allen and Robert Repino have a great post up about the history and place in American pop culture of Blaxploitation films, from 1971′s Shaft to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, which came out last year.

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a post at North Philly Notes, the blog of Temple University Press, by John S. W. Park, looking back at the lessons Mark Twain’s Huck Finn can teach us about illegal and undocumented immigrants.

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!

The following blog post is by Andrew deWaard and R. Colin Tait, authors of The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape. You can also read an interview with the authors.

In our book, The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies and Digital Videotape, one of the issues that we argue distinguishes Soderbergh’s filmmaking career is his work as an “actor’s director.” This is certainly evident in Soderbergh’s supposed last feature film, Behind the Candelabra, with A-List stars Michael Douglas and Matt Damon’s unorthodox portrayals of Liberace and his lover Scott Thorson.

As we explain in our book, Soderbergh’s films are marked by extremes between the poles of realism, modernist and (sometimes) postmodern excess. This rule of thumb applies to Behind the Candelabra, which is marked by its precise attention to historical detail in the form of the film’s re-creation of Liberace’s tastes in decorating (which he describes as “palatial kitsch”) but at the same time, relies on the audience’s foreknowledge of its stars, their heterosexuality and, thus, their playing against type.

This is certainly the case in Michael Douglas’ performance as the famously flamboyant pianist. The role is not only one of the most complex of his career, but one of the most complex characters within Soderbergh’s oeuvre. In terms of realism, Douglas concentrates on getting the most important details right to play Liberace—the voice and his mannerisms—in order for the audience to accept Douglas as the Vegas showman. Similar to other biographical portraits in Soderbergh’s body of work (Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich, Benecio del Toro as Che Guevara) this involved a great deal of research on the part of actors in order that they convincingly play the real-life figures.

On the other hand, there is a modernist streak in these performances which is similar to Bertolt Brecht’s concept of theatrical “distanciation.” In Candelabra, it is impossible to separate Michael Douglas and Matt Damon from the characters they play, adding intertextual weight to the film. Douglas’ performance is particularly striking in this regard, as the film relies on the spectator’s foreknowledge of Douglas’ star persona—seen in his most famous roles as uber-capitalist Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, put-upon adulterer in Fatal Attraction and disgruntled everyman in Falling Down—to present a radically different image to the audience. His portrayal as a gay man in this film, then, directly opposes his career-long trend of playing hyper-heterosexual and volatile characters in Basic Instinct and other movies.

That he is playing a gay man is perhaps secondary to the shock of seeing Douglas’s frail, bald, and saggy body. In our book, we label the willingness of actors to transform themselves within Soderberghian films as “dirtied stardom,” such as Matt Damon’s unflattering role in The Informant!, where he is mustachioed, obese and bald, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s character’s gruesome autopsy in Contagion. “Dirtied Stars” actively go to extremes in order to destabilize or shock the viewer by playing against their star image. In Candelabra, the most striking scenes involve Douglas and Damon displaying their bodies in very different ways than audiences are expecting—not only by way of their nudity but via graphic scenes of plastic surgery, which are far more visceral in their peeling back the veneer of stardom than the experience of seeing Douglas and Damon perform homosexual acts.

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The following is a post by Rob Stone, author of The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run. You can also read an interview with Rob Stone discussing the book and Linklater’s films:

When the British-Canadian film scholar Robin Wood wrote about Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) in his book Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 1998), he felt compelled to preface his analysis with the admission that “here was a film for which I felt not only interest or admiration but love” (1998: 318). His subscription to the kind of affective or appreciative criticism advocated by André Bazin sets a challenge for academics who commonly assume that the intellect must explain away intuition and that objectivity is our prime objective. Like many academics I was a closeted film fan allowed out to play with movies like Before Sunrise following the example of Wood, who not only shared his passion but made it an essential component of his craft.

Truth be told, I wasn’t expecting much. I was living in Madrid at the time and used to frequent the art house cinemas off the Plaza de España and just see whatever was on. Yet, as the film started, the feeling crept up on me that the world was changing. I’d done a lot of inter-railing around Europe so I knew the sensation of timelessness in travel and the everyday fantasies of actually connecting with someone who was going the same way as you; but Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) somehow ignored the fear of rejection and amazingly invited me to travel with them too. At first, I admit, I observed them, sometimes cringing at the conversation but mostly admiring the eloquent dialogue that culminates in some convoluted argument about time travel that Jesse uses to convince Céline to get off the train with him in Vienna. There they walk, talk, drift into a record store and try out a listening booth. And then this happens:

It’s been eighteen years since I first shared that song, that booth, that moment with Jesse and Céline and the feeling has never gone away. Indeed, the sensation has only intensified by reconnecting with them in the Paris-set sequel of Before Sunset (2004) and their (our) present-day reunion on a Greek island in ‘Before Midnight’ (2013). Lacking Wood’s courage, I’ve often tried to understand (and perhaps disguise) my love for this scene in analysis, bolstered by the fact that it even lends itself to academic enquiry by combining two of the most evocative themes in film studies: time and the gaze.

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Today we have an interview with Professor Goldie Kadushin, co-author of The Social Work Interview, 5th edition. The Social Work Interview has been a crucial textbook in the social work field in various editions since 1972, and it is still the only textbook to outline the skills social workers need to conduct effective client interviews. In the Q&A today, Professor Kadushin talks about how the newest edition of The Social Work Interview reflects new trends in the social work field and how social work has changed since the first edition of The Social Work Interview came out.

Question: This is the fifth edition of The Social Work Interview. What is new in this edition?

Goldie Kadushin: Every chapter was updated with research published after 1997 (the publication date of the fourth edition) in the social, medical, and psychological sciences. The chapter on cross-cultural interviewing was completely rewritten to focus on culturally competent interviewing of sexual and racial/ethnic minorities and the elderly. Case examples were revised to reflect current practice.

Q: What are some of the most important research findings about the social work interview in the last 15 years?

GK: The importance of the client’s role in the interview is a new finding. Research indicates that clients interpret the interview in terms of their own goals, needs and agenda. Consistent with this finding, adaptation of the interview to client preferences may be helpful in achieving positive outcomes. Research has continued to accumulate indicating that techniques and the helping relationship are inseparable and complementary. Self-disclosure, an effective but controversial interviewing technique, received new attention. Researchers concluded that the question was no longer whether to self-disclose but how to self-disclose. New research on adapting the interview to the needs of lesbian and gay clients and the elderly has also been published in the last decade.

Q: What distinguishes the social work interview from the interviews of other helping professions?

GK: The content of the social work interview differs from the interviews of other helping professions in its focus on improving clients’ social functioning and their access to environmental resources. However, the social work interview overlaps with the interviews of other professions in sharing the same structure and techniques. So, while the book emphasizes social work interviewing, it can also be used by other professions such as psychology and counseling.

Q: Can a textbook teach social work interviewing?

GK: No. “Knowing about” is clearly different than “knowing how.” Ultimately, interviewing is learned through doing. However, even though “to know” is very different from “to do,” it is clearly better than not knowing. For every conversational turn, the interviewer must select a technique that is likely to be responsive to the client, while also conveying the interviewer’s intention. Knowledge about interviewing thus informs the clinician’s consideration of relevant choices that determine skill in the use of technique.

Q: The first edition of The Social Work Interview was published in 1972. How do you explain the continuing popularity of this particular textbook?

GK: If I had to guess, I would say there are probably two reasons. One, the book is explicitly concerned with the problems and issues of social work interview and, two, the book is scholarly, yet accessible. We have made an effort to review relevant research and to present the findings in a readable style for both beginning and advanced clinicians and students. These two qualities may explain the continued appeal of this textbook for social work and other audiences.

“I think that [Soderbergh's] ‘final films’ from 2009-2013 after he announced his retirement reflect one of the most prolific and creative bursts of filmmaking in recent American cinema.”—R. Colin Tait, coauthor of The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh

The following is an interview with Andrew deWaard and R. Colin Tait, authors of The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies and Digital Videotape

Question: What made you interested in writing about the topic of Steven Soderbergh?

Andrew deWaard: Like many, if not most students in film studies, we were interested in the concept of film auteurs and the personal visions of film directors. Soderbergh presented a dramatic alternative to this school of thought; he seemed to radically change his style and subject matter with every new film.

R. Colin Tait: There was also the strange coincidence that we both arrived to graduate school with a similar idea—to work on Soderbergh—and that collaborating on a project would allow us to push each other in ways that I think a single-authored piece couldn’t. There was also the matter of why Soderbergh’s contributions had largely been overshadowed within an era that he was hugely responsible for defining, which became one of our central questions when approaching the subject.

Q: How about your subtitle: what do you mean by “indie sex, corporate lies and digital videotape”?

RCT: Well, it’s a play on and an update of the title of Soderbergh’s breakout film, sex, lies and videotape. In the book, we wonder aloud how Soderbergh might define the running themes throughout his work from today’s vantage point. By indie sex we intend to evoke the “romantic” account of the indie era of American filmmaking in the early 1990s, and how Soderbergh, often thought of as a cold, aloof filmmaker, has filmed some of the most cinematic, non-traditional love scenes (Out of Sight, Solaris) in recent years. For “corporate lies” we evoke the anti-corporate stance of many of Soderbergh’s movies, where the “little guys” face off against big business (as in the case of Ocean’s 11). And finally, for digital videotape, we wanted to highlight Soderbergh’s essential role as an early adopter of digital technologies and his role in changing the aesthetic of contemporary films.

AD: “Corporate lies” can be seen to be a significant concern throughout Soderbergh’s body of work, including those he directed — environmental pollution and corporate malfeasance in Erin Brockovich, the lobbying industry in Washington in K-Street, global price-fixing in The Informant!, environmental destruction that leads to a pandemic in Contagion — as well as those he helped produce — the geopolitical ramifications of the oil industry in Syriana (Stephen Gaghan), the psychotropic dystopia of A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater), and the corporate and legal corruption featured in Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy), among others

Q: What did you intend to accomplish with this book?

AD: Primarily we wanted to shed light on a then-underrated yet prolific filmmaker. When we began writing, there wasn’t a single book dedicated to Soderbergh; there are now five, attesting to his recently realized significance. Once we started writing, it became apparent that Soderbergh wouldn’t fit into traditional auteur formulations, so we sought to expand our analysis to include some of the other important factors in contemporary filmmaking, such as economics, publicity, and technology. Similar to Soderbergh’s own filmmaking practice, we attempt to introduce a new idea or concept with each chapter, rather than adhere to any single paradigm.

RCT: I think that it was important to build a contemporary model for considering how authorship has become much more complicated within the Hollywood industry. I’m certain that the model we constructed can be used to consider other directors as well. There has also been a tendency on the part of critics to dismiss figures that don’t broadcast their own significance or possess an obvious signature. We wanted to explain that Soderbergh was not only significant, but his career was emblematic of the shifts within the industry within the past 20 years or so.

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The following is an interview with Rob Stone, author of The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run.

Question: What makes the cinema of Richard Linklater a good subject for study?

Rob Stone: Linklater is an incredibly versatile filmmaker, not only in the range of genres that he’s tried, which includes romantic comedy, western, science-fiction, animation, documentary and much else besides, but in the way he operates between the independent and studio systems of production and distribution. At the same time his films are literate and thoughtful to the point of being philosophical, even spiritual, and they always have this amazing dialogue going on, not just between the characters who do their fair share of walking and talking, but between American and European ideas of time, cinema, politics and understandings of life. He’s made over twenty films, shorts and documentaries and has influenced filmmakers all over the world.

Q: What are the aims of the book?

Chapters in the book aim to contextualize his cinema in the location of Austin, discuss and describe his working methods including his use of rotoscoping, consider his most dominant themes and recurring aesthetics and analyze the full range of his work. This includes his little-known documentaries on baseball and New York post-9/11 and even an unseen pilot for a situation comedy. But one of the richest seams of inquiry is often that of his cinema in relation to the history of independent American cinema and indeed the recent blurring of the term and idea of an “indie” film or filmmaker in relation to the bigger studios, changing modes and platforms of distribution and even transnational and world cinema. I was fortunate in that Linklater is also approachable, immensely affable and even collaborative so the chance to interview him at length was a major incentive too.

Q: How did the interviews go?

RS: I went to Austin, Texas, where he lives and where he helped established the Austin Film Studios and his own Detour film production company. It was July and baking hot and I took a taxi out of Austin to the converted aircraft hangars that now house the studios and the wooden bungalows beside them where his production offices are. His offices are like a gallery of original film posters, many of them rare and all carefully framed. It was his birthday but he showed up at noon and was friendly, welcoming and funny. Our interviews just drifted in the best possible way and we covered the entirety of his career. A vegan chocolate birthday cake arrived and we enjoyed that and met the next day at his apartment in downtown Austin, which had even more classic film posters adorning the walls. He was always the most forthright and generous interviewee to the point where I had one of those out-of-body moments of perception like you see in Linklater’s films such as Waking Life when you look down on yourself and think ‘wow, I’m talking about my favorite film of all time with the guy who directed it!’

Q: And which is your favorite film?

RS: Before Sunrise I think, although I find it impossible to separate it from its sequel nine years later, Before Sunset, so can I have both? In fact I’ll be seeing the third installment, Before Midnight in Vienna in a couple of weeks so I’d better make room for that too.

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The Problem with God: Why Atheists, True Believers, and Even Agnostics Must All Be Wrong
Peter J. Steinberger

The Great Civilized Conversation: Education for a World Community
Wm. Theodore de Bary

Global Intellectual History
Edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori

Return of the Dragon: Rising China and Regional Security
Denny Roy

The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō
Abe Kōbō; Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Richard F. Calichman

The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan
J. Charles Schencking

Social Work Values and Ethics, Fourth Edition
Frederic G. Reamer

Stalking Nabokov (Now available in paper)
Brian Boyd

Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement (Now available in paper)
William Duggan

The Cinema of Aki Kaurismäki: Contrarian Stories
Andrew Nestingen

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