Winner of the American Comparative Literature Association's Rene Wellek Prize (2004) As one of the founding poets and editors of the Language School of poetry and one of its central theorists, Barrett Watten has consistently challenged the boundaries of literature and art. In The Constructivist Moment, he offers a series of theoretically informed and textually sensitive readings that advance a revisionist account of the avant-garde through the methodologies of cultural studies. His major topics include American modernist and postmodern poetics, Soviet constructivist and post-Soviet literature and art, Fordism and Detroit techno—each proposed as exemplary of the social construction of aesthetic and cultural forms. His book is a full-scale attempt to place the linguistic turn of critical theory and the self-reflexive foregrounding of language by the avant-garde since the Russian Formalists in relation to the cultural politics of postcolonial studies, feminism, and race theory. As such, it will provide a crucial revisionist perspective within modernist and avant-garde studies.

It has been variously labelled ‘Language Poetry’, ‘Language Writing’, ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing’ (after the magazine that ran from 1978 to 1981), and ‘language-centred writing’. It has been placed according to its geographical positions, on East or West coasts; its venues in small magazines, independent presses and performance spaces, and its descent from historical precursors, be they the Objectivists, the composers-by-field of the Black Mountain School, the Russian Constructivists or American modernism à la William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Indeed, one of the few statements that can be made about it with little qualification is that ‘it’ has both fostered and endured a crisis in representation more or less since it first became visible in the 1970s. In Poetry & Language Writing David Arnold grasps the nettle of Language poetry, reassessing its relationship with surrealism and providing a scholarly, intelligent way of understanding the movement. Poets discussed include Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer and Barrett Watten.

Based on rare archival material and numerous interviews with practitioners, Art in the North of England 1979-2008 analyses the relation between political and economic changes stemming from the 1980s and artistic developments in the principal cities of the North of England in the late 20th century. Looking in particular at the art scenes of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle, Gabriel Gee unveils a set of powerful aesthetic reactions to industrial change and urban reconstruction during this period on the part of artists including John Davies, Pete Clarke, the Amber collective, Richard Wilson, Karen Watson, Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson, John Kippin, and the contribution of organisations such as Projects UK/Locus +, East Street Arts, the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust and the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool. While the geographical focus of this study is highly specific, a key concern throughout is the relationship between regional, national and international artistic practices and identities. Of interest to all scholars and students concerned with the developments of British art in the second half of the 20th century, the study is also of direct pertinence to observers of global narratives, which are here described and analysed through the concept of trans-industriality.

The book examines philosophical and sociological approaches within critical theory and more widely from the vantage point of communicative reason. It seeks to revitalize the sociological dimension of critical theory by advancing a critical sociology of reason. It does so fully in the knowledge that reason is a contentious concept in sociology and other disciplines. Nonetheless, building on Habermas’s original insight, it argues that an extensively modified version of communicative reason is indispensable. This modified approach will draw extensively from Peirce’s pragmatist semiotics and critical cognitive sociology. Such a focus has significant implications for meta-theoretical, theoretical-empirical, and methodological approaches in critical theory, critical sociology, and related disciplines. This book will be of interest to readers in the social sciences, humanities, and philosophy who value the importance of a social theory of a reasonable society for their disciplines and for increasingly essential interdisciplinary activities. The book will also appeal to many in critical theory and beyond who are interested in the cognitive foundations of normative orders, including unjust or pathological as well as actually or potentially just foundations. The book emphasizes both validity and critique within communicative reason and critical theory and accordingly presents a distinctive perspective on critical-reconstructive research.

This widely acclaimed work provides a lively counterbalance to the standard assessment-measurement-accountability prescriptions that have made showing you did your job more important than actually doing it. Now extensively revised, it articulates a postmodern theory of public administration that challenges the field to redirect its attention away from narrow, technique-oriented scientism, and toward democratic openness and ethics.The authors incorporate insights from thinkers like Rorty, Giddens, Derrida, and Foucault to recast public administration as an arena of decentered practices. In their framework, ideographic collisions and everyday impasses bring about political events that challenge the status quo, creating possibilities for social change. "Postmodern Public Administration" is an outstanding intellectual achievement that has rewritten the political theory of public administration. This new edition will encourage everyone who reads it to think quite differently about democratic governance.

By outlining a novel concept of literary practice 'potentialism', this text shows how opening up literary possibilities enabled writers such as Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Lyn Hejinian to tackle matters of power and politics.

Integrate psychotherapy with residential treatment to achieve positive results for patients in group care! This book addresses the complex issues that arise in the effort to provide individual therapy in group care settings. It reviews classical case material, presents contemporary case studies, and examines practical and theoretical issues important to the effective delivery of treatment to individuals living in residential care. Noted experts who have been associated with The Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, share knowledge garnered from years of real-world experience to help you stay at the leading edge of the field and provide effective individual treatment to your clients in long- and short-term residential care. Psychotherapy in Group Care: Making Life Good Enough includes practical and theoretical chapters exploring important aspects of the group care paradigm. The book: presents a case study that describes vital aspects of the analytic process that emerged in work with an adolescent boy in a group home who felt as though he was a psychological orphan illustrates the role of play as a continuous and basic function in therapy and presents play-themed vignettes from analytic work with two young people in residential care revisits Joey: A Mechanical Boy and Tommy the Space Childclassic case studies from Bruno Bettelheim and Rudolph Ekstienand explores the implications of contemporary relational theory for using the meaning and metaphor of behaviors and communications addresses issues of transference and counter-transference in the psychodynamic psychotherapy of a young girl in residential carewith a discussion of unrecognized rescue fantasies and projective identification, and of the need for residential childcare workers to recognize and work through the difficult feelings evoked in the process of working with seriously disturbed young people examines the structural basis for the integration of psychotherapy and residential treatment, considering the meaning of integration, variables that affect the manner and degree to which integration can be accomplished, and changes in the psychotherapists' roles that can maximize the potential of each variable explores three sets of theoretical issues facing clinicians as they play multiple roles in short-term residential treatment, discussing how conflicts in the roles of therapists and team leaders can be resolved, the implications of such a resolution in terms of confidentiality, and ways in which major approaches to psychotherapy can be adapted to new conditions considers the role of the primary clinician in relation to the residential team and explores the ways in which integration of psychotherapy and residential treatment can be implemented in the early phase of the treatment process

The shape, lineation, and prosody of postmodern poems are extravagantly inventive, imbuing both form and content with meaning. Through a survey of American poetry and poetics from the end of World War II to the present, Michael Golston traces the proliferation of these experiments to a growing fascination with allegory in philosophy, linguistics, critical theory, and aesthetics, introducing new strategies for reading American poetry while embedding its formal innovations within the history of intellectual thought. Beginning with Walter Benjamin's explicit understanding of Surrealism as an allegorical art, Golston defines a distinct engagement with allegory among philosophers, theorists, and critics from 1950 to today. Reading Fredric Jameson, Angus Fletcher, Roland Barthes, and Craig Owens, and working with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce, Golston develops a theory of allegory he then applies to the poems of Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker, who, he argues, wrote in response to the Surrealists; the poems of John Ashbery and Clark Coolidge, who incorporated formal aspects of filmmaking and photography into their work; the groundbreaking configurations of P. Inman, Lyn Hejinian, Myung Mi Kim, and the Language poets; Susan Howe's "Pierce-Arrow," which he submits to semiotic analysis; and the innovations of Craig Dworkin and the conceptualists. Revitalizing what many consider to be a staid rhetorical trope, Golston positions allegory as a creative catalyst behind American poetry's postwar avant-garde achievements.

Geographies of Identity: Narrative Forms, Feminist Futures explores identity and American culture through hybrid, prose work by women, and expands the strategies of cultural poetics practices into the study of innovative narrative writing. Informed by Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Harryette Mullen, Julia Kristeva, and others, this project further considers feminist identity politics, race, and ethnicity as cultural content in and through poetic and non/narrative forms. The texts reflected on here explore literal and figurative landscapes, linguistic and cultural geographies, sexual borders, and spatial topographies. Ultimately, they offer non-prescriptive models that go beyond expectations for narrative forms, and create textual webs that reflect the diverse realities of multi-ethnic, multi-oriented, multi-linguistic cultural experiences. Readings of Gertrude Stein's A Geographical History of America, Renee Gladman's Juice, Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Juliana Spahr's The Transformation, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS show how alternatively narrative modes of writing can expand access to representation, means of identification, and subjective agency, and point to horizons of possibility for new futures. These texts critique essentializing practices in which subjects are defined by specific identity categories, and offer complicated, contextualized, and historical understandings of identity formation through the textual weaving of form and content.

The first volume of the new series “European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies” focuses on the relation between the avant-garde, modernism and Europe. It combines interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics. The essays, written by experts from more than fifteen countries, seek to bring out the complexity of the European avant-garde and modernism by relating it to Europe’s intricate history, multiculturalism and multilingualism. They aim to inquire into the divergent cultural views on Europe taking shape in avant-garde and modernist practices and to chart a composite image of the “other Europe(s)” that have emerged from the (contemporary) avant-garde and experimental modernism. How did the avant-garde and modernism in (and outside) Europe give shape to local, national and pan-European forms of identity and community? To what extent does the transnational exchange and cross-fertilisation of aesthetic tendencies illustrate the well-rehearsed claim that the avant-gardes form a typically European phenomenon? Dealing with canonised as well as lesser known exponents of modernism and the avant-garde throughout Europe, this book will appeal to all those interested in European cultural, literary and art history.