New York Intellect

New York Intellect is Thomas Bender's remarkable look at the connections between the life of a city and the life of the mind. New York has never been comfortable or convenient as a milieu for art and intellect, Bender notes. Yet New Yorkers have always struggled to create institutions and styles of thought and writing that reflect the special character of the city, its boundless energies and deep divisions.

In the 1790s, a single conversational circle—the Friendly Club—united New York City's most ambitious young writers, and in Republic of Intellect, Bryan Waterman uses an innovative blend of literary criticism and historical narrative to re-create the club's intellectual culture. The story of the Friendly Club reveals the mutually informing conditions of authorship, literary association, print culture, and production of knowledge in a specific time and place—the tumultuous, tenuous world of post-revolutionary New York City. More than any similar group in the early American republic, the Friendly Club occupied a crossroads—geographical, professional, and otherwise—of American literary and intellectual culture. Waterman argues that the relationships among club members' novels, plays, poetry, diaries, legal writing, and medical essays lead to important first examples of a distinctively American literature and also illuminate the local, national, and transatlantic circuits of influence and information that club members called "the republic of intellect." He addresses topics ranging from political conspiracy in the gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown to the opening of William Dunlap's Park Theatre, from early American debates on gendered conversation to the publication of the first American medical journal. Voluntary association and print culture helped these young New Yorkers, Waterman concludes, to produce a broader and more diverse post-revolutionary public sphere than scholars have yet recognized.

At a time of much unease in academia and among the general public about the relation of intellect to public life, Thomas Bender explores both the 19th-century origins and the 20th-century configurations of academic intellect in the United States. "Bender's positive, generous civil voice injects a soothing dose of optimism into current academic debates . . . ".--AMERICAN QUARTERLY.

Ron Athey is one of the most important, prolific, and influential performance artists of the past four decades. A singular example of lived creativity, his radical performances are odds with the art worlds and art marketplaces that have increasingly dominated contemporary art and performance art over the period of his career. Queer Communion, an exploration of Athey's career, refuses the linear narratives of art discourse and instead pays homage to the intensities of each mode of Athey's performative practice and each community he engages. Emphasizing the ephemeral and largely uncollectible nature of his work, the book places Athey's own writing at its center, turning to memoir, memory recall, and other modes of retrieval and narration to archive his performances. In addition to documenting Athey's art, ephemera, notes, and drawings, the volume features commissioned essays, concise "object lessons" on individual objects in the Athey archive, and short testimonials by friends and collaborators by contributors including Dominic Johnson, Amber Musser, Julie Tolentino, Ming Ma, David Getsy, Alpesh Patel, and Zackary Drucker, among others. Together they form Queer Communion, a counter history of contemporary art.

"This book confronts the problem of meaning by fusing together methods specific to different fields and exploring the computational efficiency and scalability of these methods"--Provided by publisher.

The works published by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and his associates during the past forty years constitute the largest repository of knowledge about the cognitive development of children that is available anywhere, and Piaget's general theory of intellectual development rivals, in scope and comprehensiveness, Freud's theory of personality development Here is a self-contained general summary of Piaget's theory, written at a relatively nontechnical level. It is suitable for use in a variety of courses in psychology and education -- child psychology, child development, educational psychology, learning, psychological systems, general psychology, and others. It will also interest professionals and educated laymen as a timely exposition of ideas that are attracting the attention of increasing numbers of American psychologists. In order to convey the complexities of the theory to readers who have had no previous contact with it, the author uses a number of unusual pedagogical devices. He first outlines the theory in an introduction that students can reread with increasing comprehension as they study the text. The main part of the book is an elucidation of the Piagetian periods of intellectual development, with enough illustrations of Piaget's research activities to give the theory meaning. The author frequently reproduces passages from Piaget's clinical observations with Piaget's interpretations deleted, so that the reader can assess his own understanding and better appreciate Piaget's style of inquiry. In an epilogue, the author discusses the educational implications of Piaget's work.