Repossessing The World

Why does it seem as if everyone is writing memoirs, and particularly women? The current popularity of memoir verifies the common belief that we each have a story to tell. And we do...especially women. Memoirs are not only representations of women’s personal lives but also of their desire to repossess important parts of our culture, in which women’s stories have not mattered. Beginning with her own motivations for writing memoirs, Helen M. Buss examines the many kinds of memoir written by contemporary women: memoirs about growing up, memoirs about traumatic events, about relationships, about work. In writing memoirs, these women publicly assert that their lives have mattered. They reshape the memoir, a form as old as the middle ages and as young as today, into a social discourse that blends the personal with the political, the self with the significant other, literature with history, and fiction with autobiography and essay. Buss urges readers to use their reading experience to help themselves understand and write the significance of their own lives. Repossessing the World is the first book-length critical inquiry into women’s use of a form that has often been dismissed as less important than autobiography, less professional than the novel, and less intellectual than the formal essay. Buss demonstrates that the memoir makes its own art, not only through selective borrowing from these genres but also through the unique way that the tripartite narrative voice of the memoir constructs the personal and public experience of the memorist as significant to our cultural moment.

The Shan have been fighting since 1958 for the autonomous state in Southeast Asia they were promised. Jane M. Ferguson articulates Shanland as an ongoing project of resistance, resilience, and accommodation within Thailand and Myanmar, showing how the Shan have forged a homeland and identity during great upheaval.

Fluxus was a pivotal movement in redefining art’s role and the artist’s identity in the contemporary world, so that its aesthetics – as well as many of its gimmicks – have become so deeply embedded in our social setting that we now no longer realize where they originally came into being. Fluxus has been described as the most radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s, challenging conventional thinking on art and culture. It had a central role in the birth of such key contemporary art forms as concept art, installation, performance art, intermedia and video. The amount of Fluxus-related scholarly activity has increased since 2009, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired the world’s largest collection of Fluxus works, the Lila and Gilbert Silverman Collection, and this in turn led to a series of exhibitions, first at MoMA and subsequently at other institutions worldwide. Focusing on Japanese artists involved in Fluxus, the book proposes a new understanding of this movement which, in spite of its anti-academicism, its aversion to authorial identity and the ephemeral character of its output, is “the best documented and best cross-indexed art movement in history,” (Nam June Paik 1994, 77). The book presents postwar Japanese radical avant-garde and the related and highly refined discourse and debate behind it, enlightening crucial if less known aspects of (local) Fluxus history and theory.

Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war.

If we are responsible educators, the causes of the Holocaust must be addressed in order to prevent future genocide. Contemporary Jewish Identity: Emanuele Ottolenghi and Mark Weitzman examine contemporary antisemitism in Europe and North America respectively. Michael Pollan reflects upon Jewish identity from the unique perspective of a young Jew who worked as a civil servant for the Austrian government in a program designed to acknowledge Austria's role as a perpetrator of the Shoah. Testimony: Firsthand testimony will soon be available only in memoirs or recorded oral histories. In the future, second and subsequent generations must speak as witnesses. Sheldon Schreter, a grandchild of Holocaust victims, describes a visit with his four sons to Sighet, Romania, his parents' birthplace, and struggles with the question of 'Why?' The prevention of genocide is, in large measure, dependent upon the good will and intervention of citizens living in modern cultures.

Comparative Postcolonialism in the Works of V.S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison: Fragmented Identities places comparative literature in a postcolonial context in order to widen its traditional scope and thereby pay greater attention to the relationship between indigenous and hegemonic cultures.

The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1978, volume 1, contains messages given by Brother Witness Lee from January 22 through December 11, 1978. In 1978 Brother Lee spoke seventy-five messages that were published in Life-study of Genesis and Life-study of Ephesians. The Life-study messages are not included in The Collected Works of Witness Lee. From the beginning of the year until the end of April, Brother Lee ministered in Anaheim, California. From the beginning of May through the middle of May, he visited Boston, Massachusetts, after which he returned to Anaheim. Except for brief visits to the nearby cities of Costa Mesa, Irvine, and San Diego, California, he remained in Anaheim from the middle of May through the first week in August. The remaining messages included in this volume that were given after the first week in August were all spoken in Anaheim. The contents of this volume are divided into nine sections, as follows: 1. Six messages given in Anaheim, California, on January 22 through December 10. These messages are included in this volume under the title Experiencing Christ as Life and Being Constituted with the Truth for God's Building. 2. Nine messages given in Anaheim, California, on January 26 through October 19. These messages were consolidated into five chapters and are included in this volume under the title Fellowship with the Church in Anaheim. 3. Seven messages given in Anaheim, California, on March 23 through April 9. They were previously published in an eight-chapter book entitled The Exercise of the Kingdom for the Building of the Church and are included in this volume under the same title. 4. Twenty-two meetings for fellowship with the serving ones in the Living Stream Ministry office in Anaheim, California, on March 27 through December 11. Brother Lee's speaking in these meetings was informally published as nineteen individual messages under the general title Fellowship with Serving Ones. These chapters are included in this volume under the same title. 5. A message given during a time of fellowship with college students in Costa Mesa, California, on April 6. The edited message was divided into two chapters, which are included in this volume under the title Bearing the Testimony of Jesus by Living a Crucified Life in Resurrection. 6. A message given during a time of fellowship with leading brothers in Orange County, California, on April 15. This message is included in this volume under the title The Lord's Recovery of His Testimony. 7. Five messages given in Anaheim, California, on April 16 through May 21. These messages were previously published in a book entitled Basic Training and are included in this volume under the same title. 8. Twenty-three messages given in Boston, Massachusetts, and Anaheim, California, on May 1 through June 25. These messages were previously published in a book entitled The Experience of Christ and are included in this volume under the same title. 9. Twenty-three messages given in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 1 through 12. They were consolidated into nineteen chapters and are included in this volume under the title The Present Need among the Churches in the Lord's Recovery.