Faculty Authors Signing Reception-October 15

Thursday, October 15, 2009
3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
The Gelman Library, Room 207

ANNA HELM, Professorial Lecturer, School of Business
The Intersection of Material and Poetic Economy: Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben and Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer
This work explores the intersection of the material and poetic economies in Soll und Haben and Der Nachsommer. It demonstrates how the main poetical strategies of the two novels, dichotomization (Soll und Haben) and total economization (Der Nachsommer), are defined by economic themes, structures, and forms. The «economopoetics» of the novels, i.e. the multitude of connections between economics and aesthetics, pervades the texts on three different levels: as content, as representational model, and as literary strategy. Although very different in their treatment of topics relating to business and economics, both novels are driven by narratives parsed with economic expression. The diverging patterns of economopoetics support central commentaries on their underlying realist aesthetics. One important finding is that, in spite of money's apparent absence from the core content of some literary texts, economic relations are inherent in the narrative structure of those texts. The book shows that economopoetics is relevant not only to any extant literature which attempts explicitly to thematize business and economics (such as Soll und Haben), but also to that which does not (such as Der Nachsommer). Economic organizing principles are pervasive signatures of the novel's aesthetic.
(Peter Lang Publishing, 2009)

ANN ROMINES, Professor of English
Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Scholarly Edition)
Willa Cather’s twelfth and final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is her most intense fictional engagement with political and personal conflict. Set in Cather’s Virginia birthplace in 1856, the novel draws on family and local history and the escalating conflicts of the last years of slavery—conflicts in which Cather’s family members were deeply involved, both as slave owners and as opponents of slavery. Cather, at five years old, appears as a character in an unprecedented first-person epilogue. Tapping her earliest memories, Cather powerfully and sparely renders a Virginia world that is simultaneously beautiful and, as she said, “terrible.”
Ann Romines, a professor of English at the George Washington University, is a well-known Cather scholar. She is the author and editor of several books, including Willa Cather’s Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South.
(University of Nebraska Press, 2009)

GREGORY SQUIRES, Professor of Sociology and of Public Policy and Public Administration
The Integration Debate: Competing Futures For American Cities
Racial integration, and policies intended to achieve greater integration, continue to generate controversy in the United States, with some of the most heated debates taking place among long-standing advocates of racial equality. Today, many nonwhites express what has been referred to as integration exhaustion as they question the value of integration in today’s world. And many whites exhibit what has been labeled race fatigue, arguing that we have done enough to reconcile the races. Many policies have been implemented in efforts to open up traditionally restricted neighborhoods, while others have been designed to diversify traditionally poor, often nonwhite, neighborhoods. Still, racial segregation persists, along with the many social costs of such patterns of uneven development. This book explores both long-standing and emerging controversies over the nation’s ongoing struggles with discrimination and segregation. More urgently, it offers guidance on how these barriers can be overcome to achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns.
(Routledge, 2009)

CHARLES TOFTOY, Associate Professor Emeritus of Management Science
It’s in the Eyes
A PSYCHOPATH IS STALKING CO-EDS IN WASHINGTON, DC
It's spring in Washington, DC - a beautiful time of year in the nation's capital, yet its citizens are uneasy. Their heightened restlessness is reminiscent of the recent 9/11, sniper, and anthrax scares. But this time the enemy is a psychopathic killer responsible for the deaths of four local university co-eds - raping and murdering them using rituals practiced by the Thuggees, killers for the Goddess Kali who were responsible for the deaths of more than two million travelers in India in the 17th and 18th centuries.
It's up to Lars Neilsen, a college professor and part-time sleuth, and his highly skilled Alpha Team to find out who is committing these atrocious murders. But Lars and his team are in for a few nasty surprises along the way...
(Outskirts Press, 2009)