Books published by University of Minnesota Press

Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Roman Jakobson, one of the most important thinkers of our century, was bet known for his role in the rise and spread of the structural approach to linguistics and literature. His formative structuralism approach to linguistics and literature. His formative years with the Russian Futurists and subsequent involvement in the Moscow and Prague Linguistic Circles (which he co-founded) resulted in a lifelong devotion to fundamental change in both literary theory and linguistics. In bringing each to bear upon the other, he enlivened both disciplines; if a literary work was to a him a linguistic fact, it was also a semiotic phenomenon - part of the entire universe of signs; and above all, for both language and literature, time was an integral factor, one that produced momentum and change. Jakobson''s books and articles, written in many languages and published around the world, were collected in a monumental seven-volume work, Selected Writings (1962 -1984), which has been available only to a limited readership. Not long before his death in 1982, Jakobson brought together this group of eleven essays—Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time — to serve as an introduction to some of his linguistic theories and especially, to his work in poetics. Jakobson''s introductory article and the editor''s preface together suggest the range of his work and provide a context for the essays in this book, which fall into three groups. Those in the first section reflect his preoccupation with the dynamic role of time in language and society. Jakobson challenges Saussure''s rigid distinction between language as a static (synchronic) system and its historical (diachronic) development - a false opposition, in his view, since it ignores the role of time in the present moment of language. The essays on time counter the notion that structuralism itself, as heir to Saussure''s work, has discarded history; in Jakabson''s hands, we see a struggle to integrate the two modes. In central group essays, on poetic theory, he shows how the grammatical categories of everyday speech become the expressive, highly charged language of poetry. These essays also deal with the related issues of subliminal and intentional linguistic patterns of poetry. These essays also deal with the related issues of subliminal and intentional linguistic patterns in poetry—areas that are problematic in structural analysis—and provide exemplary readings of Pushkin and Yeats. The last essays, on Mayakovsky and Holderlin, make clear that Jakobson was aware of the essential (and in these instances, tragic) bond between a poet''s life and art. The book closes with essays by Linda Waugh, Krystyna Pomorska, and Igor Melchuk that provide a thoughtful perspective on Jakobson''s work as a whole.

Nationality is not enough to understand “Latin”-descended populations in the United States LatinX has neither country nor fixed geography. LatinX, according to Claudia Milian, is the most powerful conceptual tool of the Latino/a present, an itinerary whose analytic routes incorporate the Global South and ecological devastation. Milian’s trailblazing study deploys the indeterminate but thunderous “X” as intellectual armor, a speculative springboard, and a question for our times that never stops being asked. LatinX sorts out and addresses issues about the unknowability of social realities that exceed our present knowledge.Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

"Grocery Activism looks back to the 1970s, when the mission of cooperative grocery stores shifted from political activism to the promotion of natural and organic foods"--

Tracing the erosion of democratic norms in the US and the conditions that make it possible Jonathan Beecher Field tracks the permutations of the town hall meeting from its original context as a form of democratic community governance in New England into a format for presidential debates and a staple of corporate governance. In its contemporary iteration, the town hall meeting models the aesthetic of the former but replaces actual democratic deliberation with a spectacle that involves no immediate electoral stakes or functions as a glorified press conference. Urgently, Field notes that though this evolution might be apparent, evidence suggests many US citizens don’t care to differentiate. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

An investigation of how-to guides for sensor technologies Sensors are increasingly common within citizen-sensing and DIY projects, but these devices often require the use of a how-to guide. From online instructional videos for troubleshooting sensor installations to handbooks for using and abusing the Internet of Things, the how-to genres and formats of digital instruction continue to expand and develop. As the how-to proliferates, and instructions unfold through multiple aspects of technoscientific practices, Jennifer Gabrys asks why the how-to has become one of the prevailing genres of the digital. How to Do Things with Sensors explores the ways in which things are made do-able with and through sensors and further considers how worlds are made sense-able and actionable through the instructional mode of citizen-sensing projects.Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Andrew¿Lison is assistant professor of media study at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. ¿ Marcell Mars is research associate at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. ¿ Tomislav Medak is a doctoral student at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. ¿ Rick Prelinger, professor of film and digital media at University of California, Santa Cruz, is an archivist, writer, and filmmaker. ¿

Leonard S. Marcus is one of the world’s leading authorities on children’s books and illustration. Among his many books are Minders of Make-Believe and Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon. A frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, he is on the faculty of New York University and the School of Visual Arts.¿Lisa Von Drasek is curator of the Children’s Literature Research Collections at the University of Minnesota.

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer is associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University. He is author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (Minnesota, 2012).

For the first time in English, the father of the shopping mall" tells his life story"

Automation,animation, and ecosystems are terms of central media-philosophical concern intoday's society of humans and machines. This volume describes the socialconsequences of machines as a mediating concept for the animation of life andautomation of technology.

Today,communication unfolds merely between two or more conscious entities but oftenincludes an invisible third party. Inspired by this drastic shift, this volumeuncovers new meanings of what it means 'to communicate.'

Thispolitically and historically attuned media theory of markets is concerned withcontemporary phenomena such as high-frequency trading and cryptocurrencies. Bybringing together key thinkers of economic studies with German media theory, itdescribes the central role of the media specificity of markets in new detail.

"Anthropocene Poetics looks at contemporary anglophone poetry from Anthropocene, Plantationocene, and Multispecies perspectives, and sets out a poetics for thinking about 'geologic intimacy,' the deeply relational reality of 'sacrifice zones,' and processes of kin-making in a time of extinction"

"Herwath Walden's Der Sturm--the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin (1910-1932)--has never before been the subject of a book-length study in English. In Four Metaphors of Modernism, Jenny Anger positions Der Sturm at the center of the avant-garde and as an integral part of Euro-American modern art, theory, and practice"--