Leadership, innovation, diversity, inclusiveness, sharing, accountability—such is the resounding administrative refrain we keep hearing in the contemporary Western university. What kinds of benefits does this refrain generate? For whom? What discursive incitements undergird such benefits? Although there are innumerable discussions of Michel Foucault in the English-speaking academy, seldom is his work used systematically to unravel the dead ends and potentialities of humanistic inquiry as embedded in these simple but dynamic questions. Rey Chow takes up this challenge by articulating the plight of the humanities in the age of global finance and neoliberal mores through a resharpened focus on Foucault’s concept “outside.” This general discussion is followed by a series of micro-arguments about several loosely linked topics: the biopolitics of literary study, visibilities and invisibilities, race and racism, sound/voice/listening, and confession and self-entrepreneurship. Against what she polemicizes as the moralistic-entrepreneurial norming of knowledge production, Chow foregrounds a nonutilitarian approach, stressing anew the intellectual and pedagogical objectives fundamental to humanistic inquiry: How to process, analyze, and evaluate different types of texts across languages and disciplines; how to form and sustain viable arguments; how to rethink familiar problems through less known as well as very well-known sources, figures, and methods. Above all, she asks in an abidingly humanistic spirit, how not to know all the answers before the questions have been posed.

Universities and the social circuitry of finance -- Our new financial oligarchy -- Bankers to the rescue : the political turn to student debt -- The top : how universities became hedge funds -- The bottom : a Wall Street takeover of for-profit colleges -- The middle : a hidden squeeze on public universities -- Reimagining (higher education) finance from below -- Methodological appendix : a comparative, qualitative, and quantitative study of elites.

What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel explores this question through readings of major works by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Working at the height of the Russian realist tradition, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky each discovered unprecedented techniques for intensifying the aesthetic illusion that Chloë Kitzinger calls mimetic life—the reader’s sense of a character’s autonomous, embodied existence. At the same time, both authors tested the practical limits of that illusion by extending it toward the novel’s formal and generic bounds: philosophy, history, journalism, theology, myth. Through new readings of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and other novels, Kitzinger traces a productive tension between mimetic characterization and the author’s ambition to transform the reader. She shows how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky create lifelike characters and why the dream of carrying the illusion of “life” beyond the novel consistently fails. Mimetic Lives challenges the contemporary truism that novels educate us by providing enduring models for the perspectives of others, with whom we can then better empathize. Seen close, the realist novel’s power to create a world of compelling fictional persons underscores its resources as a form for thought and its limits as a direct source of spiritual, social, or political change. Drawing on scholarship in Russian literary studies as well as the theory of the novel, Kitzinger’s lucid work of criticism will intrigue and challenge scholars working in both fields.

Much of the historiography on the age of democratic revolutions has seemed to come to a halt until recent years. Historians of this period have tried to develop new explanatory paradigms but there are few that have had a lasting impact. David A. Bell and Yair Mintzker seek to break through the narrow views of this period with research that reaches beyond the traditional geographical and chronological boundaries of the subject. Rethinking the Age of Revolutions brings together some of the most exciting and important research now being done on the French Revolutionary era, by prominent historians from North America and France. Adopting a variety of approaches, and tackling a wide variety of subjects, such as natural rights in the early modern world, the birth of celebrity culture and the phenomenon of modern political charisma, among others, this collection shows the continuing vitality and importance of the field. This is an important book not only for specialists, but for anyone interested in the origins of some of the most important issues in the politics and culture of the modern West.

Abou El Fadl (Islamic law, UCLA School of Law) wrote the 62 brief essays here over the course of five years. Through a combination of musings and critical reflections on classical Muslim authors, he both traces Muslim intellectual history and also confronts questions of ethics, faith, law, politics, culture, and modern identity. He ranges over many facets of Islam in the contemporary world, exploring censorship, political oppression, terrorism, the veil and the treatment of women, marriage, parental rights, the dynamics between law and morality, the character of the prophet Muhammad, and other topics. About half the essays first appeared in The minaret magazine. c. Book News Inc.