FORTHCOMING TITLES
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The Creation of Reality
​Consciousness in Cinema, Fiction, & Poetry

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The Creation of Reality boldly details the ways that our relationships with literature shape our understanding of the world around us, the others that inhabit it, and the ethical obligations we have to them all. 
In a series of compounding analyses, exemplary works of cinema (Spike Jonze’s Her), poetry (John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”), and fiction (Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Bleeding Edge) are examined in order to explore the ways that they interact with the most fundamental elements of human consciousness. Drawing on recent advances in neuroscience and philosophy, Grayson proposes that the unreal, almost spectral, consciousnesses we perceive in fictional beings allow us to interact with the real and the unreal simultaneously, experiencing not only the fictive minds of characters, but also the compound, composing, and projecting mind of what he calls the "authorial consciousness." 

The undeniable reality and the irreducible complexity of this authorial consciousness confronts us with a highly intimate experience of the other, and carries with it all the ethical responsibilities attached to that relationship: the thrill, joy, and horror of something real. This new work serves as a valuable contribution to discussions within studies of literature, consciousness, and philosophy. 

Author:
Phillip D. Grayson, Ph.D.
​Assistant Professor of English (Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy, Tennessee State University)

​Release date: September 2019

Transnational Women
​Neocolonialism and Feminine Identity in the ​21st-Century American Novel

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Transnational Women uses recent Western feminist theory to read a selection of novels by four American women writers that have been published since 9/11. The overall socio-historical context within which the book locates these literary texts is the terror and trauma of 9/11 and the effects of 9/11 on attitudes toward non-white Americans whether born in America or overseas.  Bornaki and Salami bring Sally Haslanger’s concept of socially constructed transnational female identities, Carol Gilligan’s “ethics of care," and the political democratic matrix found in Chantal Mouffe’s theory of “agonistic pluralism.” They argue that Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care proposes that women innately care for each other. They seek to investigate whether this understanding of a particular form of feminine subjectivity is able to bridge the gap between what Spivak terms "Third World Women" and "First World Feminism."

In practice, this work is concerned with the relations between white Americans and women in the U.S. who are racially or ethnically “other.”  The novelists in question present their women characters as invoking an ethics of care in the face of the intensified fracturing of American society which is heightening issues of ethnicity and race in the US. This ethics of care attempts to paper over the underlying issues transforming antagonistic relations into agonistic relations while keeping underlying white power intact.
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Authors:
Fatemeh Bornaki, Ph.D.
Literary critic and Assistant Professor and head of the English Department
(Islamic Azad University - Karaj Branch, Iran)
Ali Salami, Ph.D.
​Shakespearean scholar, lexicographer, Assistant Professor (University of Tehran),
​and current research scholar at the Folger Shakespeare Institute in Washington, D.C.

Release date: October 2019
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Reliving the Crash
Global Recession Narratives in Film and Television

A new anthology of cutting edge research into the phenomenon of post-Great Recession film and television explores the collective social trauma around the 2008-2009 global financial recession. This collection has an inclusive focus on global perspectives, exploring issues of recession anxiety, capitalism, gender and the workplace, housing insecurity, origins of the financial crisis, and more. This anthology makes an innovative contribution to the study of screen-based narratives, serving as a pedagogical tool for teaching how film and television depict and explore social change.

Editor:
Lauren J. DeCarvalho, Ph.D., Assistant Professor (Department of Media, Film & Journalism Studies, University of Denver)

​Release date:  April 2020