Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
OUP has just published the second and revised edition of The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, and we were happy to welcome Joyce Carol Oates into our Madison Ave offices recently to sign stock, and to meet staff. Here are some photos of her with OUP employees.
By Aniruddh D. Patel
Music and language are our two most powerful and complex communication systems. What is their relationship as mental systems? This question has fascinated thinkers for centuries, but only in the past decade has it become a focus of empirical research.
As a musician, I found this absolutely shocking — here I thought I’d been hearing the glissando (the effect created when, for example, a pianist runs his finger up or down the keyboard), all my life, and suddenly it turned out that the very legitimacy of the word had been dismissed by Blom, a prominent music-writer linguist, more than 30 years before I was even born.
Polls and election results show Americans are sharply divided on same-sex marriage, and the controversy is unlikely to subside, especially with a presidential election almost upon us. As a result, Debating Same-Sex Marriage co-author John Corvino, chose to speak to some of the questions revolving around the same-sex marriage dilemma and why the rights and responsibilities of marriage are still important.
In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we’ve pulled the following excerpt from Surviving Triple-Negative Breast Cancer: Hope, Treatment, and Recovery by Patricia Prijatel. She provides a quick guide on how to eat healthy in order to better fight the disease.
If a theater noob polled a group of theater fans on what classic musicals she must see to jumpstart her theater education, you would be hard pressed to find a fan without The Phantom of the Opera on their list. The show, which opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on 9 October 1986, has left an undeniable impact on London’s West End, Broadway, and theater in general.
A remote village covered almost permanently in snow and dominated by a castle and its staff of dictatorial, sexually predatory bureaucrats — this is the setting for Kafka’s story about a man seeking both acceptance in the village and access to the castle. In The Castle, Kafka explores the relationship between the individual and power, as the protagonist K. asks why the villagers so readily submit to an authority which may exist only in their collective imagination. In the following excerpt from the new Oxford World’s Classics edition, K. first encounters the castle and the strange power it holds over the village.
The Beatles’ dream of releasing a record came to fruition fifty years ago today when Parlophone issued the band’s first disc, “Love Me Do.” That night, EMI played the song on its own London-produced weekly radio program Friday Spectacular, broadcast on Radio Luxembourg. In the Beatles’ Anthology, George Harrison recalled that, “First hearing ‘Love Me Do’ on the radio sent me shivery all over.
Few characters in the history of cinema, if any, are more iconic than Ian Fleming’s debonair super-spy, James Bond; few, too, can boast of any comparison to the equally iconic music which accompanies the intrepid agent 007’s exploits. Since the series’ beginning, the Bond films have been marked by exceptional music, including contributions from Paul McCartney, Shirley Bassey, Louis Armstrong and Madonna, and, of course, John Barry’s instantly recognizable “James Bond Theme.”
By H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman
We’re at the Tacoma Theatre in Washington, DC. Packed house, predominantly Black crowd. Chris Rock struts across the stage: “You know how I could tell he can’t be President? Whenever he on the news, White people always give him the same compliments, always the same compliments. ‘He speaks so well.’ … Like that’s a compliment… What the fuck did you expect him to sound like?!”
By Helen Berry
The artist Grayson Perry recently completed a cycle of six giant tapestries, The Vanity of Small Differences, inspired by William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. In the Turner Prizewinner’s modern rendition, Tim Rakewell (like his Georgian counterpart Tom Rakewell) undergoes a social transformation from humble origins to landed gentry. In Perry’s version, Tim’s life course is transformed by university education and a self-made fortune in computers – which catapults him socially from his humble origins in a Northern council house, via the bourgeois confines of middle-class dinner tables, to owning his own country estate.
By William Kinderman
A blend of past and present, art and life: Beethoven’s most challenging work for piano, the Diabelli Variations op. 120, has triggered a mania of interest on the theatrical scene. Several years ago New York playwright Moisés Kaufman visited my wife Katherine Syer and myself — the first of several visits — to shape a play on Beethoven.
By Mark Davie
It’s curious that the language I’ve mostly worked with — Italian — has provided the adage which is routinely quoted in any discussion of the challenges of translation, and yet no-one seems to know who first coined the phrase. It appears in the plural form “Traduttori traditori” — “translators traitors” — in a collection of Tuscan proverbs by the 19th-century writer Giuseppe Giusti.
For the past 15 years my colleagues and I have researched mass murder; the intentional killing of three or more individuals, during one event. Recent cases of mass murder have pointed to misconceptions about this rare and frightening act, and I would like to shed some light on some common myths.
Stephanie Li
While our presidential candidates are known far in advance of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, party conventions remain intriguing spectacles for the kind of human detail they offer about the men who aspire to the Oval Office. Every four years pundits and political commentators observe that conventions have become increasingly scripted affairs that lack the spontaneity of times past, but party conventions serve to present individual narratives as much as specific policy positions.
Some of my more radical academic colleagues remain inordinately sceptical of the role of individual leaders set against the tectonic plates of economic systems, social classes, genders, political alliances and ethnic groups. To suggest that individual leaders might make a difference is to place an unwarranted responsibility upon mere actors when the real issue is ‘the system’ – whatever the system is.