LSU Faculty-Published Books

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  The Age of Nixon: A Study in Cultural Power

  2012
  Carl Howard Freedman

  The fundamental argument of this book is, first, that Richard Nixon, though not generally regarded as a charismatic or emotionally outgoing politician like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, did establish profound psychic connections with the American people, connections that can be detected both in the brilliant electoral success that he enjoyed for most of his career and in his ultimate defeat during the Watergate scandal; and, second and even more important, that these connections are symptomatic of many of the most important currents in American life. The book is not just a work of political history or political biography but a study of cultural power: that is, a study in the ways that culture shapes our politics and frames our sense of possibilities and values. In its application of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and other theoretical tools to the study of American electoral politics, and in a way designed for the general as well as for the academic reader, it is a new kind of book.
  

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  Discrete-Time Linear Systems: Theory and Design with Applications

  2012
  Guoxiang Gu

  Discrete-Time Linear Systems: Theory and Design with Applications combines system theory and design in order to show the importance of system theory and its role in system design. The book focuses on system theory (including optimal state feedback and optimal state estimation) and system design (with applications to feedback control systems and wireless transceivers, plus system identification and channel estimation).

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  Foreign Correspondence

  2012
  John Maxwell Hamilton

  Despite the importance of foreign news, its history, transformation and indeed its future have not been much studied. The scholarly community often calls attention to journalism's shortcomings covering the world, yet the topic has not been systematically examined across countries or over time. The need to redress this neglect and the desire to assess the impact of new media technologies on the future of journalism - including foreign correspondence - provide the motivation for this stimulating, exciting and thought-provoking book.

  While the old economic models supporting news have crumbled in the wake of new media technologies, these changes have the potential to bring new and improved ways to inform people of foreign news. In an increasingly globalized era, journalism is being transformed by the effortlessly quick sharing of information across national boundaries. As such, we need to reconsider foreign correspondence and explore where such reporting is headed. This book discusses the current state and future prospects for foreign correspondence across the full range of media platforms, and assesses developments in the reporting of overseas news for audiences, governments and foreign policy in both contemporary and historical settings around the globe.

  As Emmy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Serge Schmemann reminds us in this book, "quality journalism and unbiased reporting are as valid and necessary today as they ever were [...] one of the primary tasks of journalists and scholars as they follow the changes taking place must be to ensure that the 'new international information order' now imposed by the Internet remains true to the ideals and traditions that define our journalism."

  This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

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  Selling ASAP: Art, Science, Agility, Performance

  2012
  Eli Jones

  Selling ASAP combines both timely and timeless components of selling to help professionals achieve their sales objectives in today's fast-paced business world. As the authors demonstrate, rapidly changing customer expectations have led to a dramatic shift in the business of selling. Customers no longer want product experts -- they want trusted advisors. This invaluable guide stresses the importance of viewing a sale not as a one-time encounter but as an opportunity to build a long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationship.
  Utilizing sound academic research and solid business practices, the authors provide strategies for better anticipating client needs and prescribing solutions that build value over time. The professional edition of Selling ASAP includes numerous practical tips, such as how to behave during a sales call, what language to use or avoid, and how to complete a transaction and begin a profitable business relationship. In addition to covering the fundamentals, Selling ASAP offers innovative sales techniques -- backed by extensive research -- for the modern salesperson.

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  The Foundations of Organizational Evil

  2012
  Carole L. Jurkiewicz

  Numerous reprehensible corporate, governmental, and nonprofit activities over recent years have highlighted the existence of organizational evil. Unlike other works on the topic, this book fully develops the concept of organizational evil, conceptually weaving the interchange between evil individuals (microlevel) who ultimately create the organizational environment that is evil, and the macrolevel elements of policy, culture, and manipulations of the social environment.

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  Offshore Wind Energy Cost Modeling: Installation and Decommissioning

  2012
  Mark J. Kaiser and Brian F. Snyder

  Offshore wind energy is one of the most promising and fastest growing alternative energy sources in the world. Offshore Wind Energy Cost Modeling provides a methodological framework to assess installation and decommissioning costs, and using examples from the European experience, provides a broad review of existing processes and systems used in the offshore wind industry.

  Offshore Wind Energy Cost Modeling provides a step-by-step guide to modeling costs over four sections. These sections cover:

  ·Background and introductory material,

  ·Installation processes and vessel requirements,

  ·Installation cost estimation, and

  ·Decommissioning methods and cost estimation.

  This self-contained and detailed treatment of the key principles in offshore wind development is supported throughout by visual aids and data tables. Offshore Wind Energy Cost Modeling is a key resource for anyone interested in the offshore wind industry, particularly those interested in the technical and economic aspects of installation and decommissioning. The book provides a reliable point of reference for industry practitioners and policy makers developing generalizable installation or decommissioning cost estimates.

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  Computer Mediated Communication: Issues and Approaches in Education

  2012
  Sigrid Kelsey

  Computer Mediated Communication: Issues and Approaches in Education examines online interactions from different national, cultural, linguistic, legal, and economic perspectives, exploring how the increasingly international and intercultural Internet affects the ways users present ideas, exchange information, and conduct discussions online. Educators, researchers, and practitioners will discover ways to effectively use Web-based technologies, transcending barriers to participate and collaborate in international projects that reflect the scope and scale of today's global interactions.
  

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  Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

  2012
  J. Gerald Kennedy

  Edgar Allan Poe (1809--1849) has long occupied the position of literary outsider. Dismissed as unrepresentative of the main currents of antebellum culture, Poe commented incisively -- in fiction and nonfiction -- on nationalism, science, materialism, popular taste, and cultural ideology. Opposing the pressure to write nationalistic "American" tales or from a restricted New England perspective, he produced a body of work held in greater international esteem than that of any of his U.S. contemporaries.
  In Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, scholars explore Poe's anti-nationalistic Americanism as they redefine the outlines of antebellum print culture and challenge ideas that situate Poe at the margins of national thought and cultural activity.
  The contributors offer fresh perspectives on an often-maligned author, including essays on Poe's preoccupation with celebrity, his fascination with metropolitan crime and mystery, his impact as an observer of racial fear, his role as an eccentric cultural icon, and his fluctuating reputation in our own era. They also argue for new digital approaches that facilitate remapping of print culture.
  Contributors: Anna Brickhouse, Betsy Erkkila, Jennifer Rae Greeson, Leon Jackson, J. Gerald Kennedy, Maurice S. Lee, Jerome McGann, Scott Peeples, Leland S. Person, and Eliza Richards

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  Modeling, Analysis, and Optimization of Process and Energy Systems

  2012
  F. Carl Knopf

  Energy costs impact the profitability of virtually all industrial processes. Stressing how plants use power, and how that power is actually generated, this book provides a clear and simple way to understand the energy usage in various processes, as well as methods for optimizing these processes using practical hands-on simulations and a unique approach that details solved problems utilizing actual plant data. Invaluable information offers a complete energy-saving approach essential for both the chemical and mechanical engineering curricula, as well as for practicing engineers.
  

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  Calvinists and Catholics During Holland's Golden Age: Heretics and Idolaters

  2012
  Christine Kooi

  This book examines the social, political and religious relationships between Calvinists and Catholics during Holland's Golden Age. Although Holland, the largest province of the Dutch Republic, was officially Calvinist, its population was one of the most religiously heterogeneous in early modern Europe. The Catholic Church was officially disestablished in the 1570s, yet by the 1620s Catholicism underwent a revival, flourishing in a semi-clandestine private sphere. The book focuses on how Reformed Protestants dealt with this revived Catholicism, arguing that confessional coexistence between Calvinists and Catholics operated within a number of contiguous and overlapping social, political and cultural spaces. The result was a paradox: a society that was at once Calvinist and pluralist. Christine Kooi maps the daily interactions between people of different faiths and examines how religious boundaries were negotiated during an era of tumultuous religious change.

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  On Absalom, Absalom! : A Guide through Myriad-Minded Faulkner

  2012
  David Madden

  The purpose of this collection of sixteen essays on William Faulkner's multi-faceted novel is to provide the reader who has read or is about to read Absalom, Absalom! with as much of a multi-faceted perspective as possible.
  
  Faulkner created a novel so complex that every interpretation of his "little postage stamp of native soil" is as valid as a single postage stamp in a postal system. Each essay is limited by its premise, but that very limitation enables the critic to focus the reader's attention upon an aspect of this multifaceted novel. The value of each of these pieces is not only what it reveals but what it does not reveal, enabling the reader to participate in the critical process by questioning, disagreeing, conjuring his or her own insights along the way.
  
  The opening six original essays offer basic, clearly stated perspectives: a brief view of Faulkner's life and works; and two close readings of Absalom, Absalom! that apply specific critical methods. The novel in a cultural-historical context is also discussed, as is the novel's critical reception. Many more narrowly-focused essays discuss the novel from a feminist standpoint, its relationship to The Great Gatsby and All the King's Men.
  
  The narrative perspective and the storytelling themes that pervade the novel are discussed at length as is the interwoven web of facts that enriches Absalom, Absalom! with countless dimensions. Tensions between the old south and the modern era are explored. Faulkner's structure and prose style are meticulously investigated. In sum, this reference provides a remarkably rich, deeply varied number of perspectives on a novel that continues to offer new insight into its complex design and execution.
  
  Each essay is 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of "Works Cited," along with endnotes. Finally, the volume's appendixes offer a section of useful reference resources.

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  Bad History and the Logics of Blockbuster Cinema: Titanic, Gangs of New York, Australia, Inglourious Basterds

  2012
  Patrick McGee

  McGee studies historical representation in commodified, popular cinema as expressions of historical truths that more authentic histories usually miss and argues for the political and social significance of mass culture through the interpretation of four recent big-budget movies: Titanic, Gangs of New York, Australia, and Inglourious Basterds .

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  Afro-Cuban Identity in Postrevolutionary Novel and Film: Inclusion, Loss, and Cultural Resistance

  2012
  Andrea E. Morris

  Afro-Cuban Identity in Post-Revolutionary Novel and Film examines the changing discourse on race as portrayed in Cuban novels and films produced after 1959. Andrea Easley Morris analyzes the artists participation in and questioning of the revolutionary government s revision of national identity to include the unique experience and contributions of Cuban men and women of African descent. While the Cuban revolution brought sweeping changes that vastly improved the material condition of many Afro-Cubans, at the time overrepresented among Cuba s poor and marginalized, the government s official position was that racial inequities had been resolved as early as 1962. Although a more open dialogue on race was cut short, the work of several novelists and film directors from the late 1960s and 70s expresses the need to explore what was gained and lost by Afro-Cubans in the early years of the revolution, among them Manuel Granados, Miguel Barnet, Nivaria Tejera, Sara Gomez, Cesar Leante, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Sergio Giral, and Manuel Cofino. Their works participate in the process of redefining Cuban national identity that took place after the revolution and, more specifically, they explore the place of Afro-Cuban identity within a broader notion of revolutionary Cubanness. This occurs through an emphasis on Afro-Cuban cultural practices that have constituted forms of resistance to colonial and neo-colonial oppression. This book examines the identity conflicts portrayed in these works and takes into account the artists negotiation of their own status within the revolutionary context by looking at the narrative strategies used to address racial issues within the constraints placed on cultural production in Cuba after 1962. "

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  Criminal Papers: Reading Crime in the French Nineteenth Century

  2012
  Rosemary A. Peters

  Throughout the nineteenth century, shady characters appear in French writings from one end of the literary spectrum to another. While Paris gleams through the night, the City of Lights has a darker underside with its own infrastructure, its own rules and traditions - and its own literature. In the shadows of the capital, thieves, murderers, addicts, shoplifters, seducers, and smugglers carry out their nefarious acts, pursued by detectives (both police and private) who seek to apprehend and analyze them. These novels pave the way for a new genre, the detective novel or roman polar, which gains ever-increasing popularity as the nineteenth century moves toward its close and the twentieth dawns with developments in literature and other genres. These stories are experimental by nature, and lend themselves to further innovations, both apertures (to borrow Barthes's term) and departures. In addition, the detective stories of the nineteenth century contribute to the creation of a new art in the twentieth century: they are part and parcel of the work of film, especially film noir. This volume considers literature of the criminal underworld and its encounters with society, in the city and the popular imagination. The twelve essays compiled here examine the intersections between law and literature in the nineteenth century, from the newly adjusted property laws after the Revolution of 1789 through the scientific discourse around kleptomania in the fin-de-siecle. The authors question how texts, both canonical and paraliterary, are inscribed into the social, political, economic and artistic dialogues of the period. Other questions come up in these textual examinations: how are real-life criminals and the spaces they inhabit translated into literary ones? How do crimes in novels reflect or produce social tensions and preoccupations around issues of gender, education, class, and ideology? And, perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to be the author of a crime?

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  A Psychoanalyst on the Couch

  2012
  François Raffoul

  In A Psychoanalyst on the Couch, we find the noted psychoanalyst and Lacan commentator Juan-David Nasio on the analyst s couch himself. In the interview that makes up this book, he provides insight into his forty-year career as a writer and practitioner, elaborating on Freudian and Lacanian concepts important to his work and reflecting on broad issues related to psychology and culture as well as personal remembrances. The result is an intimate and wide-ranging look at the man and thinker, both an introduction to his work and a deeper look at his approach and outlook."

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  Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era

  2012
  Amy Reynolds

  Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era highlights press criticisms during the Progressive Era (1890-1920) that aimed to enhance the role of the press in a democracy, limit corporatization, and better utilize the press’ capacity as an agent for social change. This insightful history of the press criticism of the era includes selections from the writings of critics of the news media of the time. The press critics discussed and republished in this volume include Charles Edward Russell, Moorfield Storey, Oswald Garrison Villard, Donald Wilhelm, Roscoe C.E. Brown, anonymous editorial writers at The Public and The Nation, and others. Their ideas and challenges to the corporate/commercial press model are as relevant today as they were nearly a century ago.

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  Representing Finite Groups: A Semisimple Introduction

  2012
  Ambar Sengupta

  This graduate textbook presents the basics of representation theory for finite groups from the point of view of semisimple algebras and modules over them. The presentation interweaves insights from specific examples with development of general and powerful tools based on the notion of semisimplicity. The elegant ideas of commutant duality are introduced, along with an introduction to representations of unitary groups. The text progresses systematically and the presentation is friendly and inviting. Central concepts are revisited and explored from multiple viewpoints. Exercises at the end of the chapter help reinforce the material.

  Representing Finite Groups: A Semisimple Introduction would serve as a textbook for graduate and some advanced undergraduate courses in mathematics. Prerequisites include acquaintance with elementary group theory and some familiarity with rings and modules. A final chapter presents a self-contained account of notions and results in algebra that are used. Researchers in mathematics and mathematical physics will also find this book useful.

  A separate solutions manual is available for instructors.

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  Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500-1900

  2012
  Andrew Sluyter

  In this groundbreaking book Andrew Sluyter demonstrates for the first time that Africans played significant creative roles in establishing open-range cattle ranching in the Americas. In so doing, he provides a new way of looking at and studying the history of land, labor, property, and commerce in the Atlantic world.

  Sluyter shows that Africans' ideas and creativity helped to establish a production system so fundamental to the environmental and social relations of the American colonies that the consequences persist to the present. He examines various methods of cattle production, compares these methods to those used in Europe and the Americas, and traces the networks of actors that linked that Atlantic world. The use of archival documents, material culture items, and ecological relationships between landscape elements make this book a methodologically and substantively original contribution to Atlantic, African-American, and agricultural history.

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  Doubt and Skepticism in Antiquity and the Renaissance

  2012
  Michelle Zerba

  This book is an interdisciplinary study of the forms and uses of doubt in works by Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Cicero, Machiavelli, Shakespeare and Montaigne. Based on close analysis of literary and philosophical texts by these important authors, Michelle Zerba argues that doubt is a defining experience in antiquity and the Renaissance, one that constantly challenges the limits of thought and representation. The wide-ranging discussion considers issues that run the gamut from tragic loss to comic bombast, from psychological collapse to skeptical dexterity and from solitary reflection to political improvisation in civic contexts and puts Greek and Roman treatments of doubt into dialogue not only with sixteenth-century texts but with contemporary works as well. Using the past to engage questions of vital concern to our time, Zerba demonstrates that although doubt sometimes has destructive consequences, it can also be conducive to tolerance, discovery and conversation across sociopolitical boundaries.

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  Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japenese Women's Rituals

  2011
  Paula Kane Robinson Arai

  Healing lies at the heart of Zen in the home, as Paula Arai discovered in her pioneering research on the ritual lives of Zen Buddhist laywomen. She reveals a vital stream of religious practice that flourishes outside the bounds of formal institutions through sacred rites that women develop and transmit to one another. Everyday objects and common materials are used in inventive ways. For example, polishing cloths, vivified by prayer and mantra recitation, become potent tools. The creation of beauty through the arts of tea ceremony, calligraphy, poetry, and flower arrangement become rites of healing.
  
  Bringing Zen Home brings a fresh perspective to Zen scholarship by uncovering a previously unrecognized but nonetheless vibrant strand of lay practice. The creativity of domestic Zen is evident in the ritual activities that women fashion, weaving tradition and innovation, to gain a sense of wholeness and balance in the midst of illness, loss, and anguish. Their rituals include chanting, ingesting elixirs and consecrated substances, and contemplative approaches that elevate cleaning, cooking, child-rearing, and caring for the sick and dying into spiritual disciplines. Creating beauty is central to domestic Zen and figures prominently in Arai's analyses. She also discovers a novel application of the concept of Buddha nature as the women honor deceased loved ones as "personal Buddhas."
  
  One of the hallmarks of the study is its longitudinal nature, spanning fourteen years of fieldwork. Arai developed a "second-person," or relational, approach to ethnographic research prompted by recent trends in psychobiology. This allowed her to cultivate relationships of trust and mutual vulnerability over many years to inquire into not only the practices but also their ongoing and changing roles. The women in her study entrusted her with their life stories, personal reflections, and religious insights, yielding an ethnography rich in descriptive and narrative detail as well as nuanced explorations of the experiential dimensions and effects of rituals.
  
  In Bringing Zen Home, the first study of the ritual lives of Zen laywomen, Arai applies a cutting-edge ethnographic method to reveal a thriving domain of religious practice. Her work represents an important contribution on a number of fronts--to Zen studies, ritual studies, scholarship on women and religion, and the cross-cultural study of healing.

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  Filling in the Blanks: Standardized Testing and the Black-White Achievement Gap

  2011
  Keena Arbuthnot

  A volume in Contemporary Perspectives in Race and Ethnic Relations Series Editors: M. Christopher Brown II, Alcorn State University and T. Elon Dancy II, University of Oklahoma Filling in the Blanks is a book dedicated to helping policymakers, researchers, academics and teachers, better understand standardized testing and the Black-White achievement gap. This book provides a wealth of background information, as well as the most recent findings, about testing and measurement concepts essential to understanding standardized tests. The book then reviews theories and research that has been conducted which explain the differences in performance between Black and White test takers on many standardized tests. Most notably, Filling in the Blanks presents several new theories that address why Black students do not perform as well as their White counterparts. These theories present very novel and innovative perspectives to understanding these test performance differences. The book ends with a host of recommendations that are intended to address the concerns and questions of several stakeholder groups. . The series centers on volumes that treat race and ethnicity in conjunction or parallel with social sciences, human studies, public policy, and/or education and that disseminate ideas and strategies useful for various communities against a backdrop of race and/or ethnicity in America. Books in this series foreground novel thinking about race and ethnicity, important policy/praxis issues, developing trends and responses across society, and the concerns of public and/or institutional constituencies. To the extent possible, books in the series explore the interconnection of multiple perspectives, while concurrently articulating implications resultant from the intersections of race/ethnicity (i.e. gender, class, sexual orientation, creed, ability). Each volume investigates one or more critical topics missing from the extant literature, and engages one or more theoretical perspectives.

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  Dracula in Visual Media: Film, Television, Comic Book and Electronic Game Appearances, 1921-2010

  2011
  John Edgar Browning

  This is a comprehensive sourcebook on the world's most famous vampire, with more than 700 citations of domestic and international Dracula films, television programs, documentaries, adult features, animated works, and video games, as well as nearly a thousand comic books and stage adaptations. While they vary in length, significance, quality, genre, moral character, country, and format, each of the cited works adopts some form of Bram Stoker's original creation, and Dracula himself, or a recognizable vampiric semblance of Dracula, appears in each.

  The book includes contributions from Dacre Stoker, David J. Skal, Laura Helen Marks, Dodd Alley, Mitch Frye, Ian Holt, Robert Eighteen-Bisang, and J. Gordon Melton.

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  The Blackwell Companion to Jesus

  2011
  Delbert Royce Burkett

  The Blackwell Companion to Jesus features a comprehensive collection of essays that explore the diverse ways in which Jesus has been imagined or portrayed from the beginnings of Christianity to the present day.

  Considers portrayals of Jesus in the New Testament and beyond, Jesus in non-Christian religions, philosophical and historic perspectives, modern manifestations, and representations in Christian art, novels, and film Comprehensive scope of coverage distinguishes this work from similar offerings Examines both Christian and non-Christian perspectives on Jesus, including those from ethnic and sexual groups, as well as from other faiths Offers rich and rewarding insights which will shape our understanding of this influential figure and his enduring legacy

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  Lenguaje, arte y revoluciones ayer y hoy: New Approaches to Hispanic Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Studies

  2011
  Alejandro Cortazar

  This book depicts new paradigms in Hispanic linguistic, literary and cultural studies. Part I: Literary and Cultural Studies includes eight essays focusing on a new trend of cultural representation attempting to find new meaning(s). They explore a series of reflections on some of those moments - from the period that begins with the cry for independence in 1810 and that spans beyond 2010 - textually translated as new approaches of analysis on the recollections of things to come. The contexts examined evince critical occurrences related to periods of change toward democracy and social justice that eventually lead to revolutionary or emancipating ends, by way of artistic, textual manifestations. Part II: Linguistic and Cultural Studies contains nine articles representative of the most current, ground breaking research on Hispanic linguistics. It focuses on important linguistic and cultural issues pertaining, geographically, to various corners of the Hispanic world, spanning from central Florida and New York City, to Bolivia, and on to the Prince Islands in Turkey. The issues explored include the sociolinguistic and cultural identity of Puerto Ricans in the United States, the pragmatics of humor in Mexican film, the effects of language evolution on modern Spanish, and the acquisition of Spanish by English speakers.

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  Howard Chaykin: Conversations

  2011
  Brannon Costello

  One of the most distinctive voices in mainstream comics since the 1970s, Howard Chaykin (b. 1950) has earned a reputation as a visionary formal innovator and a compelling storyteller whose comics offer both pulp-adventure thrills and thoughtful engagement with real-world politics and culture. His body of work is defined by the belief that comics can be a vehicle for sophisticated adult entertainment and for narratives that utilize the medium's unique properties to explore serious themes with intelligence and wit.Beginning with early interviews in fanzines and concluding with a new interview conducted in 2010 with the volume's editor, Howard Chaykin: Conversations collects widely ranging discussions from Chaykin's earliest days as an assistant for such legends as Gil Kane and Wallace Wood to his recent work on titles including Dominic Fortune, Challengers of the Unknown, and American Century. The book includes 35 line illustrations selected from Chaykin, as well. As a writer/artist for outlets such as DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and Heavy Metal, he has participated in and influenced many of the major developments in mainstream comics over the past four decades. He was an early pioneer in the graphic novel format in the 1970s, and his groundbreaking sci-fi satire American Flagg! was an essential contribution to the maturation of the comic book as a vehicle for social commentary in the 1980s.