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Dewey contends that while Powers's novels investigate the most pressing issues of the new millennium, the novelist is most deeply interested in the same thematic argument that consumed Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson - the problem of the self, the deep and unshakable loneliness that has always been at the heart of the American literary imagination."--BOOK JACKET.

We’re not implying anything but... It’s time for a bit of no-nonsense advice in the form of some choice expletive-laden life lessons. This small but f*cking mighty tome is just the tonic to set you on the path to being an awesome human, and will teach YOU how not to be a D*CK.

The project examines how three prominent philosophers of education - William Torrey Harris, John Dewey, and Gregory Bateson - each developed a world view that provides a philosophical basis for environmental education.

An exploration of Chabon's career-long fascination with the consolations—and dangers—of the imagination Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon has emerged as one of the most daring writers of American fiction in the post-Pynchon era. Joseph Dewey examines how Chabon's narratives have sought to bring together the defining elements of the two principal expressions of the American narrative that his generation inherited: the formal extravagances of postmodernism and the compelling storytelling of psychological realism. Like the audacious, self-conscious excesses of Pynchon and his postmodern disciples, Dewey argues, Chabon's fictions are extravagant, often ironic, experiments into form animated by dense verbal and linguistic energy. As with the probing texts of psychological realism by Updike and his faithful, Chabon's fictions center on keenly drawn, recognizable characters caught up in familiar, heartbreaking dilemmas; enthralling storylines compelled by suspense, enriched with suggestive symbols; and humane themes about love and death, work and family, and sexuality and religion. Evolving over three decades, this hybrid fiction has made Chabon not only one of the most widely read composers of serious fiction of his guild but one of the most critically respected writers as well, thus positioning Chabon as a representative voice of the generation. Dewey's study, the first to examine the full breadth of Chabon's fiction from his landmark debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, to his controversial 2012 best seller, Telegraph Avenue, places Chabon's fictional sensibility, for all its hipness, within what has been the defining theme of American literature since the provocative romances of Hawthorne and Melville: the anxious tension between escape and engagement; between the sweet, centripetal pull of the redemptive imagination as a splendid, if imperfect, engine of retreat and the harsh, centrifugal pull of real life itself, recklessly deformed by the crude handiwork of surprise and chance and unable to coax even the simplest appearance of logic.

In the closing decade of the twentieth century, Don DeLillo emerged from the privileged status of a writer's writer to become by any measure - productivity, influence, scope, gravitas - the dominant novelist of fin-de-millennium America. Beginning in 1982 with The Names and continuing with White Noise and Underworld, DeLillo defined himself as a provocative, articulate anatomist of American culture. Dewey offers an astute assessment of this daunting yet important writer's four-decade cultural critique. Dewey finds DeLillo's concerns to be organized around three rubrics that mark the writer's own creative evolution: the love of the street, the embrace of the word, and the celebration of the soul. Dewey takes the reader through the novelist's hip avant-garde satires of the mid-1960s, his dense interrogations of the power of language and the spell of narrative in the 1980s and 1990s, and his recent efforts to transcend the immediate. Dewey explores DeLillo's fascination with Eastern philosophies, interest in Native American traditions, passion for jazz, and deep roots in Catholicism.

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Joseph Grange's beautifully written book provides a unique synthesis of two major figures of world philosophy, John Dewey and Confucius, and points the way to a global philosophy based on American and Confucian values. Grange concentrates on the major themes of experience, felt intelligence, and culture to make the connections between these two giants of Western and Eastern thought. He explains why the Chinese called Dewey "A Second Confucius," and deepens our understanding of Confucius's concepts of the way (dao) of human excellence (ren). The important dimensions of American and Chinese cultural philosophy are welded into an argument that calls for the liberation of what is finest in both traditions. The work gives a new appreciation of fundamental issues facing Chinese and American relations and brings the opportunities and dangers of globalization into focus.

"What was gunpowder?" Trivial. What was electricity? Meaningless. This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in wrath." - Winston Churchill, July 1945 Commencing earnestly in the1960s, the American novel began its exploration into how mankind could adjustto life in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, how we could begin to think aboutthe Unthinkable. American writers faced squarely the age birthed by nuclearphysics and found in its very darkness difficult avenues to hope byrediscovering that most potent, traditional response to a history in crisis:the apocalyptic temper. Dewey focuses on seven novelsthat touch the variety of generic experiments and postures of the post-WorldWar II American novel. These novels by Vonnegut, Coover, Percy, Pynchon,Gaddis, and DeLillo represent a significant argument concerning the Americanliterary response to living within the oppressive technologies of the NuclearAge. Departing from other studies that veer toward speculative fiction ortoward the more narrowly defined religious angles, In a Dark Time defines the apocalyptic temper as a most traditionalliterary genre that articulates the anxieties of a community in crisis, a wayfor that community to respond to the perception of a history gone critical byturning squarely to that history and to find, in that gesture, the way toward agenuine hope. Dewey's new approach consistsof applying the theory of apocalyptic literature to a body of essentiallysecular writings. Dewey resists the traditional approach - studying worksdealing with nuclear devastation - to focus on how a generation of literaryresponses have dealt with the larger questions about how to live with therecognition of End times. Dewey convincingly demonstrates that this literaturereminds its moments in history that only in a dark time will the eye begin tosee.

"If postmodern play is literature's equivalent to Disney World, then Dewey introduces us to authors who work against the glitz, who try to find something worth committing to in a world of simulacra."--Kathryn Hume, Distinguished Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University "A vivid and engaging account of American literature produced during the Reagan Era . . . intelligent, thoughtful, and accessible."--James A. Schiff, University of Cincinnati Introducing the term "spectacle realism," Joseph Dewey analyzes eight contemporary novels that extend the current understanding of American literary realism, the authors of which possess a moral energy and compassion often obscured in postmodern writing. For nearly 100 years, Dewey says, American realism produced novels that treated most bleakly the major events in people's lives--like falling in love or facing death. Focusing on the Reagan era, Dewey examines a group of popular novelists (Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving, Reynolds Price, T. Coraghessan Boyle, William Kennedy, Robert Ferro, Anne Tyler, and Richard Powers) who departed from that traditional realism. Their characters move beyond disillusionment to affirmation, finding that engagement with the signature events of their lives brings rewards rather than punishment. In addition to presenting a compelling picture of the cultural values of the 1980s, Novels from Reagan's America shows how significant writers have begun to reclaim for fiction the traditional right to illuminate our lives. Joseph Dewey, associate professor of contemporary American literature at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, is the author of In A Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age and of articles in the Mississippi Quarterly, the Hollins Critic, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction.