A traditional way to honor distinguished scientists is to combine collections of papers solicited from friendly colleagues into dedicatory volumes. To honor our friend and colleague Mort Gurtin on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, we followed a surer path to produce a work of intrinsic and lasting scientific value: We collected pa pers that we deemed seminal in the field of evolving phase interfaces in solids, a field to which Mort Gu...
From Herman Melville's claim that "failure is the true test of greatness" to Henry Adams's self-identification with the "mortifying failure in [his] long education" and William Faulkner's eagerness to be judged by his "splendid failure to do the impossible, " the rhetoric of failure has served as a master trope of modernist American literary expression.
The rhetoric of failure has served as a master trope of modernist American literary expression. David Ball's magisterial study addresses the fundamental questions of language, meaning, and authority that run counter to well-rehearsed claims of American innocence and positivity, beginning with the American Renaissance and extending into modernist and contemporary literature.
The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking" brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars about the comics of Chicago-based cartoonist Chris Ware (b. 1967). Both inside and outside academic circles, Ware's work is rapidly being distinguished as essential to the developing canon of the graphic novel. Winner of the 2001 "Guardian" First Book Prize for the genre-defining "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Eart...
