Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton

Catherine Liu is assistant professor in the departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, French, and Italian at the University of Minnesota.

Literature & Fiction

Liu, Catherine

History & Criticism

Univ. of Minnesota Press

Literary Theory/Cultural Studies 
Explores literary theory's fear of and fascination with the mechanical. 
Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica of the human being, the automaton, are as old as the first appearance of the machine itself. Exploring these anxieties and the efforts they prompted, this book opens a window on one of the most significant, if subtle, ideological battles waged on behalf of the human against the machine since the Enlightenment-one that continues in the wake of technological and conceptual progress today. 
A sustained examination of the automaton as early modern machine and as a curious ancestor of the twentieth-century robot, Copying Machines offers extended readings of mechanistic images in the eighteenth century through the prism of twentieth-century commentary. In readings of texts by Lafayette, Molire, Laclos, and La Bruyre-and in a chapter on the eighteenth-century inventor of automatons, Jacques Vaucanson-Catherine Liu provides a fascinating account of ways in which figures of the automaton and of the preindustrial machine haunt the imagination of ancien rgime France and structure key moments of the canonical literature and criticism of the period. 
Catherine Liu is assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota. 
Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

Table of Contents: Introduction - Ingredients - Pots, Pans, And Kitchen Tools - Fundamental Cooking Methods Used In This Book - Guide To Good Chinese Cooking - Stocks - How To Use The Recipes - Soups And Appetizers - Rice - Noodles - Pastry - Szechwan Food And Exotic Cooking - America's Favorite Chinese Dishes - Quick And Easy - Salads - Dim Sim, Dessert And Tea - Crockery Cooking And Stewing - Hot Pot: Cook-At-The-Table Dinner - Sauce - Meal Planning - Index By Types Of Dishes

Chinese Cooking the American Way

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Regional & International

Catherine's Art of Cooking

Product Description 
A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship. 
 Review 
"Virtue Hoarders amplifies a discussion that still needs to be had."—Spiked 
"Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, argues that the professional-managerial class-working class alliance was doomed from the start for the simple reason that the two classes’ interests are fundamentally opposed. "—The Washington Examiner 
 About the Author 
Catherine Liu is professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class (Forerunners: Ideas First)

Business & Money

Business Culture

University of Minnesota Press

A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, American Idyll argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else. Academic freedom and aesthetic education are reserved for high-scoring, privileged students and vocational education is the only option for economically marginal ones. Throughout most of American history, antielitist sentiment was reserved for attacks against an entrenched aristocracy or rapacious plutocracy, but it has now become a revolt against meritocracy itself, directed against what insurgents see as a ruling class of credentialed elites with degrees from exclusive academic institutions. Catherine Liu reveals that, within the academy and stemming from the relatively new discipline of cultural studies, animosity against expertise has animated much of the Left’s cultural criticism. By unpacking the disciplinary formation and academic ambitions of American cultural studies, Liu uncovers the genealogy of the current antielitism, placing the populism that dominates headlines within a broad historical context. In the process, she emphasizes the relevance of the historical origins of populist revolt against finance capital and its political influence. American Idyll reveals the unlikely alliance between American pragmatism and proponents of the Frankfurt School and argues for the importance of broad frames of historical thinking in encouraging robust academic debate within democratic institutions. In a bold thought experiment that revives and defends Richard Hofstadter’s theories of anti-intellectualism in American life, Liu asks, What if cultural populism had been the consensus politics of the past three decades? American Idyll shows that recent antielitism does nothing to redress the source of its discontent—namely, growing economic inequality and diminishing social mobility. Instead, pseudopopulist rage, in conservative and countercultural forms alike, has been transformed into resentment, content merely to take down allegedly elitist cultural forms without questioning the real political and economic consolidation of powers that has taken place in America during the past thirty years.

American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

University Of Iowa Press

It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor, and even cheaper entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Catherine Liu's 1997 novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance - now reprinted by Kaya Press - is a young Chinese-American woman who skirts the edges of New York privilege. A refugee both from her Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she navigates the city as a slacker, temp, and exotic dancer, outmaneuvering the ever-present lure of Prozac. Liu's debut novel recalls the seedy street atmosphere of Bette Gordon's 1984 film Variety through a narrator that is perceptive, funny, and unhinged.

Oriental Girls Desire Romance

Literary

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

The Abject, America (Lusitania)

Arts & Photography

Lusitania Press

Catherine Liu's novel is a modern day Inferno that weaves a complex and dark vision of urban life."It's encouraging that Liu's... promising debut has been published. It's a small, hopeful sign that perhaps in the future, the literary landscape might be wide enough to accommodate the notion of an Asian woman who doesn't bow down to expectations."--Melissa de la Cruz, Feedmag.

United States

Kaya/Muae

It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor and even cheaper entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Catherine Liu's 1997 novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance--now reprinted by Kaya Press--is a young Chinese-American woman who skirts the edges of New York privilege. A refugee both from her Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she navigates the city as a slacker, temp and exotic dancer, outmaneuvering the ever-present lure of Prozac. Liu's debut novel recalls the seedy street atmosphere of Bette Gordon's 1984 film Variety through a narrator that is perceptive, funny and unhinged.

Kaya Press

Underground Theory

Žižek, Slavoj

Finkelstein, Norman

McGowan, Todd

Zupančič, Alenka

MCLUHAN, MARSHALL

Downs, Michael

Power, Nina

McKerracher, David

Cutrone, Chris

Philosophy

Independently published

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